Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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An illustration of some of the consequences of this starting point at which
‘language is never innocent’ (Barthes, [1953] 1967, p. 16) can be found in literary
criticism. Once upon a time critics took it as their task to discern, say, ways in
which we could get a better picture of Victorian capitalism through reading
Dombey and Son, or to examine the ethos of masculinity evidenced in the short
stories of Ernest Hemingway, or to assess how D. H. Lawrence’s upbringing
shaped his later writing. The presupposition of critics was that one could look
through the language of these authors to a reality behind the words (to a historical
period, an ideology, a family background), and the aspiration of these critics
was for themselves to elucidate this function as unobtrusively – as transparently,
hence objectively – as was possible. To such intellectuals clarity of writing, from
both artist and critics, was at a premium, since the prime task was to look through
the language to a reality beyond.
Roland Barthes (1963, 1964) caused a considerable fuss in the early 1960s
inside French literary circles when he attacked such assumptions in debate
with a leading critic, Raymond Picard. Barthes offered a reading of Racine, an
icon of classical French literature, which, first, objected to the supposition that
the meaning of Racine’s words is inherently clear and, second, insisted that all
critical approaches developed and drew upon metalanguages (Freudianism,
Marxism, structuralism, etc.) in their commentaries. This is something that
subverted any ambition of critics themselves to enhance the text (Barthes, 1966)
by, as a rule, making more comprehensible the historical context of its production.
The centrepiece of Barthes’ objection here, of course, is that language is not
transparent, authorship is not about looking through language to a phenomenon
out there, but is a matter of the making of languages, first by the author, then by
the critics.
The pertinence of this literary debate to our concern with postmodernism
becomes evident when we realise that Barthes, and others, extend their principle
that language is all the reality we know to a wide variety of disciplines, from
history to social science. Across a wide range they endeavour to analyse the
‘phrase-regime’ (Lyotard) which characterises particular subjects. As such, they
query the truth claims of other intellectuals and suggest alternative – postmodern
– approaches to study which examine subjects as matters of language (or, to
adopt the favoured word, discourses).
Moreover, it is significant, too, that Barthes (1979) applied his approach to
an enormous variety of phenomena in the contemporary world, from politicians,
wrestlers, movies, fashion, cuisine, radio and photography to magazine articles,
always discussing his subjects as types of language. Following this route taken
by Barthes, we can see that, if reality is a matter of language/discourse, then
everything that we experience, encounter and know is informational. Nothing
is transparent or clear since everything is constructed in language and must
be understood in language. In sum, one relevance of postmodernism to considerations
of information is the perception that we do not live in a world about
which we simply have information. On the contrary, we inhabit a world that is
informational.
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