mapping knowledge

The readings this week seemed tenuously related at first, but after a bit of diagramming I decided that all of them concern, to varying degrees, the relation between the individual and the environment, the part and the whole; all of the texts, in one way or another, concern an individual's self-knowledge, her knowledge of her immediate environment, the abstract knowledge of a totality (a totality that is perhaps available to thought only as an abstraction, such as the Pacific gyre, multinational capitalism, or the structure of the internet), and the exchange of knowledge within, between, and about these levels.

Even those articles that explore the structure of the internet and the flow of internet chain-letters are in some sense concerned with individual knowledge, even if this concern manifests itself as an exclusion of an individual's knowledge of the total structure. Kleinberg ("Navigation...") must "constrain the algorithm to use only local information--with global knowledge of all connections in the network, the shortest chain can be found very simply" (845) in order to make claims about the most efficient distribution of short- and long-range connections in sociological letter-sending experiments.

Libon-Nowell & Kleinberg ("Tracing...") also limit individuals' knowledge of the total structure and their desire to act upon it (the nodes in each network are assigned properties probabilistically and not, for example, based on what sending strategies would yield the longest list of names with the minimum amount of repetition). Guided by the specific dimensions and densities of the total structure in an effort to reduce & reproduce it, the authors neither completely discount nor valorize the knowledge of individuals' behavior they gain from their data. They generate chain-letter trees from data by removing elements of back-sending that create light (in terms of "weight") duplicate segments in order to produce a tree structure (an action they describe as "pruning" the tree); yet they must reintroduce the back-sending phenomenon to their generative model in order to produce a similar tree structure. In the abstraction of data from a "noisy" set, the authors discount certain knowledge of individual behavior in order to produce a model; then, in the generation of their synthetic trees, they must reintroduce this knowledge of the individual scale in order to produce trees of the proper dimensions. (An interesting case of the Platonic backhand and forehand for anyone familiar with N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman).

Granovetter's sociology of weak ties focuses on the inter-individual exchange of information through networks of friends and acquaintances. Although his essay treats many phenomena and provides an entire analytic approach to the sociometry of relationships and information, I find most interesting that he posits a paradox between individual alienation and group cohesion: that is, while too many weak ties have been thought to produce alienation at the micro-level, too many strong ties (often biased in selection experiments reflecting idealized situations in the mode of "with whom would you most like to spend your time?") produce fragmentation at the macro-level. The flow of knowledge between individuals (and throughout the structure of a community, as Granovetter argues in the community organizing section) is maximized by a certain distribution of both weak and strong ties (in a sense laying the groundwork for Kleinberg's algorithm study).

These three articles seem to me to privilege the totality of the structure in terms of a system of information exchange over (and sometimes against) the individual's knowledge of the totality in which they are embedded and the individual's self-knowledge (perhaps with the exception of a point that may stem from Granovetter that an individual's desires may not accord with maximizing her receptivity to new knowledge). Althusser's, Jameson's and Lacan's approaches, on the other hand, emphasize the individual's knowledge and experience.

Jameson argues that there have been in the last 60 years or so, historical shifts in capital, cultural production, and the experience of time, space and emotions that he terms 'postmodern'. While Jameson's essay is expansive in its treatment of these issues, I'd like to emphasize his tentative solution to the subject's fragmentation and disorientation in postmodernity: cognitive mapping, which would provide a "mode of representing" the "world space of multinational capital" so that "we may again be able to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion" (54). It is primarily the subject's orientation that is in question; if the subject is fragmented, it does not seem to be as a condition of her being, but as a function of her relationship to her environment, the historical period in which she lives, and her place in multinational capital. Jameson theorizes cognitive mapping as adding an essential third dimension, the symbolic, to Althusser's notion of ideology (as the imaginary relation of a subject to her real conditions of existence) in order to recuperate praxis from the confusion of contemporary life. That is, the symbolic dimension of cognitive mapping would provide a bridge between individual imaginaries, unique to one subject, and abstract knowledge of the real conditions of existence, "never positioned in or actualized by any concrete subject" (Jameson, 53).

Yet I'm not so sure that the mode Jameson wants to use to bridge the "gap" between Real and Imaginary in Althusser is supported by Lacan's essay. For Lacan does not "regard the ego as centred on the perception-consciousness system, or as organized by the 'reality principle'" (6); "we should start instead," he argues, "from the function of méconnaissance" (6). Méconnaissance translates to "misrecognition", with an emphasis that the 'cognition' described is the more personal type used for people and places, connaissance, in contrast to savoir which is abstract, scientific knowledge. Thus, the entry into the Symbolic (that is, into language and its structure) rests on a primary misrecognition that splits the subject; first identifying with the imago splits the subject between her sensation of dependence and the independence of the imago; this split prefigures the split between the intrinsic sense of self produced by the ideal ego and the social determination of the individual in the "symbolic matrix." I don't want to belabor my point with psychoanalytic terminology and classification; the substance of my argument is that a cognitive bridging of subject and world, of imaginary and real, may not be able to take place in the Lacanian Symbolic because that symbolic comes to divide or alienate the subject to varying degrees. I'm not sure how serious this issue is, however, since Jameson seems interested in precisely the social 'I' who is a part of groups, that most symbolic part of the subject which is prone to group action; yet Jameson's discussion of affective intensities may still run aground on the Lacanian Symbolic.

My questions: Why do we see such a polarization of approaches to the totality and the individual between the (social-)scientific papers and the psychoanalytic / cultural / ideological analysis papers? Is it merely a question of scale? Jameson and Althusser seem to place the stakes of their arguments on the articulation of the individual and the social totality, but do their approaches to these different levels end up favoring a dominant culture over the possibilities of individual experience? Does Lacan's contention that when the mirror stage ends, the "paranoiac alienation" of the "deflection of the specular I into the social I . . . decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others" have any explanatory purchase on this rift between abstract and personal knowledge? If, as Lacan says "psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the 'Thou art that,' in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny," that is, if psychoanalysis may bring the patient to an awareness of the structure of his desire, "but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the real journey begins," where does the real journey begin? Can cognitive mapping bring the subject there? Can studies of the internet bring the subject to a greater understanding of how her actions are structured by the networks in which they are embedded, thus giving her opportunities for praxis, or are these scientific studies too 'abstract,' as Jameson might contend?