Bodies and Artifacts (interlude)—Sennett's Materialism

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

[7] The word materialism should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.

More than one thing can be true of course. This rage to understand social norms from every conceivable angle has, among other things, put beyond reproach the notion that said norms are in fact mirrored pretty much anywhere we might seek or find them. This certainly leads to things not being fully or properly considered in themselves . The above paragraph is yet another useful reiteration of the general thrust of this series. But it stops short of asking such questions as the following:

If social norms are reflected in everything, mustn't there nonetheless be vast differences among various objects' ways of mirroring?

Mumford—Art and Technics (postlude)

Once we have achieved the right form for a type-object, it should keep that form for the next generation, or for the next thousand years. Indeed, we should be ready to accept further variations only when some radical advance in scientific knowledge, or some radical change in the conditions of life has come about... This interpretation of the path of technics, as leading to a series of flat plateaus rather than as a steady climb upward is, I know, a baffling contradiction to the popular one. ...The animus of the last three centuries has been toward improvement, innovation, invention without end; and the chief duty of man, according to the utilitarian catechism, is to adapt himself to such mechanical changes as rapidly as is necessary to make them profitable. But this stale view assumes that we are capable of learning nothing, that we are incapable of mastering the machine we have created and putting it in its place; that we shall not emancipate ourselves from the manias and compulsions that our preoccupation with the machine has brought into existence; that philosophy and religion and art will never again open up to man the vision of a whole human life. ...But once we arrive at a fuller degree of self-understanding, we shall render unto the machine only that which belongs to the machine; and we shall give back to life the things that belong to life: initiative, power of choice, self-government—in short, freedom and creativeness. Because man must grow, we shall be content that the machine, once it has achieved the power and economy of a good type, should stand still—at least until the creator again places himself above the level of his mechanical creature.
(pp. 83-84)

This is Mumford at his most Situationist, making a connection which the Situationists themselves were too self-absorbed and self-important to make. This is the case for Functionalism itself as a weapon against wasteful consumption and alienated expression, for an ascetic rather than a hedonistic resistance to entrenched power. This is how technology can free us from the burdens of mere survival now rather than at some yet-to-be-determined time in the future.

[December 2019. Like most concluding remarks, this was originally written first rather than last.]

Mumford—Art and Technics (xvi)

[Prefatory note: I struggled mightily with this final installment of the series, so much so that what should have been a centerpiece became an afterthought. It remains both incomplete and overlong. It is at least completed somewhat by recent posts, at the cost of adding verbiage rather than paring it. Such is the content-rich, editor-poor world we live in. Enjoy, if you can.]

Lewis Mumford
Art and Technics (1952)

The general effect of this multiplication of graphic symbols has been to lessen the impact of art itself. ... In order to survive in this image-glutted world, it is necessary for us to devaluate the symbol and to reject every aspect of it but the purely sensational one. For note, the very repetition of the stimulus would make it necessary for us in self-defense to empty it of meaning if the process of repetition did not, quite automatically, produce this result. Then, by a reciprocal twist, the emptier a symbol is of meaning, the more must its user depend upon mere repetition and mere sensationalism to achieve his purpose. This is a vicious circle, if there ever was one. ...people must, to retain any degree of autonomy and self-direction, achieve a certain opacity, a certain insensitiveness, a certain protective thickening of the hide, in order not to be overwhelmed and confused by the multitude of demands that are made upon their attention.
(p. 98)

...we only half-see, half-understand what is going on; for we should be neurotic wrecks if we tried to give all the extraneous mechanical stimuli that impinge upon us anything like our full attention. That habit perhaps protects us from an early nevous breakdown; but it also protects us from the powerful impact of genuine works of art, for such works demand our fullest attention, our fullest participation, our most individualized and re-creative response. What we settle for, since we must close our minds, are the bare sensations; and that is perhaps one of the reasons that the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say. In order to make sensations seem more important than meanings, he is compelled to use processes of magnification and distortion, similar to the stunts used by the big advertiser to attract attention. So the doctine of quantification, Faster and Faster, leads to the sensationalism of Louder and Louder; and that in turn, as it affects the meaning of the symbols used by the artist, means Emptier and Emptier. This is a heavy price to pay for mass production and the artist's need to compete with mass production.
(pp. 98-99)

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xv)

"As against a single person who could use a brush passably, there were thousands who could take reasonably good photographs. Here the first effect of the machine process was to deliver people from the specialist and to restore the status and function of the amateur. Thanks to the camera, the eye at least was reeducated, after having been too long committed to the verbal symbols of print. People awoke to the constant miracles of the natural world, like an invalid long secluded in a dark room, able for the first time to breath fresh air... But though the art of taking pictures is necessarily a selective one, the very spread and progress of that art, not least with the invention of the motion picture, was in the opposite direction; it multiplied the permanent image as images had never been multiplied before, and by sheer superabundance it undermined old habits of careful evaluation and selection. And that very fact, which went along with the achievement of a democratic medium of expression, has raised a whole series of problems that we must wrestle with today, if, here as elsewhere, we are not to starve in the midst of plenty." (94-95)

"What has been the result of the mass production of esthetic symbols that began in the fifteenth century? ... [The good:] By means of our various reproductive devices, a large part of our experience, which once vanished without any sort of record, has been arrested and fixed. Because of the varied processes of reproduction that are now at hand, many important experiences, difficult to transpose into words, are now visible in images; and certain aspects of art, which were once reserved for the privileged, are now an everyday experience to those who make use of the resources of printing and photography." (95-96)

In other words, reproduction is also, in many instances, record-keeping. All of the oppression and dispossession which inhered in denial of the right to have a past, a heritage, a discrete culture, and indeed the very right to collective introspection vis-a-vis these identifications, to have a hard look in the mirror on the cultural level, all of these privileges have been progressively democratized by the ever-increasing ease and ubiquity of this "mass production of esthetic symbols."

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xiv)

"As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of the early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended upon the photographer's respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before his eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice--which sometimes occurred at the point when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints--the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit." (93)

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xiii)

"...by perfecting a mechanical method, the "taking of pictures" by a mere registration of sensations was democratized. ... What had been in the seventeenth century a slow handicraft process, requiring well-trained eyes and extremely skilled hands...now became an all-but-automatic gesture. Not entirely an automatic gesture, I hasten to add, lest any photographers in this audience should squirm in agonized silence... For after all it turns out that even in the making of the most mechanically contrived image, something more than machines and chemicals is involved. The eye, which means taste. The interest in the subject and an insight into the moment when it--or he or she--is ready. An understanding of just what esthetic values can be further brought out in the manipulation of the instrument and the materials. All these human contributions are essential. As in science, no matter how faithfully one excludes the subjective, it is still the subject who contrives the exclusion." (92)

There is, internecine politicking aside, a squirm-worthy element of these developments nonetheless: the inaccessible Technics of "a slow handicraft process" can indeed be elided via mechanization, and said process thereby rendered superfluous; but the choice and responsibility of Art, as Mumford speaks to earlier on, cannot be elided. (And why would we want them to be?) This "democratization" is thus constructive only insofar as the old Technical barriers prevented latent Art from being realized; insofar as they were concurrently preventing vapid or destructive impulses from manifesting in the material world, they were at worst neutral and at best critically important. Who is to say, really, how much of which kind of desire is latent at any given time?

The chance of gaining generative power without first passing through a protracted period of struggle and introspection is bound to be irresistible to many people, at least to the extent that they are consciously aware of this dynamic. Struggle and introspection themselves are, if inherently resistible to most people most of the time, nonetheless endemic to a certain small cross-section of the personality spectrum from which the master handicraftsperson tends to come. I say this not to valorize these traits but in fact to de-valorize them. In value-laden notions of art's place in society, such formative factors have a way of becoming value-laden too. By positing certain deep-psychological traits as conducive to artisthood and others as anathema to it, we run afoul of the distinctively American (and it is this even now, actually) belief in total freedom of vocational choice. But if artists did not place themselves on such pedestals to start with, then the assertion that not everyone is fit to be an artist ceases to be offensive, even under a regime of totally free choice¹.

And so, if the imposition of handicraft morality at a certain point came to look like a mere protection of entrenched gerontocratic interests, if its effectiveness in jump-starting a concurrent development of moral sense was habitually overstated by those same interests, if it truly is functionally dispensable, if it is a mere antiquated roadblock to self-actualization which is best bypassed altogether so as not to delay consummation, and if distribution channels (i.e. the Internet) have now belatedly undergone the complementary democratization necessary to complete the two-way artistic transaction, then I would expect great democratizations such as the one under discussion here to have begotten far greater and broader progress than they have. It seems instead that the extent of the progress has been to initiate an ever-ongoing Marshmallow Test whereby successful passage of the test has over time become defined by ever-shorter intervals of delayed gratification. For Mumford here, to the extent that it is a basic human need to be generative in some capacity or other, the ever-escalating development of the technics of reproduction has enabled this need to be met more fully, a profound social gain purchased at the equally profound cost of a correspondingly massive devaluation of the resulting products. This confounds the technocratic-progressive conceit to "a steady climb upward", pointing instead to "a series of flat plateaus" (84) borne of a complex web of concurrent microtrends. Threads of progress and regress thus swirl together in ways that can be quite confusing to the human subjects swept up in them.

To note just one much-discussed current, there are of course those whose subsistence labor commitments occupy virtually their entire lives, who simply don't have time for introspection, but who may also avail themselves of these shortcuts to generativity. There is an ever-present temptation to valorize their output (and its lack of refinement) as the essential expression of a particular oppressed class or ethnic group; yet such work surely also reflects, regardless of its other good or bad qualities, the condition of oppression itself and thus an intolerable stunting of human potential. The full introjection by the oppressed of the very artifacts of their oppression is precisely the condition in which said oppression becomes self-perpetuating. Certainly the degree of refinement needs to be a choice freely taken and not imposed from above, but therefore also not merely foreclosed by structural barriers. Short of that, who can say where the dynamic interaction of personality and circumstance, of nature and nurture, might deliver any given person who is afforded the opportunity to stop and think about all of this more-than-occasionally? Given that most basic right, reflections of identity are bound to look rather different that they do without it. And if we simply elect never to stop and think about what we are doing, then what is the point?

1. Is totally free vocational choice really such a privilege? Is it really quite so kind and caring to let young people figure all of this out for themselves just as it has become too late to change course?

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xii)

"In the case of photography...there was for long a question as to whether it was or was not art. And the answer to that question is: Is there any leeway for choice and initiative on the part of the photographer? If there is such leeway, there is a possibility of art, that is of success or failure in terms that would have significance to the beholder. Perhaps the best effect of machine art is to make us conscious of the play of the human personality in the small area where it remains free, a differentiation so delicate, so subtle, that a coarse eye would hardly take it in and an insensitive spirit would not know what it meant." (82)

p. 93 -- "As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of the early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended upon the photographer's respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before his eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice--which sometimes occurred at the point when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints--the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit."

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xi)

"Each art has its technical side...what would often be, were it not for the ultimate end of the process, sheer monotony and drudgery. But in the period when handicraft dominated, the artist and the technician arrived, as it were, at a happy compromise... That extra effort, that extra display of love and esthetic skill, tends to act as a preservative of any structure; for, until the symbols themselves become meaningless, men tend to value, and if possible to save from decay and destruction, works of art that bear the human imprint." (49)

Re: "preservatives," here is a useful, matter-of-fact statement of observations that have been made in increasingly strident terms since Mumford's time. Concretization of Art in discrete material artifacts has some of the same implications as does consciousness of and self-identification with cultures, traditions, races, etc. Perhaps there is even an evolutionary incentive for "the human imprint" to "act as a preservative" of our inanimate artistic creations much as it does regarding our living offspring; but there are, to be sure, mechanisms of devolution here as well. Concretization channels the weight of a whole array of human needs and impulses onto material objects, visual symbols, etc. The cultural-utilitarian halflife of such objects and symbols is usually quite a bit shorter than that which their "preservatives" ultimately enable them to enjoy; and so these works stick around long past their expiration date, long after they have ceased to be "relevant," as the most impatient cultural commentators would have it; this for better or for worse, and indeed often both at once. Artworks start to smell funny long before there is sufficient collective social momentum to toss them, and by the time that momentum coalesces, the discourse has become, as an apt figure of speech would have it, toxic. It turns out that this "happy compromise" plays better in times of scarcity than times of abundance; in the latter condition, more is preserved for longer than anyone can find the wherewithal to make sense of. Hence our world is overpopulated with images and ideas as well as with people.

Of course so-called relevance is very much in the eye (and the Philosophy/Theory) of the beholder. Often enough the full cultural relevance ledger looks completely irrational and counterproductive to everybody all at once. But the preservative acts upon the artifact regardless, blindly keeping in circulation the unjustly neglected and the justly ridiculed alike. If artists collectively gave as much thought to this general dynamic as they do to warring over the turf it encompasses, there would suddenly be a lot more vacant turf and a lot less fighing over it.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (x)

"In some sense, man must forgo his purely personal preference and submit to the machine before he can achieve good results in the limited province of choice that remains to him. This curtailment of freedom is not unknown even in the pure arts...material and process play this part everywhere." (81)

Indeed, not "unknown" but frequently denied or willfully ignored. The "fundamental vanity" of the infant and the "irrationality" of the savage are archetypes to which Mumford has already appealed, psychological barriers to conscious acceptance of any "curtailment of freedom" as may be threatened. These barriers are presented as pathologies or deviations, failures of normative development; as with so-called Uncommon Sense, the norm is also an achievement, not a given. If there is any sympathy due the vain and irrational, it might be grounded in the observation that many curtailments are simply imposed upon us, accepted on our behalf, or perfectly untransparent to us at pivotal moments. I will forever be envious of trombonists for the potential (not to say the certainty) of the trombone to be both in-tone and in-tune where players of valved brass face ineluctable conflicts between those two ideals. Then again, if as an adolescent this had been explained to me intellectually, I would most certainly have ignored it. Immaturity is at best half the reason why.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (ix)

"...this recognition of the human importance of technics was indeed one of the radical discoveries of modern times...[Bacon] proposed to honor inventors and scientists in the way that mankind had once honored statesmen, saints, philosophers, and religious prophets...[Marx] pointed out that the means by which a culture gained its living and mastered the physical and economic problems of existence altered profoundly its spiritual attitudes and purposes. ...The world had too long overlooked the significance of technical effort. To the old categories of the good, the true, and the [38] beautiful, modern man added an important factor that slave cultures had overlooked or degraded: the useful. That was a notable human advance." (37-38)

"Man's success in technics depended, however, upon two conditions. One of these was beneficial to the development of his personality, the other in some degree inimical to it. The great original contribution of technics was not merely to man's physical life, but to his sanity and general balance: it gave him a certain kind of respect for the nature of the materials and processes with which he worked, a sense of the painful fact that no amount of coaxing or cajoling, no repetition of spells or runes, no performance of sympathetic magic, could change a block of flint into an arrowhead or a knife. ...it was important for man's further development and maturity that he should [42] recognize that there are certain conditions of nature that can be mastered only if he approaches them with humility, indeed with self-effacement." (41-42)

[the second, "inimical" condition...] "Man's need for order and power turns him toward technics and the object, precisely as his need for playful activity, for autonomous creation, for significant expression, turns him to art and the symbol. But however important man's technical achievements are to his survival and development, we must not overlook the fact that they have, for the greater part of historic times, been achieved only at a painful sacrifice of his other functions. Except to meet pressing needs and interests, few men would devote themselves to a whole lifetime of mechanical work; indeed, those forms of work that are most effectively dehumanized--like mining--were for long treated as punishment, fit only for condemned criminals" (45-46)

So, the Technical in fact has a higher purpose beyond its material, earthly one. Albeit limited in scope, this purpose is nonetheless essential. For individuals and collectivities alike, Technics are an empirical pathway towards certain crucial developmental landmarks: towards "sanity and general balance;" towards "respect for the nature of the materials and processes" involved; towards the realization that "there are certain conditions of nature that can be mastered only if [the technician] approaches them with humility"; and, on the cosmic level, proof of "useful[ness]" as a universal value, not merely a contingent phenomenon. These are not the sentiments of a technophobe, but they do set rather narrow boundaries both for the role of Technics and for normative human development, ontogenetic and phylogenetic alike. Like any such narrow prescriptions they can be problematized on the grounds that they are not as universal as they purport to be. I confess that I for one would not be inclined to take that tack. This all describes quite well precisely what I feel I've learned from wrestling with various instruments, acoustic environments and bodily limitations. It doesn't (or it shouldn't) take a full-on natural disaster for us to learn to appreciate the power of nature; in fact colloquial reliance on disasters in their capacity as Lessons Learned points precisely to a loss of humility and understanding vis-a-vis nature, a devolution into primitive irrationality which is justified by the seeming irrationality of nature herself in bulldozing houses on one side of the street while leaving those on the other side untouched. No, if you're a wind or brass instrumentalist you can learn the same lesson less hazardously just by trying to play in tune in uncomfortably hot or cold climes. I will be thinking about this as I attempt to do so later today.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (viii)

"We ordinarily use the word technology to describe both the field of the practical arts and the systematic study of their operations and products. For the sake of clarity, I prefer to use technics alone to describe the field itself, that part of human activity wherein, by an energetic organization of the process of work, man controls and directs the forces of nature for his own purposes." (15)

"Art, in the only sense in which one can separate art and technics, is primarily the domain of the person; and the purpose of art, apart from various incidental technical functions that may be associated with it, is to widen the province of personality, so that feelings, emotions, attitudes, and values, in the special individualized form in which they happen in one particular person, in one particular culture, can be transmitted with all their force and meaning to other persons or to other cultures." (16)

"...art is that part of technics which bears the fullest imprint of the human personality; technics is that manifestation of art from which a large part of the human personality has been excluded, in order to further the mechanical process." (21)

Given these two definitions, it is more obvious how technics could get out of hand than art could, more obvious that the task of controlling/directing the forces of nature is fraught with invitations to material excess and destruction than is the seemingly private, scalable, immaterial task of "widen[ing] the province of personality." Art for the drawer can run amok in that drawer without doing any damage on the outside. It is not creation or expression per se but rather art's imperative to be "transmitted with all [its] force and meaning" where complications arise. Does whoever is on the receiving end of such transmissions get any choice in the matter? Are the technics of transmission not just as fraught as any other technical questions? Most of all, how much of this personality-widening inheres in mere creation and how much in transmission, reception, and response? This last question is, in my mind, one of the most important questions for artists living in the internet age. I would say that Cage's famous self-imposed belief that a work was not complete until it had been performed was rather out of step with his yet-more-famous conceit to the elision of the will and personality. Willfulness for the drawer is harmless, a tree falling which nobody can hear. Willfulness is not the problem, oversharing is.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (ivb)

If the acronym STEM once found merely prosaic use, it now by its mere existence and invocation encapsulates quite neatly the territory which the objective has pillaged from the non-objective. STEM encompasses the most lucrative professions and growthiest growth industries, and also demands the most rigorous academic and technical skills. It experiences shortages of qualified (home-grown) workers, and it is also too white and too male for its own good. For all of these reasons and more, STEM Matters. If "modern man" has, incidentally, also "patterned himself on the machine" with terrible consequences, if money cannot actually buy happiness (still), if the academic topics thought most rigorous are really just the most objective ones, if nature can be thought to trump nurture even where diversity is valued over homogeneity, that is none of STEM's business. STEM is too busy making money, improving lives, and generally being awesome. If you want in on that action, then STEM is what you do.

Artists as a group are liable to be more unified in their general sense of objection to this situation than they are in the substance of their specific critiques. I tend toward Mumford's outlook, seeing in the current condition of American art and artists several particular manifestations of a more widely observable human dynamic by which the objective, the quantifiable, and the provable runs amok. Against this there is the option to play ball, to commence laying out the various strictly objective cases for the value of art and artists: educational, therapeutic, economic, activist, and so on. To me this latter tack has always looked self-defeating. The harder we work at proving our own objective worth, the further we get from actually doing so, and the more ridiculous we look both to STEMers and to each other. Objective value is not what we do. I fear that we let the Technics terrorists win by trying to play their game.

In spite of this division among artists, or perhaps because of it, the A-for-Art eventually wedged its way into the acronym, forming STEAM. It takes an artist to notice a sort of symbolic conflation of chemical and physical transformation in this too-cute linguistic maneuver, and also to appreciate and reclaim the irony. STEM always carried a cultural charge and was bound to be reactive for this reason. How stable, then, is the new molecule? Where, really, are the affinities between STEM and The Arts? There are some good ones, to be sure, but do they supply the necessary energy for a change of state?

Mumford's Functionalist rejection of Industrial Design is a powerful rejoinder to orthodox STEAM rhetoric. In what he classifies as "machine arts," with printing as the paradigmatic example, "we give up a certain subjective freedom in order to better serve a common collective goal." (74) And so,

by very reason of its impersonality and standardization, a machine art, once it has achieved a high level of form, is not subject to endless variations: the main problem is to keep it at its original high level.

Whereas "repetition without variation and re-creation is fatal to the existence of the humane arts,"

This is not so with the arts of the machine. Here the type is the supreme achievement; for the sake of functional economy, for the sake of order and common use, the fewer new demands that are made, the better. The capital danger in the arts of the machine is misplaced creativity, in other words trying to make the machine take over the functions of the person. (73)

I read this as essentially a consequentialist argument. To me it is at least imaginable that pure design considerations could be applied to a more-or-less perfected technology without affecting its functionality. Mumford's unwillingness to abide, say, the painting of typewriters and coffee grinders even after they have been designed, manufactured and purchased (p. 80), seems calculated to project total rhetorical consistency rather than rhetorical grace. This is the intransigence which earned Functionalism its staunchest enemies: what kind of Puritan would want to live in a world where purely decorative touches were so deeply mistrusted as to be veritably quarantined even from the most quotidian of technical pursuits? Ironic, then, that such radical anti-functionalists as Jorn and Debord unequivocally shared Mumford's contempt for "the canons of conspicuous waste, dear to the businessman, and the newly rich" by which "someone is picking your pocket of money you might use for better purposes, under the pretext that he is furnishing you with art." (75)

In other words, where the Situs wanted to liberate desire, Mumford was deeply suspicious of it. Both saw consumerism channeling desire to nefarious ends, but where the Situs saw unmediated desire as the weapon that would topple entrenched power, Mumford saw desire as one side of an essential duality which demands balance, discipline and restraint rather than release.

From the standpoint of effective communication, the handwrought manuscript tended by its very elaboration to lose sight of its essential reason for existence. In this respect, its development was very similar to that we often find in other arts, a tendency on the part of human fantasy, once it is emancipated from the restraint of practical needs, to run riot, to seek to prolong the esthetic moment beyond any reasonable duration. ...Quite evidently this desire to prolong a pleasurable occupation, while it makes for a good life, has its own kind of shortcoming; and in the case of the book, the very esthetic excellence of the illuminators and illustrators served also to retard the process of copying and so limit the circulation of books. (69)

I suspect that printing is a well-cherrypicked example to which there not as many companions as Mumford would have us believe. That said, the current smartphone/tablet landscape seems as good an illustration as any of how collisions of agendas can disfigure a technology to the extent of interfering with a quite settled functional profile. Yet another CalArts memory comes to mind, that of Barry Schrader asserting that the digital computer is a settled type of machine which has not meaningfully changed in decades, thereby eliciting raucous protest from a gaggle of BFA-1 Music Techbros, who were palpably invested in the idea that they were entering a cutting-edge field. Mumford's Puritanical version of Functionalism (he reluctantly but unapologetically embraces both labels) is a bit hard to relate to personally, even for me; but read consequentialistically (and, as it were, pessimistically) it certainly is not lacking for anecdotal support. The balance between art and technics is an achievement, not a given, because the conflicting impulses at play here (the need for expression and the need for order) are so fundamental and powerful.

I think also of a passage from Cory Doctorow:

I’ve seen sausages made. I’ve seen laws made. Both pale in comparison to the process by which anti-copying technology agreements are made.

This technology, usually called “Digital Rights Management” (DRM), proposes to make your computer worse at copying some of the files on its hard drive or on other media. Since all computer operations involve copying, this is a daunting task — as security expert Bruce Schneier has said, “Making bits harder to copy is like making water that’s less wet.” (27)

Apple in particular, with the i-Devices, not only has made an end run around this "daunting task" but also figured out how to have people literally lining up at midnight to pay steep prices for the privilege of being thus manipulated. STEAMers sure are correct to see the iPhone as a money-machine which fully integrates the initials. It seems to me that this is, however, exactly the kind of mongrel contraption which Mumford theorized, a weaponization of aesthetics in service of endless consumption, resulting in a sleek supercomputer that can't keep a webpage loaded unless you threaten to fight it. (Yes, I own one.)

Incidentally, musical instruments are excellent examples of machines which achieve their visual appeal rather by accident, and where there are, with a few exceptions, not very many things you can do to them to change their appearance that won't at least marginally affect their utility. Instrument building is also a near-perfect STEAM topic, sitting as it does squarely on the intersection of art and technics, of rugged necessity and personal expression, of the machine arts and the performing arts. Yet even among the most accomplished high school instrumentalists, how many play so well that the differences between silver and lacquer, pistons and rotors, funnels and bowls, are viscerally rather than intellectually or rationally known? And what about the vast majority who are less accomplished, or who know these things only as abstract information that they have learned secondhand, or who have never stopped to consider them at all without prompting?

Indeed,

Behind the appearance of printing from moveable types, apparently so sudden, and on superficial analysis just a great mechanical feat, we find a thousand years of self-discipline and esthetic training, which went along with the effort to respect the gifts of the spirit and to deepen the inner life. Some of that training still is important for those who would design typography. You might think that, once printing was achieved, it would be possible to cut loose entirely from these earlier sources; but in fact the continued interdependence of art and technics could not be better illustrated than in this wholly mechanical art. ... As soon as the art of the calligrapher fell into decay, the art of type design became more difficult, for in aiming at mechanical accuracy and finish, the designer often lost the precious touch of the hand itself. Once utilitarian and rational interests predominated over esthetic ones, as they did in the nineteenth century, there followed a series of lapses both in type itself and in the layout of the printed page... (71-72)

Again, there is a consequentialist flavor to this view, but Mumford is hardly the only one to advocate for the continued need for "self-discipline and esthetic training" even as machines continue to take over more and more tasks from humans. If STEM, the brand, is too rigidly one-sided, or perhaps appears that way on the surface to concerned parents, that is a question of overall purview; the extent to which different disciplines are compartmentalized or integrated in the curriculum is an entirely different question. Maximum integration of topics seems to me unnecessary if the goal is simply to develop the whole person, though I fear the actual goal is simply to look that way superficially. Comprehensive education seems like the obvious winner in any case. But of course comprehensive education is, again, essentially politically unviable anywhere fiscal conservativism reaches a certain critical mass, and so this invites some messy workarounds. STEAMers certainly can count on the artists to play along: we're generally happy to trade our street cred for any degree of mainstream acceptance vis-a-vis this vocal minority of true believers in Hire Education. There is liable to be a personal incentive for us to integrate our marginalized disciplines with more prestigious ones regardless of the potential therein. Call it a classic democratic compromise where nobody gets exactly what they want.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (vi)

"...until recently we have taken for granted that, since we ourselves live in a Machine Age and boast of that fact, every other age was correspondingly dominated and influenced by its tools and technical devices. Despite our own devaluation of symbolism we had nevertheless made the Machine the symbol of life itself, and transferred our own obsession with that particular idol to every other phase of human history." (38-39)

"One has only to compare the cave paintings of the Aurignacian hunters with the tools that they used to see that their technical instruments...were extremely primitive, while their symbolic arts were so advanced that many of them stand on a par, in economy of line and esthetic vitality, with the work of the Chinese painters of the Sung dynasty." (39)

"Early man had created vast and wonderful symbolic structures in language at a time when a handful of tools sufficed to meet his needs in hunting and agriculture...
a civilization of great complexity arose in Egypt and Peru before the invention of the wheel as a means of transportation. If man were preeminently the tool-using animal, this long backwardness in technics would be hard to account for." (40)

And so man is therefore preeminently the...aesthete? Symbolist? Builder of complex civilizations? If as a species we are not quite "preeminently" aesthetic, Mumford's gloss at least restores aesthetics to its rightful place of phylogenetic priority.

The anthropological bent here could be an excellent testimonial in favor of the arts as a basic necessity, a human right, a core subject, etc., or it could be the opposite. Perhaps aesthetic refinement and self-indulgence are not just tendencies but desires, not mere bad habits learned from European romanticism but rather top-shelf items in a hierarchy of needs. Or, perhaps today's rigidly formalized consolidations of aesthetics (broad) into art (much narrower) are indeed perverted/alienated/denatured/artificial forms of expression which civilizations use to channel dangerous impulses into benign ones. As I see it, the phylogenetic priority of aesthetics is precisely what justifies and demands its consolidation into formalized practices. Basic human needs tend to become sites of formal knowledge gathering, cultivation, and refinement precisely because of their importance to human life, not in spite of it. Indeed, they almost inevitably become sites of alienation for the same reason; but proscriptions against formalization are alienating too.

-----

...here again [in printing] the esthetic symbol preceeded the practical use. For the first application of printing was in the domain of art, the printing of woodcuts: it was only at a later stage that the interest in the word led to...the invention of movable type. (67)

Is it an incidental detail that the particular piece of social technics which precipitated this was "the word?" Does this not seal the deal that mere words, like symbols, operate on "art" in their ephemeral ways much as machines loom more materially?

Mumford -- Art and Technics (v)

"What my friend Matthew Nowicki used to say about architecture--that a great client was essential in the production of a great building--holds for every other form of art..." (28)

"[the] stage of full maturity...that only great art reaches...in both the artist and his community it demands a certain dedication, indeed a certain sacrifice, that sets it off from the more decorative and pleasurable phases of art." (29)

Cue Branford on Cecil for a not-so-friendly reminder that there are limits to what artists can reasonably expect from audiences. That said, neither community nor clientele is exactly the same as audience; in fact, Mumford reminds us here, the latter is rather limited in influence compared to the more pervasive, less tractable influence of both the wider community and the specific person or group controlling the purse strings.

I suspect that virtually every gigging musician can recall at least one instance (but probably more than one) of client and audience being out of step, where all chains of accountability ran through the client and none directly between artist and audience. Perhaps this scenario belongs too properly to the commercial rather than the artistic world to be relevant here; it most certainly belongs to the community, though, and it most certainly represents a temporary breakdown of that institution. Communities get the art they deserve, the art for which they have laid the foundation via whatever conduct and discourse prevails therein; clients get the art they ask for, whether they know what they're actually asking for or not; and audiences too often are left to choose from among the debris field of broken relationships and communication bottlenecks.

The notion that the community has a role to play in helping its art to reach the greatest possible heights has unfortunately become conflated with the task of initiating the non-initiated into such esoteric art practices as the administrophere sees fit to impose on them. This in and of itself does nothing to create the conditions under which art thrives.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (iva)

"Our power and knowledge, our scientific discoveries and our technical achievements, have all been running wild because Western man turned his back upon the very core and center of his own life. ... More and more, from the sixteenth century on, modern man patterned himself upon the machine. Despite sentimental compunctions of various sorts, compunctions expressed in the romantic movement, in nationalism, in the reactivation of Christian theology, Western man has sought to live in a nonhistoric and impersonal world of matter and motion, a world with no value except the value of quantities; a world of causal sequences, not human purposes. ... In such a world, man's spiritual life is limited to that part of it which directly or indirectly serves science and technics: all other interests and activities of the person are suppressed as "non-objective," emotional, and therefore unreal." (12-13)

And so the place of the "non-objective" in education, for example, remains a highly polarizing issue which nowadays must be relitigated by each generation. Educational quality that cannot be quantified cannot be proved. Deficits of trust lead to ever-louder calls for greater Accountability, an edifice which is built only from the objective standpoint.

As with technical progress in the arts, I'm more convinced of the correlation than the causation here when it comes to human beings seemingly "pattern[ing themselves] upon the machine." Technological progress certainly provides means and models that did not previously exist; but there already existed strictly human dynamics which point in the same direction. The less cultural consensus we share, the more our various atomized cultures must be litigated by our consensus-based institutions, and the further we sink into the abyss of radical empiricism, low-trust economics, and institutional sclerosis. Certainly mechanization is instrumental here, and also materially and symbolically aligned with such rages for order; but for mechanization to itself serve as an idol is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a tyranny of objectivity to take hold. All that is needed is enough of the right (or wrong) kind of people.

Indeed, common culture can in fact be seen as its own tyrannically objective force, even in its pre-mechanized epoch.

Europe, at that time [the fourteenth century], had created an imposing symbolic structure, in the dogmas, the philosophy, the ritual, and the daily pattern of conduct promoted by the Christian Church. Medieval civilization was overcome not by its weaknesses but by its achievements. So successful was this effort at symbolization, this habit of seeing every fact and every event as a witness to the truths of the Christian religion, that a plethora of symbolic "inner" meanings lay over every natural event and every simple act: nothing was itself or existed in its own right, it was always a point of reference for something else whose ultimate habitat was another world. The simplest operations of the mind were cluttered by symbolic verbiage of an entirely nonoperational kind. (57)

For Mumford (continuing),

In order to come clean, man took refuge in a different kind of order and a different kind of abstraction: in mechanical order, in number, in regularity, in drill. Unfortunately, Western Man in his search for the object, presently forgot the object of his search. In getting rid of an embarrassing otherworldliness he also got rid of himself.

This implies that there is an element of backlash in the post-enlightenment tyranny of Technics, that it somehow began as an overcorrection for a tyranny of art. To the contrary, I read this as the best demonstration yet that language and "symbolization" are actually branches of Technics, not of Art. The greatest "success" of the medieval Christian Church was social control, and this

plethora of symbolic "inner" meanings [which] lay over every natural event and every simple act

was a huge part of that enterprise. This was a world as unreceptive to the artistic and the ephemeral as any work review with your boss at the office ever could be. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that modern corporations and offices have developed their own lexicons and dialects, and their own code-switching practices; and it is not for nothing that the imposition of code-switching itself, of which it could just as well be said that

the simplest operations of the mind [are] cluttered by symbolic verbiage of an entirely nonoperational kind

is properly seen as an instrument of oppression when it is demanded of people based on their self- or perceived identity rather than by the real requirements of the task at hand.

The individuals who today populate such institutions serve objective, technical masters, be those masters human, mechanical, or conceptual. These people are totally managed and hence must manage back. It is true that the specter of real, violent death imposed from without has been replaced by the relatively humane specter of Career Suicide. But at least the medievals believed in an afterlife.

The ultimate lesson of all this is that there is no escaping from freedom, as it were, back into consensus. Both the bounded cultural world Mumford describes above and the fragmented one Americans live in today impose an objective Way that is not so easy to swim against. This indicates that institutions, in spite of their sclerotic predisposition, are more susceptible to progressive change than people are. We have ceded a lot of "personal responsibility" but refuse to cede control. Few of us could survive in the wild, so to speak, but most all of us want our needs met on our terms. Trust is still strictly conditional; changes in the conditions are trivial compared to the stability of the institution of conditionality itself.

Mumford is easily misread as a crank or a technophobe. His superficial biases certainly get the better of him on many occasions here. But ultimately he writes not against progress but in favor of balance between opposing forces. This is the most compelling part of his argument because it describes a human dynamic that can be seen in quite a few other yin-yang dualities besides the one which gives this work its title.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (iii)

...that the development of art historically has its parallel in the development of the individual, and that human infants exhibit, without embarrassment, many characteristics we find most marked [25] in the artist--above all a certain innocent self-love, which makes him regard his own productions as precious and worthy of attention. Without that fundamental vanity, man might never have had sufficient respect for the materials of symbolism to transform them into works of art--works taking stable form under and exacting discipline, and so capable of influencing the feelings and conduct of other men. (24-25)

Here is the old saw, artists as infantile. We find certain infantile traits "most marked" in the artist; they are noticeable, then, but are they determinative? Essential?

Whatever LM means precisely by "innocent self-love," whatever is "fundamental" about his notion of the infant-artist's "fundamental vanity," one can certainly confirm the resemblance anecdotally, and perhaps copiously in certain milieux (e.g. art school). I would, however, caution against defining artisthood this way; that is, to move from correlation to causation, as many in the post-Freudian continuum did. Creativity is one of those traits of children that lead armchair psychologists to trumpet the value of staying young at heart; but for every one of these traits there are a handful of others which are handicaps to artists much the same as they are to any other adult. I cannot help but think here of the popular, movie-made image of Mozart as against that of Bach, Beethoven or Brahms, or dozens of other Grown Ass Men and Women whose art has outlived them. Perhaps, then, it would be better to say that the arts are a sector where it is easier get away with not growing up, especially if you're talented (true of most fields), or even if you're not (I think this is the biggest difference).

By locating "sufficient respect for the materials of symbolism" as arising only from the artist's vanity, LM makes out "stable form" and "exacting discipline" to be quite the chores. By this account, a socially maladaptive/pathological trait (infantilism) is in fact well-adapted to and defined as normal within the world of art. The mind of the artist, this child's mind in an adult's body, could never find "discipline" rewarding in and of itself, but if discipline is what it takes to sate the artist's vanity, then it is a means to an end which will be milked for all its worth. I have known and worked with several people like this, generally for short periods of time.

Of course no sooner has the infant-artist axis been established than LM reveals a schema for an artistic maturation process (a deep-psychological one, in contrast to the merely behavioristic observations which precede). In the highest stage the artist "lose[s] himself in [the] act" of creation, which has become all about "begetting fresh forms of life," the work becoming "itself an independent force", etc. This all sounds lovely, but it's not clear (nor is it ever really addressed) that there is any real correlation between good intentions, good artists, and good art. I would question whether creation and reception have ever been well-integrated enough to bear the weight of the prescriptions he issues for them here. For LM it is the second of three stages, the "adolescent," during which "exhibitionism passes into communication." To the contrary, I would argue that "communication" per se is essentially a branch of technics, not art. To speak of communication rather than something more vague or euphemistic, to speak of symbols rather than signals, is precisely to hone in on "that manifestation of art from which a large part of the human personality has been excluded." Communication is the technical end to which language is merely the most capable and nuanced means; art is also nuanced but not nearly so capable. To define art and artisthood as literally communicative points, ironically, toward the fully-rationalized world LM writes against. This is art-ontological technics run amok, elevating a more technical, tractable function over fuzzier ones, and conflating concreteness of expression with maturity of purpose.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (ii)

...the very growth of mechanical facilities has given people a false ideal of technical perfectionism, so that unless they can compete with the products of the machine or with those whose professional training qualifies them for such a public appearance, they are all too ready to take a back seat. (pp. 6-7)

If "professional training" has contributed to a chilling effect borne of meaninglessly inflated standards, then the technologies responsible are not the ones which automate and dehumanize the task in question but rather the technologies which enable culture to be recorded, archived, and disseminated. (Perish the thought that the last step, reception, will eventually somehow be automated too.) I would say that in music, at least, we can observe the emergence of "a false ideal of technical perfectionism" which is borne entirely of human dynamics and which predates the usual technological suspects. Eminent musical technicians have set many a new bar unaided by concurrent technological advance and without taking mechanical reproduction as their model^{1 2}. But they have been reliant on information technology to make available relevant artifacts of the past, distant and recent alike. For temporal artists who need to gather firsthand evidence, faster travel has helped too (it could have saved Bach several weeks of walking), but in a pragmatic rather than a generative way.

So, mechanization has been the primary means of development of a mass culture which shrunk the world and accelerated change in the widest-reaching ways. Yet even today there are only a few corners of the musical universe where machines are truly admired to the point of serving as models for human musical ambitions. It seems to me that musicians fairly reliably get where they're going in this respect via the dynamic interaction of nature and nurture, and indeed that this interaction is a bit too dynamic for "compet[ing] with the products of the machine" to ever hold much interest for more than a few of us, not even when we are surrounded by machines as seductive as the iPhone and the 3-D printer. In other words, we must eventually zoom in from the bird's eye view where Mumford has perched himself, at which point it becomes clear that not everyone is inexoribly led to form such "false ideals" no matter how thoroughly such ideals surround them. Even now we still have a few evangelists for slow food, quiet music, close reading, etc. The early-period Situationists confronted the 1950s at far younger ages than did Professor Mumford, yet they certainly shared his contention that

with all our superabundance of energy, food, materials, products, there has been no commensurate improvement in the quality of our daily existence. (13)

Perhaps, then, the Situs' basic critique was not as radical as their proposed solutions. By the same token, perhaps Mumford resolves the Structure-Agency problem too one-sidedly because he is interested in interventions to which only Structure is susceptible; in reform rather than revolution. But then a sociology of technical perfectionism is needed before practical reform can be theorized, and I don't think we have that here. Later on we learn, in fact, that Mumford himself (suddenly ahead of his time rather than behind it) expects to find the social valuation of mechanization leading rather than trailing technological development itself.

men become mechanized, they themselves are transformed into mechanical, uniform, replaceable parts, or they teach themselves how to perform, with accuracy, standardized and repeatable acts, before they take the final step of inventing machines that take on these duties. The social division of labor precedes the mechanical division of labor, and the mechanical division of labor, in general, precedes the invention of complicated automatic machines. (64-65)

And he continues,

The first step is to reduce a whole human being into a magnified eye, a magnified hand, a magnified finger, subordinating every other function to that whose province is enlarged. This specialization takes place even under the handicraft system at a late stage in its development. By breaking the once unified process of work into a series of fractional operations...the output can be increased at the simple cost of taking all the fun and interest and personal responsibility out of the operation for the worker.

Those who enjoy pillorying millennials for sport can entertain themselves unpacking whether "fun" and "interest" are reasonable things to expect out of your job. For the rest of us, the phrase that leaps off the page is "personal responsibility." Here Mumford, the non-revolutionary, encapsulates in concise, plain language why mass production is not merely tedious but in fact socially destructive. Personal responsibility, this central tenet of classical conservatism, is directly countervailed by the ways neo-conservatives like to pursue economic growth. This is worth keeping in mind anytime the "anti-business" epithet is trotted out in American political warfare.

I would propose that the now-endemic corporate and governmental construct of Accountability, a superhuman human standard whose rigidity gives it a clear affinity with mechanization/automation but which clearly issues from of all kinds of forces besides machine worship, is in fact a desperate effort to re-wrest control of the post-responsibility worker, whose predictable response to a world where "fun" and "interest" take place only outside of work now creates an unsustainable level of friction within the prevailing social and economic systems. Machines are both models of accountability themselves and far superior to humans as tools for testing and imposing accountability on other humans. Plus, they don't need to have fun.

I did at one time perform (and rehearse) extensively with an ensemble where contact mics and digital tuners were de rigeur during rehearsals. I take every opportunity to relate this experience to other professional brass players and have yet to find one who thinks this is a good idea. I'm also positive that the formative events leading to this outcome in that group of people need not await the invention of even more accurate tuners in order to find full expression. Here the machine was neither competitor nor prophet; it was merely meeting an unmet psychological need. Where stakes are not so high and solutions not so elusive, meanwhile, I would expect to find very few people and institutions worshipping the machine. The self-cleaning oven is foremost about exempting us from the chore and only secondarily about doing a better job of it.


1. Daniel Wolf:

let's throw out any claims for an inevitable progression in musical history from less to more complex -- it didn't happen as we left antiquity, with its now-lost enharmonic genus and wealth of modal melodic types, it didn't happen in the way from the late 14th through the early 16th centuries, it didn't happen from the late Baroque to classicism -- successive musics focused on different issues, and the location of audible or associative complexity in musical textures moved as well. We need a more complex view of musical complexity.

2. Milo Fine:

each succeeding generation has "improved" technical wiring; which is why, for instance, contemporary composers are generally one generation ahead of people actually being able to realize what they write. This is much more inevitable than it is admirable; a natural progression of technique, but, of course, not necessarily resonance.

Lewis Mumford -- Art and Technics (i)

Three and a half centuries ago Francis Bacon hailed the advancement of scientific learning and mechanical invention as the surest means of relieving man's estate: with a few expiatory gestures of piety, he turned his back upon religion and philosophy and art and pinned every hope for human improvement on the development of mechanical invention. ... Neither Bacon nor his eager followers in science and technics...had any anticipation of the fact that all our hard-won mastery of the physical world might, in the twentieth century, threaten the very existence of the human race. If by some clairvoyance Bacon could have followed to their ultimate conclusions the developments he forecast with such unqualified optimism, he might easily have decided, instead of continuing his speculations in science, to write Shakespeare's plays, as at least a more innocent occupation.

(pp. 4-5)

Already by adolescence music had seduced me away from cultivating a latent interest in science which had always existed more in word than deed. The disparity in earning potential between the two tracks leads unavoidably to grass-is-always-greener moments for those of us who followed our muse, but I must confess that current technological events have thoroughly eliminated any purely altruistic regrets. I'm not sure there's anything we can do to slow down the forces that have already been set in motion, and I'm not sure we should; but I am very glad, for the sake of my own conscience, that I haven't invented any of it myself.

My paternal grandfather the scientist is said to have remarked that he would have rather lived in the nineteenth century with penicillin. I find myself leaning that way nowadays.