Networks and Spatialized Information

 

The Relations of Relating

Levi has a nice post up, I believe repeating he has made before, that networks express themselves in terms of a structure that is both material and for want of a better word, positional: Spatio-Temporal Topology– A Brief Remark. I like his graph of networks, but it is exactly this kind of point he is trying to bring to the “object” world that is much better served by treating information itself as a constituent, structuring element of the Universe, such as I argued adopting Stonier’s theory of information to Spinozist terms in Information, Spinoza’s “Idea” and The Structure of the Universe. It is in just this way that the human-oriented world that Levi and others are trying to flee is most easily surmounted, as information as “productive work” not only describes the organizational properties of human/non-biotic networks, but also of non-biotic structures as well (a crystal, or the informational properties of light being fine examples). Information (much like Spinoza’s “idea”), cuts across the whole fabric of the Universe, creating the edges of what is possible. Why object-oriented ones do not seize onto this idea is perhaps a product of their very “object” consciousness, they want an optical “final constituent of the world”, a piece of the world they can float in their mind’s eye. Our eyes see objects, but our ears, or sense of smell, hearing even our sense of touch, and even our kinesthetic sense do not primarily perceive “objects”. It is just this desire to “think in pictures” as Spinoza put it, that characterizes much of object-consciousness, that restricts the kinds of solutions one would naturally pursue. And it is precisely in the nature of networks, and therefore processes, that information takes its more obvious stand: where relations are juxtaposed to the work needed to create and maintain them. So much better, I think, it is to see as Stonier offers, that matter, energy and information are the three constituents of the world.

As Stonier argues, it was the computer’s invention that gave rise to the awareness of information being constituent, just as the steam engine gave rise to our awareness of universal energy. Network thinking also has grown out of computer relations and powers of organization, there could be no more historically natural connection that could be made than between networks and information. It would seem, at least historically, until the next great conceptual device is invented, that for those who want to think in networked fashion, and beyond the merely human, information is a bedrock of interpretation, and projective “objects” whose prominence grew out of Renaissance linear perspective (Panofsky) and the invention of the camera obscura, perhaps much less so.

 

Related posts: From Ideal Networks to Real Ones: Al Qaeda and Chaoplexic Warfare and Is Spinoza a Cyberneticist, or a Chaocomplexicist?