Abstract

This series of essays offers a critique of Information Studies, taken as a discipline largely concerned with informational objects and their representations on the one hand and the control of these same by means of other informational objects and their representations on the other. Specifically, the critique put forward here attends to the ways that the common practices of Information Studies may reinforce representationalist ideologies that are historically problematic and that are likely to continue to be so into the future if allowed to persist. Such ideologies are bound up with histories of oppression, colonialism, and cognitive injustice in ways that seem likely to be undesirable to most practitioners upon consideration. The critique offered seeks to point out this conjunction of aesthetic and ethical issues in our practical epistemological constructs, opening out largely untried avenues of exploration with regard to our axiological habits--axiology being defined here as the inquiry that includes ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology--and the architectonic structures of meaning and understanding that we deploy with ever increasing density in the world.In the related field of semiotics, an assumption, bordering on a principle, obtains that meaning has structure and that that meaning is intelligible. The work of semiotic theorists has shown that this is not likely to be exclusively a logocentric prejudice. The works of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes partner Felix Guattari, along with those of C.S. Peirce and Justus Buchler, each postulate in their own way that meaning and its structure are continuous with the world, and, going further, that the structures of meaning that exist in the world have no intrinsic limit to their complexity in a general sense other than the availability of resources to build that complexity. This is not equivalent to saying that the forms of such complexity are unlimited in the sense that they could take all possible forms, though the number of possible form-states may be infinite in principle when the availability of resources is bracketed off as a concern. That indicates to us the likelihood that no single ideology gives us a complete picture of all possible semiotic modalities and that, with sufficient resources, multiple modalities may coexist and interact in a single system, event, or order. All of this places semiosis in a thermodynamic milieu between complex systems theory and computation theory, even while suggesting analogies to ecophenomenology and ecosystems thinking as an interpretation of Peircean "infinite semiosis."While semiotics, as an architectonic discipline, traces continuities with the Kantian paradigm, the Deleuzean approach represents a turn in philosophy both in expressive style and ways of doing philosophy, such that both a reinvestigation of semiotic structures and the production of new rhetorical modes are suggested in light of it--though Deleuze is a threshold for such matters, not a container. Making use of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Luciano Floridi, and François Laruelle to construct an ordinal semiotic compatible with various structural realisms, the arguments here commit to a pataphysical and hermetic swerve that aligns with the "Dark Deleuzean" aesthetics of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, exploring the metaphor of darkness itself by way of the immanence theories of Timothy Morton and Eugene Thacker. The argument pattern described can be seen as an affirmation of possibly novel values of global, transspecies cognitive justice and "cognitive veganism" at least partially consistent with the ethical concerns and images of thought of such thinkers as Richard Kahn and Stephen David Ross. Due to the emphasis on continuity with the world, the above motivates us to take seriously various posthumanistic rhetorics' priorities: cybernetics, informatics, thermodynamics, complex and autopoietic systems, codality, cognitive and neuro-diversity, enhanced and artificial intelligence, postvitalist ecology, and perhaps even Singularity. Because of that same continuity, each of these should be necessarily thought in relation to planetarity and global history. Through that thought we can understand semiotic processes and ecologies as bound up with what Land has called a "terraprocess." Information Studies, as a discipline emerging into full fruition within the context of a posthumanistic moment, situated in turn within the Anthropocene Era, should understand and engage with this terraprocess as the architectonic syntax for a more fundamental informatic and metainformatic axiology