James Purdon - Modernist informatics: literature, information, and the state

Modernist Informatics

Modernist Literature & Culture

Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors

Consuming Traditions

Elizabeth Outka

Machine Age Comedy

Michael North

The Art of Scandal

Sean Latham

The Hypothetical Mandarin

Eric Hayot

Nations of Nothing But Poetry

Matthew Hart

Modernism & Copyright

Paul K. Saint-Amour

Accented America

Joshua L. Miller

Criminal Ingenuity

Ellen Levy

Modernisms Mythic Pose

Carrie J. Preston

Pragmatic Modernism

Lisi Schoenbach

Unseasonable Youth

Jed Esty

World Views

Jon Hegglund

Americanizing Britain

Genevieve Abravanel

Modernism and the New Spain

Gayle Rogers

At the Violet Hour

Sarah Cole

Fictions of Autonomy

Andrew Goldstone

The Great American Songbooks

T. Austin Graham

Without Copyrights

Robert Spoo

The Degenerate Muse

Robin Schulze

Commonwealth of Letters

Peter J. Kalliney

Modernism and Melancholia

Sanja Bahun

Digital Modernism

Jessica Pressman

In a Strange Room

David Sherman

Epic Negation

C. D. Blanton

Modernist Informatics

James Purdon

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Purdon, James, 1983

Modernist informatics : literature, information, and the state / James Purdon.

p.cm. (Modernist literature & culture ; 25)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780190493325 (ebook) ISBN 9780190211707 (pdf)

1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Government informationAccess control. 3. Mass media and literatureHistory20th century. I. Title.

PN56.M54P87 2016

809.9112dc23

2015012270

987654321

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

for my parents

One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory, but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the Universe. But Hell could not have one, for in Hell, as in prison and the army, its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number. They do not have numbers, they are numbers.

W. H. Auden, The Dyers Hand

To indulge in ruthless telegraphic shorthand, Modernist Informatics provides a prehistory of cybernetics. James Purdons richly detailed bookthe range of reference is astonishingdevelops its argument through what sometimes resembles a chapter by chapter scatter plot, the technique of data visualization that demonstrates (where possible) correlation and coherence within a mass of data that otherwise might seem random.

Thus in , Information Blacked Out, offering the most sustained literary analysis of a single text, locates Elizabeth Bowens The Heat of the Day within a matrix that includes World War II propaganda posters and films, optical and informational black-outs, and E. M. Forsters essays. Finally, Coda: Information Machines, connects the dots between George Orwell, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener, who brings us back to cybernetics.

The coherence of these data points is made possible by the clarity of Purdons central claim: informaticsthat is, the science of managing informationdoes not begin, as is commonly thought, with digitization but with the emergence of new controls on information around the turn of the twentieth century that Purdon calls (playing with the ambiguous genitive) the government of information. Heres where Purdons difference from a number of related books becomes clear. Literary treatments of information control from which Purdons book emerges include Alexander Welshs George Eliot and Blackmail, Mark Wollaegers Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, and Mark Gobles Beautiful Circuits; literary treatments attuned, as Purdon is, to the material infrastructure of information include Carolyn Marvins When Old Technologies Were New, Richard Menkes Telegraphic Realism, and Jay Claytons Charles Dickens in Cyberspace; and enabling non-literary histories of information include James Benigers The Control Revolution and Daniel Headricks When Information Came of Age.

But none of these focuses so intently on the government of information, which is to say on the way that information has emerged as both the basis of modern political power and one of its primary objects of attention. Thus the sustained story of Modernist Informatics is how the politics of information became one of the principal ways through which both literary culture and the state came to define themselves in the twentieth century. Roughly coincident with common periodizing accounts of modernism, the British government began to undertake coordinated administration of a state understood as dependent on information beginning around 1889 with the first of a series of Official Secrets Acts, and it had to change approaches after World War II, when digital computing required the development of a new set of control protocols, or cybernetics proper. The literary data points here do not coincide with the usual high modernist suspectsthe men of 1914 or, in Bonnie Scotts revision, the women of 1928. Like Wollaeger, Purdon routes his story through Conrad and Ford, both of whom were closely involved with official networks of information control, but also through many less well known writers and film makers. These chapters will undoubtedly spur others to extend his approach to additional figures, from Joyce, Eliot, and Rebecca West, who surface occasionally, to those who do not, such as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, or Dorothy Richardson.

How did we arrive in todays media ecology, in which biometric data collection, information insecurity, and global hacking scandals dominate not only the headlines but our lives? And what kinds of writing and film in the modernist period anticipate todays glitch or archive art? In Purdons rich (pre)history, Conrad, exploring leaks and the emergence of preprocessing (Beniger), emerges as a kind of proto-hacker; Ford, attentive to war-time systems for the storage and cross-checking of personal data, adumbrates the concept of the data double and the dividual long before the terms were coined, respectively, by surveillance studies and Gilles Deleuze; and Bowen, in Purdons tour de force analysis of her torqued syntax, unidiomatic double negatives, and insistent redundancies, comes to look like a signal jammer.