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 that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc., and which tend to create certain great historical individualities? We are not even sure of ourselves when we use these distinction in our own world of discourse, let alone when we are analysing groups of statements which, when first formulated, were distributed, 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

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, ISIS 79 (1988): 606-23.

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

deliberating from disparate corners of the planet. Nonetheless, there is more evidence that the Internet rather than exacerbating preexisting 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-tomany 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

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.5 Does 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

Illustration 1: Where the Mainstream Media meets the Blogosphere

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

interferences of the material world.6 Internet 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

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 field is 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,

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 crossreferenced 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, interactive conversations will force a self-examination... they argue that communication scholars need 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

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 Mind others 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

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 "differentspeech", 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

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 for the 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.

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 the point 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

3. 4. 5.

identifying the rule delimiting the sayable identifying the rules creating spaces for new statements 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

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