In this post I will provide a brief explanation of the concept of metainformational writing and texts, which concept I introduced in my 2009 Master of Philosophy thesis Informationist Science Fiction and Informationist Science Fiction Theory. This concept has caused some perplexity among some writers and scholars of science fiction literature, but has been well received and understood by some others. I have greatly enjoyed seeing the concept deployed and redeployed as a literary device in fiction and as a tropic novum in cinema numerous times in the last decade, and so thought it high time to pay it some further attention.
This is a short post by scholarly standards, but my intention is that it be of academic standard in terms of its style, and in terms of the interest that it should hold for scholars in both philosophy and literary theory, especially with respect to aesthetics, the philosophy of fiction, and science fiction theory.
I propose that there are few ways in which the arts and sciences are unified in the information age that match what is achieved in informationist science fiction both by informationist novums (such as infomorphs, a kind of informationally estranged character novum common in informationist science fiction), and by the literary mechanism that is metainformational writing, which latter is my focus here.
To begin with, however, a little scholarly and interdisciplinary scene-setting is in order.
Philosophers, philosophers of science, and even scientists, often attempt to unify elements of the arts and sciences, or even to bridge the two epistemes. In most cases, of course, it is science that is taken to exert an influence on art and literature, often by way of lending credibility to some component of literary or artistic theories. That is my primary interest here.
One example that is directly salient to this post are the unificatory attempts of the late structuralists and post structuralists (mostly structuralism in literary theory, but also in linguistics) who were interested in combining scientific information theory with disciplines and theories in the humanities. Some of them (mostly philosophers, linguists, and literary theorists) made such attempts in order to integrate the relatively newly minted (in historical terms) science of mathematical communication theory with both linguistics (for obvious reasons) and literature (for perhaps not quite so obvious reasons).
Two of my favourite examples of such scholars who are of the literary persuasion, whom I will mention further (albeit briefly) and whose work is directly salient to this topic, are Wolfgang Iser, and little known French analytic philosopher Abraham Moles who might rightly be called the first French philosopher of information (Moles was beaten to the global honour by Rudolph Carnap and Yehoshua BarHillel). Numerous influential late structuralist and post structuralist linguists are what I call informationist scholars. They have more scientific approaches and objectives, but I am less interested in that paradigm here. Both Noam Chomsky and the less (popularly) known academic John Lyons are good examples of linguistic information theorists, or informationist linguistic theorists.
This practice of integrating elements of science and the arts has been the business of philosophers since Plato and Aristotle, but in the modern and information ages has frequently raised eyebrows (and, admittedly, giggles) among hard scientists, and is often treated with some suspicion by contemporary scholars of the humanities. In addition to eyebrow raising and suspicion, there is commonly also derision and outright dubiety. However, the latter is usually misguided and not scholarly, and often not intended to be so.
While there is often doubt, despair, and even something like the gnashing of teeth due to attempts at unification of disciplines, and at interdisciplinary theorising, across the arts and sciences, the influence of science on the arts, at least, is undeniable. The endeavour of marrying art to science is rightly recognised as important and interesting. Famous philosophers well known for their focus on unifying, or bridging, the humanities and the sciences include Nelson Goodman and C. P. Snow.
The work and careers of science fiction writers from Mary Shelly, Jules Verne, and Arthur C Clarke to Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson bear testimony to the cultural impact and importance of the art-science juxtaposition. The entire corpus of modern science fiction and Sci Fi literature and cinema is a product thereof.
In my 2011 Master of Philosophy thesis in English (this is between a Master degree by research and a PhD at The University of Sydney) I introduced two new concepts to the corpus of science fiction literary theory. One was the aesthetic of informational estrangement (Long, 20-25, 95-8). The other was the idea of metainformational writing, which is my focus in this post.
Metainformational Writing and Texts Explained
Metainformational writing is perhaps one of the newest aesthetic and literary devices in literature and the literary canon. It is one of the most unusual devices in all of literature, and is unique inasmuch as it is the only one whose existence depends upon the advent of a particular scientific discovery in a specific scientific theory: upon a specific advance in the field of science that has direct bearing on the transmission of literature and literary texts in both an objective and psychologistic sense.
To grasp the basis of the idea of metainformational writing, it is best to start with the simpler, and more general, idea of metafiction. Metafictional writing is not the same thing, but is a similar idea with respect to the idea of self-reflexivity or self-reference, and its definition and conception require us to exercise and engage the same mental and conceptual ‘muscles’. Undergraduate literary theorists and students of literature in general understand the basic concept of metafiction. It is easy to state. It is fiction about fiction. For example, any time an author depicts or represents within a work of fiction the process of writing fiction, or some protagonist involved in this process, the outcome is metafiction.
The idea of metainformational writing is slightly less straightforward, but just as accessible. It involves the representation in fiction not of fiction or of the process of producing fiction, but of the processes of the generation, encoding, transmission, and decoding of information. Whereas metafiction is fiction about fiction and fiction production, metainformational writing is fiction that represents information production and transmission. However, it represents them with a critically important additional layer of meaning. There is thus a further, more subtle, and much more interesting element in metainformational writing.
Metainformational writing not only represents the processes of the production and transmission of information. It is, at the same time, itself an example of exactly this kind of production and transmission. It is thus doubly self-reflexive. As you read, consume, and respond to a piece of metainformational writing, or a metainformational text, you are also engaging the processes of the production and transmission of information (including its encoding and decoding.) You are also generating internal informational representations of the entire information production and transmission process, and this also is an informational process. Thus the self-reflexive element is also layered in subjective, objective, and psychological terms.
If you are reading a fiction about someone writing fiction, or about fiction generally, or about some agent otherwise involved in somehow producing fiction, then you are consuming a metafiction. If you are reading about someone reading fiction, then you are also consuming a metafiction (especially if we give credence to Iser’s Reader Response Theory, which I, for one, do). However, in the latter case you are not quite consuming a piece of metainformational writing. That requires the fiction being consumed to depict and embody specific information theoretic and information scientific concepts, and specific informational dynamics (such as transmission and generation, for example).
Metainformational writing requires more specific referential content, and is more complex, and, in my view, far more interesting. The text must be about some representation of the processes of interest to Shannon in his 1948 Mathematical Theory of Communication, or else about some other scientific or formal conception of information and the production of information, such as complexity theory or perhaps algorithmic information theory (it could also involve fictional references to logics of information, or even theories of psychological or semantic information). However, references to the processes defined and described in Shannon’s theory provide the best examples, since Shannon’s theory is centrally about generation, encoding, and transmission of information.
If you are reading some specific fictional depiction – metaphorical or otherwise - of the processes of the production, generation, processing, encoding, decoding, transmission, and encryption of information, then you are consuming a piece of metainformational fiction. In my Master of philosophy thesis I argue that there are specific aesthetics that go with this kind of text: the aesthetic of informational estrangement, and the aesthetic of informational complexity (Long, 20-25, 95-8, 90).
Examples of Metainformational Texts and Writing
One of the most striking examples of metainformational writing and metainformational texts in science fiction literature and cinema dates from 1998. It is Ted Chiang’s novella The Story of Your Life, which has recently (2018) been adapted for the screen in the cinematic masterpiece Arrival. In it the concepts embodied in the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (people think differently in accordance with the natural language that they speak) are explored quite overtly in a hard-science-fictional manner. However, the more interesting tropes explored involve the transmission of information through time – including in a psychological sense - and this is emphatically metainformational writing.
Chiang’s work is predated, and its tropes and novums foreshadowed, by one of the most important metainformational works in the history of the informationist science fiction genre which predates it by about 30 years: Samuel R. Delany’s Babel 17. The entire book is an exploration of the use of a special encrypted kind of natural language, which the protagonist Rydra Wong learns has been weaponised by her opponents. It moves stealthily between computers and minds in a natural encrypted form, and ‘infects’, or colonises, the mind of Wong herself. The additional information-scientific themes of encryption and algorithmic information complexity make Babel 17 perhaps the locus classicus metainformationist science fiction text par excellence of the 20th and 21st centuries.
There are numerous other noteworthy examples of metainformationist writing from writers such as William Gibson (Idoru and Johnny Mnemonic) and Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon), but to round off the small set of examples with another accessible piece that has been adapted to film, we can include the 2018 movie Annihiliation, based upon an adaptation by Alex Garland of the novel Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. The metainformationist novums of the novel and the movie explore the concept of encoding and transmission of information in nature, with an emphasis on naturalistic, mutational estranging effects.
In the story, information moves between different natural kinds or types in a viral, and in a strange and pathological way: signals and messages are converted between auditory and electromagnetic information and biological information, for example. This results in all manner of aesthetically estranged, and very satisfying, infomorph beasties and beings. This work is perhaps the most striking exemplification of the various informational aesthetic estrangement devices described my 2009 MPhil thesis.
I am perhaps just as satisfied and pleased with the outcomes of my MPhil thesis and the contribution that it has made to the informationist science fiction theory, and indirectly the science fiction genre, as I am with my PhD thesis in the philosophy of information. Sometimes moreso, since in the form of the concept of metainformational writing and associated aesthetic the former has had far more connection with, and in some cases influence upon, popular culture and cultural texts.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Broderick, D. ―New Wave and Backwash.‖ James, E. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. E. James and Farah Mendelsohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 186-208.
—. Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 1995.
—. The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994.
Delany, Samuel R. ―About 5,750 Words. Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. New York: Berkley Windhover, 1978.
—. Babel 17. London: Gollancz (Ace), 1987 (1966).
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. 2nd. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976.
Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking (Vol. 51). Hackett Publishing.
Hayles, N. Katherine. ―Information or Noise? Economy of Explanation in Barthe's S/Z and Shannon's Information Theory. One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature. Ed. George Levine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. 119-142.
Iser, W. “Reception Theory”. Ed. Wolfgang Iser. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006., n.d.
—. How to do Theory. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
—. The Act of Reading: An Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Long, B. R. (2010). Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction (Master of Philosophy thesis, University of Sydney.)
Lyons, J. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968-9.
Moles, Abraham A. Information Theory and Esthetic Perception. Trans. Joel E Cohen. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1966 (Trans. of 1958.)
Snow, C. P. (2012). The two cultures. Cambridge University Press.
Suvin, D. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Yale: Yale University Press, 1980.
Vinge, V. ―Signs of the Singularity. June 2008. IEEE Spectrum Online. 5 November 2008 <http://spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6306>.
— A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought). New York: Tor Books, 1999.
—. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor, 1992.
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