Page 178 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Semiotics and the Dialectic of Information 167

Stated otherwise, theorists like Boulding, Wiener, de Saussure, and Gross-
berg focus on but one side of the dialectic of information, namely on the form
or pattern. They neglect or dismiss the matter/energy that necessarily embod-
ies or carries these shapes or patterns. Hence Grossberg, in forwarding ar-
15
ticulation as a principal poststructuralist category, lost sight of the energy that
must be expended to construct new forms and to disassemble other ones.
An immaterialist conception of information is at least implicit also in
the work of poststructuralist Jean Baudrillard, who wrote famously about
the hyperreal, defined as “the generation by models of a real without origin
or reality.” For Baudrillard, “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor sur-
vives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—PRECESSION OF
SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory.” 16
Less pointed than the foregoing, but still in keeping with the “de-material-
ization” thesis—namely that shape or form counts for much more than mere
matter—is the position advanced early in his career by Northrop Frye. In
Anatomy of Criticism, Frye broke the connection (dialectic) between verbal
structures/discourses on the one hand and the objects or worlds to which they
ostensibly refer on the other. He claimed that literature is largely independent
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of outside factors. “Nothing is prior in significance to literature itself,” Frye
announced. Rather, works of literature reflect and refer primarily to one an-
other, through their conventions, genres, images, archetypes, and so forth.
Literature is an “order of words,” a seamless structure: “The new poem, like
the new baby, is born into an already existing order and is typical of the struc-
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ture of poetry, which is ready to receive it.” Frye even extended these sen-
timents to the sciences, which he saw also as being fundamentally “an order
of words.” 19
Drawing attention from material reality and toward the symbolic world of
language, discourse, and simulacra (i.e., “forms”), as the aforementioned cul-
tural theorists do, subverts the possibility of political economy. For political
economy is certainly concerned with the material world. At its best, political
economy asks, among other things, how power selects certain “forms” and re-
jects others, and how it influences or even sets the meanings people attach to
the forms that circulate. Political economy, therefore, can be understood as
encompassing what de Saussure called external linguistics.
Critical political economy is concerned, first and foremost, with exposing
injustice, particularly with regard to the distribution of wealth and income,
but in other matters as well—environmental injustice, for instance. To rule
out political economy by focusing mainly on language itself as opposed to
what language refers to in the material world, or to the interests propagating
discourses, is to debilitate the quest for justice.