Post on 22-Jan-2023
Filbert – Informing Information 2
Nathan W. Filbert
Emporia State University
LI 839 – Professor Ann O’Neill
Filbert – Informing Information 3
Abstract
Utilizing concepts such as entanglement, improvisation and
stigmergy from the fields of archaeology, anthropology and other
sciences, this paper will examine recorded information as an
artifact constructed by humans interacting with one another and
with the material resources available to them. Large-scale
processes occurring in complex dynamic open systems provide a
framework for understanding human developments and artifacts,
including culture, language, communication and technologies.
Recorded information exemplifies artifacts stigmergically
constructed through technological improvisations resulting from
human entanglement with material resources. Keywords: information,
culture, recorded knowledge, anthropology, artifacts, material resources, library
science, material culture
Filbert – Informing Information 4
“in the exchange of the word we cannot see where the exchange ofthe thing is”
-Michel Serres-
In fact, we are rarely aware of the “thing” at all. The
material resources that comprise a word, a sign, a mark -
inscribed or otherwise made to appear (the sounds of our bodies
with air; tool-drawn with some chemical mix on reed or paper;
scratched, scraped or impressed on clay or stone; coded into
numeric values signaling circuits of energy or pixels; even a
finger in dirt or sand) - often function for us like window-
panes – invisibly framing the information we perceive. Yet these
human-thing material entanglements bring information to life.
And life is a creative composition of matter and energy
interacting in motion. For humans, a “thing” is perceived as a
“transient bounded entity through which matter, energy and
information flow” (Hodder, 2012, p. 219) – a temporarily
perceivable, tangled gathering of living components.
Entanglement and Emergence.
Our world is constituted by the interaction of things.
Things we influence and affect and are affected and influenced
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by. The ways humans interact with their material environments
(including one another) is “technology” (Sigaut, 1994) and
produces more things, known as “artifacts” (Aunger, 2010a, p.
764; Hodder, 2012, p. 5). Developing particular “habits and
capabilities” through human group interaction comprise our
“cultures” (Urban, 2010, p. 122). Activities such as increasing
control of vocal impulses for signaling, leaving traces or paths
in our environments, and elaborating means and modes of
communication - from gestures and sounds toward signs and
symbols - are prime examples of socially constituted things, or
“social facts” (Sigaut, 1994, p. 422). Social facts indicate
elements of life selected and composed for the successful
interaction of groups of living things and the promotion of
survival. We often think of such elements as existing-in-
themselves when actually they only exist-in-relations between
humans and things, or humans and humans (things) - including such
realities as language, technology, communication, and behavior,
thought, emotion, and activity.
In order to perceive and examine our world, we differentiate
and distinguish the tangle and chaos of permeable interactions
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into transiently bounded gatherings or examinable, identifiable
patterns, thereby co-constructing new things – artifacts. As we
work with, elaborate, and complicate the artifacts (an additive
process) we develop techniques – “any set of movements or acts,
usually and mostly manual, organized and traditional, combined to
achieve a known physical, chemical or organic goal” (Mauss &
Schlanger, 2006, p. 73) resulting in a process and production we
call technology. “Artefacts are the result of particular kinds
of interactions between an organism and materials which those
organisms find useful…Technology is about interaction with
artifacts in particular contexts of engagement” (Aunger, 2010a,
p. 764).
This process can be described as stigmergic – “coordination
mediated by modifications of the environment” (Marsh, 2007, p.
1), which is characteristic of cultures (habits and capabilities)
of social organisms (from insects to humans, see Theraulaz G.,
1999) as they coordinate tasks and behaviors in a shared
environment through “ongoing and mutual modification or
conditioning” (Marsh, 2007, p. 3). This reciprocal coordination
among social groups depends on self-organizing organisms adapting
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in open, dynamic, and complex systems resulting in emergent
modifications to behaviors and activities. “The use of
environmental conditions as instigators of action and the overall
ability of the group to perform problem-solving activities that
exceed the knowledge and the computational scope of each
individual member” (Clark, 1997, p. 234) also exhibits a
discernible pattern – “preparation – production – interaction –
maintenance/repair/change – emergence/increased complexity
(“fix”) or abandonment/disposal” (Aunger, 2010b; Hodder, 2011;
Ingold, 2011; Sigaut, 1994).
Improvisation.
As social coordination forms, interactively utilizing
environmental resources, co-developing habits and capabilities in
relation to one another, things, and thing-to-thing, new
environments emerge which include these techniques, technologies,
signals, practices, processes and shared artifacts. This
promotes continual adaptation and accretion – the constant
presence of change. The co-construction of environments - of
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organisms with material resources, facilitating changes and
further co-construction - is improvisation.
There is no script for social and cultural life. People have to work it out as they go along. In a word, they have to improvise. [Improvisation]…is generative, in the sense that it gives rise to the phenomenal forms of culture as experienced by those wholive by them or in accord with them…it is relational, in that it is continually attuned and responsive to the performance of others…it is temporal, meaning that it cannot be collapsed into an instant, or even a series of instants, but embodies certain durations. Finally, improvisation is the way we work (Hallam & Ingold, 2007,p. 1)
In fact, all living things work this way, including
their techniques and artifacts. A spider builds a web by
interacting with its environment’s material resources, but
the artifact (in this case, a web), carries on improvising
via environmental forces of change (weather, decay,
intruder) to be further interacted with by the spider or
abandoned to its own improvisatory processes. Greg Urban
examines a collective of primates that demonstrate
particular howls variously indicating predator-presence
(fear) or interest and desire. Put into a situation that
stimulates both fear and desire, the ape will modify a yowl
Filbert – Informing Information 9
as a new sound, combining aspects of the intonations for
fear and desire (Urban, 2002). These improvisational
processes - the reciprocal and reflexive interaction of
organisms and environment, the continual disturbance and
adaptation to change, the ongoing influence of movement in
reorganizing boundaries of matter, energy and information
according to emerging and selected social processes of
coordination - provide a way to engage the materiality of
language in artifacts of text.
Technology.
Technologies are the “way people do things” (White &
Lynn, 1940, p. 142) and a part of the context in which they
do them. The material resources humans utilize in becoming
themselves also act – in the form of constraints and
potentials – continually altering both the humans and their
surround. “In many cases it is not the mind that imposes
its forms on material objects, but rather the latter that
give shape to the forms of thought in this endless shuttling back
and forth between the mind and the material world” (Ingold, 2010, p.
Filbert – Informing Information 10
95, italics added). “Technology, then, can be seen as a
paradox – both an effect of societal change and a cause of a
transformed conception both of society and of self” (Budd,
2012, p. 359). The “way people do things” in recording and
encoding marks in materials, result in objects (entities
that are part of the world yet can be treated as separate
from ourselves); activities (skills, behaviors, uses and
forces); knowledge (content acquisition and know-how,
rhetoric and semantic); and purposes (creative, intentional
and as means of control) that are coordinately structured,
shaped and enabled by the material resources and reciprocal
improvisation and innovation.
“New technologies alter the structure of our interests:
the things we think about. They alter the character of our
symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the
nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop”
(Postman, 1992, p. 20). Recorded information is a realm of
human experience that depends on material resources and both
transmits and modifies culture. “Utterances and discourses
are themselves material objects made through human activity
Filbert – Informing Information 11
– made, in a physical sense, out of vibrating columns of
air, ink on paper, pixels in electronic media” (Urban, 2010,
p. 123). Inertia and recursive properties of human learning
produce artifacts that enable complex relationships to the
past. “Metaculture” (or, “culture that is about culture”
Urban, 2010, p. 123) also stigmergically shapes human groups
and their activities and artefacts as cultural groups share
and borrow symbols and words, techniques and technologies to
produce and reorganize information. Interest – “what
counts” for each individual/group/environment mesh – also
has obvious effect on what is inscribed, preserved, utilized
or abandoned. Finally, entropy – noise, disturbances,
forgetting and decay – are forces of change that co-
constitute human-material entanglements.
Taking these larger processes into account, we are able
to make comprehensive inquiries into the significances of
recorded information. We can work to identify and describe
the operations involved in human groups to produce
information artifacts. We can look for paths that specific
environmental affordances and constraints (natural
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resources, weather, proximities, etc.) coupled with the
habits and capabilities of human groups (labor needs, size,
threats, values, etc.) interweave - to force, allow or
disable certain technological processes involved in
inscription. We perceive networks of these pathways between
human groups, their environments and resources, and how and
what they select to record.
Filbert – Informing Information 13
Textual Artifacts.
“words are artifact types” (Urban, 2010, p. 133)
Theorizing and investigating the origins of language
and its subsequent artifactual developments into forms and
systems of writing have occupied humans for thousands of
years (Goody, 1968, 1977, 2000; Havelock, 1986; Hutchins,
1995; Maturana, 1992; Ong, 1982, 1986; Rossi-Landi &
Williams, 1981; Säljö, 1988; Wright, 2007). Conceptualizing
humanity’s written record within a larger model of
organisms-interacting-with-their- environment enables us to
understand the multitude of arguments and interpretations
associated with the significance of the processes and
products of writing.
Discussions around literacy and cognition; alphabetic
systems in relation to pictographic, logographic and
syllabary systems; even historical and cultural distinctions
made between “primitive” and “advanced” cultures on the
basis of systems of writing, gain important new perspective
when viewed through larger processes. What is difficult
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about investigating the significances of humanity’s vast
variety and accumulation of recorded information is that the
processes and products (culture, technology, communication,
social semantics, skills and so on) that comprise the
affordances of recording and inscribing are the very same
processes and products we must use to investigate them.
Viewed from the perspective of organism-environment
interaction and co-constitutive, improvisatory survival
processes, we are able to understand how the inscribed
record necessarily entangles social, political, cultural,
religious, economic, cognitive, behavioral – all manner of
human meanings – both external and internal, global and
local – and is able to traverse various scales of time and
space – owing to its materiality. This perspective sheds
light on arguments relating to whether language developed
primarily for purposes of communication or accounting – as
we are able to follow aspects and developments of complexity
and use through dynamic human-material entanglement and
begin to observe the data with greater flexibility.
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“Essentially, language expresses the meanings that
inhere in and define the culture – the information that
constitutes the social system,” serving “both as a vehicle
and as a metaphor – both maintaining and symbolizing the
social system” (Royce & Bowcher, 2007, p. 1). “Writing
connects human artifacts to social practices in which the
artifact plays a functioning role” (Royce & Bowcher, 2007,
p. 112). Though the technologies are unique, and the kinds
of meanings afforded particular, these refractive
“systematic human attempts to make the world intelligible
and to manipulate it in the service of needs experienced”
(Säljö, 1988, p. 1) can be investigated more clearly when a
conception of human-thing entanglement and effects of
dynamic complex systems (stigmergy, emergence) are the
model.
Within this framework, textual developments of
abstraction – logic, numerals, mnemonics, precision,
standardization, generalities, evidence, ‘objectivity’;
organization – codification and classification, hierarchies
and hermeneutics, histories, laws and rituals, in particular
Filbert – Informing Information 16
discourses; communication – depersonalization, autonomy,
ideologies, contents and contexts, forms and genres,
education, and so forth, are more fruitfully engaged and
evinced by understanding the active mutual shaping between
humans and their materials. Developments and adaptations,
complexities and simplifications are not owned by human
agents but are describable as constraints and potentialities
co-created between human groups and their material
surroundings.
If, for example, gesture and gestural sounds arose to
enable humans to continue crucial tasks for survival
(Shennan, 2009; Urban, 1998, 2002), we can begin to see how
the improvisatory interplay between material resources and
human groups progress via artifact production and
experience-based learning. Increasingly complex structures
emerge from simple, local rules of interaction through the
recursive social work of maintenance and improvisation.
Modifying use in adapting to change and ever-increasing
complexity as the technologies accrete, results in habits
and capabilities that are “robust, scalable and adaptive”
Filbert – Informing Information 17
(Aunger, 2010a, 2010b; Hutchins, 1995; Parunak, 2006).
Interactive, environmental demands and opportunities help to
make sense of pathways of markings – tokens, signals,
pictographs, logograms, cuneiform, syllabaries, notations
and alphabets. For example,
The layout of cases on early tablets was not fixed, andthe signs, while more or less conventionalized in form,displayed considerable variation. The primary referents of the signs are physical objects. The line drawing of a bull’s head refers to a bull or, perhaps, generally to cattle. The general form of the sign is significant, but the composition of the line drawing isnot standardized. It is still the pictorial value thatcounts. But the more the scribes write the more they develop routines to produce the pictograms and in the process turn to impressinginstead of scratching lines into the clay. Drawn lines are replaced by stylus impressions resulting in the characteristic wedge shapes that gave the Sumerian script its modern name: cuneiform, from Latin cuneus ‘wedge’…Recognition of the signs is no longer based on similarity but on discrimination, as pictorial likeness is gradually replaced by the necessity to distinguish one sign from another.Differentiation thus becomes the principal feature of the signs. For example, that the sign of a bull resembles a bull is now less important than that it differs from the sign of a cow. Hence the number and direction of wedges of which a given sign is composed are standardized. Signs come to be characterized as configurations of fixed numbers of strokes arranged in a fixed order…The relationship between signs and objects is superseded by multiple relationships between signs and other signs as the scribes’chief concern. The signs thus become part of a graphicsystem characterized by negative differentiation (Royce& Bowcher, 2007, p. 9, italics added)
Filbert – Informing Information 18
and,
When I speak of writing as a technology of the intellect, I refer not just to pen and paper, stylus and tablet, as complex as these instruments are, but tothe training required, the acquisition of new motor skills, and the different uses of eyesight, as well as to the products themselves, the books that are stacked on library shelves, objects that one consults and from which one learns, and which one may also, in time, compose (Goody, 2000, p. 133)
The knowledge, artifacts, intentions and activities
facilitating recorded information throughout its relatively
brief history affect everything about our being-in-the-world
because - like everything else – they involve everything
about our being-in-the-world. They are products and
processes of our “particular kinds of interactions” with
“particular kinds of materials” (Aunger, 2010a, p. 764).
Differences throughout times and cultures “are thoroughly
dependent on technologies, social organizations and cultural
traditions which cannot be understood as simple effects of
the use of different media” (Linell, 2010, p. 41) and are
mutually informed by those material media. The
technologies, social organizations and cultural traditions –
Filbert – Informing Information 19
the ways people do things – depend as much on the things
they do with.
Air as a medium for gesture and sound enables
particular communicative movements for our bodies. Stone
allows certain types of marks or alterations calling for
certain kinds of tools. Clay enables another set of
possibilities, depending on availabilities. Papyrus and wood
– cultivation. Wax, papers, ink, the list goes on. Each
material or combination of materials enables and constrains
human action; refuting or allowing reorganization,
reformation, new constructions, tools, methods and types of
information. Humans depend on things and those things
depend on humans, in an ongoing, reciprocal, and improvising
creativity subservient to even larger processes of matter,
energy and movement – all of which inform recorded
information.
Textility
Which brings us to the text – “the wording of anything
written or printed; the structure formed by the words in
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their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as
written” (“text, n.1,” n.d.). “Texture, tissue…the process
or art of weaving…to construct by or as by weaving; to give
a texture to anything” (“text, n.2,” n.d., “text, v.,” n.d.,
“texture, n.,” n.d.). We have already seen how structure,
visibility, transferability, organization, content, and
textual kind or style, size or type depend on the material
in which it is embodied and the tools, techniques and
technologies required to produce them. How appropriate that
we call the artifacts text – as they give texture to, and
weave entire ways of being – symbolizing and signaling,
representing, inventing and modifying habits and capacities
- economic, political, religious, social, scientific,
cognitive, communicative and cultural – into human-material
artifacts of a particular and limited kind. All of human
experience leaves traces, but not all can be textualized, or
can only be woven through other material mediums by
different modes and methods. A text will never dance. A
text is unable to sing. A text cannot provide intonation
and facial expressions or “body language.” To question a
Filbert – Informing Information 21
text is to improvise new texts. To engage a text is to
recontextualize. The artifacts of texts upon each
interaction are a new site of entanglement between humans
and things. Improvisation. Innovation with persistent
matter and previous marks. One way we record our
entanglements.
The text idea allows the analyst of culture to extract a portion of ongoing social action – discourse or some nondiscursive but nevertheless semiotic action – from its infinitely rich, exquisitely detailed context, and draw a boundary around it, inquiring into its structure andmeaning. This textual fragment of culture can then be re-embedded by asking how it relates to its ‘context’, where context is understood as nonreadable surround or background (or if the context is regarded as readable, by asking how the text relates to its ‘co-text’)(Silverstein & Urban, 1996, p. 1, italics added)
The circulation of artifacts – “in which the abstract
aspect of language as shared meaning-bearing system is seen
to depend on the replication and circulation of discourse in
the world and about the world” (Urban, 1998, p. 582).
Every utterance not only says something in itself (i.e.about the world, about an extralinguistic referent of some kind), but it also says something about itself, and hence, every ‘pragmatics’ (every way of handling language) goes hand in hand with a ‘metapragmatics’ (comments about and references to the way of handling
Filbert – Informing Information 22
language)…in other words, participants mark those partsof speech that are ‘text’ and those that are ‘instructions about how that discourse is to be approached as a text, through replication or with some form of response’…a phase in the history of discourse and not just a seemingly atemporal projection of discourse from one ‘stable’ context onto another(Blommaert, 2004, pp. 13–14)
Weaving, texture, textility. If the world of humans-
and-things-in-relation weaves itself into artifacts and
technologies of culture, society, communication and
commerce, so those artifacts carry on - entangling disparate
cultures, societies, artifacts and technologies toward
continual improvisation and adaptation. Texts, as graphic
marks in coordinately suitable materials, create new
contexts – formal contexts such as lists, tables, matrices,
contracts and accounts; conventional contexts like languages
and dialects, dictionaries, encyclopedias and fields of
discourse; cognitive contexts – notions of contradiction and
evidence, syllogisms and arguments, boundaries,
classifications and generalizing norms; (among many other
effects both procedural and productive) – with “long-term
effects on the organization of society and the forms and
contents selected” (Bernstein, 2013; Goody, 1977, 1986,
Filbert – Informing Information 23
2000; Havelock, 1986; Killeen & Forshaw, 2007; McNeely,
2008; Olson, 1996; Ong, 1982). Indeed, “one of the basic
philological precepts states that ’the text knows more than
the author’, that it is not we who know, but first and
foremost a certain condition of ours which knows”(Gitelman,
2013, pp. 111–112). This paper has been an attempt to
elucidate the extent and largesse of formations of textual
artifacts and to indicate their ongoing niche in the world.
There is no question that graphic constructions,
alphanumeric systems, and literacies for recording and
utilizing recorded information have had gargantuan effects
in the becoming of humankind. It is evident that the
technologies, capabilities, knowledge and skills involved in
the materialization of recorded information are one among
many of “myriad tactical improvisations by which actual
living organisms co-opt whatever possibilities their
environments may afford to make their ways in the tangle of
the world” (Hallam & Ingold, 2007, p. 5). In the exchange
of recorded information (word or line, map or figure) among
literate (or graphic-system-based cultures) we often miss
Filbert – Informing Information 24
where the exchange or relationship of the thing is, and the
myriad ways in which the things make us.
Conclusion
“We are only human through things” (Hodder, 2012, p. 221)
Textual artifacts and recorded information come about
through large and complex processes of human groups
interacting with their material surround. The ways people
do these things form technologies in which humans depend on
things, things depend on other things, and these things
depend on humans. Things do fall apart - they transform,
die, change, decay, run out. “The defining aspect of human
entanglement with made things [artifacts] is that humans get
caught in a double-bind, depending on things that depend on
humans” (Hodder, 2011, p. 154).
Recorded information are material artifacts that depend
on humans for their selection, collection, preservation and
maintenance. Their material constitution and artifactual
value as woven textures of social human becoming gather
together a vast evidence of human-material relating and are
Filbert – Informing Information 25
themselves entities of evidence - fresh contexts for human
improvisation. Libraries and librarians, museums and their
curators present a field of humans on which these things
depend - to organize, utilize and disseminate information
artifacts and to keep them entangled in the ongoing
evolution of culture. Concepts such as entanglement,
stigmergy, emergence and improvisation offer important ways
of evidencing and promoting the significance of recorded
information as well as the importance for our societies of
collecting, organizing, preserving and disseminating these
artifacts in and through our cultures.
Filbert – Informing Information 26
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