Page 176 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Semiotics and the Dialectic of Information 165

In this chapter as well as chapter 8 and the Conclusion, I turn (implicitly) to
internal vs. external linguistics. For the remainder of this chapter, I emphasize
the de-linking of matter and form.

UNDULY EMPHASIZING SHAPE OR FORM

Many analysts, not just de Saussure, emphasize the shape or form of infor-
mation while slighting the material element. Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener,
for instance, viewed the human body as a “text” and rhapsodized how, over
time, the body discards and replaces all of its matter while retaining the pat-
tern: “To describe an organism,” he explained, “we do not try to specify each
molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain ques-
tions about it which reveal its pattern.” He continued:

Life . . . is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis which is the touchstone
of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the
air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momen-
tary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our exc-
reta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that
abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. 9

Economist Kenneth Boulding went even further. He declared that informa-
tion not merely defies the first and second laws of thermodynamics, but ac-
tually counters them. Regarding the first law, namely the Law of Conserva-
tion of Matter-Energy, he wrote:

The through-put of information in an organization involves a “teaching” or
structuring process which does not follow any strict law of conservation even
though there may be limitations imposed upon it. When a teacher instructs a
class, at the end of the hour presumably the students know more and the teacher
does not know any less. In this sense the teaching process is utterly unlike the
process of exchange which is the basis of the law of conservation. In exchange,
what one gives up another acquires; what one gains another loses. In teaching
this is not so. What the student gains the teacher does not lose. Indeed, in the
teaching process, as every teacher knows, the teacher gains as well as the stu-
dent. In this phenomenon we find the key to the mystery of life. 10

Regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of
Entropy, Boulding noted that in the absence of energy entering a system from
outside, there is an ineluctable tendency over time for matter and energy
within the system to become less ordered, less concentrated, less differenti-
ated; the end of the universe, according to the Law of Entropy, is but a “thin