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Three Propositions on Informational Cultures 17noise (competing politicians, but also the whole noisy communicationenvironment to which such politicians relate, where, for example,more young people vote for reality TV shows than for generalelections). Or in another context: don’t the techniques of advertisinginvolve, first of all, an attempt to bypass the noise of a crowdedinformational milieu by establishing a connection with potentialcustomers? The purpose of communication (the exclusion of noiseand the establishment of contact) is simultaneously presupposed,technically produced, and actively reinforced. It is understandable,then, why cultural activism of the No Logo variety should havefocused so much on what Mark Dery has called ‘culture jamming’ –signal distortion, graffiti on advertising posters, hijacking of corporateevents, all kind of attempts at disrupting the smooth efficiency ofthe communication machine. Or, as Gilles Deleuze suggested, whycultural resistance within control societies might also involve thecreation of ‘vacuoles’ of non-communication able to elude the latter’scommand. Or why, in conditions of media monopoly, the problembecomes that of undermining the stronghold of such tyrannicalcontact by opening up as many other venues of communication aspossible (from festivals to the Internet, from demos and workshopsto screenings, dancing and public performances).The conditions within which a cultural politics of informationunfolds are thus those of a communicational environment thathas been technically reduced to its ‘fundamental problem’, asShannon put it (or its minimum conditions as we would say). Itis such minimum conditions that must be recreated each time bythe techniques of communication: the successful constitution of acontact, the suspension of all competing signals and the filtering outof all possible corruption of the message in transit. There is nothinginherently technological here, in the modern sense of a Frankensteinmonster which has been created by human will but which is nowthreatening to destroy it. It is not so much a question of technologyas of techniques and forms of knowledge that all converge – througha variety of media and channels – on the basic problem of how toclear out a space and establish a successful contact.Does that mean, then, that journalists and activists who hang onto relevance and truth and meaning have been made redundant bycommunication managers with a much better grasp of informationaldynamics? The problem here is not that of arguing for the obsolescenceof meaning and truth in favour of sheer manipulation within aninformational milieu. It might be the case, that is, that such managers