Epilogue: Interpreting Information

2025

Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives.

I have contributed a series of diagrams that take up the general problem of information across domains in order to elaborate upon the unspecified ‘info’ from the original ‘Informatics of Domination’ Chart catalyzing the contributions in the volume. Information, as such, remains a challenging concept taking on different signification in mathematics, biology, hermeneutics, as well as computation. The first diagram portrays a fork that occurs with regards to discursively interpreting what information is, despite sharing an identical formalized, mathematical basis. Following an interpretation wherein information skews towards novelty, rather than predictability, its binary opposition to noise is unsettled in a logical move that expands an understanding of computation beyond a strictly digital form. In the second diagram spread, information as dependent upon a ‘cut’ in the Real, that is as dependent on the filter of an organismic model, is elaborated biosemiotically and socio-historically, pointing to the correlation between organismic sensitivity and environmental sensory over-abundance (in the case of humans, normative conditioning in the evaluation of information). The third diagram looks at the blurring of distinctions between data signs and natural signs in a planetary epoch, wherein the human is re-embedded as a ‘figure’ sutured to a ‘ground’. The final chart provides a schema as to the representational choice of such a format, compared to a diagram, in the dissemination of information comparisons.

Patricia Reed, "Epilogue: Interpreting Information", in Informatics of Domination, eds. Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee, (Durham: Duke University Press), 2025. Link