Critique of Information, by S. Lash. London: Sage Publications, 2002

Critique of Information is an important book of social theory that deserves a wide audience among students of media and society, although its dense conceptual structure and style of argument may challenge readers. It will certainly send them reaching for their copies of earlier work by McLuhan, Bell, Habermas, Giddens, Luhmann, Deleuze and Guattari, Lefebvre, Latour, Haraway, Poster, Luke, and a half dozen more; here, Scott Lash has attempted a major feat of theoretical synthesis, and to a great extent succeeds. Unlike more skeptical observers such as Frank Webster, Lash takes the phrase “information society” seriously, even literally. He identifies what he considers to be the key characteristics of information in a technologically-saturated media environment (embeddedness, nonlinearity, flow, space/time compression, real-time circulation and use) and then argues that because contemporary society itself is intrinsically informational, it too has these same characteristics. Crucially, information is not in society or related to society; information is society, and vice versa. This development has been facilitated by the spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs), so that all aspects of social life are, to echo Bruno Latour, sociotechnical, with social action and technical infrastructure inextricably tied in codetermining networks of people and things. The centerpiece of Lash’s argument is his departure from critical theory of both the “German dialectic[s] and French post-structural aporetic[s]” schools (p. 8) to contend that today there is no longer any transcendental, objective, or privileged position from which critique or social analysis can be undertaken. If society is intrinsically informational, and the analyst is inescapably part of the society, so too must the analyst and the analysis be informational, as tied up with and characterized by the nature of information as every other social entity or phenomenon. As Lash repeatedly insists, “The critique of information is in the information itself” (p. 220); “Information critique must be critique without transcendentals” (p. 9). By the same token, fundamental social phenomena like power, capital, sociality, and so on are also essentially informational and share the same character. Lash makes the case that in such an environment power is exercised not so much as exploitation of certain classes, groups or regions by others, but (following Castells) by exclusion from the flows and means of communication: “Previously exploited, semi-skilled and ethnic minority working classes become increasingly irrelevant to informationalaccumulation, which now takes place not on their backs but behind their backs” (p. 5). Therefore, Lash believes, the resistance or response to power must be informational too—real-time, nonlinear, a matter of navigation through networks and flows. Overall, Lash draws from an extraordinary range of contemporary social theories to contend that there must be a new form and practice of social analysis and critique. Due to the sheer velocity, constant flow, and succession of information (bits, images, text, sounds, etc.), social critics and analysts no longer have the luxury of holding variables constant, of suspending action in principle in order to make abstract comparisons, of focusing narrowly on a single phenomenon or relationship at a time. Conventional causal models must be replaced by “additive” models or theories where “and” is the central operator rather than “because.” (This would also imply that subtractivity is a corollary; if the propelling dynamic of networks and flows is cumulative, there would also seem to be a counterdynamic of breakdown and loss that permits further accumulation to occur. Lash doesn’t state this explicitly, but it is suggested by his claims about power exercised as exclusion; social groups have “spaces to dis-identify as well as re-identify” [p. 5].) The intriguing possibility he suggests is a move away from conventional forms of social analysis and critique and toward conceptual art as the new critical practice, or perhaps a merger of art and critique. Given the recent fixation of contemporary artists on new media forms and production techniques, and the centrality of social criticism