For millions of people around the world, social media systems now represent a
central, material-semiotic mode of relation. At the level of algorithmic
technique, their vision of the social is primarily achieved through the capture
of, and interactive feedback upon choice and decision, made
between information-objects as they are retrieved and circulated in
communication. Choosing to befriend someone and not someone else, to linger over
one product instead of another, or to select some search result over those above
or below it, are all moments that differentiate a collective significance on
these platforms. How might new materialist thinking intervene? The paper wonders
whether current technical schemas for social media, which understand choice as
an epistemic relation, might be fruitfully reconceived in terms of a prior
ontological relation. Borrowing conceptual vocabulary from the philosopher
Gilbert Simondon, the paper asks: how might we understand information as a
differential effect of the distributed potential for becoming?
Whether to mobilize around some issue or event, perform personal identity or put a
friendly face on an institution, tens of millions of people around the world have
enthusiastically adopted social media. And like any other writing technology before
them, the platforms have generated a particular, material-semiotic relation to the
world. Conceptualizing the mode of this relation, we might say that the software
services offer a primarily communicative-epistemic lens on the
world, in that they are premised on intersubjective expression as it can promote the
pragmatic discovery and recovery of knowledge and information. Having evolved from a
rich tradition of tools and techniques in the library and information sciences,
social media are a technology purpose-built for both instant communication, and the
intersubjective disambiguation of documents. We might add that, living amidst what
Ronald Day (2007) calls
‘post-documentary’ forms, it is becoming more difficult to draw precise
boundaries between communication and retrieval. Under the terms of social media, we
are now one another’s librarians, curators and tastemakers; socializing
around, antagonizing one another through, and otherwise forging relationships in a
context of perpetually retrieving documentary fragments, like tweets, posts, and
comments. Software and database developers treat these as manipulable objects or
entities, but I will gather them generally under the (admittedly somewhat redundant)
term of information-signs. With the rise of semantic web
technologies and the so-called internet of things, in the near future everything on
the planet may very well come to serve as a sortable information-sign in this
regard, defined and circulated according to the terms of optimal search and
retrieval.
At the underlying level of their algorithms, the platforms achieve this social
functionality thanks to the constant capture of, and interactive feedback upon,
prior consensus decisions between information-signs. The clicks, likes and other
traces of activity we leave behind get compared in aggregate to those left before
us, by loose groupings, acquaintances, and strangers who share our interests and
attachments. Social software services derive useful patterns of relevance from
recording these habits of choice, collectively steering everyone towards
whatever information-sign they happen to be seeking out.
Whether we follow Benkler (2006, 3) and call
the result ‘coordinate action’, or Terranova (2004, 123) to understand ourselves among ‘acentred
multitudes’, this is the basic technical capacity of social media: to
formalize significance into the frame of a computably rationalized event, whose
logic perpetually flocks us together around information-signs, gathering and
dissipating groups of thematic concern.
But with the advent of this rationalizing procedure, differences productive of the
social itself seem increasingly at risk, potentially flattened or made technically
coeval with private choice and preferential attachment, in a prefiguration of the
general conditions for encountering one another online. Pariser (2011) calls it the ‘filter bubble’:
the choice to befriend someone and not someone else, to linger over one product page
instead of another, or to select a search result over those above or below it, are
all steering us into highly personalized worlds of significance. Elsewhere (Thomas, 2013) I’ve relied on Bernard
Stiegler’s (2009, 20) term
‘orthothesis’ to describe this new, default mediating condition; where
increasingly social media technology, with its focus on personal choice, acts as a
founding ‘givenness’ for experience, establishing the conditions of the
recording of what happens.
The importance of choice and consensus decision at this basic level of technique has
many historical connections, which I will gesture to only briefly before coming to
the paper’s main themes. First, Shannon & Weaver’s (1949) mathematical theory of communication is
an important core element, in establishing the theory of information as a basic
principle for computing: information is understood to be the improbable selection of
one among a set of possible messages, with entropy measuring the unpredictability of
that selection. Second, deployed in institutions of all sizes, management
information systems steer the modern enterprise through the capture of data, in
support of decision as the basic paradigm for business analysis. Third, in terms of
a software and interface design paradigm, John Searle’s (1995) speech act theory and Jürgen Habermas’ (1984) communicative action—with their
focus on intersubjectively-achieved meaning and consensual social norms as a ground
for decision—have given important philosophical justification for
computer-supported cooperative work since the 1980s, especially through Terry
Winograd’s (1987)
‘Language/Action Perspective’.
And finally, economically-styled rational choice theory has made its way into all
kinds of social modeling (Surowiecki, 2004; Pentland, 2014), not least in the
mathematical analysis of link reciprocity driving services like Google, in what some
(Crogan & Kinsley, 2012) now
justifiably theorize as the political economy of attention online. These and other
elements hang together in what I am shorthanding all too quickly as a cybernetic
dispositif (Galloway,
2014): based in social choice constantly feeding back on itself in a
systemic way, to structure much of life in post-Fordist, highly computerized
societies.1 How might new materialist
thinking intervene into this central feature of social media? Acknowledging the
profound insights of phenomenological sociology as it has helped to shape social
media design, new materialism offers us a powerfully different philosophical
vocabulary to describe these tools. Consistent with its commitments to distributed
agency, the materiality of perception, and a bracketing of methodological
anthropocentrism, new materialism can help us to understand the protocols and
algorithms of social media in the altered terms of a non-, or a-humanistic,
material-semiotic relationality.
The approach has substantial roots in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (1987). In an influential reading of
the sign-relation, which ran against the grain of more traditional, idealized
accounts of its nature, these eclectic anti-philosophers argued that signs always
involve more than just the performance of shared meaning in a sociolinguistic
context. Further, signs involve more than just a logical or formal relation, secured
in the terms of semantics and correct reference—a relation to the sign still
very much with us today, as it structures the databases that support the modern
world.
For them, signs had a still-deeper dimension, best understood in the terms of an
impersonal event, from which individuals receive an ordered
orientation, and a sense of before and after. From their ‘mixed’
semiotic perspective, things in the world combine with language and events through
signs according to a prior modality of power. From this peculiar but profound
position, signs arrive with a kind of ‘fourth-person’ perspective: an
effective function exterior to human beings that emerges from impersonal repetitions
and redundancies in life, structured into what they called collective
assemblages of enunciation. Although I will be relying primarily on the
work of Gilbert Simondon, it’s in these broad terms that the paper connects to
new materialist thinking, so that we may better see how electronic media work as a
‘ubiquitous force’, as Connolly (2010,
189) puts it, that ‘flows into the circuits of discipline,
perception, self-awareness, and conduct.’
Following others like Rosi Braidotti (2013) in taking up this
‘post-anthropocentric’ position towards the technology, I argue that we
need to venture beyond intersubjective, consensus-based choice as the dominant
paradigm for understanding sociality through information systems. An important first
step involves putting social media’s epistemic understanding of identity and
difference into relief against other theorizations of difference, especially those
not conceptually beholden to decision or choice in quite the same way; it’s
here that I turn to the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. Influential upon Deleuze,
but also working alongside (and critical of) both the cybernetic tradition as it
unfolded, and the phenomenological tradition of his mentor Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Simondon did not define identity in primarily epistemic terms. For him, difference
was not based in an objective knowledge principle that resolved identity
mechanistically, as a relation of probable choice between objective entities.
Rather, difference was ontogenetic and non-identitary, manifesting
in a process that he called disparation, describing a tensile
difference between an individual’s world and its own process of becoming. The
paper uses disparation as a frame of reference to critique social media at the level
of technique. Insofar as the tools increasingly come to form what Simondon called a
principle of psychic and collective individuation, I follow him here in wanting to
understand individuals—the user, and the various types of post-documentary
information-signs that circulate online—from the perspective of social
media’s current processes of technical individuation.
Connected to his account of choice, for Simondon information was not just defined as
exchanged messages between sender and receiver; it was also an internal resonance to
being, individuating on the basis of its own dephasing (2005, 328). Simondon’s thought carefully
spanned dimensions of the psychic, the collective and the technical, and in light of
his work the goal is to consider social media not as we normally might—by
gesturing to already-substantialized, knowledge-seeking social subjects who
communicate in networks, as a ground for explaining the social—but rather by
considering the technical theories that constitute these networks of relations
between people and things in the first place as themselves in need
of justification and critique.
Self-organizing knowledge systems
It was not so long ago that links and networks were mostly a matter for engineers,
scientific researchers, and a cottage industry of web designers, with relation
defined simply in terms of the associative principle of the hyperlink.
Internetworked connections between servers made real the visions of people like Paul
Otlet (1990), Vannevar Bush (1969) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (1999), affording users the capacity to jump from
one document to another at will, following chains of thought collaboratively
inscribed as links between texts. With the rise of Web 2.0, linking became more
rationalized as sharing, and data exchange began to pivot on the more
individualized, attentional value of the link, soon dragging large portions of life
into its orbit. As Helmond (2013, 5) writes,
citing Langlois et. al (2009), here
‘Platforms emerge as an interface between users, webmasters and search
engines and ‘arise as sites of articulations between a diverse range of
processes and actors’. For the political economy of linking in the era of
social media, platforms become important actors in the production and
distribution of links while at the same time regulating access to these links
for engines.’
Acknowledging these and other important themes concerning the political economy of
communication and knowledge online, another important site for the establishment of
the social through a technical relation is social media’s philosophical roots
in epistemic individualization. Especially relevant is the
technology’s debt to second-order cybernetics, and the field’s
conceptualization of self-organizing systems. Having lived under conditions of
‘information overload’ since Herbert Simon coined the term in 1970, most
of us are all too familiar with what James Gleick (2011, 403) describes as that anxious gap between information and
knowledge, where a ‘barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to
know’, and where knowledge management systems theorize effective
action as the key for minding that gap (Jashapara, 2011). From a systems perspective, however, it was the
physicist-philosopher Heinz von Foerster who first described the
information-knowledge gap as involving a recursive feedback dynamic, or an
observer-knowledge relation. His accompanying notion of the
eigenvalue now deeply structures the technical, algorithmic and mathematical
approaches to social media, and to information retrieval as a discipline.
Self-organizing systems are those that, despite striving for operational closure,
are structured in such a way as to remain open and adaptable to change, as a
function of maintaining/postponing that closure. Paradoxically, in these systems it
is the continuous reaction to difference as a force of imbalance that maintains
balance.
Referring to some contemporary interlocutors along the way, Clarke (2009, 56) sums up von Foerster’s approach
when he writes that second-order cybernetics
‘sees a world so constructed that any single observer’s observations
may be rendered stable from moment to moment by the structural couplings and
recursive conversations of its multiple observers. Just as all
nervous systems and all organisms that possess them within themselves are
virtual consortiums of multiple autopoietic systems, so are all observers bound
into (what Varela calls) ‘observer-communities’ within which (what
Luhmann calls) social autopoiesis […] produces (what von
Foerster calls) eigenvalues.’
These are defined as ‘stable yet mobile and multiple recursive consensuses
about shared environments’ (Ibid). Eigenvalues are the objectified knowledge
conditions under which meaning is organized into socially coherent identities, such
that a probabilistically-structured ‘either/or’ choice can occur between
them, with the overall system designed to offer coordinating conditions for
collective thinking. To say this more plainly in light of the affordances of social
media: thanks to my choices being compared to the trails of choice left behind by
others before me, I can more quickly discriminate the particular person, thing or
document I am looking for—while also being exposed to related,
‘recommended for you’-type information-signs that may also be of
interest.
Most social media adopt some combination of three contemporary strategies for storing
and reproducing eigenvalues, the ‘recursive consensuses’ that von
Foerster theorized: knowledge graphs, social graphs and citation graphs. All of them
take a constructivist approach to knowledge, in presuming a stable and
self-referential user at their center. Knowledge graphs focus on exteriorizing
discourse into networks of atomic propositions, capturing relations between things
as disembedded, factual webs of correct reference. Social graphs act in a similar
way, but treat people as the basic atoms, focusing on the more
performative and illocutionary dimensions of identity and group affiliation.
Finally, citation graphs start from document-objects and records as the entity to be
individualized, analyzing relations between large text corpora statistically, to see
how they link in to and out of one another, by way of footnote or hyperlink. As any
pre-tenure colleague concerned with a journal’s impact factor will tell you,
citation analysis works on the principle that treating interlinked documents in this
way somehow reveals (and thus influences) significant patterns of knowledge
production. In the brief descriptions for all three forms of graph that follow, bear
in mind significant overlap between them in practice.
Knowledge as a propositional-atomic feedback relation
Knowledge modeling focuses on the automatic recognition and evaluation of named
entities; examples of knowledge modelling systems include the Freebase Project,
Google’s Knowledge Graph, and Stephen Wolfram’s knowledge engine Wolfram
Alpha. These services are often accessed invisibly, in support of the natural
language capabilities now built into smartphones and tablets. When you speak into
Apple’s Siri in search of a factually discrete answer, like
‘What’s the capital of Saskatchewan?’, or (who knew?), ‘What
planes are above me right now?’ your phone is likely to connect to a knowledge
graph database called a triplestore to retrieve the answer. True to
their name, the databases structure information by way of interlinked facts called
triples, which follow the assertoric structure of
‘subject-predicate-object’, as in: Regina is_the_capital_of
Saskatchewan. The Freebase Project’s open source engine boasts a collection of
2.5 billion discrete facts organized as triples, for example, representing a
distributed effort to make all sorts of different knowledge domains, from religion
to skiing, amenable to factual inference by machines. By interlinking assertions to
form domains of knowledge, they offer both users and software designers the capacity
to compose and automate fact-based decision routines.
Like relational databases before them, triplestores are an eigenvalue technique that
promotes regularities around meaning and action, by establishing a
consensually-held, closed world of facts against which questions can be compared and
winnowed down to a precise answer. A key difference is that by relying on networked
structures based in the simple assertion instead of more heavily-structured
relational data tables, triplestore databases can interact more flexibly
‘flush’ with everyday discourse. On top of being responsive to the
retrieval of encyclopedia-style knowledge, triples are used to represent knowledge
relative to you and your local environment. If while inputting his number into my
phone I indicate that Bryan is my brother, then later say ‘Have dinner
tomorrow night with my brother at 8:00’, the utterance is parsed into a set of
assertions that bring both private and public information-signs into a graphed
relation, producing useful knowledge: the date, a given slot of time, the correct
person I’m meeting by name (via the familial relation I’ve previously
indicated) and probably even the restaurant’s location will all fall into
place automatically as a set of known facts. It’s at this point that we begin
to see drift between knowledge graphs and social graphs, where the Facebook social
network service is a clear example.
Knowledge as a performative feedback relation
In the latest incarnation of its development platform called Open Graph, Facebook
gives anyone hoping to develop software that connects to social media the ability to
solicit and circulate what it calls ‘Stories’ from users. The difference
between knowledge graphs and social graphs can be slippery, but is roughly captured
in a distinction first made by the philosopher J.L. Austin, between
constative and performative utterances, in his
theory of speech acts. Though he eventually came to see dimensions of both in every
utterance, Austin (1975, 5) originally posited
that a statement was constative if it imparted factual ‘information’,
and performative if it was issued in the course of the ‘doing of an
action’. If knowledge graphs generally store constative triples, then social
graphs generally store performative ones. As a formal procedure, the Facebook
Stories architecture represents the state-of-the-art of this process of embedding
performatives into electronic discourse.
Like knowledge graphs, social graphs involve precise, semantic relations between
entities; but instead of producing records that store factually accurate statements
about the world, Stories retain and circulate performances between
‘friends’, under conditions of social felicity that involve a more
emotional, declarative or promissory dimension. In algorithmic terms, Stories
contribute to Facebook’s constantly churning signals and weightings, helping
to drive conditions for what will be visible and salient for users in different
parts of the platform. In this manner social ties become the ongoing heuristic for
relevance and the technical condition under which triples are
formed.
Following their developer documentation, three elements go into telling stories on
any app that relies on Facebook’s social graph: an actor, an action and an
object (Facebook.com, 2014). The
‘subject-predicates-object’ structure of the assertion is framed
performatively, where the actor is the person who wants to express themselves
through the triple format, an event that Facebook calls ‘publishing’.
The action is the activity the actor is performing, such as reading a book, running
a distance, or enjoying a film, representing how they want to predicate their
experience through the Story. The object is whatever information-sign the actor is
interacting with: an evening concert, another person, or a lawn mower they’ve
just purchased. Here’s a direct example:
if you’re building an app to track rock climbing you may want to make an
action ‘climb’ where the object is a mountain. The story can include
a picture and the geographic location of the mountain. By adding additional data
you can create a compelling story to share with friends and make your app a part
of how people express themselves to others (Ibid).
In other words, through this process users are encouraged to make their interests,
tastes and lifestyle choices public to friends. On the platform side Facebook
parses, in a staggering number of ways, the resulting giant graph of people and
information-signs, aggregating demographic niches that it sells to advertisers. As
Bucher (2013, 487) writes, it is through
technical features like Stories that ‘Facebook seeks to induce and simulate
the emotional and intimate connections seen as a defining feature of
friendship’.
Knowledge as a citational feedback relation
Although first applied to scientific research papers by the information scientist
Eugene Garfield (1972), perhaps the most
famous application of citation graphs was Google’s PageRank algorithm (Page et. al, 1998). Its success was based in
large part on certain statistical processes that demonstrate von Foerster’s
eigenvalues. The German prefix eigen- means own, inherent or
proper, and PageRank’s innovation was to treat the frequency of hyperlinking
across the web as a mathematical matrix of eigenvalues. The approach was iterative
and recursive; a way for the web to ‘appropriate itself’, or stage a
self-organizing interaction between its structure and function, giving users far
better search results than had previously been seen.
Every page captured in Google’s massive cache of the web theoretically began
with an equal and finite quantity of ‘popularity’, assigned as a
mathematical baseline. In an initial step of ranking, a chain of links was followed
randomly among the cached web pages, with a determination of which page had received
a greater share of backlink endorsement made once complete; the process is known as
a Markov chain in mathematics, or more simply a ‘random walk’. It mimics
the way a user chooses their way across the web to find what they’re looking
for, or how they think through an idea associatively. Pages landed on more than once
in the first random walk, intuiting a higher number of backlinks, took over a
greater portion of the finite distribution of popularity, at the expense of pages
that did not have as many backlinks. At the end of this first pass each page was
assigned a score, represented in the original algorithm as a whole number from
0–100 (Ibid, 4). Then another random walk among links occurred, as if the
imaginary user was clicking their way through the web a certain
‘distance’ before getting bored or frustrated, starting again in some
other random place. But in subsequent iterations beyond the first scoring, the
results of each random walk had the additional attribute of prior
page-popularity, which recursively boosted any page randomly landed on
via more popular backlinks. In other words, the quantity of backlinks a page
received remained important, but now an endorsement from a page popular in the
previous pass would count for more than an endorsement from one
with smaller prior popularity.
Feeding prior popularity scores into consecutive random walks during the ranking
process, and re-running this entire process over time (every six to eight weeks in
the early going at Google, but constantly now thanks to its globally distributed
cache of the web) has the effect of restructuring the modern web as though
hyperlinked documents and records were ‘voting’ for one another,
essentially conceiving of them, and/or their authors, as rational agents making
choices. Subsequent versions of Google’s algorithm have added many refinements
to the process: daily activity over all of Google’s properties, geographical
location, language used, personal search history, and the search histories of
friends on social network services are just a few of the thousands of signals that
now structure personalized results through the mechanism of probabilistic choice
(Google.com, 2013).
As has hopefully been demonstrated by a rehearsal of their underlying conceptual
frameworks, each system outlined relies on a self-organizing model predicated on
rational-individual choice, with prior selection outputs feeding back into current
needs, interactively resolved through a platform’s eigenvalue relations.
Especially with the profusion of mobile devices, a major goal of social media has
been to offer up this rational, self-organizing relation whenever
something happens to disturb a user’s ‘operational autonomy’,
providing information to address the disparities of one’s environment across a
wide variety of situations. But at the level of technique, these moments of
knowledge disparity and resolution have all being defined by a Kantian conception of
what a knowledge-relation is, and how it is to be resolved: in the
terms of probabilistic choice between already-constituted, mutually-exclusive
entities that fit a pre-established code. The user is a discrete
subject, and things, people and events are conceived as objective information-signs
disembedded from their manifestation in the world.
Given the freedom and convenience afforded by social media—to access so much
knowledge about the world around us, and manage the organizational complexity of
everyday life—we clearly attain significant autonomy through its technical
relations. But in a more speculative and new materialist register, we can ask
whether users still lack autonomy with respect to the prior ontological
terms of that knowledge-relation; where in its establishment, each
user’s shifting differentials of becoming get projected into the systems in a
particular way, coming to matter mostly in the terms of abstract utilitarian choice.
In other words, by fitting into pre-existing coded structures that interlace private
choice with the essential diagram of information theory—e.g. the probabilistic
selection of one entity from an overall set, conceived as exchanged signals securing
semantic consensus—users forfeit a deeper, prior relation of
the knowledge relation.
As suggested in the introduction, elaborating this issue means shifting discussion
from epistemology to ontology, to ask: are there other ways to comprehend the
‘productive disparity’ of the individual, coupled to the social in an
autopoietic relation that current services conceive as a relation of choice among
informational resources? A starting response is that each approach tacitly relies
on, but ultimately leaves out prior conditions of heteronomous
relation among individuals, conceived as singularities in life. Toscano (2006, 3) starts to get at these conditions in
his description of anomalous individuation, which appeals to
‘the unequal or differential ground of production that lies beneath the
actual, constituted, individuals which provide the objects of the philosophies of
representation’. These we might call the affective, perceptual and psychic
polarities, or bifurcations of becoming that constitute individuals, which form a
deeper, yet obscured ground for choice. They are elements that social media
platforms have tended to envelop through constant redefinition into the epistemic
terms of retrieval, as a paradigm for eigenvalues.
In a corporate video describing the evolution of search, for example, Google Fellow
Ben Gomes states that, ‘Our goal is actually to make improvements to search
that just answer the user’s informational needs, get them to their answer
faster and faster, so that there’s almost a seamless connection between their
thoughts and informational needs and the search results they find’ (Googleblog 2011). Contemporary academic
discourse in the information sciences sees retrieval as deeply penetrating the
psyche in similar ways. Cole (2011, 1227)
writes for example that, ‘Information need is at its deepest level primarily a
human adaptive mechanism—at the level of human perception, at the level of
society and the world in which the individual operates, and at the level of survival
as a species’. It was due to similar, positivistic accounts of information as
a phenomenon that Simondon sometimes criticized cybernetic models of the individual,
rejecting their representationalist assumptions for misconstruing what he saw
information’s real role to be: in individuation (Toscano, 2005, 147).
Knowledge as an ontological dephasing relation
It is worth noting again that Simondon’s ontology does not draw hard boundaries
between the vital individuation of life, individual psyches, social collectivities,
and evolving technologies; rather, he conceives of them all as intercalated, each
participating in the formation of individuated interiors and exteriors of the
other’s wider systems. Individuals are always-already only one part in the
processes of larger entities (Simondon, 1992,
300). Characteristic of new materialist thinking, in justifying his
definition of individuals Simondon inverts the relationship typically established
between being and becoming. Where the various schemes for retrieval outlined above
define the sign-relation as a cognitive or epistemic lack, whose
need is fulfilled by selecting one’s way to the correct object, Simondon
conceives of the sign-relation as an ontological excess: a being
‘more-than-individual’ (Combes, 2013,
35), upon whose surplus individuation takes place. His concept of
disparation is fundamental here, in designating
a tension, an incompatibility between two elements of a situation, which only a
new individuation can resolve by giving birth to a new level of reality. Vision,
for instance, is described by Simondon as the resolution of a disparation
between the image perceived by the left eye and the image perceived by the right
eye. These two disparate two-dimensional images call forth a three-dimensional
dimension as the only way to unify them’ (Ibid, 111).
For Simondon, metaphysically substantialist accounts of the individual (upon which
social media’s technicity is premised) mistakenly define becoming in the terms
of being: the unity of an individual is sustained, and its singularity (or
haecceity) defined, by some prior principle of difference. On
this understanding, the issue for him is that ‘Anything that can serve as the
basis for a relation is already of the same mode of being as the individual, whether
it be an atom, an external and indivisible particle, prima material
or form’ (Simondon, 2009, 4). In the
case of social media, choice as a principle of psychic and collective individuation
comes to fit hand-in-glove with a techno-logical principle of the excluded
middle—where a proposition is either true, or its negation is true, as a basic
mediating feature of computing—thereby producing a prior basis for
relation, and a mode of being. In giving substance to
being through any one of the three strategies outlined, rational choice becomes the
general social principle of co-becoming and adaptability for both
people and the media systems, impressing the conceptual form of ‘rational
being’ onto users and things conceived as unformed matter,
establishing them as discrete subject and object.
How is Simondon’s approach distinctive? From a certain perspective it can be
hard to see much difference between his account of individuation, and one given for
a reflexive subject that is integrated into self-organizing knowledge structures.
Following the ocular analogy of disparation, are we not in some sense now one
another’s ‘opposing eye’ on social media systems, achieving
collective disparation through the algorithmic, pairwise superimposition of our
differing private choices? Guided by someone like Anthony Giddens’ (1984)
theory of individualization, for example, social media systems would here simply be
the latest assemblage to predicate social order upon a ‘gap’ at the
heart of a self-reflexive subject. We negotiate subject-object relations via a
disequilibriating encounter with our structuring environment, and these encounters
resolve for the individual through the acquisition and use of knowledge, as we
receive its ‘structurated’, consensual norms for behavior. For Simondon
however, there is a crucial difference between individuation and individualization:
in his account of the former, neither the structure nor the operating individual
ever has unity as a concrete, self-identical being.
Where self-organizing systems theory typically understands incompatibility from the
perspective of an agentic organism’s demands on the environment, Simondon sees
incompatibility with an environment in a more Spinozist way, as the default
condition of collective individuation—of life, psyches,
sociality and technology together, in a global situation. In other words, the
environment has its own individuating conditions, which relate to
the conditions of the organism through what Simondon calls the preindividual,
modulating a ‘double-becoming’. Agent and container are effectively a
constant flux, never achieving some state of self-similarity, and it’s in this
light that he asks: how does the organism differ from itself, how does the
environment differ from itself, and under what circumstances do they nonetheless
come to relate in a disjunctive (non-)relation? As Hansen
(2009, 134) writes, ‘if the global situation is a global perspective, it is
not a perspective of the organism but a perspective on the
entire process of individuation of which the organism is only one
part—a perspective, in short, that situates the organism within the broader
context of the preindividual’.
In other words, preindividual being simply is this milieu: the given
conditions under which a tension between potentials belonging to previously
separated orders of magnitude can be resolved via their communication (Combes, 2013, 4). Bearing Simondon’s
‘flipped’ understanding of being and becoming in mind, in their current
incarnation social media stage preindividual being as a decisionistic milieu,
individuating people as choice-makers with preferential attachments, and platforms
as real-time decision-capture machines that space us out into probabilistic fields
of ‘having chosen something’. It’s in this fuller sense that the
systems can be charitably read as structuring a disparation, but
individuating in a fashion more accurately described as individualization: they
resolve magnitudes algorithmically between people and signs by relying on actual
choices made in a behavioristic sense, establishing the preindividuated potential to
choose through their adoption.
Simondon’s way of thinking suggests that at its core, individuating relation is
only secondarily epistemic; it is primarily ontogenetic, though the
two remain importantly intertwined through what he goes on to specify as
‘allagmatic’ operations. Massumi (2012,
43) writes that ontogenesis involves a ‘self-inventive passing to a
new level of existence’, meaning that being and thinking are the
same as they occur in an individual’s milieu. But we
alienate ourselves in allowing a representationalist approach towards thinking to
stand in for, and then ‘cast back’ upon being. The limitations of our
current operational understanding of sociality online stem from a similarly
a posteriori, epistemic characterization of relation itself.
Relation ought not take place according to a principle that appeals to some higher
rank of being—in this case an extraction of mental connection as utilitarian
rational choice, as we forge endless connections between disparate entities under
the philosophical auspices of intentional categorization. Rather, being
itself becomes by linking together differentially, spacing itself out
in an internal milieu, through a difference particular to living and not adequately
known through the taxonomic sorting of concepts. As Combes (2013, 18) describes in a helpful refrain: ‘knowledge
exists in the same mode as the beings that it links together, considered from the
point of view of that which constitutes their reality’.
Acknowledging that we are moving here into a more speculative discussion that may not
fit with the extant capacities of information systems, the user-as-individual in
this case might no longer be understood as a discrete agent making choices with
autonomous intentionality.2 Rather, they would
be taken more impersonally as an ‘it’: an individuating process-organism
involved in the ‘local resolution of disparation, as the invention of a
compatibility between heterogeneous domains and demands’ (Ibid, 149).
Perpetually ‘becoming-individual’, the relation would not be based in
some preconceived notion of ‘bringing like together with like’ through
choice as an abstract mechanism; it would rather emerge
between-itself in the vital and semiotic resolution of a
milieu, with choice conceived as a problem resolved by way of the user’s
inventive analogical capacity, to make comparisons in order to see
novel differences. Individuation would still be a knowledge relation, but one
defined by an individual entirely in light of its particular individuating
dynamic—or ‘preindividual share’, as Simondon understands
it—and thus not admitting of any one, generalized epistemic principle.
Conceived in light of his critique of the cybernetic approach to information,
Simondon’s appeal to a deeper, ‘first information’ is instructive
here.
Iliadis (2013, 7) relies on Luciano
Floridi’s (2010, 74) work to discern three ways of talking about information:
as reality, ‘e.g. patterns, fingerprints, tree
rings;’ for reality, ‘e.g. commands, algorithms,
recipes;’ and about reality, ‘e.g. train tables, maps,
entries in an encyclopedia’. Iliadis points out that, ‘Where the
cyberneticists thought the interoperability and indeterminacy of information
‘about’ and ‘for’ reality, Simondon thought these concepts
in terms of information ‘as’ reality’. A focus on the former two
has led to the kinds of algorithmic procedures that motivate current social media
platforms. In theorizing the latter, Simondon believed that the relational
difference of choice might be inverted: to becomes less a principle of signification
as information ‘about’ reality —where a dominating subject
presides over a neutral object, engaged in its interactive control—and more a
compositional principle of signification as invention, with
individuation once again thought of as an excess. As Massumi (2012, 32) describes, for Simondon information ‘is not
susceptible to any stable formalization because it is continually giving rise to new
operational solidarities that did not exist before, and therefore exceed all prior
formalization’. Choice thus needs to be better understood in terms of the
advent of being—information’s
‘as’—instead of its simple relation as something already organized
between sender and receiver (Simondon, 2005,
310). As Toscano (2006, 143) writes, Simondon is attempting to
‘appropriate the concept of information for a consideration of ontogenesis in
terms that would precede and condition the formation and circumscription of these
individuated entities and quantities that go by the names sender,
receiver and code’. To follow his line
of thinking, how might this alternative account bear on the functionality of social
media? In the space that remains, I need to look elsewhere than the services
themselves, to try and indicate a disparational energy of semiotic difference in
generic discourse that currently fails to register in the referential techniques
already outlined.
As we saw above, knowledge and social graphs structure the sign according to
predication, pivoting around the copula of the ‘is’
in formal-semantic terms. I have argued that this gives a metaphysical account of
identity and difference that, based in the social-autopoietic terms of second-order
cybernetics, secures particular relations between subjects and objects. In offering
an alternative approach that extrapolates from Simondon, I want to hold on to this
designative, referential dimension between subjects and object as it supports our
relationship to signs. But I will try to indicate a different way to appreciate
reason and ratio as a ground for thinking, which does not rely on formal
predication. The goal is to mark a more latent, immanent dimension of the sign that
people like Heidegger (1991) and Deleuze
(1990) have in the past thematized as the
sign’s manifestation. To repeat myself, differently: insofar
as social media tools are too premised on an intersubjective economy of choice, they
obscure other semiotic ‘hints’ of difference that may be worthy of
inscription into new practices, especially as these bolster a Simondonian account of
the preindividual. Exemplifying their generic presence in discourse, I find (some
will say, hallucinate) these hints in some bits of discourse taken from two pieces
of editorial writing online.
In the Table 1 are two sets of four
statements, published after US President Barack Obama’s 2013 proposed gun
control legislation was defeated. Taken from politically polarized sites, they have
been very tendentiously excerpted for two reasons. First, to preserve their possible
circulation as information-signs: to pull them out as fragments of reference that
bear some resemblance to current, post-documentary styles of algorithmic processing,
which rely on the ‘is’ copula. Second, and more importantly, they are
excerpted to portray Barack Obama’s significance as an ongoing problem
of collective individuation. An underlying motive is to suggest that in
this example, there is signification based on difference, operating in a register
below what has been described throughout as the retrieval
relation. Deploying Simondon’s vocabulary, there is a contrastive
metastability in these excerpts, between incompatible potentials of becoming, which
contributes to, but would otherwise remain obscured by a relation of choice between
them as separate ‘things to be read as information’. Thinking
ontologically about what it means to be social around signs involves recuperating
and marking such contrastive energies as themselves constructively
individuating operations that might be made amenable to eigenvalue techniques. In
other words, for any information-sign there is more going on than factual
denotation; following Simondon, information-signs percolate with a
manifestation of becoming, a deictic of individuation that
takes place in writing through the operation of analogy. Borrowing again from
Toscano (2006, 140), ‘Rather than providing the emblem of closure or
totalization, relationality is ‘the non-identity of being with regard to
itself.’’.
These are direct excerpts from two web articles. Contrastive relations
immanent to sequential, or nearby sentences in the articles themselves are
being pulled out of context, for the purposes of highlighting how they
manifest a differential; some kind of (admittedly abstract)
analogical ratio of ‘more/less’. For the
purposes of a more ontogenetically-inflected style of information
processing, these differentials might be operationalized—by the author
or others, over time—through some kind of technical
‘hinting’ strategy that marks the ratios in a collective
practice—a kind of ontogenetic
“hypersense” that builds on the strategies of
lexia-based hypertext.
President Barack Obama, on
gun control (Breitbart.com
4/17/13)
claimed that opponents of expanded federal
background checks had “no coherent arguments” for their
position
< 〉
resorted to false claims and statistics about
current laws, including the repeatedly debunked argument that 40% of gun
sales are private.
used the Newtown disaster to make an argument
about the urgent need for new laws
< 〉
exploited the Newtown disaster to make an
argument about the urgent need for new laws
noted that 90% of Americans, and a majority of
National Rifle Association members, supported expanded background
checks
< 〉
ignored the fact that constitutional rights
like the Second Amendment exist precisely to protect minorities against
majoritarian passions
Showed a reserved, measured response to the
Boston Marathon bombings
< 〉
attacked his opponents viciously, expressing
and evoking such visceral emotions--especially at a time of
mourning.
President Barack Obama, on
gun control (Slate.com
4/22/13)
Thwarted by partisanship
< 〉
lacked the skills to manage the moment
Could have done more
< 〉
required a different skill set
Admitted he usually thinks he can do his
staff’s job better than they can
< 〉
had his best shot handing this issue over to
Biden
Master of the art of politics
< 〉
hired because he is the anti-politician
Using the different statistical or taxonomic strategies outlined earlier, a
formal-semantic approach would differentiate the sign ‘President Barack Obama
on gun control’ in any number of ways: Barack Obama could be an entity
different from other presidents, or other words like ‘baracan’ or
‘obey’, or other prominent African Americans, or perhaps temporally into
a first-term and second-term president, for example. To think relation in
Simondon’s terms, as both an epistemic-conceptual relation
and a becoming-manifestation relation, the goal instead (or
somehow prior to these epistemic operations) would be to preserve ‘Obama on
gun control’ as persisting in the action of an individuating sign
encountering other signs in a problematic field, involving
immanent ratios between series of signifiers and signifieds that were being
brought into relation by humans and non-humans dynamically
animating the sign. I have tried to capture this in the example above, by drawing
attention to how ‘Obama on gun control’ is repeatedly compared in the
writing to itself as a sign, through a sequence of analogical operations that
indicate a choice, but one that is auto-constitutive in its
signification-through-difference, and not based in a selection between predigested
objects. For Simondon, as Combes (2013, 16)
writes, ‘A substance appears when a term absorbs into itself the relation that
gave rise to it, thus obscuring it’. It’s in this sense that I am trying
to depict signification more immanently, where the wider goal is not to zero in on
Obama’s ‘correct’ reference in, or as a closed constellation of
facts. Rather, difference is mobilized to involve the conditions of a collective
becoming-individual, with other psyches, institutions, collectivities and signs
participating in an overall milieu, staged by signs that thematize the world as a
set of outstanding questions or problems. Read through a Simondonian lens, the
authors face a surfeit of potential meanings, and are thinking through an analogical
operation to resolve signs into compossible relations. What I am suggesting is that
this relation of compossibility could serve (or serve differently) as a site for
information processing than the current context of social media.
Drawing out the features of an individual psyche coping with heterogeneous
potentialities in order to resolve an excess of meaning, the Table 1 tries to show where we might find
contrastive, relational differences latent to writing as collective expression.
Simondon’s alternative account of ‘first information’ is
suggestive here. Whenever someone chains together signs in disparation, they tacitly
rely on different ‘more-or-less’ operations of affective, perceptual and
conceptual ratios that connect up disparate fields, modulating signs into
disjunctive series of signifiers and signifieds. I have tried to denote this with
the symbols in the middle of the table, where the inventive tendency towards one
relation over another is denoted by the slightly larger, greater-than
symbol—in effect offering an alternative, more immanent way to think about
choice.
The upshot of this rather wooly exposition is to wonder: would it be possible to
organize a technical practice, and a set of computational operations around these
ratios, to push current thinking about the potentials and pitfalls of social media
in a new direction? From the perspective of a post-documentary form, here the basic
force for differentiating information-signs into visibility would no longer be
‘personal choice between retrieved objects.’ It would rather be
something like an entity’s immanent, continual ‘bifurcation into
problematics.’ Signs should matter because their status is in
question globally, technologically captured and motivated by the energy
of how people are questioning it, rather than simply
that they are being communicative in their questioning, as we
might see in an otherwise innovative platform like Twitter. In other words, could
social media strive for less crowd-trending, and more collective-agonistic, designed
from the perspective of questioning rather than from the perspective of answering
queries? The idea is that as a matter of underlying technique, social media might
capture, store and organize signs as a manifestation of internal asymmetries and
polarities in thinking, rather than to impose a polarizing structure through which
signs come to matter mostly as instances or tokens of thought.
The statements of the two writers quoted above inflect and refract certain perceptual
and affective intensities in their relation to Obama’s interventions into gun
control, putting these intensities into relation through disjunctive series. Instead
of encountering the two articles discretely, with one perhaps ranked over top of the
other on the basis of what you’ve read in the past, or based on who’s
recommended one over another to you, the statements themselves might sit more flush
with the enchaining together of series of what you will read, respond to, feel and
do next, through their more immanent contrastive relations. In other words, the
example is meant to suggest a set of alternative traces we might leave behind (and
in a sense already are leaving behind, but in an obscured way) which might still be
productively computed into collective eigenvalues. In terms of one’s
capacities towards these signs, rather than picking the next document to read, you
might conceivably add your own contrastive bifurcation to a transversal space of
statements around ‘Obama on gun control’ as a collective process-entity,
for example.
Future in-formation
At a more basic level, I have tried to indicate that despite their increasing
conflation, signification through retrieval is not the same thing as signification
through ontogenesis. In the push to make discourse more technically amenable to the
optimizing disparation of existing knowledge, social and citation graph services, we
may be unwittingly obscuring important, metaphysical dimensions of the semiotic.
Individuals are more than abstract epistemic agents; they carry resonant ontogenetic
differences within themselves, as they become through their
bifurcations to be one way, and not another. These are asemantic,
disjunctive signals that set up ratios of excess and lack in signification, upon
which individuals carry out compatibilities of communication in the form of
expressive, individuating sign-events. Through social media systems, these signals
are being put to work to serialize thinking in a particular way.
In light of this horizon, we need to be asking questions about the conditions under
which technique will support signification online, and what more preferable
conditions for the preservation and amplification of society’s
transindividuation might look like. From the altered point of view I have sketched
out here, the hope is to better see how certain long-standing accounts of meaning
and knowledge reproduce an intersubjective orientation to the sign at the expense of
obscuring a prior, ‘enunciative’ relation. The result is what we might
call an ‘operational subject’ that is too heavily premised as a
communicative-epistemic agent, leading to an end-user who finds
themselves constantly re-enacting retrieval as the general paradigm for social
significance online.
As this retrieval relation bleeds into more intimate registers of life in network
societies, it risks defining our relationship to signs as such in a way that
forecloses upon other conceptual possibilities. The counterintuitive gambit is that
to reimagine social media, we benefit from suspending a
sociological approach to computing; one where, as Bruno Latour
(2005, 91) remarks, the social is somehow
made of some homogeneous stuff. Instead, we need to engage with social media’s
procedures by taking a new materialist, ‘mixed’ semiotic approach to our
relations with things, institutions, technologies and power. Thinking in this vein
contends that signs always involve more than the performance of shared meaning in a
sociolinguistic context. They also involve more than a formalized relation of valid
reference, a feature of signs that has nevertheless become crucial for the
coordination of life in an information age. Signs have a still-deeper dimension,
best understood in terms of an impersonal event, from which individuals receive an
ordered orientation for living, and an experiential sense of before and after.
When unique Twitter hashtags emerge to orient people around a street conflict or
natural disaster, for example, or when Google aggregates real-time search queries to
predict national flu activity, have we not moved beyond the simple denotation and
retrieval of information? By involving new materialist thinking, and especially
Simondon’s philosophical theories in my analysis, I have tried to gesture in a
different direction for thinking about social media, premised on the idea that signs
involve not just signification, but manifestation: a combination of language,
singular bodies and events that perpetually shifts according to some prior,
conditioning modality of power. If the social web is to serve as a future platform
for both information retrieval and public expression, then it is
crucial that we rethink the latter on its own more distinctive sociotechnical
terms.
Competing Interests
The author declares that they have no competing interests.
I am grateful here to Bryan Behrenshausen, for conversations and reading sessions
around cybernetics and the mathematical theory of communication, which helped to
focus the overall direction and development of this paper.
One existing community that does seem to challenge the typical linkage between
autonomous intentionality and social-semiotic mediation in interesting ways is
the Japanese-language site 2channel. Nozawa (2012) develops a compelling ethnographic portrait of the
site’s norms of ‘headlessness’ and ‘material
camouflage’, for example. I’m grateful to Keiko Nishimura for
pointing out this fascinating work.
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