Metacritique of information: on Scott Lash's Critique of Information

SCOTT LASH’S Critique of Information (2002) is one of the most ambitious and provocative works on the theory of the global information revolution to have appeared in recent years. Yet if the book is received simply as another account of the electronic flows and circuitry of the information age it will be misunderstood. Its fate would be one of eager, if temporary, academic consumption and relegation to the limbo of courses in social theory and cultural analysis. This book, like its predecessor Another Modernity: A Different Rationality (1999), deserves better than this. As a highly original exercise in critical theorizing, it is a speculative tour de force, forging a site of radical interrogation of the place of theory and political critique in the digital maelstrom of the e-society and exemplifying the possibilities of a renewed engagement with some of the most intractable problems of modern culture. The chapters of the book are organized into three thematic sections: ‘Information’, ‘Critique’, and ‘Critique of Information’. The development of the argument is woven around a grammar of four interrelated concerns: a theory of information as the new cultural capital of global communicationsociety, the limits of information-based power and the effects of disinformation as the central object of informationcritique, the resurgence of ‘the idea’, and the place of radical reflexivity within the new power flows of cyberculture.