After the Avant-Gardes

choice. Redundancy makes communication possible by imposing rules

that force speakers and writers to conform to somewhat predictable pat-

terns. Claude Shannon, the pioneering founder of information theory,

estimates, for instance, that

English is about 50 percent redundant when we consider samples of

eight letters at a time. If the length of the sample is increased, the redun-

dancy is much greater. For sequences up to 100 letters it rises to approx-

imately 75 percent. The figure is even higher in the case of whole pages

or chapters, where the reader is able to get an idea of the long-range sta-

tistics of a text, including its theme and literary style. This means...

that much of what we write is dictated by the structure of the language

and is more or less forced upon us. Only what little is left is of our own

free choosing.

This explanation seems to support the paranoid notions of theorists like

Foucault, who believe that language-users are puppets controlled by vast

“totalizing” systems handed down from the past. The truth is subtler and

more interesting. Though we do have to submit to constraints in order to

communicate, within these limits we have countless opportunities for

creativity and freedom. The alternative to constraints is not the anarchic

“bliss” posited by theorists, but paralyzing entropy, as Campbell makes

clear:

A thermodynamic system cannot do anything useful if all its parts are free

to arrange themselves in any way whatever. Its entropy will be at maximum

and its energy inaccessible. To do work, the system’s entropy must be

reduced, and that means limiting the number of permitted arrangements of

its parts. Similarly, information theory makes it clear that if symbols can be

strung together at random, in any order, the messages they generate will not

be intelligible, nor will they be protected from error.

This is bad news for professors of literature from Lagado to France.

Despite modern critics who want to dispense with authors and treat

texts as infinitely malleable globs of verbal clay, it makes far more

sense to define texts in the terms of information theory as “messages”

sent by authors to readers—as long as we keep in mind that these

“messages” are complex systems of mind-boggling reflexivity and

depth.

Every increase in freedom comes with the price of increased noise

and distortion. Avant-garde texts are often boring for precisely this rea-

son: noise and distortion aren’t interesting. Roland Barthes himself

160 Paul Lake