Talking to Tom Fuerstner and looking at his blogjects an idea strikes me. What if we extend our century-old talking about objects and subjects to a talking about catjects? Looking at computers' and networks' abilities to handle multimedia quasi-objects (Michel Serres) and boundary objects (Susan Star), and not only to handle them but to indexicalize, catalogize, link and search them, we certainly deal with a new kind of -jects which take on a life almost all of its own. Remember Jacques Derrida's theory "jetties"? They are similar, being missiles send on their way and related to by observers of most different perspective.
Objects, for Aristotle, are the hypokemeinon, the underlying stuff and substance of the writing society. Aristotle, in his first book on logic, the Categories, tries to fix them such decisions can be taken whether assertions about them are true or false. Reading his text it is fascinating to observe how he has to rely, first, on forms, then, on genres, in order to fix at least our talking about them, since the objects themselves are elusive. They emerge, and vanish the moment you look at them. Ever since, we argue about the reality of our perceptions.
Subjects, for Hume, Descartes, and Kant, are the hypokemeinon, the underlying stuff and substance of the printing press society. Human reason, individual doubts, judgements become the address to which categories get attributed such that we know what and how we are able to talk about. However, these subjects are as elusive as the objects before. They have to be transcendentalized in order to fix them, framing them with respect to sensus communis, to acceptable ways of talk, in order to get them pinned down where logics need them. In fact, subjects are individuals having their own minds and hearts and bodies and memories and fears and desires. They don't accept being looked at as being in charge of reason. Let reason take charge of itself, Kant therefore had to muse. That cuts a long story short. Ever since, we argue about the truth an observer may claim.
Catjects are an idea which might be appropriate for computer society. That idea, crude as it is as yet, takes seriously that the categories that were attributed first to objects and then to subjects and didn't stick, at least underwent their own development and refinement. From Peirce to Whitehead and more recently on to Joseph A. Goguen, Bill Lawvere, and Ernst Kleinert, categories enter the center stage of mathematical and philosophical thinking. We might try to look at how they start to lead their own life, becoming catjects, based not on substance nor on reason, but on their own form, their own morphism, emerging as an eigen-value of nonlinear recursive processes in syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic computations, in pictures, sounds, texts, and gestures, a kind of sociological topology (or topological sociology) for which ideas of all kinds abound. Ever since, we love to argue about the functions of our arguments.
That is an idea spelled out at its most crude. The literature is rich, yet complicated. Maybe, we look a little closer at the authors quoted for ideas how to do what System One attempts to do, flashing out semantic webs for almost about everything.
Knowing, our last and most general level of re-entry in the Spencer-Brown form http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/SocialChoice.pdf, means to be able to watch the distinction between the system that promises to guarantee the iteration of your choices, on one hand, and the outside of the form (as part of the entire content of the form), which is unmarked on the other. Choice is social if and when that kind of operational closure is part of the game, an operational closure which means, as Heinz von Foerster had it, that the system looses one degree of freedom in exchange with a wealth of possibilities to explore. The removal of this degree of freedom means that any end, in any domain, must coincide with a beginning.
It is evident that only such a condition turns choice into a social one. If reproduction is the law, then networks and budgets, talk and action are guaranteed to be looked at in terms of their maintenance, even if in the form of their change, variation, revolution, and subversion. If there is any one condition that guarantees that there is something to be known, and a basis for the appropriate knowledge, it is this one.
Knowing means that any switching is a switching not only from, but also to something or someone. It means that any tying is done with respect to both causal independence and communicative interdependence. Tying generates a knowledge, and it profits from knowledge. And knowing means that gaming and mating generate their knowledge as well, as you cannot avoid making your experiences as you choose what you choose and whom.
Knowledge, therefore, is a very basic category of process, a product of the system reproducing and re-entering, while reproducing, the distinction between itself and its environment, into the system. That knowledge must not be a true one for any external observer operating under the very same conditions. But it is the knowledge of a system generated by its own choices, and its a knowledge without which no choice would be possible since it re-enters the ignorance of the unmarked state into the form such that any knowledge is recognized as a exploratory one, not until further notice, but in principle.
Knowledge means competence. And competence means use and control of doubt. System One here again seems to be the right choice. In using it you are at any one point of time in the necessary situation to have to check on your own knowledge in order to be able to evaluate the knowledge the system (one, this time) is presenting to you. And that is what brings knowledge forth, in the first place.
As the model unfolds, we are tempted to do one further step and go for a more general model, which does not only cover organizational choice but social choice in general. This one would be a model of the new open access world, a network world, to be distinguished from the institutional world of formal organizations we are about to leave behind. This model sticks with the re-entry-levels we already introduced - with one exception: it talks about "knowing" instead of "creating" -, but exchanges all the variables we haven't yet introduced formally ("behavior", "communication", "organization", and "society") and which hinted to autopoietical entities of some kind, for variables exhibiting an interface characteristics. Thus, we have a new model talking about "action", "talk", "budgets", "network" (this one we keep in place), and "system". It looks like:
social choice = action || talk || budget || network || system ||
The full model you find at http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/SocialChoice.pdf.
We here go for a "flow analysis of choice", assuming that "organization" or, better, "organizing" (Karl E. Weick) is only part of it, a part, that is, that stems from "budgets" attributed to you, you then decide on to know and make sure who works with you on what. I'll come back to this later.
The important point for now is that the new model is more like a flow model then an institutional model. It has organizing as one variables among all others, yet is not necessarily limited to organizational behavior.
That makes System One's contribution to a new form of work flow implementation even more far reaching. You may now enter budget variables among the search data you routinely account for, and extend your horizons of relevance the more the better you know where and how to account for them.
Budgets, to be sure, do not only consist in assets and liabilities accounted for in money terms, but may be viewed as budgets in reputation and prestige as well as in power and influence, or in knowledge and intelligence, or even in emotion and affect.
Imagine an organization you are a member of because it leaves your motivation to join up to you. Ready?
Now contrast this with a plethora of organizations trying to motivate you, as an employee, as a manager, as a client, as an investor, as a regulator, or what have you. Ready?
... read full article.System One promises to be the midwife of another instantiation of the concept and the reality of the the postclassical organization, which assumes a world of ontogenetics instead of ontologies, and of undecidability instead of determinateness.
The basic idea of the postclassical organization is self-organization, still in the sense discovered by complexity research sixty years ago. If you cannot describe a phenomenon by the means of either causality or statistics, and you have good reasons to assume it exists nevertheless, Warren Weaver told us in his paper on "Science and Complexity" (American Scientist 1948), you may assume as well that the phenomenon knows something about itself, that you don't know about it. If not, it would not exist. Call, what the phenomenon knows about itself, its way to self-organize. ... read full article.