Scott Lash
Notes on the Notion of Information

The 'keywords' of the Hoff-Pedersen document seem to be power, organisation, information, democracy. I hope I can address these in the following. Especially information and power.

Technological change has influenced me to rethink a lot of what I've been writing in social theory. So much so that I now would understand contemporary times very much in terms of the information society, rather than postmodernism or the risk society, late capitalism, etc. Information society is preferable to postmodernism in that the former says what the society's principle is rather than saying merely what it comes after. Postmodernism primarily in this sense comes after modernism. Second, PM deals largely with disorder, fragmentation, irrationality, whilst the notion of information account for both the (new) order and disorder that we contemporaries experience. Indeed as we will see below the disorder (irrationality) is largely the unintended consequences of the order (rationality). Third, architects such as Venturi understand postmodernism in terms of 'complexity' and 'contradiction', and in particular from the contradiction of juxtaposition of elements of style, and of the contradiction of decoration and structure. Information is preferable and more powerful as a notion because it operates from a unified principle. Thus an 'informational architecture' is an architecture of flows, of movement, encouraging real time relations over distances; it is an architecture of disembedding. Of the compression of time and space. The primary qualities of information - as distinct from other socio-cultural categories such as narrative or discourse or monument or institution - is flow, disembeddedness, spatial compression, temporal compression, real time relations. It is not exclusively, but mainly, in this sense that we live in an information age. Some people have called some of these qualities late-modern (Giddens), others post-modern (Harvey), but these concepts are so amorphous. Information is not. In any event the place to go to grasp these qualities of the information age is for me, not so much Giddens and Harvey or Beck or even Castells. But rather Virilio, Deleuze, Haraway, McLuhan, Benjamin and the architect Rem Koolhaas.

I would understand the information society somewhat differently than it usually has been understood by sociologists. (I haven't had the time to benefit from Frank Webster's new book yet, which I am just about to buy). The information society has often (say Bell, Touraine, Castells) been understood in terms of knowledge intensive production and a post-industrial array of goods and service that are produced. This needs to be broadened out. First and foremost perhaps is to look at the paradox of the information society. This is how can such highly rational production result in the incredible irrationality of information overloads, misinformation, disinformation and out of control information. This is what Josef Esser calls the 'desinformierte Informationsgesellschaft'.

The key to understanding this is to look at what is produced in information production not as information rich goods and services, but more or less as out of control bites of information, This is indeed a theory of unintended consequences, but one that is a lot different than Beck and Giddens. For one thing it is not reflexive in their sense. There is little time for reflection. It is perhaps reflexive in an ethnomethodological sense. But in an ethnomethodological sense in which objects too take on powers of indexicality. (Please excuse compressed and cryptic nature of this remark)

Information production involves an important compression, indeed several important compressions. The most important one for me, I'm ashamed to say I've learnt from McLuhan, read, of course, as a thinker more of the information than the media age. In this context I think it is useful to understand 'the medium is the message' as the paradigmatic cultural form of the information age. Previously the dominant medium was narrative, lyric poetry, discourse, the painting. But now it is the message. The message or the 'communication'. The medium now is very byte like. It is compressed.

The newspaper already gave us the model for the information age. Only now it has become much more pervasive and has spread to a whole series of mostly machinic interfaces. Unlike say narrative or discourse or painting, the information in newspapers comes in very short messages. It is compressed. Literally compressed. Narrative as in the novel works from a beginning, middle and end. There is intentionality on the part of the protagonist and events follow from one another as causes and effects. Discourse - as in say philosophic or social scientific texts - is comprised of conceptual frameworks, of serious speech acts, of propositional logic, of speech acts backed up by legitimating arguments. Information is none of these. Once the medium becomes the message, or the bite (quite short but of various lengths) of information, we are in a different ball game. The value of a discursive book will last 20 or more years. The informational message in the newspaper will have value for only a day. After a day we throw it in the garbage. The message, as Knorr-Cetina has shown, for international currency traders, has validity (or value) for a mere twenty seconds, at that point your interlocutor is free to change the price spread on the currency deal at issue.

Discourse or the narrative novel or painting is produced with great time for reflection, say 3-4 years for a social science discursive text. The message, the information bite, the article that is written for The Sun after Manchester United v. Arsenal must be ready for transmission in about ninety minutes. No time for reflection. Produced pretty much in real time, a time contiguous with the event, separable with difficulty indeed from the event, and in this sense indexical. This is another way in which time is compressed in informationalisation. It is very different from narrative or discourse. The bit of information has its effect on you without the sort of legitimating argument that you are presented with in discourse. Information here is outside of a systematic conceptual framework. without propositional logic. But with an immediacy of symbolic violence.

In this sense I think it fair to say that Foucault may have once been right but no longer is. Power was once largely discursive, But it now is largely informational. Power is still very strongly as Foucault suggested tied to knowledge, but informational knowledge is increasingly displacing narrative and discursive knowledge. Power is indeed still very importantly tied to the commodity, in an age that is more than ever capitalist. But in a very important way it may no longer be commodification that is driving informationalization, but instead informationalization that is driving commodification. Information explodes the distinction between use value and exchange value as Mark Poster suggests in The Second Media Age. But then it is recaptured by capital for further commodification. Fast moving consumer goods and branded consumer products are also informational in their quick obsolescence, their global flows, their regulation through intellectual property, their largely immaterial nature in which the work of design and branding assumes centrality, while the actual production is outsourced to Malaysia or Thailand.

Power in the manufacturing age was attached to property as the mechanical means of production. In the information age it is attached to intellectual property. It is intellectual property, especially in the form of patent, copyright and trademark that put a new order on the out of control swirls of bits and bytes of information so that they can be valorised to create profit. For example in biotechnology, patents on genome techniques and forms of genetic modification, allow specific firms exclusive rights to the valorisation of genetic information. (Rabinow, Franklin, Lury and Stacey) In the IT sector itself, copyright (again the right to keep everybody else out) in say operating systems software allows firms to realise super profits. In fast moving consumer goods and designer goods, the trademarking of brands, which are already in the public domain, such as Macdonalds, Nike, but also Versace and Boss establish other monopolies and re-configurations of power around the otherwise anarchy of information.

To summarise, there is a sort of twisting dialectic involved in the information society. It moves from order to disorder to new order. Highly rational and knowledge-intensive production results in a quasi-anarchy of information proliferation and flows. This disorder of immediacy of information produces its own power relations in the immediate power/knowledge of bytes of information on the one hand. and in the re-ordering of information in categories of intellectual property in order to accumulate capital on a world scale in the information age.

Please accept these notes as a few only very semi-processed ideas thrown into the quasi-private domain of this emergent Anglo-Nordic new technology and theory group. Again my apologies for being unable to attend this initial meeting.

Scott Lash
5 April 1999