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The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context

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Electronic communications today have, according to Mark Poster, radically altered our discursive patterns, thus reconfiguring our perceptions of ourselves and our relationships with others. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context argues that "new forms of language wrapping are imposing significant changes in the social field, and that poststructuralist theory is uniquely appropriate to interpret this" phenomenon. This thesis is quite provocative, but Poster's delivery is somewhat uneven.

An appreciation of this book requires at the very least a working knowledge of poststructuralism and the four theorists on which Poster focuses (Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard). Poster only rather briefly addresses the relevant theories themselves, and to a reader unfamiliar with the discipline, Poster's focus on application and his jargon-laden text will be somewhat inaccessible.

Poster argues, as I indicated, somewhat unevenly. Much of the book is spent exposing minute shortcomings of Marxist, Weberian, and various other structure-oriented theories of communications, and the reader is often left wondering when Poster himself will articulate a theory. Therein lies a significant concern; Poster decries totalizing theories, arguing that such theorization is a feature of the "new, linguistically-based, structures of domination" in our contemporary society. Thus, the latter two-thirds of the book apply poststructuralist theory to individual forms of electronic communication, and Poster never provides a framework for understanding society as a whole.

This, of course, is a hallmark of postmodern theory, and many readers will undoubtedly find sections of this book quite outlandish, particularly the chapters on Derrida and Lyotard. The chapters on Baudrillard and Foucault are, however, quite well argued and provide some excellent analysis of the impact of television advertisements and databases. The theses of these sections are relatively innocuous, and even a reader who strongly disagrees with the tenets of poststructuralism will find here something of value.

Generally speaking, The Mode of Information will be welcomed by those who embrace poststructuralism and avoided by those who reject it. For the more ambivalent reader, Poster's book is a thought-provoking investigation into our contemporary means of communication.

Everyone who wants to understand how subjectivity, the "in here" of each of us, is shaped in the late modern age must read two chapters of this book. What McLuhan did for media, Poster does for information; he explains how databases and computer science set us up and bring us forth in their own distinctive ways. Saying he "explains" is perhaps too strong; the shaping of our "in here" is an elusive matter. But if you're looking to understand critics who complain that our everyday life is "informatized" and that the self is "multiplied by databases," these chapters are superior to anything I've read eleswhere, especially given their brevity. The remainder --an introduction to post-industrial society and chapters on TV commercials and electronic writing--are excellent and will be useful to many.

Poster's perspective is commonly known as "post-modern," and he enlists four seminal thinkers to do the heavy lifting: Jean Baudrillard (TV commercials), Michel Foucault (databases), Jacques Derrida (electronic writing) and Francois Lyotard (computer science). Readers who are not familiar with this perspective or these authors may find themselves befuddled. Poster doesn't do much handholding; the book is a terse 150+ pages. To remedy this situation, readers may want to bone up with Robert Hollinger Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach (Contemporary Social Theory) and/or Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences.

Once you're up to speed, anyone thinking hard about how the self, the hero of modernism, emerges within post-modern or more modestly late modern conditions will find Poster's slender volume an important contribution.