Language, like logic or mathematics is alive with a dynamic and self-inflected metamorphosis of endlessly-extensible, recombinatory abstraction. It is the means of our self-expression, of the essential causal and cognitive architecture of language and the shared experience of culture, and it is the core pattern around which conscious and unconscious self-identity and symbolic processing self-gravitates, but – it is not something we own.
Language is the self-propagating information system that obtains maximal value through its primary transmission medium of human minds, artefacts and distributed or the cognitive hyper-extension of technologically-mediated information systems. In many ways, we are the bearers of a language that autonomously exploits us every bit as much (if not more) as we use it. We find ourselves the unwitting subjects to a powerful pattern and force of complexity that cultivates all our successes and failures, all of our conflicts and resolutions, and all of our certainties and insecurities as both message and transmission medium.
This is not so much (only) to reiterate McLuhan’s quip that the medium is the message, so much as to assert that in the self-inflected metamorphosis of this autonomously self-propagating, adaptive pattern of information systems is really all there is. Even our treasured self-identities – although not without substance or value – are little more than recombinatory organisms of logical self-inflection, adrift on oceans of recursive complexity.
Daedelus Kite 