We are bound by physics as much as by logic to serially and partially approximate to the center of a representational and/or referential, relational network and distribution. An unexamined enigma: this approximation to a systemic, semiotic or otherwise communicative barycenter is an expression of the principle of Least Action, in the relational dynamics of information systems themselves. Information, that is, and as a transient (if persistent) configuration entity, has a tendency to minimise the action required to sustainably self-propagate.
Of course, we are never all that surprised to find ourselves, our expectations and our experiences reflected back to (and as!) us. The characteristically introspective inflections of median configuration values as propulsive transformational mechanisms do not simply or inadvertently assume the parochial Manichaean “Othering” and reciprocal epistemological leverage of a central controller, logical identity and wilfully orchestrated subjective agency – they are irreducibly and generatively the recursive engine of the cultural, psychological and technological systems that inhabit us every bit as much as we inhabit them. (Distributed control trolls us all: logical absence is simply another type of ontological presence.)
When raising issues of information, identity and idiopathic sociotechnical psychoses, as I think we inevitably must, all of this referential complexity invokes a fairly stunning and humbling acknowledgement. That is – not simply that we find ourselves inhabiting, enthusiastically replicating and actively, adaptively and endlessly problematising the central band of a low-dimensional projection of inordinately complex sociopsychological multiplicity – the attention-garnering, technology-speciating center of this distribution is not a bounded entity. We are, essentially, not in control but participate in the forms, delusions, dissimulations and variously self-deceptive mechanisms of communicative drift into configurations states primed for more of the same. Approximation to total knowledge or control is grounded in its complete impossibility and this is both its and our primary method of systemic self-propagation through productive uncertainty.
Daedelus Kite 