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 rhetoric—professional choices required more than ‘surface’ level analysis because the problem was that of ideology and its construction of history—past, 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 theory’s “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 “historical”as anything that does not fit within the production of historical evidence or narrative. (Versus Nietzsche’s 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 book’s 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 historiography”—an historiographical method that begins and ends in rather unself-reflexive narrative representation.)

12. Method of the book • The book’s 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 history—in 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, Heidegger’s critique of information and cybernetics as the latest occurrence of metaphysics in culture.

15. Method of the book, cont. • Paul de Man’s “Allegories of Reading,” particularly the chapter on Rilke’s work was a very strong influence at the time of writing, because it discusses how Rilke’s work constructs the possibilities of its own reading—i.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 other’s 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 Weber’s 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 book’s 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 (Otlet’s “in-forme’”, “con-science”; Briet’s “primary document,” Benjamin’s notion of excess to modernity’s dialectic, Nietzsche’s sense “untimely” thought, Heidegger’s notion of truth as alethia, before truth as veritas, Deleuze’s sense of affect as a performative type of information and communication, Negri’s 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.