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Semiotics and the Dialectic of Information 171

case, however, one would really need to elaborate the connections within
McLuhan’s own thought between, on the one hand, his medium theory of
eye-ear bias, and on the other his treatment of media as manifestations of
rhetorical tropes. To my knowledge, these connections have yet to be made.
This chapter has explored the “dialectic of information” as a means of rec-
onciling political economy and cultural studies. Both an extreme idealism/im-
materialism (as exemplified by de Saussure, Boulding, Baudrillard, and
Grossberg) and an undue materialism (Skinner, Bentham, and the “vulgar
Marxists”) are in grievous error on account of reductionism. Only the “di-
alectic of information” can avoid their grievous errors.
Exemplary in this regard are both McLuhan and Innis—the first a literary
critic with an expertise in symbolist poetry, the second a “dirt economist.”
Considered separately, both are highly heuristic. Juxtaposed and interrelated,
they provide new richness of insight, and constitute a bulwark against post-
structuralist dematerializations and undue economistic determinisms. This
feat both theorists accomplish through their singular, distinct, but related af-
firmations of the dialectic of information.

NOTES

1. Robert E. Babe, “Information Industries and Economic Analysis: Policy-Mak-
ers Beware,” in Communication and the Transformation of Economics (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1995), 9–20.
2. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, The Unity of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1980), 38–39.
3. He wrote: “In language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought
from sound. . . . Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound
and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance.” And
again: “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-
image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psycho-
logical imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses. The sound-
image is sensory, and if I happen to call it ‘material,’ it is only in that sense, and by
way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is gener-
ally more abstract.” De Saussure treated written language phonetically, that is as
standing for (signifying) a sound image. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1915),
113, 66; emphasis in original. www2.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-3/s06/Saussure
.pdf (accessed Dec. 16, 2007).
4. Daniel Chandler, “Signs: Semiotics for Beginners,” April 2006, www.aber.ac.uk
/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html (accessed Dec. 15, 2007).
5. Weizsäcker, The Unity of Nature, 274.
6. De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 20–21.