This is the beginning of a series explaining the road-not-taken in the academic field of literary criticism. The result has been the academic dominance of critical theory and a century of post-modernism (or Baudrillardian Simulation, or Orwellian historical revision, or however else you might put it).
Thee Thy, Though Thumb
The missing ingredient in all contemporary media analysis is appreciation for analogical proportionality. The reason this factor has been lacking, I think, is the catch-22 of requiring the faculty in order to develop it further. The difficulty is like that of Tom Thumb were he to hitch a ride with Jack up the beanstalk on a mission to educate the giants on the apples and the oranges: implicit barriers between a whole stack of several differing orders of magnitude must be overcome merely to put any modern situation into fluent human language!
The hope for an encompassing sensibility lays in the poetic skills of those self-selected artists who have managed—more or less by grace alone—to bootstrap such a perception of communicable ratios of proportion across the wild scales of our modern existence and then share the results as novel analogies and metaphors which can take hold within culture.
Let me give a concrete example. In the 1940s, “electronic brains” the size of whole buildings were not only decisive in World War II, but then inaugurated the age of cybernation and quantification of public opinion out of which the post-War economy was built. These machines, it was well known, could perform mathematical calculations far, far faster than mere humans could. Decades later, much faster machines were shrunk down to fit within the palm of your hands. Decades further still, these machines increased enormously in capability to a degree which the human mind refuses to fathom.
The scales, the proportions, of advancement in computing technology are inarticulable. We haven’t coherent language reasonably capture the scales of it all. Instead, we adopt a relative scale. Machines in the ‘50s which were fast are now ancient—we consider them to exist in some sort of primitive “stone age” of computing, and juxtapose them, in our minds, with stone clubs and bearskins. Computers from the ‘80s, which put the spreadsheet into the hands of millions and redefined the markets and businesses of the total economy—are today considered either worthless trash or collectable antiques. They are certainly far too slow to be good for anything today except as an aesthetic novelty or bit of nostalgia. Our smartphones today, popular culture tells us, put all preceding machines to absolute shame in their speed and capabilities.
This relative scale of time, wherein the speed of a computer is understood within a narrow, always-contemporary, moving frame relative to the present is unquestionably a total social construction. The ubiquity of digital calculators has lead to a total cultural ignorance as to how long it takes to actually do complicated math by pencil, slide-rule, and consultation of published tables of trigonometry, etc. Let’s call this embodied, or human scale math, because it takes a human at a desk, working with hand tools, in order to accomplish. Advanced mathematical computation has—absent widespread experience of hours and weeks spent “running the numbers,”—lost any familiarity to our common culture as an embodied activity performed by humans. Without that experience, expressible in relatable symbolic form or archetype, no analogical proportions can be made for measure against it! And so computers have lost their anchor.
Absent that human-scale baseline, or anchor, against which the computers of the ‘50s were considered to be “fast,” the temporal frame-of-reference was easily unmoored from any story of its origins relatable to a 21st century subject—old books and documentaries on computers seem “quaint” in their “exaggerations” of the machines which, to our aesthetic sensibilities, seem innocent and primitive. The writers and thinkers of the time, in turn, come off as 2-dimensional or unrealistic in their naiveté. Every claim of speed and power made for a machine elicits a knowing laugh or condescending, cynical rejoinder.
It should be clear by now, when I talk about the proportions of computing power, I’m not talking about mathematical proportions. This isn’t about the measured ratios of megahertz or storage capability between machines then and now. I’m talking about the analogical proportionality of metaphorical language. In the drifting, post-modern poetic proportions of our perception of the computers age, the ENIAC feels paleolithic!
If you asked a hundred people if the ENIAC, which was completed in 1945, was a fast computer, not one of them would think to compare it to teams of mathematician at desks trying to compute rocket trajectories with a pencil and paper. That image does not exist as a basis for comparison. Not a person, not a single one, would think “Yes! The ENIAC is blindingly fast! It can do five thousand operations per second! Anything that can do five thousand operations in a second is a wonder! That’s twenty times faster than the honey bee flaps its wings! Hell, five thousand hertz is the rate of every oscillation of the 8th D note on a piano—I can barely even make my voice box warble quickly! The ENIAC is so fast, it is on the threshold of moving beyond comprehension to the sensible, embodied human condition!”
The ENIAC hasn’t changed. The human body hasn’t changed. The weights and measures of the physical world have remained constant. The change in computers from fast to slow is a purely cultural construction which is retroactively fed backward into time, instead of one built out of any culture which we’ve inherited moving forward out of history into the present.
The Simulation
Before I suggest means of redressing this problem, it will be worth exploring whether or not the relegation of popular understanding of computers to a floating, unmoored, always-relative temporal frame is, in fact, a problem.
It’s certainly not a problem to anyone invested within the technology market—the entire business of selling computers (including “smart phones” and all the rest) lays in making purchasers afraid to “fall behind”, dropping off the end of the temporal frame into the oblivion of unsupported devices and discontinued, unmaintained software applications and services. Our tech overlords would prefer that the world of their consumer products remains flat, and that slow sailors regularly fall-off the ends of the earth as a wretched warning to the rest. “Don’t allow yourself to get squeezed out of the economy and society,” the tech companies might say, “like those lonely, wandering souls whose ‘dumb phones’ have stopped working. Look upon the price of their cable TV subscription, which they watch in their isolation, and thank god you’ve escaped their pitiable fate!”
This is, however, not a view to which I am sympathetic. As just one out of a great, great many of other concerns, consider the price which has been paid in the blood of tens of thousands of people over the past few decades for the precious minerals necessary for making modern microchips. The disgusting waste of these blood-minerals in the needless turnover of our high-tech commodities alone ought to outweigh (analogical proportion!) any regard for the profits which are built on the social-construction of artificial, premature obsolescence. The sooner we stop throwing away perfectly good things on account of illusions created by marketers and ad executives, the better—nothing could be less morally ambiguous to me.
The Subtle Art of Installing Brakes on a Runaway Train in Motion
When classical Socratic works by Plato and Aristotle resurfaced in 12th century Europe, their pre-Christian teachings were incompatible with the predominant Christian philosophies. The intellectual service St. Thomas Aquinas offered up to the culture of his time was a synthesis, or potential for reconciliation and dialogue between Aristotle and Catholicism. By integrating the pagan worldview into his contemporary Christian world view, and putting them into conversation, he redirected a potentially dangerous conflict between Church and heresy into fruitful, sustaining intellectual dialectic.
Thomist intellectual Jacques Maritain, McLuhan judged, served something of a similar role in the theories of art criticism during the 20th “occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.” (Dec 21, 1948 letter to Ezra Pound) which had lingered since the 18th century. Maritain’s example, I believe, set McLuhan on his own path toward synthesizing the Catholic traditions of his faith and the secular, gnostic, and “pagan” sciences and belief systems of the modern world.
Understanding the nature of this “occultation” requires an appreciation of the nature of metaphor as understood by classical grammarians. McLuhan had taken up the grammarian tradition in a serious way during his studies at Cambridge in the 1930s, and honed his use of their techniques for interpretation in his rigorous study of the Modernist writers and poets such as T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Henry James, and many others.
I have no reason to doubt that McLuhan’s prodigious output in the ‘40s might have sustained and redefined the New Criticism school of literary criticism well-into the later-20th century had he himself not have jumped track into media studies and abandoned English studies. Instead, critical theory—derived from semiotics and structuralism—has replaced New Criticism in the academy, and the draft typescripts for works which might have sustained and cemented the reign of interpretive techniques developed by I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and William Empson lay—as though to be spotted in the final scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’—un-examined and unpublished. McLuhan the television icon eclipsed McLuhan, the man of letters.
Of course, McLuhan did not abandon the exegetical techniques he had learned, but rather had expanded them into a higher, more universal form, which he set to applying to not just words on a page, or the “text” (as a modern critical theorist would put it) of an artistic piece, but for all the created things and forms which comprise the human world as it sets us, as a species, apart from and against the raw, wild, animal nature. That is, McLuhan tries to account for the total material and inter-subjective environmental envelope—since the first words and quest for fire— which broke humanity out of—and separated us from—the long primal scene within which the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin are set.
Until I pick this back up, consider it this way: McLuhan recognized the distortions in the proportions of the metaphors used in contemporary language which fracture our perception of various facets of the world across time and space. To use our example above, he saw remedies to distortions which would place our primitive era in the actual paleolithic tens of thousands of years ago, but which today place the ENIAC, to our senses, proportionately also in its own fictional paleolithic era. The duty came down to proportional perception of the human-sized world as expressed in eloquent language with poetic felicity, the faculties which he said were largely lost by writers in the 1920s during the rise of the mass mind of radio and cinema. Another way of saying this is that he was trying to put the breaks on Orwell’s 1984. We will explore some of the fundamentals of his means in the next post.
Those eager to read ahead can get sneak peaks on page 207 of The Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) in his Dec. 21, 1948 letter to Ezra Pound, or reading from page 229 of McLuhan and McLuhan’s Laws of Media (1988).
Thank you, Clinton, a most provocative and interesting post. I look forward to your next.
Duncan