[Upd-discuss] Article: From the Rosicrucians' Fama society to the information society: of prophets, gods, and the Nettime server demon

[Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza]

To be cited:
Cramer, Florian. (1999). "From Fama to
information society: of prophets, gods, and the
Nettime server demon." In: Nettime. (1999). 	
ReadMe! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of
Knowledge. New York: Autonomedia, February 1999,
556p. ISBN: 1570270899 [Online]
http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/nettime/DOCS/zkp5/intro1.html

This article is taken from the book:

Nettime. (1999). 	
ReadMe! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of
Knowledge. New York: Autonomedia, February 1999,
556p. ISBN: 1570270899 [Online]
http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/nettime/DOCS/zkp5/intro1.html

This book is featured with over 100 articles of
authors such as: Delueze, Negri... and others,
read their bios here:
http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/nettime/DOCS/zkp5/pdf/nettime.pdf

The article:

NETTIME / VIRUS / PAGE 516
SUBJECT: FROM FAMA TO INFORMATION SOCIETY:
OF PROPHETS, GODS, AND THE NETTIME SERVER DEMON
FROM: FLORIAN CRAMER
DATE: FRI, 25 SEP 1998 17:28:16 +0200
The concept of information society not only
focuses
new media prophecies, politics and business. It
also seems central to “net criticism” and “net
culture”
as they are discussed in Nettime. In the
archives of the mailing list, “information
society” is
typically referred to as an either present or
emerging
reality: a reality to be reassessed with
alternative,
critical or at least noncorporate visions.
As a social utopia, information society however
predates the Internet and its prophets and
critics.
In the seventeenth century, the Protestant
scholars
Johann Valentin Andreae, Jan Amos Comenius,
and Samuel Hartlib developed a general program
to inform mankind. Their project was outlined in
Andreae’s 1619 pamphlet Turris Babel (“The Tower
of Babel”), a dialogical satire on
Rosicrucianism.
The Rosicrucian reformation of mankind had first
been proclaimed five years earlier in the Fama
fraternitatis
among whose anonymous authors had
been Andreae himself. He soon had to witness how
his fiction took up a life of its own. More than
150
replies appeared until 1619 whose authors sought
to get in touch with the hermetic brotherhood.
With Turris Babel, Andreae joins the debate and
mocks the craze he had created. But instead of
declaring himself the author of the Fama, he
brings
up seventy-five allegorical protagonists who each
pronounce their own opinion about the
Rosicrucians. In chapter sixteen, three
characters
enter the scene, the “reformator,” the “deforma-
tor,” and the “informator.” While the deformator
wants to do away with all traditional ties and
institutions
including church and state, the reformator
hopes for their restoration through the
Rosicrucians.
The informator finally supersedes their
debate by demanding to “inform” mankind so that
“the divine law will be saved from the
deformator’s
corruption and the reformator’s eagerness and
become the constitution of this world.”
“Information” refers to its Latin root here; it
reads
as “impregnation,” “shaping,” or “instruction.”
The informist is an agent of a new Christiana
societas,
which the final chapter of Turris Babel and
Andreae’s subsequent writings proclaim. The
Rosicrucians give way to the Christian Society,
and
fama is followed by information, or, education.
In
the ideal state of this information society,
Andreae’s
utopian republic, all knowledge is denoted in
public
mural paintings. The information and impregnation
of society follows, one could say, the logic of
a push channel. Pedagogics becomes the master
discipline of this project because it provides
the
programming tools. In 1620, Andreae writes his
educational treatise Theophilus; but it were his
disciples
and confrères Comenius and Hartlib who succeeded
in rewriting pedagogics into a new universal
science. With the plans of the Christiana
societas failing
last in England, Andreae’s followers rescue the
technologies of their information utopia into
public
education. Comenius turns the “view houses” of
Christianopolis into an Orbis pictus (“The World
in
Pictures”), the first illustrated children’s
primer.
Until the late eighteenth century, the Orbis
pictus
remains the canonical schoolbook in Europe.
What does the post-Rosicrucian information
society
have in common with the postmodern information
society net prophets and “net critics” describe?
Defined against deformation, reformation and
fama, Andreae’s information is not only loaded
with
pedagogics and theology; more than that, its
definition
is radically performative. It implies that
information
is only what has an impact, reaching and
impregnating its recipients. This notion is
surprisingly
modern in its affinity to Shannon’s definition
of information as anti-redundance. Here,
information
is not a self-referential plaything. It implies a
vertical power relation between informants and
the
informed, between source and receivers.
Information
comes from the source, it is radically original.
To speak originally, the informant must avoid
redundant overlapping with the knowledge of the
informed; he must speak from a remote place and
dwell outside society. Unlike other information
societies, Andreae’s Christiana societas makes no
attempt at concealing this place, but labels it
“heaven”
and calls the informant “God.”
Andreae’s information society does not inform
itself,
it is being informed. But is this also the case
in contemporary
information societies? Can an information
society be made a society of informants, instead
of a society of the informed? According to the
Latin
etymology of the word, society is a body of
companions
(socii ) who follow (sequi ) each other. Society
thus rests upon smoothed out paths. If smoothing
out implies redundance whereas information
translates,
according to Andreae and Shannon, as
antiredundance,
it follows that information and society
are contradictions. Andreae’s Christian
information
society resolves this contradiction by secluding
the
informant from itself. A society founded upon its
self-information however—that is, a society
founded
upon radical originality instead of redundances
or a
remote informant—cannot communicate. It would
not be a society.
Perhaps those who speak of information society
today don’t use the word information in Shannon’s
or
Andreae’s rigorous sense, but identify
“information”
with “signs.” As “signs,” “information” would
comprehend
noise as well as signals, fuzziness as much
as focus. But in this case, “information society”
would no longer make a difference. It would not
describe any departure from the habitual
signal–noise economics of “society”; it would
exhaust itself in a buzzword. But perhaps the
question
is not whether “information society” is only a
buzzword or whether a self-informing information
society would be a contradiction in itself. If
one
acknowledges that the concept of “information
society” has political impact nevertheless, then
the
more relevant conclusion is that no “information
society” which is more than a buzzword can do
without transcendental informants.
When presupposing information society as a
present
or emerging reality, “net criticism” and “net
culture” do not only operate with the same
theoretical
dispositive as net prophecy. They also partici-
NETTIME / VIRUS / PAGE 517
pate, nilly-willy, in the political theology
inscribed
into its very concept. “Net critics” and net
prophets
coincide where they pretend to do without
transcendental
informants, but continue to employ
them. When Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz presented
their concept of “net culture” and “net
criticism”
in a panel speech for a congress that accompanied
Documenta X in summer 1997, they
defended “the net” against traditional academia
all
the while calling upon academics to go online.
Given the academic surrounding and sponsorship
of the event, the audience interpreted this as
undeserved
polemics. It failed to recognize that, instead
of a university lecture, it had witnessed a
perfect reenactment
of the Rosicrucian Fama, its bold rhetoric,
its general critique of culture and its final
appeal to the scholars of the world. The speakers
had furthermore observed the Rosicrucian rules of
curing everyone without charging money, wearing
innocuous clothing and speaking the local idiom
in
each country they visit in order to keep their
theological
mission under the hood.
The next logical step after the Fama is Nettime
writing
itself as a dialogical satire of its own
discourse.
When the discourse of “net criticism” generates
the
very critical “net culture” it reflects, and when
the
discourse of net prophecy generates the very
affirmative
“net culture” it reflects, and vice versa, it
seems as if the “information societies” addressed
both in “net prophecy” and “net criticism” are,
first
of all, self-descriptions. They emerge as
romantic
symbols: demonic and divine hieroglyphs, shining
bright in the rigorous sun of Telechristianopolis.

=====
Vorwärts!

Zapopan Martín Muela Meza
PhD student Information Studies
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/research/phd.html
http://www.geocities.com/zapopanmuela/index.html


		
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