1. Instructor's Introduction
2. Student Opener: Robert Adlington
3. A hypertext of materials that may be useful for class discussion

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  • Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge / HarperCollins, 1998)
  • Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1996)
  • Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry," in his Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-70 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970)
  • Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998)
  • Charles Jonscher, The Evolution of Wired Life: From the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip–How Information Technologies Change Our World (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999)
  • William Wordsworth, "Essays Upon Epitaphs," ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 32 (Oxford Univ. Press: 1974)

Excerpt from the presentation:

It seems that, in Borgmann's view, reality has been flattened, like a corporation. The vertical structure of significance has been downsized, sacrificed to efficiency. We were all once middle managers, slowly struggling to interpret signs and present them in reports. Now this process of perception has been automated. The board of this flat new RealityCorp are the media and industrial moguls who have put in place information gathering and disseminating systems. And the rest of us are what Robert Reich calls "Routine Producers" seeing only a heavily mediated reality delivered to us on a screen, and involved in the contextless work (and leisure) of information-processing, simulating engagement and significance.

Question or challenge posed during the presentation:

In light of Derrida's contention that '[f]rom the moment there is meaning there are nothing but signs,' how seriously can we treat Borgmann's notion of 'the ultimate context, reality itself'? Can we believe the world to be (or to have ever been) 'semantically coherent'? Can we 'know' 'things'?

Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (1999) (instructor's initial interrogations or comments in RED)

The Natural "Environment" of Information (pp. 2-3, 25, 30)
            (compare orality) (compare Goldsworthy on "place" and "around")

The Conventional "Economy" of Information (2-3)

[Why is one an environment and the other an economy?]

The Eloquence of Things (29)
            (compare orality)

[What is the relation between the "eloquence of things" and actual orality?]

Direct vs. Indirect Presentation (2-3, 5, 14, 17, 45-46)
            (compare orality) (compare Goldsworthy on "under, within, and "around" and "holes" and "photographs")

[Is indirect information "representational" if it is not presentational?]

Focal vs. Distant (15)

[What actually does "focus" mean? Is it a cognitive, hard-wired experience or a constructed, symbolic experience?]

Incidental vs. Intentional Signs (30)

[What is an "incidental" sign? ("incident" rooted in cadere, to fall; related to "accident," "occasion," "cadence") If an incident occurred on a place so as to make the focal scene significant, is that an indication of a well-ordered, natural environment of signs or of coincidence? And what is the relation of "incidents" to narrativity, the tale-of-what-happened-here?]

Monumental vs. Instrumental Signs (37)

[The above four binaries are grids that Borgmann uses to try to get a handle on the hypothetical problem of the transition from "ancestral" to "conventional" information (and ultimately from all prehistorical to historical, written information). Does living in a literate age make a difference in our very perception of the problem? Antecedently, would such a conceptual grid have made equal sense if we lived in a hunter-gatherer as opposed to agricultural ancestral culture?]

Contingency (33)

[The same as playfulness?]

"Context" (20, 23, 30)
           (compare orality)

[Context, or contexts?]

Things vs. Signs, or "Chatoyancy" (used by Borgmann on p. 18; from chatoyant, 1816, shiny like a cat's eyes; changeable luster or color with an undulating band of white light, as in opals [see Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary]) (19, 25)

[Is things vs. signs a digital or analog distinction?] [Where is the chatoyancy in this Goldsworthy image?]

"Digital" vs. "Analog" (28)

Borgmann's summary semiotic scheme (22)

The Labor of Information (37)

[It takes lot of work to carve a stone; it took a fair amount of work to create the Web page you are looking at. Does the labor of information make a difference in the status or nature of information?]

Pleasure and Playfulness (24, 42, 44)

[How related to: contingency, labor, noise, "laughing / in the mechanism"?]

        Information about reality exhibits its pristine form in a natural setting. An expanse of smooth gravel is a sign that you are close to a river. Cottonwoods tell you where the river bank is. An assembly of twigs in a tree points to ospreys. The presence of ospreys shows that there are trout in the river. In the original economy of signs, one thing refers to another in a settled order of reference and presence. A gravel bar seen from a distance refers you to the river. It is a sign. When you have reached and begun to walk on the smooth and colored stones, the gravel has become present in its own right. It is a thing. And so with the trees, the nest, the raptors, and the fish.
          While natural signs emerge from their environment and disappear in it again, conventional signs have an unnatural prominence and stability. Stones that are piled up in a cairn show a concentration and an angle of repose that set them apart from their surroundings. Conventional signs become truly distinctive vehicles of information when they not only stand out from nature the way cairns do, but are also detached from their environment and rendered mobile as first happened with notches on sticks and pebbles in pockets, and then with clay tokens in pouches, marks on clay tablets, letters on papyrus, and maps on parchment. Signs came to stand apart from things and at the origin of entirely new things. Covenants helped tribes to become nations, plans guided the construction of cathedrals, and scores enabled musicians to perform cantatas. An economy of cultural signs came to enrich the realm of natural signs. (pp. 2-3)

But the virtual church itself is as free-floating a cultural item as the altar. But whatever is touched by information technology detaches itself from its foundation and retains a bond to its origin that is no more substantial than the Hope diamond's tie to the mine where it was found (5)

But isn't having information the same as knowing? So it is; but there are two kinds of knowledge, direct knowledge and indirect, and only the latter is the same as having information about something or someone. I know of Death Valley; I know that it is and and contains the lowest point in the United States. But, I must confess, I do not know it. I know of Toni Morrison; I know that she wrote Tar Baby and received the Nobel Prize. But, I regret to say, I do not know her. Direct knowing, as it happens, takes a direct object, indirect knowing an indirect object or a dependent clause. (14)

Something analogous [to Austin's paradigm of the "pig" as "evidence"] can be said about information. The word normally implies a focal area of nearness and a peripheral realm of farness. "Information," David Israel and John Perry hold, "typically involves a fact [a sign, as I would put it] indicating something about the way things are elsewhere and elsewhen, and this is what makes information useful and interesting."
          Austin concludes his instruction for philosophers with an assured "the question is settled." So it may be as regards the notion of evidence or information. But when it comes to leading our lives in contemporary culture, the question of the presence of things and persons is very much open. The leveling of the distinction between direct and indirect knowledge and of the difference between the nearness and fatness of reality is not the result of a wrong move in epistemology, but a reflection of the historic decline of meaning. Cultural landmarks, dimensions, and distinctions are dissolving. Everyone is becoming indifferently related to everything and everyone else. This process began with the modern era, and it is now approaching is culmination through information technology. (15)

Instructive information is not a carrier that brings a distant thing to our doorstep. It is not true that a sign is a distant thing; it rather is about a distant thing. What it delivers is not a thing but the sense of a thing—a message. For information to work that way, there have to be signs, objects of some sort that are about some thing, objects whose function is reference rather than presence. (17)

John Hollander, "Kitty: Black Domestic Shorthair," in Types of Shape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), poem 16 (reproduced in Borgmann, p. 19)

An object is not a sign or a thing simply; it depends on the context whether it is one or the other. The context is proximally shaped by our playfulness, our needs, our standpoints. Our purposes, however, respond finally to the ultimate context, reality itself, whose cosmic or divine meaning is disclosed by things like landmarks. It is the consonance of cosmic context and focal things that makes the world semantically coherent and allows references to emerge and submerge. Hence information has to be a relation of at least four terms: A PERSON is informed by a SIGN about some THING within a certain CONTEXT. (20)

INTELLIGENCE provided,a PERSON is informed by a SIGN about some THING within a certain CONTEXT. (22)

Time and space have always and already engaged and surpassed me. The symmetry of humanity and reality is encompassed by reality. Within the world of eloquent and interrelated things and intelligent persons, it is possible to specify the reference of a thing, that is, to let one thing refer to another in a special way and make the former into a sign. Signs are always and already meaningful things. We can discover, explain, and qualify their meanings. But there is no such thing as the original bestowal of meaning on a meaningless sign." (23)

The ancestral environment is the ground state of information and reality. Human beings evolved in it, and so did their ability to read its signs. It is reasonable to assume that the attunement of humans to their original environment felt good. Pleasure is what one feels when things are going right. Information about reality is the way humans are attuned to their wider world. Hence we may look to the ancestral environment to find out about the basic and deeply pleasant structure of information. (24)

Natural signs disclose the more distant environment, yet they do not get in the way of things. A natural sign, having served as a point of reference, turns back into a thing, not as artfully as John Hollander's shaped poems nor as abruptly as the hikers' map or the skiers' money, but naturally and quietly. Thus the ancestral environment, however and wherever humans moved in it, maintained a focal area of presence with a penumbra of signs referring to the wider world.
         The ancestral environment of the Salish was well-ordered as well as coherent because some natural signs stood out as landmarks from among the inconspicuous and transitory signs of creeks, rocks, trees, and tracks. Landmarks were focal points of an encompassing order. (25)

Speaking most directly about information theory, Fred Dretske contrasts the sharp-edged information of language, which he calls digital, with the diffuse information, called analog, that a picture conveys—not to mention the boundless information that reality displays. "The cup has coffee in it," gives you just so much information. A picture, to the contrary, "tells you that there is some coffee in the cup by telling you, roughly, how much coffee is in the cup, the shape, size, and color of the cup, and so on." There is as much information as there is structure, too much in other words. "Information, as we usually encounter it," says Keith Devlin, "is not unlike a 'bottomless pit' seemingly capable of further and further penetration." Thus to get from the abundance of structural information to the economy of significant information, one needs to convert the analog abundance and confusion into digital and significant order. "Digital conversion," Dretske says, "is a process in which irrelevant pieces of information are pruned away and discarded." (28)

And in the ancestral environment particularly, things did not just present themselves minimally and furtively. They were alive with eloquence. . . . The eloquence of things makes it possible for signs to be about-sorne-thing. A sign cannot contain a thing entire; but, given human intelligence, it can convey and provoke the impression a thing would leave on a person. In the ancestral environment, the message of a sign is sent by a thing rather than selected by a person, though the recipient needs the capacity to gather the message from the sign. (29)

        What landmarks convey can usually be inferred from their context. In less spectacular cases too, immersion in the surrounding reality helps us to grasp the meaning of a sign. Trees that in places had their bark stripped down to the nutritious cambium and have since grown rounded scars around their ancient wounds point to a prehistoric winter camp nearby. Rocks that have been collected into a small circle and contain traces of ash and charred wood under the grass and forbs mark the site of a camp. This intimacy with its context defines a sign as natural or incidental.
          A sign becomes conventional and intentional when its message exceeds what can be gleaned from its surroundings. The Medicine Tree west of Missoula, a large ponderosa pine, was the reminder of a young Salish who, pursued by his enemies, was invincible as long as his medicine bundle hung from a limb of the tree and was instantly killed when one of his pursuers succeeded in snatching the bundle away. The tree and its setting were part of the event the tree referred to, but only a part, and the full event needed a narrative convention to be remembered. Thus the tree was more than a merely natural sign and distinguished as a conventional one by the things the Indians hung on it, "small articles of bead work, bear claws, strips of red cloth, queer-shaped stones, bunches of white sage, pieces of buffalo scalp, small pieces of bone, etc."
         Once set apart from its natural surroundings, a sign is no longer incidental, something we overhear as it tells its tale; it is now an intentional sign, one that addresses us directly and means to be understood." (30)

That the significance and eloquence of reality should reveal itself with similar finality seems impossible to grasp. It is as though Abraham received the big bang of divine information, while we are left with faint cosmic background radiation. The meaning of reality has declined and become occluded. It has been reduced to contingency—the unexplainable residue of accident and randomness. That divinity, whether from within or beyond the world, should reveal itself in contingency seems inconceivable, and so does the idea that lawfulness for its part—for example, in its mathematical purity—should be a trace of divinity, a trace that seemed indubitably divine to Augustine (354-430) and Leibniz (1646-1716). (33)

        The something a cairn conveys arises from a particular occasion, most eminently the appearance of the divine. Since the informational capacity of the cairn is so small, large tasks remain for the people to whom the cairn is significant. Elaborate instruction and careful memorizing are needed if the message of the sign is to survive. Moreover, since the cairn as a sign is occasion-bound as well as placebound, it normally carries one and only one message. It is not a vessel that can be used to convey different contents on different occasions.
         All this suggests why conventional signs developed from the stationary and monumental to the mobile and instrumental and so became better signs if lesser things. In fact the slight and footloose signs we call letters turned out to be much more reliable and durable containers of information than monumental signs of stone or bronze. Had not, a few centuries after the Abrahamic events, a writer now commonly called J set down for us the account known as Genesis, God knows whether Abraham and Sarah's story would have come down to us. But evidently the instrumental signs in turn depend on the monumental. The latter make for information that is worth recording and transmitting, and even the mundane information that occupies much of daily life today moves along lines that have been laid down by focal events and monumental signs. (37)

Playfulness, perhaps, came to the aid of usefulness when the handling and forming of clay led to regular and distinctive little tokens, spheres, discs, cones, tetrahedrons, ovoids, etc. (42)

Once more playful irreverence must have been the channel of utility. Phonetic writing, depicting spoken sounds rather than intended things, events, or concepts appears to have come about through rebus writing. . . . (44)

        To be sure, spoken language is a most intricate system of commmunication, exhibiting manifold structures and elements, among them those that are captured in alphabetic writing—the components we call sounds or letters, the compounds we call words, and the compounds of these compounds, the sentences. But in speech, these structural features are almost inextricably woven into a rich bodily and contextual reality. Spoken language is not so much a thing that a person uses as it is a representation of the way a person is. Speech is to the mind as skin is to the body. It is the way a person comes to be a definite and expressive creature. Speech is as inseparable (even though distinguishable) from a person's thoughts and feelings as skin is from bones and muscles. And just as bodily movements are fluid, passing, and largely instinctive, so is spoken language.
         Moving and speaking persons, moreover, are who and what they are in a specific context. Much of the meaning of posture and gesture is clear from its setting. So it is with speaking. Words like you, now, here particularly mean everything and nothing without a context.
         Keeping the richness of spoken language in mind, we can see that alphabetic writing, however serendipitously arrived at, constitutes a radical abstraction from speaking, no less so than an X-ray picture abstracts from a living person. Writing sets aside the fluidity, inflection, evanescence, the embodiment and context of speaking and leaves us with a rigid, permanent, and detached piece of information. In fact, writing extricates information from persons and contexts and sets it off against humanity and reality. (45-46)

Truly oral speaking is like gathering stones. You take what is at hand and comes to mind. If things go well, if the pieces are colorful, polished, and fit together, speech can rise to monumental proportions. But the moment may be inauspicious, and what comes to mind can be rough and clumsy. The felicitous expressions remain beyond reach, and one's speech remains flat. Through writing, language turns into marble one can shape in outline, come back to, carve, refine, and polish. It becomes possible, as Nietzsche has it, "to work on a page of prose the way you work on a sculpture." (54)

Andy Goldsworthy:

Images

Words

Cf., J. M. W. Turner