A Special Treat: Don Theall's recent talk at Tarrytown
purple
Excerpts from the conclusion:
1. "It is from this critique by the early
avant-garde as well as from the perceptions of modernist poets and
artists that there arose the intellectual satire of media ecology which
vitiated the work of McLuhan, and then moved in differing ways into that
of such successors as Ong, Kroker, Baudrillard, Neil Postman, Bob Dobbs
and John Cage."
2. "... which is the beginning point of a research
project in which I am currently engaged that will trace the role of
artists and popular artists throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth
century - from Duchamp, Chaplin and Apollinaire through Joyce, Lewis and
Al Capp to the Rauschenbergs, Sterns, Pynchons, Gibsons and Zappas as a
way of exploring the aesthetic contribution to the emergence of
digiculture." - Don Theall, 74, author of THE VIRTUAL MARSHALL McLUHAN
(2001)
[Radical Modernism and its Aftermath:
Cultural Production and the Pre-history of the Digital Infomatrix and
Cyberculture
(NYSCA introduction to Master Class, October 2002)
Donald F. Theall
I open these introductory remarks to our discussion by repeating
the
opening two paragraphs of a lecture entitled "From the Cyberglobal
Chaosmos to the Gutenberg Galaxy The Prehistory of Cyberelectronic
Language(s)" presented in New York City on June 21, 2002 at the Third
Annual Media Ecology Conference.
In the 1970s a distinguished Québecois author, multimedia
artist,
broadcaster, and dramatist ? a recent winner of the Onassis prize for
drama - produced a short book on the cover of which was an illustration
of a figure dressed in the jersey of a Montréal Canadien hockey star,
the head of which was a famous bust of Pythagoras. The author, Jacques
Languirand, entitled his little book De McLuhan à Pythagore ? (i.e, From
McLuhan to Pythagoras). I begin at this point, for two reasons ? both
of which will play roles in my remarks: first, Languirand had designed
one of the multi-media productions within the Man and Community theme
pavilions at Expo `67 (Montreal) which has been dubbed "McLuhan's Fair";
second and more significantly he was one of the few Québecois cultural
figures of the moment who commented in a playful, offbeat book that
emphasized McLuhan's leading us back through the complex traditions of
the past in order to understand "the tradition of the new". Probably
Jacques did so, because existing in the relatively small cultural
complex of Montreal oriented to the past of France and Romance Europe as
well as to the future of the United States and North America, he was
acutely aware of the coming together of the distant past, the immediate
past and the future-oriented transformations of the present at the
moment when McLuhan emerged.
My title plays against the same motifs which interested
Languirand in
McLuhan's work, for it points to the historical connections of the
understanding of modern media with the long march from the birth of
civilization in the Near East, Egypt and Greece to the period of
McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy (from the Renaissance until the twentieth
century), a work which contemporizes the medley of science, art and the
occult in the world of Pythagorean virtuality. By 1950 with the
inception of electric media the Galaxy signals a present in which the
cybernetic global theatre could be partly anticipated. It also weaves
together the ways that the arts, philosophy, theology, occult traditions
as proto-science and poetry contributed to understandings that were
crucial to the early development of humanistically oriented studies of
human communication. Two historic intellectual cultures were central as
the historical work of Friedrich Kittler and James Peters confirm:
first, liberal scholarship with its emphases on the arts, drama,
literature, poetry and the historical and archeological study of the
past; second, the near immediate history of the arts and literature from
the inception of electric media in the nineteenth century to major
radical and avant-garde movements of the twentieth.
Today in our discussion I want to probe both of these
intellectual
cultures in the context of a research project I'm currently pursuing on
the role of radical modernism from 1850 to 2000 on the pre-history of
our digiculture and how that simultaneously grounds the pre-history of
cyberspace and cyberculture in ancient Egypt, classical Greece, the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The relevance of this to communication
scholars and researchers lies in it being at the core of those earlier
studies of communication which are the groundwork of media ecology,
speech communication and history of communication(s): Robert Park of the
Chicago School (the first communication scholar to speak about social
ecology in relation to communication), Kenneth Burke, Walter Benjamin,
Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Ted Carpenter and Walter
Ong. In varying ways each of these figures relates to one or both of
these two intellectual cultures and it can be illustrated that they
incorporated this relationship within their work on media,
communication, culture and technology. McLuhan perhaps became the
focal figure since he so thoroughly embraced the spectrum of both
intellectual cultures, but then it must be noted he did so because from
his early interests in the history of the trivium (grammar, dialectics,
rhetoric and education), G.K. Chesterton and the Catholic Middle Ages
and the early Renaissance, he turned to an absorption with the emergence
of all the modernist arts throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
century and their roots in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
cetury, partly as a critique of the Enlightenment,.
This is significant since the source of so many of his probes
begin in
works with insights taken from the radical literary tradition from
Baudelaire to Joyce and Lewis or the radical artistic tradition from
Duchamp, Léger, Vertov, the Bauhaus and Sergei Eisenstein to Kepes,
Cunningham, Cage and Nam Paik. And yet what fist led him there was a
deep interest in the classical, occult and esoteric world; a fascination
with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas's writings and an extensive scholarly
knowledge of the world of the Renaissance and its roots in ancient
culture.
In 1992 I published a paper in Postmodern Culture entitled
"Beyond the
Orality/literacy Principle: James Joyce and the Pre-history of
Cyberspace" which was the first exposition of a hypothesis linking the
fascination of modernism with fragmentation, discontinuity and
synaesthesia to the perceived imperative of the new electric inscription
technologies towards an ever-increasing synaesthesia. For our purposes
that concept becomes part of radical modernism in the mid-nineteenth
century raising the problem of how to integrate the fragmented spectrum
of the human sensorium. The perceptual intuition of this concept is
already present in Edgar Allen Poe's, Baudelaire's and Rimbaud's poetry
and critical writing, although its first use by psychologists according
to the OED and the Petit Larousse is around 1890. This is relevant to
the understanding of communication media, since this drive toward
synaesthesia occurs in the very same period of time in which the
telegraph, the gramophone and the beginnings of cinema occurred.
Synaesthesia and its accompanying phenomenon, coenaesthesia or the
orchestration of the modes of communication arise as specific responses
to electro mechanization and photochemical modes of technological
production, reproduction and dissemination of information and as a
corollary to the "total theater" concept propounded by Richard Wagner,
the Bauhaus and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
What is happening during this period is affiliated with the
growth of
cities and in particular in France, of the arcades, the forerunner of
the contemporary shopping centers that form a focus of some of Walter
Benjamin's writings as well as his major Arcades project ? a materialist
history of the nineteenth century. The fragmentation of the city and
the fragmentation created by the newly and rapidly evolving technologies
of inscription or communication are intrinsically related in a process
of a growing understanding of mediation that leads to the exploration of
the modes by which emerging media can inter-relate the variety of
sensory, external and internal phenomena (incidentally, this might also
be the ground for McLuhan's definition of medium in Understanding Media,
where everything from highways and houses to automation and TV are
representatives of media), With the telegraph and the Morse code,
digitalization begins! It required a complex imaginative step to see
how this could arise from the emerging media of inscription which appear
to be both privileging the senses (the ear, the grampohone; the eye, the
still camera and its relation to vision in motion). It should probably
be noted, as Friedrich Kittler's work has made obvious, that the
typewriter also was exercising a similar fragmentary exercise on writing
and print.
Simultaneously the artists (painters, musicians,
cinematographers) and
the writers impacted by and playing with these phenomena are providing
an implicit satiric critique utilizing and unconsciously or
semi-consciously redirecting the process towards dreams of synthesis and
orchestration leading through vision in motion to new ecological
potentialities ? potentialities that would surface during the first
third of the twentieth century. Duchamp's Bride, Muybridge's
experiments in animation, the Futurists asethstic, Léger's views on
"machine art" and Léger and Vertov's early films provide exempla of this
probing. Exempla which triggered the type of experimentation with
language in print that occurs in James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake where the author seeks for a way of adopting language to a new
world of fragmented sensory inscriptions and an evolving drive towards
the synaesthetic and the orchestration of the arts.
A Swedish literary theorist, Sara Danius, in her recent book,
The
Senses of Modernism: Perception, Technology and Aesthetics, tentatively
probes these aspects of Joyce as well as similar patterns in Proust and
Mann. Her investigation in many ways is inspired by the theory and
history of discourse networks articulated in Friedrich Kitler's
Discourse Networks 1800-1900 and extended to the modern period in
Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. Danius illustrates how Joyce ultimately
develops a perceptual vision of the impact of technologies, particularly
inscription technologies, on the human sensorium. Yet while literary
theorists and historians are beginning to recognize the importance of
the new technologies, even now their approach is still more constrained
and limited than the impact would justify. McLuhan, however, had
extended the aesthetic understanding of contemporary technologies to an
anticipation of the internet, the Web and VR. @@@ Joyce, P. Wyndham
Lewis and Giambattista Vico (a central structural work in the Wake) are
among the most predominant of the many modern artists and writers in
McLuhan's works. This is because they provided not only the foundation
for his peculiarly satiric and ambivalent analysis of the history of
communication and the emergence of modern media, but also established
him with the ground from which to launch the beginning moment of an
understanding of Joyce as the culmination of radical modernism and an
anticipation of media convergence. This enabled him to develop a unique
vision of the rapidly evolving effect of communication technologies to
realize and accelerate the convergence of media. This is something
which McLuhan partly realized in developing his perceptions of modern
media.
One particularly crucial difference in McLuhan's approach is his
overriding emphasis on tactility and the functioning of the CNS as a
sensus communis in the scholastic sense ? an interior site where all the
senses operate together interactively and mnemotechnically through
electric impulses. Only since the revival of McLuhan with the emergence
of digiculture has there been an wider appreciation of the importance of
his discussions of the application of the Aristotlean and scholastic
concept of the nous poetikos, the agent intellect, the power to
individuate anew in a the neurological systems of the human body that
which it has abstracted from existence. These concepts were a starting
point towards understanding Joyce's prepostmodern poetics from which
Ulysses and particularly Finnegans Wake were constructed. Joyce's
version of modernism strives precisely for this type of effect,
ultimately achieved in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake ? especially in the
latter where the entire world of everyday reality associated with media
is internalized within a dream in which the dreamer ? "Here Comes
Everybody" -- is a communicating machine, "This harmonic condenser
enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric transmission-receiver system,
an ear, the human sensorium, a presence "eclectrically filtered for all
irish earths and ohmes." Joyce envisions the person as embodied within
an electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic environment),
which becomes an extension of the human body, an interior presence,
indicated by a stress on the playfulness of the whole person and on
tactility as calling attention to the interplay of sensory information
within the electro-chemical neurological system.
Imagine Joyce around 1930 asking the question: what is the role
of the
book in a culture which has discovered photography, phonography, radio,
film, television, telegraph, cable, and telephone and has developed
newspapers, magazines, advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion?
What people read, they will now go to see in film and on television;
everyday life will appear in greater detail and more up-to-date fashion
in the press, on radio and in television; oral poetry will be reanimated
by the potentialities of sound recording. Joyce's consciousness of
everyday culture is apparent in his use of a multitude of forms
(cross-words, riddles, logical puzzles) and content (comics, movies,
sports events, radio broadcasts) to make the Wake the poetry of
everyman.
When it becomes apparent that the range of the arts, including
poetry
and literature, were responding to their confrontation with the world of
electronic media, it also becomes apparent that their response in a
variety of media were providing important insights into technology,
particularly communication technologies and what their impact was on the
individual sensorium and the social ecology. That this exploration of
the ways in which art might contribute to an understanding of technology
is beginning to be grasped in the academic study of the history of
science and technology is confirmed by the recently published anthology,
Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, by the theoretical work of
Brenda Laurel Computers as Theatre and of aethetic theorists such as
Sara Danius noted previously.
The rise of the so-called avant-garde, directly connected to
these
theoretical, mathematical, scientific and technological phenomena, is
really a coming to terms with the evolutionary (and therefore also
devolutionary) aspects of the growth of cities, the taking command of
mechanization, the impact of electricity and photography and the
"shrinking" of the globe. To understand turbulent transformation it was
necessary for those creative minds living through the experience to
revisit and re-examine the modes of expression and communication.
Walter Benjamin, reviewing the development of the history of modernism
from Baudelaire through Dadaism and Surrealism and the emergence of
"technological modes of reproducibility", dramatized their intense
interest in extending the sense of what language meant, while
simultaneously associating it with the esoteric traditions of the
occult, particularly the Kaballah. His ability to bridge the work of
Baudelaire, of Brecht, of Kafka, of the surrealists and of new modes of
technological production, reproducibility and dissemination arose from
his awareness that there existed a spectrum of languages rather than any
relatively limited sense of what constituted language.
While Benjamin respected the "language of man" with its
propensity
towards naming, he still asserted the importance of the language of
things which could reach its realization through painting, sculpture,
architecture, design or the new modes of production: In his essay "On
Language as Such and On the Language of Man", Benjamin notes the future
importance of the convergence of languages ? the blending of modes of
discourse ? and points out that the artists of the later nineteenth
century and of the early twentieth century are the early stages of a
dramatic interface with this ? an anticipation of the emergence of
cyberspace.
Joyce's further development of radical modernist linguistic
alchemy
simultaneously lays the groundwork for the ongoing transformations of
media, since it underlines the fluidity of modes of communication,
linking them with transitions in science and technology. It lays the
groundwork for a growing acceptance of the quest for hypermedia, since
it presents the probes which provide the linguistic fluidity and the
synaesthetic consciousness that are requisite to understand the
accelerating convergence of modes of expression that had earlier been
intuited by film makers, photographers, typographers and many others.
All of this is grounded within the satiric exposure of the ecological
problems of media that permeated the work of avant-gardistes, especially
Marcel Duchamp, Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce. I am primarily in my
ongoing research project using the insight gained from such associations
as an exemplum of how all the arts ? the traditional fine arts, what
were then in the 1930s called by Gilbert Seldes the newer "lively
arts", and subsequent pop arts and media ? were with varying degrees of
consciousness developing a vision of newly transformed paraoral and
paraverbal languages. (I am coining these terms to indicate that the
new, potentially primary language would exist beyond, beside and above
existing oral languages.)
A key doucument in this pre-history is Moholy-Nagy's Vision in
Motion. Along with Wyndham Lewis he was a strong influence on the
early McLuhan. Within his own creative work he explored a variety of
approaches and media: photograms, painting, sculpture, design,
industrial design, experimental film and writing. He also articulated
the importance of the growing inter-relation of art, technology and
science in developing contemporary solutions to living in a global
society. Moholy_Nagy's basis for this project is his assertion that the
primary discovery contemporary artists and poets had made is the
significance of "vision in motion". In his writings he demonstrated
repeatedly that painting, sculpture, architecture, music, film and
contemporary poetry and creative writing along with many other artistic
developments were all becoming more conscious of the ancient awareness
of the arts as aspiring to reproduce "vision in motion". Mohily-Nagy
also stressed that "vision in motion" had a particular relationship with
the new space-time world in which everyone in the twentieth century had
become immersed, and consequently with the increasing importance of
electricity and electronics, all of which he specifically mentions.
In this respect, Moholy-Nagy is building on the work of the
Dadaists
and the Cubists, but particularly Duchamp, whose Large Glass was so
intrinsically involved with electricity, with new technologies, with the
new space-time continuum and the fourth dimension. Vision in Motion, is,
therefore, an exploration of the possibilities of an assemblage of new
languages, which partly reflect his own lifelong practice as an artist,
designer and teacher. Moholy-Nagy in many ways is the pioneering
founder of what led through his successors, particularly his student
Gyorgy Kepes, to the M.I.T visual arts program and then to the M.I.T.
Media lab with its exploration of cyberspace and the World Wide Web. He
stressed the importance of linking Joyce's work to the new directions of
vision in motion as well as indicating the intimate association of
advertising, comics and industrial art with the avant-garde critique of
media.
As McLuhan realized through his study of and association with
Wyndham
Lewis, the early avant-garde were involved in an ecologically oriented
satiric critique of the rise of new electric modes of communication.
Such a critique is not intended to be purely negative, since there is
always within it a positive element of what might come to be along with
a powerful comic critique. It is from this critique by the early
avant-garde as well as from the perceptions of modernist poets and
artists that there arose the intellectual satire of media ecology which
vitiated the work of McLuhan, and then moved in differing ways into that
of such successors as Ong, Kroker, Baudrillard, Neil Postman, Bob Dobbs
and John Cage. Beyond McLuhan and in his wake there came the pragmatic
practices and critical discussions of the exploration of hypertextuality
and cyberspace. These practices and discussions are beginning to
provide a new ecological perspective to what Ong called "secondary
orality" and what McLuhan and later Baudrillard, could see as the next
transformation of the idea of the libris, which has moved through
history from stone and papyrus to manuscripts, printed words,
illustrated words and the like. As Baudrillard pointed out in a recent
interview, tactility (and the ratio of all the senses) was always more
crucial in the McLuhanesque understanding of media than specific biases
toward the acoustic sphere or the visual range. Implicit in that
transformation was an acceptance of the "chaosmic" nature of our complex
cosmos, which is the context in which the new cyber-electronic
language(s) is taking form. This enables us to appreciate the
complexities involved in exploring the transformations of the modes of
expression and their dissemination, while also demonstrating that we
have always already been moving towards our parahuman ? not posthuman ?
vision of virtuality.
The reason it is important to appreciate the roots of this in
the
avant-garde movements and the roots of such artistic movements in the
poetics and rhetoric of the ancient world is both to return to them for
a deeper understanding of the problems of media ecology (or in a play on
McLuhan's ratio of the senses ? an ecology of sense) and to appreciate
the need to attend to and study the mature contemporary artists and
poets (particularly playing with the new hypermedia) as a guide to
understanding the ecological implications of the future of the
Twenty-first century. What we have looked at today is the importance of
realizing that there is a musical, choregraphic, visual art and poetic
presence side by side with the techno-scientific in the emergence of our
new cyber-electronic languages (our contemporary thrust for the
para-oral and para-verbal), which is the beginning point of a research
project in which I am currently engaged that will trace the role of
artists and popular artists throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth
century - from Duchamp, Chaplin and Apollinaire through Joyce, Lewis and
Al Capp to the Rauschenbergs, Sterns, Pynchons, Gibsons and Zappas as a
way of exploring the aesthetic contribution to the emergence of
digiculture.]
Bob Dobbs
nenslo
nikolai kingsley
> You misspelled "Stupid Bullshit."
this is an area which can be a bit confusing, if you've ever bought into the
whole postmodernism/appropriation thing at all. i can read an interview
with, say, Blixa Bargeld and end up with a half-way decent idea of what he
was talking about. Arthur Kroker, well, the text seems to be swimming in
neologisms. Sandy Stone, and i can't see the bottom of the pool, so to
speak. when i read the interviews with Sordide Sentimentale in that ReSearch
book on Industrial Culture, i thought they were joking, making it up as they
went along, you know, kind of like, uh, media jamming! yeah.
nikolai
---
or as we call it down here, "bullshitting"
Rev. Ivan Stang
nikolai kingsley <nik...@broadway.net.au> wrote:
When monkeys do it, it's called "signifying" or "jacking off."
--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected (Rev. Ivan Stang, prop.)
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