global coherence for a world mind

8/6/2019 Global Coherence for a World Mind

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Global Coherence for a World Mind

Sad Kassem Hamideh

This disorderly global space has the capacity to carry various schools of knowledge

that flow across the globe. There are the harmonious knowledges that move together in

tandem, or building off each other. The works cited pages of academia, in this sense, are

the connective tissue of a corpus. As to the connections, there are authors agreeing with or

contradicting other authors with a different take on things, in which case the existence of this

agreeing or disagreeing Other is always acknowledged. On the other hand, if we are to detect

the way knowledges behave and move within a larger space, an episteme, or to use

Habermasian terms-- a sphere-- we would then witness a significant number of

transdisciplinary connections between individual products of knowledge unacknowledged,

not collated neatly, nor linked through hyperspace, or however it is that we would position or

treat individual works within a larger intellectual matrix. In academia, where disciplinary

idioms obscure intellectual redundancies and a division of labor creates a disconnect

necessarily precluding meaningful dialogue for richer understanding, so too is this fragmented

informational dynamic exhibited at a global scale; Academia, of course, is one of the more

orderly and intimate of the many spheres of criss-crossing knowledge. Foucault is hardly as

generous in his observations:

Can we accept, as such, the distinction between the major types of discourse, or thatbetween such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history,fiction, etc., and which tend to create certain great historical individualities? We are noteven sure of ourselves when we use these distinction in our own world of discourse, letalone when we are analysing groups of statements which, when first formulated, weredistributed, divided, and characterized in a quite different way...1

1 Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language Transl. By A.M. Sheridan Smith,

Pantheon Books (New York: 1972). p. 22


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It is in today's state of globalization where the talk of flows becomes convenient as a

decriptor: a flow as such because knowledge moves blindly and in seemingly arbitrary

clusters, without any autonomy over its predestined location; to echo Foucault, then,

knowledges are transient and passing through space as they are socially structured. Arjun

Appadurai captures the multidimensional aspect of this flow space with the term scape, to

accommodate for flows of anything: capital, laborers, culture and mediated symbols that

traverse a plane, be it spatial, temporal or ideational. Arjun Appadurai gives us

technoscapes, financescapes, and mediascapes. Keeping the scape in mind, let us then

consider what it would be to imagine a space where knowledges flow according to how

conduits of information internal to the sphere are stuctured--a knowledge-scape, or an

epistemic sphere (episteme) over which a world wide web of highways is mounted. First of

all, we would need to entertain the distinct possibility that much of what everyone produces

fails to generate new intellectual ground. Like the millions of sperm cells falling just short of

the one chance for interaction with an ovum-- so too does the knowledge production process

often mirror the biological laws of fertility. This was the premise used by the foremost

knowledge sociologist, Robert Merton that most peer-reviewed academic journal articles go

about completely unread.2 Noam Chomsky in the epilogue to one of Edward Said's books

wrote that after a lifetime of writing on Middle East policy, he still felt as if he was shouting

over the hilltops.

However, these are all phenomena, I would argue, that belong more to a pre-Internet

reality. This is true not just because of the expanded reach into diverse readerships that

knowledge products access, and the overall increase in the size of the audience, but because

2 Robert K. Merton, The Matthew Effect II: Cumulative Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property,ISIS79

(1988): 606-23.


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the Internet has the potential to pose itself as a properly functioning, centralalized

clearinghouse of sorts-- an intersection where disparate knowledges intersect with the

(oftentimes unintended) purpose of a dialogically informed transformation. It is a central space

of intellectual fertilization, where, unlike the physical constraints burdening the offline world,

there is capacity to match producers together in a space designed to interweave knowledge

products. Internet technologies, unlike bound paper, physical space and a committee of

curmudgeonly editors, if you will, are infinitely more capable of manipulating the conditions

needed to break new epistemological frontiers befitting of the Information Age.

Notwithstanding, the jury is still out on whether Internet-enhanced dialogues

contributing to a meaningful, collaborative public sphere can even exist. There is concern that

growing corporate influence marks the trend of personalized content: web portals that

customize news, advertisements and other information relevant to individual demographic

variables.3 This would spell doom since a civic community online consisting of members from

diverse backgrounds would need to share the same content over which they could deliberate.

In practice, Internet projects (whose founders were conscious of the erosion of a public

civic space online) such as the electronically mediated "town hall" of Hoogeveen, Netherlands

yield mostly disappointing results.4 We cannot forget that the prospects for deliberative

democracy online are dependent on the capabilities of computer-mediated communication

(CMC) platforms for fostering a space of meaningful dialogue. The Internet collapsing time

and space may be a necessary ingredient linked to the increased opportunities for

participatory modes of social activity online. Yet this speaks nothing of the Internet's potential

to reinscribe an idealized, Habermasian public sphere comprised of diverse contributors

3 Supriya is the one who sent me that link to what the future of the Internet may look like

4 Nicholas Jankowski and Martine van Selm The Promise and Practice of Public Debate in Cyberspace Chapter

prepared for Digital Democracy: Issues of Theory and Practice Kenneth Hacker & Jan van Dijk (eds.) London, Sage

Publications, 2000


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deliberating from disparate corners of the planet.

Nonetheless, there is more evidence that the Internet rather than exacerbating pre-

existing divides, functions contrarily-- as an interlocutor between intellectual communities who

would otherwise sit on their knowledge. Much like Habermas's history on the rise of the public

sphere, the Internet started with a few elites trading hyperlinked content, to a robust many-to-

many network having turned the knowledge production process, with its elitist structure, on its

head.

The process didn't happen over night. Cable and satellite TV, well into its new order of

1,000 plus channels, started by promising the venue space for the exposure of specialized

content only modern global media systems could deliver with their efficient undercutting of

traditional barriers of space and time. Yet the closing of inter-civilizational gaps through

increased access to programming was only one small step towards how we arrived to where

we are. It is correct to notice that in the first stages of Internet usage, connectivity between

average users entailed little more than obvious uses of the IRC chat room and listserv

bulletins. HDTV and the Internet had yet to fuse its wares seamlessly together, blurring the

lines between active and passive media consumption. A new mood where the fruits of media

programming were directly generated from the dialogic interaction between producers of

content and their audiences didn't happen until well after turn of the millenium. In short, there

were few substantive reasons to exploit a many-to-many network of users generating the

content themselves.

Now on the cusp of a "post-mass media" age, we can only long for the days where

Walter Cronkite soothed an American nation, from coast to coast, with his evening broadcast.

Messages may still boom overhead a sea of masses-- but can no longer circulate freely

before transacting with an increasingly self-assertive and contentious Blogosphere. The


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information highway can finally claim to a purer bi-directionality and multiplicity of voices

thanks to an increase in online technologies that level the asymmetry of traditional two-way

information conduits. The consequences were astounding: intimate details of non-notable

twenty-something's jockeyed for time alongside national news stories, forcing network news

and cable TV to take cues from informational groundswells.

Particular advancements of the Blogosphere are now beginning to resemble the

flowering of readership networks surrounding 17 and 18th century epistolary exchanges

between French philosophes. The Republic of Letters, much like the Blogosphere, creatively

appropriated not simply letters, but cross-genre productions: pamphlets, letters to the editor,

novels, and plays into a space for public discourse.5Does the Blogosphere portal Technorati

(http://www.technorati.com ) conserve so efficiently as the Republic of Letter did the

circulation of disparate talking points in order to create a robust and coherent sphere of

universally transferable knowledge products?

5 Dena Goodman
http://www.technorati.com/http://www.technorati.com/


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The evidence is enough to leave techno optimists hopeful as long as bloggers increasingly

become an understated way of denoting an immediate public, privileged enough to send

knowledge through its own filters of meaning, feeding it back to the mainstream media, if it so

chooses. Blog portals, are but one technological arm of this grassroots revolution-- it

continuing its ascent lockstep with other participatory/UGC (user generated content) genres

such as Indymedia, Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr. The pitfalls of cyber utopianism, of

course, are rife under this type of cyber narrative.

Starting with the germination of McLuhan's idea of a "global village", it did not take

long for those to imagine how the planet would not only have to accommodate for an mental

atmosphere, but a "noosphere" where a layer of thinking could circulate free from

Illustration 1: Where the Mainstream Media meets the Blogosphere


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interferences of the material world.6Internet technologies could be easily identified as the

next way to facilitate the global network through which human "consciousness" would

engirdle the planet, competing with corporate satellites that blanket the globe. Granting that a

"noosphere" of unfettered human thinking could exist, techno-optimists, furthermore, carried

this premise to herald the Internet's emancipatory powers, as if this noosphere were merely a

collaborative space where all human thinking would simply accumulate and progress on its

own.7

This line of thinking goes unproblematized, however, by Jean Francois-Lyotard's

caveat of "unintelligible electronic communities", who, rather than harmonizing with each

other, exist in disunity. As is the real world, Henri Lefebvre sees the Internet not only as a

"representational space" but as a microcosm that reinscribes the knowledge conflicts playing

out between different "discourse communities" (Canagarajah 2003) or "epistemic

communities" (Haas, Alcott and Potter) that have vested interests in the material world.

Yet one need not be overly distracted by promises of an unmoored edifice of

knowledge towering into the heavens. Much of it has happened already without the Internet,

with the oldest inhabitants of the so called noosphere, then, being the thorougly-globalized

community of scientific collaborators. If we are to glean any lessons from practice in scientific

laboratories, it is that the advancement of knowledge, as in that fashioned through globalized

communicative action, proceeds through the type of agonistic reasoning inherent to the

dialectics of the scientific method. It is Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in their now famous

study of a scientific laboratory where they borrow the term agonistic from Lyotard to

describe the field of interplay between competing theories.8 It is another form of interrogation

and reflexivity employed by scientists to test the validity of claims, introduce diverse

6 Footnote needed

7 cite

8 Latour and Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press. 1979. p. 237


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hypotheses and tackle problems using interdisciplinary approaches; Stronger theories rise

from their probability vis-a-vis weaker theories, for example. So while Latour and Woolgar

may have found that the agonistic fieldis alive and well within one scientific laboratory in

California, this is a far cry from what occurs over the sites of intersecting knowledge online.

The benefits of agonistic reasoning may have been appropriate scientific collaboration

between colleagues at a research laboratory in California. The Internet, on the other hand, is

a microcosm of the world and its built-in conflicts. The agonistic field, as a framework for

understanding how the world communicates to each other, does not theoretically

accommodate for knowledges that flow or talk past each other, refusing to acknowledge any

inter-connections that may link them together into a larger system of meaning. Should a

technology come about that would capture a truly globalized dialogue without reducing the

chances of delimiting the sphere, or oversimplifying how the constituent parts of a new global

knowledge would cohere, then it would be with a different theoretical framework altogether.

As if the limitations in creating order, meaning, and structure in an episteme via the

offline technologies of information science hadn't proven difficult enough, we must also

account for the gradual unfastening of the tightly knit intelligentsias of Paris, Berlin and New

York over the last two hundred years. By tightly knit, of course, I do not mean that Voltaire

and Rousseau agreed with each other often. I am referring to the ever so rare moment that

two starkly opposing minds work together to operate within the same coherent discourse: a

matrix of meaning that allows for the substantive intereweaving of utterances. A coherent

discourse of global knowledge fueled by a properly functioning epistemic organ.

It is nothing less than a World Mind, or Foucault's great, uninterrupted text that

many have alluded through reference to its many constituent attributes: open

source/participatory, transcultural dialogue, and the constructivist reproduction of knowledge,


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to name some. At this eras most modest, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger calls for the

collating of all knowledge into a single Book of the World, to be executed by a large,

volunteer army of disciplinary experts-- the goal being to smash interdisciplinary and

language barriers.

9

In the Collation Project, Sanger sees the possibility for infinitely cross-

referenced works, leaving no good angle to knowlege unexcavated by the thorough diligence

of expert groups.

What is striking about these types of rhetoric, however, is their relative inattention paid

to the natural dispersion of meaning and irreconcilability of discourse (a concept explicated

further below). In Sanger's attempt to reach an optimal form of strong collaboration, he feels

that casting the widest net of global participants possible as he had designed in Wikipedia,

would be detrimental. And, of course, it would be -- as long the old-fashioned form of

collaboration, Wikipedia style, is perceived to have produced imperfect textual products

stitched together incoherently like a Frankenstein monster.

What is needed, I would like to argue, is a more explicit position taken by the Sanger's

of the world on the role of how epistemic difference in knowledge production matters. A

knowledge production process informed by a less sanitized representation of the world--

fragmented as it is not only in its stocks of literature and knowledge, but fundamentally

divided up to the very theories and paradigms that mold how ideological communities operate

and shape facts. Surely it is an ambitious project, but it is one that has been called for within

academia for a while now. By taking a cue from feminist and subaltern epistemology, Radha

Hegde points out that:

..we tend to think of our work in monologic terms; only extended, interactiveconversations will force a self-examination... they argue that communication scholarsneed to look at 'patterns in our writing and speaking and at the ideological positions

9 Larry Sanger: Text and Collaboration: A personal manifesto for the Text Outline Project


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such patterns depend on, reproduce, or refuse'10

This quote is nothing less than the petition within academia for the studied application of

Foucauldian discourse theory in knowledge production and is one that should be heeded by

cyber epistemologists. Collating the world's pre-existing stocks of knowledge for easy

reference falls short of this progressive call-- as much as that might enrich individualized

research. Sanger's idea of a World Mind denotes world in the sense that it would take a

world's worth of laborers to gather the right documents to collate into a master repository of

knowledge. Doing so, however, he leaves unanswered the questions asked by feminist and

minority scholars of the 70s and 80s. Who is this knowledge written by? For whom? And

for what purposes? These are the types of question that put a project titled World Mind to

shame for its old guard cosmopolitanism. Perhaps the World Mindothers were hoping Larry

would explore was one where a new consciousness a grounded noosphere, if you will--

would arise, one capable of reconciling pre-existing fragmentation of the planet's various

discourses, be they hegemonic or alternative. Out of the chaos and fragmentation, a new

product would arise. A connaitre that transcends the local milieu by almagating it with all other

local discoursestransforming it, in essence. Such a line of thinking is much more aligned to

the times where there is talk of collective intelligence (or more derogatorily hive mind or

digital maoism.)11 Larry Sanger need only look under his nose for an exciting project; he

invented the Wiki software whose current potential is under many a cyber theorist's radar.

The current focus is on the open source potential in Wikis, the software that allows

anyone to directly and immediately edit anything written by anyone else. With a Wiki, one

history of a single battle could have been composed and edited by 10,000 users, given a little

10 Radha S. HegdeA View from Elsewhere: Locating Difference and the Politics of Representation from a Transnational

Feminist Perspective Communication Theory Volume 8 Page 271 - August 1998

11 Marshall Poe The Hive Atlantic Monthly, September, 2006.

Jaron Lanier Digital Maosim: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism Edge, May 30, 2006


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time and enough interest. Collaborating comes at a cost, however, as the final text belongs to

no one. Wikis are a technology, that, as such, better absorbs the discursive challenges posed

to us by globalization. Today, Foucault would have trembled by the prospects offered in this

technology: a new social text capable of transcending the authorities of delimitation,

emergence, and specification -- not by ignoring them completely, but by problematizing them

in heteroglossic dialogue.12

A Heteroglossic World Mind: towards fragmentation or coherence across knowledge products?

Mikhail Bakhtin put forward the term "heteroglossia", meaning literally "different-

speech", to encapsulate the idea that the official, top-down efforts to restrain language must

compete with alternative linguistic communities that push language usage and meaning in

heterogenous directions. Like a centripetal force, authorities maintain a centralized,

hegemonic discourse, whereas ethnic, gender, sexual, class, diversity disperses official

discourse towards alternate tropes like a centrifugal force.[footnote needed] The way we are

visualizing these competing forces internal to one official discursive system, one could also

imagine how this is true between various discourses on the global scale. In this context then,

it must seem as if the dual concepts of World Mind and heteroglossia, together, amount to

an oxymoron. After all, how can there be something that accomodates for the dispersion of

meaning in a fragmented world, and at the same time be coherent enough to retain the

universal quality of a World Mind? The answer is that a heteroglossic 'World Mind', like a

form of consciousness, is a site of struggle where the discursive structures of meaning are

destabilized and transformed into new, dialogically-conceived categories. This antimonial

relationship-- harnessing the tension between the fragmentation of particularity and the

coherence intrinsic to statements that pass as universal knowledge-- is what sets this very

real project off as a process by which a transcultural ethic of communicative action can

12 Archaeology of Knowledge p. 44


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proceed.

Discourse Theory

To a great extent, the draw of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia based on the Wiki editing platform,

has been its mere positioning at the center of the world's need to create social

representations of reality-- the way it sees fit. Encyclopedicity is a reductivist exercise in that

it attempts to mold knowledge products into an objective/neutral format, which, once codified

can be transferred universally as, bite-sized, reference material. According to Harold McInnis,

dictionaries and encyclopedias were used by elites to consolidate and prune national

discourses to their liking. Dan Savage, the sex columnist forthe Onion understands this idea

all too well as evidenced by his attempt to introduce (R-Penn) Senator Rick Santorum's last

name as a proxy term for a particular type of fluid common in sexual intercourse among gays.

It will be up to the Webster's Dictionary editors to include this new definition or not, in either

case, the editors will be unable to escape the political ramifications of their decision.

Encyclopedias, which rather than define and explicate concepts, describe the reality of

objects and events in ostensibly neutral language; the neutral point of view policy on

Wikipedia has generated a natural draw from a global-wide network of contributers attempting

to represent reality using the linguistic tools available to them.

Pentzford and Seidenglanz, borrowing discourse theory from Foucault via Kendall and

Wickam, have the been the first to publish how the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has

functioned as a proxy site of discursive struggle.

13

To use a wonderful metaphor used in X's

primer on discourse theory, think of language as a fishing net where the individual knots are

the words of a language fixed within the larger fishing net. The meaning of words, or the

13 Christian Pentzold and Sebastian Seidenglanz Foucault @ Wiki: First Steps Towards a Conceptual Framework for the

Analysis of Wiki Discourses WikiSym 2006, August 21-23, 2006, Odense, Denmark

Kendall, G. and Wickham, G. Using Foucault's Methods. Sage, London, UK, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,

India, 1999.


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knots, are determined by the overall relation to the other knots in the fishing net. This is the

basic structuralist view of language. Discourse theory, and poststructuralism in general,

however, posit that the knots are always moving, which in effect, would change the

meanings derived from the relationship between any two knots. Laclau and Mouffe have used

the word floating signifier to talk about the moving knots. These are knots that can easily

forge different meanings depending on what type of fishing net--or discourse-- it is positioned

within. Foucult called this force tearing the meaning of words in different directions thepoint

of diffraction. There are many of these signifers that float around in search for a discursive

home: terrorism, liberty, life, rights, all denote different semantic properties depending

on the larger, discursive context that constitutes it.

However, the Wikipedists have found a way to circumnavigate the lexical point of

diffraction in social representations (is it a 'suicide bomber' or a 'homicide bomber'?). The

solution is a journalists approach: descriptive objectivism. That is to say, there is no limit to

how detached an observer can be from the language games of the world. In composing an

encyclopedia article on the Media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for

example, it would be as easy as mentioning that there exist different terminology that people

use to describe their reality. Pentzold and Seidenglanz's Foucauldian analysis of Wiki texts,

however, accounts for more than just the discursive wrestling over terminology. There are

other ways to generalize how discourses go about delimiting the scope of what can be

possibly said. Kendall and Wickham's Foucauldian categories are five fold14:

1. recognizing a discourse as a corpus of regularly and systematically

organized statements

2. identifying the rule of production

14 Foucault @ Wiki p. 4.1.2


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3. identifying the rule delimiting the sayable

4. identifying the rules creating spaces for new statements

5. identifying the rules ensuring that a practice is material and discursive at

the same time (i.e. That the discourse is always connected to the setting and

places where it is produced)

Discourse Centering and Global Coherence

Before Wikis, no author had to fret too much about identifying how his or her own discourse

delimited the sayable or implied corrolary truths. It was up to readers of knowledge products

to understand a text within its intellectual milieu. Sure, pre-Wiki knowledge had its colleagues,

gatekeepers, imprimaturs and detractors to stay in dialogue with, however, there was never a

communicative module designed to reign in the dispersed flows of knowledge into the delta of

dialogism (cheesy metaphor?). In the meantime, we have no way to bridge Dershowitz's

The Case for Israel with Edward Said's Blaming the Victims. Both books will sit stupidly in

the library stacks waiting for a reconciliation of meaning. It is what I call global coherence of a

world mind. This is nothing new. M.J. Baker approximates to this idea with his dialogical

reasoning or Grosz's discourse centering.15 The premise is that if two, disagreeing minds

are forced to collaborate towards coherence, a dialogical communicative exercise will ensue

(my Master's Thesis sets about explaining exactly how coherence is essentially forced out of

two members from irreconcilable discourse communities).

Heidi In my move, I have lost some sources and an important book that I cannot access in

time. With it I can finish my final subsection which is on:

Universal Coherence vs. Local Particularity (Seyla Benhabib) in other words, do we

want to efface all local tacit knowledge of the local milieu? No, this is just an exercise in

15 Barbara J. Grosz et al. Discourse Centering Computational Linguistics


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dialogical reasoning. Sources:

M.J. Baker: Modelling Dialogue asnd Beliefs as a basis for

generating guidance in a CSCL environment Proceeding of the

International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (eds. C.

Frasson, G. Gauthier & A. Lesgold) pp. 206-214. Montral. Berling:

Springer-Verlag.

Susan Bracci and Christians. The Interactive Universalism of Seyla

Benhabib. Chapter in Global Communication Ethics

global coherence for a world mind

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