r uss c astronoVo Security and the Informational Sublime “How had my ancient security vanished! ” Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland The paradox of security is that its pursuit requires the imagination of scenarios that contribute to feelings of anxiety, apprehension, even terror. Security, in essence, makes people feel unsafe: planning for security requires us to anticipate all the scenarios in which we might be in danger, at risk, in a word, insecure� The homeowner who imagines burglars breaking through a kitchen window can install an electronic security system� The investor worried about economic uncertainty and recession can create a portfolio that relies on financial securities to reduce risk—although recent history has shown that low-risk holdings such as mortgage-backed securities exposed entire national economies to levels of insecurity that wiped out billions of investment dollars seemingly overnight� States like Russia, North Korea, and the United States have sought international security through deterrence, a policy based on the ultimate insecurity of nuclear war� “By wanting after security,” R� N� Berki wrote in 1986, “we are really courting insecurity, nay, actually engaging in the question after insecurity” (39)� The tight circuit between security and insecurity generates an affective force field that makes paranoia, alarm, and fear an unavoidable byproduct of the striving for personal and public safety� Despite this powerful affective charge, security is not often viewed as an aesthetic matter� Instead, discussions of security have been dominated by the field of international relations, studies of policing, and surveillance studies with an emphasis on social science particularly after 9/ 11� The state has long been lodged front and center of security discourse, a tendency that favors diplomacy analysis, game theory, and probabilistic assessments of risk that orient discourse around data and information, not feelings and affect� Rather than accept this division, this essay raises a broad set of questions: What set of affects does the superabundance of information associated with security produce? What new understandings of security might an examination of unease, terror, and other feelings yield? That is, what information about security does affect provide? After 9/ 11 exposed the insufficiency of state-centric models for gauging security threats, former director of the Department of Homeland Security and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act Michael Chertoff argued that “the rise of ungoverned space throughout the world” (51) makes it urgent to ramp up intelligence gathering activities� To correct for “an outmoded conception of the nature of modernity security threats,” Chertoff advised abandoning 238 r uss c astronoVo a “neat binary conception of national security threats as either warmaking or crime” and concentrating instead on the networks and technologies that have deterritorialized terror itself (53-54)� For Chertoff, the lessons learned from previous intelligence failures present a clear case for expanding surveillance so that security agencies can be given “as many tools as possible to be applied overseas and at home” (61-62) in the gathering, sorting, and use of actionable intelligence� Like any good Foucauldian, Chertoff appreciates the linkage of power-knowledge, especially as it applies to the hard-to-define calculus of modern governmentality: populations� Where Michel Foucault recounts how states gradually recognized the population as a biopolitical problem during the famines and plagues of the Middle Ages, Chertoff and other security analysts now confront global populations as information problems responsible every day for innumerable cell phone calls, billions of emails, and incalculable—and often untraceable—amounts of electronic money transfers� Such immense data sets would seem to cry out for more capacious and sophisticated surveillance techniques to collect and sort information, but, as this essay will argue, the unimaginable expanse of information is itself the problem� What is more, that problem is at core affective and aesthetic, as information appears as a source of sublime terror� Neither International Relations nor the field of Critical Security Studies that emerged at the end of the twentieth century (see Krause and Williams; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams) are good at asking aesthetic questions� This oversight is understandable not only because researchers in these fields are instead concerned with the range of constitutional, ethical, and technological challenges created by security issues� For their part, cultural theorists interested in aesthetics have not asked very good questions about security� Not that literary critics, for example, have not turned their attention to security, but when they have done so their focus has often been limited to how an ecological, terrorist, or other crisis is represented� The result often takes shape as an appliqué that invokes a novel or film as demonstration of conclusions that theorists of biopolitics have already reached� As Johannes Voelz contends, “so far literary theorists have primarily offered readings of literary texts that illustrate and confirm the mappings of security mechanisms first articulated in other disciplines” (“Security Theory”). Foremost among these disciplines are International Relations, criminology, and political theory, which, while useful for understanding security as a matter of state, do not attend to all the zones of human activity that have become the subject of securitization� 1 The military and the police constitute only the most visible components of national security, but credit card fraud, computer hacking, and identity theft signal the extent to which security has expanded to encompass financial, epistemological, and even ontological concerns. “Political theory has much to say about the concept or concepts of ‘security,’ but generally neglects the term’s elasticity and its historically shifting applicability,” 1 Bigo and Tsoukala observe how International Relations has a “monopoly on the meanings of security” (6) and instead argue for interdisciplinary approaches� They include law, sociology, and psychology, but make no mention of art, aesthetics, or literature� Security and the Informational Sublime 239 writes John Hamilton in an erudite and fascinating philological approach to the topic (14)� Given the presence of security in every crook and recess of modern life and identity via regimes of surveillance that have morphed into dataveillance, political theory by itself seems inadequate for grappling with security� But nor has literary interpretation and theory, in limiting itself to representations of policing or state control, staked out much more than a subordinate and tertiary position with respect to security discourse� What if “instead of taking literature to reflect a set of problems and mechanisms first articulated in security theory,” as Voelz suggests, cultural theorists took aesthetics as a provocation for asking fundamental questions about the project of security that shapes information, health, technology, media, and just about every other facet of contemporary life? This essay moves modestly toward that goal by taking the eighteenthcentury gothic as critical commentary on the collecting, amassing, and sorting of information that undergirds the project of security� The Aesthetics of Information Overload The idea that literary research may play a role beyond merely representing or reflecting issues of security and surveillance appears ironically enough in a film. The American Literary Historical Society where Joe Turner reads books in Three Days of the Condor (dir� Sydney Pollack) presumes “literary historical” research as a valued and therefore vulnerable component of national security� As an analyst for a CIA front for counterterrorism, Turner (played by Robert Redford) spends his days reading books, but things turn deadly when, while working up a précis of a pulp thriller, he stumbles on a real-life conspiracy to take control of Middle East oilfields. Returning from lunch like any ordinary office worker, he finds all his colleagues at the American Literary Historical Society murdered and knows that he is next on the hit list. Turner, whose codename is Condor, begs his superiors to take him in: “I’m not a field agent, I just read books�” But reading books is a matter of security because it equips Turner with the facility to detect plots and amass information. Perplexed by Turner’s luck in avoiding assassination attempts, one of the agency men asks, “Where did he learn evasive moves? ” The answer shouldn’t surprise us, “He… reads�” But it does surprise the agency man, “What in the hell’s that mean? ” It means that information, especially an ability to process large amounts of text and assemble it into plots and narratives, is equally a security threat and a security resource. The deputy CIA director explains, “You don’t understand. He reads… everything�” Humanities work, especially the literary-historical variety, hints at a vital connection between information and security� The conspiracies and secrets at the heart of the spy novel, according to Matthew Potolsky, are recent iterations of a Gothic mode that stages national security as an overwhelming and ultimately unfathomable project� While never mentioning eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant or novelists such as Anne Radcliffe and Charles Brockden 240 r uss c astronoVo Brown who gave sublime terror theoretical and narrative form, intelligence experts and security analysts describe information—especially in its superabundance—as an overwhelming, often terrifying, phenomenon that dwarfs attempts at human comprehension. Gothic plots typically find resolution by unveiling secrets about an evil duke or other malefactor, but in the arena of national security actors are beset by the “dawning recognition that these secrets have become so large and pervasive that the powerful no longer needs veils of mystery” (Potolsky 85)� The promise of information consists of the specific facts that were once hidden and now brought to light. Such promise is also a problem, however, as the unbounded, incomplete, and infinite nature of information forestalls resolution and makes any conclusion inadequate� How to process in narrative form the massive volume of cellphone calls, web searches, and keystrokes logged by the NSA and other intelligence gathering agencies? “At present, US collection produces too much data,” writes the director of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security� “The sheer volume of the data, or ‘take,’ from the collection, just from intelligence’s own sources, threaten to overwhelm the processing of it” (Treverton 9). Intelligence gathering, in effect, creates its own knowledge deficits. In terms of information, security operations seek more only to find that there can never be enough� Criminologists and lawyers who view security as a “thick public good” (Loader and Walker 4) recognize that security often becomes an obsession that can never complete its task of controlling for every possibility� Knowing that there is always more to know, the project of security confronts “an infinite and ever-disappearing horizon of possibility” (Loader and Walker 84) that, ironically, makes security a source of insecurity� “The more it knows, the less it knows,” writes Michael Dillon in Biopolitics of Security (39). Usng the parenthetical expression “(in)securitization,” Didier Bigo captures how surveillance data, biometrics, and statistical knowledge produce a state of continual unease and vulnerability for citizens (12)� As the security apparatus tracks more and more things—letters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, telephone calls and radio broadcasts in the twentieth, and digital footprints and biometric data in the twenty-first—it gives rise to a dizzying awareness that there are an infinite number of finite things to keep tabs on� 2 The Latin maxim sapere aude (dare to know! ) that kicks off Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment? ” might thus also be seen as the motto of security society that strives for infinite knowledge about an ever-expanding archive of information� Faced with the prospect of too much data, we confront information as a sort of sublime overload. Even proponents of security admit that security exists “as a condition beyond our grasp that appears to require more ‘security measures’” (Loader and Walker 84). Yet this crisis in which an infinite amount 2 Dillon writes, “Politics, government and rule are problematised in terms of the infinite government of finite things. The infinity of finite things knows no eschatology in the traditional sense of an ending to time combined with the advent of a different, a better, time to come” (7)� The temporality of security always stretches out toward the future, trying to detect threats before they happen� Security and the Informational Sublime 241 of data dwarfs our senses and capacities represents more than a symptom of life within the contemporary security state� It suggests a problem of sense perception, cognition, and imagination that tracks back to eighteenth-century theories of the sublime� Information is more than a technical matter; it is fundamentally a philosophical and aesthetic concern, whose unsettled and expansive dimensions indicate that the human need for security cannot be solved by more data, sharper cameras, or faster computers� Long before the accumulation of massive data sets, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke probed the connections between infinite amounts of information and terror, and these thinkers discovered obscurity and darkness at the fringes of the human desire to know and communicate� The idea of complete and instant access to staggering amounts of information at once represents the fulfillment of enlightenment knowledge and the “delightful horror” (67) that Burke associated with sublime infinity. Philosophical consideration of the sublime could go on forever. “That task would be infinite,” muses Burke, as he embarks on the daunting mission of writing about the sublime and beautiful (4)� How sublime it is to conceive of a colossal, unending stream of information, and yet “the terrible uncertainty” (58) of such a thing rattles our faculties� Such tensions are constitutive of an informational sublime in which the amassing of knowledge simultaneously points to unbounded comprehension and “a moment of linguistic and cognitive breakdown” (McCarthy 548), each bound up with the impossible burden of knowing so much� Coming in and out of focus, defying human reason but broadening the imagination, the informational sublime denotes both a conceptual and aesthetic zone in which rational requirements for security are always in tension with sensations of terror� The sheer idea of information—whose status as an uncountable noun hints at its expanse—carries an affective charge that takes its toll on epistemology as well as ontology� The inventive formulation that “grammar notwithstanding, information is a gerund” (Lee 16) reinforces that idea that information, by virtue of its essential and inescapable incompleteness, can foster unease, distress, and paranoia� Surely, people act upon pieces of information all the time, but it is also the case that information, not so much in small bits or even large datasets but as a total concept, can erode our emotional security� “Information is not an ontological Thing,” writes Maurice Lee in Overwhelming Words, “but rather something that happens to communication” (16)� This sensibility that information does something affective to us, however, is hardly the usual way of understanding information� By the twentieth century, information became aligned with a “rational mathematical calculus” that imparts stability to definitions of the concept (Geoghegan 174). Yet the mathematical offers its own gateway to the sublime in ways that challenge the ascendancy of reason� A vast collection that conceivably runs on forever can prove captivating, not in itself, but because it awakens an imaginative capacity to envisage such vastness� Kant postulates that in contrast to beauty, which depends on external stimulus from flowers and such, we seek “the sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude for thought,” making 242 r uss c astronoVo the sublime a property of our own subjectivity (84)� When we confront some undefined magnitude or innumerable quantity, a sort of two-step process ensues in which our imagination runs to infinity and then reason cleans up the scene by employing math to comprehend it� How sublime is the mind that can ponder a question as eternal as the number of stars in the heavens! Or, as a contemporary variant, how sublime must it be to cull an endless stream of raw data from global telecommunications! Information might not appear sublime—after all, colloquial usage often aligns it with basic, straightforward stuff—but its superabundance can prove dizzying� The informational sublime outstrips sensory perception and provokes a vertiginous encounter with the mind’s own capacity to contemplate infinity. From this Kantian perspective, what keeps security experts up at night is that data abundance and information overload constitute threats in their own right, taxing to the extreme any meager human ability to assemble, process, and most crucially, to tell a coherent story about an expanse of information so incomprehensible that it can only be understood as sublime� Kant makes the crucial distinction that in these circumstances it is not the colossal object that is astonishing; rather it is our own mind coming to grips with the inadequacy of our senses, as we try to imagine some staggering infinity, that is sublime. We do not find pleasure in some object just because it is immense, but we do find “[a satisfaction] in the extension of the imagination by itself” to apprehend “what is great beyond all comparison” (Kant 86-87)� Unlike the experience of the beautiful that leads to “restful contemplation” (Kant 85), however, the sublime unnerves the rational person. Overawed by excess with no end in sight, “the feeling is one of on and on, of being lost,” as aphasia sets in and the subject becomes “speechless” (Weiskel 26, 30)� More profound and soul-crushing than the discovery of a specific plot or conspiracy, the terror of intelligence gathering lies precisely in the inability to imagine all the information that may be captured, not to mention the incalculable connections it creates� Incomprehensible and inassimilable, a glut of information carries the overpowering force of the sublime, but it differs from the Kantian account in one crucial respect� Kant’s subject ultimately achieves “elevation and transcendence,” but the intelligence expert or security analyst, not to mention the everyday citizen, is never free from the “resignation or bewilderment” (Potolsky 34) caused by the flood of too much information. Security may be sublime, but it is the sublime without release or enlightenment� The informational sublime creates a narratological crisis: how can experts, let alone ordinary human beings, detect a plot when there are so many details but no single story? As anyone who has struggled through Kant’s Critique of Judgment knows, aesthetic experience is difficult enough to parse; now try to imagine communicating the overwhelming aspect of sublimity that takes the form of a data set so vast and capacious that it is indescribable� So, too, as any consumer of information knows, the media that convey information instill a series of private terrors all their own by spinning scenarios of insecurity—news coverage of border walls and migrant caravans only being the most recent—in the name of security� “We feel secure only Security and the Informational Sublime 243 because we can be frightened,” writes Hamilton (297), and nothing is better suited to this purpose than the Gothic novel as an aesthetics of information� Communication is always a matter of security—and no more so than when the project is the impossible one to describe an encounter with a phenomenon that resists description� The sublime only “works” if assurances of ultimate security and safety mitigate the terror and fear that it inspires� At least, this is Kant’s view in which the human subject encounters the sublime not directly but in mediated fashion filtered through the capacity to imagine an overawing plenitude. With some distance or protection—think of guardrails at a precipice or a telephoto lens that offers the illusion of proximity—the observer can indulge in the sort of reflection that provides pleasure because, in these examples, reinforced metal barriers and enhanced optics mediate contact with the sublime� How thrilling to see “volcanoes in all the violence of their destruction” or the “lofty waterfall of a mighty river” (Kant 100)—but only when these phenomena are meditated (by distance, by television, by drones, etc�) and the observer is assured that any danger is minimal. The sublime must be experienced from a zone of safety otherwise the threat is too imminent to be intellectual� “Provided only that we are in security,” writes Kant, can we feel safe enough to ponder immensity and colossal power in ways that elevate the soul� 3 An unmediated encounter with the sublime incapacitates the viewer� Terror is disabling: “He who fears can form no judgement about the Sublime in nature … it is impossible to find satisfaction in a terror that is seriously felt” (Kant 100)� Mountain crags, rushing torrents, and other sublime features of the earth’s landscape can be viewed from safe distances, but what has been called the “digital sublime” (Mosco) of cyberscape allows for no such buffer� The transcendent annihilation of petty divisions of time and space promised by the digital extends the limitless reach of governments and corporations into public space and private lives� Whereas Kant invokes a vaguely Romantic landscape, assertions about the meaninglessness of geography within cyberspace make the digital sublime an experience of awe and terror with no refuge. For those who herald “computer communication as the logical continuation of Enlightenment rationality” (Mosco 91), it is worth remembering that security and surveillance fit nicely into this idea of progress. Where the aim of sovereign states had once been to ensure territory as a matter of geopolitical security, today the quest for biopolitical security makes life itself the focus of power� 4 3 Burke agrees about the need for distance and security when experiencing the sublime: “terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too closely” (42)� 4 For more on this point, see Hamilton (15)� 244 r uss c astronoVo The Unspeakable Terror of the Gothic Infinitude, as a primary attribute of the sublime, raises that disconcerting proposition that information may itself be a source of terror� The tight conduit between security and insecurity is an effect of Enlightenment priorities, as the passion for data and knowledge produces an inexhaustible reservoir of uncertainty, apprehension, and vulnerability� This set of unnerving affects takes narrative form in the gothic� Creepy dungeons, supernatural events, and other stock features of the gothic novel produce unease, but at bottom it is information that terrifies. As a mode obsessed with the intelligence gained from whispers, glances, eavesdropping, misdirected letters, long-lost manuscripts, chance encounters with newspapers, and other forms of communication, the gothic transposes the informational sublime to narrative form. Often corrupted, frequently deficient, and always lacking transparency, these media heighten the impossible quest to know more, driving characters to incur greater risks and propelling readers to turn page after page� For subjects both within and outside the world of the novel, the range of feelings from dull unease to sudden fright suggests the affective dimensions of information as powerful, encompassing, but unspecified security quantum. The sublime is an “overglutted sign” (Mishra 19) whose manifestation in gothic fiction stages a confrontation with excess and superabundance that induces a terrible but inexpressible crisis of subjectivity� Within “gothic sublimity” (Mishra), the subject crushed by an excess of information is not exalted or elevated with sudden access to complete knowledge in the end� Full understanding is at once promised and withheld by the mainstays of gothic fiction—secrets and surveillance—that make for emotionally charged storytelling suffused with terror and suspense� The intensity reaches such depths that gothic novels routinely resound with “the despair of the incommunicable” in ways that recall the sublime’s penchant for leaving the subject speechless (qtd� in Sedgwick)� Even though gothic tales routinely dredge up some “unutterable” or “unspeakable” terror, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or the Transformation, an American Tale (1798) is strangely prolix when it comes to the topics of information, communication, and media� His characters pore over manuscripts, compose letters, consult translations, scan newspapers, and become fixated by cultish religious tracts� As is typical for the gothic, scenes of doubling and repetition transmute the lack of verifiable information into its opposite, namely an excess of information that characters and readers alike struggle to assimilate and understand� “Until the gothic had been discovered, the serious American novel could not begin,” Leslie Fiedler declared in Love and Death in the American Novel (143), and critics since have often named Wieland as the prototype for the American gothic� Narrated by Clara Wieland, Brown’s novel tells the story of a genteel family that suffers a range of traumas, including self-combustion, multiple homicides, suicide, and attempted rape� From the paterfamilias who fervently believes that “security lay in ceaseless watchfulness and prayer” to his adult children, Theodore and Clara, who Security and the Informational Sublime 245 retreat to “the bosom of security and luxury” at their family estate, the quest for security is undone by a series of faulty, untrustworthy communications emanating from books, letters, the supposed voice of God, the deceptions of a ventriloquist, and their own sensory perceptions� Although Brown penned no formal or systematic study of information, his gothic novels, above all Wieland, imply that every medium of communication, from intimate conversation to public records such as newspapers and court transcripts, is proximate to terror. Brown’s recognition that each communicative act has the potential to bring subjects to the brink of fear is more than an uncanny anticipation of the epistemological crises that emerged with the advent of information age� Worry over the relationship among information overload, security, and terror appears as a biopolitical problem long before the rise of the security state and what Shoshana Zuboff has recently called “surveillance capitalism�” At a moment when critical studies of security are often dominated by International Relations and cognate disciplines in the social sciences, the gothic provides an unruly but insistent reminder that our never-ending and total encounter with security is always an aesthetic experience. Wieland in particular presents this experience as a philosophical conundrum: why does the communication of information make human beings feel unsafe and insecure? Simple and straightforward acts of communication unhinge listeners and readers in Wieland, which is overburdened with letter writing, scenes of textual exegesis, and “vocalic surplus” (Sizemore 95). Notices in newspapers create fears of pursuit� Court documents are doled out bit by bit lest immediate and full disclosure overwhelm the recipient� One-word commands such as “hold! ” incite extreme terror. Religious texts sear the soul instead of providing solace� Even silence is viewed as a variant of information that amounts to deception� “Brown’s work has few peers in its almost obsessive attention to speaking, hearing, reading, and writing,” summarizes Michael Gilmore (646)� Upon encountering a corpse that he will soon dispose of in fitting gothic fashion by carrying the murder victim to the cellar for a quick and clandestine burial, the title character of Arthur Mervyn might be speaking for all of Brown’s narrators when he confesses, “How to communicate my thoughts … I knew not” (84). The paralyzing desire to express the unspeakable and convey the incommunicable aligns with the genre’s conventions� There is little surprise that Arthur Mervyn and kindred narrators such as Clara Wieland or Constantia Dudley in Ormond struggle to express their surprise as they encounter conspiracies and other nefarious designs� What is more surprising is that a rational, serious, and dry setting—that is to say, a secular temple devoted to textual scholarship and humanistic interpretation—can provoke terror� Consider a communicative scene where gentlemen scholars debate the wording of a classical text and failing to agree, they return to the original source� The task seems simple enough: hunt up the original, check the text, return with accurate information, and resolve the discrepancy� But the endeavor quickly becomes gothic when the search throws the fundamentals of humanities inquiry—verifiability, rationalism, 246 r uss c astronoVo empiricism—into doubt� Wieland sets out a scene familiar to any academic� The novel describes a group of humanities scholars who enjoy a sort of endless postdoctoral fellowship, discussing classical rhetoric and ancient texts without any care to labor or precarity� Clara describes her brother’s rustic seminar in superlative terms: “no spot on the globe enjoyed equal security and liberty” as this secluded academy (35)� Two more mentions of “security” quickly follow, but the cautious balancing of security and liberty seen in authorizing documents such as The Federalist Papers is wholly upset by what seems like innocuous and, if you will, boring humanities scholarship� 5 Theodore Wieland “was diligent in settling and restoring purity of the text. For this end, he collected all the editions and commentaries that could be procured, and employed months of severe study in exploring and comparing them” (23)� Information becomes obsession� Wieland’s activities reflect a concern for security consistent with the drive to procure, gather, and compare information. What happens next is completely accidental but also a direct outcome of trying to aggregate information� His intense devotion to secular humanism, ironically not unlike his father’s religious fanaticism that ends in spontaneous human combustion, leads to a prolonged chain of unreliable but still strangely authoritative communications� His “psychological fall from devoted father and pious classicist to homicidal lunatic” (Cahill 192) originates from textual inconsistencies in addition to mental ones� Trying to resolve a disagreement about Cicero, Wieland returns to the summerhouse for the volume when a servant meets him with a letter describing a waterfall, which leads to talk of another letter describing another waterfall� The goal seems to be a cross-referencing of the sublime, comparing a European cataract with an American one� But sublimity goes from merely being the content of communication to its medium when a disembodied voice commands him to desist in his investigations� Awesome, mysterious, and unknowable, this voice produces “a thrilling, and not unpleasing solemnity” (32), not so much for what it says as for the attention it draws to communication itself as a vertiginous endeavor� To be clear, the classical volume Wieland is reading is hardly gothic, but then again Brown suggests that any text, simply by virtue of its communicative properties, leads to places unknown� His sister Clara recounts how debate over a fine point in Latin rhetoric introduces the possibility of “misquotation” (28), prompting Wieland to return to his pastoral think tank for the book� On his way he meets up with a letter that then has him retracing his steps to a promontory in search of a different letter where he encounters an “auricular deception” (32)� The information carried across this communication chain is raw and disparate, and it offers no accord or resolution about 5 In letters to his family, Brown wrote about safety, as the yellow fever epidemic approached New York� In a letter from August 25, 1793, he reassured his brother James that his “abode is far enough from the seat of the disease” to provide “the utmost security” (Dunlap 4)� In a follow-up from September 4, Brown chides James for his susceptibility, not to yellow fever, but to print by believing the worst about the epidemic: “When did you learn to rely upon rumor news-paper information? ” (Dunlap 4)� Security and the Informational Sublime 247 either Cicero or waterfalls� The information he does receive sets in motion a complex affective response that is expressly linked to “that terror which is pleasing” (42)� The original source should settle a matter of “misquotation.” Comparison of multiple texts should help determine aesthetic judgments about sublime splendor� But in Wieland philology fails, spectacularly so� When Wieland and his friend Pleyel question the authority of the mysterious voice, the reply from the void insists that the news (about the death of a noblewoman across the ocean) is “from a source that cannot fail” (41)� Neither can the volume of Cicero fail—until it does. Not unlike the textual authority that Wieland wants to summon but never does, the source behind this information remains incomplete, obscure, and suspect� 6 A dearth of information in Wieland seems to pose a barrier to human understanding� This view has the support of Trish Loughran’s argument in The Republic in Print that undependable deliveries, impassable rivers, and other infrastructural obstacles prevented the development of a national print culture� Brown suggests something different: instability is immanent to information itself, jeopardizing the security provided by empiricism and rationality within the vaunted “age of reason�” Brown reverses longstanding narratives that celebrate print culture for blazing the way to the expansion of commerce, the diffusion of knowledge, and the broadening of political liberty� 7 By falling out of step with this narrative, Wieland invites a suspicious re-reading of one of the signature texts of Enlightenment rationality, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)� Named by The Guardian in 2017 as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of all time, Locke’s Essay “could hardly be more topical today” (McCrum) when reason seems in short supply and empirical knowledge about election results and global temperatures is actively dismissed by heads of state� And it was just as topical in Brown’s day, as Wieland, a novel whose “primary assumption is vintage Locke” (Fliegelman 237), cautions against the dangerous conclusions that may be derived from faulty sensory data—like taking a counterfeited voice to be the real thing or reading written words as the truth� Even as Lockean reason appears as a beacon in the darkness, the gothic gloom that tints the informational sublime in Brown’s novel unsettles Locke’s ideas about cognition� Reflecting on his frequent use of the word idea in the Essay, Locke presents it as a substitute for a variety of words, including “phantasm,” that refers to whatever may be in people’s minds� The question to ask about phantasmatic ideas is: “How do they come into the mind” in the first place? By a mixture of accident and deceit. Brown’s answer to Locke’s query reveals the extent to which information provides not the bedrock but the unstable ground of 6 If “Brown embraces the problematic and inescapable need for creating narrative explanations” (P� Gilmore 119), the storytelling required by these narratives creates another set of problems whose dimensions are communicative and philosophical� 7 For a critique of such technological determinism that sees print as inherently progressive, see Warner (5-7)� An additional problem is the assumption that “technology has an ontological status prior to culture” (Warner 5), as though print is an external force that pushes “culture” in the abstract toward Enlightenment values and practices� 248 r uss c astronoVo Enlightenment rationality� Locke’s “defensive stance against any mode of thinking that undermines the principles of self-enclosure and internal coherency” proves vulnerable to gothic suggestions entering the mind “through the portal of the senses” (Roberts 13)� For Brown, the senses seem especially at risk from information transmitted via written and printed media� In the genteel society of farmer-philosophers depicted in Wieland, a servant can bring a letter at any moment or a newspaper can catch the unsuspecting eye� Sunny predictions about the American Enlightenment that “widespread publication of ideas of correct ideas will make all of the difference in human history” (Ferguson 87) bump against Brown’s rude reminders that gothic messages can intrude without warning upon even the most idyllic scene� The problem, however, is not the familiar epistemological one about the limits of sensory perception; an excess of textual stimuli and a glut of information vex—rather than facilitate—the project of human understanding. Whether one agrees that Brown’s work displays “egregiously sloppy writing” or that “his prose carries the dispensations of print to extravagant lengths” (M. Gilmore 648), there is simply too much text in a book that is presented as though it were one single letter written by Clara Wieland� What is more, this epistolary letter makes mention upon mention of books sent from Germany, newspapers carried by ship captains, letters beset by “miscarriage” (37), and memoirs hidden in closets� If the central question of the novel is “how to establish the authority of information” (Levine 27), then the surfeit of information that dwarfs the human (in)capacity to sort, verify, interpret, and understand speech and written communication renders that question still more pressing and fraught� As a speculative anticipation of the gothic energies that haunt the underside of modern information theory, Wieland offers a peculiar history of the uncertainty and distortion that inevitably accompanies enlightened, humanist communication� A narrative about transatlantic print production and reception, Wieland heightens the suspicion that writing does more than convey intelligence, deepen knowledge, or simply share news� It instills doubt that the link between information and communication cannot be trusted� Books and newspapers appeal to characters in ways that defy rational explanation. The history of the Wieland family takes a decisive turn when the paterfamilias encounters a book by an obscure religious sect� Not much of a reader, the elder Wieland “entertained no relish for books, and was wholly unconscious of any power they possessed to delight or instruct” (7)� By chance, this volume that “had lain for years in a corner of his garret, half buried in dust and rubbish” (7) gets reactivated by no discernible logic or intention� Books are not about human agency� Brown’s doomed characters do not consult texts because they want information or diversion. Instead, some inexplicable force draws them to texts. As the elder Wieland becomes a reader, he becomes a deranged symptom of Enlightenment print culture: born in Saxony, migrating to London, attracted to an obscure book by an obscure French Protestant sect, and impelled to become a missionary spreading the Word of the gospel to the indigenous peoples of North America, he becomes Security and the Informational Sublime 249 as combustible as the paper of the texts he reads. Not for nothing did Kant in “What is Enlightenment? ” cite falling back on “a book that thinks for me” as an example of self-imposed tutelage. In his first contact with a dormant book, Wieland père mistakes print culture as a genuine source of illumination. After reading this religious text for a while “he regretted the decline of light which obliged him for the present to close it” (8), a not-so subtle indication that books may not be messengers of Enlightenment, after all� No matter their dubious status, books, manuscripts, newspapers, and letters assuredly do provide information to Brown’s characters who wander the transatlantic world and then settle, hide, or reinvent themselves in America� The source of that information may flow from God or it may spring from the deceptions of an unscrupulous ventriloquist—or, still yet, it may be immanent to print itself� Then again, books, not the least of which are Wieland and the other specimens of Brown’s corpus, regularly fail to provide illumination and, along with all the other vehicles such as letters and newspapers that provide intelligence, stand counterpoised to Enlightenment� This tension cuts across Brown’s dark take on communication in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world, and it also suggests why the informational sublime continues to pose a problem for security in our own age of terror� To allow these two temporally distinct idioms to bleed into one another is to begin to wonder what lies in the gothic cellar of information theory� A Gothic Theory of Information Information theory tends to treat information as though it is clear and unadulterated at the outset, an attitude not unlike the manner in which Wieland fils trusts in “the purity of the text.” According to this thinking, distortion only makes its way into the communication chain in the process of transmission when unwanted noise is added to the message� A diagram from Claude E� Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication lays out a linear schematic (fig. 1) that traces how a message travels from its “information source” to its “receiver” and “destination�” Transmitting messages securely and ensuring the integrity of information encoded as printed characters, electronic signals, or data bits, is paramount to the security of all communication systems, whether postal, telegraphic, or digital� Hacking, data breaches, and electronic theft are the most recent in a long line of threats, including counterfeits and intercepted letters, that have long jeopardized the security of information� Brown’s gothic novel, however, points to a concern of a different order: not only is information never secure from tampering, but information promotes insecurity through its own abundance and proliferation. Gaps and occlusions create knowledge deficits, to be sure. But it is information experienced as sublime excess that reveals how doubt and incomprehension are identical to information itself� Having more information about potential threats is a security goal that nonetheless serves to amplify the number of possible threats, thus creating the need to track and gather 250 r uss c astronoVo more information about each new threat as it is imagined� Security, because it is always productive of insecurity, breeds affective states such as unease, anxiety, and terror that frustrate comprehension, forestall action, and multiply feelings of vulnerability� The inherent insecurity of information conflicts sharply with influential accounts of information theory� Look again at Shannon’s graphic of a communication chain that presents an “information source” without complication until it gets activated by the flow of information. A “noise source” not located on this trajectory, seemingly external to the system itself, interrupts and intrudes upon the message at some point between sender and recipient� Noise enters printed texts, telegraph messages, and faxes as typographical errors, smudges, creases, and the like� Radios pick up static and analog TV sets at one time were interrupted by random patterns described as “snow�” Cell phone calls can sound eerie due to an echo effect in which callers hear their own voices, inviting plenty of internet speculation about whether this experience of audio discomfort means that someone is tapping into phones. All these effects are added to the message at later stages after it leaves the “information source” at the start of the chain� Fig� 1� “Schematic diagram of a general communication system” (Shannon 2)� The scientific paper containing this diagram, first published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, earned Shannon acclaim as “the father of information theory�” 8 In the words of his recent biographers, “every email we have ever sent, every DVD and sound file we have ever played, and every Web page we have ever seen loaded bears a debt to Claude Shannon” (Soni and Goodman xii). His breakthrough insight applied principles of thermodynamics, especially entropy as a measure of uncertainty, to communication� Its potential for surveillance and secrecy was clear from the outset: calculating the range 8 A curious coincidence is that Joe Turner from Three Days of the Condor, like Shannon, worked at Bell Labs� Security and the Informational Sublime 251 of possible messages that can be sent relies on similar principles as the effort “to track an airplane and compute its probable future positions” (Shannon and Weaver 3)� Such information, of course, would be of immense value to anyone programming a “guided missile” (Shannon and Waver 3) to intercept this airplane, as Shannon recognized� Shannon had preceded this paper with another, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography” in 1945, indicating that connections between a secrecy system and an information system are closer than at first thought. 9 In translating Shannon’s mathematical formulae for lay readers, Warren Weaver declares that this theory gets at “the real inner core of the communication problem” (25), but that does not stop him from offering two small but important correctives� Given the opportunity, Weaver amends the above schematic and relabels the “noise source” in the above diagram as “engineering noise” to allow for static or other distortion. (Solar flares that intensify every eleven years, for instance, can disrupt telecommunications satellites�) Next, a new box, labeled “semantic noise,” is added to the diagram, placed between the information source and transmitter to register “the perturbations or distortions of meaning which are not intended by the source” (26) but nonetheless affect how the message is received, decoded, and understood at the other end of this communication chain (fig. 2). Perhaps I do not intend to be rude, but my tone gives offense� Perhaps I do not mean to confess my crime, but my words give me away. Or, in Brown’s terms as expressed through Carwin, “Who can betray but myself” (281)� “Semantic noise” in Weaver’s amended diagram comes into play only with the onset of communication; that is, the temporal lag that exists between the “information source” and its encoding as a “signal” that can be transmitted preserves this idea that information can be isolated from noise� Fig� 2� A theory of communication with input and interferrence from semantic noise and engineering noise� 9 As Gleick observes, “From the point of view of cryptologists, a secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communication system” (216)� One tries to hide a message within noise while the other attempts to filter out the noise that impedes meaning. 252 r uss c astronoVo A gothic theory of communication inspired by Brown is both shorter and less linear� Even though characters in Wieland hear voices and receive letters, the suspicion is that ultimately there may be no outside vectors that corrupt information because it is already distorted at its source (fig. 3). Rather than a linear schematic where message and meaning move from left to right in what appears as a temporal sequence, this image suggests that communication is part of a media “environment” that, unlike “logical systems of structures” (Mitchell 203), cannot be easily tamed� There’s little rhyme and certainly no reason to how people communicate with books and other texts in Brown’s world. Doing nothing in particular in his cluttered London flat, Wieland’s father looks about the room and “his eye was attracted by a page of this book, which, by some accident, had been opened, and placed full in his view” (8)� The insistence on the passive in this account of reading suggests that human beings have little control over the information they seek� A phrase from the book, “seek and ye shall find” (8), jumps out at him, but it offers neither assurance nor guarantee about what might be found� Variations of this scene are repeated in the novel, as characters “glancing carelessly round” (183) suddenly and without reason fixate on private correspondence and diaries. Like Wieland, do we know what we will dredge up from our searches? Do we know what results, either actual or metaphysical, our searches will yield? Can we be prepared for the deluge of information that we receive? Fig� 3� A gothic theory of communication� Locke, for one, hoped to answer such questions by defining the “bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things, between what is, and what is not comprehensible by us,” but the inhabitants of Brown’s transatlantic world have little success in this regard� Clara initially seems armed with a formidable supply of Lockean optimism in offering her tale as a contribution to human understanding: “If it [my story] be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit” (5)� Her stipulation echoes Locke’s advice that people should give wide berth to the “dark parts of things” lest they “wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing” (ch. 1, §7)� But Clara proves to be a better student of Burke, who disputed “Mr� Locke’s opinion, that darkness is not naturally an idea of terror” and saw Security and the Informational Sublime 253 empiricism as no match for the uncertainty that at every second and in every direction surrounds us in darkness (30)� Reason may not be the antidote to terror that has been supposed� Lurking within the “darker implications of Locke’s psychology” lies a mentality “stressed to its own limits” (Weiskel 16) and bruised by its inability to grasp what is at the fringes of perception� What eludes sense perception nonetheless quickens our affective sensibilities, stoking the impulse to gather more data in hopes of illuminating these dark recesses� “Known unknowns,” to use Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s memorable phrasing, are both the target of security efforts and source of continuing unease and insecurity� Clara’s encounter with the informational sublime, as a typology for the subject of security, produces terror, but, unlike the Kantian sublime, hers is terror without enlightenment� Events in Wieland suggest a theory of communication that contrasts Shannon’s linear diagram with its settled telos of “message received” at its logical endpoint. Seeking and finding leads not to revelation but to distressing encounters with obscurity and noise� A gothic theory of communication— as opposed to Shannon’s mathematical one—gets rid of the outside “noise source” (seen in fig. 2) that affects the message in its transit from “information source” to its “destination.” Instead, this model (fig. 3) makes noise immanent to the system and elemental from the get-go� No hard-and-fast distinction between “information source” and “noise source” can be made� Noise is always buried deep within information� In this diagramming of information as gothic, no logic explains why people are drawn to texts. There is no a priori reason that attracts Wieland’s father to the fateful religious tract� Seeking and finding hardly seem like intentional activities and, what is more, the implicit link between the two is rendered more doubtful than ever� “Some instinct induced me to lay my hand upon a newspaper” (119), says Pleyel in an effort to explain how he learns that Carwin is a hunted fugitive not to be trusted. This explanation explains nothing other than the fact that Pleyel is no more able to account for his textual attractions than anyone else in Wieland’s humanities salon. In another scene of unaccountable textual attraction, Pleyel confesses that, in a half-hearted attempt to exculpate his snooping and surveillance of his friend’s innermost thoughts, “my eye glanced spontaneously upon the paper” (115) of Clara’s diary� His reward is a partial, hurried reading, making the diary the source of misinformation and conjecture about Clara’s virtue� Reading here is not all that different from the invasion of privacy, the niceties of the Fourth Amendment to the U�S� Constitution neatly cast aside� Clara proves susceptible to the same condition: “What was it that suggested the design of perusing my father’s manuscript? ” she wonders (86), effectively repeating her father’s pathology in being drawn inexplicably to enigmatic texts. A little bit of information goes a long way, not in providing clarity, but in fueling the search for more information, more seeking in the hopes of finding� Pleyel acknowledges that he “caught only parts of sentences” (115) when he spies over Clara’s shoulder, which convinces him that more investigation and more surveillance will enable him to understand the whole� So, at midnight, he sneaks up to the summerhouse in order to listen in on Carwin and 254 r uss c astronoVo a woman, whom he assumes is Clara, having sex. In the darkness, “hearing was the only avenue to information” (125), but for Pleyel it suffices because this intelligence fits with what he has learned from transatlantic dispatches printed in the Philadelphia newspapers� The article he reads in the American press, reprinted from a British paper, impels more searching: “it occurred to me, that the information I possessed was, in one sense sufficient, yet if more could be obtained, more was desirable” (120)� Adding more details, acquiring more data, and securing more intelligence do not dissipate Locke’s “dark parts of things” or set the stage for perspicacity� The news item about Carwin, even if factual and illuminating, nonetheless motivates a search for additional reports, whether to satisfy curiosity or supply corroboration� A similar impulse seized Brown himself, who completed Wieland and then later began working on serial installments of Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, whose plot hinges on the mania for information� In his relationship with his Illuminati mentor, Carwin “must determine to disclose every fact in his history, and every secret of his heart … and must continue to communicate, at stated seasons, every new thought, and every new occurrence … This confidence was to be absolutely limitless” (263). Critical self-examination becomes indistinguishable from gothic surveillance� The collection of data, the retrieval of information, the aggregation of search results are by design always in need of supplementation even when they are, as Pleyel declares about the newspaper story, “sufficient.” To return to the biblical verse that spurs Wieland’s fanaticism, finding does not put an end to seeking. Instead, finding only drives more seeking� The countermeasure to terror, especially when this sensation is provoked by indistinct apprehension of the unknown, is often assumed to lie in the collection of more information� Enveloped by the darkness, we are “forced to pray for light” (Burke 30)� With more data comes more knowledge, illuminating what had been obscure� But there is never enough information; there is only, paradoxically, too much information—and too much to assemble into a coherent story. The more information Pleyel uncovers, the more horrified he is by the false proofs of Clara’s sexual perfidy. The more evidence Clara receives from her senses, the more inarticulate she becomes� “My terror kept me mute,” she says (128)� She realizes the futility of enlightening her fellow humanist who is also her off-and-on love interest: “all my conversations and letters, affords me no security” (108) from Pleyel’s suspicions� Her insight might diagnose the communication anxiety that pervades the novel as a whole� Prized volumes about Ciceronian rhetoric produce confusion� Misplaced letters enable deception� Voices confound hearers� Newspapers deepen distrust� In short, communication itself affords no security and, in fact, imperils the sense of safety� The reasons, as we have seen, are several: the restless search for more information; the glut of data received but also its incompleteness; and, above all, the “noise” and uncertainty that are endemic to information� Security and the Informational Sublime 255 Information is closely associated with uncertainty� In an effort to describe how such uncertainty might be measured, Shannon borrowed the concept of entropy from thermodynamics to express the randomness and range of possibilities that accompany any message� If “it seems intuitively clear that a message about which the receiver was highly uncertain prior to its arrival conveys more information than one that the receiver could predict with certainty” (Schweighauser 7), then information becomes a function of uncertainty. Shannon worked out a complex equation that posits information as a logarithmic function, but the basic takeaway is that uncertainty resides within all information as the possible number of messages that can be sent and received. A helpful—and prototypically American—example that James Gleick provides is the information about British troop movements transmitted from the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston by the number of lanterns. In this simple scenario from 1775, two possible messages exist (“one if by land, two if by sea”), and this fundamental uncertainty is the precondition for communicating information� In contrast, “if only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information” (Gleick 219)� Thus a courtroom where “only one answer is really conceivable” to the question, “‘Do you swear to tell the whole truth? ’… provides almost no new information—we could have guessed it beforehand” (Soni and Goodman 142). A more complex scenario, say, messages sent by a German “enigma machine” during World War II, has a much greater degree of entropy, but nonetheless the uncertainty and randomness are “still susceptible to statistical analysis” (Gleick 219)� A mathematical theory of communication, by this reasoning, is not without its reassuring affect—one that reminds men that they remain in control—for dealing with the uncertainty of information� When Warren Weaver popularized Shannon’s research at Bell Labs, his explanation relied on an analogy suited to the era’s fantasies about gender and technology: “communication theory is just like a very proper and discreet girl accepting your telegram� She pays no attention to the meaning, whether it be sad, or joyous, or embarrassing� But she must be prepared to deal with all that come to her desk” (Shannon and Weaver 27). The expectation for a modern communication system is no different, and like this feminine embodiment of modesty, it “ought to try to deal with all possible messages” no matter the content� But what if that girl is Clara Wieland? What if that girl is a “story-teller” who produces “enjoyably terrible and deliberately obscure pleasures” (Galluzzo 262) that take shape as the first gothic American novel? Like the discreet office girl, Clara and others versed in gothic reading know that the content of the message ultimately is not as important as the otherwise unnoticeable contrivances and accords that enable communication in a presumably enlightened era� In place of a statistical approach to communication, her mode for understanding communication as gothic is rooted in the suspicion that information is corrupted at its source and made less secure the more it accumulates� This decidedly eighteenth-century approach listens for the irrational fears and inexplicable desires within communications systems that are typically ignored as so much noise� 256 r uss c astronoVo The novel violates normative protocols by which “the understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself” (Locke, ch�1 §1)� Clara doubts this supposition since the media that inform her understanding are a constant source of apprehension in both senses as a feeling of misgiving and as the capacity to grasp an idea or concept� Wieland examines what happens when the understanding does, in fact, take notice of itself, insinuating a challenge to Locke’s rational investigation of how the mind operates. The path is self-reflexive and dizzying, diverting attention from the content of information toward the medium of its own conveyance� Media scholars such as Lisa Gitelman and Niklas Luhmann have suggested that communication depends on our not recognizing the media that facilitate communication. “Structural amnesia” is baked into our experience with media (Gitelman 7), allowing us to forget that communication requires an intervening medium such as paper or a screen� The trick, then, is to see what is invisible� But how can something “be made visible which must remain invisible to itself” (Luhmann, Mass Media 121)? Any effort in this direction confronts what Luhmann calls “an injunctive paradox” (Mass Media 121) that prohibits the eye from seeing itself, that keeps us from observing how we observe� Each time that Clara recalls the terror that paralyzes her, she steps aside from the flow of her narrative to observe her own writing practices. Or, perhaps more accurately, each time that she pauses to think about the account she is writing, she is thrown into terror. She experiences this shock on at least three separate occasions� First, as she basks in her brother’s erudition, assured that “the world would have accepted a treatise” on the Daemon of Socrates “from his hand,” she breaks off and turns her narration to the present time and space of her own writing (45)� “My blood is congealed: and my fingers are palsied,” she exclaims (45). Having reached the moment when Carwin appears in her story, her trepidation ostensibly arises from remembering the fateful chain of events linked to the deceiver� But what stokes her initial interest in Carwin is the “sketch upon paper” (49) that she executes of his countenance and then stays up “half the night” (50) examining in her bedroom. Not the biloquist himself but the examination of the media she uses to represent him places her in the vertiginous position of trying, in Locke’s terms, to enable her eye to observe itself� A second moment comes just before her discovery of her sister-in-law’s murdered body� Her present writing anticipates the shock she is set to narrate: “my fingers are enervated … my language is faint” (135)� Once more she is brought to the brink of an expressive abyss as she communicates “incommunicable sentiments” (135). In this state, she interrupts the flow of her narrative and warns her reader that “abruptnesses, and dark transitions” (135) will mar her account, a narrative advisory that is itself an abrupt, if not a dark, transition� As Clara writes about her own writing, the action of the story “is displaced by the process of uttering itself,” a recursive strategy symptomatic of the novel’s fixation with books (Seltzer 83)� A note from Carwin warning that she is about to behold “a sight so horrible” (137) heightens her alarm, not for what it says, but because Security and the Informational Sublime 257 its ink is still wet, suggesting that Carwin lingers and is stealing up behind her at the very moment of her reading� Seized a third time by the mania of writing about her own writing, Clara announces that she will die when she puts down her pen and ends her story� “A few words more and I lay aside the pen for ever” (202), she declares, but like a true obsessive she goes on for three more chapters� What is far from clear, however, is whether any of these endeavors of the eye to see itself, to write about writing, and to understand human understanding can provide clarity about ourselves� More likely, these efforts generate noise and distortion, what Luhmann calls “irritations” (Reality 7), that are routinely folded into self-reproducing media systems� But not always� While “it is conventional to assume that humans can communicate,” in strict actuality “humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate” directly with one another since a medium is always required (Luhmann, “Mind” 371)� Locke, too, had his doubts that the “thoughts of men’s minds [might] be conveyed from one to another” and regrets that many ideas, especially ones with the potential to instruct or delight, frequently are “invisible and hidden from others�” Worse still, potentially enlightening ideas cannot be intuitively apprehended or automatically understood since thoughts cannot “of themselves be made to appear” (ch� 2, §1)� Some other medium—air for vibration, language for words, ink and paper for texts—is needed, but “when the medium becomes visible, it becomes disruptive, just as the strong whoosh and whistle of the air inside a car traveling at high speed disrupts words of communication” (Luhmann, “Mind” 377). Clara Wieland experiences this disruption at her core when after writing about writing, she reflects, “I stand aside, as it were, from myself” (203). Should her claim be believed, which, after all, is itself interrupted by the subjunctive (“as it were”) to mark its status as supposition? When it comes to communication media, standing aside is a fantasy� As Gitelman contends, getting “outside” (20) of media is practically, if not conceptually, impossible when the formulation of such an external account in Brown’s world requires intense scrutiny of pens, paper, and other tools used for self-expression. The example Gitelman gives of such inescapable reflexivity is the impossible project of writing a history of the Word Wide Web without resorting to the resources, archives, and links of the Web itself. Clara’s example is similar but only more gothic: information about the self is always bound by the medium of its own existence. This observation about the self does not pretend to pass as a metaphysical conclusion� It might better be taken as a materialist description of the media that make information insecure� “However commonplace it is to think of information as separable from” or “uninformed by media” (Gitelman 7), the stuff that gets communicated is always determined by the mode of its communication� Luhmann’s assertion represents a radical condensation of this idea: “only communication can communicate�” The upshot of this sibylline pronouncement is that neither half-formed thoughts nor full-blown ideas can circulate or signify without a medium� Yet any medium must also have enough transparency to allow us to forget that it is there� “Sentences 258 r uss c astronoVo that are thought and spoken are only parts of a process that disappear at the moment of their generation� They are constitutively unstable� Their accumulation would very quickly lead to uncontrolled complexity, that is, chaos. Just imagine the noise that would result if spoken words did not fade away but remained audible! ” (Luhmann, “Mind” 379)� Biloquism in Wieland represents an eerie twist on this formulation: what if words appeared in two places at once, three, if you count their reappearance in Clara’s letters, four if you count the novel, and so on? We misread if we dwell upon “content without attending to the medium that … communicates that content” and, in the process, shapes what can be thought and expressed (Gitleman 7). The gothic nature of Brown’s novel draws unwanted attention to media that would otherwise remain invisible� Clara’s narrative-as-letter refuses to let the noise fade away in its compulsive return to the medium of its own narration� Wieland obsesses over authorship but not in the familiar sense of claiming a specifically literary identity in the early United States. Instead the fixation disallows the structural amnesia that is necessary to smooth communication. In thematic terms, Brown “attempts to make visible complex modes of communication” (Margolis 362). In terms of style, this refusal might explain Brown’s “egregiously sloppy writing” that “carries the dispensations of print to extravagant lengths” (M. Gilmore 648). It certainly explains Clara’s many locutions about people being the “authors” of events, outcomes, and narratives. She identifies Carwin as “the author of this black conspiracy” (174) and later accuses him directly, “Thou art the author of these horrors! ” (208)� Attributions of authorship would seem to clear up the mystery by identifying a single malevolent agent as the guilty party� Yet assurances that the malefactor behind a conspiracy can be brought to light become uncertain in the next breath, as Clara acknowledges that the “relief” found when “an author is discovered or imagined” may, in fact, only be imaginary� When she presses her uncle to learn why her brother languishes in a prison cell, he asks her, “Shall I make him the narrator of his own tale? ” (149)� The scenario is gothic in more ways than one: Wieland, the murderer of his wife and children, sits in a dark hole with the sole ambition of escaping to kill his sister and, at the same time, this odd estrangement from his own tale hints at an array of intervening institutions and media: medical authorities like her uncle, legal documents, signed confessions, and, of course, letters� Beyond the criminal court and the written text of her brother’s confession, the screen or barrier between Wieland and his own narrative invites the darker possibility that human beings are always hidden from others� A person possesses no true information to communicate because a self’s thoughts “are all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear” (Locke, ch�2 §1)� This last bit comes from not from Clara Wieland but from Locke, a flicker of recognition that the implicit arrangements that allow people to agree on what words mean are at best flimsy and ephemeral. 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