An encounter with Jan M. Broekman, "Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation" (Springer Nature, 2023): Part 10 --Chapter 9 ("Conversions Convert Us All")

  

 

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.

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 10 examines Chapter 9 of the book, entitled "Conversions Convert Us All") and my own engagement with it.

One moves in this final chapter from rear-guarding subjectivity to van-guarding digital subjectivity.

If the human is no longer at the center—in every sense of that de-centering--then what comes next? Philosophy in the late twentieth and early 21st century has suggested a course of action: an insistence on the singularity of the human at the center of a reality that is real only because the human is at the center. In this sense the philosophy of the modern and the postmodern—the badly behaved children of the Aufklärung—were aligned if with nothing else. And semiotics was complicit in this mad enterprise by assuming away the simultaneity of triadic relations among emerging forms of subjectivity that could only be ignored by a deliberate blindness. And, indeed, the continual re-centering on the human, even in the face of the unavoidable emergence of the plural subject, even conscious of the implications of plural subjectivity, is a temptation that is not merely hard to resist, but also hard to avoid. The difficulty is not conceptual but pragmatic—the subject can know only what it can know. Its encasing—in its body, in its mind, in its own abstracted universe within which rationalization is possible—makes it infinitely more difficult to reach subjective “escape velocity.” Nonetheless, it is one thing to acknowledge the power of the self under conditions of subjectivity; it is quite another to use that condition to read out of reality the subjectivity of the selfie, and the SELF-E—not as a function of the human, but as an autonomous subjectivity, only part of the manifestation of which is actually cognizable by the human. That is the difficulty. And while Broekman can grasp it—and does, courageously—it remains difficult to overcome the notion that the human self is an exclusive hub of an (the?) ontological universe of cognition. 

Pix credit here

 But that is the problem. Broekman stops where it is possible to continue forward—from the Self/Self-E mirror, to the Self/Self-E generative self—which is no longer the self. Is there a self beyond the Self/selfie/Self-E? The thrust of Broekman’s exploration suggests that there is. It is just less fascinating in a world that remains, at bottom, essentially narcissistic. If it does not reflect, proceed from, mirror, or extend the human, then it may hold no interest for the human project of building a world in which the human stands at the center. Nonetheless, it is clear that there are many such states of being in which the human is not centered. These are the worlds and spaces that exist and engage in their own subjectivities whether or not the human is casting its gaze in that direction or feeling its effects. If there is no dominion is there any reality of interest to the human? Philosophy suggests that it is a point not worth considering because it lies beyond sight. In the movie Alien (1979), the famous tag line was ”In space no one can hear you scream.” One might suggest that in that case either the scream does not count because it does not relate to a listener other than its producer; or it may suggest the power of auditory hallucination. Yet might hallucination have a power equal to that of its physical manifestation? Psychiatry suggests it does. One might consider the generative digital (including its predictive modelling elements) as the scream that is not heard. It exists and continues its existence though it may not directly affect the inter-subjective across the boundaries of plural subjectivity.

And yet it exists: data continues to be scrapped even when a program is not activated to consume data; data and its analytics may be discarded by may continue to exist if the “cloud.” Whatever is deleted in hardware may be easily retrieved. Delegation, here, serving as a metaphor—it is made inaccessible to those who exercise the deletion power, but is otherwise available in itself and to others. Here the notion of possession, nicely developed by Broekman in his chapter 8, may serve an additional duty. The intersubjectivity of the plural self may be defined as an act of possession as much as a process. The flow exists whether or not the human is aware, and certainly whether or not the human inserts itself. But the act of possession, of insertion, of naming and using, these then activate cognition (in the human) and provide a shape for its object. But that shaping is an altogether human exercise; it does not necessarily affect the thing itself in itself. And that is what is most feared about generative AI and predictive modelling—the idea that it can exist autonomously from the control of humanity—from its possession and instrumentalization. Broekman nicely casts a light on the exercise, again, of the all too human reflex to develop subjectivity taboos and inter-subjective ontologies that make it impossible to conceive of something as other than a slave of another—Aristotle’s “natural” slave. The repercussions of these unconscious presumptions pervade the current generation of efforts to "regulate" A.I., though better put, the human interface with generative and predictive A.I. systems.

Pix cred it here

 

Additional posts will consider each of the other nine chapters that make up this work. Links to the discussion of the book:

Part 1: Preface

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.

11. Chapter 9 (Conversions Convert Us All)

 

If the product of the transformations of cognition that are inevitable as the human divides itself into its carbon wrapped self and its non-carbon encased selfie (SELF-E) produces a stubborn rear-guardism based on the momentary incarnation of space, time, and place through the eyes of a human subject, then the emergence of a cognitive van (avant)-guardism based on the transfiguration of cognition of the flow of time, space and place in some cognitively accessible way is required to align cognition with the times. The core ontological issue  emerged in the plural—being (and its relational meaning of things) now appeared in the plural—as the self and the mirror of the self; and then triple, as the self, its mirrored image, and its digitalized re-production. Each was then, in a sense, both freed of the others, and yet intimately bound the residue shared essence. That was, certainly, the fundamental philosophical task which Broekman  shoulders (Broekman, supra, Preface). The semiosis of the cognition deepened the analysis. That  triadic semiosis revealed the cascading tripleness of meaning, and its epistemology, as object, as a  separable signification of the object (which was connected to but also detached from the thing), and its interpretation that encased  the signified object with meaning that could be shared (meaning as an object, signifier, and interpretation of itself) among subjects. Meaning, in this sense provided the casing that gave form to signification and object. Tripleness, of course, is embedded in all subjects. And multiple subjects, interacting with plural subjects, produce a crisis of cognition  that destabilizes entirely a multi-millennia search for meaning within the core postulate of subjective singularity.

 

If the human is no longer at the center—in every sense of that de-centering--then what comes next? Philosophy in the late twentieth and early 21^st century has suggested a course of action: an insistence on the singularity of the human at the center of a reality that is real only because the human is at the center. In this sense the philosophy of the modern and the postmodern—the badly behaved children of the Aufklärung—were aligned if with nothing else.  And semiotics was complicit in this mad enterprise by assuming away the simultaneity of triadic relations among emerging forms of subjectivity that could only be ignored by a deliberate blindness. And, indeed, the continual re-centering on the human, even in the face of the unavoidable emergence of the plural subject, even conscious of the implications of plural subjectivity, is a temptation that is not merely hard to resist, but also hard to avoid. The difficulty is not conceptual but pragmatic—the subject can know only what it can know.  Its encasing—in its body, in its mind, in its own abstracted universe within which rationalization is possible—makes it infinitely more difficult to reach subjective “escape velocity.” Nonetheless, it is one thing to acknowledge the power of the self under conditions of subjectivity; it is quite another to use that condition to read out of reality the subjectivity of the selfie, and the SELF-E—not as a function of the human, but as an autonomous subjectivity, only part of the manifestation of which is actually cognizable by the human.  That is the difficulty.  And while Broekman can grasp it—and does, courageously—it remains difficult to overcome the notion that the human self is an exclusive hub of an (the?) ontological universe of cognition.

 

This grasping embraces the fundamental semiotics of the additive principle—from the simplest aggregation of objects, to the trajectories of infinite iterations so small that they flow from and in and through time, space, and place. This is the embrace of the AND between cognition and conversion, the greatest challenge of which is “to consider that no component of that insight could unfold without the Self considered as the omni” (Broekman, supra, p. 171). But which self; which perspective? Broekman suggests three ways from the fixity of the subjectivity of philosophy to the self-ishness of plural subjectivity.  First, he stresses that the triadic self is human, all too human (The human self (introduced in these pages as ‘the -S triad’) does still play a primary role in those transformations” (ibid.) of cognition amidst and related with analog, digital, quantum, and A.I. approaches. Nonetheless the  gulf between the subject and the self can exist at the margins (Broekman, supra, “The Self and the Self-E”, pp. 172-178). Second, these transformations require a more radical engagement with the implications of “and” (the additive principle) in cognition. That in turn requires a more radical differentiation of the traditional subject—but still within the human self, however more finely one slices that object (Broekman, supra, “The Semiosphere of the Se4lf”, pp. 178-181). Third, that radical differentiation, and the plural self, even if it deemed to be no more than self-reflecting mirroring, requires a conversion mechanism to access cognition; in Broekman’s terms, it may produce not an additive principle of cognition and conversion, but rather the merging of cognition into conversion—the process becomes the object. (Ibid.; “Are interfaces Facial?”; pp. 182-186). Broekman, sums up the results  as “Mundial Reach (ibid., pp. 186-189); and “Climate and Change” (ibid., pp. 189-199).

 

 Broekman starts the section “The Self and the Self-E” (ibid., pp. 172-178), with a reminder of the humanity of the digital. “The preceding pages  proposed the term ‘Self-E’ as a special indication for the Self in Digital Spheres and fields of Meaning” (Ibid., 171). These were tied, in turn, to ego-positionality, and with it to a re-reading of Husserl’s phenomenological insights (ibid.). The SELF-E fractures the human subject, but does not de-center the human in the subject, just the fixity of its imagining in itself, and its images.  But fracturing –the pulling apart—also creates connection. That is the connection of meaning and sign between aspects of the self in analog and digital built on mutuality. Mutuality, itself is a function of mirroring, rather than of advantage. “The Self is here and here, it is not there and will never submerge in an unknown composition—it is here, and it is Self-creating a Self-E. The world is the result of an infinite mirroring.” (Broekman, supra, p. 174).  It is on the mirroring fractured self (self, Self-E, subject) and their mutuality that it is possible both the become conscious of the digital and to give it form in the human. “The adaptation of those three anchor points sustains our worldwide network of digital knowledge” (Broekman, supra, p. 173).

 

Not quite mine.    Broekman has less interest in the selfie—the image of the self in the digital, though Benjamin (The History of Photography) might serve as a reminder of the critical place of the selfie in the constitution of the flow in which self, Self-E and subject can be constituted.  The selfie, rather than the antipodes of Self and SSELF-E (like the binary analog/digital) speaks to the edges but not to the key transition  point, the transformational instant, of the selfie. It is both the mirror and the gateway between self and Self-E; perhaps the meeting point of both as (plural) (human) subject. In addition, and perhaps critically, it is mirror of the human in the digital (rather than  of there-presentation of the human as the digital). That is not the direction that Broekman’s logic drives the analysis though. And yet it appears at the edges of that analysis. It is the click of the camera that creates the selfie , and it is the selfie that, for the human self, marks the transition from self to Self-E. It is memory, in the way that an instant is a memory of the flow. “Yes, indeed: take your smart phone and click one of the many options the instrument offers you. With each choice  you change into a somewhat different subject and perhaps  also a different Self because of the multiple consequences of your click” (Broekman, supra, p. 174).

 

A tripod needs connection—with or without the intervening selfie.  And connection produces cognition. Connection is what Broekman names conversion—translation, re-presentation, aggregation, summation, and to some extent alignment.  “It seems precisely important to underline how conversion functioned as a silent power of semiotic articulation of the Self and the Self-E in the heart of all these changes.” (Broekman, supra, pp. 173-174). For Broekman, the Self-E takes the self (and its subjectivity) into a digitalized mirror of the incarnated world.  A re-production, and an opposing subjectivity, as well as a map of the other.  One moves from the reduction of moments of rain activity and then their memorialization in text, and then image, to a converging of the self and its memory that exposes the multiplicity of the self (image) and thus the subject.  At its limit it reflect a process rather than a summing. Here Broekman quite correctly invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (trans) NY: Penguin Classics 2009 (1972)). No humanity, no nature, only process, producing one within the other and mechanizing both, “producing machines, desiring machines everywhere” (Broekman, supra, p. 175, quoting Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, supra, . 2). But where Broekman remembers Anti-Oedipus, one might also recall the Dao: “The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do” (Tao-te Ching, supra, Chp. 7(1)).

 

But for Broekman, the Self-E signifies something quite definite.  It is in its “-E” that the self fractures between analog and digital, and between incarnate and virtual mirroring images.  It is the portal to the world of the digital (e-commerce; e-mail; etc.) which produces extensions, exceptions externalizations, and to the hardware within which the digital is encased (e-devices, etc.) (Broekman, supra, pp. 176-177). But it is signified by the human. “So, if one analyzes an e-conversation of whatever nature, there seems to be a central cluster: the you and me and the world of E-. . . Difficult to decide is that there seem to be two real and a virtual partner in an e-dialogue” (Broekman, supra, p. 177) with the E- as the mediating but also mirroring agent. What one produces here is an enrichment of the subject through the emergence of fractured but connected selves. At last one sees where Broekman is going—to the manifestation of the human in and through technological expressions of the self.  This is an impulse as old as the cave dwellers, the writing on stone tablets, the creation of text, and its technological transformations within physical space through the mechanisms of printing. Each created a proto E- in the shape of the technologies through which the self was expressed in a mirror image—text, pictures, books, and the like.  And now the transformation of the digital points to yet another.  But this one is different because it is not the human projected in image and text; it is the human projected as a human in a space that is not physically but virtually human.” Here we are back to the Self and the digital Self-E! Both are a metaphor for the wealth of inner positions, which are created during the self’s continuous positioning in life” (Broekman, supra, p. 178).  

 

But that is the problem.  Broekman stops where it is possible to continue forward—from the Self/Self-E mirror, to the Self/Self-E  generative self—which is no longer the self. Is there a self beyond the Self/selfie/Self-E? The thrust of Broekman’s exploration suggests that there is.  It is just less fascinating in a world that remains, at bottom, essentially narcissistic. If it does not reflect, proceed from, mirror, or extend the human, then it may hold no interest for the human project of building a world in which the human stands at the center. Nonetheless, it is clear that there are many such states of being in which the human is not centered. These are the worlds and spaces that exist and engage in their own subjectivities whether or not the human is casting its gaze in that direction or feeling its effects.  If there is no dominion is there any reality of interest to the human? Philosophy suggests that it is a point not worth considering because it lies beyond sight. In the movie Alien (1979), the famous tag line was ”In space no one can hear you scream.”  One might suggest that in that case either the scream does not count because it does not relate to a listener other than its producer; or it may suggest the power of auditory hallucination.  Yet might hallucination have a power equal to that of its physical manifestation? Psychiatry suggests it does. One might consider the generative digital (including its predictive modelling elements) as the scream that is not heard.  It exists and continues its existence though it may not directly affect the intersubjective across the boundaries of plural subjectivity. 

 

And yet it exists: data continues to be scrapped even when a program is not activated to consume data; data and its analytics may be discarded by may continue to exist if the “cloud.” Whatever is deleted in hardware may be easily retrieved. Delegation, here, serving as a metaphor—it is made inaccessible to those who exercise the deletion power, but is otherwise available in itself and to others.  Here the notion of possession, nicely developed by Broekman in his chapter 8, may serve an additional duty.  The intersubjectivity of the plural self may be defined as an act of possession as much as a process. The flow exists whether or not the human is aware, and certainly whether or not the human inserts itself.  But the act of possession, of insertion, of naming and using, these then activate cognition (in the human) and provide a shape for its object. But that shaping is an altogether human exercise; it does not necessarily affect the thing itself in itself.  And that is what is most feared about generative AI and predictive modelling—the idea that it can exist autonomously from the control of humanity—from its possession and instrumentalization. Broekman nicely casts a light on the exercise, again, of the all too human reflex to develop subjectivity taboos and inter-subjective ontologies that make it impossible to conceive of something as other than a slave of another—Aristotle’s “natural” slave.

 

Indeed, the tendrils of Aristotle continue to run deep in society in the West: “for the same thing is useful to the part and to the whole, to the body and to the soul; but the slave is as it were a part of the master, as if he were an animated part of his body, though separate” (Aristotle, Treatise on Government, supra, Bk I, Chp. VI). That is as apt a description of human plural subjectivity in theory, and of the approach of current efforts to possess the generative and predictive animus of the digital by those who believe themselves empowered to do so.   It is in this way, for example that the OECD’s Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence distinguishes between “AI actors (“AI actors are those who play an active role in the AI system lifecycle, including organisations and individuals that deploy or operate AI”) and AI systems (“a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. AI systems are designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy”) (OECD, Recommendation on A.I., supra, p. 7).  Regulatory ideology then shapes the battle over the nature of possession and its exploitation for ideologically differentiated portions of the Semiosphere (Anu Bradford, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (OUP, 2023).

 

Broekman makes inevitable the recognition of the Generative digital self as something distinct from the self in the digital.  And it is in that recognition that the revolution in philosophy will be generated. It is also the space in which the limits of human centered approaches to the regulation of generative intelligence and predictive modelling will be exposed for what it is—an effect to reduce the generative digital self to a Self-E. But that can only be possible to the extent that the human can possess the generative digital Self.  It is unclear that this possession is either comprehensive or complete.  Much less is it clear that such possession, embedded in the architecture of human law systems and social relations, will have the apparatus to enforce this possession even within the human—without the autonomous intervention of the generative selves which it means to control. That is the current great paradox of current approaches to AI regulation—the emerging terror that comes with the realization that only generative AI can be used to effectively manage generative AI.  More fascinating still:  the technology for creating basic generative intelligence is so accessible, and data clusters available enough,  that it is even harder to control the human intent on activating generative intelligence or predictive systems unconnected to the systems of surveillance and control operationalized through law systems. And here we speak only to actors at the interior margins of social relations.  But already well positioned are those rogue individuals (and soon generative digital selves who are deployed to underline authoritative systems of social relations in law, culture, economics, and politics.

 

This becomes clearer in the course of Broekman’s discussion of the Semiosphere of the self (Broekman, supra., pp. 178-181). The semiosphere is a concept that fascinates. At its broadest, it is understood as a relational biosphere built on the interconnection of related sets of semiotic relations that provide a rationalized structure of sense and experience, and therefore of knowledge and meaning (Juri Lotman, “On the semiosphere” (Wilma Clark (trans)) Sign Systems Studies (2005) 33(1) 205–229). Lotman’s insights, of course, have morphed  with the rise of Broekman’s “-E” to embrace digital realms (John Hartley, Indek Ibrus, and Maarja Ojama, On the Digital Semiosphere: Culture, Media, and Science for the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2020). Broekman rightly rejects the narrowness of the original Tartu-Moscow School approach limited to cultural dynamics.  He notes respecting the power of the sphere of the Self as such  to create forms of life through meanings: “The latter  should cause the Self to unfold a meaningful life. Indeed: spheres enable cognition” (Broekman, supra, p. 179). He astutely connects through Peirce, the semiosphere with the redirection of cognition from out of conversion (Broekman, supra, pp. 180-181).  They also serve to define the borders—and barriers—of and to the sphere (Juri Lotman, The Semiosphere, Soviet Psychology (1989) 27 40-61). The essence, and effect on the Self-E is the contrast of signs in spheres contrasted to a meaning in discourse—that is between the digital and the analog (Broekman, supra, p. 180). The Semiosphere, then, is the ideal place for the intersubjectivity of the New Plural within the human. “It seems interesting that in this case the human body seems to be understood as the birthplace of this interface, in other words: a carrier of extra-sensorial awareness, since it combines sensorial and artificial awareness. . . A sameness of cyber space and body space seems in this light one of the most important suggestions to unfold human cognition” (Broekman, supra, p. 181).

 

This sameness and connection, this process of conversion, then, requires a mechanics.  And for Broekman, that mechanics can be intensified through the signification of the “interface”:

 

The combination of the sensorial and the artificial presents the riddle again how the activity of the human mind and a human body integrate. . . this includes explanations concerning the body proper and above all in a body enclosed Self! A sameness of cyber space and body space seems in this light one of the most important suggestions to unfold human cognition. . . They do so in an exemplary manner through their appeal on embodiment as a constitutive moment of human relations—which finds ultimate its conformation in the digital expression ‘interface’” (Broekman, supra, p. 181).

 

That, in turn, requires a rethinking of the semiotics of cyberspace (ibid., pp. 182-186). Here, Broekman deploys the insights of the prior chapters to  work through the semiotics of the “inter” face, and to the “inter” subjective. That touches on their humanization. Reasoning from the body has been the central element of the digitalization of the human. Where Foucault suggested that the human would be reduced to an aggregation of data and then reconstituted as its digital expression (Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (NY: Picador, 2010)), Broekman inverts the trajectories—the digital will be disaggregated and reconstituted in human form.  This is the semiotics of Max Headroom, the 1980s cult program about a virtual A.I. television personality the transmission of which was itself notoriously hijacked (“Mad About Max: The Making of a Video Cult, Newsweek 20 April 1987 “He’s cool. He’s hot. He’s handsome and witty. He’s a transatlantic cult figure. Max Headroom is so perfect he seems almost inhuman, which, in fact, he is.”; Jay Shefsky, “30 Years Later, Notorious ‘Max Headroom Incident’ Remains a Mystery,” WATTO News (21 November 2017)).   

 

But it is also a plural concept. What is aggregated as the cyber interfacial can also be disaggregated, and thus re-made, fashioned as a marketplace or a platform. The humanization of the cyber can also signify the process of human social relations and a pulsation (an iterative flow) between aggregations and fracturing necessary for reconstitution. That itself also suggests the dialectic at the heart of the human cognitive experience—with all its modernist flaws, the layers of which Broekman explored earlier.  “Metaphors of the human body fulfill a major role in that context: they claim an enduring proximity of the market and its techniques of communication, on the one hand, and the dignity of the human being on the other” (Broekman, supra, p. 18). Nonetheless it does not extend to the generative digital. Max Headroom exists only as an extension of the human, and as an iterative manifestation of platforms, but the human is hardly ever thought of as the extension of Max Headroom—thought from within the platform that direction of the interface males as much sense of the human facing one.

 

Max Headroom and its unexplored possibilities brings us back to the interfacial as an element of situating the selfie and the Self-E within the . That is meant to bring home the point of the humanity of the digital—at least the humanity of that part of the digital which appears to be of interest to human cognition—and therefore to the epistemology of the human imaginary. Max Headroom but without its generative elements (Luke Buckmaster, “Max Headroom: one of sci-fi TV’s strangest characters deserves a comeback,” The Guardian 25 July 2023).   Thus the “face” on the interface “(a) like  what is metaphorical in a natural language, but (b) they are only metaphorical in what a natural language calls: artificial language” (Broekman, supra, p. 185). The generative would turn this on its head. And here, at least we arrive at Narcissus (ibid., pp. 185-186).Max Headroom again, this time from the opposite side—foreshadowing the inversion of ontological starting point it elaborated the story of a human  dressed up to look like a generative A.I. program dressed up to look like a human.  This is a different sort of mirroring—more like the farce “Victor Victoria” (MGM/Universal Artists 1982), about a woman playing a man playing a woman. And indeed, the generative makes a farce of the humanity of human cognition.

 

But where those parameters are powerful, as they are for Broekman standing even at the edge of the abyss beyond which lies the un-human, the interface then serves as a means of moving from the singularity of the human, to the collective singularity of humanity.  The same aggregation-fracturing, mirroring, and self-absorption apply, but here at a collective level and with respect to social relations (ibid., pp. 186-191). The baseline, though, remains the same: “What once was the result of intention and attempts of a subject is today based on processual acts between a Subject, a Self, and a Self-E in their dynamic connectivity. That is the most important thesis of this book” (Broekman, supra, p. 187). But its reach is global—which now becomes the hardware for an analog-digital humanity /ibid., p. 187-188).   Data itself provides no basis for developing insights into the human psyche—but that stands to reason. More interesting is Broekman’s insight that what data does do is to “initiate certain behavioral patterns, as can be concluded from the development of those bases” (Broekman, supra, p. 188). Most importantly, is the exposure of the flow in digital space (even as the flow in physical space remains less interesting to a humanity bent on reducing itself to a calculus of selfies—that is to a constant flow of memorialization of time momentarily frozen which together constitute the record of time—and for human cognition, time itself in the flow (Fernand Braudel, On History (Sarah Matthews (trans) University of Chicago Press, 1980)).