DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Word order By
Lewis H Lapham
I speak Spanish to God,
Italian to women, French to men, and German to my
horse. - Emperor Charles V
But in which language does one speak to a
machine, and what can be expected by way of
response? The questions arise from the
accelerating data streams out of which we've
learned to draw the breath of life, posed in
consultation with the equipment that scans the
flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the
GPS, and the EKG, arranges the assignations on
Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman
Sachs, catalogs the
pornography and drives the
car, tells us how and when and where to connect
the dots and thus recognize ourselves as human
beings.
Why then does it come to pass that
the more data we collect - from Google, YouTube,
and Facebook - the less likely we are to know what
it means?
The conundrum is in line with
the late Marshall McLuhan's noticing 50 years ago
the presence of "an acoustic world", one with "no
continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no
stasis", a new "information environment of which
humanity has no experience whatever". He published
Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the
premise that "we become what we behold," that "we
shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape
us."
Media were to be understood as
"make-happen agents" rather than as "make-aware
agents," not as art or philosophy but as systems
comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers.
Content follows form; new means of communication
give rise to new structures of feeling and
thought.
To account for the transference
of the idioms of print to those of the electronic
media, McLuhan examined two technological
revolutions that overturned the epistemological
status quo. First, in the mid-fifteenth century,
Johannes Gutenberg's invention of moveable type,
which deconstructed the illuminated wisdom
preserved on manuscript in monasteries, encouraged
people to organize their perceptions of the world
along the straight lines of the printed page.
Second, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the applications of electricity (telegraph,
telephone, radio, movie camera, television screen,
eventually the computer), favored a sensibility
that runs in circles, compressing or eliminating
the dimensions of space and time, narrative
dissolving into montage, the word replaced with
the icon and the rebus.
Within a year of
its publication, Understanding Media acquired the
standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author
the foremost oracle of the age. The New York
Herald Tribune proclaimed him "the most important
thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and
Pavlov." Although never at a loss for Delphic
aphorism - "The electric light is pure
information"; "In the electric age, we wear all
mankind as our skin" - McLuhan assumed that he had
done nothing more than look into the window of the
future at what was both obvious and certain.
Floating the fiction of
democracy In 1964, I was slow to take the
point, possibly because I was working at the time
in a medium that McLuhan had listed as endangered
- writing, for The Saturday Evening Post, inclined
to think in sentences, accustomed to associating a
cause with an effect, a beginning with a middle
and an end. Television news I construed as an
attempt to tell a story with an alphabet of
brightly colored children's blocks, and when
offered the chance to become a correspondent for
NBC, I declined the referral to what I regarded as
a course in remedial reading.
The judgment
was poorly timed. Within five years The Saturday
Evening Post had gone the way of the great auk;
news had become entertainment, entertainment news,
the distinctions between a fiction and a fact as
irrelevant as they were increasingly difficult to
parse. Another 20 years and I understood what
McLuhan meant by the phrase, "The medium is the
message," when in the writing of a television
history of America's foreign policy in the
twentieth century, I was allotted roughly 73
seconds in which to account for the origins of
World War II, while at the same time providing a
voiceover transition between newsreel footage of
Jesse Owens running the hundred-yard dash at the
Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936, and Adolf
Hitler marching the Wehrmacht into Vienna in the
spring of 1938.
McLuhan regarded the
medium of television as better suited to the sale
of a product than to the expression of a thought.
The voice of the first person singular becomes
incorporated into the collective surges of emotion
housed within an artificial kingdom of wish and
dream; the viewer's participation in the insistent
and ever-present promise of paradise regained
greatly strengthens what McLuhan identified as
"the huge educational enterprise that we call
advertising." By which he didn't mean the
education of a competently democratic citizenry -
"Mosaic news is neither narrative, nor point of
view, nor explanation, nor comment" - but rather
as "the gathering and processing of exploitable
social data" by "Madison Avenue frogmen of the
mind" intent on retrieving the sunken subconscious
treasure of human credulity and desire.
McLuhan died on New Year's Eve 1979, 15
years before the weaving of the World Wide Web,
but his concerns over the dehumanized extensions
of man (a society in which it is the machine that
thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of
the thing) are consistent with those more recently
noted by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who
suggests that the data-mining genius of the
computer reduces individual human expression to "a
primitive, retrograde activity." Among the framers
of the digital constitution, Lanier in the
mid-1980s was a California computer engineer
engaged in the early programming of virtual
reality.
In the same way that McLuhan in
his more optimistic projections of the electronic
future had envisioned unified networks of
communication restoring mankind to a state of
freedom not unlike the one said to have existed in
the Garden of Eden, so too Lanier had entertained
the hope of limitless good news. Writing in 2010
in his book You Are Not a Gadget, he finds that
the ideology promoting radical freedom on the
surface of the Web is "more for machines than
people" - machines that place advertising at the
"center of the human universe ... the only form of
expression meriting general commercial protection
in the new world to come. Any other form of
expression to be remashed, anonymized, and
decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness."
The reduction of individual human
expression to a "primitive, retrograde activity"
accounts for the product currently being sold
under the labels of "election" and "democracy".
The candidates stand and serve as farm equipment
meant to cultivate an opinion poll, their value
measured by the cost of their manufacture; the
news media's expensive collection of talking heads
bundles the derivatives into the commodity of
market share. The steadily higher cost of floating
the fiction of democracy - the sale of political
television advertising up from nearly $200 million
in the presidential election of 1996 to $2 billion
in the election of 2008 - reflects the
ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact.
Like the music in elevators, the
machine-made news comes and goes on a reassuringly
familiar loop, the same footage, the same
spokespeople, the same commentaries, what was said
last week certain to be said this week, next week,
and then again six weeks from now, the sequence
returning as surely as the sun, demanding little
else from the would-be citizen except devout
observance. French Novelist Albert Camus in the
1950s already had remanded the predicament to an
aphorism: "A single sentence will suffice for
modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."
Ritual becomes the form of applied
knowledge that both McLuhan and Lanier define as
pattern recognition - Nike is a sneaker or a cap,
Miller beer is wet, Paris Hilton is not a golf
ball. The making of countless connections in the
course of a morning's googling, an afternoon's
shopping, an evening's tweeting constitutes the
guarantee of being in the know. Among people who
worship the objects of their own invention -
money, cloud computing, the Super Bowl - the
technology can be understood, in Swiss playwright
Max Frisch's phrase, as "the knack of so arranging
the world that we don't have to experience it."
Better to consume it, best of all to buy it, and
to the degree that information can be commodified
(as corporate logo, designer dress, politician
custom-fitted to a super PAC) the amassment of
wealth and the acquisition of power follows from
the labeling of things rather than from the making
of them.
The voice of money talking to
money Never have so many labels come so
readily to hand, not only on Fox News and MSNBC,
but also on the Goodyear blimp and on the fence
behind home plate at Yankee Stadium. The
achievement has been duly celebrated by the
promoters of "innovative delivery strategies" that
broaden our horizons and brighten our lives with
"quicker access to valued customers."
Maybe I miss the "key performance
indicators," but I don't know how a language meant
to be disposable enriches anybody's life. I can
understand why words construed as product
placement serve the interest of the corporation or
the state, but they don't "enhance" or "empower"
people who would find in their freedoms of thought
and expression a voice, and therefore a life, that
they can somehow recognize as their own.
The regime change implicit in the
ascendant rule of signs funds the art of saying
nothing. Meaning evaporates, the historical
perspective loses its depth of field, the
vocabulary contracts. George Orwell made the point
in 1946, in his essay "Politics and the English
Language". "The slovenliness of our language," he
said, "makes it easier for us to have foolish
thoughts. If one gets rid of these habits, one can
think more clearly, and to think clearly is a
necessary first step toward political
regeneration."
Advertising isn't
interested in political regeneration. The purpose
is to nurture foolish thoughts, and the laziness
of mind suckled at the silicone breasts of CBS and
Disney counts as a consumer benefit. The
postliterate sensibility is offended by anything
that isn't television, views with suspicion the
compound sentence, the subordinate clause, words
of more than three syllables. The home and studio
audiences become accustomed to hearing voices
swept clean of improvised literary devices,
downsized into data points, degraded into
industrial-waste product.
Ambiguity
doesn't sell the shoes. Neither does taking time
to think, or allowing too long a pause between the
subject and the predicate. In the synthetic
America the Beautiful, everything good is easy,
anything difficult is bad, and the customer is
always right. The body politic divides into
constituencies of one, separate states of wishful
thinking receding from one another at the speed of
light.
Every loss of language, whether
among the northern Inuit or the natives of the
Jersey Shore, the critic George Steiner writes
down as "an impoverishment in the ecology of the
human psyche" comparable to the depletion of
species in California and Ecuador. The abundance
of many languages (as many as 68 of them in
Mexico), together with the richness of their
lexical and grammatical encoding (the many uses of
the subjunctive among certain tribes in Africa)
stores, as do the trees in Amazonia, a "boundless
wealth of possibility" that cannot be replaced by
the machinery of the global market.
"The
true catastrophe of Babel," says Steiner, "is not
the scattering of tongues. It is the reduction of
human speech to a handful of planetary,
'multinational' tongues ... Anglo-American
standardized vocabularies" and grammar shaped by
"military technocratic megalomania" and "the
imperatives of commercial greed."
Which is
the voice of money talking to money, in the
currency that Toni Morrison, accepting the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1993, denominates as "the
language that drinks blood," happy to "admire its
own paralysis," possessed of "no desire or purpose
other than maintaining the free range of narcotic
narcissism…dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting
reverence in schoolchildren, providing a shelter
for despots." Language designed to "sanction
ignorance and preserve privilege," prioritized to
fit the needs of palsied bureaucracy, retrograde
religion, or our own 2012 presidential election.
History's grim data-mining
operations The vocabulary is limited but
long abiding. The aristocracy of ancient Rome
didn't engage in dialog with slaves, a segment of
the population classified by the Roman
agriculturalist Marcus Terentius Varro as
"speaking tools," animate but otherwise equivalent
to an iPhone app.
The sponsors of the
Spanish Inquisition, among them Charles V,
possibly in consultation with his horse, ran
data-mining operations not unlike the ones
conducted by Facebook. So did the content
aggregators otherwise known as the NKVD in Soviet
Russia, as the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. In South
Africa during most of the 20th century the policy
of apartheid was dressed up in propaganda that
novelist Breyten Breytenbach likens to the sound
of a "wooden tongue clacking away in the wooden
orifice in order to produce the wooden singsong
praises to the big bang-bang and the fluttering
flag".
The Internet equips the fear of
freedom with even more expansive and far-seeing
means of surveillance than were available to Tomás
de Torquemada or Joseph Goebbels, provides our own
national security agencies with databanks that
sift the email traffic for words earmarked as
subversive, among them "collective bargaining,"
"occupy," and "rally."
The hope and
exercise of freedom relies, in 2012 as in 1939, on
what Breytenbach understood as the keeping of "the
word alive, or uncontaminated, or at least to
allow it to have a meaning, to be a conduit of
awareness." The force and power of the words
themselves, not their packaging or purchase price.
Which is why when listening to New York publishers
these days tell sad stories about the death of
books in print, I don't find myself moved to
tears. They confuse the container with the thing
contained, as did the 15th-century illuminati who
saw in Gutenberg's printing press the mark and
presence of the Devil. Filippo de Strata, a
Benedictine monk and a copier of manuscripts,
deplored the triumph of wickedness:
Through printing, tender boys and
gentle girls, chaste without foul stain,
take in whatever mars the purity of mind or
body ... Writing indeed, which brings in gold
for us, should be respected and held to be
nobler than all goods, unless she has
suffered degradation in the brothel of the
printing presses. She is a maiden with a pen,
a harlot in print.
The humanist
scholars across Europe discerned the collapse of
civilization, the apocalypse apparent to Niccolò
Perotti, teacher of poetry and rhetoric at the
University of Bologna, who was appalled by "a new
kind of writing which was recently brought to us
from Germany ... Anyone is free to print whatever
they wish ... for the sake of entertainment, what
would best be forgotten, or, better still, erased
from all books." McLuhan in 1964 ridiculed the
same sort of fear and trembling in Grub Street by
observing that, in the twentieth century as in the
fifteenth, the literary man preferred "to 'view
with alarm' and 'point with pride,' while
scrupulously ignoring what's going on." He
understood that the concerns had to do with the
moving of the merchandise as opposed to the making
of it, where the new money was to be found, how to
collect what tolls on which shipments of the
grammar and the syntax. Then as now, the questions
are neither visionary nor new. They accompanied
the building of the nation's railroads and the
stringing of its telephone poles, and as is
customary under the American definition of free
enterprise, I expect them to be resolved in favor
of monopoly.
The more relevant questions
are political and epistemological. What counts as
a claim to knowledge? How do we know what we think
we know? Which inputs prop up even one of the
seven pillars of wisdom? Without a human language
holding a common store of human value, how do we
compose a society governed by a human form of
politics?
The history of the ultimate
toy Every age is an age of information,
its worth and meaning always subject to change
without much notice. Whether shaped as ideograph
or mathematical equation, as gesture, encrypted
code, or flower arrangement, the means of
communication are as restless as the movement of
the sea, as numberless as the expressions that
drift across the surface of the human face.
The written word emerges from the spoken
word, the radar screen from signal fires,
compositions for full orchestra and choir from the
tapping of a solitary drum. The various currencies
of glyph and sign trade in concert and in
competition with one another. Books will perhaps
become more expensive and less often seen, but
clearly they are not soon destined to vanish from
the earth. Bowker's Global Books in Print accounts
for the publication of 316,480 new titles in 2010,
up from 247,777 in 1998. In the United States in
2010, 751,729,000 books were sold, the revenue
stream of $11.67 billion defying the trend of
economic downturn and the voyaging into
cyberspace. The book remains, and likely will
remain, the primary store of human energy and
hope.
The times, like all others, can be
said to be the best of times and the worst of
times. The Internet can be perceived as a cesspool
of misinformation, a phrase that frequently
bubbles up to a microphone in Congress or into the
pages of the Wall Street Journal; it also can be
construed as a fountain of youth pouring out data
streams in directions heretofore unimaginable and
unknown, allowing David Carr, media columnist and
critic for the New York Times, to believe that
"someday, I should be able to walk into a hotel in
Kansas, tell the television who I am and find
everything I have bought and paid for, there for
the consuming."
Carr presumably knows
whereof he speaks, and I'm content to regard the
Internet as the best and brightest machine ever
made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin
ear and a wooden tongue. It is one thing to browse
the Internet; it is another thing to write for it.
The author doesn't speak to a fellow human
being, whether a Spaniard, a Frenchman, or a
German. He or she addresses an algorithm geared to
accommodate keywords - insurance, Steve Jobs,
Muammar Gaddafi, mortgage, Casey Anthony - but is
neither willing nor able to wonder what the words
might mean. It scans everything but hears nothing,
as tone-deaf as the filtering devices maintained
by a search engine or the Pentagon, processing
words as lifeless objects, not as living subjects.
The strength of language doesn't consist
in its capacity to pin things down or sort things
out. "Word work," Toni Morrison said in Stockholm,
"is sublime because it is generative," its
felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. "We
die," she said. "That may be the meaning of life.
But we do language. That may be the measure of our
lives." Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a
sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer's day,
offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of
immortality: "So long as men can breathe or eyes
can see,/So long lives this and this gives life to
thee."
Maybe our digital technology is
still too new. Writing first appears on clay
tablets around 3000 BC; it's another 3,300 years
before mankind invents the codex; from the codex
to moveable type, 1,150 years; from moveable type
to the Internet, 532 years. Forty years haven't
passed since the general introduction of the
personal computer; the World Wide Web has only
been in place for 20.
We're still playing
with toys. The Internet is blessed with
undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language
is not yet one of them. Absent the force of the
human imagination and its powers of expression,
our machines cannot accelerate the hope of
political and social change, which stems from
language that induces a change of heart.
Lewis H Lapham is editor of
Lapham's Quarterly. Formerly editor of Harper's
Magazine, he is the author of numerous books,
including Money and Class in America, Theater
of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions
to Empire. The New York Times has likened
him to H L Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a
strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe
has compared him to Montaigne. This essay
introduces "Means of Communication," the Spring
2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly.
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