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CYBEK 


INFORMATION (TECHNOLOGY)
AND
KNOWLEDGE (MANAGEMENT)

Copyright © Dr William Theaux 1999

 


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FOREWORD

Following its principle regarding Grey Literature, works and texts in progress at CYBEK are available UNDER CONSTRUCTION. It is still the case for the present page that integrates Linguistics and Cybernetics with the practical social Knowledge Management, that is in work in progress and not even edited. For especially this step in conceptualization of Knowledge Management is decisive and would contradict itself if it was not developed in a logic of public environment.

 


ABSTRACT

This article describes how the Science of Representations and Meanings, known as Linguistics, stresses and reduces two major notions (Information Technology and Knowledge Management) as two redundancies, meaning that Technology is Information, and its Management is  Knowledge. This treatment of our concepts is a management itself - that is knowledge which is expressed in algebraic formulae.


 
 
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Introduction 

Cybernetics - Information Technology - and Linguistics 
The Significand and its logic 
The Code and its logic 

Collective Psychology 

Formulae of Knowledge 

Sociological identification of Cybernetics 

Clinic and Praxis 

 

 CONVENTION : Definition of Cybernetics - Instead of Information Technology (I.T.) I use Cybernetics which is equivalent yet an earlier and more mature notion of the usual science of the information processes. It also emphasizes the detection, and the reduction of a redundancy within the expression of 'Information Technology'. Information and Technology are equivalent, as both represented by Cybernetics. Moreover, set of formulae are already implementing Cybernetics so that they provide an algebra for the emerging consciousness which is indicated in terms of Knowledge Management.


 

Introduction

The activity of Knowledge Management, which now gains practicability, deserved well to be first generated and instituted by Intuition. But as a counterpart, after several years of development, it is not yet clear with its own definition. An input of knowledge from Psychoanalysis in this field may improve this situation and even supply a radical step in this practice's assertion. It is important to notice that Psychoanalysis operates there only as a link, for a real element intervenes with it--that is Cybernetics. The traditional function of Psychoanalysis is to reveal and reset at its place what is obvious (against resistance). For instance, it is commonly admitted that the present awareness and ability for Knowledge Management has been induced as an effects of Cybernetics (I.T). However it is sometimes overlooked. As often with simple facts, it is their obviousness which then allow to neglect them. It is however necessary to maintain a constant consideration of the factor of Cybernetics in any evaluation of Knowledge Management. Cybernetics remains the condition of Knowledge Management with which it is inseparably intricate. In providing several formulae on the ground of Cybernetics, Psychoanalysis supplies them for a continuous understanding of Knowledge Management.

This article first describes which are the elements from Cybernetics to enhance the theory of Knowledge Management. It then describes the ground of Knowledge Management (the human/social domain) which can receive these enhancement. The specific formulae of Knowledge which results constitutes the third chapter. It is followed by the integration of Cybernetics within Knowledge Management. A practical application concludes the essay.  

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 


Cybernetics and Linguistics
 

The Scientific contemplation of Nature makes two distinctions in the building of life and its industry: Life carries a meaning process, as it is shown through languages, behaviors and instincts - it is also called 'system of value' - and it also carries sequencing of code, social, chemical, genetic for example. Significand (meanings) and Code (registration) are correspondent but different. Both their domains are intertwined and often overlap - yet they can be differentiated through their logic.

 

A General example

It is important to appreciate under which condition the distinction between Code and Significand happens in the human thinking, otherwise we would not be able, as human, to use it efficiently.
The human brain does not make distinction between phenomena, unless it is imposed upon its perception. The discrimination between the two Code and Significant logics has been brought to our perception through the effects of the modern Information Technology and its science which is Cybernetics. Beside covering the fields of electronics, Information Technology, network systems, Artificial Intelligence, robotics etc... as the science of the relationship between artificial systems and nature, Cybernetics has imposed the need for discriminating a relationship between data and meaning (sometime also called meta-data) of information itself. Important enough, this discrimination allows an identification within an environment.
Data and Meaning constitute our current Knowledge. If the Cybernetic degree of our present technology would collapse tomorrow, this actual form of our Knowledge would probably be the next thing to vanish. Admitting that our actual Knowledge is an outcome of Cybernetics, as a modern subject admits that he or she is the outcome of an Unconscious, keeps us realistic and efficient, with a constant awareness that the role and function of the Cybernetic apparatus in society will always be included in all account and definition of knowledge. A recent example will make our point explicit:
Government, Academia, Business and Industry are currently compelled to identify what librarians call Grey Literature (that is the unregistered textuality: pre-print, email, Web etc... in comparison with a 'White' Literature which represents the official and published documents). They thus actualize a 'Tacit Knowledge' beside an 'Explicit Knowledge' (this can be found in any glossary of Knowledge Management). All observers agree that this identification is made necessary by Cybernetics (Information Technology: Internet, electronic networks etc...). Before this effective Cybernetics, nobody was interested by the distinction between Grey and White literature. It was not factual. The reality is that it came to the human mind and collectively, under the pressure of Cybernetics; and it would lead to a catastrophe if the role of Cybernetics was not constantly kept acknowledged along with its management. Psychoanalysis describes how the oblivion of a causal factor of our perception elaborates a Death Drive (Thanatos).
On the opposite, when we admit the necessity to count Cybernetics as a real factor of our actual Knowledge, we observe and study it, and realize that such acknowledged intervention of Cybernetics within the Significand space (Literature) causes a regeneration of the Code (organization). This has been described within the context of Literature. It is what we shall look more in depth in the scope of general Knowledge.

Or first observation is that the distinction between data and meaning gets more refined as distinction between Code and Significand:



The Code:

The system of the Code is made of items which represent something for other things (examples: in a computer, a code represents a command for a key-board button; in society and profession, a code represents a salary for a certain job production). This can be formulated according to the linguistic mode of representation - by conventions in Linguistic algorithms, the Code (item 'C') is above and separated by a trait from a certain thing 'x1', meaning that it 'represents' x1 for another thing, x2 :

 
Fig 01: formula of the Code
A three places - tripartite topology

First we see this algorithm as representing data (for example, a certain number, C, represents a certain length, x1). But it reveals data's more complex nature that we believe at first sight. For instance, the length of an artifact does not stand by itself, it is relative and if must be referred. For their practicability, data are built according on a principle of code - for an example: a centimeter ('x1') represents something for a metric system ('x2').
An important development results from the awareness of a Structure of Code at the base of our perception:
Further analysis of this algorithm shows that such simple, yet trine and primary complex ('C', 'x1', 'x2'), generates a logic which superdetermine the Code itself and its items (order of increment for example). In certain environment this superdetermination can become quite complex (genetic code for example) and constitutes a logic by itself. Hence, beyond a structure of Code, a logic of Code must be made part of our knowledge.
This logic has been called a Serial Logic, while such description and awareness of the Code has followed the progress of the modern age:

The serial logic has been grounded on Sociology:

The premises of a described Logic of Code can be found in the concluding philosophy of Friedrich Hegel. The initiation of Cybernetics had been laid earlier, in the last moments of the Hermetic Tradition along with its repression (Note10). And though Hegel was participating with the beginning of the Era of Masses, Cybernetics was not yet apparent in his time in order to practically ground his conceptualization. Later, his follower Jean-Paul.Sartre is still known as a philosopher. But if Sartre could refuse the Nobel Price at the end of his life, this is nevertheless strongly indicating the scientific quality of his writings on Sociology. Actually, improving the knowledge of his time according to the Hegelian phenomenology, he participated in the electronic age and coined a Serial Logic which has been then implemented by his disciple, the English Psychiatrist Ronald D.Laing, with a complete formulation in a social Psychiatry. From that moment, the Serial Logic was brought very close to the fields of social perception, mentalities, beliefs and knowledge; and ready to ground a theory of Code.

The achieved step has been made with the junction of this serial logic of Code, with another logic - namely of the Significand - which is the Science of Meaning, and which was described concurrently by Psychoanalysis.



The Significand:

A scientific concept of Significand originated with Linguistics at the end of the 19th Century (Ferdinand de Saussure) - it has been then applied and improved by the Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In 1960 Lacan attempted to formulate Freud's still intuitive concept of the Unconscious. He elaborated a degree of algebra using the Saussurian foundation. In Lacan's algorithms 'Knowledge' is explicitly represented by the symbol S2.
The idea of De Saussure have been that the objects of Linguistics, the signifier or 'Significand' differed from a code in that they were representing something for another Significand (instead of another thing). Beside the algorithm of Code, a second algorithm can thus be written:

 
Fig 02: formula of the Significand
A four places - quadripartite topology

The algorithm of the Significand indicates that a 'first' Significand (S1) implies another one, which represents its knowledge (S2). This is ruling a different logic that of the Code. This Lacanian formula shows that this logic  (S1;S2) has shifted above the signified (s', s'', s'''...), of which it appears to become independent. In the personal human experience, this is manifested through the feeling of independence of thoughts. In the field of science, such shift implies an improvement, as it allows to formulate knowledge, yet a loss at the same time, for it generates an industry that can apparently lose all contact with reality (the signified). Two examples can illustrate this situation: it is the case when an Operating System allows software to communicate together without bound to their underlying hardware. As a biological example, it is the situation which allow dreams.

 

The Logic of the Significant has been grounded on Sociology:

During the 20ht century a major expression of this logic as been described by Sociology. It is Emile Durkheim in Europe, who suggested that the organization of Society was less directed by an apparent ideal or by direct material inductions, than driven by the plurality of meanings which were manifested as professions and roles (Division of Labor). These building blocks of the social world cannot stand alone, one by one. For instance the industry of iron extraction has no meaning without the industry of blacksmith, which has no meaning without industry of fire and also mechanics, architecture etc... In a society which is based on a 'Division of Labor', each primary item stands only in regard of at least another one. The model of Linguistics thus applies to the Western Sociology, whose Industry forms discourses which operates in the environment as a language.

   

Code and Significand constitute the two logics which combine to make Cybernetics.
We have also noticed twice that these two logics are related to a social dimension.
This will fulfill the requirement that Cybernetics, as we want to keep it present in our formulation of Knowledge,
indicates its acquaintance with the social dimension.
Hence it is necessary and time to see why and how
the ground of sociology reciprocally calls for, and needs to absorb the factor of Cybernetics

 

CHAPTER TWO

 


Collective Psychology
 

The presence of Artificial Intelligence (aka Cybernetics) challenges the individual human relationship with his or her own collective psychology. As much as an individuals overlook the superdetermination of mass psychology on one's own thoughts, s/he will establish a paranoiac relationship with Artificial Intelligence. On the opposite the ego's awareness of its superdetermination by the collective enables its existential individualization in response to Artificial Intelligence. For this, Science of knowledge must have a model which integrates Cybernetics.

 

The initial difficulty and its solution

When the logic of the Significand is observed in the Social domain, it first shows the same resistance that the individual psychology has revealed. Based on the observation that individual analysis has taught, science shifts up to the collective model. The early history of Knowledge Management has expressed a fundamental uncertainty in its own behavior, and the Knowledge of what Knowledge Management has been a puzzle.
Though we know that 'History repeats itself,' the fact that we would ignore that Knowledge Management has already been practiced in the past, would precisely repeat what has happened then - that is, in this perspective, the Dead End that Knowledge Management has lead to. This loop of negativity is reflected in the human psychology, through its difficulty to develop its full potentiality.
In this direction, we easily notice that the Knowledge Management community is quite unanimous for claiming that its practice is new, without equivalent attempts in the past. It is however possible to loosen slightly this riddle and its knot of creation-without-past-information. But in order to get it radically clarified, we must pass through eerie concepts in the field of this community. This, I hope, will be admitted, with the argument that the industrial world is today dealing with a very, very serious challenge. Original and vital forces are now controlled by our technology and, at the level of the total planet, for several years and much more in a close future, life on earth will depend from the industrial management. There is no reason to hesitate for bringing in our collective reflection the instance of death. For the industrial Knowledge Management, it is now part of the equation that it is responsible for.

As much as our community will address the challenge with responsibility, it will be comforted to know how science has already get familiarized with this intriguing test. The famous Psychoanalytical Model of Thanatos has prepared a set of concept that will show its usefulness in order to span the whole historical process of Knowledge Management. A link toward appropriate original Freudian excerpts will get us assured first that Psychoanalysis aims indeed to address the management of industrial human resources of knowledge and/or repression.
Once we get assured that the science of Life and Death Drives intends to treat peoples on the same base than through its treatment of Unconscious and therefore Knowledge, we can continue to gather information of the Human Sciences that will combine for the understanding of the nature of Knowledge Management.

A second source of information indeed is Sociology itself. It is certainly not out of focus to contemplate that prior to 1900 when this Science began, it was call the Science of Education - and this certainly means Knowledge Management. But as interesting is what it developed when it integrated the 20th century mode of Science.
As indicated earlier, it is E. Durkheim who established it on the ground of the logic of the Significand. But a sinister concept was also brought beside the inoffensive Division of Labor and discrimination of values. Applied to the human  society, Sociology was able, even more that psychoanalysis, to indicate a fatal factor that the formulation of Knowledge was seeming to raise. Durkheim definitely established the social system of values with the condition of an 'anomy' which is that of suicide.

Fundamentals of Death and Suicide are not amongst the front line topics of the essays that professionals of Knowledge Management regularly publish. But on the other hand, if one agrees to ponder for a minute how we may qualify some of our environmental current issues, it suddenly turns out that, in facing these pessimistic concepts, rather than to arouse them we may realize that Knowledge Management is just set to address and solve them. Instead of escaping the fact of industrial Thanatos, the ultimate function of Knowledge Management may be to dissolve the drive of an unconscious collective suicide. From this revealed point of view the motivation of Knowledge Management suddenly gains a new brilliant mission and perhaps an enthusiasm for incorporating to its references the two monumental corpus of Deep Psychology and Fundamental Sociology.

 

However, at that point we have still only brought forces into our research,
and the identification of Cybernetics in a model of Collective Psychology has not yet been considered. Important points have been conquered though. We have been able to justify the attachment of the fundamental of Human Sciences to any prosaic approach of Knowledge Management. Moreover, this is actually the way their Cybernetic formula will be introduced into the practical realization of Knowledge Management.

 

CHAPTER THREE

 


Formula of Knowledge

 

Assuming that it is the cleavage (as explained above) between the regime of value (Significand) and its reality (signified) which causes a suicide-like situation of an economical and industrial  system, it is suggested that the regime of Code, which is, on the opposite, indefectibly rooted in the 'signified', will combine with the Significand and provoke a regeneration instead.
This would answer to the most important challenge of the knowledge-based economy, as being to find a methodology, a discipline or a process with which information can be made productive (Roelof P. Beijerse citing P.F.Drucker's Post Capitalistic Society).

 

The building of the Discourses and algorithms of Cybernetics 

The combination of the  tripartite formula of the Code (fig.01) and of the quadripartite formula of the Significand (fig.02) has first been established in the Lacanian theory with an illustration through an 'Optical Model'. Taking advantage from the comparison between images that the Science of Optic calls 'real' (variety of 3D hologram) and 'virtual' (image in a mirror), Lacan could represent a duplicity between the 'things' ('x1', 'x2'; above) which are in respect to the Code, and the 'images' which are virtually detached with reality from the Significand (s', s'', s'''..; above). The compilation of the two logics (Code & Significand) establishes a system which is perpetually unstable and shifting from one logic to the other. Lacan's early Model in 1960 was primitive yet sophisticated enough to establish the representation of such dynamics, like the first heart beats of an embryo, which switched from the serial logic, to the logic of the Significand and alternatively.

 
Fig 03: formula of the Code and of the Significand - that associate into a matrix which alternates as
a four (left) and/or three (right) components system; as the two forms of the optical model show (above).
Combined as two phases, these forms constitute a dynamic model (below):

It seems that this was the first time that the elusive status of the representation of Knowledge ('S2') was established for the scientific community, in a formal, algebraic, algorithmic manner. Still today Knowledge Management practitioners often operate with subjective definition of the object upon which they operate. One of them for instance would define Knowledge as follows: Knowledge is seen as information; the capability to interpret data and information through a process of giving meaning to these data and information; and an attitude aimed at wanting to do so (Roelof P. uit Beijerse 1999). We immediately see that - though it mentions the constitutive concepts (data, information, meaning etc...) - the literary definition is far more uncertain than the algorithmic organization; and that only the latter allows a mode of mathematics, a Cyphermatics, which organically links it to the Artificial Intelligence organ that must vitally be integrated to any practice of Knowledge Management.
Lacan could then achieve the formulation, through a rotative matrix, in which 'S2' (Knowledge) is located in four types of discourses, according to the places that it occupies, in a scientific Significand/Code system:


 Fig 04: Knowledge in the Collective Psychology algorithm:
Reassembling the two switching phases of Code and Significand,
Four Discourses are composed in two 'regressive' and 'progressive' turns.

4 Discourses  



This formula first allows to allocate a representation to the Artificial Intelligence apparatus (Cybernetics), according to a development applied after Lacan by A.Verdiglione. His contribution parallels the conception of 'meme', originated in biology and extended since in the genetic algorithms of computer science. This is technically described when the object ('a') is in 'place of product' as a meme (aka semblance, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence etc...). The other element that directly related Knowledge management, is Knowledge ('S2') itself - which is not abstracted there into an elusive conception, but objectified as a Significand which is put a certain places in respect to four types of discourses.
The Discourse of the Government for instance, represents the human subject in regards of this other Significand which is the human Knowledge. But Knowledge can also be agent as it is constitutive of the Discourse of the Academia. Details about the Discourses and the function of this matrix can be found in an article about the management of repertoried Knowledge (Grey and White Literature). Focusing here on Knowledge the algorithm identifies when 'S2' is treated as an object (signified) in the Discourse of the Industry, as Knowledge Management understand it as an output and a capital. Knowledge is there the product of the enterprise which can be re-invested as the truth for its business. And in the Discourse of the Business, this Significand is also signified, being there in place of the Truth on which the agent of the Business relies.
An illustrative and interesting note can be made about the latter Discourse. The Discourse of the Business has been originally theorized as the Discourse of the analyst. In this original observation, since Truth has no alternative but itself, the Knowledge ('S2') has been identified with an isolated support of the Transference which has been called the Unconscious. But only after a progress (PLural ANalysis) of this analysis, the conceptualization of the Unconscious could be understood as a theory of Ecology. Now we can realize that the same process is actualized through the difficulty for the Business to integrate the factor of the environment in its motive.

The final step of resistance

This new ability for understanding Knowledge Management has brought in all together the practical tools for the integration of Cybernetics in the social world and the foundation itself of these formula. Consequently. Knowledge Management acquire information about the source itself of these formula, and therefore gains an access towards its own origin and history. The algorithm of the Code & Significant logic is based on the fundamentals of what happens when one draws a sign, when one reads it, and when it establishes itself as a Letter. In other words the very power of this formula is to represent in the collective psychology the simple - yet essential - fact of writing.
Consequently, we have introduced in our intelligence of Knowledge Management the coordinates of the first cause Industry, and we are able to relate our concept of Knowledge to the founding moment, the paradigm, of writing. And from this base we are quite well equipped for answering the question of the presence of Knowledge Management in the past - that is a History, or a pre-History, of Knowledge Management as indicated above.

Writing developed through several phases in History of civilization, and they have been example of destruction, sometime more obviously than expression of progress. Descending in the past, we find Gutenberg's revolution and the following Inquisition - earlier was The Greek Ptolemaic and the final destruction of the Library resource - and earlier, the divulgation of the art of Writing by the Egyptians to the people represents one of the most typical and primary scene of repression in History. If Writing is a true management of knowledge, it seems that each time that a Knowledge Management has been applied in process, it has been associated with a devastation.
There are so many obvious positive elements that comes with the development, on the other hand, that we must look at the negative in order to protect them. For instance the Death Drive is the hidden factor of the Darwinian evolution, by which death of the species allow their replacement the better ones. But this mode of evolution goes only until a continuous and conscious one becomes much more economical in term of memory and energy. An improvement in the Practice of Writing (as we identify it to Knowledge Management) should allow the species to develop through transformation (rather than disappearance and repetition). This is actually what Knowledge Management tries to develop in Business' and Industry's ability for change.

 

The Linguistic and Cybernetic formula of the function of Writing in our collective psychology, allow to identify Knowledge Management with them, and to determine the possibility for their improvement. Once we have thus disclosed the value and potential of Knowledge Management through an acknowledgement of its history, we shall determine what is, in the present fay, the factor of this progress.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

Sociological identification of Cybernetics 

a) Writing, b)Art of Memory

object

LAPAREIL

with a logic (serial), Information can be understood as a techne)

Artificial Intelligence - 'meme'

----------

anomia

effects

PURAL

 

 

CHAPTER FIFTH

 

Sociological identification of Cybernetics 

Principle of Reflection of the cause

expl Academia

Application of Plural Analysis

Some Links/References

Emile Durkheim: http://cid.unomaha.edu/~ajuska/cltheory/Durkheim.htm

 

 

WORK IN PROGRESS

 


Foot Notes:

Note 10: As it has been revealed by the historian F.Yates, the origins and development of Cybernetics follows the psychological rules of an initial primary repression - that took place with the prefiguration of Artificial intelligence, according to Yates, by Giordano Bruno, the last Hermetic representative in Europe and the turn of the Renaissance. <back to text>