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 between ever-escalating mechanization and human beings increasingly "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 to order/control; but for mechanization to serve as an idol for self-modeling is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a tyranny of objectivity to take hold. Rather, it takes a certain kind of person for that, and there are many other ways for them to meet their needs. 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, whereby
the simplest operations of the mind were 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 populate these modern institutions serve objective, technical masters, be those masters human, mechanical, or conceptual. They 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. Certainly there has been great progress since medieval times, but it is institutional progress against the backdrop of which the people ourselves haven't changed much. We have ceded a lot of "personal responsibility" but we still feel the need for 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 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.
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=--=--=--= COMMENTS "even within the last generation, a philosopher as resolutely concerned with life in all its creativity as Henri Bergson, proposed that we should drop the Linnaean classification of man and call him not Homo Sapiens but Homo Faber, Man the Maker. This preoccupation with technics even caused Bergson to misinterpret the very nature of language, treating it as if it originated in the same tendencies as led man to create tools, seeing language in its relatively late tendency to conceptualize and geometrize experience, rather than in its original form, visible to us in the intercourse of a mother and her baby, as the vehicle, par excellence, of emotion and intuition, of fellow feeling and love, with a minimum of intellectual content." (Mumford, p. 38) "In order to understand the essential quality of the poet and the poetic art, we have to take account of the material in which the artist works far more than we need to do in the case of the arts of plastic and picture. For this material, language, is itself a purely human creation, which had a birth and development of its own before it was used in poetry; and this we can only understand as a creative process. ... In one point modern research is more or less unanimous: that the most vital elements in our culture--the making of fire, agriculture, domestication of animals, measurement of time, observation of the stars--originate in the satisfaction not of practical, but of religious, supersensible, and ideological needs. The same seems to be true of language, as to which recent study more and more rejects the obvious theory that it arose in the need to make oneself understood." (Rank, Art and Artist, p. 235) =--=--=--= (ivb) Artists are no longer literally burned at the stake, but they are in constant danger of being metaphorically excommunicated from sacred institutions of higher learning if they can't prove their objective worth to the half of the electorate that otherwise doesn't see one. If the acronym STEM once found merely prosaic use, it now by its mere existence and invokation encapsulates quite neatly the territory on which such pedagogical culture warring is conducted: it 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 liguistic 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 this 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 calls "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)Further,
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 functionability. Mumford's unwillingness to abide, say, the painting of typewriters and coffee grinders (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 from all 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. Where they saw unmediated desire as the weapon that would topple entrenched power, Mumford sees desire as one side of an essential duality which demands balance rather than concentration.
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. Here I cannot help but share yet another CalArts memory, 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 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. Perhaps Cory Doctorow was more prophetic than he knew when he observed in 200[#]'s Content that [computers would have to get less capable in order to enable content owners to control content] Apple in particular, with the i-Devices, has figured out not only how to make the computer less capable but also how to have people literally lining up at midnight for the privilege of paying steep prices for the latest mongrel contraption. So, STEAMers sure are correct to point to the iPhone as a money-machine which fully integrates the initials. But are we sure that is a good thing? every mingling of art and technics is an opportunity for an imbalance between them to emerge; indeed, balance 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: So, at least in the case of functional arts, where prolongation of the aesthetic moment is not itself the point of the endeavor, function 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 interdepence of art and technics could not be better illustrated than in this wholly mechanical art. The great fonts of type, the platonic forms from which all later types down to our own day have been derived, were almost all cast within a century of the invention of printing. ... 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)
I read this as an argument in favor of the compartmentalization of academic subjects and against premature integration of still-developing skills. The question of intergration versus compartmentalization of disciplines is, indeed, rather separate from that of overall purview. STEAMers seem concerned that STEM is too rigidly one-sided, or perhaps that it appears that way on the surface. I confess that this mystifies me, since I've known and known of so many scientist-musicians. Comprehensive education seems like the obvious winner, whether it happens via the integrated or compartmentalized curricular style. But of course comprehensive education is, again, essentially politically unviable anywhere fiscal conservativism reaches a certian 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. I suppose this is a classic democratic compromise where nobody gets what they want. This is merely one example of a potential STEAM connection, raised here only because it is one of the few on which I can speak with some authority. I imagine that after taking inventory of the full lot of such potential connections and then arranging them on a continuum from least to most conductive, it would be possible to locate some projects which can be productively tackled from the place of less-than-expert knowledge which, presumably, young students are coming from. What Mumford is warning us about, however, is the specter that this very combination of non-experthood and overbroad objectives is the perfect recipe for unbalanced, regressive technological change. Caution is advised regarding such sweeping-yet-vague glosses as this, but the point is nonetheless brilliant and timely. Contemporary technics have enabled us to catalog myriad further examples of the imposition from without of "entirely nonoperational" cognitive considerations which "clutter" the "operations of the mind"; code-switching comes to mind. Besides foreclosing collective social possibilities, Dominant Ideologies foreclose even individual ones too. And perhaps postmodernity imposes something worse yet: the same nonoperational clutter, the same not-itself-ness, the same draining of identity/agency/dignity that comes with all of this, but in service of MANY co-dominant symbolic orders among which Mass Culture itself has learned, by evolutionary necessity, to code-switch. And so, what could be a more appropriate artistic/aesthetic/cultural (maybe even political!!!) response to this than the elision of the symbolic? It is true that this ultimately leads to the emergence of new codes, new in-/out-groups, new cognitive loads; but there is an initial period of potency before signals/styles (staying away from symbols) get used up, and that is a useful place to be if we can indeed stay in it. p. 75 --as in the constant restyling of the less essential parts of a motorcar--you know that , have gotten the better of the canons of economy and function; and that The current name for that particular perversion is industrial design." Here is one pro-Situ and one anti-Situ thesis: the ongoing repackaging of the same goods enhances profits but not life itself; but the antidote to this is a severe Functionalism, not a total liberation of desire; indeed, LM would ally the latter with "the canons of conspicuous waste," not with liberation from them.
In the effort to achieve power and order by means of the machine, modern man allowed a large segment of his personal life to be displaced and buried. In the very act of giving authority to the automaton, he released the id and recognized the forces of life only in their most raw and brutal manifestations. (57)
pp. 71-72 -- "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 interdepence of art and technics could not be better illustrated than in this wholly mechanical art. The great fonts of type, the platonic forms from which all later types down to our own day have been derived, were almost all cast within a century of the invention of printing. ... [72]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..." p. 73 -- "...there is something else involved in the fact that such a typical machine art as printing reached its highest plateau of achievement within a century of its invention; and this is the truth that, 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. Though the subjective arts often fall into stereotypes and fashionable molds, the fact is that man's inner life, when awakened, is inexhaustible; and 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." So, whereas "repetition without variation and re-creation is fatal to the existence of the humane arts," conversely, "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." If, on the other hand, putting the A in STEAM is merely a way to soothe the anxieties of that minority of woke parents who would balk at the specter of a strictly objective education, then one out of five letters ain't bad. For the same reasons that not everyone coming of age in a mechanically-centered world is thereby conditioned to model themselves after the machine, those pesky "sentimental compunctions" continually bubble up. (The positing of "nationalism" in this context is, unfortunately, once again very topical.) Where technics are truly "running wild" are in institutions which cannot function without objective bases for their operation, of which those schools where the A-for-Art has found inclusion strictly for image-making purposes are one visible example. [continued from above]p. 13 -- "This decision in effect banished art, because art is one of the essential spheres of man's autonomous and creative activities. Art as the domain of symbol and form, of pattern and significance became the blighted area of modern life, within whose dilapidated mansions a few pious caretakers and family servants fought a hopeless battle against neglect..." I find LM's use here of "autonomous" and "symbol" to be a bit jarring, since autonomy could, in some contexts, ential a freedom even from symbolic function. Perhaps in the Jungian sense the symbolic is indeed always in there somewhere; but in that case, what is either perceptible or remarkable about it? If LM is indeed following Jung, then the concept of the symbolic is undertheorized here. Unlike Art and Technics, which are, eventually, given explicit definitions, the reader who seeks to grasp LM's precise intention vis-a-vis the symbolic must get there inductively. Evidently LM was no fan of modern art, and so here is where he leaves the trail of breadcrumbs: [quote] LM ostensibly leverages this inescapable grounding in the symbolic to read modern art; but this reading is too fixed and direct for my tastes. In LM's own terms, I would say it is too objective; it is itself quite out of step with with art's "non-objective" side, thereby becoming functionally complicit in the tyranny of the objective the he writes explicitly against. An all-encompassing grounding in the symbolic is art-ontological technics run amok. This seems less a mere observation and more like a definition of what LM has meant by "machine art" all along. But it is not clear why this should correlate to machines, as opposed to describing one broad mode of creation, i.e. that which "serve[s] a common collective goal" rather than individual "subjective freedom," regardless of the means. Many people hold there to be aspects of the "subjective arts" which serve the common good, and aspects of "machine arts" which serve subjective human desires. What, really, does such a firm division between these modes do for us? =-=-=-=-= COMMENTS =-=-=-=-= Richard Sennett The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006) "In poetic usage, a consuming passion can connote a passion that burns itself out by its own intensity; put in less lurid form, in using things we use them up. Our desire for a dress may be ardent, but a few days after we [138] actually buy and wear it, the garment arouses us less. Here the imagination is strongest in anticipation, grows ever weaker through use. Today's economy strengthens this kind of self-consuming passion, both in shopping malls and in politics." (p. 137) "Balzac imagines this psychology to embody a social transition, a shift from old-fashioned peasants clinging to everything they have accumulated to more cosmopolitan characters who dwell in material desires which die when consummated. The sociologist might explain this social shift as a change in institutions..." (p. 138) "Only by the mid-nineteenth century was it possible for a family of modest means to contemplate throwing out old worn shoes rather than mending them, or to possess a battery of clothes adapted to the seasons. Mechanical production explains Georg Lukac's observation that Balzac was a prophet of capitalism's expansion of desire, but the cornucopia in itself does not explain the subsequent withering of pleasure in possession." (p. 139) (Sennett, CNC) "...the modern consumer needs to think like a craftsman without being able to do what a craftsman does. "Ideally, this should be true. And, in practice, one virtue of Wal-Mart...lies in the utilitarian character of its stores... Other ways of marketing, however, seek to prevent consumers from thinking like craftsmen about a product's utility. Instead, branding seeks to make a basic product sold globally seem distinctive, seeks to obscure homogeneity. The means of doing so today are more complicated than Packard's concept of the "motor of fashion." "Today, manufacturing deploys on a global scale the "platform construction" of goods from automobiles to computers to clothes. The platform consists of a basic object on which minor, surface changes are imposed in order to convert the product into a particular brand. ... "Manufacturers call these changes built on the modern platform gold-plating, and that image is exact. To sell a basically standardized thing, the seller will magnify the value of minor differences quickly and easily engineered, so that the surface is what counts. The brand must seem to the consumer more than the thing itself." (pp. 143-144) "Often, in this kind of production, the rough assembly work on the platform will occur in low-wage countries in the developing world; the gold-plating will occur in finishing plants closer to local markets." (p. 144) (Sennett, CNC) "potency"..."A commonplace in the electronics industry is that ordinary consumers buy equipment whose capabilities they will never use...[ditto] owners of the infamous SUV machines meant for desert navigation used mostly to shepherd children to and from school." (p. 151) "memory theater [e.g. of medieval scholars] is not built into the random access procedures of an iPod. ... One [download] site, for instance, offers three thousand golden oldies... But again there is the difficulty of hearing nine thousand minutes in the mind. Not surprisingly, Michael Bull, who has written a study of how people use the Walkman, the iPod's primitive parent, has found that people listened to the same twenty or thirty songs over and over again—which is as much active musical memory as most people possess." (p. 153) "Put abstractly: desire becomes mobilized when potency is divorced from practice; put simply: you don't limit what you want to what you can do. In a way the Wal-Mart also epitomizes this divorce, a vast assembly under one roof of more than any one person could buy; the sheer mass of the objects duplicates desire." (p. 154) (Sennett, CNC) against the notion that unleashed consumer desire can be constructive for the progressive-political imagination: "The realm of consumption is theatrical because the seller, like a playwright, has to command the willing suspension of disbelief in order for the consumer to buy. Even the prosaic Wal-Mart is such a theater, in which the size and sheer mass of goods on offer change the spectator-consumer's understanding of the things in themselves. Today, the consuming passion has a dramatic power: possessive use is less arousing to the spectator-consumer than the desire for things he does not yet have; the dramatization of potential leads the spectator-consumer to desire things he cannot fully use. "Politics is equally theatrical, and progressive politics in particular requires a certain kind of rhetoric. It deploys a willing suspension of disbelief of citizens in their own accumulated experience. I've tried to accent the positive side of this. But, like the marketing of consumer goods, the marketing of politics can take a much more negative turn. What's missing in the hope for progressive change is an understanding of the profoundly enervating role that illusion plays in modern society. I mean here to propound a paradox, that people can actively enter into their own passivity." (pp. 161-162) "The VW platform is a common chassis from which small material differences are inflated in value to become brands. Modern politics has a similar form, which we commonly call consensus politics." (p. 162) at that point, "the rhetoric of competing political parties necessarily has to stress differences. Indeed, by concentrating on the platform alone as reality, we would miss the lived experience of political life, which is that differences are what really arouse voters and the media. Gold-plating explains how this arousal occurs. The simplest form of gold-plating is symbol in-[165]flation. In Britain, the parties have differed passionately on whether or not hunting foxes with dogs ought to be allowed." (p. 164) "There's nothing new in symbolic inflation of trivia—what is new is the consanance between the advertising of products and political behavior. The marketing of political personalities comes increasingly to resemble the marketing of soap..." (p. 165) "Platform and brand combine in politics to produce something other than a progressive desire for change—rather, a political climate akin to what Freud first called the "narcissism of small differences." As in advertising, so in politics branding can lead to loss of realistic, Skoda-minded judgment [a reference to his previous discussion of platform construction in automobiles, with Skoda and Audi being the low- and high-end versions of the same chassis] and opens a particularly modern door to prejudice." (pp. 167-168) (Re: Sennett on politics as "gold-plating" and consumption of "potency") This is an engaging analysis of the "theater" underlying contemporary politics, but it is rather unsatisfying as a political Theory Of Everthing. That's because the "consensus" of "consensus politics" is not and has never been the consensus of the governed (though that in and of itself may not be such a bad thing). Increasingly it is the consensus of "elites," of both the democratically-appointed and the self-appointed variety, based first on their own self-interest and secondarily if at all on that of their constituencies. And so, yes, as good marketers do, they then appeal to "symbol inflation" and "wedge issues" in order to grease the skids. But the other pitfall lurking here, I hasten to insist, is to blanket-equate "wedge issues" with "trivia." The ultimate perniciousness/insidiousness of "gold-plating" here is that, say, the hunting of foxes with dogs or the questions surrounding stem cell research, are NOT "trivial" in any reasonable sense; rather, they become "trivial" in the strictly relative sense which emerges from a gridlocked, polarized, sclerotic legislative scene where even the basics have become contentious and draining. Frankly, come to think of it, I do find fox hunting repulsive; just because it's not worth hundreds of hours of parliamentary time right now does not mean it is an altogether "trivial" issue. If this view makes me ungovernable, then maybe I'll go live in the woods. Do YOU think these are "trivial" issues? We can lament our collective ungovernability both on abstract principle and from a pragmatic perspective, but I think there is more happening here than manipulation via marketing. Some bifurcating dynamic along the lines of Jacobs' two "moral syndromes" seems to exist between the left and right Platform polities, with formal comprimise between them leading predictably to "monstrous moral hybrids." The harder we try to govern ourselves, the more morally depraved we become. And as the dialogue gets more superficial and toxic, it gets easier and not harder to figure out which of two sides you are on! That is the perniciousness of the wedge! But the wedge is not so easy to break. (We have now strayed quite far from Industrial Design and Functionalism! But I do think these excerpts from Sennett are best presented together.) =-=-=-=-= N.N. Taleb Antifragile (2012) "with so many technologically driven and modernistic items—skis, cars, computers, computer programs—it seems that we notice differences between versions rather than commonalities. We even rapidly tire of what we have, continuously searching for versions 2.0 and similar iterations. ... These impulses to buy new things that will eventually lose their novelty, particularly when compared to newer things, are called treadmill effects. ...they arise from the same generator of biases as the one about the salience of variations mentioned in the section before: we notice differences and become dissatisfied with some items and some classes of goods. This treadmill effect has been investigated by Danny Kanhneman and his peers when they studied the psychology of what they call hedonic states. People acquire a new item, feel more satisfied after an initial boost, then rapidly revert to their baseline of well-being. ... "But it looks as though we don't incur the same treadmilling techno-dissatisfaction with classical art, older furniture—whatever we do not put in the category of the technological. You may have an oil painting and a flat-screen television set inhabiting the same room of your house. ... I am quite certain that you are not eager to upgrade the oil painting but that soon your flat-screen TV set will be donated to the local chapter of some kidney foundation. (pp. 322-323) (Taleb, Antifragile) "...Whenever I sit on an airplane next to some businessman reading the usual trash businessmen read on an e-reader, said businessperson will not resist disparaging my use of the book by comparing the two items. Supposedly, an e-reader is more "efficient." It delivers the essence of the book, which said businessman assumes is information, but in a more convenient way, as he can carry a library on his device and "optimize" his time between golf outings. I have never heard anyone address the large differences between e-readers and physical books, like smell, texture, dimension (books are in three dimensions), color, ability to change pages, physicality of an object compared to a computer screen, and hidden properties causing unexplained differences in enjoyment. The focus of the discussion will be commonalities (how close to a book this wonderful device is). Yet when he compared his version of an e-reader to another e-reader, he will invariably focus on minute differences. Just as when Lebanese run into Syrians, they focus on the tiny variations in their respective Levantine dialects, but when Lebanese run into Italians, they focus on similarities. "There may be a heuristic that helps put such items in categories. First, the electronic on-off switch. ... For these items, I focus on variations, with attendant neomania. But consider the difference between the artisinal—the other category—and the industrial. What is artisinal has the love of the maker infused in it, and tends to satisfy—we don't have this nagging impression of incompleteness we encounter with electronics. "It also so happens that whatever is technological happens to be fragile. Articles made by an artisan cause fewer treadmill effects. And they tend to have some antifragility—recall how my artisinal shoes take months before becoming comfortable. Items with an on-off switch tend to have no such redeeming antifragility." (pp. 323-324) =-=-=-=-=-=-= https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2022/04/how-can-algorithms-be-biased.html John Danaher: "One of the interesting things that you learn when writing about the ethics of technology is how little of it is new. Many of the basic categories and terms of debate have been set in stone for some time. This is true for much of philosophy of course, but those of use working in ‘cutting edge’ areas such as the ethics of AI sometimes like to kid ourselves that we are doing truly innovative and original work in applied ethics. This is rarely the case. =-=-=-=-=-=-= Paul and Percival Goodman Communitas (1960) [173] "When production becomes an integral part of life, the workman becomes an artist. It is the definition of an artist that he follows the medium, and finds new possibilities of expression in it. He is not bound by the fact that things have always been made in a certain way, nor even by the fact that it is these things that have been made. Our industrialists...are very [174] much concerned these days to get "creative" people, and they make psychological studies on how to foster an "atmosphere of creativity"; but they don't sufficiently conjure with the awful possibility that truly creative people might tell them to shut up shop. They wish to use creativity in just the way that it cannot be used, for it is a process that also generates its own ends." =-=-=-=-=-= Paul Goodman Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (1962??) "Applied science" and superstition" (pp. 22-48) [25] "Marxist philosophers have insisted on an indissoluble relation, if not formal identity, between science and technology; and in a background sense, this is, in my opinion, true. Especially experimental science would not much exist among peoples who lack elaborate industrial arts; they would not have the data, they would not have the techniques, and they would not consider it important. ... A dangerous confusion occurs, however, when contemporary science and the current style of technology [26] come to exist in people's minds as one block, to be necessarily taken as a single whole. The effect of this is that political arguments for some kind or complex of technology, which indeed has been made possible by modern science, are illogically strengthened by the moral excellence, the prestige, and the superstition of science itself. Contrariwise, if anybody opposes the mass production, the export to underdeveloped countries, or the widespread domestic use of certain machines, technical complexes, or therapies, he is sure to be "refuted" as an obscurantist, an irrationalist or esthete, a pessimist or a Luddite. ... Because the adventure of modern science must be pursued, it is concluded that there are no choices in the adoption of scientific technology. This is an error in reasoning, but unfortunately there are powerful vested interests in business and politics throughout the world, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, that want to reinforce this error and probably believe it." =-=-=-=-=-=-= =-=-=-=-=-=-= Freddie deBoer STEM: Still No Shortage 27 Nov 2013 "in 2011, Vivek Wadhwa, who holds a large number of academic and corporate appointments in these fields, wrote an open letter to President Obama, asking him to stop claiming that there is a STEM shortage. ... Wadhwa also relays the fact that 94% of the people who are offered jobs at Microsoft take them. That’s great for them, but a 94% acceptance rate indicates a field where applicants lack bargaining power. Wadhwa’s discomfort with claims about a STEM shortage, given that he’s a true insider in this domain, is in keeping with a lot of my own investigations on this issue,... ... "There’s another side to these STEM shortage arguments, and they are straightforwardly moralizing: the reason for our continued employment crisis is that too many students took “impractical” majors and are suffering as a result. As Virginia Postrel pointed out last year, this narrative simply is not supportable. We don’t, actually, graduate a ton of people in the supposedly impractical arts or humanities. While participation in the humanities is stable, the number of students who pursue humanities majors is low, around 12%-15%. (Incorrect claims that the humanities are in a crisis of plummeting enrollment somehow coexist with arguments that too many students are taking them as majors.) ... A quick glance at the actual data shows that the notion of an army of deluded dreamers taking supposedly impractical majors is simply not supportable. What sticks out, more than anything, is the relentless rise of the Business major,... "... We face a stagnant job market and a crisis for the long-term unemployed because of inadequate aggregate demand, not because too many people decided to study French poetry. ... As both Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke have argued, the idea of a skills mismatch is not supportable from evidence. I think the point of claiming one is to blame broad macroeconomic problems on individuals, and to make our problems seem easier to solve than they really are. ... "...one of the big tech job fairs here at Purdue University, where some of the most powerful and profitable companies in science and technology come to entice Purdue students to apply for jobs. ...it was hard not to believe in the notion of a STEM shortage. "When I mentioned that point to my friend, he laughed and said, “These companies are all trying to get the same 50 students.”" =-=-=-=-=-= James Hillman and Michael Ventura We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse (1992)
***some mumford post somewhere***
https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2019/12/mumford-art-and-technics-ivb.html
[130]"Puritanism is no joke. It's the structural fiber of America;... We are supposed to be sensually numb. That is the fundamental nature of puritan goodness. ... "Yet we each know that nothing so moves the soul as an aesthetic leap of the heart at the sight of a fox in the forest, of [131] a lovely open face, the sound of a little melody. ... "Instead our motto is "just say no." And we pass laws to make everything "clean" and "safe"... Laws for order, once the inherent cosmos (the Greek word for aesthetic order) of the world is no longer sensed. ... "...aesthetics and a therapy of things is also eminently practical. Take our trade war with the Japanese. We believe we have lost out to them because they have better management techniques; because they plan farther ahead; they coordinate better among the bankers, researchers, industrialists, and government; because they work like slaves. These economic reasons don't cut it. There is also an aesthetic reason for their guaranteed quality, which our puritan mind simply cannot even imagine. The Japanese are trained aesthetically early on and live in a culture devoted as much to the chrysanthemum (beauty) as to the sword (efficiency)—to use their symbols. "Japanese people—ordinary people—have hobbies of calligraphy, flower arrangement, dance gesture, paper twisting and cutting. They live in a world of very small detail, which we call quality control. ... Even their language takes immense care. It's aesthetic training that gives them the economic edge, even if they get as drunk as we do and as tired." =-=-=-=-=-=