Transduction
I call this blog the “transducer” in honor of an idea that I want to cultivate and expand into a framework for a philosophical anthropology I have been gestating since my undergraduate days, when I spent most of my cycles trying to process Christianity, capitalism, Darwinism, Marxism, and physics. I now believe the concept of transduction is the, or a, key to understanding the relationship between meaning and causality, mimesis and mutation, the fundamental ontological dualism that philosophical monism can never seem to dispense with except by periodic calls to burn the books of theologians and metaphysicians. (This is an enlightened tradition that includes Hume, Ayers, and now any number of New Humanists who have no time for this sort of nonsense.)
The theory of transduction, as I want to develop it, is a possibility opened up by Shannon’s theory of information (so-called). In focusing on this concept, I am inspired by the at this point undervalued work of Roy Rappaport and by the brilliantly muddled works of Gregory Bateson, to whom everything interesing I read nowadays concerning teaching, learning and technology is more a less a footnote.
Transduction is the transfer of information that attends every transfer of energy. For example, in any mechanical interaction, energy is transferred from one body to another. But information also passes: the amount of energy transferred, the direction of movement, the frequency of the event if it is repeated, the time of the event, etc. Measurable indicators such as velocity and position are part of the information that inheres in the event.
Transduction is most apparent — and useful — when energy is converted from one form to another. A well-known example is the transduction that occurs when mechanical energy is converted into electrical energy through a phonographic needle designed to optimize the attendant transfer of information. The needle is part of a larger system of transduction: sound waves are transduced by a microphone, which are transduced into a recording medium, which is then transduced back into electricity, which transduces the sound through the mechanical vibration of a speaker.
The theory of transduction follows from the hypothesis that everything (and everyone) acts as a needle in a vast economy or ecology of signal transmission. We are all transducers made of countless transducers, and we are probably elements of larger transductivities, such as the economic system and so forth. And we are constantly transmitting and transducing signals which “contain” messages. Here it becomes interesting — where do the messages come from? Do we create messages? If so, how? Are there really messages, or is it signals (traces, différance) all the way down?
Pop quiz: How many needles dance in the head of an angel? (Angels, of course, are God’s messengers, Judeo-Christian versions of Hermes and Mercury. McLuhan had something to say about angels as well.)
The term transduction, of coruse, has been appropriated by genetics, where it refers to a process in which DNA is transferred from one bacterium to another by a virus, or where foreign DNA is introduced into another cell through a virus. This too is transduction in the sense that I mean it — that is, it’s not just a semantic appropriation. But it introduces the notion of mediated transduction by means of an agent — in this case, a virus. In this case, the virus plays the role of the wax record (to keep the analogy simple) in the sequence of transductions I described above.
What is interesting about viral transduction is that it provides an example of how simple, unmediated transduction produces complex, mediated transduction. If, as I posit above, the universe is a vast system of transduction, then, apparently, elements of that system evolve and emerge to play roles in that system. The virus seems a clear case of this, evolving only to perform that transductive work of a cell-based, biological system, which itself emerged through transductive reproduction.
And this is another concept that seems describable in terms of transduction — reproduction. For what is transduction but the reproduction of information? But always an incomplete reproduction, as not all information passes through. As Bateson famously wrote, information is any difference that makes a difference. That is, only information that survives transduction is information. So, transduction is a kind of reproduction, but it is also always a misprision, a creative misreading.
An interesting consequence of the theory of transduction is that you can’t measure transduction without introducing more of it, and therefore becoming subject to Bateson’s law (you only get differences that make a difference). This fact normally doesn’t bother us, but it really comes out in relativity theory, where Einstein shows that time is, in a very real sense, the meausrement of time.
Other examples of transduction include walking and leaving footprints, the impression on a wooden surface left by thrown rock, the decaying of carbon 14, settlement patterns left by the inhabitants of population centers, the Van Eck “phreaking” described in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, biological evolution of genotypes, learning, etc. Yes, evolution and learning, what Bateson wrote about mostly. The concept is recursive in the sense that transductive elements can form transductive systems which are in turn transductive.
Ultimately, if all this is true or coherent, we, as language-using humans, are vastly complex transducers of signals that go way, way, back, picking up cosmic, genetic, cultural, and social signals as we go through life, as wayfarers (to use Walker Percy’s use of Augustine’s image).
And this is how I view blogging . The Internet is probably the first human institution (and it is an institution, more than it is a “technology,” whatever that means) built explicitly on the principles of transduction. We are each transducers of the messages that pass through our “post,” to use Lyotard’s image. It’s a good image, one that recalls Pynchon’s image of the Pony Express in The Crying of Lot 49 and Melville’s image of mail in Bartleby. For, from the perspective of transduction, what worse hell can be imagined than the dead letter office?
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