An information meta-state approach to documentation
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2012-0118 |
| Date | 08 July 2014 |
| Published date | 08 July 2014 |
| Pages | 503-525 |
| Author | Kane X. Faucher |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management |
An information meta-state
approach to documentation
Kane X. Faucher
Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University, London, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to bring both Simondonian and Deleuzian insights to bear
upon the nature of documents and documentation by viewing them as non-representationalist, and as
products of transduction and reticulation that render documents assemblages that are in constant
negotiation with an environment as instances of a perpetually renewing problematic.
Design/methodology/approach – Simondon’s work on metastability and transduction can offer
particular insights into how the author views documents in terms of their materiality, signification,
and possibly to move beyond the phenomenological bias in the treatment of documents.
Findings – In understanding or describing the process of documentation as a reticulation or
unfolding, the author also comes to view the document as an assemblage in perpetual negotiation.
This paper adapts Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation framework of expression-signification and
provides a bit of groundwork towards two registers of information (first and second order) according
to the preindividual process of that allows for the individuation of documents.
Originality/value – This paper makes an original contribution to understanding the process
of documentation and the product of documents in a more fluid, interdynamic context by shifting
or displacing the traditional view of information.
Keywords Information theory, Becoming, Metastability, Transduction, Sense
Paper type Conce ptual paper
Casting information in neither the purely mathematical register of Shannon-Weaver’s
communication theory (which is a technical definition that references communication
and not information as such), nor in the domain of computation alism, we return in part
to Norbert Wiener’s (1961) dictum, “information is information, not matter or energy”
(p. 132) which positions information as a vital third “substance” in physics. It should be
noted that Wiener viewed physics as philosophy, and that his aim was to provide
a non-theistic principle by which matter and energy are organized. Yet, we need not
reduce information to purely mechanistic conceptions, and instead reframe it in more
metaphysical terms as being a part of a “meta-state” in what Gilbert Simondon
calls the metastability of preindividuation and what Deleuze calls the virtual. It is
our contention that a Simondon-Deleuze approach to information has significant
conceptual traction in being applied to documentation studies as a means of
explaining how documentation is a process of unfolding from the virtual to the
actual, and that the document as information matrix is the result of accretion and
reticulation (patterning) that may return to the virtual as a problematic. By using this
critical and conceptual lens, we may expand our view of documentation by recourse to
the fundamental ontological question upon which the very study of documentation
frequently turns (i.e. “what is information?”), and thus by acknowledging a document’s
becoming as primary presupposition to its being. In addition, the conceptual approach
also supplies a critical blueprint for the pragmatic question of what a document can do
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
Received 17 September 2012
Revised 22 March 2013
26 March 2013
Accepted 4 April 2013
Journal of Documentation
Vol.70 No. 4, 2014
pp. 503-525
rEmeraldGroup Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/J D-09-2012-0118
This paper is modified from its initial presentation at the DOCAM’12 conference at Western
University, 15-17 August 2012.
503
An information
meta-state
approach
without falling back on representationalist interpretations that may only serve to fix
a document’s “difference” as subordinate to classification or categorical regimes.
By reformulating “documentation” as an “assemblage”, we also extend the domain of
interpretation and inquiry as more open-ended than a stable entity of objective study,
recognizing in part that an assemblage is not a formed matter as such, but
a collection of heterogeneous elements where relation takes precedence over fixed
identity. In embracing a Simondon-Deleuze approach, we may also work towards
overturning any latent substantialism or hylemorphism in the understanding of the
form-content relationship of documentation. Theclassic models of deductionthat emerge
from assuming substance, or the inductive model of assuming a more Aristotelian
framework, may be suspended to consider the benefits of embracing what Simondon
calls transduction. The purpose hereis not to be prescriptive,but that we might consider
subscribing to an alternative model beyond deduction or induction.
The aspiration here would be to speak of the meta-state of documentation that sets
aside the binaryof form-first and medium-first perspectives ondocuments. A meta-state
view might be far more germane an attempt to demonstrate the generative power of
a document’s becoming which aims to explain both what a document is, and what it
can do. The reason for adopting a meta-state approach would be to recognize how the
local instabilities of document states may actually support the metastable condition of
documentation as an expression of becoming without having to insist that it is all
relativist or chaotic. However, it will also articulate that a document’s becoming is
guaranteed by an inherent mechanism of sense-production, and this through a dynamic
reticulation that involves information that is both an organizational principle and
immanent to the document itself. This “reticulum” in which the document is embodied,
and its relative position in an environment, operates as an assemblage in a dynamic
system where said heterogeneous components interrelate freely, or set the conditions
through whichmatter and energy flow. It is not throughthe convergence of the observer,
the document, and the environment that each of these terms maintains their strict
identity, but their heterogeneous relations that emerge in the production of something
new: not the observer and document altered in their relation as if in a dialectical
exchange, nor the document and environment in terms of part and whole, but a hybrid
form of observer-document-environment as something other. Readers of Deleuze and
Guattari may recognize this formulation as strongly reminiscent of the wasp-orchid
relation where the wasp traces the orchid, the orchid’s petal structure traces the flight of
the wasp, and both surrender their singular quiddity to construct something new that
was not prefigured as such in either ofthem independently.In this way,what is generated
is the relationthat does not preexist either components prior to their becoming a kind of
assemblage. Before discussing this relation specifically in reference to document(ation),
we must allow a brief detour into information.
Materialist v. non-materialist conceptions of information
The debate over documents and documentation may be escalated to the level of
information proper. It is there that we find competing definitions that assert that
information has a materialist or non-materialist basi s. Among the latter camp we
might include R.A. Fisher whose work in statistical mechanics (adapted in slightly
different measure by Norbert Wiener) treats information as an abstract quantity
necessary for measuring infor mation loss or gainwith respect to probability of events.
Moreover, work in the mathematical sense of the term as a successor to electrical systems
in Shannon’s theory of communication has continued in this vein to treat informationas
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