Samuel Gerald Collins

Dept. of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice
Towson University
scollins@towson.edu

 

Review of: Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

 

Reacting against the Boasian study of myths for “historical data,” Claude Levi-Strauss urged anthropologists to look behind myths to what they might reveal of cultural and cognitive structures:

 

The myth is certainly related to given facts, but not a representation of them. The relationship is of a dialectical kind, and the institutions described in the myths can be the very opposite of the real institutions. This conception of the relation of myth to reality no doubt limits the use of the former as a documentary source. But it opens the way for other possibilities; for in abandoning the search for a constantly accurate picture of ethnographic reality in the myth, we gain, on occasions, a means of reading unconscious realities. (172-73)

 

The twenty-first century finds the myth-making apparatus producing a surfeit of narratives chronicling the emergence of the “information society.” Some of these posit a decisive break with the past, an information society so different from preceding Fordist or Gutenberg eras as to engender entirely new modes of being. Other works locate the information society at the apex (or the aporia) of developments in culture, politics, or library science. In these, the information society is only explicable in light of earlier epochs–a “Gutenberg Galaxy” giving way to more “cool” mediums, the vertical organizations of Fordism giving way to post-Fordist, flexible networks. But all of these formulations remain “emergent”; the information society has proven notoriously resistant to empirical description, and to argue for a summary break with the past or for a selective genealogy is, in these works, ultimately a metaphysical question. Nevertheless, the tremendous outpouring of commentary suggests that information–whatever its status as a bona fide object of social inquiry–is an important site for cultural work. What is at stake here is, I would suggest, nothing less than the shape of the future: the possibilities engendered in the new and the continuities with what has gone before.

 

Albert Borgmann’s Holding On to Reality is an ultimately mythological narrative outlining a highly selective vision of the past parlayed into a Procrustean manifesto for the future. Uneasily jumping between Dionysian novelty and Apollonian continuity, Borgmann’s work is, finally, conservative and even Arnoldian, recapitulating the moral-redemptive message of his 1993 Crossing the Postmodern Divide. And yet, there is much here that might prove useful to the student of the information society, even if one sometimes works against Borgmann’s text.

 

Unlike technocratic definitions of information as a thing, value, or signal:noise ratio, Borgmann’s information is relational: “INTELLIGENCE provided, a PERSON is informed by a SIGN about some THING in a certain CONTEXT” (38). That is, given some pre-acquired information literacy, people are able to ascertain something about the world from signs in a particular social or cultural milieu. It’s this phenomenological reading that has changed over the course of millennia, from Edenic beginnings in “natural information” to the contemporary postmodernity of “technological information.” Ultimately, Borgmann’s information is the motor informing both his historical narrative and his moral judgments on the efficacy of information for modern life.

 

Like the savage for Rousseau, Native Americans function for Borgmann as the architectonic origin of information, the “ancestral computer,” as it were. The Salish, according to Borgmann, lived in a world characterized by natural information: for example, “Snow-capped Lolo Peak was the sign that pointed the Salish toward the salmon on the other side of the Bitterroot divide” (25). People (with proper knowledge) are surrounded by a world of signs and things in the “fullness” of natural contexts. Humans inhabit an inherently perspicuous world. In any paradise, of course, there must be a myth of the Fall. For the Salish (uncomfortably subsumed as “our” ancestors), this means the erection of monumental signs across the landscape, cairns, and “medicine wheels” that while “well-ordered” and “eloquent” nevertheless gesture to things expelled from the garden of presence. And yet, these monumental signs have only a limited capacity for reference:

 

Since the informational capacity of the cairn is so small, large tasks remain for the people to whom the cairn is significant. Elaborate instruction and careful memorizing are needed if the message of the sign is to survive. Moreover, since the cairn as a sign is occasion-bound as well as place-bound, it normally carries one and only one message. It is not a vessel that can be used to convey different contents on different occasions. (37)

 

We can see where Borgmann is going here. In this tale of information theodicy, successive forms of information are already immanent in their predecessors, forms that admit technical advantage while gradually surrendering the antediluvian “fullness” of signs, things, and contexts.

 

The successor to natural information–that is, “cultural information”–is typified by the emergence of writing: “letters and texts, lines and graphs, notes and scores” (57). Its strength lies precisely in its abstraction from reality, the way that three of the five nodes signified in information “drift into the background,” i.e., “intelligence,” “person,” and “context” recede against the ascendance of “sign” and “thing.” “Writing consists of signs that are about some thing, letters that convey meaning. By itself, writing is not bound to a particular person or context, and its possession requires no particular intelligence” (47).

 

However, by removing information from natural “presence,” cultural information opens up the world to “structure,” by both exposing structure through the study of nature and imposing structure through the elaboration of musical notation and architectural drawing. By foregrounding signs and things, cultural information begs the question of their ratio, ultimately opening the possibility of the perfect concordance of signs and things. Yet, in the wake of Wittgenstein and in the slow demise of generative grammars, this would seem an impossible goal.

 

Nevertheless, it is cultural information that, for Borgmann, heralds the development of the sciences and humanities, of the great works that he alternately rhapsodizes and elegizes. It is cultural information that balances perspicuity and nature, reality and structure. In a vast, synthetic panorama, Borgmann turns from Euclid’s postulates to the development of writing and reading culture to Thomas Jefferson’s surveying methodologies to, finally, the architecture of Freiburg Minster, the great medieval church that, for Borgmann, is one of the finest exemplars of cultural information, a monumental structure that is also an “open book” filled with signs.

 

Combining Romanesque and Gothic elements in the context of the mountainous landscape, Freiburg Minster is manifestly perspicuous but also highly engaged with reality, or what Borgmann begins glossing as “contingency”: “contingency, however, is inherently meaningful and so makes significant information possible. Contingency comes to us as misfortune or good luck, as disaster or relief, as misery or grace” (105). For Freiburg Minster, “contingency” means a succession of builders each appending different designs to the church–Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance. In other words, it is in the frisson of the contending, contingent whole that we apprehend cultural information.

 

And yet, as wonderfully balanced as cultural information is, “technological information” is already immanent in the cultural. In the search for ultimate structure and the struggle to impose structure on an obstinately contingent world, physics, mathematics, and, later, cybernetics and information science posit fundamental, fungible elements ultimately constitutive of reality; this will-to-structure generates our “digital” world. “Thus physics and mathematics engendered the hope that, once the elementary particles of information had been found, information theory might devise a semantic engine that would bridge the gap between structural and instructive information” (128). Out of the conjectural interstices of physics and the topologies of mathematics comes an “information space” structured “all the way down” to binary “bits” and, therefore, potentially infinitely transparent and infinitely controllable.

 

However, by developing an information space, reality itself is elided by this self-contained, infinite perspicuity: signs detach from things, completing the alienation from presence that cultural information began. In a somewhat labored and oddly trivial example, Borgmann explains the difference. Your daughter attends a performance of Bach’s Cantata no. 10 and returns home. In answer to your query, she tells you she’s just attended a performance of Bach’s Cantata no. 10. This corresponds to natural information about reality. In the second case, she returns home and presents you with a score for the Cantata. This is an example of cultural information for reality. In the final case, she returns home and gives you a CD. “The compact disc, finally, can be information about and for reality. But the technological information it contains is distinctively information as reality. Information gets more and more detached from reality and in the end is offered as something that rivals and replaces reality” (182). That is, the performance itself is utterly eclipsed by the world of the compact disc. There is no need to go beyond the information space of the CD. It is all there–absolute presence premised on the absolute absence of context.

 

It is this progressive disengagement from reality that really irks Borgmann, and he summons up touchingly dated evocations of MUDs and MOOs to drive home his point.

 

At the limit, virtual reality takes up with the contingency of the world by avoiding it altogether. The computer, when it harbors virtual reality, is no longer a machine that helps us cope with the world by making a beneficial difference in reality; it makes all the difference and liberates us from actual reality. (183)

 

 

Only signs matter in the hermetic, evacuated worlds of technological information. But by refusing the contingency of the world for self-contained information space, technological information risks triviality, a fatal separation from the “eloquence” of reality. The result, Borgmann suggests, is an unsatisfying life riven with postmodern versions of modern alienation: “anomie 2.1.”

 

Not surprisingly, Borgmann cautions us to attend to the contingency and ambiguity of reality and balance that against the torpor of technological information.

 

No amount or sophistication of cultural or technological information can compensate for the loss of well-being we would suffer if we let the realm of natural information decay to one of resources, storage, and transportation. Analogously, nothing so concentrates human creativity and discipline as the austerity of cultural information, provided the latter again is of the highest order, consisting of the great literature of fiction, poetry, and music. Our power of realizing information and our competence in enriching the life of the mind and spirit would atrophy if we surrendered the task of realization to information technology. (219-20)

 

In a foregone conclusion, Borgmann returns to the idyll of the Montana countryside, interspersed with some unexpected paeans to urban living. For him, the “moral eloquence of reality” can only be achieved through admixtures of Virgilian nature and Arnoldian culture, heir to the Emersonian perambulations Leo Marx explores in The Machine in the Garden; indeed, Borgmann reiterates a well-worn American ambivalence towards technological change and social “tradition.”

 

So what are we supposed to draw from Borgmann’s triptych? Certainly not lessons on historiography. Holding On to Reality is rife with jarring anachronisms and prolepses. We are told that “Theuth discovered the digital nature of letters” (60). And this “digitality,” moreover, would have resulted in “faultless copying were it not for the foibles of scribes” (81).¹ The book of Genesis is testament to the fullness of natural information, with God designing to directly manifest to Moses (rather than send an e-mail with a .jpg attachment). “That there should be information of such magnitude seems incredible or incomprehensible to some of the most thoughtful people today” (32). But these examples, however fanciful, are consistent with the spurious teleology of the whole project. We have to give up much in the way of incredulity to see burial cairns as the ancestors of the CD. In anthropology, we certainly have no compelling reason to think of these things as species of proto-computers. To do so is simply to subsume the past into the present, the Other into the Self, constructing far-flung genealogies that echo the Victorian penchant for unilinear, evolutionary schema–first savages, then barbarians, and finally civilized Europeans. An “Assiniboin Medicine Sign,” a medieval church, a Vedic fire altar: we can only consider these varieties of information if we submerge their cultural and historical contexts, building, as it were, our own hermetically sealed, virtual environments where others are consigned to infinitely reflecting the West. There may be, as anthropologists have pointed out since the end of the nineteenth century, a brief thrill in discovering an information society in the Salish, in Euclid, in incunabulum, but that pleasure is bought at the cost of real understanding.

 

But while Borgmann’s evolutionary account of “our ancestors” is unconvincing, I find his description of contemporary information compelling. “Technological information” is inherently transparent, e.g., Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can “uncover” successive features of geomorphology. Fourteen hundred digital photos of Freiburg Minster taken by a computerized camera mounted on a helicopter render every detail stunningly clear. Yet, the transparency of technological information may not be analogous to the perspicuity of natural or cultural information:

 

The word transparency, like clarity, has a double meaning. It denotes both absence and presence. We call information transparent when the fog between us and our object of inquiry has been removed and the medium of transmission has become pellucid. But we also call clear or transparent what has become present once the fog has lifted, the objects or structures we are curious about. (176-77)

 

 

Borgmann’s point–though deeply imbricated in a metaphysics of presence–is that information implies both transparency and occlusion, the foregrounding of some signs and the active suppression of others. Back at the aforementioned Freiburg Minster, site of cultural information’s triumph, another sort of knowledge has been suppressed. Despite heroic portrayals of many Old Testament motifs that “generally reflect the genial and cooperative relations” between Jewish and Christian citizens, Freiburg excelled–for over five hundred years–in brutal anti-Semitism (116). Is this information part of the church, or is this information in spite of the church?

 

Part of the context in the relationship that enables information must be institutional. Surely, cultural and technological information doesn’t just exist “out there” to be apprehended by monadic intellects. Information is instead produced by governments, universities, and corporations. And it may be in the interest of institutions to suppress information even as they produce it. In the course of my research on the information society at the Library of Congress, I attended a staff introduction to the LC’s National Digital Library. In response to Head Librarian James Billington’s proclamation that the digital collection would concentrate on “American memory,” one of the staffers asked if Latin American or South American materials would be included. Billington angrily retorted that only U.S. materials would be digitized. Was there nothing in Latin or South American histories germane to U.S. history? And what does it mean to distance “U.S. history” from its military and mercantile past in these regions? We may be able to understand Billington’s summary comments, however, in the context of a budget-cutting Congress and the growing importance of corporate sponsorship in which philanthropy is oftentimes synonymous with public relations. This context is vital to the production (and reduction) of information.²

 

By the 1960s, commentators would complain that we are awash in too much information, that, inundated with “data smog,” we suffer from “information anxiety.” The prescription for this postmodern malaise is the establishment of “limits” and “boundaries.” As Saul Wurman advises in Information Anxiety, “the secret to processing information is narrowing your field of information to that which is relevant to your life, i.e. making careful choices about what kind of information merits your time and attention” (317). This is a formidable task. Any perfunctory internet search opens onto a jumble of widely brachiating topics, each exhibiting considerable variance in relevance and banality. Efforts at limiting information, however, are immensely helped by the shape of technological information itself.

 

As Borgmann demonstrates in an interesting chapter on Boolean architecture in information processing, technological information is binary–it is “on” or “off,” “yes” or “no.” “Between input and output, however, there is nothing but the pure structure of yeses or noes” (147). Either the file is there, or it is not; either the hyper-links are there, or they aren’t. Technological information may be hyperbolically fecund in a media-saturated, internetworked world, but it is also easier to control, to parse “all the way down.”

 

As I write this review, the United States is engaged in a military campaign in Afghanistan. It is very much a physical battle, with many Afghani casualties, but it is also a war of information, with the United States battling its “information other,” the flexible, post-Fordist al-Qaida network.³ The United States seeks to expand its information network at all costs–detaining immigrants, seizing bank accounts, renewing a campaign of cloak-and-dagger espionage. At the same time, it tries to limit information output, winning seemingly complete complicity from news corporations in not reporting, underreporting, or misreporting details of U.S. military maneuvers and tactics. Al-Qaida seems equally invested in the occlusion of perspicuity, sundering the binary linkages in its network at the onset of U.S. investigations. On the other hand, deliberate misinformation abounds: the London Sunday Telegraph reported that, in a particularly postmodern subterfuge, Osama bin Laden has as many of 10 doubles of himself in Afghanistan (Hall and Rayment).

 

In military communications, information is subsumed into C3I (Command, Control, Communications and Information). But, as an organizational form, the information society demands this kind of vigilant surveillance of all institutions: proprietary knowledge and spin control have arisen alongside any putative information explosion. Additionally, insofar as we have all become–à la C. Wright Mills–“organization” people, we have also been interpellated as information managers, separating public from private lives, taking care to control our appearance under the surveillant glare of the corporation and the state. In other words, not enabling information is as important as enabling it; in binary logic, “information” and “no-information” are meaningful values constituting the program of advanced capitalism. To re-work Borgmann’s initial formulation, “INTELLIGENCE provided, a PERSON is informed about a SIGN about some THING and NOT ABOUT some OTHER THING in a certain CONTEXT” (38). Erasing those errant or critical linkages to alternative things, meanings, and identities has been the great defining element in an era of technological information, resulting in an information black hole right alongside the information explosion. Alternatives to capitalism, local struggles, dialectical theorizing–all of these have disappeared into an event horizon even as other information overwhelms the public sensorium.

 

Notes

 

1. The “copy” has had a very long history, from Plato’s denunciations in The Republic to Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and beyond. Monks copying the Vulgate are doing something rather different than I do when I download MP3 files!

 

2. This is a serious–and telling–omission in Borgmann’s book. Anthony Giddens, Herbert Schiller and many others have examined political economies of information, while Borgmann considers only IT theorists (cf. Shannon and Weaver).

 

3. Al-Qaida appears (in the U.S. press, at least) to employ the same sorts of “flexible accumulation” strategies as transnational corporations, making them the perfect foil of advanced capitalism, the ideal enemy in the post-socialist imaginary.

 

Works Cited

 

• Borgmann, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity, 1985.
• Hall, Macer, and Sean Rayment. “Ring ‘Closing’ on bin Laden.” Sunday Telegraph [London] 18 Nov. 2001.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Vol. 2. New York: Basic, 1976.
• Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. [1964] New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
• Schiller, Herbert. Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of American Expression. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone, 1996.
• Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1964.
• Wurman, Richard Saul. Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday, 1989.