Our dialog with technology
is a dialog with ourselves. Technology can indeed have a powerful effect upon
the subsequent development of culture, but it is the kind of effect that
powerful meanings have. This must be distinguished from any mechanical sort of
cause and effect.
I draw on the work of Owen
Barfield to indicate how the development of both printing press and perspective
art, as companion movements toward abstraction, fit into the broad evolution of
western consciousness. My conclusion is that, once we take this evolution into
account -- and reckon especially with our own place in it -- we cannot say, in
quite the way it is often said, that technology "causes" a radical
transformation in the conditions of intellectual life.
We typically prefer not to
meet ourselves in the world. And when we do encounter something of ourselves --
as when we get spooked by a dark forest -- we berate ourselves for our
superstition. As children of the scientific era, we feel obligated to become
dispassionate observers whose primary (and admirable) goal is to avoid
meeting ourselves -- our biases and unconscious wishes -- in the world.
But whatever the case may be with the
natural world, we cannot avoid meeting ourselves within the sphere of the
technological artifact. I want to speak about that
meeting, and I will begin with a little story that might go under the title,
"Neil Postman's Undue Modesty." This story is exceedingly brief,
consisting of a single statement followed by a single comment. The statement is
from The Disappearance of Childhood:
Television...does not call
one's attention to ideas, which are abstract, complex, and sequential, but to
personalities, which are concrete, vivid, and holistic" (101).
The comment is really a question: whose
attention is not called to ideas? I ask because television has quite evidently
called Neil Postman's attention to ideas of the most elegantly abstract,
complex, and sequential sort -- for which many of us will be forever grateful.
Now, it is understandable that a man of such
modesty should not have interrupted his exposition by interjecting, "I
myself, however, am an exception to this rule; I have learned to read
television as the expression of certain ideas, such as the ideas of concreteness,
vividness, and holism." Understandable, I say, but unfortunate, for this
remark would, I think, have been the single most important thing he could have
said. Certainly, it would have helped to deliver us from the mistake of
forgetting ourselves.
Of course, such immodesty would also have
troubled the argument in which it occurred. But I think this particular trouble
is healthy trouble, and I would like to stir it up as best I can.
Putting the issue paradoxically: to the
extent Postman is right about the concrete, non-ideational character of
television, to that extent he has proven himself wrong. But then, this sort of
apparent paradox is one we should be getting used to. There are many ways to
formulate the matter. For example: our becoming increasingly aware of the
unconscious effects of the media signifies our becoming more fully conscious of
those effects. Or again: our becoming increasingly aware of the collective,
cultural aspects of our behavior signifies our
becoming more individually responsible for our behavior.
In Marshall McLuhan's formulation:
Hitherto most people have
accepted their cultures as a fate, like climate or vernacular; but our empathic
awareness of the exact modes of many cultures is itself a liberation from them
as prisons. (76)
You may argue that the margin of
self-awareness, along with the consequent margin of freedom, is slim indeed.
But surely that margin is what our lives -- and especially, perhaps, the lives
of media ecologists -- are all about.
We defeat ourselves in the very act of
knowing -- defeat ourselves in the most hopeful way, bringing liberation. How
is it that this fact has not figured more centrally in a discipline that
delights in unraveling the complex relationship
between the expressive human being and the media that constrain his expression?
If the relationship changes with every success of the discipline -- well,
that's one thing we dare not lose sight of for long!
What I want to suggest, then, is that we
ourselves, with our active and evolving mindsets, must stand, not only in the
place of the media ecology investigator, but also at the center
of the investigations themselves. That is, if an overly insistent distinction
between knower and known, between mind and content, is ever misleading, surely
it is misleading here, where what we try to know (and what we thereby end up
altering) is the style of our own knowing. Leaving ourselves out of the picture
easily leads to an unjustified technological determinism.
It is, I suppose, a matter of emphasis, and
my unease arises from what I perceive to be the prevailing balance of emphasis.
Here, for example, is how Postman describes media ecology:
Media ecology looks into the
matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding,
feeling and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes
our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments:
their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a
complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking,
feeling, and behaving. ("Reformed," 161)
This statement does recognize interaction of
some sort, but the effective causation seems mostly a one-way affair: the media
of communication affect human perception and understanding, and media
environments impose on us certain ways of thinking, feeling, and
behaving. But ask yourselves: given that this very insight constitutes an
escape from the imposition, what is more fundamental -- the indicated
causation, or the transcending act of insight?
I do not see how we can pursue media ecology
much further without moving the human being as knower closer to the center of the enterprise. In the remainder of this paper I
will try to hint at what this might mean, beginning with three brief summary
statements.
1. An artifact
is what it is only because of the meanings and intentions we have invested in
it. We meet ourselves in the artifact.
A pencil lies in front of me as I write. It
was, by design, made from soft wood, which is less expensive than hard wood and
allows for easy sharpening; at the same time, it is sufficiently rigid to hold
its shape while acting as an extension of my limbs. The thin cylinder of
graphite inserted lengthwise through the wood is selected for the right
softness, so that with reasonable pressure of fingers, hand, and arm, it leaves
by friction a visible, but not excessive, trace upon the surface against which
it is drawn. This trace, reflecting the movement of my limbs, is normally
invested with meaning, whether via the alphabet and words, or via some other
system of signification.
The particular pencil I am looking at is
shaped hexagonally so that it will rest stably and comfortably between thumb
and fingers. The eraser on the end is, you might say, an acknowledgment of
human fallibility, and its length compared to the length of the pencil can be
seen as a very rough "index of fallibility," among other things.
While the yellow-gold paint over the wood may offer protection against the
minor risk of splinters, it also testifies to at least a vestigial human need
for aesthetic satisfaction in the objects of everyday use. Similarly with the
pattern of grooves and indentations by which the metal band fastens the eraser
conveniently to the wood, so that it is always there when we need it, and so
that the wood serves as a convenient handle for exercising the small eraser.
The pencil's length is a happy medium: if it
were two or three times as long, it would not fit inside my notebook and would
be awkward to carry around; if it were half or third as long, its usable life
would be greatly reduced, and the economics of its use would not be nearly as
attractive since a higher percentage of the original length would have to be
thrown away. The word "
Here, then, are a few of the more immediate
meanings of the pencil. Many other meanings cluster in varying configurations
around the ones I have mentioned. They might be associated with memories of our
school days, or with some threatening, bureaucratic use of the pencil, or with
the typical posture and look assumed by the diligent pencil user...and so on
almost without end.
At least some of these meanings and
intentions are essential to the pencil's existence; without them there is no
pencil -- not even if I happened to be holding this very same yellow wooden
object in my hands. Look at it this way: for the small child who has so far
discovered only the joyful, hole-poking capabilities of this object, there is
no pencil. Likewise, if the object is lying underfoot in a pig sty, there might
be a piece of wood there (whatever a piece of wood may be to a pig), but there
is no pencil. The artifact is decisively an
expression of human consciousness.
This, I have found, is easy to assent to,
but extraordinarily difficult to hold onto. The reason it is difficult to hold
onto is that we are all, in our bones if not in our theorizing, naive
materialists. We cannot avoid relapsing into the wholly untenable thought that
the pencil just is a particular configuration of wood, graphite, metal,
and rubber.
But if the tool essentially embodies our
meanings and intentions, what does it mean to say that tools shape and
determine our conscious life?
2. Those aspects of ourselves -- meanings
and intentions -- that we meet in a specific tool are typically expressed, not
only in that one tool, but throughout our culture.
The mind capable of imagining an early
automobile was a mind already relating to physical materials, speed,
conspicuous consumption, noise, pollution, mechanical artifacts,
time, space, and the aesthetics of machines in a manner characteristic of the
modern era. It is hard to imagine any subsequent effects of the automobile not
already implicit in this mindset, even if it is true (as it surely is) that the
automobile gave magnificent new scope to the preexistent
movements of the western psyche.
Looking backward from Henry Ford's
manufacturing innovations, M.I.T. social scientist Charles Sabel
remarks that
it was as if the Ford
engineers, putting in place the crucial pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle,
suddenly made intelligible the major themes of a century of industrialization.
(Quoted in Howard, 24)
Looking forward, we can ask: how much of the
town's conversion to a spread-out, impersonal, rationalized,
streetlight-controlled, machine- adapted metropolis was already prefigured on
the floor of the first assembly-line factory?
Again: if, as many believe, the computer
will serve to rationalize our businesses and overwhelm us with data, these
effects are hardly distinguishable from the general thrust of the processes
leading up to the computer's development. In fact, you could almost say that
our businesses were becoming computers long before the computer itself existed,
and that the computer was modeled on these
businesses. This is far closer to the truth than most people realize.
Computer systems analysis
and design promptly took up and generalized the methods of rational
administration that organizations had developed throughout the modern era. The
technical concept of "algorithm" was assimilated to the bureaucratic
concept of "procedure," and the technical concept of "data"
was assimilated to the bureaucratic concept of "files"....Computing
practice drew on an established tradition of automating paper-based work. (Agre)
Historians Martin
Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray have recently made
clear how far the principles of the computer were already embodied in business
models. In his Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith described an
imaginary pin factory based on the novel principle of the division of labor. Some fourteen years later the Frenchman De Prony, charged with creating mathematical tables,
"conceived all of a sudden the idea of applying the same method to the
immense work with which I had been burdened, and to manufacture logarithms as
one manufactures pins" (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray,
12). Thereafter the organization of "human computers" for jobs such
as tabulating census data and calculating ballistic firing tables was closely
intertwined with the evolving organization of business in general.
Charles Babbage, credited with conceiving
and designing the first computer during the 1820s and 1830s, was first of all
an eminent economist whose work on automatic computing grew out of the
rationalization of business. "Babbage is a seminal figure who connects
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to the Scientific Management movement
founded in America by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s"
(Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 15). If, today, the
computer can actually be, for example, a financial trading business, it
is because financial trading has already been reduced to sheer computation,
without regard for producing substantive value.
Given how fully our businesses had already
come to express our computational mindset, it is not at all clear what it would
mean to say that the computer began "causing" these businesses to
evolve in certain directions. Which is operative in the first instance -- the
physical machines, or the larger, organizational "computer," or the
habits of mind that have found expression in both machine and organization?
Focusing on a different side of the
computer's history, Paul N. Edwards claims that "virtually no one has
recognized how profoundly the cold war shaped computer technology. Its politics
became embedded in the machine -- even, at times, in their technical design --
while the machines helped make possible its politics" (ix).
One more example. Langdon Winner tells us
how the technology of nuclear power pushes social institutions in certain
directions:
But even if one accepts that nuclear power
is an inherently political technology, its inhering politics are, finally, our
own. Nuclear power plants emerged from, among other things, military weapons
development and big science. That is, they emerged from a society that had
already proven willing to shape itself around big science and a technologically
driven military.
3. The meanings of an artifact
change with time.
With Winner's comment about nuclear power
plants before us, it is interesting to ask what other technologies present
similar political challenges. The
Regarding nuclear power itself, the social
"determinations" of the plants are one thing when the plants are
being built in rapid succession and hailed naively as the harbingers of a
clean, economic, energy-efficient future, but something rather different when
we are routinely shutting plants down for cause, decommissioning others, and
looking in fresh directions for our energy future -- and something different
again in a political environment such as the one that surrounded Chernobyl. I
would hate to be the one who had to argue that there are no other mindsets,
involving radically different intentions and radically different social
determinations, beside the three just mentioned.
That the significance of our artifacts changes with time is in any case hardly
controversial. If new technologies, or the meanings they embody, bring the
sorts of ecological changes Postman speaks of -- and they certainly do -- then
they change the significances of all the old technologies. A quill does not
remain the same artifact in an age of ballpoint pins,
and public debates are not the same events in the television age. The
conversation of culture and technology is an ongoing one, and we are now
participating in it.
But if this is true, then it is crucial for
us to attend to our own participation, rather than simply look for influences
issuing from technologies.
All this is, I think, implicit in Postman's
choice of the term, "media ecology." Stressing the parallel with
environmental science, he notes that "one significant change generates
total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not
left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new
environment....The same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that
has had none." So "a new technology does not add or subtract
something. It changes everything" (Technopoly,
18).
But this implies something else as well. In
an ecological system, rather like in an organism, not only does every part
affect the whole, but the whole is also expressed in every part. Which is to
say that, with the possible exception of those cases where one culture
forcefully imposes itself upon a completely foreign culture, the new artifacts, processes, ideas, and habits of thought that
arise already bear within themselves, however creatively, the "drift"
of what has gone before. They are expressions of the whole before they are
modifiers of the whole.
If this has not received sufficient
emphasis, I suspect it is because of that unconsidered materialistic assumption
I mentioned earlier. It is easier for us to think of the technological device
as a "thing" that somehow affects our thinking than to think of it
as, in its essential nature, an expression of our thinking.
Perhaps the easiest place to see the true
relationship is in language itself. Every speaker must rely upon the received,
lexical meanings of his terms even as he attempts to transform these meanings
according to his own intentions. His distinctive usage may, in turn, play its
greater or lesser role in nudging the lexical meaning in a certain direction
(Barfield, Speaker's Meaning).
Once we have reckoned with the technological
artifact as a bearer of meanings and intentions, we
realize that technological assessment is a fundamentally semantic
enterprise. We are attempting to listen in on a conversation of meanings.
That the "new" ecological element
is already an expression of the whole is no less true of printing technology
than of the other technologies we have glanced at. Here is the context for the
first printing presses, as one observer summarizes it:
Gutenberg was but one of
many seeking to speed book production through mechanization; others were
carrying out similar experiments in the
A propitious time indeed. Clearly, the
mechanically assisted written word was going to play an ever greater role in
western culture, Gutenberg press or no Gutenberg press. So, too -- although it
is not my purpose here to attempt a demonstration -- the clergy's influence
upon society was going to continue waning. And if we shift our gaze to the
techniques of the artist, we find that the increasing distance between knower
and known, form and content, word and meaning, which is so often attributed to
the printing press, had already found decisive expression in the development of
linear perspective. By the early fifteenth century the artisan had begun
learning to take up a subjective "eye-point" from which to view a
detached, objective world through a window -- sometimes a literal window --
upon which a precise, mathematical projection of the world beyond could be
traced. If the world, as it was being drained of its intrinsic meaning, could
finally be re-presented as an abstract, reduced, mathematically derived schema
upon a canvas, then so, too, the word, as it was being drained of its
intrinsic meanings and becoming a "mere name" for something else,
could finally be manipulated into rows of metal type.
These changes in word and image are not
unrelated. However it was that the unified, ensouled
world split into external, material object on the one hand and subjective
viewpoint on the other, surely the separation of the word as outer, material
body from the word as interior meaning is a manifestation of the same split. It
is above all a historical semantics -- the study of how words change their
meanings over time, which is also a study of human consciousness -- that
enables us to characterize the split.
Nothing enters conversation proper except
insofar as it is a bearer of meaning. But, as meaning, it can only have arisen
from previous intention. In such a conversation of ideas and meanings, it makes
little sense to speak of efficient causation, as if our interior worlds were
connected to a set of material technologies by mechanical linkages. That is not
how conversations evolve. Certainly some meanings are extraordinarily powerful;
but the impact of meaning upon meaning, while it may be profound and pivotal
for a culture, is not a material one, and the language of mechanical
determination is wholly inappropriate for grasping that impact.
What language can we use? We exercise
such a language whenever we explicate a set of interwoven meanings. If we want
a history of the conversation of technology and culture, then we must pursue
the history of meanings. Another way to say this is that we must pursue the
history, or evolution, of consciousness. But there is a tremendous resistance
to this, which can be illustrated by the voluminous literature about orality and literacy.
What bothers me about this literature -- or
at least the minuscule proportion of it I have read -- is precisely its
occasional tendency to substitute materially conceived causes for formal or
final causes. That is, its tendency to speak one-sidedly about how things -- artifacts, technologies -- determine our ideas or meanings
or the qualities of our consciousness. But this is to forget that things are
ideas -- embodied ideas. They are meanings. They are the
qualities of our consciousness. This truth is perhaps most obvious in the case
of the computer, which is a radically different machine depending upon what
program -- what body of logic -- it is running. But it holds equally for the
pencil, as I remarked earlier. And for every other artifact.
Jack Goody, quarreling
with those sociologists and anthropologists who make an overly simple, binary
distinction between primitive or advanced, wild or domesticated thinking,
suggests that
many of the valid aspects of
these somewhat vague dichotomies can be related to changes in the mode of
communication, especially the introduction of various forms of writing. The
advantage of this approach lies in the fact that it does not simply describe
the differences but relates them to a third set of facts, and thus provides
some kind of explanation, some kind of mechanism, for the changes that are
assumed to occur. (16)
No investigator as subtle and balanced as
Goody could be charged with using "mechanism" here in a crude,
mechanical sense. But his use of the term is nevertheless symptomatic; what does
it mean? If there did not stand behind it some notion of the causal efficacy of
material technologies as such, apart from their meanings, he would not have
been able to contrast his own approach so sharply with the others. He would not
have called for a "third set of facts" to give explanation to
all the others. He would instead have substituted more accurate and finely
nuanced distinctions of meaning for those "vague dichotomies" -- and
would have done so, of course (actually, he does do so in good part), by
reading the technologies as critically important expressions within this
interior conversation.
Ong tells us that "Goody has convincingly shown how
shifts hitherto labeled as shifts from magic to
science, or from the so-called `prelogical' to the
more and more `rational' state of consciousness, or from Levi-Strauss's
`savage' mind to domesticated thought, can be more economically and cogently
explained as shifts from orality to various stages of
literacy." But why are these different explanations? Ong seems to have in mind the difference between a
material, causal explanation on the one hand, and a resort to vague mental
analyses on the other. He goes on to say,
I had earlier
suggested...that many of the contrasts often made between `western' and other
views seem reducible to contrasts between deeply interiorized literacy and more
or less residually oral states of consciousness." (29)
Like Goody's
"mechanism," Ong's "reducible"
appears symptomatic. Somehow he has in the back of his mind the interiorization of various aspects of physical technology
-- which is fine and sound as far as it goes. But if he had kept in view the
fact that the tool is only a tool so far as it bears meanings and intentions,
and that all meaning and intention is by nature interior, he would have
realized that his reference to "interiorized literacy" is rather like
speaking of "interiorized interiority." What is the point? The point
ought to be to unravel exactly those nuances of interiority that differ from
one culture to another, accounting among other things for the embrace of
different technologies and for the different expressions represented by the
same technology in different cultures -- all, of course, as a matter of
historical fact rather than arbitrary systematizing. But this is the approach
he seems to be denigrating.
In sum, when we talk about the mutual
determinations of technology and humanity, we're talking about an interior
conversation. It is a conversation between ideas and meanings expressed in
particular technologies, in the culture at large, and, to one degree or another
(perhaps a very small degree) in the conscious thoughts and words of
individuals.
As a brief, merely suggestive example of
such a conversation, I will look at the changes in the nature of space -- which
is also to say, changes in the inner experience or meaning of space -- leading
up to the discovery of linear perspective.
The two-dimensional image, as we have it
today, is the result of the purest mathematical abstraction -- an abstraction
fixed upon human consciousness at almost exactly the same historic moment as
the printed word. Leon Battista Alberti's Della Pittura, the first treatise on linear perspective, was
published in 1435. The "discovery" of perspective, which caused such
a sensation, involved reconceiving the artist's
canvas as the section of a mathematical projection of points in space. The
pictorial image, once governed first of all by a pattern of meanings, was now
increasingly conceived, and then seen, as a product of points and rays. Points,
according to the German master of perspective, Albrecht Durer,
"are the beginning and end of all things."
It was, of course, an interest in the image
as mathematical projection that led to the Renaissance fascination with the
camera obscura and other precursors of the modern camera. And, today, the
triumph of the digital image is wholly owing to the computer programmer's
mastery of coordinate systems and projections. The graphical image is built up
abstractly and analytically in software, pixel by pixel.
What the graphics engineer produces, whether
with the aid of a lens or from pure, mathematical manipulations, is what we
see -- first, in the graphics themselves, and then (with a vision disciplined
by these graphics) in the world. Already at the outset "Alberti exhorted his artist-readers to learn to see
in terms of...grid coordinates in order that they develop an intuitive sense
of proportion" (Edgerton, 119). The Italian historian, Giovanni Cavalcanti, wrote in 1838:
And thus the eye is the
ruler and compass of distant regions and of longitudes and abstract lines.
Everything is comprehended under the geometric doctrine, and with the aid of
the arithmetic art, we see that there is a rule for...measuring with the
eye." (Quoted in Edgerton, 115)
The window and grid of the perspective
artist was necessary to prevent the mind's old habits from subverting the eye's
measuring capabilities. The grid, when employed with the right intention,
successfully squelches the mind's tendency to read meaning rather than gauge
spatial relations. In this sense the grid we have plastered over our eyes
complements those other tools with which, as scientists, we measure the world.
But the habit of perspective viewing had to
be achieved If it is true that the discovery of the various mechanisms
for perspective representation helped to fix this habit upon the western mind,
it is also true that the developing habit was what made the discovery possible
in the first place.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, artists in northern Italy struggled mightily with the problems of
spatial representation. Viewing their art today, we can watch as foreground
slowly separates from background, and as individual figures begin to
"stand out" in bold relief. Through continual experimentation, these
artists achieved considerable success in perspective representation well before
the breakthrough discovery of the geometry and technical apparatus of
perspective. The early fourteenth-century painter, Giotto,
gained wide fame for his life- like portrayals. According to Boccaccio, "there is nothing which Giotto
could not have portrayed in such a manner as to deceive the sense of
sight" (quoted in Gombrich, 61).
In The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial
Space, John White traces in great detail the artistic process by which the
object begins to emerge within a new space of its own. It begins with the
artist focusing on the individual object, now felt to possess an unwonted
solidity. Captivation by the object itself "precedes any interest in space
as such. The interval, or nothingness, which separates one solid from the next,
is relatively unimportant" (35).
In this early phase, objective space only
hesitantly makes an appearance, as a kind of appendage of the object. It
"clings, expanding and contracting, to the figures, and to the simple
solids that are indispensable to them in the playing of their parts" (p.
221). The artist has succeeded in rendering the individual object, in all its
solidity, with considerable fidelity. And he has cleared enough habitable space
around the human figures to allow for their gestures and actions. But the
coordination of all these separate spaces within the overall work of art
remains inconsistent, a source of growing puzzlement as the whole question of
space began to be felt by the artist as a problem. Only with the
fifteenth-century elaboration of the systematic rules of perspective did the
new space finally come into its own:
Now the pictorial process is
complete. Space is created first, and then the solid objects of the pictured
world are arranged within it in accordance with the rules which it dictates.
Space now contains the objects by which formerly it was created....The result
is an approximation to an infinite, mathematically homogeneous space1.
In their struggle to "get out of the
picture" and to see the world objectively in perspective, the artists of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were at the same time working
themselves free -- or being worked free -- of an older, medieval experience of
the world. Barfield, who has limned that older experience in a lively manner,
observes that, despite a "strong and growing sense of the individual soul,
the man of the middle ages "was not yet felt, either physically or
psychically, to be isolated from his surroundings in the way that he is today.
Conversely, his mind and soul were not felt to be imprisoned within, and
dependent upon, his body" (History, 124). Barfield asks us to
imagine what it was like to stand in the world as a citizen of the medieval
era:
If it is daytime, we see the
air filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is
filled with blood proceeding from a living heart. If it is night-time, we do
not merely see a plain, homogeneous vault pricked with separate points of
light, but a regional, qualitative sky, from which first of all the different
sections of the great zodiacal belt, and secondly the planets and the moon
(each of which is embedded in its own revolving crystal sphere) are raying down
their complex influences upon the earth, its metals, its plants, its animals
and its men and women, including ourselves....Our own health and temperament
are joined by invisible threads to these heavenly bodies we are looking at....
We turn our eyes on the sea -- and at once we are aware that we are looking at
one of the four elements, of which all things on earth are composed, including
our own bodies. We take it for granted that these elements have invisible
constituents, for, as to that part of them which is incorporated in our own
bodies, we experience them inwardly as the "four humors"
which go to make up our temperament. (Saving, 76-77)
Likewise, a man's disposition -- for
example, his jovial, saturnine, or mercurial nature -- was
at the same time a disposition of the heavens, whose influences
were intrinsic to his own being, placing him in sympathy with other
persons and things similarly influenced (History, 126). These sorts of
relations can be traced by entering sensitively into word meanings and
following their changes over time, as Barfield has done in numerous works.
All this had consequences for the experience
of both space and image. Medieval art looks flat and unreal to us, but its
contemporary beholders were drawn into a rich tapestry of meaning. Pictorial
depth, for them, was not quantitative and spatial, but imaginal. As for the
world itself, they participated in it more fully than we; it was less
like a stage they walked over than a garment they wore. They felt themselves
"rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo" than we do
today. (Both the garment and embryo metaphor come from Barfield, Saving).
Accustomed to experiencing the real world imaginally,
they found it much easier than we to experience the image realistically.
If the challenge for the Renaissance
artisans was to extricate themselves from the web of influences -- meanings --
by which their own seeing was shaped, that of the Greeks, Barfield tells us,
was to detach the very idea of thought "first from the idea of movement in
space, and then from the idea of movement of any sort" (Saving,
103). Barfield reminds us that Plato found the "revolutions of the
mind" inseparable from the heavens:
As to the relation between
thought and space, it is almost sufficient to read the Timaeus
-- which, incidentally, was the principal channel through which the thinking of
Plato and his predecessors was known to the Middle Ages. In this dialogue,
Plato describes the world as `a moving image of eternity'. It is however not
simply a matter of a few revealing uses of key-words, though of these there are
enough and to spare: as when he tells us that of the seven different kinds of
movement, movement in a circle is..."the one that has most to do with mind
and understanding," or again, that by contemplating the undisturbed
revolutions...of mind in the heavens we may make use of them for the
revolutions of our own intellect, which, though disturbed, are nevertheless
akin to the former. It is rather that the whole development and structure of
thought in the dialogue is such that celestial astronomy and metaphysics are
inextricably one. (Saving, 102-3)
Earlier still, as Bruno Snell shows in The
Discovery of the Mind, the very recognition of one's mind as one's own had
to be won from the surroundings. The heroes of the Iliad experienced
many of their pivotal thoughts and impulses of will as arriving from without,
given to them by the gods. That is, the self -- our interiority itself -- was
received from "out there." But if interior is exterior, then the
meaning of space can have had almost nothing in common with our experience of
it today.
So the overall movement is from a time when
"what we call space was conceived rather as a kind of unindividualized,
all-enclosing continuum, or mental mobile, for which perhaps wisdom
is the best modern word we can find" (Barfield, Saving, 149). From
this plenum a progressive contraction of interiority into individual centers occurred -- not by any means as a uniform process,
but traceable by means of delicate semantic investigation -- until by the time
the scientific revolution had done its work, the fully awake individual looked
out upon an objective world and a container space in which he was no longer
conscious of meeting himself2.
One thing, I think, emerges clearly from all
this: there are different levels at which we can try to eavesdrop upon the
conversation of culture and technology. At one level we can observe with
Edgerton that the early pioneers of perspective wanted to glorify God by making
manifest in their art the world's harmonious, divinely given order even as they
unwittingly contributed further to the emptying of sacred meaning from several
hundred years' worth of paintings. The Renaissance "rediscovery" of
perspective
was not immediately heralded
as a victory of objective reality over medieval mysticism. To the contrary, the
early users of the new art- science thought of it as a tool which might help
restore the moral authority of the Church in a world becoming progressively
materialistic. (7)
At the same level we can
observe with Postman that Gutenberg, a devout Catholic, "would have been
horrified to hear that accursed heretic Luther describe printing as `God's
highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven
forward'" (Technopoly, 15). In other
words, our thoughts about our technical contrivances have a miserable
history -- enough so to make a pessimistic judgment appear quite reasonable:
"The effects of technology are always unpredictable" (Postman, Disappearance,
24).
But at a deeper level we find profound
continuity of meaning, although not necessarily of conscious meaning. Not surprisingly,
Postman provides the lucid exposition against which it is easiest to explain
the point. I'm thinking of those paragraphs in The Disappearance of
Childhood where he speaks about the Frankenstein syndrome (23-25). I will
alternately quote from his text and supply my own running commentary -- not so
much to disagree outright as to tweak the emphasis at one or two points.
First, then, Postman quotes Myron Gilmore:
The invention of printing with movable
type brought about the most radical transformation in the conditions of
intellectual life in the history of Western civilization....Its effects were
sooner or later felt in every department of human activity.
But remember that the technical
sophistication of Gutenberg's press with its movable type was about as far
removed from the technology of, say, three hundred years previous as the
"radically transformed" conditions of intellectual life brought by
the press were removed from the conditions of three hundred years previous. And
those were not two altogether different removes. Did the detached, abstracting,
objectivizing, sequential, logical mind ever express itself in a single,
greater leap than when, still half-embedded in a medieval environment, it
worked systematically, in many artisan shops across Europe, to perfect a
machine to print books -- a machine based on the coordination of numerous
technologies, on a tightly controlled, mechanical sequence of events in the
press itself, and on rows of tiny, individual typographical elements now wholly
abstracted from the words of which they are part and free to move around in
endless, complex rearrangement?
If there was ever a comparable achievement
of the abstracting mind, perhaps it was when the Renaissance painters managed
to analyze what had once been a meaning-soaked
landscape into a projective configuration of lines and points sectioned by a
canvas. Or perhaps it was when the first syllabary or alphabet was conceived
and impressed upon a physical material. Many an important cultural movement
never subsequently achieves a stride to match the reach and significance of its
first steps, but merely plays out in an increasingly routine fashion the logic
of its early, defining gestures.
So where Gilmore claims that the invention
of printing "brought about" the most radical transformation of the
conditions of western intellectual life, it would be safer to say that the
modern condition of mind, as it was coming to birth, expressed itself decisively
and characteristically by contriving the tools it could most effectively lay
hold of. Those tools then contributed to the further development of the modern
tendencies -- as expression strengthens expression, not as material cause
produces material effect.
Harold Innis...stressed
that changes in communication technology invariably have three kinds of
effects: They alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the
character of symbols (the things thought with), and the nature of community
(the area in which thoughts develop). To put it as simply as one can, every
machine is an idea, or a conglomerate of ideas.
This last sentence is the perfect summary of
much that I have been saying. But (as we will see below) there is a vexing
question of emphasis. Postman appears to be saying that the machine is an idea
because of the specific nature of the effects it causes, or helps to
cause, not that it arose as, and essentially is itself, a conglomerate of ideas
or meanings. There is no explicit acknowledgment that the ideas are our
ideas, or that the "ideological bias" embedded in every tool (Technopoly, 13) is our bias, whether
conscious or not.
But they are not the sort of ideas that
lead an inventor to conceive of a machine in the first place....There is a
sense in which all inventors are, to use Arthur Koestler's
word, sleepwalkers. Or perhaps we might call them Frankensteins,
and the entire process, the Frankenstein Syndrome: One creates a machine for a
particular and limited purpose. But once the machine is built, we discover --
sometimes to our horror, usually to our discomfort, always to our surprise --
that it has ideas of its own; that it is quite capable not only of changing our
habits but, as Innis tried to show, of changing our
habits of mind.
But if we truly accept that "the
machine is a conglomerate of ideas," then we must see it as an expression
of our habits of mind before we talk about it as a means for changing
our habits of mind. These habits do indeed tend to be unconscious -- we are in
that sense sleepwalkers -- but they are nevertheless habits of mind.
Their expressions must be read as meanings, not physical causes. It is true
that inventors have rarely foreseen many fundamental consequences of their
inventions, but this is only to say that they are not fully conscious of their
own -- and their culture's -- habits of mind. As to our horror upon discovering
that the machine "has ideas of its own," that horror is perhaps
healthiest when it reflects a growing self-awareness.
To say it in James Carey's bold way: We
may find that the structure of our consciousness has been reshaped to parallel
the structure of communication, that we have become what we have made.
As Carey says, we do risk becoming the tools
of our tools. But this risk is that we will be possessed by unconscious
meanings. We cannot disown these simply because they remain unconscious. Like
the pencil, the other physical structures of communication consist of
particular configurations of our consciousness, particular tapestries of
meaning. Their subsequent reactions upon consciousness and meaning must be read
as a conversation, not as material causation3.
The effects of technology are always unpredictable.
The invention of the printing press, as also
the discovery of linear perspective, dates back to the early Renaissance,
preceding the onset of the scientific revolution by one or two centuries. The
idea of history in the modern sense -- the understanding of the past as
"something different" and the habit of "looking on the past as a
sort of seed, of which the present is the transformation or fruit" -- this
whole developmental view of time is, as Barfield points out, hardly more than
three centuries old (Barfield, Speaker's Meaning, 14-16).
So of course Gutenberg did not grasp
in conscious thought the consequences of his invention. But a lot of water has
passed over the dam in the meantime. We now have sophisticated
histories. More than that, we have historiography. We have the discipline of
technology assessment. Best of all, we have, as of just three decades or so
ago, the ongoing work of Neil Postman. Can we say today with quite the same
confidence that the effects of technology are always unpredictable? Surely they
will never be predictable in the manner of mechanically connected events. But
we have at least begun to see that they are assessable, and we have our first
serious attempts at assessment. We can now look at ranges of possibilities
based on current social habits and on the manifest urges to change some of
those habits.
To become conscious of something is no
longer to be merely the passive recipient of influences operating collectively
and unconsciously. As we look over the past several hundred years, it is urgent
that we do not forget ourselves as historians, media ecologists, and whatever
else. We are something new upon the face of the earth, and if there is a source
of white heat and light from which the conversation of technology and culture
will gain its future impetus and direction, we must not fail to look for it
first of all within ourselves.
To use [Lynn White, Jr.'s]
metaphor, the printing press opened a door upon which European culture had been
anxiously knocking. And when it was finally opened, the entire culture went
flying through.
This, to my mind, is the nearly perfect
statement, and it is the anxious knocking that I have tried to elucidate. We
need only avoid an undue emphasis upon the material door or on its character as
a radical separator in any qualitative sense -- as opposed to a radical
accelerator of what is already there. For in a conversation, unlike a
mechanical system, the knocking at the door of future possibilities is already
the passing through. It is well known that one cannot ask a question rightly
without already possessing the greater part of the answer. So, too, one cannot
knock at a particular technological door without already having entered into
the possibilities on the other side.
However slight the changes of emphasis I am
proposing, they arise from a point of view that is in some respects radically
skewed relative to more conventional perspectives. This point of view has been
greatly influenced by Owen Barfield. In the remainder of this paper I will
summarize a few aspects of Barfield's work, particularly as they bear upon the
issues discussed above.
Barfield has spent most of this century (he
is now 98 years old) pursuing a semantic approach to history. He has not only,
nor even primarily, been interested in the impact of idea upon idea. A history
of consciousness (as opposed to a history of ideas) attempts "to penetrate
into the very texture and activity of thought, rather than to collate
conclusions. It is concerned, semantically, with the way in which words are
used rather than with the product of discourse" (Saving, 90).
Attending in this way way
to the qualities and movements of consciousness -- and particularly of western
consciousness -- Barfield found that it has a coherent story to tell. It is a
story about the broad, slow shift of the locus of meaning from "out
there" in the world to "in here" in the human being. It is at
the same time a story about a certain shift within meaning:
"throughout the recorded history of language the movement of meaning has
been from concrete to abstract" (Saving, 117). Not concrete in the
modern sense of "material" (which turns out to be a highly abstract
notion), but in the sense that every perceptible exterior possessed an interior
-- was ensouled -- and every soul and spirit was
embodied.
This concrete unity of body and soul
progressively split apart, with the interior qualities of the world
increasingly experienced as arising within the human being, and the now dis-ensouled objects of the world confronting this human
being as wholly external realities. From a kind of mythic participation or
dispersal in the world, man's interior -- it might be better to say "the
world's interior" -- gradually withdrew "inside man's skin"
until, in the time of the Stoics, his "I" or ego was first raised to
philosophic consciousness. By the time of Descartes the separation of this ego
from the world had become severe enough to pose the problem of re-connection.
In our own time of sharp preoccupation with an "objective reality"
purged of all inner qualities, the subject has departed so far as to become a
vague ghost awaiting final exorcism. In our preoccupation with the object, we
lose sight of the one who is preoccupied. We forget ourselves4.
Stated in this way, the entire perspective
could easily be taken as a neat, abstract schema to be imposed upon history.
What distinguishes Barfield from some others who have spoken of the transition
from an early primitive or participatory consciousness to modern consciousness
is precisely his resistance to such abstraction or "top-down"
schematizing. This resistance is already implicit in his chosen method of
historical semantics, which demands an exquisite sensitivity to the concrete
play of meanings in highly particularized contexts. Anyone who has learned a
foreign language knows something about the requirements of this method. To
impose universal dictionary meanings (which, as Barfield points out, are
typically abstract meanings) upon a particular text is to lose almost
everything distinctive that the text has to give. In attending to the word, one
must hear both the given (lexical) meanings of the culture and the individual
speaker's inner intent, of which the oral or written expression is the outer
body.
But this mention of the individual only
obscures the truth inasmuch as the slow emergence of the individual from the
collective is not a given; it is achieved in the course of the evolution of
consciousness. So long as the direction of meaning's flow is from the world
into man -- so long as man does not know himself as the source of his own
meanings -- we can hardly talk about the individual in anything like the modern
sense. And if we want to find the historical moment in the western world when
this direction of meaning's flow had clearly reversed itself, we could do no
better than look at the transition from the medieval era to the Renaissance --
and more particularly at the development of linear perspective and the
invention of the printing press. At that moment we were rapidly waking up to a
world "out there" on the other side of the window, a world from which
our last, dream-like entanglements were disappearing. Similarly, as word,
thought, and thing became disentangled, we woke up to words as our own playthings,
freely manipulable and interchangeable; the world no longer forced its meanings
upon us.
Given such a historical understanding, one
is no longer tempted to think that the printing press caused this waking
up and this objectification of the world. These are coherent shifts in
consciousness that tell their own story going as far back as recorded history
carries us. They can only be explicated in their own terms. In a conversation
of meanings, as I have been insistently pointing out, material cause and effect
cannot figure directly. A piece of technology can enter this conversation only
as a bearer of meanings. And in recent history these have become more and more our
meanings rather than the world's meanings, more and more individual meanings
rather than collective meanings, more and more conscious meanings rather than
unconscious meanings. Or, at least, that is what is being asked of us by our
own evolving capabilities.
One consequence of the emergence of the
wide-awake individual is that the history of ideas and the history of
consciousness become less and less distinct. As our individual awareness is
brought to bear upon our own consciousness -- and upon such questions as how
technology interacts with our habits of thought -- our ideas about
things gain a quality of self-awareness that is at the same time a change in
the underlying structure of our thinking. Where Gutenberg was largely
unconscious of the dialog transpiring between himself and his press, so that he
could not have reasoned accurately about the historical meanings of his
technological involvements, Neil Postman is not unconscious; his
awareness of his relation to the technology has changed even the way he watches
television. The television has become a different tool for him than it is for
most people, bearing different meanings, much as the stick of wood and graphite
is a different tool when it ceases to be a hole- puncher and is used for the
first time as a pencil.
With this growing freedom comes growing
responsibility. Barfield emphasizes that we must now supply out of our own,
spirit-connected depths the meaning that once was the world's gift. Failing
this, we become puppets of unconscious meanings -- meanings that possess us
instead of being possessed by us. If there was a time when meaning properly and
necessarily flowed into man from the world, that time is no longer. As we wake
up out of the world, we become the world's wakefulness.
The lesson of media ecology, I think, is
that we encounter ourselves in the sphere of artifacts,
and are becoming responsible for what we find there. Barfield provides a larger
context within which we can place the passage, for example, from Gutenberg's
unawareness to Postman's awareness, as well as a method for tracing the passage
and understanding it "from within," the way one understands a
conversation. This context and method encourage us to be ever alert to the new
possibilities and responsibilities that continually arise within the evolving
conversation of technology and culture.
Barfield's Saving the Appearances
would have to be considered his fundamental work related to the topic of this
paper. But that book is exceedingly dense and full of unfamiliar ideas. Much
clearing of the ground was accomplished in his early (1928) work, Poetic
Diction.
For a general introduction to Barfield's
thought, the essays and lectures in the following works are useful: The
Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays (1977), Speaker's Meaning
(1967), and History, Guilt, and Habit (1979).
1. 123-24. If "space now contains the objects by
which formerly it was created," there is, I think, a parallel truth
applying to the word: consciousness is coming to "contain" the words
by which formerly it was uttered. As the physical objects of space could now be
projected onto a two-dimensional canvas and manipulated there, the mind could
also project the physical word onto the printed page and manipulate it there.
2. See the last section of this paper for a little
more context. For Barfield's discussion of western man's experience of space,
see "The Harp and the Camera" in Barfield, Speaker's, in
addition to the works cited in the text above.
3. No material object, conceived in the manner of a
reductionist science, can participate meaningfully in the development of
consciousness. It can only disrupt consciousness, as when a needle is thrust
through the brain. The material "because" is not the same as the
rational "because" -- a fact that is lost sight of with more and more
regularity today.
4. I have tried to describe the late stages of this
process in the chapter, "Mona Lisa's Smile," in Talbott,
249-61.
Agre, Philip. "Beyond the Mirror World: Computers,
Privacy, and Representation." Draft chapter (1 June 1996) for Agre and Marc Rotenberg, eds., Technology and Privacy:
The New Landscape. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1996.
Barfield, Owen. History, Guilt, and Habit.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979.
Barfield, Owen. History in English Words.
The edition I have used is undated (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and
Company). The book was originally published in 1926 and was reprinted by
Lindisfarne Press in 1986.
Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Originally published in
1928.
Barfield, Owen. The Rediscovery of
Meaning, and Other Essays. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1977.
Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: A
Study in Idolatry. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.
Barfield, Owen. Speaker's Meaning.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.
Campbell-Kelly, Martin. and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Edgerton, Samuel Y. Jr.
The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Basic
Books, 1975.
Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World:
Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge,
Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1996.
Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969.
Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the
Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Howard, Robert. Brave New Workplace.
New York: Penguin, 1985.
Kern, S. The Culture of Time and Space:
1880-1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Ong, Walter J. Orality
and Literacy. London: Routledge, 1982.
Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of
Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 1982.
Postman, Neil. "The Reformed English
Curriculum." In Eurich, Alvin C. (ed.), High
School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education. New
York: Pitman, 1970, pp. 160-68.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly:
The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993.
(Originally published in 1992.)
Romanyshyn, Robert D. Technology As Symptom and Dream.
New York: Routledge, 1989.
Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind:
The Greek Origins of European Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1953.
Talbott, Stephen L. The Future Does Not Compute:
Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. Sebastopol, Calif.:
O'Reilly & Associates, 1995.
van den Berg, Jan Hendrik.
The Changing Nature of Man. New York: Dell, 1975.
Wells, J. "The History of
Printing." Encyclopedia Britannica.
Chicago: William Benton, 1965.
White, John. The Birth and Rebirth of
Pictorial Space. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the
Reactor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. (Originally published
in 1986.)