I.
Over the last few months, a colleague of mine has sung the praises of a software development paradigm called "Reactive Programming". (Don't worry, non-technical friends. This post isn't about engineering.)
Unlike the well known Von Neumann architecture, where a control plane (the "code”) moves step by step, changing the state of the data plane, Reactive Programming is like a controlled butterfly effect: a user wiggles his mouse, a packet comes through the wire, and in response a cascade of events ensues, rippling in a predetermined way across the various parts of the application. Although the term has taken on a more specific technical meaning, it would not be off base to describe reactive programming as "event driven", in that the paradigm is not so concerned with "running code" as with propagation of change.
One might begin to notice that other paradigms far outside software, even outside technology, function similarly. For example: consider the idea of an institutional process, the core of organizational functioning. A process consists of various interlocked behavioral responses, where some input triggers a cascade of linked behaviors, decisions made, spreadsheets updated, tickets written, work dispatched, feature completed, tested, accepted, shipped, announced, and ultimately, evaluated in terms of success or failure, resulting in a new input to the entire process. Does this business process not have the same form as reactive programming, the event-driven cascade?
Outside the realm of business, even narrative itself appears to abide by the same structure. Events occur, which influence future events in a cascade. The structure of a history begins with a single event, and extends outward across time and space as further events occur and influence each other.
One could say that causality itself presupposes a certain reactivity to nature, or at least a reactivity in terms of our capacity to understand or construct a logic of the world. If one were to formalize the pattern, we could say that a reactive logic takes the form of some set S containing events A, which leads to B, which leads to C, and so on. More generally, we might even want to think of a graph G, in which some node A points to B and C, each pointing to further nodes as the events cascade.
The core assumption of the entire logic can be reduced down to the idea of "ordering", where there exists a "first" object, and further objects are distinguished by their relation to other objects in terms of before or after. The intuition behind ordering seems to come from temporality, insofar as time is the realm in which ordering is first and most easily grasped. This isn't to say that ordering is inherently temporal, but that all orders have a potential for temporal representation, insofar as events must occur in series over time.
One must not get confused by the fact that an ordered list can be represented a single, non-temporal whole or shape: the structure represented by the list is temporal (in potentiality, although indefinite), but the structure of the list is not. We will see why later on.
The sense most closely connected to time is hearing. We can consider sound itself as "patterned time", in that we can perform an act of basic recognition on sound divided into time-based chunks, without necessarily knowing anything deeper about it. You hear one thing, then another thing, and so on.
II.
And yet, not everything is reactive or event driven. What if, instead of hearing, we considered sight? Rather than time, we could construct knowledge via the intuition of space. Formally speaking, spatial intuition is not "ordered" in the same sense as temporal intuition, but instead seeks to relate objects to each other and back to the whole. We can look at a set S and the relation of each of its elements A, B, C, etc both in terms of how A relates to S, how B relates to S, etc, and how A relates to B, B relates to C, etc. Rather than gaining the sense of a movement across time, we instead come to see a spatial structure, the state of an image.
This "state of the image" should indeed be familiar to programmers. When we think about the Von Neumann architecture, we can imagine the control plane "doing its thing", modifying the data plane, with an emphasis on the actual state of the data rather than on the way that change "flows" across the application. The data itself forms a persistent image, and change is incidental, or only relevant insofar as the image undergoes a transformation at the hands of the shifting control plane.
Outside of a technical context, we may find this spatial pattern in the act of description, whereby one relates qualities or characteristics of a thing to circumscribe the essence of the thing. It is in this way that space-oriented forms are atemporal, even eternal. In an event-driven world, the thing has no essence, it exists only as movement, but in space, things persist. Things "are", as stable compositions of smaller things. "Existence" is a property of this stability afforded by the form of space, as we know about it primarily through our visual capacity.
III.
And so, we come to grasp the two paradigms. One of time and hearing, the other of space and sight. But what of the other senses? Taste and smell seem to condition our understanding of differential quality, perhaps with an element of good vs bad, of judgment. Touch as proprioception (rather than as quality, which is more similar to taste and smell) seems related instead to the idea of the boundary, the construction of the object altogether, the very basic apprehension of difference as rooted in the original "me vs not me".
To restate the division another way, the "reactive form" is "object-driven", in that the pattern is rooted in the original appearance of an object, which sets off a cascade outward. The "stateful form" is instead "subject-driven", where each object matters only insofar as it is related back to a center, be it data, an image, an observer. We find here the same division as Jung's extroversion vs introversion, where the extroverted function acts on the object in a centrifugal pattern away from the subject, and the introverted function acts on objects in a centripetal fashion, pulling them toward the center.
We might notice, however, that each form is implicit in the other: each element of the object-driven form, A to B to C, is still implicitly related back to the original set S, the "frame" that the elements exist under, and we can analyze it as if it were a static image. On the other side, the way we apprehend spatial or state relations, A to S, B to S, etc. must necessarily be ordered, insofar as thought exists in time. The ordering in which we apprehend e.g. descriptive relations or qualities may not be meaningful, but there is an ordering nonetheless, and we can analyze the temporal movement of approach as much as the totality of elements. One could say that, in this way, the two forms are isomorphic, convertible from one to the other.
Through the idea of the isomorphism, I find myself approaching the notion of the Jungian "shadow". I may be thinking in a linear fashion, but there is always a space of possible thoughts that structures the linear pattern of my thinking, although I may not have knowledge of it. Or, I may be attempting to understand the structure of an image, but there is always an order to the way that I take in each element, each relationship, and attempt to make sense of it, although I may not have knowledge of the logic or necessity of the ordering itself.
In writing this post, I hoped to walk the reader through a series of movements that began with an event of thought, with the intent of revealing the image that I originally saw with a sense of delight and satisfaction. So it befits my Ni/Te cognitive functional structure, Introverted Intuition followed by Extroverted Thinking, to apprehend a form as image and relate it through an ordered association of ideas. There are plenty more possibilities and applications for the basic division I laid out above, but I will leave that task to someone else, perhaps someone with Extroverted Intuition, who could follow the cascade of resultant forms far beyond the capacity of my imagination.