Literature as Product and Medium of Ecological Communication

Information Theory as an Answer to the Challenges of Our Time for Literature and Literary Scholarship

If we grant the premise that urban-industrial culture is currently undergoing profound changes and that the term "information society" brings to a point current developments in our culture—including a vision for the future—then we need to introduce new frameworks to describe not only the economy, but also science, literature, and practically all other cultural phenomena. For one, the phrase demands that we conceive of ourselves, our culture, and our environment as information-processing systems, and the resultant procedures as forms of information processing and communication. If we subscribe to this notion, we can, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, identify fundamental changes in the cultural processing of information. From an information-theoretical point of view, some of the arguably most important changes can be represented as in Table 1.

The first point contends that the basic terms of industrial societies—such as land, labor, energy, and capital—will be supplemented by concepts deriving from the domains of information and communication. From this perspective, literature is understood as a cultural form of gaining, processing, and representing experience that is fundamentally interconnected. It operates holistically, that is, it draws on all the human media and sensory organs and increasingly functions as a social cooperation—frequently, with immediate feedback loops —between humans and their communities. In contrast to traditional epistemological and action-oriented approaches, such a model conceives of the registration, processing, and representation of information as a circular and recursive operation. And it becomes, hence, nonsensical to formulate models of reception without corresponding forms of representation, and vice versa.² Pressured by new technological media, artists and scientists instantly reorient themselves away from the notions of "production" and "reception" typical of industrial and print-based cultures. Literary projects on the Internet, among others, frequently do not allow for a strict distinction between authors and users, participation and distance.³

Second, I assume that the kind of information processing that is unilaterally grounded in vision and in rational and standard-language-based media will surrender its privileged cultural position to the multisensual, multiprocessual, and multimedial processing of information. The basis of the typographic age—the model of monomedial and technological communication free of interaction, which to this day underlies most common theories of communication and literature—is out of synch with our historical moment that centers on the orchestration of various media links and on the improvement of feedback. As the most complex case of interactive, multisensual, and multimedial communication, face-to-face communication (between more than two speakers) offers a suggestive basis for the definition of a multimedial literature, as well as for a multisensual aesthetic processing of information (and for theories of communication more generally). (Typically, computer programming, in modeling its software, resorts to this situation as well.) In those contexts, what appears as media is not only speech, but the motion of the entire body, as in dancing.

Third, we must assume that the frequency of feedback will increase and that the scenario of cooperation free from interaction—the common ideal of the print market since the Enlightenment—will lose its luster. Consequently, completely different problems, such as the synchronization between communicators, will move into the foreground.

Fourth, globalization and the decentered networks connecting people and cultures will deemphasize the significance of national identity formation and of hierarchical social systems. The literatures of industrialized cultures, which derived much of their legitimacy in past centuries from their role in shaping national communities, will have to reorient themselves. Their erstwhile focus on public welfare will trade places with those factors that are important for the survival of humanity.

In such an ongoing process of globalization, the discipline of comparative literature will have to redefine its role. I doubt that this globalization of...