Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

age.”²⁹ In his account, modernism and propaganda deviate recognizably in their respective orientations toward autonomy and integration, a differentiation occurring in “a kind of psychosocial contact zone defined at one extreme by subjectivity construed as a sanctuary for being, and at the other by propaganda as an encompassing array of manipulative discourses.”³⁰ In staging this distinction as a question of means and ends, the book’s close readings present various coeval mechanisms of understanding produced “in response to new experiences of chaos,” but assume the priority (in both senses of the word) of the categorical difference of modernism and propaganda. While the readings are nuanced in locating texts within what he calls the “information-propaganda matrix,” or the continuum of “psychosocial” states between sanctuary and manipulation, it is nonetheless the case that, in distinguishing modernist narrative and propagandistic technique, their categorical difference both precedes and outweighs any homologous likeness or continuity. Wollaeger’s literary objects possess a given categorical priority by virtue of their canonicity—that is, by an end that sanctions the means of its recognition. As such, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda deals less with informative interactions than with confirmative distinctions.

      The most substantial effect of this classification appears in the complete identification of “new experiences of chaos” with information overload. In totalizing this “literary” understanding of a grossly uneven field, Wollaeger misses the dialectical relation of overload and privation. It is a short step to information overload from subjectivity under siege by impinging “discourses,” but one that evades accompanying conditions of scarcity, restriction, and unequal access: “chaos” certainly results as often (and more devastatingly) from access to too little as from exposure to too much. More to the point, “chaos” names the structure of feeling produced by simultaneous overabundance and scarcity, the structural contradiction that is second nature, a “new form of coherence,” in the so-called information age. One canonical dramatization of this stratified condition is the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which information inundates the reader while ultimately providing little qualitative increase to what is known of the day’s events. On a smaller, sharper scale, this condition similarly animates the chance encounter in “Wandering Rocks” of Stephen Dedalus and his younger sister Dilly, just after she purchases a French primer at a secondhand bookstall. Looking into her blue eyes, he fears for Dilly as he fears her, believing that one or both of them will be drowned in the undertow of their family’s dissolution. Caught between compassion and self-preservation, Stephen thinks “Misery! Misery!,” a narrative repetition that specifies the objective destitution and subjective distress characterizing the familial situation.³¹ By demonstrating how trickles no less than torrents constitute “flows,” both examples challenge the adequacy of this metaphoric notion, which, like “overload,” has assumed a lopsided heuristic power in proportion to its ability to euphemize objective relations of uneven distribution.³² While finding in the fluvial “channels” and “currents” terms more specifically appropriate to the circulatory processes it examines, Ireland and the Problem of Information altogether avoids the figurative language of “flows,” choosing instead simply to attend to particular media or formats in their practical materiality. Beyond methodological considerations, this decision represents an attempt to sound out a peculiarly Irish dynamic, in which knowing only too much is reflexively predicated on knowing very little.³³

      A last point about “flows” indicates why this decision is not the gnomic putdown it might seem, but, like Joyce’s doubled “misery,” a critical acknowledgment of unevenness. Where the problem of information designates the coupling of lack and surfeit, the necessary corollary is the act of putting in formation what Lisa Gitelman calls the “data of culture.”³⁴ Rather than define information as a thing or quantity available prior to or beyond its use, it is crucial to recognize this practical work of formally organizing and structuring units or items for their access. This recognition in turn locates access not as a value-free condition, but as the function of administration and control, a distinction especially important in a moment enthralled by “raw data,” yet periodically unnerved by reminders of its collection and storage as “big data.” In this regard, Wollaeger states a fundamental epistemological relationship, in noting how the “complex entangling of modernism, new media, and propaganda” inheres in the interplay of details (whether “fragments” or “facts”) and “larger systems of meaning that invest them with significance.”³⁵ Yet this “investment” cannot be fully understood when presented as a self-realizing action, an event that happens of its own being. By allowing categorical presuppositions leveraged through a metaphoric language of “flows” to stand in for determining motivation in both transmission and reception, actual agents and their real investments evaporate. Already possessing an object in hand, this dominant analytical method, so common to both modernist and new media scholarship, thus misses the stakes of its investigation. This connection becomes clearer through Raymond Williams’s account of watching television programs intercut with commercials and previews: “The notion of ‘interruption,’ while it still has some residual force from an older model, has become inadequate. What is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting.’ ”³⁶ This passage specifies the essence of the process of putting items “in formation,” particularly as they are received and experienced at the point of access. In Williams’s sense of composite sequences of cross-fading items, Ireland and the Problem of Information finds justification for its emphasis on noncanonical and ephemeral works less for what they indicate about the modernist literary canon than what they demonstrate and make concrete about practical acts of formation.

      Information is not indeterminate because its dispositions or forms cannot be described, but, as Douglas Raber notes, because it can be described and mobilized in so many contradictory ways.³⁷ Over and over again in what follows, this books tracks figures who possess some kind of authoritative expertise or professional specialization that is hidden, denied, displaced, repurposed, or misrecognized, in service to new or alternative forms of agency. What they mobilize is less properly information than their access—to the data of culture, to disseminating institutions and networks, to reception communities, and to their own specific forms of authority. As an interaction of autonomy and heteronomy, this practical mobilization is decisive. For even in its most cautionary guises, such access represents a possibility for communication that is otherwise silenced, whether through epistemological neglect, planned obsolescence, or critical abnegation. With the instantiation of information as the defining term of contemporary existence, it has become easy to forget the primary mediating work of giving form to content, of articulating relations and contradictions, and of rendering this work “in formation”; and, moreover, to abstract this work into infinitely sequential acts of “storage” and “retrieval” that promise a condition of access devoid of mediation. This forgetfulness is a generalized example of what Timothy Brennan indeed names in a more specialized sense as “flow”: “not simply influence but the air of inevitability that surrounds certain concepts traveling through the intellectual market, where the borrowing of ideas is concealed in order to replay a theatrical act of discovery of what is already hegemonic, so that the predominant can continue to enjoy the status of the emergent.”³⁸ Among its other effects, this maneuver casts processes that were once, and often still are, fiercely contested strategies of forming and working-through as transhistorical categories or transcendental objects. Recognizing this structure helps lay bare the question of access, while also serving to objectify failings or denials of access. In a glancing comment, Bourdieu once remarked that cultural capital “should in fact [be called] informational capital to give the notion its full generality.”³⁹ What this gloss suggests, then, is that information is legitimated simultaneously in specific formations and as a condition of its accessibility. For this reason, this study declines in advance of its investigation to substantialize “information” as an abstract economic, philosophical, or technological category. This book is not a work of ontology. Information does not exist outside of its classification: hence the problem of information.