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lifeworlds and ‘counter-memories’ (p. 10), to political theoretical alternatives. In stressing the rich diversity of American cultural life, Shapiro rightly reminds us of the inadequacies of many of the old stories about America. Finally, he offers no alternative political ideas or institutions for our consideration. Richard H King University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Information Please Mark Poster Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006, 303pp. ISBN: 0 8223 3839 4. Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 500–502. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300315
Mark Poster’s publication of The Mode of Information in 1990 was the start of a major project, still extant, that applied post-structuralism to the study of contemporary media. Though this earlier monograph was a sophisticated critique of the impact of electronic writing on human subjectivity, he could not have envisaged at that time the impact that the World Wide Web (hereafter referred to as ‘the Web’) would have on Media Studies. And, despite the inevitable alterations in perspective brought about by both the reflexivity that all good scholars should practise and the massive cultural change effected by the Web, Poster’s work has succeeded in being consistent without losing the flexibility that is needed to make sense of the vicissitudes of modern western society. His latest book, therefore, explores themes familiar to his readers, such as the role of the media in the construction of subjectivity and the significance to society of the proliferation of information. These and other themes are analysed through the use of a series of interesting case studies. Thus, there are chapters on the use of an image of Sesame Street’s Bert alongside Osama Bin Laden’s face on banners held by protestors in Bangladesh (pp. 9–26), the Teletubbies as symbolic of the fusion of humans and machines (pp. 176–181), and Philip K. Dick’s representation of media and advertising in his novel Ubik (pp. 250–267). These serve to demonstrate respectively the effect on national cultures of the deracination of signifiers from their place of initial reception, the increasing importance of what Poster terms ‘humachines’ and the potential of science fiction to offer a vision of a posthuman society. The latter two examples highlight the most fascinating theme of the whole book. Poster has long held the view that developments in media technology over the past Contemporary Political Theory 2007 6
Book Reviews
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two decades reinforce the ideas of various post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault. Their notion that language was not a reference to an external reality but constitutive of meaning has been used by theorists of new media — not only by Poster, but also Virilio (2000) and Lash (2002) — to challenge the metaphysical separation of subject and object. This purported loss of human agency and the increasing ubiquity of machines have political consequences: A critical theory of globalization y to the extent that it explores media, must look not for a revolutionary subject but for
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