Dissertation Abstract

THE IDEOLOGY OF INFORMATION & THE TACTICS OF LITERATURE

Erick Heroux


At the end of our century, the computerization of society has been pervasive, and the advent of an infrastructure of digital networks has brought with it new ideological effects, referred to variously as postindustrialism, the informational society, and as the postmodern condition. Informationism is identified as a significant emerging ideology. My study situates literature and its theories within this historical context, which is not a dystopia, though it is very far from utopian. It asks how informationism is inflected in literary works, and conversely, how literature tactically engages the strategy of informationism. Rather than enter into the speculative debates around the promises of hypertext or even around some essential distinction between literature and information, my approach is oblique and genealogical. It makes use of sociology, psychology, and philosophy, but these are enacted on a stage already set by literary knowledge. The result is a new approach to discussing literature in its relation to the digital forces of production; and vice-versa.
The introduction narrates how my personal experience with editing an online journal and teaching a networked classroom led me to this critique. I then search through our warehouse of theoretical terms for an appropriate means of analyzing how we talk about "information." Ideology, hegemony, apparatus, discourse, and the distinction between strategy and tactic are treated. A rationale for certain neologisms is proffered. Terms coined in later moments of this dissertation are "informentality," "amanuentic subject," "micro obsessives," and "metastructure." Another chapter positions my study within a survey of contemporary history since WWII in order to specify which "postmodernity" I am addressing. This is followed by a rethinking of the history of ideas about alienation since Marx. It closes by recomposing alienation in a structure of objective divestment and subjective disaffection. This is needed in order to think critically in a context where informationism is hyped as a revolution which promises connection, transparency, access, communication; in sum, disalienation. With this ground prepared, I look at how literature has featured the alienated worker in an informational setting-- a genealogy of the absurd clerk in fiction from 1840 to 1995, a literary tactic for representing the amanuentic subject. This genealogy includes short works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, Douglas Coupland, and William Gibson. The genealogy also tracks these fictional clerks with significant changes in office technology and personnel over the same time period. Finally, a chapter on informentality analyzes examples of networked micro-obsessives and compares this abnormal extreme with existing theories of postmodern pathology (Kristeva, Baudrillard, Kroker). A postscript suggests the implications for "normal" subjectivity and for literary knowledge under the slow rise of informationism. Lesser known moments of theoretical works by De Certeau, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Barthes are compared in surprising ways in this regard. The conclusion argues for the continued importance of literary knowledge for the critique of an informational culture.