[-empyre-] Digital Objects // PROCESS : What is a digital process?

[Alexander Wilson]

Hello to everyone on the list. Thanks to our hosts for organizing this
discussion (and for inviting me). I've just caught up on the discussion
sthus far.

I thought I'd give a go at the first question proposed:

"What is a digital process?"

The term "process" usually connotes continuity. The canonical heraclitean
river, different each time one enters it, presents the essential character
of process: it flows. Digital processes, however, are characterized by
cuts, breaks, and jumps. The digital is given as a series of
discontinuities. We look at the river flowing: it seems continuous, a
unified flux. It is highly entropic, meaning it exceeds our capacity to
resolve the minuscule details we assume compose it (water molecules). Every
time you walk into it though, it feels decisively different. It may be
warmer today than yesterday, the current might be stronger or it may have
waned.

Process implies change. But change in the digital realm can only happen
discretely: one moment we have one state, the next we have another. One
moment the water is warm, the next it is cold. There is nothing in between,
no process to speak of. In this sense the digital neatly elides change. It
is as though nothing has changed at all. The state space in the digital
domain is finite; it is as though the various moments in the digital
process are given all at once, and for all eternity. Indeed, one might say
they are "outside of time", for these states, in themselves, are not
affected by the process; each time they are taken up, they are exactly the
same. The process hence seems to move the digital from the outside.

The digital is inseparable from processes of "discretization", as Bernard
Stiegler observes. It is simply the process which cuts continuities into
discontinuities, making unified, homogeneous mixtures discrete, nameable,
mobile, functional. It is true Stiegler usually looks at this as a
(pre)historical or anthropological process (ie: grammatization). I, like
Simondon, am more interested in seeing this process as an ontogenetic one.
Simondon, remember, envisions the evolution of technology somewhat like
thermodynamic process: a crystal propagating through a supersaturated
solution, where the unified mixture of molecules is progressively
organized, and structured, put to the service of the reproduction of the
given symmetries ad infinitum, mechanically and algorithmically, until the
favourable circumstances, or preindividual potentials, are exhausted.

The digital is intimately related to such an ontogenetic process of
selection. It is as though the algorithm prefigures the digital. The
if-then decisional procedure of the algorithm gives rise to the series of
cuts typical of the digital process, as the ebbs and flows of the
unidentified, unresolved chaos "outside" is sampled, once a threshold of
potential is met. Snapshot. The digital emerges in the moment of sampling;
it is in the only moment a determinate system touches an indeterminate,
un-incorporated preindividual "outside", that a "bit" comes into existence.
Without this moment, the digital is not connected to any process: it is,
like the crystal in the mind of the crystallographer, an eternal and
infinite expanse of symmetries. Hence, the digital is moved by processes
outside of itself. The digital process, therefore, always implies the
"analogue". But the crude term "analogue" is hopelessly inadequate for
signifying the monstrous radical contingency that hides in each sampled
interval, in between the quantized cracks of our pixels and voxels.

But what is this outside I have been referring to? The outside, in a
cybernetic sense, is simply that which interacts with a given system
through its inputs and outputs. A system is said to be operationally closed
implying boundaries and definite topological connectivity. It will
typically be composed of various (continuous) flows, feeding back upon
themselves, according to a certain topological arrangement, implying
certain thresholds, minima and maxima, varying ebbs of potential. The
feedback loops themselves imply recursive processes. For digital cuts to
emerge, loops in the process are necessary. The digital bit is born out of
a specific decision implied by the structural coupling of some chaotic
outside with some defined inside: physicists will call this measurement or
observation.

In order for a proper "digital process" to be conceived as a series of
cuts, these cuts and breaks have to be recorded or inscribed in some
context. The system must somehow change to receive the event. If it does
not change, then nothing has happened. As people say on the web, when
someone posts an unbelievable claim: "picture, or it didn't happen".
Indeed, nothing happens that is not somewhere inscribed in some context.
For something to happen, it must happen to something. This is the very
structure of information: "difference that makes a difference" to use
Bateson's famous adage. If it does not get inscribed anywhere, it doesn't
"make a difference" to anything or for anything, and hence didn't happen.
Process implies the system must change, and this change implies a break in
its topology. This is the nature of actualization : we could discuss
Whitehead in these terms (I would say the superject is always what "will
have been" the context for the event). A difference can remain in potentia
forever (as an eternal object), but it only is actualized and "makes a
difference" once inscribed in some context.

It is true that mathematics is plagued by a fundamental randomness:
Chaitin's famous "Omega" exemplifies this; it distributes all possible
decidable and undecidable computations in an algorithmically random manner.
And it would seem that in cosmological physics, too, with the advent of the
holographic principle, the "observable universe" much like the projection
of a hologram, emerges from a discrete two-dimensional set of randomly
distributed bits at the Planck scale, corresponding to the surface of the
initial inflationary break from symmetry which gave rise to "everything".
Here "everything should remain in scare quotes, because scientists will
disagee as to whether this non-pattern truly does implies totality. Like
the "thumbprint of god" (a term once used to describe Mandelbrot's
fractal), the digital in its extremes seems to encounter an absolute
contingency "outside of itself". The "observable universe" is bounded by
pure ungrounded randomness; and all process is a coupling of this
randomness and some procedure for resolving it. The absolute outside
implies the symmetry of pure randomness. And randomness is dialectically
opposed to the asymmetry of the observer and the event observed. Similarly,
the digital always already implies the procedural abstraction, the
algorithm, that leads to its sampling and resolving.

Whether it be the decisive moment of a discerning subjective judgement, or
the quantized capture of an electronic converter, the digital's process is
extrinsic to the digital itself. Contingency is not digital. Change is not
digital. Change is absolute difference: difference which does not (yet)
"make" a difference. It "makes" a difference in the moment of the
topological break, the rerouting of the observing systems circuit, that
inscribes the event in some context: an intensity is measured, an aesthetic
is judged, a value is attributed, a signal is sampled.

I'll leave it at that for now.

best,
Alexander





-- 
alexanderwilson.net
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