Page 183 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

172 Chapter Seven

7. De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 20.
8. De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 22–23.
9. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
(1950; reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1967), 129, 130.
10. Kenneth Boulding, The Image: Knowledge and Life in Society (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1956), 35.
11. Kenneth Boulding, Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution (Bev-
erly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, 1978), 10.
12. Boulding, Ecodynamics, 10.
13. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cyber-
netics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xi.
14. With convergence, voice, image, video, text, and indeed combinations thereof,
are stored and transmitted via phone lines, cables, satellite circuits, hard drives, and
floppy disks through a series of on-off electrostatic charges or pulses.
15. To acknowledge the dialectic of information is also to controvert Boulding’s
contention that information is not subject to the law of conservation. Of course, the
planet we inhabit is not a closed system, as energy in the form of sunlight continually
enters the planetary system and heat is radiated into space.
16. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitch-
man (New York: Semioltext(e), 1983), 2; emphasis in original.
17. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; reprint, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 17.
18. Northrop Frye, “The Language of Poetry,” in Explorations in Communication,
ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 44.
19. In subsequent work, Frye backed off from this extreme and nondialectical po-
sition to affirm what I call here the dialectic of information. In The Critical Path, for
example, he saw the autonomy of literature and of criticism as constituting but one
pole of an overarching dialectic, namely that of “literature as a coherent structure, his-
torically conditioned but shaping its own history, responding to but not determined in
its form by an external historical process.” Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: An Es-
say on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1971), 24.
20. This is what mainstream “information economists” try to do, with little suc-
cess. See Robert E. Babe, “The Place of Information in Economics,” in Information
and Communication in Economics, ed. Robert E. Babe (Boston: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1994), 41–67.
21. Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics
as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
22. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
1781. www.utilitarianism.com/jeremy-bentham/index.html (accessed August 22,
2008).
23. Everett Rogers, A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach
(New York: The Free Press, 1994), 499; Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American
Mind (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 148.