T Information Knowledge
T Information Knowledge
T Information Knowledge
Suhail Malik
I
N HIS now venerable ‘report on knowledge’, Jean-François Lyotard states
that technoscientific ‘transformations’ in cybernetics, communication
theory, data storage and transmission, and so on, ‘can be expected to
have a considerable impact on knowledge’. This has of course become a
truism and a reality in the 20 years since the writing of The Postmodern
Condition, as has the specific determination of this ‘impact’:
[Knowledge] can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if
learning is translated into quantities of information. . . . The ‘producers’ and
users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of trans-
lating into these languages whatever they invent or learn. . . . Along with the
hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of
prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as ‘knowledge’
statements. ([1979] 1984: 4)
Theory, Culture & Society 2005 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 22(1): 29–49
DOI: 10.1177/0263276405048434
04_malik_048434 (jk/d) 17/1/05 8:32 am Page 30
concept of information and its consequences that this article seeks to estab-
lish. On the other hand, working towards this level of conceptual general-
ity and consistency (for the general sense of ‘situatedness’, for example)
requires an abstraction from precisely the disciplinary and empirically
specific characterizations of information and the constellation of terms that
it carries with it. So, though the characterization of information as an event
that is situated in a system with an organized memory is developed in the
following pages by moving between the biological and social determinations
of information, this general characterization does not, however, mean that
organic memory and social memory (or personal memory for that matter) are
the same thing or are unproblematically identifiable, or that what infor-
mation is, in fact, is the same thing in every instance. In fact, the argument
here suggests that it cannot be since what and how the mnemic organization
is for each developmental system is, precisely, different and particular. The
concern here is not then to specify what, for example, the mnemic organiz-
ation is, and so what the specificity or actuality of information is, in every
case. For all that, such specificity is observed in the later section on infor-
mation societies since what is being constructed here through the examples
considered is an understanding of the centrality of information, not just in
the formation of certain kinds of society, but, more intrinsically, as a
condition for the constitution of complex societies at all.
What appears through these arguments is that rather than being the
reduction of knowledge, information involves a complexification of meaning
and systems, a complexification that can now be attributed to the operation
of information with some specificity. In particular, there is a reversal of the
conventional critical attributions noted above: it is not that information is
the latest or only a particular mode of instrumentalization (of knowledge,
say) but rather that instrumentality is a particular stratum of informatic
operationality, one that determines and is determined in an anthropotech-
nical complex (and which therefore precedes consciousness as the condition
for knowledge in its anthropically derived sense). The received critique of
instrumentality is thus seen to be a disavowal of this complex mnemic
organization that is central to the development of all orders of living systems
and societies; central, that is, to production from pre-cellular-organic to
post-industrial levels.
This invites questions: a difference in what (What are you paying attention
to?), about what (What matters?), for whom (Who is asking, who is affected?).
Asking these questions leads us to focus on the knower, a knower who always
has a particular history, social location and point of view. (2000: 147)
The information difference that exists between the linear order of polypep-
tides and the three-dimensional order of proteins can be illustrated with a
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simple example. The linear order of 100 punctiform amino acids is specified
by 100 coordinates, while their three-dimensional organisation requires 300
coordinates (three for each amino acid). Protein folding, or self-assembly,
amounts therefore to adding the 200 missing coordinates to the 100 coordi-
nates provided by the genes. And since the complexity of a system is deter-
mined by the number of parameters that are required to describe it, it is clear
that protein folding is a phenomenon that produces an increase of complexity.
In embryonic development . . . the term epigenesis has been used to
describe the increase of complexity that takes place in a growing embryo, but
that term can be generalized to any other convergent increase in complexity,
and we can therefore say that protein folding is an example of molecular
epigenesis. (Barbieri, 2003)
Organic codes are then the internal meaning of the living system (which
does not even have to have reached the cellular stage of development).
These organic codes/memories ‘situate’ or, in Barbieri’s terms, contextual-
ize (2003: 111), the function of any molecule in the cell (including the
genome), enabling it to inform the development and (internal or external)
function of the living system. The codes give the elements of the living
system an organic meaning. Barbieri’s contention is that these codes belong
to neither the genotype nor the phenotype of the system but are in fact their
common logical and historical condition,4 and even artifactualize them
(2003: 160).
This theory of the development of living systems as being conditioned
in the first instance by organic meaning – whence Barbieri’s ‘semantic
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That is, there are (at least) two mnemic registers that determine the develop-
mental order and regularity of a cell, not just the one stipulated by the geno-
informatic determinism of neo-Darwinian molecular biology. Second, then,
the dual organic memory of the cell gives the linear information contained
in the genome its meaning in the developmental process. And the more
general inference is that the organic memory of the cell gives whatever infor-
mation is contained in the cell – either in its linear coding or in its spatio-
temporal ordering – functional effectivity:
For Dretske, the absolute character of knowledge stems from the absolutism
of information ‘on which [knowledge] depends’, on information’s eventual
redundancy. Information can be redundant because it contributes nothing
to knowledge:
Dretske is in his own way articulating the point we saw Luhmann make
earlier: the repetition of the same piece of information is not information.
The difference from Luhmann’s characterization, however, is that for
Dretske this redundancy arises not because information can happen only
once (in its evention) but because knowledge as knowledge is immutable
and because further information can add nothing to knowledge. The Platonic
assumption here is clear. Meaning for Dretske is to be filled and completed
rather than mutated. What follows (in a perfectly Hegelian way) is that infor-
mation is determined by and directed towards such a stabilized or fulfill-
able knowledge – as Dretske puts it, ‘no more’ information can modify
knowledge once there is knowledge. Hence their common absolute
character.
Meaning qua information can thus be exhausted in knowledge – and
therefore quantified: the certainty in knowledge offers a 0 (no knowledge)
and a 1 (knowledge) by which the relevance and transmission of information
can be calibrated. Dretske establishes the mathematization of information
by communications theory on this basis. What is measured between the 0
and 1 is not the information itself or the knowledge it generates but the
material and practical context in which that knowledge and information take
place:
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(2002: 154) and there can be no separation between information and disin-
formation, it is nonetheless important to emphasize that with the analysis
proposed here the ‘risk’ effects of the information society are not ‘conse-
quences’ of information but are the operation of information itself. Risk, the
meaning of risk, is occasioned with information because information
involves the transmutation of existing conditions. The alteration to
knowledge that follows is just the informatic dimension of meaning, even if
it is not meaningful and even countermands meaningfulness (as knowledge).
In this way, the ‘anarchy’ of information is institutionalized – mnemically
organized – to some degree or other. It is then not so much that ‘the critique
of information is information itself’ but that information is the critique of
meaning, the vector of meaning’s transmutations. The move from founding
and orienting social order and meaning on the basis of secure knowledge,
whatever local modality that securing may take, to ‘information societies’
(the move of capitalism, arguably) is a move that promotes a society turned
towards evention and the alteration of meanings. But it does not spell the
collapse of meaning – only that meaning is not established or, pushed to its
limit, establishable. It is contingent – on new information.
Second, Paul Virilio’s ‘accident thesis’ also articulates the risk of infor-
mation at the sociotechnical-global level. Virilio adopts Aristotle’s categori-
cal distinction between substance, which is ‘absolute and necessary’, and
accident, which is ‘relative and contingent’, to inscribe a logic of global
history: ‘we can now equate “substance” with the beginning of knowledge,
and the “accident” with the end of that philosophical intuition initiated by
Aristotle and a few others’ (2003: 25). That is, the accident spells the end
of knowledge. And, for Virilio, this is a global concern because the
sociotechnical developments of modernity have industrialized and eventu-
ally globalized the production of the accident such that it is, in another
version of the risk society thesis, the habitus of the contemporary world:
The accident, as Virilio describes it, is of the order of the event, and it
undermines the securing of a social or personal order on the basis of knowl-
edge. It can be equated with the evention of information as it is being elabor-
ated here. What is at stake for Virilio in this re-orientation of meaning at
all levels is, however, the ‘catastrophic’ abolition of knowledge, including
the mode of knowing that is consciousness. Virilio issues the dire warning:
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the loss of consciousness of the accident, and of the major disaster, would
amount not just to thoughtlessness, but to madness – the madness of volun-
tary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions (I am
thinking in particular of genetic engineering and the biotechnologies). . . .
We would see the fatal emergence of the accident of knowledge, of which
information technology may well be the sign by the very nature of its
undoubted advances, but also by the incommensurable damage it has done.
(2003: 7)
The point here is to focus on the originality of the epigenetic process that is
put in place from the moment of the appearance of tools, insofar as they are
conserved in their form beyond the individuals producing or using them.
. . . Epiphylogenesis, a recapitulating, dynamic, and morphogenetic
(phylogenetic) accumulation of individual experience (epi), designates the
appearance of a new relation between the organism and its environment,
which is also a new state of matter. If the individual is organic organized
matter, then its relation to the environment (to matter in general, organic or
inorganic), when it a question of the who, is mediated by the organized but
inorganic matter of the organon, the tool with its instructive role (its role qua
instrument), the what. It is in this sense that the what invents the who just
as much as it is invented by it. (Stiegler, [1994] 1998: 176–7)
that Stiegler affirms in the process of hominization. But we can note that
the distinction Stiegler draws between human development through the
sociotechnical exteriorization of memory and the rest of organic life – the
specificity of the human – is somewhat weakened by the ‘organic codes’
Barbieri speaks about. Because what Barbieri proposes is that even at the
level of biological formation of the cell, a process of epigenetic development
is underway that includes the genetic code as but one of its determinants.
Hence, any distinction between genetic determination and epigenetic
formation is undermined at the base biological level of the cell if not below
it. The distinction between the human and the rest of life made by Stiegler
on the basis of the former’s epigenetic development and the latter’s more
completely genetic formation cannot then be sustained. The continuity
rather than rupture between anthropotechnical life and life in general is
further confirmed by Barbieri’s argument that even at pre-cellular stage of
the production of ribonuclear proteins, the presence of coded polymers
requires the production of polymer units external to the organic codes that
generate them. That is, there is a production of molecules ‘from without’
(2003: 160) – an artificial production. The organic codes act in this sense
as a technical memory at the level of pre-cellular organic production.
Instrumentality Reviewed
Stiegler’s ‘instrumental maieutic’ as an epigenesis vectored through an
external mnemic organization is not then restricted to the emergence of the
human as anthropotechnical complex. Rather, ‘it structures all levels of the
living’ as he puts it in a commentary on Derrida’s notion of the grammé
([1994] 1998: 137). If, then, epigenesis can be identified with the process
of information’s evention of meaning, it can be said that information – the
alteration of meaning – is at the heart of the development of life from organic
to inorganic organized matter, from base levels of the biotic to the techni-
cal, for which the human is then one site among others. What is in tran-
sition, what is in continuity, through this rupture is meaning, from organic
meaning to socio-technical – i.e., symbolic, cultural and operational –
meaning.
Some caution, however, needs to be observed about the continuity of
the epigenetic constitution of meaning from pre-cellular-organic to social
informatic processes. As stated in the introductory comments above, the
interest here has been in developing a concept of information, and this
entails a certain necessary degree of abstraction and therefore of general-
ity. The situatedness of information, however, means that what information
is, and what meaning/mnemic organization is at any level (or even sub-
level), in any situation, is distinct and demands differentiation from what it
is at any other. That is, although it is argued that the process of informatic-
epigenetic constitution described here runs from pre-cellular-organic to
post-industrial-social conditions, this ought not to be confounded with a
developmental continuity between them. It is an argument for a conceptual
consistency in how ‘development’ (which is to say, changes in meaning and
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of the present discussion is that the dominant doctrines of modern biology, neo-
Darwinism and its experimental practice, molecular biology, locate all (or nearly
all) of the developmental information of the organism in the genome, i.e., in the
gene which is therefore a kind of ‘map’ of the organism as a whole. It is there
proposed that control and modification of the gene will on its own and all other
things being constant result in a specifically modified organism (the phenotype).
The genotype is supposed to ‘suppl[y] the fundamental pattern of the organism’
(Oyama, 2000: 16); it is the ‘biological software’ of the organism (Barbieri, 2003:
25), ‘a deposit of instructions and therefore . . . potentially capable of carrying the
project of embryonic development’ (Barbieri, 2003). What is important in this
determination of organic development as a background to the present argument is
that the phenotype is degraded if not ignored as a factor in development, never
mind the environment in which the organism exists. That is, the ‘situation’ of the
genome is ignored and the information controlling development (as this doctrine
would have it) is attributed exclusively to a material and substantial location – as
a design – in the gene – whence the ‘reductionism’ noted in the main text. (This is
the kind of preformationist fantasy behind the narratives and anxieties around
genetics in popular culture, from Jurassic Park to Gattaca to more complicated
concerns about GMOs.) The main text here and the argument it makes (following
Oyama, Barbieri and others) for a located and situated account and operation of
information are in part to be understood against this substantialist notion of infor-
mation, i.e., as directed towards undermining the assumptions of the determinism
of neo-Darwinism and molecular biology.
2. The term ‘eventive’ is constructed here to parallel ‘inventive’, whence ‘evention’,
‘eventing’, and so on. The neologism is useful as a shorthand way of indicating the
dynamic operation of information in and to a system. This serves to indicate, first,
how the each-time-event of information is transitive, verb-like and adjectival rather
than substantive and noun-like, and, second, a certain proximity and distance to
invention. This last point is taken up towards the end of this article.
3. Technical terms that may be required from here (though they are not significant
to the present argument and so will not be presented in any detail) include amino
acids – the base molecules out of which longer chains of certain biologically func-
tioning molecules are made, specifically the following classes of biomolecule:
nucleotides – chains of amino or nucleic acids (the latter are so called because they
are found in cell nuclei), the only relevant ones of which here are DNA and RNA,
the former being a famously helixical intertwining of two nucleotides and the basic
though complex molecule of the gene; and polypeptides – single linear chains of
amino acids such as proteins which are to be found throughout the cell and take
on a wide variety of functions.
In the neo-Darwinian doctrines of modern (molecular) biology all other
molecular activity is subordinated to and organized by the supposedly principal
nucleotide that is the gene, whence the genocentrism that Barbieri critiques through
the argument presented in the next few lines of the main text here.
4. Since both genotypes and phenotype and the ‘first organic systems’ (2003: 145)
are constituted by the earlier production of ribonucleo-proteins, Barbieri proposes
a ribotype theory for the origin of life. Ribotypes are the ‘seat of genetic coding’ in
Barbieri’s theory (2003: 156) – which is to say that organic codes and thus organic
meaning are the condition for the development of life even at its origin.
5. This statement also characterizes the logic of Derrida’s ethics, in particular the
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logic of the ‘to come’ and the quasi-eschatological messiahanism of the promise
that have gained increasing prominence in Derrida’s work. See, for example,
Specters of Marx ([1993] 1994: 91). Important differences remain, however: though
the following argument in the main text on knowledge is entirely relevant to Virilio,
it is only pertinent to Derrida in a severely limited way.
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