Page 177 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

166 Chapter Seven

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soup without form.” Boulding then went on to claim, however, that infor-
mation counteracts entropy through “the Law of Evolution,” which he de-
fined as the capacity/propensity of the universe or portions thereof to increase
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in complexity, organization, differentiation, and structure. He saw, then, two
opposing forces: the law of entropy and the law of evolution, the key to the
latter being “information” which opposes (and hence is not itself subject to)
entropy.
The position taken in the present chapter, however, is that in the absence of
matter or energy—both of which, Boulding agrees, are subject to entropy—
there is and can be no “information,”—nor “signs,” either, for that matter. In-
formation is (in part) the form or pattern which matter or energy assumes.
Boulding’s declaration is really a tautology that comes down to this: increas-
ing order (i.e., greater complexity of form) counters decreasing order or de-
clining complexity of form. Expressed a bit differently, information counters
declines in information. Boulding’s shortcoming, if I may be so bold, was to
consider information as existing without the matter/energy component—that
is, as pure form. But only in the problematic realms of angels and parapsy-
chology can such be the case. Actually, entropy means the lessening of pat-
tern or form on the part of matter and/or energy, that is increased randomiza-
tion, a loss of information.
Cultural theorist Katherine Hayles has attributed the tendency of writers,
like Boulding and Wiener, to de-materialize information—or as she put it, to
view information as “an entity distinct from the substrates [or media] carry-
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ing it” —to the influence of Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of
communication (1948). Shannon and Weaver theorized digital communica-
tion, foreshadowing today’s convergence. 14 With convergence, information
may seem to be disembodied—as existing in a world of patterned electrons
flitting about the globe via radio waves or nestled temporarily on a computer
hard drive—in much the same way that Wiener emphasized the static pattern
of the human body while downplaying the necessary presence of its ever-
shifting materials. However, simply because patterns of electrons can be em-
bedded onto new carriers with apparent ease does not deny that there must
always be a carrier and that work must be done (i.e., energy expended) to ex-
ecute the transferal. All this is precisely what advocates of a de-materialized
notion of information omit or forget. Boulding, for example, in remarking
how both he and his students were enriched by his classes, neglected to recall
that students, too, are material carriers of information (their bodies “em-
body” Wiener’s patterns; their brains “carry” Boulding’s lectures); that en-
ergy is expended as these living organisms acquire and process the knowl-
edge (new patterns and forms); and that energy is expended through
metabolism as his students simply maintain their existence.