Transcription
I have been introduced quite recently as Canada's revenge on the United States, you know, from the land of the DEW line early warning system. But um, the um, this is one of my themes tonight, as it were: the artist as early warning system for New Media. But um, the um, another main theme, of course, will be that the medium is the massage and not the message, and um, that it really works us over; it really takes hold and and and massages the uh population in a savage way, which does recall, from the land of the DEW line, I can bring you a a special kind of world of jokes that you may not have encountered: namely, the grievance joke associated with French Canada. The uh, it's not like the Polish joke or the Italian joke and so on.
I have a bit of a cold, and it feels very strange. I'm very pleased to be here, but it feels very strange to be here. When I was out there a few nights ago listening to Arthur Chrysler, it's a very strange switch of roles. But I think it was Steve Allen who said that the funny man is a man with a grievance, and um, if you look around at the joke uh world from that point of view, it's sometimes rather instructive. In Canada, we have jokes such as the one about the mouse being pursued by the cat and finally hiding under the floor, and all is quiet until suddenly there's a kind of a Bow Wow arp arp sound, and uh, the mouse figures, ah, house dog has come; scared cat away, and up comes the mouse; the cat grabs it. As the cat chews the mouse down, it says, you know, it pays to be bilingual. And the uh, there are a lot of those jokes around up there. But uh, the um, I think uh, it is rather amusing to watch the U the joke as a sign of uh grievance, and U in the same way slang can be an indicator of subtle change of sensibility; shifting patterns of perception. And if if our youngsters were encouraged to pay the utmost attention in respect to slang, therefrom this point of view, it might uh clarify some of the problems they have.
Isn't it strange that no matter how complicated slanging is, no child ever made a mistake in slang? And that goes even for the word cool. I once presented one of my children with a strange object; it was actually a yearbook from Rice University, and it was made uh, it was about uh 6x6 inches square, just cards taped together, and it was it had the little stories and poems of the year in it. And when our 13-year-old saw this, he said, Dad, that's real cool, and he was using the term quite correctly. But many people have difficulty with that term, especially when I use it. And um, actually, I merely draw it from the world of slang in which it means involved and detached at the same time. Like a surgeon operating, cool means identification with the creative process. When a person is both involved and detached, he has to identify with the creative process. You can read a great deal about the concept cool in Mr. Eliot's Four Quartets. It's a somewhat Oriental concept, and uh, the Western man tends to be either totally involved or detached, but not both at once. So this this is a new development in our society; it is a complicated idea, and it is a profoundly creative idea.
Well, I I'm going to have a pleasant uh few minutes here, and I'm going to break at 9:00 so that some people can be seated, and uh, then we'll continue and have a few questions after a bit of chatting. Um, the um, one of the strange changes that is taking place in our world, and and John Cage gave me a curious example of what it meant to him, is that we're moving out of the world of the planter, out of the world of the specialist, out of the world of the separated, fragmented person, into the world of the hunter, the unified person. This is the meaning of James Bond; it's the meaning of the sleuth; the meaning of the uh obsession with crime in our world, because the criminal or criminologist alike are both hunters; they belong to the old Paleolithic world and are really a new type of human being in our midst: the person who explores the total human environment um, the way the old hunter used to, and food gatherer used to explore his entire environment as a unified field. Because the man, the planter man, the basket weaver, the pot maker, and so on, he came in after the Paleolithic man, and we've had thousands of years of the planter. And uh, John Cage, when I mentioned this to him, he said that's very interesting; he said, I spend my life hunting mushrooms; I am not the least bit interested in cultivating them. And uh, this is a curious illustration of the difference between the two kinds of man. The hunter is not concerned with classification or specialism or the processes of cultivation, only with discovery. And uh, so uh, there are some rather exciting things afoot.
For example, if one wanted to talk about the future of work in our world, we know that it has very little to do with jobs as they're presently understood; it has much to do with discovery; much to do with knowing; much to do with involvement in processes; so much so that um, the future of work is plainly knowing. And uh, there there was a time when the job of royalty, the prince, was not to learn any special skill, but simply to grow up. Jacques Ellul, the U author of Propaganda, points out that in our 20th-century world, a the child is the hardest working child in all human history. Our children in a 20th-century information environment have to process more data than any human being in any previous culture of the world. Our children from early infancy are engaged in extraordinarily hard work, and that work is mainly just growing, growing up; because to grow up in a modern electronic environment is a fantastically complex and difficult job. It's also a job which threatens to deprive people of a identity, and you know, the personal concept; because in a one of the peculiarities of an electronic environment is that people become so profoundly involved in each other that they lose that sense of private identity. This is one of the peculiar cruxes of our time: that people, precisely because they become profoundly involved in one another in an all-at-once simultaneous field of happenings, and then begin to lose their sense of private identity, because identity used to be connected with simple classification and fragmentation and non-involvement. In a world of profound involvement, identity seems to evaporate.
Well, the future of work as knowing; the future of identity as involvement uh brings one around to a kind of idea of perhaps roles instead of jobs; roles. A person, a mother, doesn't have a job; she has 60 jobs, and that's a role. A top executive doesn't have a job; he has many jobs simultaneously; that is a role. I think this is happening to all of us in many in in varying degrees. The very speeded-up world we live in guarantees that we can all have a highly integrated existence, which really points in the direction of role-playing rather than of job-holding. I was talking to a group of managers at one time, and I thought I'd just tried out on them; it seemed to me plausible to suggest to them that the real future of old age in business is discovery. They were quite struck by this; it seemed to make profound sense. Most of them are over 40, and um, but the point about old age as a period of discovery uh contradicts the merely chronological approach to things. But the older older man in business is a man who knows the field, and he's in a much better position to be a discoverer than some younger man who is merely job-holding. And so there's hope. And another, in case I forget it, there's another basic theme associated with this computer threat to job-holding: Come into my parlor, said the computer to the specialist. Anybody who wants to be taken over by a computer just uh just specialized.
Um, but one of the hopeful things about the computer is this: that as or retrieval system uh, the instantaneous speed of retrieval by computer offers a tremendous future of discovery, because a retrieval system of very high speed brushes so many facets of knowledge together; so many kinds of layers of experience get brushed together that they reveal structures; they reveal forms; they reveal the life of forms; they reveal knowledge and all sorts of new patterns. So it is typical of our time, or any other time perhaps, that they should tackle this new form of technology as and put it on the old job-classified data. What we're doing with the computer up to now is merely giving it to the librarians and to the card catalogers. But the possibility of retrieval as a form of discovery is something we all know from our own memories. When we recall something, we tend to make discoveries; we certainly tend to make changes in the uh pattern of the thing we know. But Finnegan's Wake is a book built entirely on this retrieval system, and you know, casting his pearls before swains; this is a phrase out of Finnegan's Wake, and it's typical of the technique of Finnegan's Wake. Joyce regarded the human uh human language as the biggest res uh uh storage system of human knowledge and perception anywhere, and his own use of that vast store of human perception was to retrieve from it in a pattern which made discovery natural, though he might have been more humble. There's no police like Holmes, and um, yeah, that's retrieval. The pun as a form of retrieval brushes various layers and contexts together and creates a new discovery pattern. Um, so the computer offers many advantages uh uh besides just uh the threat to wipe out jobs and provide leisure.
Now, the the future of uh in the under electric conditions, the future of suggests perhaps an approach to various other things which I might uh mention awhile on that theme: the future of the planet as a work of art. Since the planet has its new environment of satellites and and information uh electronic information, the planet is rapidly becoming an old nose cone, a work of art. Like the Model T, like old silents on TV, uh, the planet is now becoming a content of our own man-made environment. And the future of the planet as Williamsburg, as a work of art, as a carefully prepared archaeological exhibit, is really quite amusing. And the future work of mankind will be mainly raking and tidying and clipping the whole plant, putting it in shape, reconstructing it pretty much the way it was when the pilgrims landed, and that sort of thing. This um, this really I'm really using this as an illustration of a basic theme: that anything becomes a work of art as soon as it is surrounded by a new environment. Give any form at all a new uh environment, and it acquires art status; in other words, it becomes visible. Because this is the peculiar character of art: it creates attention; it creates perception. And the role of the artist as a creator of perceptual models and perceptual means is perhaps misunderstood by those who think of art as primarily a blood bank of stored human values. In our time, there are a great many unhappy people who see the great art treasures of the past being polluted by a corrupt new vulgar environment. It never occurs to them, perhaps, that their job is the penetration and exploration of these new environments, and that the mere accumulation of past human experience in blood banks called Art does not really contribute very much toward the perception of our current environment. But we we might come back to that theme during questions. But the a great many people are confused and unhappy at the present time because they sense that all the great values of the past are being polluted and um corrupted and neo-ized by a vulgar entertainment, mass entertainment.
So in that regard, let's pause a moment on the future of the book: the printed book created what did we call the public? With the coming of electric circuitry, you have what is called the mass; it's a Time Factor. The book created the public because the book was, as a printed form, made possible a very large body of people, but not simultaneously. The peculiar dimension of the mass audience is that it's all at once; it's a happening, like the telegraph, like the daily paper. The daily paper is a good example of a happening, because everything that's in it happens at the same moment. The date line is the only organizing principle in a newspaper; there is no connection between the items otherwise than the date line. And if you take away the date line from any newspaper whatever, you have a quite handsome surrealist poem; it becomes much more enjoyable if you pull the date line off. The date line presents a plausible pretext of rationality, meaning connection, which is not really uh very uh deeply related to the newspaper. The the sort of constellation of events that is incorporated on any page of a newspaper is a kind of environmental image for which many people find it natural to identify empathically and so on. And the uh paper as a happening is very much in this dimension of the all at once. The editorial page, by contrast, represents a point of view, a fixed, arrested position with regard to the happening. And uh, so the newspaper, in regard to this, the the editorial is very closely related to the book as a form; the book, the printed book rather, as a form created the public. And Montaigne said, upon recognizing the existence of this new entity, this new environment called the public, he said, I owe the public a complete portrait of myself. It was a matter of immediate response on the part of writers that their task as writers would be, from now on, the evolution, the evolving of self-portraiture, an image. There was no such impulse or response in the Middle Ages when they had a scribe and manuscript culture, or in the ancient world. It was with the coming of the printed book that people suddenly felt the need to reflect, to bounce their image off this public as a form of self-expression; self-portraiture. Self-portraiture was a very special response to the printed word and was never felt as a need or a response for the manuscript form of culture.
Now, Xerox has brought a kind of revolution into the publishing world that is only being felt slowly; uh, it will be felt more and more. Xerox is the application of electric circuitry to a world which had formerly been merely mechanical and fragmented. Xerox enables, or xerography enables, the reader to become publisher, and this is an important aspect of all electric circuitry: the audience is increasingly involved in the process. With the public, the audience was detached, observant, but not involved. With circuitry, the reader, the audience becomes involved in itself and in the process of publishing the book. The future of the book is very much in the order of book as information service instead of the book as a fixed package of repeatable and U uniform character suited to the market with pricing and so on. The book is increasingly taking on the character of service, an information service, and the book as an information service is tailor-made and custom-built. The strange uh dynamic or pattern of U electric information is to involve the audience as um increasingly as part of the workforce instead of just tossing things to it as consumer or as um entertainment. The tendency is to involve the audience as workforce, as as with electric toasters, electric races, electric anything; you do the work. And we're coming to this; I'll come back to this perhaps apropos the future of television or forms like that, in which it will become possible, or is now possible, to brief audiences um in prime time on top-level problems in physics, science, whatever, and invite their response to these problems by uh IBM cards sent out in supermarkets or in magazines. And you see if uh Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer, is fond of saying, there are kids playing right here on the sidewalk who could solve some of my toughest problems in physics; they have modes of perception that I lost 40 years ago. Now, Oppenheimer realizes in that remark that uh most scientific problems are really not concept problems but perception problems; that most scientists are blocked in their positions, conceptions by preconceptions and prepossessions. When you're dealing simultaneously with several million people, it's obvious that somebody in that audience is going to have a perceptual perforation into the problem without any difficulty whatever. Eight scientists working on a problem for 50 years might not get through; about 10 million people working on the problem for 10 minutes might get through. And anyway, audience participation can mean many things. You remember in the old quiz shows, the audience was browned off when they discovered that the shows had been rigged, and they'd really been left out; they had there was nothing dishonest about rigging quiz shows any more than there is about rigging a movie uh and making it look uh different from what uh a real-life situation might be. But it was a misuse of the medium of TV, which calls for much participation. The movie world doesn't call for any participation; it's a fantasy world, highly visual, with the audience sitting very much back from the show. TV is not like that; TV is a profoundly involving medium, with the audience as environment; the audience as vanishing point; the audience as screen. In the movie, the audience is the camera eye; the movie audience looks out at the environment. With TV, the audience is the environment; is the screen; is the vanishing point. And this creates a completely different relation to programming; it creates a kind of Oriental effect, with reverse perspective. Audience as vanishing point creates a reverse perspective, with a kind of Orientalism involved. It's not I think accidental that our Western world is taking on many profound Oriental traits since television. But it's not just television; it's electric circuitry.
The safety car is another peculiar example of electric circuitry afflicting a mechanical object; that is, the consequences of the car are now being felt by the designers of the car, whereas formerly they merely concerned themselves with the projectile; you hurled it out into the public, and you know, let the chips fall where they may. But suddenly, in the age of circuitry, the feedback is coming into the design. Product design now takes on the character of audience participation. But perhaps the the safety car is more an example of the effect of the space capsule. Bucky Fuller is famous for having pointed out, among many brilliant observations, that the space capsule is the first man-made environment, totally man-made. You know the old saying, you can't take it with you. In the space capsule, you've got to take it with you; you you have to take the planet with you. And so the space capsule is really a kind of complete environment in which all consequences of all maneuvers are anticipated by design, by the built-in design pattern. This sense of the space capsule as applied to the motor car is now creating the motor car as a pad itself. And what more appropriate form of design for the maniac driver? But the the the motor car as a feedback design pattern turns into a padded cell. I have a friend who calls, speaks of the motor car as the car cophus, and U Don't rock the bandwagon is another of his remarks. Um, the um, the cophus is a form of paretic vehicle in which the um effects of the object on the environment are built back into the object, and uh, this um is something that is characteristic of electric circuits; they are they the a circuit as such is a form that feeds back and feeds us into the circuit. All circuits are do-it-yourself objects. The the book on Xerox becomes uh somewhat like the safety car; the the uh reader becomes a publisher and and author. In the ancient days of the scribe in manuscript cultures, the scribe was both publisher and author, and we are sort of coming around, circling around to that condition again in which, with Xerox, the reader of the book can excerpt it and relate it to any other excerpts or any other notions or any other soundtracks and publish it as his own creative effort. And this is already happening; teachers are strongly inclined to make their own books for their own classes, designs specifically for the needs of a particular class. This is another peculiar feature of electric technology; it tends toward decentralized, tailor-made, custom-built servicing.
You see, it's typical of our uh rearview mirror orientation that we look at all these new technologies as if they were reflexes of the old technology. For heaven knows how long, people have encountered each new technology by translating it back into the old familiar one. It's not, you know, you know this, all the types of examples of that; the the the first motor cars were made with buggy-whip holders, and the new uh automation uh uh computer devices are being made as if they were card catalogs. And uh, this uh strange habit of looking backward when moving forward is uh one that um perhaps won't quite bear up; isn't quite consistent with jet speeds and electronic speeds. It may be that we are the first human generation to feel the need for uh a close look at what's actually happening under our noses instead of that rearview mirror look; because the rearview mirror is a very comforting spot; it gives you a sense of um remoteness and, like Bonanza, the suburban world of our time lives in Bonanza land. This gives it a comfortable sense of distance and security; it's a 19th-century image. When the railway was new in the 19th century, people formed an image not of the railway and the new world it was creating, the new cities; they formed an image of an Arcadian retreat, a pastoral, innocent world, a Jeffersonian paradise; that was their image of the railway. As soon as they banged into the railway, they translated themselves back into an agrarian, Arcadian, pastoral world. And this is a kind of normal human reaction to novelty and innovation; it's uh inappropriateness as a reaction is in no way deters people from this strategy; it's a kind of dad view. Every time you encounter the new, you say, I've been here before, and um, this isn't as new as you might think. All that the um, this uh seems to tie in with the ancient theory of human learning as needfully going from the known to the unknown. I don't think there's too much evidence that uh this is a basic pattern of human learning; I think there's lots of evidence though for the fact that the moment you encounter the unknown, you translate it back into the known. This means that we never encounter the unknown; we encounter only uh convenient self-deceptions. But U the U the world of electric technology and circuitry then, as involving the audience as workforce, has extraordinary implications. And you can see, while this development is taking place, while the audience is becoming profoundly involved in making a world of entertainment, uh, the um gloom-bearers stand around uh classifying the program and providing program ratings of the most unhappy kind. This um, while the audience is about to take over this vast creative act, the gloom-bearers stand around reading off audience ratings: at, for example, 350 million people each week watch Bonanza in 62 different countries of the world. What could be a more gloomy image of the human condition? And so on. Actually, Bonanza isn't that bad a show. There was a a little boy in Nairobi a few weeks ago in Africa who was found wandering around the city, and on being questioned by the police, he explained he had come from some village and he was an orphan. And they said, yeah, well, why are you here? He said, I'm looking for Mr. Cartwright; I I think he can help me. And I'm quite sure he could too. But um, the uh Bonanza is U for countries in Africa or in Indonesia and China. Bonanza must have a very strange aspect; it must look like some distant science fiction image of some remote world to come; that is, for countries that never had a 19th century.
[Music]
Bonanza, and by the way, this also happens to apply to the West Coast. California didn't have a 19th century. During the 19th century, people were making their way out there as best they could, but there there were no factories; there were no cities; there was no industrial life, etc., etc. Now I note uh the result is that, not having had a 19th century, the uh West Coast leapfrogged out of the 18th into the 20th with great advantage to itself; that is uh, if you leapfrog out of one century and leapfrog over a century or two, you can, upon encountering the new conditions, you can feel completely uncrippled by the older ones; you can behave in a much more spontaneous and much more resourceful way than people who had been through the whole process. Those who lived through the 19th century lived through the most stupefying and fragmenting and systematizing and categorizing century in human history. Therefore, anybody who can leapfrog over the 19th century might retain
Some imaginative life, and those who went through the 19th century, were, uh, named and mutilated, uh, very horribly because of this enormous power to fragment and systematize and classify everything that happens. So, uh, Canada is in a peculiar position, by the way. Canada, uh, never had anything, as it were, about a 19th century; that is, Canada was invented in the 19th century, and the United States was invented in the 18th century, wasn't it? Analy Stevenson who said Columbus went too far. The, um, this business of leapfrogging, though, is not, is not without its significant, uh, uh, features in our present time. You see, there are many countries in the world who are leapfrogging out of 10,000 BC into the 20th century; many countries that are doing this leapfrogging out of prehistory into post-history. And, uh, just psychically, what is the consequence of skipping, uh, thousands and thousands of years of Western history? No one knows; uh, it hasn't been thought about.
And so, uh, to come back a moment to the strange prodigy of the Xerox book, the, uh, tendency to involve audience as actor, as publisher, as writer, is a characteristic that applies to an enormous amount of electric technology, quite apart from this particular instance. And the, um, it's a, a sort of prospect that, um, will increasingly, uh, bring us into the need for new instruments of handling our problems. One way of putting it is to say, for the first time in human history, there is more information and data outside the, say, the classroom or the school, uh, situation than inside. The amount, a sheer amount, levels of information outside in the environment far exceed the amount of data and, uh, information inside the classroom. Now, the, uh, this is not just of very recent origin; it's, it's occurring more and more rapidly, uh, and on a much bigger and bigger scale. You know, the all the statistics one hears, again intended to panic people, that by the year 1980 there will be more people, I'm, are more scientists than people, and more, more, and more, and more, and more, and more; but what would seem to be therefore the future of Education in a world in which the proportions of information have been reversed? That in our ordinary human past there had been more in knowledge and information available inside the classroom conditions and outside; or with this spectacular reversal of this condition, it would seem to be possible that the business of the school has also reversed; that the business of the, the school is no longer instruction, but Discovery, and that the business of, of, of the teaching establishment is to train perception upon the outer environment instead of merely stenciling information upon the brain pans of children inside the environment.
Now, uh, we have never had an educational system programmed to, uh, train perception of the outer world, and, uh, it will create a considerable, uh, trauma or shock, uh, to switch into that mode of activity. But it's like the audience, uh, in the entertainment world that is ready to go into action on high-level problems. The, the children in a school system at the present time have very high-level information, uh, resources, both in their own, uh, makeup and nervous systems, and in the world immediately accessible to them, and they can, uh, be, uh, uh, given the task, in teams, of researching all sorts of fascinating problems. The, for example, suppose a group of elementary school children were given the job of trying to find out what was happening to America since color TV. Teams of them could be turned loose in just making inventories of effects observable in clothing, in food, in cars, in designs, in family life, in all sorts of forms. If they merely made inventories, they didn't have to use any ideas; they didn't have to reach any conclusions; they merely were invited to observe, to make inventories of, e.g., small children love this kind of work and are just as able researchers as any team of sociologists in the world. And, uh, the accumulation of such inventories can be absolutely necessary and indispensable to the highest operations. And, uh, many people, I've, I, I, I was hearing a sociologist today, uh, uh, suggest that it was quite impossible to make a direct connection between television and any change whatever. Now this, uh, is in a certain sense true. On the other hand, if you make an inventory of all the changes that have taken place in the last 12, 15 years since TV, without any preconceptions, without any theories about the what television is or what television does, if one merely made an inventory of all the changes in speech, uh, in politics, in habits of human association, habits of reading, habits of dress and food and so on, uh, it might become quite evident that, uh, there had been a kind of a pattern of change, and, uh, this would be a scientific report in the usual way of an induction; no conclusions, just, here are the changes that have taken place in the past 15 years in all these fields since TV, and you could in turn look at that same curve in relation to some other technology if you chose.
But the way to study the effects—well, for example, if you wanted to study the what the motorcar was, you might find out more from what it did to the environment and the community. In other words, if you notice that the motorcar created road systems and vast servicing industries, uh, you would probably have a better idea of the motorcar than you could have from photographic images of cars in catalogues. The car is what it does to people and what it does to the environment, and so with any other medium, as far as I know. Uh, a medium creates an environment; an environment is a process; an environment is a process; it is not a wrapper; it's an action, and it goes to work on our nervous systems and on our sensory lives, completely altering them. The, um, content of any technology is nearly inevitably the older technology; the new environment goes around the old environment and turns the old one into an art form. This happened to the Greeks; it happened to the Romans; it happened to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so on; where there's no lack of evidence of this happening now at the present time. I mentioned the strange fate of the planet as art form resulting from the new environment of satellite and electronic information. Well, now, now one of the biggest Revolutions in Western culture occurred when the, um, world of the Arts in the 18th century began to create deliberately, to create Landscapes and environments as a way of controlling mental life. The 18th-century artist, whether in paint or in poetry or in landscaping and, and city-building, the 18th-century artist created Landscapes, what he called the picturesque, making things look as if they already were framed in pictures, and he found that these Landscapes or pictures situations could be used as a means of controlling the mental life of the Observer. And the function of Romantic art or picturesque art was to control moods; it was all oriented toward effect. Earlier, the Arts had been more concerned with simply permitting the audience to enjoy the sense of community and festive, uh, involvement. Medieval Arts, as we are popularly aware, Medieval Arts were festive and communal and participative; they were not intended to give any sense of privileged or elite life.
Now there's a little bit like the, um, Banes who say we have no art; we do everything as well as possible. They think of art as that which applies to the environment; they program the environment. Art, for them, means dealing with the environment itself as if it were a work of art, and this, I think, is one of the meanings of Pop Art. Pop Art is a recognition that the outer environment is itself capable of being processed like art, and this, I think, is an electronic phenomenon; that's only in an age of electronic immediacy and totality could we ever, ever dream of tackling the whole human environment as a work of art. This is happening to us, and Pop Art is merely a report to the nation, as it were, that this event is taking place and that we can, uh, prepare ourselves accordingly. The, uh, you know how the, uh, elite artist, bloodbank people are shocked by Pop Art because they try to classify the content of Pop Art instead of viewing Pop Art as a means of perception; they think of it as a means of classification, as a merely a, a means of, uh, uh, ratings and, and, um, the idea that it might have a function, just training human perception, doesn't seem to get through easily to these people.
But let's go back for a moment to the 18th-century landscape, picturesque artist. Having devised this landscape as a way of controlling the mental life of populations, there came shortly after, in the middle of the 19th century, a sudden break in which the artists said it is the inner life, not the outer landscape, that counts. And the Symbolists and the Rambos, the Wagner, the Bodar, began to examine the inner mental landscape as something that could be programmed as a means of enriching consciousness, of creating an inclusive Consciousness instead of just creating, as the Romantic artists had done, creating a mood; they began to work on the idea of the total consciousness. And, uh, we're going to have some questions, but there are some lessons to be learned from the artist in regard to our own time. This way, a man like Seurat, a painter, was painting TV in 1880; that is, he had a Model A perception that had all the technical features of TV: rear projection, minute fragmentation of image into these little point-limes. The TV viewer is, you know, receives these little spots on himself; they wrap around him; he becomes Lord of the Flies; they settle on him; that is, the TV viewer is covered with these little dots, these little flies. Now Seurat knew that, and he painted that back in 1880, but he had, he wanted an effect; he was not painting the technology; he was painting the effect; he wanted the effect he wanted from this TV image or this type of Quon. The effect he wanted was that of total audience participation, involvement of a multi-sensuous kind. Seurat was consciously aiming at not merely visual, but total sensuous involvement; he wanted all the senses to be involved in the painting, and that's why he used this rear projection. There's a story, very a pleasant story about Moer taking General de Gaulle around an art gallery recently and pointing out this and that, and the General was saying, aha, what's that one over there? And Moer said, that's a Dufy. And, oh, what's that one? Oh, that's a Renoir. Ah, says de Gaulle, suddenly, I know that cartoon over there; that must be a Renoir. No, sir, that's a mirror. But, um, Renoir came to mind because he, too, was a rear projectionist; that is, the light came through the image to the viewer. This light through our rear projection creates a much higher degree of involvement than otherwise was possible. The painters suddenly wanted to involve the audience deeply in their images, with all their senses. Electric technology—both radio, TV, for example—has this power, have this power of involving us in all our senses. Uh, many people don't seem to, uh, recognize very easily that a cartoon, a mere outline, a mere contour, is a profoundly involving experience, using that, that requires, uh, our participation of all our senses, whereas a photograph is more limited to one sense, the visual merely, uh, whereas a cartoon, although it seems much simpler, is actually more profound in involving our senses. Essential was L. Well, the painters knew this; that's I learned this, uh, from the, uh, later, uh, 19th-century painters. All this stuff about the media that I talk about, I learned from them, and in fact, you'll find the great instructors in all media matters are these painters and Poets of the later 19th century, and, um, people like James Joyce and E.L.P. and others, and they, they spent their lives studying our senses as they go out technologically into the environment, because they realized this had a profound effect on language and on the medium that they were working with as poets.
One of the things that puzzles many people about our world, about advertising, that, um, there, there seems to be such a strange disproportion between the effect of the ad and the content. Now, the, a, take a Picasso painting, such as a man sitting in a chair; you see, see no chair, you see no man, but the painting is designed to convey the effect of sitting in a chair, not the appearance, not what it looks like, but what it feels like. Now this painting, the effect minus the appearances, is a means of involvement, and the painters and Poets alike sought increasingly the techniques of involvement. In our time, hence the return, for example, of poetic drama, because the dramatist discovered that if you want to really involve the audience in the action of a play, you must not use prose, which merely leaves the actors talking at each other, to each other, the audience and the actors; you must use poetry, which brings the audience right up onto the stage. And it's rather paradoxical to say that poetry is a more involving experience than prose, when in actual fact most people read prose and very few read poetry, but in terms of effect this is true. And it's, uh, the same with the painting. So now in modern advertising, is much the same Revolution going forward as has been going forward in, uh, well, painting and poetry and in, uh, the world of entertainment, with the audience moving more and more into the act. Modern Advertising is more and more a substitute for the product because of its rich resources and means of sensuous solicitation. Modern advertising can give you the effect of almost anything without you're having to bother about having a thing at all. Tony Schwartz is in the audience tonight, bless him, and he is an expert in this very department. In terms of auditory magic, the power of giving effect without thing, uh, is entirely within his domain. But you see, the advertisers have been puzzled for a long time, time in their surveys, to discover that people don't really read ads until they own the thing, and if you own that icebox or that car, then you notice the ads very, very much, because this is how you get your [Music] [Applause] satisfaction. This kind of, of, this is the ad; the ad world then becomes an enormous area of information service, part of the service industries, enabling you to substitute the effect for the thing, just like Picasso and, um, this is called nonobjective abstract art, and now you see it, now you don't see it, and so on. But no, the, the artists have been, I usually go through these maneuvers, uh, 50 or more years before the engineers get around to them, and so the advantage of knowing art is orientation in a complex world; uh, it gives you 50-year breathing space before the thing hits, and, um, that is, that is a considerable advantage. The, um, one of the, in, in these terms, and I'm going to pause here for a few questions, uh, after this observation, one of the peculiar results of this profound involvement through circuitry as compared with the old detachment of literacy and visual culture, one of the effects has been the increasing orientalization of the Western world. Even as we pour and lavish our 19th-century technology on the East, we are doing to ourselves the exact opposite; we are orientalizing ourselves by going inward. And it's very easy to see them going westward and very difficult to see ourselves going inward because it is so environmental with us that it becomes almost imperceptible. You can, however, if you do inventory, discover the amazing rise of Oriental values in the Arts and in all sorts of produce and all sorts of habits. And I'm sure they could, by similar inventories, find that they West made considerable inroads into their world. But this kind of, this may serve as a, a last, or, pa, uh, break example for the, um, kind of change that is going on in our own midst; that we're, we're conveying; we're doing this to ourselves; nobody's doing it to us; we are orientalizing our orientalizing ourselves while westernizing the East and seemingly taking much credit to ourselves for the westernizing and not even noticing what we're doing to ourselves. The, uh, you see how, uh, many people find it desirable to saddle me with moral judgments and the need for value judgments. You can see that, too, if you notice this orientalizing in the Western world; it would be impertinent and somewhat fatuous to approve or disapprove anything that concerns the life of nations and many, many millions of people simultaneously. It would be very much like the position of Margaret Fuller, uh, one of Bucky's relatives, by the way, who said back in what, 1850, I accept the universe. And Emerson, I think it was, who said, okay, she'd better. Well, now, time for a few questions. Thanks. I, oh, there's a mic, a mobile mic down there for people with questions. Uh-huh.
Well, it's a wedding, and, um, most, most of our media are like that; they tend to hybridize or cross over with other media, and, um, you know, the book and the picture and the, the movie and the soundtrack, and the motorcar is itself a product of the Union of the machine and of the electric circuit or the sparking system. Uh, most of our technologies depend upon two or more technologies wedding each other. Yes. The effect, however, the effect of the, of TV on the movie has been a, or of movie on TV has been more profound than that. When you are looking at, just answer your question, when you're looking at TV, a movie on TV, you're watching TV; you're not seeing a movie. However, that is, the translation is into TV, not into movie. Now one of the strange effects that TV has had on the movie has been to deprive it of its storyline. The Fellini world, stripping off storyline, is a normal result of speed-up electric technology. The, um, newspaper lost its storyline when it got telegraphic services; they, um, little stories without a unifying one. You see, in earlier days, the newspaper, each day's paper came out as a kind of big essay or editorial, all unified. Then, as the news services improved, it became impossible to unify, and so they broke down the storyline. But in the same way, uh, TV has stripped the storyline off the novel. The thing, novel, the romance shows, has come in, uh, along with the Fellini or, or Visconti movie. The movie without a storyline is a movie more subtly responsive to modulations of complex environments and human needs. It's, um, many people find very baffling, and, um, you see, Dr. Zhivago has no storyline to speak of, but that's not because of the influence of TV; it's simply because the Russians never needed a storyline; they were, they were always a corporate, Collective, uh, sense; they sense the meaning of vast environmental changes and corporate changes, and so in War and Peace or in, uh, Dr. Zhivago, you have this sense of mass Collective energy reshaping whole populations, and so a narrative, a mere narrative storyline from a personal point of view of an author doesn't tend to exist. But the storyline has not only disappeared in humor; you know, the all the vast new, uh, group of jokes in many areas that have many effects but no stories, like Alexander Graham Bell, the first telephone folk, and no story but just an effect. Now it's an effect of a happening; everything happening at once without a connecting story. Uh, our humor, the elephant jokes and, and many others, are all in this pattern: The Disappearance of storyline goes along with The Disappearance of, uh, clotheslines, hemlines, stag lines, you name it; the line, that, in, in, as a means of organizing human energy, is [Applause] disappearing. I don't say this a good or bad thing; I'm, I'm not, I, I don't even pretend to know, but it disappears, uh, under the impact of an all-at-once technology. TV is not a narrative medium, and, uh, any attempts to keep it within the narrative mold have been rather unhappy. But narrative comes with, um, book culture, especially print culture; uh, prior to print, the narrative structure was rather obscure and opaque compared to what it came with printing. As a matter of fact, you don't even get fictional narrative until you hit upon the wonderful device of getting the characters all moving along a road; 18th-century novel. When you get the characters on the road, then you begin to get novels with plots. But, um, uh, the fictional form is a very peculiar one and disappearing very rapidly in, you know, a thing like In Cold Blood would have been a novel, um, 20, 30 years ago. In Cold Blood is like Dr. Zhivago: the account of a huge upheaval within our own sensory life; it's like the safety car, a radical change of orientation; it's a revolution, and, uh, it doesn't depend on a storyline so much as on an environmental, uh, shaping of energy. So, and novel, and I mean movie and TV have this profound kind of relationship that the movie is undergoing very rapid change along with the novel as a result of contact with TV. Yes sir.
I wonder if you could give a few more concrete examples of what you mean by orientalizing our society. Well, in terms of our own children's lives, the, uh, our children today, small, small children anywhere in their up to the teenage group, have, uh, they, they've gone inside themselves in the sense of taking themselves with profound seriousness; they're not looking for goals a lot at the old movie world with its camera angles outward; they're looking for roles, involvement, participation, and again I'm not approving or disapproving; it's simply something that's happened; they are, are we live, the young people today are not goal-oriented; they're role-oriented. It's like Peace Corps; Peace Corps isn't a goal activity; it's a role; it's involvement; and, uh, we need Peace Corps activity at home. The, the, it's ridiculous to think of Peace Corps as something should be going on out in remote parts of the world; it should be done on our own campuses, anyway. The, this kind of inwardness and, uh, this self-inspection and inquisition and profound earnestness and seriousness, lack of playfulness and so on, is very much a part of the Oriental in our own lives. This gentleman had asked if I could merely give some examples of Oriental influences in our own lives. A curious example comes to mind in the life of Thomas Merton, who, as you know, became a Trappist monk years, quite a few years ago, and who has emerged from that Monastery to become a hermit; he finds the corporate life of a monastery altogether too brash, vulgar, and noisy for his inward life; he has removed himself from that, uh, Branch Community into a silent hut. Now this is a, this kind of involvement, the yogi-like or contemplative-like involvement in depth in ourselves, this quest inwardly for huge significances, this is not exactly a Western habit, you know, of a cheerful Endeavor and applied knowledge and so on. The, um, I'm not, I'm not trying to make any prophecies or any gloomy observations at all; I simply notice these changes, and, uh, the changes are very much like changes between the old dance style and the new dance style. In the old dance style, you moved around a dance floor; you asked people for dances; you changed partners. Now you move out onto the floor and you sculpture, they call it fusion, whatnot; you make images; you can't ask anybody for a dance on that floor; there's no way of getting in; it's a closed world; it's profound; it has depth, whereas the old Fox Trot world and the was an exceedingly superficial, although cheerful world, and to which I [Music] belong.
Of power are creating merges are quite frightening in the communications industry; power, you mean weddings between RCA and publishing. However, you see in Canada, to illustrate again, here's a country that was shaped by the railway; uh, it was unified from, on this vast Frontier or span by rail until there was a rail connection East-West; there was no Canada. And now, with airplane and electronic speeds of information movement, that whole country is falling apart; that is, it has, has fallen apart; that is, French separatism is like school dropout-ism, an inability to make contact with an alien form of organization; that is, our children, we live in a world in which, I'm not saying it is profoundly integrated in terms of, say, content or programming, but in the sense of everything happening at once and everything affecting everything. Our children live in a world which they feel isn't profoundly unified; they go into a schoolroom where all subjects are classified, separate and unrelated to each other, and they're really baffled. In the same way, the French Canadians in the electric age have an image of themselves as profoundly participating in the life of Canada, and they are offered legally and politically, uh, participation only by the most fragmentary and partial forms, like nose-counting voting. They want a role; they want to be part of the significant developing life of Canada, and they have no, nothing offered to them that permits this, this role. So the, uh, they
Just drop out. That's all. It's a it's an involuntary gesture. Uh, I don't know whether there's likely to be any more fuss and feathers about it or not. It's simply happened. It isn't something that's going to happen. They dropped out, but they may be persuaded to return to school again.
But you know, electric technology doesn't centralize; it decentralizes human energies because it makes possible anything happening anywhere at the same time. You don't have to be in anyone's favored position in order to enjoy the advantages of electric light. You can have it under the polar ice cap, and do you can have it at the top of Mount Everest, and do it. It isn't a kind of service that is limited to any area. And the same is true of all the information in our world; it's available to everybody at the same time and uh in the same excellent measure.
Now, I I really am concerned. As a professor of literature, I'm concerned with what effect does this have on the future of literature, on the future of the work I have undertaken. I what I it has been largely irritation with these new forms that has made me consider their properties, and uh I'm not not fascination but irritation. But I have, as I become have become more attentive to the structure of these forms, I have become more fascinated. They have tremendous untapped resources that are far in excess of anything men have ever known. So I don't think there's too much occasion to despond. Thanks very much.