Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
most routine things and activities. For example, to de Certeau the ordinary action
of driving a car is extraordinary, an astonishing arena of creativity: it may be
cruising, commuting, speeding, low-riding, Sunday-riding, time alone, thinkingtime,
dreaming-time, playing one’s music, relaxing, observing other drivers. In
such circumstances, how dare intellectuals intrude to claim that they have
privileged access to what ordinary people think or even feel about things?
It will not surprise readers who have gone this far to learn that a bête noire
of postmodernism is the claim to identify the essential features of any phenomenon.
‘Essentialism’ provokes the postmodernist to recite the familiar charges
against arrogant modernists’ presumptions: that the analyst can impartially
cognise the ‘truth’, that features hidden beneath the surface of appearances are
open to the scrutiny of the privileged observer, that there is a core meaning which
can be established by the more able analyst, that there are authentic elements of
subjects which can be located by those who look hard and long enough.
Since I do not subscribe to postmodern thought, I do not hesitate summarily
to review key elements of postmodernism as an intellectual and as a social
phenomenon. These include:
• the rejection of modernist thought, values and practices
• the rejection of claims to identify ‘truth’ on grounds that there are only versions
of ‘truth’
• the rejection of the search for authenticity since everything is inauthentic
• the rejection of quests to identify meaning because there are an infinity of
meanings (which subverts the search for meaning itself)
• the celebration of differences: of interpretations, of values and of styles
• an emphasis on pleasure, on sensate experience prior to analysis, on jouissance
and the sublime
• delight in the superficial, in appearances, in diversity, in change, in parody,
irony and pastiche
• recognition of the creativity and imagination of ordinary people which defies
determinist explanations of behaviour.
Postmodernism and information
But what has this to do with information? A first response comes from the postmodern
insistence that we can know the world only through language. While
Enlightenment thinkers have subscribed to the idea that language was a tool to
describe a reality apart from words, the postmodernist asserts that this is ‘myth
of transparency’ (Vattimo, [1989] 1992, p. 18) because it is blind to the fact
that symbols and images (i.e. information) are the only ‘reality’ that we have.
We do not, in other words, see reality through language; rather, language is the
reality that we see. As Michel Foucault once put it, ‘reality does not exist . . .
language is all there is and what we are talking about is language, we speak
within language’ (quoted in Macey, 1993, p. 150).
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