Modernist informatics literature, information, and the state

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Purdon, James, 1983– Modern

Modernist Informatics

Modernist Literature & Culture

Kevin J H Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors

The Great American Songbooks

Modernist Informatics

Literature, Information, and the State

James Purdon

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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Purdon, James, 1983–

Modernist informatics : literature, information, and the state / James Purdon.

p. cm — (Modernist literature & culture ; 25)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–19–049332–5 (ebook) — ISBN 978–0–19–021170–7 (pdf)

1 Modernism (Literature) 2 Government information—Access control 3 Mass media and literature—History—20th century I Title PN56.M54P87 2016

for my parents

One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory, but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the Universe But Hell could not have one, for in Hell, as in prison and the army, its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number They do not have numbers, they are numbers.

—W H Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Government of Information

1 Secret Agents, Official Secrets

Inspector Heat’s Postal Power

Korzeniowski’s Dead Letter Box

The National Point of View

… a Mass of Unrelated Facts

This Little Old E of Ours

Connectivity and Collectivity

… Paper of All Kinds Broadcast Everywhere …

Frankie’s Papers, Bowen’s Notes

Between the Lines

Coda: Information Machines

Selected Bibliography Index

Series Editors’ Foreword

To indulge in ruthless telegraphic shorthand, Modernist Informatics provides a prehistory of

cybernetics James Purdon’s richly detailed book–the range of reference is astonishing–develops itsargument through what sometimes resembles a chapter by chapter scatter plot, the technique of datavisualization that demonstrates (where possible) correlation and coherence within a mass of data thatotherwise might seem random

Thus in chapter one, “Secret Agents, Official Secrets,” Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent shares

space with nineteenth-century postal scandals, underpaid copyists, Italian revolutionary GiuseppeMazzini, and the Official Secrets Acts of 1889, 1911, and 1920 In chapter two, “Dossier Fiction,”

Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End constellates standardized forms, the National Registration Act of

1915, Arnold Bennett’s overlooked modernist gem Riceyman Steps, the concept of the data double,

fingerprinting, passports, and the thriller In the third chapter, “Information Collectives,” Stephen

Spender’s journal Fact introduces Mass-Observation (M-O) and responses to M-O by satirical

essayist G W Stonier, novelist and screenwriter John Sommerfield (if you don’t know him, you’llwant to), and anthropologist and occultist T C Lethbridge Chapter four, “Public Information,”emplots documentary film maker John Grierson, W H Auden, concepts of patterning, and the picturelanguage known as Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) Chapter five,

“Information Blacked Out,” offering the most sustained literary analysis of a single text, locates

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day within a matrix that includes World War II propaganda

posters and films, optical and informational black-outs, and E M Forster’s essays Finally, “Coda:Information Machines,” connects the dots between George Orwell, Claude Shannon, and NorbertWiener, who brings us back to cybernetics

The coherence of these data points is made possible by the clarity of Purdon’s central claim:informatics–that is, the science of managing information–does not begin, as is commonly thought, withdigitization but with the emergence of new controls on information around the turn of the twentiethcentury that Purdon calls (playing with the ambiguous genitive) “the government of information.”Here’s where Purdon’s difference from a number of related books becomes clear Literary treatments

of information control from which Purdon’s book emerges include Alexander Welsh’s George Eliot

and Blackmail, Mark Wollaeger’s Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, and Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits; literary treatments attuned, as Purdon is, to the material infrastructure of

information include Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New , Richard Menke’s

Telegraphic Realism, and Jay Clayton’s Charles Dickens in Cyberspace; and enabling non-literary

histories of information include James Beniger’s The Control Revolution and Daniel Headrick’s

When Information Came of Age.

But none of these focuses so intently on the government of information, which is to say on the way

that information has emerged as both the basis of modern political power and one of its primary

objects of attention Thus the sustained story of Modernist Informatics is how the politics of

information became one of the principal ways through which both literary culture and the state came

to define themselves in the twentieth century Roughly coincident with common periodizing accounts

of modernism, the British government began to undertake coordinated administration of a stateunderstood as dependent on information beginning around 1889 with the first of a series of Official

Secrets Acts, and it had to change approaches after World War II, when digital computing requiredthe development of a new set of control protocols, or cybernetics proper The literary data pointshere do not coincide with the usual high modernist suspects–the men of 1914 or, in Bonnie Scott’srevision, the women of 1928 Like Wollaeger, Purdon routes his story through Conrad and Ford, both

of whom were closely involved with official networks of information control, but also through manyless well known writers and film makers These chapters will undoubtedly spur others to extend hisapproach to additional figures, from Joyce, Eliot, and Rebecca West, who surface occasionally, tothose who do not, such as H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, or Dorothy Richardson

How did we arrive in today’s media ecology, in which biometric data collection, informationinsecurity, and global hacking scandals dominate not only the headlines but our lives? And what kinds

of writing and film in the modernist period anticipate today’s “glitch” or “archive” art? In Purdon’srich (pre)history, Conrad, exploring leaks and the emergence of “preprocessing” (Beniger), emerges

as a kind of proto-hacker; Ford, attentive to war-time systems for the storage and cross-checking ofpersonal data, adumbrates the concept of the data double and the “dividual” long before the termswere coined, respectively, by surveillance studies and Gilles Deleuze; and Bowen, in Purdon’s tour

de force analysis of her torqued syntax, unidiomatic double negatives, and insistent redundancies,

comes to look like a signal jammer Modernist Informatics offers more surprises than sysadmins are

willing to tolerate, and for that reason will make its readers very happy

—MARK WOLLAEGER AND KEVIN J H DETTMAR

Long before it came to describe a set of virtual patterns, “information” meant the process offashioning a character, a consciousness First and foremost I am grateful to the teachers who haveinformed me in that older sense of the word, and most especially to David Trotter, whose influenceand example helped to shape this book from start to finish

Leo Mellor played a key role in the early stages, when the ideas expressed here were still in themaking; later, Alex Houen and Adam Piette offered invaluable criticism and guidance Many of thearguments made in these pages were tested and strengthened in the course of lively discussions withBeci Carver, Charlotte Charteris, Michael Englard, James Fox, John Gallagher, Olivia Laing, RobertMacfarlane, Rod Mengham, Robbie Moore, Ian Patterson, Beryl Pong, Mark Rawlinson, JordanSavage, Philip Sidney, Alfie Spencer, and James Wade For their support and encouragement at othertimes and in other ways, I am grateful to Jon Day, Susanna Hislop, Arthur House, Thomas Marks,Peter Scott, and Dan Stevens

Mark Wollaeger and Kevin Dettmar were encouraging readers of the manuscript, while the twoanonymous readers who reported on it offered a wealth of constructive suggestions

The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the doctoral thesis that began the project.Thanks for practical help are due to the archivists of Mass-Observation at the University of Sussexand the John Grierson Archive at the University of Stirling, and to the curators of the British PostalMuseum I am also grateful to the fellows and staff of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and JesusCollege, Cambridge, where most of the writing took place

Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kristen Treen

Material from the Mass-Observation Archive is reproduced with permission of Curtis BrownGroup Ltd., London, on behalf of The Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive

Quotations from John Grierson’s unpublished writings are reproduced with the kind permission ofthe John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling

Part of Chapter 1 first appeared as “Secret Agents, Official Secrets: Joseph Conrad and the

Security of the Mail,” The Review of English Studies 65, pp 302–320; parts of Chapter 4 appeared

in “Electric Cinema, Pylon Poetry,” Amodern 2 (October 2013).

Modernist Informatics

Introduction: The Government of Information

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?1

—T S Eliot

In the July edition of The Idler for 1892 there appeared a short story by Israel Zangwill Part science

fiction, part sting-in-the-tail parable, “The Memory Clearing House” is narrated by a “poor, unhappy,struggling, realistic novelist” who, having allowed his realist ambitions to lapse, has at last foundpopularity with a successfully sentimental romance.2 Using his new-found wealth, he has moved to amore expensive address, and circulated the usual cards to let his friends know where to reach him.Yet all is not well Before long, one of those friends—an Irish parliamentarian named O’Donovan—accosts the narrator in the street to complain about the difficulty of replacing the memory of the oldaddress with that of the new:

Just imagine what a weary grind it has been to master—“109, Little Turncot Street, Chapelby Road, St Pancras.” For the last eighteen months I have been grappling with it, and now, just as I am letter perfect and postcard secure, behold all my labour destroyed, all my pains made ridiculous It’s the waste that vexes me Here is a piece of information, slowly and laboriously acquired, yet absolutely useless […] It cannot be scotched—it must lie there blocking up my brains, a heavy, uncouth mass,

always ready to spring at the wrong moment; a possession of no value to anyone but the owner, and not the least use to him (p.

187)

Frustrated, O’Donovan resolves to turn his own difficulty into an opportunity With the help of

“psychical science” he succeeds in contriving an apparatus which he calls “the noemagraph, orthought-writer” for transferring memories from one mind to another (p 191) This device, whichimprints memories “on a sensitised plate,” preserves discrete, decontextualized, transferable records

of memory just as a camera preserves discrete, decontextualized, transferable records of light: whatthe photograph does for the eye, the noemagraph does for the mind

Before long O’Donovan is in the information business He establishes the titular clearing house,setting the methods of the stock-exchange (or, equally well, the pawn shop) to work on memory itself,and is soon doing a roaring trade among those whose minds unhelpfully store useless information,particularly “politicians, clergymen, and ex-examinees” (p 193) When the business expands beyondthe trading of superfluous memories to deal in trade-ins, memory rentals, and amnesia, however, itbegins to expose problems in the relationship between information and the integrity of the self.Customers who are “tired of themselves” begin to call at the clearing house “to get a complete newoutfit of memories, and thus change their identities” (p 195) In the end, the formerly strugglingrealistic novelist caves in and invests in the memories of a murderer, hoping to write “the mostveracious novel the world has seen” (p 202) Having done so, he finds himself facing trial for thevery murder he had hoped to use in his realistic fiction

Zangwill’s story satirizes fin-de-siècle London’s posing litterateurs as well as its upwardly mobile

middle classes, but what makes “The Memory Clearing House” doubly interesting is that it plays oneanxiety of excess against another, making information overload into a way of talking about theexpansion of consumer culture, and vice-versa “Information,” which had once meant the shaping ofcharacter, especially through moral instruction or religious inspiration, had by the 1890s lost most of

those old associations But it had not yet come to designate a mathematical quantity or a virtualdomain In the meantime what it increasingly resembled, at least to the primed gaze of late-Victoriancapitalism, was a commodity.

Certainly, information can be understood to satisfy the essential requirements of the commodityform as Marx had expressed them.3 It has a use-value: O’Donovan’s problem is not that hislaboriously acquired information is inherently useless, but that—like many other commodities—it isperishable It can satisfy a human need or desire And, as O’Donovan realizes, it has an exchange-value: it can be traded for other commodities, or for a money equivalent Yet information is a strangekind of commodity, one that can exist simultaneously in multiple locations “If I have a disk and make

a copy for you,” writes N Katherine Hayles, “we both have the information Like the fabled magicpot, information promises to proliferate virtually without cost.”4 This strange quality of information-as-commodity—that information exchanged may also be retained—has led theorists such as Haylesand Mark Poster to speculate about the relationship between the increasing ease with whichinformation can be reproduced and the radical reorganization of capitalism in post-industrialeconomies The “dream of information,” in Hayles’s account, opens the way to “a realm of plenitudeand infinite replenishment, in sharp contrast to what might be called the regime of scarcity.” In thisnew realm, which both Hayles and Poster associate with the increasing ease and speed ofreproduction enabled by digital technology, terms such as “exchange value” and “surplus value”become nonsensical: the value that inheres in information seems to transcend the laws of supply anddemand That, at least, is the fantasy Yet the regime of scarcity, both theorists also point out, has ahabit of reasserting itself, bringing the dream of informational plenitude and freedom back under thecontrol of market relations and political hierarchies The genius of the noemagraph, which furnishesZangwill’s story with its conceit, is that it does just that In response to information’s dizzyingincrease, it reinstitutes the regime of scarcity by technological means, allowing information to betreated like any other commodity By removing memories from one mind and installing them inanother, the apparatus transforms information into a thing that can be exchanged in the same way thatbales of linen or hats can be exchanged Customers at the memory clearing house forfeit theirsuperfluous information for cash, or for new information Either way, they no longer possess theoriginal, and for O’Donovan this is all to the good Fixed as a finite substance—“a heavy, uncouthmass”—information finally makes sense to his entrepreneurial mind

To those without the benefit of a noemagraph, however, information remained profoundlytroubling Returning to Hayles’s analogy, it helps to recall the cautionary aspect of the Grimms’ magicpot, which goes on uncontrollably producing porridge beyond all bounds: “and there was the greatestdistress, but no one knew how to stop it.”5 The anxiety that attends most discussions of information in

late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing arises precisely from the fact that it cannot be

secured and controlled in the same way as other commodities.6 Information is transmitted rather thantraded: its governing logic is not exchange but contagion (The virus, Jussi Parikka has suggested, isthe informational form par excellence.)7 Like other real and imaginary epidemics of the fin-de-

siècle—criminality, homosexuality, syphilis, absinthe-drinking—information was understood both as

a moral and as an economic problem, a disturbance of the relationship between the self and the worldand a threat to the structure of society The epidemic had somehow to be brought under control Thecommodity form had to be secured

We no longer think of information as a substance Or, if we do, we seldom think in terms of themetaphors used by O’Donovan Heaviness, uncouthness, mass: these describe a set of associations

very different from those which circulate at the beginning of the twenty-first century, wheninformation tends to figure as weightlessly abstract, culturally dominant, the most sought-after of allcommodities How did that transvaluation happen? How was information transformed from theburdensome residue of fact into the “universal solvent” of cybernetics and digital computing?8 Whatcultural pressures went into the making of information as a concept before it was conscripted as atheory? Those questions are at the heart of this book Its general claims are that information andliterary narrative have a history of entanglement as well as antagonism, and that this relationship—theproductive challenge posed to literature by the genres of information—was a significant factor in thecultural shaping of modernist narrative.

*

One good reason for beginning with “The Memory Clearing House” is that it successfully anticipatesmany of the information problems that would become pressing for twentieth-century writers In aninfluential essay first published in the year 2000, the critic James Wood wrote that “Information hasbecome the new character.”9 His point was that the vast novels of contemporary fiction have tended

to focus less on the elaboration of unique subjectivities than on the background hum of information—information about manufactured objects, industrial processes, flows of commodities, and patterns ofconsumption—against or through which the postmodern subject comes to be formed But Zangwill’sstory should once again remind us that such anxieties about the proliferation and control of

information are not new They weren’t new even to Zangwill An 1853 editorial in The Times could

declare in passing that Victorian England was already “in an age of information,” and the latenineteenth century’s array of new i-compounds easily matches that of the twentieth.10 As early as the1780s, British travelers could take advantage of an “information office” in Calcutta, but it was almost

a hundred years before vocabulary really caught up with the rising professions, producing new terms

including “information bureau” (first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary 1869), “information

agent” (1871), “information room” (1874), “information service” (1885), “information officer”(1889), and “information work” (1890) In the company kept by the word—public service andbusiness, agency and control—we can begin to discern the outline of a modern understanding ofinformation as a form of mediation which structures relations between individuals, corporations, andstate bureaucracies

In the middle of the nineteenth century, those relations were significantly reconfigured by a series

of interrelated administrative changes Between them, the Penny Post of 1840, the end of thenewspaper stamp duty in 1855, the repeal of paper duties in 1861, and the Elementary Education Act

of 1870 formed the conditions for increasing literacy among the lower social classes, and fueleddemand for reading matter.11 Meanwhile, extensive reforms were carried out in the Post Office, theCivil Service, the British Museum, the British East India Company, and other state institutions.12 Thesophisticated new classifying and sorting operations developed in the course of those reformsgradually effected the transformation of Victorian statistics into modernist informatics Where theVictorians had instituted the much-satirized Society for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge, theirchildren and grandchildren would build Ministries of Information; where statistics had come to beunderstood as the science of rational government according to abstract data, informatics wouldforeground the new material, social, and technological practices of official communications.Informatics supplemented the bureaucratic fantasy of rational government-by-numbers with a morecomplicated set of protocols, technologies, and social assemblages designed to mediate between

states and populations.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “informatics” as the “branch of study that deals with the

structure, properties, and communication of information and with means of storing and processinginformation.” The word entered English in the computer science boom of the mid-1960s on the model

of the Russian informatika (the theory of scientific information) and perhaps under the influence of related but distinct terms in French (informatique) and German (Informatik) Informatics can be

regarded as the infrastructure of information, but it need not be limited to digital computing machines,

or indeed to machines alone The most recent edition of the International Encyclopaedia of

Information and Library Science, for instance, allows that since “computers, individuals, and

organizations all process information, informatics has computational, cognitive, and social aspects.”Informatics, that is to say, deals with the representation, processing, and communication ofinformation within and between systems of several kinds: not only “computer communications andnetworking” but “paper, analogue and digital records,” “organizational processes,” and even “humanreasoning.”13

This more expansive concept of informatics has helped to shape contemporary theories oftechnology and culture In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, Donna Haraway argues that the

“polymorphous information system” of post-industrial capitalism has brought about “a massiveintensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment.”14 The consolidation of what Haraway calls

“the informatics of domination” marks, decisively in her view, the transition from the settled form ofindustrial capitalism in which power and ownership relations are relatively clear to the decenteredglobal flows of information that characterize the expansion of capital in its post-industrial mode.Similarly, N Katherine Hayles proposes a broad definition of informatics encompassing all of “thematerial, technological, and social structures that make the information age possible.”15 Like Hayles Ifind it useful to distinguish these structures from the “information” stored, processed, and transmitted

in accordance with their individual capacities and rules Yet here I part company with both Harawayand Hayles, who understand informatics as a relatively recent development, with primary application

to systems that have already become digital The “Cyborg Manifesto” does not attempt to distinguishbetween what Haraway has elsewhere called “post-industrial, post-modern, or other postedlocations,” nor does Hayles pursue the implications of her sweeping definition of informatics for ourunderstanding of an era before cybernetics.16 My own view is that the informatic revolution described

by both theorists was as much a legacy of early twentieth-century bureaucracies as a post-industrialachievement In what follows, I trace the development of informatic systems in the period betweensteam and cybernetics, when the statistical analyses of nineteenth-century public offices graduallybecame the informatic protocols of twentieth-century ministries, and the attention of governmentshifted from the analysis of populations and quantities to the control of access and channels.17

Modernist Informatics explores the premise that informatics begins not with digitization but rather

with the development of new information controls in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

government systems Informatics might then be understood as the government of information,

allowing that phrase its full measure of ambiguity in order to call to mind the way information hasemerged as both the basis of modern political power and one of its primary objects of attention andcontrol

Literary criticism, on the other hand, has been relatively slow to take an interest in information and

informatics In March 2010 the journal Library and Information History could look back on “An

Information History Decade” during which important work had been done in evaluating the role and

importance of the concept of information in the development of modernity.18 Not until the end of thatdecade did modernist studies begin seriously to broach the subject of information, by way of anincreasing interest in the role of the state in cultural production In an influential 2008 article for

PMLA, Douglas Mao and Rebecca L Walkowitz reviewed the work of “The New Modernist

Studies,” paying particular attention to scholars’ growing interest in international modernisms andpolitical modernisms, and calling for scholarly investigations to “probe much further the effects of thestate on Modernist production.” “It would be surprising,” they concluded, “if modernist studies,centered as it is on times and places marked by especially dramatic changes in the politics ofinformation, ignored this pressing challenge.”19

One way of responding to that challenge is by directing attention toward phenomena other than theconsumable public media of entertainment and the audio-visual technologies of storage anddissemination With a tacit understanding that the most heated debates regarding twenty-first-centurydata culture involve the retention and use of information by state institutions and transnationalcorporations, this book posits a new media presence in early twentieth-century narrative: one whichhas received little critical attention for the very reason that it operates semi-covertly, mediating notbetween an artist and an audience but between citizens and the institutions of the state “In our epoch,”notes John Guillory, “large numbers of people write, but they do not for the most part write poems orscientific papers; they fill out forms, compose memos or reports, send interoffice emails.”20 These

“information genres” as Guillory calls them—along with post-marks, records and reports, files andlicenses, passports and mugshots—have tended to remain covert in the sense that their reading hasbeen imagined, when imagined at all, as an official activity Their ideal reader, typically conceived

as a professional bureaucrat or state functionary, is one whose role is to process conventions and dataaccording to particular institutional rules and with a view to defined outcomes: marriage, arrest,admittance, payment, conscription, and so on The representation of such forms in literary workstends, therefore, to depend upon an interruption in the usual circulation of documents in institutionalsign systems that otherwise remain closed and invisible as a condition of their proper functioning

Alexander Welsh has shown how, for instance, the increasing prominence of blackmail plots in thenovels of George Eliot reflects the emergence of a characteristic “pathology of information” in thelatter half of the nineteenth century By making blackmail intrinsic to its narrative structure, Eliot’sfiction is able to uncover the contradictions within a new set of social conventions regarding privacy,publicity, and reputation.21 Drawing on Welsh’s work, Mark Wollaeger goes on to argue that asblackmail was to the Victorians, so propaganda—the “chief information pathology of the twentiethcentury”—was to their modernist successors.22 Yet here, it seems to me, pathology encounters a slight

difficulty For it remains unclear why propaganda should necessarily constitute a pathology of

information Indeed, from an official perspective, successful propaganda might rather appear to be thesign of a national information system in rude health If a symptomatic analysis of this kind is to workeffectively, it needs to account for the fact that information systems are fundamentally political inways that the human body is not, and that what appears pathological from one perspective can lookperfectly proper and even desirable from another Where information systems themselves becomeobjects of attention, we are dealing not simply with moments of error, but with what Lisa Gitelmancalls “moments of innovation, dispute, breakdown, transfer, and the like, moments in which thegrounds of meaning itself seem to have been most clearly at stake.”23 Is the leaking of officialdocuments a political pathology or a public service? Are identification technologies necessary for thesafety of law-abiding citizens or illiberal impositions of control? These questions are still relevant,

and making sense of them requires political as well as symptomatic analysis.

Modernist Informatics charts the structures of information in modernist culture by attending to

moments at which those structures emerge into view, but it also insists that “the politics ofinformation,” far from constituting a new field for the exercise of forms of official power later to berepresented in cultural artifacts, was one of the principal ways in which both the state and literaryculture came to define themselves in the new century Information did not spring suddenly upon theworld at the end of the nineteenth century, yet from the work of writers such as Joseph Conrad, FordMadox Ford, Graham Greene, and Elizabeth Bowen there emerges a new understanding of therelationship between the technologies of information management and the conditions of everyday lifeand thought in modern societies Conrad’s interest in interception and leaking, Greene’s horror of thelost identity, and Bowen’s structural and syntactic jammings are all attuned to the contestedfrequencies of information in ways that remind us forcefully of the difficulties of reading, thinking,and knowing in the situation of modernity

Regarding the scope of that modernity, some studies have pushed the history of information backfurther still Welsh himself has argued for the crucial role played by the Foudrinier paper machine(1799) and the rotary press (1843) in encouraging increased literacy and meeting the consequentdemand for printed material “For better or worse,” he concludes, “the age of information commencedabout two hundred years ago.”24 For Toni Weller, too, “The 1800s formed the nascent years of ourmodern information age.”25 Extending the timeline, Peter Burke notes that “The commodification ofinformation is as old as capitalism.”26 Despite their advantages, such wide optics have tended toelide real historical differences in how information was conceived, managed, and represented AsDaniel R Headrick has pointed out, “information” has come to designate a category so vague as to becritically useless: he therefore turns his attention to “a more manageable concept, the study of

information systems.”27 Yet I am less confident than Headrick that we can point to a thresholdmoment when information (as the title of his study puts it) “came of age.” There was no one momentwhen information became a governing force in people’s lives, nor even a significant date after which

it suddenly became widely understood as such

But if we cannot set a date for the beginning of the information age, we can at least identify thecrucial moment when the British government began to construe itself as administering a state

predicated on information This moment was the passing into law in 1889 of An Act to Prevent the

Disclosure of Official Documents and Information, generally known as the Official Secrets Act, the

first piece of legislation of its kind anywhere in the world The Conservative government of the day,led by Lord Salisbury, had been preparing the legislation for almost two years, spurred by theincreasing commerce between newspaper editors who felt they were being deprived of information,and clerks and draftsmen in government service who felt they were being deprived of an incomeconsistent with their responsibilities Information security was thus both an inward-looking and anoutward-looking phenomenon, in which the danger posed by external enemies was compounded byinternal grievance

By claiming this moment as crucial, I do not mean to suggest that literary texts simply produce orrespond to moments of sudden convulsion in media or in the politics of information Following the

example of James Beniger, whose The Control Revolution has long been the standard work on

Anglo-American communications and control technologies, I take it that revolutions can be ongoingprocesses as well as sudden events From Beniger, too, I draw corroboration for the intuition that wehave tended retrospectively to post-date the development of “information society” in seeing

twentieth-century instruments (and computer microprocessors in particular) as marking a decisivebreak with pre-existing technologies rather than accelerating an ongoing process Against “prevailingviews, which locate the origins of the Information Society in World War II,” or in “the commercialdevelopment of television,” or in computers, or in “computer-based telecommunications in the 1960sand early 1970s,” or in “microprocessing technology in the late 1970s,” Beniger argues—rightly, in

my view—that “the basic societal transformation from Industrial to Information Society had beenessentially completed by the late 1930s.”28 While the rate and method of this transformation differedsignificantly between the United States and the United Kingdom, Beniger’s account nonethelessprovides a persuasive, if counterintuitive, periodization Where my argument differs from his is inemphasizing the role of cultural production, as well as the official discourses of parliamentarydebates and legislative instruments, in the relationship between governments and publics Officialpolicy in Britain was neither solely driven by technological change nor simply imposed upon citizensaccording to political expediency Rather, political discourse about information security, and aboutnational security more broadly, was enmeshed with social, technological, and cultural changes.Novelists affected government policy; governments censored books and paintings; ministriesproduced films and sponsored radio broadcasts Technologies of photographic and cinematicrepresentation developed at the same time as, and in dynamic interaction with, “official” technologies

of identification and surveillance

In the case of the visual arts, Sven Spieker has proposed that the aesthetics of early century visual modernism can be understood “as a reaction formation to the storage crisis that came inthe wake of Beniger’s revolution, a giant paper jam based on exponential increase in stored data, both

twentieth-in the realm of public admtwentieth-inistration and twentieth-in large companies whose archives were soon bursttwentieth-ing atthe seams.”29 The archival imagination became a focus for artists because of its rich possibilities formodeling the relationship between time, memory, and chance Where the eighteenth-century

information systems of Linnaeus, Diderot, and the philosophes sought to classify, organize, and

discriminate, the archives of the nineteenth century became places “where historians hoped to find thesediments of time itself […] in flux and ongoing.” For Spieker, the expansion of archives in thenineteenth century reflects an increasing interest in registering the visible traces of what normallyeludes representation, so that the modernist project may be said to begin by turning that high ambitionback on the archive itself, revealing how contingency not only determines its contents but affects theintellectual work it accomplishes and enables Spieker’s thesis is appealing, not least because itallows him to account in new and persuasive ways for the upsurge of interest in dossiers, files, andbureaucratic records in the work of twentieth-century artists from Marcel Duchamp to GerhardRichter My own enquiry begins from a similar hypothesis about the proliferation of information, but

it approaches the problem through analysis of texts from several apparently discrete domains ofdiscourse My aim in these readings has been to recognize not only the contingency of archivalprocesses but also the real continuity between those realms—public/private, official/unofficial,literary/popular—whose notional boundaries were shaped by the circulation of writing

So much for Informatics: why modernist? It should be clear from the outset that comparatively littleattention is devoted here to those writers—Eliot, Joyce, Pound, and Woolf, to name only four—whose work even after several decades of wide-ranging re-examination and recuperation remainscentral to the institutional reception of modernism My intention has been to make visible a rather

different set of concerns within the writing of modernity Modernist Informatics traces a circuit in

which the term “modernism” is not to be regarded as a stable name for a single mode or genre ofwriting, but rather—like “information”—as the residue of a series of definitions, none of them

adequate to encompass all possible forms or instances of the protean phenomenon they aim tocircumscribe That said, the main figures discussed here do have one important feature in common, inthat all of them at one time or another were intimately involved with official networks of informationcontrol Joseph Conrad—the child of exiled political dissidents—spent his early working lifenavigating the communication routes of the British Empire Ford Madox Ford saw service both in theWar Propaganda Bureau and as an officer in the Welsh Regiment Graham Greene worked for theMinistry of Information and for the British Secret Intelligence Service, while the energetic founders

of Mass-Observation found themselves absorbed into more mundane government work The directorand impresario John Grierson worked as a telegraph operator on a minesweeper during the FirstWorld War before becoming the British Commonwealth’s leading theorist of public information AndElizabeth Bowen reported covertly on morale in neutral Ireland Each of the figures considered herewas in some way uniquely positioned on the margins of class or nationality All found ways to re-invent themselves through creative work that drew upon intimate knowledge of the informaticstructures of the British state By reading their works together, I aim to demonstrate how a specifickind of modernist culture emerged at points of intersection between private, public, and officialmedia channels in the first half of the twentieth century

*

Anglophone novelists have been struggling to understand the nature of information at least since

Joseph Conrad’s Chance (1914), in which Charles Marlow pauses to reflect on the epistemological

conditions of his own storytelling The passage is part of Marlow’s commentary on the story of thedisgraced banker de Barral, which is itself the context for a romance plot involving de Barral’sdaughter Flora:

“You must not think,” went on Marlow after a pause, “that on that morning […] I went consciously in my mind over all this, let us call it information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which I had, or rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral Information is something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull Whereas knowledge comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in its repose a fine resonant quality… But as such distinctions touch upon the transcendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them […]”30

With his fastidious revisions, Marlow seeks to articulate a distinction between information andknowledge as differing modes of possession Knowledge, he decides, isn’t the kind of acquisition thatcan be “had” in a way that keeps it separate from the self, but rather something that “exists” in him in

some unspecified way Slipping into the financial idiom that permeates Chance, he describes

knowledge as a “fund,” a word he elsewhere uses only for affective states (Mrs de Barral, he tells

us, was once a woman “with a fund of simple gaiety”; later he complains that women do not share

“that fund of at least conditional loyalty” with which men are said to regard each other.)31 Ifinformation, for Marlow, resembles base metal, the fund that is knowledge suggests active(“resonant”) capital: capital invested in the expectation of a return rather than hoarded unproductively

in the form of raw material Both information and knowledge, in this schematic view, are to beunderstood as economic phenomena but with different implications: one is laboriously and tediouslysought and hoarded; the other simply “comes to one” as a “chance acquisition.” Marlow, evidently, isthinking of financial matters; pausing for a moment to explain a point to his listeners, he does so underthe influence of a financial idiom.32

One problem with this distinction, of course, is that information is not at all like lead It is neither

fungible (one piece of information is not interchangeable with any other) nor is it alienable in the

same way That difficulty may help to explain Marlow’s rather de haut en bas tone—and the

authorial ellipsis—when he chooses to let the subject drop In Conrad’s writing, the figure who mostfrequently embodies the lamentable ascendancy of information is the newspaper reporter, and indeedMarlow’s meditation on information and knowledge comes immediately after his description of anencounter with a “pressman” acquaintance outside the trial of de Barral In the course of theirdiscussion, he obtains a piece of information: the fact that de Barral, when sentenced, “permittedhimself his very first and last gesture in all these days, raising a hard-clenched fist above his head.”The pressman, according to Marlow, has failed to grasp the significance of the gesture: “Is it ever thebusiness of any pressman to understand anything? I guess not It would lead him too far away from theactualities which are the daily bread of the public mind.” For Marlow, however, de Barral’s gesturematters far more than as a simple “actuality.” He takes it as evidence of an “imagination […] at lastroused into activity,” and what interests him—as a matter not of contingent news but of universalhuman nature—is the idea that the stolid and unimaginative de Barral has finally understood the tragicaspect of his precipitous fall The moment of anagnorisis is lost on the pressman who is obligedsimply to write “a readable account” and be done with it But it is not lost on Marlow, in whom itresonates between mind and body, provoking “a thrill very much approaching a shudder.”33

Such thrills and shudders mark, for Conrad, a psychic boundary to pass beyond which informationmust become something else entirely Sometimes he calls that something else knowledge, sometimessympathy, and sometimes understanding In any case, art seems to be the only possible vehicle:newspapers, for instance, remain firmly in the realm of information Consider the essay “Autocracyand War” (1905), which turns a scathing eye on the “cold, silent, colourless” press coverage of theRusso-Japanese War:

In this age of knowledge, our sympathetic imagination, to which we can alone look for the ultimate triumph of Concord and Justice, remains strangely impervious to information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed As to the austere eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the futility of eloquence without force It is the exploded superstition of enthusiastic statisticians.34

In the course of explaining how the “sympathetic imagination” is “impervious to information,” Conrad

makes the same stylistic move that he will later repeat in Chance, here turning not to the idiom of

finance but to a series of military metaphors By superimposing the language of warfare on anindictment of information-saturated media, the essay makes metaphor into critique: “serried array”projects the image of ranked troops over the “austere eloquence” of enumeration, while “exploded”holds the real violence of the war in the same frame as the “enthusiastic statisticians” whose abstractcalculations make that violence possible In both cases, the prose demonstrates what it declares: thatliterary language is capable of working upon the reader in ways that are quite different from thestraightforward model of affectless, objective transmission implicit in informational forms such as thenewspaper story and the statistical report

News, according to Walter Benjamin, was the form of modern writing that had most powerfullyaffected imaginative literature The rising power of the middle class and its increasing control of thepress were, for Benjamin, the key factors in the development of a “new form of communication”inimical not only to the oral tradition of the epic and folktale but also to the bourgeois narrative formwhich had already supplanted that tradition: the novel “This new form of communication,” he wrote,

“is information.”35 [Diese neue Form der Mitteilung ist die Information.] Benjamin used the term

die Information here to denote a specifically new form of communication, a specificity somewhat

obscured by the standard English translation of the collected essays, which collapses the distinction

by rendering both Information here and Mitteilung elsewhere as “information.”36 What Benjamin

chose to call die Information exhibited a distinct mode of social operation that he considered unique

to the industrial phase of modernity:

The intelligence [die Kunde] that came from afar—whether the spatial kind from foreign countries or the temporal kind of tradition—possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification Information [die

Information], however, lays claim to prompt verifiability The prime requirement is that it appear “understandable in itself.” Often

it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries was But while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous,

it is indispensable for information to sound plausible Because of this it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling [dem

Geist der Erzählung].

“Information” here gains its value not from the authority that communicates it but from its freshness,verifiability, self-sufficiency, and plausibility For Benjamin, information collapses space andtradition into an undifferentiated simultaneity, unlike storytelling which “thrives for a long time in themilieu of work—the rural, the maritime, and the urban” and “does not aim to convey the pure essence

of the thing, like information or a report It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order tobring it out of him again.” The value of information thus inheres “only in the moment in which it wasnew.”37 (“Poetry,” Ezra Pound had insisted a couple of years earlier, “is news that stays news.”)38

Benjamin’s essay instantiates a more general trend in modern literary engagements with thediscourse of information, since it aims to define this apparently new phenomenon by contrast withsome favored quality that it threatens to displace E M Forster—who was not altogether kind aboutConrad’s studiously uninformative prose style—considered that different forms of literary productionmight partake more or less of the qualities of information “Books are composed of words,” he wrote,

“and words have two functions to perform: they give information or they create an atmosphere.” As

an example of something close to “pure information,” Forster suggested the word “stop” on atramway sign, which he went on to compare with another hypothetical sign reading “Beware ofpickpockets, male and female.” The latter sign, he thought, could be said to contain something morethan information: “Who can see those words without a slight sinking feeling at the heart? […] Besidesconveying information it has created an atmosphere, and to that extent is literature.” It was Forster’sview that dramatic writing contained on average a higher proportion of information than lyric poetry,the novel a higher proportion than dramatic writing, the newspaper a higher proportion still, followed

by advertisements and price lists and signs He had not yet had to contend with the traffic lightsinstalled across London in the early 1930s, which completed the reduction of sign to signal and setVirginia Woolf’s dinner companions wondering whether the gallery-going public might lose itsappreciation of color as a result.39

A little later in the same essay, Forster turns to the more difficult question of what gets left overwhen the information value in language is accounted for:

What is this element in words that is not information? I have called it “atmosphere,” but it requires stricter definition than that It resides not in any particular word, but in the order in which words are arranged—that is to say, in style It is the power that words have to raise our emotions or quicken our blood It is also something else, and to define that other thing would be to explain the secret of the universe This “something else” in words is undefinable It is their power to create not only atmosphere, but a world, which, while it lasts, seems more real and solid than this daily existence of pickpockets and trams Information is true if it is accurate A poem is true if it hangs together Information points to something else A poem points to nothing but itself Information is relative A poem is absolute.40

What these moments in Conrad, Benjamin, and Forster have in common is the rhetorical invocation in

each instance of “information” to clear space in an increasingly congested media ecology for somespecial quality, proper to literary art, which remains “undefinable” except by negation Conrad’s

knowledge, Benjamin’s Erzählung, and Forster’s atmosphere each stake a claim to some additional

quality of resonance (Conrad), miraculousness (Benjamin), or creativity (Forster), over and abovethose possessed by “information.” In each case, a concern with information surfaces where thesurvival of literariness is itself in question It is information against which the idea of the literarymust be defined, as the fantasy of what Forster calls “pure information” is put to work in order toevoke by contrast the literary value it lacks

In fact, as I shall argue, the relationship between information and fiction was rather more complexand interesting than these basic oppositions would suggest From the end of the nineteenth centuryonward, powerful new technologies and vast systems were developed in order to govern and monitorthe new world of information Far from maintaining a pure aesthetic distance from these newinformatic webs, many writers and artists found themselves increasingly entangled Benjamin,Conrad, and Forster had good reason to familiarize themselves with such information systems, as weshall see So too did Ford Madox Ford, Graham Greene, John Grierson, and Elizabeth Bowen Each

of these figures was profoundly affected both by the political regulation of information systems and bythe use of information systems as instruments of political authority Their writings began to respond tothose phenomena in new ways Where “information” had usually been considered antagonistic toaesthetic value, or at best as the inert workaday material upon which the work of art might stamp suchvalue, by the 1930s it had become possible to conceive of an information aesthetic, partly because ofthe ways in which modernist writers and filmmakers had begun to reflect upon and make visible theinformatic structures governing their own work Rather than occupying the opposite end of thespectrum described by Forster, literary narrative in the early twentieth century interacted inunexpected and fascinating ways with the government of information

One writer who suddenly found himself at the center of a global information system was the young

T S Eliot, who in March 1917 began working in the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyd’sBank In September 1919, however, Eliot moved to the new “Information” Department on the firstfloor of the bank’s Lombard Street headquarters.41 (The address for cables, he told Dorothy Pound,was “Eliot, Information, Branchage, Stock, London.”)42 Early the following year, in a letter to hismother, he noted that the department was short-staffed:

Next week I shall have an assistant and a typist to write my letters and do card indexing, but last week I have had to struggle through chaos myself, receiving hundreds of reports from Branches of the bank, classifying them, picking out the points that needed immediate attention, interviewing other banks and Government Departments, and trying to elucidate knotty points in that appalling document the Peace Treaty.43

Lawrence Rainey has pointed out that this comment about “card indexing”—a “relatively new officeprocedure”—is interesting in that it places Eliot at the heart of the bureaucratic control revolutiondescribed by Max Weber (and, more recently, by Beniger).44 But Rainey also misdates Eliot’s letter

to September 1919, perhaps because that was the month when the first part of “Tradition and the

Individual Talent” was published in The Egoist It might be thought that Eliot’s letter clarifies one of

the more abstruse points in that essay: the idea that the “existing monuments” of a culture “form anideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new)work of art among them.”45

The reason this passage remains puzzling is that “monuments” is an odd word in an essay

otherwise concerned above all with writing Suddenly the reader is confronted not by words

evaluated by a critic but by objects rearranged—as in a filing cabinet—after the introduction of somenew addition There is certainly something appealing to the literary historian in the idea of the poet-essayist, exhausted by bureaucratic minutiae, turning to his critical prose with the eye of a filing-clerkand hitting upon ideas of sorting and rearrangement as an apposite metaphor for the formation of anaesthetic tradition Of course, Eliot had been working at Lloyd’s for almost two years: plenty of timefor him to have become quite familiar with the work of filing And Rainey is surely right to describethe card-index and its operator as “a nexus of formal communication flows under the impress ofsystematic management.” Yet the problem of canon-formation is already one of information sortingand storage Rather than “Tradition and the Individual Talent” having its genesis in the experience of

office “chaos,” as Rainey’s alignment might imply, the essay in fact preceded Eliot’s confession of

bureaucratic exhaustion Eliot, like other modern writers, was already dealing in his creative andcritical work with problems of information control that were becoming more widely noticeable ineveryday life The Lloyds card index was only one node in an information network which hadexpanded dramatically since 1914, and the most telling aspect of the letter is perhaps not itsdescription of office muddle but its reference to the Treaty of Versailles That “appalling document”threatens to institute a much larger muddle which will not be sorted out by filing

As it happens, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” does have something to say about therelationship between information and literature In the second part of the essay, Eliot develops histheory of poetic impersonality by differentiating between, on the one hand, the kind of “[h]onest andsensitive criticism” that is “directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry,” and, on the other, theimproper interest taken by the public and the press in the personalities of poets themselves: “If weattend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition thatfollows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge butthe enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it.”46 “Blue-book knowledge”refers to the information collected and printed in the sessional papers of Parliament, the “blue books”

so called because of the color of their bindings (“Blue-books are generally dull reading,” confirmsOscar Wilde.)47 The phrase stands, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” for a kind ofinstrumental and official knowledge, collected and assembled to serve definite ends For Eliot,nothing could be further from the open-ended private experience of literary appreciation

As Frank Kermode has said, the idea of a spontaneously self-organizing tradition was Eliot’s way

of engaging the idea of canon “in the service of an order which can be discerned in history butactually transcends it, and makes everything timeless and modern.”48 The construction of canons,argues Kermode, is a flawed but necessary way of selecting objects of attention from a vast set ofpossibilities Though canons are always “complicit with power,” they are nonetheless “useful in thatthey enable us to handle otherwise unmanageable historical deposits.” To read Eliot’s essay againstthe grain—to understand that for all its sniffiness about “Blue-book knowledge” it too deals with thequestion of how information comes to be arranged and managed—is to link the cultural canon throughthe poet-clerk and the politician to the wider social implications of information governance

Numerous recent studies have shown that modernism was made not by poetry alone, but in part byinstitutions—the Market, the University, Parliament, the Press—directed and populated by people.There is, in the end, no hard and fast line between official and unofficial writing, and problems ofinformation control, whether in aesthetics or in politics, are not made less pressing if we ignore therole of those institutions or their human agents “Bureaucrats can be poets and poets bureaucrats,” asFriedrich Kittler points out “The matter becomes delicate only when the double life is not merely

confided to official yet confidential letters, but seizes an entire world of poetic readers, whichincludes bureaucratic colleagues.” For Kittler, the state is the shadowy institution that stands behindall hermeneutic activity, while itself remaining “closed off to every hermeneutic.”49 If Romanticism’sdiscourse network idealizes the union of poetry and state bureaucracy, that union remains one ofdistinct personae: a “double life.” In modernity, however, communications technology moves out ofthe office to encompass and mediate all human activity By Eliot’s time, poetry and bureaucracy haveceased to be separate terms held in productive tension under the dominion of the state, and havebecome recognizable as effects of the cultural and technological mediations by which the stateproduces itself.

Modernist Informatics contends that certain modernist figures, deeply invested as they were in

working through problems of identity and the limits of textual representation, were uniquely placed tounderstand these new manifestations of state textuality and their implications for cultural life My first

chapter stages a new reading of Joseph Conrad’s novel of 1907, The Secret Agent, tracing beyond the

novel itself the communications networks which traverse Conrad’s London As an officer in Britishcargo ships, as a Polish exile from a family of dissidents, and as a struggling author, Conrad hadbecome acutely aware of the information systems that crisscrossed England, Europe, and the globe,making possible the growth and ensuring the maintenance of imperial power This chapter argues thatthe reception history of Conrad’s novel of anarchism has tended too readily to draw attention to themismatch between its literary ambitions and its penny-dreadful content at the cost of undervaluing itsattention to the technologies of information control in which such distinctions of genre participate Ittherefore concentrates on late nineteenth-century attempts to define the boundaries between differenttypes of information: on the one hand, information required and protected by the state, and on theother information that remained the property of private individuals At its center is an analysis of the

novel’s interest in postal systems which situates The Secret Agent in relation to the post office

interception scandals of the 1840s and the parliamentary information leaks of the 1880s Beginning byhistoricizing the presence of information control and communications technologies in the novel, I re-evaluate the “gratuitous” and “irrelevant” matter which its first critics disparaged, in order to showhow Conrad shifts the work of signification away from both a realist fondling of object detail and animpressionist subjectivity to produce instead a work that acknowledges the new social andtechnological structure of the fields of signification within which perception itself operates In onesense, this is the logical development of Conrad’s broadly impressionist aesthetic; in another sense itblows that aesthetic apart by recognizing the profound problem that haunts nineteenth-century realismand Edwardian impressionism alike: the problem of accounting for the relationship between

representation and reality while reducing neither one to a straightforward function of the other The

Secret Agent, I argue, seeks to resolve that problem by acknowledging that impressions are not

limited by the senses but are partly determined, or preprocessed, by the wider informatic networkswhich already structure the possibilities of perception, semiosis, and interpretation As the cybernetictheorist Gregory Bateson argues, “The mental world—the mind—the world of information processing

—is not limited by the skin.”50

Chapter 2 extends this interest in the determining cultural presence of information in modernity byconcentrating on a particular kind of scene that emerged and proliferated in fiction after the FirstWorld War This is the scene of identification, in which protagonists confront their own bureaucraticghosts, or “data doubles,” as set out in new technologies such as passports, identity cards, armyrecords, driving permits, and intelligence dossiers Tracing the development of such scenes from

Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923) through Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–1928),

and ultimately to novels by Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, this chapter advances an argumentabout the changing understanding of identity, identification, and their representation in fiction betweenthe world wars Drawing on theories of visual culture, I argue that writers and official institutionsconfronted similar problems in reconciling the parts of a modern self newly split into the spuriousfixity of bureaucratic identity on the one hand and the mutability of temporal existence on the other.

Chapter 3 deals with the Mass-Observation movement founded in 1937 by the anthropologist TomHarrisson, the poet Charles Madge, and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings It seeks to understand theparanoia and insecurity arising when, instead of generating networks of difference amenable todisinterested enquiry into the nature of the modern state, information networks are co-opted bygovernment power in order to define and produce a unified conception of national identity Described

by Bronisław Malinowski as “A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service,” Mass-Observation was itselfrestructured along governmental lines on the eve of the Second World War, when it began reportingfor the Ministry of Information Investigating both the Mass-Observation movement itself and itsrepresentation in writing by G W Stonier, John Sommerfield, and others, this chapter considers therelationship between paranoia, information, and security, and elaborates the connection betweenMass-Observation and the wider documentary movement of the 1930s It diagnoses some pathologies

of state paranoia in the cultural production of Great Britain between the wars, when the country wasengaged in an extended project of introspection and self-analysis Furthermore, by basing itsdiscussion on a network of operators rather than a single influential figure, this chapter seeks torecognize that modernist literature and culture did not spring fully formed from the pens of isolatedartists, but emerged from complex interactions between individuals and a whole set of historicallyspecific social, technological, political, and aesthetic dispositions

Bringing together documentary and state information systems, chapter 4 focuses on the filmmaker,

theorist, and cultural administrator John Grierson After directing the landmark documentary Drifters

(1929), Grierson moved into a role as impresario, producer, and evangelist for the Britishdocumentary movement Later, he went to Canada as an educator and film researcher, becoming thefirst director of the Canadian National Film Commission in 1939 It was here, throughout the 1940s,that he published a series of essays setting out the responsibility of documentarists and educational

filmmakers to provide not only facts and figures but “a pattern of thought and feeling” that could

shape the modern citizen-subject’s ability to navigate and make use of an increasingly vast andbewildering selection of information Grierson, this chapter argues, was a key figure in thedevelopment of a British information aesthetic that emerged in the films of the Empire MarketingBoard and the Crown Film Unit, lasting well into the post-war years in the productions of the CentralOffice of Information Drawing on archival research as well as published writings and films, itargues that Grierson’s work constitutes a crucial nexus of late modernist experiment, media theory,and administrative control, and shows how this emerging “information aesthetic” was bound up, infilms by Grierson, Paul Rotha, and other documentary directors, with the official response to newpolitical and social challenges

The final chapter brings us to the Second World War, and to Elizabeth Bowen’s novel of the

London Blitz, The Heat of the Day Bowen’s novel, although not published until 1948, records the

uneasy ways in which information and lack of information came to destabilize relationships betweenpeople in wartime London, giving rise to a culture of suspicion that the chapter places in the context

of literal and figurative senses of the term black-out The black-out, which began in 1939, came to

mean not only the dimming of metropolitan lights but also censorship and other forms of informationcontrol Reading the novel alongside several of Bowen’s earlier short stories, as well as

contemporary propaganda posters, news reports, and works by other authors who took an interest inthe freedom or otherwise of speech, I investigate the ways in which suspicion—or, as Bowen put it,

“the habit of guardedness”—precipitates from a generalized atmosphere into the syntactic feints andsecond-guessings of the novel itself For Bowen, the act of reading a text that resists immediatecomprehension, holding its most important revelations away from the reader at each structural level,becomes a way of recuperating some form of reliable knowledge amid war’s paranoid profusion ofinformation and disinformation By demonstrating the parallel projects of revelation and concealment

in fiction and in the wartime state, this chapter argues for a link between the government informationmonopoly of the early 1940s and the increasingly complicated stylistic strategies of Bowen’s post-war work

Official secrets, identification documents, information films, social surveys, surveillance dossiers:

if we wish to understand the literary and filmic cultures of modernism, we need to attend to thesephenomena as carefully as did the writers and filmmakers whose works are full of their functioningand malfunctioning These five chapters trace the development of informatic narratives from the latenineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, when technological innovations had onceagain transformed the associations of “information” so that a new set of control protocols began toemerge based on rapid digital computing By then, however, the basic structures of the new regime ofinformation were largely in place, redefining the relationship between citizen and state according tothe new priorities of superpower politics It was in this new landscape—of checkpoints and archives,surveillance hubs and propaganda bureaux—that the major conflicts and narratives of the latertwentieth century would take place Today we inhabit a world of global connectivity, in whichsecurity services and sysadmins contend with hackers and whistle-blowers for control of virtualterritories and user profiles This book is, among other things, a genealogy of that situation It is abouthow our informatic world was written into existence

1 Secret Agents, Official Secrets

information, n.

[Anglo-Norman enformacioun, enformation, informacioun, informacione, Anglo-Norman and Middle French enformacion,

informacion, information (French information) investigation in a criminal matter made by legal officers …]

I The imparting of incriminating knowledge …

II The imparting of knowledge in general …

III The giving of form.

—Oxford English Dictionary

Inspector Heat’s Postal Power

Mr Verloc’s brother-in-law lies in pieces on a mortuary table, sole victim of the explosive device hehas been made to carry to the Greenwich Observatory Not all of the pieces are his As ChiefInspector Heat inspects Stevie’s body, he sees, mingled with the “raw material,” scraps of fabric, a

“heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops.” Heat is noSherlock Holmes, but he has a keen eye: “‘You used a shovel,’ he remarked, observing a sprinkling

of small gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood as fine as needles.” Yetthese fragments tell him nothing “He would have liked to trace this affair back to its mysteriousorigin for his own information […] That, however, appeared impossible The first term of theproblem was unreadable—lacked all suggestion but that of atrocious cruelty.”1

What the unreadable fragments produce instead of understanding is disgust, an “unpleasantsensation” in the Inspector’s throat What he needs—the clue he is looking for—turns out to be a text,

a written label on the collar of the overcoat that Stevie has been wearing, “a narrow strip of velvetwith a large triangular piece of dark blue cloth hanging from it.” The triangle is the sign of the secretagent Verloc (“the celebrated agent ∆” (p 31)), yet the significance of the scrap for Heat is not that itoffers a symbol to interpret, but that it provides him, to his amazement, with a street address healready knows: “he began to mistrust such a gratuitous and accidental success—just because itseemed forced upon him” (p 80)

Heat finds it difficult to trust in such an occurrence, perhaps because the diminishment of chancehappenings is the very foundation of the security whose representative he is What he does not seem

to recognize, however, is the degree to which his discovery of a clue depends upon the fact that theaddress on the label is already the product of a system instituted to make sense of mixed things It isnot, entirely, a chance encounter; nor is it mere authorial whim that selects the comparison made bythe Constable who has collected Stevie’s dismembered body: “I don’t think I missed a single piece,”

he tells Heat, “as big as a postage stamp” (p 80)

Pause for a moment on the postage stamp that the Constable attaches as if by chance to theintercepted message, the mangled corpse of Stevie, in order to guarantee to Heat that it has reached itsfinal destination complete if not intact True, both the Constable and the Chief Inspector inhabit aculture in which postal paraphernalia are so familiar that they come readily to mind as metrics ofscale Yet the Constable might just as easily select any convenient small object A button A match.Why a stamp?

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) is oddly interested in the apparatus of the postal system,

even though the only dispatch actually composed in it is a trivial domestic request from the AssistantCommissioner of Scotland Yard to his wife When Chief Inspector Heat wishes to communicate withVerloc, he does so by mail—“I drop him a line, unsigned, and he answers me in the same way at myprivate address” (p 112)—but the only other letter mentioned in the novel is the one “stamped withthe arms of the Embassy” that summons Verloc to the foreign official Mr Vladimir, and this functionsless as a communication than as a “talisman,” granting its bearer access to the embassy with whosesigil it is inscribed.2 It is, in fact, the envelope that repeatedly matters in The Secret Agent, from the

embassy stamp to the “mortal envelope” of Mr Verloc’s body, an epithet first applied as he shambleshome from his meeting with Mr Vladimir and repeated later, emptily, as “the mortal envelope of thelate Mr Verloc reposing on the sofa” (p 39, p 213) The contents of these envelopes never amount tomuch: control, in this novel, does not mean censorship or control of content, but rather control of the

conditions of communication This becomes clear if we consider the context in which the novel’s

first envelopes appear amid the clutter of Verloc’s shop window:

The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly

printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong—rousing titles.

As Tom Rice notes, Conrad’s description of these nondescript packages and flimsy envelopes is verylikely intended to imply that they contain prophylactics The “superfine Indiarubber” that appears onthe label of Verloc’s wares in the serial version of the novel is here displaced to a more circumspectassociation with “rubber stamps,” while the array of continental publications strung out in the displayactivates that other association of the postal with the prophylactic: the condom as “French letter.”3Rousing, indeed Already in this window dressing there is a hint that the power exercised overVerloc by Inspector Heat is in part a postal power integrating border security and the mail, as theInspector himself will later point out: “[A] word from us to the Custom-House people would havebeen enough to get some of these packages he gets from Paris and Brussels opened in Dover, withconfiscation to follow for certain, and perhaps a prosecution as well at the end of it” (p 111)

In Postal Pleasures, Kate Thomas argues that the Victorian Post Office inaugurated a new kind of

communication whose meaning arose not just from the content of letters, but from the “enfolding” ofthose letters in a new system of relations For Thomas, this enfolding not only calls into question thecoherence of the principle of the inviolability of the mail, but serves further to deconstruct the grandnarrative of rigid Victorian distinctions between the public sphere and private life “Not only did thepostal system aggregate the broadest miscellany of textual expression,” she writes, “but the civilservants who administered the dissemination of these texts were ‘discourse functionaries’ whointermediated all postal exchanges When it came to correspondence public and private wereintermixed, intermediated.”4 It is such an intermediation of private and public, under the supervision

of a network of official “discourse functionaries,” that muddies the investigation plot of The Secret

Agent The reform of postal communications in the mid-nineteenth century reverberates in Conrad’s

Edwardian fiction partly because mid-century postal scandals were recapitulated as scandals of

official information later in the century; the strange narrative fluidity of The Secret Agent—in which,

as in the contemporaneous short story “The Informer,” phrases drift inexplicably between narratorand characters—and the problem, for its early critics, of its combination of literary presentation andsensationalist content, are explicable in relation to the same anxieties of information security that

produced postal scandals and the institution of official secrecy Content was somehow in the wrongplace, shifting, fluid, and unpredictable in ways that were dangerously insecure Thomas is surelyright to emphasize the importance of the Post Office in making vivid the queerness of Victoriandiscourses of privacy, but there remains something to be said about the wider field of private andpublic information in government Scandals of public and private may have emerged most clearly inRowland Hill’s reformed Post Office, but before long they engulfed that other reformed institution,the Civil Service, where leaks by underpaid copyists in the 1870s and 1880s led directly tolegislation instituting the principle of official secrecy.5 Conrad was among the first novelists to takesuch matters seriously, and to suggest that the problem of public and private information was not to besolved by measures such as those to be found in the Official Secrets Act Moreover, he implied thatthere might be advantages as well as drawbacks to acknowledging this state of affairs, since anawareness of such contamination would at least admit that information is never entirely pre-interpretive or disembedded from human context It may be no bad thing that Chief Inspector Heat isable to use his private knowledge of Verloc to maintain public order, but what about the power hewields at the interface between the customs office and the postal system? And should the AssistantCommissioner give quite so much thought to his wife’s social position in directing operations againstanarchism? Conrad, calling that thought of the Assistant Commissioner’s “a special kind of interest inhis work of social protection—an improper sort of interest” (p 90), seems clear on the matter, but itshould be recalled that the Commissioner’s unwillingness to implicate the revolutionary Michaeliscounteracts Heat’s over-hasty and unjust desire to have Michaelis arrested The distinction betweenthe official sphere and private life, the novel implies, is a fantasy: “No man engaged in a work hedoes not like can preserve many saving illusions about himself The distaste, the absence of glamour,extend from the occupation to the personality” (p 97).

The alliance between postal power and state surveillance is established, covertly, from thebeginning of the novel Indeed, provided we don’t dismiss the wry commentary of Conrad’s narrator

as incidental drollery, its effect can be seen in the subordination of an anfractuous cognitive map ofLondon to the more rational graticulations of a legislated urban cartography Mr Verloc, heading forthe Embassy of his foreign employers at 10 Chesham Square—an address mirroring that otherpolitical no 10 which had been reclaimed as an official residence by Arthur Balfour in 1902—is

“cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London’s topographical mysteries”; but those mysterieslead the novel’s narrator to muse on the strange placement of the Embassy:

This belonged to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, one of which rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is charged with the duty of keeping track of London’s strayed houses Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short Act would do) for compelling these edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of municipal administration (p 22)

There are multiple levels of irony at work in this teasing passage, which foreshadows the plothatched by Mr Vladimir to induce the government to pass something along the lines of a short Act tocompel Britain’s community of exiled revolutionary anarchists “to return where they belong.” At thesame time, the embassy itself marks a displaced territory coming under the jurisdiction of its homepower Yet the emphasis in the first half of the passage is squarely on the strange and inscrutablesystem of house numbering, a measure for “keeping track of London’s strayed houses” that had beeninstituted in 1855, by the Metropolis Management Act and urged on two years later under pressureexerted by the Post Office

The numbering of houses under the Metropolis Management Act was a way of reducing to legibleinformation the complex historical and social relations that had contributed to the formation of urbanspace The maps thus created could be used for several purposes, from tax collection and thecompiling of census data to postal delivery and infrastructural planning Yet their primary mode ofoperation was the same in every case, as the political historian James C Scott has argued:

These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were […] rather like abridged maps They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer They were, moreover, not just maps Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property- holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law.6

Such an understanding of official power may possess considerable explanatory power in the literaryculture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, partly because of the proliferation at the time

in Great Britain of precisely this kind of mapping, and partly because fiction itself may be considered

to remake and to recreate reality through similar processes of abridgment By way of illustration,

consider D A Miller’s ingenious argument about the linen register which Inspector Cuff, in The

Moonstone, trawls for clues to that novel’s mystery: “Suggestively, the washing book belongs to a

preestablished system for accounting for the linen Cuff’s hypothesis, in other words, would verify

itself by a means that already exists as a means of verification.”7 The clue that Cuff is looking for isalready preprocessed by a system which exists for no other purpose than that of surveillance andcontrol We can think of the postal network—which not only maps temporal locations of sending andreceipt, but also, through postal addresses and later postal codes, sets up a lattice of spatialsurveillance—as a national-scale homologue for Collins’s washing inventory Its manner of mapping

will of course prove central to the plot of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, since the clue that Inspector

Heat finds in the shattered remains of Stevie is not a Holmesian spatter of mud or tobacco ash, but awritten address label identifying one particular point in the postal network I draw the useful concept

of “preprocessing” from the work of the economic historian James Beniger, who applies it to anyrepresentation of an unwieldily variable and continuous reality by a more rigorous system ofordering, and argues that preprocessing is what makes it possible in modernity “to maintain large-scale, complex social systems that would be overwhelmed by a rising tide of information they couldnot process were it necessary to govern by the particularistic considerations […] that characterizepreindustrial societies.”8 Among his examples of industrial preprocessing systems, notcoincidentally, is the establishment in 1884 of time zoning based on the Greenwich meridian

“Once the name was replaced by an anonymous street number,” writes Bernhard Siegert, “identity

no longer was a question of biographical depth, but of potential addressability”:

In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, with the lapse of “the addressee’s acknowledgment of receipt” in the delivery of court mandates, such addressability ultimately became synonymous with the legal definition of the person We exist in the eyes of the law as long as only one mail slot is to be found at the address recorded by power.9

The questions raised by Siegert—questions about identity, addressability, and power—wereincreasingly interconnected in the new links forged between information and citizens in the highlyorganized western societies of the twentieth century, and my second chapter will return to examinetheir cultural implications How societies manage these complex associations between bodies andsigns has a good deal to do with cultural production as well as with industrial control, and hinges on

the unprecedented expansion, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of control technologiesdesigned to perform such abridgements as those described by Scott and Siegert.

Somewhat later in his career, Conrad would turn his attention to another kind of mapping regularlyand reliably undertaken “Outside Literature.” It is a strange title, which both assumes a particulardelimiting of “literature” and implies—as do Conrad’s repeated protests that his subject, the

Admiralty’s Notices to Mariners, are “not literature”—that given the vagaries of taste and history the

borders of the republic of letters might not be so clear after all:

A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature; I mean that of its greatest and humblest men Wasn’t it “Papa Augier” who, being given a copy of “Hamlet,” glanced through it expertly and then dropped it with the dry remark: “Vous appelez

ça une pièce, vous?” [‘You call that a play?’] The whole tragedy of art lies in the nutshell of this terrifying anecdote But it never will occur to anybody to question the prosaic force of the author of Notices to Mariners, which are not literature, and his fidelity

to his honorable ideal—the ideal of perfect accuracy.10

The essay begins with Conrad reflecting on some “old feelings and impressions which, strictlyprofessional as they were, have yet contributed towards the existence of a certain amount of

literature; or at any rate of pages of prose.” The Notices, which since 1834 had advised shipping of

hydrographical and infrastructural changes to the standard charts, would not be admitted by any critic

“into the body of literature,” and rightly so, since an “imaginatively written Notice to Mariners would

be a deadly thing.” What is expected of them “is not suggestion but information of an ideal accuracy.”Between suggestion and information, in this essayistic assessment, lies the disputed territory betweenthe composition of literary and unliterary prose But one feels, too, Conrad’s appreciation for suchunliterary prose as that upon which his own survival and career has depended: a form ofcompositional labor “having no connection with the intellectual culture of mankind, and yet of someimportance to a civilization which is founded on the protection of life and property.” “OutsideLiterature” is a celebration of preprocessing But the problem that Conrad’s essay keeps coming up

against, from its odd title to a final sentence which again reminds us that Notices to Mariners “are not

literature,” is that the delimitation of the “literary” as a subset of writing constitutes a preprocessingsystem of its own, and one which gains much of its power from the increasing need to distinguishbetween competing axiological claims in an increasingly complex world of literacy, information, andcommunication

Novels, no less than empires, seek to manage their own coherence and security by a carefulorganization of those contingent factors which are the conditions of the real before they become theeffects of realism The chance occurrence had had portentous meaning for Conrad as early as “TheReturn,” a story of 1898 in which Alvan Hervey, finding an unexpected letter from his wife lying out

“in evidence for chance discovery,” experiences “a staggering sense of insecurity, an absurd andbizarre flash of a notion that the house had moved a little under his feet.”11 Chance, which hereprecipitates both affect and action, is explicitly identified as the enemy of security such thatcontingency—usefully described by Alan Liu as “a philosophy of compromise between determinationand random access”—becomes the motor of fictional narrative.12 In 1907, while Conrad was

correcting the proofs of The Secret Agent, his friend Henry James—to whom he later gifted a copy of the finished book—was working on his own proofs of the New York edition of Roderick Hudson, in

the Preface to which James famously describes the work of the author as having to do with suchconditions:

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the

circle within which they shall happily appear to do so He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter with him.13

The novel, in this account, is itself a sort of preprocessing system: a falsified representation thatoperates by diminishing, and yet preserving, continuity When Conrad’s narrator suggests that “in theclose-woven stuff of relations between conspirator and police there occur unexpected solutions ofcontinuity, sudden holes in space and time” (p 76), his sense of the relationship between continuityand narrative is consonant with that expressed by James, but it also anticipates the analogy Conradhimself would later draw in the Author’s Note of 1920 between the process of writing the novel and

“the process of crystallization in a test tube containing some colourless solution” (p 10) As in James

—whose syntax simultaneously proposes that the artist find a way of delimiting a circle inside which

relations shall appear to stop, and one inside which they shall appear to stop nowhere—there is an

important ambiguity in Conrad’s term “solution,” which describes both the fluid, heterogeneous,loosely structured material of perception out of which writing builds its crystalline artifice, and theprocess of writing itself, which seems to offer a way out of continuity’s confusions

Novels, then, are concerned with preprocessing in that they simultaneously diminish and celebratethe contingencies of “real” relations so as to make meaning out of those contingencies But in thenineteenth century Novels themselves were subjected to increasingly stringent forms of preprocessingdesigned to identify, classify, and grade their different ways of being meaningful The rapidlyexpanding system of generic categories can be understood as a literary counterpart to the array of

social preprocessing technologies that ensnare the characters of The Secret Agent even as that novel

directs its own efforts at sabotage towards the institution of genre itself While correcting the proofs,Conrad wrote to his agent, J B Pinker, to insist that the novel was “a distinctly new departure,” aswell as to manage expectations: “Preconceived notions of Conrad as a sea writer will stand in theway of its acceptance.”14 Preprocessing constitutes a technology for converting heterogeneous, fluid,chaotic relations—James’s “continuity of things”—into the sort of homogeneous yet discreteinformation that Marlow finds so “unvibrating” and “dull.”

That The Secret Agent is a novel sensitive to the politics of mass media has been well noted.

Among recent studies, Peter Mallios’s analysis stands out for the attention it pays to the century history of the British newspaper industry But where Mallios argues persuasively thatConrad’s novel marks an early phase in “a ‘stylistics’ of information and a power of ‘simulation’ thatare still with us today,” I now wish to extend and to deepen that analysis by shifting focus away fromthe overt power of newspapers as condensers and controllers of public opinion, and placing it instead

nineteenth-on the covert power exercised by the communicatinineteenth-ons networks that traverse the text.15 As AdamParkes has more recently argued, the information that saturates the novel may complicate ourunderstanding of the relationship between Conrad’s impressionist aesthetics and the functionallanguages of processed data In Parkes’s view, “information” was for Conrad “homologous with theinterrupted, interruptive form of the impression, which […] seems barely separable from the language

of mediatization In other words, what Conrad derided as the ‘printed voice of the press’ may havemore in common with his ever-fading impressions than he wanted to allow.”16 With that briefsuggestion, Parkes foregrounds Conrad’s interest in the ways in which the conditions under whichimpressions themselves may reach an observing subject are increasingly affected by informationsystems extending far beyond the perceiving self In what follows, I read these networks aspreprocessing systems: organizational structures which reduce complex and seemingly chaoticrelations and events into information that can more readily be used and secured Such structures

would include things as disparate as assembly-line manufacturing, survey maps, time zones, andquestionnaires They would include, too, the reduction of a complicated name—Józef Teodor Konrad

Korzeniowski—to a simple “Conrad.” In The Secret Agent, however, they take the form of the

nineteenth century’s most important and most admired preprocessing apparatus, the Post Office

Korzeniowski’s Dead Letter Box

A decade before it became the name of an author, “Conrad” was an address Writing from Calcutta tohis new friend Spiridion Kliszczewski in November 1885, the 28-year-old Conrad Korzeniowskiasked for advice on financing a whaling venture He suggested that Kliszczewski write to him inScotland, where he expected to arrive the following summer: “My ad[d]ress: Mr Conrad 2d mate

‘Tilkhurst’ Sailors Home Dundee To be delivered on arrival.—Write about end May—say the20th.”17 Though nothing came of the whaling expedition, that is the first recorded sighting of Mr.Conrad He may have used the name before Certainly he had settled on “Mr J Conrad” by January,when he wrote again to Kliszczewski announcing his imminent departure from India He signed off as

“Conrad Korzeniowski” in November and as “Conrad” tout court in January, when he also put his

initials, “CK,” to a postscript The envelope marked the boundary of a public identity: “J Conrad”outside, “CK” within He would later use a third-person “Conrad” frequently in letters, particularly

to publishers, in order to denote such an identity in the form of an eponym for his own particularbrand of fiction Was that “Conrad” in January 1886 an informal first name? That would be unusual inlight of the rest of the surviving letters But neither is it the full name, or the initial and surname, that

he usually inscribed It is perhaps best seen as a transitional moment: a moment when a form ofaddress becomes a name

Writers have had various reasons for taking pseudonyms, and Conrad’s stated rationale was moreprosaic than some “It is widely known that I am a Pole,” he wrote to Józef Korzeniowski—noimmediate relation—in February 1901, “and that Józef Konrad are my two Christian names, the latterbeing used by me as a surname so that foreign mouths should not distort my real surname—adistortion which I cannot stand.”18 This was written in retrospect, and quite possibly it was true But

it was not the whole story If Conrad was worried about the distortions of “foreign mouths,” he mayhave been equally worried about those of western eyes He clearly knew of the Italian revolutionary

Giuseppe Mazzini, whose name appears in Under Western Eyes when the revolutionary Peter

Ivanovitch is described inside ironizing quotation marks as “the ‘Russian Mazzini’.”19 The realMazzini had been an influential irredentist, and the founder, in 1831, of the secret revolutionarymovement La Giovine Italia (Young Italy) While in exile in England in the 1840s, he had ignited one

of the great public scandals of the decade on discovering that the Post Office had intercepted andopened his private letters According to a long article which appeared that same winter in the

Westminster Review:

The attention of Mazzini had […] been excited by frequent delays in the delivery of his letters; and now, on examining the mark, his suspicions were confirmed by observing that they invariably bore the mark of two different stamps; the one intended to efface the other; the object of which appeared to be to make the hour of delivery correspond with that in which the letter had been received, and so to prevent the original stamp, or attestation of the receiver of the time when the letter was posted, being evidence of the fact of its detention.20

post-Mazzini, the Review reported, had begun a counter-surveillance of his own He arranged for letters to

be posted to him, “containing grains of sand, poppy seeds, or fine hairs,” rightly guessing that a spysystem which intercepted and opened letters in order to extract information from their textual contentswould be unable to read the kinds of enclosure that appeared to have no semiotic value at all Mazzinitransformed himself into what we would now recognize as a hacker, exploiting the excess signifyingpotential within an informatic system in order to circumvent its security When the letters arrived, thesand, seeds, and hairs had disappeared: sure evidence of tampering.

In the wake of the Mazzini affair, others in London’s community of exiled dissidents came forwardwith their grievances about postal interception Among them was a Pole, Charles Stolzman, whocomplained, via the Radical MP Thomas Duncombe, “that this system of espionage is carried on to sogreat an extent that he [could not] any longer with confidence and security avail himself of the sacredprivileges hitherto supposed to belong to Her Majesty’s General Post Office.”21 Stolzman had been

an artillery officer in the Polish army, had taken part in the Warsaw uprising of 1830, and had sincebecome a prominent member of the Polish nationalist diaspora.22 If Conrad knew about Mazzini, hedoubtless knew too that even in the 1880s a discreet pseudonymy might be a wise precaution for theBritish-domiciled son of a European political agitator For while he would insist, notwithstanding hisearlier mention of “foreign mouths,” and with a significant caveat as to language, that “Whenspeaking, writing or thinking in English the word Home always means for me the hospitable shores ofGreat Britain,” he was aware that the authorities in his country of residence, despite or because ofthat country’s vaunted tradition of tolerant liberalism, were quite capable of intercepting and openingletters to and from foreigners with political connections.23 As the revolutionary spirit spread acrossEurope, it had begun to seem that the price of peace might be a more vigilant control of privatecorrespondence In an 1865 history of the Post Office, William Lewins pointed out that therevelations of 1844 had prompted outcry partly because they “could not be forgotten by the publicwhen they intrusted their letters to the custody of the Post-office.” Nor, as Spencer Walpole pointedout a few years after Conrad’s correspondence with Kliszczewski, had Duncombe’s interventionentirely resolved matters Writing in 1890, Walpole (who had been private secretary to his father,Horace, in the 1850s, and would soon be Secretary of the Post Office) admitted that the opening ofletters was still “more usual than is generally supposed.”24 If so, Conrad had good reason to becautious, despite the assurances given by Lewins, who told his readers that although “[t]he law, it istrue, remains unaltered, […] it is believed to be virtually a dead letter.”25

The letter-opening scandal of the 1840s marks the beginning of the nineteenth-century development

of a new politics of information in Britain That new dispensation becomes visible to the historian inscandals of communications interception and leakage as well as in new legislative instruments, such

as the first Official Secrets Act, that were hurriedly enacted later in the century to address themounting crisis of information proliferation and the concomitant problem of information security But

it also shaped the work of writers who were sensitive, as Conrad certainly was, to its widerimplications Changes in jurisdiction over information left their mark on Conrad’s thinking, on thethinking of all those connected with revolutionary or dissident circles, and on that of the Britishpublic in general Originating as a ghost address in the communications system, “Conrad” certainlyensured that letters would reach Korzeniowski despite the worst efforts of English postmen andlandlords to mangle the name, but it also meant they would bear no outward mark of their recipient’s

dubious foreignness that might invite official attention “Conrad,” in that sense, was the site of a poste

restante, or—as it would be described in jargon of a later generation of secret agents—a dead letter

box

The genius of Mazzini’s postal trick was to lay clues in a symbolic language that had no content todivulge Had he responded by writing letters in code (a precaution he would take, after the resolution

of the letter-opening scandal, for the rest of his life) it would have revealed his knowledge of theinterception, and the letters themselves would no doubt have been decoded by the Secret Department

of the Post Office Like Inspector Heat, however, the postal surveillance system, geared toward ahermeneutic model of extracting content, could make nothing of a message incapable of being “laid

hold of mentally,” a message carried by pure form, by matter Since the mid-nineteenth century,

surveillance systems have had to deal with the problem of recuperating such material traces as well

as intercepting decipherable messages Hence the extraordinary success of Sherlock Holmes, an agentwho can process matter into information, a detective who doesn’t require—as Heat does—that apreexisting apparatus such as postal addressability or the railway ticketing system should be in place

in order to identify localities or individuals Fingerprinting at the end of the nineteenth century, detecting” polygraphy in the 1930s, and the DNA databases of the late twentieth and early twenty-firstcenturies have all attempted to bring matter within the purview of an authority that rationalizesComrade Ossipon’s faith in the physiological criminology of Cesare Lombroso by instituting regimes

“lie-of biopower underpinned by scientific experiment and justified by statistical thinking

No Edwardian fiction has seemed to chime with such recent preoccupations better than The Secret

Agent Conrad himself, in his retrospective Author’s Note, was perhaps the first to note the novel’s

continuing ability to shock “Lately,” he wrote, “circumstances […] have compelled me to strip thistale of the literary robe of indignant scorn it has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago […] Iconfess that it makes a grisly skeleton” (p 12) The circumstances were both those of history andthose of writing: Conrad had been adapting the book into a play But the novel itself was somethingdifferent after the Great War than it had been in 1907, something different again for F R Leavis in

1948, and our own time has found in it resonances with contemporary anxieties about terrorism andsuicide bombing This circumstantial attention, while bringing into focus one aspect of Conrad’s

achievement, has tended to obscure some other, perhaps more interesting, strands of The Secret

Agent The Author’s Note, after all, concentrates not on the relation of the novel to the event that

provided its organizing (or disorganizing) center—the Greenwich Observatory bomb of 1894—butrather on the sources from which Conrad gleaned the fragments of knowledge that went into thenarrative and the way in which those fragments were transformed into the unity of the novel itself TheNote, that is, concentrates its attention not on action, or on revolutionary anarchism, but on thetransmission, processing, and use of information

Like the snoopers who read the Mazzini letters, reviewers of The Secret Agent had problems

making sense of the “stuff” that accompanied its narrative Among the contemporary reviews of the

novel, a notice in the Boston Evening Transcript stands out for the barbed compliment with which its

anonymous author reacted to the novel’s peculiar hybrid of the literary and the popular Though theevents of the narrative seemed “the stuff whereof shilling shockers are made,” Conrad, he wrote, hadmade of that stuff “something far different and far superior, even if less interesting.”26 The

Transcript’s reviewer thus stands at the head of a long line of critics who have wished to distinguish

between the raw material of the novel—its apparent scopophilic lingering on “sordid surroundingsand […] moral squalor”—and the process of literary sublimation that had been performed upon it.More than one reviewer seemed perturbed by the spectacle of a literary author dealing with what

appeared to be an unliterary subject “Of course,” commented the [London] Times Literary

Supplement, “we have no hesitation in saying that the whole thing is indecent.”27 In the American

journal The Bookman, meanwhile, Stewart Edward White charged that Conrad, “without any real

reason for it,” had offered the reader “mangled flesh scooped up with a shovel, and gentlemen withcarving knives in their bosoms, and abandoned crazy ladies leaping from channel steamers,” alongwith other extraneities which seemed “a trifle irrelevant, not to say impertinent.” For other readers,

the problem was not a surfeit of information, but a lack The Sunday Times, for instance, complained

that “Mr Conrad encourages himself in obscurities of style,” and judged the book “stiff reading.”28This litany of discontent can in part be explained with reference to expectations raised by the genericcodes that Conrad set up only to subvert Certain kinds of information—the fondling object detail ofnaturalism—seem out of keeping with the narrative exigencies of a detective-espionage story, whilethe loopings and jammings of the narrative, with its flashbacks, omissions, and abstract disquisitions,seem to work against both the propulsive linearity of popular fiction and the ocular and hapticspecificities of realism

At the end of this line of critics stands Fredric Jameson, whose influential case study of Lord Jim

begins by wondering why, “even after eighty years, [Conrad’s] place is still unstable, undecidable,and his work unclassifiable, spilling out of high literature into light reading and romance.” ForJameson—who deploys the trade-name “Conrad” in much the same portentous way as the authorhimself did when writing to publishers—“Conrad marks, indeed, a strategic fault line in theemergence of contemporary narrative, a place from which the structure of twentieth-century literary

and cultural institutions becomes visible.”29 It is perhaps unsurprising that Jameson’s focus on Lord

Jim, with its apparently unsettling transformation from a complex forensic study of colonialist

modernity into a popular romance, should result in so many breaks and binaries Yet the difficulty

faced by Conrad in finding a way to finish Lord Jim gave rise to the writer who, with the mongrel form of The Secret Agent, provoked in reviewers and critics the unease that issues from an encounter

with the unclassifiable And we should not forget that it was phrenology—the pseudoscienceunderlying the work of Comrade Ossipon’s beloved Cesare Lombroso—that supplied culturalcriticism with its vocabulary of the “high-brow” and the “low-brow.”

In the Author’s Note, Conrad himself seems to wish to distinguish between pure form (“the literaryrobe of indignant scorn”) and sordid content (“bare bones”; “a grisly skeleton”); yet removing the

“literary robe” leaves only raw material and not, as one might expect, a naked truth The shifting

metaphors reveal something in Conrad’s thinking about the “artistic purpose” of The Secret Agent,

which appears not in opposition to, but rather in symbiosis with the seemingly gratuitous aspects ofthe book (“I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind” (p 12)), and

that supplement simultaneously enriches fullness and fulfills that lack which it discloses The Secret

Agent offers Conrad’s sustained and experimental response to the question of what his writing might

offer over and above the sensational banalities of the generic spy story or the political memoir Mightthe “stuff”—the “sordid surroundings” and the “moral squalor”—be readable as anything other thanmerely “indecent”? Might the gratuitous, the material, the messy, mean anything? Or are wecondemned, like Inspector Heat, to read only for that which points us away from what is in front of us

to a system of which we already feel ourselves to be the masters?

Insecurity

“Private friendship, private information, private use of it—that’s how I look upon it.” Chief InspectorHeat has his own ideas about how information should be collected, kept and used His “privatefriendship” with the secret agent Verloc yields the kind of information on which Heat has built a

professional career: “it makes me what I am—” he points out, “and I am looked upon as a man whoknows his work” (p 109) And yet, insofar as Heat knows his work, he knows it because of what(and who) he knows outside his work “Of course,” he tells his superior, “the department has norecord” of Verloc This is unsettling for the Assistant Commissioner, who wonders out loud whetherHeat thinks “that sort of private knowledge consistent” with his “official position.” For the ChiefInspector is also “Private Citizen Heat,” an epithet deployed as though that too were an official

position in the hierarchy of state security (p 166) In The Secret Agent, private knowledge can be

distinguished from official knowledge only as a political fiction, so that the familiar Conradian figure

of homo duplex is inverted: it is Heat’s status as homo simplex, the single knowing mind common to

both Inspector and Citizen, that calls into question the information state’s false binaries of public andprivate, official and unofficial In the latter half of the century, the administration of postal powershifted its ground No longer exercised to the same degree on the correspondence of foreigners, thegovernment prerogative to intercept and open mail was transformed into an ever more stringentpower of control over the communications of its own officials By the end of the century, Parliamentwas dealing with a scandal not because private letters had been intercepted, but because it was nolonger quite clear what distinguished a private letter from an official dispatch

The 1840s were a crucial decade in Britain’s development of a secret state The phrase “officialsecrecy” appears in the Hansard record of parliamentary debates on the Mazzini scandal, though the

Oxford English Dictionary does not record “official secret” before 1891 The term was deployed by

Thomas Duncombe, MP, who had presented Mazzini’s petition of protest “If a Secretary of State, orthe Government, were justified in screening and sheltering themselves behind this official secrecy,”

he asked, “what became of that responsibility of which we heard so much when any measure wassubmitted giving more extensive powers to the Secretary of State or the Government?”30 Sir JamesGraham, the serving Home Secretary, initially refused Duncombe’s request that the matter should belooked into, standing firm until the heat of public opinion, stoked by the press, became unbearable

Punch even produced a sheet of the adhesive “wafers” (see Fig 1.1) commonly used to sealenvelopes, each bearing a different warning for prying eyes (The “Anti-Graham Wafers” were

“DEDICATED TO THE HOME SECRETARY / AND PRESENTED TO HIM BY / THOMAS SLINGSBY DUNCOMBE, ESQ., M.P.”)31