Purveying Poe

cussion of information in the antebellum economy has some interesting nuances and qualification, but in the final analysis he subsumes it beneath his concept of production: “Although Poe called it ‘thinking material,’ I have used the simpler name of information to designate the kind of written or otherwise objectified knowledge that re-enters the process of production and thereby valorizes capital” [271]. But there is, of course, another notion of information, as an “explanatory quantity . . . of zero dimensions” [Gregory Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972): 4031. Such an understanding is hardly a refutation or denial of the ways in which information as knowledge can be produced, stored, accumulated, and capitalized; but it does suggest that there are different dynamisms at work as well, ones in which information is not transmitted, but rather emergent from processes of relationality and selection: This economics differs from an economics of energy or money . . . being a ratio [it] is not subject to addition or subtraction but only to multiplicative processes, such as fractionation” [Bateson, 4031. If we decide that the knowledge economy and the information economy can neither be separated nor conflated, we find ourselves in an environment of dismaying complexity and hypersaturated meaning, in which, pace Whalen, there are neither first nor last instances and thus very little chance of securely distinguishing a new contribution to knowledge from “yet another text for interpretation” [196],