Knowledge is handling, and Kantian transcendental conditions are actual experimental setups and theoretical models.  The Archimedean analogy not only describes the physicist’s research work itself, but also the physicist’s theoretical structures—handles being degrees of freedom, probing modeling our interaction with Nature, and tools often being physical models and mathematics as well as experimental equipment.[5]

But if doing physics is a haptic activity where the practices of the community correspond to the interacting components of the theory that they collectively fashion, then perhaps it would be more appropriate to analogize contemporary physical theories not to the relatively outmoded modernist, industrial trope of the factory, but to a more contemporary economic organization.  After all, to risk stating the obvious, even the quantum theorists of the early half of the twentieth century, although part of a culture organized around industrial production, did not practice physics in factories, but in research universities and laboratories.

            I would argue that research universities, as the principle hosts for the practice of theoretical high energy physics, ought to serve as the conceptual metaphor that generates contemporary cosmologies, in particular that of string theory.  In his work The Information Age: The Rise of the Network Society, Manual Castells articulates the fundamental transformation that has occurred in the transition from an industrial economy to an informational one.[6]  Unlike a principally industrial economy, where cheap inputs of energy and raw materials lead directly to the mass production and distribution of affordable consumer goods, in an informational economy, ‘the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing, and symbol communication’.[7]  Cheap inputs of energy give way to cheap inputs of information that are, in turn, invested back into the production cycle for the generation of yet more information.  Castells defines ‘informationalism’ as ‘a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power, because of new technology conditions emerging in the historical period’.[8]  He sees the decisive historical period for the emergence of the informational economy as the 1980s, when deregulation and liberalization allowed for the reorganization of the telecommunications industry, in particular, the divestiture of ATT in 1984.  Castells argues that ‘the availability of new telecommunication networks and information systems prepared the ground for the global integration of financial markets and the segmented articulation of production and trade throughout the world.’[9]  One could trace the roots of the telecommunications reorganization during the mid-1980s, along with the emergence of information systems as an integral part of economic production, back to the post-war economic boom.  Even though the American economy, the dominant Western economy, at the time concerned itself primarily with industrial production as defined above, federal policies designed to foster knowledge-production through basic and applied research at the growing universities, as well as techno-military supremacy over the Soviet Union, led ultimately to the establishment of ARPANet in 1969 at several major U.S. university campuses.  ARPANet spread slowly over the next two decades until it exploded in the early 1990s into the Internet, that quintessential embodiment of the information economy that we have increasingly come to depend upon in the twenty-first century as it gets further integrated with almost every aspect of the world economy.  Originally designed as a decentralized, nodal network for distributed computing, the first users of the Internet, scientists at those first few top level research universities, quickly enhanced the Internet’s operating system to accommodate inter-nodal communication, most notably email, but, of course, later for newsgroups, Gopher, and eventually the World Wide Web.

            It would seem that the most appropriate conceptual metaphor to employ then, to draw the analogy between contemporary social practice within the string theory community and its concomitant cosmology, would not be the factory, nor even the university, as a brick-and-mortar localized institution, but the network, and in particular, what Castells calls the enterprise network and argues is, for the first time in history, the ‘basic unit of economic organization’ (as opposed to the individual, i.e. the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial family, or the collective, whether the capitalist class, the corporation, or the state).[10]  Castells defines the enterprise network as ‘that specific form of enterprise whose system of means is constituted by the intersection of segments of autonomous systems of goals’.[11]  Enterprise networks cut across cultural, disciplinary, institutional, and geographic boundaries to form an autonomous and cohesive ipseity; they are autotelic and directed towards self-defined goals.  As we have seen, the theoretical high energy physics community possess just these features: it functions nodally (practitioners working alone or in small groups) across institutional and national boundaries; it is autotelic and goal-oriented, or in the vocabulary of the community, oriented towards the solving of ‘problems’; by cloaking itself in an objective epistemology, as well as through its nearly universal social codes and norms, it attempts to transcend culture and inhabit an ahistorical, ‘supranational and supracultural’[12] virtual space of practice.  Castells goes on to describe the selective porosity of enterprise networks:

[C]ooperation and networking offer the only possibility to share costs, and risks, as well as to keep up with constantly renewed information.  Yet networks also act as gatekeepers.  Inside the networks, new possibilities are relentlessly created.  Outside the networks, survival is increasingly difficult.[13]

Earlier in the chapter we explored the principles governing the opening and closing of the string theory community’s peripheries; Castells formulation of the network as both gate and gatekeeper would seem to reinforce this notion.

The other defining feature of an enterprise network, and networks in general, is that, by organizing themselves across and through the other networks that constitute the total ‘world’ system, they are best described, not in terms of the interaction of rigid Newtonian bodies (analogous to an early industrial economy’s division of labor), nor the field/particle ambiguities and flat spacetime of quantum theory (analogous to cheap inputs of energy that generate the class-leveling proliferation of mass produced goods), but through the topologies of a smoothly curving fabric of interlaced, generic, and ontologically adaptable entities.  This is precisely what a string theory cosmology would seem to engender.  And as in string theory, within the network society, force—extrapolated to causation—is expressed in terms of the transformations of the topological contours of these multidimensional spaces.  Interaction becomes information exchange.

Lastly, and perhaps most notably, enterprise networks, in a feedback loop, constitute and are constituted by flows of information.  Castells argues that although enterprise networks are not pervasive in the informational economy—networks exclude as much as they incorporate—they do serve as its dominant process, its core organizing dynamic.  Accordingly, the information society as a whole, taking its cue from its core enterprise networks, ‘is constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds, and symbols’[14].  Taken in aggregate, Castells calls this interlaced network structure a ‘space of flows’, which he defines as ‘the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows’.[15]  Castells also recognizes that this space of flows is not without its ambivalences:

The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes.  Unless cultural and physical bridges are deliberately built between these two forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of a social hyperspace. [his italics][16]

There would seem to be another uncanny parallel between string theory cosmology and Castells’ formulation of the space of flows—its ahistoricity.  As discussed earlier, a fully relativized spacetime where time constitutes a cosmo-eschatological totality would emerge out of string theory in its ultimate, fully-realized M-theory or F-theory form, rather than spacetime having to be inserted into the cosmology as an assumed flat background.  In its current incomplete formulation, string theory cosmology still features both an excess of degrees of freedom and a paucity of inevitability, which, in this context, would manifest as clearly articulated symmetry connections that allow the particle groups in string theory to better correspond to observed data.  These symmetry connections are analogous here to the bridges mentioned above that connect the ‘parallel universes’ of isolated spaces incapable of sharing ‘cultural codes’ to a process akin to overwriting by the space of flows.  Ahistorical, universal codes replace local, historically specific ones.  As we have seen, though, this process of acculturation is something that the participants, as the nodes of the string theory, in certain respects, actively embrace in their efforts to belong.

            Interestingly, Castells in his discussion of the space of flows, evokes the concepts of ‘parallel universes’, ‘warped dimensions’, and ‘hyperspace’, terms he surely appropriated from Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, a work Castells mentions earlier in his text and that he subsequently includes in the bibliography.[17]  This evocation of string theory concepts illustrates the complex circularity of these intertextual feedback loops.  Castells employs the conceptual metaphor of a multidimensional ‘social’ hyperspace to describe a tangible social phenomena, the network enterprise and its space of flows that, in turn, the string theory community, through its particular social organization, projects out into the world as a cosmology.  Social practice generates cosmology which in term generates social practice.  A critic of these kinds of textual practices (such as Sokal) would perhaps complain that such appropriations poach technically precise and context specific terms and arbitrarily inject them into irrelevant and misleading contexts.  And this may be the case here.  But as far as the Durkheim’s feedback loop goes, the complaint would seem beside the point.  Who could categorically deny that string theorists, in their formulation of extra dimensions, did not, in fact, borrow that conceptual metaphor from an earlier exposure to it through popular culture?

            Another point: earlier I described the practice of string theory as operating within a virtual space, largely predicated on the formalism of pure mathematics and also largely divorced from the demands of experimental evidence.  As the Internet has grown to become more dominant in its role as medium of communication over the past decade for enterprise networks in general, and specifically the string theory community (recall the Merz and Knorr Cetina ethnography’s observation that theorists, when dislocated, communicate principally through email), this centrality of the Internet, as the supporting architecture of this virtual space, has come to reinforce the virtual space of the practitioner’s theorizing.  The informational space of flows of the community as a whole inform the multidimensional informational spaces of the networks of communication the theorists utilize in doing their work which, in turn, inform the multidimensional informational spaces of the theory itself.  In keeping with the circularity of feedback loops, the reverse would also be the case.[18]  In quantum theory, the key conceptual currency is energy, perpetually recycled and conserved[19]; in string theory, it is information.

Comments (3)

M.R.: ... Its deja vu all over again--albeit with much more, pomo-post-deconstructionist-like jargon.... Remember Chaos Theory, with every other person writing or speaking in Systems Theory or Complexity Theory terminology, desperately seeking a functional analog/model to 'layer over' social, economic, and/or intellectual activity, and thereby validate the theory by validating its applicability to (nearly) everything else? In fact, terms like 'network', 'feedback', and even 'nodal' refer to dynamic systems and the emergent phenomena and complex interactions and that arise from them; they are still more fitting for Chaos and Complexity 'analogizing' than String Theory. ST is, as noted, an incomplete theory ('of everything', thus the ultimate social analog conceptuology, potentially) with many 'irrational' components to it (such as Kalabi-Yau symmetry equations)... Further, superstrings are (as defined) irreducible, vibrating 'somethings' ('strings are made of string'), and seem to indicate (perhaps) some other analog application (a multi-dimensional one)...whereas, 'information', though it certainly reccommends itself to 'flow' descriptions (in its transferance), in its theoretical basis, IT involves discrete, individual transformations (into binary code, for example) that are continuous, but entirley dependent upon context for any meaningful assessment--and certainly not indicative of a fundamental level of order; (digital) information is 'second order'. I feel/sense a conceptual disconnect in this modeling exercise. I guess I will have to re-read the entire, multi-part, blog posting to grok the basic justification for using String Theory as an analog model for social-economic activity in an Information Age. M.R. 1 December 03, 2006 Sean M.: ... Thanks for the astute comments, M.R. I would add that perhaps one cannot so easily label the theme of this essay 'po-mo'. I'm not suggesting that an analogy between string theory and information theory is anything more than an analogy. I'm also not suggesting that string theory is purely a social construct. What I am arguning here is that, in their struggles to come to terms with the difficulties of modeling string theory--with incorporating, so to speak, the 'information' empirically manifest in both quantum theory and general relativity--string theorists have a tendency to craft the theory from more human scales--using discursive lexicons borrowed perhaps from other culturally influential domains. In effect, string theory, as a tool to model fundamental interactions at the Planck scale, because it is fashioned by human minds, necessarily has human thumbprints on it--informationalism. That doesn't make it any less mathematically rigorous, nor does it address the issue of whether or not the tool is or will some day be effective in making causal interventions into an 'objective' universe. It only demonstrates that string theory is indeed crafted in part by human imaginations, not simply 'discovered' out there in nature. 2 December 05, 2006 po wow: ... wow gold pas cher po wow World of Warcraft Gold. 3 August 04, 2010

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