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Information Poetics Barrett Aw Tten Wayne State University Criticism Volume 60 | Issue 2 Article 8 Information Poetics Barrett aW tten Wayne State University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Watten, Barrett () "Information Poetics," Criticism: Vol. 60 : Iss. 2 , Article 8. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol60/iss2/8 INFORMATION I have nearly unlimited access to music; I can audio- POETICS record my entire day; I can Barrett Watten record high-definition video and send it wirelessly. There The Poetics of Information are over forty thousand mes- Overload: From Gertrude Stein sages in my Gmail inbox. to Conceptual Writing by Paul The world’s major newspa- Stephens. Minneapolis: University pers are continually updated of Minnesota Press, 2015. 240 + by the minute. Thanks to xvi pp. Paperback: $25.00 my mobile web browser, I have access to more words than were contained in the National Library of Ireland on June 16, 1904. On that day, Leopold Bloom carried the following items in his pocket. (ix) What do we mean by information? How can we discuss its poetics— the discourse of the making of art or writing as its condition of pos- sibility? There are three distinct uses of the term at work in Paul Stephens’s revisionist history of the American avant-garde tradi- tion. Stephens’s baseline narrative is the pervasive sense of being over- whelmed that we live and suffer on a daily basis, readily identifiable in the quotation above and reflected in the covers of self-help publica- tions with titles such as Surviving Information Overload, Information Anxiety, and Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization (xii–xiii). A second narrative begins with mod- ernism’s imitation of information surplus, represented by the list of Criticism Spring 2018, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 275–283. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.60.2.0275 275 © 2018 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 276 BARRETT Watten random items in Leopold Bloom’s communication, data storage, and pocket, continuing through the tex- bureaucratic control—not simply tual experiments of Gertrude Stein rejecting those technologies, but and the avant-garde “Revolution of also adopting and commenting on the Word” of the 1930s, and end- them” (1). ing at a point of convergence with Innovations of modernist and conceptual art and writing, from avant-garde poetics thus intersect the 1960s to now. As initial prem- with information in ways that pro- ise, Stephens wants to show how duce a proliferation of forms that modernism and the avant-garde reflect on, as they counteract, this in its development recognized, overload. But here the question is contested, transformed, and made precisely how the convergence of something new out of the techno- poetic form and what Mark Poster logical development of what has termed “the mode of information” been called, from the 1950s on, the takes place. At the basis of this “information society.” The two question is what is meant by “infor- narratives of development parallel mation” and even more specifically and support each other, in a con- its relation to the language that tinuous present of technological embodies it. Mediated processes of determinism: the increasing ten- storage and retrieval are anything dency toward ever-greater infor- but neutral to the information—or mation resources as a consequence the knowledge and language— of the media and technology that they represent. At the intersection create and access them and the par- of information and poetics is a set allel development of avant-garde of parallel but also negative condi- forms that represent or reflect on tions in which, for Poster, “the rep- surplus information. Stephens’s resentational function of language focus on the avant-garde—despite has been placed in question by the disparities of scale between big data differential communicational pat- or mass media and the elusive and terns each of which shift to the inaccessible works of individuals forefront the self-referential aspect and coteries—is his overarching of language.”1 Rendering a form claim: that works of experimental of knowledge—for example, the art and literature provide the best catalogue of the National Library register, and potential remedy for, of Ireland—into information (the the condition in which we live: card catalogue that accesses it) “Although information technology transforms the library’s content has typically been figured as hos- into something entirely different, tile or foreign to poetry, . avant- a differential system that turns its garde poetry has been centrally content into a formalized set of concerned with technologies of metadata. ON THE POETICS OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD 277 For Ron Day, the modern inven- in this sense reflects the develop- tion of information is thus a politi- ment of information theory, after cally and culturally invested process its primary instance in Claude that leads to social “command and Shannon and Warren Weaver’s control,” on the one hand, along The Mathematical Theory of with the illusion of an equivalence Communication (1948). For and transparency of information Shannon and Weaver, informa- in its major forms, on the other: tion is the radical stripping of con- “Information and communication tent (the message to be conveyed) technologies are not just repre- from its mode of communication, sentational or ‘virtual’ at the level reduced to a measure representing of presenting visual or auditory the probability of its being received simulacra; they themselves may as message as its quantity of infor- constitute instances of representa- mation. The mathematics of quan- tion or virtuality insofar as they are tifying information as probability substitutional or tropic figurations led Shannon and Weaver to reduce that mediate the future both tech- information to its minimal unit, the nologically and semiotically.”2 The bit or binary digit, from which as concept of “information overload” we know all computer languages depends on such large-scale figura- and digital media are now built. tions, in ways that obscure or over- Reducing information to minimal write the relation of information units is provisionally a radical for- to the objects of knowledge or lan- malism in which meaning, mes- guage it represents. “Information” sage, or content are elided for their is thus a differential rather than a greater technological capacity for positive term, as it produces a form being transmitted and received. of representation—metadata, code, However, even at the basic level of or language—that strips the object the construction of information as of knowledge from its manner of a probabilistic calculation of mini- indexical organization. In order mal units or bits, there is a payoff to access fully the potential rela- for a politics of information over- tionship of forms of poetry and load in a positive as well as negative art to information, then, the poet- sense: “The concept of information ics of information itself must be applies not to the individual mes- described, not in the metaphor of sages (as the concept of meaning a “mass of data” but in the precise would), but rather to the situation constitution of its elements. as a whole, the unit information The third narrative of infor- indicating that in this situation one mation poetics, then, must be that has an amount of freedom of choice, which comprehends the specific- in selecting a message, which it is ity of both terms. Information convenient to regard as a standard 278 BARRETT Watten or unit amount.”3 The radical par- thus humanized, and subjectivity ticularity of the bit, then, implies a is computerized, allowing them to horizon of freedom of choice that join in a symbiotic union whose works through the probability of result is narrative.”5 transmission to the meaning, mes- But it may equally be the abstract sage, or content that may be located “freedom of choice,” not merely the through it (a freedom that may perception of informatic pattern- refer to post–World War II repu- ing, that results from the stripping diations of totalitarian systems of of content to bits that is most crucial meaning, Stalinist or fascist, that for an information poetics. Here, restrict “freedom of choice”). the radical particularity of the bit Katherine Hayles, in How suggests a relationship to the ubiq- We Became Posthuman, devel- uitous formal device of the nonnar- ops another line from the radi- rative foregrounding of the part cal formalism of the bit and its within a larger whole that we find consequent dematerialization of everywhere in works of the avant- content, seeing the relationship garde, from Marcel Duchamp between information and mean- and William Carlos Williams to ing in the digital age to be the result Language and conceptual writ- of the persistence of immateriality ing.6 Poets and conceptual artists, within material forms as what she in a way entirely different from the terms “virtuality”: “From ATMs virtual fantasies of cyber- or post- to the Internet, from the morph- modern fiction, exploit the tension ing programs used in Terminator between abstract information and II to the sophisticated visualization its material embodiment in alter- programs used to guide microsur- native forms. A central strength of geries, information is increasingly Stephens’s Poetics of Information perceived as interpenetrating mate- Overload, then, is not merely to rial forms. From here it is a small draw a technologically determined step to perceiving information as parallel between information soci- more mobile, more important, ety and the avant-garde but to more essential than material forms. show how a series of nonnarra- When this impression becomes tive forms, which foreground both part of your cultural mindset, you materiality and particularity, inter- have entered the condition of vir- sect with the technological series in tuality.”4 Hayles’s derivation of ways that do not simply reproduce “virtuality” leads from media tech- it.
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