Page 194 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Keeping the Portals Open: Poster vs. Innis 183

nological determinist in associating three eras of media with three different
modes of language. Ironically, his emphasis on the technological context was
his self-consciously formulated response to accusations leveled at poststruc-
turalism of linguistic reductionism. “My effort,” he wrote, “in theorizing the
mode of information, has been to counteract the textualist tendency by link-
ing poststructuralist theory with social change, by connecting it with elec-
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tronic communications.” In brief, Poster’s cure for linguistic reductionism
is a dose of technological determinism.
However, even this cannot resolve the more basic issue of self-referentiality.
For once electronic media have transformed language from being representa-
tional into being self-referential, then nothing can actually be said with accuracy
about anything existing outside language—including electronic media and the
electronic mode of information. In order to have validity, any and all statements
(including the string of books by Poster) about the mode of information would
require an infusion of the representational properties of language. In other
words, according to Poster’s position, we should feel free to disregard every-
thing he says—unless we assume him to occupy a position of omniscience (i.e.,
that of a “transcendental ego”), a position he also claims poststructuralism has
discredited and neutralized. (In contrast Innis, and political economy generally,
avoided the trap of self-referentiality first through reflexivity and second by
claiming that there is a political economy of discourse, whereby knowledge
structures affect power in the material world, even as the material world influ-
ences power structures; according to political economy, there is a two-way, non-
deterministic interplay between medium and message.)
Finally, let us consider Poster’s insistence that poststructuralists endeavor
“to consider the context in which one is theorizing.” For Poster, a poststruc-
turalist is always aware of and reflects upon “the relative importance of the
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topic one is choosing to treat.” In other words, poststructuralists endeavor
to adopt a position of theoretical relativism, as opposed to the absolutism of
the “grand narrators.” By “connecting one’s theoretical domain to one’s soci-
ocultural world or to some aspect of it,” he explains, “one ensures in advance
that one’s discourse does not emanate from a transcendental ego.” But just
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how successful is Poster (or can any writer be, for that matter), in avoiding
“totalizations” emanating from a “transcendental ego”? The following ex-
cerpts from Poster’s work speak for themselves:

The intellectual’s will to power is stashed in his or her text in the form of uni-
versal reason. The art of appropriating the universal was the main business of
the Enlightenment. The philosophes were master impressionists whose collec-
tive textual voice ventriloquized that of humanity but spoke for a particular so-
cial class. 44