No document is ever relevant. The phrase works in practice because one component of a complex relation is made to stand for the whole. Theory cannot afford that compression. Relevance obtains only when some perceived feature of a document becomes consequential for a subject. The document is involved, but relevance belongs to the relation, not to the object.
A conceptual and historical analysis of grammatical compression and figurative language in information science is developed. The analysis examines how the noun “information” migrated beyond its restricted engineering use and how reification, metaphor, personification and metonymy became embedded in the field's theoretical vocabulary.
The field's central noun compresses unlike phenomena, documents, signals, interpretations and cognitive changes, into a single substantive form. Grammar lets them glide together as if continuous. What begins as useful shorthand hardens into theoretical danger once the compression is forgotten. Process becomes object through reification. Object becomes agent through personification. The vocabulary that results deceives smoothly. Information flows, systems retrieve, documents contain, mediators act. Friction disappears. Motion becomes effortless and illusory. The grammar of informing restores resistance. Documents and systems arrange possible encounters. Subjects apprehend. Informing occurs only where encounter becomes consequential for a knower.
Information science theory is relocated from substance to event, from possession to consequence and from thing to relation. Informing preserves the distinctions that information collapses and returns relevance to the relation in which a perceived feature becomes consequential for a subject.
