The Mode of Information

Poststructuralism and Social Contexts

Mark Poster

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745603278, 9780745603261
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this path-breaking work, Mark Poster highlights the nature of the newly emerging forms of social life, in the current era. The flexibility of language which the computer allows makes the written word less certain and less concrete. The result of these changes, Poster argues, is a new communication experience, an interaction between humankind and a new kind of reality.

Poster discusses the addictive properties of television and arcade video games, as well as the surveillance possibilities which the new communication technologies offer the state. His wide-ranging analysis incorporates the new language-based theories of mathematics, philosophy and literature in Wiener, Derrida and Barthes, among others.

This work is a major new contribution to the debate surrounding the future of electronically mediated-experiences.

1

The Concept of Postindustrial Society

Bell and the Problem of Rhetoric

Is it not commonplace nowadays to say that the forces of man have already entered into a relation with the forces of information technology and their third-generation machines which together create something other than man, indivisible ‘man-machine’ systems? Is this a union with silicon instead of carbon?

From Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

Recent efforts to generate a new theory of the contemporary social world have met with great resistance. Notions of advanced capitalism, for Marxists, and the idea of modernization, for Weberians, still dominate their respective traditions of social theory and empirical studies. In general, changes in the social order that have occurred in the past few decades are explained within the old models. Alternative rubrics – postindustrial society, information society, the third wave, the atomic or nuclear or electronic age – have been considered and, on the whole, rejected.

And yet things are happening in the social fabric, things that are radically new and that are not well accounted for within the confines of the established positions. It could be the case that students of society are confronted with a paradigm shift, in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, except that the anomalous instances, the elements that resist the old frameworks, have not yet reached a critical mass or do not yet constitute a large enough corpus to convince observers that traditional positions need to be abandoned in favor of new ones. It could equally be the case that recent social changes are comprehensible within the existing frameworks.

Another possibility is that the issue is not the substitution of one totalizing framework for another, but the elaboration of a regional theory that accounts for the new phenomena. This is the position I would like to defend in the pages that follow. I want to affirm and to theorize the conditions for the study of a new historical sector, one that implies radical changes in the social order. Also as part of the theoretical conditions for the analysis of the new sector I want to argue against the notion of a totalizing theory. These are two distinct but related theoretical issues. I will argue that what is new in society is a set of structures of domination that are linguistically based, that one feature of these structures is their reliance on totalizing forms of discourse. Hence one problem for critical theory is to develop a form of discourse that does not repeat the totalizing quality of the discourses it proposes to analyze and unseat. The first deficiency therefore of concepts like “postindustrial society” is that they substitute one totalizing position for another.

Before presenting my critique of postindustrial theories I want to clarify my critique of totalizing theories. A distinction needs to be made between general theories and totalizing theories. A general theory specifies a field that encompasses the vast majority of society at a specific level of analysis or for a defined portion of experience. Demographics is an example of general theory. General theory becomes totalizing when it claims to include within its field all social phenomena, or the “essence” of society, in sum, when it marginalizes those perspectives or experiences that are not within its domain. As I use the term, totalizing theory disqualifies antagonistic perspectives and claims to exhaust the meaning of the entire social field, or less drastically, that portion of the social field that it theoretically constitutes as an object of study. Totalizing theories tend to dehistoricize the social field by grounding their positions in nature, the dialectic, reason, statistical calculations, and so forth. There is one moment of theory formation in which totalization cannot, indeed should not, be avoided. When the theorist selects his or her field or topic there is an implicit totalizing act since the selection is made from a field of all possible topics. In this sense alone, totalization is a condition for the possibility of any theory.

The Cunning of Totalization

The discursive effect of the term postindustrial society is to deny the validity of positions rooted in the analysis of industrial society. The theory of postindustrial society introduces a break in the strong sense, one that reduces to insignificance those social dimensions that precede the break. After the term postindustrial is introduced the social theorist can no longer claim as significant for analysis those features of society that belong to the industrial period. The theorist of postindustrialism has thus redefined social reality, has reconstituted the field of analysis, making invalid areas of experience that are not characteristic of the new model. This process of cancellation is the power effect of the totalizing term. Totalization introduces a theoretical zero–sum game, a game that has been played over and over again in the history of social theory, in which theories are pitted against one another like two bulls in springtime fighting for control of a group of cows. Regardless of the validity of the argument for the concept of postindustrialism, its totalizing character introduces a rhetorical gesture that elicits an equally totalizing response.

Daniel Bell, whose work is most closely associated with the theory of postindustrial society, commits the error of totalization in the strongest sense.¹ He defines postindustrial society in opposition to all previous social formations, encompassing the entire history of humanity in a schema that distinguishes the new from the old. Citing the statistical analysis of the US economy by Marc Porat, Bell concludes that “nearly fifty per cent of GNP, and more than fifty per cent of wages and salaries, derive from the production, processing and distribution of information goods and services. It is in that sense that we have become an information economy.”² By contrast, in earlier societies income was largely derived from “extraction” or “fabrication.” In addition to the distinction based on income sources, postindustrial society is unique, Bell contends, in that more than half the labor force now consists, for the first time in history, of information workers.³ Bell’s third criterion for postindustrial society derives from and develops further those of income and labor: knowledge and information are now the “axial principles” of society. In his words, “The axial principle of postindustrial society … [is] the centrality of theoretical knowledge …”⁴ While he recognizes that all societies employ knowledge in production, he proposes that only recently has the economy become characterized by “a fusion of science and engineering …” For Bell the indices of income, labor and knowledge determine that a new social and economic structure has emerged, a postindustrial society.

Bell is far too astute a theorist to ignore completely the problem of totalization. He pretends to limit the definition of postindustrial society only to the level of economic and social structure, eschewing any attempt to characterize “the total configuration of society.”⁵ Yet on the very next page of his text one reads that postindustrial society is a change in “reality,” one that gives priority to the social world and subordinates nature and things to it. The register has shifted from social analysis to ontology and the theorist’s categories of analysis have become indexes of reality itself. In fact the issue is finally not that Bell does or does not limit his analysis to the social structure: throughout his work economic, political and cultural factors are swept up into a unified definition of postindustrial society.⁶ The problem is rather that the rhetoric of totalization is integral to his problematic. The discursive act of defining the limits of new social phenomena is carried out by Bell in a register in which the definition of the new phenomena becomes the definition of the entire society.

Bell makes little effort to limit the scope of his analysis and therefore to avoid the impression that he is presenting a new totalization. The statistical analyses he uses are at the macrological level and his assertions about the character of postindustrial society are flat statements of general fact. For example, he presents a tripartite history of social “infrastructures” in which there is a progression from transportation systems, to energy systems, to mass communications systems. The change to postindustrial society occurs during the third stage when there occurs a merger of the mass media with the computer.⁷ The social world is thus transformed by general processes that have no clear limits. What is most regrettable in all of this is that while Bell would eschew “technological determinism,”⁸ he attributes the cause of postindustrial society to a technical innovation (the computer + mass media = postindustrial society), thus contradicting himself. Even if one grants Bell his slip into technological determinism the problem of totalization remains, for he depicts the entire field of social reality as uniformly and homogeneously affected by the introduction of computerized mass media.

Another difficulty in Bell’s totalizing discourse is his use of social scientific language to validate and legitimize his theory of postindustrial society. Bell argues that with the coming of postindustrial society the major “variables” have changed from those of capital and labor to those of information and knowledge.⁹ Bell here disguises the vagueness of his formulation by the use of the term “variable,” which lends a precise, scientific aura to his statements. The statement asserts that knowledge is the independent variable in postindustrial society and that it determines other dependent variables, such as capital and labor. Formulated as a hypothesis, the statement might serve as a guide for future studies, but Bell presents it to the reader as a conclusion, transforming by the magic of rhetoric an assumption into a finding. The assertion assumes what in fact needs to be demonstrated by empirical studies.

Bell’s proclamation that knowledge and information are now “the crucial variables” does more than violate the order of scientific method. The formulation is much too totalizing to be of much use in empirical social science. The terms are all wrong: capital, labor, knowledge and information are not comparable units of analysis. They cannot be “operationalized” in research like the categories of age, sex, race, income. Even if studies were done to demonstrate Bell’s proposition they would not likely convince many observers because of the level of generality involved. We are back to the problem of totalization: one would need to have all the variables of society and carry out all possible correlations in order to conclude that the chief variables are knowledge and information. In short, Bell’s claim that “knowledge and information are the crucial variables of postindustrial society” is a theoretical argument that is given the appearance of proven fact.

Bell may have used the term “variable” in a metaphoric sense in which the term means the important or leading phenomenon. In this case the difficulty in his position is precisely the question of the epistemological authority on which the judgment is based. The statement in question is performative¹⁰ not constative. That knowledge and information are the leading variables of society is not known or proven but asserted by Bell. By dressing the assertion in the garb of science the author is doing things to the reader, commanding a reordering of the reader’s perception of what is important in the social field. He is not merely transmitting knowledge. And this reordering is at the level of the social totality, not at the level of a particular phenomenon. It is no accident that Bell resorts to performative statements at the point in his argument where he is concerned with the totality. Since the totality cannot be known by situated individuals it must be figured,¹¹ usually in performative strategies like the one Bell uses.

The Repression of Language

If the conceptualization of postindustrial society is flawed by a rhetoric of totalization, it is also theoretically deficient when it represses the linguistic level of the phenomena that it designates as new. Theorists of postindustrialism tend to ignore the problem of language both at the level of theory and at the level of the constituted social field. Even though they give priority to phenomena like knowledge, information, and communication, they do not treat these phenomena as linguistic issues and they give no heed to the linguistic quality of their own discourse. This omission is serious and it mars the effort to present a coherent argument for postindustrial or information society. The problem speaks to the limit of a social science that refuses to concern itself with language theory, raising the important epistemological difficulty of the border between disciplines and their essential non-unity.¹²

Like Marx and Weber, Bell assumes that the social field consists of actions. As we have seen, he characterizes postindustrial society as a service economy with a majority of people working no longer in the extraction of raw materials or the fabrication of goods but in an information exchange or “game” between persons. Bell insists that the central feature of postindustrial society is the new role of knowledge and information in the economy. Indeed writers who argue in favor of a new social formation generally focus on information as the major theme of the emerging new economic world. They divine a new pattern of the production, distribution and consumption of information as the chief attribute of the new epoch. They all, Bell especially, treat information as a set of economic facts, thereby absorbing the new social phenomenon within the old categories of capitalist (or in some cases Marxist¹³) economic theory.

Bell is quick to notice the anomalous quality of information: unlike material goods, information is not exhausted in its consumption. The fact that one person gains information from a database does not reduce the ability of another to gain the same information. Everyone in fact may “have” the same information even at the same time. Scarcity of material resources, the prime axiom of capitalist economic theory, does not apply to information.¹⁴ The edifice of capitalism appears to be threatened by the inexhaustibility of information, by its resistance to the commodity form. Instead of raising the theoretical question of the possibility of an economy beyond the limits of scarce commodities, Bell hurries to reconcile the new with the old. While information is not suited to spatial forms of scarcity it initiates a new form of scarcity, he contends, the scarcity of time. Information becomes a commodity to the extent that the time needed to reproduce it falls within the principles of capitalist economic theory. Bell and capitalist theorists generally have discovered that information, like automobiles, can be sold and therefore may fall within the market system. The price of information is determined for them by the same laws of supply and demand that govern the distribution of material commodities.

Bell thereby lends legitimacy to the extension of the commodity form to the new realm of information, reversing a longstanding liberal princple that, in a democracy, knowledge and information in general must be freely accessible. When Denis Diderot, the eighteenth-century liberal, included in his Encyclopedia detailed information about the production processes in the major crafts, he hoped to destroy the principle of secret knowledge that was a mainstay of the old guild system. The wealth of a democratic nation, he thought, depended upon the unimpeded circulation of scientific and technical information. It is something of a scandal that a major liberal thinker of the twentieth century, like Bell, should reverse this principle. Just when the merger of mass communications and the computer makes possible the rapid, universal distribution of information, and therefore in principle extends radically the democratization of knowledge, and thereby perhaps a deeper social democratization, Bell sees fit to authorize the restriction of information to those who can foot the bill. Capitalism thus extends the domain of crime to those who reproduce knowledge without authorization and those who access it without paying their fees. The exchange of information between individuals and groups, if Bell has his way, would fall within the commodity form, in the Marxian and Lukácsian sense, alienating and reifying yet another aspect of social relationships.

One feature of the electronic information works against its commodification. The new technologies advance considerably the reproducibility of information. The combination of electronic coding and recording on plastic tape surfaced with oxides enables the speedy and accurate copying of many forms of information: words, numbers, music, visual images. As the technologies that process and reproduce information are integrated with the technologies that mo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Words without Things
• 1 The Concept of Postindustrial Society Bell and the Problem of Rhetoric
• 2 Baudrillard and TV Ads The Language of the Economy
• 3 Foucault and Databases Participatory Surveillance
• 4 Derrida and Electronic Writing The Subject of the Computer
• 5 Lyotard and Computer Science The Possibilities of Postmodern Politics
• Notes
• Names Index