Context of book

1
Context of book

• Living in SF during dot.com boom watching the
  circular relationships between a speculative
  social and professional rhetoric of information
  and economic speculation. Both economies were
  tied together at the level of the symbolic
• Working as a librarian and having to allocate
  resources based on this rhetoricprofessional
  choices required more than surface level
  analysis because the problem was that of ideology
  and its construction of historypast, present,
  and future.

2
Purpose of the book

• To write an interdisciplinary book, published by
  a university press, that would
• 1) Intervene in the speculative economy of
  information with historical reflection and a
  deep-level vocabulary (critical theory) for
  analysis in order to recover historical agency by
  social subjects.
• 2) Intervene in the professional appropriation
  and reproduction of this speculative economy, so
  as to to recover historical agency by information
  professionals, foremost, in LIS, at the level of
  history and vocabulary.

3
Purpose of book, cont.

• To account for the historical invention of
  information as a concept of knowledge in terms of
  presence and representation through a process of
  textual analysis, and to offer examples of
  interventions into this historical process and
  construction in mid-century that were forgotten
  or misread (I.e., Benjamin and Heidegger).

4
Purpose of book, cont

• To show that there were multiple information
  ages in the twentieth century (i.e., that there
  were multiple historical points where the same
  rhetoric of information (as factual/self-present
  knowledge, as leading to a utopian future, as a
  new stage in human development, etc.the
  information age, the information society,
  etc.) occur, using the same or very similar
  rhetorical tropes to help it occur as the
  dominant sense of society and history (thus
  leading the possibilities of subjective agency
  within one direction the production of knowledge
  and society as information).

5
Purpose of the book, cont.

• To show that the historical construction of
  information (as fact, as re-presentation) erases
  freedom in historicity, or, that is, determines
  freedom to be agency within a set of known or
  knowable choices. (E.g., information theorys
  freedom of choice). Such a sense of knowledge
  extends to history itself, so that history is
  only possibility, not potentiality. Radical
  alterity and thus a radical sense of freedom
  (promised in the Enlightenment) is foreclosed.

6
Purpose of the book, cont.

• Information (as fact, as re-presentation)
  assures the forgetting of history of anything
  that is not promised as historicalas anything
  that does not fit within the production of
  historical evidence or narrative. (Versus
  Nietzsches sense of untimely or a-temporal
  historical interventions).
• Information, in brief, forgets history which is
  not itself informational. One thing that it
  forgets, for example, is the multiple occurrences
  of the information age.

7
Purpose of book, cont.

• The danger of an informational form of history
  (history as fact and re-presentation an
  historical future that is not historical, but
  simply, systemic and narrative (I.e., of a
  nihilistic form of postmodernism postmodernism
  as the repetition of modernist forms and values).

8
Purpose of the book, cont.

• Hence, the book has political, historical,
  ethical, aesthetic (problems of form and
  representation), and even psychological (problems
  of intent and unconscious meaning in language)
  levels, simultaneously.

9
Method of the book

• An analysis of the discursive strategies of key
  texts in this history of information and
  communication culture in the 20th century,
  enacted through close readings of historically
  important texts in the 20th century that
  promoted, and attempted to intervene, in the
  historical construction of knowledge as presence
  and representation, particularly within
  evidentiary claims and systematic forms (i.e.,
  knowledge as information).

10
Method of the book

• Hence, the book is not so much a history, as a
  critique of historical construction, by means of
  the close analysis and deconstruction of
  historical texts. Its textual and cultural
  critique is rooted, however, in historically
  significant texts in information culture.

11
Method of the book

• The books mode of analysis proposes a different
  sense to historical analysis in LIS, which has,
  thus far, functioned largely in the mode of
  simple representation (I.e., what I have called,
  largely non-pejoratively, naïve
  historiographyan historiographical method that
  begins and ends in rather unself-reflexive
  narrative representation.)

12
Method of the book

• The books style of writing and placement also
  had another very explicit intent to intervene in
  an instrumental and reductive understanding of
  the concept of information (I.e., an
  informational understanding of information)
  within LIS studies. It did this by attempting to
  introduce vocabulary (common in the university
  qualitative social sciences and humanities) about
  information within a book on the historical
  construction of vocabulary on information.

13
Method of the text

• The book, in other words, by challenging the
  horizons of the field at the level of vocabulary,
  both supplied a future for the field, even as it
  showed the limits of the field when it provoked
  complaints at the difficulty of the text by
  people within the field. The book was written to
  be both descriptive and performative of
  historyin other words, to be an active political
  agency in social and professional history. (See
  letter to JASIS, forthcoming.)

14
Method of the book, cont.

• Dominant formal (though often unarticulated)
  influences were the writings of Derrida and
  Foucault, and most of all, Heideggers critique
  of information and cybernetics as the latest
  occurrence of metaphysics in culture.

15
Method of the book, cont.

• Paul de Mans Allegories of Reading,
  particularly the chapter on Rilkes work was a
  very strong influence at the time of writing,
  because it discusses how Rilkes work constructs
  the possibilities of its own readingi.e., for
  its future historical occurrence. (Hence, the
  problem of how information texts construct the
  possibilities of their own readings, assuring
  their historical survival and canceling that of
  others reading of their topic (i.e.,
  information).
• (Therefore, the problem of the political
  relationship of professional texts and activities
  to dominant political strong attractors and the
  role of information ethics (i.e., the social and
  historical accountability of information
  professionals).) (See also Samual Webers work
  on professionalism in the university.)

16
Some questions

• From all this, the book asks many questions.
  Some of these are
• What rhetorical devices are deployed by
  professional and authoritative texts in order to
  create and place themselves with an information
  age and information society?
• 1) how do information professionals and
  authorities attempt to politically align
  themselves? 2) do ethics (analyses of the role of
  freedom in history and society) ever really
  occur, performatively? 3) what is the role of
  professionals to history and to the state? (Since
  the 19th century, the critical aspects of
  professionalism, particularly in the university
  of recent, has been becoming lost).

17
More questions

• Given that information is (or at the time of
  the books writing), was seen (as it had been
  previously seen in the 20th century, but then
  forgotten) as a driving force in history, what is
  the relation of information professionals and
  authorities to history, particularly to a history
  that is, at least on the popular level, often no
  more than that of repeated narratives, narrative
  forms, symbols, and tropes, reinforced by
  educational, economic, and political power (ie.,
  history as little more than ideology)?

18
Still, more questions

• In other words, what is the historical agency of
  information professionals and authorities within
  the political, economic, and social agency of
  the information age? What are their relations
  to other organizational and social forces and
  institutions?
• How do they participate in creating a social
  meaning to knowledge or information, and
  thus, a value to the political and social
  efficacy of thinking, reading, and
  communicating with one another?

19
The formal structure of the book

• Chapters
• Introduction Remembering information
• European Documentation Paul Otlet and Suzanne
  Briet
• Information Theory, Cybernetics, and the
  Discourse of Man
• Pierre Lévy and the Virtual
• Heidegger and Benjamin The Metaphysics and
  Fetish of Information
• Conclusion Information and the Role of
  Critical Theory

20
Some of my projects that the book is located
within and contributes to.

• To better describe information not as presence
  and re-presentation, but as excess and affect at
  the very heart of presence (Otlets in-forme,
  con-science Briets primary document,
  Benjamins notion of excess to modernitys
  dialectic, Nietzsches sense untimely thought,
  Heideggers notion of truth as alethia, before
  truth as veritas, Deleuzes sense of affect as a
  performative type of information and
  communication, Negris notion of knowledge as the
  in-common, at the edge of time).
• To introduce the problem of interpretation into
  the concept of information, and from that, to
  reach to reach beyond hermeneutics toward better
  accounts of the problem of time in information
  and knowledge and the event of communication. ).

21
My project

• To introduce a general economy into a restricted
  economy of information in the social and in LIS.
• In LIS, to do this by 1) Expanding the scope of
  study in the field, 2) by the insertion and
  expansion of vocabulary in the field 3) by the
  deconstruction of established, and reified,
  metaphysical models, pseudo-scientific methods,
  and poorly founded epistemic assumptions.