Page 187 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

176 Chapter Eight

poststructuralist, Poster’s focus is on language, and so he is concerned pri-
marily with how changes in the medium of communication affect language,
and how these changes in turn affect the network of social relations. As the
means of communication change, he wrote, “the relation of language and so-
4
ciety, idea and action, self and other,” changes also. Poster coined the term,
the mode of information, to designate the nature of a medium’s “interven-
tions,” particularly with regard to language. 5
Poster proposed three stages in the mode of information, each correspon-
ding to a particular impact on language by the means of communication. In
the first stage, occurring in oral societies, symbolical correspondences pre-
dominate because communicators converse principally about objects in their
immediate environs, or as Poster put it, “the self is constituted as a position
of enunciation through its embeddedness in a totality of face-to-face rela-
6
tions.” In the second stage, where exchanges are predominantly mediated by
print, the representational property of language comes to the fore. In this
stage, the “self is constructed as an agent in rational/imaginary autonomy.” 7
Presumably this is due to the private nature of reading/writing and the con-
cern for depicting through language remote objects and events, as well as
completely imaginary ones. The third stage is that of electronics, and Poster
places such great emphasis on it that he often uses the term, mode of infor-
mation, to refer solely to it, declaring, for instance, that the mode of informa-
tion “designates social relations mediated by electronic communication sys-
8
tems,” and again: “The mode of information designates social relations
mediated by electronic communication systems, which constitute new pat-
terns of language.” 9
Although language is significant in structuring human relations and con-
figuring individual identities in all three stages, according to Poster it is
10
of most significance in the era of electronics. He claims that communica-
tion analysts (the “grand theorists”) in the ages of writing and of face-to-
face could with equanimity focus on actions or activities and neglect
language, whereas social theorists in the electronics era must turn from ac-
11
tion to language. It is this focus on language, as opposed to action, that
defines Poster as a poststructuralist, 12 and divorces him from political
economy. 13
In this third stage, the era of electronics, words (or more generally signs)
cease to represent the outside/nonlinguistic world and refer instead chiefly to
themselves (the self-referentiality of language). Electronic media, according
to Poster (drawing particularly on Jean Baudrillard), allow or cause signifiers
to float freely, attaching to and detaching from referents without rhyme or
reason, and in the process transforming the linguistic context within which
people function. He writes: