To my great delight, I was asked to review Jan Broekman's brilliant new work, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation
(Springer Nature, 2023). The work is published as Volume 8 of the
Series Law and Visual Jurisprudence, for which I serve as an Advisory
Editor.
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Knowledge in Change approaches ancient and perplexing issues of the organization of human collectives within a rationalized understanding of the world in which these collectives function (exteriorization) and the investigation of the human individual as disaggregated components of that world of human social relations (internalization). These are usually articulated by knowledge guardians as issues of phenomenology (a philosophy of experience; meaning through lived experience),epistemology (theories of knowledge; the rationalization of reality) and intersubjectivity (shared perceptions of reality; the experience of knowledge as social relations, the rationalization of human interaction at every level of complexity). All of these currents and problems presume the humanity as the only or the central subject of interest.
But the book does much more than that. It provides a basis for re-thinking the fundamentals of the way in which one understands the interface between humanity and its increasingly autonomous technology, and between the idea of humanity as innate in itself against the reality that the human may now be more intensely manifested in its interfacing with increasingly self-generative machine intelligence and the hardware within which it resides. The consequences for everything from philosophy to a philosophy of knowledge, to core insights for the organization of social relations within a world that is now populated by carbon and silicon based intelligence may be quite profound. Human social collectives already fear and desire this new world--the engagement with artificial intelligence and its consequences is but a tip of that iceberg. While humanity started this century secure in its conceit that it was the center of all things, by century's end a very different form of intersubjectivity may well be the basis of the ruling ideology for humanity within its natural and machine orders.
It is with that in mind that in this and several posts that follow I will review Knowledge in Change. This Part 9 examines Chapter 8 of the book, entitled "Rearguards of Subjectivity" and my own engagement with it.
So who are the rear-guards of subjectivity? The human. What had been in the vanguard since the dawn of consciousness and its emergence as sentience—of the human person, and the human collective—now finds itself a rear-guard of subjectivity in the face of a new plural vanguard of the digital versions of the human and humanity, and its sentience manifested in the generative capacity of non-carbon based intelligence, and in the relentless march of descriptive and predictive modeling. The hologram, and the virtual self now leads. But leads what? And whom? And what might the flower of a philosophy of the self have to tell the human about the imaginaries of the selfie and SELF-E. That is the essence of the problem with which Broekman wrestles.
Thus, it is a small step from the subjectivity of language, to the cognition of coded programs and the sentience of generative AI and predictive modeling. The rearguards of subjectivity embody a negative dialectics, perhaps despite itself, that provides the foundations of exteriorization that makes it possible to begin to think of a de-humanized philosophy of cognition. The subjectivity of language, the dialectics of thought processes itself, of experiential epistemology, and of contradiction (in the Chinese Leninist style; Adorno, supra, Preface), all detach the self from the human, even as they seek to more deeply embed the one in the other. That detachment makes the space necessary to reconstruct the mimesis of the selfie and the SELF-E from a mirroring of the human, to its re-production in its own spaces. The rearguarding of subjectivity makes possible the van-guarding of the subjectivities of the digital. The detachment of one, the human centered analog, from the other, the generative digital, is fascinating—if only for its core consequence: the current efforts to develop a human facing regulatory environment for generative AI, predictive modeling and the like, is essentially also a rearguard action, and one that will, in its own way, provide the space to make possible the rear-guarding of human de-centered legalities of a subject that is no longer possessed entirely by humanity.
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Additional posts will consider each of the other nine chapters that make up this work. Links to the discussion of the book:
Part 2: Chapter 1 (Minds, Moons and Cognition)
Part 3: Chapter 2 (Fluidity and Flow)
Part 4: Chapter 3 (Post-Dialectics)
Part 5: Chapter 4 (Flow and Firstness)
Part 6: Chapter 5 (Interludes: Changing Worlds Changing Words)
Part 7: Chapter 6 ("The Non-Naïve-Natural")
Part 8: Chapter 7 ( "Plurality and the Natural")
Part 9: Chapter 8 ("Rearguards of Subjectivity)"
Part 10: Chapter 9 ("Conversions Convert Us All")
Part 11: An Epilogue (Chapter 9.5 ("Climate and Change")
Full discussion draft available for download SSRN here.
10. Chapter 8 (Rearguards of Subjectivity)
At last, one comes to fully face the implications of the virtual domains—at least as they relate to the human—a humanity that still presumes a measure of control. If in Chapter 7 Broekman moved the reader from the flow and conversion-cognition, back to the human within the digital, then in Chapter 8 Broekman squarely faces its consequences--the critical role of rear guarding subjectivity even in the transformation of a philosophy of the human to one of multi-subjectivity. That is, of the need to baseline philosophy in the rearguarding of the human in the emerging plural flows of conversion-cognition in the inter-subjectivity of the multiple bases of sentience.
To rearguard is to place the issue of conversion-cognition on battle footing. It alludes to the old French rearguard, to the portion of an army that is placed to in the back of a moving military force—moving forward with the group but facing backwards against threats from behind. An army, like a semiotic collective (Kevelson) is understood in three parts or guards: the rear; main; and van-guard. The rearguard and the vanguard are separated by the main guard. The vanguard looks forward, moving the body of the collective force with it. The rearguard moves with the collective with its back to it; the main-guard is shepherded between rear- and van-guards. The most vital aspect of the notion of a rear guard is its intimate connection with the van-guard. A rearguard may look back, but faces the vanguard of its opposition (and thus defines the contours of human dialectics in physical space). Vanguards and rearguards are relational concepts and contextual. One can define a rearguard only by reference to its oppositional vanguard in the field in which a dialectics is invoked passively or actively—that is consciously or with intent. To speak to a rearguard, then, is to acknowledge the vanguard that give the rear substance—and to some extent direction.
The guiding spirit of this effort to rearguard subjectivity, for Broekman, is Mimesis. That is a delightfully complicated choice. It points forward toward (vanguards) the iterative inductive subjectivity of data based sentience. Recall that Mimesis suggests not just imitation, or copying, but re-representation. It is the essence of the selfie (a re-presentation of the self) and the SELF-E, as it is of posters depicting copies of famous works of art hanging on student dormitories (and other places) globally. It is the essence of the symbolic drift of object from res (object, place, space) to sign (cognition of a thing in itself and apart from other things), and from sign to shared meaning (sentience of the object sign in a rationalized space of object-signs now ordered). For the modernist vanguard mimesis was challenging when it lost its human center (William Gaddes, Agape Agape (London: Penguin Classics, 2003); Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations (Hannah Arendt (ed); Harry Zohn (trans); New York Schocken Books, 1969 (1935)). Perhaps for Broekman as well.
The challenge here focuses on the dialectic between rearguards and the vanguard against which it is deployed. That, itself, serves as a dialectic—but a dialectic in reverse. It is not necessarily aligned with Adorno’s notion of the “negative dialectics (Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (E.B. Ashton (trans), New York: Routledge, 1990 (original, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,1966)). Adorno appeared more concerned about the trajectories of dialectics—one inherited from biblical assumptions and then transmuted by Marx into some sort of forced march to the ultimate “better.” Adorno suggests both directionlessness and its revelations about the limits of knowledge; all centered on the self—the traditional “self-ish” stance of philosophy. The obsession with the limits of things, of course, was the marker of the last two centuries of philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, Ltd., 1922). “It is largely this task of limiting the realm of the thinkable that makes Wittgenstein’s philosophical enterprise not only analogous to but intrinsically similar to Kant’s” (Jaako Hintikka, Lingua Universalis vs. Calculus Ratiocinator: An Ultimate Presupposition of Twentieth Century Philosophy (Dordrecht, Neth: Kluwer, 2010, p. 178).
But rearguarding against vanguards in the digital reveals the character of the process as well as the range of its direction and the illumination of the limits of the human as the measure of all things. One moves here beyond Nietzsche’s pointlessness of dialectic except as acts of (collective) will, to the power of direction through iteration. That power does not suggest direction other than that direction is measured in the sometimes infinitesimal spaces between rear- and van-guard along an axis of time and space (John Bell, “Continuity and Infinitesimals,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (last update 16 March 2022)). It is here that one runs up against the rear-guard’s hesitation. Here one thinks of its origins in (as Benjamin puts it) la modernité, of the image as both a discontinuity and reshaping of presumptions about dialectics and human cognition, and as a radical transformation of time and memory (Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Screen 13(1) (1972) 5–26). In a sense, though, one here encounters the same anxiety that confronted humans before—the printed text, the written word, the painted image—all radically transformative, and all radically focused on the preservation and projection of cognition from out of the individual shell (its life-husk the way that software is encased in hardware) to a community of life forms. The image—like text—serves both as continuity (memory) and as infinitesimals, measuring the distance between the image and the viewer. “Everything in the early pictures was designed to last. . . whose disappearance was certainly one of the most accurate symptoms of what was happening in society itself. . . “, Benjamin “A Short History,” supra, p. 17).
The intersubjectivity between the internal (the human) and the external (the detritus of consciousness and memory), once delightfully conceived as entirely “all too human” (Nietzsche, Human All too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Alexander Harvey (trans) Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co, 1908) now acquires complexity where the detritus itself is animated (like Frankenstein) but also ensouled through the autonomy of iterative and inductive self-awareness. Rear-guarding here then looks forward to preserving the humanity of subjectivity in the face of plural inter-subjectivity in which the human is dis-placed (the fear is to be re-placed) by what had started out as the visualization of cognition (text) and the memory of time (image). It also suggests the rear guarding of the iterative essence of the calculus by reference to the Tao (Yi Lin, “Introduction: Discontinuity—a Weakness of Calculus and Beginning of a New Era,” Kyberbytes (1998) 27:6/7 614-617). Here one encounters the problem of the image in a different form: “In a certain sense, it realizes the Chinese philosophy that ‘The Tao has no form and can be seen only under specific circumstances.’” (Yi Lin, supra, p. 616). The rear-guarding focuses on the inter-subjective discontinuities (the breaks in the flow); the van-guarding focuses on the continuities of the flow as an infinite iterative process of production and re-production. The Tao continues; but it takes form under specific circumstances. For the human, that involves the human and their offerings; for the digital, it centers on the flow of iteration, of mimesis itself.-
The resulting inter-subjective dialectic between human and non-human cogitation is marked—and here it comes again—by mimesis—and made intelligible to both by the inter-language of conversion. But in the digital the mimesis of the calculus (Abraham Robinson, “The Metaphysics of the Calculus,” Studies in the Logic and Foundations of Mathematics (1967) 47 28-46; ----------). Less so, though for the human, still wrestling with the contradictions of an inter-subjectivity punctuated by text and image. So within subjectivity, in the face of the digital, a human centered subjectivity must engage in a rear guard action against a vanguard of the selfie and the SELF-E, leading a sentience of predictive modeling and generative AI. And that points to an even more interesting reverse dialectics—though the subjectivity of the digital is advancing in its vanguardism (without conceding direction other than a change in position relative to other positions which is marked by a greater richness of data-flow) human intersubjectivity must necessarily retreat (in the sense that, again without conceding direction, it changes in position marked by a diminishing richness of data-flow, or a data-flow more contingent on the plural subjectivity that is accessible only through the digital). It can know only itself—and it is to the cultivation of that self-ishness to which the construction of reality is set. Wittgenstein set the tone with the very first words of the Preface to his Tractatus: “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, supra, Preface p. 23). Mimesis as rearguards of subjectivity.
It is to the rules of conversion (Wittgenstein’s “translation” esp. Chp 4) that Broekman uses to attach the fact-universe of the human, to that of the human-digital (selfie), to that of the digital (SELF-E) and within it the shape and limits of flow. All involve a calculus of perceiving flow within the flow of the infinite for the constitution of reality—from time to time—as infinite discontinuities within a continuous flow of these instances. Perhaps Spinoza had it right:
Again, from the fact that we can limit duration and quantity at our pleasure, when we conceive the latter abstractedly as apart from substance, and separate the former from the manner whereby it flows from things eternal, there arise time and measure; time for the purpose of limiting duration, measure for the purpose of limiting quantity, so that we may, as far as is possible, the more readily imagine them. Further, inasmuch as we separate the modifications of substance from substance itself, and reduce them to classes, so that we may, as far as is possible, the more readily imagine them, there arises number, whereby we limit them. Whence it is clearly to be seen, that measure, time, and number, are merely modes of thinking, or, rather, of imagining. (Spinoza, Letter 29, p. 7 (R. H. M. Elwes (trans) Spinoza, Correspondence (1883)).
So who are the rear-guards of subjectivity? The human. What had been in the vanguard since the dawn of consciousness and its emergence as sentience—of the human person, and the human collective—now finds itself a rear-guard of subjectivity in the face of a new plural vanguard of the digital versions of the human and humanity, and its sentience manifested in the generative capacity of non-carbon based intelligence, and in the relentless march of descriptive and predictive modeling. The hologram, and the virtual self now leads. But leads what? And whom? And what might the flower of a philosophy of the self have to tell the human about the imaginaries of the selfie and SELF-E. That is the essence of the problem with which Broekman wrestles.
This is the path--from rear-guards of subjectivity toward the van-guards of plural inter-subjectivity. Where does Broekman take us? He starts where started—with Walter Benjamin, but the Benjamin of ruminations of a snapshot—of Paris just before the German occupation (Broekman, supra, p. 147)). But this is a Benjamin in a slightly different mood. This is a Benjamin in which mimesis describes the images that presage discontinuity. He speaks of the self as the mimesis of the self-image—the self-understood as its own image and thus an expression of classical intersubjectivity. Yet this is also the Benjamin in which the self-image is external to the self—not in the mind, but in physical expression as image (and of course as text). One presage not a rear-guard here, but a van-guard of digital inter-subjectivity, when the images and text are animated.
For Broekman, Benjamin is the jumping off point for a consideration of ‘Mimetics and Modernity (Broekman, supra, pp. 148-1509). And rightly so. He moves us from self-image to self-knowledge—the abstraction of image from object to sentience as a knowing state of being (ibid., p. 148). Now the general proposition of modernity, bouncing back and forth (human iteration) between the self and its self-image), takes a turn from the interiorization of the Self-Image binary, to its exteriorization, and by that shift, expanding the binary to a plural form (ibid., pp. 148-149). But it comes with a twist—the bending back of the plural toward its human core: “All these considerations lead to the proposed look behind the popular Selfie and name the Self as the central subject of the digital culture of the Self-E.” (Ibid., p. 149). It is this humanization of exteriorization that, Broekman suggests, “also applies to the formation of the work of contemporary thinkers” (ibid.). He speaks of connectivity, but the connections feel like a hub and spoke, the Habermasian reworking “of ideology into a communication theorem”( ibid.) producing, as between Habermas and Benjamin a deeply problematic and polemically connected” alignment between mimetic thought and modernity (ibid.). But the problemmatique remains—with respect to time and place, and dialectics. “Mimetics, modernity, and dialogic insights institute a stable and challenging thought pattern and cultural view. But one finds, remarkably enough, never a remark concerning any form of cognition and the role of the other in that process” (Broekman, supra, p. 150). The power of the rear-guard.
That fundamental problem moves Broekman to a consideration of “Culture and Criticism (ibid., pp. 151-155); “Knowledge and Truth (ibid., pp. 155-159); “The decay of the Aura (ibid., pp. 159-164); to the “Complexities of the Plural” (ibid., pp. 164- 170). It makes sense, in an ironic kind of way, to start with the last and work one’s way up to the beginning. Broekman here reveals that the character of the rearguard of the subject as a function of reality (“Culture ad Criticism”), of position (“Knowledge and Truth”), and of function of the subject (“The Decay of the Aura”) (Broekman, supra, p. 164). These were defensive (rear guarding) rather than advancing (van-guarding) stances. It was only at their edges “and often underground [that] unfolded also new and more complex forms of interhuman communication” (Broekman, p. 164). But not, critically , of forms of human-digital communication. Communication remains a one way street. In other words, the rear-guarding of which Broekman concentrates is one that is temporally framed and human centered. It is a reminder that communication from one point to the next of the flow loses meaning—and acquires another—as the sentience at one point in the flow seeks to decipher the messages encoded in text, images, and artifacts of another.
That characterizes the philosophical mess from the last decades of the twentieth century. They were not only determined by what an actual philosopher was thinking, writing, and publishing at a certain moment in the 20th or earlier century. No, they were also differently received and understood because of the changing patterns of our twenty-first century’s reading and understanding (Broekman, supra, p. 164).
This brings us back to of language (as the artifact through which information is conveyed) as signal in the analog, but also hinting at signal in the digital. For language in the analog, mimesis (as re-presentation) produces a continuous signal of physical measurements—one is obsessed with the calculus of the space between points of reality. For Broekman, “like digital signals results from modulation” (ibid., p. 165). The difference is one between variations in amplitude (the analog) and the binary language of the digital (which produces combinations of only two amplitudes—zero and one)). And yet that may be a difference in format but not in frame—both bridge gaps as signal in the analog, and the binary language of the digital, but also hinting at language as the bridging framework of the calculus: in which one must link (provide a portal between) the infinitesimally small and yet profound spaces between points in the flow. For language in the analog, mimesis (as re-presentation) produces a continuous signal of physical measurements—one is obsessed with the calculus of the space between points of reality. This has consequences: “In an analog language are meanings determined by a speaker who uses grammatical or cultural practices for his speech, whereas in digital language are meanings the product of the topic that is organized binarily.” (Broekman, supra, p. 165). And yet that may miss a point of convergence—speakers in the analog are constrained by the rationality of topicality; topics in the digital are shaded by the speaker (understood as the coded programming that animates a digital “voice”).
The question has other consequences—especially for the understanding of the notion of plurality in inter-subjectivity. The essence of it is straightforward: plurality does not occur within the analog (human) or the digital (generative or predictive sentience). But it does occur in communication between them—in the flow (or rather the flow as it can be accessed and processed by each in its own way). Given that sense of the plural, its intersubjectivity (and thus cognition in the age of the digital) cannot occur without conversion. Conversion is a sort of translating protocol between plural subjects (analog and digital—human and generative). Its functions are not to be confused with its location—as interface, in platforms, as markets (Broekman, supra, pp. 166-168). “It all focuses directly to the thesis of our preceding chapters, that conversion is the most recent dynamics of cognition thanks to the New Plural’s context” (Ibid., p. 168). That has a liberating effect on cognition, which can exist beyond a subject driven control hierarchy precisely because it exist in that in between space between the analog and the digital, between cognitively significant point of amplitude, and beyond the iterative qualities of the binary (ibid.). More importantly, it severs the connection between knowledge and possession—between the objectification of knowledge and the possession what we like to know. That, for Broekman, more powerfully aligns communication with flow—that is the process of cognition with the process of conversion (ibid., pp. 168-169). And it is to the semiotics of cognition and conversion—to the semiotics of the AND between cognition and conversion, and its effect on shaping the epistemology of the digital, that Broekman turns to in his last chapter. Here, then, the prequel (Broekman, supra, pp. 169-170).
But what of the rear-guards to the “Complexities of the Plural” (ibid., pp. 164- 170—of reality, Culture and Criticism (ibid., pp. 151-155); of position, “Knowledge and Truth (ibid., pp. 155-159); and of function of the subject, “The decay of the Aura (ibid., pp. 159-164? The rear-guarding of reality embroils philosophy in the quest for purpose, or for a purpose without a center, or for the purpose of avoiding purpose. The object of all of this fussing was, of course, the Aufkläring—the German term being richer in some sense than its English Enlightenment (Broekman, supra, p. 151). But it was more than that—the Aufkläring was, indeed, nothing more than mimesis—and a rear-guarding dialectic. It replaced a faith (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (John Allen (trans) Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1813; Vol. I, Bk. II, chp. II, pp. 490 et seq.) in the progress of knowledge from cognition (knowledge of) to sentience (revelation)—which for Calvinists was tied to the distinction between Jesus being “known” to his Jewish people, to the revelation of his vocation only through the Gospels (ibid., Chp. IX). The replacement—a certainty in the revelation of the central subjectivity of the human, then produced both the progressivism of the Aufklärung (which remains deeply embedded in liberal democratic society), and the Marxist-Leninist theory of progress lead by the vanguard of social forces organized as professional revolutionaries (Lenin, “What is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement,” Lenin Collected Works Vol. I, pp. 119-271 (Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961 (1901/02)) and then as the incarnation of the political authority of the masses through which the march toward the establishment of a communist society would be realized.
More ironic still, for Broekman’s discussion (ibid, supra pp. 151-152) it became the essence of the post-modern, appearing as a mirror of itself and of the thing against which it was constructed. This is “the basic problem of the modern: namely the problem of an age that must seek its normativity within itself. . . Postmodern work with a concealed normativity” (Broekman, supra, p. 151). This self-centering progressivism is the hallmark of the analog, and the foundation of reality. The rest is an imitation of the digital: the distancing of experience (the internalization of an exteriorized phenomenology); the development of objects of mimesis and anchors in flow (text, image, and the documents of culture; Broekman, supra, pp. 152-153) and the obsession with narrative and (again irony) bias and orthodoxy; and the revelation of a curated experiential self-awareness through which the world is revealed (ibid., pp. 15-154). And here we are back to Calvin (knowledge versus revelation). More ironic still is the alignment of the structures of the analog as a process for conversion not just to the digital, but toward the digital that could then detach itself from the stream of inter-subjectivity which was the postmodern (and modern) construction of the self-aware lifeworld (imaginaries) of the human. As Broekman suggests, again perhaps with irony, “it is always about rationally justifiable knowledge” (Ibid., p. 155). Human cognition romps around in a well-manicured zoo—the wild is far too forbidding, except as its own mimeses. Well positioned to look forward toward the digital—philosophy guards itself against what is coming.
The rear-guarding of position centers mimesis in all its glory. But it poses the ultimate problem for the Aufkläring, the highest products of which have been the construction of the human. The flow has no position; nor does reality. One gives it form. Who is “one”? That has been the problematique of the modern/postmodern, and of political philosophy. Choose as you will, the choice is only as good as the ability to frame around it the artifacts of pictures that create a reality measured from instantaneous manifestation to another. As Broekman nicely puts it: “to know is to appropriate” (Ibid., p. 156). And to appropriate is to dispose, or re-arrange. Truth is in the relation between knowledge and revelation; and that depends on the context in which the object of both finds themselves. But this is old news. But its mimesis is new. First, the position of the subject in time is the expression of mimetic moments (Broekman, p. 156). But it is more than that—it foreshadows the connection between mimesis and iteration in the digital—and the essence of the temporality of generative AI and predictive models—one measured by the space between iterations. Second, possession is itself mimetic. It produces its own relational dialectic of appropriation, transformation, and disposal (Broekman, supra, pp. 156-157). It also foreshadows the digital—the aggregation and processing of data. Third, it suggests an epistemological mimesis. “It always concerns interpretation as a reading of reality. Theory unmasks that this truth can be possessed.” (Ibid., p. 157). Here again, epistemology as a collection of bias and taboo, arranged to suit, becomes remarkably aligned with digital programicity. That ought to fascinate. Third, mimesis and realization unfold together (ibid., p. 158-159). Reflection and experience is defining of both the human and the spaces within the perception field of the human. Not just interpretation, but a temporal possession dialectics that reinforces what is already known but can now be revealed as a truth that is possessed. Again foreshadowing—the application of algorithm for assessment and judgment. The unfolding does not measure but makes its object.
Lastly, the rear-guarding of the subject invokes the mimesis of re-production. And it is here that one returns to the initial discussion of this section—the relational position of rear-guarding where the object is itself a defense against another vanguard. It is important to recall here, then, that the position of guarding which changes its complexion depending on position, is also the sum of re-resentati6on that solidifies the subject within the framework of reality and position. This is underscored by the concept of the false conscious—a favorite cliché of the post-modern, but important for the way it reveals the subject-object-subject relation in collective (human space. (ibid., pp. 160-161). But more than that, it reveals its appropriation of iterative control in the digital where authenticity s measured against bias that fails to conform to the idealized bias structures of the human. In both cases the mimetic relationship between language and experience—between the conscious (knowledge) and the sentient (revelation). Broekman reveals in a most fascinating way: “the mimetic relation is the basis of seeing and reading. It is the central motive for types of textuality” (Ibid., p. 161). And thus the aura of subjectivity of the human which is both rear-guarding, and looking forward (van-guarding): first in the form of the notion that myth is not a repository but rather a unit of expressing meaning; second units of meaning define the possibilities of movement; and third in the face of scarcity of meaning units there is conflict—that is there is dialectic (ibid., p. 162). And, at last the true nature of the aura of subjectivity—the subjectivity of language itself. (ibid., p. 163-164). Here something fascinating—it points backwards (Michael Peters, “Wittgenstein/Foucault/anti-philosophy: Contingency, community, and the ethics of self-cultivation” Educational Philosophy and Theory (2022) 54 1495-1500; Li Feng, “On the Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity of language,” Communication and Linguistic Studies (2020) 6(1) 1-5; Senko K. Maynard, Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion, and Voice in the Japanese Language (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 1993)).
It is a small step from the subjectivity of language, to the cognition of coded programs and the sentience of generative AI and predictive modeling. The rearguards of subjectivity embody a negative dialectics, perhaps despite itself, that provides the foundations of exteriorization that makes it possible to begin to think of a de-humanized philosophy of cognition. The subjectivity of language, the dialectics of thought processes itself, of experiential epistemology, and of contradiction (in the Chinese Leninist style; Adorno, supra, Preface), all detach the self from the human, even as they seek to more deeply embed the one in the other. That detachment makes the space necessary to reconstruct the mimesis of the selfie and the SELF-E from a mirroring of the human, to its re-production in its own spaces. The rearguarding of subjectivity makes possible the van-guarding of the subjectivities of the digital. The detachment of one, the human centered analog, from the other, the generative digital, is fascinating—if only for its core consequence: the current efforts to develop a human facing regulatory environment for generative AI, predictive modeling and the like, is essentially also a rearguard action, and one that will, in its own way, provide the space to make possible the rear-guarding of human de-centered legalities of a subject that is no longer possessed entirely by humanity.
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