Marshall
McLuhan
Understanding Media
The extensions of man
London and New York
CONTENTS
PARTI 1
Introduction 3
1 The Medium is the Message 7
2 Media Hot and Cold 24
3 Reversal of the Overheated Medium 36
4 The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis 45
5 Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 53
6 Media as Translators 62
7 Challenge and Collapse: the Nemesis of Creativity 68
PART II 81
8 The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil? 83
9 The Written Word: an Eye for an Ear 88
10 Roads and Paper Routes 97
11 Number: Profile ofthe Crowd 115
12 Clothing: Our Extended Skin 129
13 Housing: New Look and New Outlook 133
14 Money: the Poor Man's Credit Card 142
15 Clocks: the Scent of Time 157
16 The Print: How to Dig it 170
17 Comics: Mad Vestibule to TV 178
18 The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism 185
19 Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane 195
20 The Photograph: the Brothel-without-Walls 204
21 Press: Government by News Leak 220
22 Motorcar: the Mechanical Bride 236
23 Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses 246
24 Games: the Extensions of Man 254
25 Telegraph: the Social Hormone 267
26 The Typewriter: into the Age of the Iron Whim 281
27 The Telephone: Sounding Brass or TinklingSymbol? 289
28 The Phonograph: the Toy that Shrank the National Chest
300
29 Movies: the Reel World 310
30 Radio: the Tribal Drum 324
31 Television: the Timid Giant 336
32 Weapons: War of the Icons 369
33 Automation: Learning a Living 378
Part Ｉ
INTRODUCTION
James Reston wrote in The New York Times (July 7, 1957):
A health director . . . reported this week that a small
mouse, which presumably had been watching television,
attacked a little girl and her full-grown cat. . . . Both
mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded
here as a reminder that things seem to be changing.
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary
and mechanical technologies, the Western world is
imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies
in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we
have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,
abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.
Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man-- the
technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative
process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to
the whole of human society, much
as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the
various media Whether the extension of consciousness, so long
sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a
question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of
answering such questions about the extensions of man without
considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin,
hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.
Some of the principal extensions, together with some of their psychic
and social consequences, are studied in this book. Just how little
consideration has been given to such matters in the past can be
gathered from the consternation of one of the editors of this book.
He noted in dismay that "seventy-five per cent of your material is
new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten per cent
new." Such a risk seems quite worth taking at the present time when
the stakes are very high, and the need to understand the effects of
the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour.
In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken
without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the
reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the
action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. We actually
live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in
the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.
Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to
act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this
way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless
if he were to become humanly involved us in the whole of mankind
and to incorporate with in his operation. We acquired the art of
carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete
detachment. But our
detachment was a posture of noninvolvement. In the electric age,
when our central nervous system is technologically extended to
whole of mankind and to incorporate the
whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the
consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt
the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.
The Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of
Western man, the man of action who appears not to be involved in
the action. Such is the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett's clowns.
After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing
specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our
bodies, our world has become compressional by dramatic reversal.
As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.
Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in
a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of
responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implo-sive factor that
alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other
groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of
limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in
theirs, thanks to the electric media.
This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that
compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any
"point of view." The partial and specialized character of the viewpoint,
however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the
information level the same upset has occurred with the substitution
of the inclusive image for the mere viewpoint. If the nineteenth
century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the
psychiatrist's couch. As extension of man the chair is a specialist
ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative absolute of backside,
whereas the couch extends the integral being. The psychiatrist
employs the couch, since it removes the temptation to express
private points of view and obviates the need to rationalize events.
The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of
awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology. The age of
mechanical industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of
private outlook the natural mode of expression. Every
culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and
knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and
everything. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed
patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare
their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new
attitude— a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.
Such is the faith in which this book has been written. It explores the
contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking
the principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence
that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that will
bring them into orderly service, I have looked at time anew,
accepting very little of the conventional wisdom concerning them.
One can say of media as Robert Theobald has said of economic
depressions: "There is one additional factor that has helped to
control depressions, and that is a better understanding of their
development." Examination of the origin and development of the
individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some
general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with
the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in
the individual and society.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all
things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be
reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the
message. This is merely to say that the personal and social
consequences of any medium-- that is, of any extension of ourselves
-- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each
extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with
automation, for example, the new patterns of human association
tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative result. Positively,
automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of
involvement in their work and human association that our preceding
mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be
disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with
the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways
in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to
ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out
cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and
association was
shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of
machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the
opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine
was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of
human relationships.
The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this
connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium
without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some
verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that
the "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content
of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print,
and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, "What is the
content of speech?," it is necessary to say, "It is an actual process of
thought, which is in itself nonverbal." An abstract painting represents
direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might
appear in computer designs. What we are considering here,
however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or
patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the
"message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or
pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did
not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into
human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous
human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds
of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in
a tropical or a northern environment and is quite independent of the
freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other
hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the
railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of
what the airplane is used for.
Let us return to the electric light. When the light is being used for
brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be
argued that these activities are in some way the
"content" of the electric light, since they could not exist without the
electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium
is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls
the scale and form of human association and action. The content or
uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping
the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the
"content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. It
is only today that industries have become aware of the various kinds
of business in which they are engaged. When IBM discovered that it
was not in the business of making office equipment or business
machines, but that it was in the business of processing information,
then it began to navigate with dear vision. The General Electric
Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric
light bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite
as much as A.T.& T., it is in the business of moving information.
The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just
because it has no "content." And this makes it an invaluable instance
of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric
light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a
medium. Then it is not the light but the "content" (or what is really
another medium) that is noticed. The message of the electric light is
like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical,
pervasive, and decentralized. For electric light and power are
separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors
in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and
TV, creating involvement in depth.
A fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man could
be made up from selections from Shakespeare. Some might quibble
about whether or not he was referring to TV in these familiar lines
from Romeo and Juliet:
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It speaks, and yet says nothing.
In Othello, which, as much as King Lear, is concerned with the
torment of people transformed by illusions, there are these lines that
bespeak Shakespeare's intuition of the transforming powers of new
media:
Is there not charms
By which the property of youth and maidhood
May be abus'd? Have you not read Roderigo,
Of some such thing?
In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which is almost completely
devoted to both a psychic and social study of communication,
Shakespeare states his awareness that true social and political
navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of
innovation:
The providence that's in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus' gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
Keeps place with thought, and almost like the gods
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.
The increasing awareness of the action of media, quite
independently of their "content" or programming, was indicated in
the annoyed and anonymous stanza:
In modern thought, (if not in fact)
Nothing is that doesn't act,
So that is reckoned wisdom which
Describes the scratch but not the itch.
The same kind of total, configuration awareness that reveals why the
medium is socially the message has occurred in the most recent and
rad,cal medial theories. In his Stress of Life, Hans
Selye tells of the dismay of a research colleague on hearing of
Selye's theory:
When he saw me thus launched on yet another enraptured
description of what I had observed in animals treated with
this or that impure, toxic material, he looked at me with
desperately sad eyes and said in obvious despair: "But
Selye, try to realize what you are doing before it is too late!
You have now decided to spend your entire life studying
the pharmacology of dirt!"
(Hans Selye, The Stress of Life)
As Selye deals with the total environmental situation in his "stress"
theory of disease, so the latest approach to media study considers
not only the "content" but the medium and the cultural matrix within
which the particular medium operates. The older unawareness of
the psychic and social effects of media can be illustrated from
almost any of the conventional pronouncements.
In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame
a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We
are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for
the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science
are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that
determines their value." That is the voice of the current
somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself
neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its
value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is
the way it is used that determines its value." Again, "Firearms are in
themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that
determines their value." That is, if the slugs reach the right people
firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the
right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply
nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores
the nature of the medium.
of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by
the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical
form. General Sarnor Twent on to explain his attitude to the
technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much
trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the
thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to
General Sarnoffthat any technology could do anything but add itself
on to what we already are.
Such economists as Robert Theobald, W W. Rostow, and John
Kenneth Galbraith have been explaining for years how it is that
"classical economics" cannot explain change or growth. And the
paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of
maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization
excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of
change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any
process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet, as
David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle
of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another
accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change.
So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended
sequence by making things instant. With instant speed the causes of
things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done
with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of
asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed
that a chicken was an egg's idea for getting more eggs.
Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves
become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of
sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of
being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms
reach their peak performance. Mechanization was never so vividly
fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies the moment
that translated us beyond mechanism into the world of growth and
organic interrelation. The movie, by
message. The message, it seemed, was the "content." as people
used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to
ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was
about. In such matters, people retained some sense of the whole
pattern, of form and function as a unity. But in the electric age this
integral idea of structure and configuration has become so prevalent
that educational theory has taken up the matter. Instead of working
with specialized "problems" in arithmetic, the structural approach
now follows the linea of force in the field of number and has small
children meditating about number theory and "sets."
Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, "He understood the grammar of
gunpowder." Napoleon had paid some attention to other media as
well, especially the semaphore telegraph that gave him a great
advantage over his enemies. He is on record for saying that "Three
hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand
bayonets."
Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print
and typography. He was thus able to read off the message of
coming change in France and America as if he were reading aloud
from a text that had been handed to him. In fact, the nineteenth
century in France and in America was just such an open book to de
Tocqueville because he had learned the grammar of print. So he,
also, knew when that grammar did not apply. He was asked why he
did not write a book on England, since he knew and admired
England. He replied:
One would have to have an unusual degree of philosophical folly to
believe oneself able to judge England in six months. A year always
seemed to me too short a time in which to appreciate the United
States properly, and it is much easier to acquire clear and precise
notions about the American Union than about Great Britain. In
America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of thought.
The whole of society, so to speak is
founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple
principle. One could compare America to a forest pierced by a
multitude of straight roads all converging on the same point. One
has only to find the center and everything is revealed at a glance.
But in England the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by travelling
down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole.
De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had
explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural
saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French
nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south
The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had
overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. The
Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers.
In England, however, such was the power of the ancient oral
traditions of common law, backed by the medieval institution of
Parliament, that no uniformity or continuity of the new visual print
culture could take complete hold. The result was that the most
important event in English history has never taken place; namely,
the English Revolution on the lines of die French Revolution. The
American Revolution had no medieval legal institutions to discard or
to root out, apart from monarchy. And many have held that the
American Presidency has become very much more personal and
monarchical than any European monarch ever could be.
De Tocqueville's contrast between England and America is clearly
based on the fact of typography and of print culture creating
uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has rejected this
principle and dung to the dynamic or oral common-law tradition.
Hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture.
The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral
and nonwritten culture and
institutions. The English aristocracy was properly classified as
barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had
nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural forms of typography.
Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication
of his Decline and Fall; "Another damned fat book, eh, Mr. Gibbon?
Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?" De Tocqueville was a
highly literate aristocrat who was quite able to be detached from the
values and assumptions of typography. That is why he alone
understood the grammar of typography. And it is only on those terms,
standing aside from any structure or medium, that its principles and
lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of
imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control
consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the
greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur
immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster is a dramatic study of the
inability of oral and intuitive oriental culture to meet with the rational,
visual European patterns of experience. "Rational," of course, has
for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In
other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism
with a single technology. Thus in the electric age man seems to the
conventional West to become irrational. In Forster's novel the
moment of truth and dislocation from the typographic trance of the
West comes in the Marabar Caves. Adela Quested's reasoning
powers cannot cope with the total inclusive field of resonance that is
India. After the Caves:
Lite went on as usual, but had no consequences, that is
to say, sounds did not echo nor thought develop.
Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore
infected with illusion."
A Passage to India (the phrase is from Whitman, who saw America
headed Eastward) is a parable of Western man in the electric age,
and is only incidentally related to Europe or the Orient. The ultimate
conflict between sigh and sound, between written and
The killer is regarded as we do a cancer victim. "How terrible it must
be to feel like that," they say. J. M. Synge took up this idea very
effectively in his Playboy of the Western World.
If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the
demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous
patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot
conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the
woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and
typographic technology as victims of injustice. On the other hand, in
a culture that assigns roles instead of jobs to people -- the dwarf, the
skew, the child create their own spaces. They are not expected to fit
into some uniform and repeatable niche that is not their size anyway.
Consider the phrase "It's a man's world." As a quantitative
observation endlessly repeated from within a homogenized culture,
this phrase refers to the men in such a culture who have to be
homogenized Dagwoods in order to belong at all. It is in our I.Q.
testing that we have produced the greatest flood of misbegotten
standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers
assume that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence,
thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.
C. P. Snow, reviewing a book of A. L Rowse (The New York Times
Book Review, December 24, 1961) on Appeasement and the road to
Munich, describes the top level of British brains and experience in
the 1930s. "Their I.Q.'s were much higher than usual among political
bosses. Why were they such a disaster?" The view of Rowse, Snow
approves: "They would not listen to warnings because they did not
wish to hear." Being anti-Red made it impossible for them to read the
message of Hitler. But their failure was as nothing compared to our
present one The American stake in literacy as a technology or
uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry,
and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The
threat of Stalin Hitler was external. The electric technology is within
the
gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter
with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American
way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies
when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in
the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy
was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our
conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are
used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For
the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by
the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the
medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another
medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or
an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program
content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is
almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.
Arnold Toynbee is innocent of any understanding of media as they
have shaped history, but he is full of examples that the student of
media can use. At one moment he can seriously suggest that adult
education, such as the Workers Educational Association in Britain, is
a useful counterforce to the popular press. Toynbee considers that
although all of the oriental societies have in our time accepted the
industrial technology and its political consequences: "On the cultural
plane, however, there is no uniform corresponding tendency."
(Somervell, I. 267) This is like the voice of the literate man,
floundering in a milieu of ads, who boasts, "Personally, I pay no
attention to ads." The spiritual and cultural reservations that the
oriental peoples may have toward our technology will avail them not
at all. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions
or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily
and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able
to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert
aware of the changes in sense perception.
The operation of the money medium in seventeenth-century Japan
had effects not unlike the operation of typography in the West The
penetration of the money economy, wrote G. B. San-som (in Japan.
Cresset Press, London, 193 1) "caused a slow but irresistible
revolution, culminating in the breakdown of feudal government and
the resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after more than
two hundred years of seclusion." Money has reorganized the sense
life of peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives. This
change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of those
living in the society.
Arnold Toynbee made one approach to the transforming power of
media in his concept of "etherialization," which he holds to be the
principle of progressive simplification and efficiency in any
organization or technology. Typically, he is ignoring the effect of the
challenge of these forms upon the response of our senses. He
imagines that it is the response of our opinions that is relevant to the
effect of media and technology in society, a "point of view" that is
plainly the result of the typographic spell. For the man in a literate
and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and
discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third
dimension and the "private point of view" as part of his Narcissus
fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake's awareness or that of the
Psalmist, that we become what we behold.
Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and
have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any
technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society
where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in
which it was unknown. Professor Wilbur Schramm made such a
tactical move in studying Television in the Lives of Our Children. He
found areas where TV had not penetrated at all and ran some tests.
Since he had made no study of the peculiar nature of the TV image,
his tests were of "content" preferences, viewing time, and
vocabulary counts. In a word, his
approach to the problem was a literary one, albeit unconsciously so.
Consequently, he had nothing to report. Had his methods been
employed in 1500 a.d. to discover the effects of the printed book in
the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the
changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography.
Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century.
Program and "content" analysis offer no dues to the magic of these
media or to their subliminal charge.
Leonard Doob, in his report Communication in Africa, tells of one
African who took great pains to listen each evening to the BBC news,
even though he could understand nothing of it. Just to be in the
presence of those sounds at 7 p.m. each day was important for him.
His attitude to speech was like ours to melody--the resonant
intonation was meaning enough. In the seventeenth century our
ancestors still shared this native's attitude to the forms of media, as
is plain in the following sentiment of the Frenchman Bernard Lam
expressed in The Art of Speaking (London, 1696):
Tis an effect of the Wisdom of God, who created Man to be
happy, that whatever is useful to his conversation (way of life) is
agreeable to him ... because all victual that conduces to nourishment
is relishable, whereas other things that cannot be
assimulated and be turned into our substance are insipid. A
Discourse cannot be pleasant to the Hearer that is not easily to
the Speaker; nor can it be easily pronounced unless it be heard
with delight.
Here is an equilibrium theory of human diet and expression such as
even now we are only striving to work out again for media after
centuries of fragmentation and specialism.
Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of
the media today. On February 1 7, 1 950, he said:
oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us.
Since understanding stops action, as Nietzsche observed, we can
moderate the fierceness of this conflict by understanding the media
that extend us and raise these wars within and without us.
Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on tribal man is
the theme of a book by the psychiatrist J. C. Carothers, The African
Mind in Health and Disease (World Health Organization, Geneva,
1953). Much of his material appeared in an article in Psychiatry
magazine, November, 1959: "The Culture, Psychiatry, and the
Written Word." Again, it is electric speed that has revealed the lines
of force operating from Western technology in the remotest areas of
bush, savannah, and desert. One example is the Bedouin with his
battery radio on board the camel. Submerging natives with floods of
concepts for which nothing has prepared them is the normal action
of all of our technology. But with electric media Western man himself
experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote native. We
are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu
than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes
him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual
isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native
involved in our literate and mechanical culture.
Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of
industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the
postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very
common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and
endless new patterns of information. Wyndham Lewis made this a
theme of his group of novels called The Human Age. The first of
these. The Childerraass, is concerned precisely with accelerated
media change as a kind of massacre of the innocents. In our own
world as we become more aware of the effects of technology on
psychic formation and manifestation, we are losing all confidence in
our right to assign guilt. Ancient prehistoric societies regard violent
crime as pathetic.
sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of
sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration
and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition
from lineal connections to configurations. It is the transition that
produced the now quite correct observation: "If it works, it's
obsolete." When electric speed further takes over from mechanical
movie sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media
become loud and clear. We return to the inclusive form of the icon.
To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a
world of triumphant illusions and dreams diat money could buy. It
was at this moment of the movie that cubism occurred, and it has
been described by E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) as "the most
radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of
the picture-that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas." For
cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the
"point of view" or facet of perspective illusion. Instead of the
specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up
an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of
patterns, lights, textures that "drives home the message" by
involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not
in illusion.
In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top,
bottom, back, and front and die rest, in two dimensions, drops the
illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the
whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly
announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the
moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the
world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has
happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication?
Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we
can now say, "The medium is the message" quite naturally. Before
the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium
is the
The killer is regarded as we do a cancer victim. "How terrible it must
be to feel like that," they say. J. M. Synge took up this idea very
effectively in his Playboy of the Western World.
If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the
demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous
patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot
conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the
woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and
typographic technology as victims of injustice. On the other hand, in
a culture that assigns roles instead of jobs to people 梩 he dwarf, the
skew, the child create their own spaces. They are not expected to fit
into some uniform and repeatable niche that is not their size anyway.
Consider the phrase "It's a man's world." As a quantitative
observation endlessly repeated from within a homogenized culture,
this phrase refers to the men in such a culture who have to be
homogenized Dagwoods in order to belong at all. It is in our I.Q.
testing that we have produced the greatest flood of misbegotten
standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers
assume that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence,
thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.
C. P. Snow, reviewing a book of A. L Rowse (The New York Times
Book Review, December 24, 1961) on Appeasement and the road to
Munich, describes the top level of British brains and experience in
the 1930s. "Their I.Q.'s were much higher than usual among political
bosses. Why were they such a disaster?" The view of Rowse, Snow
approves: "They would not listen to warnings because they did not
wish to hear." Being anti-Red made it impossible for them to read the
message of Hitler. But their failure was as nothing compared to our
present one The American stake in literacy as a technology or
uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry,
and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The
threat of Stalin Hitler was external. The electric technology is within
the
gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter
with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American
way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies
when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in
the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy
was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our
conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are
used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For
the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by
the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the
medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another
medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or
an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program
content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is
almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.
Arnold Toynbee is innocent of any understanding of media as they
have shaped history, but he is full of examples that the student of
media can use. At one moment he can seriously suggest that adult
education, such as the Workers Educational Association in Britain, is
a useful counterforce to the popular press. Toynbee considers that
although all of the oriental societies have in our time accepted the
industrial technology and its political consequences: "On the cultural
plane, however, there is no uniform corresponding tendency."
(Somervell, I. 267) This is like the voice of the literate man,
floundering in a milieu of ads, who boasts, "Personally, I pay no
attention to ads." The spiritual and cultural reservations that the
oriental peoples may have toward our technology will avail them not
at all. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions
or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily
and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able
to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert
aware of the changes in sense perception.
The operation of the money medium in seventeenth-century Japan
had effects not unlike the operation of typography in the West The
penetration of the money economy, wrote G. B. San-som (in Japan.
Cresset Press, London, 193 1) "caused a slow but irresistible
revolution, culminating in the breakdown of feudal government and
the resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after more than
two hundred years of seclusion." Money has reorganized the sense
life of peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives. This
change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of those
living in the society.
Arnold Toynbee made one approach to the transforming power of
media in his concept of "etherialization," which he holds to be the
principle of progressive simplification and efficiency in any
organization or technology. Typically, he is ignoring the effect of the
challenge of these forms upon the response of our senses. He
imagines that it is the response of our opinions that is relevant to the
effect of media and technology in society, a "point of view" that is
plainly the result of the typographic spell. For the man in a literate
and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and
discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third
dimension and the "private point of view" as part of his Narcissus
fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake's awareness or that of the
Psalmist, that we become what we behold.
Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and
have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any
technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society
where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in
which it was unknown. Professor Wilbur Schramm made such a
tactical move in studying Television in the Lives of Our Children. He
found areas where TV had not penetrated at all and ran some tests.
Since he had made no study of the peculiar nature of the TV image,
his tests were of "content" preferences, viewing time, and
vocabulary counts. In a word, his
approach to the problem was a literary one, albeit unconsciously so.
Consequently, he had nothing to report. Had his methods been
employed in 1500 a.d. to discover the effects of the printed book in
the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the
changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography.
Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century.
Program and "content" analysis offer no dues to the magic of these
media or to their subliminal charge.
Leonard Doob, in his report Communication in Africa, tells of one
African who took great pains to listen each evening to the BBC news,
even though he could understand nothing of it. Just to be in the
presence of those sounds at 7 p.m. each day was important for him.
His attitude to speech was like ours to melody--the resonant
intonation was meaning enough. In the seventeenth century our
ancestors still shared this native's attitude to the forms of media, as
is plain in the following sentiment of the Frenchman Bernard Lam
expressed in The Art of Speaking (London, 1696):
‘Tis an effect of the Wisdom of God, who created Man to be
happy, that whatever is useful to his conversation (way of life) is
agreeable to him ... because all victual that conduces to nourishment
is relishable, whereas other things that cannot be
assimulated and be turned into our substance are insipid. A
Discourse cannot be pleasant to the Hearer that is not easie to
the Speaker; nor can it be easily pronounced unless it be heard
with delight.
Here is an equilibrium theory of human diet and expression such as
even now we are only striving to work out again for media after
centuries of fragmentation and specialism.
Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of
the media today. On February 1 7, 1 950, he said:
It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and
the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance
of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of
communication and the capacity of the individual's own reaction.
Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical and total for
mankind. Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has
made them prisons without walls for their human users. As A. ].
Liebling remarked in his book The Press, a man is not free if he
cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get
there. For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to
clobber other media and other groups. The result is that the present
age has been one of multiple civil wars that are not limited to the
world of art and entertainment. In War and Human Progress,
Professor J. U Nef declared: "The total wars of our time have been
the result of a series of intellectual mistakes ..."
If the formative power in the media are the media themselves, that
raises a host of large matters that can only be mentioned here,
although they deserve volumes. Namely, that technological media
are staples or natural resources, exactly as are coal and cotton and
oil. Anybody will concede that society whose economy is dependent
upon one or two major staples like cotton, or grain, or lumber, or fish,
or cattle is going to have some obvious social patterns of
organization as a result. Stress on a few major staples creates
extreme instability in the economy but great endurance in the
population. The pathos and humor of the American South are
embedded in such an economy of limited staples. For a society
configured by reliance on a few commodities accepts them as a
social bond quite as much as the metropolis does the press. Cotton
and oil, like radio and TV, become fixed charges" on the entire
psychic life of the community. And this pervasive fact creates the
unique cultural flavor of any
society. It pays through the nose and all its other senses for each
staple that shapes its life.
That our human senses, of which all media are extensions, are also
fixed charges on our personal energies, and that they also configure
the awareness and experience of each one of us, may be perceived
in another connection mentioned by the psychologist C. G. Jung:
Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his
psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became
inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly
in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through
the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield
himself from such an influence (Contributions to Analytical
Psychology, London, 1928).
2
Media Cold and Hot
"The rise of the waltz," explained Curt Sachs in the World History of
the Dance, "was a result of that longing for truth, simplicity,
closeness to nature, and primitivism, which the last two-thirds of the
eighteenth century fulfilled." In the century of jazz we are likely to
overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human
expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly
and choral dance styles.
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio
from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie
from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single
sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well
filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon
is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is
provided. Telephone is a cool medium. or one of low definition,
because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And
speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given
and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, ho,
media do not
leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot
media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in
participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a
hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a
cool medium like the telephone.
A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammic written characters
has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the
phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of
abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with
its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds
and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of
enterprise and monopoly. But the typical reversal occurred when
extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation, with its
impersonal empire over many lives. The hotting-up of the medium of
writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the
religious wars of the sixteenth century. The heavy and unwieldy
media, such as stone, are time binders. Used for writing, they are
very cool indeed, and serve to unify the ages; whereas paper is a
hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally, both in political
and entertainment empires.
Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a
lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for
less than dialogue. With print many earlier forms were excluded from
life and art, and many were given strange new intensity. But our own
time is crowded with examples of the principle that the hot form
excludes, and the cool one includes. When ballerinas began to
dance on their toes a century ago, it was felt that the art of the ballet
had acquired a new "spirituality." With this new intensity, male
figures were excluded from ballet. The role of women had also
become fragmented with the advent of industrial specialism and the
explosion of home functions into laundries, bakeries, and hospitals
on the periphery of the community. Intensity or high definition
engenders
specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which
explains why any intense experience must be "forgotten,"
"censored," and reduced to a very cool state before it can be
"learned" or assimilated. The Freudian "censor" is less of a moral
function than an indispensable condition of learning. Were we to
accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of
awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-talces
and pressing panic buttons every minute. The "censor" protects our
centra] system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by
simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. For many
people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of psychic rigor
mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of
new technology.
An example of the disruptive impact of a hot technology succeeding
a cool one is given by Robert Theobald in The Rich and the Poor.
When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries,
their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had
not only been scarce but had always been a basic status symbol of
male importance. The missionaries provided quantities of sharp
steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had
even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male
dignity. A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses
quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform,
and repetitive kind. The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any
other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information, will
serve to fragment a tribal structure. Similarly, a very much greater
speedup, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a
tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the
introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a
result oi TV m America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The
nonspecia ist electric technology retribalizes. The process of upset
resulting from a new distribution of skills is accompanied
by much culture lag in which people feel compelled to look at
new situations as if they were old ones, and come up with ideas of
"population explosion" in an age of implosion. Newton, in an age of
clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a
clock. But poets like Blalce were far ahead of Newton in their
response to the challenge of the clock. Blake spoke of the need to
be delivered "from single vision and Newton's sleep," knowing very
well that Newton's response to the challenge of the new mechanism
was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge. Blake saw
Newton and Locke and others as hypnotized Narcissus types quite
unable to meet the challenge of mechanism. W B. Yeats gave the
full Blakean version of Newton and Locke in a famous epigram:
Locke sank into a swoon;
The garden died;
Cod took the spinning jenny Out of his side.
Yeats presents Locke, the philosopher of mechanical and lineal
associationism, as hypnotized by his own image. The "garden," or
unified consciousness, ended. Eighteenth-century man got an
extension of himself in the form of the spinning machine that Yeats
endows with its full sexual significance. Woman, herself, is thus
seen as a technological extension of man's being.
Blake's counterstrategy for his age was to meet mechanism with
organic myth. Today, deep in the electric age, organic myth is itself a
simple and automatic response capable of mathematical formulation
and expression, without any of the imaginative perception of Blake
about it. Had he encountered the electric age, Blake would not have
met its challenge with a mere repetition of electric form. For myth is
the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a
long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the
instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary
industrial and social
action today. We live mythically but continue to think frag-mentarily
and on single planes.
Scholars today are acutely aware of a discrepancy between their
ways of treating subjects and the subject itself. Scriptural scholars of
both the Old and New Testaments frequently say that while their
treatment must be linear, the subject is not. The subject treats of the
relations between God and man, and between God and the world,
and of the relations between man and his neighbor-- all these
subsist together, and act and react upon one another at the same
time. The Hebrew and Eastern mode of thought tackles problem and
resolution, at the outset of a discussion, in a way typical of oral
societies in general. The entire message is then traced and retraced,
again and again, on the rounds of a concentric spiral with seeming
redundancy. One can stop anywhere after the first few sentences
and have the full message, if one is prepared to "dig" it. This kind of
plan seems to have inspired Frank Lloyd Wright in designing the
Guggenheim Art Gallery on a spiral, concentric basis. It is a
redundant form inevitable to the electric age, in which the concentric
pattern is imposed by the instant quality, and overlay in depth, of
electric speed. But the concentric with its endless intersection of
planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight,
and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its i
meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other
media.
The new electric structuring and configuring of life more and more
encounters the old lineal and fragmentary procedures and tools of
analysis from the mechanical age. More and more we turn from the
content of messages to study total effect. Kenneth Boulding put this
matter in The Image by saying, "The meaning of a message is the
change which i, produces in the image." Concern with effect. rather
than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect
involves the total situation, and not a single level information
movement. Strangely, there is recognition of this
matter of effect rather than information in the British idea of libel:
"The greater the truth, the greater the libel."
The effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it
appears to create boredom. We have been through the three stages
of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion that occur in every disease or
stress of life, whether individual or collective. At least, our exhausted
slump after the first encounter with the electric has inclined us to
expect new problems. However, backward countries that have
experienced little permeation with our own mechanical and specialist
culture are much better able to confront and to understand electric
technology. Not only have backward and nonindustrial cultures no
specialist habits to overcome in their encounter with
electromagnetism, but they have still much of their traditional oral
culture that has the total, unified "field" character of our new
electromagnetism. Our old industrialized areas, having eroded their
oral traditions automatically, are in the position of having to
rediscover them in order to cope with the electric age.
In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are
cool, and we are hot. The "city slicker" is hot, and the rustic is cool.
But in terms of the reversal of procedures and values in the electric
age, the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are
cool. The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the
industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast,
the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.
The jazz of the period of the hot new media of movie and radio was
hot jazz. Yet jazz of itself tends to be a casual dialogue form of
dance quite lacking in the repetitive and mechanical forms of the
waltz. Cool jazz came in quite naturally after the first impact of radio
and movie had been absorbed.
In the special Russian issue of Life magazine for September 13.
1963, it is mentioned in Russian restaurants and night clubs,
"though the Charleston is tolerated, the Twist is taboo." All this
is to say that a country in the process of industrialization iss inclined
to regard hot jazz as consistent with its developing programs. The
cool and involved form of the Twist, on the other hand, would strike
such a culture at once as retrograde and incompatible with its new
mechanical stress. The Charleston, with its aspect of a mechanical
doll agitated by strings, appears in Russia as an avant-garde form.
We, on the other hand, find the avant-jarde in the cool and the
primitive, with its promise of depth involvement and integral
expression.
The "hard" sell and the "hot" line become mere comedy in the TV
age, and the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe
has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite
unacquainted with itself. America, in fact, would seem to be living
through the reverse process that Margaret Mead described in Time
magazine (September 4, 1954): "There are too many complaints
about society having to move too fast to keep up with the machine.
There is great advantage in moving fast if you move completely, if
social, educational, and recreational changes keep pace. You must
change the whole pattern at once and the whole group together 梐
nd the people themselves must decide to move."
Margaret Mead is thinking here of change as uniform speedup of
motion or a uniform hotting-up of temperatures in backward
societies. We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a
world automatically controlled to the point where we could say, "Six
hours less radio in Indonesia next week or there will be a great
falling off in literary attention." Or, "We can ! program twenty more
hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal
temperature raised by radio last week." Whole cultures could now be
programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way
that we have begun to know something about maintaining
equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world
In the merely personal and private sphere we are often
reminded of how changes of tone and attitude are demanded of
different times and seasons in order to keep situations in hand.
British clubmen, for the sake of companionship and amiability, have
long excluded the hot topics of religion and politics from mention
inside the highly participational club. In the same vein, W. H. Auden
wrote, "... this season the man of goodwill will wear his heart up his
sleeve, not on it. ... the honest manly style is today suited only to
Iago" (Introduction to John Betjeman's Slick But Not Streamlined). In
the Renaissance, as print technology hotted up the social milieu to a
very high point, the gentleman and the courtier (Hamlet 桵 ercutio
style) adopted, in contrast, the casual and cool nonchalance of the
playful and superior being. The Iago allusion of Auden reminds us
that Iago was the alter ego and assistant of the intensely earnest
and very non-nonchalant General Othello. In imitation of the earnest
and forthright general, Iago hotted up his own image and wore his
heart on his sleeve, until General Othello read him loud and clear as
"honest Iago," a man after his own grimly earnest heart.
Throughout The City in History, Lewis Mumford favors die cool or
casually structured towns over the hot and intensely filled-in cities.
The great period of Athens, he feels, was one during which most of
the democratic habits of village life and participation still obtained.
Then burst forth the full variety of human expression and exploration
such as was later impossible in highly developed urban centers, For
the highly developed situation is, by definition, low in opportunities of
participation, and rigorous in its demands of specialist fragmentation
from those who would control it. For example, what is known as "job
enlargement" today in business and in management consists in
allowing the employee more freedom to discover and define his
function. Likewise, in reading a detective story the reader participates
as co-author simply because so much has been left out of
the narrative. The open-mesh silk stocking is far more
sensuous than the smooth nylon, just because the eye must act as
hand in filling in and completing the image, exactly as in the mosaic
of the TV image.
Douglas Cater in The Fourth Branch of Government tells how the
men of the Washington press bureaus delighted to complete or fill in
the blank of Calvin Coolidge's personality. Because he was so like a
mere cartoon, they felt the urge to complete his image for him and
his public. It is instructive that the press applied the word "cool" to
Cal. In the very sense of a cool medium, Calvin Coolidge was so
lacking in any articulation of data in his public image that there was
only one word for him. He was real cool. In the hot 1920s, the hot
press medium found Cal very cool and rejoiced in his lack of image,
since it compelled the participation of the press in filling in an image
of him for the public. By contrast, F.D.R. was a hot press agent,
himself a rival of the newspaper medium and one who delighted in
scoring off the press on the rival hot medium of radio. Quite in
contrast, Jack Paar ran a cool show for the cool TV medium, and
became a rival for the patrons of the night spots and their allies in
the gossip columns. Jack Paar's war with the gossip columnists was
a weird example of clash between a hot and cold medium such as
had occurred with the "scandal of the rigged TV quiz shows." The
rivalry between the hot press and radio media, on one hand, and TV
on the other, for the hot ad buck, served to confuse and to overheat
the issues in the affair that pointlessly involved Charles van Doren.
An Associated Press story from Santa Monica, California, August 9,
1962, reported how
Nearly loo traffic violators watched a police traffic accident film today
to atone for their violations. Two had to be treated tor nausea and
shock.
Viewers were offered a $5.00 reduction in fines if they agreed to see
the movie, Signal 30, made by Ohio State police.
It showed twisted wreckage and mangled bodies and recorded the
screams of accident victims.
Whether the hot film medium using hot content would cool off the hot
drivers is a moot point. But it does concern any understanding of
media. The effect of hot media treatment cannot include much
empathy or participation at any time. In this connection an insurance
ad that featured Dad in an iron lung surrounded by a joyful family
group did more to strike terror into the reader than all the warning
wisdom in the world. It is a question that arises in connection with
capital punishment. Is a severe penalty the best deterrent to serious
crime? With regard to the bomb and the cold war, is the threat of
massive retaliation the most effective means to peace? Is it not
evident in every human situation that is pushed to a point of
saturation that some precipitation occurs? When all the available
resources and energies have been played up in an organism or in
any structure there is some kind of reversal of pattern. The spectacle
of brutality used as deterrent can brutalize. Brutality used in sports
may humanize under some conditions, at least. But with regard to
the bomb and retaliation as deterrent, it is obvious that numbness is
the result of any prolonged terror, a fact that was discovered when
the fallout shelter program was broached. The price of eternal
vigilance is indifference.
Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is
used in a hot or a cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or
nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in
England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or
low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as
entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as
the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world.
And as for the cool war and the hot bomb scare, the cultural strategy
that is desperately needed is humor and play. It is play
that cools off the hot situations of actual life by miming them.
Competitive sports between Russia and the West will hardly : serve
that purpose of relaxation. Such sports are inflammatory, it is plain.
And what we consider entertainment or fun in our media inevitably
appears as violent political agitation to a cool ; culture.
One way to spot the basic difference between hot and cold media
uses is to compare and contrast a broadcast of a symphony
performance with a broadcast of a symphony rehearsal. Two of the
finest shows ever released by the CBC were of Glenn Gould's
procedure in recording piano recitals, and Igor Stravinsky's
rehearsing the Toronto symphony in some of his new i work. A cool
medium like TV, when really used, demands this involvement in
process. The neat tight package is suited to hot J media, like radio
and gramophone. Francis Bacon never tired of contrasting hot and
cool prose. Writing in "methods" or complete packages, he
contrasted with writing in aphorisms, or single observations such as
"Revenge is a kind of wild justice." The passive consumer wants
packages, but those, he suggested, who are concerned in pursuing
knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just
because they are incomplete and require participation in depth.
The principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is perfectly
embodied in the folk wisdom: "Men seldom make passes at girls
who wear glasses." Glasses intensify the outward-going vision, and
fill in the feminine image exceedingly, Marion the Librarian
notwithstanding. Dark glasses, on the other hand, ere- ; ate the
inscrutable and inaccessible image that invites a great deal of
participation and completion.
Again, in a visual and highly literate culture, when we meet a person
for the first time his visual appearance dims out the sound of the
name, so that in self-defense we add- "How do you spell your
name?" Whereas, in an ear culture, the sound of a man’s name the
overwhelming fact, as Joyce knew when he
said in Finneoans Wake, "Who gave you that numb?" For the name
of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
Another vantage point from which to test the difference between hot
and cold media is the practical joke. The hot literary medium
excludes the practical and participant aspect of the joke so
completely that Constance Rourke, in her American Humor, considers
it as no joke at all. To literary people, the practical joke with its
total physical involvement is as distasteful as the pun that derails us
from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order.
Indeed, to the literary person who is quite unaware of the intensely
abstract nature of the typographic medium, it is the grosser and
participant forms of art that seem "hot," and the abstract and
intensely literary form that seems "cool." "You may perceive,
Madam," said Dr. Johnson, with a pugilistic smile, "that I am
well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity." And Dr. Johnson
was right in supposing that "well-bred" had come to mean a
white-shirted stress on attire that rivaled the rigor of the printed page.
"Comfort" consists in abandoning a visual arrangement in favor of
one that permits casual participation of the senses, a state that is
excluded when any one sense, but especially the visual sense, is
hotted up to the point of dominant command of a situation.
On the other hand, in experiments in which all outer sensation is
withdrawn, the subject begins a furious fill-in or completion of senses
that is sheer hallucination. So the hotting-up of one sense tends to
effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in
hallucination.
3
REVERSAL OF THE OVERHEATED MEDIUM
A headline for June 21, 1963, read:
WASHINGTON-MOSCOW HOT LINE TO OPEN IN 60 DAYS
The Times of London Service, Geneva: The agreement to
establish a direct communication link between Washington and
Moscow for emergencies was signed here yesterday by Charles
Stelle of the United States and Semyon Tsarapkin of the Soviet
Union.
The link, known as the hot line, will be opened within sixty days,
according to U.S. officials. It will make use of leased commercial
circuits, one cable and the other wireless, using teleprinter
equipment.
The decision to use the hot printed medium in place of the cool,
participational, telephone medium is unfortunate in the extreme. No
doubt the decision was prompted by the literary
bias of the West for the printed form, on the ground that it is more
impersonal than the telephone. The printed form has quite different
implications in Moscow from what it has in Washington. So with the
telephone. The Russians' love of this instrument, so congenial to
their oral traditions, is owing to the rich nonvisual involvement it
affords. The Russian uses the telephone for the sort of effects we
associate with the eager conversation of the lapel-gripper whose
face is twelve inches away.
Both telephone and teleprinter as amplifications of the unconscious
cultural bias of Moscow, on one hand, and of Washington, on the
other, are invitations to monstrous misunderstandings. The Russian
bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural. He is
outraged by our visual spying, however, finding this quite unnatural.
The principle that during the stages of their development all things
appear under forms opposite to those that they finally present is an
ancient doctrine. Interest in the power of things to reverse
themselves by evolution is evident in a great diversity of
observations, sage and jocular. Alexander Pope wrote
Vice is a monster of such frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
But seen too oft, familiar with its face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
A caterpillar gazing at the butterfly is supposed to have remarked.
"Waal, you'll never catch me in one of those durn things."
At another level we have seen in this century the changeover from
the debunking of traditional myths and legends to their reverent
study. As we begin to react in depth to the social life and problems of
our global village, we become reactionaries. Involvement that goes
with our instant technologies transforms the most "socially
conscious" people into conservatives. When
Sputnik had first gone into orbit a schoolteacher asked her
second-graders to write some verse of the subject. One child wrote:
The stars are so big,
The earth is so small, Stay as you are.
With man his knowledge and the process of obtaining knowledge
are of equal magnitude. Our ability to apprehend galaxies and
subatomic structures, as well, is a movement of faculties that include
and transcend them. The second-grader who wrote the words above
lives in a world much vaster than any which a scientist today has
instruments to measure, or concepts to describe. As W B. Yeats
wrote of this reversal, "The visible world is no longer a reality and the
unseen world is no longer a dream."
Associated with this transformation of the real world into science
fiction is the reversal now proceeding apace, by which the Western
world is going Eastern, even as the East goes Western. Joyce
encoded this reciprocal reverse in his cryptic phrase:
The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for
morn.
The title of his Finnegans Wake is a set of multi-leveled puns on the
reversal by which Western man enters his tribal, or Finn, cycle once
more, following the track of the old Finn, but wide awake this time as
we re-enter the tribal night. It is like our contemporary
consciousness of the Unconscious.
The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric
form reverses explosion into implosion. In our present electric age
the imploding or contracting energies of our world now clash with the
old expansionist and traditional patterns of
organization. Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social,
political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think
of it as "explosive," or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we
still talk about the population explosion and the explosion in learning.
In fact, it is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our
concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the
world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric
involvement in one another's lives. In education, likewise, it is not the
increase in numbers of those seeking to learn that creates the crisis.
Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an
interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the
curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental
sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties
under conditions of electric speed. Obsession with the older patterns
of mechanical, one-way expansion from centers to margins is no
longer relevant to our electric world. Electricity does not centralize,
but decentralizes. It is like the difference between a railway system
and an electric grid system: the one requires rail-heads and big
urban centers. Electric power, equally available in the farmhouse
and the Executive Suite, permits any place to be a center, and does
not require large aggregations. This reverse pattern appeared quite
early in electrical "labor-saving" devices, whether a toaster or
washing machine or vacuum cleaner. Instead of saving work, these
devices permit everybody to do his own work. What the nineteenth
century had delegated to servants and housemaids we now do for
ourselves. This principle applies in toto in the electric age. In politics,
it permits Castro to exist as independent nucleus or center. It would
permit Quebec to leave the Canadian union in a way quite
inconceivable under the regime of the railways. The railways require
a uniform political and economic space. On the other hand, airplane
and radio permit the utmost discontinuity and diversity in spatial
organization.
Today the great principle of classical physics and economics and
political science, namely that of the divisibility of each process, has
reversed itself by sheer extension into the unified field theory; and
automation in industry replaces the divisibility of process with the
organic interlacing of all functions in the com-plex. The electric tape
succeeds the assembly line.
In the new electric Age of Information and programmed production,
commodities themselves assume more and more the character of
information, although this trend appears mainly in the increasing
advertising budget. Significantly, it is those com- modities that are
most used in social communication, cigarettes, cosmetics, and soap
(cosmetic removers) that bear much of the burden of the upkeep of
the media in general. As electric information levels rise, almost any
kind of material will serve any kind of need or function, forcing the
intellectual more and more into the role of social command and into
the service of production.
It was Julien Benda's Great Betrayal that helped to clarify the new
situation in which the intellectual suddenly holds the whip hand in
society. Benda saw that the artists and intellectuals who had long
been alienated from power, and who since Voltaire had been in
opposition, had now been drafted for service in the highest echelons
of decision-making. Their great betrayal was that they had
surrendered their autonomy and had become the flunkies of power,
as the atomic physicist at the present moment is the flunky of the
war lords.
Had Benda known his history, he would have been less angry and
less surprised. For it has always been the role of intelligentsia to act
as liaison and as mediators between old and new power groups.
Most familiar of such groups is the case of the Greek slaves, who
were for long the educators and confidential clerks of the Roman
power. And it is precisely this servile role of the confidential clerk to
the tycoon –commerce, military, or political -- that the educator
has continued to play in the Western
world until the present moment. In England "the Angries" were a
group of such clerks who had suddenly emerged from the lower
echelons by the educational escape hatch. As they emerged into the
upper world of power, they found that the air was not at all fresh or
bracing. But they lost their nerve even quicker than Bernard Shaw
lost his. Like Shaw, they quickly settled down to whimsy and to the
cultivation of entertainment values.
In his Study of History, Toynbee notes a great many reversals of
form and dynamic, as when, in the middle of the fourth century A.D.,
the Germans in the Roman service began abruptly to be proud of
their tribal names and to retain them. Such a moment marked new
confidence born of saturation with Roman values, and it was a
moment marked by the complementary Roman swing toward
primitive values. (As Americans saturate with European values,
especially since TV, they begin to insist upon American coach lamps,
hitching posts, and colonial kitchen-ware as cultural objects.) Just as
the barbarians got to the top of the Roman social ladder, the
Romans themselves were disposed to assume the dress and
manners of tribesmen out of the same frivolous and snobbish spirit
that attached the French court of Louis XVI to the world of
shepherds and shepherdesses. It would have seemed a natural
moment for the intellectuals to have taken over while the governing
class was touring Disneyland, as it were. So it must have appeared
to Marx and his followers. But they reckoned without understanding
die dynamics of the new media of communication. Marx based his
analysis most untimely on the machine, just as the telegraph and
other implosive forms began to reverse the mechanical dynamic.
The present chapter is concerned with showing that in any medium
or structure there is what Kenneth Boulding calls a "break boundary
at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some
point of no return in its dynamic processes." Several such "break
boundaries" will be discussed
later including the one from stasis to motion, and from the
mechanical to the organic in the pictorial world. One effect of the
static photo had been to suppress the conspicuous consumption of
the rich, but the effect of the speed-up of the photo had been to
provide fantasy riches for the poor of the entire globe.
Today the road beyond its break boundary turns cities into highways,
and the highway proper takes on a continuous urban character.
Another characteristic reversal after passing a road break boundary
is that the country ceases to be the center of all work, and the city
ceases to be the center of leisure. In fact, improved roads and
transport have reversed the ancient pattern and made cities the
centers of work and the country the place of leisure and of
recreation.
Earlier, the increase of traffic that came with money and roads had
ended the static tribal state (as Toynbee calls the nomadic
food-gathering culture). Typical of the reversing that occurs at break
boundaries is the paradox that nomadic mobile man, the hunter and
food-gatherer, is socially static. On the other hand, sedentary,
specialist man is dynamic, explosive, progressive. The new
magnetic or world city will be static and iconic or inclusive. In the
ancient world the intuitive awareness of break boundaries as points
of reversal and of no return was embodied in the Greek idea of
hubris, which Toynbee presents in his Study of History, under the
head of "The Nemesis of Creativity" and "The Reversal of
Roles." The Greek dramatists presented the idea of creativity as
creating, also, its own kind of blindness, as in the case of Oedipus
Rex, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx. It was as if the Greeks felt
that the penalty for one break-through was a general sealing-off of
awareness to the total field. In a Chinese work-The Way and Its
Power (A. Waley translation)--there is a series of instances of the
overheated medium, the overextended man or culture, and the
peripety or reversal that inevitably
He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm;
He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest...
He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing;
He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures.
One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the
cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print
with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the
talkies). Today with microfilm and micro-cards, not to mention
electric memories, the printed word assumes again much of the
handicraft character of a manuscript. But printing from movable type
was, itself, the major break boundary in the history of phonetic
literacy, just as the phonetic alphabet had been the break boundary
between tribal and individualist man.
The endless reversals or break boundaries passed in the interplay of
the structures of bureaucracy and enterprise include the point at
which individuals began to be held responsible and accountable for
their "private actions." That was the moment of the collapse of tribal
collective authority. Centuries later, when further explosion and
expansion had exhausted the powers of private action, corporate
enterprise invented the idea of Public Debt, making the individual
privately accountable for group action.
As the nineteenth century heated up the mechanical and dissociative
procedures of technical fragmentation, the entire attention
of men turned to the associative and the corporate. In the first great
age of the substitution of machine for human toil Carlyle and the
Pre-Raphaelites promulgated the doctrine of Work as a mystical
social communion, and millionaires like Ruskin and Morris toiled like
navvies for esthetic reasons. Marx was an impressionable recipient
of these doctrines. Most bizarre of all the reversals in the great
Victorian age of mechanization and high moral tone is the
counter-strategy of Lewis Carroll and
Edward Lear, whose nonsense has proved exceedingly durable.
While the Lord Cardigans were taking their blood baths in the Valley
of Death, Gilbert and Sullivan were announcing that the boundary
break had been passed.
4
THE GADGET LOVER
Narcissus as Narcosis
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of
human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the
Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook
his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of
himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the
servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The
nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech,
but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of
himself and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become
fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than
themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall
deepest in love with women who give them back their own image.
Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not
convey any idea that Narcissus fell in
love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have
had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an
extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias
of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we
have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love
with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!
Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of
ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers
like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of
ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain
equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as
"autoamputation," and they find that the autoamputative power or
strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power
cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has
many expressions that indicate this self-amputation that is imposed
by various pressures. We speak of "wanting to jump out of my skin"
or of "going out of my mind," being "driven batty" or "flipping my lid."
And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and
stresses of real life under controlled conditions of sport and play.
While it was no part of the intention of Jonas and Selye to provide an
explanation of human invention and technology, they have given us
a theory of disease (discomfort) that goes far to explain why man is
impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of
autoamputation. In the physical stress of superstimulation of various
kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy
of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function.
Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of
pace and increase of load. For example, in the case of the wheel as
an extension of the toot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from
the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was
the immediate occasion of the extension or "amputation" of this
function from
our bodies. The wheel as a counter-irritant to increased burdens, in
turn, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a
separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation). Such amplification
is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or
blocking of perception. This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The
young man's image is a self-amputation or extension induced by
irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a
generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition.
Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.
The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on
the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the
media of communication from speech to computer.
Physiologically, the central nervous system, that electric network
that coordinates the various media of our senses, plays the chief
role. Whatever threatens its function must be contained, localized, or
cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function
of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the
central nervous system, is to act as buffers against sudden
variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment.
Sudden social failure or shame is a shock that some may "take to
heart" or that may cause muscular disturbance in general, signaling
for the person to withdraw from the threatening situation.
Therapy, whether physical or social, is a counter-irritant that aids in
that equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central
nervous system. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant (e.g., sports,
entertainment, and alcohol), comfort is the removal of irritants. Both
pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibrium for the central
nervous system.
With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside
himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the
degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate
and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous
system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be
protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous
mechanism. It could well be that the successive mechanizations of
the various physical organs since the invention of printing have
made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the
central nervous system to endure.
In relation to that only too plausible cause of such development, we
can return to the Narcissus theme. For if Narcissus is numbed by his
self-amputated image, there is a very good reason for the numbness.
There is a close parallel of response between the patterns of
physical and psychic trauma or shock. A person suddenly deprived
of loved ones and a person who drops a few feet unexpectedly will
both register shock. Both the loss of family and a physical fall are
extreme instances of amputations of the self. Shock induces a
generalized numbness or an increased threshold to all types of
perception. The victim seems immune to pain or sense.
Battle shock created by violent noise has been adapted for dental
use in the device known as audiac. The patient puts on headphones
and turns a dial raising the noise level to the point that he feels no
pain from the drill. The selection of a single sense for intense
stimulus, or of a single extended, isolated, or "amputated" sense in
technology, is in part the reason for the numbing effect that
technology as such has on its makers and users. For the central
nervous system rallies a response of general numbness to the
challenge of specialized irritation.
The person who falls suddenly experiences immunity to all pain or
sensory stimuli because the central nervous system has to be
protected from any intense thrust of sensation. Only gradually does
he regain normal sensitivity to sights and sounds, at which time he
may begin to tremble and perspire and to react as he would have
done if the central nervous system had been prepared in advance
for the fall that occurred unexpectedly. Depending on which sense or
faculty is extended
technologically, or "autoamputated," the "closure" or
equilibrium-seeking among the other senses is fairly predictable. It is
with the senses as it is with color. Sensation is always 100 per cent,
and a color is always 100 per cent color. But the ratio among the
components in the sensation or the color can differ infinitely. Yet if
sound, for example, is intensified, touch and taste and sight are
affected at once. The effect of radio on literate or visual man was to
reawaken his tribal memories, and the effect of sound added to
motion pictures was to diminish the role of mime, tactility, and
kinesthesis. Similarly, when nomadic man turned to sedentary and
specialist ways, the senses specialized too. The development of
writing and the visual organization of life made possible the
discovery of individualism, introspection and so on. Any invention or
technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies,
and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums
among the other organs and extensions of the body. There is, for
example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or
sense "closure" evoked by the TV image. But the effect of the entry
of the TV image will vary from culture to culture in accordance with
the existing sense ratios in each culture. In audile-tactile Europe TV
has intensified the visual sense, spurring them toward American
styles of packaging and dressing. In America, the intensely visual
culture, TV has opened the doors of audile-tactile perception to the
non-visual world of spoken languages and food and the plastic arts.
As an extension and expediter of the sense life, any medium at once
affects the entire field of the senses, as the Psalmist explained long
ago in the 113th Psalm:
Their idols are silver and gold,
The work of men's hands.
They have mouths, but they speak not;
Eyes they have, but they see not;
They have ears, but they hear not;
Noses have they, but they smell not;
They have hands, but they handle not;
Feet have they, but they walk not;
Neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them shall be like unto them;
Yea, every one that trusteth in them.
The concept of "idol" for the Hebrew Psalmist is much like that of
Narcissus for the Greek mythmaker. And the Psalmist i insists that
the beholding of idols, or the use of technology, conforms men to
them. "They that make them shall be like unto them." This is a
simple fact of sense "closure." The poet Blake! developed the
Psalmist's ideas into an entire theory of communication and social
change, It is in his long poem of Jerusalem that he explains why
men have become what they have beheld What they have, says
Blake, is "the spectre of the Reasoning Power in Man" that has
become fragmented and "separated from Imagination and enclosing
itself as in steel." Blake, in a word, sees man as fragmented by his
technologies. But he insists that these technologies are
self-amputations of our own organs. When so amputated, each
organ becomes a closed system of great new intensity that hurls
man into "martyrdoms and wars." Moreover, Blake announces as his
theme in Jerusalem the organs of perception:
If Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary: If
Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also.
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in
tech-nological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or
to read the primed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves
into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement
of perception that follows automatically. It is this
continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that
puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness
in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing
technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms.
That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these
extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the
servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the
executive of his clock.
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his
variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn
finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as
it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant
world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The
machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and
desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of
motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to
the motorcar.
Socially, it is the accumulation of group pressures and irritations that
prompt invention and innovation as counter-irritants. War and the
fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to
technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his
The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of
our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the
preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological
period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios
to accommodate the impact of the invading culture. It is from such
intensive hybrid exchange and strife of ideas and forms that the
greatest social energies are released, and from which arise the
greatest technologies. Buckminster Fuller estimates that since 1910
the governments of the world have spent 31/2 trillion dollars on
airplanes. That is 62 times the existing gold supply of the world.
The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology,
as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system
when it is extended and exposed, or we will die.
Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the
unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of
consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central
nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious
awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so
that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an
extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have
happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total
field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private
and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we
have "social consciousness" presented to us as a cause of
guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather
than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the
bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the
electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.
5
HYBRID ENERGY
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
"For most of our lifetime civil war has been raging in the world of art
and entertainment. . . . Moving pictures, gramophone records, radio,
talking pictures. ..." This is the view of Donald McWhinnie, analyst of
the radio medium. Most of this civil war affects us in the depths of
our psychic lives, as well, since the war is conducted by forces that
are extensions and amplifications of our own beings. Indeed, the
interplay among media is only another name for this civil war" that
rages in our society and our psyches alike. "To the blind all things
are sudden," it has been said. The crossings or hybridizations of the
media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion.
There need be no blindness in these matters once we have been
notified that there is anything to observe.
It has now been explained that media, or the extensions of man, are
"make happen" agents, but not "make aware" agents.
The hybridizing or compounding of these agents offers an especially
favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and
properties. "As the silent film cried out for sound so does the sound
film cry out for color," wrote Sergei Eisenstein in his Notes of a Film
Director. This type of observation can be extended systematically to
all media: "As the printing press cried out for nationalism, so did the
radio cry out for tribalism" These media, being extensions of
ourselves, also depend upon us for their interplay and their evolution.
The fact that they do interact and spawn new progeny has been a
source of wonder over the ages. It need baffle us no longer if we
trouble to scrutinize their action. We can, if we choose, think things
out before we put them out.
Plato, in all his striving to imagine an ideal training school, failed to
notice that Athens was a greater school than any university even he
could dream up. In other words, the greatest school had been put
out for human use before it has been thought out. Now, this is
especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are
thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the
possibility of their being thought of at all.
Everybody notices how coal and steel and cars affect the
arrangements of daily existence. In our time, study has finally turned
to the medium of language itself as shaping the arrangements of
daily life, so that society begins to look like a linguistic echo or repeat
of language norms, a fact that has disturbed the Russian Communist
party very deeply. Wedded as they are to nineteenth-century
industrial technology as the basis of class liberation, nothing could
be more subversive of the Marxian dialectic than the idea that
linguistic media shape social development, as much as do the
means of production.
In fact, of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of
energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate
and oral cultures. The giving to man of an eye for an ear
by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most
radical explosion mat can occur in any social structure. This
explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in "backward areas," we
call Westernization. With literacy now about to hybridize the cultures
of the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans, we are about to
experience such a release of human power and aggressive violence
as makes the previous history of phonetic alphabet technology seem
quite tame.
That is only the East side story, for the electric implosion now brings
oral and tribal ear-culture to the literate West. Not only does the
visual, specialist, and fragmented Westerner have now to live in
closest daily association with all the ancient oral cultures of the earth,
but his own electric technology now begins to translate the visual or
eye man back into the tribal and oral pattern with its seamless web
of kinship and interdependence.
We know from our own past the kind of energy that is released, as
by fission, when literacy explodes the tribal or family unit. What do
we know about the social and psychic energies that develop by
electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly
gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new
Common Market pressure in Europe? Make no mistake, the fusion
of people who have known individualism and nationalism is not the
same process as the fission of "backward" and oral cultures that are
just coming to individualism and nationalism. It is the difference
between the "A" bomb and the "H" bomb. The latter is more violent,
by far. Moreover, the products of electric fusion are immensely
complex, while the products of fission are simple. Literacy creates
very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the
complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented
man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies
are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or
visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes. The oral man's
inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings
that the Western practical man has long ago eroded or sup-pressed
within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality.
The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man
encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his
steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured
person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest
of human society. Representatives of the older Western
individualism are even now assuming the appearance, for good or ill,
of Al Capp's General Bull Moose or of the John Birchers, tribally
dedicated to opposing the tribal. Fragmented, literate, and visual
individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and
imploded society. So what is to be done? Do we dare to confront
such facts at the conscious level, or is it best to becloud and repress
such matters until some violence releases us from the entire burden?
For the fate of implosion and interdependence is more terrible for
Western man than the fate of explosion and independence for tribal
man. It may be merely temperament in my own case, but I find some
easing of the burden in just understanding and clarifying the issues.
On the other hand, since consciousness and awareness seem to be
a human privilege, may it not be desirable to extend this condition to
our hidden conflicts, both private and social?
The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the
conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to
which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these
conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. Let us now note a few
of the effects of media hybrids, or of the interpenetration of one
medium by another.
Life at the Pentagon has been greatly complicated by jet travel, or
example. Every few minutes an assembly gong rings to summon
many specialists from their desks to hear a personal report from an
expert from some remote part of the world Meantime, the undone
paper work mounts on each desk. And
each department daily dispatches personnel by jet to remote areas
for more data and reports. Such is the speed of this process of the
meeting of the jet plane, the oral report, and the typewriter that those
going forth to the ends of the earth often arrive unable to spell the
name of the spot to which they have been sent as experts. Lewis
Carroll pointed out that as large-scale maps got more and more
detailed and extensive, they would tend to blanket agriculture and
rouse the protest of farmers. So why not use the actual earth as a
map of itself? We have reached a similar point of data gathering
when each stick of chewing gum we reach for is acutely noted by
some computer that translates our least gesture into a new
probability curve or some parameter of social science. Our private
and corporate lives have become information processes just
because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in
electric technology. That is the key to Professor Boorstin's
bewilderment in The Image, or What Happened to the American
Dream.
The electric light ended the regime of night and day, of indoors and
out-of-doors. But it is when the light encounters already existing
patterns of human organization mat the hybrid energy is released.
Cars can travel all night, ball players can play all night, and windows
can be left out of buildings. In a word, the message of the electric
light is total change. It is pure information without any content to
restrict its transforming and informing power.
If the student of media will but meditate on the power of this medium
of electric light to transform every structure of time and space and
work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key
to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that
they touch. Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one
acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.
It is a peculiar bias of those who operate media for the owners that
they be concerned about the program content of radio, or
press, or film. The owners themselves are concerned more about
the media as such, and are not inclined to go beyond "what the
public wants" or some vague formula. Owners are aware of the
media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with
"content" or the media within the media.
When the press opened up the "human interest" keyboard after the
telegraph had restructured the press medium, the newspaper killed
the theater, just as TV hit the movies and the night dubs very hard.
George Bernard Shaw had the wit and imagination to fight back. He
put the press into the theater,! taking over the controversies and the
human interest world of the press for the stage, as Dickens had
done for the novel. The movie took over the novel and the
newspaper and the stage, all at once. Then TV pervaded the movie
and gave the theater-in-the-round back to the public.
What I am saying is that media as extensions of our senses institute
new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among
themselves, when they interact among themselves. Radio changed
the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in the
talkies. TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the
form of the thing or documentary novel. It is the poets and painters
who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. Radio and
gramophone and tape recorder gave us back the poet's voice as an
important dimension of the poetic experience. Words became a kind
of painting with light, again. But TV, with its deep-participation mode,
caused young poets suddenly to present their poems in cafes, in
public parks, anywhere. After TV, they suddenly felt the need for
personal contact with their public. (In print-oriented Toronto,
poetry-reading in the public parks is a public offense. Religion Pities
are permitted, but not poetry as many young poets recently
discovered.)
John O'Hara, the novelist, wrote in The New York Times Boot
Review of November 27, 1955.
You get a great satisfaction from a book. You know your reader is
captive inside those covers, but as novelist you have to imagine the
satisfaction he's getting. Now, in the theater well, I used to drop in
during both productions of Pal Joey and watch, not imagine, the
people enjoy it. I'd willingly start my next novel-- about a small
town--right now, but I need the diversion of a play.
In our age artists are able to mix their media diet as easily as their
book diet. A poet like Yeats made the fullest use of oral peasant
culture in creating his literary effects. Quite early, Eliot made a great
impact by the careful use of jazz and film form. The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock gets much of its power from an inter-penetration of
film form and jazz idiom. But this mix reached its greatest power in
The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. Prufrock uses not only
film form but the film theme of Charlie Chaplin, as did James Joyce
in Ulysses. Joyce's Bloom is a deliberate takeover from Chaplin
("Chorney Choplain," as he called him in Finnegans Wake). And
Chaplin, just as Chopin had adapted the pianoforte to the style of the
ballet, hit upon the wondrous media mix of ballet and film in
developing his Pavlova-like alternation of ecstasy and waddle. He
adopted the classical steps of ballet to a movie mime that converged
exactly the right blend of the lyric and the ironic that is found also in
Prufrock and Ulysses. Artists in various fields are always the first to
discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power
of another. In a simpler form, it is the technique employed by
Charles Boyer in his kind of French-English blend of urbane, throaty
delirium.
The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of
expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and
narrative plane of the printed word. The advent of electric media
released art from this straitjacket at once, creating the world of Paul
Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James
Joyce.
A headline in The New York Times Rook Review (September 16.
1962) trills: There's Nothing Like a Best Seller to Set Hollywood
a-Tingle.
Of course, nowadays, movie stars can only be lured from the
beaches or science-fiction or some self-improvement course by the
cultural lure of a role in a famous book. That is the way that the
interplay of media now affects many in the movie colony. They have
no more understanding of their media problems than does Madison
Avenue. But from the point of view of the owners of the film and
related media, the best seller is a form of insurance that some
massive new gestalt or pattern has been isolated in the public
psyche. It is an oil strike or a gold mine that can be depended on to
yield a fair amount of boodle to the careful and canny processer.
Hollywood bankers, that is, are smarter than literary historians, for
the latter despise popular taste except when it has been filtered
down from lecture course to literary handbook.
Lillian Ross in Picture wrote a snide account of the filming of The
Red Bodge of Courage. She got a good deal of easy kudos for a
foolish book about a great film by simply assuming the superiority of
the literary medium to the film medium. Her book got much attention
as a hybrid.
Agatha Christie wrote far above her usual good level in a group of
twelve short stories about Hercule Poirot, called The Labours of
Hercules. By adjusting the classical themes to make reasonable
modern parallels, she was able to lift the detective form to
extraordinary intensity.
Such was, also, the method of James Joyce in Dubliners and
Ulysses, when the precise classical parallels created the true hybrid
energy. Baudelaire, said Mr. Eliot, "taught us how to raise the
imagery of common life to first intensity." It is done, not by any direct
heave-ho of poetic strength, but by a simple adjustment of situations
from one culture in hybrid form with those of mother. It is precisely in
this way that during wars and
migrations new cultural mix is the norm of ordinary daily life.
Operations Research programs the hybrid principle as a technique
of creative discovery.
When the movie scenario or picture story was applied to the idea
article, the magazine world had discovered a hybrid that ended the
supremacy of the short story. When wheels were put in tandem form,
the wheel principle combined with the lineal typographic principle to
create aerodynamic balance. The wheel crossed with industrial,
lineal form released the new form of the airplane.
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and
revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two
media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of
the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a
moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and
numbness imposed by them on our senses.
6
MEDIA AS TRANSLATORS
The tendency of neurotic children to lose neurotic traits when
telephoning has been a puzzle to psychiatrists. Some stutterers lose
their stutter when they switch to a foreign language. That
technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into
another mode has been expressed by Lyman Bryson in the phrase
"technology is explicitness." Translation is thus a 'spelling-out"
of forms of knowing. What we call "mechanization ' is a translation of
nature, and of our own natures, into amplified and specialized forms.
Thus the quip in Finnegans Wake, “What bird has done yesterday
man may do next year," is a strictly literal observation of the courses
of technology. The Power of technology as dependent on alternately
grasping and letting go in order to enlarge the scope of action has
been observed as the power of the higher arboreal apes as
compared with those that are on the ground. Elias Canetti made the
proper association of this power of the higher apes to grasp and let
go, with the strategy of the stock market speculators. It is all
capsulated in the popular variant on Robert Browning: "A man's
reach
must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor." All media are active
metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to
let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are
a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total
environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex
systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into
our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness.
By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal
symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.
In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and
more into the form of information, moving toward the technological
extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that
we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can
translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression
that exceed ourselves. Man is a form of expression who is
traditionally expected to repeat himself and to echo the praise of his
Creator. "Prayer," said George Herbert, "is reversed thunder." Man
has the power to reverberate the Divine thunder, by verbal
translation.
By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems,
by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all
previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet
and teeth and bodily heat-controls--all such extensions of our bodies,
including cities--will be translated into information systems.
Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and
quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears
its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must
serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic
fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography,
and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this
difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary,
and the electric is
total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as
necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however,
it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for
speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this
side of the light barrier.
Just as when information levels rise in physics and chemistry, it is
possible to use anything for fuel or fabric or building material, so with
electric technology all solid goods can be summoned to appear as
solid commodities by means of information circuits set up in the
organic patterns that we call "automation" and information retrieval.
Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes
learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an
"economy" (the Greek word for a household), this means that all
forms of employment become "paid learning," and all forms of
wealth result from the movement of information. The problem of
discovering occupations or employment may prove as difficult as
wealth is easy.
The long revolution by which men have sought to translate nature
into art we have long referred to as "applied knowledge." "Applied"
means translated or carried across from one kind of material form
into another. For those who care to consider this amazing process of
applied knowledge in Western civilization, Shakespeare's As You
Like It provides a good deal to think about. His forest of Arden is just
such a golden world of translated benefits and joblessness as we
are now entering via the gate of electric automation.
It is no more than one would expect that Shakespeare should nave
understood the Forest of Arden as an advance model of the age of
automation when all things are translatable into anything else that is
desired:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.
AMIENS!
Happy is your Grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
(As You Like It, II, i. 15-21)
Shakespeare speaks of a world into which, by programming, as it
were one can play back the materials of the natural world in a variety
of levels and intensities of style. We are close to doing just this on a
massive scale at the present time electronically. Here is the image of
the golden age as one of complete metamorphoses or translations
of nature into human art, that stands ready of access to our electric
age. The poet Stephane Mallarme thought "the world exists to end in
a book." We are now in a position to go beyond that and to transfer
the entire show to the memory of a computer. For man, as Julian
Huxley observes, unlike merely biological creatures, possesses an
apparatus of transmission and transformation based on his power to
store experience. And his power to store, as in a language itself, is
also a means of transformation of experience:
"Those pearls that were his eyes."
Our dilemma may become like that of the listener who phoned the
radio station: "Are you the station that gives twice as much weather?
Well, turn it off. I'm drowning." Or we might return to the state of
tribal man, for whom magic rituals are his means of "applied
knowledge." Instead of translating nature into art, the native
nonliterate attempts to invest nature with spiritual energy.
Perhaps there is a key to some of these problems in the Freudian
idea that when we fail to translate some natural event
or experience into conscious art we "repress" it. It is ^ mechanism
that also serves to numb us in the presence of those extensions of
ourselves that are the media studied in this book. For just as a
metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media.
When we say, "I'll take a rain-check on that," We translate a social
invitation into a sporting event, stepping up the conventional regret
to an image of spontaneous disappointment: "Your invitation is not
just one of those casual gestures that 1 must brush off. It makes me
feel all the frustration of an interrupted ball game that I can't get with
it." As in all metaphors, there are complex ratios among four parts:
"Your invitation is to ordinary invitations as ball games are to
conventional social life. It is in this way that by seeing one set of
relations through another set that we store and amplify experience in
such forms as money. For money is also a metaphor. And all media
as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision
and awareness. "It is an excellent invention," Bacon says, "that Pan
or the world is said to make choice of Echo only (above all other
speeches or voices) for his wife, for that alone is true philosophy
which doth faithfully render the very words of the world ..."
Today Mark II stands by to render the masterpieces of literature from
any language into any other language, giving as follows, the words
of a Russian critic of Tolstoy about "War and World (peace…But
nonetheless culture not stands) costs on
place. Something translate. Something print." (Boorstin, 141)
Our very word "grasp" or "apprehension" points to the process of
getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many
facets at a time through more than one sense at a time. It begins to
be evident that "touch" is not skin but the interplay of the senses,
and the “keep in touch” and “getting in touch” is a matter of fruitful
meeting of senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into
movement, and taste and smell. The “common sense” was for many
centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one
kind of experience
of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result
nntinuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a
unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark four
rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again For
it is now possible to program ratios among the senses that approach
the condition of consciousness. Yet such a condition would
necessarily be an extension of our own consciousness as much as
wheel is an extension of feet in rotation. Having extended or
translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic
technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to
the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to
program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor
distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that
beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own
gimmickry.
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a
more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might
not our current translation of our entire lives into die spiritual form of
information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human
family, a single consciousness?
7
CHALLENGE AND COLLAPSE
The Nemesis of Creativity
It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the
twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgment. A.
N. Whitehead, on the other hand, explained how the great discovery
of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of
discovery. Namely, the technique of starting with the thing to be
discovered and working back, step by step, as on an assembly line,
to the point at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the
desired object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then
inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that
effect and no other.
But the "technique of the suspended judgment" goes further. It
anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood on an adult, and
offsets the effect before it happens. In psychiatry, it is the technique
of total permissiveness extended as an anesthetic
for the mind, while various adhesions and moral effects of false
judgments are systematically eliminated.
This is a very different thing from the numbing or narcotic effect of
new technology that lulls attention while the new form slams the
gates of judgment and perception. For massive social surgery is
needed to insert new technology into the group mind, and this is
achieved by the built-in numbing apparatus discussed earlier Now
the "technique of the suspended judgment" presents the possibility
of rejecting the narcotic and of postponing indefinitely the operation
of inserting the new technology in the social psyche. A new stasis is
in prospect.
Werner Heisenberg, in The Physicist's Conception of Nature, is an
example of the new quantum physicist whose over-all awareness of
forms suggests to him that we would do well to stand aside from
most of them. He points out that technical change alters not only
habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation, citing with
approval the outlook of the Chinese sage:
AsTzu-Gung was traveling through the regions north of the river
Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He
had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into a well,
fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the
ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to
be very meager.
Tzu-Gung said, "There is a way whereby you can irrigate a
hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with
little effort. Would you not like to hear of it?"
Then the gardener stood up, looked at him and said, "And what
would that be?"
Tsu-Gung replied, "You take a wooden lever, weighted at the
back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so
quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well."
Then anger rose up in the old man's face, and he said, "I have
heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all
his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine
grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a
machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his
simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul.
Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does
not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such
things; I am ashamed to use them."
Perhaps the most interesting point about this anecdote is that it
appeals to a modern physicist. It would not have appealed to
Newton or to Adam Smith, for they were great experts and advocates
of the fragmentary and the specialist approaches. It is by
means quite in accord with the outlook of the Chinese sage that
Hans Selye works at his "stress" idea of illness. In the 1920s he had
been baffled at why physicians always seemed to concentrate on
the recognition of individual diseases and specific remedies for such
isolated causes, while never paying any attention to the "syndrome
of just being sick." Those who are concerned with the program
"content" of media and not with the medium proper, appear to be in
the position of physicians who ignore the "syndrome of just being
sick." Hans Selye, in tackling a total, inclusive approach to the field
of sickness, began what Adolphe Jonas has continued in Irritation
and Counter-Irritation; namely, a quest for the response to injury as
such, or to novel impact of any kind. Today we have anesthetics that
enable us to perform the most frightful physical operations on one
another.
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend
ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social
body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are
needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the
operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a
new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The
area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is
changed. The effect of radio is visual.
fleet of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios
among all the senses. What we seek today is either a means of
controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios of the psychic and social
outlook, or a means of avoiding them altogether. To have a
disease without its symptoms is to be immune. No society has ever
known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its
new extensions or technologies. Today we have begunto sense that
art may be able to provide such immunity.
In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious
adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new
extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. The
artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge
decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds
models or Noah's arks for facing the change that is at hand. "The
war of 1870 need never have been fought had people read my
Sentimental Education," said Gustave Flaubert.
It is this aspect of new art that Kenneth Galbraith recommends to the
careful study of businessmen who want to stay in business. For in
the electric age there is no longer any sense in talking about the
artist's being ahead of his time. Our technology is, also, ahead of its
time, if we reckon by the ability to recognize it for what it is. To
prevent undue wreckage in society, the artist tends now to move
from the ivory tower to the control tower of society. Just as higher
education is no longer a frill or luxury but a stark need of production
and operational design in the electric age, so the artist is
indispensable in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the
life of forms, and structures created by electric technology.
The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably
muttered cliches about the impracticality of artists and their fanciful
preferences. But in the past century it has come generally
acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis. "The artist is
always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future
because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present."
Knowledge of this simple fact is now needed for human survival. The
ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of
any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old.
Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot
sidestep the new violence, to recognize their need of the artist. To
reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of
ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for
survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic,
who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in
his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
The artist can correct the sense ratios before the blow of new
technology has numbed conscious procedures. He can correct diem
before numbness and subliminal groping and reaction begin. If this
is true, how is it possible to present the matter to those who are in a
position to do something about it? If there were even a remote
likelihood of this analysis being true, it would warrant a global
armistice and period of stock-taking. If it is true that the artist
possesses the means of anticipating and avoiding the
consequences of technological trauma, then what are we to think of
the world and bureaucracy of "art appreciation"? Would it not seem
suddenly to be a conspiracy to make die artist a frill, a fribble, or a
MUltown? If men were able to be convinced that art is precise
advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social
consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?
Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social
navigation charts? 1 am curious to know what would happen if art
were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how
to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from
our own extended faculties. Would we, then, cease to look at works
of art as an explorer might regard the gold and gems used as the
ornaments of simple nonliterates?
At any rate, in experimental art, men are given the exact
specifications of 'coming violence to their own psyches from their
own counter-irritants or technology. For those parts of ourselves that
we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to counter or
neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter-irritant
usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug
habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to "ride with the
punch," instead of "taking it on the chin " It can only be repeated that
human history is a record of "taking it on the chin."
Emile Durkheim long ago expressed the idea that the specialized
task always escaped the action of the social conscience. In this
regard, it would appear that the artist is the social conscience and is
treated accordingly! "We have no art," say the Balinese; "we do
everything as well as possible."
The modern metropolis is now sprawling helplessly after the impact
of the motorcar. As a response to the challenge of railway speeds
die suburb and the garden city arrived too late, or just in time to
become a motorcar disaster. For an arrangement of functions
adjusted to one set of intensities becomes unbearable at another
intensity. And a technological extension of our bodies designed to
alleviate physical stress can bring on psychic stress that may be
much worse. Western specialist technology transferred to the Arab
world in late Roman times released a furious discharge of tribal
energy.
The somewhat devious means of diagnosis that have to be used to
pin down the actual form and impact of a new medium are not unlike
those indicated in detective fiction by Peter Cheyney.
In You Cant's Keep the Change (Collins, London, 1956) he wrote:
A case to Callaghan was merely a collection of people, some of
whom -- all of whom -- were giving incorrect information, or
telling lies, because circumstances either forced them or led
them into the process.
But the fact that they had to tell lies; had to give false
impres-sions, necessitated a reorientation of their own
viewpoints and their own lives. Sooner or later they became
exhausted or careless. Then, and not until then, was an
investigator able to put his finger on the one fact that would lead
him to a possible logical solution.
It is interesting to note that success in keeping up a respectable front
of customary kind can only be done by a frantic scramble back of the
facade. After the crime, after the blow has fallen, the facade of
custom can only be held up by swift rearrangement of the props. So
it is in our social lives when a new technology strikes, or in our
private life when some intense and, therefore, indigestible
experience occurs, and the censor acts at once to numb us from the
blow and to ready the faculties to assimilate the intruder. Peter
Cheyney's observations of a mode of detective fiction is another
instance of a popular form of entertainment functioning as mimic
model of the real thing.
Perhaps the most obvious "closure" or psychic consequence of any
new technology is just the demand for it. Nobody wants a motorcar
till there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are
TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of
demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of
our own bodies and senses. When we are deprived of our sense of
sight, the other senses take up the role of sight in some degree. But
the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as
breathing--a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep radio and TV
going more or less continuously. The urge to continuous use is quite
independent of the content" of public programs or of the private
sense life, being testimony to the fact that technology is part of our
bodies. Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous
systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played
over its own nerves. This question would be like asking people what
sort of sights and sounds they would prefer around them in an urban
metropolis! Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous
systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit
from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really
have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to
commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a
private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a
company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened
with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our
central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we
adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own
bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet
all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin
pirouette and collapse.
Archimedes once said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the
world." Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said,
"I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain,
and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose." We have
leased these "places to stand" to private corporations.
Arnold Toynbee has devoted much of his A Study of History to
analyzing the kinds of challenge faced by a variety of cultures during
many centuries. Highly relevant to Western man is Toynbee's
explanation of how the lame and the crippled respond to their
handicaps in a society of active warriors. They become specialists
like Vulcan, the smith and armorer. And how do whole communities
act when conquered and enslaved? The same strategy serves them
as it does the lame individual in a society of warriors. They
specialize and become indispensable to their masters. It is probably
the long human history of enslavement, and the collapse into
specialism as a counter-irritant, that have put the stigma of servitude
and pusillanimity on the figure
of the specialist, even in modern times. The capitulation of Western
man to his technology, with its crescendo of specialized
demands, has always appeared to many observers of our world as a
kind of enslavement. But the resulting fragmentation has been
voluntary and enthusiastic, unlike the conscious strategy of
specialism on the part of the captives of military conquest.
It is plain that fragmentation or specialism as a technique of
achieving security under tyranny and oppression of any kind has an
attendant danger. Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved
by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a
kind of static terminus for a creature. Even slight changes in the
environment of the very well adjusted find them without any resource
to meet new challenge. Such is the plight of the representatives of
"conventional wisdom" in any society. Their entire stake of security
and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that
innovation is for them not novelty but annihilation.
A related form of challenge that has always faced cultures is the
simple fact of a frontier or a wall, on the other side of which exists
another kind of society. Mere existence side by side of any two
forms of organization generates a great deal of tension. Such,
indeed, has been the principle of symbolist artistic structures in the
past century. Toynbee observes that the challenge of a civilization
set side by side with a tribal society has over and over demonstrated
that the simpler society finds its integral economy and institutions
"disintegrated by a rain of psychic energy generated by the
civilization" of the more complex culture. When two societies exist
side by side, the psychic challenge of the more complex one acts as
an explosive release of energy in the simpler one. For prolific
evidence of this kind of problem it is not necessary to look beyond
the life of the teenager lived daily in the midst of a complex urban
center As the barbarian was driven to furious restlessness by the
civilized contact, collapsing into mass migration, so the teenager,
compelled to share the life of a city that cannot accept him as an
adult, collapses into "rebellion without a cause." Earlier the
adolescent had been
provided with a rain check. He was prepared to wait it out. But since
TV the drive to participation has ended adolescence, and every
American home has its Berlin wall.
Toynbee is very generous in providing examples of widely varied
challenge and collapse, and is especially apt in pointing to the
frequent and futile resort to futurism and archaism as strategies of
encountering radical change. But to point back to the day of the
horse or to look forward to the coming of antigravitational vehicles is
not an adequate response to the challenge of the motorcar. Yet
these two uniform ways of backward and forward looking are
habitual ways of avoiding the discontinuities of present experience
with their demand for sensitive inspection and appraisal. Only the
dedicated artist seems to have the power for encountering the
present actuality.
Toynbee urges again and again the cultural strategy of the imitation
of the example of great men. This, of course, is to locate cultural
safety in the power of the will, rather than in the power of adequate
perception of situations. Anybody could quip that this is the British
trust in character as opposed to intellect. In view of the endless
power of men to hypnotize themselves into unawareness in the
presence of challenge, it may be argued that willpower is as useful
as intelligence for survival. Today we need also the will to be
exceedingly informed and aware.
Arnold Toynbee gives an example of Renaissance technology being
effectively encountered and creatively controlled when he shows
how the revival of the decentralized medieval parliament saved
English society from the monopoly of centralism that seized the
continent. Lewis Mumford in The City in History tells the strange tale
of how the New England town was able to carry out the pattern of
the medieval ideal city because it was able to dispense with walls
and to mix town and country. When the technology of a time is
powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a
countervailing thrust. The implosion of electric energy in our century
cannot be met by explosion or
expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of
multiple small centers. For example, the rush of students into our
universities is not explosion but implosion. And the needful strategy
to encounter this force is not to enlarge the university but to create
numerous groups of autonomous colleges in place of our centralized
university plant that grew up on the lines of European government
and nineteenth-century industry.
In the same way the excessive tactile effects of the TV image cannot
be met by mere program changes. Imaginative strategy based on
adequate diagnosis would prescribe a corresponding depth or
structural approach to the existing literary and visual world. If we
persist in a conventional approach to these developments our
traditional culture will be swept aside as scholasticism was in the
sixteenth century. Had the Schoolmen with their complex oral
culture understood the Gutenberg technology, they could have
created a new synthesis of written and oral education, instead of
bowing out of the picture and allowing the merely visual page to take
over the educational enterprise. The oral Schoolmen did not meet
the new visual challenge of print, and the resulting expansion or
explosion of Gutenberg technology was in many respects an
impoverishment of the culture, as historians like Mumford are now
beginning to explain. Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, in
considering "the nature of growths of civilizations," not only
abandons the concept of enlargement as a criterion of real growth of
society, but states: More often geographical expansion is a
concomitant of real decline and coincides with a 'time of troubles' or
a universal state--both of them stages of decline and disintegration."
Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or rapid
change produce militarism, and it is militarism that produces empire
and expansion. The old Greek myth which taught that the alphabet
produced militarism ("King Cadmus sowed the dragon s teeth, and
they sprang up armed men") really goes much deeper than
Toynbee's story. In fact, "militarism" is just
vague description, not analysis of causality at all. Militarism is a kind
of visual organization of social energies that is both specialist and
explosive, so that it is merely repetitive to say, as Toynbee does that
it both creates large empires and causes social breakdown. But
militarism is a form of industrialism or the concentration of large
amounts of homogenized energies into a few kinds of production.
The Roman soldier was a man with a spade. He was an expert
workman and builder who processed and packaged the resources of
many societies and sent them home. Before machinery, the only
massive work forces available for processing material were soldiers
or slaves. As the Greek myth of Cadmus points out, the phonetic
alphabet was the greatest processer of men for homogenized
military life that was known to antiquity. The age of Greek society
that Herodotus acknowledges to have been "overwhelmed by more
troubles than in the twenty preceding generations" was the time that
to our literary retrospect appears as one of the greatest of human
centuries. It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not pleasant to
live in times about which it was exciting to read. The succeeding age
of Alexander saw Hellenism expand into Asia and prepare the
course of the later Roman expansion. These, however, were the
very centuries in which Greek civilization obviously fell apart.
Toynbee points to the strange falsification of history by archeology,
insofar as the survival of many material objects of the past does not
indicate the quality of ordinary life and experience at my particular
time. Continuous technical improvement in the means of warfare
occurs over the entire period of Hellenic and Roman decline.
Toynbee checks out his hypothesis by testing it with the
developments in Greek agriculture. When the enterprise of Solon
weaned the Greeks from mixed farming to a program of specialized
products for export, there were happy consequences and a glorious
manifestation of energy in Greek life. When the next phase of the
same specialist stress involved much reliance on slave labor, there
was spectacular increase of
production. But the armies of technologically specialized slave
working the land blighted the social existence of the independent
yeomen and small farmers, and led to the strange world of the
Roman towns and cities crowded with rootless parasites
To a much greater degree than Roman slavery, the specialism of
mechanized industry and market organization has faced Western
man with the challenge of manufacture by mono-fracture, or the
tackling of all things and operations one-bit-at-a-time. This is the
challenge that has permeated all aspects of our" lives and enabled
us to expand so triumphantly in all directions and in all spheres.
Part II
8
THE SPOKEN WORD
Flower of Evil?
A few seconds from a popular disk-jockey show were typed out as
follows:
That's Patty Baby and that's the girl with the dancing feet and
that's Freddy Cannon there on the David Mickie Show in the
night time ooohbah scubadoo how are you booboo. Next we'll
be Swinging on a Star and sssshhhwwoooo and sliding on a
moonbeam.
Waaaaaaa how about that. . . one of the goodest guys with
you .... this is lovable kissable D.M. in the p.m. at 22 minutes
past nine o'clock there, aahhrightie, we're gonna have a Hitline,
all you have to do is call WAlnut 5-1151, WAInut 5-1151, tell
them what number it is on the Hitline.
Dave Mickie alternately soars, groans, swings, sings, solos, intones,
and scampers, always reacting to his own actions. He
moves entirely in the spoken rather than the written area of
experience. It is in this way that audience participation is created.
The spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically, though
highly literate people tend to speak as connectedly and casually as
possible. The sensuous involvement natural to cultures in which
literacy is not the ruling form of experience is sometimes indicated in
travel guides, as in this item from a guide to Greece:
You will notice that many Creek men seem to spend a lot of time
counting the beads of what appear to be amber rosaries. But these
have no religious significance. They are komboloia or "worry beads,"
a legacy from the Turks, and Creeks click them on land, on the sea,
in the air to ward off that insupportable silence which threatens to
reign whenever conversation lags. Shepherds do it, cops do it,
stevedores and merchants in their shops do it. And if you wonder
why so few Creek women wear beads, you'll know it's because their
husbands have preempted them for the simple pleasure of clicking.
More aesthetic than thumb-twiddling, less expensive than smoking,
this Queeg-like obsession indicates a tactile sensuousness
characteristic of a race which has produced the western world's
greatest sculpture
Where the heavy visual stress of literacy is lacking in a culture, there
occurs another form of sensuous involvement and cultural
apprecauon that our Greek guide explains whimsically:
...do not be surprised at the frequency with which you are
patted, petted and prodded in Greece. You may end up feeling
like the family dog... in an affectionate family. This propensity
to pat seems to us a tactile extension of the avid Greek
curiosity noted before. It's as though your hosts are trying to
find out what you are made of.
The widely separate characters of the spoken and written words are
easy to study today when there is ever closer touch with nonliterate
societies. One native, the only literate member of his group, told of
acting as reader for the others when they received letters. He said
he felt impelled to put his fingers to his ears while reading aloud, so
as not to violate the privacy of their letters. This is interesting
testimony to the values of privacy fostered by the visual stress of
phonetic writing. Such separation of the senses, and of the individual
from the group, can scarcely occur without the influence of phonetic
writing. The spoken word does not afford the extension and
amplification of the visual power needed for habits of individualism
and privacy.
It helps to appreciate the nature of the spoken word to contrast it
with the written form. Although phonetic writing separates and
extends the visual power of words, it is comparatively crude and
slow. There are not many ways of writing "tonight," but Stanislavsky
used to ask his young actors to pronounce and stress it fifty different
ways while the audience wrote down the different shades of feeling
and meaning expressed. Many a page of prose and many a
narrative has been devoted to expressing what was, in effect, a sob,
a moan, a laugh, or a piercing scream. The written word spells out in
sequence what is quick and implicit in the spoken word.
Again, in speech we tend to react to each situation that occurs,
reacting in tone and gesture even to our own act of speaking. But
writing tends to be a kind of separate or specialist action in which
there is little opportunity or call for reaction. The literate man or
society develops the tremendous power of acting in any matter with
considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement
that a nonliterate man or society would experience.
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition
of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a
human technology that has impaired and diminished
the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in
speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly
wider reality. Without language. Bergson suggests, human
intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its
attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for
the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing
with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language
extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His
collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this
technical extension of consciousness that is speech.
Bergson argues in Creative Evolution that even consciousness is an
extension of man that dims the bliss of union in the collective
unconscious. Speech acts to separate man iron man, and mankind
from the cosmic unconscious. As an extension or uttering (outering)
of all our senses at once, language has always been held to be
man's richest art form, that which distinguishes him from the animal
creation.
If the human ear can be compared to a radio receiver that is able to
decode electromagnetic waves and recode them as sound, die
human voice may be compared to the radio transmitter in being able
to translate sound into electromagnetic waves. The power of the
voice to shape air and space into verbal patterns may well have
been preceded by a less specialized expression of cries, grunts,
gestures, and commands, of song and dance. The patterns of the
senses that are extended in the various languages of men are as
varied as styles of dress and art. Each mother tongue teaches its
users a way of seeing and feeling the world, and of acting in the
world, that is quite unique.
Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a
global embrace has large implications for the future of language.
Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital
computer needs numbers. Electricity points the
way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a
world scale, and without any verbalization whatever. Such a state
of co llective awareness may have been the preverbal condition of
men, Language as the technology of human extension, whose of
division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower
of Babel" by which men sought to scale the hi hest heavens. Today
computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of
any code or language into any other code or language. The
computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition
of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would
seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a
general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the
collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of
"weightlessness," that biologists say promises a physical immortality,
may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could
confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.
9
THE WRITTEN WORD
An Eye for an Ear
Prince Modupe wrote of his encounter with the written word in his
West African days:
The ore crowded space in Father Perry's house was his
bookshelves. I gradually came to understand that the marks on
the pages were trapped words. Anyone could learn to decipher
the symbols and turn the trapped words loose again into speech.
The ink of the print trapped the thoughts; they could no rnore get
away than a daomboo could get out of a pit. When the full
realization of what this meant flooded over me, I experienced the
same thrill and amazement as when I had my first glimpse of the
bright lights of Konakry. I shivered with the intensity of my desire
to learn to do this wondrous thing myself.
In striking contrast to the native's eagerness, there are
the current anxieties of civilized man concerning the written word. To
some Westerners the written or printed word has become a very
touchy subject. It is true that there is more material written and
printed and read today than ever before, but there is also a new
electric technology that threatens this ancient technology of literacy
built on the phonetic alphabet. Because of its action in extending our
central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the
inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written
word. Our Western values, built on the written
word have already been considerably affected by the electric media
of telephone, radio, and TV Perhaps that is the reason why many
highly literate people in our time find it difficult to examine this
question without getting into a moral panic. There is the further
circumstance that, during his more than two thousand years of
literacy, Western man has done little to study or to understand the
effects of the phonetic alphabet in creating many of his basic
patterns of culture. To begin now to examine the question may,
therefore, seem too late.
Suppose that, instead of displaying the Stars and Stripes, we were
to write the words "American flag" across a piece of cloth and to
display that. While the symbols would convey the same meaning,
the effect would be quite different. To translate the rich visual mosaic
of the Stars and Stripes into written form would be to deprive it of
most of its qualities of corporate image and of experience, yet the
abstract literal bond would remain much the same. Perhaps this
illustration will serve to suggest the change the tribal man
experiences when he becomes literate.
Nearly all the emotional and corporate family feeling is eliminated
from his relationship with his social group. He is emotionally free to
separate from the tribute and to become a civilized individual, a man
of visual organization who has uniform attitudes, habits, and rights
with all other civilized individuals.
The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the
king who introduced the phonetic letters into
Greece, sowed the dragon's teeth, and they sprang up arm men.
Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a
flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control
of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus,
the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies
and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power. Unlike
pre-alphabetic writing, which with its innumerable signs was difficult
to master, the alphabet could be learned in a few hours. The
acquisition of so extensive a knowledge and so complex a skill as
pre-alphabetic writing represented, when applied to such unwieldy
materials as brick and stone, insured for the scribal caste a
monopoly of priestly power. The easier alphabet and the light, cheap,
transportable papyrus together effected the transfer of power from
the priestly to the military class. All this is implied in the myth about
Cadmus and the dragon's teeth, including the fall of the city states,
the rise of empires and military bureaucracies.
In terms of the extensions of man, the theme of the dragon's teeth in
the Cadmus myth is of the utmost importance. Elias Canetti in
Crowds and Power reminds us that the teeth are an obvious agent of
power in man, and especially in many animals. Languages are filled
with testimony to the grasping, devouring power and precision of
teeth. That the power of letters as agents of aggressive order and
precision should be expressed as extensions of the dragon's teeth is
natural and fitting. Teeth are emphatically visual in their lineal order.
Letters are not only like teeth visually, but their power to put teeth
into the business of empire-building is manifest in our Western
history.
The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been
many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one
phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are
used to correspond to semantically meaningly sounds. This stark
divison and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was
both crude and ruthless, culturally
speaking. The phonetically written word sacrifices worlds of meaning
and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyph and
the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing,
however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the
magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into
the cool and uniform visual medium. Many centuries of ideogrammic
use have not threatened the seamless web of family and tribal
subtleties of Chinese society. On the other hand, a single generation
of alphabetic literacy suffices in Africa today, as in Gaul two
thousand years ago, to release the individual initially, at least, from
the tribal web. This fact has nothing to do with the content of the
alphabetized words; it is the result of the sudden breach between
the auditory and the visual experience of man. Only the phonetic
alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving to its
user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of
resonating word magic and the web of kinship.
It can be argued, then, that the phonetic alphabet, alone, is the
technology that has been the means of creating "civilized man" -the
separate individuals equal before a written code of law.
Separateness of the individual, continuity of space and of time, and
uniformity of codes are the prime marks of literate and civilized
societies. Tribal cultures like those of the Indian and the Chinese
may be greatly superior to the Western cultures, in the range and
delicacy of their perceptions and expression. However, we are not
here concerned with the question of values, but with the
configurations of societies. Tribal cultures cannot entertain the
possibility of the individual or of the separate citizen. Their ideas of
spaces and times are neither continuous nor uniform, but
compassional and compressional in their intensity. It is in its power
to extend patterns of visual uniformity and continuity that the
"message" of the alphabet is felt by cultures.
As an intensification and extension of the visual function, the
phonetic alphabet diminishes the role of the other senses of
sound and touch and taste in any literate culture. The fact that this
does not happen in cultures such as the Chinese, which use
nonphonetic scripts, enables them to retain a rich store of inclusive
perception in depth of experience that tends to become eroded in
civilized cultures of the phonetic alphabet. For the ideogram is an
inclusive gestalt, not an analytic dissociation of senses and functions
like phonetic writing.
The achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are testimony
to the tremendous values of literacy. But many people are also
disposed to object that we have purchased our structure of specialist
technology and values at too high a price. Certainly the lineal
structuring of rational life by phonetic literacy has involved us in an
interlocking set of consistencies that axe striking enough to justify a
much more extensive inquiry than that of the present chapter.
Perhaps there are better approaches along quite different lines; for
example, consciousness is regarded as the mark of a rational being,
yet there is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of
awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness.
Consciousness is not a verbal process. Yet during all our centuries
of phonetic literacy we have favored the chain of inference as the
mark of logic and reason. Chinese writing, in contrast, invests each
ideogram with a total intuition of being and reason that allows only a
small role to visual sequence as a mark of mental effort and
organization. In Western literate society it is still plausible and
acceptable to say that something "follows" from something, as if
there were some cause at work that makes such a sequence. It was
David Hume who, in the eighteenth century, demonstrated that there
is no causality indicated in any sequence, natural or logical. The
sequential is merely additive, not causative. Hume's argument, said
Immanuel Kant, awoke me from my dogmatic slumber." Neither
Hume nor Kant, however, detected the hidden cause of our Western
bias toward sequence as "logic" in the all-pervasive technology of
the alphabet. Today in the electric age we feel as free to invent
nonlineal logics as we do to make non-Euclidean geometries. Even
the assembly line, as the method of analytic sequence for
mechanizing every kind of making and production, is nowadays
yielding to new forms.
Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal
sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization.
The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in
order to produce faster action and change of form (applied
knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and
nature alike. That is the reason why our Western industrial programs
have quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs
have been so industrial. Both are shaped by the alphabet in their
technique of transformation and control by making all situations
uniform and continuous. This procedure, manifest even in the
Graeco-Roman phase, became more intense with the uniformity and
repeatability of the Gutenberg development.
Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is a uniform
processing of a culture by a visual sense extended in space and
time by the alphabet. In tribal cultures, experience is arranged by a
dominant auditory sense-life that represses visual values. The
auditory sense, unlike the cool and neutral eye, is hyper-esthetic and
delicate and all-inclusive. Oral cultures act and react at the same
time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing
their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without
reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western
literate man.
The story of The Ugly American describes the endless succession of
blunders achieved by visual and civilized Americans when
confronted with the tribal and auditory cultures of the East. As a
civilized UNESCO experiment, running water--with its lineal
organization of pipes--as installed recently in some Indian villages.
Soon the villagers requested that the pipes be removed, for it
seemed to them that the whole social life of the village had been
impoverished when it was no longer necessary for all to
visit the communal well. To us the pipe is a convenience. We do not
think of it as culture or as a product of literacy, any more than we
think of literacy as changing our habits, our emotions, or our
perceptions. To nonliterate people, it is perfectly obvious that the
most commonplace conveniences represent total changes in
culture.
The Russians, less permeated with the patterns of literate culture
than Americans, have much less difficulty in perceiving and
accommodating the Asiatic attitudes. For the West, literacy has long
been pipes and taps and streets and assembly lines and inventories.
Perhaps most potent of all as an expression of literacy is our system
of uniform pricing that penetrates distant markets and speeds the
turn-over of commodities. Even our ideas of cause and effect in the
literate West have long been in the form of things in sequence and
succession, an idea that strikes any tribal or auditory culture as quite
ridiculous, and one that has lost its prime place in our own new
physics and biology.
All the alphabets in use in the Western world, from that of Russia to
that of the Basques, from that of Portugal to that of Peru, are
derivatives of the Graeco-Roman letters. Their unique separation of
sight and sound from semantic and verbal content made them a
most radical technology for the translation and homogenization of
cultures. All other forms of writing had served merely one culture,
and had served to separate that culture from others. The phonetic
letters alone could be used to translate, albeit crudely, the sounds of
any language into one-and-the-same visual code. Today, the effort
of the Chinese to use our phonetic letters to translate their language
has run into special problems in the wide tonal variations and
meanings of similar sounds This has led to the practice of
fragmenting Chinese monosyllables into polysyllables in order to
eliminate tonal ambiguity The Western phonetic alphabet is now at
work transforming the central auditory features of the Chinese
language and culture m order that China can also develop the lineal
and
visual patterns that give central unity and aggregate uniform power
to Western work and organization. As we move out of the Gutenberg
era of our own culture, we can more readily discern its primary
features of homogeneity, uniformity, and continuity. These were the
characteristics that gave the Greeks and Romans their easy
ascendancy over the nonliterate barbarians. The barbarian or tribal
man, then as now, was hampered by cultural pluralism, uniqueness,
and discontinuity.
To sum up, pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in
Babylonian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures represents an extension
of the visual sense for storing and expediting access to human
experience. All of these forms give pictorial expression to oral
meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are
extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data and
operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a
few letters only, was able to encompass all languages. Such an
achievement, however, involved the separation of both signs and
sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings. No other
system of writing had accomplished this feat.
The same separation of sight and sound and meaning that is
peculiar to the phonetic alphabet also extends to its social and
psychological effects. Literate man undergoes much separation of
his imaginative, emotional, and sense life, as Rousseau (and later
the Romantic poets and philosophers) proclaimed long ago. Today
the mere mention of D. H. Lawrence will serve to recall the
twentieth-century efforts made to by-pass literate man in order to
recover human "wholeness." If Western literate man undergoes
much dissociation of inner sensibility from his use of the alphabet,
he also wins his personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan
and family. This freedom to shape an individual career manifested
itself in the ancient world in military life. Careers were open to talents
in Republican Rome, as much as in Napoleonic France, and for the
same reasons. The new
literacy had created an homogeneous and malleable milieu in which
the mobility of armed groups and of ambitious individuals, equally,
was as novel as it was practical.
10
ROADS AND PAPER ROUTES
It was not until the advent of the telegraph that messages could
travel faster than a messenger. Before this, roads and the written
word were closely interrelated. It is only since the telegraph that
information has detached itself from such solid commodities as
stone and papyrus, much as money had earlier detached itself from
hides, bullion, and metals, and has ended as paper. The term
"communication" has had an extensive use in connection with roads
and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became
transformed into "information movement" in the electric age.
Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of
the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of
transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea
from transport to information by means of electricity. The word
"metaphor" is from the Greek meld plus pherein, to carry across or
transport. In this book we are concerned with all forms of transport of
goods and information, both as metaphor and exchange. Each form
of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the
sender, the receiver,
and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of
man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it
alters the ratios among our senses.
It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are
extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power
and speed. Again, unless there were such increases of power and
speed, new extensions of ourselves would not occur or would be
discarded. For an increase of power or speed in any kind of grouping
of any components whatever is itself a disruption that causes a
change of organization. The alteration of social groupings, and the
formation of new communities, occur with the increased speed of
information movement by means of paper messages and road
transport. Such speed-up means much more control at much greater
distances. Historically, it meant the formation of the Roman Empire
and the disruption of the previous city-states of the Greek world.
Before the use of papyrus and alphabet created the incentives for
building fast, hard-surface roads, the walled town and the city-state
were natural forms that could endure.
Village and city-state essentially are forms that include all human
needs and functions. With greater speed and, therefore, greater
military control at a distance, the city-state collapsed. Once inclusive
and self-contained, its needs and functions were extended in the
specialist activities of an empire. Speed-up tends to separate
functions, both commercial and political, and acceleration beyond a
point in any system becomes disruption and breakdown. So when
Arnold Toynbee turns, in A Study of History, to a massive
documentation of "the breakdowns of civilizations," he begins by
saying: "One of the most conspicuous marks of disintegration, as we
have already noticed, is ... when a disintegrating civilisation
purchases a reprieve by submitting to forcible political unification in a
universal state." Disintegration and reprieve, alike, are the
consequence of ever faster movement of information by couriers on
excellent roads.
Speed-up creates what some economists refer to as a
center-margin structure. When this becomes too extensive for the
generating and control center, pieces begin to detach themselves
and to set up new center-margin systems of their own. The most
familiar example is the story of the American colonies of Great
Britain. When the thirteen colonies began to develop a considerable
social and economic life of their own, they felt the need to become
centers themselves, with their own margins. This is the time when
the original center may make a more rigorous effort of centralized
control of the margins, as, indeed, Great Britain did. The slowness of
sea travel proved altogether inadequate to the maintenance of so
extensive an empire on a mere center-margin basis. Land powers
can more easily attain a unified center-margin pattern than sea
powers. It is the relative slowness of sea travel that inspires sea
powers to foster multiple centers by a kind of seeding process. Sea
powers thus tend to create centers without margins, and land
empires favor the center-margin structure. Electric speeds create
centers everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet.
Lack of homogeneity in speed of information movement creates
diversity of patterns in organization. It is quite predictable, then, that
any new mean of moving information will alter any power structure
whatever. So long as the new means is everywhere available at the
same time, there is a possibility that the structure may be changed
without breakdown. Where there are great discrepancies in speeds
of movement, as between air and road travel or between telephone
and typewriter, serious conflicts occur within organizations. The
metropolis of our time has become a test case for such
discrepancies. If homogeneity of speeds were total, there would be
no rebellion and no breakdown. With print, political unity via
homogeneity became feasible for the first time. In ancient Rome,
however, there was only the light paper manuscript to pierce the
opacity, or to reduce the discontinuity, of the tribal villages; and
when the
paper supplies failed, the roads were vacated, as they were in our
own age during gas-rationing. Thus the old city-state returned and
feudalism replaced republicanism.
It seems obvious enough that technical means of speed-up should
wipe out the independence of villages and city-states. Whenever
speed-up has occurred, the new centralist power always takes
action to homogenize as many marginal areas as possible. The
process that Rome effected by the phonetic alpha bet geared to its
paper routes has been occurring in Russia for the last century. Again,
from the current example of Africa we can observe how very much
visual processing of the human psyche by alphabetic means will be
needed before any appreciable degree of homogenized social
organization is possible. Much of this visual processing was done in
the ancient world by nonliterate technologies, as in Assyria. The
phonetic alphabet has no rival, however, as a translator of man out
of the closed tribal echo-chamber into the neutral visual world of
lineal organization.
The situation of Africa today is complicated by the new electronic
technology. Western man is himself being
de-Westernized by his own new speed-up, as much as the Africans
are being detribalized by our old print and industrial technology. If
we understood our own media old and new these confusions and
disruptions could be programmed and synchronized, The very
success we enjoy in specializing and separating functions in order to
have speed-up, however, is at the same time the cause of
inattention and unawareness of the situation. It has ever been thus
in the Western world at least. Self-consciousness of the causes and
limits of one's own culture seem to threaten the ego structure and is,
therefore, avoided. Nietzsche said understanding stops action, and
men of action seem to have an intuition of the fact in their shunning
the dangers of comprehension.
The point of the matter of speed-up by wheel, road, and paper is the
extension of power in an ever more homogeneous and
uniform space. Thus the real potential of the Roman technology was
not realized until printing had given road and wheel a much greater
speed than that of the Roman vortex. Yet the speed-up of the
electronic age is as disrupting for literate, lineal, and Western man
as the Roman paper routes were for tribal villagers. Our speed-up
today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an
instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our
specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is
suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its
mechanized bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the
global village. The village, as Mumford explains in The City in
History, had achieved a social and institutional extension of all
human faculties. Speed-up and city aggregates only served to
separate these from one another in more specialist forms. The
electronic age cannot sustain the very low gear of a center-margin
structure such as we associate with the past two thousand years of
the Western world. Nor is this a question of values. If we understood
our older media, such as roads and the written word, and if we
valued their human effects sufficiently, we could reduce or even
eliminate the electronic factor from our lives. Is there an instance of
any culture that understood the technology that sustained its
structure and was prepared to keep it that way? If so, that would be
an instance of values or reasoned preference. The values or
preferences that arise from the mere automatic operation of this or
that technology in our social lives are not capable of being
perpetuated.
In the chapter on the wheel it will be shown that transport without
wheels had played a big role before the wheel, some of which was
by sledge, over both snow and bogs. Much of it was by pack
animal-- woman being the first pack animal. Most wheel-less
transport in the past, however, was by river and by sea, a fact that is
today as richly expressed as ever in the location and form of the
great cities of the world. Some writers have observed that man's
oldest beast of burden was woman, because
the male had to be free to run interference for the woman, as
ball-carrier, as it were. But that phase belonged to the prewheel
stage of transport, when there was only the tractless waste of man
the hunter and food-gatherer. Today, when the greatest volume of
transport consists in the moving of information, the wheel and the
road are undergoing recession and obsolescence; but in the first
instance, given the pressure for, and from, wheels, there had to be
roads to accommodate them. Settlements had created the impulse
for exchange and for the increasing movement of raw material and
produce from countryside to processing centers, where there was
division of labor and specialist craft skills. Improvement of wheel and
road more and more brought the town to the country in a reciprocal
spongelike action of give-and-take. It is a process we have seen in
this century with the motorcar. Great improvements in roads brought
the city more and more to the country. The road became a substitute
for the country by the time people began to talk about "taking a spin
in the country." With super-highways the road became a wall
between man and the country. Then came the stage of the highway
as city, a city stretching continuously across the continent, dissolving
all earlier cities into the sprawling aggregates that desolate their
populations today.
With air transport comes a further disruption of the old town-country
complex that had occurred with wheel and road. With the plane the
cities began to have the same slender relation to human needs that
museums do. They became corridors of showcases echoing the
departing forms of industrial assembly lines. The road is, then, used
less and less for travel, and more and more for recreation. The
traveler now turns to the airways, and thereby ceases to experience
the act of traveling. As people used to say that an ocean liner might
as well be a hotel in a big city, the jet traveler, whether he is over
Tokyo or New York, might just as well be in a cocktail lounge so far
as travel experience is concerned. He will begin to travel only after
he lands.
Meantime, the countryside, as oriented and fashioned by plane, by
highway, and by electric information-gathering, tends to become
once more the nomadic trackless area that preceded the wheel. The
beatniks gather on the sands to meditate haiku.
The principal factors in media impact on existing social forms are
acceleration and disruption. Today the acceleration tends to be total,
and thus ends space as the main factor in social arrangements.
Toynbee sees the acceleration factor as translating the physical into
moral problems, pointing to the antique road crowded with dog carts,
wagons, and rickshaws as full of minor nuisance, but also minor
dangers. Further, as the forces impelling traffic mount in power,
there is no more problem of hauling and carrying, but the physical
problem is translated into a psychological one as the annihilation of
space permits easy annihilation of travelers as well. This principle
applies to all media study. All means of interchange and of human in
terassociation tend to improve by acceleration. Speed, in turn,
accentuates problems of form and structure. The older
arrangements had not been made with a view to such speeds, and
people begin to sense a draining-away of life values as they try to
make the old physical forms adjust to the new and speedier
movement. These problems, however, are not new. Julius Caesar's
first act upon assuming power was to restrict the night movement
of wheeled vehicles in the city of Rome in order to permit sleep.
Improved transport in the Renaissance turned the medieval walled
towns into slums.
Prior to the considerable diffusion of power through alphabet and
papyrus, even the attempts of kings to extend their rule in spatial
terms were opposed at home by the priestly bureaucracies. Then
complex and unwieldy media of stone inscription made wide ranging
empires appear very dangerous to such static monopolies. The
struggles between those who exercised power over the hearts of
men and those who sought to control the physical resources of
nations were not of one time and place.
In the Old Testament, just this kind of struggle is reported in the
Book of Samuel (I, viii) when the children of Israel besought Samuel
to give them a king. Samuel explained to them the nature of kingly,
as opposed to priestly, rule:
This will be the manner of the King that shall reign over you: he
will take your sons, and appoint them unto him for his chariots;
and they shall run before his chariots: and he will appoint them
unto him for captains of thousands, and captains of fifties; and
he will set some to plough his ground, and to reap his harvest,
and to make his instruments of war, and the instruments of his
chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries,
and to be cooks and to be bakers. And he will take your fields,
and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them,
and give them to his servants.
Paradoxically, the effect of the wheel and of paper in organizing new
power structures was not to decentralize but to centralize. A
speed-up in communications always enables a central authority to
extend its operations to more distant margins. The introduction of
alphabet and papyrus meant that many more people had to be
trained as scribes and administrators. However, the resulting
extension of homogenization and of uniform training did not come
into play in the ancient or medieval world to any great degree. It was
not really until the mechanization o( writing in the Renaissance that
intensely unified and centralized power was possible. Since this
process is still occurring, it should be easy for us to see that it was in
the armies of Egypt and Rome that a kind of democratization by
uniform technological education occurred. Careers were then open
to talents for those with literate training. In the chapter on the written
word we saw how phonetic writing translated tribal man into a visual
world and invited him to undertake the visual organization of space.
The
priestly groups in the temples had been more concerned with the
records of the past and with the control of the inner space of the
unseen than with outward military conquest. Hence, there was a
clash between the priestly monopolizers of knowledge and those
who wished to apply it abroad as new conquest and power. (This
same clash now recurs between the university and the business
world.) It was this kind of rivalry that inspired Ptolemy II to establish
the great library at Alexandria as a center of imperial power. The
huge staff of civil servants and scribes assigned to many specialist
tasks was an antithetic and countervailing force to the Egyptian
priesthood. The library could serve the political organization of
empire in a way that did not interest the priesthood at all. A
not-dissimilar rivalry is developing today between the atomic
scientists and those who are mainly concerned with power.
If we realize that the city as center was in the first instance an
aggregate of threatened villagers, it is then easier for us to grasp
how such harassed companies of refugees might fan out into an
empire. The city-state as a form was not a response to peaceful
commercial development, but a huddling for security amidst anarchy
and dissolution. Thus the Greek city-state was a tribal form of
inclusive and integral community, quite unlike the specialist cities
that grew up as extensions of Roman military expansion. The Greek
city-states eventually disintegrated by the usual action of specialist
trading and the separation of functions that Mumford portrays in The
City in History. The Roman cities began that way--as specialist
operations of the central power. The Greek cities ended that way.
If a city undertakes rural trade, it sets up at once a center-margin
relation with the rural area in question. That relation involves taking
staples and raw produce from the country in exchange for specialist
products of the craftsman. If, on the other hand, the same city
attempts to engage in overseas trade, it is more natural to "seed"
another city center, as the Greeks did,
rather than to deal with the overseas area as a specialized margin or
raw material supply.
A brief review of the structural changes in the organization of space
as they resulted from wheel, road, and papyrus could go as follows:
There was first the village, which lacked all of these group
extensions of the private physical body. The village, however, was
already a form of community different from that of food-gathering
hunters and fishers, for villagers may be sedentary and may begin a
division of labor and functions. Their being congregated is, itself, a
form of acceleration of human activities which provides momentum
for further separation and specialization of action. Such are the
conditions for the extension of feet-as-wheel to speed production
and exchange. These are, also, the conditions that intensify
communal conflicts and ruptures that send men huddling into ever
larger aggregates, in order to resist the accelerated activities of
other communities. The villages are swept up into the city-state by
way of resistance and for the purpose of security and protection.
The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low
intensity. In this mild form everyone could play many roles.
Participation was high, and organization was low. This is the formula
for stability in any type of organization. Nevertheless, the
enlargement of village forms in the city-state called for greater
intensity and the inevitable separation of functions to cope with this
intensity and competition. The villagers had all participated in the
seasonal rituals that in the city became the specialized Greek drama.
Mumford feels that "The village measure prevailed in the
development of the Greek cities, down to the fourth century . . ."
(The City in History). It is this extension and translation of the human
organs into the village model without loss of corporal unity that
Mumford uses as a criterion of excellence for city forms in any time
or locale. This biological approach to the man-made environment
is sought today once more in the electric age. How strange that the
idea of the
"human scale" should have seemed quite without appeal during the
mechanical centuries.
The natural tendency of the enlarged community of the city is to
increase the intensity and accelerate functions of every sort whether
of speech, or crafts, or currency and exchange. This in turn, implies
an inevitable extension of these actions by subdivision or, what is
the same thing, new invention. So that even though the city was
formed as a kind of protective hide or shield for man, this protective
layer was purchased at the cost of maximized struggle within the
walls. War games such as those described by Herodotus began as
ritual blood baths between the citizenry. Rostrum, law courts, and
marketplace all acquired the intense image of divisive competition
that is nowadays called "the rat race." Nevertheless, it was amidst
such irritations that man produced his greatest inventions as
counter-irritants. These inventions were extensions of himself by
means of concentrated toil, by which he hoped to neutralize distress.
The Greek word ponos, or "toil," was a term used by Hippocrates,
the father of medicine, to describe the fight of the body in disease.
Today this idea is called homeostasis, or equilibrium as a strategy of
the staying power of any body. All organizations, but especially biological
ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition
amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man-made
social environment as an extension of man's physical body is no
exception. The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new
pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensions always in
the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and
homeostasis.
The city, having been formed for protection, unexpectedly generated
fierce intensities and new hybrid energies from accelerated interplay
of functions and knowledge. It burst forth into aggression. The alarm
of the village, followed by the resistance of" the city, expanded into
the exhaustion and inertia of empire. These three stages of the
disease and irritation syndrome
were felt, by those living through them, as normal physical
expressions of counter-irritant recovery from disease.
The third stage of struggle for equilibrium among the forces within
the city took the form of empire, or a universal state, that generated
the extension of human senses in wheel, road, and alphabet. We
can sympathize with those who first saw in these tools a providential
means of bringing order to distant areas of turbulence and anarchy.
These tools would have seemed a glorious form of "foreign aid,"
extending the blessings of the center to the barbarian margins. At
this moment, for example, we are quite in the dark about the political
implications of Telstar. By outering these satellites as extensions of
our nervous system, there is an automatic response in all the organs
of the body politic of mankind. Such new intensity of proximity
imposed by Telstar calls for radical rearrangement of all organs in
order to maintain staying power and equilibrium. The teaching and
learning process for every child will be affected sooner rather than
later. The time factor in every decision of business and finance will
acquire new patterns. Among the peoples of the world strange new
vortices of power will appear unexpectedly.
The full-blown city coincides with the development of writing --
especially of phonetic writing, the specialist form of writing that
makes a division between sight and sound. It was with this
instrument that Rome was able to reduce the tribal areas to some
visual order. The effects of phonetic literacy do not depend upon
persuasion or cajolery for their acceptance. This technology for
translating the resonating tribal world into Euclidean lineality and
visuality is automatic. Roman roads and Roman streets were
uniform and repeatable wherever they occurred. There was no
adaptation to the contours of local hill or custom. With the decline of
papyrus supplies, the wheeled traffic stopped on these roads, too.
Deprivation of papyrus, resulting from the Roman loss of Egypt,
meant the decline of bureaucracy and of army organization as well.
Thus the medieval world grew
up without uniform roads or cities or bureaucracies, and it fought the
wheel, as later city forms fought the railways; and as we, today, fight
the automobile. For new speed and power are never compatible with
existing spatial and social arrangements. Writing about the new
straight avenues of the seventeenth-century cities, Mumford points
to a factor that was also present in the Roman city with its wheeled
traffic; namely, the need for broad straight avenues to speed military
movements, and to express the pomp and circumstance of power. In
the Roman world the army was the work force of a mechanized
wealth-creating process. By means of soldiers as uniform and
replaceable parts, the Roman military machine made and delivered
the goods, very much in the manner of industry during the early
phases of the industrial revolution. Trade followed the legions. More
than that, the legions were the industrial machine, itself; and
numerous new cities were like new factories manned by uniformly
trained army personnel. With the spread of literacy after printing, the
bond between the uniformed soldier and the wealth-making factory
hand became less visible. It was obvious enough in Napoleon's
armies. Napoleon, with his citizen-armies, was the industrial
revolution itself, as it reached areas long protected from it.
The Roman army as a mobile, industrial wealth-making force
created in addition a vast consumer public in the Roman towns.
Division of labor always creates a separation between producer and
consumer, even as it tends to separate the place oi work and the
living space. Before Roman literate bureaucracy, nothing
comparable to the Roman consumer specialists had been seen in
the world. This fact was institutionalized in the individual known as
"parasite," and in the social institution of the gladiatorial games.
(Panem et circmse.) The private sponge and the collective sponge,
both reaching out for their rations of sensation, achieved a horrible
distinctness and clarity that matched the raw power of the predatory
army machine.
With the cutting-off of the supplies of papyrus by the Mohammedans,
the Mediterranean, long a Roman lake, became a Muslim lake, and
the Roman center collapsed. What had been the margins of this
center-margin structure became independent centers on a new
feudal, structural base. The Roman center collapsed by the fifth
century A.D. as wheel, road, and paper dwindled into a ghostly
paradigm of former power.
Papyrus never returned. Byzantium, like the medieval centers, relied
heavily on parchment, but this was too expensive and scarce a
material to speed commerce or even education. It was paper from
China, gradually making its way through the Near East to Europe,
that accelerated education and commerce steadily from the eleventh
century, and provided the basis for "the Renaissance of the twelfth
century," popularizing prints and, finally, making printing possible by
the fifteenth century.
With the moving of information in printed form, the wheel and the
road came into play again after having been in abeyance for a
thousand years. In England, pressure from the press brought
about hard-surface roads in the eighteenth century, with all the
population and industrial rearrangement that entailed. Print, or
mechanized writing, introduced a separation and extension of
human functions unimaginable even in Roman times. It was only
natural, therefore, that greatly increased wheel speeds, both on road
and in factory, should be related to the alphabet that had once done
a similar job of speed-up and specialization in the ancient world.
Speed, at least in its lower reaches of the mechanical order, always
operates to separate, to extend, and to amplify functions of the body.
Even specialist learning in higher education proceeds by ignoring
interrelationships; for such complex awareness slows down the
achieving of expertness.
The post roads of England were, for the most part, paid for by the
newspapers. The rapid increase of traffic brought in the railway, that
accommodated a more specialized form of wheel than
the road. The story of modern America that began with the discovery
of the white man by the Indians, as a wag has truly said, quickly
passed from exploration by canoe to development by railway. For
three centuries Europe invested in America for its fish and its furs.
The fishing schooner and the canoe preceded the road and the
postal route as marks of our North American spatial organization.
The European investors in the fur trade naturally did not want the
trapping lines overrun by Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. They fought
land surveyors and settlers, like Washington and Jefferson, who
simply would not think in terms of mink. Thus the War of
Independence was deeply involved in media and staple rivalries.
Any new medium, by its acceleration, disrupts the lives and
investments of whole communities. It was the railway that raised the
art of war to unheard-of intensity, making the American Civil War the
first major conflict fought by rail, and causing it to be studied and
admired by all European general staffs, who had not yet had an
opportunity to use railways for a general blood-letting.
War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. It
begins when some notable disequilibrium among existing structures
has been brought about by inequality of rates of growth. The very
late industrialization and unification of Germany had left her out of
the race for staples and colonies for many years. As the Napoleonic
wars were technologically a sort of catching-up of France with
England, the First World War was itself a major phase of the final
industrialization of Germany and America. As Rome had not shown
before, and Russia has shown today, militarism is itself the main
route of technological education and acceleration for lagging areas.
Almost unanimous enthusiasm for improved routes of land
transportation followed the War of 1812. Furthermore, the British
blockade of the Atlantic coast had compelled an unprecedented
amount of land carriage, thus emphasizing the unsatisfactory
character of the highways. War is certainly a form
of emphasis that delivers many a telling touch to lagging social
attention. However, in the very Hot Peace since the Second War, it
is the highways of the mind that have been found inadequate. Many
have felt dissatisfaction with our educational methods since Sputnik,
in exactly the same spirit that many complained about the highways
during the War of 1812.
Now that man has extended his central nervous system by electric
technology, the field of battle has shifted to mental
image-making-and-breaking, both in war and in business. Until the
electric age, higher education had been a privilege and a luxury for
the leisured classes; today it has become a necessity for production
and survival. Now, when information itself is the main traffic, the
need for advanced knowledge presses on the spirits of the most
routine-ridden minds. So sudden an upsurge of academic training
into the marketplace has in it the quality of classical peripety or
reversal, and the result has been a wild guffaw from the gallery and
the campus. The hilarity, however, will die down as the Executive
Suites are taken over by the Ph.D.s.
For an insight into the ways in which the acceleration of wheel and
road and paper rescramble population and settlement patterns, let
us glance at some instances provided by Oscar Handlin in his study
Boston's Immigrants. In I 790, he tells us, Boston was a compact unit
with all workers and traders living in sight of each other, so that there
was no tendency to section residential areas on a class basis: "But
as the town grew, as the outlying districts became more accessible,
the people spread out and at the same time were localized in
distinctive areas." That one sentence capsulates the theme of this
chapter. The sentence can be generalized to include the art of
writing: "As knowledge was spread out visually and as it became
more accessible in alphabetic form, it was localized and divided into
specialties." Up to the point just short of electrification, increase of
speed produces division of function, and of social classes, and of
knowledge.
At electric speed, however, all that is reversed. Implosion and
contraction then replace mechanical explosion and expansion. If the
Handlin formula is extended to power, it becomes: "As power grew,
and as outlying areas became accessible to power, it was localized
in distinctive delegated jobs and functions." This formula is a
principle of acceleration at all levels of human organization. It
concerns especially those extensions of our physical bodies that
appear in wheel and road and paper messages. Now that we have
extended not just our physical organs but the nervous system, itself,
in electric technology, the principle of specialism and division as a
factor of speed no longer applies. When information moves at the
speed of signals in the central nervous system, man is confronted
with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as
road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness.
The old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become
irrelevant.
Until the 1820s, Handlin tells us, Bostonians walked to and fro, or
used private conveyances. Horse-drawn buses were introduced in
1826, and these speeded up and extended business a great deal.
Meantime the speed-up of industry in England had extended
business into the rural areas, dislodging many from the land and
increasing the rate of immigration. Sea transport of immigrants
became lucrative and encouraged a great speed-up of ocean
transport. Then the Cunard Line was subsidized by the British
government in order to ensure swift contact with the colonies. The
railways soon linked into this Cunard service, to convey mail and
immigrants inland.
Although America developed a massive service of inland canals and
river steamboats, they were not geared to the speeding wheels of
the new industrial production. The railroad was needed to cope with
mechanized production, as much as to span the great distances of
the continent. The steam railroad as an accelerator proved to be one
of the most revolutionary of all extensions of our physical bodies,
creating a new political
centralism and a new kind of urban shape and size. It is to the
railroad that the American city owes its abstract grid layout the
nonorganic separation of production, consumption and residence. It
is the motorcar that scrambled the abstract shape of the industrial
town, mixing up its separated functions to a degree that has
frustrated and baffled both planner and citizen It remained for the
airplane to complete the confusion by amplifying the mobility of the
citizen to the point where urban space as such was irrelevant.
Metropolitan space is equally irrelevant for the telephone, the
telegraph, the radio, and television. What the town planners call "the
human scale" in discussing ideal urban spaces is equally unrelated
to these electric forms. Our electric-extensions of ourselves simply
by-pass space and time and create problems of human involvement
and organization for which there is no precedent. We may yet yearn
for the simple days of the automobile and the superhighway.
11
NUMBER
Profile of the Crowd
Hitler made a special horror of the Versailles Treaty because it had
deflated the German army. After 1870 the heel-clicking members of
the German army had become the new symbol of tribal unity and
power. In England and America the same sense of numerical
grandeur from sheer numbers was associated with the mounting
output of industry, and the statistics of wealth and production: "tanks
a million." The power of sheer numbers, in wealth or in crowds, to
set up a dynamic drive toward growth and aggrandizement is
mysterious. Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power illustrates the
profound tie between monetary inflation and crowd behavior. He is
baffled by our failure to study inflation as a crowd phenomenon,
since its effects on our modern world are pervasive. The drive
toward unlimited growth inherent in any kind of crowd, heap, or
horde would seem to link economic and Population inflation.
In the theater, at a ball, at a ball game, in church, every individual
enjoys all those others present. The pleasure of being among the
masses is the sense of the joy in the multiplication of numbers,
which has long been suspect among the literate members of
Western society.
In such society, the separation of the individual from the group in
space (privacy), and in thought ("point of view"), and in work
(specialism), has had the cultural and technological support of
literacy, and its attendant galaxy of fragmented industrial and
political institutions. But the power of the printed word to create the
homogenized social man grew steadily until our time, creating the
paradox of the "mass mind" and the mass militarism of citizen
armies. Pushed to the mechanized extreme, letters have often
seemed to produce effects opposite to civilization, just as numbering
in earlier times seemed to break tribal unity, as the Old Testament
declares ("And Satan rose up against Israel, and moved David to
number Israel"). Phonetic letters and number were the first means of
fragmenting and detribalizing man.
Throughout Western history we have traditionally and rightly
regarded letters as the source of civilization, and looked to our
literatures as the hallmark of civilized attainment. Yet all along, there
has been with us a shadow of number, the language of science. In
isolation, number is as mysterious as writing. Seen as an extension
of our physical bodies, it becomes quite intelligible. Just as writing is
an extension and separation of our most neutral and objective sense,
the sense of sight, number is an extension and separation of our
most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch.
This faculty of touch, called the "haptic" sense by the Greeks, was
popularized as such by the Bauhaus program of sensuous
education, through the work of Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and many
others in the Germany of the 1920s. The sense of touch, as offering
a kind of nervous system or organic unity in the work
of art, has obsessed the minds of the artists since the time of
Cezanne. For more than a century now artists have tried to meet the
challenge of the electric age by investing the tactile sense with the
role of a nervous system for unifying all the others. Paradoxically,
this has been achieved by "abstract art," which offers a central
nervous system for a work of art, rather than the conventional husk
of the old pictorial image. More and more it has occurred to people
that the sense of touch is necessary to integral existence. The
weightless occupant of the space capsule has to fight to retain the
integrating sense of touch. Our mechanical technologies for
extending and separating the functions of our physical beings have
brought us near to a state of disintegration by putting us out of touch
with ourselves. It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives
the interplay among our senses is what constitutes the sense of
touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very
life of things in the mind? The Greeks had the notion of a consensus
or a faculty of "common sense" that translated each sense into each
other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we
have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we
are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and
experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a
world-wide consensus. When we have achieved a world-wide
fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a world-wide
integration. Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was
dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere
broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive
consciousness. What we have today, instead of a social
consciousness electrically ordered, however, is a private
subconsciousness or individual "point of view" rigorously imposed by
older mechanical technology. This is a perfectly natural result of
"culture lag" or conflict, in a world suspended between two
technologies.
The ancient world associated number magically with the properties
of physical things, and with the necessary causes of things, much as
science has tended until recent times to reduce all objects to
numerical quantities. In any and all of its manifestations, however,
number seems to have both auditory and repetitive resonance, and
a tactile dimension as well.
It is the quality of number that explains its power to create the effect
of an icon or an inclusive compressed image. Such is its use in
newspaper and magazine reporting, as: "Cyclist John Jameson, 12,
Collides with Bus," or "William Samson, 51, New Vice-President in
Charge of Brooms." By rule of thumb the journalists have discovered
the iconic power of number.
Since Henri Bergson and the Bauhaus group of artists, to say
nothing of Jung and Freud, the nonliterate and even antiliterate
values of tribal man have in general received enthusiastic study and
promotion. For many European artists and intellectuals, jazz
became one of the rallying points in their quest for the integral
Romantic Image. The uncritical enthusiasm of the European
intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the
architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in
stone." It appears again in the artist Moholy-Nagy's account of his
visit to a San Francisco night club in 1940. A Negro band was
playing with zest and laughter. Suddenly a player intoned, "One
million and three," and was answered: "One million and seven and a
half." Then another sang, "Eleven," and another, "Twenty-one."
Then amidst "happy laughter and shrill singing the numbers took
over the place."
Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the
land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of
their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and
"behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an
industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.
Take 36-24-36. Numbers cannot become more sensuously tactile
than when mumbled as the
magic formula for the female figure while the haptic hand sweeps
the air.
Baudelaire had the true intuition of number as a tactile hand or
nervous system for interrelating separate units, when he said that
"number is within the individual. Intoxication is a number." That
explains why "the pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious
expression of delight in the multiplication of number " Number, that is
to say, is not only auditory and resonant, like the spoken word, but
originates in the sense of touch, of which it is an extension. The
statistical aggregation or crowding of numbers yields the current
cave-drawings or finger-paintings of the statisticians' charts. In every
sense, the amassing of numbers statistically gives man a new influx
of primitive intuition and magically subconscious awareness,
whether of public taste or feeling: "You feel better satisfied when you
use well-known brands."
Like money and clocks and all other forms of measurement,
numbers acquired a separate life and intensity with the growth of
literacy. Nonliterate societies had small use for numbers, and today
the nonliterate digital computer substitutes "yes" and "no" for
numbers. The computer is strong on contours, weak on digits. In
effect, then, the electric age brings number back into unity with
visual and auditory experience, for good or ill.
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West originated in large part
from his concern with the new mathematics. Non-Euclidean
geometries, on one hand, and the rise of Functions in number theory,
on the other, seemed to Spengler to spell the end of Western man.
He had not grasped the fact that the invention of luiclidean space is.
itself, a direct result of the action of the phonetic- alphabet on the
human senses. Nor had he realized (hat number is an extension of
the physical body of man, an extension of our sense of touch. The
"infinity of functional processes," into which Spengler gloomily saw
traditional number and geometry dissolving, is, also, the extension of
our central nervous system in electrical technologies. We need not
feel
grateful to apocalyptic writers like Spengler, who see our technologies
as cosmic visitors from outer space. The Spenglers are
tribally entranced men who crave the swoon back into collective
unconsciousness and all the intoxication of number. In India the idea
of darshon -- of the mystical experience of being in very large
gatherings --stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the
Western idea of conscious values.
The most primitive tribes of Australia and Africa, like the Eskimos of
today, have not yet reached finger-counting, nor do they have
numbers in series. Instead they have a binary system of
independent numbers for one and two, with composite numbers up
to six. After six, they perceive only "heap." Lacking the sense of
series, they will scarcely notice when two pins have been removed
from a row of seven. They become aware at once, however, if one
pin is missing. Tobias Dantzig, who investigated these matters,
points out (in Number: The Language of Science) that the parity or
kinesthetic sense of these people is stronger than their number
sense. It is certainly an indication of a developing visual stress in a
culture when number appears. A closely integrated tribal culture will
not easily yield to the separatist visual and individualistic pressures
that lead to the division of labor, and then to such accelerated forms
as writing and money. On the other hand, Western man, were he
determined to cling to the fragmented and individualist ways that he
has derived from the printed word in particular, would be well
advised to scrap all his electric technology since the telegraph. The
implosive (cora-pressional) character of the electric technology
plays the disk or film of Western man backward, into the heart of
tribal darkness, or into what Joseph Conrad called "the Africa
within." The instant character of electric information movement does
not enlarge, but involves, the family of man in the cohesive state of
village living.
It seems contradictory that the fragmenting and divisive power of our
analytic Western world should derive from an
accentuation of the visual faculty. This same visual sense is, also,
responsible for the habit of seeing all things as continuous and
connected. Fragmentation by means of visual stress occurs in that
isolation of moment in time, or of aspect in space, that is beyond the
power of touch, or hearing, or smell, or movement. By imposing
unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed,
electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the
dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other
senses.
Spengler was plunged into a Slough of Despond by what he saw as
the Western retreat from Numerical Magnitude into a Faery Land of
Functions and abstract relations. "The most valuable thing in
classical mathematic," he wrote, "is its proposition that number is the
essence of all things perceptible to the senses. Defining number as
a measure, it contains the whole world-feeling of a soul passionately
devoted to the 'here' and 'now' Measurement in this sense means
the measurement of something near and corporeal."
The ecstatic tribal man emanates from every page of Spengler. It
never occurred to him that the ratio among corporeal things could
never be less than rational. That is to say, rationality or
consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous
components of experience, and is not something added to such
sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving
such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed
wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of
experience. Consciousness, complex and subde, can be impaired or
ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense
intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification
of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.
Thus, when he thought he saw modern mathematics and science
abandoning visual relations and constructions for a nonvisual theory
of relations and functions, Spengler pronounced the demise of the
West.
Had Spengler taken the time to discover the origins of both number
and Euclidean space in the psychological effects of the phonetic
alphabet, The Decline of the West might never have been written.
That work is based on the assumption that classical man, Apollonian
man, was not the product of a technological bias in Greek culture
(namely, the early impact of literacy on a tribal society), but rather
the result of a special tremor in the soul stuff that embosomed the
Greek world. This is a striking instance of how easily men of any one
particular culture will panic when some familiar pattern or landmark
gets smudged or shifted because of the indirect pressure of new
media. Spengler, as much as Hitler, had derived from radio a
subconscious mandate to announce the end of all "rational" or visual
values. He was acting like Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations. Pip
was a poor boy who had a hidden benefactor who wanted to raise
Pip to the status of a gentleman. Pip was ready and willing until he
found that his benefactor was an escaped convict. Spengler and
Hitler and many more of the would-be "irrationalists" of our century
are like singing-telegram delivery boys, who are quite innocent of
any understanding of the medium that prompts the song they sing.
So far as Tobias Dantzig is concerned in his Number: The Language
of Science, the progress from the tactile fingering of toes and fingers
to "the homogeneous number concept, which made mathematics
possible" is the result of visual abstraction from the operation of
tactile manipulation. We have both extremes of this process in our
daily speech. The gangster term "to put the finger on" says that
somebody's "number" has come up. At the extreme of the graph
profiles of the statisticians there is the frankly expressed object of
manipulation of population for varieties of power purposes. For
example, in any large stockbroker's office there is a modern
medicine man known as "Mr. Odd Lots." His magical function is to
study the daily purchases and sales of the small buyers on the big
exchanges. Long experience
has revealed that these small buyers are wrong 80 per cent of the
time. A statistical profile of the failure of the little man to be in touch
enables the big operators to be about 80 per cent right Thus from
error comes truth; and from poverty, riches, thanks to numbers. This
is the modern magic of numbers. The more primitive attitude toward
the magical power of numbers appeared in the dread of the English
when William the Conqueror numbered them and their chattels in
what the folk called the Doomsday Book.
To turn again briefly to the question of number in its more limited
manifestation, Dantzig, having made clear that the idea of
homogeneity had to come before primitive numbers could be
advanced to the level of mathematics, points to another literate and
visual factor in the older mathematics. "Correspondence and
succession, the two principles which permeate all mathematics-- nay,
all realms of exact thought -- an woven into the very fabric of our
number system," he observes. So, indeed, are they woven into the
very fabric of Western logic and philosophy. We have already seen
how the phonetic technology fostered visual continuity and individual
point of view, and how these contributed to the rise of uniform
Euclidean space. Dantzig says that it is the idea of correspondence
which gives us cardinal numbers. Both of these spatial ideas
--lineality and point of view--come with writing, especially with
phonetic writing; but neither is necessary in our new mathematics
and physics. Nor is writing necessary to an electric technology. Of
course, writing and conventional arithmetic may long continue to be
of the utmost use to man, for all that. Even Einstein could not face the
new quantum physics with comfort. Too visual a Newtonian for the
new task, he said that quanta could not be handled mathematically.
That is as much as to say that poetry cannot be properly translated
into merely visual form on the printed page.
Dantzig develops his points about number by saying that a literate
population soon departs from the abacus and from finger
enumeration, though arithmetic manuals in the Renaissance
continued to give elaborate rules for calculating on the hands. It
could be true that numbers preceded literacy in some cultures, but
so did visual stress precede writing. For writing is only the principal
manifestation of the extension of our visual sense, as the
photograph and the movie today may well remind us. And long
before literate technology, the binary factors of hands and feet
sufficed to launch man on the path of counting. Indeed, the
mathematical Leibniz saw in the mystic elegance of the binary
system of zero and I the image of Creation. The unity of the
Supreme Being operating in the void by binary function would, he
felt, suffice to make all beings from the void.
Dantzig reminds us also that in the age of manuscript there was a
chaotic variety of signs for numerals, and that they did not assume a
stable form until printing. Although this was one of the least of the
cultural effects of printing, it should serve to recall that one of the big
factors in the Greek adoption of the letters of the phonetic alphabet
was the prestige and currency of the number system of the
Phoenician traders. The Romans got the Phoenician letters from the
Greeks but retained a number system that was much more ancient.
Wayne and Shuster, the comedian team, never fail to get a good
laugh when they line up a group of ancient Roman cops in togas and
have them number themselves from left to right, uttering Roman
numerals. This joke demonstrates how the pressure of numbers
caused men to seek ever more streamlined methods of numeration.
Before the advant of ordinal, successive, or positional numbers,
rulers had to count large bodies of soldiery by displacement
methods. Sometimes they were herded by groups into spaces of
approximately known area. The method of having them march in file
and of dropping pebbles into containers was another method not
unrelated to the abacus and the counting board. Eventually the
method of the counting board gave rise to the great discovery of the
principle of position in the early centuries of our era. By simply
putting 3
and 4 and 2 in position on the board, one after another, it was
possible to step up the speed and potential of calculation fantastically.
The discovery of calculation by positional numbers rather
than by merely additive numbers led, also, to the discovery of zero.
Mere positions for 3 and 2 on the board created ambiguities about
whether the number was 32 or 302. The need was to have a sign for
the gaps between numbers. It was not till the thirteenth century that
sifr, the Arab word for "gap" or "empty," was Latinized and added to
our culture as "cipher" (ziphirum) and finally became the Italian zero.
Zero really meant a positional gap. It did not acquire the
indispensable quality of "infinity" until the rise of perspective and
"vanishing point" in Renaissance painting. The new visual space of
Renaissance painting affected number as much as lineal waiting
had done centuries earlier.
A main fact about numbers has now been reached, with the link
between the medieval positional zero and the Renaissance
vanishing point. That both vanishing point and infinity were unknown
in the Greek and Roman cultures can be explained as by-products
of literacy. It was not until printing extended the visual faculty into
very high precision, uniformity, and intensity of special order that the
other senses could be restrained or depressed sufficiently to create
the new awareness of infinity. As one aspect of perspective and
printing, mathematical or numerical infinity serves as an instance of
how our various physical extensions or media act upon one another
through the agency of our own senses. It is in this mode that man
appears as the reproductive organ of the technological world, a fact
that Samuel Butler bizarrely announced in Erewhon.
The effect of any kind of technology engenders a new equilibrium in
us that brings quite new technologies to birth, as we have just seen
in the interplay of number (the tactile and quantitative form), and the
more abstract forms of written or visual culture. Print technology
transformed the medieval zero into the
Renaissance infinity, not only by convergence -- perspective and
vanishing point -- but by bringing into play for the first time in human
history the factor of exact repeatability. Print gave to men the concept
of indefinite repetition so necessary to the mathematical concept of
infinity.
The same Gutenberg fact of uniform, continuous, and indefinitely
repeatable bits inspired also the related concept of the infinitesimal
calculus, by which it became possible to translate any kind of tricky
space into the straight, the flat, the uniform, and the "rational." This
concept of infinity was not imposed upon us by logic. It was the gift
of Gutenberg. So, also, later on, was the industrial assembly line.
The power to translate knowledge into mechanical production by the
breaking up of any process into fragmented aspects to be placed in
a lineal sequence of movable, yet uniform, parts was the formal
essence of the printing press. This amazing technique of spatial
analysis duplicating itself at once, by a kind of echo, invaded the
world of number and touch.
Here, then, is merely one familiar, if unrecognized, instance of the
power of one medium to translate itself into another medium. Since
all media are extensions of our own bodies and senses, and since
we habitually translate one sense into another in our own experience,
it need not surprise us that our extended senses or technologies
should repeat the process of translation and assimilation of one form
into another. This process may well be inseparable from the
character of touch, and from the abrasively interfaced action of
surfaces, whether in chemistry or crowds or technologies. The
mysterious need of crowds to grow and to reach out, equally
characteristic of large accumulations of wealth, can be understood if
money and numbers are, indeed, technologies that extend the
power of touch and the grasp of the hand. For numbers, whether of
people or of digits, and units of money would seem to possess the
same factual magic for seizing and incorporating
The Greeks ran head-on into the problem of translating their own
new media when they tried to apply rational arithmetic to a problem
in geometry. Up arose the specter of Achilles and the tortoise. These
attempts resulted in the first crisis in the history of our Western
mathematics. Such a crisis concerned the problems of determining
the diagonal of a square and the circumference of a circle: a clear
case of number, the tactile sense, trying to cope with visual and
pictorial space by reduction of the visual space to itself.
For the Renaissance, it was the infinitesimal calculus that enabled
arithmetic to take over mechanics, physics, and geometry. The idea
of an infinite but continuous and uniform process, so basic to the
Gutenberg technology of movable types, gave rise to the calculus.
Banish the infinite process and mathematics, pure and applied, is
reduced to the state known to the pre-Pythagoreans. This is to say,
banish the new medium of print with its fragmented technology of
uniform, lineal repeatability, and modern mathematics disappears.
Apply, however, this infinite uniform process to finding the length of
an arc, and all that need be done is to inscribe in the arc a sequence
of rectilinear contours of an increasing number of sides. When these
contours approach a limit, the length of the arc becomes the limit of
this sequence. The older method of determining volumes by liquid
displacement is thus translated into abstract visual terms by calculus.
The principles regarding the concept of length apply also to notions
of areas, volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses
and strains, velocities and accelerations.
The miracle-maker, the sheer function of the infinitely fragmented
and repeatable, became the means of making visually flat, straight,
and uniform all that was nonvisual: the skew, the curved, and the
bumpy. In the same way, the phonetic alphabet had, centuries
before, invaded the discontinuous cultures of the barbarians, and
translated their sinuosities and obtusities into the uniformities of the
visual culture of the Western world. It is
empty
12
CLOTHING
Our Extended Skin
Economists have estimated that an unclad society eats 40 per cent
more than one in Western attire. Clothing as an extension of our skin
helps to store and to channel energy, so that if the Westerner needs
less food, he may also demand more sex. Yet neither clothing nor
sex can be understood as separate isolated factors, and many
sociologists have noted that sex can become a compensation for
crowded living. Privacy, like individualism, is unknown in tribal
societies, a fact that Westerners need to keep in mind when
estimating the attractions of our way of life to nonliterate peoples.
Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a
heat-control mechanism and as a means of denning the self socially.
In these respects, clothing and housing are near twins, though
clothing is both nearer and elder; for housing extends the inner
heat-control mechanisms of our organism, while
clothing is a more direct extension of the outer surface of the body.
Today Europeans have begun to dress for the eye,
American-style, just at the moment when Americans have begun to
abandon their traditional visual style. The media analyst knows why
these opposite styles suddenly transfer their locations. The
European, since the Second War, has begun to stress visual values;
his economy, not coincidentally, now supports a large amount of
uniform consumer goods. Americans, on the other hand, have
begun to rebel against uniform consumer values for the first time. In
cars, in clothes, in paperback books; in beards, babies, and beehive
hairdos, the American has declared for stress on touch, on
participation, involvement, and sculptural values. America, once the
land of an abstractly visual order, is profoundly "in touch" again with
European traditions of food and life and art. What was an
avant-garde program for the 1920 expatriates is now the teenagers'
norm.
The Europeans, however, underwent a sort of consumer revolution
at the end of the eighteenth century. When industrialism was a
novelty, it became fashionable among the upper classes to abandon
rich, courtly attire in favor of simpler materials. That was the time
when men first donned the trousers of the common foot soldier (or
pioneer, the original French usage), but it was done at that time as a
kind of brash gesture of social "integration." Up until then, the feudal
system had inclined the upper classes to dress as they spoke, in a
courtly style quite removed from that of ordinary people. Dress and
speech were accorded a degree of splendor and richness of texture
that universal literacy and mass production were eventually to
eliminate completely. The sewing machine, for example, created the
long straight line in clothes, as much as the linotype flattened the
human vocal style.
A recent ad for C-E-I-R Computer Services pictured a plain cotton
dress and the headline: "Why does Mrs. 'K' dress that way?"
--referring to the wife of Nikita Khrushchev. Some of the
copy of this very ingenious ad continued: "It is an icon. To its own
underprivileged population and to the uncommitted of the East and
South, it says: 'We are thrif-ty, simple, hon-est; peaceful, home-y,
go-od.' To the free nations of the West it says: 'We will bury you.' "
This is precisely the message that the new simple clothing of our
forefathers had for the feudal classes at the time of the French
Revolution. Clothing was then a nonverbal manifesto of political
upset.
Today in America there is a revolutionary attitude expressed as
much in our attire as in our patios and small cars. For a decade and
more, women's dress and hair styles have abandoned visual for
iconic--or sculptural and tactual--stress. Like toreador pants and
gaiter stockings, the beehive hairdo is also iconic and sensuously
inclusive, rather than abstractly visual. In a word, the American
woman for the first time presents herself as a person to be touched
and handled, not just to be looked at. While the Russians are groping
vaguely toward visual consumer values, North Americans are
frolicking amidst newly discovered tactile, sculptural spaces in cars,
clothes, and housing. For this reason, it is relatively easy for us now
to recognize clothing as an extension of the skin. In the age of the
bikini and of skin-diving, we begin to understand "the castle of our
skin" as a space and world of its own. Gone are the thrills of
strip-tease. Nudity could be naughty excitement only for a visual
culture that had divorced itself from the audile-tactile values of less
abstract societies. As late as 1930, four-letter words made visual on
the printed page seemed portentous. Words that most people used
every hour of the day became as frantic as nudity, when printed.
Most "four-letter words" are heavy with tactile-involving stress. For
this reason they seem earthy and vigorous to visual man. So it is with
nudity. To backward cultures still embedded in the full gamut of
sense-life, not yet abstracted by literacy and industrial visual order,
nudity is merely pathetic. The Kinsey Report on the sex
life of the male expressed bafflement that peasants and backward
peoples did not relish marital or boudoir nudity. Khrushchev did not
enjoy the can-can dance provided for his entertainment in Hollywood.
Naturally not. That sort of mime of sense involvement is
meaningful only to long-literate societies. Backward peoples
approach nudity, if at all, with the attitude we have come to expect
from our painters and sculptors -- the attitude made up of all the
senses at once. To a person using the whole sensorium, nudity is the
richest possible expression of structural form. But to the highly visual
and lopsided sensibility of industrial societies, the sudden
confrontation with tactile flesh is heady music, indeed.
There is a movement toward a new equilibrium today, as we
become aware of the preference for coarse, heavy textures and
sculptural shapes in dress. There is, also, the ritualistic exposure of
the body indoors and out-of-doors. Psychologists have long taught
us that much of our hearing takes place through the skin itself. After
centuries of being fully clad and of being contained in uniform visual
space, the electric age ushers us into a world in which we live and
breathe and listen with the entire epidermis. Of course, there is
much zest of novelty in this cult, and the eventual equilibrium among
the senses will slough off a good deal of the new ritual, both in
clothing and in housing. Meantime, in both new attire and new
dwellings, our unified sensibility cavorts amidst a wide range of
awareness of materials and colors which makes ours one of the
greatest ages of music, poetry, painting, and architecture
13
HOUSING
New Look and New Outlook
If clothing is an extension of our private skins to store and channel
our own heat and energy, housing is a collective means of achieving
the same end for the family or the group. Housing as shelter is an
extension of our bodily heat-control mechanisms --a collective skin
or garment. Cities are an even further extension of bodily organs to
accommodate the needs of large groups. Many readers are familiar
with the way in which lames Joyce organized Ulysses by assigning
the various city forms "I walls, streets, civic buildings, and media to
the various bodily organs. Such a parallel between the city and the
human body enabled Joyce to establish a further parallel between
ancient Ithaca and modern Dublin, creating a sense of human unity in
depth, transcending history.
Baudelaire originally intended to call his Flairs du Mai, Lei mines,
having in mind the city as corporate extensions of our
physical organs. Our letting-go of ourselves, self-alienations, as it
were, in order to amplify or increase the power of various functions,
Baudelaire considered to be flowers of growths of evil. The city as
amplification of human lusts and sensual striving had for him an
entire organic and psychic unity.
Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and enclose space and
to separate functions, whereas tribal man had
freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. Acting
as an organ of the cosmos, tribal man accepted his bodily functions
as modes of participation in the divine energies. The human body in
Indian religious thought was ritually related to the cosmic image, and
this in turn was assimilated into the form of house. Housing was an
image of both the body and the universe for tribal and nonliterate
societies. The building of the house with its hearth as fire-altar was
ritually associated with the act of creation. This same ritual was even
more deeply embedded in the building of the ancient cities, their
shape and process having been deliberately modeled as an act of
divine praise. The city and the home in the tribal world (as in China
and India today) can be accepted as iconic embodiments of the
word, the divine mythos, the universal aspiration. Even in our
present electric age, many people yearn for this inclusive strategy of
acquiring significance for their own private and isolated beings.
Literate man, once having accepted an analytic technology of
fragmentation, is not nearly so accessible to cosmic patterns as
tribal man. He prefers separateness and compartmented spaces,
rather than the open cosmos. He becomes less inclined to accept
his body as a model of the universe, or to see his house -- or any
other of the media of communication, for that matter -- as a ritual
extension of his body. Once men have adopted the visual dynamic
of the phonetic alphabet, they begin to lose the tribal man's
obsession with cosmic order and ritual as recurrent in the physical
organs and their social extension. Indifference to the cosmic,
however, fosters intense concentration on minute
segments and specialist tasks, which is the unique strength of
Western man. For the specialist is one who never makes small
mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
Men live in round houses until they become sedentary and
specialized in their work organization. Anthropologists have often
noted this change from round to square without knowing its cause.
The media analyst can help the anthropologist in this matter,
although the explanation will not be obvious to people of visual
culture. The visual man, likewise, cannot see much difference
between the motion picture and TV, or between a Corvair and a
Volkswagen, for this difference is not between two visual spaces, but
between tactile and visual ones. A tent or a wigwam is not an
enclosed or visual space. Neither is a cave nor a hole in the ground.
These kinds of space -- the tent, the wigwam, the igloo, the cave --
are not "enclosed" in the visual sense because they follow dynamic
lines of force, like a triangle. When enclosed, or translated into visual
space, architecture tends to lose its tactile kinetic pressure. A square
is the enclosure of a visual space; that is, it consists of space
properties abstracted from manifest tensions. A triangle follows lines
of force, this being the most economical way of anchoring a vertical
object. A square moves beyond such kinetic pressures to enclose
visual space relations, while depending upon diagonal anchors. This
separation of the visual from direct tactile and kinetic pressure, and
its translation into new dwelling spaces, occurs only when men have
learned to practice specialization of their senses, and fragmentation
of their work skills. The square room or house speaks the language
of the sedentary specialist, while the round hut or igloo, like the
conical wigwam, tells of the integral nomadic ways of food-gathering
communities.
This entire discussion is offered at considerable risk of misapprehension
because these are, spatially, highly technical matters.
Nevertheless, when such spaces are understood, they offer the key
to a great many enigmas, past and present. They explain the
change from circular-dome architecture to gothic forms, a change
occasioned by alteration in the ratio or proportion of the sense lives
in the members of a society. Such a shift occurs with the extension
of the body in new social technology and invention. A new extension
sets up a new equilibrium among all of the senses and faculties
leading, as we say, to a "new outlook" --new attitudes and
preferences in many areas.
In the simplest terms, as already noted, housing is an effort to
extend the body's heat-control mechanism. Clothing tackles the
problem more directly but less fundamentally, and privately rather
than socially. Both clothing and housing store warmth and energy
and make these readily accessible for the execution of many tasks
otherwise impossible. In making heat and energy accessible socially,
to the family or the group, housing fosters new skills and new
learning, performing the basic functions of all other media. Heat
control is the key factor in housing, as well as in clothing. The
Eskimo's dwelling is a good example. The Eskimo can go for days
without food at 50 degrees below zero. The unclad native, deprived
of nourishment, dies in a few hours. It may surprise many to learn
that the primitive shape of the igloo is, nonetheless, traceable to the
primus stove. Eskimos have lived for ages in round stone houses,
and, for the most part, still do. The igloo, made of snow blocks, is a
fairly recent development in the life of this stone-age people. To live
in such structures became possible with the coming of the white
man and his portable stove. The igloo is an ephemeral shelter,
devised for temporary use by trappers. The Eskimo became a
trapper only after he had made contact with the white man; up until
then he had been simply a food-gatherer. Let the igloo serve as an
example of the way in which a new pattern is introduced into an
ancient way of life by the intensification of a single factor --in this
instance, artificial heat. In the same way, the intensification of a
single factor in our complex lives leads naturally to a new balance
among our technologically extended faculties, resulting
in a new look and a new "outlook" with new motivations and
inventions.
In the twentieth century we are familiar with the changes in housing
and architecture that are the result of electric energy made available
to elevators. The same energy devoted to lighting has altered our
living and working spaces even more radically. Electric light
abolished the divisions of night and day, of inner and outer, and of
the subterranean and the terrestrial. It altered every consideration of
space for work and production as much as the other electric media
had altered the space-time experience of society. All this is
reasonably familiar. Less familiar is the architectural revolution made
possible by improvements in heating centuries ago. With the mining
of coal on a large scale in the Renaissance, inhabitants in the colder
climates discovered great new resources of personal energy. New
means of heating permitted the manufacture of glass and the
enlargement of living quarters and the raising of ceilings. The
Burgher house of the Renaissance became at once bedroom,
kitchen, workshop, and sale outlet.
Once housing is seen as group (or corporate) clothing and heat
control, the new means of heating can be understood as causing
change in spatial form. Lighting, however, is almost as decisive as
heating in causing these changes in architectural and city spaces.
That is the reason why the story of glass is so closely related to the
history of housing. The story of the mirror is a main chapter in the
history oi' dress and manners and the sense of the self.
Recently an imaginative school principal in a slum area provided
each student in the school with a photograph of himself. The
classrooms of the school were abundantly supplied with large
mirrors. The result was an astounding increase in the learning rate.
The slum child has ordinarily very little visual orientation. He does
not see himself as becoming something. He does not envisage
distant goals and objectives. He has deeply involved
in his own world from day to day, and can establish no beachhead in
the highly specialized sense life of visual man. The plight of the slum
child, via the TV image, is increasingly extended to the entire
population.
Clothing and housing, as extensions of skin and heat-control
mechanisms, are media of communication, first of all, in the sense
that they shape and rearrange the patterns of human association
and community. Varied techniques of lighting and heating would
seem only to give new flexibility and scope to what is the basic
principle of these media of clothing and housing; namely, their
extension of our bodily heat-control mechanisms in a way that
enables us to attain some degree of equilibrium in a changing
environment.
Modern engineering provides means of housing that range from the
space capsule to walls created by air jets. Some firms now
specialize in providing large buildings with inside walls and floors
that can be moved at will. Such flexibility naturally tends toward the
organic. Human sensitivity seems once more to be attuned to the
universal currents that made of tribal man a cosmic skin-diver.
It is not only the Ulysses of James Joyce that testifies to this trend.
Recent studies of the Gothic churches have stressed the organic
aims of their builders. The saints took the body seriously as the
symbolic vesture of the spirit, and they regarded the Church as a
second body, viewing its every detail with great completeness.
Before James Joyce provided his detailed image of the metropolis
as a second body, Baudelaire had provided a similar "dialogue"
between the parts of the body extended to form the metropolis, in his
Fleurs du Mai.
Electric lighting has brought into the cultural complex of the
extensions of man in housing and city, an organic flexibility unknown
to any other age. If color photography has created "museums
without walls," how much more has electric lighting created space
without walls, and day without night. Whether
the night city, the night highway, or the night ball game, sketching
and writing with light have moved from the domain of the pictorial
photograph to the live, dynamic spaces created by out of-door
lighting.
Not many ages ago, glass windows were unknown luxuries. With
light control by glass came also a means of controlling the regularity
of domestic routine, and steady application to crafts and trade
without regard to cold or rain. The world was put in a frame. With
electric light not only can we carry out the most precise operations
with no regard for time or place or climate, hut we can photograph
the submicroscopic as easily as we can enter the subterranean
world of the mine and of the cave-painters.
Lighting as an extension of our powers affords the clearest cut
example of how such extensions alter our perceptions. If people are
inclined to doubt whether the wheel or typography or the plane could
change our habits of sense perception, their doubts end with electric
lighting. In this domain, the medium is the message, and when the
light is on there is a world of sense that disappears when the light is
off.
"Painting with light" is jargon from the world of stage-electricity. The
uses of light in the world of motion, whether in (he motorcar or the
movie or the microscope, are as diverse as the uses of electricity in
the world of power. Light is information without "content," much as
the missile is a vehicle without the additions of wheel or highway. As
the missile is a self-contained transportation system that consumes
not only its fuel but its engine, so light is a self-contained
communication system in which the medium is the message.
The recent development of the laser ray has introduced new
possibilities for light. The laser ray is an amplification of light by
intensified radiation. Concentration of radiant energy has made
available some new properties in light. The laser ray -- by thickening
light, as it were --enables it to be modulated to carry
information as do radio waves. But because of its greater intensity, a
single laser beam can carry as much information as all the combined
radio and TV channels in the United States. Such beams are not
within the range of vision, and may well have a military future as a
lethal agents.
From the air at night, the seeming chaos of the urban area manifests
itself as a delicate embroidery on a dark velvet ground. Gyorgy
Kepes has developed these aerial effects of the city at night as a
new art form of "landscape by light through" rather than "light on."
His new electric landscapes have complete congruity with the TV
image, which also exists by light through rather than by light on.
The French painter Andre Girard began painting directly on film
before the photographic movies became popular. In that early phase
it was easy to speculate about "painting with light" and about
introducing movement into the art of painting. Said Girard:
I would not be surprised if, fifty years from now, almost no one
would pay attention to paintings whose subjects remain still in
their always too-narrow frames.
The coming of TV inspired him anew:
Once I saw suddenly, in a control room, the sensitive eye of the
camera presenting to me, one after another, the faces, the
landscapes, the expressions of a big painting of mine in an order
which I had never thought of. I had the feeling of a composer
listening to one of his operas, all scenes mixed up in an order
different from the one he wrote. It was like seeing a build-ing
from a fast elevator that showed you the roof before the
basement, and made quick stops at some floors but not others.
Since that phase, Girard has worked out new techniques of
control for painting with light in association with CBS and NBC
technicians. The relevance of his work for housing is that it enables
us to conceive of totally new possibilities for architectural and artistic
modulation of space. Painting with light is a kind of housing without
walls. The same electric technology, extended to the job of providing
global thermostatic controls, points to the obsolescence of housing
as an extension of the heat control mechanisms of the body. It is
equally conceivable that the electric extension of the process of
collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls,
might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering
extensions of our live senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An
immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a
kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats
could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses.
Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric
simulation may easily occur in the 1960s.
14
MONEY
The Poor Man's Credit Card
Central to modern psychoanalytical theory is the
relation between the money complex and the human body. Some
analysts derive money from the infantile impulse to play with faeces.
Ferenczi, in particular, calls money "nothing other than odorless
dehydrated filth that has been made to shine." Ferenczi, in his
concept of money, is elaborating Freud's concept of "Character and
Anal Erotism." Although this idea of linking "filthy lucre" with the anal
has continued in the main lines of psychoanalysis, it does not
correspond sufficiently to the nature and function of money in society
to provide a theme for the present chapter.
Money began in nonliterate cultures as a commodity, such as
whales' teeth on Fiji; or rats on Easter Island, which later were
considered a delicacy, were valued as a luxury, and thus became a
means of mediation or barter. When the Spaniards were besieging
Leyden in 1574, leather money was issued, but as
hardship increased the population boiled and ate the
new currency.
In literate cultures, circumstances may reintroduce commodity
money. The Dutch, after the German occupation of World War II,
were avid for tobacco. Since the supply was small, objects of high
value such as jewels, precision instruments, and even houses were
sold for small quantities of cigarettes. The Reader's Digest recorded
an episode from the early occupation of Europe in 1 945, describing
how an unopened pack of cigarettes served as currency, passing
from hand to hand, translating the skill of one worker into the skill of
another as long as no one broke the seal.
Money always retains something of its commodity and community
character. In the beginning, its function of extending the grasp of
men from their nearest staples and commodities to more distant
ones is very slight. Increased mobility of grasp and trading is small at
first. So it is with the emergence of language in the child. In the first
months grasping is reflexive, and the power to make voluntary
release comes only toward the end of the first year. Speech comes
with the development of the power to let go of objects. It gives the
power of detachment from the environment that is also the power of
great mobility in knowledge of the environment. So it is with the
growth of the idea of money as currency rather than commodity.
Currency is a way of letting go of the immediate staples and
commodities that at first serve as money, in order to extend trading
to the whole social complex. Trading by currency is based on the
principle of grasping and letting go in an oscillating cycle. The one
hand retains the article with which it tempts the other party. The
other hand is extended in demand toward the object which is desired
in exchange. The first hand lets go as soon as the second object is
touched, somewhat in the manner of a trapeze artist exchanging one
bar for another. In fact, Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power argues
that the trader is Involved in one of the most ancient of all pastimes,
namely that of climbing trees and swinging from limb to limb. The
primitive grasping, calculating, and timing of the greater arboreal
apes he sees as a translation into financial terms of one of the oldest
movement patterns. Just as the hand among the branches of the
trees learned a pattern of grasping that was quite removed from the
moving of food to mouth, so the trader and the financier have
developed enthralling abstract activities that are extensions of the
avid climbing and mobility of the greater apes.
Like any other medium, it is a staple, a natural resource. As an
outward and visible form of the urge to change and to exchange, it is
a corporate image, depending on society for its institutional status.
Apart from communal participation, money is meaningless, as
Robinson Crusoe discovered when he found the coins in the
wrecked ship:
I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. "O drug!" said I
aloud, "What art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me --no,
not the taking off the ground: one of those knives is worth all
this heap: I have no manner of use for thee; e'en remain where
thou art and, go to the bottom, as a creature whose life is not
worth saving."
However, upon second thoughts, I took it away; and wrapping
it all in a piece of canvas, I began to think of making another
raft . . .
Primitive commodity money, like the magical words of non-literate
society, can be a storehouse of power, and has often become the
occasion of feverish economic activity. The natives of the South
Seas, when they are so engaged, seek no economic advantage.
Furious application to production may be followed by deliberate
destruction of the products in order to achieve moral prestige. Even
in these "potlatch" cultures, however, the effect of the currencies
was to expedite and to accelerate human
energies in a way that had become universal in the ancient world
with the technology of the phonetic alphabet. Money, like writing,
has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to
separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work
to another. Even in the electronic age it has lost none of this power.
Potlatch is very widespread, especially where there is ease of
food-gathering or food-production. For example, among the
Northwest coast fishermen, or rice-planters of Borneo, huge
surpluses are produced that have to be destroyed or class differences
would arise that would destroy the traditional social order. In
Borneo the traveler may see tons of rice exposed to rains in rituals,
and great art constructions, involving tremendous efforts, smashed.
At the same time, in these primitive societies, while money may
release frantic energies in order to charge a bit of copper with
magical prestige, it can buy very little. Rich and poor necessarily live
in much the same manner. Today, in the electronic age, the richest
man is reduced to having much the same entertainment, and even
the same food and vehicles as the ordinary man.
The use of a commodity such as money naturally increases its
production. The nonspecialist economy of Virginia in the seventeenth
century made the elaborate European currencies quite
dispensable. Having little capital, and wishing to put as little of this
capital as possible into the shape of money, the Virginians turned to
commodity money in some instances. When a commodity like
tobacco was legislated into legal tender, it had the effect of
stimulating the production of tobacco, just as the establishment of
metallic currencies advanced the mining of metals.
Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill
in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical
power with the coming of representative money, or Paper money.
Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing,
when printed money supplanted gold the
compelling aura of it disappeared. Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872)
gave clear indications in his treatment of the mysterious prestige
conferred by precious metals. His ridicule of the money medium took
the form of presenting the old reverent attitude to money in a new
social context. This new kind of abstract, printed money of the high
industrial age, however, simply would not sustain the old attitude:
This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in
the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing
the price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in
the pound --this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So
strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man
has made a fortune of over/2O,ooo a year they exempt him from
all taxation, considering him a work of art, and too precious to be
meddled with; they say, "How very much he must have done for
society before society could have been prevailed upon to give
him so much money"; so magnificent an organization overawes
them; they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven.
"Money," they say, "is the symbol of duty, it is the sacrament of
having done for mankind that which mankind wanted. Mankind
may not be a very good judge, but there is no better." This used
to shock me at first, when I remembered that it had been said on
high authority that they who have riches shall enter hardly into
the kingdom of heaven; but the influence of Erewhon had made
me begin to see things in a new light, and I could not help
thinking that they who have not riches shall enter more hardly
still.
Earlier in the book, Butler had ridiculed the cash-register morality
and religion of an industrialized world, under the guise of the
"Musical Banks," with clergy in the role of cashiers. In the present
passage, he perceives money as "the sacrament of having
done for mankind that which mankind wanted." Money, he is saying,
is the "outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. "
Money as a social medium or extension of an inner wish and motive
creates social and spiritual values, as happens even in fashions in
women's dress. A current ad underlines this aspect of dress as
currency (that is, as social sacrament or outward and visible sign)
"The important thing in today's world of fashion is to appear to be
wearing a popular fabric." Conformity to this fashion literally gives
currency to a style or fabric, creating a social medium that increases
wealth and expression thereby. Does not this stress how money, or
any medium whatever, is constituted and made efficacious? When
men become uneasy about such social values achieved by
uniformity and repetition, doing for mankind that which mankind
wants, we can take it as a mark of the decline of mechanical
technology.
"Money talks" because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a
bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of
communally achieved work, skill, and experience. Money, however,
is also a specialist technology like writing; and as writing intensifies
the visual aspect of speech and order, and as the clock visually
separates time from space, so money separates work from the other
social functions. Even today money is a language for translating the
work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or
plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money --
like writing --speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of
interdependence in any community. It gives great spatial extension
and control to political organizations, just as writing does, or the
calendar. It is action at a distance, both in space and in time. In a
highly literate, fragmented society, "Time is money," and money is
the store of other people's time and effort.
During the Middle Ages the idea of the fisc or "the King's purse" kept
the notion of money in relation to language ("the
King's English") and to communication by travel ("the King's
highway"). Before the advent of printing, it was quite natural for the
means of communication to be regarded as extensions of a single
body. In an increasingly literate society, money and the clock
assumed a high degree of visual or fragmented stress. In practice,
our Western use of money as store and translator of communal work
and skill has depended upon long accustomation to the written word,
and upon the power of the written word to specialize, to delegate,
and to separate functions in an organization.
When we look at the nature and uses of money in nonliterate
societies, we can better understand the ways in which writing helps
to establish currencies. Uniformity of commodities, combined with a
fixed-price system such as we now take for granted, does not
become possible until printing prepares the ground. "Backward"
countries take a long time to reach economic "takeoff' because they
do not undergo the extensive processing of print with its
psychological conditioning in the ways of uniformity and repeatability.
In general, the West is little aware of the way in which the world of
prices and numbering is supported by the pervasive visual culture of
literacy.
Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic resources to
create and sustain the enormous structures of statistical information
that we call markets and prices. Far easier is the organization of
production than is the training of whole populations in the habits of
translating their wishes and desires statistically, as it were, by
means of market mechanisms of supply and demand, and the visual
technology of prices. It was only in the eighteenth century that the
West began to accept this form of extension of its inner life in the
new statistical pattern of marketing. So bizarre did this new
mechanism appear to thinkers of that time that they called it a
"Hedonistic calculus." Prices then seemed to be comparable, in
terms of feelings and desires, to the vast world of space that had
yielded its inequities earlier to the
translating power of the differential calculus. In a word, the
fragmentation of the inner life by prices seemed as mysterious in the
eighteenth century, as the minute fragmentation of space by means
of calculus had seemed a century earlier.
The extreme abstraction and detachment represented by our pricing
system is quite unthinkable and unusable amidst populations for
whom the exciting drama of price haggling occurs with every
transaction.
Today, as the new vortices of power are shaped by the instant
electric interdependence of all men on this planet, the visual factor in
social organization and in personal experience recedes, and money
begins to be less and less a means of storing or exchanging work
and skill. Automation, which is electronic, does not represent
physical work so much as programmed knowledge. As work is
replaced by the sheer movement of information, money as a store of
work merges with the informational forms of credit and credit card.
From coin to paper currency, and from currency to credit card there
is a steady progression toward commercial exchange as the
movement of information itself. This trend toward an inclusive
information is the kind of image represented by the credit card, and
approaches once more the character of tribal money. For tribal
society, not knowing the specialisms of job or of work, does not
specialize money either. Its money can be eaten, drunk, or worn like
the new space ships that are now designed to be edible.
"Work," however, does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive
hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet,
painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is
no work. Work begins with the division of labor and the
specialization of functions and tasks in sedentary, agricultural
communities. In the computer age we are once more totally involved
in our roles. In the electric age the "job of work ' yields to dedication
and commitment, as in the tribe.
In nonliterate societies money relates itself to the other organs
of society quite simply. The role of money is enormously increased
after money begins to foster specialism and separation of social
functions. Money becomes, in fact, the principal means of
interrelating the ever more specialist activities of literate society. The
fragmenting power of the visual sense, as literacy separates it from
the other senses, is a fact more easily identified now in the electronic
age. Nowadays, with computers and electric programming, the
means of storing and moving information become less and less
visual and mechanical, while increasingly integral and organic. The
total field created by the instantaneous electric forms cannot be
visualized any more than the velocities of electronic particles can be
visualized. The instantaneous creates an interplay among time and
space and human occupations, for which the older forms of currency
exchange become increasingly inadequate. A modern physicist who
attempted to employ visual models of perception in organizing
atomic data would not be able to get anywhere near the nature of his
problems. Both time (as measured visually and segmentally) and
space (as uniform, pictorial, and enclosed) disappear in the
electronic age of instant information. In the age of instant information
man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of
information gathering. Today information gathering resumes the
inclusive concept of "culture," exactly as the primitive food-gatherer
worked in complete equilibrium with his entire
environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and "work-less
world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life
and society.
Men left the closed world of the tribe for the "open society,"
exchanging an ear for an eye by means of the technology of writing.
The alphabet in particular enabled them to break out of the charmed
circle and resonating magic of the tribal world. A similar process of
economic change from the closed to the open society, from
mercantilism and the economic protection of national trade to the
open market ideal of the free-traders, was
accomplished in more recent times by means of the printed word,
and by moving from metallic to paper currencies. Today, electric
technology puts the very concept of money in jeopardy, as the new
dynamics of human interdependence shift from fragmenting media
such as printing to inclusive or mass media like the telegraph.
Since all media are extensions of ourselves, or translations of some
part of us into various materials, any study of one medium helps us
to understand all the others. Money is no exception. The primitive or
nonliterate use of money is especially enlightening, since it
manifests an easy acceptance of staple products as media of
communication. The nonliterate man can accept any staple as
money, partly because the staples of a community are as much
media of communication as they are commodities. Cotton, wheat,
cattle, tobacco, timber, fish, fur, and many other products have acted
as major shaping forces of community life in many cultures. When
one of these staples becomes dominant as a social bond, it serves,
also, as a store of value, and as a translator or exchanger of skills
and tasks.
The classic curse of Midas, his power of translating all he touched
into gold, is in some degree the character of any medium, including
language. This myth draws attention to a magic aspect of all
extensions of human sense and body; that is, to all technology
whatever. All technology has the Midas touch. When a community
develops some extension of itself, it tends to allow all other functions
to be altered to accommodate that form.
Language, like currency, acts as a store of perception and as a
transmitter of the perceptions and experience of one person or of
one generation to another. As both a translator and storehouse of
experience, language is, in addition, a reducer and a distorter of
experience. The very great advantage of accelerating the learning
process, and of making possible the transmission of knowledge and
insight across time and space, easily overrides
the disadvantages of linguistic codifications of experience. In
modern mathematics and science there are increasingly mere and
more nonverbal ways of codifying experience.
Money, like language a store of work and experience, acts also as
translator and transmitter. Especially since the written word has
advanced the separation of social functions, money is able to move
away from its role as store of work. This role is obvious when a
staple or commodity like cattle or fur is used as money. As money
separates itself from the commodity form and becomes a specialist
agent of exchange (or translator of values), it moves with greater
speed and in ever greater volume.
Even in recent times, the dramatic arrival of paper currency, or
"representative money," as a substitute for commodity money
caused confusions. Much in the same way, the Gutenberg
technology created a vast new republic of letters, and stirred great
confusion about the boundaries between the realms of literature and
life. Representative money, based on print technology, created new
speedy dimensions of credit that were quite inconsistent with the
inert mass of bullion and of commodity money. Yet all efforts were
bent to make the speedy new money behave like the slow bullion
coach. J. M. Keynes stated this policy in A Treatise on Money:
Thus the long age of Commodity Money has at last passed
finally away before the age of Representative Money. Cold has
ceased to be a coin, a hoard, a tangible claim to wealth, of which
the value cannot slip away so long as the hand of the individual
clutches the material stuff. It has become a much more abstract
thing--just a standard of value; and it only keeps this nominal
status by being handed round from time to time in quite small
quantities amongst a group of Central Banks, on the occasions
when one of them has been inflating or deflating its managed
representative money in a different degree from what is
appropriate to the behavior of its neighbours.
Paper, or representative money, has specialized itself away from the
ancient role of money as a store of work into the equally ancient and
basic function of money as transmitter and expediter of any kind of
work into any other kind. Just as the alphabet was a drastic visual
abstraction from the rich hieroglyphic culture of the Egyptians, so it
also reduced and translated that culture into the great visual vortex
of the Graeco-Roman world. The alphabet is a one-way process of
reduction of nonlit-erate cultures into the specialist visual fragments
of our Western world. Money is an adjunct of that specialist
alphabetic technology, raising even the Gutenberg form of
mechanical repeatability to new intensity. As the alphabet
neutralized the divergencies of primitive cultures by translation of
their complexities into simple visual terms, so
representative money reduced moral values in the nineteenth
century. As paper expedited the power of the alphabet to reduce the
oral barbarians to Roman uniformity of civilization, so paper money
enabled Western industry to blanket the globe.
Shortly before the advent of paper money, the greatly increased
volume of information movement in European newsletters and
newspapers created the image and concept of National Credit. Such
a corporate image of credit depended, then as now, on the fast and
comprehensive information movement that we have taken for
granted for two centuries and more. At that stage of the emergence
of public credit, money assumed the further role of translating, not
just local, but national stores of work from one culture to another.
One of the inevitable results of acceleration of information
movement and of the translating power of money is the opportunity
of enrichment for those who can anticipate this transformation by a
few hours or years, as the case may be. We are particularly familiar
today with examples of enrichment by means of advance
information in stocks and bonds and real estate. In the past, when
wealth was not so obviously related to
information, an entire social class could monopolize the wealth
resulting from a casual shift in technology. Keynes' report of just
such an instance, in his study of "Shakespeare and the Profit
Inflations," explains that since new wealth and bullion fall first to the
governing classes, they experience a sudden buoyancy and
euphoria, a glad release from the habitual stress and anxieties that
fosters a prosperity, which in turn inspires the starving artist
in his garret to invent new triumphant rhythms and exultant forms of
painting and poetry. As long as profits leap well ahead of wages, the
governing class cavorts in a style that inspires the greatest
conceptions in the bosom of the impecunious artist.
When, however, profits and wages keep in reasonable touch, this
abounding joy of the governing class is correspondingly diminished,
and art then cannot benefit from prosperity. Keynes discovered the
dynamics of money as a medium. The real task of a study of this one
medium is identical with that of the study of all media; namely, as
Keynes wrote, "to treat the problem dynamically, analyzing the
different elements involved, in such a manner as to exhibit the
causal process by which the price level is determined, and the
method of transition from one position of equilibrium to another."
In a word, money is not a closed system, and does not have its
meaning alone. As a translator and amplifier, money has
exceptional powers of substituting one kind of thing for another.
Information analysts have come to the conclusion that the degree
to which one resource can be substituted for another increases
when information increases. As we know more, we rely less on any
one food or fuel or raw material. Clothes and furniture can now be
made from many different materials. Money, which had been for
many centuries the principal transmitter and exchanger of
information, is now having its function increasingly transferred to
science and automation.
Today, even natural resources have an informational aspect. They
exist by virtue of the culture and skill of some community.
The reverse, however, is true also. All media –or extension of man --
are natural resources that exist by virtue of the shared knowledge
and skill of a community. It was awareness of this aspect of money
that hit Robinson Crusoe very hard when he visited the wreck,
resulting in the meditation quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
When there are goods but no money, some sort of barter --or direct
exchange of one product for another --has to occur. When, however,
in nonliterate societies goods are used in direct exchange, then it is
easiest to note their tendency to include the function of money. Some
work has been done to some material, if only in bringing it from a
distance. The object, then, stores work and information or technical
knowledge to the extent that something has been done to it. When
the one object is exchanged for another, it is already assuming the
function of money, as translator or reducer of multiple things to some
common denominator. The common denominator (or translator) is,
however, also a time-saver and expediter. As such, money is time,
and it would be hard to separate labor-saving from time-saving in this
operation.
There is a mystery about the Phoenicians, who, although they were
avid maritime traders, adopted coinage later man the landed
Lydians. The reason assigned for this delay may not explain the
Phoenician problem, but it draws sharp attention to a basic fact
about money as a medium; namely, that those who traded by
caravan required a light and portable medium of payment. This need
was less for those who, like the Phoenicians, traded by sea.
Portability, as a means of expediting and extending the effective
distance of action, was also notably illustrated by papyrus. The
alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite
another when set down on light papyrus. The resulting leap in speed
and space created the Roman Empire.
In the industrial age the increasingly exact measurement of work
revealed time-saving as a major aspect of labor-saving. The
media of money and writing and clock began to converge into an
organic whole again that has brought us as close to the total
involvement of man in his work, as of native in a primitive society, or
of artist in his studio.
Money in one of its features provides a natural transition to number
because the money hoard or collection has much in common with
the crowd. Moreover, the psychological patterns of the crowd and
those associated with accumulations of wealth are very close. Elias
Canetti stresses that the dynamic which is basic to crowds is the
urge to rapid and unlimited growth. The same power dynamic is
characteristic of large concentrations of wealth or treasure. In fact,
the modern unit of treasure in popular use is the million. It is a unit
acceptable to any type of currency. Always associated with the
million is the idea that it can be reached by a rapid speculative
scramble. In the same way, Canetti explains how the ambition to see
numbers mounting up was typical of Hitler's speeches.
Not only do crowds of people and piles of money strive toward
increase, but they also breed uneasiness about the possibility of
disintegration and deflation. This two-way movement of expansion
and deflation seems to be the cause of the restlessness of crowds
and the uneasiness that goes with wealth. Canetti spends a good
deal of analysis on the psychic effects of the German inflation after
the First World War. The depreciation of the citizen went along with
that of the German mark. There was a loss of face and of worth in
which the personal and monetary units became confused.
15
CLOCKS
The Scent of Time
Writing on Communication in Africa, Leonard Doob observes: "The
turban, the sword and nowadays the alarm clock are worn or carried
to signify high rank." Presumably it will be rather long before the
African will watch the clock in order to be punctual. Just as a great
revolution in mathematics came when positional, tandem numbers
were discovered (302 instead of 32, and so on), so great cultural
changes occurred in the West when it was found possible to fix time
as something that happens between two points. From this
application of visual, abstract, and uniform units came our Western
feeling for time as duration. From our division of time into uniform,
visualizable units comes our sense of duration and our impatience
when we cannot endure the delay between events. Such a sense of
impatience, of time as duration, is unknown among non literate
cultures. Just as work began with the division of labor, duration
begins with the
division of time, and especially with those subdivisions by which
mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense.
As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces
uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern.
Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of
human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create
the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered
universe. It was in the world of the medieval monasteries, with their
need for a rule and for synchronized order to guide communal life,
that the clock got started on its modern developments. Time
measured not by the uniqueness of private experience but by
abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense life, much as
does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but also
eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock
rather than to organic needs. As the pattern of arbitrary and uniform
measurement of time extended itself across society, even clothing
began to undergo annual alteration in a way convenient for industry.
At that point, of course, mechanical measurement of time as a
principle of applied knowledge joined forces with printing and
assembly line as means of uniform fragmentation of processes.
The most integral and involving time sense imaginable is that
expressed in the Chinese and Japanese cultures. Until the coming
of the missionaries in the seventeenth century, and the introduction
of the mechanical clocks, the Chinese and Japanese had for
thousands of years measured time by graduations of incense. Not
only the hours and days, but the seasons and zodiacal signs were
simultaneously indicated by a succession of carefully ordered scents.
The sense of smell, long considered the root of memory and the
unifying basis of individuality, has come to the fore again in the
experiments of Wilder Penfield. During brain surgery, electric
probing of brain tissue revived many memories of the patients.
These evocations were dominated and unified by
unique scents and odors that structured these past experiences. The
sense of smell is not only the most subtle and delicate of the human
senses; it is, also, the most iconic in that it involves the entire human
sensorium more fully than any other sense. It is not surprising,
therefore, that highly literate societies take steps to reduce or
eliminate odors from the environment. B.O., the unique signature and
declaration of human individuality, is a bad word in literate societies.
It is far too involving for our habits of detachment and specialist
attention. Societies that measured time scents would tend to be so
cohesive and so profoundly unified as to resist every kind of change.
Lewis Mumford has suggested that the clock preceded the printing
press in order of influence on the mechanization of society. But
Mumford takes no account of the phonetic alphabet as the
technology that had made possible the visual and uniform
fragmentation of time. Mumford, in fact, is unaware of the alphabet
as the source of Western mechanism, just as he is unaware of
mechanization as the translation of society from audile-tactile modes
into visual values. Our new electric technology is organic and
nonmechanical in tendency because it extends, not our eyes, but
our central nervous systems as a planetary vesture. In the
space-time world of electric technology, the older mechanical time
begins to feel unacceptable, if only because it is uniform.
Modern linguistics studies are structural rather than literary, and owe
much to the new possibilities of computers for translation. As soon
as an entire language is examined as a unified system, strange
pockets appear. Looking at the usage scale of English, Martin Joos
has wittily designated "five clocks of style," or five different zones
and independent cultural climates. Only one of these zones is the
area of responsibility. This is the zone of homogeneity and uniformity
that ink-browed Gutenberg rules as his domain. It is the style-zone
of Standard English pervaded by Central Standard Time, and within
this
zone the dwellers, as it were, may show varying degrees of
punctuality.
Edward T. Hall in The Silent Language discusses how "Time Talks:
American Accents," contrasting our time-sense with that of the Hopi
Indians. Time for them is not a uniform succession or duration, but a
pluralism of many kinds of things co-existing. "It is what happens
when the corn matures or a sheep grows up. ... It is the natural
process that takes place while living substance acts out its life
drama." Therefore, as many kinds of time exist for them as there are
kinds of life. This, also, is the kind of time-sense held by the modern
physicist and scientist. They no longer try to contain events in time,
but think of each thing as making its own time and its own space.
Moreover, now that we live electrically in an instantaneous world,
space and time interpenetrate each other totally in a space-time
world. In the same way, the painter, since Cezanne, has recovered
the plastic image by which all of the senses coexist in a unified
pattern. Each object and each set of objects engenders its own
unique space by the relations it has among others visually or
musically. When this awareness recurred in the Western world, it
was denounced as the merging of all things in a flux. We now realize
that this anxiety was a natural literary and visual response to the
new nonvisual technology.
J. Z. Young, in Doubt and Certainty in Science, explains how electricity
is not something that is conveyed by or contained in anything,
but is something that occurs when two or more bodies are in special
positions. Our language derived from phonetic technology cannot
cope with this new view of knowledge. We still talk of electric current
"flowing," or we speak of the "discharge" of electric energy like the
lineal firing of guns. But quite as much as with the esthetic magic of
painterly power, "electricity is the condition we observe when there
are certain spatial relations between things." The painter learns how
to adjust relations among things to release new perception, and the
chemist
and physicist learn how other relations release other kinds of power.
Less and less, in the electric age, can we find any good reason for
imposing the same set of relations on every kind of object or group
of objects. Yet in the ancient world the only means of achieving
power was getting a thousand slaves to act as one man. During the
Middle Ages the communal clock extended by the bell permitted
high coordination of the energies of small communities. In the
Renaissance the clock combined with the uniform respectability of
the new typography to extend the power of social organization
almost to a national scale. By the nineteenth century it had provided
a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and
transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an
automaton. Now in the electric age of decentralized power and
information we begin to chafe under the uniformity of clock-time. In
this age of space-time we seek multiplicity, rather than repeatability,
of rhythms. This is the difference between marching soldiers and
ballet.
It is a necessary approach in understanding media and technology
to realize that when the spell of the gimmick or an extension of our
bodies is new, there comes narcosis or numbing to the newly
amplified area. The complaints about clocks did not begin until the
electric age had made their mechanical sort of time starkly
incongruous. In our electric century the mechanical time-kept city
looks like an aggregation of somnambulists and zombies, made
familiar in the early part of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
On a planet reduced to village size by new media, cities themselves
appear quaint and odd, like archaic forms already overlaid with new
patterns of culture. However, when mechanical clocks had been
given great new force and practicality by mechanical writing, as
printing was at first called, the response to the new time sense was
very ambiguous and even mocking. Shakespeare's sonnets are full
of the twin themes of immortality of
fame conferred by the engine of print, as well as the petty futility of
daily existence as measured by the clock:
When I doe count the clock that tels the time,
And see the brave day sunck in hidious night. . .
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must goe.
(Sonnet X)
In Macbeth, Shakespeare links the twin technologies of print and
mechanical time in the familiar soliloquy, to manifest the
disintegration of Macbeth's world:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time.
Time, as hacked into uniform successive bits by clock and print
together, became a major theme of the Renaissance neurosis,
inseparable from the new cult of precise measurement in the
sciences. In Sonnet LX, Shakespeare puts mechanical time at the
beginning, and the new engine of immortality (print) at the end:
Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore,
So do our minuites hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand
Praising thy worth, dispight his cruell hand.
John Donne's poem on "The Sun Rising" exploits the contrast
between aristocratic and bourgeois time. The one trait that most
damned the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century was their
punctuality, their pedantic devotion to mechanical-time and
sequential order. As space-time flooded through the gates of
awareness from the new electric technology, all mechanical
observance became distasteful and even ridiculous. Donne had the
same ironic sense of the irrelevance of clock-time, but pretended
that in the kingdom of love even the great cosmic cycles of time
were also petty aspects of the clock:
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy, pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys, and sour prentices,
Co tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Much of Donne's twentieth-century vogue was due to his challenging
the authority of the new Gutenberg age to invest him with the
stigmata of uniform repeatable typography and with the motives of
precise visual measurement. In like manner, Andrew Marvell's "To
his Coy Mistress" was full of contempt for the new spirit of
measurement and calculation of time and virtue:
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime We would sit down and
think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day. . . .
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart,
For lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
Marvell merged the rates of exchange with the rates of praise suited
to the conventional and fashionably fragmented outlook of his
inamorata. For her box-office approach to reality, he substituted
another time-structure, and a different model of perception. It is not
unlike Hamlet's "Look on this picture and on that." Instead of a quiet
bourgeois translation of the medieval love code into the language of
the new middle-class tradesman, why not a Byronic caper to the
farther shores of ideal love?
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Here is the new lineal perspective that had come to painting with
Gutenberg, but that had not entered the verbal universe until Milton's
Paradise Lost. Even written language had resisted for two centuries
the abstract visual order of lineal succession and vanishing point.
The next age after Marvell, however, took to landscape poetry and
the subordination of language to special visual effects.
But Marvell concluded his reverse strategy for the conquest of
bourgeois clock-time with the observation
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
He proposed that his beloved and he should transform
themselves into a cannonball and fire themselves at the sun to make
it run. Time can be defeated, as it were, by reversal of its
characteristics if only it be speeded up enough. Experience of this
fact awaited the electronic age, which found that instant speeds
abolish time and space, and return man to an integral and primitive
awareness.
Today not only clock-time, but the wheel itself, is obsolescent and is
retracting into animal form under the impulse of greater and greater
speeds. In the poem above, Andrew Marvell's intuition that
clock-time could be defeated by speed was quite sound. At present
the mechanical begins to yield to organic unity under conditions of
electric speeds. Man now can look back at two or three thousand
years of varying degrees of mechanization with full awareness of the
mechanical as an interlude between two great organic periods of
culture. In 1911 the Italian sculptor Boccioni said, "We are primitives
of an unknown culture." Half a century later we know a bit more
about the new culture of the electronic age, and that knowledge has
lifted the mystery surrounding the machine.
As contrasted with the mere tool, the machine is an extension or
outering of a process. The tool extends the fist, the nails, the teeth,
the arm. The wheel extends the feet in rotation or sequential
movement. Printing, the first complete mechanization of a handicraft,
breaks up the movement of the hand into a series of discrete steps
that are as repeatable as the wheel is rotary. From this analytic
sequence came the assembly-line principle, but the assembly line is
now obsolete in the electric age because synchronization is no
longer sequential. By electric tapes, synchronization of any number
of different acts can be simultaneous. Thus the mechanical principle
of analysis in series has come to an end. Even the wheel has now
come to an end in principle, although the mechanical stratum of our
culture carries it still as part of an accumulated momentum, an
archaic configuration.
The modern clock, mechanical in principle, embodied the
wheel. The clock has ceased to have its older meanings and
functions. Plurality-of-times succeeds uniformity-of-time. Today it is
only too easy to have dinner in New York and indigestion in Paris.
Travelers also have the daily experience of being at one hour in a
culture that is still 3000 B.C., and at the next hour in a culture that is
1900 A.D.. Most of North American life is, in its externals, conducted
on nineteenth-century lines. Our inner experience, increasingly at
variance with these mechanical patterns, is electric, inclusive, and
mythic in mode. The mythic or iconic mode of awareness substitutes
the multi-faceted for point-of-view.
Historians agree on the basic role of the clock in monastic life for the
synchronization of human tasks. The acceptance of such
fragmenting of life into minutes and hours was unthinkable, save in
highly literate communities. Readiness to submit the human
organism to the alien mode of mechanical time was as dependent
upon literacy in the first Christian centuries as it is today. For the
clock to dominate, there has to be the prior acceptance of the visual
stress that is inseparable from phonetic literacy. Literacy is itself an
abstract asceticism that prepares the way for endless patterns of
privation in the human community. With universal literacy, time can
take on the character of an enclosed or pictorial space that can be
divided and subdivided. It can be filled-in. "My schedule is filled up."
It can be kept free: "I have a free week next month." And as
Sebastian de Grazia has shown in of Time, Work and Leisure, all the
free time in the world is not leisure, because leisure accepts neither
the division of labor that constitutes "work," nor the divisions of time
that create "full time" and free time." Leisure excludes times as a
container. Once time is mechanically or visually enclosed, divided,
and filled, it is possible to use it more and more efficiently. Time can
be transformed into a labor-saving machine, as Parkinson reveals in
his famous "Parkinson's Law."
The student of the history of the clock will find that a totally
new principle entered with the invention of the mechanical clock.
The earliest mechanical clocks had retained the old principle of the
continuous action of the driving force, such as was used in the water
clock and in the water wheel. It was about 1300 A.D. that the step
was taken of momentarily interrupting rotary movement by a crown
rod and balance wheel. This function was called "escapement" and
was the means of literally translating the continuous force of the
wheel into the visual principle of uniform but segmented succession.
Escapement introduced the reciprocal reversing action of the hands
in rotating a spindle forward and backward. The meeting in the
mechanical clock of this ancient extension of hand movement with
the forward rotary motion of the wheel was, in effect, the translation
of hands into feet, and feet into hands. Perhaps no more difficult
technological extension of interinvolved bodily appendages could be
found. The source of the energy of the clock was thus separated
from the hands, or the source of information, by technological
translation. Escapement as a translation of one kind of wheel space
into uniform and visual space is thus a direct anticipation of the
infinitesimal calculus that translates any kind of space or movement
into a uniform, continuous, and visual space.
Parkinson, sitting on the fence between the mechanical and the
electric uses of work and time, is able to provide us with real
entertainment by simply squinting, now with one eye, now with the
other, at the time and work picture. Cultures like ours, poised at the
point of transformation, engender both tragic and comic awareness
in great abundance. It is the maximal interplay of diverse forms of
perception and experience that makes great the cultures of the fifth
century B.C., the sixteenth century, and the twentieth century. But
few people have enjoyed living in these intense periods when all that
ensures familiarity and security dissolves and is reconfigured in a
few decades.
It was not the clock, but literacy reinforced by the clock, that
created abstract time and led men to eat, not when they were hungry,
but when it was "time to eat." Lewis Mumford makes a telling
observation when he says that the abstract mechanical time-sense
of the Renaissance enabled men to live in the classical past, and to
tear themselves out of their own present. Here again, it was the
printing press that made possible the re-creation of the classic past
by mass production of its literature and texts. The establishment of a
mechanical and abstract time pattern soon extends itself to periodic
alteration of clothing styles, much in the same way that mass
production extends itself to periodic publication of newspapers and
magazines. Today we take for granted that the job of Vogue
magazine is to alter the dress styles as part of the process of its
being printed at all. When a thing is current, it creates currency;
fashion creates wealth by moving textiles and making them ever
more current. This process we have seen at work in the section on
"Money." Clocks are mechanical media that transform tasks and
create new work and wealth by accelerating the pace of human
association. By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and
goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.
It is not really incongruous, therefore, when Mumford associates "the
clock and the printing press and the blast furnace" as the giant
innovations of the Renaissance. The clock, as much as the blast
furnace, speeded the melting of materials and the rise of smooth
conformity in the contours of social life. Long before the industrial
revolution of the later eighteenth century, people complained that
society had become a "prose machine" that whisked them through
life at a dizzy pace.
The clock dragged man out of the world of seasonal rhythms and
recurrence, as effectively as the alphabet had released him from the
magical resonance of the spoken word and the tribal trap. This dual
translation of the individual out of the grip of Nature and out of the
clutch of the tribe was not without its own penalties. But the return to
Nature and the return to the tribe are
under electric conditions, fatally simple. We need beware of those
who announce programs for restoring man to the original state and
language of the race. These crusaders have never examined the
role of media and technology in tossing man about from dimension
to dimension. They are like the somnambulistic African chief with the
alarm clock strapped to his back.
Mircea Eliade, professor of comparative religion, is unaware, in The
Sacred and the Profane, that a "sacred" universe in his sense is one
dominated by the spoken word and by auditory media. A "profane"
universe, on the other hand, is one dominated by the visual sense.
The clock and the alphabet, by hacking the universe into visual
segments, ended the music of interrelation. The visual desacralizes
the universe and produces the "nonreligious man of modern
societies."
Historically, however, Eliade is useful in recounting how, before the
age of the clock and the time-kept city, there was for tribal man a
cosmic clock and a sacred time of the cosmogony itself. When tribal
man wanted to build a city or a house, or cure an illness, he wound
up the cosmic clock by an elaborate ritual reenactment or recitation
of the original process of creation. Eliade mentions that in Fiji "the
ceremony for installing a new ruler is called 'creation of the world.'"
The same drama is enacted to help the growth of crops. Whereas
modern man feels obligated to be punctual and conservative of time,
tribal man bore the responsibility for keeping the cosmic clock
supplied with energy. But electric or ecological man (man of the total
field) can be expected to surpass the old tribal cosmic concern with
the Africa within.
Primitive man lived in a much more tyrannical cosmic machine than
Western literate man has ever invented. The world of the ear is more
embracing and inclusive than that of the eye can ever be. The ear is
hypersensitive. The eye is cool and detached. The ear turns man
over to universal panic while the eye, extended by literacy and
mechanical time, leaves some gaps and some islands free from the
unremitting acoustic pressure and reverberation.
16
THE PRINT
How to Dig it
The art of making pictorial statements in a precise and repeatable
form is one that we have long taken for granted in the West. But it is
usually forgotten that without prints and blueprints, without maps
and geometry, the world of modern sciences and technologies
would hardly exist.
In the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and other maritime monarchs,
maps were top-secret, like new electronic discoveries today. When
the captains returned from their voyages, every effort was made by
the officers of the crown to obtain both originals and copies of the
maps made during the voyage. The result was a lucrative
black-market trade, and secret maps were widely sold. The sort of
maps in question had nothing in common with those of later design,
being in fact more like diaries of different adventures and
experiences. For the later perception of space as uniform and
continuous was unknown to the medieval
cartographer, whose efforts resembled modern nonobjective art.
The shock of the new Renaissance space is still felt by natives who
encounter it today for the first time. Prince Modupe tells in his
autobiography, I Was a Savage, how he had learned to read maps
at school, and how he had taken back home to his village a map of a
river his father had traveled for years as a trader.
. . .my father thought the whole idea was absurd. He refused to
identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no
deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread
waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles
had no meaning for him. . . . Maps are liars, he told me briefly.
From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in
some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt
one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy
and the hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in
anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled. ... I understand
now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy
sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys
he had measured on tired feet. With my big map-talk, I
had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden, heat-weighted
treks.
All the words in the world cannot describe an object like a bucket,
although it is possible to tell in a few words how to make a bucket.
This inadequacy of words to convey visual information about objects
was an effectual block to the development of the Greek and Roman
sciences. Pliny the Elder reported the inability of the Greek and Latin
botanists to devise a means of transmitting information about plants
and flowers:
Hence it is that other writers have confined themselves to a
verbal description of the plants; indeed some of them have not
so much as described them even, but have contented
themselves for the most part with a bare recital of their
names . ..
We are confronted here once more with that basic function of media
--to store and to expedite information. Plainly, to store is to expedite,
since what is stored is also more accessible than what has to be
gathered. The fact that visual information about flowers and plants
cannot be stored verbally also points to the fact that science in the
Western world has long been dependent on the visual factor. Nor is
this surprising in a literate culture based on the technology of the
alphabet, one that reduces even spoken language to a visual mode.
As electricity has created multiple non-visual means of storing and
retrieving information, not only culture but science also has shifted its
entire base and character. For the educator, as well as the
philosopher, exact knowledge of what this shift means for learning
and the mental process is not necessary.
Well before Gutenberg's development of printing from movable
types, a great deal of printing on paper by woodcut had been done.
Perhaps the most popular form of this kind of block printing of text
and image had been in the form of the Biblia Pauperum, or Bibles of
the Poor. Printers in this woodcut sense preceded typographic
printers, though by just how long a period it is not easy to establish,
because these cheap and popular prints, despised by the learned,
were not preserved any more than are the comic books of today.
The great law of bibliography comes into play in this matter of the
printing that precedes Gutenberg: "The more there were, the fewer
there are." It applies to many items besides printed matter --to the
postage stamp and to the early forms of radio receiving sets.
Medieval and Renaissance man experienced little of the separation
and speciality among the arts that developed later. The manuscript
and the earlier printed books were read aloud, and poetry was sung
or intoned. Oratory, music, literature, and
drawing were closely related. Above all, the world of the illuminated
manuscript was one in which lettering itself was given plastic stress
to an almost sculptural degree. In a study of the art of Andrea
Mantegna, the illuminator of manuscripts, Millard Meiss mentions
that, amidst the flowery and leafy margins of the page, Mantegna's
letters "rise like monuments, stony, stable and finely cut. . . .
Palpably soled and weighty, they stand boldly before the colored
ground, upon which they often throw a shadow. . ."
The same feeling for the letters of the alphabet as engraved icons
has returned in our own day in the graphic arts and in advertising
display. Perhaps the reader will have encountered the sense of this
coming change in Rimbaud's sonnet on the vowels, or in some of
Braque's paintings. But ordinary newspaper headline style tends to
push letters toward the iconic form, a form that is very near to
auditory resonance, as it is also to tactile and sculptural quality.
Perhaps the supreme quality of the print is one that is lost on us,
since it has so casual and obvious an existence. It is simply that it is
a pictorial statement that can be repeated precisely and indefinitely
--at least as long as the printing surface lasts. Repeatability is the
core of the mechanical principle that has dominated our world,
especially since the Gutenberg technology. The message of the print
and of typography is primarily that of repeatability. With typography,
the principle of movable type introduced the means of mechanizing
any handicraft by the process of segmenting and fragmenting an
integral action. What had begun with the alphabet as a separation of
the multiple gestures and sights and sounds in the spoken word,
reached a new level of intensity, first with the woodcut and then with
typography. The alphabet left the visual component as supreme in
the word, reducing all other sensuous facts of the spoken word to this
form. This helps to explain why the woodcut, and even the
photograph, were so eagerly welcomed in a literate world. These
forms provide a world of inclusive gesture and dramatic posture that
necessarily is omitted in the written word.
The print was eagerly seized upon as a means of imparting
information, as well as an incentive to piety and meditation. In 1472
the Art of War by Volturius was printed at Verona, with many
woodcuts to explain the machinery of war. But the uses of the
woodcut as an aid to contemplation in Books of Hours, Emblems,
and Shepherds' Calendars continued for two hundred years on a
large scale.
It is relevant to consider that the old prints and woodcuts, like the
modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about
any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The
viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and
interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike
the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with
its very low degree of data about objects, and the resulting high
degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is
only hinted at in the mosaic mesh of dots. Since the advent of TV,
the comic book has gone into a decline. It is, perhaps, obvious
enough that if a cool medium involves the viewer a great deal, a hot
medium will not. It may contradict popular ideas to say that
typography as a hot medium involves the reader much less than did
manuscript, or to point out that the comic book and TV as cool media
involve the user, as maker and participant, a great deal.
After the exhaustion of the Graeco-Roman pools of slave labor, the
West had to technologize more intensively than the ancient world
had done. In the same way the American farmer, confronted with
new tasks and opportunities, and at the same time with a great
shortage of human assistance, was goaded into a frenzy of creation
of labor-saving devices. It would seem that the logic of success in
this matter is the ultimate retirement of the work force from the scene
of toil. In a word, automation. If this, however, has been the motive
behind all of our human
technologies, it does not follow that we are prepared to accept the
consequences. It helps to get one's bearings to see the process at
work in remote times when work meant specialist servitude, and
leisure alone meant a life of human dignity and involvement of the
whole man.
The print in its clumsy woodcut-phase reveals a major aspect of
language; namely, that words cannot bear sharp definition in daily
use. When Descartes surveyed the philosophical scene at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, he was appalled at the
confusion of tongues and began to strive toward a reduction of
philosophy to precise mathematical form. This striving for an
irrelevant precision served only to exclude from philosophy most of
the questions of philosophy; and that great kingdom of philosophy
was soon parceled out into the wide range of uncommunicating
sciences and specialities we know today. Intensity of stress on
visual blueprinting and precision is an explosive force that fragments
the world of power and knowledge alike. The increasing precision
and quantity of visual information transformed the print into a
three-dimensional world of perspective and fixed point of view.
Hieronymus Bosch, by means of paintings that interfused medieval
forms in Renaissance space, told what it felt like to live straddled
between the two worlds of the old and the new during this revolution.
Simultaneously, Bosch provided the older kind of plastic, tactile
image but placed it in the intense new visual perspective. He gave at
once the older medieval idea of unique, discontinuous space,
superimposed on the new idea of uniform, connected space. This he
did with earnest nightmare intensity.
Lewis Carroll took the nineteenth century into a dream world that
was as startling as that of Bosch, but built on reverse principles.
Alice in Wonderland offers as norm that continuous time and space
that had created consternation in the Renaissance. Pervading this
uniform Euclidean world of familiar space-and time, Carroll drove a
fantasia of discontinuous space-and-time that
anticipated Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot. Carroll, the mathematical
contemporary of Clerk Maxwell, was quite avant-garde enough to
know about the non-Euclidean geometries coming into vogue in his
time. He gave the confident Victorians a playful foretaste of
Einsteinian time-and-space in Alice in Wonderland. Bosch had provided
his era a foretaste of the new continuous time-and-space of
uniform perspective. Bosch looked ahead to the modern world with
horror, as Shakespeare did in King Lear, and as Pope did in The
Dunciad. But Lewis Carroll greeted the electronic age of space-time
with a cheer.
Nigerians studying at American universities are sometimes asked to
identify spatial relations. Confronted with objects in sunshine, they
are often unable to indicate in which direction shadows will fall, for
this involves casting into three-dimensional perspective. Thus sun,
objects, and observer are experienced separately and regarded as
independent of one another. For medieval man, as for the native,
space was not homogeneous and did not contain objects. Each
thing made its own space, as it still does for the native (and equally
for the modern physicist). Of course this does not mean that native
artists do not relate things. They often contrive the most complicated,
sophisticated configurations. Neither artist nor observer has the
slightest trouble recognizing and interpreting the pattern, but only
when it is a traditional one. If you begin to modify it, or translate it
into another medium (three dimensions, for instance), the native fails
to recognize it.
An anthropological film showed a Melanesian carver cutting out a
decorated drum with such skill, coordination, and ease that the
audience several times broke into applause --it became a song, a
ballet. But when the anthropologist asked the tribe to build crates to
ship these carvings in, they struggled unsuccessfully for three days
to make two planks intersect at a 90-degree angle, then gave up in
frustration. They couldn't crate what they had created.
in the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each object
created its own space, and the there was no rational connected
space into which it must fit. As the retinal impressiois intensified,
objects cease to cohere in a space of their own making, and, instead,
become "contained" in a uniform,continuous and "rational" space.
Relativity theory in 1905announced the dissolution of uniform
Newtonian space as an illusion or fiction, however useful. Einstein
pronounced the doom of continusou or "rational" space, and the way
was made clear for Picasso and the Marx brothers and MAD.
17
COMICS
Mad Vestibule to TV
It was thanks to the print that Dickens became a comic writer. He
began as a provider of copy for a popular cartoonist. To consider the
comics here, after "The Print," is to fix attention upon the persistent
print-like, and even crude woodcut, characteristics of our
twentieth-century comics. It is by no means easy to perceive how
the same qualities of print and woodcut could reappear in the
mosaic mesh of the TV image. TV is so difficult a subject for literary
people that it has to be approached obliquely. From the three million
dots per second on TV, the viewer is able to accept, in an iconic
grasp, only a few dozen seventy or so, from which to shape an
image. The image thus made is as crude as that of the comics. It is
for this reason that the print and the comics provide a useful
approach to understanding the TV image, for they offer very little
visual information or connected detail. Painters and sculptors,
however, can easily understand TV, because they sense
how very much tactile involvement is needed for the appreciation of
plastic art.
The structural qualities of the print and woodcut obtain, also, in the
cartoon, all of which share a participational and do-it-yourself
character that pervades a wide variety of media experiences today.
The print is clue to the comic cartoon, just as the cartoon is clue to
understanding the TV image.
Many a wrinkled teenager recalls his fascination with that pride of
the comics, the "Yellow Kid" of Richard F. Outcault. On first
appearance, it was called "Hogan's Alley" in the New York Sunday
World. It featured a variety of scenes of kids from the tenements,
Maggie and Jiggs as children, as it were. This feature sold many
papers in 1898 and thereafter. Hearst soon bought it, and began
large scale comic supplements. Comics (as already explained in the
chapter on The Print), being low in definition, are a highly
participational form of expression, perfectly adapted to the mosaic
form of the newspaper. They provide, also, a sense of continuity
from one day to the next. The individual news item is very low in
information, and requires completion or fill-in by the reader, exactly
as does the TV image, or the wirephoto. That is the reason why TV
hit the comic-book world so hard. It was a real rival, rather than a
complement. But TV hit the pictorial ad world even harder,
dislodging the sharp and glossy, in favor of the shaggy, the
sculptural, and the tactual. Hence the sudden eminence of MAD
magazine which offers, merely, a ludicrous and cool replay of the
forms of the hot media of photo, radio, and film. MAD is the old print
and woodcut image that recurs in various media today. Its type of
configuration will come to shape all of the acceptable TV offerings.
The biggest casualty of the TV impact was Al Capp's "Li 1 Abner."
For eighteen years Al Capp had kept Li'l Abner on the verge of
matrimony. The sophisticated formula used with his characters was
the reverse of that employed by the French novelist Stendhal, who
said, "I simply involve my people in the
consequences of their own stupidity and then give them brains so
they can suffer." Al Capp, in effect, said, "I simply involve my people
in the consequences of their own stupidity and then take away their
brains so that they can do nothing about it." Their inability to help
themselves created a sort of parody of all the other suspense
comics. Al Capp pushed suspense into absurdity. But readers have
long enjoyed the fact that the Dogpatch predicament of helpless
ineptitude was a paradigm of the human situation, in general.
With the arrival of TV and its iconic mosaic image, the everyday life
situations began to seem very square, indeed. Al Capp suddenly
found that his kind of distortion no longer worked. He felt that
Americans had lost their power to laugh at themselves. He was
wrong. TV simply involved everybody in everybody more deeply
than before. This cool medium, with its mandate of participation in
depth, required Capp to refocus the Li'l Abner image. His confusion
and dismay were a perfect match for the feelings of those in every
major American enterprise. From Life to General Motors, and from
the classroom to the Executive Suite, a refocusing of aims and
images to permit ever more audience involvement and participation
has been inevitable. Capp said: "But now America has changed.
The humorist feels the change more, perhaps, than anyone. Now
there are things about America we can't kid."
Depth involvement encourages everyone to take himself much more
seriously than before. As TV cooled off the American audience,
giving it new preferences and new orientation of sight and sound
and touch and taste, Al Capp's wonderful brew also had to be toned
down. There was no more need to kid Dick Tracy or the suspense
routines. As MAD magazine discovered, the new audience found the
scenes and themes of ordinary life as funny as anything in remote
Dogpatch. MAD magazine simply transferred the world of ads into
the world of the comic book, and it did this just when the TV image
was beginning to eliminate the comic
book by direct rivalry. At the same time, the TV image rendered the
sharp and clear photographic image as blur and blear. TV cooled off
the ad audience until the continuing vehemence of the ads and
entertainment suited the program of the MAD magazine world very
well. TV, in fact, turned the previous hot media of photo, film, and
radio into a comic-strip world by simply featuring them as
overheated packages. Today the ten-year-old clutches his or her
MAD ("Build up your Ego with MAD") in the same way that the
Russian beatnik treasures an old Presley tape obtained from a G.I.
broadcast. If the "Voice of America" suddenly switched to jazz, the
Kremlin would have reason to crumble. It would be almost as
effective as if the Russian citizens had copies of Sears Roebuck
catalogues to goggle at, instead of our dreary propaganda for the
American way of life.
Picasso has long been a fan of American comics. The highbrow,
from Joyce to Picasso, has long been devoted to American popular
art because he finds in it an authentic imaginative reaction to official
action. Genteel art, on the other hand, tends merely to evade and
disapprove of the blatant modes of action in a powerful high
definition, or "square," society. Genteel art is a kind of repeat of the
specialized acrobatic feats of an industrialized world. Popular art is
the clown reminding us of all the life and faculty that we have omitted
from our daily routines. He ventures to perform the specialized
routines of the society, acting as integral man. But integral man is
quite inept in a specialist situation. This, at least, is one way to get at
the art of the comics, and the art of the clown.
Today our ten-year-olds, in voting for MAD, are telling us in their own
way that the TV image has ended the consumer phase of American
culture. They are now telling us what the eighteen-year-old beatniks
were first trying to say ten years ago. The pictorial consumer age is
dead. The iconic age is upon us. We now toss to the Europeans the
package that concerned us from 1922 to 1952. They, in turn, enter
their first consumer age of
standardized goods. We move into our first depth-age of
art-and-producer orientation. America is Europeanizing on as
extensive a pattern as Europe is Americanizing.
Where does this leave the older popular comics? What about
"Blondie" and "Bringing Up Father"? Theirs was a pastoral world of
primal innocence from which young America has clearly graduated.
There was still adolescence in those days, and there were still
remote ideals and private dreams, and visualizable goals, rather
than vigorous and ever-present corporate postures for group
participation.
The chapter on The Print indicated how the cartoon is a
do-it-yourself form of experience that has developed an ever more
vigorous life as the electric age advanced. Thus, all electric appliances,
far from being labor-saving devices, are new forms of work,
decentralized and made available to everybody. Such is, also, the
world of the telephone and the TV image that demands so much
more of its users than does radio or movie. As a simple
consequence of this participational and do-it-yourself aspect of the
electric technology, every kind of entertainment in the TV age favors
the same kind of personal involvement. Hence the paradox that, in
the TV age, Johnny can't read because reading, as customarily
taught, is too superficial and consumerlike an activity. Therefore the
highbrow paperback, because of its depth character, may appeal to
youngsters who spurn ordinary narrative offerings. Teachers today
frequently find that students who can't read a page of history are
becoming experts in code and linguistic analysis. The problem,
therefore, is not that Johnny can't read, but that, in an age of depth
involvement, Johnny can't visualize distant goals.
The first comic books appeared in 1935. Not having anything
connected or literary about them, and being as difficult to decipher
as the Book of Kells, they caught on with the young. The elders of
the tribe, who had never noticed that the ordinary newspaper was as
frantic as a surrealist art exhibition, could
hardly be expected to notice that the comic books were as exotic as
eighth-century illuminations. So, having noticed nothing about the
form, they could discern nothing of the contents, either. The
mayhem and violence were all they noted. Therefore, with naive
literary logic, they waited for violence to flood the world. Or,
alternatively, they attributed existing crime to the comics. The
dimmest-witted convict learned to moan, "It wuz comic books done
this to me."
Meantime, the violence of an industrial and mechanical environment
had to be lived and given meaning and motive in the nerves and
viscera of the young. To live and experience anything is to translate
its direct impact into many indirect forms of awareness. We provided
the young with a shrill and raucous asphalt jungle, beside which any
tropical animal jungle was as quiet and tame as a rabbit hutch. We
called this normal. We paid people to keep it at the highest pitch of
intensity because it paid well. When the entertainment industries
tried to provide a reasonable facsimile of the ordinary city
vehemence, eyebrows were raised.
It was Al Capp who discovered that until TV, at least, any degree of
Scragg mayhem or Phogbound morality was accepted as funny. He
didn't think it was funny. He put in his strip just exactly what he saw
around him. But our trained incapacity to relate one situation to
another enabled his sardonic realism to be mistaken for humor. The
more he showed the capacity of people to involve themselves in
hideous difficulties, along with their entire inability to turn a hand to
help themselves, the more they giggled. "Satire," said Swift, "is a
glass in which we see every countenance but our own."
The comic strip and the ad, then, both belong to the world of games,
to the world of models and extensions of situations elsewhere. MAD
magazine, world of the woodcut, the print, and the cartoon, brought
them together with other games and models from the world of
entertainment. MAD is a kind of newspaper
mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of
madness. Above all, it is a print- and woodcut-form of expression
and experience whose sudden appeal is a sure index of deen
changes in our culture. Our need now is to understand the formal
character of print, comic and cartoon, both as challenging and
changing the consumer-culture of film, photo, and press There is no
single approach to this task, and no single observation or idea that
can solve so complex a problem in changing human perception.
18
THE PRINTED WORD
Architect of Nationalism
You may perceive, Madam," said Dr. Johnson with a pugilistic smile,
that I am well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity " Whatever
the degree of conformity the Doctor had achieved with the new
stress of his time on white-shirted tidiness, he was quite aware of the
growing social demand for visual presentability.
Printing from movable types was the first mechanization of a
complex handicraft, and became the archetype of all subsequent
mechanization. From Rabelais and More to Mill and Morris, the
typographic explosion extended the minds and voices of men to
reconstitute the human dialogue on a world scale that has bridged
the ages. For if seen merely as a store of information, or as a new
means of speedy retrieval of knowledge, typography ended
parochialism and tribalism, psychically and socially, both m space
and in time. Indeed the first two centuries of printing
from movable types were motivated much more by the desire to see
ancient and medieval books than by the need to read and write new
ones. Until 1 700 much more than SO per cent of all printed books
were ancient or medieval. Not only antiquity but also the Middle
Ages were given to the first reading public of the printed word. And
the medieval texts were by far the most popular.
Like any other extension of man, typography had psychic and social
consequences that suddenly shifted previous boundaries and
patterns of culture. In bringing the ancient and medieval worlds into
fusion --or, as some would say, confusion -- the printed book created
a third world, the modern world, which now encounters a new electric
technology or a new extension of man. Electric means of moving of
information are altering our typographic culture as sharply as print
modified medieval manuscript and scholastic culture.
Beatrice Warde has recently described in Alphabet an electric
display of letters painted by light. It was a Norman McLaren movie
advertisement of which she asks
Do you wonder that I was late for the theatre that night, when I
tell you that I saw two club-footed Egyptian A's . . . walking off
arm-in-arm with the unmistakable swagger of a music-hall
comedy-team? I saw base-serifs pulled together as if by ballet
shoes, so that the letters tripped off literally sur les pointes . . .
after forty centuries of the necessarily static Alphabet, I saw
what its members could do in the fourth dimension of Time,
"flux," movement. You may well say that I was electrified.
Nothing could be farther from typographic culture with its "place for
everything and everything in its place."
Mrs. Warde has spent her life in the study of typography and she
shows sure tact in her startled response to letters that are not printed
by types but painted by light. It may be that the
explosion that began with phonetic letters (the "dragon's teeth"
sowed by King Cadmus) will reverse into "implosion" under the
impulse of the instant speed of electricity. The alphabet (and its
extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power
that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus
exploding him into agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and
speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the
concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The
human family becomes one tribe again.
Any student of the social history of the printed book is likely to be
puzzled by the lack of understanding of the psychic and social
effects of printing. In five centuries explicit comment and awareness
of the effects of print on human sensibility are very scarce. But the
same observation can be made about all the extensions of man,
whether it be clothing or the computer. An extension appears to be
an amplification of an organ, a sense or a function, that inspires the
central nervous system to a self-protective gesture of numbing of the
extended area, at least so far as direct inspection and awareness
are concerned. Indirect comment on the effects of the printed book
is available in abundance in the work of Rabelais, Cervantes,
Montaigne, Swift, Pope, and Joyce. They used typography to create
new art forms.
Psychically the printed book, an extension of the visual faculty,
intensified perspective and the fixed point of view. Associated with
the visual stress on point of view and the vanishing point that
provides the illusion of perspective there comes another illusion that
space is visual, uniform and continuous. The linearity precision and
uniformity of the arrangement of movable types are inseparable from
these great cultural forms and innovations of Renaissance
experience. The new intensity of visual stress and private point of
view in the first century of printing were united to the means of
self-expression made possible by the typographic extension of man.
Socially, the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism,
industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education.
For print presented an image of repeatable precision that inspired
totally new forms of extending social energies. Print released great
psychic and social energies in the Renaissance, as today in Japan
or Russia, by breaking the individual out of the traditional group
while providing a model of how to add individual to individual in
massive agglomeration of power. The same spirit of private
enterprise that emboldened authors and artists to cultivate
self-expression led other men to create giant corporations, both
military and commercial.
Perhaps the most significant of the gifts of typography to man is that
of detachment and noninvolvement--the power to act without
reacting. Science since the Renaissance has exalted this gift which
has become an embarrassment in the electric age, in which all
people are involved in all others at all times. The very word
"disinterested," expressing the loftiest detachment and ethical
integrity of typographic man, has in the past decade been
increasingly used to mean: "He couldn't care less." The same
integrity indicated by the term "disinterested" as a mark of the
scientific and scholarly temper of a literate and enlightened society is
now increasingly repudiated as "specialization" and fragmentation of
knowledge and sensibility. The fragmenting and analytic power of the
printed word in our psychic lives gave us that "dissociation of
sensibility" which in the arts and literature since Cezanne and since
Baudelaire has been a top priority for elimination in every program of
reform in taste and knowledge. In the "implosion" of the electric age
the separation of thought and feeling has come to seem as strange
as the departmentalization of knowledge in schools and universities.
Yet it was precisely the power to separate thought and feeling, to be
able to act without reacting, that split literate man out of the tribal
world of close family bonds in private and and social life.
Typography was no more an addition to the scribal art than
the motorcar was an addition to the horse. Printing had its
"horse-less carriage" phase of being misconceived and misapplied
during its first decades, when it was not uncommon for the
purchaser of a printed book to take it to a scribe to have it copied
and illustrated. Even in the early eighteenth century a "textbook" was
still defined as a "Classick Author written very wide by the Students,
to give room for an Interpretation dictated by the Master, &c, to be
inserted in the Interlines" (O.E.D.). Before printing, much of the time
in school and college classrooms was spent in making such texts.
The classroom tended to be a scriptorium with a commentary. The
student was an editor-publisher. By the same token the book market
was a secondhand market of relatively scarce items. Printing
changed learning and marketing processes alike. The book
was the first teaching machine and also the first mass-produced
commodity. In amplifying and extending the written word,
typography revealed and greatly extended the structure of writing.
Today, with the cinema and the electric speed-up of information
movement, the formal structure of the printed word, as of
mechanism in general, stands forth like a branch washed up on the
beach. A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it
leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older
media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Manuscript
culture had sustained an oral procedure in education that was called
"scholasticism" at its higher levels; but by putting the same text in
front of any given number of students or readers print ended the
scholastic regime of oral disputation very quickly. Print provided a
vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory
inadequate.
Margaret Mead has reported that when she brought several copies
of the same book to a Pacific island there was great excitement. The
natives had seen books, but only one copy of each, which they had
assumed to be unique. Their astonishment at the identical character
of several books was a natural response
to what is after all the most magical and potent aspect of print and
mass production. It involves a principle of extension by
homogenization that is the key to understanding Western power.
The open society is open by virtue of a uniform typographic
educational processing that permits indefinite expansion of any
group by additive means. The printed book based on typographic
uniformity and repeatability in the visual order was the first teaching
machine, just as typography was the first mechanization of a
handicraft. Yet in spite of the extreme fragmentation or
specialization of human action necessary to achieve the printed
word, the printed book represents a rich composite of previous
cultural inventions. The total effort embodied in the illustrated book
in print offers a striking example of the variety of separate acts of
invention that are requisite to bring about a new technological result.
The psychic and social consequences of print included an extension
of its fissile and uniform character to the gradual homogenization of
diverse regions with the resulting amplification of power, energy, and
aggression that we associate with new nationalisms. Psychically, the
visual extension and amplification of the individual by print had many
effects. Perhaps as striking as any other is the one mentioned by Mr.
E. M. Forster, who, when discussing some Renaissance types,
suggested that "the printing press, then only a century old, had been
mistaken for an engine of immortality, and men had hastened to
commit to it deeds and passions for the benefit of future ages."
People began to act as though immortality were inherent in the
magic repeatability and extensions of print.
Another significant aspect of the uniformity and repeatability of the
printed page was the pressure it exerted toward "correct" spelling,
syntax, and pronunciation. Even more notable were the effects of
print in separating poetry from song, and prose from oratory, and
popular from educated speech. In the matter of poetry it turned out
that, as poetry could be read without being
heard, musical instruments could also be played without
accompanying any verses. Music veered from the spoken word, to
converge again with Bartok and Schoenberg.
With typography the process of separation (or explosion) of
functions went on swiftly at all levels and in all spheres; nowhere
was this matter observed and commented on with more bitterness
than in the plays of Shakespeare. Especially in King Lear,
Shakespeare provided an image or model of the process of quantification
and fragmentation as it entered the world of politics and of
family life. Lear at the very opening of the play presents "our darker
purpose" as a plan of delegation of powers and duties:
Only we shall retain
The name, and all th' addition to a King;
The sway, revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons, be yours: which to confirm,
This coronet part between you.
This act of fragmentation and delegation blasts Lear, his kingdom,
and his family. Yet to divide and rule was the dominant new idea of
the organization of power in the Renaissance. "Our darker purpose"
refers to Machiavelli himself, who had developed an individualist and
quantitative idea of power that struck more fear in that time than
Marx in ours. Print, then, challenged the corporate patterns of
medieval organization as much as electricity now challenges our
fragmented individualism.
The uniformity and repeatability of print permeated the Renaissance
with the idea of time and space as continuous measurable quantities.
The immediate effect of this idea was to desacralize the world of
nature and the world of power alike. The new technique of control of
physical processes by segmentation a
nd fragmentation separated
God and Nature as much as Man
and Nature, or man and man. Shock at this departure from
traditional vision and inclusive awareness was often directed toward
the figure of Machiavelli, who had merely spelled out the new
quantitative and neutral or scientific ideas of force as applied to the
manipulation of kingdoms.
Shakespeare's entire work is taken up with the themes of the new
delimitations of power, both kingly and private. No greater horror
could be imagined in his time than the spectacle of Richard II, the
sacral king, undergoing the indignities of imprisonment and
denudation of his sacred prerogatives. It is in Troilus and Cressida,
however, that the new cults of fissile, irresponsible power, public and
private, are paraded as a cynical charade of atomistic competition:
Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow
Where one but goes abreast: keep, then, the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide they all rush by
And leave you hindmost. . .
The image of society as segmented into a homogeneous mass of
quantified appetites shadows Shakespeare's vision in the later
plays.
Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the
emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar. Political
unification of populations by means of vernacular and language
groupings was unthinkable before printing turned each vernacular
into an extensive mass medium. The tribe, an extended form of a
family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an
association of men homogeneously trained to be
individuals. Nationalism itself came as an intense new visual image
of group destiny and status, and depended on a speed of
information movement unknown before printing. Today nationalism
as an image still depends on the press but has all the electric media
against it. In business, as in politics, the effect of even jet-plane
speeds is to render the older national groupings of social
organization quite unworkable. In the Renaissance it was the speed
of print and the ensuing market and commercial developments that
made nationalism (which is continuity and competition in
homogeneous space) as natural as it was new. By the same token,
the heterogeneities and noncompetitive discontinuities of medieval
guilds and family organization had become a great nuisance as
speed-up of information by print called for more fragmentation and
uniformity of function. The Benvenuto Cellinis, the
goldsmith-cum-painter-cum-sculptor-cum-writer-cum-condottiere,
became obsolete.
Once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to
permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated. Typography
has permeated every phase of the arts and sciences in the past five
hundred years. It would be easy to document the processes by
which the principles of continuity, uniformity, and repeatability have
become the basis of calculus and of marketing, as of industrial
production, entertainment, and science. It will be enough to point out
that repeatability conferred on the printed book the strangely novel
character of a uniformly priced commodity opening the door to price
systems. The printed book had in addition the quality of portability
and accessibility that had been lacking in the manuscript.
Directly associated with these expansive qualities was the revolution
in expression. Under manuscript conditions the role of being an
author was a vague and uncertain one, like that of a minstrel. Hence,
self-expression was of little interest. Typography, however, created
a medium in which it was possible to speak out loud and bold to the
world itself, just as it was possible
to circumnavigate the world of books previously locked up in a
pluralistic world of monastic cells. Boldness of type created boldness
of expression.
Uniformity reached also into areas of speech and writing, leading to
a single tone and attitude to reader and subject spread throughout
an entire composition. The "man of letters" was born. Extended to
the spoken word, this literate equitone enabled literate people to
maintain a single "high tone" in discourse that was quite devastating,
and enabled nineteenth-century prose writers to assume moral
qualities that few would now care to simulate. Permeation of the
colloquial language with literate uniform qualities has flattened out
educated speech till it is a very reasonable acoustic facsimile of the
uniform and continuous visual effects of typography. From this
technological effect follows the further fact that the humor, slang,
and dramatic vigor of American-English speech are monopolies of
the semi-literate.
These typographical matters for many people are charged with
controversial values. Yet in any approach to understanding print it is
necessary to stand aside from the form in question if its typical
pressure and life are to be observed. Those who panic now about
the threat of the newer media and about the revolution we are
forging, vaster in scope than that of Gutenberg, are obviously
lacking in cool visual detachment and gratitude for that most potent
gift bestowed on Western man by literacy and typography: his power
to act without reaction or involvement. It is this kind of specialization
by dissociation that has created Western power and efficiency.
Without this dissociation of action from feeling and emotion people
are hampered and hesitant. Print taught men to say, "Damn the
torpedoes. Full steam ahead!"
19
WHEEL, BICYCLE, AND AIRPLANE
The kinds of interplay between wheel, bicycle, and airplane are
startling to those who have never thought about them. Scholars tend
to work on the archeological assumption that things need to be
studied in isolation. This is the habit of specialism that quite naturally
derives from typographic culture. When a scholar like Lynn White
ventures to make some interrelations, even in his own area of
special historical study, he causes a good deal of unhappiness
among his merely specialist colleagues. In his Medieval Technology
and Social Change he explains how the feudal system was a social
extension of the stirrup. The stirrup first appeared in the West in the
eighth century A.D., having been introduced from the East. With the
stirrup came mounted shock combat that called into existence a new
social class. The European cavalier class had already existed to be
armed, but to mount a knight in full armor required the combined
resources often or more peasant holdings. Charlemagne demanded
that less prosperous freemen merge their private farms to equip a
single knight for the
wars. The pressure of the new war technology gradually developed
classes and an economic system that could provide numerous
cavaliers in heavy armor. By about the year 1000 A.D. the old word
miles had changed from "soldier" to "knight."
Lynn White has much to say, also, about horseshoes and
horse-collars as revolutionary technology that increased the power
and extended the range and speed of human action in the early
Middle Ages. He is sensitive to the psychic and social implications of
each technological extension of man, showing how the heavy
wheel-plow brought about a new order in the field system, as well as
in the diet of that age. "The Middle Ages were literally full of beans."
To come more directly to our subject of the wheel, Lynn White
explains how the evolution of the wheel in the Middle Ages was
related to the development of the horsecollar and the harness. The
greater speed and endurance of the horse was not available for
cartage until the discovery of the collar. But once evolved, this
horse-harness led to the development of wagons with pivoted front
axles and brakes. The four-wheel wagon capable of hauling heavy
loads was a common feature by the middle of the thirteenth century.
The effects on town life were extraordinary. Peasants began to live
in cities while going each day to their fields, almost in the manner of
motorized Saskatchewan farmers. These latter live mainly in the city,
having no housing in the country beyond sheds for their tractors and
equipment.
With the coming of the horse-drawn bus and streetcar, American
towns developed housing that was no longer within sight of shop or
factory. The railroad next took over the development of the suburbs,
with housing kept within walking distance of the railroad stop. Shops
and hotels around the railroad gave some concentration and form to
the suburb. The automobile, followed by the airplane, dissolved this
grouping and ended the pedestrian, or human, scale of the suburb.
Lewis Mumford contends
that the car turned the suburban housewife into a full-time chauffeur.
Certainly the transformations of the wheel as expediter of tasks, and
architect of ever-new human relations, is far from finished, but its
shaping power is waning in the electric age of information, and that
fact makes us much more aware of its characteristic form as now
tending toward the archaic.
Before the emergence of the wheeled vehicle, there was merely the
abrasive traction principle -runners, skids, and skis preceded wheels
for vehicles, just as the abrasive, semirotary motion of the
hand-operated spindle and drill preceded the full, free rotary motion
of the potter's wheel. There is a moment of translation or
"abstraction" needed to separate the reciprocating movement of
hand from the free movement of wheel. "Doubtless the notion of the
wheel came originally from observing that rolling a log was easier
than shoving it," writes Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization.
Some might object that log-rolling is closer to the spindle operation of
the hands than to the rotary movement of feet, and need never have
got translated into the technology of wheel. Under stress, it is more
natural to fragment our own bodily form, and to let part of it go into
another material, than it is to transfer any of the motions of external
objects into another material. To extend our bodily postures and
motions into new materials, by way of amplification, is a constant
drive for more power. Most of our bodily stresses are interpreted as
needs for extending storage and mobility functions, such as occur,
also, in speech, money, and writing. All manner of utensils are a
yielding to this bodily stress by means of extensions of the body. The
need for storage and portability can readily be noted in vases, jars,
and "slow matches" (stored fire).
Perhaps the main feature of all tools and machines -economy of
gesture --is the immediate expression of any physical pressure which
impels us to outer or to extend ourselves, whether in words or in
wheels. Man can say it with flowers or plows or locomotives. In
"Krazy Kat," Ignatz said it with bricks.
One of the most advanced and complicated uses of the wheel
occurs in the movie camera and in the movie projector. It is
significant that this most subtle and complex grouping of wheels
should have been invented in order to win a bet that all four feet of a
running horse were sometimes off the ground simultaneously. This
bet was made between the pioneer photographer Edward
Muybridge and horse-owner Leland Stanford, in 1889. At first, a
series of cameras were set up side by side, each to snap an
arrested moment of the horse's hooves in action. The movie camera
and the projector were evolved from the idea of reconstructing
mechanically the movement of feet. The wheel, that began as
extended feet, took a great evolutionary step into the movie theater.
By an enormous speed-up of assembly-line segments, the movie
camera rolls up the real world on a spool, to be unrolled and
translated later onto the screen. That the movie recreates organic
process and movement by pushing the mechanical principle to the
point of reversal is a pattern that appears in all human extensions,
whatever, as they reach a peak of performance. By speed-up, the
airplane rolls up the highway into itself. The road disappears into the
plane at take-off, and the plane becomes a missile, a self-contained
transportation system. At this point the wheel is reabsorbed into the
form of bird or fish that the plane becomes as it takes to the air.
Skin-divers need no path or road, and claim that their motion is like
that of bird flight; their feet cease to exist as the progressive,
sequential movement that is the origin of rotary action of the wheel.
Unlike wing or fin, the wheel is lineal and requires road for its
completion.
It was the tandem alignment of wheels that created the velocipede
and then the bicycle, for with the acceleration of wheel by linkage to
the visual principle of mobile lineality, the wheel acquired a new
degree of intensity. The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of
aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane. It
was no accident that the Wright
brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early airplanes seemed in
some ways like bicycles. The transformations of technology gave
the character of organic evolution because all technologies are
extensions of our physical being. Samuel Butler raised great
admiration in Bernard Shaw by his insight that the evolutionary
process had been fantastically accelerated by transference to the
machine mode. Shaw, however, was happy to leave the matter in
this delightfully opaque state. Butler, himself, had at least indicated
that machines were given vicarious powers of reproduction by their
subsequent impact upon the very bodies that had brought them into
being by extension. Response to the increased power and speed of
our own extended bodies is one which engenders new extensions.
Every technology creates new stresses and needs in the human
beings who have engendered it. The new need and the new
technological response are born of our embrace of the already
existing technology a ceaseless process.
Those familiar with the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett need not
be reminded of the rich clowning he engenders by means of the
bicycle. It is for him the prime symbol of the Cartesian mind in its
acrobatic relation of mind and body in precarious imbalance. This
plight goes with a lineal progression that mimics the very form of
purposeful and resourceful independence of action. For Beckett, the
integral being is not the acrobat but the clown. The acrobat acts as a
specialist, using only a limited segment of his faculties. The clown is
the integral man who mimes the acrobat in an elaborate drama of
incompetence. Beckett sees the bicycle as the sign and symbol of
specialist futility in the present electric age, when we must all
interact and react, using all of our faculties at once.
Humpty-Dumpty is the familiar example of the clown unsuccessfully
imitating the acrobat. Just because all the King's horses and all the
King's men couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again, it doesn't
follow that electromagnetic automation
couldn't have put Humpty-Dumpty back together. The integral and
unified egg had no business sitting on a wall, anyway. Walls are
made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and
bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like
eggs. Humpty-Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a
spectacular collapse.
The same nursery rhyme comments on the consequences of the fall
of Humpty-Dumpty. That is the point about the King's horses and
men. They, too, are fragmented and specialized. Having no unified
vision of the whole, they are helpless. Humpty-Dumpty is an obvious
example of integral wholeness. The mere existence of the wall
already spelt his fall. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake never ceases
to interlace these themes, and the title of the work indicates his
awareness that "a stone-aging" as it may be, the electric age is
recovering the unity of plastic and iconic space, and is putting
Humpty-Dumpty back together again.
The potter’s wheel, like all other technologies, was the acceleration
of an existing process. After nomad food-gathering had shifted to
sedentary plowing and seeding, the need for storage increased.
Pots were needed for more and more purposes. Men turned their
powers to changing the forms of things by cultivation. Change to
special production in local areas created the need for exchange and
for transport. For this purpose sledges were used in Northern
Europe before 5000 B.C., and human porters and pack-bearing
animals preceded sledges naturally. The wheel under the sledge
was an accelerator of feet, not of hand. With this acceleration of the
feet came the need for road, just as with the extension of our
backsides in the form of chair, came the need for table. The wheel is
an ablative absolute of feet, as chair is the ablative absolute of
backside. But when such ablatives intrude, they alter the syntax of
society. There is no ceteris paribus in the world of media and
technology. Every extension or acceleration effects new
configurations in the over-all situation at once.
The wheel made the road, and moved produce faster from fields to
settlements. Acceleration created larger and larger centers more
and more specialism, and more intense incentive, aggregates, and
aggressions. So it is that the wheeled vehicle makes its appearance
at once as a war chariot, just as the urban center, created by the
wheel, makes its appearance as an aggressive stronghold No
further motivation than the compounding and consolidating of
specialist skills by acceleration of the wheel is needed to explain the
mounting degree of human creativity and destructiveness.
Lewis Mumford calls this urbanization "implosion," but it was really
an explosion. Cities were made by the fragmenting of pastoral
modes. The wheel and the road expressed and advanced this
explosion by a radiational or center-margin pattern. Centralism
depends on margins that are accessible by road and wheel.
Maritime power does not assume this center-margin structure, and
neither do desert and steppe cultures. Today with jet arid electricity,
urban centralism and specialism reverse into decentralism and
interplay of social functions in ever more nonspecialist forms.
The wheel and the road are centralizers because they accelerate up
to a point that ships cannot. But acceleration beyond a certain point,
when it occurs by means of the automobile and the plane, creates
decentralism in the midst of the older central ism. This is the origin of
the urban chaos of our time The wheel, pushed beyond a certain
intensity of movement, no longer centralizes. All electric forms
whatsoever have a decentralizing effect, cutting across the older
mechanical patterns like a bagpipe in a symphony. It is too bad that
Mr. Mumford has chosen the term "implosion" for the urban
specialist explosion "Implosion" belongs to the electronic age. as it
belonged to the prehistoric cultures. All primitive societies are
implosive, like the spoken word. Rut "technology is explicitness." as
Lyman Bryson has said; and explicitness, or specialist extension of
functions, is
centralism and explosion of functions, and not implosion, contraction
or simultaneity.
An airline executive who is much aware of the implosive character of
world aviation asked a corresponding executive of each airline in the
world to send him a pebble from outside his office. His idea was to
build a little cairn of pebbles from all parts of the world. When asked,
"So what?" he said that in one spot one could touch every part of the
world because of aviation. In effect, he had hit upon the mosaic or
iconic principle of simultaneous touch and interplay that is inherent
in the implosive speed of the airplane. The same principle of
implosive mosaic is even more characteristic of electric information
movement of all kinds.
Centralism and extension of power by wheel and written word to the
margins of empire are creative of the direct force, outside and
external, to which men do not necessarily submit their minds. But
implosion is the spell and incantation of the tribe and the family, to
which men readily submit. Under technological explicitness, even of
the urban centralist structure, some men managed to break out of
the charmed circle of tribal magic. Mumford cites the words of the
Chinese philosopher Mencius as a comment on this situation:
When men are subdued by force they do not submit in their minds,
but only because their strength is inadequate. When men are
subdued by power in personality they are pleased to their very
heart's core and do really submit.
As the expression of new specialist extensions of our bodies the
congregating of people and supplies in centers by wheel and road
called for endless reciprocal expansion in a spongelike action of
intake and output, which has entrapped all urban structures
everywhere in place and time. Mumford observes: "If I interpret the
evidence correctly, the cooperative forms of urban
polity were undermined and vitiated from the outset by the
destructive death-oriented myths which attended . . . the exorbitant
expansion of physical power and technological adroitness." To have
such power by extension of their own bodies, men must explode the
inner unity of their beings into explicit fragments. Today, in an age of
implosion, we are playing the ancient explosion backward, as on a
film. We can watch the pieces of man's being coming together again
in an age that has so much power that the all-destructive use of it
appears meaningless, even to the dim and skew of wit.
Historians see the forms of the great cities in the ancient world as
manifesting all facets of human personality. Institutions, architectural
and administrative, as extensions of our physical beings necessarily
tend toward world-wide similarities. The central nervous system of
the city was the citadel which included the great temple and palace
of the king, invested with the dimensions and iconography of power
and prestige. The extent to which this central core could extend its
power safely depended on its power of acting at a distance. Not until
the alphabet appeared, together with papyrus, could the citadel
extend itself very far in space. (See the chapter on Roads and Paper
Routes.) The ancient city, however, could appear as quickly as
specialist man could separate his inner functions in space and
architecture. To say that the cities of the Aztecs and the Peruvians
resembled European cities is only to say that the) shared and
extended the same faculties in both regions. The question of direct
physical influence and imitation as if by diffusion becomes irrelevant.
20
THE PHOTOGRAPH
The Brothel-without-Walls
A photograph of "St. Peter's at a Moment of History" was the cover
feature of Life magazine for June 14, 1963. It is one of the peculiar
characteristics of the photo that it isolates single moments in time.
The TV camera does not. The continuous scanning action of the TV
camera provides, not the isolated moment or aspect, but the contour,
the iconic profile and the transparency. Egyptian art, like primitive
sculpture today, provided the significant outline that had nothing to
do with a moment in time. Sculpture tends toward the timeless.
Awareness of the transforming power of the photo is often embodied
in popular stories like the one about the admiring friend who said,
"My, that's a fine child you have there!" Mother: "Oh, that's nothing.
You should see his photograph." The power of the camera to be
everywhere and to interrelate things is well indicated in the Vogue
magazine boast (March 15,
1953): "A woman now, and without having to leave the country can
have the best of five (or more) nations hanging in her closet
--beautiful and compatible as a statesman's dream." That is why, in
the photographic age, fashions have come to be like the collage style
in painting.
A century ago the British craze for the monocle gave to the wearer
the power of the camera to fix people in a superior stare, as if they
were objects. Eric von Stroheim did a great job with the monocle in
creating the haughty Prussian officer. Both monocle and camera
tend to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and
multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced
merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put in the
public domain by photography. They become dreams that money
can buy. They can be bought and hugged and thumbed more easily
than public prostitutes. Mass-produced merchandise has always
made some people uneasy in its prostitute aspect. Jean Genet's The
Balcony is a play on this theme of society as a brothel environed by
violence and horror. The avid desire of mankind to prostitute itself
stands up against the chaos of revolution. The brothel remains firm
and permanent amidst the most furious changes. In a word,
photography has inspired Genet with the theme of the world since
photography as a Brothel- without-Walls.
Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at
least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography
does not foster such attitudes. If there is any sense in deploring the
growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the
press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies
that these new forms corrode. Yet if there had been no prints or
woodcuts and engravings, there would never have come the
photograph. For centuries, the woodcut and the engraving had
delineated the world by an arrangement of lines and points that had
syntax oi a very elaborate kind. Many historians of this visual syntax,
like
in Seurat's pointillisme, and is still continued in the newspaper mesh
of dots that is called "wirephoto." Within a year of Daguerre's
discovery, Samuel F. B. Morse was taking photo- graphs of his wife
and daughter in New York City. Dots for the eye (photograph) and
dots for the ear (telegraph) thus met on top of a skyscraper.
A further cross-fertilization occurred in Talbot's invention of the
photo, which he imagined as an extension of the camera obscura, or
pictures in "the little dark room," as the Italians had named the
picture play-box of the sixteenth century. Just at the time when
mechanical writing had been achieved by movable types, there grew
up the pastime of looking at moving images on the wall of a dark
room. If there is sunshine outside and a pin-hole in one wall, then
the images of the outer world will appear on the wall opposite. This
new discovery was very exciting to painters, since it intensified the
new illusion of perspective and of the third dimension that is so
closely related to the printed word. But the early spectators of the
moving image in the sixteenth century saw those images upside
down. For this reason the lens was introduced --in order to turn the
picture right side up. Our normal vision is also upside down.
Psychically, we learn to turn our visual world right side up by
translating the retinal impression from visual into tactile and kinetic
terms. Right side up is apparently something we feel but cannot see
directly.
To the student of media, the fact that "normal" right-side-up vision is
a translation from one sense into another is a helpful hint about the
kinds of activity of distortion and translation that any language or
culture induces in all of us. Nothing amuses the Eskimo more than
for the white man to crane his neck to see the magazine pictures
stuck on the igloo walls. For the Eskimo no more needs to look at a
picture right side up than does a child before he has learned his
letters on a line. Just why Westerners should be disturbed to find
that natives have to learn to read
pictures, as we learn to read letters, is worth consideration. The
extreme bias and distortion of our sense-lives by our technology
would seem to be a fact that we prefer to ignore in our daily lives.
Evidence that natives do not perceive in perspective or sense the
third dimension seems to threaten the Western ego-image and
structure, as many have found after a trip through the Ames
Perception Laboratory at Ohio State University. This lab is arranged
to reveal the various illusions we create for ourselves in what we
consider to be "normal" visual perception.
That we have accepted such bias and obliquity in a subliminal way
through most of human history is clear enough. Just why we are no
longer content to leave our experience in this subliminal state, and
why many people have begun to get very conscious about the
unconscious, is a question well worth investigation. People are
nowadays much concerned to set their houses in order, a process of
self-consciousness that has received large impetus from
photography.
William Henry Fox Talbot, delighting in Swiss scenery, began to
reflect on the camera obscura and wrote that "it was during these
thoughts that the idea occurred to me . . . how charming it would be
if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint
themselves durably, and remain fixed on paper!" The printing press
had, in the Renaissance, inspired a similar desire to give
permanence to daily feelings and experience.
The method Talbot devised was that of printing positives chemically
from negatives, to yield an exactly repeatable image. Thus the
roadblock that had impeded the Greek botanists and had defeated
their successors was removed. Most of the sciences had been, from
their origins, utterly handicapped by the lack of adequate nonverbal
means of transmitting information. Today, even subatomic physics
would be unable to develop without the photograph.
The Sunday New York Times for June IS, 1958 reported:
TINY CELLS "SEEN" BY NEW TECHNIQUE
Microphoretic Method Spots Million-Billionth of Cram,
London Designer Says
Samples of substances weighing less than a million-billionth of
a gram can be analysed by a new British microscopic technique.
This is the "microphoretic method" by Bernard M.
Turner, a London biochemical analyst and instruments
designer. It can be applied to the study of the cells of the brain
and nervous system, cell duplication including that in cancerous
tissue, and it will assist, it is believed, in the analyses of
atmospheric pollution by dust. . . .
In effect, an electric current pulls or pushes the different
constituents of the sample into zones where they would
normally be invisible.
However, to say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline
the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the
world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has
become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into
what Joyce called an "all nights newsery reel," that substitutes a
"reel" world for reality. Joyce knew more about the effects of the
photograph on our senses, our language, and our thought
processes than anybody else. His verdict on the "automatic writing"
that is photography was the abnihilization of the etym. He saw the
photo as at least a rival, and perhaps a usurper, of the word,
whether written or spoken. But if etym (etymology) means the heart
and core and moist substance of those beings that we grasp in
words, then Joyce may well have meant that the photo was a new
creation from nothing (ab-nihil), or even a reduction of creation to a
photographic negative. If there is, indeed, a terrible nihilism in the
photo and a substitution of shadows for substance, then we are
surely not the worse for knowing it. The technology of the photo is an
extension of
our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other
technology if we decide that it is virulent. But amputation of such
extensions of our physical being calls for as much knowledge and
skill as are prerequisite to any other physical amputation.
If the phonetic alphabet was a technical means of severing the
spoken word from its aspects of sound and gesture, the photograph
and its development in the movie restored gesture to the human
technology of recording experience. In fact, the snapshot of arrested
human postures by photography directed more attention to physical
and psychic posture than ever before. The age of the photograph
has become the age of gesture and mime and dance, as no other
age has ever been. Freud and Jung built their observations on the
interpretation of the languages of both individual and collective
postures and gestures with respect to dreams and to the ordinary
acts of everyday life. The physical and psychic gestalts, or "still"
shots, with which they worked were much owing to the posture world
revealed by the photograph. The photograph is just as useful for
collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written
and printed language is biased toward the private and individual
posture. Thus, the traditional figures of rhetoric were individual
postures of mind of the private speaker in relation to an audience,
whereas myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the
mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it
could command mime and gesture. Moreover, that the photograph is
quite versatile in revealing and arresting posture and structure
wherever it is used, occurs in countless examples, such as the
analysis of bird-flight. It was the photograph that revealed the secret
of bird-flight and enabled man to take off. The photo, in arresting
bird-flight, showed that it was based on a principle of wing fixity.
Wing movement was seen to be for propulsion, not for flight.
Perhaps the great revolution produced by photograph was in
the traditional arts. The painter could no longer depict a world that
had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the
inner process of creativity in expressionism and in abstract art.
Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or
happenings for readers who already knew what was happening by
photo, press, film, and radio. The poet and novelist turned to those
inward gestures of the mind by which we achieve insight and by
which we make ourselves and our world. Thus art moved from outer
matching to inner making. Instead of depicting a world that matched
the world we already knew, the artists turned to presenting the
creative process for public participation. He has given to us now the
means of becoming involved in the making-process. Each
development of the electric age attracts, and demands, a high
degree of producer-orientation. The age of the consumer of
processed and packaged goods is, therefore, not the present
electric age, but the mechanical age that preceded it. Yet, inevitably,
the age of the mechanical has had to overlap with the electric, as in
such obvious instances as the internal combustion engine that
requires the electric spark to ignite the explosion that moves its
cylinders. The telegraph is an electric form that, when crossed with
print and rotary presses, yields the modern newspaper. And the
photograph is not a machine, but a chemical and light process that,
crossed with the machine, yields the movie. Yet there is a vigor and
violence in these hybrid forms that is self-liquidating, as it were. For
in radio and TV --surely electric forms from which the mechanical
principle has been excluded --there is an altogether new relation of
the medium to its users. This is a relation of high participation and
involvement that, for good or ill, no mechanism had ever evoked.
Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western
man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of
the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb
and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his
ineptness by a defensive arrogance and
condescension to "pop kulch" and "mass entertainment." It was in
this spirit of bulldog opacity that the scholastic philosophers failed to
meet the challenge of the printed book in the sixteenth century. The
vested interests of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom
have always been by-passed and engulfed by new media. The study
of this process, however, whether for the purpose of fixity or of
change, has scarcely begun. The notion that self-interest confers a
keener eye for recognizing and controlling the processes of change
is quite without foundation, as witness the motorcar industry. Here is
a world of obsolescence as surely doomed to swift erosion as was
the enterprise of the buggy- and wagon-makers in 1915. Yet does
General Motors, for example, know, or even suspect, anything about
the effect of the TV image on the users of motorcars? The magazine
enterprises are similarly undermined by the TV image and its effect
on the advertising icon. The meaning of the new ad icon has not
been grasped by those who stand to lose all. The same is true of the
movie industry in general. Each of these enterprises lacks any
"literacy" in any medium but its own, and thus the startling changes
resulting from new hybrids and crossings of media catch them
unawares.
To the student of media structures, every detail of the total mosaic of
the contemporary world is vivid with meaningful life. As early as
March 15, 1953, Vogue magazine announced a new hybrid,
resulting from a cross between photograph and air travel:
This first International Fashion Issue of Vogue is to mark a new point.
We couldn't have done such an issue before. Fashion only got its
internationalization papers a short time ago, and for the first time in
one issue we can report on couture collections in five countries.
The advantages of such ad copy as high-grade ore in the lab of
the media analyst can be recognized only by those trained in the
language of vision and of the plastic arts in general. The copy writer
has to be a strip-tease artist who has entire empathy with the
immediate state of mind of the audience. Such, indeed, is also the
aptitude of the popular novelist or song writer. It follows that any
widely accepted writer or entertainer embodies and reveals a current
set of attitudes that can be verbalized by the analyst. "Do you read
me, Mac?" But were the words of the Vogue writer to be considered
merely on literary or editorial grounds, their meaning would be
missed, just as the copy in a pictorial ad is not to be considered as
literary statement but as mime of the psychopathology of everyday
life. In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or
iconic character, whose "meaning" belongs very little to the semantic
universe, and not at all to the republic of letters.
If we open a 1938 copy of Life, the pictures or postures then seen as
normal now give a sharper sense of remote time than do objects of
real antiquity. Small children now attach the phrase "the olden days"
to yesterday's hats and overshoes, so keenly are they attuned to the
abrupt seasonal changes of visual posture in the world of fashions.
But the basic experience here is one that most people feel for
yesterday's newspaper, than which nothing could be more
drastically out of fashion. Jazz musicians express their distaste for
recorded jazz by saying, "It is as stale as yesterday's newspaper."
Perhaps that is the readiest way to grasp the meaning of the
photograph in creating a world of accelerated transience. For the
relation we have to "today's newspaper," or verbal jazz, is the same
that people feel for fashions. Fashion is not a way of being informed
or aware, but a way of being with it. That, however, is merely to draw
attention to a negative aspect of the photograph. Positively, the
effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as
the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course the photograph
does both. It wipes out our national
frontiers and cultural barriers, and involves us in The Family of Man,
regardless of any particular point of view. A picture of a group of
persons of any hue whatever is a picture of people, not of "colored
people." That is the logic of the photograph, politically speaking. But
the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a
condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with
the photograph. By the same token, the complete transformation of
human sense-awareness by this form involves a development of
self-consciousness that alters facial expression and cosmetic
makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or in
private. This fact can be gleaned from any magazine or movie of
fifteen years back. It is not too much to say, therefore, that if outer
posture is affected by the photograph, so with our inner postures
and the dialogue with ourselves. The age of Jung and Freud is,
above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of
self-critical attitudes.
This immense tidying-up of our inner lives, motivated by the new
picture gestalt culture, has had its obvious parallels in our attempts
to rearrange our homes and gardens and our cities. To see a
photograph of the local slum makes the condition unbearable. The
mere matching of the picture with reality provides a new motive for
change, as it does a new motive for travel.
Daniel Boorstin in The Image: or What Happened to the American
Dream offers a conducted literary tour of the new photographic world
of travel. One has merely to look at the new tourism in a literary
perspective to discover that it makes no sense at all. To the literary
man who has read about Europe, in leisurely anticipation of a visit,
an ad that whispers: "You are just fifteen gourmet meals from
Europe on the world's fastest ship" is gross and repugnant.
Advertisements of travel by plane are worse: "Dinner in New York,
indigestion in Paris." Moreover, the photograph has reversed the
purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange
and unfamiliar. Descartes, in the early seventeenth century, had
observed that traveling was almost like
conversing with men of other centuries, a point of view quite
unknown before his time. For those who cherish such quaint
experience, it is necessary today to go back very many centuries by
the art and archaeology route. Professor Boorstin seems unhappy
that so many Americans travel so much and are changed by it so
little. He feels that the entire travel experience has become "diluted,
contrived, prefabricated." He is not concerned to find out why the
photograph has done this to us. But in the same way intelligent
people in the past always deplored the way in which the book had
become a substitute for inquiry, conversation, and reflection, and
never troubled to reflect on the nature of the printed book. The book
reader has always tended to be passive, because that is the best
way to read. Today, the traveler has become passive. Given
travelers checks, a passport, and a toothbrush, the world is your
oyster. The macadam road, the railroad, and the steamship have
taken the travail out of travel. People moved by the silliest whims
now clutter the foreign places, because travel differs very little from
going to a movie or turning the pages of a magazine. The "Go Now,
Pay Later" formula of the travel agencies might as well read: "Go
now, arrive later," for it could be argued that such people never really
leave their beaten paths of impercipience, nor do they ever arrive at
any new place. They can have Shanghai or Berlin or Venice in a
package tour that they need never open. In 1961, TWA began to
provide new movies for its trans-Atlantic flights so that you could visit
Portugal, California, or anywhere else, while en route to Holland, for
example. Thus the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects
that have been encountered before in some other medium. It is well
known that even museum curators often prefer colored pictures to
the originals of various objects in their own cases. In the same way,
the tourist who arrives at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Grand
Canyon of Arizona, can now merely check his reactions to
something with which he has long been familiar, and take his own
pictures of the same.
To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens
and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most
of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to
the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position
that considers a literary landscape as superior to a movie travelogue.
For the untrained awareness, all reading and all movies, like all
travel, are equally banal and unnourishing as experience. Difficulty
of access does not confer adequacy of perception, though it may
involve an object in an aura of pseudo-values, as with a gem, a
movie star, or an old master. This now brings us to the factual core
of the "pseudoevent," a label applied to the new media, in general,
because of their power to give new patterns to our lives by
acceleration of older patterns. It is necessary to reflect that this
same insidious power was once felt in the old media, including
languages. All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception
and arbitrary values.
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of
personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration
of information. Some feel keenly that speed-up has impoverished
the world they knew by changing its forms of human interassociation.
There is nothing new or strange in a parochial preference for those
pseudo-events that happened to enter into the composition of
society just before the electric revolution of this century. The student
of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period
whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the
patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. This
would seem to be a normal, and even amiable, trait ensuring a
maximal degree of social continuity and permanence amidst change
and innovation. But all the conservatism in the world does not afford
even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric
media. On a moving highway the vehicle that backs up is
accelerating in relation to the highway situation. Such would seem to
be the ironical status of the cultural reactionary. When the trend is
one
way his resistance insures a greater speed of change. Control over
change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it.
Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force. Thus we
may feel like a man who has been hustled away from his favorite
knothole in the ball park by a frantic rout of fans eager to see the
arrival of a movie star. We are no sooner in position to look at one
kind of event than it is obliterated by another, just as our Western
lives seem to native cultures to be one long series of preparations
for living. But the favorite stance of literary man has long been "to
view with alarm" or "to point with pride," while scrupulously ignoring
what's going on.
One immense area of photographic influence that affects our lives is
the world of packaging and display and, in general, the organization
of shops and stores of every kind. The newspaper that could
advertise every sort of product on one page quickly gave rise to
department stores that provided every kind of product under one
roof. Today the decentralizing of such institutions into a multiplicity of
small shops in shopping plazas is partly the creation of the car,
partly the result of TV. But the photograph still exerts some centralist
pressure in the mail-order catalogue. Yet the mail-order houses
originally felt not only the centralist forces of railway and postal
services, but also, and at the same time, the decentralizing power of
the telegraph. The Sears Roebuck enterprise was directly owing to
stationmaster use of the telegraph. These men saw that the waste of
goods on railway sidings could be ended by the speed of the
telegraph to reroute and concentrate.
The complex network of media, other than the photograph that
appears in the world of merchandising, is easier to observe in the
world of sports. In one instance, the press camera contributed to
radical changes in the game of football. A press photo of battered
players in a 1905 game between Pennsylvania and Swarthmore
came to the attention of President Teddy Roosevelt. He was so
angered at the picture of Swarthmore's mangled Bob
Maxwell that he issued an immediate ultimatum --that if rough play
continued, he would abolish the game by executive edict. The effect
was the same as that of the harrowing telegraph reports of Russell
from the Crimea, which created the image and role of Florence
Nightingale.
No less drastic was the effect of the press photo coverage of the
lives of the rich. "Conspicuous consumption" owed less to the
phrase of Veblen than to the press photographer, who began to
invade the entertainment spots of the very rich. The sights of men
ordering drinks from horseback at the bars of clubs quickly caused a
public revulsion that drove the rich into the ways of timid mediocrity
and obscurity in America, which they have never abandoned. The
photograph made it quite unsafe to come out and play, for it
betrayed such blatant dimensions of power as to be self-defeating.
On the other hand, the movie phase of photography created a new
aristocracy of actors and actresses, who dramatized, on and off the
screen, the fantasia of conspicuous consumption that the rich could
never achieve. The movie demonstrated the magic power of the
photo by providing a consumer package of plutocratic dimension for
all the Cinderellas in the world.
The Gutenberg Galaxy provides the necessary background for
studying the rapid rise of new visual values after the advent of
printing from movable types. "A place for everything and everything
in its place" is a feature not only of the compositor's arrangement of
his type fonts, but of the entire range of human organization of
knowledge and action from the sixteenth century onward. Even the
inner life of the feelings and emotions began to be structured and
ordered and analyzed according to separate pictorial landscapes, as
Christopher Hussey explained in his fascinating study of The
Picturesque. More than a century of this pictorial analysis of the
inner life preceded Talbot's 1839 discovery of photography.
Photography, by carrying the pictorial delineation of natural objects
much further than paint or
language could do, had a reverse effect. By conferring a means of
self delineation of objects, of "statement without syntax," photography
gave the impetus to a delineation of the inner' world
Statement without syntax or verbalization was really statement by
gesture, by mime, and by gestaJt. This new dimension opened for
human inspection by poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud le paysage
interieur, or the countries of the mind. Poets and painters invaded
this inner landscape world long before Freud and Jung brought their
cameras and notebooks to capture states of mind. Perhaps most
spectacular of all was Claude Bernard, whose Introduction to the
Study of Experimental Medicine ushered science into le milieu
interieur of the body exactly at the time when the poets did the same
for the life of perception and feeling.
It is important to note that this ultimate stage of pictorialization was a
reversal of pattern. The world of body and mind observed by
Baudelaire and Bernard was not photographical at all, but a
nonvisual set of relations such as the physicist, for example, had
encountered by means of the new mathematics and statistics. The
photograph might be said, also, to have brought to human attention
the subvisual world of bacteria that caused Louis Pasteur to be
driven from the medical profession by his indignant colleagues. Just
as the painter Samuel Morse had unintentionally projected himself
into the nonvisual world of the telegraph, so the photograph really
transcends the pictorial by capturing the inner gestures and postures
of both body and mind, yielding the new worlds of endocrinology and
psychopathology.
To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible,
then, without grasping its relations to other media, both old and new.
For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems,
constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek
new equilibrium as new extensions occur. In America, people can
tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made
uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices. The photo
and visual worlds are secure areas of anesthesia.
21
PRESS
Government by News Leak
The headline for an Associated Press release (February 25, 1963)
read:
PRESS BLAMED FOR SUCCESS
KENNEDY MANAGES NEWS BOLDLY,
CYNICALLY, SUBTLY, KROCK CLAIMS
Arthur Krock is quoted as saying that "the principle onus rests on the
printed and electronic prprocess itself." That may seem like another
way of saying that "history is to blame." But it is the instant
consequences of electrically moved iformation that make necessary
a deliberate artistic aim in the placing and management of news. In
diplomacy the same electric speed causes the decisions to be
announced before they are made in order to ascertain the varying
responses that might occur when such
decisions actually are made. Such procedure, quite inevitable at the
electric speed that involves the entire society in the decision-making
process, shocks the old press men because it abdicates any definite
point of view. As the speed of information increases, the tendency is
for politics to move away from representation and delegation of
constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community
in the central acts of decision. Slower speeds of information make
delegation and representation mandatory. Associated with such
delegation are the points of view of the different sectors of public
interest that are expected to be put forward for processing and
consideration by the rest of the community. When the electric speed
is introduced into such a delegated and representational
organization, this obsolescent organization can only be made to
function by a series of subterfuges and makeshifts. These strike
some observers as base betrayals of the original aims and purposes
of the established forms.
The massive theme of the press can be managed only by direct
contact with the formal patterns of the medium in question. It is thus
necessary to state at once that "human interest" is a technical term
meaning that which happens when multiple book pages or multiple
information items are arranged in a mosaic on one sheet. The book
is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view." The
press is a group confessional form that provides communal
participation. It can "color" events by using them or by not using
them at all. But it is the daily communal exposure of multiple items in
juxtaposition that gives the press its complex dimension of human
interest.
The book form is not a communal mosaic or corporate image but a
private voice. One of the unexpected effects of TV on the press has
been a great increase in the popularity of Time and Newsweek.
Quite inexplicably to themselves and without any new effort at
subscription, their circulations have more than doubled since TV.
These news magazines are preeminently mosaic in
form, offering not windows on the world like the old picture
magazines, but presenting corporate images of society in action.
Whereas the spectator of a picture magazine is passive, the reader
of a news magazine becomes much involved in the making of
meanings for the corporate image. Thus the TV habit of involvement
in mosaic image has greatly strengthened the appeal of these news
magazines, but at the same time has diminished the appeal of the
older pictorial feature magazines.
Both book and newspaper are confessional in character, creating
the effect of inside story by their mere form, regardless of content.
As the book page yields the inside story of the author's mental
adventures, so the press page yields the inside story of the
community in action and interaction. It is for this reason that the
press seems to be performing its function most when revealing the
seamy side. Real news is bad news --bad news about somebody, or
bad news for somebody. In 1962, when Minneapolis had been for
months without a newspaper, the chief of police said: "Sure, I miss
the news, but so far as my job goes I hope the papers never come
back. There is less crime around without a newspaper to pass
around the ideas."
Even before the telegraph speed-up, the newspaper of the
nineteenth century had moved a long way toward a mosaic form.
Rotary steam presses came into use decades before electricity, but
typesetting by hand remained more satisfactory than any
mechanical means until the development of linotype about 1890.
With linotype, the press could adjust its form more fully to the
news-gathering of the telegraph and the news-printing of the rotary
presses. It is typical and significant that the linotype answer to the
long-standing slowness of typesetting did not come from those
directly engaged with the problem. Fortunes had been vainly spent
on typesetting machines before James Clephane, seeking a fast
way of writing out and duplicating shorthand notes, found a way to
combine the typewriter and the typesetter. It was the typewriter that
solved the utterly differentKRE5S
typesetting problem. Today the publishing of book and newspaper
both depends on the typewriter.
The speed-up of information gathering and publishing naturally
created new forms of arranging material for readers. As early as 1
830 the French poet Lamartine had said, "The book arrives too late,"
drawing attention to the fact that the book and the newspaper are
quite different forms. Slow down typesetting and news-gathering,
and there occurs a change, not only in the physical appearance of
the press, but also in the prose style of those writing for it. The first
great change in style came early in the eighteenth century, when
the famous Tatler and Spectator of Addison and Steele
discovered a new prose technique to match the form of the printed
word. It was the technique of equitone. It consisted in maintaining a
single level of tone and attitude to the reader throughout the entire
composition. By this discovery, Addison and Steele brought written
discourse into line with the printed word and away from the variety of
pitch and tone of the spoken, and of even the hand-written, word.
This way of bringing language into line with print must be clearly
understood. The telegraph broke language away again from the
printed word, and began to make erratic noises called headlines,
journalese, and telegraphese --phenomena that still dismay the
literary community with its mannerisms of supercilious equitone that
mime typographic uniformity. Headlinese produces such effects as
BARBER HONES TONSILS
FOR OLD-TIMER'S EVENT
referring to Sal (the Barber) Maglie, the swarthy curve-ball artist with
the old Brooklyn Dodgers, when he was to be guest speaker at a
Ball Club dinner. The same community admires the varied tonality
and vigor of Aretino, Rabelais, and Nashe, all of whom wrote prose
before the print pressure was strong enough to
reduce the language gestures to uniform lineality. Talking with an
economist who was serving on an unemployment commission, I
asked him whether he had considered newspaper reading as a form
of paid employment. I was not wrong in supposing that he would be
incredulous. Nevertheless, all media that mix ads with other
programming are a form of "paid learning." In years to come, when
the child will be paid to learn, educators will recognize the
sensational press as the forerunner of paid learning. One reason
that it was difficult to see this fact earlier is that the processing and
moving of information had not been the main business of a
mechanical and industrial world. It is, however, easily the dominant
business and means of wealth in the electric world. At the end of the
mechanical age people still imagined that press and radio and even
TV were merely forms of information paid for by the makers and
users of "hardware," like cars and soap and gasoline. As automation
takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial
commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to
information movement. The early stages by which information itself
became the basic economic commodity of the electric age were
obscured by the ways in which advertising and entertainment put
people off the track. Advertisers pay for space and time in paper and
magazine, on radio and TV; that is, they buy a piece of the reader,
listener, or viewer as definitely as if they hired our homes for a public
meeting. They would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer
directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do so. The only
way so far devised is to put on a free show. Movies in America have
not developed advertising intervals simply because the movie itself
is the greatest of all forms of advertisement for consumer goods.
Those who deplore the frivolity of the press and its natural form of
group exposure and communal cleansing simply ignore the nature of
the medium and demand that it be a book, as it tends to be in
Europe. The book arrived in western Europe long
before the newspaper; but Russia and middle Europe developed the
book and newspaper almost together, with the result that they have
never unscrambled the two forms. Their journalism exudes the
private point of view of the literary mandarin. British and American
journalism, however, have always tended to exploit the mosaic form
of the newspaper format in order to present the discontinuous
variety and incongruity of ordinary life. The monotonous demands of
the literary community --that the newspaper use its mosaic form to
present a fixed point of view on a single plane of perspective
--represent a failure to see the form of the press at all. It is as if the
public were suddenly to demand that department stores have only
one department.
The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of
the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such
diverse daily information be found, the press will fold. Radio and TV
can handle the sports, news, comics, and pictures. The editorial,
which is the one book-feature of the newspaper, has been ignored
for many years, unless put in the form of news or paid
advertisement.
If our press is in the main a free entertainment service paid for by
advertisers who want to buy readers, the Russian press is in toto the
basic mode of industrial promotion. If we use news, political and
personal, as entertainment to capture ad readers, the Russians use
it as a means of promotion for their economy. Their political news
has the same aggressive earnestness and posture as the voice of
the sponsor in an American ad. A culture that gets the newspaper
late (for the same reasons that industrialization is delayed) and one
that accepts the press as a form of the book and regards industry as
group political action, is not likely to seek entertainment in the news.
Even in America, literate people have small skill in understanding
the iconographic varieties of the ad world. Ads are ignored or
deplored, but seldom studied and enjoyed.
Anybody who could think that the press has the same function
in America and Russia, or in France and China, is not really in touch
with the medium. Are we to suppose that this kind of media illiteracy
is characteristic only of Westerners, and that Russians know how to
correct the bias of the medium in order to read it right? Or do people
vaguely suppose that the heads of state in the various countries of
the world know that the newspaper has totally diverse effects in
different cultures? There is no basis for such assumptions.
Unawareness of the nature of the press in its subliminal or latent
action is as common among politicians as among political scientists.
For example, in oral Russia both Pravda and Izvestia handle
domestic news, but the big international themes come to the West
over Radio Moscow. In visual America, radio and television handle
the domestic stories, and international affairs get their formal
treatment in Time magazine and The New York Times. As a foreign
service, the bluntness of Voice of America in no way compares to
the sophistication of the BBC and Radio Moscow, but what it lacks in
verbal content it makes up in the entertainment value of its American
jazz. The implications of this difference of stress are important for an
understanding of the kinds of opinions and decisions natural to an
oral, as opposed to a visual, culture.
A friend of mine who tried to teach something about the forms of
media in secondary school was struck by one unanimous response.
The students could not for a moment accept the suggestion that the
press or any other public means of communication could be used
with base intent. They felt that this would be akin to polluting the air
or the water supply, and they didn't feel that their friends and
relatives employed in these media would sink to such corruption.
Failure in perception occurs precisely in giving attention to the
program "content" of our media while ignoring the form, whether it be
radio or print or the English language itself. There have been
countless Newton Minows (formerly head of the Federal
Communications Commission) to talk about the Wasteland of the
Media, men who
know nothing about the form of any medium whatever. They imagine
that a more earnest tone and a more austere theme would pull up
the level of the book, the press, the movie, and TV. They are wrong
to a farcical degree. They have only to try out their theory for fifty
consecutive words in the mass medium of the English language.
What would Mr. Minow do, what would any advertiser do, without the
well-worn and corny cliche's of popular speech? Suppose that we
were to try for a few sentences to raise the level of our daily English
conversation by a series of sober and serious sentiments? Would
this be a way of getting at the problems of improving the medium? If
all English were enunciated at a Mandarin level of uniform elegance
and sententiousness, would the language and its users be better
served? There comes to mind the remark of Artemus Ward that
"Shakespeare wrote good plays but he wouldn't have succeeded as
the Washington correspondent of a New York daily newspaper. He
lacked the reckisit fancy and imagination."
The book-oriented man has the illusion that the press would be
better without ads and without the pressure from the advertiser.
Reader surveys have astonished even publishers with the revelation
that the roving eyes of newspaper readers take equal satisfaction in
ads and news copy. During the Second War, the U.S.Q sent special
issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces,
with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again.
Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or
newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the
making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine.
Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good
news. In order to balance off the effect and to sell good news, it is
necessary to have a lot of bad news. Moreover, the newspaper is a
hot medium. It has to have bad news for the sake of intensity and
reader participation. Real news is had news, as already noted, and
as any newspaper from the beginning of print can testify. Floods,
fires, and other
communal disasters by land and sea and air outrank any kind of
private horror or villainy as news. Ads, in contrast, have to shrill their
happy message loud and dear in order to match the penetrating
power of bad news.
Commentators on the press and the American Senate have noted
that since the Senate began its prying into unsavory subjects it has
assumed a role superior to Congress. In fact, the great disadvantage
of the Presidency and the Executive arm in relation to public opinion
is that it tries to be a source of good news and noble directive. On
the other hand, Congressmen and Senators have the free of the
seamy side so necessary to the vitality of the press.
Superficially, this may seem cynical, especially to those who
imagine that the content of a medium is a matter of policy and
personal preference, and for whom all corporate media, not only
radio and the press but ordinary popular speech as well, are
debased forms of human expression and experience. Here I must
repeat that the newspaper, from its beginnings, has tended, not to
the book form, but to the mosaic or participational form. With the
speed-up of printing and news-gathering, this mosaic form has
become a dominant aspect of human association; for the mosaic
form means, not a detached "point of view," but participation in
process. For that reason, the press is inseparable from the
democratic process, but quite expendable from a literary or book
point of view.
Again, the book-oriented man misunderstands the collective mosaic
form of the press when he complains about its endless reports on
the seamy underside of the social garment. Both book and press are,
in their very format, dedicated to the job of revealing the inside story,
whether it is Montaigne giving to the private reader the delicate
contours of his mind, or Hearst and Whitman resonating their
barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world. It is the printed form of
public address and high intensity with its precise uniformity of
repetition that gives to
book and press alike the special character of public confessional.
The first items in the press to which all men turn are the ones about
which they already know. If we have witnessed some event, whether
a ball game or a stock crash or a snowstorm, we turn to the report of
that happening, first. Why? The answer is central to any
understanding of media. Why does a child like to chatter about the
events of its day, however jerkily? Why do we prefer novels and
movies about familiar scenes and characters? Because for rational
beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form
is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new
medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness.
The press repeats the excitement we have in using our wits, and by
using our wits we can translate the outer world into the fabric of our
own beings. This excitement of translation explains why people quite
naturally wish to use their senses all the time. Those external
extensions of sense and faculty that we call media we use as
constantly as we do our eyes and ears, and from the same motives.
On the other hand, the book-oriented man considers this nonstop
use of media as debased; it is unfamiliar to him in the book-world.
Up to this point we have discussed the press as a mosaic successor
to the book-form. The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or
collective image and commands deep participation. This
participation is communal rather than private, inclusive rather than
exclusive. Further features of its form can best be grasped by a few
random views taken from outside the present form of the press.
Historically, for example, newspapers had waited for news to come
to them. The first American newspaper, issued in Boston by
Benjamin Harris on September 25, 1690, announced that it was to
be "furnished once a month (or if any Glut of Occurrences happen,
oftener)." Nothing could more plainly indicate the idea that news
was something outside and beyond the newspaper. Under such
rudimentary conditions of
awareness, a principal function of the newspaper was to correct
rumors and oral reports, as a dictionary might provide "correct"
spellings and meanings for words that had long existed without the
benefit of dictionaries. Fairly soon the press began to sense that
news was not only to be reported but also gathered, and, indeed, to
be made. What went into the press was news. The rest was not
news. "He made the news" is a strangely ambiguous phrase, since
to be in the newspaper is both to be news and to make news. Thus
"making the news," like "making good," implies a world of actions
and fictions alike. But the press is a daily action and fiction or thing
made, and it is made out of just about everything in the community.
By the mosaic means, it is made into a communal image or
cross-section.
When a conventional critic like Daniel Boorstin complains that
modern ghost-writing, teletype, and wire services create an
insubstantial world of "pseudo-events," he declares, in effect, that he
has never examined the nature of any medium prior to those of the
electric age. For the pseudo or fictitious character has always
permeated the media, not just those of recent origin. Long before big
business and corporations became aware of the image of their
operation as a fiction to be carefully tattooed upon the public
sensorium, the press had created the image of the community as a
series of on-going actions unified by datelines. Apart from the
vernacular used, the dateline is the only organizing principle of the
newspaper image of the community. Take off the dateline, and one
day's paper is the same as the next. Yet to read a week-old
newspaper without noticing that it is not today s is a disconcerting
experience. As soon as the press recognized that news presentation
was not a repetition of occurrences and reports but a direct cause of
events, many things began to happen. Advertising and promotion,
until then restricted, broke onto the front page, with the aid of
Barnum, as sensational stories. Today's press agent regards the
newspaper as a ventriloquist does his dummy. He can make it say
what he wants. He looks on
it as a painter does his palette and tubes of pigment; from the
endless resources of available events, an endless variety of managed
mosaic effects can be attained. Any private client can be
ensconced in a wide range of different patterns and tones of public
affairs or human interest and depth items.
If we pay careful attention to the fact that the press is a mosaic,
participant kind or organization and a do-it-yourself kind of world, we
can see why it is so necessary to democratic government.
Throughout his study of the press in The Fourth Branch of
Government, Douglas Cater is baffled by the fact that amidst the
extreme fragmentation of government departments and branches,
the press somehow manages to keep them in relation to each other
and to the nation. He emphasizes the paradox that the press is
dedicated to the process of cleansing by publicity, and yet that, in
the electronic world of the seamless web of events, most affairs
must be kept secret. Top secrecy is translated into public
participation and responsibility by the magic flexibility of the
controlled news leak.
It is by this kind of ingenious adaptation from day to day that
Western man is beginning to accommodate himself to the electric
world of total interdependence. Nowhere is this transforming
process of adaptation more visible than in the press. The press, in
itself, presents the contradiction of an individualistic technology
dedicated to shaping and revealing group attitudes.
It might be well now to observe how the press has been modified by
the recent developments of telephone, radio, and TV. We have seen
already that the telegraph is the factor that has done most to create
the mosaic image of the modern press, with its mass of
discontinuous and unconnected features. It is this group-image of
the communal life, rather than any editorial outlook or slanting, that
constitutes the participant of this medium. To the book-man of
detached private culture, this is the scandal of the press: its
shameless involvement in the depths of human interest and
sentiment. By eliminating time and space in
news presentation, the telegraph dimmed the privacy of the
book-form, and heightened, instead, the new public image in the
press.
The first harrowing experience for the press man visiting Moscow is
the absence of telephone books. A further horrifying revelation is the
absence of central switchboards in government departments. You
know the number, or else. The student of media is happy to read a
hundred volumes to discover two facts such as these. They
floodlight a vast murky area of the press world, and illuminate the
role of telephone as seen through another culture. The American
newspaperman in large degree assembles his stories and
processes his data by telephone because of the speed and
immediacy of the oral process. Our popular press is a near
approximation to the grapevine. The Russian and European
newspaperman is, by comparison, a litterateur. It is a paradoxical
situation, but the press in literate America has an
intensely oral character, while in oral Russia and Europe the press
has a strongly literary character and function.
The English dislike the telephone so much that they substitute
numerous mail deliveries for it. The Russians use the telephone for
a status symbol, like the alarm clock worn by tribal chiefs as an
article of attire in Africa. The mosaic of the press image in Russia is
felt as an immediate form of tribal unity and participation. Those
features of the press that we find most discordant with austere
individual standards of literary culture are just the ones that
recommend it to the Communist Party. "A newspaper," Lenin once
declared, "is not only a collective propagandist and collective
agitator; it is also a collective organizer." Stalin called it "the most
powerful weapon of our Party." Khrushchev cites it as "our chief
ideological weapon." These men had more an eye to the collective
form of the press mosaic, with its magical power to impose its own
assumptions, than to the printed word as expressing a private point
of view. In oral Russia, fragmentation of government powers is
unknown. Not for them
our function of the press as unifier of fragmented departments. The
Russian monolith has quite different uses for the press mosaic.
Russia now needs the press (as we formerly did the book) to
translate a tribal and oral community into some degree of visual,
uniform culture able to sustain a market system.
In Egypt the press is needed to effect nationalism, that visual kind of
unity that springs men out of local and tribal patterns. Paradoxically,
radio has come to the fore in Egypt as the rejuvenator of the ancient
tribes. The battery radio carried on the camel gives to the Bedouin
tribes a power and vitality unknown before, so that to use the world
"nationalism" for the fury of oral agitation that the Arabs have felt by
radio is to conceal the situation from ourselves. Unity of the
Arab-speaking world can only come by the press. Nationalism was
unknown to the Western world until the Renaissance, when
Gutenberg made it possible to see the mother tongue in uniform
dress. Radio does nothing for this uniform visual unity so necessary
to nationalism. In order to restrict radio-listening to national
programs, some Arab governments have passed a law forbidding
the use of private headphones, in effect enforcing a tribal
collectivism in their radio audiences. Radio restores tribal sensitivity
and exclusive involvement in the web of kinship. The press, on the
other hand, creates a visual, not-too-involved kind of unity that is
hospitable to the inclusion of many tribes, and to diversity of private
outlook.
If telegraph shortened the sentence, radio shortened the news story,
and TV injected the interrogative mood into journalism. In fact, the
press is now not only a telephoto mosaic of the human community
hour by hour, but its technology is also a mosaic of all the
technologies of the community. Even in its selection of the
newsworthy, the press prefers those persons who have already been
accorded some notoriety existence in movies, radio, TV, and drama.
By this fact, we can test the nature of the press medium, for anybody
who appears only in the newspaper is, by that token, an ordinary
citizen.
Wallpaper manufacturers have recently begun to issue wallpaper
that presents the appearance of a French newspaper. The Eskimo
sticks magazine pages on the ceiling of his igloo to deter drip. But
even an ordinary newspaper on a kitchen floor will reveal news
items that one had missed when the paper was in hand. Yet whether
one uses the press for privacy in public conveyances, or for
involvement in the communal while enjoying privacy, the mosaic of
the press manages to effect a complex many-leveled function of
group-awareness and participation such as the book has never been
able to perform.
The format of the press --that is, its structural characteristics --were
quite naturally taken over by the poets after Baudelaire in order to
evoke an inclusive awareness. Our ordinary newspaper page today
is not only symbolist and surrealist in an avant-garde way, but it was
the earlier inspiration of symbolism and surrealism in art and poetry,
as anybody can discover by reading Flaubert or Rimbaud.
Approached as newspaper form, any part of Joyce's Ulysses or any
poem of T. S. Eliot's before the Quartets is more readily enjoyed.
Such, however, is the austere continuity of book culture that it scorns
to notice these liaisons dangereuses among the media, especially
the scandalous affairs of the book-page with electronic creatures
from the other side of the linotype.
In view of the inveterate concern of the press with cleansing by
publicity, it may be well to ask if it does not set up an inevitable clash
with the medium of the book. The press as a collective and
communal image assumes a natural posture of opposition to all
private manipulation. Any mere individual who begins to stir about as
if he were a public something-or-other is going to get into the press.
Any individual who manipulates the public for his private good may
also feel the cleansing power of publicity. The cloak of invisibility,
therefore, would seem to fall most naturally on those who own
newspapers or who use them extensively for commercial ends. May
not this explain the strange obsession of
the bookman with the press-lords as essentially corrupt? The merely
private and fragmentary point of view assumed by the book reader
and writer finds natural grounds for hostility toward the big
communal power of the press. As forms, as media, the book and the
newspaper would seem to be as incompatible as any two media
could be. The owners of media always endeavor to give the public
what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium
and not in the message or the program.
22
MOTORCAR
The Mechanical Bride
Here is a news items that captures a good deal of the meaning of the
automobile in relation to social life:
I was terrific. There I was in my white Continental, and I was
wearing a pure-silk, pure-white, embroidered cowboy shirt,
and black gabardine trousers. Beside me in the car was my
jet-black Great Dane imported from Europe, named Dana von
Krupp. You just can't do any better than that.
Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four
wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more
importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age, it is
also true that the car has become an article of dress without which
we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
Some observers insist that, as a status
symbol, the house has, of late, supplanted the car. If so, this shift
from the mobile open road to the manicured roots of suburbia may
signify a real change in American orientation. There is a growing
uneasiness about the degree to which cars have become the real
population of our cities, with a resulting loss of human scale, both in
power and in distance. The town planners are plotting ways and
means to buy back our cities for the pedestrian from the big
transportation interests.
Lynn White tells the story of the stirrup and the heavy-armored
knight in his Medieval Technology and Social Change. So expensive
yet so mandatory was the armored rider for shock combat, that the
cooperative feudal system came into existence to pay for his
equipment. Renaissance gunpowder and ordnance ended the
military role of the knight and returned the city to the pedestrian
burgess.
If the motorist is technologically and economically far superior to the
armored knight, it may be that electric changes in technology are
about to dismount him and return us to the pedestrian scale. "Going
to work" may be only a transitory phase, like "going shopping." The
grocery interests have long foreseen the possibility of shopping by
two-way TV, or video-telephone. William M Freeman, writing for The
New York Times Service (Tuesday, October 15, 1963), reports that
there will certainly be "a decided transition from today's distribution
vehicles. . . . Mrs. Customer will be able to tune in on various stores.
Her credit identification will be picked up automatically via television.
Items in full and faithful coloring will be viewed. Distance will hold no
problem, since by the end of the century the consumer will be able to
make direct television connections regardless of how many miles
are involved."
What is wrong with all such prophecies is that they assume a stable
framework of fact --in this case, the house and the store which is
usually the first to disappear. The changing relation
between customer and shopkeeper is as nothing compared to the
changing pattern of work itself, in an age of automation. It is true that
going-to and coming-from work are almost certain to lose all of their
present character. The car as vehicle, in that sense, will go the way
of the horse. The horse has lost its role in transportation but has
made a strong comeback in entertainment. So with the motorcar. Its
future does not belong in the area of transportation. Had the infant
automotive industry; in 1910, seen fit to call a conference to consider
the future of the horse, the discussion would have been concerned
to discover new jobs for the horse and new kinds of training to
extend the usefulness of the horse. The complete revolution in
transportation and in housing and city arrangement would have
been ignored. The turn of our economy to making and servicing
motorcars, and the devotion of much leisure time to their use on a
vast new highway system, would not even have been thought of. In
other words, it is the framework itself that changes with new
technology, and not just the picture within the frame. Instead of
thinking of doing our shopping by television, we should become
aware that TV intercom means the end of shopping itself, and the
end of work as we know it as present. The same fallacy besets out
thinking about TV and education. We think of TV as an incidental aid,
whereas in fact it has already transformed the learning process of
the young, quite independently of home and school alike.
In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were inundating the
young with gore, nobody seemed to notice that emotionally the
violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparably more
hysterical than anything that could ever be printed. All the rhinos and
hippos and elephants in the world, if gathered in one city, could not
begin to create the menace and explosive intensity of the hourly and
daily experience of the internal-combustion engine. Are people really
expected to internalize live with --all this power and explosive
violence, without
processing and siphoning it off into some form of fantasy for
compensation and balance?
In the silent pictures of the 1920s a great many of the sequences
involved the motorcar and policemen. Since the film was then
accepted as an optical illusion, the cop was the principal reminder of
the existence of ground rules in the game of fantasy. As such, he
took an endless beating. The motorcars of the 1920s look to our
eyes like ingenious contraptions hastily assembled in a tool shop.
Their link with the buggy was still strong and clear. Then came the
balloon tires, the massive interior, and the bulging fenders. Some
people see the big car as a sort of bloated middle age, following the
gawky period of the first love-affair between America and the car.
But funny as the Viennese analysts have been able to get about the
car as sex object, they have at last, in so doing, drawn attention to
the fact that, like the bees in the plant world, men have always been
the sex organs of the technological world. The car is no more and no
less a sex object than the wheel or the hammer. What the motivation
researchers have missed entirely is the fact that the American sense
of spatial form has changed much since radio, and drastically since
TV It is misleading, though harmless, to try to grasp this change as
middle-age reaching out for the sylph Lolita.
Certainly there have been some strenuous slimming programs for
the car in recent years. But if one were to ask, "Will the car last?" or
"Is the motorcar here to stay?" there would be confusion and doubt
at once. Strangely, in so progressive an age, when change has
become the only constant in our lives, we never ask, "Is the car here
to stay?" The answer, of course, is "No." In the electric age, the
wheel itself is obsolescent. At the heart of the car industry there are
men who know that the car is passing, as certainly as the cuspidor
was doomed when the lady typist arrived on the business scene.
What arrangements have they made to ease the automobile industry
off the center of the stage?
The mere obsolescence of the wheel does not mean its
disappearance. It means only that, like penmanship or typography,
the wheel will move into a subsidiary role in the culture.
In the middle of the nineteenth century great success was achieved
with steam-engined cars on the open road. Only the heavy toll-taxes
levied by local road authorities discouraged steam engines on the
highways. Pneumatic tires were fitted to a steam car in France in
1887. The American Stanley Steamer began to flourish in 1899.
Ford had already built his first car in 1896, and the Ford Motor
Company was founded in 1903. It was the electric spark that
enabled the gasoline engine to take over from the steam engine.
The crossing of electricity, the biological form, with the mechanical
form was never to release a greater force.
It is TV that has dealt the heavy blow to the American car. The car
and the assembly line had become the ultimate expression of
Gutenberg technology; that is, of uniform and repeatable processes
applied to all aspects of work and living. TV brought a questioning of
all mechanical assumptions about uniformity and standardization, as
of all consumer values. TV brought also obsession with depth study
and analysis. Motivation research, offering to hook the ad and the id,
became immediately acceptable to the frantic executive world that
felt the same way about the new American tastes as Al Capp did
about his 50,000,000 audience when TV struck. Something had
happened. America was not the same.
For forty years the car had been the great leveler of physical space
and of social distance as well. The talk about the American car as a
status symbol has always overlooked the basic fact that it is the
power of the motorcar that levels all social differences, and makes
the pedestrian a second-class citizen. Many people have observed
how the real integrator or leveler of white and Negro in the South
was the private car and the truck, not the expression of moral points
of view. The simple and obvious fact about the
car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of man that turns
the rider into a superman. It is a hot, explosive medium of social
communication. And TV, by cooling off the American public tastes
and creating new needs for unique wrap-around space, which the
European car promptly provided, practically unhorsed the American
auto-cavalier. The small European cars reduce him to
near-pedestrian status once more. Some people manage to drive
them on the sidewalk.
The car did its social leveling by horsepower alone. In turn, the car
created highways and resorts that were not only very much alike in
all parts of the land, but equally available to all. Since TV, there is
naturally frequent complaint about this uniformity of vehicle and
vacation scene. As John Keats put it in his attack on the car and the
industry in The Insolent Chariots, where one automobile can go, all
other automobiles do go, and wherever the automobile goes, the
automobile version of civilization surely follows. Now this is a
TV-oriented sentiment that is not only anti-car and
anti-standardization, but anti-Gutenberg, and therefore
anti-American as well. Of course, I know that John Keats doesn't
mean this. He had never thought about media or the way in which
Gutenberg created Henry Ford and the assembly line and
standardized culture. All he knew was that it was popular to decry
the uniform, the standardized, and the hot forms of communication,
in general. For that reason, Vance Packard could make hay with The
Hidden Persuaders. He hooted at the old salesmen and the hot
media, just as MAD does. Before TV, such gestures would have
been meaningless. It wouldn't have paid off. Now, it pays to laugh
at the mechanical and the merely standardized. John Keats could
question the central glory of classless American society by saying, "If
you've seen one part of America, you've seen it all," and that the car
gave the American the opportunity, not to travel and experience
adventure, but "to make himself more and more common." Since TV,
it has become popular to regard the more and more uniform and
repeatable products of
industry with the same contempt that a Brahmin like Henry James
might have felt for a chamber-pot dynasty in 1890. It is true that
automation is about to produce the unique and custom-built at
assembly-line speed and cheapness. Automation can manage the
bespoke car or coat with less fuss than we ever produced the
standardized ones. But the unique product cannot circulate in our
market or distribution setups. As a result, we are moving into a most
revolutionary period in marketing, as in everything else.
When Europeans used to visit America before the Second War they
would say, "But you have communism here!" What they meant was
that we not only had standardized goods, but everybody had them.
Our millionaires not only ate cornflakes and hot dogs, but really
thought of themselves as middle-class people. What else? How
could a millionaire be anything but "middleclass" in America unless
he had the creative imagination of an artist to make a unique life for
himself? Is it strange that Europeans should associate uniformity of
environment and commodities with communism? And that Lloyd
Warner and his associates, in their studies of American cities,
should speak of the American class system in terms of income? The
highest income cannot liberate a North American from his
"middle-class" life. The lowest income gives everybody a
considerable piece of the same middle-class existence. That is, we
really have homogenized our schools and factories and cities and
entertainment to a great extent, just because we are literate and do
accept the logic of uniformity and homogeneity that is inherent in
Gutenberg technology. This logic, which had never been
accepted in Europe until very recently, has suddenly been
questioned in America, since the tactile mesh of the TV mosaic has
begun to permeate the American sensorium. When a popular writer
can, with confidence, decry the use of the car for travel as making
the driver "more and more common," the fabric of American life has
been questioned.
Only a few years back Cadillac announced its "El Dorado
Brougham" as having anti-dive control, outriggers, pillarless styling,
projectile-shaped gull-wing bumpers, outboard exhaust ports, and
various other exotic features borrowed from the non-motorcar world.
We were invited to associate it with Hawaiian surf riders, with gulls
soaring like sixteen-inch shells, and with the boudoir of Madame de
Pompadour. Could MAD magazine do any better? In the TV age,
any of these tales from the Vienna woods, dreamed up by
motivational researchers, could be relied upon to be an ideal comic
script for MAD. The script was always there, in fact, but not till TV
was the audience conditioned to enjoy it.
To mistake the car for a status symbol, just because it is asked to be
taken as anything but a car, is to mistake the whole meaning of this
very late product of the mechanical age that is now yielding its form
to electric technology. The car is a superb piece of uniform,
standardized mechanism that is of a piece with the Gutenberg
technology and literacy which created the first classless society in
the world. The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and
armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the
knight into a misguided missile. In fact, the American car did not
level downward, but upward, toward the aristocratic idea. Enormous
increase and distribution of power had also been the equalizing
force of literacy and various other forms of mechanization, The
willingness to accept the car as a status symbol, restricting its more
expansive form to the use of higher executives, is not a mark of the
car and mechanical age, but of the electric forces that are now
ending this mechanical age of uniformity and standardization, and
recreating the norms of status and role.
When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical mechanical
pressure of explosion and separation of functions. It broke up family
life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It separated work and domicile, as
never before. It exploded each city into a dozen
suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along
the highways until the open road seemed to become nonstop cities.
It created the asphalt jungles, and caused 40,000 square miles of
green and pleasant land to be cemented over. With the arrival of
plane travel, the motorcar and truck teamed up together to wreck the
railways. Today small children plead for a train ride as if it were a
stagecoach or horse and cutter: "Before they're gone, Daddy."
The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new
landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser. At the same
time, the motor destroyed the city as a casual environment in which
families could be reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too
intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city
filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbors became
strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much
longer to run. The tide of taste and tolerance has turned, since TV,
to make the hot-car medium increasingly tiresome. Witness the
portent of the crosswalk, where the small child has power to stop a
cement truck. The same change has rendered the big city
unbearable to many who would no more have felt that way ten years
ago than they could have enjoyed reading MAD.
The continuing power of the car medium to transform the patterns of
settlement appears fully in the way in which the new urban kitchen
has taken on the same central and multiple social character as the
old farm kitchen. The farm kitchen had been the key point of entry to
the farmhouse, and had become the social center, as well. The new
suburban home again makes the kitchen the center and, ideally, is
localized for access to and from the car. The car has become the
carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and
suburban man. Even before the Volkswagen, observers above
street level have often noticed the near-resemblance of cars to
shiny-backed insects. In the age of the tactile-oriented skin-diver,
this hard shiny carapace is one of the
blackest marks against the motorcar. It is for motorized man that the
shopping plazas have emerged. They are strange islands that make
the pedestrian feel friendless and disembodied. The car bugs hm.
The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite
and spearate men, and it will contintue to do so for a decade mroe, by
which timethe electronic successors to the car will be manifest.
23
ADS
Keeping Upset with the Joneses
The continuous pressure is to create ads more and more in the
image of audience motives and desires. The product matters less as
the audience participation increases. An extreme example is the
corset series that protests that "it is not the corset that you ieel.
The need is to make the ad include the audience experience. The
product and the public response become a single complex pattern.
The art of advertising has wondrously come to fulfill the early
definition of anthropology as "the science of man embracing
woman." The steady trend in advertising is to manifest the product
as an integral part of large social purposes and processes. With very
large budgets the commercial artists have tended to develop the ad
into an icon, and icons are not specialist fragments or aspects but
unified and compressed images of complex kind. They focus a large
region of experience in tiny compass. The trend in ads, then, is away
from the consumer
picture of product to the producer image of process. The corporate
image of process includes the consumer in the producer role as well.
This powerful new trend in ads toward the iconic image has greatly
weakened the position of the magazine industry in general and the
picture magazines in particular. Magazine features have long
employed the pictorial treatment of themes and news. Side by side
with these magazine features that present shots and fragmentary
points of view, there are the new massive iconic ads with their
compressed images that include producer and consumer, seller and
society in a single image. The ads make the features seem pale,
weak, and anemic. The features belong to the old pictorial world that
preceded TV mosaic imagery.
It is the powerful mosaic and iconic thrust in our experience since TV
that explains the paradox of the upsurge of Time and News week
and similar magazines. These magazines present the news in a
compressed mosaic form that is a real parallel to the ad world.
Mosaic news is neither narrative, nor point of view, nor explanation,
nor comment. It is a corporate image in depth of the community in
action and invites maximal participation in the social process.
Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet
or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually
assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the
plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures
of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the
unconscious may be the reason why.
Many people have expressed uneasiness about the advertising
enterprise in our time. To put the matter abruptly, the advertising
industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to
every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a
programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations
and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward
the ultimate electronic goal of a collective
consciousness. When all production and all consumption are
brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort,
then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success.
Since the advent of TV, the exploitation of the unconscious by the
advertiser has hit a snag. TV experience favors much more
consciousness concerning the unconscious than do the hard-sell
forms of presentation in the press, the magazine, movie, or radio.
The sensory tolerance of the audience has changed, and so have
the methods of appeal by the advertisers. In the new cool TV world,
the old hot world of hard-selling, earnest-talking salesmen has all the
antique charm of the songs and togs of the 1920s. Mort Sahl and
Shelley Berman are merely following, not setting, a trend in spoofing
the ad world. They discovered that they have only to reel off an ad or
news item to have the audience in fits. Will Rogers discovered years
ago that any newspaper read aloud from a theater stage is hilarious.
The same is true today of ads. Any ad put into a new setting is funny.
This is a way of saying that any ad consciously attended to is
comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are
intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise
an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists. That is one of the most
edifying aspects of the huge educational enterprise that we call
advertising, whose twelve-billion-dollar annual budget
approximates the national school budget. Any expensive ad represents
the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent
ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their
features and editorials. Any expensive ad is as carefully built on the
tested foundations of public stereotypes or "sets" of established
attitudes, as any skyscraper is built on bedrock. Since highly skilled
and perceptive teams of talent cooperate in the making of an ad for
any established line of goods whatever, it is obvious that any
acceptable ad is a vigorous
dramatization of communal experience. No group of sociologists can
approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of
exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually
on research and testing of reactions, and their products are
magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience
and feelings of the entire community. Of course, if ads were to
depart from the center of this shared experience, they would
collapse at once, by losing all hold on our feelings.
It is true, of course, that ads use the most basic and tested human
experience of a community in grotesque ways. They are as
incongruous, if looked at consciously, as the playing of "Silver
Threads among the Gold" as music for a strip-tease act. But ads are
carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frogmen-of-the-mind for
semiconscious exposure. Their mere existence is a testimony, as
well as a contribution, to the somnambulistic state of a tired
metropolis.
After the Second War, an ad-conscious American army officer in
Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of
cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by
Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian
cities was given over to political, rather than commercial, slogans.
He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever
achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to
worry about the rival claims of cornflakes and cigarettes, rather than
the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that
democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and
worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs,
sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight, and
tired blood.
The army officer was probably right. Any community that wants to
expedite and maximize the exchange of goods and services has
simply got to homogenize its social life. The decision to homogenize
comes easily to the highly literate population of the English-speaking
world. Yet it is hard for oral cultures
to agree on this program of homogenization, for they are only too
prone to translate the message of radio into tribal politics, rather
than into a new means of pushing Cadillacs. This is one reason that
it was easy for the retribalized Nazi to feel superior to the American
consumer. The tribal man can spot the gaps in the literate mentality
very easily. On the other hand, it is the special illusion of literate
societies that they are highly aware and individualistic. Centuries of
typographic conditioning in patterns of lineal uniformity and
fragmented repeatability have, in the electric age, been given
increasing critical attention by the artistic world. The lineal process
has been pushed out of industry, not only in management and
production, but in entertainment, as well. It is the new mosaic form of
the TV image that has replaced the Gutenberg structural
assumptions. Reviewers of William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch
have alluded to the prominent use of the "mosaic" term and method
in his novel. The TV image renders the world of standard brands and
consumer goods merely amusing. Basically, the reason is that the
mosaic mesh of the TV image compels so much active participation
on the part of the viewer that he develops a nostalgia for
pre-consumer ways and days. Lewis Mumford gets serious attention
when he praises the cohesive form of medieval towns as relevant to
our time and needs.
Advertising got into high gear only at the end of the last century, with
the invention of photoengraving. Ads and pictures then became
interchangeable and have continued so. More important, pictures
made possible great increases in newspaper and magazine
circulation that also increased the quantity and profitability of ads.
Today it is inconceivable that any publication, daily or periodical,
could hold more than a few thousand readers without pictures. For
both the pictorial ad or the picture story provide large quantities of
instant information and instant humans, such as are necessary for
keeping abreast in our kind of culture. Would it not seem natural and
necessary that the young
be provided with at least as much training of perception in this
graphic and photographic world as they get in the typographic? In
fact, they need more training in graphics, because the art of casting
and arranging actors in ads is both complex and forcefully insidious.
Some writers have argued that the Graphic Revolution has shifted
our culture away from private ideals to corporate images. That is
really to say that the photo and TV seduce us from the literate and
private "point of view" to the complex and inclusive world of the
group icon. That is certainly what advertising does. Instead of
presenting a private argument or vista, it offers a way of life that is
for everybody or nobody. It offers this prospect with arguments that
concern only irrelevant and trivial matters. For example, a lush car
ad features a baby's rattle on the rich rug of the back floor and says
that it has removed unwanted car rattles as easily as the user could
remove the baby's rattle. This kind of copy has really nothing to do
with rattles. The copy is merely a punning gag to distract the critical
faculties while the image of the car goes to work on the hypnotized
viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about "false and
misleading ad copy" are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are
to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protestors
are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of
pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent, as the
"meaning" of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a
song. Highly literate people cannot cope with the nonverbal art of the
pictorial, so they dance impatiently up and down to express a
pointless disapproval that renders them futile and gives new power
and authority to the ads. The unconscious depth-messages of ads
are never attacked by the literate, because of their incapacity to
notice or discuss nonverbal forms of arrangement and meaning.
They have not the art to argue with Pictures. When early in TV
broadcasting hidden ads were tried out, the literate were in a great
panic until they were dropped.
The fact that typography is itself mainly subliminal in effect and that
pictures are, as well, is a secret that is safe from the book-oriented
community.
When the movies came, the entire pattern of American life went on
the screen as a nonstop ad. Whatever any actor or actress wore or
used or ate was such an ad as had never been dreamed of. The
American bathroom, kitchen, and car, like everything else, got the
Arabian Nights treatment. The result was that all ads in magazines
and the press had to look like scenes from a movie. They still do. But
the focus has had to become softer since TV
With radio, ads openly went over to the incantation of the singing
commercial. Noise and nausea as a technique of achieving
unforgettability became universal. Ad and image making became,
and have remained, the one really dynamic and growing part of
the economy. Both movie and radio are hot media, whose arrival
pepped up everybody to a great degree, giving us the Roaring
Twenties. The effect was to provide a massive platform and a
mandate for sales promotion as a way of life that ended only with
The Death of a Salesman and the advent of TV. These two events
did not coincide by accident. TV introduced that "experience in
depth" and the "do-it-yourself pattern of living that has shattered the
image of the individualist hard-sell salesman and the docile
consumer, just as it has blurred the formerly clear figures of the
movie stars. This is not to suggest that Arthur Miller was trying to
explain TV to America on the eve of its arrival, though he could as
appropriately have titled his play "The Birth of the PR Man." Those
who saw Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy film will remember their
surprise at how much of the 1920s they had forgotten. Also, they
were surprised to find evidence of how naive and simple the
Twenties really were. That age of the vamps, the sheiks, and the
cavemen was a raucous nursery compared to our world, in which
children read MAD magazine for chuckles. It was a world still
innocently engaged in expanding and exploding, in separating and
teasing
and tearing. Today, with TV, we are experiencing the opposite
process of integrating and interrelating that is anything but innocent.
The simple faith of the salesman in the irresistibility of his line (both
talk and goods) now yields to the complex togetherness of the
corporate posture, the process and the organization.
Ads have proved to be a self-liquidating form of community
entertainment. They came along just after the Victorian gospel of
work, and they promised a Beulah land of perfectibility, where it
would be possible to "iron shirts without hating your husband." And
now they are deserting the individual consumer-product in favor of
the all-inclusive and never-ending process that is the Image of any
great corporate enterprise. The Container Corporation of America
does not feature paper bags and paper cups in its ads, but the
container function, by means of great art. The historians and
archeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the
richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made
of its entire range of activities. The Egyptian hieroglyph lags far
behind in this respect. With TV, the smarter advertisers have made
free with fur and fuzz, and blur and buzz. They have, in a word,
taken a skin-dive. For that is what the TV viewer is. He is a skin-diver,
and he no longer likes garish daylight on hard, skiny surfaces,
though he must continue to put up with a noisy radio sound track
that is painful.
24
GAMES
The Extensions of Man
Alcohol and gambling have very different Games meanings in
different cultures. In our intensely individualist and fragmented
Western world, "booze" is a social bond and a means of festive
involvement. By contrast, in closely knit tribal society "booze" is
destructive of all social pattern and is even used as a means to
mystical experience.
In tribal societies, gambling, on the other hand, is a welcome avenue
of entrepreneurial effort and individual initiative. Carried into an
individualist society, the same gambling games and
sweepstakes seem to threaten the whole social order.Gambling
pushes individual initiative to the point of mocking the individualist
social structure. The virtue is the capitalist When the boys came
home from the mud and blood baths of the Western Front in 1918
and 1919, they encountered the Volstead Prohibmon Act. It was the
social and political recognition
that the war had fraternalized and tribalized us to the point where
alcohol was a threat to an individualist society. When we too are
prepared to legalize gambling, we shall, like the English, announce
to the world the end of individualist society and the trek back to tribal
ways.
We think of humor as a mark of sanity for a good reason: in fun and
play we recover the integral person, who in the workaday world or in
professional life can use only a small sector of his being. Philip
Deane, in Captive in Korea, tells a story about games in the midst of
successive brain washings that is to the point.
There came a time when I had to stop reading those books, to
stop practising Russian because with the study of language the
absurd and constant assertion began to leave its mark, began to
find an echo, and I felt my thinking processes getting tangled,
my critical faculties getting blunted. . . . then they made a
mistake. They gave us Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure
Island in English. ... I could read Marx again, and question
myself honestly without fear. Robert Louis Stevenson made us
lighthearted, so we started dancing lessons.
Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive
or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of
social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of
the animal organism. Both games and technologies are
counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized
actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular
response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of
a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole
populations in a single dynamic image.
A Reuters dispatch for December 13, 1962, reported from Tokyo:
BUSINESS IS A BATTLEFIELD
Latest fashion among Japanese businessmen is the study of
classical military strategy and tactics in order to apply them to
business operations.... It has been reported that one of the
largest advertising companies in Japan has even made these
books compulsory reading for all its employees.
Long centuries of tight tribal organization now stand the Japanese in
very good stead in the trade and commerce of the electric age. A
few decades ago they underwent enough literacy and industrial
fragmentation to release aggressive individual energies. The close
teamwork and tribal loyalty now demanded by electrical intercom
again puts the Japanese in positive relation to their ancient traditions.
Our own tribal ways are much too remote to be of any social avail.
We have begun retribalizing with the same painful groping with
which a preliterate society begins to read and write, and to organize
its life visually in three-dimensional space.
The search for Michael Rockefeller brought the life of a New Guinea
tribe into prominent attention in Life a year ago. The editors
explained the war games of these people:
The traditional enemies of the Willigiman-wallalua are the
Wittaia, a people exactly like themselves in language, dress and
custom. . . . Every week or two the Willigiman-Wallalua and their
enemies arrange a formal battle at one of the traditional fighting
grounds. In comparison with the catastrophic conflicts of
"civilized" nations, these frays seem more like a dangerous field
sport than true war. Each battle lasts but a single day, always
stops before nightfall (because of the danger of ghosts) or if it
begins to rain (no one wants to get his hair or ornaments wet).
The men are very accurate with their weapons --they have all
played war games since they were small boys --but they are
equally adept at dodging, and hence are rarely hit by anything.
The truly lethal part of this primitive warfare is not the formal
battle but the sneak raid or stealthy ambush in which not only
men but women and children are mercilessly slaughtered. .. .
This perpetual bloodshed is carried on for none of the usual reasons
for waging war. No territory is won or lost; no goods or prisoners
seized. . . . They fight because they enthusiastically enjoy it,
because it is to them a vital function of the complete man, and
because they feel they must satisfy the ghosts of slain companions.
These people, in short, detect in these games a kind of model of the
universe, in whose deadly gavotte they can participate through the
ritual of war games.
Games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing
release of particular tensions. They are collective and popular art
forms with strict conventions. Ancient and nonliterate societies
naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or
of the outer cosmic drama. The Olympic games were direct
enactments of the agon, or struggle of the Sun god. The runners
moved around a track adorned with the zodiacal signs in imitation of
the daily circuit of the sun chariot. With games and plays that were
dramatic enactments of a cosmic struggle, the spectator role was
plainly religious. The participation in these rituals kept the cosmos
on the right track, as well as providing a booster shot for the tribe.
The tribe or the city was a dim replica of that cosmos, as much as
were the games, the dances, and the icons. How art became a sort
of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals is the story of the
detribalization which came with literacy. Art, like games, became a
mimetic echo of, and relief from, the old magic of total involvement.
As the audience for the magic games and plays became more individualistic,
the role of art and ritual shifted from the cosmic to the
humanly psychological, as in Greek drama. Even the ritual became
more verbal and less mimetic or dance like. Finally, the
verbal narrative from Homer and Ovid became a romantic literary
substitute for the corporate liturgy and group participation. Much of
the scholarly effort of the past century in many fields has been
devoted to a minute reconstruction of the conditions of primitive art
and ritual, for it has been felt that this course offers the key to
understanding the mind of primitive man. The key to this
understanding, however, is also available in our new electric
technology that is so swiftly and profoundly recreating the conditions
and attitudes of primitive tribal man in ourselves.
The wide appeal of the games of recent times --the popular sports of
baseball and football and ice hockey-- seen as outer models of inner
psychological life, become understandable. As models, they are
collective rather than private dramatizations of inner life. Like our
vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal
communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning
except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. If we take a tennis
racket in hand, or thirteen playing cards, we consent to being a part
of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially contrived situation. Is this
not the reason we enjoy those games most that mimic other
situations in our work and social lives? Do not our favorite games
provide a release from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine?
In a word, does not Aristotle's idea of drama as a mimetic
reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures apply perfectly
to all kinds of games and dance and fun? For fun or games to be
welcome, they must convey an echo of workaday life. On the other
hand, a man or society without games is one sunk in the zombie
trance of the automation. Art and games enable us to stand aside
from the material pressures of routine and convention, observing and
questioning. Games as popular art forms offer to all an immediate
means of participation in the full life of a society, such as no single
role or job can offer to any man. Hence the contradiction in
"professional" sport. When the games door opening into the
free life leads into a merely specialist job, everybody senses an
incongruity.
The games of a people reveal a great deal about them. Games are a
sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland, or some Utopian vision by
which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives. In
games we devise means of nonspecialized participation in the larger
drama of our time. But for civilized man the idea of participation is
strictly limited. Not for him the depth participation that erases the
boundaries of individual awareness as in the Indian cult of daishan,
the mystic experience of the physical presence of vast numbers of
people.
A game is a machine that can get into action only if the players
consent to become puppets for a time. For individualist Western
man, much of his "adjustment" to society has the character of a
personal surrender to the collective demands. Our games help both
to teach us this kind of adjustment and also to provide a release
from it. The uncertainty of the outcomes of our contests makes a
rational excuse for the mechanical rigor of the rules and procedures
of the game.
When the social rules change suddenly, then previously accepted
social manners and rituals may suddenly assume the stark outlines
and the arbitrary patterns of a game. The Gamesmanship of
Stephen Potter speaks of a social revolution in England. The English
are moving toward social equality and the intense personal
competition that goes with equality. The older rituals of long
accepted class behavior now begin to appear comic and irrational,
gimmicks in a game. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and
Influence People first appeared as a solemn manual of social
wisdom, but it seemed quite ludicrous to sophisticates. What
Carnegie offered as serious discoveries already seemed like a naive
mechanical ritual to those beginning to move in a milieu of Freudian
awareness charged with the psychopathology of everyday life.
Already the Freudian patterns of perception have become an
outworn code that begins to
provide the cathartic amusement of a game, rather than a guide to
living.
The social practices of one generation tend to get codified into the
"game" of the next. Finally, the game is passed on as a joke, like a
skeleton stripped of its flesh. This is especially true of periods of
suddenly altered attitudes, resulting from some radically new
technology. It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular,
that spells for a while, at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is
a game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated
specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age,
with is fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management
organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and
participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness
and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style
of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures
change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant
abstract image of an industrial society living by split-second timing,
has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for
our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the
social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life.
In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the
players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game
that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance. It
agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in
the electric age. Offhand, it might be supposed that the tight tribal
unity of football would make it a game that the Russians would
cultivate. Their devotion to ice hockey and soccer, two very
individualist forms of game, would seem little suited to the psychic
needs of a collectivist society. But Russia is still in the main an oral,
tribal world that is undergoing detribalization and just now
discovering individualism as a novelty. Soccer and ice hockey have
for them, therefore, an exotic and Utopian quality of promise that
they do not convey to the West.
This is the quality that we tend to call "snob value," and we might
derive some similar "value" from owning race horses, polo ponies, or
twelve-meter yachts.
Games, therefore, can provide many varieties of satisfaction. Here
we are looking at their role as media of communication in society as
a whole. Thus, poker is a game that has often been cited as the
expression of all the complex attitudes and unspoken values of a
competitive society. It calls for shrewdness, aggression, trickery, and
unflattering appraisals of character. It is said women cannot play
poker well because it stimulates their curiosity, and curiosity is fatal
in poker. Poker is intensely individualist, allowing no place for
kindness or consideration, but only for the greatest good of the
greatest number --the number one. It is in this perspective that it is
easy to see why war has been called the sport of kings. For kingdoms
are to monarchs what patrimonies and private income are to the
private citizen. Kings can play poker with kingdoms, as the generals
of their armies do with troops. They can bluff and deceive the
opponent about their resources and their intentions. What
disqualifies war from being a true game is probably what also
disqualifies the stock market and business --the rules are not fully
known nor accepted by all the players. Furthermore, the audience is
too fully participant in war and business, just as in a native society
there is no true art because everybody is engaged in making art. Art
and games need rules, conventions, and spectators. They must
stand forth from the over-all situation as models of it in order for the
quality of play to persist. For "play," whether in life or in a wheel,
implies interplay. There must be give and take, or dialogue, as
between two or more persons and groups. This quality can, however,
be diminished or lost in any kind of situation. Great teams often play
practice games without any audience at all. This is not sport in our
sense, because much of the quality of interplay, the very medium of
interplay, as it were, is the feeling of the audience. Rocket Richard,
the Canadian hockey player, used to comment
on the poor acoustics of some arenas. He felt that the puck off his
stick rode on the roar of the crowd. Sport, as a popular art form, is
not just self-expression but is deeply and necessarily a means of
interplay within an entire culture.
Art is not just play but an extension of human awareness in contrived
and conventional patterns. Sport as popular art is a deep reaction to
the typical action of the society. But high art, on the other hand, is
not a reaction but a profound reappraisal of a complex cultural state.
Jean Genet's The Balcony appeals to some people as a shatteringly
logical appraisal of mankind's madness in its orgy of self-destruction.
Genet offers a brothel enveloped by the holocaust of war and
revolution as an inclusive image of human life. It would be easy to
argue that Genet is hysterical, and that football offers a more serious
criticism of life than he does. Seen as live models of complex social
situations, games may lack moral earnestness, it has to be admitted.
Perhaps there is, just for this reason, a desperate need for games in
a highly specialized industrial culture, since they are the only form of
art accessible to many minds. Real interplay is reduced to nothing in
a specialist world of delegated tasks and fragmented jobs. Some
backward or tribal societies suddenly translated into industrial and
specialist forms of mechanization cannot easily devise the antidote
of sports and games to create countervailing force. They bog down
into grim earnest. Men without art, and men without the popular arts
of games, tend toward automatism.
A comment on the different kinds of games played in the British
Parliament and the French Chamber of Deputies will rally the
political experience of many readers. The British had the luck to get
the two-team pattern into the House benches, whereas the French,
trying for centralism by seating the deputies in a semicircle facing
the chair, got instead a multiplicity of teams playing a great variety of
games. By trying for unity, the French got anarchy. The British, by
setting up diversity, achieved, if anything, too much unity. The British
representative, by playing his
"side," is not tempted into private mental effort, nor does he have to
follow the debates until the ball is passed to him. As one critic said, if
the benches did not face each other the British could not tell truth
from falsehood, nor wisdom from folly, unless they listened to it all.
And since most of the debate must be nonsense, it would be stupid
to listen to all.
The form of any game is of first importance. Game theory, like
information theory, has ignored this aspect of game and information
movement. Both theories have dealt with the information content of
systems, and have observed the "noise" and "deception" factors that
divert data. This is like approaching a painting or a musical
composition from the point of view of its content. In other words, it is
guaranteed to miss the central structural core of the experience. For
as it is the pattern of a game that gives it relevance to our inner lives,
and not who is playing nor the outcome of the game, so it is with
information movement. The selection of our human senses
employed makes all the difference say between photo and telegraph.
In the arts the particular mix of our senses in the medium employed
is all-important. The ostensible program content is a lulling
distraction needed to enable the structural form to get through the
barriers of conscious attention.
Any game, like any medium of information, is an extension of the
individual or the group. Its effect on the group or individual is a
reconfiguring of the parts of the group or individual that are not so
extended. A work of art has no existence or function apart from its
effects on human observers. And art, like games or popular arts, and
like media of communication, has the power to impose its own
assumptions by setting the human community into new relationships
and postures.
Art, like games, is a translator of experience. What we have already
felt or seen in one situation we are suddenly given in a new kind of
material. Games, likewise, shift familiar experience into new forms,
giving the bleak and the blear side of things
sudden luminosity. The telephone companies make tapes of the
blither of boors, who inundate defenseless telephone operators with
various kinds of revolting expressions. When played back this
becomes salutary fun and play, and helps the operators to maintain
equilibrium.
The world of science has become quite self-conscious about the
play element in its endless experiments with models of situations
otherwise unobservable. Management training centers have long
used games as a means of developing new business perception.
John Kenneth Galbraith argues that business must now study art, for
the artist makes models of problems and situations that have not yet
emerged in the larger matrix of society, giving the artistically
perceptive businessman a decade of leeway in his planning.
In the electric age, the closing of the gaps between art and business,
or between campus and community, are part of the overall implosion
that closes the ranks of specialists at all levels. Flaubert, the French
novelist of the nineteenth century, felt that the Franco-Prussian War
could have been avoided if people had heeded his Sentimental
Education. A similar feeling has since come to be widely held by
artists. They know that they are engaged in making live models of
situations that have not yet matured in the society at large. In their
artistic play, they discovered what is actually happening, and thus
they appear to be "ahead of their time." Non-artists always look at
the present through the spectacles of the preceding age. General
staffs are always magnificently prepared to fight the previous war.
Games, then, are contrived and controlled situations, extensions of
group awareness that permit a respite from customary patterns.
They are a kind of talking to itself on the part of society as a whole.
And talking to oneself is a recognized form of play that is
indispensable to any growth of self-confidence. The British and
Americans have enjoyed during recent times an enormous
self-confidence born of the playful spirit of fun and
games. When they sense the absence of this spirit in their rivals, it
causes embarrassment. To take mere wordly things in dead earnest
betokens a defect of awareness that is pitiable. From the first days of
Christianity there grew a habit, in some quarters, of spiritual
clowning, of "playing the fool in Christ," as St. Paul put it. Paul also
associated this sense of spiritual confidence and Christianity play
with the games and sports of his time. Play goes with an awareness
of huge disproportion between the ostensible situation and the real
stakes. A similar sense hovers over the game situation, as such.
Since the game, like any art form, is a mere tangible model of
another situation that is less accessible, there is always a tingling
sense of oddity and fun in play or games that renders the very
earnest and very serious person or society laughable. When the
Victorian Englishman began to lean toward the pole of seriousness,
Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton moved in
swiftly as countervailing force. Scholars have often pointed out that
Plato conceived of play dedicated to the Deity, as the loftiest reach
of man's religious impulse.
Bergson's famous treatise on laughter sets forth the idea of
mechanism taking over life-values as the key to the ludicrous. To
see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured
system suddenly translated into a whirling machine. Since industrialism
had created a similar situation in the society of his time,
Bergson's idea was readily accepted. He seems not to have noticed
that he had mechanically turned up a mechanical metaphor in a
mechanical age in order to explain the very unme-chanical thing,
laughter, or "the mind sneezing," as Wyndham Lewis described it.
The game spirit suffered a defeat a few years ago over the rigged
TV quiz shows. For one thing, the big prize seemed to make fun of
money. Money as store of power and skill, and expediter of
exchange, still has for many people the ability to induce a trance of
great earnestness. Movies, in a sense, are also
rigged shows. Any play or poem or novel is, also, rigged to produce
an effect. So was the TV quiz show. But with the TV effect there is
deep audience participation. Movie and drama do not permit as
much participation as that afforded by the mosaic mesh of the TV
image. So great was the audience participation in the quiz shows
that the directors of the show were prosecuted as con men.
Moreover press and radio ad interests, bitter about the success of
the new TV medium, were delighted to lacerate the flesh of their
rivals. Of course, the riggers had been blithely unaware of the nature
of their medium, and had given it the movie treatment of intense
realism, instead of the softer mythic focus proper to TV Charles Van
Doren merely got clobbered as an innocent bystander, and the
whole investigation elicited no insight into the nature or effects of the
TV medium. Regrettably, it simply provided a field day for the
earnest moralizers. A moral point of view too often serves as a
substitute for understanding in technological matters.
That games are extensions, not of our private but of our social
selves, and that they are media of communication, should now be
plain. If, finally, we ask, "Are games mass media?" the answer has
to be "Yes." Games are situations contrived to permit simultaneous
participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own
corporate lives.
25
TELEGRAPH
The Social Hormone
The wireless telgraph was given spectacular publicity in 1910 wehn it
led to the arrest at sea of Dr. Hawley H. Crippen, a U.S. physician
who had been practicing in London, muerdered his wiefe,buried her
int he cellar of their home, and fled the country with is secretary
aboard the linear Montrose. The secretary was dresseda s boy, and
the pair traveled as Mr. Robinson and son. Captain George Kendal of
the Montrose became suspicious of the Robinsons, having read int
eh English papers about he Crippen case.
The Montrose was one of the few ships then equipped with
Marconi's werless. binding his werless operator ot secrecy, Captain
DEndall sent a message to Scotland Yard, and the Yard sent
Inspector Dews on a faster liner to reae the Montrose across the
Atlantic. Inspector Dews, dressed as a pilot, boarded the ontrose
before it reached port and, and arrested Crippen. Eighteen
months after Crippen's arrest, an act was passed in the British
Parliament making it compulsory for all passenger ships to carry
ireless.
The Crippen case illustrates what happens to the best-laid plans of
mice and men in any organization when the instant speed of
information movement begins. There is a collapse of delegated
authority and a dissolution of the pyramid and management
structures made familiar in the organization chart. The separation of
functions, and the division of stages, spaces, and tasks are
characteristic of literate and visual society and of the Western world.
These divisions tend to dissolve through the action of the instant and
organic interrelations of electricity.
Former German Armaments minister Albert Speer, in a speech at
the Nuremberg trials, made some bitter remarks about the effects of
electric media on German life: "The telephone, the teleprinter and
the wireless made it possible for orders from the highest levels to be
given direct to the lowest levels, where, on account of the absolute
authority behind them, they were carried out uncritically ..."
The tendency of electric media is to create a kind of organic
interdependence among all the institutions of society, emphasizing
de Chardin's view that the discovery of electromagnetism is to be
regarded as "a prodigious biological event." If political and
commercial institutions take on a biological character by means of
electric communications, it is also common now for biologists like
Hans Selye to think of the physical organism as a communication
network: "Hormone is a specific chemical messenger-substance,
made by an endocrine gland and secreted into the blood, to regulate
and coordinate the functions of distant organs."
This peculiarity about the electric form, that it ends the mechanical
age of individual steps and specialist functions, has a direct
explanation. Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself)
had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies,
electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system
itself, including the brain. Our central nervous system is a unified
field quite without segments. As J. Z. Young writes in Doubt and
Certainty in Science: A Biologist's Reflections on the Brain (Galaxy,
Oxford University Press, New York, 1960):
It may be that a great part of the secret of the brain's power is the
enormous opportunity provided for interaction between the effects of
stimulating each part of the receiving fields. It is this provision of
interacting-places or mixing-places that allows us to react to the
world as a whole to a much greater degree than most other animals
can do.
Failure to understand the organic character of electric technology is
evident in our continuing concern with the dangers of mechanizing
the world. Rather, we are in great danger of wiping out our entire
investment in the preelectric technology of the literate and
mechanical kind by means of an indiscriminate use of electrical
energy. What makes a mechanism is the separation and extension
of separate parts of our body as hand, arm, feet, in pen, hammer,
wheel. And the mechanization of a task is done by segmentation of
each part of an action in a series of uniform, repeatable, and
movable parts. The exact opposite characterizes cybernation (or
automation), which has been described as a way of thinking, as
much as a way of doing. Instead of being concerned with separate
machines, cybernation looks at the production problem as an
integrated system of information handling.
It is this same provision of interacting places in the electric media
that now compels us to react to the world as a whole. Above all,
however, it is the speed of electric involvement that creates the
integral whole of both private and public awareness. We live today in
the Age of Information and of Communication because electric
media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting
events in which all men participate. Now, the
world of public interaction has the same inclusive scope of integral
interplay that has hitherto characterized only our private nervous
systems. That is because electricity is organic in character and
confirms the organic social bond by its technological use in
telegraph and telephone, radio, and other forms. The simultaneity of
electric communication, also characteristic of our nervous system,
makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in
the world. To a large degree our co-presence everywhere at once in
the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience.
Actively, we are more likely to have this awareness when reading
the newspaper or watching a TV show.
One way to grasp the change from the mechanical to the electric
age is by noticing the difference between the layout of a literary and
a telegraph press, say between the London Times and the Daily
Express, or between The New York Times and the New York Daily
News. It is the difference between columns representing points of
view, and a mosaic of unrelated scraps in a field unified by a dateline.
Whatever else there is, there can be no point of view in a mosaic of
simultaneous items. The world of impressionism, associated with
painting in the late nineteenth century, found its more extreme form
in the pointillisme of Seurat and the refractions of light in the world of
Monet and Renoir. The stipple of points of Seurat is close to the
present technique of sending pictures by telegraph, and close to the
form of the TV image or mosaic made by the scanning finger. All of
these anticipate later electric forms because, like the digital
computer with its multiple yes-no dots and dashes, they caress the
contours of every kind of being by the multiple touches of these
points. Electricity offers a means of getting in touch with every facet
of being at once, like the brain itself. Electricity is only incidentally
visual and auditory; it is primarily tactile.
As the age of electricity began to establish itself in the later
nineteenth century, the entire world of the arts began to reach
again for the iconic qualities of touch and sense interplay
(synes-thesia, as it was called) in poetry, as in painting. The German
sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand inspired Berenson's remark that "the
painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile values to retinal
impressions." Such a program involves the endowing of each plastic
form with a kind of nervous system of its own.
The electric form of pervasive impression is profoundly tactile and
organic, endowing each object with a kind of unified sensibility, as
the cave painting had done. The unconscious task of the painter in
the new electric age was to raise this fact to the level of conscious
awareness. From this time on, the mere specialist in any field was
doomed to the sterility and inanity that echoed an archaic form of the
departing mechanical age. Contemporary awareness had to
become integral and inclusive again, after centuries of dissociated
sensibilities. The Bauhaus school became one of the great centers
of effort tending toward an inclusive human awareness; but the
same task was accepted by a race of giants that sprang up in music
and poetry, architecture, and painting. They gave the arts of this
century an ascendancy over those of other ages comparable to that
which we have long recognized as true of modern science.
During its early growth, the telegraph was subordinate to railway and
newspaper, those immediate extensions of industrial production and
marketing. In fact, once the railways began to stretch across the
continent, they relied very much on the telegraph for their
coordination, so that the image of the station-master and the
telegraph operator were easily superimposed in the American mind.
It was in 1844 that Samuel Morse opened a telegraph line from
Washington to Baltimore with $30,000 obtained from Congress.
Private enterprise, as usual, waited for bureaucracy to clarify the
image and goals of the new operation. Once it proved profitable, the
fury of private promotion and initiative became impressive, leading
to some savage episodes. No new
technology, not even the railroad, manifested a more rapid growth
than the telegraph. By 1858 the first cable had been laid across the
Atlantic, and by 1861 telegraph wires had reached across America.
That each new method of transporting commodity or information
should have to come into existence in a bitter competitive battle
against previously existing devices is not surprising. Each innovation
is not only commercially disrupting, but socially and psychologically
corroding, as well.
It is instructive to follow the embryonic stages of any new growth, for
during this period of development it is much misunderstood, whether
it be printing or the motorcar or TV. Just because people are at first
oblivious of its nature, the new form deals some revealing blows to
the zombie-eyed spectators. The original telegraph line between
Baltimore and Washington promoted chess games between experts
in the two cities. Other lines were used for lotteries and play in
general, just as early radio existed in isolation from any commercial
commitments and was, in fact, fostered by the amateur "hams" for
years before it was seized by big interests.
A few months ago John Crosby wrote to the New York Herald
Tribune from Paris in a way that well illustrates why the "content"
obsession of the man of print culture makes it difficult for him to
notice any facts about the form of a new medium:
Telstar, as you know, is that complicated ball that whirls through
space, transmitting television broadcasts, telephone messages, and
everything except common sense. When it was first cast aloft,
trumpets sounded. Continents would share each other's intellectual
pleasures. Americans would enjoy Brigitte Bardot. Europeans would
partake of the heady intellectual stimulation of "Ben Casey." . . . The
fundamental flaw in this communications miracle is the same one
that has bugged every communications miracle since they started
carving hieroglyphics on stone tablets. What do you say on it?
Telstar
went into operation in August when almost nothing of importance
was happening anywhere in Europe. All the networks were ordered
to say something, anything, on this miracle instrument. "It was a new
toy and they just had to use it," the men here say. CBS combed
Europe for hot news and came up with a sausage-eating contest,
which was duly sent back via the miracle ball, although that
particular news event could have gone by camelback without losing
any of its essence.
Any innovation threatens the equilibrium of existing organization. In
big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so that they
can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort
of lab for isolating dangerous viruses. When one is found, it is
assigned to a group for neutralizing and immunizing treatment. It is
comical, therefore, when anybody applies to a big corporation with a
new idea that would result in a great "increase of production and
sales." Such an increase would be a disaster for the existing
management. They would have to make way for new management.
Therefore, no new idea ever starts from within a big operation. It
must assail the organization from outside, through some small but
competing organization. In the same way, the outering or extension
of our bodies and senses in a "new invention" compels the whole of
our bodies and senses to shift into new positions in order to maintain
equilibrium. A new "closure" is effected in all our organs and senses,
both private and public, by any new invention. Sight and sound
assume new postures, as do all the other faculties. With the
telegraph, the entire method, both of gathering and of presenting
news, was revolutionized. Naturally, the effects on language and on
literary style and subject matter were spectacular.
In the same year, 1844, then, that men were playing chess and
lotteries on the first American telegraph, Soren Kierkegaard published
The Concept of Dread. The Age of Anxiety had begun. For
with
the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his
central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of
consciousness with satellite broadcasting. To put one's nerves
outside, and one's physical organs inside the nervous system, or the
brain, is to initiate a situation-if not a concept-of dread.
Having glanced at the major trauma of the telegraph on conscious
life, noting that it ushers in the Age of Anxiety and of Pervasive
Dread, we can turn to some specific instances of this uneasiness
and growing jitters. Whenever any new medium or human extension
occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a
major figure: Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of
Printing; Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the
public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; and
Florence Nightingale, the first singer of human woe by telegraph
wire.
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), wealthy and refined member of
the powerful new English group engendered by industrial power,
began to pick up human-distress signals, as a young lady. They were
quite undecipherable at first. They upset her entire way of life, and
couldn't be adjusted to her image of parents or friends or suitors. It
was sheer genius that enabled her to translate the new diffused
anxiety and dread of life into the idea of deep human involvement
and hospital reform. She began to think, as well as to live, her time,
and she discovered the new formula for the electronic age: Medicare.
Care of the body became balm for the nerves in the age that had
extended its nervous system outside itself for the first time in human
history. To put the Florence Nightingale story in new media terms is
quite simple. She arrived on a distant scene where controls from the
London center were of the common pre-electric hierarchical pattern.
Minute division and delegation of functions and separation of powers,
normal in military and industrial organization then and long afterward,
created an imbecile system of waste and inefficiency which for the
first time got reported daily by
telegraph. The legacy of literacy and visual fragmentation came
home to roost every day on the telegraph wire:
In England fury succeeded fury. A great storm of rage, humiliation,
and despair had been gathering through the terrible
winter of 1854-1855. For the first time in history, through
reading the dispatches of Russell, the public had realized "with
what majesty the British soldier fights." And these heroes were
dead. The men who had stormed the heights of Alma, charged
with the Light Brigade at Balaclava ... had perished of hunger
and neglect. Even horses which had taken part in the Charge
of the Light Brigade had starved to death. (Lonely Crusader,
Cecil wbodham-Smith, McGraw-Hill)
The horrors that William Howard Russell relayed by wire to The
Times were normal in British military life. He was the first war
correspondent, because the telegraph gave that immediate and
inclusive dimension of "human interest" to news that does not
belong to a "point of view." It is merely a comment on our
absentmindedness and general indifference that after more than a
century of telegraph news reporting, nobody has seen that "human
interest" is the electronic or depth dimension of immediate
involvement in news. With telegraph, there ended that separation of
interests and division of faculties that are certainly not without their
magnificent monuments of toil and ingenuity. But with telegraph,
came the integral insistence and wholeness of Dickens, and of
Florence Nightingale, and of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The electric
gives powerful voices to the weak and suffering, and sweeps aside
the bureaucratic specialisms and job descriptions of the mind tied to
a manual of instructions. The "human interest" dimension is simply
that of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that
occurs with instant information. People become instant, too, in their
response of pity or of fury when they must share the
common extension of the central nervous system with the whole of
mankind. Under these conditions, "conspicuous waste" or
"conspicuous consumption" become lost causes, and even the
hardiest of the rich dwindle into modest ways of timid service to
mankind.
At this point, some may still inquire why the telegraph should create
"human interest," and why the earlier press did not. The section on
The Press may help these readers. But there may also be a lurking
obstacle to perception. The instant aJl-at-onceness and total
involvement of the telegraphic form still repels some literary
sophisticates. For them, visual continuity and fixed "point of view"
render the immediate participation of the instant media as distasteful
and unwelcome as popular sports. These people are as much media
victims, unwittingly mutilated by their studies and toil, as children in a
Victorian blacking factory. For many people, then, who have had
their sensibilities irremediably skewed and locked into the fixed
postures of mechanical writing and printing, the iconic forms of the
electric age are as opaque, or even as invisible, as hormones to the
unaided eye. It is the artist's job to try to dislocate older media into
postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must
ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience,
even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed
in their old perceptual attitudes. The most that can be done by the
prose commentator is to capture the media in as many characteristic
and revealing postures as he can manage to discover. Let us
examine a series of these postures of the telegraph, as this new
medium encounters other media like the book and the newspaper.
By 1848 the telegraph, then only four years old, compelled several
major American newspapers to form a collective organization for
newsgathering. This effort became the basis of the Associated
Press, which, in turn, sold news service to subscribers. In one sense,
the real meaning of this form of the
electric, instant coverage was concealed by the mechanical overlay
of the visual and industrial patterns of print and printing. The
specifically electric effect may seem to appear in this instance as a
centralizing and compressional force. By many analysts, the electric
revolution has been regarded as a continuation of the process of the
mechanization of mankind. Closer inspection reveals quite a
different character. For example, the regional press, that had had to
rely on postal service and political control through the post office,
quickly escaped from this center-margin type of monopoly by means
of the new telegraph services. Even in England, where short
distances and concentrated population made the railway a powerful
agent of centralism, the monopoly of London was dissolved by the
invention of the telegraph, which now encouraged provincial
competition. The telegraph freed the marginal provincial press from
dependence on the big metropolitan press. In the whole field of the
electric revolution, this pattern of decentralization appears in multiple
guises. It is Sir Lewis Namier's view that telephone and airplane are
die biggest single cause of trouble in the world today. Professional
diplomats with delegated powers have been supplanted by prime
ministers, presidents, and foreign secretaries, who think they could
conduct all important negotiations personally. This is also the
problem encountered in big business, where it has been found
impossible to exercise delegated authority when using the telephone.
The very nature of the telephone, as all electric media, is to
compress and unify that which had previously been divided and
specialized. Only the "authority of knowledge" works by telephone
because of the speed that creates a total and inclusive field of
relations. Speed requires that the decisions made be inclusive, not
fragmentary or partial, so that literate people typically resist the
telephone. But radio and TV, we shall see, have the same power of
imposing an inclusive order, as of an oral organization. Quite in
contrast is the center-margin form of visual and written structures of
authority.
Many analysts have been misled by electric media because of the
seeming ability of these media to extend man's spatial powers of
organization. Electric media, however, abolish the spatial dimension,
rather than enlarge it. By electricity, we everywhere resume
person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a
relation in depth, and without delegation of functions or powers. The
organic everywhere supplants the mechanical. Dialogue supersedes
the lecture. The greatest dignitaries hobnob with youth. When a
group of Oxford undergraduates heard that Rudyard Kipling
received ten shillings for every word he wrote, they sent him ten
shillings by telegram during their meeting: "Please send us one of
your very best words." Back came the word a few minutes later:
"Thanks."
The hybrids of electricity and the older mechanics have been
numerous. Some of them, such as the phonograph and the movie,
are discussed elsewhere in this volume. Today the wedding of
mechanical and electric technology draws to a close, with TV
replacing the movie and Telstar threatening the wheel. A century
ago the effect of the telegraph was to send the presses racing faster,
just as the application of the electric spark was to make possible the
internal-combustion engine with its instant precision. Pushed further,
however, the electric principle everywhere dissolves the mechanical
technique of visual separation and analysis of functions. Electronic
tapes with exactly synchronized information replace the old lineal
sequence of the assembly line.
Acceleration is a formula for dissolution and breakdown in any
organization. Since the entire mechanical technology of the Western
world has been wedded to electricity, it has pushed toward higher
speeds. All the mechanical aspects of our world seem to probe
toward self-liquidation. The United States had built up a large degree
of central political controls through the interplay of the railway, the
post office, and the newspaper. In 1848 the Postmaster General
wrote, in his report, that
newspapers have "always been esteemed of so much importance to
the public, as the best means of disseminating intelligence among
the people, that the lowest rate has always been afforded for the
purpose of encouraging their circulation." The telegraph quickly
weakened this center-margin pattern and, more important, by
intensifying the volume of news, it greatly weakened the role of
editorial opinions. News has steadily overtaken views as a shaper of
public attitudes, though few examples of this change are quite so
striking as the sudden growth of the Florence Nightingale image in
the British world. And yet nothing has been more misunderstood
than the power of the telegraph in this matter. Perhaps the most
decisive feature is this. The natural dynamic of the book and, also,
newspaper is to create a unified national outlook on a centralized
pattern. All literate people, therefore, experience a desire for an
extension of the most enlightened opinions in a uniform horizontal
and homogeneous pattern to the "most backward areas," and to the
least literate minds. The telegraph ended that hope. It decentralized
the newspaper world so thoroughly that uniform national views were
quite impossible, even before the Civil War. Perhaps an even more
important consequence of the telegraph was that in America the
literary talent was drawn into journalism, rather than into the book
medium. Poe and Twain and Hemingway are examples of writers
who could find neither training nor outlet save through the
newspaper. In Europe, on the other hand, the numerous small
national groups presented a discontinuous mosaic that the
telegraph merely intensified. The result was that the telegraph in
Europe strengthened the position of the book, and forced even the
press to assume a literary character.
Not least of the developments since the telegraph has been the
weather forecast, perhaps the most popularly participative of all the
human interest items in the daily press. In the early days of
telegraph, rain created problems in the grounding of wires. These
problems drew attention to weather dynamics. One report
in Canada in 1883 stated: "It was early discovered that when the
wind at Montreal was from the East or North-East, rain storms
traveled from the West, and the stronger the land current, the faster
came the rain from the opposite direction." It is clear that telegraph,
by providing a wide sweep of instant information, could reveal
meteorological patterns of force quite beyond observation by
pre-electric man.
26
THE TYPEWRITER
Into the Age of the Iron Whim
The comments of Robert Lincoln O'Brien, writing in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1904, indicate a rich field of social material that still
remains unexplored. For example:
The invention of the typewriter has given a tremendous impetus to
the dictating habit... . This means not only greater diffuseness ... but
it also brings forward the point of view of the one who speaks. There
is the disposition on the part of the talker to explain, as if watching
the facial expression of his hearers to see how far they are following.
This attitude is not lost when his audience is following. It is no
uncommon thing in the typewriting booths at the Capitol in
Washington to see Congressmen in dictating letters use the most
vigorous gestures as if the oratorical methods of persuasion could
be transmitted to the printed page.
In 1882, ads proclaimed that the typewriter could be used as an aid
in learning to read, write, spell, and punctuate. Now, eighty years
later, the typewriter is used only in experimental classrooms. The
ordinary classroom still holds the typewriter at bay as a merely
attractive and distractive toy. But poets like Charles Olson are
eloquent in proclaiming the power of the typewriter to help the poet
to indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspension, even, of
syllables, the juxtaposition, even, of parts of phrases which he
intends, observing that, for the first time, the poet has the stave and
the bar that the musician has had.
The same kind of autonomy and independence which Charles Olson
claims that the typewriter confers on the voice of the poet was
claimed for the typewriter by the career woman of fifty years ago.
British women were reputed to have developed a "twelve-pound
look" when typewriters became available for sixty dollars or so. This
look was in some way related to the Viking gesture of Ibsen's Nora
Helmer, who slammed the door of her doll's house and set off on a
quest of vocation and soul-testing. The age of the iron whim had
begun.
The reader will recall earlier mention that when the first wave of
female typists hit the business office in the 1890s, the cuspidor
manufacturers read the sign of doom. They were right. More
important, the uniform ranks of fashionable lady typists made
possible a revolution in the garment industry. What she wore, every
farmer's daughter wanted to wear, for the typist was a popular figure
of enterprise and skill. She was a style-maker who was also eager to
follow styles. As much as the typewriter, the typist brought into
business a new dimension of the uniform, the homogeneous, and
the continuous that has made the typewriter indispensable to every
aspect of mechanical industry. A modern battleship needs dozens of
typewriters for ordinary operations. An army needs more typewriters
than medium and light artillery pieces, even in the field, suggesting
that the typewriter now fuses the functions of the pen and sword.
But the effect of the typewriter is not all of this kind. If the typewriter
has contributed greatly to the familiar forms of the homogenized
specialism and fragmentation that is print culture, it has also caused
an integration of functions and the creation of much private
independence. G. K. Chesterton demurred about this new
independence as a delusion, remarking that "women refused to be
dictated to and went out and became stenographers." The poet or
novelist now composes on the typewriter. The typewriter fuses
composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the
written and printed word. Composing on the typewriter has altered
the forms of the language and of literature in ways best seen in the
later novels of Henry James that were dictated to Miss Theodora
Bosanquet, who took them down, not by shorthand, but on a
typewriter. Her memoir, Henry James at Work, should have been
followed by other studies of how the typewriter has altered English
verse and prose, and, indeed, the very mental habits, themselves, of
writers.
With Henry James, the typewriter had become a confirmed habit by
1907, and his new style developed a sort of free, incan-tatory quality.
His secretary tells of how he found dictating not only easier but more
inspiring than composing by hand: "It all seems to be so much more
effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in
writing," he told her. Indeed, he became so attached to the sound of
his typewriter that, on his deathbed, Henry James called for his
Remington to be worked near his bedside.
Just how much the typewriter has contributed by its unjustified
right-hand margin to the development of vers libre would be hard to
discover, but free verse was really a recovery of spoken, dramatic
stress in poetry, and the typewriter encouraged exactly this quality.
Seated at the typewriter, the poet, much in the
manner of the jazz musician, has the experience of performance as
composition. In the nonliterate world, this had been the situation of
the bard or minstrel. He had themes, but no text. At the typewriter,
the poet commands the resources of the printing press. The
machine is like a public-address system immediately at hand. He
can shout or whisper or whistle, and make funny typographic faces
at the audience, as does E. E. Cummings in this sort of verse:
In Justspring
when the world is mudluscious
the little
lame baloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when
the world is puddle wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's spring
and
the
goat footed
baloonman whistles
far
and
wee
E. E. Cummings is here using the typewriter to provide a poem with
a musical score for choral speech. The older poet, separated from
the print form by various technical stages, could enjoy none of the
freedom of oral stress provided by the typewriter. The poet at the
typewriter can do Njinsky leaps or Chaplin-like shuffles and wiggles.
Because he is an audience for his own mechanical audacities, he
never ceases to react to his own performance. Composing on the
typewriter is like flying a kite.
The E. E. Cummings poem, when read aloud with widely varying
stresses and paces, will duplicate the perceptual process of its
typewriting creator. How Gerard Manley Hopkins would have loved
to have had a typewriter to compose on! People who feel that poetry
is for the eye and is to be read silently can scarcely get anywhere
with Hopkins or Cummings. Read aloud, such poetry becomes quite
natural. Putting first names in lower case, as "eddieandbill,"
bothered the literate people of forty years ago. It was supposed to.
Eliot and Pound used the typewriter for a great variety of central
effects in their poems. And with them, too, the typewriter was an oral
and mimetic instrument that gave them the colloquial freedom of the
world of jazz and ragtime. Most colloquial and jazzy of all Eliot's
poems, Sweeney Agonistes, in its first appearance in print, carried
the note: "From Wanna Go Home Baby?"
That the typewriter, which carried the Gutenberg technology into
every nook and cranny of our culture and economy should, also,
have given out with these opposite oral effects is a characteristic
reversal. Such a reversal of form happens in all extremes of
advanced technology, as with the wheel today.
As expediter, the typewriter brought writing and speech and
publication into close association. Although a merely mechanical
form, it acted in some respects as an implosion, rather than an
explosion.
In its explosive character, confirming the existing procedures of
moveable types, the typewriter had an immediate effect in regulating
spelling and grammar. The pressure of Gutenberg technology
toward "correct" or uniform spelling and grammar was felt at once.
Typewriters caused an enormous expansion in the sale of
dictionaries. They also created the innumerable overstuffed files that
led to the rise of the file-cleaning companies in our time. At first,
however, the typewriter was not seen as indispensable to business.
The personal touch of the hand-penned letter was considered so
important that the typewriter was ruled out of commercial use by the
pundits. They thought, however, that it might be of use to authors,
clergymen, and telegraph operators. Even newspapers were
lukewarm about this machine for some time.
Once any part of the economy feels a step-up in pace, the rest of the
economy has to follow suit. Soon, no business could be indifferent to
the greatly increased pace set by the typewriter. It was the
telephone, paradoxically, that sped the commercial adoption of the
typewriter. The phrase "Send me a memo on that," repeated into
millions of phones daily, helped to create the huge expansion of the
typist function. Northcote Parkinson's law that "work expands so as
to fill the time available for its completion" is precisely the zany
dynamic provided by the telephone. In no time at all, the telephone
expanded the work to be done on the typewriter to huge dimensions.
Pyramids of paperwork rise on the basis of a small telephone
network inside a single business. Like the typewriter, the telephone
fuses functions, enabling the call-girl, for example, to be her own
procurer and madam.
Northcote Parkinson had discovered that any business or bureaucratic
structure functions by itself, independently of "the work to
be done." The number of personnel and "the quality of the work are
not related to each other at all." In any given structure, the rate of
staff accumulation is not related to the work
done but to the intercommunication among the staff, itself. (In other
words, the medium is the message.) Mathematically stated,
Parkinson's Law says that the rate of accumulation of office staff per
annum will be between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent, irrespective
of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done."
"Work to be done," of course, means the transformation of one kind
of material energy into some new form, as trees into lumber or paper,
or clay into bricks or plates, or metal into pipe. In terms of this kind of
work, the accumulation of office personnel in a navy, for example,
goes up as the number of ships goes down. What Parkinson
carefully hides from himself and his readers is simply the fact that in
the area of information movement, the main "work to be done" is
actually the movement of information. The mere interrelating of
people by selected information is now the principal source of wealth
in the electric age. In the preceding mechanical age, work had not
been like that at all. Work had meant the processing of various
materials by assembly-line fragmentation of operations and
hierarchically delegated authority. Electric power circuits, in relation
to the same processing, eliminate both the assembly line and the
delegated authority. Especially with the computer, the work effort is
applied at the "programming" level, and such effort is one of
information and knowledge. In the decision-making and "make
happen" aspect of the work operation, the telephone and other such
speed-ups of information have ended the divisions of delegated
authority in favor of the "authority of knowledge." It is as if a
symphony composer, instead of sending his manuscript to the
printer and thence to the conductor and to the individual members of
the orchestra, were to compose directly on an electronic instrument
that would render each note or theme as if on the appropriate
instrument. This would end at once all the delegation and specialism
of the symphony orchestra that makes it such a natural model of the
mechanical and industrial age. The
typewriter, with regard to the poet or novelist, comes very close to
the promise of electronic music, insofar as it compresses or unifies
the various jobs of poetic composition and publication.
The historian Daniel Boorstin was scandalized by the fact that
celebrity in our information age was not due to a person's having
done anything but simply to his being known for being well known.
Professor Parkinson is scandalized that the structure of human work
now seems to be quite independent of any job to be done. As an
economist, he reveals the same incongruity and comedy, as
between the old and the new, that Stephen Potter does in his
Gamesmanship. Both have revealed the hollow mockery of "getting
ahead in the world," in its old sense. Neither honest toil nor clever
ploy will serve to advance the eager executive. The reason is simple.
Positional warfare is finished, both in private and corporate action. In
business, as in society, "getting on" may mean getting out. There is
no "ahead" in a world that is an echo chamber of instantaneous
celebrity.
The typewriter, with its promise of careers for the Nora Helmers of
the West, has really turned out to be an elusive pumpkin coach, after
all.
27
THETELEPHONE
Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol?
The readers of the New York Evening Telegram were told in
1904-"Phony implies that a thing so qualified has no more substance
than a telephone talk with a supposititious friend." The folklore of the
telephone in song and story has been augmented in the memoirs of
Jack Paar, who writes that his resentment toward the telephone
began with the singing telegram. He tells how he got a call from a
woman who said she was so lonesome she had been taking a bath
three times a day in hopes that the phone would ring.
James Joyce in Finnegans Wake head-lined TELEVISION KILLS
TELEPHONY IN BROTHERS BROIL, introducing a major theme in the
battle of the technologically extended senses that has, indeed, been
raging through our culture for more than a decade. With the
telephone, there occurs the extension of ear and voice that is of
extra sensory perception. With television came the
extension of the sense of touch or of sense interplay that even more
intimately involves the entire sensorium.
The child and the teenager understand the telephone, embracing
the cord and the ear-mike as if they were beloved pets. What we call
"the French phone," the union of mouthpiece and earphone in a
single instrument, is a significant indication of the French liaison of
the senses that English-speaking people keep firmly separate.
French is "the language of love" just because it unites voice and ear
in an especially close way, as does the telephone. So it is quite
natural to kiss via phone, but not easy to visualize while phoning.
No more unexpected social result of the telephone has been
observed than its elimination of the red-light district and its creation
of the call-girl. To the blind, all things are unexpected. The form and
character of the telephone, as of all electric technology, appear fully
in this spectacular development. The prostitute was a specialist, and
the call-girl is not. A "house" was not a home; but the call-girl not
only lives at home, she may be a matron. The power of the
telephone to decentralize every operation and to end positional
warfare, as well as localized prostitution, has been felt but not
understood by every business in the land.
The telephone, in the case of the call-girl, is like the typewriter that
fuses the functions of composition and publication. The call-girl
dispenses with the procurer and the madam. She has to be an
articulate person of varied conversation and social accomplishments
since she is expected to be able to join any company on a basis of
social equality. If the typewriter has splintered woman from the home
and turned her into a specialist in the office, the telephone gave her
back to the executive world as a general means of harmony, an
invitation to happiness, and a sort of combined confessional-and
wailing wall for the immature American executive.
The typewriter and the telephone are most unidentical twins
that have taken over the revamping of the American girl with
technological ruthlessness and thoroughness.
Since all media are fragments of ourselves extended into the public
domain, the action upon us of any one medium tends to bring the
other senses into play in a new relation. As we read, we provide a
sound track for the printed word; as we listen to the radio, we
provide a visual accompaniment. Why can we not visualize while
telephoning? At once the reader will protest, "But I do visualize on
the telephone!" When he has a chance to try the experiment
deliberately, he will find that he simply can't visualize while phoning,
though all literate people try to do so and, therefore, believe they are
succeeding. But that is not what most irritates the literate and
visualizing Westerner about the telephone. Some people can
scarcely talk to their best friends on the phone without becoming
angry. The telephone demands complete participation, unlike the
written and printed page. Any literate man resents such a heavy
demand for his total attention, because he has long been
accustomed to fragmentary attention. Similarly, literate man can
learn to speak other languages only with great difficulty, for learning
a language calls for participation of all the senses at once. On the
other hand, our habit of visualizing renders the literate
Westerner helpless in the nonvisual world of advanced physics.
Only the visceral and audile-tactile Teuton and Slav have the
needed immunity to visualization for work in the non-Euclidean math
and quantum physics. Were we to teach our math and physics by
telephone, even a highly literate and abstract Westerner could
eventually compete with the European physicists. This fact does not
interest the Bell Telephone research department, for like any other
book-oriented group they are oblivious to the telephone as a form,
and study only the content aspect of wire service. As already mentioned,
the Shanner and Weaver hypothesis about Information
Theory, like the Morgenstern Game Theory, tends to ignore the
function of the form as form. Thus both Information Theory and
Game Theory have bogged down into sterile banalities, but the
psychic and social changes resulting from these forms have altered
the whole of our lives.
Many people feel a strong urge to "doodle" while telephoning. This
fact is very much related to the characteristic of this medium, namely
that it demands participation of our senses and faculties. Unlike
radio, it cannot be used as background. Since the telephone offers a
very poor auditory image, we strengthen and complete it by the use
of all the other senses. When the auditory image is of high definition,
as with radio, we visualize the experience or complete it with the
sense of sight. When the visual image is of high definition or
intensity, we complete it by providing sound. That is why, when the
movies added sound track, there was such deep artistic upset. In
fact the disturbance was almost equal to that caused by the movie
itself. For the movie is a rival of the book, tending to provide a visual
track of narrative description and statement that is much fuller than
the written word.
In the 1920s a popular song was "All Alone by the Telephone, All
Alone Feeling Blue." Why should the phone create an intense
feeling of loneliness? Why should we feel compelled to answer a
ringing public phone when we know the call cannot concern us?
Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension? Why
is that tension so very much less for an unanswered phone in a
movie scene? The answer to all of these questions is simply that the
phone is a participant form that demands a partner, with all the
intensity of electric polarity. It simply will not act as a background
instrument like radio.
A standard practical joke of the small town in the early days of the
telephone draws attention to the phone as a form of communal
participation. No back fence could begin to rival the degree of
heated participation made possible by the partyline. The joke in
question took the form of calling several people, and in an assumed
voice, saying that the engineering department
was going to clean out the telephone lines: "We recommend that you
cover your telephone with a sheet or pillow case to prevent your
room from being filled with dirt and grease." The jokester would then
make the rounds of his friends in question to enjoy their preparations
and their momentary expectation of a hiss and roar that was sure to
come when the lines were blown out. The joke now serves to recall
that not long ago the phone was a new contraption, used more for
entertainment than for business.
The invention of the telephone was an incident in the larger effort of
the past century to render speech visible. Melville Bell, the father of
Alexander Graham Bell, spent his life devising a universal alphabet
that he published in 1867 under the title Visible Speech. Besides
the aim to make all the languages of the world immediately present
to each other in a simple visual form, the Bells, father and son, were
much concerned to improve the state of the deaf. Visible speech
seemed to promise immediate means of release for the deaf from
their prison. Their struggle to perfect visible speech for the deaf led
the Bells to a study of the new electrical devices that yielded the
telephone. In much the same way, the Braille system of
dots-for-letters had begun as a means of reading military messages
in darkness, then was transferred to music, and finally to reading for
the blind. Letters had been codified as dots for the fingers long
before the Morse Code was developed for telegraph use. And it is
relevant to note how electric technology, in like manner, had
converged on the world of speech and language, from the beginning
of electricity. That which had been the first great extension of our
central nervous system-the mass media of the spoken word-was
soon wedded to the second great extension of the central nervous
system-electric technology.
The New York Daily Graphic for March 15,1877, portrayed on its
front page "The Terrors of the Telephone-The Orator of the Future."
A disheveled Svengali stands before a microphone haranguing in a
studio. The same mike is shown in London, San
Francisco, on the Prairies, and in Dublin. Curiously, the newspaper
of that time saw the telephone as a rival to the press as PA. system,
such as radio was in fact to be fifty years later. But the telephone,
intimate and personal, is the most removed of any medium from the
PA. form. Thus wire-tapping seems even more odious than the
reading of other people's letters.
The word "telephone" came into existence in 1840, before Alexander
Graham Bell was born. It was used to describe a device made to
convey musical notes through wooden rods. By the 1870s, inventors
in many places were trying to achieve the electrical transmission of
speech, and the American Patent Office received Elisha Gray's
design for a telephone on the same day as Bell's, but an hour or two
later. The legal profession benefited enormously from this
coincidence. But Bell got the fame, and his rivals became footnotes.
The telephone presumed to offer service to the public in 1877,
paralleling wire telegraphy. The new telephone group was puny
beside the vast telegraph interests, and Western Union moved at
once to establish control over the telephone service.
It is one of the ironies of Western man that he has never felt any
concern about invention as a threat to his way of life. The fact is that,
from the alphabet to the motorcar, Western man has been steadily
refashioned in a slow technological explosion that has extended
over 2,500 years. From the time of the telegraph onward, however,
Western man began to live an implosion. He began suddenly with
Nietzschean insouciance to play the movie of his 2,500-year
explosion backward. But he still enjoys the results of the extreme
fragmentation of the original components of his tribal life. It is this
fragmentation that enables him to ignore cause-and-effect in all
interplay of technology and culture. It is quite different in Big
Business. There, tribal man is on the alert for stray seeds of change.
That was why William H. Whyte could write The Organization Man
as a horror story. Eating people is wrong. Even grafting people into
the ulcer of a big
corporation seems wrong to anybody brought up in literate visual
fragmented freedom. "I call them up at night when their guard's
down," said one senior executive.
In the 1 920s, the telephone spawned a good deal of dialogue humor
that sold as gramophone records. But radio and the talking pictures
were not kind to the monologue, even when it was made by W C.
Fields or Will Rogers. These hot media pushed aside the cooler
forms that TV has now brought back on a large scale. The new race
of night-club entertainers (Newhart, Nichols and May) have a
curious early-telephone flavor that is very welcome, indeed. We can
thank TV, with its call for such high participation, that mime and
dialogue are back. Our Mort Sahls and Shelley Bermans and Jack
Paars are almost a variety of "living newspaper," such as was
provided for the Chinese revolutionary masses by dramatic teams in
the 1930s and 1940s. Brecht's plays have the same participational
quality of the world of the comic strip and the newspaper mosaic that
TV has made acceptable, as pop art.
The mouthpiece of the telephone was a direct outgrowth of a
prolonged attempt beginning in the seventeenth century to mimic
human physiology by mechanical means. It is very much in the
nature of the electric telephone, therefore, that it has such natural
congruity with the organic. On the advice of a Boston surgeon, Dr. C.
J. Blake, the receiver of the phone was directly modeled on the bone
and diaphragm structure of the human ear. Bell paid much attention
to the work of the great Helmholtz, whose work covered many fields.
Indeed, it was because of his conviction that Helmholtz had sent
vowels by telegraph that Bell was encouraged to persevere in his
efforts. It turned out that it was his inadequate German that had
fostered this optimistic impression. Helmholtz had failed to achieve
any speech effects by wire. But Bell argued, if vowels could be sent,
why not consonants? "I thought that Helmholtz. himself, had done it.
and that my failure was due only to my ignorance of electricity. It
was a very valuable blunder. It gave me confidence. If I had been
able to read German in those days I might never have commenced
my experiments!"
One of the most startling consequences of the telephone was its
introduction of a "seamless web" of interlaced patterns in
management and decision-making. It is not feasible to exercise
delegated authority by telephone. The pyramidal structure of
job-division and description and delegated powers cannot withstand
the speed of the phone to by-pass all hierarchical arrangements,
and to involve people in depth. In the same way, mobile panzer
divisions equipped with radio telephones upset the traditional army
structure. And we have seen how the news reporter linking the
printed page to the telephone and the telegraph created a unified
corporate image out of the fragmented government departments.
Today the junior executive can get on a first-name basis with seniors
in different parts of the country. "You just start telephoning. Anybody
can walk into any manager's office by telephone. By ten o'clock of
the day I hit the New York office I was calling everybody by their first
names."
The telephone is an irresistible intruder in time or place, so that high
executives attain immunity to its call only when dining at head tables.
In its nature the telephone is an intensely personal form that ignores
all the claims of visual privacy prized by literate man. One firm of
stockbrokers recently abolished all private offices for its executives,
and settled them around a kind of seminar table. It was felt that the
instant decisions that had to be made based on the continuous flow
of teletype and other electric media could only receive group
approval fast enough if private space were abolished. When on the
alert, even the grounded crews of military aircraft cannot be out of
sight of one another at any time. This is merely a time factor. More
relevant is the need for total involvement in role that goes with this
instant structure. The two pilots of one Canadian jet fighter are
matched with all
the care used in a marriage bureau. After many tests and long
experience together they are officially married by their commanding
officer "till death do you part." There is no tongue-in-cheek about this.
It is this same kind of total integration into a role that raises the
hackles of any literate man faced by the implosive demands of the
seamless web of electric decision-making. Freedom in the Western
world has always taken the form of the explosive, the divisive,
advancing the separation of the individual from the state. The
reversal of that one-way movement outward from center-to-margin is
as clearly owing to electricity as the great Western explosion had, in
the first place, been due to phonetic literacy.
If delegated chain-of-command authority won't work by telephone
but only by written instruction, what sort of authority does come into
play? The answer is simple, but not easy to convey. On the
telephone only the authority of knowledge will work. Delegated
authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is
nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive. To act, the delegated person
must always get clearance from the chain-of-command. The electric
situation eliminates such patterns; such "checks and balances" are
alien to the inclusive authority of knowledge. Consequendy,
restraints on electric absolutist power can be achieved, not by the
separation of powers, but by a pluralism of centers. This problem
has arisen apropos of the direct private line from the Kremlin to the
White House. President Kennedy stated his preference for teletype
over telephone, with a natural Western bias.
The separation of powers had been a technique for restraining
action in a centralist structure radiating out to remote margins. In an
electric structure there are, so far as the time and space of this
planet are concerned, no margins. There can, therefore, be dialogue
only among centers and among equals. The chain-oi-command
pyramids cannot obtain support from electric technology. But in
place of delegated power, there tends to appear
again with electric media, the role. A person can now be reinvested
with all kinds of nonvisual character. King and emperor were legally
endowed to act as the collective ego of all the private egos of their
subjects. So far, Western man has encountered the restoration of
the role only tentatively. He still manages to keep individuals in
delegated jobs. In the cult of the movie star, we have allowed
ourselves somnambulistically to abandon our Western traditions,
conferring on these jobless images a mystic role. They are collective
embodiments of the multitudinous private lives of their subjects.
An extraordinary instance of the power of the telephone to involve
the whole person is recorded by psychiatrists, who report that
neurotic children lose all neurotic symptoms when telephoning. The
New York Times of September 7, 1949 printed an item that provides
bizarre testimony to the cooling participational character of the
telephone:
On September 6, 1949, a psychotic veteran, Howard B. Unruh, in a
mad rampage on the streets of Camden, New Jersey, killed thirteen
people, and then returned home. Emergency crews, bringing up
machine guns, shotguns, and tear gas bombs, opened fire. At this
point an editor on the Camden Evening Courier looked up Unruh's
name in the telephone directory and called him. Unruh stopped firing
and answered, "Hello."
"This Howard?"
"Yes. .. ."
"Why are you killing people?"
"I don't know. I can't answer that yet. I'll have to talk to you later. I'm
too busy now."
_ Art Seidenbaum, in a recent article in the Los Anyies Times
Dialectics of Unlisted Telephone Numbers," said:
Celebrities have been hiding for a long time. Paradoxically, as
their names and images are bloated on ever widening screens,
they take increasing pains to be unapproachable in the flesh or
phone. . . . Many big names never answer up to their numbers;
a service takes every call, and only upon request, delivers the
accumulated messages. . . . "Don't call us" could become the
real area code for Southern California.
"All Alone by the Telephone" has come full circle. It will soon be the
telephone that is "all alone, and feeling blue."
28
THE PHONOGRAPH
The Toy that Shrank the National Chest
The phonograph, which owes its origin to the electrical telegraph
and the telephone, had not manifested its basically electric form and
function until the tape recorder released it from its mechanical
trappings. That the world of sound is essentially a unified field of
instant relationships lends it a near resemblance to the world of
electromagnetic waves. This fact brought the phonograph and radio
into early association.
Just how obliquely the phonograph was at first received is indicated
in the observation of John Philip Sousa, the brass-band director and
composer. He commented: "With the phonograph vocal exercises
will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not
weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"
One fact Sousa had grasped: The phonograph is an extension and
amplification of the voice that may well have diminished
individual vocal activity, much as the car had reduced pedestrian
activity.
Like the radio that it still provides with program content, the
phonograph is a hot medium. Without it, the twentieth century as the
era of tango, ragtime, and jazz would have had a different rhythm.
But the phonograph was involved in many misconceptions, as one of
its early names-gramophone-implies. It was conceived as a form of
auditory writing (gramma-letters). It was also called "graphophone,"
with the needle in the role of pen. The idea of it as a "talking
machine" was especially popular. Edison was delayed in his
approach to the solution of its problems by considering it at first as a
"telephone repeater"; that is, a storehouse of data from the
telephone, enabling the telephone to "provide invaluable records,
instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting
communication." These words of Edison, published in the
North .American Review of June, 1878, illustrate how the then
recent telephone invention already had the power to color thinking in
other fields. So, the record player had to be seen as a kind of
phonetic record of telephone conversation. Hence, the names
"phonograph" and "gramophone."
Behind the immediate popularity of the phonograph was the entire
electric implosion that gave such new stress and importance to
actual speech rhythms in music, poetry, and dance alike. Yet the
phonograph was a machine merely. It did not at first use an electric
motor or circuit. But in providing a mechanical extension of the
human voice and the new ragtime melodies, the phonograph was
propelled into a central place by some of the major currents of the
age. The fact of acceptance of a new phrase or a speech form, or a
dance rhythm is already direct evidence ot some actual
development to which it is significantly related. Take, for example,
the shift of English into an interrogative mood, since the arrival of
"How about that?" Nothing could induce people to begin suddenly to
use such a phrase over an
over unless there were some new stress, rhythm, or nuance in
interpersonal relations that gave it relevance.
It was while handling paper tape, impressed by Morse Code dots
and dashes, that Edison noticed the sound given off when the tape
moved at high speed resembled human talk heard indistinctly " It
then occurred to him that indented tape could record a telephone
message. Edison became aware of the limns of lineality and the
sterility of specialism as soon as he entered the electric field. "Look,"
he said, "it's like this. I start here with the intention of reaching here
in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable;
but when I've arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a
phenomenon, and it leads me off in another direction and develops
into a phonograph." Nothing could more dramatically express the
turning point from mechanical explosion to electrical implosion.
Edison's own career embodied that very change in our world, and he
himself was often caught in the confusion between the two forms of
procedure.
It was just at the end of the nineteenth century that the psychologist
Lipps revealed by a kind of electric audiograph that the single clang
of a bell was an intensive manifold containing all possible
symphonies. It was somewhat on the same lines that Edison
approached his problems. Practical experience had taught him that
embryonically all problems contained all answers when one could
discover a means of rendering them explicit. In his own case, his
determination to give the phonograph, like the telephone, a direct
practical use in business procedures led to his neglect of the
instrument as a means of entertainment. Failure to foresee the
phonograph as a means of entertainment was really a failure to
grasp the meaning of the electric revolution in general. In our time
we are reconciled to the phonograph as a toy and a solace; but
press, radio, and TV have also acquired the same dimension of
entertainment. Meantime, entertainment pushed to an extreme
becomes the main form of business and politics.
Electric media, because of their total "field" character, tend to
eliminate the fragmented specialties of form and function that we
have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and
mechanization. The brief and compressed history of the phonograph
includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the
mechanized word. It was the advent of the electric tape recorder that
only a few years ago released the phonograph from its temporary
involvement in mechanical culture. Tape and the l.p. record suddenly
made the phonograph a means of access to all the music and speech
of the world.
Before turning to the l.p. and tape-recording revolution, we should
note that the earlier period of mechanical recording and sound
reproduction had one large factor in common with the silent picture.
The early phonograph produced a brisk and raucous experience not
unlike that of a Mack Sennett movie. But the undercurrent of
mechanical music is strangely sad. It was the genius of Charles
Chaplin to have captured for film this sagging quality of a deep blues,
and to have overlaid it with jaunty jive and bounce. The poets and
painters and musicians of the later nineteenth century all insist on a
sort of metaphysical melancholy as latent in the great industrial
world of the metropolis. The Pierrot figure is as crucial in the poetry
of Laforgue as it is in the art of Picasso or the music of Satie. Is not
the mechanical at its best a remarkable approximation to the organic?
And is not a great industrial civilization able to produce anything in
abundance for everybody? The answer is "Yes." But Chaplin and the
Pierrot poets and painters and musicians pushed this logic all the
way to reach the image of Cyrano de Bergerac, who was the
greatest lover of all, but who was never permitted the return of his
love. This weird image of Cyrano, the unloved and unlovable lover,
was caught up in the phonograph cult of the blues. Perhaps is
misleading to try to derive the origin of the blues from Negro folk
music; however, Constant Lambert, English conductor-composer,
in his Music Ho.', provides an account of the
blues that preceded the jazz of the post-World War I. He concludes
that the great flowering of jazz in the twenties was a popular
response to the highbrow richness and orchestral subtlety of the
Debussy-Delius period. Jazz would seem to be an effective bridge
between highbrow and lowbrow music, much as Chaplin made a
similar bridge for pictorial art. Literary people eagerly accepted these
bridges, and Joyce got Chaplin into Ulysses as Bloom, just as Eliot
got jazz into the rhythms of his early poems.
Chaplin's clown-Cyrano is as much a part of a deep melancholy as
Laforgue's or Satie's Pierrot art. Is it not inherent in the very triumph
of the mechanical and its omission of the human? Could the
mechanical reach a higher level than the talking machine with its
mime of voice and dance? Do not T. S. Eliot's famous lines about
the typist of the jazz age capture the entire pathos of the age of
Chaplin and the ragtime blues?
When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again,
alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a
record on the gramophone.
Read as a Chaplin-like comedy, Eliot's Prufrock makes ready sense.
Prufrock is the complete Pierrot, the little puppet of the mechanical
civilization that was about to do a flip into its electric phase.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of complex
mechanical forms such as film and phonograph as the prelude to the
automation of human song and dance. As this automation of human
voice and gesture had approached perfection, so the human work
force approached automation. Now in the electric age the assembly
line with its human hands disappears, and electric automation brings
about a withdrawal of the work force from industry. Instead of being
automated themselves-
fragmented in task and function-as had been the tendency under
mechanization, men in the electric age move increasingly to
involvement in diverse jobs simultaneously, and to the work of
learning, and to the programming of computers.
This revolutionary logic inherent in the electric age was made fairly
clear in the early electric forms of telegraph and telephone that
inspired the "talking machine." These new forms that did so much to
recover the vocal, auditory, and mimetic world that had been
repressed by the printed word, also inspired the strange new
rhythms of "the jazz age," the various forms of syncopation and
symbolist discontinuity that, like relativity and quantum physics,
heralded the end of the Gutenberg era with its smooth, uniform lines
of type and organization.
The word "jazz" comes from the French jaser, to chatter. Jazz is,
indeed, a form of dialogue among instrumentalists and dancers alike.
Thus it seemed to make an abrupt break with the homogeneous and
repetitive rhythms of the smooth waltz. In the age of Napoleon and
Lord Byron, when the waltz was a new form, it was greeted as a
barbaric fulfillment of the Rousseauistic dream of the noble savage.
Grotesque as this idea now appears, it is really a most valuable clue
to the dawning mechanical age. The impersonal choral dancing of
the older, courtly pattern was abandoned when the waltzers held
each other in a personal embrace. The waltz is precise, mechanical,
and military, as its history manifests. For a waltz to yield its full
meaning, there must be military dress "There was a sound of revelry
by night" was how Lord Byron referred to the waltzing before
Walterloo. To the eighteenth century and to the age of Napoleon, the
citizen armies seemed to be an individualistic release from the
feudal framework of courtly hierarchies. Hence the association of
waltz with noble savage, meaning no more than freedom from status
and hierarchic deference. The waltzers were all uniform and equal,
having free movement in any part of the hall. That this was the
Romantic idea of the life of the noble savage now seems
odd, but the Romantics knew as little about real savages as they did
about assembly lines.
In our own century the arrival of jazz and ragtime was also heralded
as the invasion of the bottom-wagging native. The indignant tended
to appeal from jazz to the beauty of the mechanical and repetitive
waltz that had once been greeted as pure native dancing. If jazz is
considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the
discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational,
it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which
performance is both creation and composition. It is a truism among
jazz performers that recorded jazz is "as stale as yesterday's
newspaper." Jazz is alive, like conversation; and like conversation it
depends upon a repertory of available themes. But performance is
composition. Such performance insures maximal participation
among players and dancers alike. Put in this way, it becomes
obvious at once that jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures
that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It
belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with the many allied forms in
painting and in music.
The bond between the phonograph and song and dance is no less
deep than its earlier relation to telegraph and telephone. With the
first printing of musical scores in the sixteenth century, words and
music drifted apart. The separate virtuosity of voice and instruments
became the basis of the great musical developments of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same kind of
fragmentation and specialism in the arts and sciences made
possible mammoth results in industry and in military enterprise, and
in massive cooperative enterprises such as the newspaper and the
symphony orchestra.
Certainly the phonograph as a product of industrial, assembly-line
organization and distribution showed little of the electric qualities
that had inspired its growth in the mind of Edison. There were
prophets who could foresee the great day
when the phonograph would aid medicine by providing a medical
means of discrimination between "the sob of hysteria and the sigh of
melancholia ... the ring of whooping cough and the hack of the
consumptive. It will be an expert in insanity, distinguishing between
the laugh of the maniac and drivel of the idiot. ... It will accomplish
this feat in the anteroom, while the physician is busying himself with
his last patient." In practice, however, the phonograph stayed with
the voices of the Signor Foghornis, the basso-tenores,
robusto-profundos.
Recording facilities did not presume to touch anything so subtle as
an orchestra until after the First War. Long before this, one
enthusiast looked to the record to rival the photograph album and to
hasten the happy day when "future generations will be able to
condense within the space of twenty minutes a tone-picture of a
single lifetime: five minutes of a child's prattle, five of the boy's
exultations, five of the man's reflections, and five from the feeble
utterances of the deathbed." James Joyce, somewhat later, did
better. He made Finnegans Wake a tone poem that condensed in a
single sentence all the prattlings, exultations, observations, and
remorse of the entire human race. He could not have conceived this
work in any other age than the one that produced the phonograph
and the radio.
It was radio that finally injected a full electric charge into the world of
the phonograph. The radio receiver of 1924 was already superior in
sound quality, and soon began to depress the phonograph and
record business. Eventually, radio restored the record business by
extending popular taste in the direction of the classics.
The real break came after the Second War with the availability of the
tape recorder. This meant the end of the incision recording and its
attendant surface noise. In 1949 the era of electric hi-fi was another
rescuer of the phonograph business. The hi-fi quest for "realistic
sound" soon merged with the TV image as part of the recovery of
tactile experience. For the sensation of
having the performing instruments "right in the room with you" is a
striving toward the union of the audile and tactile in a finesse of
fiddles that is in large degree the sculptural experience. To be in the
presence of performing musicians is to experience their touch and
handling of instruments as tactile and kinetic, not just as resonant.
So it can be said that hi-fi is not any quest for abstract effects of
sound in separation from the other senses. With hi-fi, the
phonograph meets the TV tactile challenge.
Stereo sound, a further development, is "all-around" or "wrap
around" sound. Previously sound had emanated from a single point
in accordance with the bias of visual culture with its fixed point of
view. The hi-fi changeover was really for music what cubism had
been for painting, and what symbolism had been for literature;
namely, the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single
experience. Another way to put it is to say that stereo is sound in
depth, as TV is the visual in depth.
Perhaps it is not very contradictory that when a medium becomes a
means of depth experience the old categories of "classical" and
"popular" or of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" no longer obtain. Watching
a blue-baby heart operation on TV is an experience that will fit none
of the categories. When l.p. and hi-fi and stereo arrived, a depth
approach to musical experience also came in. Everybody lost his
inhibitions about "highbrow," and the serious people lost their
qualms about popular music and culture. Anything that is
approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest
matters. Because "depth" means "in interrelation," not in isolation.
Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of
mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item
seen quite secondary. Consciousness itself is an inclusive process
not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate
consciousness of anything in particular.
With regard to jazz, l.p. brought many changes, such as the cult of
"real cool drool," because the greatly increased length of
a single side of a disk meant that the jazz band could really have a
long and casual chat among its instruments. The repertory of the
1920s was revived and given new depth and complexity by this new
means. But the tape recorder in combination with l.p. revolutionized
the repertory of classical music. Just as tape meant the new study of
spoken rather than written languages, so it brought in the entire
musical culture of many centuries and countries. Where before there
had been a narrow selection from periods and composers, the tape
recorder, combined with l.p., gave a full musical spectrum that made
the sixteenth century as available as the nineteenth, and Chinese
folk song as accessible as the Hungarian.
A brief summary of technological events relating to the
phonograph might go this way:
The telegraph translated writing into sound, a fact directly related to
the origin of both the telephone and phonograph. With the telegraph,
the only walls left are the vernacular walls that the photograph and
movie and wirephoto overleap so easily. The electrification of writing
was almost as big a step into the non-visual and auditory space as
the later steps soon taken by telephone, radio, and TV
The telephone: speech without walls.
The phonograph: music hall without walls.
The photograph: museum without walls.
The electric light: space without walls.
The movie, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.
Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as
information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad
than his paleolithic ancestors.
29
MOVIES
The Reel World
In England the movie theater was originally called "The Bioscope,"
because of its visual presentation of the actual movements of the
forms of life (from Greek bios, way of life). The movie, by which we
roll up the real world on a spool in order to unroll it as a magic carpet
of fantasy, is a spectacular wedding of the old mechanical
technology and the new electric world In the chapter on The Wheel,
the story was told of how the movie had a kind of symbolic origin in
an attempt to photograph the flying hooves of galloping horses, for
to set a series of cameras to study animal movement is to merge the
mechanical and the
organic in a special way. In the medieval world, curiously the one
static form for another, in sequence. They imagined the life of a
flower as a kind of cinematic strip of phases for essences. The
movie is the total realization of the medieval idea of change, in
the form of an entertaining illusion. Physiologists had very much to
do with the development of film, as they did with the telephone. On
film the mechanical appears as organic, and the growth of a flower
can be portrayed as easily and as freely as the movement of a
horse.
If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of
undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The
reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and
white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound
track. He tries to follow the contours of the author's mind, at varying
speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be
difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of
their power to generate fantasy in the viewer or reader. Cervantes
devoted his Don Quixote entirely to this aspect of the printed word
and its power to create what James Joyce throughout Finnegcms
Wake designates as "the ABCED-minded," which can be taken as
"ab-said" or "ab-sent," or just alphabetically controlled.
The business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader
or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by
typography and film. That is so obvious, and happens so completely,
that those undergoing the experience accept it subliminally and
without critical awareness. Cervantes lived in a world in which print
was as new as movies are in the West, and it seemed obvious to
him that print, like the images now on the screen, had usurped the
real world. The reader or spectator had become a dreamer under
their spell, as Rene Clair said of film in 1926.
Movies as a nonverbal form of experience are like photography, a
form of statement without syntax. In fact, however, like the print and
the photo, movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and
prove baffling to the nonliterate. Our literate acceptance of the mere
movement of the camera eye as it follows or drops a figure from view
is not acceptable to an African film
audience, if somebody disappears off the side of the film, the African
wants to know what happened to him. A literate audience however,
accustomed to following printed imagery line by line without
questioning the logic of lineality, will accept film sequence without
protest.
It was Rene Clair who pointed out that if two or three people were
together on a stage, the dramatist must ceaselessly motivate or
explain their being there at all. But the film audience, like the book
reader, accepts mere sequence as rational. Whatever the camera
turns to, the audience accepts. We are transported to another world.
As Rene Clair observed, the screen opens its white door into a
harem of beautiful visions and adolescent dreams, compared to
which the loveliest real body seems defective. Yeats saw the movie
as a world of Platonic ideals with the film projector playing "a spume
upon a ghostly paradigm of things." This was the world that haunted
Don Quixote, who found it through the folio door of the newly printed
romances. The close relation, then, between the reel world of film
and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is indispensable
to our Western acceptance of the film form. Even the film
industry regards all of its greatest achievements as derived from
novels, nor is this unreasonable. Film, both in its reel form and in its
scenario or script form, is completely involved with book culture. All
one need do is to imagine for a moment a film based on newspaper
form in order to see how close film is to book. Theoretically, there is
no reason why the camera should not be used to photograph
complex groups of items and events in dateline configurations, just
as they are presented on the page of a newspaper. Actually, poetry
tends to do this configuring or bunching" more than prose. Symbolist
poetry has much in common with the mosaic of the newspaper page,
yet very few people can detach themselves from uniform and
connected space sufficiently to grasp symbolist poems. Natives, on
the other hand, who have very little contact with phonetic literacy
and lineal print, have to learn to "see" photographs or film just as
much as we have to learn our letters. In fact, after having tried for
years to teach Africans their letters by film, John Wilson of London
University's African Institute found it easier to teach them their letters
as a means to film literacy. For even when natives have learned to
"see" pictures, they cannot accept our ideas of time and space
"illusions." On seeing Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp, the African
audience concluded that Europeans were magicians who could
restore life. They saw a character who survived a mighty blow on the
head without any indication of being hurt. When the camera shifts,
they think they see trees moving, and buildings growing or shrinking,
because they cannot make the literate assumption that space is
continuous and uniform. Nonliterate people simply don't get
perspective or distancing effects of light and shade that we assume
are innate human equipment. Literate people think of cause and
effect as sequential, as if one thing pushed another along by
physical force. Nonliterate people register very little interest in this
kind of "efficient" cause and effect, but are fascinated by hidden
forms that produce magical results. Inner, rather than outer, causes
interest the nonliterate and nonvisual cultures. And that is why the
literate West sees the rest of the world as caught in the seamless
web of superstition.
Like the oral Russian, the African will not accept sight and sound
together. The talkies were the doom of Russian filmmaking because,
like any backward or oral culture, Russians have an irresistible need
for participation that is defeated by the addition of sound to the visual
image. Both Pudovkin and Eisenstein denounced the sound film but
considered that if sound were used symbolically and contrapuntally,
rather than realistically, there would result less harm to the visual
image. The African insistence on group participation and on
chanting and shouting during films is wholly frustrated by sound
track. Our own talkies were a further completion of the visual
package as a mere
consumer commodity. For with silent film we automatically provide
sound for ourselves by way of "closure" or completion. And when it
is filled in for us there is very much less participation in the work of
the image.
Again, it has been found that nonliterates do not know how to fix
their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen,
or some distance in front of a photo. The result is that they move
their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands. It is this
same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes European men
so "sexy" to American women. Only an extremely literate and
abstract society learns to fix the eyes, as we must learn to do in
reading the printed page. For those who thus fix their eyes,
perspective results. There is great subtlety and synesthesia in native
art, but no perspective. The old belief that everybody really saw in
perspective, but only that Renaissance painters had learned how to
paint it, is erroneous. Our own first TV generation is rapidly losing
this habit of visual perspective as a sensory modality, and along with
this change comes an interest in words, not as visually uniform and
continuous, but as unique worlds in depth. Hence the craze for puns
and wordplay, even in sedate ads.
In terms of other media such as the printed page, film has the power
to store and to convey a great deal of information. In an instant it
presents a scene of landscape with figures that would require
several pages of prose to describe. In the next instant it repeats, and
can go on repeating, this detailed information. The writer, on the
other hand, has no means of holding a mass of detail before his
reader in a large bloc or gestalt. As the photograph urged the painter
in the direction of abstract, sculptural art, so the film has confirmed
the writer in verbal economy and depth symbolism where the film
cannot rival him.
Another facet of the sheer quantity of data possible in a movie shot
is exemplified in historical films like Henry V or Richard III Here
extensive research went into the making of the sets and
costumes that any six-year-old can now enjoy as readily as any
adult. T. S. Eliot reported how, in the making of the film of his Murder
in the Cathedral, it was not only necessary to have costumes of the
period, but --so great is the precision and tyranny of the camera eye
--these costumes had to be woven by the same techniques as those
used in the twelfth century. Hollywood, amidst much illusion, had also
to provide authentic scholarly replicas of many past scenes. The
stage and TV can make do with very rough approximations, because
they offer an image of low definition that evades detailed scrutiny.
At first, however, it was the detailed realism of writers like Dickens
that inspired movie pioneers like D. W. Griffiths, who carried a copy
of a Dickens novel on location. The realistic novel, that arose with
the newspaper form of communal cross-section and human-interest
coverage in the eighteenth century, was a complete anticipation of
film form. Even the poets took up the same panoramic style, with
human interest vignettes and close-ups as variant. Gray's Elegy,
Burns' The Cotter's Saturday Night, Wordsworth's Michael, and
Byron's Childe Harold are all like shooting scripts for some
contemporary documentary film.
"The kettle began it. ..." Such is the opening of Dickens' Cricket and
the Hearth. If the modern novel came out of Gogol's The Overcoat,
the modern movie, says Eisenstein, boiled up out of that kettle. It
should be plain that the American and even British approach to film
is much lacking in that free interplay among the senses and the
media that seems so natural to Eisenstein or Rene Clair. For the
Russian, especially, it is easy to approach any situation structurally,
which is to say, sculpturally. To Eisenstein, the overwhelming fact of
film was that it is an "act of juxtaposition." But to a culture in an
extreme reach of typographic conditioning, the juxtaposition must be
one of uniform and connected characters and qualities. There must
be no leaps from the unique space of the tea kettle to the unique
space of the kitten or the boot. If such objects appear, they must be
leveled off
by some continuous narrative, or be "contained" in some uniform
pictorial space. All that Salvador Dali had to do to create a furor was
to allow the chest of drawers or the grand piano to exist in us own
space against some Sahara or Alpine backdrop. Merely by releasing
objects from the uniform continuous space of typography we got
modern art and poetry. We can measure the psychic pressure of
typography by the uproar generated by that release. For most people,
their own ego image seems to have been typographically conditioned,
so that the electric age with its return to inclusive experience
threatens their idea of self. These are the fragmented ones, for whom
specialist toil renders the mere prospect of leisure or jobless security
a nightmare. Electric simultaneity ends specialist learning and
activity, and demands interrelation in depth, even of the personality.
The case of Charlie Chaplin films helps to illumine this problem. His
Modern Times was taken to be a satire on the fragmented character
of modern tasks. As clown, Chaplin presents the acrobatic feat in a
mime of elaborate incompetence, for any specialist task leaves out
most of our faculties. The clown reminds us of our fragmented state
by tackling acrobatic or special jobs in the spirit of the whole or
integral man. This is the formula for helpless incompetence. On the
street, in social situations, on the assembly line, the worker
continues his compulsive twitchings with an imaginary wrench. But
the mime of this Chaplin film and others is precisely that of the robot,
the mechanical doll whose deep pathos it is to approximate so
closely to the condition of human life. Chaplin, in all his work, did a
puppetlike ballet of the Cyrano de Bergerac kind. In order to capture
this puppethke pathos, Chaplin (a devotee of ballet and personal
mend of Pavlova) adopted from the first the foot postures of classical
ballet. Thus he could have the aura of Spectre de la Rose
shimmering around his clown getup. From the British music nail, his
first training ground, with a sure touch of genius he
took images like that of Mr. Charles Pooter, the haunting figure of a
nobody. This shoddy-genteel image he invested with an envelope of
fairy romance by means of adherence to the classic ballet postures.
The new film form was perfectly adapted to this composite image,
since film is itself a jerky mechanical ballet of flicks that yields a
sheer dream world of romantic illusions. But the film form is not just a
puppetlike dance of arrested still shots, for it manages to
approximate and even to surpass real life by means of illusion. That
is why Chaplin, in his silent pictures at least, was never tempted to
abandon the Cyrano role of the puppet who could never really be a
lover. In this stereotype Chaplin discovered the heart of the film
illusion, and he manipulated that heart with easy mastery, as the
key to the pathos of a mechanized civilization. A mechanized world
is always in the process of getting ready to live, and to this end it
brings to bear the most appalling pomp of skill and method and
resourcefulness.
The film pushed this mechanism to the utmost mechanical verge
and beyond, into a surrealism of dreams that money can buy.
Nothing is more congenial to the film form than this pathos of
superabundance and power that is the dower of a puppet for whom
they can never be real. This is the key to The Great Gatsby that
reaches its moment of truth when Daisy breaks down in
contemplating Gatsby's superb collection of shirts. Daisy and Gatsby
live in a tinsel world that is both corrupted by power, yet innocently
pastoral in its dreaming.
The movie is not only a supreme expression of mechanism, but
paradoxically it offers as product the most magical of consumer
commodities, namely dreams. It is, therefore, not accidental that the
movie has excelled as a medium that offers poor People roles of
riches and power beyond the dreams of avarice. In the chapter on
The Photograph, it was pointed out how the Press photo in particular
had discouraged the really rich from the paths of conspicuous
consumption. The life of display that
the photo had taken from the rich, the movie gave to the poor with
lavish hand:
Oh, lucky, lucky me, I shall live in luxury, For I've got a pocketful
of dreams.
The Hollywood tycoons were not wrong in acting on the assumption
that movies gave the American immigrant a means of self-fulfillment
without any delay. This strategy, however deplorable in the light of
the "absolute ideal good," was perfectly in accord with film form. It
meant that in the 1920s the American way of life was exported to the
entire world in cans. The world eagerly lined up to buy canned
dreams. The film not only accompanied the first great consumer age,
but was also incentive, advertisement and, in itself, a major
commodity. Now in terms of media study it is clear that the power of
film to store information in accessible form is unrivaled. Audio tape
and video tape were to excel film eventually as information storehouses.
But film remains a major information resource, a rival of the
book whose technology it did so much to continue and also to
surpass. At the present time, film is still in its manuscript phase, as it
were; shortly it will, under TV pressure, go into its portable,
accessible, printed-book phase. Soon everyone will be able to have
a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound
cartridge as if on a TV to screen. This type of development is part of
our present technological implosion. The present dissociation of
projector and screen is a vestige of our older mechanical world of
explosion and separation of functions that is now ending with the
electrical implosion.
Typographic man took readily to film just because, like books, it
offers an inward world of fantasy and dreams. The film viewer sits in
psychological solitude like the silent book reader. This was not the
case with the manuscript reader, nor is it true of the
watcher of television. It is not pleasant to turn on TV just for oneself
in a hotel room, nor even at home. The TV mosaic image demands
social completion and dialogue. So with the manuscript before
typography, since manuscript culture is oral and demands dialogue
and debate, as the entire culture of the ancient and medieval worlds
demonstrates. One of the major pressures of TV has been to
encourage the "teaching machine." In fact, these devices are
adaptations of the book in the direction of dialogue. These teaching
machines are really private tutors, and their being misnamed on the
principle that produced the names "wireless" and "horseless
carriage" is another instance in that long list that illustrates how
every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the
new effect is secured by the old method, amplified or
modified by some new feature.
Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a
collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting,
sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics
are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of
skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious
example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the
industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the
nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as industry went its ever more
specialized fragmented course, it demanded more and more
teamwork in sales and supplies. The symphony orchestra became a
major expression of the ensuing power of such coordinated effort,
though for the players themselves this effect was lost, both in the
symphony and in industry.
When the magazine editors recently introduced film scenario
procedures to the constructing of idea articles, the idea article
supplanted the short story. The film is the rival of the book in that
sense. (TV in turn is the rival of the magazine because of its mosaic
power.) Ideas presented as a sequence of shots or
materialized situations, almost in the manner of a teaching machine
actually drove the short story out of the magazine field. Hollywood
has fought TV mainly by becoming a subsidiary of TV Most of the
film industry is now engaged in supplying TV programs. But one new
strategy has been tried, namely the big-budget picture. The fact is
that Technicolor is the closest the movie can get to the effect of the
TV image. Technicolor greatly lowers photographic intensity and
creates, in part, the visual conditions for participant viewing. Had
Hollywood understood the reasons for Marty's success, TV might
have given us a revolution in film. Marty was a TV show that got onto
the screen in the form of low definition or low-intensity visual realism.
It was not a success story, and it had no stars, because the
low-intensity TV image is quite incompatible with the high-intensity
star image. Marty, which in fact looked like an early silent movie or
an old Russian picture, offered the film industry all the clues it
needed for meeting the TV challenge.
This kind of casual, cool realism has given the new British films easy
ascendancy. Room at the Top features the new cool realism. Not
only is it not a success story, it is as much an announcement of the
end of the Cinderella package as Marilyn Monroe was the end of the
star system. Room at the Top is the story of how the higher a
monkey climbs, the more you see of his backside. The moral is that
success is not only wicked but also the formula for misery. It is very
hard for a hot medium like film to accept the cool message of TV.
But the Peter Sellers movies I'm M Right, Jack and Only Two Can
Play are perfectly in tune with the new temper created by the cool
TV image. Such is also the meaning of the ambiguous success of
Lolita. As a novel, its acceptance announced the antiheroic
approach to romance. The film industry had long beaten out a royal
road to romance in keeping with the crescendo of the success story.
Lolita announced that the royal road was only a cowtrack, after all,
and as for success it shouldn't happen to a dog.
In the ancient world and in medieval times, the most popular of all
stories were those dealing with The Falls of Princes. With the
coming of the very hot print medium, the preference changed to a
rising rhythm and to tales of success and sudden elevation in the
world. It seemed possible to achieve anything by the new
typographic method of minute, uniform segmentation of problems. It
was by this method, eventually, that film was made Film was, as a
form, the final fulfillment of the great potential of typographic
fragmentation. But the electric implosion has now reversed the
entire process of expansion by fragmentation. Electricity has brought
back the cool, mosaic world of implosion, equilibrium, and stasis. In
our electric age, the one-way expansion of the berserk individual on
his way to the top now appears as a gruesome image of trampled
lives and disrupted harmonies. Such is the subliminal message of
the TV mosaic with its total field of simultaneous impulses. Film strip
and sequence cannot but bow to this superior power. Our own
youngsters have taken the TV message to heart in their beatnik
rejection of consumer mores and of the private success story.
Since the best way to get to the core of a form is to study its effect in
some unfamiliar setting, let us note what President Sukarno of
Indonesia announced in 1956 to a large group of Hollywood
executives. He said that he regarded them as political radicals and
revolutionaries who had greatly hastened political change in the
East. What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in
which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and
refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary
person who has been deprived of the ordinary man's birthright.
That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster
ad for consumer goods. In America this major aspect of film is
merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to
mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation,
or as a form of deferred payment by
daydreaming. But the Oriental is right, and we are wrong about this
In fact the movie is a mighty limb of the industrial giant. That it is
being amputated by the TV image reflects a still greater revolution
going on at the center of American life. It is natural that the ancient
East should feel the political pull and industrial challenge of our
movie industry. The movie, as much as the alphabet and the printed
word, is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes outward into
other cultures. Its explosive force was significantly greater in silent
pictures than in talkies, for the electromagnetic sound track already
forecast the substitution of electric implosion for mechanical
explosion. The silent pictures were immediately acceptable across
language barriers as the talkies were not. Radio teamed up with film
to give us the talkie and to carry us further on our present reverse
course of implosion or re-integration after the mechanical age of
explosion and expansion. The extreme form of this implosion or
contraction is the image of the astronaut locked into his wee bit of
wraparound space. Far from enlarging our world, he is announcing
its contraction to village size. The rocket and the space capsule are
ending the rule of the wheel and the machine, as much as did the
wire services, radio, and TV
We may now consider a further instance of the films influence in a
most conclusive aspect. In modern literature there is probably no
more celebrated technique than that of the stream of consciousness
or interior monologue. Whether in Proust, Joyce, or Eliot, this form of
sequence permits the reader an extraordinary indentification with
personalities of the utmost range and diversity. The stream of
consciousness is really managed by the transfer of film technique to
the printed page, where, in a deep sense it really originated; for as
we have seen, the Gutenberg technology of movable types is quite
indispensable to any industrial or film process. As much as the
infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change
by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and
change into a series
of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the
whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike
seemed to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical
world of increasing standardization and uniformity Nobody ever felt
oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the Chaplin ballet or by
the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold
Bloom.
In 1911 Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution created a sensation by
associating the thought process with the form of the movie. Just at
the extreme point of mechanization represented by the factory, the
film, and the press, men seemed by the stream of consciousness, or
interior film to obtain release into a world of spontaneity, of dreams,
and of unique personal experience. Dickens perhaps began it all
with his Mr. Jingle in Pickwick Papers. Certainly in David Copperfield
he made a great technical discovery, since for the first time the world
unfolds realistically through the use of the eyes of a growing child as
camera. Here was the stream of consciousness, perhaps, in its
original form before it was adopted by Proust and Joyce and Eliot. It
indicates how the enrichment of human experience can occur
unexpectedly with the crossing and interplay of the life of media
forms.
The film imports of all nations, especially those from the United
States, are very popular in Thailand, thanks in part to a deft Thai
technique for getting round the foreign-language obstacle. In
Bangkok, in place of subtitles, they use what is called
"Adam-and-Eving." This takes the form of live Thai dialogue read
through a loudspeaker by Thai actors concealed from the audience.
Split-second timing and great endurance enable these actors to
demand more than the best-paid movie stars of Thailand.
Everyone has at some time wished he were equipped with his own
sound system during a movie performance, in order to make
appropriate comments. In Thailand, one might achieve great heights
of interpretive interpolation during the inane exchanges of great
stars.
30
RADIO
The Tribal Drum
England and America had had their "shots" against radio in the form
of long exposure to literacy and industrialism. These forms involve
an intense visual organization of experience. The more earthy and
less visual European cultures were not immune to radio. Its tribal
magic was not lost on them, and the old web of kinship began to
resonate once more with the note of fascism. The inability of literate
people to grasp the language and mesmentts
of the media as such i sinvoluntarily conveyed by the comments
of sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld m discussing the effects of
The last groupo f effects may be called the monopolititic effects fo
raido. such have ttracted most public attention because of their
importance inthe totalitarian countries. If a government monopolizes
the radio, then by mere repetition and by
the.r importance in the totalitarian countries. If a government
monopolizes the radio, then by mere repetition
and byRADIO 325
exclusion of conflicting points of view it can determine the opinions of
the population. We do not know much about how this monopolistic
effect really works,but it is important to note its singularity. No
inference should be drawn regardign the effects of radio as such. It is
often forgotten that Hitler did not achieve control through radio but
almost despite it, because at the time of his rise to power radio was
controlled by his enem.es. The monopolistic effects have probably
less social importance than is generally assumed.
Professor Lazarsfeld's helpless unawareness of the nature and
effects of radio is not a personal defect, but a universally shared
ineptitude.
In a radio speech in Munich, March 14, 1936, Hitler said "I go my
way with the assurance of a somnambulist." His victims and his
critics have been equally somnambulistic. They danced entranced to
the tribal drum of radio that extended their central nervous system to
create depth involvement for everybody. "I live right inside radio
when I listen. I more easily lose myself in radio than in a book," said
a voice from a radio poll. The power of radio to involve people in
depth is manifested in its use during homework by youngsters and
by many other people who carry transistor sets in order to provide a
private world for themselves amidst crowds. There is a little poem by
the German dramatist Berthold Brecht:
You little box, held to me when escaping
So that your valves should not break,
Carried from house to ship from ship to train,
So that my enemies might go on talking to me
Near my bed, to my pain
The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning,
Of their victories and of my cares,
Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.326
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio
from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information
system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and above all
weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to
involve people in one another. Weather is that medium that involves
all people equally. It is the top item on radio, showering us with
fountains of auditory space or
lebensraum.
It was no accident that Senator McCarthy lasted such a very short
time when he switched to TV. Soon the press decided, "He isn't
news any more." Neither McCarthy nor the press ever knew what
had happened. TV is a cool medium. It rejects hot figures and hot
issues and people from the hot press media. Fred Allen was a
casualty of TV Was Marilyn Monroe? Had TV occurred on a large
scale during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly. Had TV
come first there would have been no Hitler at all. When Khrushchev
appeared on American TV he was more acceptable than Nixon, as a
clown and a lovable sort of old boy. His appearance is rendered by
TV as a comic cartoon. Radio, however, is a hot medium and takes
cartoon characters seriously. Mr. K. on radio would be a different
proposition.
In the Kennedy-Nixon debates, those who heard them on radio
received an overwhelming idea of Nixon's superiority. It was Nixon's
fate to provide a sharp, high definition image and action for the cool
TV medium that translated that sharp image into the impression of a
phony. I suppose "phony" is something that resonates wrong, that
doesn't ring true. It might well be that F.D.R. would not have done
well on TV He had learned, at least, how to use the hot radio
medium for his very cool job of fireside chatting. He first, however,
had had to hot up the press media against himself in order to create
the right atmosphere for his radio chats. He learned how to use the
press in close relation to radio. TV would have presented him with
an entirely different political and social mix of components and
problems. He would
possibly have enjoyed solving them, for he had the kind of playful
approach necessary for tackling new and obscure relationships.
Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a
world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the
listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio A private experience.
The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating
echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very
nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society
into a single echo chamber. The resonating dimension of radio is
unheeded by the script writers, with few exceptions. The famous
Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple
demonstration of the all-inclusive, completely involving scope of the
auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson
Welles treatment for real.
That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to
radio and public-address systems. This is not to say that these
media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His
thoughts were of very little consequence. Radio provided the first
massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the
entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization. For tribal
peoples, for those whose entire social existence is an extension of
family life, radio will continue to be a violent experience. Highly
literate societies, that have long subordinated family life to
individualist stress in business and politics, have managed to absorb
and to neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so,
those communities that have had only brief or superficial experience
of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.
To understand such effects, it is necessary to see literacy as
typographic technology, applied not only to the rationalizing of the
entire procedures of production and marketing, but to law and
education and city planning, as well. The principles of
continuity, uniformity, and repeatability derived from print technology
have, in England and America, long permeated every phase of
communal life. In those areas a child learns literacy from traffic and
street, from every car and toy and garment.
Learning to read and write is a minor facet of literacy in the uniform,
continuous environments of the English-speaking world. Stress on
literacy is a distinguishing mark of areas that are striving to initiate
that process of standardization that leads to the visual organization
of work and space. Without psychic transformation of the inner life
into segmented visual terms by literacy, there cannot be the
economic "take-off" that insures a continual movement of
augmented production and perpetually accelerated
change-and-exchange of goods and services.
Just prior to 1914, the Germans had become obsessed with the
menace of "encirclement." Their neighbors had all developed
elaborate railway systems that facilitated mobilization of manpower
resources. Encirclement is a highly visual image that had great
novelty for this newly industrialized nation. In the 1930s, by contrast,
the German obsession was with lebensraum.
This is not a visual concern, at all. It is a claustrophobia, engendered
by the radio implosion and compression of space. The German
defeat had thrust them back from visual obsession into brooding
upon the resonating Africa within. The tribal past has never ceased
to be a reality for the German psyche.
It was the ready access of the German and middle-European world
to the rich nonvisual resources of auditory and tactile form that
enabled them to enrich the world of music and dance and sculpture.
Above all their tribal mode gave them easy access to the new
nonvisual world of subatomic physics, in which long-literate and
long-industrialized societies are decidedly handicapped. The rich
area of preliterate vitality felt the hot impact of radio. The message of
radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance. For Africa,
India, China, and even
Russia, radio is a profound archaic force, a time bond with the most
ancient past and long-forgotten experience.
Tradition, in a word, is the sense of the total past as now. Its
awakening is a natural result of radio impact and of electric
information, in general. For the intensely literate population, however,
radio engendered a profound unrealizable sense of guilt that
sometimes expressed itself in the fellow-traveler attitude. A newly
found human involvement bred anxiety and insecurity and
unpredictability. Since literacy had fostered an extreme of
individualism, and radio had done just the opposite in reviving the
ancient experience of kinship webs of deep tribal involvement, the
literate West tried to find some sort of compromise in a larger sense
of collective responsibility. The sudden impulse to this end was just
as subliminal and obscure as the earlier literary pressure toward
individual isolation and irresponsibility; therefore, nobody was happy
about any of the positions arrived at. The Gutenberg technology had
produced a new kind of visual, national entity in the sixteenth
century that was gradually meshed with industrial production and
expansion. Telegraph and radio neutralized nationalism but evoked
archaic tribal ghosts of the most vigorous brand. This is exactly the
meeting of eye and ear, of explosion and implosion, or as Joyce puts
it in the Wake, "In that earopean end meets Ind." The opening of the
European ear brought to an end the open society and reintroduced
the Indie world of tribal man to West End woman. Joyce puts these
matters not so much in cryptic, as in dramatic and mimetic, form.
The reader has only to take any of his phrases such as this one, and
mime it until it yields the intelligible. Not a long or tedious process, if
approached in the spirit of artistic playfulness that guarantees "lots
of fun at Finnegan's wake."
Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium.
It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is
private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it
is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch
remote and forgotten chords. All technological extensions of
ourselves must be numb and subliminal, else we could not endure
the leverage exerted upon us by such extension. Even more than
telephone or telegraph, radio is that extension of the central nervous
system that is matched only by human speech itself. Is it not worthy
of our meditation that radio should be specially attuned to that
primitive extension of our central nervous system, that aboriginal
mass medium, the vernacular tongue? The crossing of these two
most intimate and potent of human technologies could not possibly
have failed to provide some extraordinary new shapes for human
experience. So it proved with Hitler, the somnambulist. But does the
detribalized and literate West imagine that it has earned immunity to
the tribal magic of radio as a permanent possession? Our teenagers
in the 1950s began to manifest many of the tribal stigmata. The
adolescent, as opposed to the teenager, can now be classified as a
phenomenon of literacy. Is it not significant that the adolescent was
indigenous only to those areas of England and America where
literacy had invested even food with abstract visual values? Europe
never had adolescents. It had chaperones. Now, to the teenager,
radio gives privacy, and at the same time it provides the tight tribal
bond of the world of the common market, of song, and of resonance.
The ear is hyperesthetic compared to the neutral eye. The ear is
intolerant, closed, and exclusive, whereas the eye is open, neutral,
and associative. Ideas of tolerance came to the West only after two
or three centuries of literacy and visual Gutenberg culture. No such
saturation with visual values had occurred in Germany by 1930.
Russia is still far from any such involvement with visual order and
values.
If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new
meanings and different textures. They become richer, even, than
architecture, which Le Corbusier rightly says can best be felt at night.
All those gestural qualities that the printed page strips
from language come back in the dark, and on the radio. Given only
the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the
sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and
"closure" of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the
young that makes them remote and inaccessible. The mystic screen
of sound with which they are invested by their radios provides the
privacy for their homework, and immunity from parental behest.
With radio came great changes to the press, to advertising, to drama,
and to poetry. Radio offered new scope to practical jokers like
Morton Downey at CBS. A sportscaster had just begun his
fifteen-minute reading from a script when he was joined by Mr.
Downey, who proceeded to remove his shoes and socks. Next
followed coat and trousers and then underwear, while the
sports-caster helplessly continued his broadcast, testifying to the
compelling power of the mike to command loyalty over modesty
and the self-protective impulse.
Radio created the disk jockey, and elevated the gag writer into a
major national role. Since the advent of radio, the gag has
supplanted the joke, not because of gag writers, but because radio
is a fast hot medium that has also rationed the reporter's space for
stories.
Jean Shepherd of WOR in New York regards radio as a new
medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly. The mike is his
pen and paper. His audience and their knowledge of the daily events
of the world provide his characters, his scenes, and moods. It is his
idea that, just as Montaigne was the first to use the page to record
his reactions to the new world of printed books, he is the first to use
radio as an essay and novel form for recording our common
awareness of a totally new world of universal human participation in
all human events, private or collective.
To the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human
indifference to social effects of these radical forces. The phonetic
alphabet and the printed word that exploded the closed tribal world
into the open society of fragmented functions and specialist
knowledge and action have never been studied in their roles as a
magical transformer. The antithetic electric power of instant
information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private
enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into
common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written
word. The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant
reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has
gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what
needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to
explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It
goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action
of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential
numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock
conditions. The history of radio is instructive as an indicator of the
bias and blindness induced in any society by its pre-existent
technology. The word "wireless," still used for radio in Britain, manifests
the negative "horseless-carriage" attitude toward a new form.
Early wireless was regarded as a form of telegraph, and was not
seen even in relation to the telephone. David Sarnoff in 1916 sent a
memo to the Director of the American Marconi Company that
employed him, advocating the idea of a music box in the home. It
was ignored. That was the year of the Irish Easter rebellion and of
the first radio broadcast. Wireless had already been used on ships
as ship-to-shore "telegraph." The Irish rebels used a ship's wireless
to make, not a point-to-point message, but a diffused broadcast in
the hope of getting word to some ship that would relay their story to
the American press. And so it proved. Even after broadcasting had
been in existence for some years, there was no commercial interest
in it. It was the amateur operators or hams and their fans, whose
petitions finally got some action in favor of the setting up of facilities.
There was reluctance
and opposition from the world of the press, which, in England, led to
the formation of the BBC and the firm shackling of radio by
newspaper and advertising interests. This is an obvious rivalry that
has not been openly discussed. The restrictive pressure by the
press on radio and TV is still a hot issue in Britain and in Canada.
But, typically, misunderstanding of the nature of the medium
rendered the restraining policies quite futile. Such has always been
the case, most notoriously in government censorship of the press
and of the movies. Although the medium is the message, the
controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always
directed to the "content," which is always another medium.
The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the
book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the
effects of radio are quite independent of its programming. To those
who have never studied media, this fact is quite as baffling as
literacy is to natives, who say, "Why do you write? Can't you
remember?"
Thus, the commercial interests who think to render media
universally acceptable, invariably settle for "entertainment" as a
strategy of neutrality. A more spectacular mode of the
ostrich-head-in-sand could not be devised, for it ensures maximal
pervasiveness for any medium whatever. The literate community will
always argue for a controversial or point-of-view use of press, radio,
and movie that would in effect diminish the operation, not only of
press, radio and movie, but of the book as well. The commercial
entertainment strategy automatically ensures maximum speed and
force of impact for any medium, on psychic and social life equally. It
thus becomes a comic strategy of unwitting self-liquidation,
conducted by those who are dedicated to permanence, rather than
to change. In the future, the only effective media controls must take
the thermostatic form of quantitative rationing. Just as we now try to
control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media
fallout. Education will become recognized as civil defense against
media fallout.
The only medium for which our education now offers some civil
defense is the print medium. The educational establishment,
founded on print, does not yet admit any other responsibilities.
Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes
acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village
size, and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and
personal malice. But while radio contracts the world to village
dimensions, it hasn't the effect of homogenizing the village quarters.
Quite the contrary. In India, where radio is the supreme form of
communication, there are more than a dozen official languages and
the same number of official radio networks. The effect of radio as a
reviver of archaism and ancient memories is not limited to Hitler's
Germany. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have undergone resurgence
of their ancient tongues since the coming of radio, and the Israeli
present an even more extreme instance of linguistic revival. They
now speak a language which has been dead in books for centuries.
Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces,
and animosities, but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the
case with all electric power and media.
Centralism of organization is based on the continuous, visual, lineal
structuring that arises from phonetic literacy. At first, therefore,
electric media merely followed the established patterns of literate
structures. Radio was released from these centralist network
pressures by TV. TV then took up the burden of centralism, from
which it may be released by Telstar. With TV accepting the central
network burden derived from our centralized industrial organization,
radio was free to diversify, and to begin a regional and local
community service that it had not known, even in the earliest days of
the radio "hams." Since TV, radio has turned to the individual needs
of people at different times of the day, a fact that goes with the
multiplicity of receiving sets in bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, cars,
and now in
pockets. Different programs are provided for those engaged in
divers activities. Radio, once a form of group listening that emptied
churches, has reverted to private and individual uses since TV The
teenager withdraws from the TV group to his private radio.
This natural bias of radio to a close tie-in with diversified community
groups is best manifested in the disk-jockey cults and in radio's use
of the telephone in a glorified form of the old trunkline wire-tapping.
Plato, who had old-fashioned tribal ideas of political structure, said
that the proper size of a city was indicated by the number of people
who could hear the voice of a public speaker. Even the printed book,
let alone radio, renders the political assumptions of Plato quite
irrelevant for practical purposes. Yet radio, because of its ease of
decentralized intimate relation with both private and small
communities, could easily implement the Platonic political dream on
a world scale.
The uniting of radio with phonograph that constitutes the average
radio program yields a very special pattern quite superior in
power to the combination of radio and telegraph press that yields our
news and weather programs. It is curious how much more arresting
are the weather reports than the news, on both radio and TV. Is not
this because "weather" is now entirely an electronic form of
information, whereas news retains much of the pattern of the printed
word? It is probably the print and book bias of the BBC and the CBC
that renders them so awkward and inhibited in radio and TV
presentation. Commercial urgency, rather than artistic insight,
fostered by contrast a hectic vivacity in the corresponding American
operation.
31
TELEVISION
The Timid Giant
Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image is the
posture of children in the early grades. Since TV,
children-regardless of eye condition --average about six and a half
inches from the printed page. Our children are striving to carry over to
the printed page the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image.
With perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they carry out the commands of
the TV image. They pore, they probe, they slow down and involve
themselves in depth. This is what they had learned to do in the cool
iconography of the comic-book medium. TV carried the process
much further. Suddenly they are transferred to the hot print medium
with its uniform patterns and fast lineal movemnt. Pointlessly they
strive to read print in depth. They bring to print all their senses, and
print rejects them. Print asks for th isolated and stripped-down visual
faculty, not for the unified sensorium.
The Mackworth head-camera, when worn by children watching TV,
has revealed that their eyes follow, not the actions, but the reactions.
The eyes scarcely deviate from the faces of the actors, even during
scenes of violence. This head-camera shows by projection both the
scene and the eye movement simultaneously. Such extraordinary
behavior is another indication of the very cool and involving
character of this medium.
On the Jack Paar show for March 8, 1963, Richard Nixon was
Paared down and remade into a suitable TV image. It turns out that
Mr. Nixon is both a pianist and a composer. With sure tact for the
character of the TV medium, Jack Paar brought out this pianoforte
side of Mr. Nixon, with excellent effect. Instead of the slick, glib, legal
Nixon, we saw the doggedly creative and modest performer. A few
timely touches like this would have quite altered the result of the
Kennedy-Nixon campaign. TV is a medium that rejects the sharp
personality and favors the presentation of processes rather than of
products.
The adaptation of TV to processes, rather than to the neatly
packaged products, explains the frustration many people experience
with this medium in its political uses. An article by Edith Efron in TV
Guide (May 18-24, 1963) labeled TV "The Timid Giant," because it is
unsuited to hot issues and sharply defined controversal topics:
"Despite official freedom from censorship, a self-imposed silence
renders network documentaries almost mute on many great issues
of the day." As a cool medium TV has, some feel, introduced a kind
of rigor mortis into the body politic. It is the extraordinary degree of
audience participation in the TV medium that explains its failure to
tackle hot issues. Howard K. Smith observed: "The networks are
delighted if you go into a controversy in a country 14,000 miles away.
They don't want real controversy, real dissent, at home." For people
conditioned to the hot newspaper medium, which is concerned
with the clash of views, rather than involvement in depth in a situation,
the TV behavior is inexplicable.
Such a hot news item that concerns TV directly was headlined "It
finally happened –a British film with English subtitles to explain the
dialects." The film in question is the British comedy "Sparrows Don't
Sing." A glossary of Yorkshire, Cockney, and other slang phrases
has been printed for the customers so that they can figure out just
what the subtitles mean. Sub subtitles are as handy an indicator of
the depth effects of TV as the new "rugged" styles in feminine attire.
One of the most extraordinary developments since TV in England
has been the upsurge of regional dialects. A regional brogue or "burr"
is the vocal equivalent of gaiter stockings. Such brogues undergo
continual erosion from literacy. Their sudden prominence in England
in areas in which previously one had heard only standard English is
one of the most significant cultural events of our time. Even in the
classrooms of Oxford and Cambridge, the local dialects are heard
again. The undergraduates of those universities no longer strive to
achieve a uniform speech. Dialectal speech since TV has been found
to provide a social bond in depth, not possible with the artificial
"standard English" that began only a century ago.
An article on Perry Como bills him as "Low-pressure king of a
high-pressure realm." The success of any TV performer depends on
his achieving a low-pressure style of presentation, although getting
his act on the air may require much high-pressure organization.
Castro may be a case in point. According to Tad Szulc's story on
"Cuban Television's One-man Show" (The Eighth Ait), m his
seemingly improvised 'as-I-go-along' style he can evolve politics and
govern his country梤ight on camera." Now, Tad Szulc is under the
illusion that TV is a hot medium, and suggests that in the Congo
"television might have helped Lumumba to incite the masses to even
greater turmoil and bloodshed." But he is quite wrong. Radio is the
medium for frenzy, and it has been the major means of hotting up the
tribal blood of Africa, India, and China, alike. TV has cooled Cuba
down, as it is cooling down America. What the Cubans are getting by
TV is the experience of
being directly engaged in the making of political decisions. Castro
presents himself as a teacher, and as Szulc says, "manages to
blend political guidance and education with propaganda so skillfully
that it is often difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends."
Exactly the same mix is used in entertainment in Europe and
America alike. Seen outside the United States, any American movie
looks like subtle political propaganda. Acceptable entertainment has
to flatter and exploit the cultural and political assumptions of the land
of its origin. These unspoken presuppositions also serve to blind
people to the most obvious facts about a new medium like TV.
In a group of simulcasts of several media done in Toronto a few
years back, TV did a strange flip. Four randomized groups of
university students were given the same information at the same
time about the structure of preliterate languages. One group
received it via radio, one from TV, one by lecture, and one read it.
For all but the reader group, the information was passed along in
straight verbal flow by the same speaker without discussion or
questions or use of blackboard. Each group had half an hour of
exposure to the material. Each was asked to fill in the same quiz
afterward. It was quite a surprise to the experimenters when the
students performed better with TV-channeled information and with
radio than they did with lecture and print --and the TV group stood
well above the radio group. Since nothing had been done to give
special stress to any of these four media, the experiment was
repeated with other randomized groups. This time each medium was
allowed full opportunity to do its stuff. For radio and TV, the material
was dramatized with many auditory and visual features. The lecturer
took full advantage of the blackboard and class discussion. The
printed form was embellished with an imaginative use of typography
and page layout to stress each point in the lecture. All of these media
had been "epped up to high intensity for this repeat of the original
per- "nance. Television and radio once again showed results high
above lecture and print. Unexpectedly to the testers however, radio
now stood significantly above television. It was a long tune before the
obvious reason declared itself, namely that TV is a cool participant
medium. When hotted up by dramatization and stingers, it performs
less well because there is less opportunity for participation. Radio is
a hot medium. When given additional intensity, it performs better. It
doesn't invite the same degree of participation in its users. Radio will
serve as background-sound or as noise-level control, as when the
ingenious teenager employs it as a means of privacy. TV will not
work as background. It engages you. You have to be with it, (The
phrase has gained acceptance since TV)
A great many things will not work since the arrival of TV. Not only the
movies, but the national magazines as well, have been hit very hard
by this new medium. Even the comic books have declined greatly.
Before TV, there had been much concern about why Johnny couldn't
read. Since TV, Johnny has acquired an entirely new set of
perceptions. He is not at all the same. Otto Preminger, director of
Aiatomy of a Murder and other hits, dates a great change in movie
making and viewing from the very first year of general TV
programming. "In 1951," he wrote, “I started a fight to get the release
in motion-picture theaters of The Moon Is Blue after the production
code approval was refused. It was a small fight and I won it."
(Toronto Daily Star, October 19, 1963) He went on to say, "The very
fact that it was the word 'virgin' that was objected to in The Moon Is
Blue is today laughable, almost incredible." Otto Preminger
considers that American movies have advanced toward maturity
owing to the influence of TV The cool TV medium promotes depth
structures in art and entertainment alike, and creates audience
involvement in depth as well. Since nearly all our technologies and
entertainment since Gutenberg have been not cool, but hot; and not
deep, but fragmentary; not producer-oriented, but
consumer-oriented there is scarcely a single area of established
relationships, fromhome
and church to school and market, that has not been profoundly
disturbed in its pattern and texture.
The psychic and social disturbance created by the TV image and not
the TV programming, occasions daily comment in the press.
Raymond Burr, who plays Perry Mason, spoke to the National
Association of Municipal Judges, reminding them that, "Without our
laymen's understanding and acceptance, the laws which you apply
and the courts in which you preside cannot continue to exist." What
Mr. Burr omitted to observe was that the Perry Mason TV program,
in which he plays the lead, is typical of that intensely participational
kind of TV experience that has altered our relation to the laws and
the courts.
The mode of the TV image has nothing in common with film or photo,
except that it offers also a nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms.
With TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light
impulses that James Joyce called the "Charge of the Light Brigade"
that imbues his "soulskin with sobconscious inklings." The TV image
is visually low in data. The TV image is not a still shot. It is not photo
in any sense, hut a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by
the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light
through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of
sculpture and icon, rather than of picture. The TV image offers some
three million dots per second to the receiver. From these he accepts
only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image.
The film image offers many more millions of data per second, and
the viewer does not have to make the same drastic reduction of
items to form his impression. He tends instead to accept the full
image as a package deal. In contrast, the viewer of the TV mosaic,
with technical control of the image, unconsciously reconfigures the
dots into an abstract work of art on the pattern of a Seurat or Rouault.
If anybody were to ask whether all this would change if technology
stepped up the character of the TV image to movie data level, one
could only counter by inquiring,
"Could we alter a cartoon by adding details of perspective and light
and shade?" The answer is "Yes," only it would then no longer be a
cartoon. Nor would "improved" TV be television. The TV image is
now a mosaic mesh of light and dark spots which a movie shot never
is, even when the quality of the movie image
is very poor.
As in any other mosaic, the third dimension is alien to TV, but it can
be superimposed. In TV the illusion of the third dimension is
provided slightly by the stage sets in the studio; but the TV image
itself is a flat two-dimensional mosaic. Most of the three-dimensional
illusion is a carry-over of habitual viewing of film and photo. For the
TV camera does not have a built-in angle of vision like die movie
camera. Eastman Kodak now has a two-dimensional camera that
can match the flat effects of the TV camera. Yet it is hard for literate
people, with their habit of fixed points of view and three-dimensional
vision, to understand the properties of two-dimensional vision. If it
had been easy for them, they would have had no difficulties with
abstract art, General Motors would not have made a mess of
motorcar design, and the picture magazine would not be having
difficulties now with the relationship between features and ads. The
TV image requires each instant that we "close" the spaces in the
mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly
kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses,
rather than the isolated contact of skin and object.
To contrast it with the film shot, many directors refer to the TV image
as one of "low definition," in the sense that it offers little detail and a
low degree of information, much like the cartoon. A TV close-up
provides only as much information as a small section of a long-shot
on the movie screen. For lack of observing so central an aspect of
the TV image, the critics of program "content" have talked nonsense
about "TV violence." The spokesmen of censorious views are
typically semiliterate book-oriented individuals who have no
competence in the
grammars of newspaper, or radio, or of film, but who look askew and
askance at all non-book media. The simplest question about any
psychic aspect, even of the book medium, throws these people into
a panic of uncertainty. Vehemence of projection of a single isolated
attitude they mistake for moral vigilance. Once these censors
became aware that in all cases "the medium is the message" or the
basic source of effects, they would turn to suppression of media as
such, instead of seeking "content" control. Their current assumption
that content or programming is the factor that influences outlook and
action is derived from the book medium, with its sharp cleavage
between form and content.
Is it not strange that TV should have been as revolutionary a
medium in America in the 1950s as radio in Europe in the 1930s?
Radio, the medium that resuscitated the tribal and kinship webs of
the European mind in the 1920s and 1930s, had no such effect in
England or America. There, the erosion of tribal bonds by means of
literacy and its industrial extensions had gone so far that our radio
did not achieve any notable tribal reactions. Yet ten years of TV
have Europeanized even the United States, as witness its changed
feelings for space and personal relations. There is new sensitivity to
the dance, plastic arts, and architecture, as well as the demand for
the small car, the paperback, sculptural hairdos and molded dress
effects --to say nothing of a new concern for complex effects in
cuisine and in the use of wines. Notwithstanding, it would be
misleading to say that TV will retribalize England and America. The
action of radio on the world of resonant speech and memory was
hysterical. But TV has certainly made England and America vulnerable
to radio where previously they had immunity to a great
degree. For good or ill, the TV image has exerted a unifying
synesthetic force on the sense-life of these intensely literate
populations, such as they have lacked for centuries. It is wise to
withhold all value judgments when studying these
media matters, since their effects are not capable of being isolated.
Synesthesia, or unified sense and imaginative life, had long seemed
an unattainable dream to Western poets, painters, and artists in
general. They had looked with sorrow and dismay on the fragmented
and impoverished imaginative life of Western literate man in the
eighteenth century and later. Such was the message of Blake and
Pater, Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, and a host of other great figures.
They were not prepared to have their dreams realized in everyday
life by the esthetic action of radio and television. Yet these massive
extensions of our central nervous systems have enveloped Western
man in a daily session of synesthesia. The Western way of life
attained centuries since by the rigorous separation and
specialization of the senses, with the visual sense atop the hierarchy,
is not able to withstand the radio and TV waves that wash about the
great visual structure of abstract Individual Man. Those who, from
political motives, would now add their force to the anti-individual
action of our electric technology are puny subliminal automatons
aping the patterns of the prevailing electric pressures. A century ago
they would, with equal somnambulism, have faced in the opposite
direction. German Romantic poets and philosophers had been
chanting in tribal chorus for a return to the dark unconscious for over
a century before radio and Hitler made such a return difficult to avoid.
What is to be thought of people who wish such a return to preliterate
ways, when they have no inkling of how the civilized visual way was
ever substituted for tribal auditory magic?
At this hour, when Americans are discovering new passions for
skin-diving and the wraparound space of small cars, thanks to the
indomitable tactile promptings of the TV image, the same image is
inspiring many English people with race feelings of tribal
exclusiveness. Whereas highly literate Westerners have always
idealized the condition of integration of races, it has been
their literate culture that made impossible real uniformity among
races. Literate man naturally dreams of visual solutions to the
problems of human differences. At the end of the nineteenth century,
this kind of dream suggested similar dress and education for both
men and women. The failure of the sex-integration programs has
provided the theme of much of the literature and psychoanalysis of
the twentieth century. Race integration, undertaken on the basis
of visual uniformity, is an extension of the same cultural strategy of
literate man, for whom differences always seem to need eradication,
both in sex and in race, and in space and in time. Electronic man, by
becoming ever more deeply involved in the actualities of the human
condition, cannot accept the literate cultural strategy. The Negro will
reject a plan of visual uniformity as definitely as women did earlier,
and for the same reasons. Women found that they had been robbed
of their distinctive roles and turned into fragmented citizens in "a
man's world." The entire approach to these problems in terms of
uniformity and social homogenization is a final pressure of the
mechanical and industrial technology. Without moralizing, it can be
said that the electric age, by involving all men deeply in one another,
will come to reject such mechanical solutions. It is more difficult to
provide uniqueness and diversity than it is to impose the uniform
patterns of mass education; but it is such uniqueness and diversity
that can be fostered under electric conditions as never before.
Temporarily, all preliterate groups in the world have begun to feel
the explosive and aggressive energies that are released by the
onset of the new literacy and mechanization. These explosions
come just at a time when the new electric technology combines to
make us share them on a global scale.
The effect of TV, as the most recent and spectacular electric
extension of our central nervous system, is hard to grasp for various
reasons. Since it has affected the totality of our lives, Personal and
social and political, it would be quite unrealistic to
attempt a "systematic" or visual presentation of such influence.
Instead, it is more feasible to "present" TV as a complex gestalt of
data gathered almost at random.
The TV image is of low intensity or definition, and, therefore, unlike
film, it does not afford detailed information about objects. The
difference is akin to that between the old manuscripts and the
printed word. Print gave intensity and uniform precision, where
before there had been a diffuse texture. Print brought in the taste for
exact measurement and repeatability that we now associate with
science and mathematics.
The TV producer will point out that speech on television must not
have the careful precision necessary in the theater. The TV actor
does not have to project either his voice or himself. Likewise, TV
acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement
of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that
the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness
that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on stage. For the audience
participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life
of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium.
The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite
casual thing. And whereas a glossy photo the size of the TV screen
would show a dozen faces in adequate detail, a dozen faces on the
TV screen are only a blur.
The peculiar character of the TV image in its relation to the actor
causes such familiar reactions as our not being able to recognize in
real life a person whom we see every week on TV Not many of us
are as alert as the kindergartener who said to Garry Moore, "How did
you get off TV?" Newscasters and actors alike report the frequency
with which they are approached by people who feel they've met
them before. Joanne Woodward in an interview was asked what was
the difference between being a movie star and a TV actress. She
replied:
When I was in the movies I heard people say, 'There goes
Joanne Woodward.' Now they say, "There goes somebody I think I
know.
The owner of a Hollywood hotel in an area where many movie and
TV actors reside reported that tourists had switched their allegiance
to TV stars. Moreover, most TV stars are men that is, 'cool
characters," while most movie stars are women since they can be
presented as "hot" characters. Men and women movie stars alike,
along with the entire star system, have tended to dwindle into a more
moderate status since TV. The movie is a hot, high-definition
medium. Perhaps the most interesting observation of the hotel
proprietor was that the tourists wanted to see Perry Mason and
Wyatt Earp. They did not want to see Raymond Burr and Hugh
O'Brian. The old movie-fan tourists had wanted to see their favorites
as they were in real life, not as they were in their film roles. The fans
of the cool TV medium want to see their star in role, whereas the
movie fans want the real
thing.
A similar reversal of attitudes occurred with the printed book. There
was little interest in the private lives of authors under manuscript or
scribal culture. Today the comic strip is close to the pre-print
woodcut and manuscript form of expression. Walt Kelly's Pogo looks
very much indeed like a gothic page. Yet in spite of great public
interest in the comic-strip form, there is as little curiosity about the
private lives of these artists as about the lives of popular-song
writers. With print, the private life became of the utmost concern to
readers. Print is a hot medium. It projects the author at the public as
the movie did. The manuscript is a cool medium that does not
project the author, so much as involve the reader. So with TV. The
viewer is involved and participant. The role of the TV star, in this way,
seems more fascinating than his private life. It is thus that the
student of media, like the psychiatrist, gets more data from his
informants than they themselves have perceived. Everybody
experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience,
rather than
understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective
matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost
inevitably unaware of their effect upon him.
Some may find it paradoxical that a cool medium like TV should be
so much more compressed and condensed than a hot medium like
film. But it is well known that a half minute of television is equal to
three minutes of stage or vaudeville. The same is true of manuscript
in contrast to print. The "cool" manuscript tended toward
compressed forms of statement, aphoristic and allegorical. The "hot"
print medium expanded expression in the direction of simplification
and the "spelling-out" of meanings. Print speeded up and "exploded"
the compressed script into simpler fragments.
A cool medium, whether the spoken word or the manuscript or TV,
leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium. If
the medium is of high definition, participation is low. If the medium is
of low intensity, the participation is high. Perhaps this is why lovers
mumble so.
Because the low definition of TV insures a high degree of audience
involvement, the most effective programs are those that present
situations which consist of some process to be completed. Thus, to
use TV to teach poetry would permit the teacher to concentrate on
the poetic process of actual making, as it pertained to a particular
poem. The book form is quite unsuited to this type of involved
presentation. The same salience of process of do-it-yourself-ness
and depth involvement in the TV image extends to the art of the TV
actor. Under TV conditions, he must be alert to improvise and to
embellish every phrase and verbal resonance with details of gesture
and posture, sustaining that intimacy with the viewer which is not
possible on the massive movie screen or on the stage.
There is the alleged remark of the Nigerian who, after seeing a TV
western, said delightedly, "I did not realize you valued human life so
little in the West." Offsetting this remark is the
behavior of our children in watching TV westerns. When equipped
with the new experimental head-cameras that follow their eye
movements while watching the image, children keep their eyes on
the faces of the TV actors. Even during physical violence their eyes
remain concentrated on the facial reactions, rather than on the
eruptive action. Guns, knives, fists, all are ignored in preference for
the facial expression. TV is not so much an action, as a re-action,
medium.
The yen of the TV medium for themes of process and complex
reactions has enabled the documentary type of film to come to the
fore. The movie can handle process superbly, but the movie viewer
is more disposed to be a passive consumer of actions, rather than a
participant in reactions. The movie western, like the movie
documentary, has always been a lowly form. With TV, the western
acquired new importance, since its theme is always: "Let's make a
town." The audience participates in the shaping and processing of a
community from meager and unpromising components. Moreover,
the TV image takes kindly to the varied and rough textures of
Western saddles, clothes, hides, and shoddy match-wood bars and
hotel lobbies. The movie camera, by contrast, is at home in the slick
chrome world of the night club and the luxury spots of a metropolis.
Moreover, the contrasting camera preferences of the movies in the
Twenties and Thirties, and of TV in the Fifties and Sixties spread to
the entire population. In ten years the new tastes of America in
clothes, in food, in housing, in entertainment, and in vehicles
express the n
ew pattern of interrelation of forms and do-it-yourself
involvement fostered by the TV image.
It is no accident that such major movie stars as Rita Hayworth, Liz
Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe ran into troubled waters in the new TV
age. They ran into an age that questioned all the "hot" m
edia values
of the pre-TV consumer days. The TV image challenges the values
of fame as much as the values of consumer goods. "Fame to me,"
said Marilyn Monroe, "certainly is only a
temporary and a partial happiness. Fame is not really for a daily diet,
that's not what fulfills you-----I think that when you are famous every
weakness is exaggerated. This industry should behave to its stars
like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But
instead of clasping the child to them they start punishing the child."
The movie community is now getting clobbered by TV, and lashes
out at anybody in its bewildered petulance. These words of the great
movie puppet who wed Mr. Baseball and Mr. Broadway are surely a
portent. If many of the rich and successful figures in America were to
question publicly the absolute value of money and success as
means to happiness and human welfare, they would offer no more
shattering a precedent than Marilyn Monroe. For nearly fifty years,
Hollywood had offered "the fallen woman" a way to the top and a
way to the hearts of all. Suddenly the love-goddess emits a horrible
cry, screams that eating people is wrong, and utters denunciations
of the whole way of life. This is exactly the mood of the suburban
beatniks. They reject a fragmented and specialist consumer life for
anything that offers humble involvement and deep commitment. It is
the same mood that recently turned girls from specialist careers to
early marriage and big families. They switch from jobs to roles. The
same new preference for depth participation has also prompted in
the young a strong drive toward religious experience with rich
liturgical overtones. The liturgical revival of the radio and TV age
affects even the most austere Protestant sects. Choral chant and
rich vestments have appeared in every quarter. The ecumenical
movement is synonymous with electric technology.
Just as TV, the mosaic mesh, does not foster perspective in art, it
does not foster lineality in living. Since TV, the assembly line has
disappeared from industry. Staff and line structures have dissolved
in management. Gone are the stag line, the party line, the receiving
line, and the pencil line from the backs of nylons. '
With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism
and fragmentation that won't work since TV Instead of the voting bloc,
we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint
or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the
product, the process. In periods of new and rapid growth there is a
blurring of outlines. In the TV image we have the supremacy of the
blurred outline, itself the maximal incentive to growth and new
"closure" or completion, especially for a consumer culture long
related to the sharp visual values that had become separated from
the other senses. So great is the change in American lives, resulting
from the loss of loyalty to the consumer package in entertainment
and commerce, that every enterprise, from Madison Avenue and
General Motors to Hollywood and General Foods, has been shaken
thoroughly and forced to seek new strategies of action. What electric
implosion or contraction has done inter-personally and
inter-nationally, the TV image does intra-personally or
intra-sensuously.
It is not hard to explain this sensuous revolution to painters and
sculptors, for they have been striving, ever since Cezanne
abandoned perspective illusion in favor of structure in painting, to
bring about the very change that TV has now effected on a fantastic
scale. TV is the Bauhaus program of design and living, or the
Montessori educational strategy, given total technological extension
and commercial sponsorship. The aggressive lunge of artistic
strategy for the remaking of Western man has, via TV, become a
vulgar sprawl and an overwhelming splurge in American life.
It would be impossible to exaggerate the degree to which this image
has disposed America to European modes of sense and sensibility.
America is now Europeanizing as furiously as Europe is
Americanizing. Europe, during the Second War, developed much of
the industrial technology needed for its first mass consumer phase.
It was, on the other hand, the First War that had re
adied America for
the same consumer "take-off." It took the
electronic implosion to dissolve the nationalist diversity of a splintered
Europe, and to do for it what the industrial explosion had done
for America. The industrial explosion that accompanies the
fragmenting expansion of literacy and industry was able to exert little
unifying effect in the European world with its numerous tongues and
cultures. The Napoleonic thrust had utilized the combined force of
the new literacy and early industrialism. But Napoleon had had a
less homogenized set of materials to work with than even the
Russians have today. The homogenizing power of the literate
process had gone further in America by 1800 than anywhere in
Europe. From the first, America took to heart the print technology for
its educational, industrial, and political life; and it was rewarded by
an unprecedented pool of standardized workers and consumers,
such as no culture had ever had before. That our cultural historians
have been oblivious of the homogenizing power of typography, and
of the irresistible strength of homogenized populations, is no credit
to them. Political scientists have been quite unaware of the effects of
media anywhere at any time, simply because nobody has been
willing to study the personal and social effects of media apart from
their "content."
America long ago achieved its Common Market by mechanical and
literate homogenization of social organization. Europe is now getting
a unity under the electric auspices of compression and interrelation.
Just how much homogenization via literacy is needed to make an
effective producer consumer group in the postmechanical age, in the
age of automation, nobody has ever asked. For it has never been
fully recognized that the role of literacy in shaping an industrial
economy is basic and archetypal. Literacy is indispensable for habits
of uniformity at all times and places. Above all, it is needed for the
workability of price systems and markets. This factor has been
ignored exactly as TV is now being ignored, for TV fosters many
preferences that are quite at variance with literate uniformity and
repeatability. It has sent
Americans questing for every sort of oddment and quaintness in
objects from out of their storied past. Many Americans will now
spare no pains or expense to get to taste some new wine or food.
The uniform and repeatable now must yield to the uniquely askew, a
fact that is increasingly the despair and confusion of our entire
standardized economy.
The power of the TV mosaic to transform American innocence into
depth sophistication, independently of "content," is not mysterious if
looked at directly. This mosaic TV image had already been
adumbrated in the popular press that grew up with the telegraph.
The commercial use of the telegraph began in 1844 in America, and
earlier in England. The electric principle and its implications received
much attention in Shelley's poetry. Artistic rule-of-thumb usually
anticipates the science and technology in these matters by a full
generation or more. The meaning of the telegraph mosaic in its
journalistic manifestations was not lost to the mind of Edgar Allan
Poe. He used it to establish two startlingly new inventions, the
symbolist poem and the detective story. Both of these forms require
do it yourself participation on the part of the reader. By offering an
incomplete image or process, Poe involved his readers in the
creative process in a way that Baudelaire, Valery, T. S. Eliot, and
many others have admired and followed. Poe had grasped at once
the electric dynamic as one of public participation in creativity.
Nevertheless, even today the homogenized consumer complains
when asked to participate in creating or completing an abstract
poem or painting or structure of any kind. Yet Poe knew even then
that participation in depth followed at once from the telegraph
mosaic. The more lineal and literal-minded of the literary brahmins
"just couldn't see it." They still can't see it. They prefer not t0
participate in the creative process. They have accommodated
themselves to the completed packages, in prose and verse and in
Ae plastic arts. It is these people who must confront, in every
classroom in the land, students who have accommodated
themselves to the tactile and nonpictorial modes of symbolist and
mythic structures, thanks to the TV image.
Life magazine for August 10, 1962, had a feature on how "Too Many
Subteens Grow Up Too Soon and Too Fast." There was no
observation of the fact that similar speed of growth and
pre-conciousness have always been the norm in tribal cultures and
in nonliterate societies. England and America fostered the institution
of prolonged adolescence by the negation of the tactile participation
that is sex. In this, there was no conscious strategy, but rather a
general acceptance of the consequences of prime stress on the
printed word and visual values as a means of organizing personal
and social life. This stress led to triumphs of industrial production
and political conformity that were their own sufficient warrant.
Respectability, or the ability to sustain visual inspection of one's life,
became dominant. No European country allowed print such
precedence. Visually, Europe has always been shoddy in American
eyes. American women, on the other hand, who have never been
equaled in any culture for visual turnout, have always seemed
abstract, mechanical dolls to Europeans. Tactility is a supreme value
in European life. For that reason, on the Continent there is no
adolescence, but only the leap from childhood to adult ways. Such is
now the American state since TV, and this state of evasion of
adolescence will continue. The introspective life of long, long
thoughts and distant goals, to be pursued in lines of Siberian railroad
kind, cannot coexist with the mosaic form of the TV image that
commands immediate participation in depth and admits of no delays.
The mandates of that image are so various yet so consistent that
even to mention them is to describe the revolution of the past
decade.
The phenomenon of the paperback, the book in "cool" version, can
head this list of TV mandates, because the TV transformation of
book culture into something else is manifested at that point.
Europeans have had paperbacks from the first. From
the beginnings of the automobile, they have preferred the wraparound
space of the small car. The pictorial value of "enclosed
space" for book, car, or house has never appealed to them. The
paperback, especially in its highbrow form, was tried in America in
the 1920s and thirties and forties. It was not, however, until 1953
that it suddenly became acceptable. No publisher really knows why.
Not only is the paperback a tactile, rather than a visual, package; it
can be as readily concerned with profound matters as with froth. The
American since TV has lost his inhibitions and his innocence about
depth culture. The paperback reader has discovered that he can
enjoy Aristotle or Confucius by simply slowing down. The old literate
habit of racing ahead on uniform lines of print yielded suddenly to
depth reading. Reading in depth is, of course, not proper to the
printed word as such. Depth probing of words and language is a
normal feature of oral and manuscript cultures, rather than of print.
Europeans have always felt that the English and Americans lacked
depth in i their culture. Since radio, and especially since TV, English
and I American literary critics have exceeded the performance of
any 1 European in depth and subtlety. The beatnik reaching out for
Zen is only carrying the mandate of the TV mosaic out into the world
of words and perception. The paperback itself has become a vast
mosaic world in depth, expressive of the changed sense-life of
Americans, for whom depth experience in words, as in physics, has
become entirely acceptable, and even sought after.
Just where to begin to examine the transformation of American
attitudes since TV is a most arbitrary affair, as can be seen in a
change so great as the abrupt decline of baseball. The removal of
the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles was a portent in itself.
Baseball moved West in an attempt to retain an audience after TV
struck. The characteristic mode of the baseball game is that it
features one-thing-at-a-time. It is a lineal, expansive game w
hich, like
golf, is perfectly adapted to the outlook of an individualist and
inner-directed society. Timing and waiting are of
the essence, with the entire field in suspense waiting upon the
performance of a single player. By contrast, football, basketball, and
ice hockey are games in which many events occur simultaneously,
with the entire team involved at the same time. With the advent of
TV, such isolation of the individual performance as occurs in
baseball became unacceptable. Interest in baseball declined, and its
stars, quite as much as movie stars, found that fame had some very
cramping dimensions. Baseball had been, like the movies, a hot
medium featuring individual virtuosity and stellar performers. The
real ball fan is a store of statistical information about previous
explosions of batters and pitchers in numerous games. Nothing
could indicate more clearly the peculiar satisfaction provided by a
game that belonged to the industrial metropolis of ceaselessly
exploding populations, stocks and bonds, and production and sales
records. Baseball belonged to the age of the first onset of the hot
press and the movie medium. It will always remain a symbol of the
era of the hot mommas, jazz babies, of sheiks and shebas, of vamps
and gold-diggers and the fast buck. Baseball, in a word, is a hot
game that got cooled off in the new TV climate, as did most of the
hot politicians and hot issues of the earlier decades.
There is no cooler medium or hotter issue at present than the small
car. It is like a badly wired woofer in a hi-fi circuit that produces a
tremendous flutter in the bottom. The small European car, like the
European paperback and the European belle, for that matter, was no
visual package job. Visually, the entire batch of European cars are
so poor an affair that it is obvious their makers never thought of them
as something to look at. They are something to put on, like pants or
a pullover. Theirs is the kind of space sought by the skin-diver, the
water-skier, and the dinghy sailor. In an immediate tactile sense, this
new space is akin to that to which the picture-window fad had
catered. In terms of "view," the picture window never made any
sense. In terms of an attempt to discover a new dimension in the
out-of-
doors by pretending to be a goldfish, the picture window does make
sense. So do the frantic efforts to roughen up the indoor walls and
textures as if they were the outside of the house. Exactly the same
impulse sends the indoor spaces and furniture out into the patios in
an attempt to experience the outside as inside. The TV viewer is in
just that role at all times. He is submarine. He is bombarded by
atoms that reveal the outside as inside in an endless adventure
amidst blurred images and mysterious contours.
However, the American car had been fashioned in accordance with
the visual mandates of the typographic and the movie images. The
American car was an enclosed space, not a tactile space. And an
enclosed space, as was shown in the chapter on Print, is one in
which all spatial qualities have been reduced to visual terms. So in
the American car, as the French observed decades ago, "one is not
on the road, one is in the car." By contrast, the European car aims to
drag you along the road and to provide a great deal of vibration for
the bottom. Brigitte Bar-dot got into the news when it was discovered
that she liked to drive barefoot in order to get the maximal vibration.
Even English cars, weak on visual appearance as they are, have
been guilty of advertising that "at sixty miles an hour all you can hear
is the ticking of the clock." That would be a very poor ad, indeed, for
a TV generation that has to be with everything and has to dig things
in order to get at them. So avid is the TV viewer for rich tactile effects
that he could be counted on to revert to skis. The wheel, so far as he
is concerned, lacks the requisite abrasiveness.
Clothes in this first TV decade repeat the same story as vehicles.
The revolution was heralded by bobby-soxers who dumped the
whole cargo of visual effects for a set of tactile ones so extreme as
to create a dead level of flat-footed dead-panism. Part of the cool
dimension of TV is the cool, deadpan mug that came in with the
teenager. Adolescence, in the age of hot media, of radio and movie,
and of the ancient book, had been a time of
fresh, eager, and expressive countenances. No elder statesman or
senior executive of the 1940s would have ventured to wear so dead
and sculptural a pan as the child of the TV age. The dances that
came in with TV were to match --all the way to the Twist, which is
merely a form of very unanimated dialogue, the gestures and
grimaces of which indicate involvement in depth, but "nothing to say."
Clothing and styling in the past decade have gone so tactile and
sculptural that they present a sort of exaggerated evidence of the
new qualities of the TV mosaic. The TV extension of our nerves in
hirsute pattern possesses the power to evoke a flood of related
imagery in clothing, hairdo, walk, and gesture.
All this adds up to the compressional implosion --the return to
nonspecialized forms of clothes and spaces, the seeking of
multi-uses for rooms and things and objects, in a single word --the
iconic. In music and poetry and painting, the tactile implosion means
the insistence on qualities that are close to casual speech. Thus
Schonherg and Stravinsky and Carl Orff and Bartok, far from being
advanced seekers of esoteric effects, seem now to have brought
music very close to the condition of ordinary human speech. It is this
colloquial rhythm that once seemed so unmelodious about their work.
Anyone who listens to the medieval works of Perotinus or Dufay will
find them very close to Stravinsky and Bartok. The great explosion of
the Renaissance that split musical instruments off from song and
speech and gave them specialist functions is now being played
backward in our age of electronic implosion.
One of the most vivid examples of the tactile quality of the TV image
occurs in medical experience. In closed-circuit instruction m surgery,
medical students from the first reported a strange effect that they
seemed not to be watching an operation, but performing it. They felt
that they were holding the scalpel. Thus the TV image, in fostering a
passion for depth involvement in every aspect of experience,
creates an obsession with bodily
welfare. The sudden emergence of the TV medico and the hospital
ward as a program to rival the western is perfectly natural. It would
be possible to list a dozen untried kinds of programs that would
prove immediately popular for the same reasons. Tom Dooley and
his epic of Medicare for the backward society was a natural
outgrowth of the first TV decade.
Now that we have considered the subliminal force of the TV image in
a redundant scattering of samples, the question would seem to arise:
"What possible immunity can there be from the subliminal operation
of a new medium like television?" People have long supposed that
bulldog opacity, backed by firm disapproval, is adequate enough
protection against any new experience. It is the theme of this book
that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a
medium can head off the ordinary "closure" of the senses that
causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. The
utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria, though the
confreres of Louis Pasteur tossed him out of the medical profession
for his base allegations about the invisible operation of bacteria. To
resist TV, therefore, one must acquire the antidote of related media
like print.
It is an especially touchy area that presents itself with the question:
"What has been the effect of TV on our political life?" Here, at least,
great traditions of critical awareness and vigilance testify to the
safeguards we have posted against the dastardly uses of power.
When Theodore White's The Making of the President: 1960 is
opened at the section on "The Television Debates," the TV student
will experience dismay. White offers statistics on the number of sets
in American homes and the number of hours of daily use of these
sets, but not one clue as to the nature of the TV image or its effects
on candidates or viewers. White considers the 'content" of the
debates and the deportment of the debaters, but it never occurs to
him to ask why TV would inevitably be a
disaster for a sharp intense image like Nixon's, and a boon for the
blurry, shaggy texture of Kennedy.
At the end of the debates, Philip Deane of the London Observer
explained my idea of the coming TV impact on the election to the
Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline of "The Sheriff and the
Lawyer," October 15, 1960. It was that TV would prove so entirely in
Kennedy's favor that he would win the election. Without TV, Nixon
had it made. Deane, toward the end of his article, wrote:
Now the press has tended to say that Mr. Nixon has been
gaining in the last two debates and that he was bad in the first.
Professor McLuhan thinks that Mr. Nixon has been sounding
progressively more definite; regardless of the value of the
Vice-President's views and principles, he has been defending
them with too much flourish for the TV medium. Mr.
Kennedy's rather sharp responses have been a mistake, but
he still presents an image closer to the TV hero, Professor
McLuhan says --something like the shy young Sheriff --while
Mr. Nixon with his very dark eyes that tend to stare, with his
slicker circumlocution, has resembled more the railway lawyer
who signs leases that are not in the interests of the folks in the
little town.
In fact, by counterattacking and by claiming for himself, as he does
in the TV debates, the same goals as the Democrats have, Mr.
Nixon may be helping his opponent by blurring the Kennedy image,
by confusing what exactly it is that Mr. Kennedy wants to change.
Mr. Kennedy is thus not handicapped by clear-cut issues; he is
visually a less well-defined image, and appears more nonchalant.
He seems less anxious to sell himself than does Mr. Nixon. So far,
then, Professor McLuhan gives Mr. Kennedy the lead without
underestimating Mr. Nixon's formidable appeal to the vast
conservative forces of the United States.
Another way of explaining the acceptable, as opposed to the
unacceptable, TV personality is to say that anybody whose appearance
strongly declares his role and status in life is wrong for TV
Anybody who looks as if he might be a teacher, a doctor, a
businessman, or any of a dozen other things all at the same time is
right for TV. When the person presented looks classifiable, as Nixon
did, the TV viewer has nothing to fill in. He feels uncomfortable with
his TV image. He says uneasily, "There's something about the guy
that isn't right." The viewer feels exactly the same about an
exceedingly pretty girl on TV, or about any of the intense "high
definition" images and messages from the sponsors. It is not
accidental that advertising has become a vast new source of comic
effects since the advent of TV. Mr. Khrushchev is a very filled-in or
completed image that appears on TV as a comic cartoon. In
wirephoto and on TV, Mr. Khrushchev is a jovial comic, an entirely
disarming presence. Likewise, precisely the formula that
recommends anybody for a movie role disqualifies that same person
for TV acceptance. For the hot movie medium needs people who
look very definitely a type of some kind. The cool TV medium cannot
abide the typical because it leaves the viewer frustrated of his job of
'closure" or completion of image. President Kennedy did not look like
a rich man or like a politician. He could have been anything from a
grocer or a professor to a football coach. He was not too precise or
too ready of speech in such a way as to spoil his pleasantly tweedy
blur of countenance and outline. He went from palace to log cabin,
from wealth to the White House, in a pattern of TV reversal and
upset.
The same components will be found in any popular TV figure. Ed
Sullivan, "the great stone face," as he was known from the first, has
the much needed harshness of texture and general sculptural quality
demanded for serious regard on TV Jack Paar is quite otherwise
--neither shaggy nor sculptural. But on the other hand, his presence
is entirely acceptable on TV because of
his utterly cool and casual verbal agility. The Jack Paar show
revealed the inherent need of TV for spontaneous chat and dialogue.
Jack discovered how to extend the TV mosaic image into the entire
format of his show, seemingly snaffling up just anybody from
anywhere at the drop of a hat. In fact, however, he understood very
well how to create a mosaic from other media, from the world of
journalism and politics, books, Broadway, and the arts in general,
until he became a formidable rival to the press mosaic itself. As
Amos and Andy had lowered church attendance on Sunday
evenings in the old days of radio, so Jack Parr certainly cut nightclub
patronage with his late show.
How about Educational Television? When the three-year-old sits
watching the President's press conference with Dad and Grandad,
that illustrates the serious educational role of TV If we ask what is
the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that
the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has
brought to America new demand for crash-programming in
education. Whether there ever will be TV in every classroom is a
small matter. The revolution has already taken place at home. TV
has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes. It has
created a taste for all experience in depth that affects language
teaching as much as car styles. Since TV, nobody is happy with a
mere book knowledge of French or English poetry. The unanimous
cry now is, "Let's talk French," and "Let the bard be heard." And
oddly enough, with the demand for depth, goes the demand for
crash programming. Not only deeper, but further, into all knowledge
has become the normal popular demand since TV. Perhaps enough
has been said about the nature of the TV image to explain why this
should be. How could it possibly pervade our lives any more than it
does? Mere classroom use could not extend its influence. Of course,
in the classroom its role compels a reshuffling of subjects, and
approaches to subjects. Merely to put the present classroom on
TVwould be like putting movies on TV The result would be a
hybrid that is neither. The right approach is to ask, "What can TV do
that the classroom cannot do for French, or for physics?" The
answer is: "TV can illustrate the interplay of process and the growth
of forms of all kinds as nothing else can."
The other side of the story concerns the fact that, in the visually
organized educational and social world, the TV child is an
underprivileged cripple. An oblique indication of this startling
reversal has been given by William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On
the one hand, it is very flattering for hordes of docile children to be
told that, once out of the sight of their governesses, the seething
savage passions within them would boil over and sweep away pram
and playpen, alike. On the other hand, Mr. Golding's little pastoral
parable does have some meaning in terms of the psychic changes in
the TV child. This matter is so important for any future strategy of
culture or politics that it demands a headline prominence, and
capsulated summary:
WHY THE TV CHILD CANNOT SEE AHEAD
The plunge into depth experience via the TV image can only be
explained in terms of the differences between visual and mosaic
space. Ability to discriminate between these radically different forms
is quite rare in our Western world. It has been pointed out that, in the
country of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. He is taken to be
an hallucinated lunatic. In a highly visual culture, it is as difficult to
communicate the nonvisual properties of spatial forms as to explain
visuality to the blind. In the ABC of Relativity Bertrand Russell began
by explaining that there is nothing difficult about Einstein's ideas, but
that they do call for total reorganization of our imaginative lives. It is
precisely this imaginative reorganization that has occurred via the
TV image.
The ordinary inability to discriminate between the photo graphic and
the TV image is not merely a crippling factor in the learning process
today; it is symptomatic of an age-old failure in
Western culture. The literate man, accustomed to an environment in
which the visual sense is extended everywhere as a principle of
organization, sometimes supposes that the mosaic world of primitive
art, or even the world of Byzantine art, represents a mere difference
in degree, a sort of failure to bring their visual portrayals up to the
level of full visual effectiveness. Nothing could be further from the
truth. This, in fact, is a misconception that has impaired
understanding between East and West for many centuries. Today it
impairs relations between colored and white societies.
Most technology produces an amplification that is quite explicit in its
separation of the senses. Radio is an extension of the aural,
high-fidelity photography of the visual. But TV is, above all, an
extension of the sense of touch, which involves maximal interplay of
all the senses. For Western man, however, the all-embracing
extension had occurred by means of phonetic writing, which is a
technology for extending the sense of sight. All non-phonetic forms
of writing are, by contrast, artistic modes that retain much variety of
sensuous orchestration. Phonetic writing, alone, has the power of
separating and fragmenting the senses and of sloughing off the
semantic complexities. The TV image reverses this literate process
of analytic fragmentation of sensory life.
The visual stress on continuity, uniformity, and connectedness, as it
derives from literacy, confronts us with the great technological
means of implementing continuity and lineality by fragmented
repetition. The ancient world found this means in the brick, whether
for wall or road. The repetitive, uniform brick, indispensable
agent of road and wall, of cities and empires, is an
extension, via letters, of the visual sense. The brick wall is not a
mosaic form, and neither is the mosaic form a visual structure. The
mosaic can be seen as dancing can, but is not structured visually;
nor is it an extension of the visual power. For mosaic is not uniform,
continuous, or repetitive. It is
discontinuous, skew, and nonlineal, like the tactual TV image. To the
sense of touch, all things are sudden, counter, original, spare,
strange. The "Pied Beauty" of G.M. Hopkins is a catalogue of the
notes of the sense of touch. The poem is a manifesto of the
nonvisual, and like Cezanne or Seurat, or Rouault it provides an
indispensable approach to understanding TV. The nonvisual mosaic
structures of modern art, like those of modern physics and
electric-information patterns, permit little detachment. The mosaic
form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in
depth of the whole being, as does the sense of touch. Literacy, in
contrast, had, by extending the visual power to the uniform
organization of time and space, psychically and socially, conferred
the power of detachment and noninvolvement.
The visual sense when extended by phonetic literacy fosters the
analytic habit of perceiving the single facet in the life of forms. The
visual power enables us to isolate the single incident in time and
space, as in representational art. In visual representation of a person
or an object, a single phase or moment or aspect is separated from
the multitude of known and felt phases, moments and aspects of the
person or object. By contrast, iconographic art uses the eye as we
use our hand in seeking to create an inclusive image, made up of
many moments, phases, and aspects of the person or thing. Thus
the iconic mode is not visual representation, nor the specialization of
visual stress as denned by viewing from a single position. The
tactual mode of perceiving is sudden but not specialist. It is total,
synesthetic, involving all the senses. Pervaded by the mosaic TV
image, the TV child encounters the world in a spirit antithetic to
literacy.
The TV image, that is to say, even more than the icon, is an
extension of the sense of touch. Where it encounters a literate
culture, it necessarily thickens the sense-mix, transforming
fragmented and specialist extensions into a seamless web of
experience. Such transformation is, of course, a "disaster" for a
literate, specialist culture. It blurs many cherished attitudes and
procedures. It dims the efficacy of the basic pedagogic techniques,
and the relevance of the curriculum. If for no other reason, it would
be well to understand the dynamic life of these forms as they intrude
upon us and upon one another. TV makes for myopia.
The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have
naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all
the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but
irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. It is the total
involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via
TV's mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with
programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs
consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in
attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image
would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to
understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness.
The TV child expects involvement and doesn't want a specialist job
in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his
society. Unbridled and misunderstood, this richly human need can
manifest itself in the distorted forms portrayed in West Side Story.
The TV child cannot see ahead because he wants involvement, and
he cannot accept a fragmentary and merely visualized goal or
destiny in learning or in life.
MURDER BY TELEVISION
Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald while tightly surrounded by guards who
were paralyzed by television cameras. The fascinating and involving
power of television scarcely needed this additional proof of its
peculiar operation upon human perceptions. The Kennedy
assassination gave people an immediate sense of the television
power to create depth involvement, on the one hand,
and a numbing effect as deep as grief, itself, on the other hand. Most
people were amazed at the depth of meaning which the event
communicated to them. Many more were surprised by the coolness
and calm of the mass reaction. The same event, handled by press or
radio (in the absence of television), would have provided a totally
different experience. The national "lid" would have "blown off."
Excitement would have been enormously greater and depth
participation in a common awareness very much less.
As explained earlier, Kennedy was an excellent TV image. He had
used the medium with the same effectiveness that Roosevelt had
learned to achieve by radio. With TV, Kennedy found it natural to
involve the nation in the office of the Presidency, both as an
operation and as an image. TV reaches out for the corporate
attributes of office. Potentially, it can transform the Presidency into a
monarchic dynasty. A merely elective Presidency scarcely affords
the depth of dedication and commitment demanded by the TV form.
Even teachers on TV seem to be endowed by the student audiences
with a charismatic or mystic character that much exceeds the
feelings developed in the classroom or lecture hall. In the course of
many studies of audience reactions to TV teaching, there recurs this
puzzling fact. The viewers feel that the teacher has a dimension
almost of sacredness. This feeling does not have its basis in
concepts or ideas, but seems to creep in uninvited and unexplained.
It baffles both the students and the analysts of their reactions. Surely,
there could be no more telling touch to tip us off to the character of
TV This is not so much a visual as a tactual-auditory medium that
involves all of our senses in depth interplay. For people long
accustomed to the merely visual experience of the typographic and
photographic varieties, it would seem to be the synesthesia, or
tactual depth of T
V experience, that dislocates them from their usual
attitudes of Passivity and detachment.
The banal and ritual remark of the conventionally literate, that
TV presents an experience for passive viewers, is wide of the mark.
TV is above all a medium that demands a creatively participant
response. The guards who failed to protect Lee Oswald were not
passive. They were so involved by the mere sight of the TV cameras
that they lost their sense of their merely practical and specialist task.
Perhaps it was the Kennedy funeral that most strongly impressed
the audience with the power of TV to invest an occasion with the
character of corporate participation. No national event except in
sports has ever had such coverage or such an audience. It revealed
the unrivaled power of TV to achieve the involvement of the
audience in a complex process. The funeral as a corporate process
caused even the image of sport to pale and dwindle into puny
proportions. The Kennedy funeral, in short, manifested the power of
TV to involve an entire population in a ritual process. By comparison,
press, movie and even radio are mere packaging devices for
consumers.
Most of all, the Kennedy event provides an opportunity for noting a
paradoxical feature of the "cool" TV medium. It involves us in moving
depth, but it does not excite, agitate or arouse. Presumably, this is a
feature of all depth experience.
32
WEAPONS
War of the Icons
When the Russian girl Valentina Tereshkova, quite without pilot
training, went into orbit on June 16, 1963, her action, as reacted to in
the press and other media, was a kind of defacing of the images of
the male astronauts, especially the Americans. Shunning the
expertise of American astronauts, all of whom were qualified test
pilots, the Russians don't seem to feel that space travel is related
enough to the airplane to require a pilot's wings." Since our culture
forbids the sending of a woman into orbit, our only repartee would
have been to launch into orbit a
group of space children, to indicate that it is, after all, child's play.
The first sputnik or "little fellowtraveler" was a witty taunting of the
capitalist world by means of a new kind of technological image or
icon, for which a group of children in orbit might yet be a telling retort.
Plainly, the first lady astronaut is offered to the
West as a little Valentine梠 梥r heart throb uited to our sentimentality.
In fact, the war of the icons, or the eroding of the collective
countenance of one's rivals, has long been under way. Ink and photo
are supplanting soldiery and tanks. The pen daily becomes mightier
than the sword.
The French phrase "guerre des nerfs" of twenty-five years ago has
since come to be referred to as "the cold war." It is really an electric
battle of information and of images that goes far deeper and is more
obsessional than the old hot wars of industrial hardware.
The "hot" wars of the past used weapons that knocked off the enemy,
one by one. Even ideological warfare in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries proceeded by persuading individuals to adopt
new points of view, one at a time. Electric persuasion by photo and
movie and TV works, instead, by dunking entire populations in new
imagery. Full awareness of this technological change had dawned
on Madison Avenue ten years ago when it shifted its tactics from the
promotion of the individual product to the collective involvement in
the "corporate image," now altered to "corporate posture."
Parallel to the new cold war of information exchange is the situation
commented on by James Reston in a New York Times release from
Washington:
Politics has gone international. The British Labor Leader is here
campaigning for Prime Minister of Britain, and fairly soon John F.
Kennedy will be over in Italy and Germany campaigning for
reelection. Everybody's now whistle-stopping through somebody
else's country, usually ours.
Washington has still not adjusted to this third-man role. It keeps
forgetting that anything said here may be used by one side or
another in some election campaign, and that it may, by accident, be
the decisive element in the final vote.
If the cold war in 1964 is being fought by informational tech-
nology, that is because all wars have been fought by the latest
technology available in any culture. In one of his sermons John
Donne commented thankfully on the blessing of heavy firearms:
So by the benefit of this light of reason they have found out Artillery,
by which warres come to quicker ends than heretofore . .
The scientific knowledge needed for the use of gunpowder and the
boring of cannon appeared to Donne as "the light of reason." He
failed to notice another advance in the same technology that
hastened and extended the scope of human slaughter. It is referred
to by John U. Nef in War and Human Progress:
The gradual abandonment of armor as a part of the equipment of
soldiers during the seventeenth century freed some metal supplies
for the manufacture of firearms and missiles.
It is easy to discover in this a seamless web of interwoven events
when we turn to look at the psychic and social consequences of the
technological extensions of man.
Back in the 1920s King Amanullah seems to have put his finger on
this web when he said, after firing off a torpedo:
"I feel half an Englishman already."
The same sense of the relentlessly interwoven texture of human
fate was touched by the schoolboy who said:
"Dad, I hate war."
"Why, son?"
"Because war makes history, and I hate history."
The techniques developed over the centuries for drilling gun-barrels
provided the means that made possible the steam engine. The
piston shaft and the gun presented the same problems in boring
hard steel. Earlier, it had been the lineal stress of Perspective that
had channeled perception in paths that led to
the creation of gunfire. Long before guns, gunpowder had been used
explosively, dynamite style. The use of gunpowder for the propelling
of missiles in trajectories waited for the coming of perspective in the
arts. This liaison of events between technology and the arts may
explain a matter that has long puzzled anthropologists. They have
repeatedly tried to explain the fact that non-literates are generally
poor shots with rifles, on the grounds that, with the bow and arrow,
proximity to game was more important than distant accuracy, which
was almost impossible to achieve hence, say some anthropologists,
their imitation of hunted beasts by dressing in skins to get close to the
herd. It is also pointed out that bows are silent, and when an arrow
missed, animals rarely fled.
If the arrow is an extension of the hand and the arm, the rifle is an
extension of the eye and teeth. It may be to the point to remark that it
was the literate American colonists who were first to insist on a rifled
barrel and improved gunsights. They improved the old muskets,
creating the Kentucky rifle. It was the highly literate Bostonians who
outshot the British regulars. Marksmanship is not the gift of the
native or the woodsman, but of the literate colonist. So runs this
argument that links gunfire itself with the rise of perspective, and
with the extension of the visual power in literacy. In the Marine Corps
it has been found that there is a definite correlation between
education and marksmanship. Not for the nonliterate is our easy
selection of a separate, isolated target in space, with the rifle as an
extension of the eye.
If gunpowder was known long before it was used for guns; the same
is also true of the use of the lodestone or magnet. Its use in the
compass for lineal navigation had, also, to wait for the discovery of
lineal perspective in the arts. Navigators took a long time to accept
the possibility of space as uniform, connected, and continuous.
Today in physics, as in painting and sculpture, progress consists in
giving up the idea of space as either uniform, continuous, or
connected. Visuality has lost its primacy.
In the Second World War the marksman was replaced by automatic
weapons fired blindly in what were called "perimeters of fire" or "fire
lanes." The old-timers fought to retain the bolt-action Springfield
which encouraged single-shot accuracy and sighting. Spraying the
air with lead in a kind of tactual embrace was found to be good by
night, as well as by day, and sighting was unnecessary. At this stage
of technology, the literate man is somewhat in the position of the
old-timers who backed the Springfield rifle against perimeter fire. It is
this same visual habit that deters and obstructs literate man in
modern physics, as Milic Capek explains in The Philosophical
Impact of Modern Physics. Men in the older oral societies of middle
Europe are better able to conceive the nonvisual velocities and
relations of the subatomic world.
Our highly literate societies are at a loss as they encounter the new
structures of opinion and feeling that result from instant and global
information. They are still in the grip of "points of view" and of habits
of dealing with things one at a time. Such habits are quite crippling in
any electric structure of information movement, yet they could be
controlled if we recognized whence they had been acquired. But
literate society thinks of its artificial visual bias as a thing natural and
innate.
Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of
industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, it locks the minds
and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix
that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society. That
is why the transition from mechanical to electric technology is so
very traumatic and severe for us all. The mechanical techniques,
with their limited powers, we have long used as weapons. The
electric techniques cannot be used aggressively except to end all life
at once, like the turning off of a light. To live with both of these
technologies at the same time is the peculiar drama of the twentieth
century.
In his Education Automation, R. Buckminster Fuller considers that
weaponry has been a source of technological advance for mankind
because it requires continually improved performance with ever
smaller means. "As we went from the ships of the sea to the ships of
the air, the performance per pound of the equipment and fuel
became of even higher importance than on the sea."
It is this trend toward more and more power with less and less
hardware that is characteristic of the electric age of information.
Fuller has estimated that in the first half century of the airplane the
nations of the world have invested two and a half trillion dollars by
subsidy of the airplane as a weapon. He added that this amounts to
sixty-two times the value of all the gold in the world. His approach to
these problems is more technological than the approach of
historians, who have often tended to find that war produces nothing
new in the way of invention.
"This man will teach us how to beat him," Peter the Great is said to
have remarked after his army had been beaten by Charles XII of
Sweden. Today, the backward countries can learn from us how to
beat us. In the new electric age of information, the backward
countries enjoy some specific advantages over the highly literate
and industrialized cultures. For backward countries have the habit
and understanding of oral propaganda and persuasion that was
eroded in industrial societies long ago. The Russians had only to
adapt their traditions of Eastern icon and image-building to the new
electric media in order to be aggressively effective in the modern
world of information. The idea of the Image, that Madison Avenue
has had to learn the hard way, was the only idea available to
Russian propaganda The Russians have not shown imagination or
resourcefulness in their propaganda. They have merely done that
which their religious and cultural traditions taught them; namely, to
build images.
The city, itself, is traditionally a military weapon, and is a collective
shield or plate armor, an extension of the castle of our very skins.
Before the huddle of the city, there was the food-gathering phase of
man the hunter, even as men have now in the
electric age returned psychically and socially to the nomad state.
Now, however, it is called information-gathering and
data-processing. But it is global, and it ignores and replaces the form
of the city which has, therefore, tended to become obsolete. With
instant electric technology, the globe itself can never again be more
than a village, and the very nature of city as a form of major
dimensions must inevitably dissolve like a fading shot in a movie.
The first circumnavigation of the globe in the Renaissance gave men
a sense of embracing and possessing the earth that was quite new,
even as the recent astronauts have again altered man's relation to
the planet, reducing its scope to the extent of an evening's stroll.
The city, like a ship, is a collective extension of the castle of our
skins, even as clothing is an extension of our individual skins. But
weapons proper are extensions of hands, nails, and teeth, and come
into existence as tools needed for accelerating the processing of
matter. Today, when we live in a time of sudden transition from
mechanical to electric technology, it is easier to see the character of
all previous technologies, we being detached from all of them for the
time being. Since our new electric technology is not an extension of
our bodies but of our central nervous systems, we now see all
technology, including language, as a means of processing
experience, a means of storing and speeding information. And in
such a situation all technology can plausibly be regarded as
weapons. Previous wars can now be regarded as the processing of
difficult and resistant materials by the latest technology, the speedy
dumping of industrial products on an enemy market to the point of
social saturation. War, in fact, can be seen as a process of achieving
equilibrium among unequal technologies, a fact that explains
Toynbee's puzzled observation that each invention of a new weapon
is a disaster for society, and that militarism itself is the most common
cause of the breaking of civilizations.
By militarism, Rome extended civilization or individualism,
literacy and lineality to many oral and backward tribes. Even today
the mere existence of a literate and industrial West appears quite
naturally as dire aggression to nonliterate societies; just as the mere
existence of the atom bomb appears as a state of universal
aggression to industrial and mechanized societies.
On the one hand, a new weapon or technology looms as a threat to
all who lack it. On the other hand, when everybody has the same
technological aids, there begins the competitive fury of the
homogenized and the egalitarian pattern against which the strategy
of social class and caste has often been used in the past. For caste
and class are techniques of social slow-down that tend to create the
stasis of tribal societies. Today we appear to be poised between two
ages --one of detribalization and one of retribalization.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing,
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a Phantasma, or a hideous
Dream: The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little Kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
(Julius Caesar, Brutus II, i)
If mechanical technology as extension of parts of the human body
had exerted a fragmenting force, psychically and socially, this fact
appears nowhere more vividly than in mechanical weaponry. With
the extension of the central nervous system by electric technology,
even weaponry makes more vivid the fact of the unity of the human
family. The very inclusiveness of information as a weapon becomes
a daily reminder that politics and history must be recast in the form
of "the concretization of numan fraternity."
This dilemma of weaponry appears very clearly to Leslie
Dewart in his Crintanity adn Revolution, wehn he points tothe
obsolescence fo the fragemnted balance of power techniques. As an
instrument of policy, modern war has come to mean "the existence
and end of one society tot he esclusion of another". At this point,
weaponry is a self-liquidating fact.
33
AUTOMATION
Learning a Living
A newspaper headline recently read, "Ittle Red Schoolhouse Dies
Wehn Good Road built." One-room schools, with all subjets being
taught to all the same time, simply dissolve when better
transportation permits specialized spaces and specialized teaching.
At the extreme of speeded up movement, however, specialism fo
sapce adn subject disappears once more. With automation, it is not
only jobs that siappear, and complex roles that reappear. Centuries
fo specialist stress in pedagogy and inthe arrangemnt of of data now
end with the instantaneous retrieval of information made possible by
electricity. Automation is information and it not only ends jobs in the
world of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. It does not end
the world of learning. The future of work consists of earning a living in
the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in
general. It ends the old dichotomies between
culture and technology, between art and commerce, and between
work and leisure. Whereas in the mechanical age of fragmentation
leisure had been the absence of work, or mere idleness, the reverse
is true in the electric age. As the age of information demands the
simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at
leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the
artists in all ages.
In terms of the industrial age, it can be pointed out that the difference
between the previous mechanical age and the new electric age
appears in the different kinds of inventories. Since electricity,
inventories are made up not so much of goods in storage as of
materials in continuous process of transformation at spatially
removed sites. For electricity not only gives primacy to process,
whether in making or in learning, but it makes independent the
source of energy from the location of the process. In entertainment
media, we speak of this fact as "mass media" because the source of
the program and the process of experiencing it are independent in
space, yet simultaneous in time. In industry this basic fact causes
the scientific revolution that is called "automation" or "cybernation."
In education the conventional division of the curriculum into subjects
is already as outdated as the medieval trivium and quadrivium after
the Renaissance. Any subject taken in depth at once relates to other
subjects. Arithmetic in grade three or nine, when taught in terms of
number theory, symbolic logic, and cultural history, ceases to be
mere practice in problems. Continued in their present patterns of
fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry
unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live.
Most scientists are quite aware that since we have acquired some
knowledge of electricity it is not possible to speak of atoms as pieces
of matter. Again, as more is known about electrical "discharges" and
energy, there is less and less tendency to speak of electricity as a
thing that "flows" like water through a wire, or
is "contained" in a battery. Rather, the tendency is to speak of
electricity as painters speak of space; namely, that it is a variable
condition that involves the special positions of two or more bodies.
There is no longer any tendency to speak of electricity as
"contained" in anything. Painters have long known that objects are
not contained in space, but that they generate their own spaces. It
was the dawning awareness of this in the mathematical world a
century ago that enabled Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician,
to contrive Alice in Wonderland, in which times, and spaces are
neither uniform nor continuous, as they had seemed to be since the
arrival of Renaissance perspective. As for the speed of light, that is
merely the speed of total causality.
It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global
network that has much of the character of our central nervous
system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric
network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience. As
biologists point out, the brain is the interacting place where all kinds
of impressions and experiences can be exchanged and translated,
enabling us to react to the world as a whole. Naturally, when electric
technology comes into play, the utmost variety and extent of
operations in industry and society quickly assume a unified posture.
Yet this organic unity of interprocess that electromagnetism inspires
in the most diverse and specialized areas and organs of action is
quite the opposite of organization in a mechanized society.
Mechanization of any process is achieved by fragmentation,
beginning with the mechanization of writing by movable types, which
has been called the "mono-fracture of manufacture."
The electric telegraph, when crossed with typography, created the
strange new form of the modern newspaper. Any page of the
telegraph press is a surrealistic mosaic of bits of "human interest" in
vivid interaction. Such was the art form of Chaplin and the early
silent movies. Here, too, an extreme speed-up of mechanization, an
assembly line of still shots on celluloid, led to
a strange reversal. The movie mechanism, aided by the electric light,
created the illusion of organic form and movement as much as a
fixed position had created the illusion of perspective on a flat surface
five hundred years before.
The same thing happens less superficially when the electric principle
crosses the mechanical lines of industrial organization. Automation
retains only as much of the mechanical character as the motorcar
kept of the forms of the horse and the carriage. Yet people discuss
automation as if we had not passed the oat barrier, and as if the
horse-vote at the next poll would sweep away the automation
regime.
Automation is not an extension of the mechanical principles of
fragmentation and separation of operations. It is rather the invasion
of the mechanical world by the instantaneous character of electricity.
That is why those involved in automation insist that it is a way of
thinking, as much as it is a way of doing. Instant synchronization of
numerous operations has ended the old mechanical pattern of
setting up operations in lineal sequence. The assembly line has
gone the way of the stag line. Nor is it just the lineal and sequential
aspect of mechanical analysis that has been erased by the electric
speed-up and exact synchronizing of information that is automation.
Automation or cybernation deals with all the units and components
of the industrial and marketing process exactly as radio or TV
combine the individuals in the audience into new interprocess. The
new kind of interrelation in both industry and entertainment is the
result of the electric instant speed. Our new electric technology now
extends the instant processing of knowledge by interrelation that has
long occurred within our central nervous system. It is that same
speed that constitutes "organic unity" and ends the mechanical age
that had gone into high gear with Gutenberg. Automation brings in
real "mass production," not in terms of size, but of an instant
inclusive embrace. Such is
also the character of "mass media." They are an indication, not of
the size of their audiences, but of the fact that everybody becomes
involved in them at the same time. Thus commodity industries under
automation share the same structural character of the entertainment
industries in the degree that both approximate the condition of
instant information. Automation affects not just production, but every
phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer becomes
producer in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of
the mosaic telegraph press makes his own news, or just is his own
news.
But there is a component in the automation story that is as basic as
tactility to the TV image. It is the fact that, in any automatic machine,
or galaxy of machines and functions, the generation and
transmission of power is quite separate from the work operation that
uses the power. The same is true in all servo-mechanist structures
that involve feedback. The source of energy is separate from the
process of translation of information, or the applying of knowledge.
This is obvious in the telegraph, where the energy and channel are
quite independent of whether the written code is French or German.
The same separation of power and process obtains in automated
industry, or in "cybernation." The electric energy can be applied
indifferently and quickly to many kinds of tasks.
Such was never the case in the mechanical systems. The power and
the work done were always in direct relation, whether it was hand
and hammer, water and wheel, horse and cart, or steam and piston.
Electricity brought a strange elasticity in this matter, much as light
itself illuminates a total field and does not dictate what shall be done.
The same light can make possible a multiplicity of tasks, just as with
electric power. Light is a nonspecial-ist kind of energy or power that
is identical with information and knowledge. Such is also the relation
of electricity to automation, since both energy and information can
be applied in a great variety of ways.
Grasp of this fact is indispensable to the understanding of the
electronic age, and of automation in particular. Energy and production
now tend to fuse with information and learning. Marketing
and consumption tend to become one with learning, enlightenment,
and the intake of information. This is all part of the electric implosion
that now follows or succeeds the centuries of explosion and
increasing specialism. The electronic age is literally one of
illumination. Just as light is at once energy and information, so
electric automation unites production, consumption, and learning in
an inextricable process. For this reason, teachers are already the
largest employee group in the U.S. economy, and may well become
the only group.
The very same process of automation that causes a withdrawal of
the present work force from industry causes learning itself to
become the principal kind of production and consumption. Hence
the folly of alarm about unemployment. Paid learning is already
becoming both the dominant employment and the source of new
wealth in our society. This is the new role for men in society,
whereas the older mechanistic idea of "jobs," or fragmented tasks
and specialist slots for "workers," becomes meaningless under
automation.
It has often been said by engineers that, as information levels rise,
almost any sort of material can be adapted to any sort of use. This
principle is the key to the understanding of electric automation, in the
case of electricity, as energy for production becomes independent of
the work operation, there is not only the speed that makes for total
and organic interplay, but there is, also, the fact that electricity is
sheer information that, in actual practice, illuminates all it touches.
Any process that approaches instant interrelation of a total field
tends to raise itself to the level of conscious awareness, so that
computers seem to "think. In fact, they are highly specialized at
present, and quite lacking in the full process of interrelation that
makes for consciousness. Obviously, they can be made to simulate
the process of
consciousness, just as our electric global networks now begin to
simulate the condition of our central nervous system. But a conscious
computer would still be one that was an extension of our
consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes, or as a
ventriloquist's dummy is an extension of the ventriloquist.
Automation certainly assumes the servomechanism and the
computer. That is to say, it assumes electricity as store and expediter
of information. These traits of store, or "memory," and
accelerator are the basic features of any medium of communication
whatever. In the case of electricity, it is not corporeal substance that
is stored or moved, but perception and information. As for
technological acceleration, it now approaches the speed of light. All
nonelectric media had merely hastened things a bit. The wheel, the
road, the ship, the airplane, and even the space rocket are utterly
lacking in the character of instant movement. Is it strange, then, that
electricity should confer on all previous human organization a
completely new character? The very toil of man now becomes a kind
of enlightenment. As unfallen Adam in the Garden of Eden was
appointed the task of the contemplation and naming of creatures, so
with automation. We have now only to name and program a process
or a product in order for it to be accomplished. Is it not rather like the
case of Al Capp's Schmoos? One had only to look at a Schmoo and
think longingly of pork chops or caviar, and the Schmoo ecstatically
transformed itself into the object of desire. Automation brings us into
the world of the Schmoo. The custom-built supplants the
mass-produced.
Let us, as the Chinese say, move our chairs closer to the fire and
see what we are saying. The electric changes associated with
automation have nothing to do with ideologies or social programs. If
they had, they could be delayed or controlled. Instead, the
technological extension of our central nervous system that we can
call the electric media began more than a century ago, subliminally.
Subliminal have been the effects. Subliminal they
remain. At no period in human culture have men understood the
psychic mechanisms involved in invention and technology. Today it
is the instant speed of electric information that, for the first time,
permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of
change and development. The entire world, past and present, now
reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an enormously accelerated
movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light and with the
understanding of causes. So, with the use of electricity in previously
mechanized situations, men easily discover causal connections and
patterns that were quite unobservable at the slower rates of
mechanical change. If we play backward the long development of
literacy and printing and their effects on social experience and
organization, we can easily see how these forms brought about that
high degree of social uniformity and homogeneity of society that is
indispensable for mechanical industry. Play them backward, and we
get just that shock of unfamiliarity in the familiar that is necessary for
the understanding of the life of forms. Electricity compels us to play
our mechanical development backward, for it reverses much of that
development. Mechanization depends on the breaking up of
processes into homogenized but unrelated bits. Electricity unifies
these fragments once more because its speed of operation requires
a high degree of interdependence among all phases of any
operation. It is this electric speed-up and interdependence that has
ended the assembly line in industry.
This same need for organic interrelation, brought in by the electric
speed of synchronization, now requires us to perform,
industry-by-industry, and country-by-country, exactly the same
organic interrelating that was first effected in the individual
automated unit. Electric speed requires organic structuring of the
global economy quite as much as early mechanization by print and
by road led to the acceptance of national unity. Let us not forget that
nationalism was a mighty invention and revolution that, in the
Renaissance, wiped out many of the local regions and
loyalties. It was a revolution achieved almost entirely by the
speed-up of information by means of uniform movable types.
Nationalism cut across most of the traditional power and cultural
groupings that had slowly grown up in various regions.
Multi-nationalism had long deprived Europe of its economic unity.
The Common Market came to it only with the Second War. War is
accelerated social change, as an explosion is an accelerated
chemical reaction and movement of matter. With electric speeds
governing industry and social life, explosion in the sense of crash
development becomes normal. On the other hand, the old-fashioned
kind of "war" becomes as impracticable as playing hopscotch with
bulldozers. Organic interdependence means that disruption of any
part of the organism can prove fatal to the whole. Every industry has
had to "rethink through" (the awkwardness of this phrase betrays the
painfulness of the process), function by function, its place in the
economy. But automation forces not only industry and town planners,
but government and even education, to come into some relation to
social facts.
The various military branches have had to come into line with
automation very quickly. The unwieldy mechanical forms of military
organization have gone. Small teams of experts have replaced the
citizen armies of yesterday even faster than they have taken over
the reorganization of industry. Uniformly trained and homogenized
citizenry, so long in preparation and so necessary to a mechanized
society, is becoming quite a burden and problem to an automated
society, for automation and electricity require depth approaches in
all fields and at all times. Hence the sudden rejection of
standardized goods and scenery and living and education in
America since the Second War. It is a switch imposed by electric
technology in general, and by the TV image in particular.
Automation was first felt and seen on a large scale in the chemical
industries of gas, coal, oil, and metallic ores. The large changes in
these operations made possible by electric energy
have now, by means of the computer, begun to invade every kind of
white-collar and management area. Many people, in consequence,
have begun to look on the whole of society as a single unified
machine for creating wealth. Such has been the normal outlook of
the stockbroker, manipulating shares and information with the
cooperation of the electric media of press, radio, telephone, and
teletype. But the peculiar and abstract manipulation of information
as a means of creating wealth is no longer a monopoly of the
stockbroker. It is now shared by every engineer and by the entire
communications industries. With electricity as energizer and
synchronizer, all aspects of production, consumption, and
organization become incidental to communications. The very idea of
communication as interplay is inherent in the electrical, which
combines both energy and information in its intensive manifold.
Anybody who begins to examine the pattern of automation finds that
perfecting the individual machine by making it automatic involves
"feedback." That means introducing an information loop or circuit,
where before there had been merely a one way flow or mechanical
sequence. Feedback is the end of the lineality that came into the
Western world with the alphabet and the continuous forms of
Euclidean space. Feedback or dialogue between the mechanism
and its environment brings a further weaving of individual machines
into a galaxy of such machines throughout the entire plant. There
follows a still further weaving of individual plants and factories into
the entire industrial matrix of materials and services of a culture.
Naturally, this last stage encounters the entire world of policy, since
to deal with the whole industrial complex as an organic system
affects employment, security, education, and polities, demanding full
understanding in advance of coming structural change. There is no
room for witless assumptions and subliminal factors in such
electrical and instant organizations.
As artists began a century ago to construct their works
backward, starting with the effect, so now with industry and
plan-nine In general, electric speed-up requires complete knowledge
of ultimate effects. Mechanical speed-ups, however radical in their
reshaping of personal and social life, still were allowed to happen
sequentially. Men could, for the most part, get through a normal life
span on the basis of a single set of skills. That is not at all the case
with electric speed-up. The acquiring of new basic knowledge and
skill by senior executives in middle age is one of the most common
needs and harrowing facts of electric technology. The senior
executives, or "big wheels," as they are archaically and ironically
designated, are among the hardest pressed and most persistently
harassed groups in human history. Electricity has not only
demanded ever deeper knowledge and faster interplay, but has
made the harmonizing of production schedules as rigorous as that
demanded of the members of a large symphony orchestra. And the
satisfactions are just as few for the big executives as for the
symphonists, since a player in a big orchestra can hear nothing of
the music that reaches the audience. He gets only noise.
The result of electric speed-up in industry at large is the creation of
intense sensitivity to the interrelation and interprocess of the whole,
so as to call for ever-new types of organization and talent. Viewed
from the old perspectives of the machine age, this electric network of
plants and processes seems brittle and tight. In fact, it is not
mechanical, and it does begin to develop the sensitivity and pliability
of the human organism. But it also demands the same varied
nutriment and nursing as the animal organism.
With the instant and complex interprocesses of the organic form,
automated industry also acquires the power of adaptability to
multiple uses. A machine set up for the automatic production of
electric bulbs represents a combination of processes that were
previously managed by several machines. With a single attendant, it
can run as continuously as a tree in its intake and output.
But, unlike the tree, it has a built-in system of jigs and fixtures that
can be shifted to cause the machine to turn out a whole range of
products from radio tubes and glass tumblers to Christmas-tree
ornaments. Although an automated plant is almost like a tree in
respect to the continuous intake and output, it is a tree that can
change from oak to maple to walnut as required. It is part of the
automation or electric logic that specialism is no longer limited to just
one specialty. The automatic machine may work in a specialist way,
but it is not limited to one line. As with our hands and fingers that are
capable of many tasks, the automatic unit incorporates a power of
adaptation that was quite lacking in the pre-electric and mechanical
stage of technology. As anything becomes more complex, it
becomes less specialized. Man is more complex and less
specialized than a dinosaur. The older mechanical operations were
designed to be more efficient as they became larger and more
specialized. The electric and automated unit, however, is quite
otherwise. A new automatic machine for making automobile tailpipes
is about the size of two or three office desks. The computer control
panel is the size of a lectern. It has in it no dies, no fixtures, no
settings of any kind, but rather certain general-purpose things like
grippers, benders, and advancers. On this machine, starting with
lengths of ordinary pipe, it is possible to make eighty different kinds
of tailpipe in succession, as rapidly, as easily, and as cheaply as it is
to make eighty of the same kind. And the characteristic of electric
automation is all in this direction of return to the general-purpose
handicraft flexibility that our own hands possess. The Programming
can now include endless changes of program. It is the electric
feedback, or dialogue pattern, of the automatic and
computer-programmed "machine" that marks it off from the older
mechanical principle of one-way movement.
This computer offers a model that has the characteristics shared by
all automation. From the point of intake of materials t0
the output of
the finished product, the operations tend to be
independently, as well as interdependent, automatic. The
synchronized concert of operations is under the control of gauges
and instruments that can be varied from the control-panel boards
that are themselves electronic. The material of intake is relatively
uniform in shape, size, and chemical properties, as likewise the
material of the output. But the processing under these conditions
permits use of the highest level of capacity for any needed period. It
is, as compared with the older machines, the difference between an
oboe in an orchestra and the same tone on an electronic music
instrument. With the electronic music instrument, any tone can be
made available in any intensity and for any length of time. Note that
the older symphony orchestra was, by comparison, a machine of
separate instruments that gave the effect of organic unity. With the
electronic instrument, one starts with organic unity as an immediate
fact of perfect synchronization. This makes the attempt to create the
effect of organic unity quite pointless. Electronic music must seek
other goals.
Such is also the harsh logic of industrial automation. All that we had
previously achieved mechanically by great exertion and coordination
can now be done electrically without effort. Hence the specter of
joblessness and propertylessness in the electric age. Wealth and
work become information factors, and totally new structures are
needed to run a business or relate it to social needs and markets.
With the electric technology, the new kinds of instant
interdependence and interprocess that take over production also
enter the market and social organizations. For this reason, markets
and education designed to cope with the products of servile toil and
mechanical production are no longer adequate. Our education has
long ago acquired the fragmentary and piece-meal character of
mechanism. It is now under increasing pressure to acquire the depth
and interrelation that are indispensable in the all-at-once world of
electric organization. Paradoxically, automation makes liberal
education mandatory
The electric age of servomechanisms suddenly releases men from
the mechanical and specialist servitude of the preceding machine
age. As the machine and the motorcar released the horse and
projected it onto the plane of entertainment, so does automation with
men. We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our
inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in
society. This would seem to be a fate that calls men to the role of
artist in society. It has the effect of making most people realize how
much they had come to depend on the fragmentalized and repetitive
routines of the mechanical era. Thousands of years ago man, the
nomadic food-gatherer, had taken up positional, or relatively
sedentary, tasks. He began to specialize. The development of
writing and printing were major stages of that process. They were
supremely specialist in separating the roles of knowledge from the
roles of action, even though at times it could appear that "the pen is
mightier than the sword." But with electricity and automation, the
technology of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the human
dialogue and the need for over-all consideration of human unity.
Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as
never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary
specialism as never before --but also involved in the total social
process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central
nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human
experience. Long accustomed to such a state in stock-market news
or front-page sensations, we can grasp the meaning of this new
dimension more readily when it is pointed out that it is possible to "fly"
unbuilt airplanes on computers. The specifications of a plane can be
programmed and the plane tested under a variety of extreme
conditions before it has left the drafting board. So with new products
and new organizations of many kinds. We can now by computer, deal
with complex social needs with the same architectural certainty that
we previously attempted in private housing. Industry as a whole has
become
the unit of reckoning, and so with society, politics, and education as
wholes.
Electric means of storing and moving information with speed and
precision make the largest units quite as manageable as small ones.
Thus the automation of a plant or of an entire industry offers a small
model of the changes that must occur in society from the same
electric technology. Total interdependence is the starting fact.
Nevertheless, the range of choice in design, stress, and goal within
that total field of electromagnetic interprocess is very much greater
than it ever could have been under mechanization.
Since electric energy is independent of the place or kind of
work-operation, it creates patterns of decentralism and diversity in
the work to be done. This is a logic that appears plainly enough in
the difference between firelight and electric light, for example.
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less
able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people
supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and
educational patterns latent in automation are those of
self-employment and artistic autonomy. Panic about automation as a
threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future
of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past.