The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation by John JohnstonTrey Strecker
John Johnston. Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998. 308 pp. Paper: $18.95.
Information theory and cybernetics have demonstrated the “viral power” of information to proliferate and circulate, as well as how the inscription of information can serve as a means of commodification and control. Drawing from information theory, media studies, and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and agency, this compelling study questions the ways in which the postmodern American novel (from 1973 to 1991) negotiates the complex interstitial space where fiction meets media. An insightful and lucid reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the assemblage—a multiplicity linking diverse elements into “systems, processes, and nodes in the circuits and flow of information exchange”—allows Johnston to interpret the fiction both as a response to the contemporary mediascape and as a novelistic “writing-down system” assembled from heterogeneous cultural data. Following Friedrich Kittler, Johnston traces a trajectory from separate and discrete media to partially connected media systems and notes a subsequent “shift from the novelistic depiction of the movements of a complex consciousness to an investigation of the interactions among scriptive systems, various media (both analogue and digital), and information technologies.” Novels of information multiplicity, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge, and William Gaddis’s JR, expertly navigate this proliferation of interfaces between different information processing systems. Johnston contrasts the novel of information multiplicity with novels of media assemblages, including Don DeLillo’s ouevre, Pynchon’s Vineland, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which mark the emergence of a more fully integrated global communications network whose increased connectivity provides a new apparatus of total information control. An engaging and attentive analysis of mediality and postmodernism, Information Multiplicity is an indispensable text for all students of contemporary fiction. [Trey Strecker]