THE POWER OF IMAGES: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE COGNITIVE VIEWPOINT
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026904 |
| Pages | 365-386 |
| Date | 01 April 1992 |
| Published date | 01 April 1992 |
| Author | BERND FROHMANN |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
THE
Journal of Documentation
VOLUME 48 NUMBER 4 DECEMBER 1992
THE POWER OF IMAGES:
A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE COGNITIVE VIEWPOINT*
BERND FROHMANN
School of Library and Information Science
University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 1H1
A discourse analysis of the cognitive viewpoint in library and
information science identifies seven discursive strategies which consti-
tute information as a commodity, and persons as surveyable inform-
ation consumers, within market economy
conditions.
These strategies
are:
(a) universality of theory, (b) referentiality and reification of
'images', (c) internalisation of representations, (d) radical individual-
ism and erasure of
the
social dimension of
theory,
(e) insistence upon
knowledge, (f) constitution of the information scientist
as
an expert in
image negotiation, and (g) instrumental reason, ruled by efficiency,
standardisation, predictability, and determination of effects. The
discourse is guided throughout by a yearning for natural-scientific
theory. The effect of
the
cognitive viewpoint's discursive strategy
is
to
enable knowledge acquisition of information processes only when
users'
and generators' 'images' are constituted as objectively given
natural-scientific entities, and to disable knowledge of the same
processes when considered as products of social practices. By its
constitution of users as free creators of images, of the information
scientist as an expert in image interpretation and delivery, and of
databases as repositories of unmediated models of the world, the
cognitive viewpoint performs ideological labour for modern capitalist
image markets.
INTRODUCTION: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
THE CONTINUING DEBATE about theory in library and information
science
(LIS)
is usually waged as a confrontation between rival epistemological
*This paper is a modified and expanded version of a paper presented at the International
Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science: Historical, Empirical and
Theoretical
Perspectives,
August
26-28,
1991,
Tampere,
Finland.
Journal
of
Documentation,
vol.
48,
no.
4,
December
1992,
pp.
365-386
365
JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION
vol.
48, no. 4
positions, each claiming to provide the most fruitful theoretical foundation
for knowledge production in a contested field. The more than fifty year long
history of these rivalries has been thoroughly documented by Schrader[1].
The debate flourishes to the time of this writing, as evidenced by, for example,
the activities of the Special Interest Group on Foundations of Information
Science within the American Society for Information Science, and the
International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science
convened in the summer of 1991 in Tampere, Finland. Whether arguing as a
'qual' or a 'quant', in Ellen Altman's[2] charming choice of terms for
qualitative versus quantitative approaches to library research, or as a devotee
of either the physical or the cognitive paradigms recently identified by Ellis[3]
as the main rival candidates in information retrieval theory, or struggling 'to
secure a degree of legitimacy' for hermeneutical methods in
LIS
research[4,
p.
229; see also 5], the stakes in the contest are the theories, together with their
associated methods, which most appropriately define and generate knowledge
about what Wersig and Neveling[6] call 'the phenomena of interest' to
LIS.
Very often, these epistemological rivalries reflect differences in attempts to
define 'information', that notorious keyword of contemporary
LIS
literature.
The record of this enterprise, however, is open to serious criticism. From his
definitive study of the definitional literature of information science, Schrader
concludes that it has brought forth only 'conceptual chaos'[7, p. 198]. Far
from bequeathing anything resembling the coherence of rival 'paradigms' or,
pace Rebecca Green, 'the profession's cognitive models of information and of
the information transfer process'[8, p.
130],
the definitional literature consists
of 'manifestations of linguistic fashion', reflecting a 'rhetoric of labels' rather
than anything approaching adequate domain definition[7, p. 198].
Concurrent with these theoretical explorations, LIS discourse is also
characterised by a curious cohabitation of tendencies which on the surface
seem, if not logically irreconcilable, at least curiously wed. The first is the
recurring theme of theoretical sterility, whose spirit is perhaps best captured in
William Cooper's well-known remark on retrieval theory: 'Deep down ... it's
shallow'[9, p. 201]. Yet far from blunting the theoretical stimulus, lamenta-
tions of sterility co-exist happily with an extraordinary flowering of the
speculative imagination. High-flying
LIS
researchers swoop indiscriminately
down upon the theoretical terrain, colonising Popperian worlds, or canni-
balising hermeneutics, phenomenology, general systems theory, symbolic
interactionism, decision theory, existentialism, structural-functionalism,
cognitive science, or philosophy of language, to name just a few of the
theoretical models on current exhibit in
LIS
research literature. The extra-
ordinary licence enjoyed by
LIS
theory is nowhere more clearly illustrated than
the recurrence, at the 1990 ASIS conference in Toronto, of a conceit already
debunked by Schrader[10] in his keynote speech to the 1989 conference in
Tampere, that the millennium of theory might easily be realised if only the
LIS
community would accept the manifest truth that 'information' is synonymous
with life
itself.
The curious and continued coexistence of figures of sterility and fecundity in
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