Adventures in Metaphysics 2: Information vs. Stories
It seems to me that we can make some dichotomy between a sort of realism/analytic approach on one side and post-modernism/critical approach on the other. The analytic approach favors ideas like "information", "networks", and "semiotics". The post-modern approach seems to favor "stories", "text", "deconstruction".
At first glance you might assume that one theory can subsume the other because both superficially deal with information-sharing. However, they seem less able to synthesize then one would at first think. Information theory has a "there" there. Information can successfully transmit to each other thus combining and recombining into novelty.
Information theory proposes there to be a sort of "objective reality" to the information. It has "efficacy" and can be seen in predictions, observations, and experiments. Post-modernism poses everything as text, so that there is no universalizing nature to information. If anything, information is always a part of itself and has its own idiosyncrasies that allow it to not universalize in a grand informational way that something like a biosemetics or other totalizing information theory would have it.
Post-modernism seems to emphasize the incommensurability of information. It focuses on where information breaks down. One is a sort of unifying force, the other is a sort of totalization of disparate and non-intelligible informational algorithms.
I don't know what to make of what I see to be this distinction but it seems that perhaps (ironically) one can inform the other. However, how can it be so?
At first glance you might assume that one theory can subsume the other because both superficially deal with information-sharing. However, they seem less able to synthesize then one would at first think. Information theory has a "there" there. Information can successfully transmit to each other thus combining and recombining into novelty.
Information theory proposes there to be a sort of "objective reality" to the information. It has "efficacy" and can be seen in predictions, observations, and experiments. Post-modernism poses everything as text, so that there is no universalizing nature to information. If anything, information is always a part of itself and has its own idiosyncrasies that allow it to not universalize in a grand informational way that something like a biosemetics or other totalizing information theory would have it.
Post-modernism seems to emphasize the incommensurability of information. It focuses on where information breaks down. One is a sort of unifying force, the other is a sort of totalization of disparate and non-intelligible informational algorithms.
I don't know what to make of what I see to be this distinction but it seems that perhaps (ironically) one can inform the other. However, how can it be so?
Comments (3)
Indeed I think that is a good dichotomy. On one side the ontological "thing" and the other, the epistemological "word". Information Theory ontologizes information as real, and not simply representational. Not something that is a sort of stand-in for what is real, but is actually the thing-itself real. Post-modernism epistemologizes information totally that one cannot get to the real. I think Brassier's quote is contra Latour's attempt to legitimize the post-modern epistmologizing as ontology par excellance with his idea of "actants", but I'd have to look more into that.
An aspect of 'information' theory that I am not sure fits with your dichotomy is the emergence of cybernetic processes and system theories. That does make it a part of the 'realist' camp but does not necessarily render the components by which we build models 'commensurate' in contrast to the "incommensurability of information" you ascribe to the post-modernist.
Maybe approaches like biosemiotics are not as 'totalizing' as they may appear because the grammar projected upon them may be a good use of metaphor but is not like logic as 'rules of thinking' in many other ways.