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The following article has been reprinted from Journal of Hydraulic Research, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 581–600,
withpermission from the copyright holders, IAHR International Association for Hydro-Environment
Engineering and Research.
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The fourth generation of numerical modelling in hydraulics
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The following article has been reprinted from Journal of Hydroinformatics, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 03–19,
with permission from the copyright holders, IWA Publishing.
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189
Introducing hydroinformatics
Introducing Hydroinformatics
Michael B. Abbott
Michael B. Abbott
International Institute for Infrastructural,
Hydraulic and Environmental
Engineering—IHE, Westvest 7, 2601 DADelft,
The Netherlands
E-mail: mba@ihe.nl
ABSTRACT
Hydroinformatics is the name of a new way of applying knowledge as this knowledge is utilised in
the worlds of the waters. This new way of applying knowledge, which is developing generally within
our present-day societies, is concerned with ways to access and employ electronically encapsulated
information, which itself becomes knowledge just to the extent that it is genuinely accessed and
authentically employed. The knowledge of how to apply knowledge in the new way is thus itself
a certain kind of ‘metaknowledge’.
Key words |hydroinformatics, knowledge application, information, metaknowledge
INTRODUCTION
This first issue of the Journal of Hydroinformatics marks a
new and important step in the progress of this subject. It
marks the point where hydroinformatics becomes
accepted as a viable discipline in its own right, where it
comes to presence in a more connected and homogeneous
way, and where it attains to a certain permanence of form.
It announces the fact that hydroinformatics has arrived,
that it is already standing right here, and that it has come
to stay.
Hydroinformatics carries into the world of the waters,
the hydro of its name, all the developments in information,
including communication, technologies that our present-
day societies provide, thereby giving it the information of
its name. We here take the word ‘information’ in the
common colloquial sense of ‘that which has the capacity
to impart knowledge’, rather than in the narrower but
more strictly scientific sense in which it is used in classical
information theory. From the point of view of the societies
in which these developments occur, information and com-
munication technologies are only the means to realise
what is essentially a social transformation, namely one
in which knowledge becomes a kind of product, to be
produced, configured, brokered, marketed, transmitted,
further transformed and ultimately consumed in new
ways. It is then usual nowadays to associate this change
with a transition from a modern to a postmodern condition
within the societies so affected. In studies of postmodern-
ism, these new ways in which knowledge comes to func-
tion are often associated through one common factor,
namely a change from an emphasis upon knowing to an
emphasis upon the consumption of knowledge. Thus, for
Appignanesi & Garrett (1995, p. 107; see, more originally,
Baudrillard 1963; Lyotard 1979//1992):
The irreversible change from knower to consumer of
knowledge is the cornerstone of postmodernity. This is the real
historic change which legitimises postmodernism.
This general tendency within societies that enter into the
postmodern condition then leads to the formation of a
new way of employing knowledge, which in turn necessi-
tates a new kind of knowledge, which is a knowledge of
how to access, absorb and apply an electronically encap-
sulated knowledge, ubiquitously called information,
which itself truly becomes knowledge precisely to the
extent that is genuinely accessed, authentically absorbed
and properly applied. This new kind of knowledge is
therefore a certain kind of ‘metaknowledge’. Thus, within
the postmodern context, hydroinformatics is the name of
this new kind of knowledge as it is applied to the worlds
of the waters.
In the case of hydroinformatics, this general post-
modern condition first made its appearance during the
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190 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
development of the fourth generation of modelling tools in
the mid-1980s. These were numerical simulation packages
that could be set up and run by persons who, although
competent in fields to which the solutions were applied,
had little knowledge of the way in which these functioned
at the level of their numerics, their graphics, their other
codings, and indeed all else of this technical-enabling
kind. Every aspect of the operation of these tools – their
input of site-specific data, their appropriate instantiation
with this data for a wide variety of map projections, their
calibration, their operation and the forms of their output –
were automated. A division then already arose between
the producers of the resulting ‘packages’, who thereby
encapsulated their knowledge of the numerics and the
control codes that realised the automation process, and
the users of these packages, who made use of this encap-
sulated knowledge without needing to possess such
knowledge personally (Abbott 1993). We accordingly
nowadays commonly make a distinction between ‘tool
makers’ and ‘tool users’ within this field. Naturally, a good
tool-making organisation is simultaneously one that is a
user of its own productions, but the number of the end
users of the tools and the variety of their applications
usually causes the tools to be applied over a much wider
range of applications than are normally available to any
one individual tool maker-user. For this reason, institu-
tional arrangements have to be set up to link users of any
specific tool to the makers of that tool, usually generalised
over classes of tools. This introduces a new kind of social
entity which links together local and regional user groups,
local-language-service and other (regional) knowledge
centres to an on-line service centre at the premises of the
tool maker that is linked further to all relevant in-house
specialists and their facilities. The on-line service centre
may itself be constituted as a multilingual centre using
standard commercial Computer Integrated Telephony
(CIT) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
systems. We observe correspondingly that even this first
stage introduces new institutional arrangements, so that it
already exhibits a sociotechnical dimension.
The first and most immediate consequence of the
introduction of such fourth-generation simulation model-
ling tools and their social-institutional infrastructure has
been that the number of organisations and individuals
making use of the highest level and most comprehensive
range of knowledge in hydraulics and water resources
has increased by about an order of magnitude every five
years. This development is shown as a graph in Figure 1,
which also projects this development further forward in
time on the basis of expectations that will be introduced
presently.
Alongside the elaboration of fourth-generation mod-
elling tools, we may identify the following developments
that have evolved directly within this first stage of the
hydroinformatics paradigm:
•The assimilation of measured data into numerical
models to provide fast and reliable data-assimilation
capabilities.
•The analysis, design, installation and operation
of combined measuring and numerical-modelling
facilities.
•The further integration of such facilities with
geographical information systems, and thus with
a wider range of social/infrastructural services.
•The introduction of flood- and other early-warning
systems.
•The introduction of real-time flood-management
systems.
Figure 1 |Historical and predicted growths in the numbers of consumers of high-level
knowledge in hydraulics, hydrology and water resources.
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191
Introducing hydroinformatics
•The construction and operation of real-time control
systems, especially for urban drainage networks and
wastewater treatment facilities.
•Several enhancements to existing products and
services, such as the on-line control of marine
operations.
In order to realise these developments, several enabling
technologies have been adopted and adapted, such as
those of artificial neural networks (ANNs), genetic algor-
ithms (GAs) and a host of enabling tools, environments
and internet development technologies such as ActiveX,
Java and CGI. Throughout this development we observe
an increasing use of knowledge not only by persons who
do not possess the knowledge itself, but increasingly by
artefacts for which knowledge, as such, can have no
meaning.
We further observe that, in almost all of these devel-
opments, persons and tools appear in close interaction,
thus providing the material overlaps of sociotechnical
studies (see, for example, Law 1986,1991). Further to this
again, most applications involve combinations of interact-
ing persons and tools, and so interacting combinations of
material overlaps.
THE TWO MAIN LINES OF CURRENT
DEVELOPMENTS
Against the backdrop of the above developments, we
currently discern two main lines of advance within
hydroinformatics. The first of these is that of data mining
for knowledge discovery, which promises to revolutionise
the way in which knowledge is produced, represented and
applied. Data-mining-for-knowledge-discovery environ-
ments are composed of combinations of persons and tools
with strong material overlaps that transforms raw data
into representations of knowledge that are accessible to
the end-users or consumers of this knowledge. The second
main line of development is often nowadays fitted under
the one rubric of knowledge management. As we use the
term here, this covers all the ways in which given bodies of
knowledge are prepared for consumption so as to be easily
distributed and turned to various uses within society. It is
also concerned with the effects of changes in knowledge
relations within societies upon power relations within
these societies, and vice versa. Knowledge management in
this more general sense is nowadays particularly directed
to the distribution of knowledge as information over
electronic networks, such as the Internet, and the corre-
sponding social networks that then come into being.
The first of these two lines of development, that of
data mining for knowledge discovery, has one singular
advantage for the purposes of this introduction. This is
that, as it is currently pursued, it is almost entirely tech-
nical, with few if any immediate social implications. The
social aspects do not disappear, of course, but their con-
sideration can usually be suspended, to be taken up later
in applications, such as at the level of knowledge manage-
ment. It is essentially this feature that makes this line of
developments so much more congenial and correspond-
ingly more readily acceptable to engineers and other
professionals.
Reinforcing this tendency to professional acceptance
again is the perception that data mining may provide a
certain correction to many of the misuses and abuses of
fourth-generation modelling tools, and especially to the
practice of ‘mindless calibration’ of models from measure-
ment that has unfortunately characterised so many of the
applications of these tools. All too many examples exist
where the calibration procedures have been used to cover
over and mask gross misrepresentations of the physical
realities of a modelled situation, so that the resulting
model, although apparently ‘well calibrated’ is of little or
no use for predictive purposes. In view of the now wide-
spread use of simulation modelling tools and the fre-
quency of their misuse, this corrective or at least palliative
role of data mining finds a sympathetic reception in many
places, thus making it acceptable already within present-
day engineering practice. The real significance of data
mining passes way beyond such immediately pragmatic
aspects, however. Indeed, the question concerning the
essential significance of data mining is critical in hydro-
informatics.
‘Questioning’, observed Heidegger, ‘is the piety of
thought’, so that in fact every such fundamental develop-
ment in technology as this necessarily starts with a
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192 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
searching question. In the present case this question con-
cerns the way in which knowledge is produced and the
means used to represent it relative to a particular kind of
consumer. Within the modernist paradigm, now already
fast receding behind us, it was the ‘knower’ who postu-
lated and formulated ‘the laws of nature’, as a kind of
reflection of the world of nature experienced within his or
her own mind. The mental reflection at a moment of time
was provided with a certain permanence through the
practices of certain ways of expression, and in the first
place through writing (Eco 1976). The modern era was
introduced and marked by one very special way of writing,
which was a quite new kind of symbolic writing. This is to
say that it was, and still is, a writing in which certain marks
ordered on a place surface – ink marks ordered on a sheet
of paper, chalk marks ordered on a blackboard, etc. –
replaced certain isolated experiences of our world of
nature for the purposes of facilitating our own, otherwise
unaided, mental operations (Abbott 1999). Each such
mark thereby constituted a token, as that which is given up
in place of a something else, and in this period the pre-
dominant tokens used in science and technology became
those that not only replaced, but effectively effaced that
which they betokened, so that they functioned as symbols.
In effect, symbols are tokens that point to themselves. We
accordingly call this period in the history of human
activity, with all its corresponding means of representing
the matters of science and technology, the symbolic era.
It reached its apogee in the setting up and playing of
language games, its mathesis, in an extension and refor-
mulation of an earlier mode of representation using the
devices of geometry (Galileo 1638; Abbott 1992; see also
again Abbott 1999). Its counterpart was a taxonomia
which, although it employed symbols extensively, had
little or no use for an algebra of the kind that was so
essential to this kind of mathesis. We situate the period of
vigorous growth of the symbolic era in the nineteenth
century, although of course its practices have continued
and proliferated much further into our own times.
When seen within a wider historical perspective, this
development can be seen as providing a certain com-
pletion of the programme of ‘Enlightenment’, increasingly
associated with a humanism in which a new kind of
subject called ‘man’ became ‘the centre of all things’
(Horkheimer & Adorno 1944/1969//1972). As such, it
was analysed and questioned critically even before the
nineteenth century by such as Locke, Hume and Kant. The
great achievements of the nineteenth century itself in
science and technology largely drowned out even these
voices of questioning, however, with only a few dissent-
ing voices making themselves heard, such as those of
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
It is really only in our own time, but then through an
apparently quite other process, through the introduction
of computer-based tools in which symbols are not
employed explicitly at all, that we arrive at a new empha-
sis upon signs, understood as tokens that point away
from themselves towards other objects, situated in the
world of nature. Since so many of these tools – finite
state automata, artificial neural networks, evolutionary
programmes, phase-space reconstruction techniques,
etc. – make little or no explicit use of symbols at all, we
commonly describe them as subsymbolic. Obviously, the
symbols still subsist at the level of the descriptions of
the ways of working of these devices and precisely for
the purposes of facilitating, and even enabling, our own
understanding, but they now already come to live a more
shadowy, secondary existence, at least one step removed
from the immediate experience of the tool-using tech-
nologist or scientist. We speak of this new period in
technology, and increasingly in science also, as the
postsymbolic era.
The essential point about the symbolic era is that it
locked its proponents into specific kinds of language
games in which the systematic manipulation of symbols
became the principal instrument for guiding human
understanding. However, one cannot employ any lan-
guage as an instrument without becoming, at least some
extent, an instrument of that language. The scientist, and
the technologist increasingly also in the symbolic era,
framed the laws of nature (in the words of Kant (1787))
after his or her own design, where this design was
expressed within the rules of symbol manipulation and in
the very first place within the rules of algebra.
The postsymbolic era in technology is then charac-
terised in the first place by a retreat from the position
that it is the ‘knowing human’ who frames the ‘laws of
nature’ after his or her own design. Instead, the person
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193
Introducing hydroinformatics
concerned, who is now more of ‘a seeker after truth’, sets
up the means for nature herself to speak of her own
designs, but then in a language which we humans can
understand. Instead of setting up as a judge presiding
over the affairs of nature, handing down judgements like
a Kantian grand inquisitor to be executed by means of
the physical interventions of humans and their machines
in nature, the technologist becomes one who mediates
between the ways of nature and those of humans. In
order to do this, he or she must necessarily use devices
that allow nature to express so far as possible her own
ways, her own interests and her own desires. And then of
course these devices that the technologist must necess-
arily use in this new mediating role are in the first place
those for mining data collected with the specific purpose
of providing insights into the own ways of nature and for
making the products of this mining comprehensible to
humans. Thus data mining for knowledge discovery is a
first and essential requirements if technologists, and
especially hydroinformaticians, are to perform this new
mediating role between the world of nature and the world
of human societies. Its precept is: Let Nature speak!
It should be clear again that those directly involved in
data mining for knowledge discovery will not normally
adduce these reasons for their activities, but will point to
much more immediate and pragmatic objectives. And
indeed it is essential that they should do this within the
Heideggerian ‘mundane and average world’ with all its
imperatives of financial viability. All ages have remarked
on this discrepancy between the reasons that practitioners
adduce for their actions and the deeper socio-historical
reasons that have been subsequently identified to justify
these actions, and indeed the adduced reasons and the
historical grounds rarely, if ever, coincide. (Consider,
for example, the observations of Tolstoy in literature, of
Keynes in economics, of Heidegger in philosophy and
of Jung in psychology.)
Every such change of paradigm naturally brings with
it a new round of misapplications of the technology and
a new crop of abuses within the social applications.
Although examples of these are instructive and are
unfortunately already plentiful enough, this does not
seem to be the appropriate place to regale the reader with
‘horror stories’ about misapplications of these tools and
technologies. The Journal of Hydroinformatics may per-
haps still publish some ‘Cautionary Tales’ in due course
and with appropriate circumspection.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
The transformation in the role of the technologist gener-
ally and the hydroinformatician in particular to that of a
mediator is necessarily associated with another transfor-
mation, but now one that is proceeding quite generally
within present-day societies regardless of whether
hydroinformatics participates or not. We have already
introduced the initial stage of this transformation as a
transformation in the role of technologists, and increas-
ingly of scientists also, from ‘knowers’ to ‘consumers of
knowledge’. Now, however, we have to extend the range
of persons involved in this process to include those who,
although consumers of technology and scientific knowl-
edge, are themselves neither technologists nor scientists,
or at least they are not persons who are normally working
professionally in the areas of concern here. We could then
try to introduce this process as one of a democratisation of
knowledge, but, as we shall shortly see, this is not entirely
satisfactory, and from several points of view.
On the other hand, like so many half-truths, it does
make for a nice slogan!
In the period that proceeds that which we are advanc-
ing as a ‘hydroinformatics era’, decisions influencing rela-
tions between the worlds of the waters, as the common
property of nature and of human societies inseparably, as
the ‘Goods of the Earth’ of Thomas d’Aquinas, are made
by only a relatively few persons, who are described
correspondingly as ‘decision makers’. In one or another
instance of last resort in democratic societies, these
persons are elected, although in practice their decision-
making powers are devolved upon other, appointed,
unelected persons who are deemed to be ‘experts’. These
‘experts’ are or are supposed to be ‘knowers’ in the orig-
inal, modernist, sense. The aims of tools and tool users are
still widely seen as those of helping the ‘experts’ to draw
up proposals for human interventions in the world of
nature that the ‘decision makers’ will subsequently imple-
ment or cause to be implemented. Even at the present
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194 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
stage of development, however, the ‘decision makers’ are
left with very little room to make their own ‘decisions’,
being constrained on the one side by the representations
of their ‘experts’ and on the other side by the expectations
of their constituents. Indeed they are often little more than
ciphers in the real decision-making process. Moreover,
even the part of the ‘experts’ in this paradigm is being
increasingly subverted in practice by the first wave of
hydroinformatics tools as introduced earlier, for several
studies have already shown how in practice the ‘experts’
are in their turn often reduced to mere ciphers by the
productions of measuring and modelling studies, whereby
nothing much remains for these ‘experts’ to do than to
approve the consequences that flow inexorably from the
studies (e.g. Teknologiraadet 1995).
Further to this again, just as data mining might be
regarded initially as a reaction to the abuses of calibration
and other modelling procedures within an existing
social context, so the development of network-distributed
environmental impact assessment and decision-support
systems can be regarded initially as a reaction to abuses of
existing sociotechnical decision-making arrangements. It
is widely understood, even it not so widely accepted
institutionally, that a considerable part of all investments
in the water sectors of human economies has been wasted,
while the cost to the natural economy has often been
immeasurable, and is in many cases irreversible. Indeed in
some sectors, and especially in the case of irrigation
schemes, it has been argued that the losses often outweigh
the benefits; in the case of irrigation, the loss of fertile land
owing to salination, the disruption of long-established
social arrangements and the increase in water-borne dis-
eases may well have outweighed the benefits of increased
food and cash crop production. If we add to this the
damage done to the natural economy, then the conse-
quences of such interventions often appear to be very
negative indeed.
In many such cases it has been recognised by at least
some of the organisations responsible for these projects
that the primary reason for this kind of situation is the
absence of participation on the part of the local popu-
lation (World Bank 1992–98). This population is the
immediate repository of knowledge about the region itself
and of its own social arrangements, whether explicit or
implicit. If this population is to be involved, however, a
whole new raft of tools is required that will help a great
variety of persons to explicate their own positions and
elaborate their own judgements about a number of pro-
posed interventions. On this basis, they may then go on to
make counterproposals, to organise themselves in support
of specific positions and otherwise engage themselves
actively in the relevant assessment and decision-making
processes. Tools that promote the explication of positions
and on this basis facilitate the making of judgements are
called judgement engines. These tools must necessarily
draw upon facts that are presented in ways that this new
class of judgement-makers can best understand, such as
may be provided already to some degree by fourth-
generation modelling systems, measuring networks and
data assimilation systems, GIS integration and other such
facilities. Such fact-providing tools then becomes fact
engines. One attempt to provide one component of a
network distributed judgement engine is presented in this
first number of our Journal, but several other such devel-
opments are already proceeding to the reporting stage.
Such judgement engines will be complimented by other
tools designed to facilitate the processes in which con-
cerned persons organise themselves into interest groups
and interact with the processes of an increasingly elec-
tronic governance of society by applying political pressure
and proceeding to litigation and otherwise engaging in
social–institutional activity. We may observe here already
that, whereas simulation modelling systems and other fact
engines are essentially instruments of enlightenment,
judgement engines and their associated tools are essen-
tially instruments of empowerment. The purpose of judge-
ment engines and thereby their supporting fact engines in
this area is to empower interested persons as genuine
stakeholders in water resources.
Thus the notion that ‘everything can be left to the
experts’ is being subverted further again by the second
wave of the informational revolution, by the introduction
of electronic networks for transporting and distributing
knowledge, as initiated through the physical medium of
the Internet. As the theory of semiotics tells us, any a such
far-reaching technical development, working as it does at
the level of signs, must have the most profound social
consequences. The immediate result is the need for a new
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195
Introducing hydroinformatics
class of tools that can be characterised in the first place as
networked-distributed environmental-impact-assessment
and decision-support systems.
The management of the knowledge resources of per-
sons and networks of persons and of the knowledge encap-
sulated in tools and network of tools, as these persons,
tools and their respective networks interact, is, then, the
proper business of knowledge management. Knowledge
management has to do with the design of social environ-
ments and events, new business processes and organis-
ational development initiatives. It is far wider than infor-
mation management, even as it draws heavily upon the
skills and products of information management. Further to
this again, within the Anglo-Saxon business community
the term ‘knowledge management’ is usually restricted to
the knowledge resources of a particular company or other
individual organisation, while we are using it here in a
much broader sense. The same may be said also of the term
‘information management’. Similarly, the Anglo-Saxon
practice has led many organisations to institute a position
that they call a ‘Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO)’ specifi-
cally to develop the knowledge core of their business.
Some observations need to be made about the position
of papers about sociotechnical developments of this kind
within the Journal of Hydroinformatics. The first of these
is that such developments may appear as rather uninter-
esting from a traditional engineering, including software
engineering, point of view: the technology does not appear
to present anything like the same challenges as does that
of data mining for example. In point of fact, however, even
the technical challenges are still present, but they are of a
quite other kind. It is in this case very much as in philos-
ophy as described by Wittgenstein, in that the software
industry has managed to produce any number of tools and
even complete environments with little or no mutual
compatibility, so that anyone who tries to produce inte-
grated products using these tools soon gets tied up in the
most agonising knots as they try to link the elements
together. The technical difficulty is, in effect, to untie the
knots that the software industry has (unwittingly) intro-
duced. It is precisely because the knots have been tied
in such complicated ways in the first place that one is
obliged to go through such complicated motions, and even
downright contortions, to disentangle everything.
The second general point that has to be made at this
juncture is that, whereas most people will not claim to
know a great deal about such enabling technologies as
ActiveX, Java or CGI, almost all will consider themselves
fully conversant with such main-line processes as those
of gathering experience and making judgements. Accord-
ingly, although most persons will understand the need to
study the enabling technologies on the software side, they
will not necessarily see much purpose in studying, let
alone researching, the human-cognitive and social sides of
the subject. Moreover, whereas there is a fair measure of
agreement in a still quite restricted literature about the
nature of ActiveX, Java or CGI, there is an immense
spread of meanings and correspondingly an overwhelming
confusion in an (indefinitely) extended literature even
about such inference chains as are introduced elsewhere
in this issue as:
(beliefs, facts (data))→attitudes→positions→
judgements→decisions→actions. (1)
The difficulty confronting the hydroinformatician in this
area is that of making some sense out of this confusion,
and so in this case of disentangling the complicated knots
that have been tied by countless opinions over the millen-
nia. Of course, hydroinformatics does not stand alone and
unsupported in this situation, for it is as well sustained by
the immense efforts, that have been made, and also over
the millennia, to create some order out of this confusion.
By way of analogy, if we may compare the task of the
data miner with that of cutting tunnels through deep and
difficult geological strata in order to reach a vein of
valuable minerals, we may compare the task of the
hydroinformatician working in the sociotechnical area
with that of hacking a path through a dense jungle of
opinions, preconceptions and biases. And moreover, just
to complicate this situation still more, this is a jungle that,
for most of its denizens, does not even exist! Thus, that
part of hydroinformatics that often appears from the out-
side as the ‘softest’ part, and therefore by implication
the easiest part, in fact turns out to be the hardest of all.
Most people simply use the words and relations expresses
in (1) without reflection, with the self-assurance that they
understand their working without further consideration.
Heidegger expressed this situation to perfection already in
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196 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
his first major work, as follows (Heidegger 1927, pp. 168–
169//1962, pp. 212,213, see also Abbott 1991, p. 95):
‘We do not so much understand the entities that are
talked about; we already are listening to what is said-in-
the-talk as such – what is said-in-the-talk gets understood;
but what the talk is [really] about is understood
only approximately and superficially.
‘. . . What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider
circles and takes in an authoritative character. Things
are so because one says so. The average understanding . . .
will never be able to decide what has been drawn from
primordial sources with a struggle and how much is gossip. . . .
The average understanding, moreover, will not want
any such distinction and does not need it, because, of
course, it understands everything.’
The third cause of the difficulties that we have to face
here, and one that already prefigures the more conten-
tious issues that we shall introduce next, is that this
background to our sociotechnical studies can prob-
ably no longer be produced. For the most part, it can
nowadays only be studied at a distance in time. So far as
we can ascertain, our present-day societies can no longer
produce a Kritik der reinen Vernunft,aSein und Zeit, an
Erfahrung und Urteil, or even a Les mots et les choses,
any more than it can produce a Rembrandt self-portrait
or a Beethoven symphony. The societies which made
these peaks of creative activity possible have passed
irrevocably from the face of the earth, just as surely as
have the tectonic forces that created the Alps or the
Himalayas. Of course, we can now do many other things
that these societies could not. For example, these
lines are written while looking across the waters of the
Caribbean at a visiting American nuclear aircraft carrier
which concentrates the greatest mobile potential for
man-made destruction ever known. No previous society
could have produced that! The point here is that every
era presents its own challenges and provides its own
means to meet these challenges. The task of the hydro-
informatician is to meet the challenges facing nature and
humanity in the world of the waters with the means that
are placed at hand in his or her own times. And these
necessarily include the means that have been bequeathed
to us by earlier societies, even (and in fact precisely
because!) these societies have themselves passed beyond
recall.
Even as the brilliant instant of clarity of impression
and thought became diffused and suffused through the
rendering of that impression and thought in a more
permanent form, it was only through this rendering that
it could be carried into its futures, and thus into our own
times. This is particularly true of the thought expressed
in writing:
The word is the crucifixion of the thought.
THE BUSINESS DIMENSION OF
HYDROINFORMATICS
This brings us to the first of the more difficult and more
contentious issues that face our Journal and its subject
generally, which are those of the true purpose of hydro-
informatics and thus the uses to which it is properly to be
put. This issue is often presented as one of ‘ethics’, but that
can be a misleading designation within a postmodern
setting (see, for example, Bauman 1993). A better point of
reference is that of the influences of changes in knowledge
relations upon power relations, transforming in time into
the influence of changes in knowledge structures on
power structures. We then speak generally, following
Foucault (e.g. 1966//1970) about the problematics of
‘knowledge/power’. As introduced earlier, it is just to
the extent that hydroinformatics realises its programme
through the provision of knowledge to very many persons
over electronic networks, and provides also the capabili-
ties for people to express their fears, concerns and aspir-
ations over these same networks, and thence to interact
and organise themselves, that it must change power
relations within society as a whole. The sign vehicles
which the new communication technologies allow us to
employ for the transmission, processing and exchange of
knowledge lead already to changes in the nature and func-
tion of signs within these societies. Thus, just to the extent
that these signs succeed in functioning as social forces, so
they cause social changes, and then not only in power
relations: they proceed further to change power structures.
The hydroinformatician cannot possibly remain indif-
ferent to these changes, but must analyse and research
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197
Introducing hydroinformatics
them alongside his or her other analyses and researches of
the means with which they are effected. The new means
now being mobilised for hydraulic and related environ-
mental knowledge to be produced, encapsulated,
marketed, brokered, leased and purchased, distributed,
and everything else of this kind, cannot be properly
analysed and researched without a simultaneous and
closely co-ordinated analysis and research of the social
implications and repercussions of such a mobilisation.
So far, this analysis and research has led to three
main conclusions that already influence the way in
which hydroinformatics is developing in this direction.
The first of these is that hydroinformatics can best be
developed and nurtured within a commercial or business
environment. The second is that the analysis and design
of the new tools of knowledge management and empow-
erment must proceed on the basis of an investigation of
the intentions of their users within appropriate physical
and social contexts, so that they must be grounded in the
field of science that is called Phenomenology. The third,
which may appear superficially as conflicting with the
first, is that the driving forces of hydroinformatics, the
ultimate sources of its creativity, of its poieses, must also
be investigated, but this brings us into a whole subject
area of ‘motivations’ which must often appear as quite
highly irrational. Such forces as drive the quasi-religious
zeal of truly creative activity do not proceed on the basis
of rational expectations and well-informed calculations,
even though these may be employed by way of self-
justification, but they proceed from a quite other place.
We really have no alternative but to relate this place to
the Kierkegaardian ‘level of the religious’ even though
we are not then using the word ‘religious’ at all in its
conventional sense. Since these conclusions are so con-
tentious and the discussion of them is so far removed
from the normal scope of a ‘technical’ journal, some
explanation is necessary.
The relation between these theses, passing through the
essential reciprocity of the first and third, was explicated
already by Heidegger (1963//1977; see also Abbott 1991,
pp. 78–79 and Abbott 1999):
‘The flight from the world of the suprasensory is replaced by
historical progress. The otherworldly goal of everlasting bliss is
transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number.
The careful maintenance of the cult of religion is relaxed
through enthusiasm for the creating of a culture or the
spreading of civilisation. Creativity, previously the unique
property of the biblical God, becomes the distinctive mark of
human activity. Human creativity finally passes over into
business enterprise’.
The essential point concerning its business dimension is
that hydroinformatics is a creative activity, but it is cre-
ative in a new kind of ‘metaknowledge-producing’ way, at
least one part of which, roughly that of knowledge encap-
sulation and distribution, is unfamiliar to most persons
already working in hydraulics, hydrology and water
resources generally. Indeed, this new way of thinking is in
several respects quite foreign to that which is followed
within most of the established sciences and technologies,
which are still dominated by the ethos of an all-exclusive
‘knowing’. Hydroinformatics correspondingly encounters
a strong resistance in most existing organisation, which
are strongly stratified in the sociotechnical sense that it is
not so much that persons-as-such are stratified by their
education and experiences or that tools-as-such are strati-
fied, but that the material overlaps between persons and
tools employed within one stratum of the organisation
differ considerably from those employed within other
strata (Abbott 1996). Hydroinformatics is often seen
accordingly as introducing a new stratum which is
intrusive upon established ways of thinking, established
procedures and established institutional hierarchies. It
may even be perceived as something that is potentially
destabilising within an already-established organisation.
Like almost every other kind of new technology, it often
appears as an unwelcome guest, supported only on suffer-
ance, only as a way of ‘staying in business’ or of ‘keeping
up with the current fashion’. Thus, from the standpoint of
many organisations, hydroinformatics is something that
has to be carefully ‘kept in its place’, and preferably at a
place as far as possible removed within the organisation
from the point of application of the technology. The most
difficult problems of applying hydroinformatics in practice
are rarely if ever of a technical nature, but they are of a
socio-institutional nature (see, for example, Abbott &
Refsgaard 1998).
At the same time, of course, hydroinformatics has the
potential to confer immense benefits upon society, and
indeed it is already demonstrating this in many areas and
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198 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
in many ways, such as will be increasingly apparent as this
Journal progresses. The basic problem of hydroinformatics
at the level of its application is then that of changing
or bypassing or otherwise getting around the socio-
institutional roadblocks that are erected in its path.
The most immediate instrument that falls to hand for
this purpose is then that of business enterprise. Hydro-
informatics has to avoid the imposition of inappropriate
organisational arrangements, it has to overcome unin-
formed (and often uninformable!) interventions in its
activities and it has generally to escape from as many as
possible of those constraints that are already only too
familiar to practitioners in this field. Hydroinformatics has
problems enough in meeting its responsibilities to society
as a whole without having to fight strings of time- and
energy-consuming battles within its own organisations.
This it can best do by meeting the demands of the users of
its products as directly as possible, through the setting up
of new business arrangements and by practising business
enterprise generally.
Unfortunately for this process, the notion still per-
sists among many scientists and engineers that business
is only about ‘making money’. Now for some persons –
financiers, business lawyers and other such opportunists
– it may in many cases be no more than that. But for
the hydroinformatician-become-entrepreneur it is really
about something quite other again, which is autonomy.
And then not just autonomy in relation to how things are
done, but, as a consequence of an own kind of research
and development, an autonomy in relation to what
things are done. For the creative spirit, business enter-
prise is the means to sustain independence of mind and
action, such as is the most conducive to the freedom to
create in a responsible, truthful and thus pleasurable
environment. Business enterprise, and even the money
that may go with it, are only the means – even though
still the necessary means – to provide the required
creative environment.
It follows that hydroinformatics must be very much
occupied with the researching, establishing and develop-
ing of its business arrangements. This aspect of hydro-
informatics must accordingly find a place also in our new
Journal. (See, by way of an earlier example, Thompson
(1998).)
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF
HYDROINFORMATICS
In order to approach the most contentious issue of all in
this area – and so by way of a halfway house on our way to
the formulation of the purpose of hydroinformatics – we
can best proceed through the consideration of the nature
of phenomena in this subject. Our starting point is that
specific direction within philosophy that studies how
objects give place to phenomena within our minds, which
study is called Phenomenology. Thus, in philosophical
terms, phenomenology is the systematic study of our ways
of thinking about our possible worlds. As a ‘thinking about
ways of thinking’ it necessarily leads to circularities, but
these have long since been identified and the precautions
required to avoid their potentially vicious consequences
have been largely established.
The need for some kind of study of phenomenology
arises already in the design of any user interface. For
example, even the elementary processes involved in the
schematisation of, say, an urban drainage system in a
simulation package necessitates a thinking about the ways
in which the user of the package may be thinking or come
to think about the urban drainage system itself. In the
design of the user interface more generally, the designer
has to make as systematic a study as possible of the various
likely trains of thought of the various users of the package
as they apply it in various situations and with a variety of
intentions. A large part, if not all, of this process may
receive a graphical representation, such as in the form of
a directed graph as already exemplified in very general
terms in (1) above.
Of course we know of no designer of a simulation
package in hydroinformatics who has actually studied
Phenomenology as a strict science (and so with an upper-
case ‘P’) within philosophy for such purposes, although we
would undoubtedly have much better user interfaces if
these studies had been made! It is in fact still possible to
manage without such systematic studies at this level.
Clearly it becomes more difficult to manage on such an ad
hoc basis when we arrive at the design of environmental
impact assessment and decision support tools, negotiation
environments and other such facilities with more varied
and complicated human interactions, and for these
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199
Introducing hydroinformatics
purposes some study of Phenomenology is surely
desirable, and may well be necessary.
For this purpose we may draw upon the great and
irreplaceable studies in this area that were initiated in the
nineteenth century by such as Bolzano and Brentano and
which were brought to fruition by the twentieth century
school of Phenomenology that was established in the first
place by Husserl (in 1900/1901//1970). In general, these
studies become increasingly important the more that we
pass from primarily technical systems to essentially socio-
technical systems. This is because it is these studies,
more than any others, that enable us to escape from the
morass of vapid opinion that otherwise threatens to drag
down our thinking and drown us in empty speculations.
Phenomenology in this sense enables us to make much
more definitive statements about situations, events and
phenomena generally and it is for this reason that it is
commonly accepted as an ‘exact science’. For example, in
the design of knowledge management facilities it does not
require much reading of Phenomenology to understand
that any attempt to provide facilities using technical means
alone will be at best suboptimal, and more likely unsuc-
cessful. Indeed, a study of the logical requirements of a
purely technical approach, following for example Husserl,
should be sufficient to show the impracticability of such an
approach. The notion of a ‘knowledge centre’ then comes
to the fore, as a place, physical and virtual, where a variety
of humans and their constructs work, together and inter-
actively, while communicating with quite other activities
of humans and tools outside the centre, situated at one
or more ‘peripheries’ (Abbott & Jonoski 1998; Jonoski &
Abbott 1998; Thein & Abbott 1998).
In the same vein, not only is some background in
Phenomenology highly desirable in the design of such
processes as (1) as these proceed during the operation of
judgement engines, but they are essential when the opera-
tions of these engines by other persons must be made
‘transparent’ (Findley 1961). This occurs when the process
that is dual to (1):
actions→decisions→judgements→positions→attitudes
(beliefs, facts, (data)) (2)
has to be explicated with, for example, only ‘actions’ and
‘facts [data]’ as observables.
The consequence of the neglect of Phenomenology as
a strict science are currently experienced most clearly in
the failure to meet their objectives of many research and
development programmes, whether at the local, national
or international level. Even more to the point, the great
damages that these programmes have caused and continue
to cause in more general business-industrial terms, as
exemplified by the virtual elimination of the computer
hardware and basic-software industries in Europe, can all
be traced to failures at the phenomenological level of
understanding in research and development programmes.
Our Journal can scarcely avoid giving some attention to
these matters, albeit within an historical context and exer-
cising the utmost restraint and the greatest decorum in
order to avoid unnecessary pain and embarrassment.
Done is done; and, after all, in the case of most of the
research programmes ‘it was only the taxpayers’ money’,
while the distortion of competitiveness relations occa-
sioned by these programmes could have been and in some
cases was compensated by other strategies on the part of
the disadvantaged enterprises.
In the case of development programmes also, the
recognition of the social aspects on the one hand and the
neglect of the overall phenomenology of the proposed
development on the other hand, leads to situations in
which the technical and social aspects do not complement
one another at all adequately, and indeed may never
come together properly at all. Indeed, on the basis of
sociotechnical-historical studies generally we may
propose the following principle:
The more experienced and brilliant the persons on the
technical side of the project and the more experienced and
brilliant the persons on the social side of the project, the
more complete will be the failure of the project if these two
sides are not properly co-ordinated and connected
together.
As a particularly pertinent, because topical, example we
may point to the stock market valuations placed upon
several Internet companies, and specifically to search-
engine providers. It is commonly observed that the
enabling technology is really quite mundane and the
social-application side often appears confused, ill-
informed and poorly organised, but in fact it is precisely
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200 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
because of this mediocrity on both sides that it is possible
to hold the two sides together and thereby make such
financial-valuation successes of these enterprises. As
probably the most widely available reference describing
the highest level of ability on both the technical and social
sides held together by a person of exceptional sociotech-
nical experience and brilliance, we cannot do better than
refer to the semi-fictional figure of Jack Aubrey in the
18-volume series of Patrick O’Brian on the role of
naval power and intelligence in the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars of 1800–15. Indeed, the very fascination
of these works, leading to their sales of millions in several
languages, derives precisely from the pleasure they provide
from their depiction of sociotechnical excellence. They
illustrate the thesis, advanced fully in the spirit of
Heidegger’s teachings, that a fascination with technology
is a fascination with truth.
Whether and to what extent our Journal can allow
itself to comment at all critically on current programmes,
and especially on certain development-aid programmes
involving hydroinformatics components with sociotechni-
cal dimensions, is more questionable, and remains for the
moment undecided. It is a common experience that criti-
cal comments in such areas have little impact and rarely
change anything, and it is usually better to make the best
of the programmes as they stand and to proceed to other
initiatives accordingly.
THE TASK OF HYDROINFORMATICS
The two main lines of hydroinformatics, of data mining for
knowledge discovery on the one side and of knowledge
management on the other side, clearly present great differ-
ences in the kinds of difficulties that they present, in the
nature of their applications and in the manner in which
they can be employed. And yet we have again to insist that
hydroinformatics must proceed along both of these lines if
it is to realise anything like its full potential. Without a
data mining capability, the sociotechnical side will be
severely restricted in its field of applications, while with-
out a sociotechnical development data mining will be just
as surely constrained in its scope. The first and primary
task of the Journal of Hydroinformatics at the moment is
to keep these two lines of study of our subject together.
It is when we come to ask why we should do this at all,
however, that we arrive at our most significant, conten-
tious divide. What is the true purpose of hydroinfor-
matics? And, given that we can identify this purpose, what
has that to say about our procedure in any particular case?
We have already introduced the level at which the
creative drive of hydroinformatics, as of any other creative
activity, must properly derive, as the (Kierkegaardian)
‘level of the religious’ (e.g. Abbott 1991). We have again at
once to add that by this we do not refer to any social
religions or their combination or their absence, but to a
level of experience and activity that is so far removed
from normal rational behaviour that, although we do not
like to condemn it as ‘inhuman’, we can no longer strictly
predicate it as ‘human’. We must then identify it in the
strict and proper (and theological) sense of the word as
‘superhuman’, and indeed it is quite common to speak of a
‘superhuman effort’ when referring to the corresponding
exertions. This is a place where the division between the
possible and the impossible is no longer clearly discerned,
and where probability has no currency at all. This level of
experience appears to be present in all humans whether
they know it or not and whether they like it or not. Its
manifestation is faith even when this is experienced within
contexts that are apparently far removed from those
associated with social religion. And then, of course,
whatever the context, ‘faith is a miracle, otherwise it is not
faith’. It is indeed the lesson of all ages that all creation
springs from this level of internal experience. Hydro-
informatics as a technology and so as an act of creation,
as a place where, in the words of Heidegger, ‘aletheia,
truth, happens’, must be founded at this level (Abbott
1991).
The creative act may here rise to the level of a ‘passion’
in the exact, and again theological, sense. We accordingly
have to do here with all manner of behaviour which
appears to be highly irrational within the social and
specifically institutional context of the Heideggerian
‘mundane and average world’. It is driven by forces that
are usually hidden even to the individual so possessed and
which frequently lead that individual into conflict with
established mores and ethics: we then have to do here with
the (again Kierkegaardian) ‘teleological suspension of the
ethical’.
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201
Introducing hydroinformatics
Of course none of this can possibly be admitted in an
institutional context, and least of all within a conventional
business context. Thus, to take an example that is particu-
larly topical at this time of writing (Wolff 1998, p. 101):
‘You can’t say to investors: I have a problem. A big problem.
You can’t say, I need your money to feed the mouths I have to
feed. I need the money to pour down the maw. You can’t say,
Hey, what do you think is going on? There’s a fire burning like
crazy that we have to keep throwing dollar bills on.
And that was, unmistakably, what [the other CEO] was
saying. And while that was true of this business and of every
other business in the new Internet industry and while everyone
knew it was true – that is that cash was being consumed at a
rate and with an illogic that no one could explain, much less
justify – you must never, never admit it’.
Now two things must be said about this that are of vital
significance to our Journal. The first of these is that
although our Journal cannot possibly become involved in
any discussion of these matters as such, it cannot avoid
considering their influence within specific sociotechnical
projects or situations. Moreover, these apparently ‘irra-
tional’ influences may intrude not only through the indi-
vidual experience of this ‘level of the religious’ in the
creative process, but also at the social-application level
as well. For example, a negotiation platform designed to
assist in the settlement of disputes between partners who
subscribe to Judaism in the one side and to Islam on the
other side cannot fail to take account of the different kinds
of values that are placed upon land within the respective
social religions (Bany-Mustafa 1998). Similarly, the value
of water as a social-unifying force in Buddhism must be
taken into account in a decision support system in a
Buddhist community (Thein & Abbott 1998). In the same
vein, a network-distributed impact assessment system can
best use different social nodes for communicating between
its inner and its outer peripheral segments, such as schools
and microbanking institutions in some Islamic communi-
ties and monasteries in certain Buddhist communities
(Thein & Abbott 1998). The technical side then has to
adapt correspondingly.
The second matter that unavoidably presents itself
here is that any such discussions as may arise at all in this
area can themselves only be conducted within a specific
tradition. Thus not only does the mode of application of
hydroinformatics change as we pass from a community
with the one tradition to one with another tradition, and
with this the technical means that are employed also, but
our very way of writing about this must change also. We
are often moving from a place where the waters of the
world are experienced in one way to a place where they
are experienced in a very different way, and our writings as
well as our actions must reflect this difference.
Both of these aspects obviously lead to great difficul-
ties in presentation, and these are exacerbated again by
differences in languages and the uses of these languages
between traditions. Our Journal must endeavour to
overcome these difficulties within its pages.
THE TECHNOLOGIES OF PERSUASION
It will now be clear that hydroinformatics is not just
concerned with the way in which man changes his outer
world, the world which he shares directly with nature, but
it is also concerned with changing man’s inner world by
providing the means for men to persuade one another in
more equitable ways. The technologies that are used to
change the inner worlds of individuals are known collec-
tively as the technologies of persuasion (e.g. Norris 1993).
These are the traditional technologies of advertising, poli-
tics and other activities that may appear at first sight to be
far removed from the interests of hydraulicians, hydrolo-
gists and environmentalists generally – and which prob-
ably in the view of most of these professionals should be
kept at as great a distance as possible from their list of
concerns! And yet hydroinformatics is unavoidably drawn
into this area also and once again regardless of its so-far-
established inclinations.
In fact, these professional inclinations often have a
sound foundation, in that the devices that pass as the
technologies of persuasion are often morally indefensible
and even downright obnoxious because of the evident
wrong-mindedness of their applications. But we shall have
to insist, and again with Heidegger, that a technology is
defined as ‘a place where aletheia, truth, happens’ and the
technologies of persuasion, if they are truly technologies
at all, must ‘tell the truth’. ‘Being true to the technology’
automatically equates to ‘telling the truth’. That which is
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202 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
used for the purposes of misrepresentation cannot then be
an authentic technology, but only an imitation of a tech-
nology. As Karl Barth explained so convincingly (1938–
1950//1961) imitation is the hallmark of the inauthentic, of
nihilism, of ‘nothingness’ (das Nichtige,le ne´ant) as the
vehicle of the lie. The one who is true to an authentic
technology is thus the one who is automatically ‘in the
service of the truth’, and those who have no use for truth
have no use for a genuine technology.
The hydroinformatician whose drives originate ‘at the
level of the religious’ is then obliged to expose deceptions,
but even for this purpose he or she must resort to the
technologies of persuasion to expose the productions of
the psuedo technologies. We thus have to do with appli-
cations of the technologies of persuasion which have the
purpose of combating and ultimately prevailing over other
such (mis)applications. Phenomenology, however, being
an exact science, cannot meet this kind of challenge, and
indeed was never meant to do so. Although Phenomenol-
ogy pays the greatest attention to intentions and intention-
ality within its own field of study, it cannot itself be the
subject of specific intentions, and least of all to conflicting
intentions. For these purposes something quite other than
an exact science is required.
The whole purpose of hydroinformatics is to per-
suade, even if only to persuade local governments to
proceed along one path of action rather than others, or
to persuade investors to invest in one way rather than in
others, or to persuade contractors to build in one way
rather than others, and so on already indefinitely. As
hydroinformatics proceeds further into its own version of
the communication revolution, extending the range of its
influence to millions of interested citizens and empower-
ing them as genuine stakeholders in water resources, so
the nature of its persuasive activity changes also. Its task
now becomes one of, so to say, persuading people to
persuade people, rather than leaving them as helpless
spectators or, possibly even worse, as the victims of one
or the other form of duplicity or coercion. The hydro-
informatician has then to provide the means for facilitat-
ing processing of persuasion, which processes are always
multidirectional. Since persuasion can only proceed
through the agency of signs, this necessitates the
research and analysis of a range of persuasive activities
and their semiotics, and this in turn necessitates a
serious study of the technologies of persuasion on the
part of hydroinformaticians. Clearly a study of
Phenomenology is essential to this purpose, but in this
case it cannot be sufficient. It cannot serve as a moral
foundation, and it is not well suited as a conceptual
foundation either in this area.
Now it has in fact been argued, and by authors as
otherwise differing as Karl Jaspers and Emanuel Levinas,
that although Phenomenology-as-such cannot properly
serve the purposes of insinuating the lie, it does have the
capacity, when suitably extended, to serve the power of
truth and thereby to expose the lie. Experience with other
such extensions of Phenomenology, and especially the
critical analyses of the extensions proposed by Heidegger
and Sartre, do little, however, to support this argument
(Barth 1938–1950//1961).
In effect, as the 1998 Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio of
John Paul II proclaims (p. 36):
‘We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium
to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary
as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone;
even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority
and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the
spiritual core and the ground from which it arises.’
Appeals to psychology, and specifically clinical psychol-
ogy as an empirical science, or to psychiatry as a set of
technologies in its own right, appear equally unproduc-
tive, with the possible exceptions of certain parts of the
works of Carl Jung and his school, which then, however,
do not really subscribe to psychology as an empirical
science.
More potentially fertile are certain areas of literary
criticism and especially those that cover the field of pas-
toral (often rendered as ‘pastorale’ in English), understood
as the rendering of specific mental experiences with a
minimum of signifying resources (Empson 1966). By
understanding pastoral in this way, we place it within a
general theory of semiotic economy. Thus, in the case of a
graphical user interface, we may pose the problem of how
we can express a certain fact, belief, position or whatever
else of that kind, with the minimum number of pixels and
the minimum of effort on the part of any specific user or
class of users.
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203
Introducing hydroinformatics
More fundamentally, such studies teach us, among
other things, that ‘understanding’ occurs not so much in
the signs themselves but in the ‘spaces’ between the signs,
such as between two lines in a sonnet or between two
adjacent illustrations in a strip cartoon. Associated with
this feature, in the technologies of pastoral we increasingly
meet instances of trains of inference that are not logical in
any ‘standard’ sense at all – neither predicate, temporal,
deontic or whatever. Instead, we enter into trains or
strings of inference which subvert the ‘standard’ forms,
even as these subversive forms do seem to have some
kind of ‘inner logic’ that appears to defy any explanation
in ‘standard’ logical terms. We accordingly say of these
inference strings that they are paralogical. There are
any number of current examples of paralogical devices,
of which probably the most widely known are those
employed in advertisements and in sequences of advertise-
ments where again, in many cases, ‘the message is in the
spaces between the images’.
Current studies of paralogical thinking take many of
their cues and much of their vocabulary from the work
of Derrida. In her English-language edition of certain of
Derrida’s key essays, Kamuf (Derrida 1991) correspond-
ingly exhorted her readers to ‘read between the blinds’,
observing how the ordered sequences of signs through
which knowledge is necessarily transmitted simul-
taneously obstruct the transmission process itself, so that
(Kamuf, in Derrida 1991) ‘these . . . could be thought of as
slats of a venetian blind, of a jalousie which partially
obstructs the view’.
The same notions currently arise also in applications of
social value theory to knowledge management processes,
where the social value of a working group’s knowledge is
observed not to combine as a simple sum of the knowledge
of a collection of individuals and nor again only as an
additive augmentation of these with the ‘knowledge con-
tent’ of their tools, but as well and essentially in the ‘social
space’ between the individuals and their tools that come
together to form the group. In the case of commercial
organisations, this may be extended further again to
encompass the social spaces between the organisation and
its clients. These notions are essential ingredients in any
attempt to estimate the social value and thence the money
value of any organisation in ‘the knowledge industry’.
Another set of technologies, used to great effect by the
marketing organisations that nowadays run many political
campaigns is that of aporia, understood as the induction of
mutually inconsistent beliefs into individual minds and
into collectivities of minds. All of these arcane tech-
nologies have of course been rather completely trans-
formed and greatly strengthened by overall developments
in ‘the media’. The position of our Journal here is difficult,
but it would seem best to accept some work on pastoral
techniques while drawing the line at paralogical and
aporiaic devices. In support of this position we may draw
upon all traditions, which uniformly regard these devices
as potentially dangerous and therefore to be avoided. As
Jung so succinctly expressed the danger involved: ‘One
cannot possess this kind of knowledge without being
possessed by it’, and that is something that we would
not wish on anybody (including ourselves!). Clearly this
limit on the sociotechical side of hydroinformatics is
far removed from the traditional concerns and interests
of professionals in hydraulics, hydrology and water
resources; but it is one of the principal duties of our
Journal to wean these professionals over to new sources
of nourishment and inspiration. Equally clearly, our
task will not be easy. As a reviewer of a recent work on
the playwright Samuel Beckett observed, ‘In the
20th century it is axiomatic that the avant-garde is to be
misunderstood’. On the other hand, one essential part
of our purpose here is to ensure that the next century
and millennium will understand the need for such a
breadth of view and will come to embrace this range of
interests.
CONCLUSIONS
Hydroinformatics is creative, poietic; it is a place where
‘aletheia, truth, happens’. It is therefore a technology in
the full Heideggerian sense. We have now seen, however,
that it is a technology that itself draws upon, combines
and co-ordinates a considerable number and variety of
quite other technologies, and even of some sciences. The
hydroinformatician is thus every bit as much of a con-
sumer of knowledge as is everyone else in the postmodern
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204 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
condition. Hydroinformatics is thus a kind of ‘technology
of other technologies, and sciences’, and so a kind of
‘metatechnology’. We have now seen how its knowledge
content is directed on its input side towards an imbibing
and consuming of quite other forms of knowledge than
its own, and on the other, output, side to transforming,
or ‘refining’ this knowledge into very different kinds of
knowledge again: it consumes knowledge only in order
to provide this quite other kind of knowledge. For the
moment hydroinformatics does this mostly within its own
frontiers, so to speak, in that it is the hydroinformatician
who personally performs this work. However, with
the more widespread and deeper-going application of
electronic information-transmission networks, hydro-
informatics aims much more to provide the equipment for
other persons than hydroinformaticians to carry out this
task. Hydroinformatics itself thus passes from a rhetoric of
expertise to a rhetoric of persuasion, or from constative to
performative modes of functioning. This is to say that
hydroinformatics becomes directed also to providing
the means for persons who are by no means hydro-
informaticians, and who may have little or no knowledge
of most of the knowledge that the hydroinformatician
consumes, nonetheless to apply this knowledge in a
responsible and valuable way. It is here in point of fact
that the added value of hydroinformatics increasingly
accrues, both in business terms and in terms of its meeting
its human responsibilities.
It is in its role of a consumer of knowledge that this
subject becomes ‘postmodern’, coalescing into a more
general postmodern condition of society. It is essentially
from this point of view that hydroinformatics may be
regarded as a ‘postmodern technology’.
Now, of course, many things that pass for ‘post-
modern’ in our present-day societies are uncongenial to
many of us: we would much rather that such things were
not going this way, and indeed that these changes did not
occur. The fact none the less remains that most of our
current societies are moving in this direction whether we
like it or not, and certainly whether we want it or not.
Correspondingly, most of the best writing on post-
modernism is by way of reporting on what is actually
happening, and not on promoting it. This writing is
primarily constative, and not prescriptive.
It is a dominant theme in every tradition that not only
does each age present its own challenges to mankind, but
each and every age provides its own means for mankind to
meet these challenges. Hydroinformatics is placed firmly
within such a tradition. The challenges facing mankind in
its relation to the waters of the world appear to us as
unprecedented, but at the same time the means that are
made available to us, both from the past and in our own
time, are just as unprecedented also. Hydroinformatics is
all about meeting these new challenges by employing these
new means. The works on postmodernism are concerned
in the first place to present the challenges as these arise in
our present-day societies, but it is the task of practitioners
in all fields, and not least in hydroinformatics, to meet
these challenges. To the extent that we succeed, so we
change also the nature of these societies by changing the
very way that they think and behave towards the worlds
of the waters. From this point of view, not only is hydro-
informatics a postmodern technology, but it belongs to
a process of redefining the postmodern condition as a
whole.
Some concluding words should be said also about the
manner in which this Journal of Hydroinformatics should
contribute to the development not only of hydroinfor-
matics as a discipline, but to the body of hydroinforma-
ticians as a community. A primary aim of this Journal is
to promote this community; to provide a ‘home’ to those
who have a community of purpose in this area, whatever
the specific nature of their immediate interests, means
and objectives. This aim of ‘building community’ remains
as a beacon towards which we must constantly steer.
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Zuerich//1953 Psychology and Alchemy (trans. Hall, R. F. C.).
Routledge, London.
Kant, I. 1787 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, second edition/1979,
facsimile edition, Reclam, Leipzig//1929 Immanual Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Kemp Smith, N.). Blackwell,
Oxford.
Law, J. (ed.) 1986 Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology
of Knowledge. Routledge, London.
Law, J. (ed.) 1991 Sociology of Monsters; Essays on Power,
Technology and Domination. Routledge, London.
Lyotard, J.-F. 1979 La Condition Postmodern; Rapport sur le Savoir.
Minuit, Paris//1992 The Postmodern Condition; A Report on
Knowledge (trans. Bennington, G. & Massumi, B.). Manchester
University Press, UK.
Norris, C. 1993 The Truth about Postmodernism. Blackwell, Oxford.
O’Brian, P. 1970–1997 Master and Commander, through 16 other
titles to The Yellow Admiral. Harper Collins, London.
Teknologiraadet, 1995 Magt og Modeller: Om den Stigende
Anvendelse af edb Modeller I det Politiske Beslutninger
(Danish Technology Council, Power and Models; On the
Increasing Application of Computer Models in Political
Decision Making, in Danish). Teknologiraadet, Copenhagen.
Thein, K. N. N. & Abbott, M. B. 1998 Internet-based management
of water resources for a new Burma. In Hydroinformatics ’98
(ed. Babovic, V. M. & Larsen, L. C.), pp. 957–963. Balkema,
Rotterdam.
Thompson, G. 1998 Hydroinformatics: a cornerstone to information
technology in business. In Hydroinformatics ’98 (ed. Babovic,
V. M. & Larsen, L. C.), pp. 9–14. Balkema, Rotterdam.
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19 Michael B. Abbott |Introducing Hydroinformatics Journal of Hydroinformatics |01.1 |1999
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The following article has been reprinted from Proceedings of the Memorial Symposium, with permission from the
publisher and distributor, TU Graz Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management.
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209
Forchheimer and schoklitsch: a postmodern retrospection
GRAZ Forchheimer & Schoklitsch Memorial Symposium 1999
AIRH – CONGRES - IAHR
FORCHHEIMER AND SCHOKLITSCH : A POSTMODERN RETROSPECTION
Michael B. Abbott
International Institute for Infrastructural, Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering
Delft, The Netherlands
SUMMARY: This truncated archaeology of the meaning and understanding of the hydraulics of
Forchheimer and Schoklitsch is used to bring out the changes occurring in such a technology as it
passes from the modern to the postmodern condition of society.
Mais les instants d’extase, où les hasards d’une sensation présente permettent la
renaissance du passé et nous donnent le sentiment joyeux de notre permanence, sont peu
nombreux dans une vie.
André Maurois, Preface to the Pléiade Edition of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Introduction
The working lives of Philipp Forchheimer (b.1852) and Armin K. Schoklitsch (b.1888)
together covered a period of hitherto unprecedented technological development, spanning the era
between the first introduction of electrical power generation and distribution systems, through the
thereby enabled developments of telephone, radio and television systems, into the era of digital
computing machines. Among their many achievements, both made important contributions to the
design and analysis of hydroelectric power plant and both left behind methods that contributed greatly
to those first employed to apply digital machines to the solution of hydraulic problems. And then, of
course, both taught at Graz.
In the modern, or rather modernist, tradition, Forchheimer and Schoklitsch might well stand as
symbols of a particular order in technology, which we might then try to characterise as ‘modern’
technology. Their works would in that case serve to symbolise a ‘modern era’. From the point of view
which is to be adopted here, on the other hand, which is essentially postmodern — or perhaps we
should rather say postmodernist — the works of these innovators and writers must stand in another
relation to their age, serving more as signs, and thereby pointing the way towards an era, which they
thereby signify. In the first, modernist, case we should have to refer to the works for what they still
have to teach us, in order that we might come to know them better or attain to a deeper understanding
of the matters that they treat. We should then approach these works in our capacities as knowers. In
the second, postmodernist, case that is adopted here, however, we are concerned essentially with how
they encapsulated knowledge and how they induced understanding. We thus now approach these
works in our capacities as consumers of knowledge. For, as Appignanesi et al (1995, p.107) emphasise
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210 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
before all else: “The irreversible change from knower to consumer of knowledge is the cornerstone of
postmodernity. This is the real historical change which legitimises postmodernism.” Or, as the present
author has observed in another place (Abbott, 1992): “We could previously navigate our way through
the world, whether as individuals or as a profession, simply by building our models of the world;
from now on, however, we must increasingly navigate our way through a world of models. But still,
of course, navigare necesse est.”
It follows from this position that we shall have rather little to do here with what Forchheimer and
Schoklitsch actually said; our attention will be directed almost exclusively to the way in which they
said it. For this purpose a certain amount of preparation is then required, and so it is to this that we
shall first turn.
The eras of ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ technology
The world of Forchheimer and Schoklitsch is gone forever; it has passed irrevocably: it is
beyond any recall in our present-day experience. And yet many of us are in some part still of that
world: we lived it even as it happened; we can still recall its music just as we can recall a performance
of a Brahms concerto or a Mahler symphony. And yet we no longer exist, whether physically or
mentally, in that world. We exist in and experience a world that has a quite other constitution, that is
of a completely other composition. Those of us who span the space between paradigms must be
forever torn between the anguish of the present experience and the pain of past memories, with each
of these engendered and reinforced by the other. At best, we perch precariously between the
endeavour and the regret.
(Even if only by way of an aside, we should observe that there is an essential simultaneity about these
experiences. While I was reading an introduction to Java and its various programming languages, my
wife asked me the function of a strange object that she had found after our last move. It was my old
slide rule, now yellow with age. It appeared to me as the very embodiment of the abandoned order
and I rather ostentatiously placed it on top of the glossy cover of the Java compendium so as to
compose a still life in the manner of the old Dutch masters, a vanitas, sic transit gloria mundi. We
are in the one world and in an entirely other world at one and the same time, and at each and every
instant of that time.)
If we should put the first and most readily available of labels on these two coexisting and conflicting
conditions, we might say that Forchheimer and Schoklitsch lived and taught the modern experience,
as we did too, whereas we now also live and teach the postmodern experience. To live through the
first was to live the Heldenleben, the excitement and elation of shaping certain isolated forms of the
material world within a passive natural setting, while remaining ourselves in a state of spiritual
stability. To live through the second is to live an entirely other kind of experience, which we might
characterise as an uncertain search for an equilibrium between a hyperactive, complex and highly
interactive artefactual world and an often strongly reactive natural environment, a search which is
further complicated by our own closely-related states of spiritual turmoil and always threatening
instability. Those of us who span the space between these paradigms live through the twilight but still
comforting glow of the one experience and the lightening but uncertain dawn of the other, occupying
a space that, although often dark enough, is still, so to say, lit from its two extremities.
Forchheimer and Schoklitsch constructed, and we constructed after them in emulation; now we just
as necessarily also deconstruct, following paths that they would mostly not recognise – and just as
little accept even if they could recognise them. The present study is just such a deconstruction,
conducted as a search for a relation, and even a certain equilibrium, between our modern and our
postmodern situations. Since from a post-modernist point of view this is always a search for an
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equilibrium between our social and individual situations as knowers, and in this case of technologies,
and our social and individual situations as consumers of knowledge, as provided by these same
technologies, it is necessarily an equilibrium that is situated between the modern and the postmodern
conditions. But, what are we to understand in the first place by these expressions of ‘modern’ and
‘postmodern’ conditions?
The modern and the postmodern conditions
It was of the essence of modern man, and especially of later ‘enlightened’ man, that he trained
his mental, and especially his logical, faculties to control his ‘more primitive’ emotions, even at the
cost of his immediately intuitive faculties. The thereby-controlled person was that much better
equipped to take the process of control further, and principally to social entities, and then at larger
and larger social scales (e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947 // 1973). These social entities could in
their turn again take over an increasing control of the world of nature.
(We speak here exclusively of ‘man’ because, as a number of postmodernist studies have indicated,
a woman could usually only enter into this modern world by renouncing an essential part of her
womanhood, at least within the social-economic sphere.)
Postmodernist writers, on the other hand, often portray the modern condition as one of an increasingly
socially-induced amnesia and self-delusion, whereby nature can no longer satisfy the truly essential
needs of societies, societies can less and less satisfy the real needs of individuals, and the individuals,
both men and women, themselves become ever more profoundly, and ultimately depressively,
dissatisfied with themselves and with one another. The further convulsions of society as it grapples
with this situation are then portrayed from the postmodern standpoint as expressions of
hypermodernity.
To speak rather more abstractly from this point of view, modernism objectified the world: nature was
seen increasingly as just so many objects that were available for control and manipulation, ultimately
proceeding at all scales, even down to the level of the manipulation of genetic codes. Similarly, the
social organisms that realised this programme were in their turn treated as collections of objects – as
material and human ‘assets’ – that could be controlled and manipulated as required for some, usually
one-sided, ‘performative’ purpose. Finally, the very individual treated him- or herself also as a
collection of objects to be controlled and manipulated as required, and usually for some similar
‘social’ purpose. The whole world, from the totality of the creation down to the single individual,
became, in the language of Heidegger, a standing reserve (Bestand): a collection of objects that are
‘just waiting there’ to be manipulated for use, available ‘at the flick of a switch’ for serving some
further, and further-objectified, purpose. Indeed, when reduced to this level, as Heidegger has also
explicated, these things are not even objects in the strict sense any more, since they are no longer
present to consciousness, but are quite lost to view and forgotten, being entirely replaced by their
simple functionalities.
All of this, of course, has its own enthusiasms and its own ecstasies, and it even has its own aesthetics.
It has, correspondingly, its own vocabulary and associated thought world, as represented by such
words as ‘conquest’ and ‘domination’. It has just as much its own exhileration, which becomes social
and spreads downwards even to the exhileration of the mob. At this lowest and most basic level of
objectification, its aesthetic expression is perhaps epitomised by the hunting scene in the
Götterdämmerung that surrounds the killing of the demi-god Siegfried. It is this, however, which
unleashes all manner of untoward consequences, and specifically the overthrow of the old gods, as
the repositories of traditional values, and the reclaiming of the gold of nature by nature through the
flooding waters of the Rhine.
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212 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
From the particular kind of postmodernist position that is adopted here, which, as Bruno Latour in
particular has observed, has also many pre-modern precedents, one cannot even begin to function as
a human being unless one treats other persons as human beings. The ‘self-control’ now becomes that
of controlling our own traits of selfishness; the domination is now directed to overcoming our own
narrow egoistic drives. This in turn leads to our acceptance that any control that we may have over
others is inseparable from our responsibility for these others, and thus from their control over us, and
that this can best occur through our own volition. More formally, no one can become a subject, as
one who can develop an own individual character and thereby participate freely in the construction
and deconstruction of objects, unless he or she treats other persons, and indeed ultimately all other
forms of the creation, as subjects. Thus, in the words of Gabriel Marcel (1950; see Troisfontaines,
1968, Part 3, p.8): “To be a subject is not a fact or a point of departure, but a conquest and a purpose
of life.”
This particular postmodernist position (which is, however, by no means the only one of its kind!)
extends naturally through social organisations, whereby the element of human consideration and
solicitude must become ever more pronounced, if only by way of compensation, as individuals spend
more and more of their time working through artificial media. The so-called ‘caring society’ thereby
becomes also increasingly “a point of departure”, and indeed hydroinformatics, as the present-day
mode of application of hydraulics in society, is primarily concerned with providing the socio-
technical means to realise this caring process (Abbott, 1991). This caring then proceeds equally
inevitably to encompass the world of nature itself. The equilibrium that is sought by hydroinformatics
is necessarily a sustainable equilibrium that is maintained between human economies and natural
economies, both of which are water-based and therefore bound together by their sharing of the waters
of planet Earth. Thus, for Matthews and Grabs (1994, p.15):
Fresh water is the vital natural resource which supports all environmental activities, that is,
the natural economy, and all human social activities, that is, the artificial economy. Therefore
life on this planet is essentially an aquaculture living in a hydro-economy.
But, if we are ever to attain to such an equilibrium, or even advance towards it, we must question
what has prevented us so far from doing so. What is there, for example, about the hydraulics that was
established at the climax of the modern period by such as Forchheimer and Schoklitsch that allowed
us to drift so much off-course from this goal? And what is there in or about this hydraulics that may
still place us on-course again? Let us now accordingly open our first investigation of this question.
The geometrical period in technology
It has become usual since the works of Duhem (1913-1959//e.g. 1985) to start the clock of the
era of modern science on March 7, 1277, with the condemnation by Etienne Tempier at the University
of Paris of Aristotle’s theses on infinity, space and time. This condemnation allowed scientific
thinking to follow new paths, and these paths were initially traced through the use of geometry in a
new way — just as the geometrical methods were themselves used increasingly to trace the actual
paths of the heavens. From the point of view that asks how knowledge is and was recorded and
transmitted, this new realm of application of geometry is of central importance. Knowledge is always
transmitted between humans through tokens and the principal kinds of tokens are signs and symbols.
A change in paradigm, whether in science or in technology or in whatever other field of human
endeavour, is always marked by a change in the way in which signs and symbols are employed. Thus,
that which Michel Foucault (e.g., 1966//1970) has characterised as an archaeology of knowledge
always proceeds through a study of the functioning of signs and symbols in knowledge transmission
processes. From the point of view of the theory of the ways of functioning of signs, which is the
theory of semiotics (e.g., Eco, 1967) the most significant of the changes that mark paradigm shifts are
recorded by the choice of the sign vehicles that are employed. Sign vehicles are, roughly speaking,
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the physical means that are employed in order to effect the signification process. Thus the application
of existing geometrical methods in a new way marked a paradigm shift and one that can be traced in
science as well as in technology. Thus, for Addis, speaking from the technological side (1990, p.
126):
Although we may never know how the people of the time perceived what was happening, nor
why it happened, there is absolutely no doubt that something extra ordinary occurred in the
art of building design and construction in the 12th century. The nature of the ‘Gothic design
revolution’ is apparent from the buildings themselves. After several hundred years of gradual
development since the end of the Roman empire, the design of large buildings took a sudden
and sharp change of direction.
Addis’s studies leave no doubt about the impetus for this design revolution: the translation of Euclid’s
Elements in 1120, just seven years before the construction of the trend-setting basilica of St. Denis
was begun. For want of a better name, the Abbot of St. Denis called this ‘new look’ an opus
modernum, and this was subsequently called Gothic as something synonymous with ‘barbaric’, and
thereby intended originally as a term of abuse. Addis explained:
Geometry had, of course, survived as a practical art throughout the Middle Ages, but the
appearance of Euclid did improve the level of geometrical knowledge that could be learnt.
Improved geometry facilitated the more accurate ‘description’ of proposed building designs
and was of great practical use in the construction process, in setting out the building and
enabling the finished parts and their relative dispositions to be checked within better
tolerances. Such an improvement alone would have enabled builders to contemplated larger
and taller buildings.
However, it was in its capacity to provide ‘justifications’ of designs that geometry probably
had the more profound effect. Euclid introduced a crucial new ingredient — the notion of the
geometrical proof. ….. Just as occurred 600 years later, philosophers put the new theoretical
tool to use in every conceivable way and created, quite literally, a new type of geometry —
‘geometria theorica’.
This influence of the theoretical proof upon the practical analysis, design and construction processes
was in fact emphasised already by Victor (1979, p.53: see Addis, 1990):
The use of theoretical methods in practical geometry seems to have increased between the
twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. At first their role was ancillary to the purposes of
practical geometry. Once proofs had found a place in practical geometry, their role increased
and changed. Theoretical proof became the goal even of practical geometry.
Thereby, as Addis observed (loc. cit., p. 132), “simultaneously not only was a new type of architecture
born, but also a new world view.”
For our own part we may add that, just as the great Gothic cathedrals symbolised in their own time
the new power of the Roman church, whereby salvation itself could proceed only through the
intercession of the Church, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, so for us they may now serve to symbolise a
change in the means of expression the sign vehicles that became available to justify and to
realise their construction. We observe that this birth of a new paradigm in technology predated the
pronouncements of Etienne Tempier by some 150 years, so that we may well suppose — as Duhem
also suggests — that these were ‘pronouncements after the fact’ with the usual academic lag time. In
any event it can be established that a new paradigm was initiated in technology a considerable time
before the announcement of the beginning of the era of modern science.
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214 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
We should now observe however that the geometrical construction persisted through the entire
intervening period into the works of Forchheimer (1931, e.g. pp. 417, 452, 455,) and Schoklitsch
(e.g., 1923), albeit augmented and combined with another kind of sign vehicle, namely that of the
curve of a graph. Figures 1 to 4 show typical geometrical constructions as these appear in the works
of Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Forchheimer, with the last two of these introducing curves of
graphs representing the behaviour of objects situated in physical space and time. Thus, we may
establish that the works of Forchheimer and Schoklitsch carry the marks of an era that preceded that
of the era of modern science by a considerable margin.
The symbolic era in technology
The symbolic era that followed, apparently inevitably, from the “new world view” of applied
geometry is commonly supposed to have been initiated by Galileo Galilei. It can be marked
Figure 1. Galileo
Figure 2. Descartes
Figure 3. Newton Figure 4. Forchheimer
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Forchheimer and schoklitsch: a postmodern retrospection
semiotically by a comparison between two earlier and lesser-known of Galileo’s works, de Moto
Accelerato (1590 +/-, e.g., pp. 332/104) and Le Meccaniche (1600 +/-, e.g. -/p. 159 et seq), and
Galileo’s later and celebrated Two New Sciences, of 1638. Although Galileo thereby laid the
foundations for the representations of the laws of dynamics in the algebraic-symbolic form that we
still use today, the general process of representing the knowledge-content of the sciences in an
algebraic-symbolic form was greatly accelerated by the almost-simultaneous appearance of the
algebra of Descartes (1637//1925/1944). Descartes demonstrated, at least in principle, how the quasi-
totality of problems that were expressed in geometrical terms could be translated into problems
expressed in algebra, and of course vice versa. In semiotic terms, Descartes provided the means to
transform the knowledge transmission process from one that was realised using the sign vehicles of
geometrical constructions to one that was realised using the sign vehicles of ordering strings of
symbols subject only to a very small number of fixed rules of algebra.
The geometric representations of motions, as exemplified by the representations of the Keplerian
orbits of the planets as ellipses, had already transformed problems of motion to problems of geometry,
and the algebraic representations of the resulting geometrical figures led in their turn and apparently
just as inexorably to the mechanics of Newton. These were necessarily expressed most generally in
symbolic form, even if only for discrete increments of space and time. We then usually date the full-
blown symbolic representation of continuous processes from 1750, with Euler’s formulation of what
is still commonly called ‘Newton’s’ second law of motion. Since it usually takes at least half a century
for notions that are current in mathematics to penetrate into technology, it was only in the beginning
of the last century that the description of processes in algebraic-symbolic forms became an accepted
norm in technology, but then with such impetus and to such an extent as to attain to the status of an
all-inclusive ‘mathematical analysis’ per se. The negative aspects of the reorganisation of the Ecole
Polytechnique of 1816 in the spirit of Laplace, Poisson and Cauchy were clear enough to Olivier
(1857: see also Weiss, 1982):
These men, who knew no language but algebra, who thought that one was ready for anything
when he knew algebra, who esteemed a man only to the extent that he knew algebra, who
were incapable of rendering services to the country other than in algebra, destroyed from top
to bottom the original organisation of studies at the Ecole Polytechnique….
This transformation naturally did not proceed unopposed even at the time, and indeed one opponent
at the Ecole Polytechnique acerbically remarked that it would reduce that already venerable institution
to an Ecole Monotechnique! Despite such opposition, however, as the military academies and other
such institutions transformed into the Technische Hochschulen in emulation, so the symbolic
representation became the principal desideratum in technical-scientific studies of processes generally,
and indeed it came to represent the very hallmark of ‘scientific-technical’ advancement. Entirely
consentaneously, the introduction of symbolic methods into a subject like hydraulics – which in this
respect was accomplished by hydraulicians such as Boussinesq, beginning already in the middle of
the 19th century – established the scientific legitimacy of hydraulics, this use of symbolic methods
being the only acceptable ‘mark of respectability’ of a scientific- technical subject. Indeed, it was
only by these means that hydraulics could be admitted within the university-level educational system.
Again correspondingly, even quite closely related subjects such as hydrology had a much more
difficult time in acquiring such credentials, treating as they did matters that were less susceptible to
algebraic representations.
From this point of view, it was the remarkable property of algebra that it came to legitimise certain
extreme forms of intellectual deprivation, whereby it became acceptable for certain academics to be
ignorant of almost everything outside of a narrow area of specialisation, just so long as they could do
algebra. Nowadays we often refer to such persons as ‘mere symbol shufflers’, but it may be less
denigrating to speak here of a very particular kind of intellectual asceticism. Corresponding to this
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216 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
process, teaching and research organisations were created or adapted to accommodate this kind of
activity, so that we may speak of an institutionalised ignorance, or a specific form of institutionalised
asceticism.
Let us now however go back a step, to recall that a symbol constitutes only one particular type of
token, where we now understand by a token any thing that is offered up to circumspection in place of
another thing. We have already seen that in the case of the symbol the token replaces in our minds
that which it betokens. In the case of the sign, on the other hand, it is that which is betokened, the
significant of the sign, as our mind’s view of the ultimate referent, which takes over our attention as
soon as the sign has fulfilled its signifying function. To use a common figure of speech, through the
symbolisation process the symbol takes over the stage, allowing that which it symbolises to bow itself
off the stage, while in the case of the sign it is the other way around, in that it is the signified object,
the signified and with this its referent, that takes over the action, while it is the signifier that bows
itself off.
Following the theory of semiotics it is of the essence of the symbolisation process that there is a
symbolisation function that maps the symbolised object into the symbolising object, while it is of the
essence of the signification process that there is a sign function that maps the signifier into the
significant, which is our mind’s or whatever other’s reflection of the outer-world or otherwise
externalised referent. In the mathematical notation of category theory, which at once provides a
convenient means of representing these process:
Symbolisation function
Symbolised object symbolising object (‘the symbol’)
ƒ
or: a b or: ƒ:a b;
signification (or sign) function
and: signifying object signified object
(or ‘sign’)
g
or: c d or: g : c d.
One and the same object can commonly appear as: a, b, c or d, in the above relations. Thus, when
Forchheimer (Hydraulik, 1930, p.47) makes verbal-descriptive distinctions between:
Das Druckgefälle
Trägheitskräfte von Typus
,
x
h
,
x
u
u
g
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Forchheimer and schoklitsch: a postmodern retrospection
Reibungskräfte von Typus
he does so in his subsequent discussion by referring to the properties of the streaming fluid, which
ultimately provides the referent, so that he is using the tokens
*
h /
x;
/ g * u *
u /
x, and
/ g
*
*
u /
x
as signs. When, however, he shortly later (p. 65) differentiates
Forchheimer’s (37c)
in which:
(37d)
to provide:
or:
or:
to obtain, by introducing the required initial conditions, the expression
he is using the tokens H. –n/2, etc., as symbols, in that we no longer give any attention to the physical
interpretations of these tokens, but we treat them only as mathematical objects, to be manipulated
solely by the rules of mathematics, through the practice of algebra. In this last case these symbolic
objects and symbolic processes have entirely replaced in our minds their ‘corresponding’ objects and
processes in the material world. Of course, there must come a moment in any technology when we
are again led to read some meaning into the expression obtained by these devices, but throughout the
intervening argument we forget completely about such meanings. As a result, to the extent that we
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218 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
regard the rules of mathematics as ‘laws of thinking’ and we apply these laws to our mathematical
representations of the ‘laws of nature’, so we may come to regard the rules of mathematics as ‘laws
of the laws of nature’.
We may already observe here, that the use of symbols allows us to erase from our minds all thoughts
about the nature and reality of the ‘objects’ that are so symbolised. The shear facility with which we
can order and reorder and act upon the symbols quite covers over the reality of the corresponding
processes of ordering, reordering and operating upon the ‘objects’ themselves. However, these only
become ‘objects’ through our own thought processes, and may in reality be, for example, living
creatures that in no way deserve to be so treated in the world of nature. The use of symbols constitutes
one of the principal means of objectifying the world in the manner of the Heideggerian Bestand
(Abbott, 1991).
It is of the essence of a technology, as the process of circumspective creation in the world that its
tokens are primarily those of signs, while those of its tokens that are employed as symbols are in fact
only used to link together its signs. In the more ‘pure’ sciences, on the other hand, and especially in
mathematics, the tokens are employed primarily as symbols, and indeed, in the limit, in an ‘absolutely
pure’ mathematics, there would be no signs at all: we should have “a language that refers entirely to
itself” (Foucault, 1966//1970).
Hydraulics, for Forchheimer and Schoklitsch, and through them and with them for other
hydraulicians, is thus a technology, even though it may utilise certain parts of science, including
certain fragments of mathematics. Hydraulics in this tradition is that which brings together and
partially orders a range of descriptions of the behaviour of fluids, and then particularly of fluids in
motion, that takes up our primary reflections of this physical world, which re-presents these through
its use of tokens, first as signs but subsequently in some situations as symbols, which manipulates (or
‘shuffles’) these symbols as it does so take them up, and which finally interprets the results of its
manipulations or shufflings again in signs that point, in their turn, to outer-world, and indeed
primarily material-world, events. We may also observe already here that, as a result of their following
this kind of approach, the technologies that were taught in the Technische Hochschuler could be
distinguished semiotically from the sciences taught at the traditional Universitäten by the differences
in the range of the sign vehicles that these two classes of institutions introduced and employed.
(As we shall later indicate, this difference in the use of sign vehicles reflects in its turn a deeper
difference at the level of the social legitimisation of these two classes of institutions. Similarly, from
our present postmodern point of view, only an age as completely confused and destabilised as our
own could have produced the oxymoron of a Technische Universität. At the same time, and as we
shall explain in conclusion, even this strange, and indeed paradoxical, construction does in fact open
up new, and essentially postmodern perspectives, but then these are surely entirely different from
anything envisaged by those who ‘instituted’ this term).
Among the many and essentially semiotic innovations introduced by Forchheimer were those based
upon the total energy line that, although implicit in hydrodynamic studies from the time of David
Bernoulli in the eighteenth century, only came into widespread use in the twentieth century (see, for
example, Jaeger, 1956, p.76). It was Forchheimer similarly who extended the energy-line concept to
unsteady flows in a thoroughly systematic way (1931, pp. 246 et seq.), but then making extensive use
of graphical, and essentially geometrical methods, while it was Schoklitsch (1917) building on the
pioneering work of Ritter (1892) who extended these notions to dambreak fronts and waves
analogously. Such graphical methods reached their apogee in studies of water hammer of the kind
that supported the design and operation of those hydropower plants which were coming into
increasingly widespread use at that time. The graphical method of Schoklitsch for the analysis of
pipeline and surge tank oscillations may serve as a paradigm in this respect.
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It is then clear that ‘modern’ technology as constituted in hydraulics and as exemplified in the works
of Forchheimer and Schoklitsch never embraced the symbolic paradigm to anything like the same
degree as did the physical sciences. Forcheimer and Schoklitsch were definitely not intellectual
ascetics. At the same time, any reading of the learned societies or, from the 1950s onwards, of the
Journal of Fluid Mechanics, shows that these were given over almost exclusively to ‘symbol
shuffling’. Hydraulics instead wove together geometrical, other-graphical and symbolic methods into
an emergent web of relations between physical observable. It combined and juxtaposed its sign
vehicles to its own immediate technical advantages. Hydraulics, like several other technologies
besides, was semiotically heterogeneous.
The significance of sign vehicles that were more specific to hydraulics
Of course, there was no ‘grand design’ or indeed anything ‘ideological’ at all about this: the
hydraulician just solved his problems with whatever tools he had available and he had little time for,
or could not afford much in the way of, ideological conformity. Hydraulics, again like most other
technologies, sought its social legitimacy, even if not its academic status, primarily in the successes
of its applications in the material world, and thus in its value to society as a whole. This ‘performative’
property was the essential ground for the legitimacy of the Technische Hochschulen alongside the
science-for-science’s-sake legitimacy that was established in the spirit of Humbolt and Schliermacher
in the Germanic Universitäten. Ideological conformity was good for scientific, and even general
intellectual, legitimacy, which certainly had its place in maintaining an equivalent status with the
Universitäten, but a show of conformity was often about as far as it really went in practice.
Beyond these more pragmatic aspects there are others again that, although related to them, are in fact
much more specific to the hydraulics of this period. The first of these was that certain sign vehicles,
and specifically the geometric-graphical methods that were expounded in the works of our two
authors, were not only intended to convey knowledge as such, but to provide devices that could be
used to produce knowledge. They thus already catered to some degree to users of knowledge at the
level of their signs. Thus, for example, Schoklitsch’s graphical procedure was intended to be
constructed by practising engineers for each application again, simply by following the processes that
he described. There was no question of a once-and-for-all-times result, but rather the prescription of
a working procedure, or algorithm.
We should further observe, however, that hydraulics made extensive use of a quite other class of sign
vehicles again, which was that of the physical-hydraulic models. Moreover, this second specific class
of sign vehicle existed almost entirely apart from the written texts of hydraulics. Using the
terminology of semiotics in the broadest sense, a model is “a collection of signs that serves as a sign”
(Abbott, 1992, 1993). A collection of visual observations and measurements, even when each one is
individually only indicative of some small part of a flow, so as to constitute only an indicative sign,
when taken together may point towards a quite other kind of sign again, whose significant is
ultimately a deeper state of understanding of the phenomenon so modelled, which phenomenon
thereby becomes its referent. It then comes to constitute an expressive sign (Husserl, 1900/1970;
Derrida, 1967,1968//1973). However, the physical-hydraulic model is special in that it is a collection
of signs that points to a sign by virtue of its sensual (and in this case purely visual) resemblance to its
referent. Such classes of sign vehicles that function through a sensual resemblance between signifier
and referent belong, however, to an even earlier and even more ‘primitive’ semiotic substratum. Thus,
for Foucault (1966, p.32//1970, p.17):
Up until the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the
knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the
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220 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organised the play of symbols, made possible
knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of presenting them.
…… The semantic web of resemblance in the sixteenth century is extremely rich: Amicitia,
Aequalitas (contractus, consensus, matrimonium, societas, pax et similia), Consonantia,
Concertus, Continuum, Paritas, Proportio, Similtudio, Conjunctio, Copula. And there are a
great many other notions that intersect, overlap, reinforce, or limit one another on the surface
of thought.
(Let us observe in passing that this mode of signification through resemblance is essentially
metonymic. Very similarly nowadays, our user interfaces also work, at least on the surface of things,
entirely with metonyms, so that the design of a user interface is confined, at least at first sight, to a
study in metonymic devices and metonymic structures. On the other hand, however, as soon as a user
interface is actually ‘used’, it may in fact introduce all manner of metaphores in the minds of its
‘users’. In effect the metonyms serve as surrogates for elements of our outer world, operating within
our field of (visual) cognition, while the metaphores are essentially products of our inner world. Thus,
although metonym is commonly regarded as the poor relative of metaphore, it is the metonyms that
serve to generate the metaphores. It follows that the design of a user interface is in point of fact an
exercise in the production of metaphores – and the theory of the design process must take account of
this. In the words of de Man (see Norris, 1993, p. 190) writing specifically of how these processes
function in Proust’s masterpiece, “The figural praxis and the metafigural theory do not coincide…The
assertion of the power of metaphore over metonymy owes its power [in fact] to the use of metonymic
structures”. At this level of retrospection, the same could then of course also be observed of the
physical-hydraulic models)
The physical-hydraulic models that also enter, albeit only in passing, into the works of Forchheimer
and Scholklitsch thus refer semiotically back to the praxis of this earlier age. But then, we must ask:
what was the essential socio-technical purpose of these most ‘primitive’ of all semiotic devices, such
as were generally eschewed by a contemporaneous science whose ‘experiments’ were usually of a
quite other kind? Taking the example of physical-hydraulic model constructed at Delft Hydraulics, a
storm-surge barrier situated at the entrance to the Rotterdamse Waterweg that was actually completed
only in 1997, Latour (loc cit, p. 230; see also Abbott, 1996) observed of this most basal class of sign
vehicles, but in the full-blown language of ‘Enlightenment’, that:
Sure enough, another ‘Copernican revolution’ has taken place. There are not that many ways
to master a situation. Either you dominate it physically; or you draw on your side a great many
allies; or else, you try to be there before anybody else. How can this be done? Simply by
reversing the flow of time. Professor Bijker and his colleagues dominate the problem, master
it more easily than [do] the port officials who are out there in the rain and are much smaller
than the landscape. Whatever may happen in the full-scale space-time, the engineers will have
already seen it. They will have become slowly acquainted with all the possibilities, rehearsing
each scenario at leisure, capitalising on paper possible outcomes, which gives them years of
experience more than the others. The order of space and time has been completely reshuffled.
We see then on the one hand how the semiotic heterogeneity of hydraulics in its ‘classical’ era, as
recorded in the writings of Forchheimer and Scholklitsch and accentuated further by the hydraulic
model, was still being employed as a combination of means to control and so to dominate situations.
Entirely in the spirit of ‘Enlightenment’, as so exactly recorded by Kant, some fragment of nature is
asked specific questions, which are the questions that we want to ask, and we only listen to nature to
the extent that it answers just these, our questions. We behave here as though we were Kantian grand
inquisitors, with nature as our prisoner. At no time do we allow any of our fellow creatures to pose
their questions, for we provide no means for them to do so. We consider just one set of fragments that
happens to be that which we identify as ‘significant’ to us and we ignore everything else. Moreover,
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this attitude pervades not only our texts and our physical models, but it extends further to our direct
observations and measurements of nature also. But, on the other hand, we see something else again
that resides in these self-same texts: that the means that are mobilised to realise this programme are
not at all uniformly those of this modern era, but have proceeded from other, and sometimes much
earlier, eras again.
Finally, in this respect, we observe that Forchheimer himself explained how he had arranged the
material of the third edition of the Hydraulik in the chronological order of a history, just as, for
Foucault (1966, p.140 // 1970, p.128):
In the sixteenth century, and right up to the middle of the seventeenth, all that existed was
histories: Belon had written a History of the nature of birds; Duret an Admirable history of
plants; Aldrovandi a History of serpents and dragons…. From then on, however, there is the
sudden separation, in the realm of Historia, of two orders of knowledge henceforth to be
considered different.
At the same time, in the case of Forchheimer we may also see this historical approach as an expression
of a faith, shared with his readers, in progress, and indeed as one inseparable part of the progress of
mankind. His work was thus conditioned by the metalanguage of a Grand Narrative, and was thus in
this sense again fully congruent with the modern condition.
So, has there ever been a ‘modern’ technology?
Could there ever be any doubt about the answer to this question? Has not ‘modern technology’
been portrayed to perfection long ago by such as Fritz Lang in his Metropolis and Chaplin in his
Modern Times? Was this technology not explicated in the greatest detail long ago by such as F.W.
Taylor? Certainly upon this surface of outer appearances there has been a modern technology. But,
of course, our whole purpose here is to pose this problem at other levels than those of superficial
appearances. For this purpose we turn, as we usually do in these matters, to Heidegger, who, even as
he already recognised the common superficial view of technology, saw that this view was essentially
misleading. Indeed, technology generally has a quite other nature than that which might at first appear
from its outer appearances (Heidegger, 1977, pp 12-13: see also Abbott, 1991):
This prospect strikes us as strange. Indeed it should do so, should do so as persistently as
possible and with so much urgency that we will finally take seriously the simple question of
what the name ‘technology’ means. The word stems from the Greek. Teknikon means that
which belongs to technē. We must observe two things with respect to the meaning of this
word. One is that technē is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but
also of the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing forth, to poiesis; it is
something poietic [creative, formative, productive, active].
“…. Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where
revealing and unconcealment take place, where alēthia, truth, happens.
Thus, although the technology of such as Forchheimer and Scholklitsch was and continues to be used
for many ‘modern’ purposes, it need not be itself in any way ‘modern’. Indeed, the semiotic
heterogeneity of hydraulics indicates already that a technology such as hydraulics cannot be entirely
absorbed into the ideology of any such movement. In this respect it differs quite essentially from
modern science, so that, again, technology cannot be regarded merely as ‘applied science’, as indeed
Heidegger also explicated convincingly. Any technology can of course be turned to the one or the
other purpose of such a modern movement, just as any other social activity may be influenced by the
prevailing ideology. But, at the end of the day, the engineer in the mould of a Forchheimer or a
Schoklitsch could not be so much interested in conforming to the current scientific ideology by filling
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222 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
the pages of the Proceedings of learned societies, but in solving real-world problems. Such persons
cannot and indeed cannot afford to be constrained by the ‘good taste’ of the current ideology. The
path of creation of technology, as the loci of places where ‘truth happens’, as the continuation of the
natural creation through human intervention, necessarily transcends the limits of any ‘ism’, including
modernism.
This is then a view of technology which is at one and the same time more modest and more exulted
than that accorded to it within a modernist ideology. It is more modest than the role accorded to it
within the modernist condition because it does not set out to conquer anything or to dominate
anything. At the same time, it is also more exalted in that it places the essence of technology above
any prevailing ideology, whether modernist, postmodernist or anything else of that kind.
(To one side again: this situation may well appear as self-evident to those who unquestionably accept
the prevailing condition, whether modern or postmodern. For the more questioning – roughly
speaking, those who have followed this piece so far – it will however appear as very strange indeed.
For the prevailing condition is a state of being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) so that this position of
technology makes it in some way extra-ontological, and indeed, in its essence, pre-ontological. This
position should indeed astonish us in the same way as Kant was astonished by the strange contiguity
between ‘the starry sky above me and the moral law within me’. As the first book of Genesis
proclaims and as Levinas, in particular, has explained in our own time, this places ‘the moral law
within me’ before human existence itself, as something pre-ontological. To propose a similar place
for technology must then appear as a scandal for good sense and indeed bordering upon, if not
transgressing, the edge of sanity. And yet, as anyone who has experienced technology at the outermost
limits of the possible can attest, it has this feeling about it. This situation is clearly totally different to
that which obtains in science. Indeed, sometimes I think that when the deserving technologists and
scientists are called before God, the technologists will stand on the right hand side and the scientists
on the left; and there will be no one left in between them, at the centre, not even an Augustine, an
Aquinas or a Barth. Such is the gulf that I envisage between these two classes of persons).
Thus in this essential sense there never has been a ‘modern technology’ but only a modernist use, or
misuse, of an otherwise timewise-overarching technology.
Can there then be a ‘postmodern technology’?
Could not all the above arguments be applied just as well to this question also? Could we not
dismiss the notion of a postmodern technology just as readily? In fact, as we shall now show in
conclusion, everything proceeds in the contrary direction in this respect, and indeed we now have to
show that the answer to this question is again by no means so obvious or so simple as it may at first
appear. We shall now have to show, moreover, that this very difficulty follows directly from the
postmodern situation of technology itself. Following this, we shall still have to identify what we mean
by a ‘postmodern technology’ as a socio-technical reality.
Technology has to do with creation in ‘the real world’ and the postmodernist experience is just that
of an ever increasing ‘destabilisation of reality’ and the formation of ever-wider divisions of views
about what constitutes ‘the world’. The roots of the postmodern themselves express the paradox that
is inherent in this situation: post (after) modo (just now). Thus the postmodern is, so to say, ‘something
that never arrives but is always arriving’. A postmodern technology would be like everything else,
including ourselves, existing in this condition of forever Waiting for Godot. And this condition
applies every bit as much to the rules of the creative act as to the creation itself. A technology can
therefore only be ‘postmodern’ to the extent that it sets up its own rules of construction at the same
time as it constructs it has to be continuously, and even recursively, poietic.
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Let us therefore conclude by placing hydraulics within this postmodernistic context, as a ‘postmodern
hydraulics’. We may perhaps best present this point-by-point as follows:
1. The hydraulics of Forchheimer and Schoklitsch was ‘purely technical’ in the sense that it did
not treat or research any of the social aspects of its applications in practice. At that time it was
possible, in effect, to separate the technical from the social in order to produce what might be
described as a homogeneous engineer. Of course in the world outside of the teaching and research
organisation there had always been heterogeneous engineers, as epitomised by Bell and Edison. Thus,
for Law (1991, p. 9 , see also Abbott, 1996):
“Edison was a ‘heterogeneous engineer’. He worked not only on inanimate physical
materials, but [also] on and through people, texts, devices, city councils, architects, economics
and all the rest. Each of these materials had to be moulded to his design if the system as a
whole was to work. And, as a consequence, he travelled between these different domains,
weaving an emergent web which constituted and reconstituted the bits and pieces that it
brought together.”
These social functionings of the engineer were scarcely treated at all, however, in the teaching and
research of the Technische Hochschuler. They were naturally implicit, but never, or hardly ever, made
explicit. In this respect teaching and research proceeded in a kind of utopia where ‘everything had its
place and there was a place for everything’. Nowadays, we scarcely meet any purely technical
problems at all, and least of all in practice: all our problems are now more-or-less sociotechnical. One
cannot any more teach and research in hydraulics, for example, without simultaneously teaching and
researching the mode of application of that hydraulics within society. Corresponding to this social
aspect, teaching and research in hydraulics now presents more the aspect of a heterotopia where
(Foucault, 1966, p. 9 //1970, p.xvii-xviii):
Things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it is
impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.
…… Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language,
because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common
names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the syntax with which we
construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to
and opposite each other) to hold together.
As Foucault also explained, however, this experience also announces the arrival of a new kind of
relation between the ‘order of things’, including the ‘order of signs’, the relation that underlies all our
means of representation and associated cognition. A new structure of thought is breaking through the
matrix of the old structure, and in this process necessarily creating an heterotopian impression. This
event then signalises that which Foucault has so aptly described as a “discontinuity in the history of
thought”. The domain where this occurs is correspondingly “more confused, more obscure and
undoubtably less easy to analyse” (Foucault, 1966 p.12 // 1970 p. xx).
By way of an example, we may observe how in simulations in hydrology a whole rhetoric of
metonyms, and indeed a complete metonymic structure, - ‘interception’, ‘stream flow’, ‘infiltration’,
‘unsaturated zone’, ‘soil-water tension’, etc., - may disappear, only to reappear as a set of ‘neurons’,
‘perceptrons’, ‘weights’, ‘input patterns’, and other such, quite different, metonyms. In effect, the
rhetoric of the descriptor collapses, or even implodes, in the one region of the total semantic field,
only to reappear as a quite other descriptor rhetoric in a completely different part of the total semantic
domain. The descriptor rhetoric is in effect ‘displaced’ discontinuously over a large distance in the
semantic field. This apparently ‘technical’ process then has all manner of social consequences, such
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224 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
as those of providing efficient real-time control systems, viable Internet-distributed environmental
impact assessment games, working decision support systems, and all sorts of other such facilities.
At the same time, however, if one were to take the new title of Technische Universität at all seriously,
at its Janus-like face value, then this institution should provide a more appropriate space within which
to pursue this new ‘dual’ approach to sociotechnological research and development with all its
semantic discontinuities. The historian A.J.P. Taylor invented the word ‘literalism’ to describe this
strategy of taking seriously that which was never intended seriously in the first place, as a means of
attaining certain ends. It is a strategy that the hydroinformatician may well adopt to good effect.
2. Further corresponding to the purely technical nature of the subject matter of Forchheimer and
Schoklitsch, there is never a moment’s doubt about the reality of the world that is treated in their
texts. Every sign that is introduced has a referent that is to be found ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’. In
the same vein, the relations between the signs and their referents always ‘makes sense’ in that there
are clear logical connections between them. Corresponding to this again, there is a definite,
identifiable and univocal channel of communication between writer and reader. Today, on the other
hand, (Lyotard, 1988, p. 13 // 1984, p. 73):
It is not necessarily the same thing to formulate a demand for some referent (and objective
reality), for some sense ( and credible transcendendence), for an addresee (and audience), or
an addresser ( and subjective expressiveness) or for some communicational consensus (and a
general code of exchanges, such as the genre of historical discourse).
Corresponding to this, our experience of reality, and indeed our very sens de réalité, has changed,
and apparently irreversibly. We recall that, for the hydroinformatician, “Reality is the name that we
give to the interface between our inner and our outer worlds” (Abbott, 1994). This reality now
however grows increasingly from the cathode ray guns of our television and computer-display tubes.
On the one hand it becomes increasingly labile and at least potentially unstable, while on the other
hand it increasingly conforms to the rule enunciated by Lyotard (1978, p. 19 // 1984, p. 17) that:
There is no reality unless testified by a consensus between partners over a certain knowledge
and certain commitments.
The ‘realities’ of ‘Limits to Growth’ of the 1960s, of ‘Global Cooling’ in the 1970s and of ‘Global
Warming’ in the later 1980s and 90s may serve as paradigms here. The conformity of these ‘realities’
to Grand Narratives shows however that they are not essentially postmodern, but, if anything,
hypermodern. But in any event the modernist situation that Heidegger described ironically already in
1927 (p. 168, 169 // 1962, p. 212) is now becoming the established social norm:
What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative
character. Things are so because one says so…. The average understanding will never be able
to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much is just
gossip. The average understanding, moreover, will not want such a distinction and does not
need it, because, of course, it understands everything.
But then, to take the examples further, our present-day science introduces ‘ten billion years’, ‘three
thousand light years’, ‘a big bang’, ‘black holes’, ‘quasars’ and all manner of other textual signs for
which no one can adduce the existence of any referents, but only indications to other signs again. As
Baudrillard explained already in 1973, these signs no longer have a ‘real’ referential function: “the
signified and the referent are now abolished to the sole benefit of the play of signifiers, of a
generalised formalisation in which the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective
‘reality’, but to its own logic.” (Baudrillard 1973, p.127). Along very much the same lines - and this
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is the crux of the postmodern critique - a so-called ‘music-television channel’ projects images that
are inconsistent with and even contradict the accompanying ‘texts’, an advertising agency uses
images that have no logical relation at all to the products that it promotes, a political party wins
elections with patently self-contradictory ‘policies’ concocted solely by its marketing consultants,
and so we can go on. And yet all of this is immensely successful, whether in cultural, business,
political or whatever other terms, serving to create senses of ‘identification’, ‘community’,
‘belonging’ and other emotional attachments, and indeed it does this precisely because of its
application of inconsistent and self-contradictory means. Since these means are so effective even as
they are predicately illogical, they must be in some sense paralogical.
There is, on the other hand, nothing essentially new about all this; it is only that it is now so immensely
reinforced by new and entirely unprecedented technical means. For one brought up in the tradition of
a Forchheimer or a Schoklitsch, a natural reaction may be just to shake one’s shoulders and go fishing,
take up ballroom dancing or retreat to a monastery in Tibet. For the hydroinformatician, however, no
such escape is possible (being anyway clearly illusory). Relative to this ‘down-side’ of the
postmodern or, strictly speaking, hypermodern condition, the hydroinformatician must always be a
résistant, and in order to succeed in this endeavour he or she must turn at least some of these
technologies of persuasion around to good use and, if necessary, even against those who so misuse
them. This necessitates, however, that the hydroinformatician must study at least some of these
technologies, and then not only alongside, but in the closest synergic relation with the technologies
that were so advanced by such as Forchheimer and Schoklitsch.
(May I be permitted to interpose one more aside? It is that since earliest times certain technologies of
psychic manipulation that are in fact being employed quite extensively, and generally
indiscriminately, in modern society, have been treated with the greatest suspicion and have been
hedged around with all kinds of warnings, restrictions and prohibitions. Very briefly, and as Jung
explained on various occasions (e.g., 1944//1953/1968) one cannot possess this kind of knowledge
without being possessed by it. Thus, although we must witness how, for example, certain marketing
consultants can snatch an electoral victory from almost certain defeat by employing paralogical and
aporiaic means [as did Saatchi and Saatchi for the Conservative Party in the 1992 UK general
elections; see Norris, 1993] we hydroinformaticians are best advised, not just to eschew, but to abjure
the use of such devices. For a most thorough argument for this renunciation, reference must be made
to Karl Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik, and then specifically to the third volume of the third part of that
monumental work. At the same time, of course, the hydroinformatician may still be obliged, in
extremis, to study inconsistency-tolerant logics, even though these might be subsumed under the
paralogical, as well as undecidable problems, even though these may be aporiaic, and similar subjects,
but then never for such purposes.)
3. The lives and works of technologists like Forchheimer and Schocklitsch were primarily those
of creation in the material world, and much less, if at all, those of persuasion. Today, our major efforts
in hydraulics are directed to the technologies of persuasion, even though still necessarily building on
the foundations provided by that earlier era. For this purpose the writings on postmodernism of such
as Baudrillard, Lyotard and Kristeva, together with the grands maîtres, Foucault and Derrida, are of
inestimable value. We accept – how could we deny? – that their findings are often grossly misused,
and that we often experience the hypermodern and postmodern conditions that they describe, analyse
and dissect as most uncongenial. But we are living through these conditions whether we like it or not,
and we must adapt correspondingly.
It follows from this situation that although hydraulicians during the time of Forchheimer and
Schoklitsch could restrict themselves to statements of facts without being concerned with judgements
of value, we can no longer do this in most cases. Alongside everything that we now constate, there
has to be an insight into how this will influence or perform in society: our constative and performative
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226 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
modes of utterance must proceed together. Whereas we could previously speak and treat of objects
as and by themselves, today we can rarely speak of objects at all without speaking of values – and
indeed it is precisely because we cannot avoid value judgements that we must now think and create
so explicitly in an object-orientated way (Abbott, 1994). Thus while Forchheimer was teaching and
researching at Graz, Alexius Meinong, the founder of the present-day theory of objects and values,
was also teaching and researching at Graz, but the works of the one find no mention whatsoever in
the works of the other. So far as we can see, Forchheimer and Meinong never met or communicated
at all, and indeed within the context of their times this was not so extraordinary. This kind of
institutionalised asceticism was then entirely justifiable. Today, however, such a situation would be,
or should be, untenable, and indeed it should be so from both sides.
4. Forchheimer and Schoklitsch researched, taught and wrote for a select group of engineering
specialists and they consulted for a small number of corporate clients. Today, we are working for a
much wider range of ‘end-users’ of hydroinformatics’ products and services. One European
organisation alone already markets 80 hydroinformatics (including modelling) products in 50
countries, with an agent network of 35 companies to support the marketing and to provide local
support and consulting services for the installed products. Some 4,000 organisations worldwide use
the products of the two major European suppliers alone. Now, however, this process is being extended
much further again as we move out ‘into Cyberspace’ to reach a new and much more numerous kind
of consumer of hydraulics knowledge. The new intranetted and extranetted generation of distributed
environmental assessment systems, decision-support systems, negotiation-facilitating environments
and everything else of this kind are intended to bring the benefits of the most advanced hydraulic and
environmental engineering knowledge and data to hundreds of thousands, and ultimately millions of
persons. At the same time, these new products and services are all sociotechnical constructions, so
that the social aspects of their applications must be accommodated and properly integrated with the
technical. Moreover, the new kinds of end-users that are now brought into this process are by no
means passive observers, and even less are they mere objects in any grand design, but they are
themselves active participants, becoming initiators of projects and creators of objects on a scale
hitherto unknown. But - and this is the essential thing in this place - far below the level of the
interactive user interfaces, deep within the workings of the code, the thinking, researching, teaching
and writing of such as Forchheimer and Schoklitsch, and with them their whole life world in Graz,
are still alive, and indeed making their contribution to humanity and to the creation as a whole as
never before.
In one sense, their world has departed for ever, and in another sense, by way of electronic
encapsulation, it has never been more alive than today, and certainly it has never before had such an
influence upon our futures. Those who retrospect, à la recherche du temps perdu, must nowadays
always look in the direction of the code of the digital machine – and as soon as they do this they
inevitably also look into their possible futures. For it is primarily through the intervention of the code
that we project and plan our possible futures as a means of choosing the one future that we find most
desirable. The experience of these new hydroinformatics devices is thereby an inseparable part of the
paradoxical, and often paralogical hypermodern and postmodern condition as a whole, for it is an
experience that replaces our present moments in order to represent our possible futures, even as it
exists at the present time.
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modern, Trans. Porter, C., Harvester, London.
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Norris, C., 1993. The truth About postmodernism, Blackwell, Oxford.
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Ritter, A., 1892, Zeitschr. D. V. deutsch Ing., 36, p.954.
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The following article has been reprinted from Journal of Hydraulic Research, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 339–349,
with permission from the copyright holders, IAHR International Association for Hydro-Environment
Engineering and Research.
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The following article has been reprinted from Journal of Hydroinformatics, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 516–530,
with permission from the copyright holders, IWA Publishing.
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Towards a hydroinformatics praxis in the service of social
justice
M. B. Abbott and Z. Vojinovic
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a new role for hydroinformatics in its sociotechnical environment. It
introduces a novel and modern approach for dealing with flooding and other such destructive
phenomena which have been increasing ever more rapidly throughout the world. By far the
greatest toll from floods and flood-related disasters, however, is in the so-called 'developing'
world where the resources for dealing with such problems are either inadequate or non-existent,
even as these are often subject to the interventions of corrupt behaviour and practices and
their related dubious legal systems. The necessity of promoting the nature of the force that is
required to overcome these negativities are identified as those provided by active stakeholder
participation and this paper indicates how this force can be informed and motivated largely
through projecting ultra-realistic dynamic and coloured illustrations within a collective social
environment.
M. B. Abbott (corresponding author)
European Institute for Industrial Leadership,
Château Latour de Freins,
Brussels, 1140,
Belgium
E-mail: knowledge.engineering@skynet.be
Z. Vojinovic
UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education,
Westvest 7 2611 AX Delft,
The Netherlands
Key words |active stakeholder participation, colour, creative imaginations, social justice
INTRODUCTION
To date, our experiences of applications of what has become
a new kind of praxis, as this involves public participation,
have been largely positive when there was substantial back-
ing from central and local governments and other such
bodies, whereby public participation could proceed satisfac-
torily. Moreover, in other social environments, where
corruption and social injustices have not yet taken such a
hold as to have become endemic, essentially the same
approaches and praxes have been employed, ultimately
also to good effect. To date, however, we have not encoun-
tered situations where these social deficiencies have
become so effectively institutionalised in size and scope
over so many years that they remain unpunished and even
become socially acceptable within the miasma of unknow-
ing that these deficiencies themselves produce. This
situation must be confronted as and when it arises, and
other means again will certainly be needed to overcome it.
It is observed, however, that these kinds of negative
forces continue to have ever-increasing destructive conse-
quences, with ever more serious deprivations for the
poorest in their society, and these events have their own
influence on the future nature of our praxes. The most
intransigent component of this kind of force as it currently
proceeds was presented in an article published in the Finan-
cial Times of 27 September 2012, p. 13, as authored by
George Soros and Fazia Hasan Abed, observing that:
‘An estimated four billion people [amounting to half the
world’s population] live outside the protection of the
law, mostly because they are poor …’
‘Without basic legal empowerment, the poor live an
uncertain existence, in fear of deprivation, displacement
and dispossession. A juvenile is wrongfully detained
and loses time at school, village land is damaged by a
mining company without compensation, an illiterate
widow is denied the inheritance she is entitled to and is
forced on to the streets with her children. By what
means can individuals and communities protect their
rights in daily life?’
516 © IWA Publishing 2014 Journal of Hydroinformatics |16.2 |2014
doi: 10.2166/hydro.2013.198
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246 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
This then appears as the principal challenge with which we
are currently confronted when venturing into this territory.
It is especially in view of the increasing menace of these
negative influences that we must now pose the questions of
how our own field of hydroinformatics can intervene to
expose and counteract these negative forces, which we
identified in the first part of Flood Risk and Social Justice
(Vojinovic & Abbott ) and to which we shall return in
the second part of this paper. This paper, as a whole, is cor-
respondingly partly devoted to a praxis that is being
increasingly applied to defeat these destructive forces in
the areas of flooding, water pollution and other water-
related damage and devastation, while accepting that this
approach is still in its infancy, even though its feasibility
was first demonstrated some 15 years ago in describing the
road and rail connection across the Øresund that separates
Denmark and Sweden. Even then, attempts were made by
certain political forces and parts of the media to subvert
and derail this gigantic project (see Thorkilsen & Dynesen
() and Abbott ()). Although that project was not
itself concerned with flooding but with countering environ-
mental damage, it has continued to provide a paradigm
case for the introduction of active stakeholder participation.
When seen in retrospect, however, a corresponding contri-
bution to this approach was its demonstration of the
power of coloured dynamic graphics in reinforcing the for-
mations of stakeholder movements and their consequent
empowerment, as means for stimulating the creative imagin-
ations and consequent actions of these stakeholders. Many
illustrations of these graphics in a variety of applications
appear in the book of Vojinovic & Abbott ()and four
major projects are described in the conclusion there.
The first awakening
It has become increasingly clear that the only kind of
activity that can combat and defeat the increasingly power-
ful forces that we shall call transgressors, in the sense that
they do not tell the whole truth and cause harm correspond-
ingly, is that which mobilises a combined effort by the
persons being transgressed, many of whom may have
already experienced flooding, pollution and other water-
borne disasters. There is, in this process, a substantial
gender issue in that women almost always play a much
more active role than do men in such movements; see
Abbott ()who explains this in terms of the Object and
Value Theory of Alexius von Meinong (see Findlay
[]) and the Category Theory of Freyd & Scedrov
(). However, we do not have space to follow up on
this aspect here, despite its importance.
When confined exclusively within the ambit of secular
law, there is the question of the cost of mobilising a suffi-
cient legal force to overcome the disclaimers and
denigrations mobilised by the much greater legal resources
of so many of these transgressors. There is a popular
adage that ‘British justice is the best that money can buy’,
but certainly the rest of Europe, most of the Europeanised
Americas, and even some others places, are nowadays not
very far behind in this respect (Abbott ).
However, even in societies with functioning legal sys-
tems, it is only through collective action by those persons
capable of foreseeing the potential destructive forces of
flooding, pollution and other such events, and those who
listen to them, that it becomes possible to raise the financial
means to support the basic costs of those lawyers who
remain honest and decent persons. Experience has shown
that some such persons and means are to be found almost
everywhere from those who are themselves so shocked by
injustices. The Mahatma Gandhi was a shining example of
this practice, acquiring an iconic status correspondingly,
even as he suffered so much from it, and there are other law-
yers (barristers and solicitors) who are even today prepared,
in extremis, to follow his example. However, we now have
other means to release ourselves from the legalised tyranny
of language that otherwise holds sway in this environment,
as we must now explain.
The formation of the stakeholder group
The task of the hydroinformatician is to form a force from
out of those who truly care about flooding and other
water-associated damage in such a way that, whether
allied with engaged and honest lawyers or not, they are
capable of exposing and repulsing such transgressions that
may be so destructive to their lives. Such a movement is
usually motivated by earlier flood and other water-related
events that have provided warning signals of future water-
driven damage. This is the task of our new kind of praxis,
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247
Towards a hydroinformatics praxis in the service of social justice
one that is only now coming into its own as a sociotechnol-
ogy. This praxis is concerned in the first place with providing
realistic simulations of flood, pollution and other such
water-related events, as provided by the hydroinformatician
over the web, whereby these phenomena can be projected
onto the minds of the present and potential stakeholders
using their web facilities, such as are demonstrated by the
websites of www.knowledge-engineering.org and www.
urbanhydroinformatics.com, both of which include simu-
lated dynamic coloured illustrations, primarily of flooding.
This process corresponds to one of catalysing the move-
ments of the minds of both the existing and the potential
stakeholders in such a way that they experience the real-
life appearances, and even the physical experiences, of the
outer-world, water-driven events. This first stage initiates
what we can describe as social infrastructure.
In taking this route we can largely avoid what Cheetham
(, pp. 2–3) described as ‘this shift in relations between
the subject and the object [which] involves a ‘withdrawal
of participation’… Another disjunction, another loss of par-
ticipation, accompanies the transition from oral to literate
society.’To continue with Cheetham (, pp. 2–3):
‘For European history the crucial transition occurs in
Greece roughly between Homer and Plato. The tech-
niques of alphabetical writing and reading forever
changed the relations of humans to language and to the
nonhuman world. Socrates was very concerned about
this new technology, and was afraid that it signified the
death of real thinking, and that education would suffer
irreparably. In fact the great sweep of Western history
as a whole has been read as a story of withdrawal and
the progressive ‘death of nature,’and the birth of a
mechanistic cosmology based on abstract materialism.’
There are of course many other authors who have empha-
sised this descent. Correspondingly, the first lesson in our
praxes is that we must avoid so far as possible all our speak-
ing, writing and reading as means of transmitting meaning,
and in our case necessarily falling back upon our envision-
ing of events.
In the conflict between the consequently better-
informed stakeholders and the potential transgressors, it is
in this way that the stakeholders come into possession of
that most powerful of all weapons: a more complete truth.
This estimation is based upon the twin-definitions intro-
duced from a sociotechnical standpoint by the first-named
author:
‘Reality is the name that we give to the interface between
our inner and our outer worlds and a truth is an intima-
tion of the oneness of these two worlds.’
Following the admonitions of Hugh of St Victor, as adum-
brated by Illich (), such a definition should be sounded
just as if it were being physically consumed, very much as
we taste and consume our food, so that it is another experi-
ence than that of reading a naked text (see Cheetham
()).
The first task of the hydroinformatician within this
environment is to create a truthful oneness from these two
worlds, thereby taking the first steps in catalysing the pro-
cesses leading to deeper understandings, and thereby to
more profound truths concerning the actual and potential
threats –and therewith identifying the means for repulsing
them.
These are the first steps in creating an environment
populated by active stakeholders, as it proceeds through
deeper individual understandings, and from there trans-
mutes into more collective understandings, and from there
again transmutes into the worlds of the creative imagination,
leading to creative understandings, that the process of active
stakeholder participation comes, through processes of rep-
etition, to fruition –and thus to a transcendence in the
understanding of the innermost reality of the water-related
threat. But this necessitates that we ask how this process is
to proceed in terms of communication.
Cheetham (), among increasingly many others,
ascribes the origins of the now clearly disintegrating world
of discourse in European modernism as follows (p. 3, with
further italics added):
‘Henri Corbin was a French philosopher, theologian and
scholar of Islamic thought, particularly Sufism and Ira-
nian Shi’ism. It was Corbin’s contention that European
civilisation experienced a ‘metaphysical catastrophe’as
a result of what we might call The Great Disjunction.
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248 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
This was signalled by the final triumph of the Aristote-
lianism of Averroes over the Platonic and neo-Platonic
cosmology championed by Avicenna. To the defeat of
that cosmology is coupled the disappearance of the
anima mundi, the Soul of the World. The catastrophic
event that gave rise to modernity is the loss of the soul
of the world.’
‘The details of this history hinge on the fate of the Aristo-
telian nous etikos, which became the Agent or Active
Intellect in medieval Western philosophy. This Active
Intellect operating through us was something equated
in Islamic thought with the Holy Spirit or Angel of Rev-
elation, the Angel Gabriel. The realm of being to which
this intellection gives access is this place of vision,
which depth psychology calls the world of the psyche
and the imagination. Corbin called it the mundus imagi-
nalis, the imaginal world, to underscore the fact that it is
not imaginary or unreal. Through the agency of the active
imagination we have access to an intermediate realm of
subtle bodies, of real presences, situated between the sen-
sible world and the intelligible. This is the realm of the
anima mundi.’
We may now proceed to introduce one of the most powerful –
and nowadays least expected –of the post-modern (and
thereby pre-modern) instruments for entering the realm of
the anima mundi, so as to provide the means for the catalys-
ing of our transmutations, namely those of colour.
The role of colour in catalysing the processes of
understanding
Active stakeholder participation, if properly conducted, is in
the last analysis a means of promoting states of social justice,
defined as states that provide the possibilities for the individ-
ual participants to transcend the selves with which they
entered into the participation, even as they collectively
seek to establish wider states of social justice in society
and its physical and emotional environments more gener-
ally. As already introduced, the way in which this has
been realised and promoted is to provide web-based hydro-
informatic environments which use dynamic, highly
detailed and relevant illustrations, almost always in colour,
of the objects that are of the greatest concern to the individ-
ual participants and to society as a whole, who are then
represented by their active stakeholders. These illustrations
are increasingly dynamic, so that the effects of proposed
changes in the environment, for example, can be followed
in detail and in their own experiential time by the active
participants.
THE CORRESPONDING HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
We have already introduced the notion that, although the
physical inputs to such hydroinformatic environments are
for a large part definable within the ambit of modern science,
the functioning of the sociotechnical hydroinformatic
environment cannot be so described. Thus, quoting from
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, under the heading of the
Condemnations of 1210–1277, referring to the Système du
Monde of Pierre Duhem (Duhem & Brenner , p. 24):
‘According to Duhem, ‘if we must assign a date for the
birth of modern science, we would, without doubt,
choose the year 1277 when the bishop of Paris solemnly
proclaimed that several worlds could exist, and that the
whole of heavens could, without contradiction, be
moved with a rectilinear motion…’
‘Duhem believed that Tempier, with his insistence of
God’s absolute power, had liberated Christian thought
from the dogmatic acceptance of Aristotelianism, and
in this way marked the birth of modern science. The con-
demnations certainly had a positive effect on science, but
scholars disagree over their relative influence. Historians
in the field no longer fully endorse his view that modern
science started in 1277.’
Being postmodern –that is, functioning in societies of Con-
sumers of Knowledge rather than in the modern sense, the
sense of The Condemnations, as Knowers –its science
reverts back to the Premodern, and then in the first place
to Alchemy, as described in Bruno Latour’s book
among many others. It is only within this context and its
manners of expression that it can be described at all. Thus,
as the imaginations of the individual stakeholders are
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Towards a hydroinformatics praxis in the service of social justice
mobilised, providing active imaginations, and as these stake-
holders coalesce into larger groups and even come to cover
the group in its entirety, we enter into the realm of the crea-
tive imagination which is at the centre of the succeeding
decision-making processes. We observe that these processes
are of an essentially qualitative nature, so that, once again,
they can only be described alchemically, as transmutations,
rather than modern-scientifically, as mere transformations.
For the nature of these transmutations themselves we
reach back in the first place to the twelfth to thirteenth cen-
tury works of Ibn’Arabi on the creative imagination, as
recalled into the twentieth century by Henri Corbin and
into our twenty-first century by many other authors. In the
spiritual sense of this movement, we may speak of a theo-
phonic imagination (Corbin /, trans. 1969, p. 99).
For our purposes, the knowledge-transmitting com-
ponents of the hydroinformatics environment, such as
those delineating houses, gardens, schools, shops, roads,
children, etc., have to be directly, subjectively and even
immediately identifiable. This necessitates the emotional
identifications of and attachments to objects that are of the
deepest concern. The role of colour in hydroinformatics
environments is to facilitate the evocations of these emotion-
al identifications as clearly and precisely as possible.
The Bortoft intervention
It is now 16 years since Henri Bortoft’s book, following
French- and German-language editions, entered the English
language as The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward
a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Bortoft ).
This was introduced by John Barnes, starting as follows:
‘Few recognise the depth of the existential crisis into which
our modern scientific world view has led us. Through its
analytical approach to material processes, it has come to
focus on a molecular realm far removed from the world
of our human experience. This narrow focus has evoked
a countermovement calling for the recognition of personal
experience and yearning for meaning and wholeness. The
result is an unhealthy polarisation of our culture in which
there is a yawning gap between objective, materialistic
science on the one hand and the subjective culture of
human experience on the other.’
‘What is urgently needed today is a further step in the
evolution of science, leading beyond material analysis
to a deeper, holistic understanding of nature. In The
Wholeness of Nature, Henri Bortoft describes how,
already 200 years ago, Goethe, the great German poet
and scientist, began to lay the groundwork for this new
development in science. I know of no other book written
in the English language that articulates the principles of
Goethe’s scientific approach as clearly as this work.’
For his own part, Bortoft provided a summary of his lecture
on Goethe’s Phenomenology of Colour when this was pre-
sented on the 17 October 2011 in London through the
good offices of the Temenos Academy and attended by the
present first-named author, as follows:
‘Goethe’s‘theory’of colours is wrongly named. It is not a
theory in the conventional sense because it does not set
out to explain colour, but to ‘make a phenomenon visible’.
It is the development of a new way of seeing through the
practice of working with the senses and exact sensorial
imagination, which keeps the phenomenon in the centre
of attention instead of replacing it with a theory. Goethe’s
way of working is illuminated by phenomenology, so that
we can understand better what he was doing on his own
terms without having to rely on comparisons with more
theory-centred approaches, This opens the door to the
possibility of a phenomenological approach to nature
which ‘allows the phenomenon to be’.’
The background to this subject is very extensive and very
varied, see Goethe ( and ). In the present case we
start out from Josef Albers’Interactions of Colour that first
appeared in 1963 from the Yale University Press as its
most magnificent production ever. By following examples
and their different modes of expression, Albers observed
that:
‘This discrepancy between physical fact and psychic
effect, called in this case a haptic illusion –haptic as
related to the sense of touch –is so ‘in the haptic
sense’. To begin the study of how colour deceives and
how to make use of this, the first exercise is to make
one and the same colour look different.’
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250 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
The value of the psychic means of personalised perception as
opposed to the modern scientific means of impersonal per-
ception lies in this direction, whereby a colour enhances the
impact of an emotionally charged ‘surreal’object and is no
longer associated with an emotionally neutral ‘real’object –
and it is only in this sense that it ‘deceives’. Colour can
‘deceive’in this way, but it cannot lie. Thus, when the user
interface projects the streets along which the various families’
children are walking to school with mobile telephones and/or
other such communication devices, the blobs that represent
the children may be simply ‘children-coloured’when there
is no danger from flooding, with the families correspondingly
indifferent to any flood-related danger, but may appear flash-
ing with an intensified ‘children-colour’when these children
are in danger and the parents may need to intervene. We
may call this ‘thinking in terms of situations’, whether prece-
dented, actual or anticipated, and, in this example, it is
realised by bringing the danger into coincidence with the
potential victims in the minds of their parents, thereby contex-
tualising their deepest concerns, whether to assuage them or
to support them. We have to do here with an emotional
impact which is entirely qualitative, even as it depends upon
the quantitative resources of web technology.
To this, however, Albers ()observes that ‘when it
comes to colour intensity (brightness) occasionally one
may find agreement among a few people but hardly within
a large group (such as a class)’. So this ‘solution’is not so
simple as it may at first seem. Of course, we are now in
the world of multi-media, so that sound transmission over
mobile telephones may be used to back-up the visual
impressions. Albers identified this possibility even before
the advent of mobile telephony:
‘Though we were taught, only a few years ago, that there
is no connection whatsoever between visual and auditory
perception, we know now that a colour changes visually
when a changing tone is heard simultaneously. This, of
course, makes the relativity of colour still more obvious,
just as tongue and eye perceptions interdepend when col-
ours of food and of its containers increase or diminish
our appetite.’
Albers first made a fundamental distinction between The
Factual and The Actual, observing correspondingly that
‘in dealing with colour relativity or colour illusion, it is prac-
tical to distinguish ‘factual facts’from ‘actual facts’. He
continued:
‘The data on wave length –the result of optical analysis
of light spectra –we acknowledge as fact. This is a factual
fact. It means something remaining what it is, something
probably not undergoing change.’
‘But when we see opaque colour as transparent or per-
ceive opacity as translucent then the optical reception
in our eye has changed in our mind to something differ-
ent. The same is true when we see three colours as four
or two, or four colours as three …’
‘Gestalt psychology has proved that 3-dimensionality is
perceived earlier and more easily than 2-dimensionality.
This explains why children do not begin –as most art-tea-
chers still wish –with painting and drawing, which are
lateral abstractions on a two-dimensional plane, but
begin all by themselves with building, constructing in
space, on a ground and upwards, in three dimensions.’
‘We believe that art education is an essential part of gen-
eral education, including so-called higher learning. We
promote therefore, after a natural and easy laissez-faire
as an initial challenge, an early shift from aimless play
to directed study and work, which offers with basic train-
ing, a continuous excitement to growth.’
‘To say this in psychological terms, it means a shift from a
recognition of the primitive drive for being occupied,
entertained –Beschäftigungstrieb –to a more advanced
drive, or better need, for being productive, creative ─
Gestaltungstrieb.’
It is within this framework of Heidegger’sGe-stell of 1927
that we identify an antinomy between the so-called Laws
of Modern Science and the Laws of Nature, which subsume
the laws of our own beings as nature has formed us. The one
speaks about Albers’factual fact and the other about his
actual fact. Albers provides many examples of the differ-
ences between these two ways of looking at and more
generally as experiencing the world, as examples of a
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251
Towards a hydroinformatics praxis in the service of social justice
fundamental difference in our ways of experiencing the
world, our Weltanschauung, but now in a situation where
we have come to live, to continue with Heidegger (), in
‘a world deprived of its worldhood’. The movement that
Albers describes is completely at one with the natural drive
to transcendence that was re-established in the seventeenth
century by Blaise Pascal, was raised again by Kierkegaard
with even more effect in the nineteenth century, and has
now been adopted as doctrine by the Catholic and some
other Churches. This is at one with the ambition to restore
a social justice that is now being expressed ever more clearly
in so many parts of our present-day world, even as it necessi-
tates a totally other way of experiencing this world if this
ambition is ever to be realised.
As Albers explains, this difference between what enters
the eye and what is observed in the mind was already ident-
ified by M.F. Chevreul in his work on The Laws of Contrast
of Colour of . He showed how an exponentially increas-
ing (1 ×,2×,4×,8×, 16 ×,…) intensity of colour, when
presented to the eye, transmutes into a linearly increasing
(1 ×,2×,4×,…) intensity of colour as it appears in the
mind. Several other examples of this nature are given in
Albers’text.
Taking our cue from Edmund Husserl’s masterpiece
(originally of , 1901 and as partly reworked in 1913),
that introduced the world to phenomenology, as the means
for identifying the things themselves, rather than accepting
whatever happened to be the current ‘modern-scientific rep-
resentations’of them, we can most conveniently return to
Bortoft.
‘Zu den Sachen Selbst!’//‘To the things themselves!’
It is with the language of modern science as with any other
language, that although we can more or less understand how
we come to use that language, we cannot really understand
how that language comes to use us. We have already intro-
duced the notion that knowledge is not achieved by the
senses alone. Thus, with italics added (Bortoft , p. 68):
‘There is always a nonsensory element in knowledge, and
this must be so whether this element is verbal-intellectual
or intuitive. The difference is that, whereas the verbal-
intellectual mind withdraws from the sensory aspect of
the phenomenon into abstraction and generality, the
intuitive mind goes into and through the sensory surface
of the phenomenon to perceive it in its own depth. It is by
first going into the full richness and diversity of sensory
detail that the intellectual mind is rendered ineffective,
so that we can escape from its prison into the freedom
of intuition.’
‘Etymologically, ‘intuition’means ‘seeing into’, which
clearly expresses the fact that it is the experience of
seeing the phenomenon in depth. But this depth is
peculiar inasmuch as it is entirely within the phenom-
enon and not behind it –so it should be seen as an
intensive dimension, and not in the manner of an exten-
sive dimension of physical space. It is in fact the depth of
the phenomenon itself. It is as if something which
appears to be two-dimensional suddenly turns out to be
three-dimensional, so that what had seemed flat is now
seen in relief. This is the experience mentioned earlier,
of seeing the phenomenon ‘standing in its own depth’.
It was said then that there is no intellectual equivalent
to this experience, and the reason for this is now clearly
because it is an intuitive experience which depends on a
change of consciousness.’
It is this change of consciousness that initiates and activates
the mobilisation of the imagination of the individual stake-
holders, whereby they become activated stakeholders, and
then as activated stakeholders within the hydroinformatics
environment that the hydroinformatician provides with his
or her dynamic and coloured, interactive-user interfaces. It
is this active imagination, as it is distributed over the differ-
ent stakeholders, each one commonly with an own
environmental interest, that leads them to explore the
actual facts of their own ‘real worlds’in relation to
the actual facts of the ‘real worlds’of their fellows, as the
preparation for their mutating into participants in the crea-
tive imagination of an increasingly unified stakeholder
group. This is in turn the conditio sine qua non for the trans-
mutation from a higher level of collective consciousness
(Bewuβtsein) into a higher level of collective conscientious-
ness (Gewissenhaftigkeit) that, through its recursions, has
the capacity to establish states of social justice, including
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252 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
ecological justice, in our otherwise so dreadfully misused
world (Vojinovic & Abbott ).
HOMAGE TO GOETHE
In the German language there is a word for what we other-
wise call ‘concrete vision’in the present context, and this is
Anschauung.Bortoft (, p. 90) expressed the essence of
this word as follows:
‘Agnes Arber, who spent her long life studying plants,
said that in this context it ‘may be held to signify the intui-
tive knowledge gained through contemplation of the
visible aspect’. This indicated very clearly that Goethe’s
approach to animal form follows the same pathway as
we have discovered in his work on colour. The method,
as described above, is active looking followed by exact
sensorial imagination, plunging into the visible aspect
to provide dishabituation from the verbal-intellectual
mind and the analytical mode of consciousness. This
exercise of redirecting attention to seeing, inwardly as
well as outwardly, removes an obstacle to the holistic
mode of consciousness. At the same time, the exercise
of trying to see the visible aspect as a whole promotes
the restructuring of consciousness into the holistic
mode. This procedure therefore has the result of taking
the Naturschauer into the phenomenon intuitively and
not just sensorially, while escaping from the prison of
abstraction that is the intellectual mind.’
In the conjunctive knowledge that joins together the social
and the technological, so as to provide a sociotechnology
as an entirely other species of knowledge than the knowl-
edges that it binds together, we have to face issues that
have not been much considered previously, either in the
modern sciences or in technologies. As we move into the
arena of active stakeholder participation in projects of all
manner of kinds, so we enter into new territories of thought
and intuition that were not previously addressed in our own
field. In the present authors’2012 book we come face to face
with the challenges that confront us, even as they hold us
together in our mission, the source of which is expressed
within the body of the work as ‘a fascination with
technology is a fascination with truth’, but then in such a
way that this fascination should never degenerate into a
one-sided ‘idolatry of truth without feelings’, such as
would threaten the most basic spiritual values of benevo-
lence (Wohltätigkeit), benignity (Freundlichkeit) and
compassion (Mitleid), those timeless values which are the
only certainties in our lives. As expressed already in the
words of Kierkegaard (//, p. 186, 1980,
p. 139): ‘He who has observed the present generation can
hardly deny the discrepancy in it, and the reason for its
anxiety and unrest is this, that in one direction truth
increases in scope and in quantity, and partly also in abstract
clarity, while in the opposite direction certainty constantly
declines’.
…still familiar?
Active stakeholder participation, as introduced by the
first-named author in 2007 and by the present authors
together in their paper of 2010, and as developed further
in their 2012 book, is increasingly seen as the only way in
which an otherwise world-catastrophic process might be
avoided, and this possibility has been taken up by several
authors in more recent times. Thus, His Royal Highness
The Prince of Wales has expressed his support for this
kind of intervention (, p. 19) as follows:
‘Now there are many examples where communities have
replaced the short-term impulse with the long-term plan.
But part of that strategy –to my mind at least at the
heart of it –is the need for a new public- and private-
sector partnership which includes NGO and community
participation. To work effectively this will require govern-
ments to provide policies which support community
participation.’
From the UNESCO Water and Ethics Series of 2004 we
select a piece from the introduction by our late-lamented
friend, James (Jim) Dooge, as follows:
‘There is no life without water, and those to whom it is
denied are denied life. Water for all and meeting mini-
mum basic needs are vitally tied to the principle of
human dignity. The ethical principle of association
means that the person is social as well as sacred. The
principle of participation means that individuals,
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253
Towards a hydroinformatics praxis in the service of social justice
especially the poor, must not be shut out from participat-
ing in those institutions which are necessary for human
fulfillment. Both these ethical principles mirror a major
theme:namely, that those who are impacted and who
would benefit from water (which is vital to their fulfill-
ment as humans) must have the opportunity to
participate in its planning and management.’
Turning to the other side of the world, to China, we have the
situation where extensive public participation has become
an accepted means of preparation for decision-making.
Thus, already in an editorial to the Beijing Review of 5
March and entitled ‘Transparency: it’s the law’, its
editor, Yao Bin, after castigating the many examples of
social injustice that so much concern the peoples and the
governments at all levels of that nation, observed that:
‘Clearly, a complete change in the above-mentioned situ-
ation lies in the establishment of a strict and transparent
legislative system that features the broadest public partici-
pation’. This has been strengthened by new legislation on
property and water rights and responsibilities that had
become increasingly urgent and which involved the active
participation of many tens of thousands of persons, even
though this participation itself necessarily led to consider-
able legislative delays in many cases. It depends of course
on the omnipresence of the web, where China currently
has much more than 500 million users, and the mobile inter-
net, with more than a billion mobile telephones in
circulation as of October 2012.
As explained in the second part of this paper, this kind
of action depends upon the hydroinformatician’s ability to
create a virtual environment that conveys the menaces and
possibilities of projected interventions in the outer worlds
of the activated stakeholders through conveying the conse-
quences of these works into the inner worlds of the minds
of the individual stakeholders. This process, in turn, motiv-
ates the collectivity of stakeholders to exercise their
combined creative imaginations. All such processes must
then employ the colours that are most suited to motivating
the active and the creative imaginations and the choice of
these most appropriate colours is an essential part of the
hydroinformatics-created environments that are at the
heart of success in this enterprise.
THE HYDROINFORMATICS OF THE THREE
ECONOMIES ─WITH COLOUR REVISITED
The definitions of the three economies
It is generally understood that the human economy, which
most persons in the West like to think of as a ‘first economy’,
is ‘supported by’or, figuratively speaking, ‘floats upon’the
natural economy, which then becomes a ‘second economy’,
where this ‘floating’metaphor introduces water, which is
that which most binds these two economies together. For
the greater part of humanity, however, this all-embracing
natural economy is founded upon another economy again,
which created and has continued to support the natural
economy and with this the human economy in all its mani-
festations, but then in such a way that it makes its presence
known to those humans within their first economy who
understand that they are charged by this ‘other economy’
with sustaining and supporting the ‘second economy’. This
‘other economy’, this Third Economy, this third support
that has served to preserve the stability of the other two
economies for as long as human existence can be traced,
and continues to sustain some semblance of stability even
in the West today, is commonly subsumed within the gen-
eral category of the spiritual to the extent that it is
concerned, under the heading of ‘Economy’, with the
divine governance of the world, to use the Shorter Oxford
Dictionary definition. In the Greater Webster’s Dictionary
it is defined, again under ‘economy’, as ‘God’s plan or
system for the governance of the world’. The term ‘economy’
itself refers back to the Greek word for the governance of
the household, as husbandry, implying as it does an attribu-
tion of values and therewith responsibilities. Another term
that is widely employed is that of stewardship.
We may return very briefly here to the most basic modes
of recognition of the various societies and individuals of the
‘second’and the ‘first’economies by referring again to the
value, and indeed the very purpose, of colour, in that, in
both economies, the most distinguishing features of these
worlds are their uses of colour, the ‘first’through such
agencies as clothing, homes, flags and banners, and the
second by such devices of nature as grasses, leaves, skin, fur
and feathers, whereby colour is in the first place an attribute
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254 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
of the second economy, as that for which we, in our self-
styled ‘first’economy, are charged with sustaining.
It is from such examples as these that the worlds of the
imagination and especially of the creative imagination now
arise, whereby colour becomes the first creative agent in
our imagination.
The subversion of technology
The reason for introducing this, in Western eyes, obscure
branch of human knowledge, and then, following a Western-
theological tradition, as an economy, is that it presents as
great a challenge to the West, in particular, as does anything
else occurring in the human and natural economies. Since
almost all technology proceeds nowadays through our being
challenged, we see at once that, to the extent that we experi-
ence that there is something highly irregular in our
technology, we must conclude that we are being challenged
in ‘the wrong way’. But what is it that causes us to be chal-
lenged ‘in the wrong way’, this being a way that we otherwise
experience, albeit subjectively, as not being a way of truth at
all, but a way of deception, of untruth? Since modern technol-
ogy must still remain, in Heidegger’s words, as ‘the place where
aletheia, truth, happens’, what we experience as happening
now is that our present-day applications of technology are tell-
ing us the truth about an untruth that is not itself attributable to
technology as such at all, but must beattributable to something
within our own selves, something that comes to presence
through the frame that we set around our worlds, in our
action of Enframing that serves to negate our spiritual virtues.
But what is this ‘something’? This is a question that has in
fact persisted throughout history, but which became increas-
ingly urgent in the Europe of the nineteenth century as the
negative influences attributed to modern technology and the
changing ways of life that it engendered became increasingly
more evident. It became posed with increasing force again
during the first half of the twentieth century, where this ques-
tion demanded increasingly clear answers in response to the
rise of the forces of fascism and Nazism, for much the greater
part in Europe, with their glorification and prosecution of
modern technology in its most terribly efficient, brutal and
barbarous forms. Since that time, this negative force has
taken on less obviously ugly forms in that part of the world
that likes to call itself the First World, having transferred its
nefarious attentions much more to the so-called Third
World, but it still remains most active, and ever more danger-
ously so in Europe, and indeed just as much and perhapseven
more so than elsewhere just because it is so much less evident.
Thus in the words of Jacques Derrida (), responding, in his
Spectres of Marx, to the empty-headed ‘optimism’of Fukuya-
ma’s()book entitled The End of History:
‘For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the
audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a lib-
eral democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of
human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion,
famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many
human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.
Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democ-
racy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end
of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’and
the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never
neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innu-
merable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress
allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures,
have so many men, women and children been subjugated,
starved or exterminated on the earth.’
If only for these reasons alone, we have no alternative but to
outline this response here already if we are to understand
the essential features of modern technology in its false
enframing, in its divorce from spiritual values, but we must
do this for other reasons besides. The hydroinformatician
cannot ignore, and indeed must take into proper account,
the existence of this negative force in all that passes
around that person. Our object is thus also to arm the hydro-
informatician properly with an understanding of this force
so that he or she can more quickly identify and subsequently
defeat this adversary whenever it is encountered.
But what, we may ask, is the name of this adversary? It –
for we have here to do with an ‘it’–was introduced in Søren
Aabye Kierkegaard’sBegrebet Angest (//,
p. 179)//The Concept of Anxiety (1960) as Intet, which trans-
lates literally as ‘nothing’, and Intethed, which we can only
translate as ‘nothingness’. It correspondingly entered
German as das Nichtige, and into French as le néant and
into English, and more awkwardly so than ever, as nothing-
ness. In an essentially atheistic philosophy, it was described
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255
Towards a hydroinformatics praxis in the service of social justice
as a nihil and its manifestations were described as nihilism.
We now have, most unfortunately because it is an unplea-
sant matter, to introduce this ‘it-which-can be-no-thing’. As
we shall see, it is this ‘nothing’, this nothingness, which
touches everything as it strives to destroy all that has been
created, whether by ‘The Absolute’or, by extrapolation, by
humankind and the whole world of nature. Correspond-
ingly, almost all the much-vaunted gains of one relatively
small part of the first economy are bought at the cost of the
devastation of both the greater part of the first and the
second economies, whereby the third economy abandons
its first economy on the grounds of its treachery, which
has allowed nothingness to instil itself in it, leading to the
Deus absconditus of our Western world, thereby setting it
on the path of certain destruction.
From nihilism to nothingness
It was primarily the experiences of nineteenth-century Euro-
pean industrialisation, with all its negative manifestations,
that gave rise to a new, more highly educated, so-called
‘middle’class that made the conventional sophistries of
the Western churches untenable. In the incisive words of
the foremost among such critics, in the words of Nietzsche
( []) written with his usual biting irony:
‘The decline of belief in the Christian God, the victory of
scientific atheism –this is a combined European achieve-
ment (ein gesamteuropäisches Ereignis) for which all
races will claim their own share of merit and honour.’
And to this he elsewhere added, in deadly seriousness:
‘The greatest recent event –that God is dead, that the
belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable –
is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.’
To Nietzsche’s rhetorical question that arose immediately
from this situation: ‘Are we not then straying through an infi-
nite nothing?’Heidegger, in his own time, of the third quarter
of the twentieth century, responded (, pp. 60–61):
‘The pronouncement that ‘God is dead’contains the confir-
mation that this Nothing is spreading out. ‘Nothing’means
here: absence of a suprasensory, obligatory world. Nihilism,
‘the most uncanny of all guests’, is standing at the door …’
‘Nihilism is a historical movement, and not just any view
or doctrine advocated by someone or other. Nihilism
moves history after the manner of a fundamental ongoing
event that is scarcely recognised in the destiny of the
Western peoples. Hence nihilism is also not simply one
historical phenomenon among others –not simply one
intellectual current that along with others, with Christen-
dom, with humanism, and with Enlightenment –that
comes to the fore within Western history.’
‘Nihilism, thought of in its essence, is rather the fundamen-
tal movement of the history of the West. It shows such great
profundity thatits unfolding canhave nothing butworld cat-
astrophes as its consequence. Nihilism is the world-
historical movement of the peoples of the Earth who have
been drawn into the power realm of the modern age.’
This is to say that, for Heidegger, nihilism was not only a
product of the nineteenth century, even though it was pri-
marily in that century that its presence became more
clearly recognised and its name more firmly established,
but its origins proceeded much further back, back through
all the histories and pre-histories of the European peoples.
It is in a spiritual reply to Nietzsche’sSieg des wis-
senschaftlichen Atheismus, that we nowadays speak of this
loss in terms of an absconded God, this Deus absconditus
(See Cheetham (), pp. 19, 55–57, 74–75, 99, 117).
This view of the mysterious nature but only too manifest
influence of ‘nihilism’was, however, essentially a philosophi-
cal one, and it was by no means the view of those with a more
theological foundation who persisted in speaking of ‘nothing’
and ‘nothingness’. Thus, even though Heidegger, for
example, did have a substantial theological education, he
was not himself a theologian: his knowledge of theology pro-
vided him with a certain theoretical apparatus for his
philosophical work, but this work was itself in no way theolo-
gical. The same could be said of Sartre, who also entered into
this analysis. It is accordingly first necessary to explain this
difference between the philosophical and the theological in
order to follow why it is that nothingness, in its essence,
can only be understood from a theological, and indeed
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256 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
from a ‘dogmatic-theological’, standpoint. We emphasise that
it cannot be at all expected nowadays that everyone inter-
ested in such matters is Christian, or indeed has any
explicit faith at all, but nonetheless all persons concerned
with such matters as the present one can and should learn
from theological studies. As concerns the most obvious
world-catastrophic consequences of nothingness –the two
world wars of the last century –both had their main focus
within Europe. As Barth observed (1960, Vol. 3, Part 3, p.
345) in his masterly commentaries on the disparate views
of Heidegger and Sartre (1960, Vol. 3, Part 3, p. 345):
‘We experience nothingness, and in so doing we experi-
ence ourselves and all other things as well. Heidegger’s
astonishment [as expressed in his masterly Der euro-
päische Nihilismus] is no less eloquent than Sartre’s
defiance [as in his equally famous L’être et le néant], nor
does the latter bear lesser witness. Their thought is deter-
mined in and by their real encounter with nothingness.
Their thought and expression are determined in and by
the considerable though not total upheaval of Western
thought and expressions occasioned by the world wars.’
In the words of the present first-named author, as written in
Hydroinformatics (Abbott ):
‘In his Church Dogmatics, Barth explained how that
motion in the depths of the collective unconscious that is
the innermost expression of nothingness has continued to
take on ever more concrete names and forms in our
outer world. Today we see in the destruction of the natural
environment and an ever-increasing poverty of the majority
of our populations, and so in the undoing of the creation,
the further allegorical representation of nothingness and
one which gives expression to ‘the kingdom of nothingness’
in the most concrete and material way possible.’
‘Now of course the manifestations of an ever-encroaching
nothingness are by no means a feature that is peculiar to
the European peoples. By no means is it this! It is however
centred upon Europe; it has a focus, in the same way as
does a physical sickness, and this focus is situated in the
collective psyche of the European peoples. Then, in so
far as hydroinformatics constitutes in its essence one
part of the total field of contest of nothingness, so it follows
that hydroinformatics begins as a European possibility.’
This is to say that the Hydroinformatics of 1991 was con-
ceived as something directed to a specifically European
situation, so that it proceeded for the most part through
the actions of the orderable, the numerable, the countable
and the computable: it was for much the greater part a
mathematical hydroinformatics of the quantities. Now, how-
ever, as the pendulum of socioeconomic development
moves increasingly, inexorably and ever more dramatically
towards Asia, and so away from the European Zeitgeist,
this hydroinformatics has to be rethought and reformulated
within new and essentially different social, cultural and
increasingly religious-cultural contexts, whereby it is
described more by a mathematics of the qualities. For this
purpose we have used or –as probably some at least will
say –misused, some fragments of category theory in our ear-
lier works and most recently in the 2012 book, so as to
provide an appropriate descriptive apparatus.
Reassessing technology
In this latest book (Vojinovic & Abbott ), as in some ear-
lier works, we have observed that a fascination with authentic
technology is a fascination with truth. Technology is grounded
in a seeking after truth in the world of human creativity, and
in our present case it seeks and finds its truths in acts of indus-
trial creativity. Industrial technology is only one, but still one,
of the many, many ways of seeking after truth and experien-
cing truth that gives us hope, cohesion and guidance as
seekers after truth in an otherwise so troubled world. In Chris-
tian-theological terms, all such searchings and strivings are
borne by that covenant of the spirit that we commonly call
‘love’, and the most profound of these movements of the intel-
lect is the love of wisdom itself.
For well over 2,000 years now, it has been normal within
the so-called Western tradition to distinguish between a love
of wisdom translated into works without the explicit suppo-
sition of any agent external to humankind itself, and so by
reason alone, which is called philosophy, and a love of
truth as the issue of a wisdom that includes but also necess-
arily transcends the powers of unaided human reason,
which is called theology. Thus philosophy requires human
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257
Towards a hydroinformatics praxis in the service of social justice
understanding, as mediated by reason, while theology
requires not only this human understanding but also some-
thing more again, which is called faith. Thus, within the
Christian tradition, as in other religious traditions of the
book besides, faith is that which surpasses human under-
standing, which transcends reason, so that, following
Kierkegaard [(Sygdommen til Døden //The Sickness
unto Death, , p. 39]), ]‘faith is a miracle, otherwise it is
not faith’.
The theologian Karl Barth correspondingly introduced
our present subversive element as follows (Vol. 3, Part
3. p. 289):
‘There is amongst the objects of God’s providence an alien
factor. It cannot escape God’s providence, but is compre-
hended by it. The manner, however, in which this is done
is highly peculiar in accordance with the particular nature
of this factor. It is distinct from that in which God’s provi-
dence rules the creature and creaturely occurrence. The
result is that the alien factor can never be considered or
mentioned together in the same context as other objects
of God’s providence. Thus the whole doctrine of God’s
providence must be investigated afresh. This opposition
and resistance, this stubborn element and alien factor,
may be provisionally defined as nothingness.’
All theology involves a struggle to express in words the
many experiences, impressions and feelings which our pre-
sent-day languages were never developed to describe and
for the expression of which these languages remain always
inadequate. This is nowhere more evident than in the pre-
sent case. In Christian-theological terms, the relation
between God and man becomes broken by this alien
element, with the consequence that every attempt to
describe nothingness, even theologically, must itself be
broken in thought and in utterance. This is to say, however,
that this description cannot form a system.
FOR WHAT THEN IS THE MODELLER SEARCHING?
That for which the hydroinformatician is constantly search-
ing, as the initiating modeller in active stakeholder
participation processes, is cause and causality. For example:
what is it that is causing the issues that are of concern to the
active stakeholders to lead to a failure to agree on a mutually
acceptable arrangement, or verdict? From this standpoint it
is clear that he or she is looking for the cause of failure, so
that for the initiating modeller, just as for the psychoanalyst
described by Lacan (/[], pp. 9 and 22): ‘In short,
there is cause only in something that does not work’.
When it can be brought ‘to work’, through the processes
of repetition and transcendence, then we arrive at ‘The
Great Work’, the magnum opus of our latter-day alchemists,
as both an individual transcendence of the Self and as a
group transcendence of the community of Selves of the
active stakeholders. Clearly, no such process is realisable
in the case of passive stakeholders. In the same vein, only
in the case that the initiating modeller can overcome the
temptations of exercising only ‘deficient modes of solicitude’
in the now-classical Heideggerian sense (whereby the stake-
holders are maintained in a passive state, such as happens
when these stakeholders are only being ‘consulted’,
‘informed’and ‘directed’, rather than being challenged-out
to exercise and develop their own inherent knowledges,
imaginations and judgments, and to exercise these both
independently and interactively) can ‘The Great Work’
succeed.
The second immediate consequence is that the function
of the modeller changes, indeed drastically, in such situ-
ations, as corresponds to this reversion from the chemical
back to the alchemical. Whereas in the pre-internet era of
hydroinformatics the emphasis was on the model, in its
new web-connected and mobile era the emphasis of hydro-
informatics is much more on the modeller: the emphasis
changes from the operand to the operator. In the words of
Lacan (/[]p. 9):
‘What is it that makes us say that, despite the dazzling
character of the stories…from ages past, alchemy,
when all is said and done, is not a science? Something,
in my view, is decisive, namely, that the purity of the
soul of the operator was, as such, and in a specific way,
an essential element in the matter.’
In hydroinformatics similarly, the purity of the soul of the
operator, which we can better here describe as the quality
of the character of the modeller, becomes inseparable from
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258 Michael Abbott’s Hydroinformatics: Poiesis of New Relationships with Water
the quality of the model within the quality of the total pro-
duction. Thus, in modern science, the outcome of an
experiment should be independent of the nature of the exper-
imenter, whereas in a pre-modern (and thereby, as in the
present case, post-modern) science this is not the case. Corre-
spondingly, the central question now comes to be posed of
‘what is the modeller’sdesire?’It is this in turn that estab-
lishes the economy of the modeller’s libidinal (in the
original sense of emotional or psychic energy) resources.
Thus the proper employment of the web-based Software as
a Service (SaaS) paradigm in hydroinformatics depends
vitally upon an authentic answer to this question, and thus,
so far as is possible, an authentic understanding. Our ques-
tion then becomes: with what kind of human activity, and
correspondingly with what kind of participating Selves, are
we concerned here? To put this question in the terms appro-
priated by Lacan for his field of psycho-analysis: ‘What
grounds it as praxis?’But then we must pose the question
of what we now mean by praxis? We follow Lacan, again
adding italics, when he says that ‘It is the broadest term to
designate a concerted human action, whatever it may be,
which places man in a position to treat the real by the sym-
bolic’. What we then do is to take our praxis with us, as
interconnected applications in our outer world, and we let
our observations of the applications ‘direct us at once towards
some fairly well-located, specifiable points of practice’.
Clearly the hydroinformatician must be able to identify
nothingness, but he or she must also be able to combat it.
For the ‘non-believer’, Barth’s observation on present-day
man and woman’s chances in this combat must then
appear at first sight as decidedly discouraging: ‘God alone
can summon, empower and arm the creature to resist and
even to conquer this adversary…The creature as such
would be no match for nothingness and certainly unable
to overcome it.’From the Christian-theological point of
view that is adopted here, however, it is not of much conse-
quence whether the person who is summoned, empowered
and armed to combat nothingness is immediately aware at
all of the source of that person’s strengths, and this person
may well be a match for nothingness without the slightest
inkling that she or he is such a match because she or he is
by no means standing alone in this confrontation. From a
theological point of view of course, both would be better
prepared again if they were aware and alert to this support,
but it is not the most immediately essential issue. The essen-
tial point is that the person so ‘chosen’is prepared to face
her or his responsibilities in such a combat –and after
that it is our present responsibility to prepare him or her
for this combat with such weapons as theology and other
means have prepared.
It follows that the weapons necessary to combat noth-
ingness are those of expressing and communicating and
inculcating truth at this most exalted level. Thus (Barth
()loc. cit. p. 529):
‘That the lie should be exposed is what is most appropri-
ate to the lie itself and most helpful to those who are
threatened, oppressed and tormented…And as it is
done the lie loses the vital breath which enables it to
threaten, oppress and torment. It is vanquished and
driven from the field.’
We conclude, again with the words of His Royal Highness
The Prince of Wales (, p. 14):
‘I believe that if we are to achieve genuinely sustainable
development we will have to rediscover, or re-acknowl-
edge, a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the
natural world and with each other. If nothing is held
sacred any more –because it is considered synonymous
with superstition, or in some other way ‘irrational’–
what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as
some ‘great laboratory of life’, with potentially disastrous
long-term consequences?’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank the referees of this paper for their
engagement in providing well-founded criticisms and
several corrections that have been of great value in
finalising its form (see also www.knowledge-engineering.org).
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