Wolfgang Iser's 'Secret' Source for Repertoire and the Interdisciplinarity of The Philosophy of Information

Philosophers of information are used to the ready interdisciplinarity that the subdiscipline both avails, and demands, of the researcher. This is due to many factors including the polysemous content of the term 'information' itself, the general intuitive and practical importance of information (on a par with such things as knowledge and structure, and related intimately to both) and the general recognition of the validity and salience of pluralist conceptions of information.

I intend to make this short post one in a series of 'who knows' how many on interdisciplinarity in the philosophy of information.

When I first embarked upon my Master of Philosophy in English at The University of Sydney, I had only recently completed an Honours First Class in Philosophy and been admitted to a PhD in philosophy. A flight of literary fancy took me and I decided to try a lateral and interdisciplinary move to English. Dr Peter Marks suggested that I use the topic of my Honours thesis as a jumping-off point. I was surprised at this suggestion, since the Honours thesis was significantly orientated towards the philosophy of information and probability: more philosophy of science and analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American vein.

I should have realised that Professor Marks knew what was afoot. I had only just met him and was not aware that I was talking to an eminent Orwell scholar from Oxford with a famous thesis about Orwell.

It transpires that Shannon's appeal in his editorial address in the 1956 edition of IEEE Transactions was a response to a trend of literary theorists and social scientists to embrace - metaphorically, analogically, and otherwise - the ideas of Shannon's very much applied scientific and statistical Mathematical Theory of Communication:

The Bandwagon Article can be found here and at this nice blogopedia Wiki based article from which I learned that the Sokal hoax article in fact draws parodically upon Shannon's article.

In Shannon's 1948 applied statistical theory, there are causal information sources (Shannon's physical stochastic processes and in-model representations of the same) and then there are complex polysemantic combined information sources which include the properties of Shannon sources, but also include dynamical situations and data structures that have pre-encoded epistemic and cognitive, linguistic, then political and ideological semantic information/content. Sounds overly fixated upon information theory and somewhat over-analytical or 'scientistic' - right?

Perhaps not. Wolfgang Iser's reader reception theory was built upon the foundation of the idea of repertoire. Repertoires are the sets of texts (using literary theoretic parlance) that influence the reader's  partial construction of parsed and interpreted texts and their associated narratives (where a narrative can be construed broadly as semantic and epistemic context and content). As is the case with most theories - especially those in the arts and humanities - the core idea came from elsewhere. It came from a little known French analytic philosopher and polymath by the name of Abram Moles. Moles' primary interest was in what is sometimes called computational aesthetics. He attempted to use Claude E. Shannon's conception of information sources and transmission in an analysis of texts and textual transmission (a not uncommon trend in the mid to late 20th century).

Abraham Moles

Moles

This influence of Shannon upon the work of structuralist literary theorists, grammarians, and social scientists is also revealed in the work of structuralists John Lyons and Zellig S. Harris. Harris was a true informationist interdisciplinarian, producing works analysing the information content of specific scientific language, formulating one of the first semantic theories of information, and even producing  an informational analysis of scientific structures in molecular bioscience/immunlogy (11 and 12 below.)

That information theory influences late structuralist and early poststructuralist and postmodern theory by way of Iser's work is borne out by those theorists investments in effort to apply information theory to grammar, linguistics, and literary theory:

From an interview with Wolfgang Iser

Notice that the references to instructions (and the execution thereof), codes, information, and feed-back all draw heavily upon the discourses of Wienerian cybernetics and Shannonian information theory as well as the emerging computer sciences of the time. Those readers familiar with the science of computer architecture will recognise that instruction processing and microcodes are the stuff of earlier microcode based CPU architectures.

More recently in history, new efforts have also arisen in the other scholarly direction - from critical theory to information theory with the former applied to the implications and effects of the latter. Fuchs work clearly reflects the style and discourse of lat 20th century neo-marxist continental philosophers.

Again the discursive admixture of very continental (and in this case neomarxist) and literary theoretic modes with that of the information sciences is striking, if not unexpected. The proposed meta-theoretic critical discipline is a natural, yet clever and inventive, evolution of the tool set of critical theory.

The philosophy of information lends itself to and requires a breathtaking interdisciplinary breadth that is also constrained by a science-humanities conceptual nexus rooted in applied science as significant as The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Professor Peter Marks had seen the influence of information theory on structuralism and poststructuralism first hand, and had a ready repertoire for a beginner to apply himself too.

Bibliography

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