NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #84      A Publication of The Nature Institute      February 9, 1999
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            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                     On the Web: http://netfuture.org
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NETFUTURE is a reader-supported publication.


                       *** SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE ***

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                  HOW TO BEGIN THINKING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

                    The Pursuit of Entangled Opposites
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CONTENTS
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Editor's Note
   Thinking in Opposites, Thinking in Unities

Quotes and Provocations
   Want to Globalize? Then Localize!
   Please Don't Love Me Only for My Architecture
   Freeman Dyson on the Survival of Craftsmanship
   Brief Notes on Polarity

There is No Such Thing as Information (Stephen L. Talbott)
   But there is always stuff

The Great Knowledge Implosion (Stephen L. Talbott)
   We're in an era of unprecedented knowledge loss

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   Wholeness and a Society without Gender (Karla Tonella)

Announcements and Resources
   Where to Go Next

About this newsletter


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                              EDITOR'S NOTE

I've wanted to put this Special Issue together for a long time, but never
felt up to the task.  My desire was to begin sharing with you some of the
germinal convictions from which nearly all my commentary in NETFUTURE has
arisen.  Certainly, I thought, the need is there.  I hardly ever finish a
piece without feeling a note of despair:  "Readers will wonder where that
came from"; or, "I have hopelessly failed to show the ground for this
point of view".

The problem is that the ground is ... the ground.  It's more difficult to
notice where you are standing than to take in the vista from there.  The
ground is full of assumptions you may not even be able to identify, let
alone explain.  And if you have spent decades trying to free yourself from
the most entrenched assumptions of your culture -- assumptions about self
and other, matter and spirit, thought and world -- the task of making your
words accessible to those who stand on other ground begins to seem
impossible.

But I have always taken the view that this sense of impossibility
represents the limitations of my own expressive powers, not the limitation
of the readership.  Unable to transcend my limitations, I have for a long
while thought it best to hold silence.  But occasionally one comes to a
point where risking failure is the necessary choice.  And this issue of
NETFUTURE feels very much like a failure to me.  Certainly it is
too "heavy".  (I have some much lighter issues planned for the near
future.) But I hope it will become one of those salutary failures I could
not do without, a failure producing the seed of future success.

Failure and success -- opposites that can't get along without each other.
I guess we're off and running.


Thinking in Opposites, Thinking in Unities
------------------------------------------

Think of a magnet.  The relation of the two poles is peculiar:  cut off as
minuscule a slice of the north end as you wish, and the sliver you now
hold will still be a proper magnet, with both north and south poles.
Somehow, each pole of the original magnet penetrated all the way through
to the opposite end.  Each pole, you might say, was "compromised" by the
other.

But it would be better simply to say that the two poles interpenetrated.
The relation of part to whole imaged here is not that of a mechanism;
rather, the whole comes to expression in each of its parts.  Another way
to put it is this:  each pole of the magnet exists, not only in contrast
and tension with the opposite pole, but also by virtue of the
opposite pole.  Neither pole can exist without the other.  If these are
opposites, they are very odd opposites, deeply entangled in each other.
("Entangled opposites" is no allusion to quantum mechanics.  The routine
meaning of the words is quite adequate to my intention.)

There are as many productive ways to begin thinking about technology as
there are individuals doing the thinking.  But I'm convinced that few
ideas are as fundamental and fruitful as the principle of polar
opposition, of which the magnet gives us a kind of picture.  But, no,
that's not quite right.  What we need isn't the idea of polarity so
much as habits of thinking that have themselves gained a polar quality.
One's movements of thought need to work against each other while at the
same time interpenetrating and fertilizing each other, until, out of this
interaction, a whole, living picture arises that is more than a sum of
parts.

This is not easy considering that we must work with mental "tools" that
have themselves been shaped by technology.  A defining trait of most
modern technologies, I'm convinced, is that they work to destroy healthy
polarity, both in the world and in our thinking.  Conversely, only through
the fluid grasp of entangled opposites can we gain a proper understanding
of technology.  This requires a thinking that is always in motion, and the
quality of this motion -- not the static content of particular thoughts --
is what bears the truth.

That, in a nutshell, is what this Special Issue is about.

SLT

Goto table of contents


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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Want to Globalize? Then Localize!
---------------------------------

"Think globally; act locally" -- so we hear almost daily.  Counters
Wendell Berry:  "Think locally; act locally" -- everything else is
destructive, since only a local context can ground an action and give it
profound meaning.

Sympathetic as I am to Berry's formulation, I worry about it.  The reason
is that, in the modern world, globalization and localization are polar
contraries:  they are in a sense opposites, and yet these opposites form
an interpenetrating unity; each pole exists not only at the expense of the
other, but also by grace of the other.

On the one hand, it's obvious enough that you can't achieve meaningful
globalization if the field over which you globalize has been denatured,
devalued, deprived of its concrete local significances.  You end up with
global relations that are relations between nothing.  When all the
emphasis is on connections and none is on deepening the people and
institutions you are connecting, then everything loses its individual
character -- which is much the same as losing its existence.  You perfect
a global syntax for interaction, but no one is left to do the interacting.
You have pure activity with no content -- a whirling dervish from which
the dervish has disappeared, leaving only the whirl.

On the other hand -- and this may be less obvious -- while a local
community provides richly textured contexts, it is the very nature of
context to be unbounded, to open outward without rigid limit.  What makes
a context a context is a matrix of meaning, and meaning wants to connect
to meaning in a way that no local geography can wholly contain.  In
ecological terms, every habitat is bound up with its neighboring habitats,
and so on ever outward.

In sum, you cannot become a better local citizen without also becoming a
better global citizen, and vice versa.  After all (see "Editor's Note"
above), you can't strengthen the north pole of a magnet without also
strengthening the south pole.

Our current, technologically motivated globalization shows every sign of
simply obliterating the local and thereby sacrificing the truly global as
well.  As Lowell Monke has shown (NF #49 and 51), even the Internet-based
multicultural programs in our schools are more a celebration of electronic
monoculture triumphant than of the invisible local cultures that
technology is so efficiently marginalizing.

This is not to say that traditional cultures must be "kept down" and
prevented from changing.  Surely they must change.  The question is
whether they will be allowed to do so out of their own inner necessity as
they confront the modern world, or instead will be steamrollered by alien
forces of globalization acting wholly from outside.

The technological society seems radically committed to the latter
approach.  It is engaged, so to speak, in an attempt to create a magnet
with only one pole, seeking universality by undermining local character.
What we haven't realized is that -- unlike with mere opposites -- to get
rid of the unappreciated pole is to destroy the whole.  You can't have a
magnet with just a north pole.

I think many have experienced this on the scale of their own lives.  Every
close-knit community, from commune to college dorm, easily becomes too
turned-in upon itself.  Its members begin to feel claustrophobic, and they
talk of "getting out into the real world".  On the other hand, those out
in the "real world" -- many employees of large corporations, for example
-- long for a more intimate and fulfilling communal context "where people
matter".

Both extremes are unhappy ones.  They become healthy only when we learn to
integrate the opposing tendencies in a higher unity -- to "breathe" them
in harmonious, rhythmic alternation.  That, in fact, is exactly what
Wendell Berry himself does:  he works his Kentucky farm while regularly
engaging (with wonderful effectiveness) the larger world that can either
help to sustain or to destroy his farm.  His effectiveness at the global
level is a direct consequence of his rootedness at the local level.  I
think he would say it's a good life.

Actually, then, we can take Berry's "Think locally; act locally" as a
sound formula -- provided we possess the mental flexibility and
imaginative power to recognize a certain globalizing tendency necessarily
already at work in our healthy striving toward localism, and inseparable
from it.  So, too, one could say, "Think globally; act globally".  But
because of society's strong urge to destroy polarity in the interest of a
purely technological and empty globalization, this second formula is much
more dangerous.  It will almost certainly be misunderstood.

The best rule of thumb for today's globalizers:  "If you don't put at
least half your energy into strengthening local contexts, ask yourself
whether you are helping to destroy the world."  But even that's an
understatement.  Given the momentum of community-eroding forces throughout
the world, the true work of globalization today is overwhelmingly the work
of strengthening local contexts.


Please Don't Love Me Only for My Architecture
---------------------------------------------

Not long ago I listened to a speaker complaining loudly about the lack of
structured information on the Net.  "Graphic images are useless as
structured information", he bellowed to his audience of librarians.  We
have "no standards.  SGML degenerated into HTML .... All we have is
islands of computerization."  And so today

   we don't need more bandwidth and computing power unless we get an
   architecture for information.

It's true:  without structure the World Wide Web -- and any other medium
-- is useless as a vehicle for communication.  At the lowest level,
structure is given by the syntax of language.  At higher levels you have
the structure of paragraphs, poems, novels, indexes, cultural discourses,
and even paintings.  Remove all structure at a particular level and the
level simply ceases to exist.  No communication of significance occurs at
that level.  Formlessness says nothing.

But if communication requires structure (and the emphasis here is on
logical structure), it also requires meaning.  It's not much use speaking
or writing in the most precisely structured way if the terms you have
articulated with such care turn out to be empty.  Effective communication
requires structure, but structure without content still fails to
communicate anything.  Moreover, while structure and content need each
other if communication is to occur, they also stand opposed:  as we will
see in a moment, the more exquisitely elaborated the structural rules of
your communication, the harder it is to say anything meaningful.

This points us to the fundamental polarity between accuracy or reliability
in communication (requiring the most exactly specified syntax or
"architecture" possible), and meaning.  Reliability has to do with how
easily you can guarantee the faithful reproduction of your thought at the
other end of the communication "channel"; meaning has to do with the
content of your message, its depth of expression or profundity of insight.
Personally, I do not see how any deep approach can be made to modern
technology -- especially digital technology -- without an explicit or
implicit understanding of these entangled opposites.

The crucial fact here -- explained further below -- is that, while
reliability in communication demands well-defined structure,
meaningfulness in communication is possible only through continual
subversion of this structure.  If there is one thing I am forever wanting
to shout at the pundits of the digital era, this is it.  For example, I
would have liked to say to that speaker at the conference of librarians,

   Yes, there must be an architecture for all communication on the Web, as
   for all communication generally.  But if you leave the matter there --
   if you do not also stress the need for pervasive violation of this
   architecture -- then you are aiming for a "one-pole magnet" (see
   articles above) and you will end up destroying the possibilities for
   meaningful communication altogether.

One way to see how meaning stands in a kind of opposition to fixed syntax
is to look at examples of perfectly fixed syntax -- say, pure
mathematics or logic -- where no syntactic violations are allowed.  In
these cases there is no meaning in any direct sense.  There is no content.
Bertrand Russell once characterized pure mathematical logic as "the
subject in which we never know what we are talking about" (Mysticism
and Logic).

Here was perhaps the most accomplished logician of all time, and he was
not being facetious.  Rather, he was rubbing our noses in the fact that
when we finally achieve perfect precision, we have also achieved perfect
abstraction.  That is, we have abstracted ourselves clean out of this
world, so that our perfect precision is precisely about nothing.  "All
propositions of logic", Ludwig Wittgenstein drily remarked, "mean the same
thing, namely nothing."

Mathematics -- all structure, no meaning -- is, you could say, a one-pole
magnet.  That's why it's not about anything, why it is not a vehicle for
communication, not a true language.  The magnet has ceased to exist.  Of
course, pure mathematics in this sense may be an ideal never quite
reached, and in any case, as soon as we bring some context to it -- as
soon as we apply it -- it begins to merge with language.  And what happens
then?  We must struggle with the tension between precise reliability and
meaningful content.  Here is how Albert Einstein once put it:

   Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality,
   they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not
   describe reality.  (Quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of
   Certainty)

And Einstein's fellow physicist, Werner Heisenberg, seemed to be
approaching the same problem when he said, "As facts and knowledge
accumulate, the claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in
a certain sense diminishes" (quoted in Ernst Lehrs, Man or Matter).  The
greater our collection of "exact facts", the harder it is to invest these
facts with meaning.  It all reminds one of the remark by William Temple:
if we attend to things only insofar as they are measurable, we will end
by having only measurements before our attention.

But it is one thing to say that precision and meaning are polar opposites
and that the syntactic rigor conducing to precision is the "sworn enemy"
of meaning; but it is quite another to get a feel for how this opposition
plays itself out.  And remember that the enemies are also locked into
mutual dependence.  Each would expire without the other to fight against.
Each survives and thrives only in the fighting.

The fighting and the thriving can be observed most directly in the use of
metaphor:

If you violate the syntax of a mathematical or logical system, you produce
gibberish.  If you violate the syntax of a human language -- assuming your
violation is well-chosen -- you produce metaphor.  A metaphor employs terms
in ways they are not "supposed" to be employed in order to suggest
meanings that may not have been available through a more law-abiding
usage.  Metaphor is the instrument for deepening and expanding meaning,
and it achieves its end through a kind of inaccuracy or falsehood.  We
"lie" in order to gain new understanding; one has to look through the lie
to glimpse the new and unexpected meaning hovering above it.

On the way from pure mathematics or logic to language (which I am not
suggesting is the historical sequence!) you have to develop terms with
meaning.  And it is a historical fact, as the English philologist Owen
Barfield reminded us over and over again, that virtually all our words
have gained their meanings through metaphor.  Our language is made up of
nothing but more or less faded metaphors.  This is as true of scientific
words like "function", "impulse", and "gravity" as it is of "right",
"wrong", "affection", and "soul".  In other words, we have our meanings
today -- and, as Barfield demonstrates, could only have them -- by grace of a
long history of inaccuracies -- syntactic violations.  We couldn't have
gotten from the "gravitas" of the Middle Ages to the "gravity" of Newton,
or from Newton's "time" to Einstein's "time", without allowing the words
to shift and shade into something different from what they were.

If you are a little perplexed at this point, don't feel badly.  I have
been trying to live my way into this pair of entangled opposites for some
twenty years, and still have barely gotten my toe into the tangle.  Let me
just suggest in conclusion a couple of the places where the polarity of
accuracy and meaning may lead us:

** One of the polarity's many faces is displayed in the opposition between
syntax and semantics (meaning).  Because this is a polarity, you cannot
separate syntax from semantics in an absolute way.  The rules of a word's
usage are bound up with its meaning (and must change with the expansions
and contractions of meaning) -- and the same can be said of every other unit
of meaning beyond the individual word.  If as our library speaker
lamented, SGML "degenerated" into HTML, it is at least in part because
every effort cleanly to isolate and specify the structure of a
communication is compromised by the living, breathing, syntax-escaping
dynamism of all meaningful communication.

** Every computer program is, by itself, a purely syntactical operation.
The syntax is inviolable.  (A computer's failure to adhere to the syntax
of the software is a malfunction, not a metaphor.)  The computer, capable
of near-miraculous accuracy, never means anything by its
operations.  That's why the mass of the world's software is, considered
by itself, frightfully inhuman.

To see how the computer can be humanized, you have to look at more than
"what we can get it to do with more sophisticated programming".  You have
to abandon the notion that the computer can do anything human or human-
like in its own right and begin to look at its context.  In particular,
you need to look at the programmer's continuing activity of revision,
which depends on his semantic grasp of the tasks he is reducing to a fixed
syntax, and you also need to look at the user's ability to transcend -- to
violate -- the syntactic necessities the computer would impose upon its
context of use.

The programmer and user both mean something (or can do so) by their
activities with the computer, and this is why they must both be prepared
to subvert the software's syntax -- the programmer by revising it, and the
user by refusing to march blindly to its logic.  Of course, neither of
these acts is meaningful unless -- well, unless the individual is capable of
investing it with meaning.  The computer itself may be absolutely
syntax-bound, but we can make of it a metaphor in the evolving syntax of
our lives.


Freeman Dyson on the Survival of Craftsmanship
----------------------------------------------

In the May 15, 1998 issue of Science the eminent physicist, Freeman
J. Dyson, wrote about "Science as a Craft Industry".  He described how the
old tradition of the skilled craftsman led to the first industrial
revolution, and then retreated before the advance of the great industrial
enterprises built by Andrew Carnegie and others.

But craft shops, Dyson tells us, never died out.  They were continually
reborn -- first (during the early twentieth century) in order to build
radios, microscopes and telescopes, motor bicycles, and flying machines,
and then, later in the century, to contrive all sorts of scientific
instruments, including computers.  But the craft era in computer
manufacture is coming to an end.  Is there anything to replace it?

Yes, Dyson answers.  The even larger, software craft industry still
flourishes, and has been joined by the biotechnology industry.  In the
same way, he expects science to spawn ever new craft industries in the
future.

All this is fine if by "craft industry" you mean little more than "an
industry where individuals and small shops can find their competitive
niches" -- which, as nearly as I can tell, is Dyson's meaning.  But this
is strangely to omit the one thing that mattered most in the old craft
shops: the artistic element -- the qualitative, expressive gesture that
put an individual stamp of meaning upon a piece of work.  Two urns from
different artisans may have had the same function, the same volume, the
same hardness, and so on, but no such sharing of technical specifications
would have made the two urns "the same".  And that artistic difference
counted for a great deal.

The human being is incorrigibly expressive, so you will doubtless find
some of the marks of creative authorship on any given piece of software.
You can look for certain patterns of organization, certain particular
usages, and the "elegance" of the overall design.  But there is no denying
that the history of craft as Dyson outlines it is in fact a history of the
loss of craft, if we take the artistic, individually expressive element as
essential to craftsmanship.

I am reminded here of those "Perl poets" who try to write poems in the
form of syntactically correct -- if computationally tortured -- Perl
programs.  It's plenty of fun, of course, but we should remember that the
meaningful and expressive side of these Perl poems, such as it is, comes
from the intentional conflation of the programming language with natural
language.  As I indicated above (see "Please Don't Love Me Only for My
Architecture"), a programming language is an inviolable syntax and
therefore offers no room for meaningful expression -- which is why a
computer executing a Perl poem steadfastly refuses to "get" all the little
jokes that titillate human readers.  It responds only to the proper and
decidedly non-poetic syntax of the programming language.

You can hardly argue that this sort of poetic stage whispering figures
prominently in real-world programming tasks.  Nor have we found much in
the way of alternative routes to artistic expression in programming.  In
fact, if we regard the programmer's task to be nothing but programming in
the narrow sense -- nothing more than taking something given and adapting it
to the computer's mechanisms -- then we need to realize that the task is
precisely to help eliminate expressive possibilities from particular human
domains.  It is to reduce one or more aspects of those domains to a fixed,
unyielding syntax.  Those who fail to see this ("Look at how I can now
express myself to people all over the world!") typically confuse new,
technically supported occasions for expression, on the one hand, with
increasing expressive depth, on the other.

Everything I've said here can be understood in terms of the polarity of
precision and meaning discussed in the previous article.  The one-sided
striving toward reliability and accuracy, without recognition of the
necessity for the polar opposite, is a striving toward rigid syntax,
toward radical abstraction and quantification, toward effective
manipulation of matter.  When elevated to the status of sole principle of
cognition, it gives us precision without content.  We have wonderfully
exact numbers, but have forgotten what they are about.  (See "Editor's
Note" in NF #83.)

All this precludes the artistic element, which requires meaning and
expressive depth.  These are flexible, qualitative, and pictorial.  They
have more to do with understanding, aesthetic sensibility, and moral
insight than with manipulation.

The science that Dyson sees fostering an endless stream of craft
industries is a science that declared, early on, "Leave qualities out of
the matter."  It opted for quantification and effective manipulation.  But
what if we need more than the ability to manipulate things?  What if the
artistic form of the buildings we live in, the implements we eat with, and
the machines we operate have a lot to do with our physical and mental
health?  What if it is even the case -- as I believe Rudolf Steiner, the
founder of Waldorf education, once suggested -- that we must learn to
treat certain illnesses by designing healing structures for the sufferers
to live in?

All these things I consider possible, if not likely.  But, if there is
truth to be found in this direction, none of the craft industries Dyson
celebrates looks like contributing much of the necessary artistic insight.

Of course, many scientists would actively belittle the possibilities I've
just listed as strange, if not downright crazy.  But such disparagement
would be an unfortunate lapse on their part.  A science that long ago
swore off paying attention to the expressive qualities of the world is not
a science in a good position to pronounce on the unexplored potentials of
those qualities.  It is, rather, a science that has approached ever closer
to perfect accuracy devoid of meaning, so that now, unsurprisingly, we
begin to hear talk of the "end of science".  When the questions science
addresses become so thin and mathematically reduced as to take leave of
all content, it is no wonder that some conclude there is no content left
worth worrying about.

Dyson rounds off his essay by fairly shouting its contradiction at us:

   We remain tool-making animals, and science will continue to exercise
   the creativity programmed into our genes.

But if anything is really "programmed" into our genes, then it most
certainly is not creativity.  More like its opposite.  Perhaps some would
hope that our programming at least included a Perl poem or two, but, even
if that were so, we would never know it.


Brief Notes on Polarity
-----------------------

** Various observers have noted two opposing principles at work in
communication, language, and thought.  For example, Heidegger
distinguishes language as disclosure from language as representation,
where the former reveals the world and the latter merely points to
something that is already fully and precisely given.  (See his On the
Way to Language.)

Similarly, the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen distinguishes between
dialectical and analytical concepts in economic thought.  As Herman Daly
and John Cobb, Jr., summarize the distinction:

   Well-defined, self-identical, analytical concepts cannot capture
   evolutionary change.  Nothing can evolve into its other if it at no
   stage overlaps with its other.  Without admitting dialectical concepts,
   and a certain amount of contradiction, we cannot deal with change.
   (See Daly and Cobb's For the Common Good)

But the only person I know who has thoroughly explored these tensions in
language and elucidated their fundamentally polar character is Owen
Barfield.

** Polarity, Barfield writes in What Coleridge Thought, "is dynamic, not
abstract":

   It is not "a mere balance or compromise" [quoting Coleridge], but "a
   living and generative interpenetration."  Where logical opposites are
   contradictory, polar opposites are generative of each other -- and
   together generative of new product.

"The apprehension of polarity", Barfield claims, "is itself the basic
act of imagination."  As illustrations of polarity he cites not only
the magnet but also the tendency of some creatures to re-grow a whole
organism from either a severed head or a severed tail.  Then he offers
this fanciful picture:

   To think of directionally opposed mechanical forces, giving rise by
   their equilibrium to a state of rest, is very well; and at least it
   shakes us out of any obsession with merely logical contradictories.
   But to think only of that will in the end prove more of a
   hindrance than a help.  We do better to envisage something like two
   nations at total war, each with a network of spies and a resistance
   movement, distributed throughout the whole of the other's territory --
   and each with a secret underground passage opening into the citadel in
   the heart of the enemy's metropolis.

** One of the most blatant failures to recognize the polar counter-
movements of thought required for all understanding shows itself in the
widespread notion that "data are the building blocks of knowledge".  The
idea is generally that the fixed bits of data are the givens, and one
somehow extracts from these, or synthesizes them into, ever more profound
understandings.  As the conventional formula has it, you levitate step by
step from data to information to knowledge to understanding to wisdom.

But, if anything, this has it backward.  Data are the worn-down,
cognitively empty end-products of analysis, and the analysis presupposes
that you had something meaningful and whole to analyze in the first place.
Wholes always come before parts.  Moreover, data that are "fixed and
given" cannot be meaningfully synthesized; they can only be set side by
side in their mutual impenetrability.  They can only be endlessly
rearranged upon a logical lattice.

What is really required for true understanding and true synthesis is the
counter-movement of mind that puts the data themselves at risk.  As I
pointed out in "Can Open Standards Suffocate Us?" (NF #82), every true
synthesis, every seeing with new eyes, is likely to alter, however subtly,
all the structures and elements from which the old picture had been built
up -- or, rather, into which the old picture had been analyzed.

It's much the same as the relation between words and sentences.  With our
atomizing mindsets we are tempted to think that we "build up" the sentence
by placing fixed, unchanging words side by side.  But if that were the
case, language would be dead and there could be no meaningful sentences.
In reality, the primary movement is the opposite of "building up":  we are
first in possession of the whole -- the overall thought of the sentence -- and
we proceed to manifest that whole through the word-parts we select.  And,
crucially, the whole helps to make the individual words what they are; the
same word in different sentences always has different nuances of meaning.
There couldn't be a whole if the whole were unable to penetrate the parts,
re-shaping them to its own image.

Of course, words have their given side as well, and having chosen a word
for my sentence, I may find that its rich, historically layered semantic
texture begins to react on my larger thought and to alter it.  It turns
out that, while the whole is prior and primary, both movements -- from the
whole to the part and from the part to the whole -- are mutually necessary
to all our cognitive enterprises.  They are polar opposites.

Ironically, though, the purer our data -- the closer their approach to
unadulterated number -- the more they have fallen out of the polar
relationship.  They are less and less about anything, and therefore lack
the semantic texture that would allow them to react upon larger thoughts.
Even if we are pursuing true cognitive synthesis, these data are scarcely
available as meaningful elements of the synthesis.  So the data-to-wisdom
chain, as it is usually portrayed, is a hollow fabrication.  The
significance of the formulation is that it testifies to a loss of
cognitive balance.

** The number three is about as clear-cut as any abstract concept can get.
But what if I point at the three objects on my desk and say, "Three
oranges"?  What has now become of my number three?

It has, to begin with, been forced to leave its state of perfect, abstract
isolation, so as to link its fate with all the uncertainties of "orange".
What, after all, is an orange?  We need to answer this question because to
say "There are three of something" isn't to say much of anything until
we've also said what the something is.  In fact, until we know what the
something is, we can't even be sure that "three" is the right number.
Maybe it should be four.

To see this you need only think about the orange for a moment.  To speak
of an orange as a kind of self-existent entity wholly given by what you
see on the table is nonsense.  It is to step outside of time.  In reality,
the orange only makes sense as an entity if you are able to imagine the
entire life cycle of the plant it comes from.  The orange can only exist
as part of an organic whole, and any enumeration of discreet parts of that
whole is bound to be a more or less artificial exercise.  The life cycle
of one plant is inseparable from the next, the orange on the table is
already different from an orange on the tree, and, due to processes of
decay, an orange on the table tomorrow will be different the one that is
there now.  Simply to say "three oranges" is to reckon with almost none of
the reality in front of you.

But as soon as you do reckon with the oranges themselves, the number you
have applied to them becomes ambiguous.  For example, what about the seeds
inside?  Each of these is an entire plant (the whole manifested in the
part!), bearing the germ of many oranges within itself.  Some of the same
problems arise with a chunk of rock.  They even arise with that model of
"indivisibility", the atom, whose existence cannot clearly be defined
apart from all the other atoms in the universe.

I am not saying you cannot be precise, but only that as you drive toward
precision you will also tend toward vacuity.  If you want your numbers to
be about something that is significant, then you face the momentous task
of forming the clearest and most comprehensive picture of the thing you
possibly can.  You must embark on the endless exploration of context -- an
exploration that will be aborted if you are too rigidly protective of your
numbers.

In a way, it's a trivial truth:  a pile of numbers is not the world.  If
you want to approach the dynamic of polarity, all you need to do is to
pick a number -- any number -- and ask yourself what happens to it when
you apply it to something.  Ask also what happens to the thing receiving
this numerical application.  With a little effort, you can begin to
experience the dynamic as a continual pull in one direction that must ever
be countered by a thrust in the other direction.

We have a science that universally believes in the efficacy of "hard
numbers".  But hard numbers by themselves are a strange thing to honor,
whereas hard numbers applied to things are no longer hard.  To repeat that
quote from Einstein given above,

   Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality,
   they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not
   describe reality.

Until we have a science that takes up the challenge and wrestles with how
these numbers manage to mean anything, we won't have the science we need.

** In a fascinating essay, "Form in Art and in Society" (published in the
journal, Golden Blade, 1951) Barfield addresses the "urgent problem" of
the relation between part and whole in society.  During the medieval era,
he says, "this problem was solved for Europeans by a wide acceptance of
the spiritual principle of hierarchy, and its social expression,
feudalism."  Today, he observes, "too many people have rendered themselves
incapable of discerning the healthy principle of hierarchy at all, by
keeping their eyes narrowly glued on its disease, exploitation."  But in a
community based on hierarchy,

   where "Degree"...is accepted as of course and felt as divinely
   ordained, no individual human "part" would dream of thinking himself
   from any point of view commensurate with the whole or the equal of
   every other "part".  But neither, on the other hand, would he feel
   isolated or insultingly inferior.

Barfield does not doubt that this notion of hierarchy and degree has
rapidly disappeared from society -- and necessarily so.  But he wonders
whether "the present chaos" is due to the fact that "our thinking has not
kept pace with" the change.  Our atomic habits of thought, giving us the
equality of isolated, side-by-side individuals, leads only to the dead
alternative between laissez faire and the totalitarian reaction against
it.

What's really needed, Barfield suggests, is a revitalized imagination and
the polar thinking it supports.  Then the part and whole, the individual
and society, will be rediscovered as interpenetrating realities:

   The characteristic of a true democracy will be, not the absence of one
   king, but the presence of many, the fact that every member of it will
   feel, however dimly, l'etat c'est moi ["I am the state"].

Each will have become all, "although -- or rather because the foundation of
the whole structure is the liberty of the individual human spirit."  The
strengthening of the individual in such a polar, organic relationship, is
a prerequisite for the strengthening of the community, and vice versa.

Barfield saw such a democracy as wholly dependent on a society-wide
cultivation of the imagination.  Only the imagination can overcome the
atomic isolation of the individual.  We must grasp the

   principles of mutual penetrability, of a dependence which is at the
   same time independence, and a separableness that is inseparable --
   tensions or polarities which are head-splitting paradoxes to judgmental
   thought, but child's-play to the imagination.


SLT

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==========================================================================

                  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INFORMATION

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)

In NF #81 ("Here's to the Information Age: A Toast") I pointed out our
curious usage of the word "information".  On the one hand, it can mean
anything and everything -- "stuff", as many are apt to put it.  Of course,
"stuff" is a perfectly legitimate word, and so is "information".  When, at
the end of a conversation, I say "Okay, send me the information", both
parties know what is being referred to, since the context has made it
clear.  Similarly, when I say "Okay, give me that stuff", there's not
likely to be any confusion.

But while it may be useful to have a word meaning not much more than
"whatever it is we were just talking about", you wouldn't expect such a
spineless and inconsequential term to carry around a halo of glory.  You
wouldn't expect to hear, for example, about the "Age of Stuff".  Yet we
hear every day about the "Age of Information".  What is going on?


Where Information Shines
------------------------

This is where the second aspect of "information" comes into the picture --
the halo-bearing aspect.  Let's look at its distinguishing marks:

** Information comes, first of all, in discrete entities of some sort --
in "bits" or "pieces" -- which we can store in databases.  It's nicely
countable, so that we can talk, for example, about doubling the size of
our databases.  (See "The Great Knowledge Implosion" below.)

** Second, information is thought to be sharp-edged and unambiguous.  It
is valid or invalid, up-to-date or out-of-date, true or false.

** Also, information can be conveyed without loss or distortion from one
place to another.  In this way databases can be exactly duplicated.

** And, lastly, information is subject to precise manipulation and control
-- which, of course, is what information-processing tools are all about.

Now, I hope all this puts you in mind of the preceding discussions of the
polar relation between accuracy and meaning.  And, if it does, you will
doubtless have noticed that the idea of information described here looks
very much like another attempt at a "one-pole magnet".  If, in
communication, you achieve absolute accuracy -- if the "information" you
communicate is something you can control and count and transmit reliably,
bit by well-defined bit, from one database to another -- then you're no
longer talking about communication at all.  That is, your accurate terms
aren't any longer about anything, just as the p's and q's of the pure
logician are no longer about anything.

The text you transmit may be, say, the text of the Emancipation
Proclamation.  But the text is not its meaning.  (It's amazing how
naturally we lose sight of this distinction today.)  The text can be
reliably transmitted, but the significance of the text cannot.  Meaning,
Owen Barfield has remarked, cannot be conveyed; it can only be suggested.


Information as Statistical Artifact
-----------------------------------

In a sense, none of this is as controversial as you might think.  The
criteria for information listed above derive historically from the
mathematical theory of communication, developed at mid-century by Norbert
Wiener and Claude Shannon, among others.  Their aim was for reliability,
precision, and control, but along the way a funny thing happened:  meaning
disappeared from view.

As Warren Weaver famously put it in one of the first essays explicating
the new theory of communication:  in a given context the word "yes" might
well represent the same "amount" of information as the entire text of the
King James Bible.  (See Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of
Communication.)  That's just the way the theory works.  Information,
according to this theory, is a statistical artifact of the communication
process and must not be confused with the content of communication, or
with meaning.

The upshot of this fact is that the easiest way to maximize the amount of
information over a communication line (in the theory's terms) is to hook
up a random noise generator to it.  (You will be forgiven the thought that
the Internet is just one massive attempt to illustrate this point.)
Weaver, when mentioning the direct connection between noise and
information, goes on to remark that this connection "beautifully
illustrates the semantic trap into which one can fall if he does not
remember that `information' is used here with a special meaning".

The trap is one few people any longer care to avoid.  While the earlier
theorists were careful to point out (again, in Weaver's words) that
"information must not be confused with meaning", the term quickly
overleapt all such hedges, even as the speakers tried to retain the mantle
of authority derived from the technical theory.


Toward the Destruction of Polarity
----------------------------------

So we come back to those observations by Russell and Einstein.  (See
"Please Don't Love Me Only for My Architecture" above.)  You can drive
single-mindedly toward the pole of accuracy only by excluding meaning from
consideration.  Perfectly quantified relationships are precise,
unambiguous -- and empty.  Bring their meaningful content into view, and
they're no longer empty, but neither are they any longer precise and
unambiguous.

Finding our way into the productive interplay of these polar opposites is
part of our job today.  We must seek the greatest accuracy possible in all
our cognitive undertakings.  And we must probe the deepest meaning of the
terms we are trying to be accurate about.

This is not a simple trade-off -- a polarity never is.  It's not that you
have to give up one or the other pole.  Magnets can be strengthened; you
strengthen one pole by also strengthening the other.  It's a matter of
struggling to hold the two poles together in unity despite the ever
greater tension between them.  This work, of course, gets harder and
harder the further we carry it, but it is the work we are called to do.
It is, most fundamentally, the way our minds need to work.

The problem is that nearly everything in the technological society presses
toward the destruction of this polar tension and balance.  We find
ourselves on a series of impossible quests for a one-pole magnet, as
indicated by many of the most prestigious keywords of our day:
information, efficiency, precision, productivity, logic .... Even when a
polar dynamic is glimpsed, it is almost immediately denied.  In The
Mathematical Theory of Communication, Weaver articulates

   the vague feeling that information [mathematically defined] and meaning
   may prove to be something like a pair of canonically conjugate
   variables in quantum theory, they being subject to some joint
   restriction that condemns a person to the sacrifice of the one as he
   insists on having much of the other.

I was shocked when I first came across these words.  Had this pillar of
conventional science actually discerned the richly textured polarity that
underscores the drive toward emptiness in so many scientific disciplines?
But, no, it immediately became clear that Weaver didn't "get it" at all.
For in the same essay, when he is imagining how one might begin to treat
meaning theoretically, he foresees our being able to talk about the "sum
of message meaning plus semantic noise", and also the "statistical
semantic characteristics" of a message.  Clearly this was not a person who
recognized a polar interplay between quantifiable precision and some
opposing principle.  Rather, he believed that any such opposing principle
could itself be quantified.  What was going to enable his information-
related numbers to be about something was merely another set of
numbers.  Given this fact, we can only shake our heads at Weaver's
expression of hope:

   The concept of information developed in this theory at first seems
   disappointing and bizarre -- disappointing because it has nothing to do
   with meaning, and bizarre because it deals not with a single message
   but rather with the statistical character of a whole ensemble of
   messages, bizarre also because in these statistical terms the two words
   information and uncertainty find themselves to be
   partners.

   I think, however, that these should be only temporary reactions; and
   that one should say, at the end, that this analysis has so
   penetratingly cleared the air that one is now, perhaps for the first
   time, ready for a real theory of meaning.

Almost exactly fifty years later we are still waiting for this theory from
cognitive scientists who, despite their protestations, remain fixated on
mathematics, logic, and syntax -- "one-pole researchers".  Signs of
progress are hard to find.


The Loss of Balance
-------------------

This brings us back to the two aspects of "information":  on the one hand,
"stuff", and on the other hand, all the glamor of an influential technical
usage -- but one in which the notion of information has been stripped of
meaning.  In both popular and scientific discourse, these two usages are
mixed up in a hopelessly incoherent way.  We want the prestige of the
technical theory, but we also want to believe we're talking about the
meaningful content of communication rather than an obscure statistical
feature of the communication process.  Unfortunately, we can't have both.

But that doesn't keep us from trying.  Every laudatory reference to "The
Age of Information" is an attempt to have it both ways.  The only thing to
be said about this contradictory, informational currency of the modern age
is that it doesn't exist.

The one-sided drive toward a purely mathematical grasp of something pre-
empts the polar balance of thought required for all understanding, and
finally deprives us of the "thing" we began to investigate in the first
place.  But the human mind cannot function entirely without content, so we
inevitably import some sort of content through the back door, illicitly.
You will often find that even those who are explicating the technical
theory of information occasionally slip into a usage whereby information
becomes a content that can be transmitted -- an outrage against the
theory.

I think you have here a pretty good picture of the imbalance of the
technological society.  At the pole of accurate abstraction and precise
manipulation, we find a well developed technical theory of information,
with its terms relatively sharp-edged and unambiguous.  But at the other
pole, where we might hope to penetrate the depths of meaning with a
muscular "polar logic", we find Weaver's hope unfulfilled.  Instead, we
see a word like "information" -- so far as it does aim toward meaningful
context -- dissolving into the limp shapelessness of "stuff".  And we see
everywhere the confused assumption that, if we just concentrate a little
harder on the glamorous pole of precision, somehow profound revelation
will follow.

The alternative is to arrest the drive toward quantification before it
becomes absolute and destructive, and to bring it into tension with the
qualities of mind that give us content.  We need to pursue meaning with
the kind of intensity that can counter and elevate our pursuit of
quantity, logic, and syntax.

Actually, while we do not have the theory of meaning Weaver hoped for (the
very idea of such a theory may be a contradiction), we do have some
remarkable elucidations of the meaning of meaning in the work of Owen
Barfield (see "Announcements and Resources" below), and I suspect that
the puzzles of the information age will yield to nothing less than a
serious reckoning with his work.

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==========================================================================

                      THE GREAT KNOWLEDGE IMPLOSION

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)

I'm now looking at an advertisement proclaiming the "explosion of
information and knowledge".  During the 150 years from 1750-1900, the ad
tells its readers, knowledge doubled.  During the next 50 years it doubled
again.  Today the cycle is just one year long.  And, we are assured,
"knowledge will double every 73 days by the year 2020."

You've heard this sort of thing many times before.  What you're much less
likely to hear is the more fateful truth:  we live in the midst of a
knowledge implosion, unprecedented in scale and threatening to suck
our entire culture into the vacuum at the center of an accelerating vortex
of flotsam and jetsam.


How Does Knowledge Disappear?
-----------------------------

Actually, I think we've at least vaguely sensed this implosion for a long
time.  Certainly the familiar idea that "we're getting to know more and
more about less and less" suggests that the purported knowledge explosion
might have a negative correlate.

I'm not speaking primarily of the much-discussed loss of digital data,
although this loss is certainly relevant to the implosion.  As Stewart
Brand summarizes the situation:

   Paper at least degrades gracefully.  Digital files are utterly brittle;
   they're complexly immersed in a temporary collusion of a certain
   version of a certain application running on a certain version of a
   certain operating system in a certain generation of a certain box, and
   kept on a certain passing medium such as a five-inch floppy.  (Quoted
   in James Gleick, "Fast Forward", New York Times Magazine, Apr.
   12, 1998)

The upshot of this, according to Brand, is that "there has never been a
time of such drastic and irretrievable information loss.  We've turned
into a total amnesiac.  We do short-term memory, period."  But this
doesn't seem quite the main point to me.  And, in any case, certainly the
gaseous, suffocating smog of data does go on compounding itself daily,
however short-term the life-expectancy of an individual datum.

Perhaps more serious in its implications is the disappearance of huge
tracts of human knowledge into computer code.  Ellen Ullman tells how IBM
advised the Federal Aviation Administration to replace its entire air-
traffic control system, because it would stop functioning reliably at the
turn of the millennium, and there is "no one left who understands the
inner workings of the host computer".  Ullman goes on:

   No one left who understands.  Air-traffic control systems, bookkeeping,
   drafting, circuit design, spelling, differential equations, assembly
   lines, ordering systems, network object communications, rocket
   launchers, atom-bomb silos, electric generators, operating systems,
   fuel injectors, CAT scans, air conditioners -- an exploding list of
   subjects, objects and processes rushing into code, which eventually
   will be left running without anyone left who understands them.
   (Salon, May 13, 1998)

But I am not sure this is altogether convincing either.  Or, rather, it
looks to me like the final stage of a much more significant loss.
Knowledge that can be transferred to a computer and forgotten is knowledge
that has already come close to disappearing into thin abstraction -- and
that disappearance is the root of the problem.


Abandonment of the World
------------------------

The biologist and conservationist, David Ehrenfeld, chronicles our
disturbing loss of knowledge about the natural world.  "We are on the
verge of losing our ability to tell one plant or animal from another and
of forgetting how the known species interact among themselves and with
their environments" (Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New
Millennium).  He tells us that almost no one is left who can recognize
and distinguish the various species of earthworms -- one of the creatures
most essential for the survival of the human race.  The problem is
repeated in one field after another.

For example, Ehrenfeld ticks off the subjects for which universities are
having a harder and harder time finding teachers:  "Classification of
Higher Plants", "Marine Invertebrates", "Ornithology", "Mammalogy",
"Biogeography", "Comparative Physiology", "Entomology".

In other words, subjects where you actually have to get to know part of
the world.  Subjects where qualitative observation, and not merely
measuring, still counts for something.  Not that teachers in these fields
are always needed.  Many of the young turn instead to molecular genetics
and other glamorous disciplines of the Information Age, where mastering
the technical procedures of the laboratory and the abstractions that drive
them is more important than understanding very much about the world.

This, I think, hints at what is really going on.  It's the loss of our
qualitative experience of the world, the disappearance of concrete
knowledge into abstraction.  Just consider a few of the symptoms:

** I've previously written (NF #74) about the loss of farmers' knowledge
of their land:  they no longer select their own seeds based on knowledge
of local climate, soil, diseases, pests, and so on; there is currently a
conversion to satellite-driven fertilization schemes; as Craig Holdrege
remarked in NF #80, the farmer receives, along with his seed, a kind of
universal, artificial environment designed to render local conditions
irrelevant; and, in general, the manufacturing mindset at work in "factory
farming" discourages any sense of stewardship for the land.

** Thanks in part to elements of chip-making technology, the individual
chemist -- who not long ago could synthesize maybe fifty or a hundred new
compounds per year -- can now synthesize tens of thousands of compounds.
The amounts may be too small to see, but they're quite adequate for the
new testing and screening techniques.  Long gone is any need for the
chemist to smell or taste the new substances he brings into being, to feel
their texture or note their subtleties of color.  He need not know
them in any intimate or substantial sense.  What knowledge there is, is
abstract and embedded in the effective procedures of the laboratory and
its computers, not in the chemist's direct, qualitative experience of
substances.

** Much the same could be said about the genetic engineer who devises new
animal breeds in petri dishes without the messy bother of having to
cohabit with and understand the living creatures -- or sometimes the
monsters -- whose destinies he manipulates.

** Some time ago the Economist described the noisy, chaotic,
spark-filled, bone-jarring reality of most automobile manufacturing
plants, such as the one in Sao Paulo where giant presses stamp out body
panels with 300-ton blows -- the power of a jumbo jet taking off.  But
now, the article continues, some of the newest plants are a different
story:

   Twenty years ago you could not see across the welding hall of the plant
   in Aurora, Illinois, because of the smoke.  Today the welding hall is
   completely clear; the giant slabs of thick sheet steel are quietly cut
   into shape by high-voltage plasma guns, which produce a much more
   precise cut and no smoke.  (Economist, June 20, 1998)

So even our working with brute material is less brutely material today.
We don't need to gain the first-hand knowledge that comes from wrestling
with things.  The abstract patterns in the computer program activate the
plasma gun, which in turn reproduces the patterns in the metal itself, all
without anyone -- or even any machine -- having to bang away in an
unseemly manner.  We manipulate a few abstractions on a screen, and then
hidden, precisely guided forces automatically reconfigure the stuff of the
world.  It's a long way from the anvil of strong-armed Hephaestus.


Atoms and Bits
--------------

But enough of examples.  You can find this abandonment of the world in
favor of abstraction wherever you care to look.  The problem is not that
abstraction as such is evil.  The problem, rather, is our extreme
imbalance, which cuts us off from the meaning and wisdom shining through
the world.

If you have read the preceding articles in this Special Issue, you will
recognize that we are again talking about the polarity of accuracy versus
meaning, of abstraction versus qualitative content.  And here, as
throughout our culture, we are witnessing the same, destructive drive
toward a "one-pole magnet", where our precise and effective abstractions
are no longer about anything we know.  Their manipulative effectiveness
is our knowledge.  We seek blind power, but blind power is always
dangerous.  We think we are wise when we are really only fearsome.

The information glut and the knowledge implosion, it turns out, are
complementary sides of the same development.  It requires an attention to
the qualitative side of things -- it requires a pictorial or imaginative
thinking -- to hold the world's phenomena together in any meaningful way.
Submit these phenomena to our reigning habits of abstraction in complete
forgetfulness of the counter-movement by which the phenomena were
recognized in the first place, and it is no wonder that things begin to
fall apart.  Having spent a few hundred years analyzing things to "bits",
we find ourselves with nothing but bits.  What both the information glut
and the knowledge implosion represent is our loss of synthesizing and
imaginative powers.

The world of atoms, according to the exultations of our more wired
contemporaries, is giving way to the world of bits.  But, no, the world of
atoms is the world of bits -- and neither of them is the world we actually
live in.  The lie of the atom -- "a-tomos", "indivisible" -- is that the world
comes in tiny bits, side by side, perfectly well-defined and therefore
utterly incapable of interpenetration.  More and more these supposedly
physical bits just are bits in software -- abstractions within a purely
formal system -- and the lie we tell about them is the same lie we tell
about bits of information when we believe they are not only precisely
transferable, but also meaningful.

Developments in physics may have overturned the lie, but this has yet to
transform either physics or popular conceptions.  It has not led to a
qualitative physics.  But the only way physical entities can gain
cognitive substance, the only way they can have anything to do with
each other -- the only way they can interpenetrate in creative ways to
produce the phenomena of the world -- is by means of their qualities.
Only in the qualities of things do we gain the possibility of synthesis,
or of meaning.  Without qualities, we are left with the multiplying shards
of our analyses.

The qualitative is the imagistic, and what Owen Barfield says about images
in relation to logic is also true of images in relation to atoms and any
other entities whose existence is largely circumscribed by logic or
mathematics:

   It is characteristic of images that they interpenetrate one another.
   Indeed, more than half the art of poetry consists in helping them to do
   so.  That is just what the terms of logic, and the notions we employ in
   logical or would-be logical thinking, must not do.
   There, interpenetration becomes the slovenly confusion of one
   determinate meaning with another determinate meaning, and there, its
   proper name is not interpenetration, but equivocation.... ("Lewis,
   Truth, and Imagination" in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis)

Here is our polarity, starkly sketched.  Can we marry the poles in a
productive quest for understanding?  Certainly we have carried logic and
mathematics to a glorious degree of perfection today.  But we have hardly
begun to learn what it means to approach the world as image in an equally
devoted and disciplined manner.  Indeed, the very idea of discipline in
this context rings false in many ears.  As long as that is the case, our
world will continue to disintegrate into pixels, bits, and atoms, giving
us a "knowledge explosion" that testifies to our loss of understanding.

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==========================================================================

                              CORRESPONDENCE


Wholeness and a Society without Gender
--------------------------------------

Response to:  "Does NETFUTURE Hold to a Masculine Standard?" (NF-83)
From:  Karla Tonella (karla-tonella@uiowa.edu)

[From Stephen L. Talbott writing in NF #83:]

   Nor am I sure what you could mean by "a society where gender does not
   exist" -- which sounds like a hellish place to me, one where both men
   and women are required to deny part of themselves.

Or, perhaps, a place where both men and women are allowed to experience
all of themselves.

Karla-Tonella@uiowa.edu


                          ---------------------

Karla Tonella --

That's an interesting observation.  I take it you are pointing to the
existence of a masculine element in the "complete" woman, and a feminine
element in the "complete" man.  If so, I'm very much with you.  But this
wouldn't lead me to think of the ideally complete woman and the ideally
complete man as simply identical with respect to gender.  I'd be more
inclined (as is appropriate for this issue of NETFUTURE!) to think of them
as standing in a relation of polar contraries -- a unity in opposition --
where the creative tension between them is also expressed (but with
opposing emphases) within each of them individually.

I hope that makes at least some sense.

Stephen L. Talbott

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==========================================================================

                       ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES


Where to Go Next
----------------

If you would like to pursue the theme of this Special Issue further, here
are a few suggestions:

** The notion of polarity figures strongly in projective geometry, and I
don't know any better way to gain a feel for polar opposites than to study
projective geometry.  But it needs to be a more qualitative approach to
the subject.  Olive Whicher's Projective Geometry makes a fairly good
text.  The more mathematically inclined will not have difficulty finding
works on the subject.

** As I have indicated throughout the articles here, Owen Barfield is the
scholar who has most thoroughly and luminously explored polarity,
especially in relation to language.  His Poetic Diction does not use the
term "polarity", but the book, as a study in the historical dimensions of
meaning, is about nothing other than the polar tension between meaning and
abstraction, as it has played itself out in the evolution of human
consciousness.  In his essay on "The Nature of Meaning" (published in the
journal, Seven, vol. 2, pp. 32-43), Barfield examines the origin of
meaning in metaphor.  You could scarcely find a more provocative and
suggestive treatment of the struggle between meaning and truth (insofar as
we identify truth with precision).

The best introductions to Barfield's work are probably found in The
Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays and also in Speaker's
Meaning.

** For a book-length elucidation of the polarity between whole and part,
see Henri Bortoft's The wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way toward a Science
of Conscious Participation in Nature.  This book is a major milestone
on the way to a renewed science.

** The themes of this Special Issue of NETFUTURE were treated at somewhat
greater length and in different ways in Chapter 23 of my book, The Future
Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst.  You'll find
this chapter online at http://netfuture.org/fdnc/ch23.html.
You'll also find an appendix giving a (highly inadequate) summary of
Barfield's work at http://netfuture.org/fdnc/appa.html.

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==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 1999 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #84 :: February 9, 1999

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