Page 191 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

180 Chapter Eight

expresses concern regarding ways in which marginalized groups (ethnic,
racial, and sexual groups) are “represented” and discussed.
Despite such commonalities, however, important distinctions between
Poster and Innis are manifest. First, Poster is far more interested than Innis in
the “constitution” or the “structuring” of individuals through various modes
of information. Innis’ main interest was the role of various media in organiz-
ing societies along the existential dimensions of time and space.
Second, Poster contrasts language and action, writing that in the electron-
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ics era social theorists must turn their attention from action to language. In
the era of the electronic mode of information, he explains, control of language
replaces control of capital as the locus of power, for the only “reality” we now
know is of the order of language. This is a far cry from Innis’ political econ-
omy. Innis would never reduce reality to language, although he certainly
emphasized the bidirectional impact between language practices (messages)
and material conditions, and he accorded particular emphasis to control over
media of communication.
Third, whereas Poster proposes that the major consequence of media
evolution from orality to print to electronics has been to transform lan-
guage from symbolic correspondence to representation and finally to self-
referentiality, for Innis the major consequence has been to alter the balance
or tension between the existential categories of continuity and change,
freedom and control, time and space.
Fourth, Innis retained a dialectical interaction between medium and mes-
sage: on the one hand, media are predisposed to carry messages with either a
time-bias or a space bias, while on the other hand messages act recursively on
media; in space-biased societies media favoring time will shrink in relative
importance and may adapt to some extent to the exigencies of space (books
addressing contemporary fashion and current affairs, for instance, or schol-
arly tomes expounding poststructuralism). Poster, in contrast, saw causation
as strictly one-way—as media affecting, indeed determining, language. In the
electronics era, according to Poster, when language becomes self-
referential because of the mode of communication, it detaches from material
reality. Here we see clearly, I would argue, one of several inconsistencies, or
flaws, in Poster’s work. (More on this below).
Finally, in terms of remedies, the two writers are also far apart. Innis made
a “plea for time,” by which he meant that time-binding media (particularly
oral debate, but also all other media emphasizing continuity and duration)
should be promoted in order to help countervail the prevailing bias of space
and contemporary present-mindedness. In contrast, Poster essentially wishes
to de-authenticate all knowledge systems, and his way of doing this is by
claiming repeatedly, in book after book, that with electronics language loses