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Three Propositions on Informational Cultures 9and identity/difference (oppositional decodings; alternative media;multiple identities; new modes of representation).The emergence of informational dynamics has thus caught themore militant strands of media and cultural theory as if by surprise.Information is no longer simply the first level of signification, butthe milieu which supports and encloses the production of meaning.There is no meaning, not so much without information, but outsideof an informational milieu that exceeds and undermines the domainof meaning from all sides. Unless we want to resign ourselves to thenotion that culture has been made immaterial and transcendentby an informational deluge, we need to reassess the ways in whichwe understand the relationship between culture, power, andcommunication. What is proposed here is that an engagement withinformation theory is rich in analytical insights into the features ofcontemporary cultural politics where such informational dynamicsare increasingly foregrounded. In particular, it allows us to moveaway from an exclusive focus on meaning and representation as theonly political dimension of culture. In as much as communication isnot simply the site of the reproduction of culture, but also that of anindeterminate production crossing the entirety of the social (fromfactories to offices to homes and leisure spaces), it also constitutes akind of common informational milieu – open to the transformativepotential of the political.Keeping these questions in mind, in this chapter we will focus onthe ‘meaning’ of information. In particular, I will turn to informationtheory (and specifically the early work of Claude E. Shannon andthe cyberneticians) to catch the points where information ceasesto be simply the content of communication and gains, so to speak,a body – that is a materiality in its connection with the world ofphysics, engineering and biology. I will thus isolate three definitionsof information as related by Shannon’s 1948 paper: information isdefined by the relation of signal to noise; information is a statisticalmeasure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system; informationimplies a nonlinear and nondeterministic relationship betweenthe microscopic and the macroscopic levels of a physical system.These hypotheses are the basis out of which Shannon built hismathematical definition of information, but they also offer someother interesting considerations or corollaries on informationalcultures. These corollaries suggest that within informational cultures,communication is crucially concerned with the problem of noise andcontact; that the cultural politics of information are not only about