Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Maybe the computational complexity of reasoning with realistic world
models is trying to tell us something. Maybe what you learn when you gain
experience with a derailleur or a city or a recipe is more specific. Perhaps it is
more biased to the specific things you've had to remember in the course of the
activity. Perhaps it is more closely tied to your goals at particular moments of
the activity. Perhaps it is more organized around the experience of the individ-
ual situations that arise in the course of the activity. These are difficult ideas.
The question is complicated and messy and poorly worked out. But that's to be
expected. Expecting it to be easy is a sign of addiction to the easy answers of
the orbiculi.
Writing as bad and good metaphor for representation
Within the technologically informed human sciences, cognition is almost uni-
versally understood to involve the mental manipulation of assemblages of sym-
bols called representations. These representations represent the individual's
world - they are the orbiculus. The vast majority of this research assumes
symbolic representations to have certain properties. They are:
-
object-like (neither events nor processes)
-
passive (not possessing any sort of agency themselves)
-
static (not apt to undergo any reconfiguration, decay, or effacement, except
through an outside process or a destructive act of some agent)
-
structured (composed of discrete, indivisible elements whose arrangement
is significant in some fashion)
-
visible (can be inspected without thereby being modified), and
-
portable (capable of being transported to anyone or anything that might
use them without thereby being altered or degraded).
Although the cognitivist understands symbolic representations as abstract
mental entities, all of these properties are shared by written texts (Latour 1986).
Words like “structured”, “inspected”, “modified”, “transported”, and “altered”
are metaphors that liken abstractions inside of computers to physical materials
such as paper. Observe also that most of these properties are deficient or absent
for spoken utterances, which evaporate as quickly as they are issued (Derrida
1976: 20) and are only decomposed into discrete elements through complex
effort. Thus we can speak of a writing metaphor for representation.
This conception of representation-as-writing is topical for several reasons.
The connectionist movement has lent urgency to the seeming conflict between
