Communication Beyond Meaning - Terranova
Communication Beyond Meaning - Terranova
Communication Beyond Meaning - Terranova
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Tiziana Terranova
Social Text, 80 (Volume 22, Number 3), Fall 2004, pp. 51-73 (Article)
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Communication beyond Meaning
O N T H E CU LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F I N FO R M AT I O N
Social Textt 80, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.
only refer to other signs in a relation of preemptive causality, or “hyperreal-
ity,” presented this development as the linear outcome of the commodifi -
cation of culture—that is, the reduction of cultural use value to exchange
value (money) and of exchange value to sign value (simulation). The result-
ing picture was that of an empty cultural milieu (literally, a desert), a real
subsumption of culture under capital that problematized even the notion of
a cultural politics as such. Is it possible, in fact, to wage a struggle around
culture if all culture has become an industry of signification—incessantly
drowning meaning in a sea of semirandom noise? More militant strands
of cultural theory have thus deemed it necessary to reject the postmodern
analysis as simply a sign of cynicism and unconditional political surrender
to the state of things (a sign of political reflux after the turbulent sixties and
seventies). Much work has thus been dedicated to rescuing the vitality of
the social from the grip of simulation (or exchange value gone irreversible
and orbital). Empirical work on audiences has shown the persistence of
counterhegemonic decodings and the resilience of meaning to all attempts
at pinning it down within stable hegemonic formations or a closed logic
of simulation. We know that meaning has not simply disappeared in the
infosphere but that it has multiplied and proliferated in its interface with
social microstratifications and segmentations emerging out of and giving
rise to classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and races. But we cannot
still reconcile this proliferation and dispersal of meaning with another
dimension of contemporary culture, the one that is not simply structured
around the codification and decodification of meaning and its articulation
into social practices but which revolves around a disturbing imperative and
a characteristic dynamics. This imperative insists that more communication
and better communication are supposed to provide the ultimate solution
to all social problems, and its characteristic dynamics involve the power
of the “space of flows” over the solidity of the “space of places.”3 Here it is
not so much a question of meanings that are encoded and decoded in texts
but a question of inclusion and exclusion, connection and disconnection,
of informational warfare, and new forms of knowledge and power (from
public relations to public communication and perception management)
that address not so much the play of meaning but the overall dynamics of
an open informational milieu.
To underscore the challenge posed by this informational milieu to our
understanding of contemporary cultural politics, I need to address two
common prejudices about the concept of information: that information
is the mere content of a communication; and that information is nothing
other than a mode of representation (or form) that has lost all reference to
materiality (or substance). This reappreciation of information theory is also
an important part of any effort to renew a method of cultural analysis able
52 Tiziana Terranova
to live up to the urgent challenges of a multimediated, hyperconnected,
and global network culture.
54 Tiziana Terranova
From a hermeneutic perspective, then, the meanings expressed and
proposed by the ruling elites through their privately owned and more or
less directly controlled media channels (from TV stations to newspapers)
are hardly innovative or original. If we could transplant Barthes from his
fi fties milieu to the early twenty-fi rst century, he would have no trouble
at all in identifying the self-perpetuation of ideology as he analyzed it in
post–World War II France. Antonio Gramsci would also easily recognize
the features of new forms of national populism as they are articulated
through the multiple institutions giving rise to a civil society. The level
at which the cultural and political process seems to have truly mutated
and innovated, however, is that of informational tactics—the techniques
by which information is effectively communicated. Whenever a piece
of information is communicated (whether it is a government policy, a
series of events, or a new brand), there you fi nd an array of techniques
and tactics for which the transmission of meaning is always a temporary
objective within a wider campaign. The entire field of culture and media
has become the object of a diversified array of knowledges, tactics, and
strategies corresponding to a hypermanagement of public opinion and
cultural trends.
What I am referring to here, however, is not simply a more sophisti-
cated version of the manipulation of the public by a new breed of “social
engineers” of communication, to which we could simply oppose resisting
audiences and oppositional meanings. The relationship between the pro-
fessionals of communication and their audiences takes place within a spe-
cific milieu—an informational one—where the dynamics of information
take precedence over those of signification. Because such informational
dynamics always presuppose a larger, common field, the social elite is not
so much manipulating a mass audience but being mutually implicated
in a multidimensional, asymmetrical, and yet dynamic process. A more
precise understanding of information and informational dynamics would
be of great help in understanding the conditions within which a cultural
politics of interacting communication networks unfolds.
Information Theory
56 Tiziana Terranova
also from the modern conception of communication as a public sphere
guaranteeing the transparent unfolding of democratic life. There is no
signifying subject, or even an audience to address; there is no rhetorical
play of ideas, but a kind of bare set, where all communication is reduced
to a drive to clear out a channel. From an informational perspective, com-
munication is neither a rational argument nor an antagonistic experience
that is based on the capacity of a speaker to encode a shared meaning. The
purpose of the information flow is to establish a contact between sender and
receiver by excluding all interference—by holding off the transformative
potential of noise: communication is a signal sent to a receptive partner in
a hostile environment.9 Senders and receivers are not opposed, as in the
traditional conception of the dialectical game, but they are assumed to be
on the same side. Opposition to the agreement between sender and receiver
cannot be subjective but only objective and external, appearing only in the
nonhuman form of meaningless noise (or in the form of an enemy intent on
disrupting the communication between two partners in agreement). “To
hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to seek to exclude him.”10
The appearance of a modern informational problematic, then, is related
to a conception of communication as an operational problem dominated
by the imperatives of the channel rather than by a concern with significa-
tion, ethical truth, or rhetorical confrontation (a defi nition that dominates
Marxist, liberal, and enlightened concepts of communication).
At the macropolitical level, the tensions introduced by such informa-
tional dynamics are well expressed by the permanent crisis undergone
by the mechanisms of populist and representative democracy in relation
to the remnants of the bourgeois public sphere. This crisis has recently
unfolded in the relation between the independent ethics of journalism
and those areas of expertise that explicitly draw on a strategic and tacti-
cal conception of communication (as in the recent controversy between
the BBC and New Labour over intelligence on weapons of mass destruc-
tion in Iraq). Such a crisis is increasingly marked by the unfolding of an
informationall dynamics as visible in the tensions that oppose journalists to
communication managers (PR agents, press officers, advertisers, percep-
tion managers, information strategists, public communication directors,
intelligence officers, and consultants). While conscientious journalists
(or even some intelligence officers) would argue that information must be
assessed in terms of its accuracy (or truth value) and relevance (meaning-
fulness), so that the political process can be made more transparent, the
social engineers of communications seem to have another type of grasp of
the informational dimension of contemporary culture—that they techni-
cally reduce to the relation of signal to noise.
The latter, in fact, understand the power of communication as deter-
58 Tiziana Terranova
of what they say but how they say it, that is, on the basis of how success- Does that
fully they manage to engage the majority in a prolonged contact. This is
a very specific operation that involves a kind of tuning in to and selective mean, then,
reinforcement of an affective link between political leaders and their elec-
torate (the dynamics of information and those of affect are, in this sense, that journalists
inextricably related in ways that we are only starting to understand).12
and activists
Or, in another context: don’t the techniques of advertising involve, fi rst of
all, an attempt to bypass the noise of a crowded informational milieu by
who hang on
establishing a connection with potential customers? It is understandable,
then, why cultural activism of the No Logo variety should have focused so to relevance,
much on what Mark Dery has called “culture jamming”—signal distortion,
graffiti on advertising posters, hijacking of corporate events—all attempts truth, and
at disrupting the smooth efficiency of the communication machine. Or, as
Gilles Deleuze suggested, why cultural resistance within control societies meaning have
might also involve the creation of “vacuoles” of communication. Or why
in cases of media monopoly, the exploration of other avenues and topolo- been made
gies of communication (from the interpersonal to television screens to
computer networks) assumes such tactical priority.
redundant
A cultural politics of information thus unfolds within a communica-
by social
tional environment that has been instrumentally reduced to its “fundamen-
tal problem,” as Shannon put it (or to its minimum conditions): the suc- engineers of
cessful constitution of a contact, the suspension of all competing signals,
and the fi ltering out of all possible corruption of the message in transit. communication?
Information in this sense is a function of the instantiation of a line of com-
mand. There is nothing inherently technological here, in the modern sense
of a Frankenstein monster created by human will but now threatening to
destroy it. It is not so much a question of technology as of techniques and
modes of knowledge and power that all converge—through a variety of
media and channels—on the terrain of informational cultures.
Does that mean, then, that journalists and activists who hang on to
relevance, truth, and meaning have been made redundant by social engi-
neers of communication who have a much better grasp of informational
dynamics? The problem here is not that of arguing for the obsolescence
of meaning and truth in favor of sheer manipulation within an informa-
tional milieu. On the other hand, we cannot simply rely on the instability
of meaning as it changes form and quality in its passage from senders to
receivers. The re-production of meaning is still surprisingly stable even
as it shifts from enthusiastic agreement to negotiated readings and oppo-
sitional decodings. It seems that communication management does not
meet its limit in the irreducibility of meaning—that is, in the audience’s
capacity to recode a message in partially divergent ways. What seems to be
at work is a more impersonal, even less human process—albeit one that can
60 Tiziana Terranova
transmitted through a channel from point A to point B but starts to jump
around, mutate, and multiply from channel to channel, from network to
network, from singularity to singularity? What happens when a channel
opens up onto an informational milieu?
Some could argue that the dynamic relation between information and
matter, signal and noise, pattern and randomness that animates our com-
munication environment does not really address what to many appears as
the essential problem of information—its alleged immateriality. It is not
too difficult to observe how the management of the public sphere and
even of cultural markets implies a crucial concern with putting things
through, and how complex the techniques of putting a message through
have become in today’s noisy communication environment. But still,
this does not address the problem of the relationship between senders
and receivers. Some could argue that this something to be communi-
cated cannot simply be a pattern but must ultimately be some kind of re-
presentation of reality. A newscast, after all, still proposes a particular
representation of events that have happened somewhere else and that
need to be conveyed to an audience. In this sense, some would argue,
information ultimately still obeys the rules of signification and meaning,
or at least as information theorists might put it; it has a semantic dimen-
sion, subject to interpretation, misreadings, and the works of signification.
It is through this semantic dimension, perhaps, that a cultural politics
of information can still be understood as a struggle over meaning. A
newscast can still be analyzed on the basis of the discursive production
of the event represented according to whatever hegemonic formation is
in the making at any particular time and as it is encoded and decoded by
producers for consumers.
This understanding, however, still leaves open the question of the
relation between information and materiality. According to the neo-
Saussurean approach to language that dominates most contemporary cul-
tural analysis, a representation can never be said to draw its meaning from
reality but only from other representations—that is, from the whole fabric
of the signifying knowledges that weave together a common understand-
ing of reality. From this perspective, a shared social reality is constructed
through and by language, and is not conceivable or accessible without it.
The question of the referent (of the object of representation) is bracketed
off. Sociolinguistic constructionism rightly points out that we will never
know what an event really was like or what a man, or a woman, or black,
62 Tiziana Terranova
reduction of a mass of data to a relatively small number of quantities which
must correctly represent this mass, or, in other words, must contain the
largest possible part of the totality of relevant information contained in the
original data.”15 The mathematical tools through which this reduction was
made possible were derived from the field of social physics as inaugurated
in the nineteenth century by the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetélet (the
inventor of the average man in society, a compiler of mortality and crimi-
nality tables, and also the author of a statistical study on the propensity
to suicide that later came to provide the foundations of Émile Durkheim’s
famous sociological study).16 A statistical average (such as that which goes
into the production of a criminal profi le) never claims in itself a complete
power of representation and defi nition. An average is a temporary suspen-
sion of our knowledge of singular variations and improbable states for the
purposes of efficient communication (as in the distribution of criminologi-
cal profi les to police agencies). Within the statistical model proposed by
Quetélet’s social physics, the average, or norm, is the representation of a
macrostate to which can correspond a variety of microstates. An average
might be the same for a number of different possibilities (an average height
of six feet in a population of one hundred people might be realized by many
different distributions of possible heights). As a macrostate, the average
does not really exist, but it is a kind of social norm, a strange attractor
endowed with the function to regulate the social body and stabilize it. It
is the center of gravity to which “all the phenomena of equilibrium and
its movement refer.”17
If Quetélet opened the way for the use of statistics as a form of con-
trol of the life of populations (what Michel Foucault called “biopower”),
these statistical tools were to fi nd quite a different use in physics. Statistics
played an important part in the redefi nition of the problem of entropy in
physics (as the law that dictates that heat tends to irreversibly dissipate,
that is, a hot cup of coffee will cool down on its own, but it will heat up
only on conditions that some work will be employed to rewarm it). Once
the problem of heat dissipation or entropy was understood as a measure
of the speed and state of the population of molecules that make it up, then
statistical tools could be employed to calculate entropy as some kind of
average measure of the probable distribution of such populations of mol-
ecules. In the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann adopted statistical
tools to defi ne the entropy of a system as the measure of an uncertainty in
our knowledge of the probable state of the distribution of a population of
particles at any given time. The introduction of the concept of probability
in physics coincides with the emergence of information as a concept able
to describe the implication of subjectivity, knowledge, and matter.
The concept of information, that is, always marks an approximation
64 Tiziana Terranova
Shannon information (or classical information) solves the problem of
such indeterminacy (or noise) through a form of data compression. “Like
astronomy and physics, information technology must grapple with num-
bers too large for human comprehension. They can be brought down to
a manageable level by the use of a mathematical curve called the natural
logarithm.”20 As a technique of data compression, information theory uses
the logarithm to bring down the uncertainty that is a function of the sheer
magnitude of data yielded by the physical world. The logarithm mediates
between a world graspable by the human senses and those processes too
complex for our comprehension, that is, processes that “change geo-
metrically, exponentially or multiplicatively: probabilities and explosions,
compound interest, populations and proliferating neural connections.”21
In doing so, the logarithm mimics the way that human senses work. “The
ear, too, perceives approximately logarithmically. The physical intensity
of sound in terms of energy carried through the air, varies by a factor of
one trillion (1012) from the barely audible to the threshold of pain; but
because neither the ear nor the brain can cope with so immense a gamut,
they convert the unimaginable multiplicative factors into a comprehensible
additive scale. The ear, in other words, relays the physical intensity of the
sound as logarithmic ratios of loudness.”22
If at some level, then, information makes the sheer magnitude and
uncertainty of the world manageable, it also makes us a lot more aware of
the approximate nature of all knowledge. Whether it is about contradictory
and ever-changing opinion polls or proliferating databases, information
technologies have helped make the complexity of the socius manageable
by compressing variations in tastes, timetables, and orientations, bypass-
ing altogether the self-evident, humanistic subject, going from masses to
populations of subindividualized units of information. 23 Gender, race, and
sexuality, the mantra of the cultural politics of difference in the eighties
and nineties, have been disassociated from stable subjects and recomposed
on a plane of modulation—a close sampling of the microvariations of the
social moving to the rhythm of market expansions and contractions. This
does not imply, of course, that identities, differences, and representations
have become irrelevant or lost their psychic power of identification or their
function in the reproduction of relations of exploitation. At the same time,
however, information technologies have also made us more aware of their
nature of metastable compounds, held together by specific social forces
and distributions of power, that lose their imagined consistency every time
different functions are applied. Unwittingly, that is, the informational
dimension reveals the turbulent play of singularities, or singular essences,
disturbances in the organized space of the logarithmic function that go
way beyond the postmodern game of identity and difference. 24
66 Tiziana Terranova
Informational Power
68 Tiziana Terranova
mation implies the unfolding of a duration—an active temporality where
consequences hardly ever follow linearly from causes.
The relationship between informational dynamics and cultural expres-
sion has been partially obscured by the predominance of linear communi-
cation media in the modern and late modern period. We have become used
to thinking of communication as being about messages (i.e., information,
meanings, and representations) essentially transmitted from a sender to
a receiver through a channel. We have thus come to place undue impor-
tance on the mental images or representations of communication—as if
information was simply another name for Ideas that flow from the minds
of the ruling classes to those of the passive majorities. The multiplication
of communication channels and media is making us more aware of the
importance of nonlinear dynamics in the unfolding of sociocultural effects.
Because information proliferates, resonates, recombines, and interferes all
over the place, it is hard not to become increasingly aware that it is neither
mere meaning nor immaterial form. There is also a widespread, informal,
and intuitive recognition of the cynical tactics of informational warfare, for
example—as when the timing of a piece of information about a terrorist
attack is made to coincide with a specific political event. The significance
of releasing information at a particular time (as in the stock market) is
also easily observable. Inasmuch as information always involves a noise—a
material interference without which it cannot stand out—it always implies
a nonlinear, active relation with material changes of state or transforma-
tions (e.g., in the sphere of affects, it involves the induction of feelings of
fear or panic or pride).
All communication of information always involves some kind of reso-
lution of a tension, characterized by an incompatibility among different
dimensions of an overall milieu. Information is thus not so much the
content of communication as a “transductive arrow”—as it attempts to
determine a direction for future actualization. Hence all communication
of information, as the cyberneticians well knew, is also a form of control
over the fluctuations of an unstable physical milieu. The message does
not simply subject the receiver to the action of a sender (including that of
accepting/negotiating/rejecting a meaning), but it also involves the overall
interplay of multiple information flows with an active power to determine
material changes of states. No communication of information can be cut
off from the specific interplay of tensions and instabilities, and all informa-
tion can be assessed also on the basis of the chain of events by which it is
set in motion and which it sets in motion. The information communicated
by a speech or an act of warfare or terrorism is not simply mediated by
cultural codes, but it has multiple and nonlinear effects that cannot be
strictly calculated beforehand or even exhaustively marked.
70 Tiziana Terranova
cultural politics of information does not simply address the proliferation
of representations but, more fundamentally, the turbulent dynamics of
sociocultural emergence within an open informational milieu.
Notes
1. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dia-
logue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984).
2. It is worth mentioning here that this new alliance is not meant to dismiss
the important sociological argument about the social organization of scientific
research and the interdependence between science, capital, and state formations.
On the other hand, it is important to distinguish such a critique from the epis-
temological argument put forward by social constructionism that all scientific
knowledge is social in a narrow sense: that is, exclusively expressive of social
knowledge rather than also involving an experimental relation with material pro-
cesses and forces (see Isabelle Stengers’s Power and Invention: Situating Science
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997]). Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari have also introduced an important distinction between what they call a
“Royal Science” and a “Nomad Science.” Such a distinction is in no way exclu-
sive to the natural sciences, but it indicates a certain predisposition of thinking as
such inasmuch as it either privileges stable, homogeneous, and regular processes
or singular, smooth, and vague ones (see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophreniaa [London: Athlone, 1984]). What
distinguishes science from other domains such as the arts and philosophy is for
Deleuze and Guattari the importance of quantitative functions, or laws, versus the
philosophers’ concepts or the artists’ percepts; see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
3. This hypothesis is at the basis of Manuel Castells’s analysis of network soci-
eties in his influential The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
4. See, for example, Frank Webster’s assessment of the information society
debate in Theories of the Information Society (London: Routledge, 1995).
5. See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana, 1977). Here Barthes acknowledged that the level of denotation
(with which information is associated) was somehow always more full than the
connotative level. In his famous example of the black soldier saluting the French
fl ag, the denotative level includes always more than connotation: it is about the
specificity of the soldier’s life and his experience, the history of the fl ag, and their
interplay in the image as such. Connotation reduces the wealth of meaning to
be found at the denotative level by reducing them to a few ideological motifs or
myths. See Barthes, Mythologies (London: J. Cape, 1972).
6. See Stuart Hall’s influential essay “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Lan-
guage, Media: W Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall, Doro-
thy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 1980).
7. Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs: Taking Aim at the
Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 2000).
8. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell
System Technical Journal, vol. 27 (1948): 379–423, 623–56.
72 Tiziana Terranova
1999), extract translated at www.cryptome.org/cuw.htm (accessed 22 November
2003).
26. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 11.
27. See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling
Brain (London: William Heinemann, 2003).
28. See Simondon, Individuation psychique et collective.
29. On the quasi cause, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
30. See Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology, and the Muta-
tions of Desire (London: Continuum, 2004).
31. See Manuel De Landa’s exploration of the implication of chaos theory
for our understanding of social and historical processes in A Thousand Y Years of
Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997).