Page 193 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

182 Chapter Eight

moreover, challenge Poster’s assertion that electronics ushered in a radically
new era because it is with electronics that language loses its representational
character and becomes merely self-referential.
To be sure, Poster qualified his argument by noting that “this [self-referen-
tial] feature of language is always present in its use,” but he then added
quickly that “today increasingly meaning is sustained through mechanisms of
self-referentiality and the non-linguistic thing, the referent, fades into obscu-
rity, playing less and less of a role in the delicate process of sustaining cul-
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tural meanings.” The operative question, then, is whether self-referentiality
is of such monumentally greater significance today compared to, for instance,
the age of print or tribal cultures, as to constitute an entirely new era. Frye’s
answer would be no.
If self-referentiality in language/discourse is not in fact the major factor de-
marcating the age of electronics from previous eras, the question becomes
whether there may be other factors ignored or downplayed by Poster which
do indeed distinguish clearly the electronics era from what preceded it—for
example, Innis’historicist concept of time-space bias. And, of course, the big-
ger question: What difference does it make if we accede to Poster’s position
or to that of Innis?
Another obvious criticism, hinted at earlier, is that poststructuralism is it-
self “a discourse,” and hence is implicated in structuring/concentrating
power. As a riposte, Poster proposed that by introducing his concept of the
mode of information into poststructuralist discourse he has lessened the “to-
talizing” tendency of poststructuralism, rendering it now merely in his words
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a “nontotalizing totalization.” This is because, he claims, despite important
commonalties, each of the electronic media (telegraph, telephone, radio, tel-
evision, computers, satellites) requires its own, detailed, unique exposition:
“There is a multiplicity of discourses within the mode of information,” he
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explained. The electronic mode of information, then, in his view, by covering
variegated media, invalidates the charge of “grand narrative.” However, this
defense seems to contradict his main point, namely that the various electronic
modes of communication individually and in combination have huge and uni-
form consequences: each and every one of these media, according to Poster,
de-centers subjects, destroys truth as a meaningful idea, disconnects language
from material reality, causes language to become more self-referential, de-
authenticates “grand narratives,” and annihilates the efficacy of reason. Do
not these effects common to the various means of communicating electroni-
cally far outweigh the differences, thereby rendering the discourse on the
electronic mode of information a “totalizing totalization”?
Even more problematic is the inconsistency in Poster’s treatment of lan-
guage and its relation to the media. On the one hand, Poster is virtually a tech-