College and Research Libraries


300 College & Research Libraries 

system that systematically and inten-
tionally denies equality of access to the 
American dream. To suspect that a 
grand conspiracy is denying millions of 
Americans the opportunity for a bacca-
laureate degree is far-fetched. In fact, vo-
cational-technical programs, while far 
from perfect, are often overenrolled and 
in great demand by students. True, some 
colleges do not include enough "demo-
cratic citizenry" courses in their curric-
ula, but this is a recognized problem and 
is being addressed. 

Unfortunately, students often drop 
out of the degree program after learning 
a skill and becoming employed. The fact 
that this happens is more a societal prob-
lem, rooted in the profit motives of 
American culture, than a problem of 
higher education. Furthermore, the 
claim that transfer programs have suf-
fered is true of only some institutions. 
Evidence shows that students who at-
tend the first two years at a community 
college make higher grades and have a 
higher completion rate in baccalaureate 
programs than students who begin their 
college career at a four-year school. 

The value of the work is in its unique 
viewpoint on the development of the 
community college movement and its 
analysis of how that development brings 
to light weaknesses in the higher educa-
tional system in general. The text de-
mands the reader's attention for its 
consideration of the larger issues of 
class, society, and equality in American 
culture. However, the book ends its anal-
ysis with 1985, and ' many of its sources 
are at least ten years old. No reader 
should use this volume to determine the 
current state of community colleges.-
W. Lee Hisle, Austin Community College, 
Austin, Texas. 

Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: 
Poststructuralism and Social Context. 
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1990. 
179p., alk. paper, $16.95 (ISBN 0-226-
67596-3 pbk.). LC 90-34770. 

The "mode of information" is the 
phrase Mark Poster has coined to desig-
nate the massive cultural changes that he 
sees occurring in postindustrial societies 

May 1991 

under the impact of electronically medi-
ated communications. Technologies like 
digital recording, television, databases, 
and computer writing do more, he ar-
gues, than merely facilitate our ability to 
produce, store, manipulate, and trans-
mit data. These tools also drastically 
alter our relation to language and 
thereby transform the ways in which we 
constitute ourselves and connect with 
others. This vision of the human uni-
verse revolutionized by electronic media 
recalls Marshall McLuhan' s 1960's 
prophecy of a postprint "global village," 
but Poster's "mode of information" is 
different-distinguished both by its 
focus on language as the crucial site of 
change and by his emphatic politiciza-
tion of the process. 

Four basic premises organize Poster's 
book. First, electronic communications 
radically destabilize the traditional bond 
between linguistic signs and their refer-
ents. Second, this disruption of language's 
representational logic subverts the self as 
a rational, autonomous subject capable of 
knowing and controlling the objective 
world. Third, this rational self,· regarded 
historically, was the dominant form of con-
sciousness during the West's capitalist, im-
perialist past and can unambiguously be 
equated with "the adult, white, male sub-
ject" and its "associated forms of patriar-
chy and ethnocentrism." And finally, 
poststructuralist theory, specifically the 
thought of its leading French exponents, 
offers a uniquely appropriate vocabulary 
for describing both the linguistic changes 
caused by electronic communications and 
their political impact on the ties ''between 
the state and the individual, between the 
individual and the community, between 
authority and law, between family mem-
bers, between consumer and retailer." 

Poster's opening chapters promote his 
poststructuralist methodology by attack-
ing the failure of modern political theory-
both liberal and Marxist-to recognize 
"the qualitative transformation of social 
relations" that stems from the electronic 
media's assault on linguistic representa-
tion. Poster ascribes this failure to the in-
ability of social scientists to free 
themselves from the totalizing logic of ref-



erential language-an inability that 
leaves them blind to the role language 
itself plays in the organization of reality. 
In contrast, poststructuralists presup-
pose the primacy of language in the for-
mation of consciousness, and it is their 
concepts that Poster subsequently em-
ploys to analyze the cultural significance 
of different types of electronic communi-
cations. 

These later chapters concentrate, in fact, on 
rather routine elements of postindustrial life 
and are the book's most engaging. Particu-
larly provocative is Poster's treatment of TV 
ads, which uses Jean Baudrillard's political 
economy of the sign to argue that television 
commercials establish "a new linguistic and 
communications reality." Emphasizing their 
imaginative splicing of different semantic 
and visual codes, Poster shows how ads sever 
words from conventional associations to cre-
ate a hyperreality of free-floating signifiers 
that "promises a new level of self-constitu-
tion, one beyond the rigidities and restraints 
of fixed identity." But while boldly proclaim-
ing the liberational dimension of TV ads, 
Poster also acknowledges their enhanced 
power of social control, which "makes possi-
ble the subordination of the individual to 
manipulative communications practices." 

A similar ambivalence governs Poster's 
discussion of databases, which proceeds 
under the rubric of Michel Foucault's twin 
concepts of surveillance and discipline. On 
the one hand, because databases are free 
from the spatio-temporal coordinates of 
speech and writing, they constitute a new 
language formation that undermines tra-
ditional modes of cultural discipline. On 
the other hand, the "structure or gram-
mar" of digital computers is so rigidly 
nonambiguous that it produces "an im-
poverished, limited language that uses the 
norm to constitute individuals and define 
deviants." From this latter perspective, 
databases appear not as the avant-garde of 
a utopian democracy of free and abundant 
information, but as a sinister tool of reac-
tionary surveillance. This dual perspective 
is also present in the two concluding chap-
ters, which invoke Jacques Derrida on 
computer writing (including both word 
processing and electronic mail) and Jean 
Lyotard on computer science. 

Book Reviews 301 

For librarians, Poster's book is especially 
valuable for the reflection it encourages 
about the electronic instruments so impor-
tant to our professional lives. Most often, 
we regard computers as passive tools of 
our ambitions to serve patrons more effi-
ciently and effectively. Poster enables us to 
understand that these machines are also 
active forces in our cultural environment, 
which are subtly but profoundly reshap-
ing us in their own image. Sensitivity to 
this fundamental fact of cybernetic real-
ity is, perhaps, no less urgent than mas-
tering a new set of commands for the 
latest database.-William McPheron, 
Stanford University, Stanford, California. 

Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Pre-
servers of Black History. Ed. by Elinor 
Des Verney Sinnette, W. Paul Coates 
and Thomas C. Battle. Washington, 
D.C.: Howard Univ. Pr., 1990. 236p. 
(ISBN 8-88258-031-0). LC 90-4458. 

Like so many facets of black history, 
black bibliography and book collecting 
have been neglected areas in American in-
tellectual history. Black Bibliophiles and Col-
lectors: Preservers of Black History is one of 
the recently published books that attempts 
to remedy this deficiency. 

This collection of essays and commentar-
ies was originally presented at Black Bib-
liophiles and Collectors: A National 
Symposium, a 1983 conference held at 
Howard University. Grouped under nine 
topics treating various aspects of collecting 
and organizing black materials, the fifteen 
essays and commentaries by established 
black scholars, bibliophiles, and librarians 
are uneven in quality. Many present little 
new information to anyone familiar with 
black collections and black scholarship. 
Some essays, however, will reward even 
the seasoned practitioner. Together, they 
provide a useful introduction for the novice 
to the subject, making the book an essential 
purchase for library school libraries. 

The venerable Dorothy Porter Wesley's 
encyclopedic contribution "Black Anti-
quarians and Bibliophiles Revisited, with a 
Glance at Today' s Lovers of Books," is a 
fascinating and informative discussion of 
black collectors from the early nineteenth 
century to the present. In this peripatetic