Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
to be jettisoned. Not least because it is inherently contradictory, betraying the
ancient Cretan paradox that ‘all men are liars’. How can we believe postmodernism’s
claims if it says that all claims are untrustworthy? This is, in the
words of Ernest Gellner (1992), ‘metatwaddle’ (p. 41), something that fails
to acknowledge that there is truth beyond the ‘discourses’ of analysts.
That is, against postmodern thinkers one may pose a reality principle, that
there is a real world beyond one’s imaginings (Norris, 1990). This is not to say
that there is TRUTH out there shining its light like a star. Of course it must be
established in language since truth is not revealed to us. But this does not subvert
the fact that truth is more than just a language game. Moreover, though we may
never grasp it in any absolute and final sense, we can develop more adequate
versions of reality by demonstrating better forms of argumentation, more trustworthy
evidence, more rigorous application of scholarship and more reliable
methodological approaches to our subjects. If this were not so, then the revealed
‘truth’ of the religious zealot must be put on a par with that of the dispassionate
scholar (Gellner, 1992), a collapse into relativism with potentially catastrophic
consequences (Gibbs, 2000).
It is this insistence on absolute relativism that reduces Baudrillard’s commentary
often to downright silliness. To be sure, he is right to draw attention to the
manufacture of news and to remind us that this construction of signs is the only
reality that most of us encounter, say, of events in Iraq, Kosovo or Kashmir.
However, it is when Baudrillard continues to argue that news is a simulation and
nothing more that he exaggerates so absurdly as to be perverse. He is absurd
because it is demonstrably the case that all news worthy of the term retains a
representational character, even if this is an imperfect representation of what is
going on in the world, and this is evidenced by either or both comparing alternative
news presentations of the same issues and events and also realising that
there is indeed an empirical reality towards which news gatherers respond. It is
surely necessary to retain the principle that news reports are, or can be, representational
so that one can, with reliability if with scepticism, judge one news
story as more accurate, as more truthful, than another. As we undertake this
comparative task, we also realise that we are engaged in discriminating between
more and less adequate – more or less truthful – representations of events, something
that gives the lie to the postmodern assertion that there is either a ‘truth’
or an infinity of ‘truths’.
More urgent than retaining the principle that news coverage has a representational
quality, however, is the need to remind ourselves that the news
reports on an empirical reality. It may not do this terribly well, but unless we
remember that there is a real world we can finish in the stupid and irresponsible
position of Baudrillard (1991) when he insisted, before the shooting started,
that the Gulf War (1991) never happened since it was all a media simulation or,
after the event, merely a war-game simulation of nuclear war (Baudrillard, 1992,
pp. 93–4).
This is by no means to deny that the First Gulf War was experienced by most
of the world solely as an informational event, or that this was the most extensively
reported war until the Kosovan invasion during 1999, the Afghan War in
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