Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation

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Author

John Johnston, professor of English and comparative literature at Emory University. His related work includes The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (MIT Press, 2008) and the edited collection Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997), which introduced Friedrich Kittler's media theory to many Anglophone readers.

Publication Details

Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-8018-5705-8.[1]

Description

Johnston asks what happens to the novel when it is written inside a media ecology it can neither ignore nor contain. His answer is that a distinctive form emerges — the "novel of information multiplicity" — which abandons the assumption that a narrative can be centred on a single consciousness moving through a knowable world, and instead registers the pressure of competing information flows on the writing itself.

The corpus is a specific one: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge, William Gaddis's JR, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Libra, and William Gibson's Neuromancer. Johnston reads these not as novels about media but as novels operating under media conditions — texts in which the ordering of information has become the plot, and in which paranoia is less a psychological state than a rational response to the volume of signal available.

His theoretical apparatus is drawn from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, from Friedrich Kittler's account of discourse networks, and from information theory itself. The result is a reading of postmodern American fiction that grounds its formal difficulty in a material history of recording, transmission and storage rather than in a philosophical mood.

Key Ideas

  • Information multiplicity. The condition in which multiple, incompatible information systems operate simultaneously on the same events, so that no single account can be assembled from them.
  • The assemblage rather than the subject. Character in these novels is distributed across media — files, tapes, transcripts, film, rumour — rather than located in an interior.
  • Paranoia as method. The paranoid reading, in this corpus, is the only reading that treats the connections between data as real. Its pathology consists only in its refusal to stop.
  • Noise as content. What earlier fiction would have filtered out as irrelevant — the media surround, the advertising, the ambient text — becomes the substance of the writing.
  • Media determine the novel's situation. Following Kittler, Johnston treats the technical conditions of storage and transmission as prior to, and formative of, literary form.

Criticism

The book is written for specialists and assumes fluency in both post-structuralist theory and information theory. Its corpus is also narrow and canonical — white, male, American, mostly long — which limits how far the diagnosis can be generalised to fiction of the same period written under the same conditions elsewhere.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Johnston describes, in the register of literary form, the experience that later became ordinary: living inside more streams of information than can be reconciled, and developing reading strategies adapted to that. The novels he treats were early instruments for detecting a condition that mobile and networked media subsequently made universal.

References

  1. ↑ Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998; see also the review essay "The Novel: Awash in Media Flows," Postmodern Culture.
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