Emergence and ontogenetics: Towards a communication without agent

Abstract

In the scientific community, discussions about emergence are motivated by a need to understand the process by which complex systems exhibit novel characteristics that cannot be reduced to those of their parts. The whole is thus said to be greater than the sum of the parts. We borrow from this framework in order to explore a different understanding of communication. Instead of seeing the whole as the result of a communication process between the parts, we take a step back and propose to understand communication as the process through which both parts and whole emerge. This perspective opens the possibility to think of a communication that is not the result of an exchange between pre-existing individual agents, but the very process by which individuals emerge in the first place. From the perspective of social sciences in general, and of communication studies in particular, this theoretical experimentation points towards a model that is not subordinated to the traditional opposition between parts and wholes, individuals and collectives.

Possibilities of artificial intelligence in assessing the impact of potentially dangerous texts in modern news discourse: problem of statement

“…This variety of information is usually contradictory, where there is not only a standard text structure represented as a linear sequence of letters, but also a hypertext structure with the necessary hyperlinks. All this makes it necessary to analyze a large array of documents, which it would be advisable to analyze using AI methods [35,36]. At the same time, the creation of a program to ensure the safety of the human psyche in the face of information pressure will serve as the basis for ensuring the health of the country and human civilization as a whole.…”

Posthuman Media Studies

“…Such an approach would offer a significant alternative to the widely studied cybernetic model for communication. This shift has been suggested by Iliadis (2013) and expanded using the concept of emergence by Choukah and Theophanidis (2016). Such methods would open up the study of communication beyond the realm of the human, though it would certainly not exclude the continued study of human communication.…”

Instrumental dialogue and the ethics of expressing solicitude for each other’s existence

“…Viewing dialogue as instrumental and oriented towards solicitude also reconnects it with theorizing on agency and authority. Studies on agency have shown that it does not stem from a single individual; it is "without agents" (Bencherki, Brummans, and Vézy 2020;Choukah and Theophanidis 2016). Instead, it should be understood as a "chain of agency," where individuals can present their actions as motivated or constrained by a prior link.…”