Because there is no identity without attempts to control both itself and other elements it relies on – while making sure, of course, that it gets the control (i.e., respect, attention, recognition), which it tries to merit.
This is the answer to "why networks?", because any identity, to be one, is involved in operations of mutual control, including self-control, which make up for a network, presuppose a network, and may be observed as a network. Non-network structures, if they exist at all, are the equivalent of structural holes, separating identities, who, in the eyes of an observer, may be related but are not. The point of this notion of network, thanks for your question, is that it is an operational one. Structures are done, are relied upon, are quoted, are imagined, or else aren't any structures at all. This compares with a statistical notion of structures, based on correlations, that identified correlations without having to be explicit about the operations actually producing them. Statistics, thus, assumes a structure relating numbers, produced by the statistician, to that statistician, leading to a network the statistician calls up in order to emphasize his/her own identity with respect to further network nodes he may, or may not, be related to in a specific society. Distinguishing networks from non -networks, therefore, might be seen as a way to be clear about generative operations responsible for a structure you either are able to see and show or should not claim to exist. One may think of a post-structuralist notion of structure which does not assume any more that there are structures out there waiting for us to be discovered. Instead, as post-structuralism was on its way to show, all structures are structures assumed by observers relying on networks other observers (including the first observers self-observing) may, or may not, be interested to look at. It is, if you like, a constructivist notion of structure I am interested in, relating structures to form, form to distinctions, and distinctions to observers, who discover the structures they are in by learning to draw distinctions, implicit ones and explicit ones, semantic ones and bodily ones, perceptive ones and reflective ones. This turns the concept of network (and of other notions) into a percept sensu Gilles Deleuze.
thanks indeed - i will have to think this over ... my interest (idiosyncratical perhaps) is: what are the relations of your constructivist structure-concept and another kind of operational/processual structure-concept i am trying to thin over at present: foucault's notion of "enonces" permanently generating a kind of flickering (but still surprisingly continuous) semiotic structures in a sort of chain reactions (which is semiosis itself). and i'm asking myself why i obviously tend to have a problem with the notion of "observers" - always trying to think of rather unpersonal processes of signification. (The neigbours watching or ignoring each other seen as agents in a bigger and more vague signification process ...)
Well, I'm not sure about Foucault. He describes l'enoncé as "la fonction d'existence" of a phrase, an act of language, of its correctness and acceptability, of its legitimacy and its good form, and of its effectiveness (L'archéologie du savoir, p. 114/5). That seems to me to be quite of lot to demand of a single function, doesn't it? Why does Foucoult do such a marvellous analysis of the most different prerequisites of language - and then lumbs them all together back into one single function?
Yet I share your interest in "flickering" semiotic structures. I'm sure we have to look for language, and communication, and mental structures able to stay ambiguous for quite a while, and able even to produce ambiguity for other to feel invited to get into it and add their own interpretation, an equally ambiguous one if everything goes well, for still others to be able to join. Italo Calvino, in his Lezioni Americani, called this the necessary vagueness of indeterminate, yet gracious talking. It invites others to add their more determinate distinctions, and so keeps communication, and thinking, coming. Or think of your pseudonym's idea of a "principle of alternation" in language (Lotman/Uspenskij, On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture, 1971): If you are not supposed to be able to switch, you won't agree to talk.
Observers get into this via the very idea that, when embarking for communication, you better account for observers observing you and having different minds about what you are saying and doing, and how you possibly mean it, and what you are probably up to. That is a very practical matter, and a matter of life and its graciousness. You will allow for divergent interpretation just to make sure that observers observing you will feel invited to stay with you. You will attribute degrees of freedom to them, you will call them individuals, just to make sure that nobody feels determined by what you are proposing. Even the necessities you venture will have the structure of an invitation. There is no other way to share commitments. There is indeed some unpersonality in this, since you should not only account for the personality of the individuals you are dealing with, respecting them as observers, but also for the contexts, these individuals are in, being contexts unfamiliar to you. There is a certain thirdness (think rather of Serres, not necessarily of Peirce) entering the game. Nobody is to be addressed in his or her pure personality, since all personality is made of both the person and the contexts he or she is consciously or unconsciously calling up when trying to figure out how to flicker with you. So we better keep signification vague, just in order not to nail down what is authentic only when moving.
We will have to account for this within System One, I guess. Or better, System One is already designed to account for this flickering and alternating. It is embedded within structures of second-order observation. Its structure follows the idea of invitation, not any idea of objectification. More specifically, it invites decisions, it does not detemine them. That is why it seems to be such a wonderful tool for organizations.
(1) Thanks again: this is fun. Please don’t feel obligated to answer, as soon as you do not feel like that anymore. So I’m free to keep on reflecting vaguely … It’s like comparing very different, and at the same time similar, perspectives. In my frame of thinking there are systems-with-boundaries as dynamic entities, and there are certainly strong (semiotic) second-order effects, but there’s no special need for the observer function. What I find striking is that constructivism, and your kind of system theory, seems tho have such a hidden, but strong hermeneutical flavour: very much focusing on the individual, where I always would follow Foucault in thinking of the individual as a cluster of small pieces loosely joined, a point of intersection for multiple threads (discourses). (Not that I would neglect that observers are there, for me they just don’t seem so important in the first line. But you are right, there are some passages from Lotman pointing in that direction. I’ll have to look them up again.)
(2) “There is a certain thirdness … entering the game.” What i like is the idea of “thirdness” here, though I don’t know Serres’ version and always keep forgetting about what Peirce had exactly meant with his. “So we better keep signification vague, just in order not to nail down what is authentic only when moving.” Yes: A certain vagueness, a paradoxal structured vagueness, like we use in metaphors and metonymies, is something I see as an essential part of semiosis. (From my perspective I always instinctively try to avoid the term “communication”.) I’d call that a language game -- the late Wittgenstein was also after the structural role of vagueness in dynamic processes of signification, it seems: football as a paradigm, instead of chess. I believe that to be the right path for Semantic Web theory, which should replace AI anyway.
So maybe we could say: In making a move in a language game (in football: more like throwing myself in) I invite the other to follow me on a playground which is neither defined by my personality/context nor by his/hers. And to meet there, we have (mostly) to make vague moves to open possibilities for different kinds of (anschlüsse). Indeed that is what I always had experienced when using the web as “social software”. If System One had such a playful vagueness built in, that would be good indeed. But it will be quite difficult to build something like that in Intranet wikilogs.
(3) Enonces: I’m sure that is a very valuable concept for modeling the way worlds are permanently made out of signs, and no, I don’t think that this concept is designed to be “all and nothing”. In fact F. always tends to define them ex negativo (often in a provocative way) in order to conjure the openness and vagueness he needs for this concept. But to “see” the nature of enonces (small sign-events) one has to willingfully ignore the subjects who “do” the utterances. Again it is more like a game: a permanent, never fully predictable chain reaction of sign-events that are kept in a permanent flow. I have the strong suspicion that one could and should use this to create a better theory of the Web as a semiotic/social system.
Yes, right, allright. From what you are saying about Foucault's enoncés I think they should be able to play the role I expect from Spencer Brown's forms. Don't we all have our pet terms and pet authors? Mine most certainly are "form" and "Spencer Brown" respectively. And flow, as in Tom Fuerstner on cognitive workflow, may be a bridge term which suits everybody well.
You are right, I have fun in rediscovering individuals, yet, no, I don't take them alone to be the observers I am interested in. Individuals are markers, or shifters, providing situations with adresses we may look at to learn about these situations, like in Kurt Lewin's notion of behavior, being a function of individual + situation.
And since we are talking here about networks playing their role with System One: System One will depend, among other things, on some decisions about where in networks to accept the indeterminate nodes holding it all together while weaving it into the most divergent flows. There is no better place to invest indeterminateness in than in those good old human beings, you and me, surfing the flow of the computer envelope. That is the fun I see in this. But it is dead serious at the same time. We are dreaming up a new kind of organization (a "postclassical" one), which is already with us and of which we will, I think, have to be able to show its kind of working.
yes, i agree. (and, you are right, of course, about pet theorists).
and "flow" is another pet term of mine, too. what is interesting me most here is the possible inclusion of the "workflow" in the concept of the "media flow" (brilliant summary here: http://www.newschool.edu/mediastudies/tv/channel7/index.html). and the synthesis with the concept of "lifestreams" (David Gelernter; my own - german - summary including links here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0132241/2004/01/21.html#a97). Highly relevant for System One, I shpuld think. And stuff for a whole conference I'd love to attend.
Comment by singgih_kisro
1629 days ago:
hhmmm... hello... i'd rather not commenting the article or journal since i have a very little knowledge about it. I am an indonesian student who is now trying to write my first thesis.... i get confused in the process of making it especially in the concept offered by michel foucault. power / knowledge more specifically.. well.. now... i humbly would like to ask anyone who would be very kind to give a very general explanation bout the theory power/knowledge to me.. i found it difficult to access books abut foucault where i live now... so if there is anyone of you who would like to help me, please send the explanation email to my email account. old_kisro@yahoo.com
thanks......
Yet I share your interest in "flickering" semiotic structures. I'm sure we have to look for language, and communication, and mental structures able to stay ambiguous for quite a while, and able even to produce ambiguity for other to feel invited to get into it and add their own interpretation, an equally ambiguous one if everything goes well, for still others to be able to join. Italo Calvino, in his Lezioni Americani, called this the necessary vagueness of indeterminate, yet gracious talking. It invites others to add their more determinate distinctions, and so keeps communication, and thinking, coming. Or think of your pseudonym's idea of a "principle of alternation" in language (Lotman/Uspenskij, On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture, 1971): If you are not supposed to be able to switch, you won't agree to talk.
Observers get into this via the very idea that, when embarking for communication, you better account for observers observing you and having different minds about what you are saying and doing, and how you possibly mean it, and what you are probably up to. That is a very practical matter, and a matter of life and its graciousness. You will allow for divergent interpretation just to make sure that observers observing you will feel invited to stay with you. You will attribute degrees of freedom to them, you will call them individuals, just to make sure that nobody feels determined by what you are proposing. Even the necessities you venture will have the structure of an invitation. There is no other way to share commitments. There is indeed some unpersonality in this, since you should not only account for the personality of the individuals you are dealing with, respecting them as observers, but also for the contexts, these individuals are in, being contexts unfamiliar to you. There is a certain thirdness (think rather of Serres, not necessarily of Peirce) entering the game. Nobody is to be addressed in his or her pure personality, since all personality is made of both the person and the contexts he or she is consciously or unconsciously calling up when trying to figure out how to flicker with you. So we better keep signification vague, just in order not to nail down what is authentic only when moving.
We will have to account for this within System One, I guess. Or better, System One is already designed to account for this flickering and alternating. It is embedded within structures of second-order observation. Its structure follows the idea of invitation, not any idea of objectification. More specifically, it invites decisions, it does not detemine them. That is why it seems to be such a wonderful tool for organizations.
(2) “There is a certain thirdness … entering the game.” What i like is the idea of “thirdness” here, though I don’t know Serres’ version and always keep forgetting about what Peirce had exactly meant with his. “So we better keep signification vague, just in order not to nail down what is authentic only when moving.” Yes: A certain vagueness, a paradoxal structured vagueness, like we use in metaphors and metonymies, is something I see as an essential part of semiosis. (From my perspective I always instinctively try to avoid the term “communication”.) I’d call that a language game -- the late Wittgenstein was also after the structural role of vagueness in dynamic processes of signification, it seems: football as a paradigm, instead of chess. I believe that to be the right path for Semantic Web theory, which should replace AI anyway.
So maybe we could say: In making a move in a language game (in football: more like throwing myself in) I invite the other to follow me on a playground which is neither defined by my personality/context nor by his/hers. And to meet there, we have (mostly) to make vague moves to open possibilities for different kinds of (anschlüsse). Indeed that is what I always had experienced when using the web as “social software”. If System One had such a playful vagueness built in, that would be good indeed. But it will be quite difficult to build something like that in Intranet wikilogs.
(3) Enonces: I’m sure that is a very valuable concept for modeling the way worlds are permanently made out of signs, and no, I don’t think that this concept is designed to be “all and nothing”. In fact F. always tends to define them ex negativo (often in a provocative way) in order to conjure the openness and vagueness he needs for this concept. But to “see” the nature of enonces (small sign-events) one has to willingfully ignore the subjects who “do” the utterances. Again it is more like a game: a permanent, never fully predictable chain reaction of sign-events that are kept in a permanent flow. I have the strong suspicion that one could and should use this to create a better theory of the Web as a semiotic/social system.
You are right, I have fun in rediscovering individuals, yet, no, I don't take them alone to be the observers I am interested in. Individuals are markers, or shifters, providing situations with adresses we may look at to learn about these situations, like in Kurt Lewin's notion of behavior, being a function of individual + situation.
And since we are talking here about networks playing their role with System One: System One will depend, among other things, on some decisions about where in networks to accept the indeterminate nodes holding it all together while weaving it into the most divergent flows. There is no better place to invest indeterminateness in than in those good old human beings, you and me, surfing the flow of the computer envelope. That is the fun I see in this. But it is dead serious at the same time. We are dreaming up a new kind of organization (a "postclassical" one), which is already with us and of which we will, I think, have to be able to show its kind of working.
and "flow" is another pet term of mine, too. what is interesting me most here is the possible inclusion of the "workflow" in the concept of the "media flow" (brilliant summary here: http://www.newschool.edu/mediastudies/tv/channel7/index.html). and the synthesis with the concept of "lifestreams" (David Gelernter; my own - german - summary including links here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0132241/2004/01/21.html#a97). Highly relevant for System One, I shpuld think. And stuff for a whole conference I'd love to attend.
thanks......