A Few Ways to Be in a Room

There is to be a third section of this blog, dealing with the conception, execution, and outcome of as of yet unimagined undertakings which we Fabulists will be undertaking, and I assure you that there are big things in the making. If we had it our way, we would never even come inside. The Fabulists are, after all, a hardy group of rebel-philosophers, actors, men and women of action. But in the end, we’re also faced with the ongoing crisis of actually needing to be somewhere, and this primary problem introduces a succession of secondary conditions imposed as much on us as by us involving things like sustenance, health, and equanimity, maintained, respectively, through aggravating but necessary amenities such as food, warmth, and comfort: it becomes a whole cascade of things, when we are precisely trying to get away from things and become more immersed in processes, in events. My abbreviated and unacademic survey of relevant literature suggests that this is the typical course of events when like minded insurgents get together. To be sure, we enjoy participation in what one might call situations as much as the next group of dissidents, but the truth is that, due to some incalculable combination of diminutive resources and organizational incapacity which approximately equates to a general shortage of wherewithal, we seem to be, for now, spending the majority of our time very much outside of any kind of situation, but otherwise very much inside. To an extent, I fear that the short history of the Fabulists could probably be delineated in terms of the spaces which we’ve occupied, and not by anything which has, in the historically notable sense, happened. If we had it our way, we would do away with those parts of ourselves (most of them) that tie us to the world of things and become sheer impulses fulminating like a power surge through the circuit board at the surface of the material universe, sheer actions, conscious processes with only the most basic components necessary for volition and enactment, liberated from the entrapments of corporality, solar powered.

Information is always made out of something, though. This is not necessarily the same as saying that information is a type of matter in the way that concrete, building, or abode are things in the world, or even that thoughts and emotions are information: information is the currency which conducts these things from place to place in the universe of processes, and, like an ice cube or a well-lubricated snake, it is slipping or slithering away from us step by step each time we try to grab it, melting, molting layers of signification right in our hands. Take this room in which I sit, for instance, which is a shabby place completely suitable for the antisocial types of things which I’m doing here, but which still remits a degree of nuance, in terms of geometric complexity, variation of surface, or facilities providing platforms for a battery of actions which in their turn suggest a progression of perhaps infinite subcategorization. I try to pin it all down with this word room, but now I’ve simply replaced the arrangement of forms which I inhabit with another one which I see on a screen. Next, but only in my mind, learning quickly and cautious now of the representational litter which is accumulating in my space as a result of my reckless semiosis, I move back a level and try to hold the word room strictly to myself, strictly as an experience. As soon as I’ve done this, though, I find myself once again grasping, this time at such intangible agents as photons and oscillatory disruptions of the air. Glimpsing beneath this most elemental mode of transmission, I can briefly glean the workings of a diabolical homunculus in the form of an arrangement which must be a simulacrum of the room which I intended to define in the first place, existing somewhere in the asymmetrical murk of my own brain which is like a mound of perpetually moist clay: like the room, my brain is tawdry and cluttered; like the room, it seems to be a spatial arrangement of reducible units; and, as with the room which I sit in now, I find that in order to decipher the projected room in my brain, I have to start all over again with a new process of definitions and divisions. One room, I am in, and the other room is in me; shouldn’t there be an I with a room in him in that inner room? I abandon the project just in time to avert a telescopic crisis of recursion.

In this way, symbols are signposts which seem to always be leading to other symbols, to the point where, if we’re fortunate enough to ever arrive back and find a familiar sign unaltered, we might have to conclude that the significance of information is determined entirely by its relationship to other information. But this is problematic: information, after all, still must be made of something, must correspond, at least as an associated property, with something which makes the information the way that it is. After all, of what use would knowledge of matter, with all the exertion, danger, and pain of moving, overcoming, or circumventing it, be to us feeling specters if not as a vehicle for us to know things and say things? If nothing else, matter has this alphabetic property, as the thing out of which we can construct our statements about things. Thus, to the degree that there is a material world, the experience of it is mediated by information, and bijectively, all information is associated with some sort of matter. Everything which can be read, or seen, or known, or in any way delivered from and received by a system which interprets signals from beginning to end floats on a material vehicle, an arrangement of matter which is read to mean whatever it means. It has already been established that information is the product of processes or events which exhibit a degree of uncertainty, a degree of probability. These events, having happened, effect a new arrangement of matter in the universe, an arrangement which necessarily could not be entirely foreseen. This new arrangement is itself precisely the material substrate of the information, the substance of the sign which is being read.

It is not therefore accurate to state that the symbol which conveys information is selected independently from the process which it describes, which is to say that it is not apt to expound upon the arbitrariness of the sign. The impression of arbitrariness seems to arise out of the role of choice in the conscious generation of systems of signification. But the choice which is apparently exercised in assigning a meaning to a symbol is only a symptom of the prerequisite of probability which is the condition, not the result, of the production of information. The tentative but crucial existence of choice in the universe in the first place depends upon a reality which is full of uncertainties and corresponding decisions, and the suggestion that this choice is the incipient binding which sticks data to the events which they describe invokes that very same homunculus of spaces within space which nearly dragged me into an oblivion of parallel mirrors in my meager attempt to define merely the room in which I sit a few paragraphs earlier. In fact, in the end, it is the phenomenon of deciding which results in the production of information and of symbols, but this choosing really just describes the virtually inscrutable decisions which instant by instant make reality what it is, resolving a future of possibilities into a history of information. There’s a correspondence between this choice, which is described in terms of psychology and cognizance, and the seething of elementary, alphabetic particles, described in terms of wave functions and action potentials which is happening instant by instant on the level of quanta in the physical universe.

So when we think about the problem of the nomination of this room, we see that my issuance of the information room is the result of an ongoing and convoluted process, and that this identification, while not predetermined, is also not independent of a storied history involving other rooms, things like rooms, words like room, and a variety of other factors stretching back to long before the birth of human communication, back to the seminal instance of uncertainty which has, like a contagion, spawned all subsequent uncertainties and every consequent datum: instant by instant, each new revelation of information has corresponded to a rearrangement of the material universe on which the information is predicated, until, as the chain reactive tendrils of that first moment bifurcated, stretched, and entwined through time and space, the individual dynamics of each new event became too complex to conceivably parse, and reconstructive linguists had no choice but to resort to invocations of arbitrariness. Moreover, considering that matter is affected entirely by its interaction with other matter, and that information rides this matter, floating on the surface of the material universe, it is natural that, from the semiotically informed perspective of a sentient navigator, it should seem that it is the information, accessible to the empirical apparatus of consciousness, which is causing the events which are in truth merely the ongoing play of the underlying material substrates which will continue to produce information as long as matter exists and there is uncertainty in the universe. To say that a writer, a human, or any propagator of a process reacts to information is to say that this agent reacts to the experience of the matter which underwrites the information, a statement which itself encapsulates a definition of information. Likewise, to say that there is matter, just to have matter, to indicate something either ostensively with an extended finger or linguistically or representationally, or even just to feel it, just to be in a room, is to commit semiosis, because an arrangement of matter cannot come to pass without remit a correspondent datum. So matter and information cannot be separated, and at the same time this infrangible bond cannot be described as arbitrary.