Transduction

The Very Large Array, New Mexico

Signifiers and signifieds, meet your mysterious twin brother, the transduced...

The era of the linguistic turn thought of information models such as signifiers and signified (structuralism). These were subject to various different kinds of analysis, such as deconstruction, which argues that there is no genuine signified, just an infinitely deferred chain of signifiers. When it makes this observation, what deconstruction is pointing to, obliquely, is the presence of a withdrawn object (1+n objects, precisely), outside the signifying system. Like the letters on this page don't care about the pixels they're made of, but without them...

The era of OOO, by contrast, will deal in the following couple: transducer and transduced.

A transducer converts one kind of energy into another kind of energy. In other words, a transducer is an object that mediates between one object and another. In still other words, a transducer is an essential component of vicarious causation.

An electromagnetic wave propagates through space. An antenna focuses the wave and converts it into electrical signals.


Electrons flow through a wire. A fluorescent bulb converts their energy into light (Dan Flavin, one of my favorites).







The piezoelectric effect transduces mechanical pressure into high voltage electrical energy, a jet of electrons. This jet of information is amplified further by butane, resulting in a flame.

A record needle (magnetic cartridge) converts mechanical vibrations from vinyl into an electrical signal. A loudspeaker converts this electrical signal into sound waves.

In short, transduction is the logistics of vicarious causation. In each case, input into the transducer is treated as information, which gives the energy in the transducer a specific form.

The transduction energy then acts as a carrier wave for this information.

(On this view, “clunk causality” (mechanical causation) is a small region of the configuration space of transductions. Mechanical energy in one system is converted into mechanical energy in another, thus giving rise to the illusion for mechanical-scale objects (such as humans) that causality is only mechanical and that information is only ideal, not physical.)

(Also, on this view, perception is just a small region of transduction space. Hearing, for example, depends on pressure cells in the cochlea. FYI these are the only plant cells in the mammal body...)

Thus in any causal event we have two series, depending on whether we are thinking from the point of view of the transducer or that of the transduced:

From the point of view of the transducer, incoming energy is information. This is in line with the notion that the causal dimension is aesthetic. Information is the aesthetic form given to the carrier wave supplied by the transducer. Reality looks like this:

information >>> carrier wave >>> information >>>

From the point of view of the transduced, the transducer is irrelevant (nonsensual, withdrawn). This is in line with the reality of real objects. Reality doesn’t “look like” anything.

Thus we have a nice asymmetry, an OOO asymmetry. It matters not one whit to the transduced whether it is picked up or amplified or whatever by an aerial or a microphone or a piezoelectric crystal. The electromagnetic waves go on propagating around the aerial, despite it. The aerial might as well not be there.

Sign theories such as structuralism only deal with the point of view of transducers. To a transducer, everything looks like information. Rather than ignoring it or regressing from it (by substituting some form of new material for instance, such as a flow), OOO encapsulates linguistic turn theory in a wider configuration space that includes the physical.