path: root/ch3.tex

\chapter{}

Beginning, perhaps, in the 17\ts{th} century, a
few had embarked on a program of "modernizing' society; shattering old categories
and languages while inventing new ones.
Leibniz, for instance, dreamed of a logical\slash mathematical-based universal language. One
of the great agendas of the 18\ts{th} and 19\ts{th}
centuries was a vast program of reclassification. 
There was also an attempt to trace back
all modern languages to a primal Indo-European tongue. Past and present humans,
societies, languages, plants and animals were
arranged on a progressive scale (and this was
a continuation of the Renaissance, which
had introjected the past, ancient Greece, into
its program of liberation from medieval
thinking). New theories and new disciplines
emerged: economics, politics, psychology,
sociology, history, the physical sciences,
mythology, anthropology\ldots\ all split off
from philosophy. These new disciplines began to atomize and reconstruct, emphasizing quantification. They were partial fictions
and suffered all the difficulties of translation; each developed their own jargons, hard
and soft tools, aesthetics, formal modes of
organizing the perception of the world,
creating new mediating lenses between humans, and between humans and the natural
world. In time, each one of these disciplines
claimed to be a total world view \ldots\ as did
each mitotic sub-discipline. General systems
theory and interdisciplinary studies began
to emerge in the early twentieth century.
Now, in the tail end of the 20\ts{th} century, are
remelted into the general category of information and communication theory.

The information age required a vast new
enterprise: an enormous translation or conversion project; a reduction of all disciplines
into a kind of symbolic, quantified representation --- a new universal language which
would translate the languages, dialects and jargons of all languages and disciplines ---
appropriate to the basic circuit logics in the computers. Bit by bit the differences between
disciplines and disparate bodies of knowledge (as well as living and non-living bodies
considered as language) are becoming eroded. This endeavor implied a perhaps fictional
notion; that the universe and everything in it is logico-mathematical. It also implied
that all things and forces in the universe could be treated as a cryptogram, a code, a
text that could be \emph{read}, sooner or later. Another and muted implication was that all
things in the universe were in some sense \emph{perceptually} simultaneous.

The general computer-compatible\slash general systems-schema runs something like this:
\begin{enumerate}
	\item Anything (or anyone) that can be exactly specified can be automated.
	\item Inferential, judgemental, learned or adaptive behavior can be specified (which raises the problem of translation or conversion of knowledge to information).
	\item Intuitional and creative activity can be indistinguishably simulated by machine (the drive for artificial intelligence).
	\item All this can be communicated from machine to machine, for the speeds of transmission means that messages are distance-insensitive (relatively speaking).
	\item Which means that one has to deal with complexes of social sets and the way in which they, or the information they have, or that represents them (not the same thing) can be communicated.
	\item Information is passed among (or taken from, or imposed on) the sets (but they also frequently resist this passage or appropriation of knowledge about themselves: this implies hierarchy of information systems).
	\item The forces which produce stability inside these social sets create instability among the sets.
	\item From the point of view of the general systematizers, an improvement between and among all social sets (and the way they interpret themselves and the world\ldots\ or the way in which they are interpretable) leads to a better management of the metasystem's information.
\end{enumerate}

But from whose point of view?

By the \enquote{social set} we mean a population
which has a language, a mode of discourse
and a set of customs (by which the language
it uses is processed) existing in a variety of
domains or environments, using sets and
subsets of natural and artificial languages;
bureacracies, corporations, secret societies,
individuals, professional societies, classes
(in the social sense), ethnicities and races,
disciplines, nations, regions, hierarchies\ldots\ and so forth\ldots\ in whatever ways society has
been split, conceptually and actually. These,
of course, overlap. It is apparent that for all
these groupings, the means for universal
discourse hasn't been invented yet and
what's more, many resist translation actively.
All the propositions point directly at the
problem of translation, or the generation of a
universal language.

Systems-building has gone on since the beginning of the appearance of humans.
Even the most \enquote{primitive} of groupings builds all-encompassing (and complexly
muddled) systems. Underlying this newest global climacteric, this vast re-writing program,
was a not particularly new set of assumptions: that any set of things, events,
forces linking people and events could be represented by some language, or set of
languages, logics, numbers, letters, symbols, signs\ldots\ That there is an ultimate and fundamental language, a deep structure in the
universe \ldots\ and that it is mathematicological and is discoverable and translatable\ldots\ These representations could be
linked in several ways: language to language and language to the world represented by
these languages ... into interactive and mobile structures that in some way match,
dance in time to the underlying and fundamental language of the universe (automated
natural language translation is a disaster). When things and people move, the signs
representing their existence are communicated to this informational technosphere.
Conversely, when signs, symbols, language elements, variables of all sorts are moved,
people, things, whole economies, the universe and all that is in it, should move. This
manipulator's dream is possible only if information is connected to the universe in
some concrete way, requiring sensors, languages, translators, categories and levers.

The sensors (eyes, ears, skin, writers of books, typists, telescopes, microscopes, 
electronic sensors of all kinds ... and so forth)
must \enquote{read}, transmit and input these signs of movement into some kind of storage
where language could work on them (meaning the incredible complex of miniscule and
high speed movement in the circuits, in and out of the various logical devices and timers
and storages ... ). Contrariwise, a set of language-motivated output levers could,
theoretically, energize and change the configuration of the universe. (In quantum,
operationally-oriented physics, this interventionary notion, that mere thought and its
instrumentalities affect the universe---in yet unmeasurable ways---is implicit. 
By extension, mere thought affects the universe, but in as yet unmeasurable ways.) This desire
reflects an ancient obsession; the Archimedean dream of minimal expenditures of energy 
moving great masses, for example shifting the great nebula in Andromeda into a
better orbit.

All of these desires occasions the search for the universal system-langauge which is,
at the same time, the \emph{real} language of the universe, the ultimate \enquote{machine code.}
A recourse to what can be considered gnostic wisdom, Pythagoreanism, or Kaballism:
these are used as key words to exemplify a way of thinking. Pythagoreanism was both a
mathematical and a magical system. Number translates into space and converely; all is
number and geometry. Kaballism and gnosticism are fundamentally literary. Cartesian
thinking carried this obsession further, turning space into a vast, suburban real-estate
development. Kaballa views the universe as \enquote{word} (although \enquote{word} translates into
number games: \emph{Gematria}). Considered from the perspective of these ancient magical
systems: gnosticism, hermeticism, the religion of the Jains, the I-Ching, Rosicrucianism,
alchemy and astrology, all the material universe is translatable. But this is to throw a
net of language out into the universe, and is the precursor, perhaps, to quantum physics
and operational indeterminacy.

None of this denies the need for the creation of language but points toward a recurrant obsession with language as the ultimate reality. What drives this obsession?

The hunt for the ultimate, sacred, or secular, usable, transmissible knowledge or information is like a vision of, a penetration to a sacred realm where total, instantaneous,
universal and all-purpose code, exists. This kind of thinking assumes an underlying,
unified universe. To match this universe, somewhere, somehow,
there exists, and is decodeable (if only in visions and dreams)
an underlying language, an ultimate metalanguage, a deep structure of grammar, a
boss language of all boss languages to match that reality. 
And that meta-language is basically mathematical, logical, rational. 
\enquote{In The Beginning was The Word and The Word was made Flesh.}

(In anticipation, let's propose several such languages:
the language of genetics, the language of quantum-relativistic 
particle physics, the language of finance, the language of
mathematical logic, the language of literature \ldots
which includes the psychoanalytical disciplines. There are more.)

However out of this uniform ur-language has come Babel. That is to say pure Word,
pure light (ultimate information), being made into Flesh, yielded corruption, decay,
dialects, death, a plethora of languages. Or, from the evolutionary geneticist's point of
view, diversity, uniqueness, adaptability to material conditions, non-repeatability \ldots
\emph{quality}. Diversity is the way to disorder, chaos, entropy, 
a confusion of languages. Specialized knowledges divide into languages,
sub-languages, jargons (even putting it this way assumes primal unity);
specializations fragment futher the possible wholeness into cultures, sexes, nations,
races\ldots Truly unlike languages have unlike assumptions behind them;
they cannot translate. This arises out of observing the bewildering array of languages, proliferated
into mutually incomprehensible dialects, a diversity of natural languages,
in a short period of time. But worse, the presence of,
the possibility of incompatible languages intimates that the underlying 
\emph{physical} universe is not one. Again, chaos. These \enquote{mutations} 
puzzle and anger the unifiers. They take steps to correct the process of decay and
dissolution. (As the first Rockefeller put it:
\enquote{Combination is the wave of the future,} in more ways than one.)

If there is a fundamental oneness in the
universe---particles seen one way, waves
another---and all things, people and events,
all singular events are manifested out of this
fundament, then all change and process and
people are mere aspects, illusion, perhaps
developed over time. This \emph{ur}ness should
have its own language, shouldn't it? Why
this diversity? Or perhaps this \emph{ur}-language
existed before the beginning of time? What
happened to fragment pre-temporal paradise
(which will become balanced at the other
end by post-temporal paradise), this primal
oneness, this \emph{quality}, leading to the 
shattering of Eden into cosmic Babel? The Fall?
Sin? Imbalance?

It is to offset the effects of a modern Babel that languages are constantly converted into
one another, hopefully without losing anything. Work into COBOL; COBOL into Aramaic;
Hebrew into digital \ldots and so forth.
The universe and all that is in it is assumed to contain a secret code or cryptogram; the
new language project, this drive toward fusion is designed to unlock the code (or
perhaps its purpose is to \emph{invent} the code).
Strings of biochemicals, DNA and RNA, are
called a code or cryptogram. The code expresses and replicates to duplicate itself
(with mutational and combinatorial variations) and becomes a body which eats food,
converts it into energy to give growth to
another body-shell in order to perpetuate a
code, a language, a message. The body as a
message transmitter.

The wisdom of the east handles this problem another way: it announces that diversity
is an illusion. The west, at present, holds that the clue to the ultimate bottom language is
supposed to lie in the human mind: in some way this primal unity can be \emph{remembered}.

(Remember Lucifer's tale before Eden was built? Consider the role of knowledge in the
tale of Eden. There is a struggle over the possession of information and thus a fight to
control the sacred language, or Lucifer's tale before Eden was built. Satan becomes the
Lord of Diversity, the Lord of disinformation, disunity, chaos, entropy: Prometheus
becomes the lord of stolen knowledge.)

Word-obsessed Kaballistic or Gnostic lore anticipates the Big Bang. Many religions
anticipate the Fall. The Big Bang leads to entropy: entropy leads to diversity. Humans,
we are told, are themselves the creators of
negentropy (holding the center together conceptually, if not physically) 
in the expanding universe, and so they invent unification and then start on the project\ldots The
mental act of unification has evolved into a technological and informational endeavour.
Diffusion is death; unification is eternal life. 

The division of knowledge into disciplines to pre-conceptually \enquote{observe} society was
problematical to begin with. What assumptions were brought to this task? The newest
synthesis raises new problems without solving the old ones. In order to achieve this
translation, one should look at some underlying assumptions of western, perhaps human, 
thought. One fundamental tenet of this kind of thought is that one can take wholes,
break them down into fundamental units
and rebuild all up from those units, providing the structural operations, the \enquote{grammar}
to string the units, complexes of units, into
whole, new languages. In this newest approach, wholes are broken down into a language of irreducible particles (which are
easy to account for, and match up to units
that are either measureable and countable,
modeleable, mappable, comparable: specifiable) and are built up again.

Now, structuralist thought (which allows
one to reorganize the positioning and sequencing of any text and relate it in new
ways to any other text \ldots an exercise in
simultaneity) and semiotics begins to treat
life---including literary and media artifacts---
like a complex cryptogram, a treasure, always
oblique, to be disinterred. It should be noted,
however, that while this can be done with
artifacts, with fictions, with records of the
dead, it cannot be done in real life.

One of the first rules of this game of
interdictions is that almost nothing is allowed to mean what it first seemed to be.
Novelists, priests, poets, mythmakers, magicians, have practiced this combinatorial and
sequencing, this matching-up and conversionary pythagoreanism for centuries. Novelists, tied to certain traditions, were permitted
to only see a limited set of realities and not
others. In much the same way poverty is
invisible in the board room, suffering is not a
category to be found in an annual report.

But the new constructs in the present
contain an accretion from the past (a sort of
memory) which is then used to rewrite and
reconsider the past. (The act of \emph{primal} creation---and its time, or the \enquote{beginning} of
time, and timing---didn't happen \emph{then} but is
reinvented again and again, and happens \emph{now}, just as history is rewritten again and
again to justify the present in order to assert that all events could only lead up to the
inevitable present.)

The newest instance of breakdown and
buildup has led to several crises: atomic
theory is in trouble. The breakdowns threaten
to become endless. \enquote{Fundamental} particles
proliferate; gravitons and chronons are invented 
alongside quarks which require prequarks. Every sub-atomic particle must be
specified and recorded, creating firestorms of indeterminacy between all boundaries of
thought (and reality), which allows for certain 
excesses of the imagination, the possibility of new transformations, shapeshifting
and chimeras, creating arcane juxtapositions
in the life of things, operations which once

belonged to the realm of dreams. Unit-quantum thinking contains a history of obsessional perception since Democritus: the universe particularized ... wholes fragmented
into quanta... This difficulty is apparent in psychosocial, statistical disciplines which
study groups and individuals... atoms and wholes. And yet, at the same time, the 
universe is percieved as a unified and contiguous whole in which the most distant parts
affect one another \ldots sooner or later.

Another complex contradiction to be considered: all could be viewed as the agglomeration of force-fields, electromagnetic waves, gravitational waves, frequencies, which,
when they reach some critical density, change into some other \enquote{quality.} (Or geometries,
numbers, values, dimensions, symbols, images, gods, spirits, phantoms, cash, talk,
drawings, dances \ldots ) One can look at humans as\slash of\slash in these fields in many ways,
from many angles, through a variety of disciplinary lenses. Humans, for instance, could
be considered as manifestations of the cosmological/astrophysical (and astrological)
whole ... brothers, sisters, spawn of the stars;
as biological manifestations concreting out of Fourier processes, complex waves
inventing complexes of waves in order to explain the self. If so, then medicine based
on physics, chemistry, molecular biology
should, in time, be replaced by electromagnetic wave therapy ... which is what voodoo is based on.

When the universe is waved, or when a
universal language is discovered or invented,
the boundaries between objects and objects,
and between objects and languages blur. As
boundaries were blurred, the disciplineseperated currents of the past dissolved. It
became desireable to create the logical links
that united the now-unbounded contents of
once artificially seperated areas of thought.
Indeed, the newest developments in computer thought demand this unity... but in a 
special way. Language domains can, in
principle, be interpolated into any form of
discourse, past and present, spatially seperated, including literary and psychological
discourse (we consider those psychologies
that don't take account of the nervous system to be literary; word games). Now a
re-reading and re-critique of all \enquote{great traditions} becomes possible. But, as in all translation, much has to be left out, cast aside as
irrelevant or dangeous dross, basically untranslatable (or not desireable to translate).
New problems of classification are raised,
for one cannot say \enquote{OM} and have it stand
for the \emph{All}.

The long and corrective project that some
humans are in the process of inventing and
reinventing leads to reunification and reconcentration. In the legend, humans are
created to replace fallen angels, but they
must go through aeons of ‘‘development."'
Through a long-range process, this concept
mutates into \enquote{evolution.} All of history is a
trip toward ascendance and transfiguration,
or transsubstantiation: in modern times this
reads as a recombinant genetics project for
the manufacture of immortal angels. (And in
the Golem myth, information placed into
dust brings the dust to life.)

How is this fragmentation of languages, of
civilization, of energy to be cured? Perhaps
by creating the appropriate thesauri, slide
rules, categories, classes, conversion matrices
for comparative mapping of realm onto
realm. A mental act should make it possible
to describe n-dimensional hyperspaces in
which the languages of, say, poetry, finance,
or relativity theory are seen to be one. Recreate a post-ur-language at one of the timeends of the universe? New vision? Not
really. Kaballa anticipates these alternate
spaces as language-manipulation. Primitive
religions describe journeys in folded and
short-circuited spaces which can be matched
up to the hoard-spaces and passages through
which bankers hurl their money around.

If fragmentation is the way to death, then
the parts of the person can still be united.
How? Resurrection: by the parts being conjoined (keeping track of them, memorializing the whole and its subsequent parts
in a file), \emph{communicating} in a magical
medium... If not a mystical medium, then
possibly an \emph{externalized} nervous system, a
great, artificial brain. Who does the connection? In the old days, the witch, the shaman,
the priest, The Church, the observor, the
remembrancer, the tale-teller. The information establishment plays the modern role.
Modern medical information and telecommunication
systems may memorialize representations of whole, or parts of people in
different and seperate data repositories even
in different and distant countries (since the
speed of communication is distance-insensitive, and time-insensitive, relatively speaking), ready to join the parts together in the
twinkling of an eye. By maintaining communications and preserving a joining-together algorithm, one can create a modern
version of the Resurrection through wire or
wave transmission, reuniting the parts. The
presence maintained after death. Ghosts, of a
sort.

Let's consider a practical problem: the operation of the multi-purpose computer in
the defense sectors: the Situation-Room.
There are various defense and intelligence situation-rooms, and presumably the ultimate and best one in the White House. The
purpose of the situation room is to recieve data from all over the world, so that a response to a political or military problem is
instantaneously possible. It is a vast intelligence input/output, monitoring device,  % TODO fix
presumably in a form understandable to nonexperts. (After all, for the crisis-data to arrive
in machine language, or any other primal computer languages, would be meaningless.)
Information arrives from all over the world. Given a change of any variable in the 
political, military, economic orders, creates
changes in the computer: it's a sort of electronic spread-sheet.

In order for this to work a number of conditions must be met. Various sensing
systems must be recieving and sending data at all times: a world network of National
Security Agency stations monitoring all electronic traffic, decoding and interpreting
it, the Central Intelligence Agency recieving a stream of reports, Internal Revenue
System, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Political
analysis, economic reportage, inputs
from the civilian sector \ldots and so forth.

This incredible influx of data must not only be translated, compressed and graded
in terms of importance, and matched up to
already existant data (to determine significant change), but must be arranged according
to some overriding set of scenarios for ready response\ldots scenarios into which go various
modes of analysis which had, at some point or other, to be automated, must match up, in
computer languages, to those original systems which generated the scenarios in the
first place. That is to say, military, economic, agricultural,
trade, political, sociological, psychological, anthropological, even medical data, country studies, all, at one time or
another, have to be translated into machine-readable forms. And, as much as possible,
this influx must be in real time. Of course
when one considers the variables, the incredible proliferation of disciplines and
their attendant languages which developed
before the computer arrived, we see that
what constitutes actionable facts are hard to
deal with and are imperfectly specifiable,
translatable or programmable without enormous distortions.

But another consideration is more practical and that has to do with the question of
whether or not individuals, classes, social
sets share, or don't share their data. While on
the one hand there is a striving for grand unification,
at the same time centrifugal forces --- competition,
protective secrecy, a proliferation of sub-disciplines --- work in
the opposite direction. After all, to take one example, given an age of high taxation,
many groupings and individuals have a vested interest in concealing their data.

But, in practical terms, when projected
production of oil and its consumption do not
conform to electronic wishes and statistical
projections of energy companies, then the
instrumental Archimedean levers to correct
this deplorable situation becomes the Marines, the CIA, the torturers, moving in to fit
a preconcieved notion of immediate long-term gain and growth.

Of course, beneath all of this there are
larger agendas, whole world-views which
are, by nature, metaphysical. Views of human
nature (psychological theories), views of nature itself, progressive --- military-assisted ---
Hegelian-Calvinistic destiny.