Month: July 2018

“Famously, the word ‘entropy’ was suggested by von Neumann to Shannon to name the value of information embedded in a message. Simondon knew about these thermodynamic beginnings. In the MTC approach, he tells us, ‘information theory is the starting point of a body of research that founded the concept of negative entropy (or negentropy), showing that information corresponds to an inverse process of degradation and that, within the entire pattern, information is not definable in terms of the source, or the receiver, but from the relationship between source and receiver.”

Andrew Iliadis, “Informational Ontology”

“We now confront Kant’s question with our own: ‘How is social synthesis possible in the forms of commodity exchange?’ [ … ] Accordingly commodity exchange does not depend on language, on what we communicate to each other. Nothing regarding the essence of things need be communicated. Some semantics for ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ for pointing to this or that, and to indicate quantity, is sufficient to the essentials of a transaction of exchange whether it is carried on between two village gossips or between two strangers who do not speak each other‘s language. Ethnologists are acquainted with the incidence of ‘silent trade.’ To put it in the words of Bertrand Russell it is ‘that all my data, in so far as they are matters of fact, are private to me …’ Thus one can justifiably say that commodity exchange impels solipsism.”

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology