File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0104, message 46


Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 00:03:29 -0400
From: hugh bone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: The differance that makes a difference


Eric,

This is a very broad and to the best of my knowledge substanially accurate
summary of what we are talking about.

I will make a few comments at **

> Steve, Reg, Don, Hugh and all -
>
> Steve has written some provocative posts on the subject of information
> in response to Hugh, Don, Reg and others.  While there is no doubt that
> Shannon gets credit for formulating the science of information while
> working (if fuzzy memory serves) as a engineer at Bell Labs, I would
> maintain that what made information so sexy in the fifties was the
> connection made by others with biology, cyborgs and Darwin.
**Shannon's work had to do with humans sending coded messages to humans, and
it fit with the messages computers send within their
structures as well across wires, cables etc.**

>
> As a very short recapitulation of the topic, consider the following
> events.
>
> 1. Alan Turing created among his many prodigious inventions, the Turing
> test - namely, and simplifying to the extreme, the behavioral question
> that if a subject could not distinguish between the responses of a
> computer and the responses of a human, then the question of the
> difference between the two became somewhat moot.
>
> 2. Watson and Crick were able to apply information concepts to genetics
in their formulation of the transmission of DNA in sexual reproduction.
**Genes were not nearly as well understood when DNA, RNA were discovered as
they are now.**
>
> 3. John von Neuman applied the concept of information to the new science
> of cybernetics - the study of communication and control in organism and
machine.
**Norbert Weiner wrote his  "Cybernetics" book soon after WWII.  I don't
think either he or von Neuman applied it to organisms.**
>
> 4. The Macy Conferences which applied these concepts to the social
> sciences and included figures such as Gregory Bateson, who famously
> defined information as "the difference that makes a difference" and
> situated information in a biological/epistemological context he was to
> later describe poetically as "Steps to an Ecology of Mind".
>
> Using the concept of information as it currently tends to be applied in
> contemporary theories, information becomes equated with negentropy as
> the self-organizing property of a complex system (organic or inorganic)
capable of sustaining itself in a state of disequalibrium.  In this
formulation, God may be described as the principle of self-organization  in
the universe; synergistically enhancing the various modes of singularity.
**Once upon a time there was a big bang and hydrogen, and then helium, and
then other chemical elements until only 14, or 15 billion years later, 116
elements had self-organized themselves and populated the universe. Note the
small number of elements compared with tens of millions of species that
self-organized their appearance, and (most of them) disappearance from
Planet Earth.

It began with maybe a few dozen atomic particles in the hydrogen atom.
Information, (apparently not Shannon or genetic, nor the info that folds
proteins) caused atomic particles to play their roles.

Understanding the info that folds proteins is a new puzzle for Science
although it may be as old as life itself and has no need of humans.**

> I agree that the reason the concept of information is so popular today
> is probably due to the way it echoes the current dominant modes of
> production. It echoes Marx comment (which I can't remember exactly and
> must paraphrase here) the cotton gin gives one kind of society and the
> steam engine another.
>
> Be that as it may, the interest in information is also tied to the
> insight that the ability to process information effectively, to
> determine by means of pattern recognition, what is and isn't
> significant, impacts considerably on the continued survival of the
> complex organism.
**Just saw a PBS documentary on the human genome.  It said decoding the
genome, which is linear four-letter sequences, is simple compared with
understanding proteins the genome orders to be made.  Proteins are complex
three-dimensional substances which must be precisely folded.**
>
> This relates to Lyotard's argument in "The Differend" concerning the
> organization of temporality as a closed system (capitalism) versus an
> open system (what Lyotard calls the event - the arrive-t-il).  Who will
> control the data banks is perhaps the central metaphysical question par
> excellence that Lyotard raises.
**If memory serves, this is in "The Postmodern Condition"**
>
> It is interesting to me to consider the trends of business literature
> over the past decade in the status quo writings from Peters, Senge,
> Handy and others.  They all converge in emphasizing that for a business
> enterprise to succeed in today's economy it must become a quasi-organism
> (what Senge termed a learning organization).  There is an implicit
> recognition here that the previous mode of organization, derived from a
> mechanistic Fordist philosophy which is hierarchical and centralized is
> now inadequate because it cannot adapt quickly enough to relentless and
> ongoing change.  There is a need for organizations to de-layer,
> decentralize, empower workers as self-directing teams etc. etc. in order
to become successful.
**Yes, emulating some aspects of Japanese production became fashionable.**
>
> This shows, on the part of management, a recognition that an information
economy drastically changes the nature of our social organization. This very
strategy is an attempt to dominate the spontaneous orders which compose
themselves around information and control them by design and  from above in
order to capture the surplus value that such organization  of information
offers.
**I would say it's more a matter of
 1)who owns a country's natural resources, real estate, and means of
production, and 2) how effectively owners of a country control the
legislature, courts, and government agencies who determine the terms of
employment and the taxes workers must pay for the privilege of using others'
property to earn a living.**
>
> The counterstrategy on the part of labor is not simply to resist, but to
develop new organizations of information that elude such control by
continuosly proliferating multiple centers that elide and envelop the
existing forms of control.
**For instance?**
>
> Which brings me round to the question of art which I believe is also
> intrinsically tied to the question of what Lyotard names the event, the
> arrive-t-il.
>
> Steve has argued that art is related to noise.  My response is that, to
the extent information is noise, it is simply not noticed and therefore
cannot be art.  Art must foreground this noise in a certain way to > render
it audible, visible, tangible even as it resists being absorbed > into a
system of discourse, a mall of signs.  Art always is the > difference that
makes a difference.
>
> John Rajchman has made the following comments about Lyotard's
> aesthetics.
>
> "For Lyotard, by contrast, aesthetics became more a gay science,
> concerning more with a time to come rather than a compendious philosophy
> of history, a restless activity that starts in those
> incommensurabilities in our practices or agreements which ensure that
> the language one ends up with in thinking is never the same as the one
> from which one starts, since it translates something as yet unspoken and
> never completely understood.  With this weakness (this impouvoir as he
> called it) there then goes a whole art - one might say an ethic - of
> breaking with those with whom one nonetheless identifies, while exposing
> oneself to the singularities of those one nevertheless tries to
> understand". **Too much in one mouthful.**
>
> Esctatic networks with branching and bifurcating nodes through which
> sublime feelings pass and reverberate across a matrix of complexity.
> Difference demands a response and thereby creates the inexplicable event
> that rocks your world. **Much too much**
>
> The blessed abide in disequalibrium!






   

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