Rebecca Rauve

Department of English
Purdue University
rrauve1@purdue.edu

 

Review of: John Johnston, Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

 

The discovery of electronic means to code and transfer information. An increasingly machinic understanding of consciousness, brought about by advances in neurobiology and genetics. The creation of a media system so extensive and effective that it can actually shape events as it reports–not to mention the audience to whom it reports. These developments have ramifications so profound that we are only beginning to understand how they may change us.

 

Information Multiplicity, a Deleuzian study of contemporary American fiction, maps the mutating forms of human subjectivity as it simultaneously effects and is affected by these developments, particularly in the field of the media. The book identifies a category of fiction that John Johnston, a professor of English at Emory University, has dubbed the “novel of information multiplicity.” Beginning with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and ending with Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), the study traces a trajectory that began when TV and computers became household items, and ends as the Net wraps the globe.

 

Johnston is by no means the first to analyze the relationship of information technology and fiction. Joseph Tabbi’s Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk looks at literary treatments of the machine, taking into account several of the same authors that Johnston chooses to discuss. As early as 1985, Charles Newman described the postmodern novel as in part an attempt to undercut the complacency of a reading audience “saturated” by electronic information. “The overwhelming sense not merely of the relativity of ideas, but of the sheer quantity and incoherence of information, a culture of inextricable cross-currents and energies–such is the primary sensation of our time,” he wrote in the preface to The Post-Modern Aura (9). But Johnston shows us what happens when not only the audience, but the fiction itself, is media-saturated. He documents with precision the link between media proliferation and the dissolution of intellectual authority at the heart of postmodernism. And he is perhaps the first to take advantage of how well-suited Deleuzian terms are to a discussion of the effects of technology on literature.

 

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Information, which, according to Johnston, is neither a language nor a medium, is above all heterogeneous. It refers to multiple orders of events and it is not hierarchical. Instead, it is viral, proliferating beyond specified goals and uses. (For instance, Johnston’s book and this review are viral responses to the novels that bred them.) Finally, information is corrosive, corrupting and/or destroying older cultural forms even as it creates new ones.

 

This description is entirely compatible with a Deleuzian universe, where everything can be understood either as partial object or desire-fueled flow. “In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage,” Deleuze and Guattari write in the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus (4-5).

 

They further define the literary assemblage in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, explaining how it overturns the novel’s traditional tripartite structure of world-representation-subjectivity to propose a new kind of response: not a book produced by an author, but rather a conglomeration of texts put together by a (desiring) writing machine. A literary assemblage is what results when a desiring body hooks up with different aspects of contemporary reality in configurations that allow desire to flow. This in turn produces additional configurations and extended opportunities for flow (and breakdown).

 

Unlike an “author,” the writing machine is cognizant of its cog-like role within a larger assemblage, and conscious of the fact that writing is merely one desiring-flow among a host of others: “A writer isn’t a writer-man, he is a machine-man, an experimental man” (7). Instead of depicting human beings who face challenges and make choices, the writing machine maps its characters as constituents of various machines (in Kafka, the trial machine, the castle machine, and so on) composed of heterogeneous human and non-human parts.

 

Johnston realizes that the concept of the machinic assemblage is particularly useful in our media-saturated culture, where the line between “fact” and “fiction” grows increasingly blurred, and the question of what is machine (that is, programmed) and what is human (possessing agency) becomes increasingly problematic. Like information, the literary assemblage is corrosive, working both within and against the apparatus of control that typifies late-capitalist American culture. As Deleuze noted, writing has a double function–it can’t translate what it uses into assemblages without in some sense dismantling the assemblages upon which it feeds.

 

The Deleuzian concept of “lines of flight” also helps Johnston to describe the ambiguous creative/destructive effects of proliferating information. Lines of flight occur when desire exceeds its coded channeling and extends out through cracks and fissures in a structure, tending to dismantle it in the process. Desire that spills beyond (or is taken out of) its context is “deterritorialized” or “decoded,” much like data transcribed into a series of ones and zeros for processing in a computer. Literary assemblages reveal how lines of force are coded and connected by decoding them into asignifying particles.

 

The novels Johnston examines are all literary assemblages, concerned with multiplicity and heterogeneity, composed of diverse parts and processes. They deal with mixed regimes of signs and discourse, sometimes (especially in the earlier works) allowing these to proliferate to the point of delirium. They don’t make symbols; they register effects.

 

The books in question do not attempt to portray their subjects as “realistic” representations of human beings, but, rather, to investigate “new forms of individuation in the zones of intensity produced by ‘missing’ information or its excess” (6). None of these novels in any way returns us to the cozy notion of selfhood.

 

*

 

Johnston divides the trajectory he posits into two parts. Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge, and William Gaddis’s JR fall in the vanguard, emerging in an information-saturated environment where the separation between the various media was just beginning to erode and uncertainty ran rampant.

 

The novels of Don DeLillo, together with Pynchon’s Vineland, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Cadigan’s Synners, were published in what Johnston calls a “totalized information economy.” Information multiplicity was assumed and the commodification of information had become a fact of life. Reflecting the interconnectedness of the media, the later works tend less toward chaos and more toward conventional forms. They no longer present information as viral, but instead portray a heightened level of totalization and control. Johnston calls these “novels of media assemblages.”

 

Though William Burroughs is not included as a formal part of the study, Johnston notes that Naked Lunch (1959) and Burroughs’s subsequent works foreshadow the emergence of the novel of information multiplicity. In place of the notion of authorial agency, Naked Lunch substitutes a controller/controlled problematic. The novel attempts to counter language as a control mechanism by refusing to impose any control over its own diverse, radically unstable parts. And Burroughs, who sees language as viral if not continually slashed, folded, or otherwise disrupted, decodes his own text using an intensification of slang, linguistic and grammatical “deformations,” and vivid streams of hallucinatory images that appeal to the reader’s nonverbal capacities. These techniques created an opening through which the novel of information multiplicity could emerge.

 

According to Johnston, The Crying of Lot 49 was the first novel about information in the contemporary sense of the word. By the late 1960s, technology had begun to affect profoundly theories of consciousness. Johnston pauses at the beginning of Chapter 3 to explain how Henri Bergson’s concept of an organic “stream” of consciousness had given way to Daniel Dennett’s machinic notion of “multiple drafts” produced by myriad mental channels and circuits in the absence of some overarching awareness. Information theory and cybernetics were increasingly familiar ways of explaining the world, and neither necessarily implied the presence of a conscious subject. (Even literary modernists like Baudelaire and Proust, the latter perhaps influenced by Freud, looked to the unconscious for access to a pure, authentic past–a practice that conveyed belief in a fundamental separation between information and experience.)

 

In Lot 49, Oedipa functions at once as a recorder of perceptions and a blind spot, incapable of knowing how to read all the information she acquires. She faces an array of either/or choices, an experience she likens to walking among the matrices of a huge digital computer. The novel allegorizes the difficulty of information processing by presenting her with a range of possibilities representing the same underlying semiotic structure. Oedipa wonders whether or not she’s paranoid, but she can never achieve any transcendent footing from which to view her position; every “self” she might affirm is only a feedback-effect in a cybernetic system.

 

Pynchon’s next novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, was written in the shadow of the American military-industrial complex brought about by World War II. Information had been digitalized, and the networks of global capitalization established. History, myth, and personal experience were now contaminated terms, incapable of supporting stable oppositions.

 

In response to this situation, the novel presents a mix of semiotic regimes all operating within the same historical context. The question that initiates the book’s central plot can serve as an example. What is a reader to make of the fact that new German rocket bombs are falling at starred locations on a map of sexual encounters kept by American Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop? Is there a cause-effect relationship? If so, should the confluence of events be interpreted statistically or behavioristically? Should more weight be given to what is known about missile guidance systems, or to what is known about psychic communication with “the other side”? The initial mystery detonates an explosion of multiple plots and characters, accompanied by a dizzying proliferation of possible ways to read their meanings. Where Lot 49 posited several interpretations of a single set of data, Gravity’s Rainbow depicts situations and signs that multiply to the point of meaninglessness. Pynchon deliberately exacerbates the narrative’s complexity by shifting abruptly from one time, place, or point of view to another, and by blurring the boundaries between what is apparently real and what is dream, fantasy, or hallucination.

 

As does any assemblage, Gravity’s Rainbow possesses an overcoding agency (the “They-system”) as well as a constant pull toward the outside–what Deleuze and Guattari call “lines of flight.” In this context, the novel’s understandably paranoid/schizoid subject has two options: either capture by the system, or disappearance.

 

The book was influenced by the medium of film, whose ability to halt and reverse sequences of cause-and-effect made any simple relation with the world a thing of the past. Like a filmstrip, Gravity’s Rainbow is a stream of machinic images that never stop, where diachronic order eventually collapses.

 

At first glance, Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge appears to deal with film as well. The novel documents a quest to discover why a film made by the narrator and his friend has been destroyed. With its multiple plots, characters, objects, bodies of knowledge, and patterns of significance, it is clearly another fictional assemblage. Its central metaphor, the cartridge, evokes how subjects may be inserted into various networks of determination and control. But McElroy’s novel is less a cinematic flow than the articulation of Dennett’s notion of multiple drafts. Temporal and spatial leaps in the narrative create a crucial sense of “betweenness,” of gaps, even as information proliferates. The novel tries to show how human experience, like the missing film, is a “collaborative network” made by people with varying motives and different understandings of what it’s actually about. At the novel’s end, while the reader does discover what happens to the film, she is left with many unanswered questions, awash in the many ambiguous narratives that do not achieve narrative closure.

 

Gaddis’s JR, published in 1975, was influenced by television, a medium then seen as radical because its messages weren’t delivered as discrete units, but rather, like capital, in flows. This book deals with the stock market. Its eleven-year-old title character doesn’t require an authorized identity in order to function effectively as a switching mechanism for the flow of capital.

 

Much of the story unfolds in a series of telephone conversations, in which individual voices give way to “a molecular assemblage of enunciation,” a decoding of speech to the point that it almost resembles the decoded flows of capitalism. In the end, JR’s empire becomes so deterritorialized that it’s swept away by its own out-of-control flows. Don DeLillo is the first author in Johnston’s study to write about the media as an interconnected system rather than as discrete events and technologies. In DeLillo’s novels, as in our contemporary hypermediated culture, the media forms a kind of “wrap-around frame” and old truths no longer hold. The Kennedy assassination was mainstream America’s first real encounter with information multiplicity, a historical event from which contradictory facts and accounts kept proliferating.

 

Conventional history rests on a classical representational scheme, but Libra, DeLillo’s fictionalized portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, functions as a Deleuzian “intensive system,” where events are no longer defined by the protocols of representation, related by similarity, but rather are instantiated in arrangements of difference. Subjectivity in this context is “subtractive”: we are the image minus that which fails to interest us. Oswald’s schizophrenic dispersion of identity can be viewed as the response Deleuze and Guattari pose to the Oedipalization of capitalist culture.

 

In Pynchon’s Vineland, the media forms the context in which the characters attempt to make sense of their lives. Film splits and penetrates the identity of Frenesi, a former hippie filmed in the act of conspiring in the murder of her lover. Frenesi’s daughter Prairie constructs her identity through a series of partial identifications with TV characters. As she attempts to research her mother’s deeds on-line, the computer’s memory comes to function as a “ghostly realm” where she can achieve a temporary transition from third person to omniscient point of view. Differences between media still create varying subjective readings of events, but in Vineland, it is possible to anticipate a world where a homogeneous media network will cause all confusion to disappear.

 

This is what finally transpires in Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and in Cadigan’s Synners. Both of these cyberpunk fictions deal with the interface of electronic data and the materiality of the body. In both, information is not multiplicitous, but comes from a single, interconnected source. The consequence of these programmable, interconnected sources is the elimination of chaos–and with it, the elimination of freedom. In place of the paranoid/schizoid opposition, Cadigan shows the individual giving way to a subjective continuum that ranges from an ex-orbital self at one extreme to hive mind at the other.

 

I find the first part of Johnston’s book, which documents the emergence of the novel of information multiplicity, more satisfying than the analysis of these final works. Perhaps life in the “totalized information economy” is still a relatively new proposition, and we are still grappling to understand its effects. Nevertheless, I wonder why Johnston chose to narrow his discussion of works marked by the “disappearance” of the media to the category of cyberpunk. Johnston tells us that the media disappears because we take media as a given. But if cyberspace is now truly everywhere, if the media truly has become “wrap-around,” then novels of media assemblage must occur everywhere as well. Future discussions of novels of media assemblage should probably expand to include literary and mainstream fiction.

 

Hive mind, the elimination of freedom–the stakes described in Information Multiplicity‘s final chapter–are high. I find myself wishing for a call to action, something along the lines of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” with its assertion that “the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute” (154). But the tone of Johnston’s study remains scrupulously neutral, and perhaps in the end that’s also a strength. Detached assessment is as necessary as passion if the goal is to bring about change. Few, if any, have traced the trajectory of media proliferation and its effects on literature more lucidly or meticulously than Johnston. His study leaves no doubt that the media is changing us in ways that make Deleuze and Guattari’s theories sound prophetic. And it’s changing the kind of books we can write.

 

Works Cited

 

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• —. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Newman, Charles. The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1985.
• Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995.