Mumford Art and Technics ----- p. 6-7 -- "...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 quali-[p.7]fies them for such a public appearance, they are all too ready to take a back seat." If "professional training" has contributed to a chilling effect ("...all too ready to take a back seat") 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. (See Daniel Wolf on compositional complexity as a cyclical phenomenon rather than a teleological one. Also Milo Fine on improved wiring vs. improved "resonance.") But they have been reliant on information technology to make available relevant artifacts of the past, distant and recent alike. For temporal artists, faster travel has helped too (it could have saved Bach several weeks of walking), but in a pragmatic rather than a generative way. 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, and perhaps Mumford resolves the Structure-Agency problem too one-sidedly because he is interested in interventions to which only Structure is susceptible; that is, 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 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.
The phrase "personal responsibility" leaps off the page here, a central tenet of classical conservatism countervailed by a central imperative of classical industrialism. 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 economic machine. Machines are both models of accountability themselves and far superior to humans as tools for imposing accountability on other humans. Where stakes are not so high and solutions not so elusive, meanwhile, I would expect to find far fewer 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. 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 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. Mumford objects to Frenchifying "technics" into "technique," and we might also profitably pay attention to the difference between the prefixes techni- (as in technics/technique") and techno- (as in technology). "Professional training" and "public appearance," meanwhile, is another kettle of fish. LM has just offered the example of bygone domestic music-making contrasted with mechanically-aided listening (i.e. to recordings), but in fact passive listening and a firmer distinction between musician and audience overlap with the twilight of domestic musicking and predate the wide availability of sound recordings both by about a century. The passive consumer of shrink-wrapped culture was emerging even before human technics were fully ready for her; it would not be surprising if technological change followed as much as it led here. ----- Mumford -- Art and Technics (iv)
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.
-----
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? ----- Mumford -- Art and Technics (iii) pp. 24-25 -- "...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." p. 25 -- "...three stages,...[1]self-enclosed or infantile...[2]social or adolescent...[3]personal or mature..." 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 "loose[s] himself in [the] act" of creation, which has become all about "begetting fresh forms of life," the work becoming "itself and 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. (The same critique applies generally to message-rich, aesthetics-poor art; unambiguous and tractible "communication" is achieved only at the expense of "a large part of the human personality," not through it.) The resemblance is merely a superficial/behavioristic one, concealing more than it reveals about both artists and infants. Many cultures/thinkers have found discipline essential and vanity dispensible (if not downright hazardous). There are no grounds to excuse artists, nor they themselves, from this developmental trajectory. but if it is not, then mustn't any such reward be derived from the indulgence of a "fundamental vanity"? Or worse? Surely in part, but to do so in whole is properly seen as immature in both the wider sense and in the various parochial disciplinary senses which prevail in different art forms. ----- p. 28 -- "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..." p. 29 -- "[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." Cue Branford on Cecil for a 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, LM reminds us here, the latter is comparatively limited in influence. 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 breakdown of that institution by virtually any standard. Communities get the art they deserve, the art for which they have laid the foundation via whatever conduct and discourse prevails therein. The notion that the "community" has a role to play in helping its art to reach it greatest possible height has unfortunately become conflated with the task of initiating non-initiated to various esoteric art practices; that is, with "outreach" as that term is used in the administrosphere. LM continues... p. 29 -- "...the artist's self dissolves into the work of art and transcends the limitations of his personality and culture. When art rises to this stage, the artist feels himself the instrument and agent of a higher force: the final triumph of the person is to lose himself in this act." pp. 29-30 -- "...like sexual love, this development [of art and artist] likewise brings with it the same danger of premature arrest or fixation at one of its infantile or adolescent phases... Our society, because it has recklessly overdeveloped both the technics of power and the power of technics, shows many signs of these arrests and these rejections; and the result has been damaging to the arts. Because the very division of labor, with its magnification of the specialist, is hostile to the needs of [30] the whole personality, our society makes life difficult for those who would in any way alter its routine to further such development... Thus, by our own preoccupations with the practical, we condemn the artist, if he seeks to gain attention, to sheer exhibitionism, or at worst, to committing a nuisance, just to attract some small modicum of attention. The Salvador Dalis and the Ezra Pounds are obvious examples of artists who use infantile means to recapture the normal status of the artist in a balanced society." There is a lot of outmoded bluster here but also several points worth considering carefully. It would be great if maturity, transcendence and selflessness always came as a package, but unfortunately they don't. Just as art and artists lacking full maturity have scored plenty of great successes, so have the selfless and mature quite often failed to hold the attention even of their contemporaries. This undermines LM's taxonomy, but the ways in which it does so are informative. Narratives of (im)maturity in pre-postmodern art criticism (usually with an assist from reductionist Freudianism) tend to mistake correlation for causation. Children are exhibitionists by nature; artists, per John Cage's outlook, require realization of the work (perhaps including an audience) to complete their creation. That psychosocial maturity inexorably brings creative inhibition along with it is taken for granted, with artists posited as the exception that proves the rule. To the contrary, I think that the outpouring of age-is-just-a-number uplift in every corner of discourse from the poppiest pop psychobabble to the most rigorous social-scientific tracts on aging tells us, via a sort of collective social slippage/cleavage, everything we need to know about normative theories of maturity such as classical psychoanalysis proffers. Against the backdrop of a convention-bound form, radical departures from said convention are, it is true, bound to be jarring almost by definition; hence in such a narrowly-defined scenario the accusation of "sheer exhibitionism" will always have superficial explanatory power whether or not it actually explains anything at all. And so the first problem with making personal qualities like maturity and selflessness into hard art-intellectual currency is that they cannot be read reliably, not even by those within a convention-bound culture or community. I read LM as holding that maturity mediates intent; but intent is notoriously hard to read from the receiving end of an artistic transmission. None of us have any hope of achieving more than middling success in sorting the immature radicals from the sincere ones based solely on their artworks. I know of a few people who have sharpened this kind of sense to its greatest potential through narrow and intense focus on an art practice of tractible breadth; but if even LM with his breadth and depth of learning can't overcome the inevitable hardening of neural pathways to see the contributions of modernism to his own project, then I would aver that no one can. I have a personal investment in de-conflating socially-defined and personally-defined conceptions of maturity. I lived with the "mature" label seemingly from birth all the way through my 20s simply because I was well-behaved and demonstrated a strong work ethic. In the society I was born into, these qualities are highly-valued and idealized adult characteristics; it does not follow from this, however, that motivated, well-behaved children have passed through a maturation process that takes their more troublesome peers a bit longer, nor that troublesome, idle adults have failed to hit some benchmark of life experience. The most "childish" adult behavior I've ever witnessed has been by a pair of gentlemen who are fully bought-in to American society's rubric of socially-defined adulthood. This anecdotal experience has only reinforced my own emerging self-awareness that in fact my "mature" teenage years were in reality defined by run-of-the-mill teenage problems, specifically those which only nurture and not nature can resolve. Indeed, a few of them may well remain unresolved: I was called "immature" to my face for the first time in my life as a 30-year old graduate student by a peer-frenemy who had traversed a far more difficult road to graduate study than I had. Of course from my perspective the ground has merely shifted around me, but I think it is worth the trouble to consider to what extent that is actually true. It is absolutely true, I think, with regard to procreation and child-rearing (not for nothing does LM explicitly extend his analogy here): as a teen I thought of "pro-choice" as if one reproduces, whereas as an adult it seems limited to when. Overlaid on the patriarchy is a filiarchy of equal pervasiveness and toxicity which is uniquely facile in universalizing what are actually quite socially contingent values. I accept that I could be missing out on a lot by not having children; I reject that this is a question of maturity, not when there are so many material considerations at play. (The chiasmic pair again brings Debord to mind. Is something going on here?) ----- Art and Technics (#) p. 38-39 -- against the appellation Homo Faber: "...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 [39] transferred our own obsession with that particular idol to every other phase of human history." (38-39) p. 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." p. 40 -- "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. And so man is therefore preeminently the...aesthete? Symbolist? Builder of complex civilizations? If as a species we are not quite "preeminently" aesthetic, this gloss at least restores aesthetics to its rightful place of phylogenetic priority. The anthropological bent here could be an excellent testimionial 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 formalized intellectual consolodations 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. For me, the phylogenetic priority of aesthetics is precisely what justifies and demands its consolodation 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 alientation for the same reason; but is it the over-formalization or under-formalization of the practice which leads down this road? also p. 67 -- "...here again [in printing] the esthetic symbol predeeded 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." 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? ----- 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. It is more obvious that controlling/directing the forces of nature is fraught with invitations to excess than is the seemingly scalable task of "widen[ing] the province of personality." ...and again, here is an affirmative definition of art against which technics is defined via negation. p. 37-38 -- "...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." pp. 41-42 -- "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." pp. 45-46 [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 suvival 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 [46] effectively dehumanized--like mining--were for long treated as punishment, fit only for condemned criminals" So, the Technical undertaking in fact has a social function, one which is necessary and constructive if nonetheless of limited scope. Technics are an empirical pathway towards some 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, in a more cosmic respect, proof of "useful[ness]" as a universal value rather than a mere contingent characteristic. 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 would not be inclined to take that tack here. This all describes quite well precisely what I feel I've learned from wrestling with various tubas and the various acoustic environments I've attempted to operate them in. It doesn't (or it shouldn't) take a full-on natural disaster 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 retreat into 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 just that later today. ----- Art and Technics (vii) p. 44 -- "Order of any kind gives man a sense of security: it is the changeful, the unexpected, the capricious, in other words the unpredictable and uncontrollable, that fill him with anxiety and dread. Hence whenever man becomes unsure of himself, or whenever his creative powers seem inadequate, whenever his symbolisms breed confusion and conflict, his tendency is either to find a refuge in blind Fate, or to concentrate upon those processes in which his own subjective interests are not directly involved. Our psychiatrists have discovered, in recent years, the genuine healing value of mechanical processes like weaving; and weaving remained, down almost to modern times, the highest type of mechanical order..." Musical instruments and the attendant details in learning to play them fall all along this continuum from "the unpredictable and uncontrollable" at one extreme, to total "mechanical order" at the other. Wooden recorders become saturated with water after a certain amount of playing and have to be swapped out; brass players meanwhile can, in a pinch, empty quite a bit of residual condensation in a second or two. Temperature changes effect different instruments differently. Reeds and corks, springs and strings, sticks and heads are all consumable items, introducing different degrees and kinds of uncertainty into technique and performance practice. Water management is a wellspring (sorry) of in-group humor for musicians of all ages, orientations and abilities; but on a more serious note, it does profoundly shape what is possible for the instruments and for the people who play them. In other words, it is political, just like matters of instrumentation always are. Certainly these politics loom large wherever "genuine healing value" is prioritized. There are many reasons why brass players generally are not in the healing business: brass technique is uniquely untransparent to beginners; the physical demands are severe; a big-picture resonance between student and instrument can be foreclosed by fixed factors of oral anatomy. ----- p. 48 -- the word "functionalism" appears also p. 54, "a slang word lately popular in esthetics" ----- p. 48 -- "...we may easily underrate the amount of dull and repetitive work even in the freest craftsman is compelled to do, though he work under ideal conditions. Indeed, the overemphasis of the creative moments in art, the tendency to picture esthetic creation as one long, fervent, spontaneous activity, without severe toil and painful effort, without a constant mastery of technics, is one of the sure indications of the amateur and the outsider." Better for the amateur, perhaps, since commitment kills the enjoyment for most people. There is a puritanical streak on display here, with a rather hard and fast distinction drawn between the "dull and repetitive work" of technics on one hand and the "fervent, spontaneous activity" of art on the other. This is too dualistic; indeed, this dualism is itself, I would say, part of this amateur/outsider mindset. The committed craftsperson may succumb to this thinking in their weaker moments, but in the moment there is only work; if there is an inherently fun part of this work, it is the completion of the project. ----- Art and Technics (ix)
"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," 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 natural preservatives enable; and so these works stick around long past their expiration date, long after they have ceased to be "relevant." They start to smell funny long before there is sufficient collective social momentum to throw them out, and by the time that momentum coalesces, the discourse has become, so to speak, toxic. Of course so-called relevance is not infallible. Often enough the cultural relevance ledger looks completely irrational and counterproductive. 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, everyone would be better for it. Mumford continues,
Except in the sense that works of art have a survival value through appeal to human sentiment, which things of pure utility may lack, no matter how carefully fashioned, there is no way in which this happy compromise [between the artist and the technician] can be defended, from a purely technical point of view. A water spout does not drain water more effectively off a roof because it comes out of the mouth of a carved gargoyle... [50]But in the times when art has flourished, an intense inner life, a meaningful and valuable life, seemed more important to people than a merely long life spent in useful mechanical toil... ...where both aims, the esthetic and the technical, were pursued together, it had the happy result of producing an harmonious relation between the subjective and the objective life, between spotaneity and necessity, between fantasy and fact. These moments of balance between art and technics, when man respects nature's conditions but modifies them for his own purpose, when his tools and machines regulate his life, freeing it from disorderly subjectivity, but do not dominate it, represent a high point in any civilization's development. (49-50)
The opening sentence understates the case. Rearranged for emphasis: "things of pure utility" lack "appeal to human sentiment," hence even the "purely technical point of view" would be feeling its oats to deny the "survival value" of such appeals. But this "dynamic equilibrium" is "a difficult one to maintain." (50) p. 51 -- "Esthetic symbolism for a long time seemed to man either a short-cut to knowledge and power or an adequate substitute. So he applied it, not merely to things that could properly be created or formed by these methods...but also to the physical environment and to natural forces: he foolishly invoked art and ritual to bring on rain or increase human fertility. Without the counterbalancing interests and methods of technics, man might easily have gone mad, in that his symbols might have progressively displaced realities and in the end have produced a blind confusion... "... Perhaps the fatal course all civilizations have so far followed has been due, not to natural miscarriages, the disastrous effects of famines and floods and diseases, but to accumulated perversions of the symbolic functions. Obsession with money and neglect of productivity. Obsession with the symbols of centralized political power and sovereignty, and neglect of the processes of mutual aid in the small face-to-face community. Obsession with the symbols of religion to the neglect of the ideal ends or the daily practices of love and friendship through which these symbols would be given an effective life." p. 52 -- "The disorganization and derangement of the symbolic functions, their proliferation at the expense of life, their overriding of man's daily need for honest labor and nourishing bread has too often in history meant a threat to man's very existence. Complete attachment to the symbol, complete withdrawal into and inner world, can be as fatal to man's development as complete externalism." This has come to be known as the decadent stage of civilization, the last stage of its life, the stage immediately preceding its death. LM of course explicitly includes in this warning "an overpreoccupation with the fine arts themselves." ----- p. 52 -- "...why, during the last few centuries, Western man's absorption in the machine not merely increased the amount of physical power available, but actually gave him a great sense of subjective release. ...the kind of order promised by that conception [of even nature as machine] delivered him from the state of curdled subjectivity that he found himself in. Unable to bring the various parts of his life into harmony, he traded wholeness, so to say, for order; that is, order of a limited mechanical kind." p. 53 -- The "effort to make mechanical order and objectivity itself a subject of art has served in some sense as a counterpoise to the tendency to relapse into the primitive and the infantile, the disordered and the perverse--the reaction of those who feel excluded from the modern world and who, to maintain their very status as human beings, must in some sense seek revenge." Even so, a "complete synthesis" eludes such mechanical art, which "must suppress emotion, feeling, sentiment.." ----- p. 54 -- "...this "functionalism," to use a slang word lately popular in esthetics, is in fact a valuable contribution to the whole personality. ...with its sense that the person himself is also an object, to be viewed from the outside by others, it tends toward a certain underemphasis, a certain decent self-effacement, which is in the best style of our epoch." So, a connection here to psychology per se; and it must be duly noted that "self-effacement" was not exactly the strong suit of Jorn and Debord, who had no use for functionalism. Is this also a question of maturity/development? Or are self-effacers born rather than made? ----- p. 57 -- "...we are now faced with a situation quite different from that which characterized Western Europe in the fourteenth century, when the disintegration of medieval civilization became visible. Europe, at that time, 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. 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. 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." 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. 62 -- "...two things throughout the greater part of history served to redeem the whole process of technical development. One of them was that the operations were under the direct control of the craftsman himself. He took his own time about his work, he obeyed the rhythms of his own body, resting when he was tired, reflecting and planning as he went along, lingering over the parts that interested him most, so that, though his work proceeded slowly, the time that he spent on it was truly life time. ...the rewards of labor were intrinsic to the activity itself, and the effect of art was merely to heighten and intensify these natural organic processes--not to serve as mere compensation or escape." p. 63 -- "...the fact that the handicraft worker is master of the process, so long as he respects the nature of his materials, was a great satisfaction and a support of personal dignity." Again overstated, but again a worthy angle in on things. Besides alienating the worker by raising the stakes, scaling up the operation, intensifying competition, etc., standardization of quality and quantity alike meant working against nature more of the time. So there is, actually, a confluence of interests between humans and their environment when things are allowed to take their pre-industrial/pre-capitalist course; it is only at scale that the present adversarial relationship emerges. --"The other reward of craftsmanship in many branches of art and technics was that the worker could pass, with further technical skill, from the operational to the expressive parts of his job. Through acquiring skill in technics, he became licensed, as it were, to practice art. At that stage the machine itself makes a contribution to creative release. ...Up to a point, then, in all the industrial arts, technical development and symbolic expression go hand in hand. Who can say, indeed, whether the great string music of the eighteenth century would ever have been written had not violin-makers like Stradivarius placed in the hands of the composer such superb instruments as the violins they created?" ------ p. 68-69 -- "Reading would be a most laborious art if, on every page, one had to struggle with a new personality and master his vagaries of written expression as well as his thought. For the sake of general legibility and universality it was important that the human being who copied a book should achieve a certain kind of neutrality and impersonality, that he should sacri-[69]fice expressiveness to order, subduing his idiosyncrasies, making each letter conform to a common type, rigorously standardizing the product. The typical and the repeatable--what is that but the province of the machine? After a copyist repeated the same letter a thousand times, his letters would achieve that impersonal quality. And by habit and repetition, by restraint and humility, he brought the manuscript to a point of mechanical perfection at which the letter themselves could readily be transferred into movable types. "But note how perverse art itself can be when divorced from other equally central human purposes. 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." p. 70 -- "...as long as art held production in check, there were never enough books, even in an illiterate age, to go round. So eventually, in the development of the manuscript, there came a point where the two impulses, the technical and the esthetic, came to a parting of the ways. The esthetic and personal part of copying was getting in the way of the practical offices of the book; and for the sake of increasing the circulation of ideas, it was time for the two sides of the art to separate. At that point, the machine entered, to take over the repetitive part of the process. As a result, printing itself reached maturity almost overnight." [continuing]-- "Unfortunately, it took a long time to discover that, to be an art in its own right, the machine need not, in fact must not, attempt to imitate the special graces of handicraft art." pp. 70-71 -- "The early printers hesitated to let the type speak for itself. They thought [71] machine ornaments were better than no ornaments, whereas they should have realized that a certain chastity of statement, a certain reserve and underemphasis, is characteristic of good machine art; it is the function itself that addresses us, and the aesthetic appeal must always be within the compass of a rational judgment. p. 75 -- "In short, the machine, and the machine arts, when taken on their own essential terms, are necessarily stable, like all type forms, and there is nothing more fatal to a good machine form than irrelevant subjectivity, misplaced creativeness, meretricious uniqueness, as if produced by hand. As soon as you find such suspicious features in any machine form--as in the constant restyling of the less essential parts of a motorcar--you know that the canons of conspicuous waste, dear to the businessman, and the newly rich, have gotten the better of the canons of economy and function; and that someone is picking your pocket of money you might use for better purposes, under the pretext that he is furnishing you with art. 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. Since he takes pains earlier to distinguish Technics from Technology, this is particularly puzzling. ----- p. 76 -- "Printing broke the class monopoly of the written word, and it provided the common man with a means of gaining access to the culture of the world, at least, all of that culture as had been translated into words or other printable symbols; doing so, it increased every man's range in time and space, bringing together times past and times to come, near and distant, peoples long dead and peoples still unborn. Recent generations have perhaps overestimated the benefits of literacy, for these benefits do no come about automatically, and they may be accompanied, if unwisely used, by a loss of firsthand experiences and contacts, a loss of both sense and sensibility, with an increase of pride and prejudice. But it is hardly possible to overestimate the handicaps of illiteracy; for that chains one to the world of the here and now, a form of cultural solitary confinement, fatal to human development. Again, though print undoubtedly accentuated man's natural eye-mindedness,...it also freed the mind from the retarding effects of irrelevant concreteness." ----- p. 77 -- "What further innovations remain to be made in printing...are mainly on the technical side. They are similar to what has been happening in other departments of technics. One improvement that is surely coming...is a completion of the automatic process with the aid of a scanner which will automatically set up type without the intervention of the typographer. When that final invention takes place in printing, this art will have achieved its theoretical limit of perfection... The other possibility, also a technical one, would lead in the other direction, not toward automatism and large-scale mass production, but in the direction of making printing or its equivalent possible by a more simple and direct method, lending itself to small-scale production and therefore to a larger measure of personal expression." p. 78 -- "From my point of view, the greatest developments to be expected of technics...will not be, as we are usually led to think, in the direction of universalizing even more strenuously the wasteful American system of mass production: no, on the contrary, it will consist in using machines on a human scale, directly under human control, to fulfill with more exquisite adaptation, with a higher refinement of skill, the human needs that are to be served. ... Much that is now in the realm of automatism and mass production will come back under directly personal control, not by abandoning the machine, but by using it to better purpose, not by quantifying but by qualifying its further use." ----- p. 79 -- "At present, half our gains in technical efficiency are nullified by the annual custom of restyling." p. 80 -- "Instead of lengthening the life of the product and lowering the cost to the user, they raise the cost to the user by shortening the life of the product and causing him to be conscious of mere stylistic tricks that are without any kind of human significance or value." -- "There is no extraneous way of humanizing the machine, or of turning it to the advantage of that part of the human personality which has heretofore expressed itself in what we may call the humane arts. You do not make a machine more human by painting it with flowers...the canons of machine art are precision, economy, slickness, severity, restriction to the essential, and whenever these canons are violated...[81[the result is not the humanization of the machine but its debasement. It does not thereby acquire human values; it merely loses important mechanical values, values which, by their proper esthetic expression, do have at least a modicum of human relevance, to the extent that they express order or subserve power. ...[the machine] is, when properly conceived, an extension of the rational and operative parts, and it must not wantonly tresspass on areas that do not belong to it. If you fall in love with a machine, there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion." ----- Art and Technics (xii)
"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; but as with so-called Uncommon Sense, perhaps Mumford's norm is actually an achievement, and thus quite a bit more elusive. Perhaps by universalizing the contingent he runs afoul not of cultural differences but individual ones. 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 ineluctible 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 continues,
What is peculiar to the machine is that choice, freedom, esthetic evaluation, are transferred from the process as a whole...to the initial stage of design. Once choice is made here, any further human interference, any effort to leave the human imprint, can only give impurity to the form and defeat the final result. (82)
In other words, as you design a machine, you make important choices on behalf of all who might use it. Similarly, end users implicitly accept such choices by their use. Makers can never fully anticipate future use. Users who tinker are limited by that which the existing device makes imaginable. There really is no elision of will or agency available here other than by a strictly deterministic outlook, no possibility of denying responsibility either for design choices or for that approval which use implies. On both sides of this transaction, we make our beds and then we lie in them. I think that we find the least willingness to accept these points where people have the most personal investment in the idea of particular materials and processes as progressive, liberating, important, signifying, etc., which is to say in cases where particular materials and processes have, by no fault of anyone involved, become the stuff of core self-identity, likely via proceedings which were not (and alas cannot be) conducted rationally or with those concerned possessing all of the information they would like to have had. I think this is the precise social-psychological location of the regressions to vanity and mysticism which deliver such absurdities as "Bebop is the Music of the Future" and "Harmony is the New Avant-Garde," which drive uncle Steve to give his new CD as a Christmas gift, which motivate generals in the Style Wars to pursue scorched-earth tactics. This is what I think. And I went to CalArts. Go figure. People are endlessly creative in their use and misuse of machines, but only within arenas where such choices have not already been made for them. If we want to take those foreclosed choices for ourselves, we must ourselves backtrack from end user to designer/inventor. Failing that, we either accept the technician's choices as binding or we adopt opposition to them as a generative strategy. I for one have never seen better than limited generative potential in explicitly working against materials and processes. I have also entertained the notion that this seemingly rational opinion is in fact an irrational psychological defense of my identity as an aesthetically-oriented, lines-and-dots musician who fears he is watching conceptual avant-gardists and commercial illiterates unwittingly form a coalition to ban chairs and stands from all musical performance. In any case, Mumford here offers up a powerfully rational case for affirmative rather than oppositional machine use, one which certainly speaks to my sensibilities on the matter. Undeniably, opposition to otherwise settled function always has at least some limited generative potential, and it would be tragic (and also a very bad indication for the state of the field in question) if for mere lack of interest this was not pursued at all. If I were ever to teach college tuba, I would at some point assign every orchestral performance major to disassemble their instrument and take inventory of potential new sound sources. The question is not "When am I ever going to use this?", but rather, "What might this teach me that I really ought/need to know?" If you're serious about playing, then knowing the instrument inside and out, forwards and backwards, etc. is not merely a metaphor. And certainly if I was presented with the far-less likely obverse case, a 17 year-old music school applicant from an arts high school whose entire practice consisted of tuba improvisation using extended techniques, we would have the materials/processes talk often, and we'd learn a Bordogni a week until we could have the materials/processes talk about Bordogni too. I'll probably never have the chance to attempt this type of constructive brain scrambling with students talented, bright and persistent enough to learn something from it, but I find it a most interesting thought exercise even so. I would expect that the next, best question, that of judgment, would follow for these hypothetical students more naturally regarding the foreign modus operandi imposed on them than it would regarding the practice to which they were affirmatively, instinctively drawn. The ultimate goal of course is not to elicit or reaffirm negative judgments of other practices but to prompt conscious intellectual consideration of the core practice, to expose hitherto unchallenged, unwitting assumptions and judgments to new scrutiny. A reaffirmation of these assumptions is a perfectly acceptable outcome, perhaps even the most promising one, for it would indicate that the student's gut, their animal instincts, and all of the environmental factors that they didn't necessarily choose, that all of these thing over which we in reality have almost no control have, nonetheless, been managed and processed by the student in a way that has enabled him or her to find a calling and to be at peace, consciously now, with the particular privileges and responsibilities associated with that calling. If, on the other hand, significant fissures are revealed in the student's thinking about the thing they say they want to do with their life, this is a less happy outcome but an equally constructive one vis-a-vis the function of education in society. Under pressure of expedience, music schools have taken up far blunter instruments in this come-to-Jesus talk, devious things like, in the case of my alma mater, scheduling unpleasant classes early in the morning and front-loading them in degree plans¹. I think it would be better to stick to the old-fashioned method of attacking the desired specialization from every angle and leaving students to decide if, after several years of this, they still find the subject interesting. Such generative limitations as exist in working against rather than with a machine can easily remain invisible to artists working in relative isolation, but they become painfully obvious when a wider net is cast (e.g. when you move to a bigger city, or when the internet is invented). All processes limit as well as enable, which is part of why seemingly revolutionary stylistic changes eventually beget the same stale redundancy they once shattered. It is, unfortunately, far easier to shield ourselves from this reality than to proactively gather the evidence of its truth; and once we have so shielded ourselves, our sense of our own self-importance, of our place in the pecking order, of the wider potential of our work, all of these perceptions lose their grounding in reality quite easily. Not so when reality is sporadically permitted to recalibrate them. I have, as an adult, always found it constructive to be reminded when I am least expecting it that something I'm thinking or doing is not all that original. I have always been much more upset to be paid the complement that something I'm thinking or doing is wholly original when I know this not to be case. The latter has indeed happened a few times, and I am never quite sure where to go from there; whereas the former case is a near-ideal prompt to improve a specific element of what I do and who I am, whether that entails a diversification or consolidation of influences. If self-improvement of any kind is something you're interested in, then you must not merely be accepting of vulnerability but in fact actively seek it out. There is certainly plenty of vanity in the arts, but in this respect I think it's pretty clear that humility plays far better out in the world. Only the narrowest of specialists can achieve something great without some seasoning and without exposing themselves to critique (explicit or otherwise) issuing from outside their specialty. This kind of hyper-specialist can actually be quite useful to have around; but the next time you meet one, try poking around for leading indicators of the vanity and mysticism which Mumford sees it as the role of Technics to resolve for us; for whether or not they see the humane value in "usefulness;" to what degree they are at piece with that which they cannot control; to what extent their specialism represents the affirmative giving over of the self to a higher calling and to what extent it is psychological armor (perhaps material too) against a Big Scary World to which they are far less important than they are to their specialty. 1. Uncharacteristically for me at that age, I spoke up against this front-loading in my first group advising session. I was told that, if I insisted, then yes, I could put off first-year Music History/Musicology until year two and second-year Music Theory until year three, in order to free up space for non-music classes which the degree plan listed as happening almost entirely in my fourth year. It was, however, non-negotiable and most crucial that I enroll in first-year Music Theory from the outset. I remember thinking at the time what a revealing/loaded assertion this was, and this feeling has only deepened with experience gained. What I only later realized was that I had unwittingly liberated myself from the threat of having 8am classes five days a week for an entire school year, the way things were meant to be for freshman. I wonder how different/better so many of my classmates' lives could have been, how many breakdowns and burnouts and health scares and suicides could have been nipped in the bud this way. And, given my classmates' general attitude towards their non-music classes, I wonder if this would not also have been an even more effective weeding-out procedure than the one that was already in place. ----- Mumford -- Art and Technics (xiii)
"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) "Henry James, in that wonderful story "The Great Good Place," dreamed of an architecture "all [83] beautified by omissions"; and that effort to rid itself of the superfluous, to return to the essential and the inevitable, is one of the truly esthetic qualities of machine art, one that indicates the maximum determination by human values." (82-83) p. 92 -- "...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." 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."
Here Mumford takes photography's seemingly most obvious bug, the confinement of "choice and initiative" to an exceedingly "small area," and posits it as a feature. That the Technics of the endeavor so strictly circumscibe desire without quite disabling it entirely is, for him, not a limitation at all but in fact "one of the truly esthetic qualities of machine art," of disciplines where the "the play of the human personality" is brought into higher relief precisely for being so narrowly channeled. Though he does not explicitly state the obverse thesis, it is fair to wonder if, by this logic, there is at the other extreme a degree of artistic freedom into which the personality is merely diffused rather than exalted. And though he does not invoke the concept of accessibility, it would not be reading too closely between the lines to theorize a further connection to this most loaded construct, i.e. to posit that strict channeling of the aesthetic impulse has a parallel effect on the reception side as is ascribed to it here on the generative side; that "truly esthetic" reception is borne of intelligibility, and that intelligibility is borne of the strict channeling of generative desire. Wherever photography's status as art is in fact questioned, indeed wherever the compulsion to settle on a hard and fast definition of "art" is for any particular reason prioritized, Mumford's gloss could be quite compelling in favor of including photography under any definition in which expression and/or communication are the linchpins: whereas conceits to expression and communication through art quite frequently run aground on the non-specificity of abstraction, photorepresentation is supremely concrete in surface content while permitting expressive depth within a manageably "small area." If art is to be about sending messages, then photorepresentation is a medium which strikes a rare and delicate balance in this department. This is certainly an interesting angle from which to consider photography as a medium and as an art form. The question of conclusively defining art is, however, never quite as interesting as it seems like it should be; it is interesting enough to divert Mumford here, I think, for two not-terribly-good reasons. Explcitly, he wishes to gently head off the charge that his hard-functionalist theory of machine art more or less does away with the art part of the question, and as such he wishes not to offend photographers by appearing to deny them their rightful status as artists. Rather, photography is art because it does afford generative-aesthetic choice, and it is not non-art simply because this choice is narrowly channeled by a mechanical intermediary. This point seemingly arises as a procedural matter rather than an essential one. It is a heading-off of offense borne of misunderstanding, a little white nugget of interest-group mollification offered up simply to keep things moving, "lest any photographers in this audience should squirm in agonized silence." Though now living on only in written form, these missives are in fact conceived as "lectures," whereby the lecturer is potentially face-to-face with the aggrieved. In the solitary consumption of formal academic writing, meanwhile, there is nothing but "agonized silence" and, probably, a squirm or two to boot. This is simply part of the readerly deal, and it is easier to accept when the only available recourse is itself a written one.[Note1] [Note1 The radical empiricists among us badly underrate this aspect of formal academic discourse and its potential, especially now, to elide much of the social friction which inheres in face-to-face interaction. With as much attention as the issue of implicit bias has recently attracted, it is remarkable to me that anyone could consider the failings of abstraction, disinterest, and secondary sourcing to be the greater evil. At the risk of trivializing the issue of implicit bias, I would say that it is a luxury to so much as be able to stop and consider it: we are ruled by explicit biases and by the lizard-brain to an extent that makes all face-to-face interaction risky, with worst-case scenarios in play which are far more severe than being passed over for a job interview. The possibilities for resolving epistemic conflict face-to-face have always been extremely limited, which is why the academic ideal has evolved to so severely restrict not just the personality but the entire social brain. It is one thing to complain that this paradigm is no fun, quite another to take a hard line for empiricism as against rationalism. Similarly, even as the academic conceit to objectivity has been ruthlessly problematized from an epistemological angle, as a mere conceit it has at least delivered conventions which are quite useful as blinding tools. This is worth keeping in mind as ever-clumsier blinding tools are resorted to in other social arenas. The lizard brain doesn't like to see the productions of the higher cortices forcibly blinded; rather, it wants due credit for them on its own terms; and so at that point it falls to other regions of those higher cortices to intervene. When the issue at hand is actually important, there is a lot to be said for eliminating affect from discourse, and it wouldn't hurt to eliminate self-listening, interrupting, and performing too. It is certainly too bad that fewer people will read most academic journal articles than can fit into a booth at the local micropub, but nor does it make any sense to expect superhuman degrees of impartiality and colorblindness in any face-to-face social contact. Wherever the discourse turns fraught, proceding in writing and out of view of each other has clear benefits: it forces us to take turns, to restrain our affect, and most of all, to think twice or thrice about what we are about to say. That potential is not to be taken lightly. Is the staged debate not first and foremost about the contestants and only distantly secondarily about the question(s) at hand? ] That being as it is, these assertions are actually quite central to Mumford's larger thesis, to his view that the metaphysics of machine usage are settled fact to a degree that the artists in the room may well find, in a word, unartistic, and this no matter their metiers. His is just about as hard and fast a definition of art as is ever put forward, so much so that there can be only "a possibility of art," not a certainty of it, inhering in any given technical medium. Arthood is not (or not entirely) in the subjective eye of the beholder but rather (also) can be objectively deduced from the evidenced relationship between human creator and technical intermediary. If I were a photographer in the audience, the possibility of inclusion under such a strict rubric would not be all that comforting. Nor would the implication that photographs which are "soft and misty and impressionistic" are, as a rule, something less than fully artistic or aesthetic. The overriding need or desire for early photographers "to justify their productions as art" at a time when such status was not yet firmly established furnishes Mumford with a handy example, but it simultaneously evinces a massive confounding factor vis-a-vis the argument he uses it to support. Presumably having judged such works aesthetic failures, he points to the fact that they work against rather than with the designed purpose of the camera. This is solid correlation which is nonetheless still a long way from causation; to take one for the other is to betray the presence of an underlying primary judgment which is far less rational than a fully-rationalized functionalist regime permits. By staking this argument to the concept of narrow channeling, Mumford risks contradicting his earlier assertion that "material and process play this [limiting] part everywhere." If that is so, then what is the significance of degree therein? Can our perception of these degrees of limitation ever be objective and reliable, or is it itself perspective-bound and ephemeral? Is the artistic leeway permitted by machine art truly narrower than in the fine and performing arts, or is its narrowness simply harder to ignore once machines become involved? As always, the possibility of a global, prescriptive definition of art is rhetorically useful only up to the point where it must be fleshed out; for pragmatic purposes it is at that point elided by instead settling for the inscription of sub-categories within it rather than boundaries around it. This is somewhat less-than-explicit in the text but seems to me nonetheless an unavoidable takeaway. "If there is such leeway [for choice and initiative on the part of the Technician], there is a possibility of art, that is of success or failure in terms that would have significance to the beholder." Ostensibly this question of "success or failure" and that of "significance" would mark the common ground between so-called machine art and all other kinds of art, simultaneously becoming a rather strict prescription for all against which all cannot possibly stack up equally. Crucially, then, material differences among arts determine the ease with which their artifacts may meet this standard and the methods which are available to do so. Complete automation and wholecloth creation stake out the opposite poles of this continuum, along which various art forms and traditions can be placed. The "possibility of art," then, is somewhat broader than the possibilities of expression or communication; therefore, wherever expression and communication are the functional mandates of art, the boundaries begin to close in, often rather precipitously. Mumford is thus favorably disposed toward machine arts only insofar as they conform to his prescriptions for art broadly, those being narrow enough so as to create, ultimately, a taxonomy whereby machine arts play by entirely different rules than do the fine and performing arts. Rhetorically at least, these others lie towards an opposite pole which could be represented by any of a few wholecloth, "handicraft" archtypes: the lump of clay, the blank canvas, the silence before a musical performance; in other words, by voids, real or perceived, material or intellectual, from which artworks are brought into being, and where the Technics of this process are elementary enough that the Art side of his cosmic duality cannot help but predominate for sheer lack of resistance. The maker of machines faces up to this same void, but not so the end user: this is a void of agency as well as material which, once it has been filled, is not so easy to selectively rearrange without simply emptying it entirely and starting over. In machine art, beginnings determine middles and endings; path dependency carries the day. A whole array of "choice, freedom, esthetic evaluation, [is] transferred from the process as a whole...to the initial stage of design" (82), that is, to the maker and away from the end user. The maker thus gives the end user enough rope to hang themselves, "leeway" which can be consummated as the freedom to specialize in Art with minimum Technical toil, or as the abdication of Art in mere undirected, sub-Artistic Play. Hence a fork in the road of absolute morality: to have "the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose" (110), or to have too much of everything all at once; to sit quietly during the Marshmellow Test, or to devour the morsel at first sight. The same disparity of agency between wholecloth and prefabricated creation of course applies to immaterial inheritances too: to culture-bound conventions and processes, to ideas and ideologies, and certainly, in my own bailiwick, to the uses of musical machines which themselves define "the small area where the play of the human personality remains free" for even the most creative, expressive or communicative instrumentalists. Even the humble lump of clay has, as its proverb-ization indicates, quite a weight of precedent and convention attached to it, as well as material limitations which I must imagine only seem simple to those who have never had to wrestle with them. This is quite a lot for the artist-technician to take account of as they seek a mediation between the inner and outer world; or, if you prefer, for the naive artist to manage to remain ignorant of lest they see their individuality incinerated in the pyre of received convention. In either case, clearly the old lump presents in a phase where, by Mumford's logic, the available extent of "choice and evaluation" is as great as it can ever be in the mediums of pottery and sculpture. Machines can be used to realize such choices as are subsequently made, but machines cannot be held responsible for them; responsibility is, for better or worse, a human burden, as any frustrated tech support worker will tell you. Certainly there are unique limitations, conventions, perceptions, politics and meanings at play in truly hand-made materials and processes, meaningful differences from works which are more fully machine-aided, where the role of the machine so inheres in the fabric of the work that there is, literally, no use pretending it is not there. But are these differences truly determined by the width or narrowness of expressive boundaries? Or, are we merely better able to see, hear and feel boudaries imposed by machines than we are to perceive those limitations which live inside of us, which inhere in intellectual inheritances we have never sufficiently questioned, which we can scarcely perceive because they have always been there, which are ineluctable laws of "nature," or which are imposed on us unwittingly and without our consent in myriad aspects of "nurture?" I'm skeptical that degrees of limitation can be meaningfully distinguished when the object of said limitations (the degree to which the human personality roams free) is itself so ephemeral as to be difficult to codify or quantify. But I do think it is informative that the subset of the arts defined by the central role of well-developed machines (represented here by photography and printing) would be thought to confine expressive potential more tightly than those which involve less complex, more transparent technical ingredients (say lumps of clay, plucked strings, or buckets of paint). This Perception may well be incorrect, and it may have become Reality nonetheless. For Mumford, under a machine-imposed regime, such expression as is possible results in, "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," this as a direct consequence of the narrowness of the leeway permitted by the machine. Hence a double bind: are both machine precision itself and the general automization of artisinal gruntwork not constructs which appeal specifically to the coarse and the insensitive? Indeed, if this were not the case, then what would be be the point of taking such lengths to counterpoint the narrative of unbroken progress through Technics? If the basis for ability and affinity in the "machine arts" was a quality which consummates these arts rather than one which debases them, then would the arc of progress not be more steady and less jagged than Mumford elsewhere suggests it has been? Is the superficial, lizard-brain appeal of machine precision not in and of itself the reason why ideal functionalist machine use is the exception and not the rule? In seeking explanations on points such as these, Mumford is, as I read him, more interested in the "myth of the machine," to invoke another of his subtitles, in what Technics represents as opposed to what it is vis-a-vis users and end users. Undoubtedly that is one piece of the puzzle, and undoubtedly it is an easier position to defend than any such sweeping generalization about human hard-wiring as I have made above. If we think we perceive freer flights of fancy elsewhere, then might we on this basis expect to find coarser eyes and less sensitive spirits there? This certainly goes against the grain of everything we self-styled handicraft aesthetes like to think about ourselves as well as about machine art. It is quite the subversion of the fine and performing arts' side of the spectrum, where diffusion of the generative personality into a more permissive Technics begets multiplicity of reception and interpretation, and where, as a result, we feel that we are the ones most frequently and profoundly faced with non-comprehension and non-interest from audiences. It seems to me that machine precision is, just like technical precision in instrumental music, infamously hypnotizing to the so-called "coarse eye," that this has a tendency to divert attention from the expressive dimension, and that we see this dynamic played out in various ways all across the spectrum from clay to photograph. This would mean that "machine arts" have a tendency to attract followers who are least well-suited to its modus operandi, and perhaps the same for the most low-tech, analog of the fine and performing arts. I think that setting up shop in the squishy areas of sensitivity and meaning is a bit of a sideshow. That any given results of such processes are "inevitable" is more easily granted than that they are "essential." Similarly, "significance to the beholder" seems to me more useful in a quotidian sense and less useful in the value-laden sense of the would-be artist's "success or failure." and that this impulse arose from gainfulness rather than from altruism, from fear of exclusion rather than desire for expression. The subversion of technics correlates, in this case, with an extra-artistic agenda and with aesthetic failure Causation is hardly established this way. Had the intervening decades not seen a single instance of affirmative aestheticism channeled into "soft and misty" photographs? It seems to me absurd to insist that it had not. [Note2 on Getty exhibition.] "to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting" "in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light" "that final moment of choice" "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." ----- Art and Technics (xiv) p. 92 -- "...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." 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 it 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 irresistable to many people, at least to the extent that they are consciously aware of this dynamic. Struggle and introspection themselves are, if inherently resistable 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, the 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 choice. (Is totally free 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?) And so, if the imposition of the handicraft process at a certain point came to look like a mere protection of entrenched genontocratic 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 dispensible, 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 Marshmellow 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, at the obvious cost of a correspondingly massive devaluation of the resulting products. This confounds notions of "[uninterrupted progress]" (p.##), pointing instead to complex web of concurrent microtrends about which it is difficult to formulate macro-level judgments such as progress and regress. To note just one much-discussed strand in this web, 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. Their output as such, and its lack of refinement, have occasionally been valorized as the essential expression of a particular oppressed class or ethnic group, whereas it seems clear to me that what this kind of work actually reflects is the condition of oppression itself and an intolerable stunting of human potential, not the identity of the group. (Following Mumford, however, it may well still reflect narrowly channeled individual desires, and though the narrow channeling is in this case something less than consensual, there is nonetheless the potential for compelling individualistic production.) 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? And if we simply elect never to stop and think about what we are doing, then what can come of this? "well-trained eyes and extremely skilled hands" 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." "in conjunction with his own purpose" In other words, this is where willfulness and vanity are turned to constructive ends; or at least the artists themselves are bound to think so, since these are their "purposes" and not someone else's. Ideally the audience/recipient also has an active part to play in assuming the same discriminating posture vis-a-vis any transmission they might choose to receive; but the question of direct communication of messages and ideas, of the equal validity of myriad contradictory interpretations of the transmission, looms large here. What if the recipient's purpose is, from the outset, somehow at odds with that of the artist? And even where their purposes are in fact aligned precisely, who is to say that the message could not still get lost in the aesthetic shuffle? Indeed, the skeptic is wont to intone: If you really need to send a message, write a letter. To decode that saying in terms of the present discussion: a language (one worthy of the name and shared by the parties concerned) is the most functional Technical means of comunication (worthy of the name), and photography is not, quite, a language. In Technics, initial design choices determine the use dynamics of a machine, which in turn determine an essential purpose for it. Similarly, the very notion of message or purpose seems to dictate that there is, whether really or merely ideally, an essential standard against which efforts of realization can be judged. All together now: Communication is a branch of Technics, not of Art. Aesthetic objects, meanwhile, say what words alone cannot, which is fine if the substance of your message or purpose is vague or negotiable. If your purpose is in fact deathly important, then you should get Technical and exclude a large part of your human personality from the transmission. If your personality is the message, then it's fine to use Art, but you had better be an unusually interesting and deep person if you expect anyone else to care. From any position short of full comminicative potential, the aesthetic distinction between impressionistic photography and photographic photography (what else to call it?), between machine art which "attempts to ape...the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by [handicraft]" and that which "depends upon the [machine artist's] respect for his medium," between art which subverts mechanical function and art which affirms it, this distinction comes to seem rather arbitrary. In this passage it is implied, and elsewhere asserted, that art which subverts Technics is less successful across the board, including (perhaps especially) aesthetically, than art which affirms Technics. Mumford puts forward "machine art" as the clearest illustration of this dynamic, but ultimately I think that the distinction between functional art and recreational/contemplative/aestheticist art is most meaningful here. In other words, where there is a clear, objective standard of success or failure against which to measure the artist and their work, a standard which is borne of quotidian matters rather than hedonistic or metaphysical ones, then I would expect a pattern to emerge whereby affirmative machine use begets demonstrably higher functioning products than does subversive machine use. Art for its own sake, meanwhile, is definitionally oblivious to process, cares only about results, and imposes no (or at least many fewer) absolute standards of success or quality. This is why, from the standpoint of an aestheticist artist, Mumford's stricture against subversive machine use seems more like axe-grinding than meaningful analysis. I for one consider there to be no remarkable deviation in quality along the distinction between affirmative and subversive technicians; I do, however, see a certain path dependence as inhering in each way of working, with subversion leading not, as is so often claimed for it, to a broad flowering of untapped possibilities but simply to more or less equally narrow set of possibilities dictated by the initial design of the machine. As such, the lesson I would take from the example of nineteenth century impressionistic photography is neither that it is doomed aesthetically nor that it can find no function, but merely that the desire for social acceptance under a very particular rubric is itself quite the arbitrary consideration vis-a-vis Art, arising as it does from neither aesthetic nor from functional demands but from social insecurity. It would be totally unsurprising, then, if art issuing from this quite unartistic mindset would fail at fulfilling roles which it was neither conceived nor designed to fill. In my own bailiwick there is no shortage of analogous examples: there are instrumentalists who turn to extended techniques and avant-garde performance practices simply to draw attention to themselves, to stand out, to be contrarian, or to conceal other deficiencies; and there are those who make their names and careers as earnest, compelling avant-gardists who subsequently choose to cash in on the mere spectacular potential which inheres in a drastic reversal of course. And then there are, on the other hand, musicians like Robin Hayward and Vinko Globukar who have built compelling practices on technical subversion and succeeded on most every critical level while sustaining a sincere posture. That they are exceptional examples is, I think, a function of the overall poor signal-to-noise ratio in the contemplative arts, and not necessarily a function of how contemplative artists use or misuse machines. If all of this is so, then it would be absurd to claim that the "human person" is less "operative" here than elsewhere. I've known some profoundly deficient, supremely operative human persons, and I think we can all be thankful, actually, that they've gravitated toward the contemplative arts and away from the functional ones. The further right one travels on that continuum, the higher the stakes, the more clearcut the purpose, and hence the more logical it is to fear the consequences of the subversion of Technics. "that final moment of choice" Thus the photorepresentational will has just recently found its Technical apotheosis in the smartphone and its various space-age cameras, in the "burst" and the "moment," functions which have done for curation what the camera itself did for representation. This seems a near-archetypal instance of an innovation which was technically achievable decades before social conditions led it to be advertised widely on television. [a google phone commercial?] Similarly, it is just the latest instance of the problematic, the others, the imperfect rejects, being at minimum more interesting, and often enough also more artistic, than the acceptable, the idealized, the perfect, which it is the contemporary will's social duty to prefer; they're so good, in fact, that the commercial leads with the outtakes rather than with the choice cuts. If there are device- and marketing-specific reasons, as well as social ones, that these concepts have just recently come (back?) into vogue, they are incidentally also extremely relevant to the dynamic Mumford outlines here. These technologies themselves now make more transparent than ever before the possibility that this "moment of choice" can just as well come after the properly technical concerns and the gadgets themselves have been powered down and returned to the shelf. Curation is at that point not merely more accessible but, given the wide reach of these devices materially and socially alike, very nearly an essential part of photography, much as music production and post-production are, despite the prodigious recent growth of specialized credentialing therein, more likely than ever before in the recording era to be handled by the performers themselves. For artists there are two ways to interpret all of this vis-a-vis the will. Perhaps a compulsory choice is no choice at all; or perhaps this choice was always implied/tacet and by being made conscious makes (gently enough) a genuine agent out of the formerly passive recreator. Perhaps production responsibilities are imposed on music performers via an unfortunate confluence of economic, material and cultural forces; or perhaps musicians have thus wrested control of something they can do for themselves as well as anyone else can do it for them, thereby cutting overhead and regaining agency where usury and abdication and previously prevailed. As for photo-representational art, perhaps the social world thus represented is, essentially, a play of wills which is only made stronger by diversity; or perhaps this social world is a war of wills where greater technical power makes possible ever greater mutual destruction. Are there downsides to this democratization? Photogs still need the skill to account for many of the same variables Mumford lists even if their timing no longer needs to be perfect. There is even the possibility, which I assume has by this time been realized thousands of times over if not necessarily under the auspices of the formal art world, of a firmer division of labor between moment photographer and burst sorter, between technician and curator. In such a scenario, neither person is able to lay a whole claim to Mumford's conception of artisthood independent of the partnership, like a termite colony in which the group demonstrates the characteristics of a complex organism but the individual bug does not. Termites get a lot of work done this way, but a human society committed to any degree of individualism might think twice about the implications of such extreme divisions of labor for the fate of the individual. Is there not a point where lifting the burdens of agency itself becomes oppressive by stunting development? And is this not precisely what Technical advances do in spite of their many more salutary aspects? The object which is mechanically reproduced by the photographic image has, as far as I can tell, no sentience or agency in Mumford's account; but in fact this object is quite frequently another human being, another citizen, social agent, and desiring subject, and this means that the advent of photography created a new conflict of rights, i.e. between the subject's freedom of expression and the object's freedom from it. Mumford speaks to the possibility that the moment of choice can occur at two different stages of the process, either in the moment the picture is taken or as it is selected from among many such options. This two-part process of generation followed by curation is hardly unique to the photorepresentational arts, but the unique political dynamics of the potential representation of one subject by another are multiplied, literally and figuratively, by it. The object-agent can now be violated not just once but twice: first they can have their image captured for purposes over which they have no control; then they may see this image reproduced, deployed, distorted in all kinds of ways that may be more specificaly violating. As photography becomes faster, more powerful and precise, it requires a lot less skill than it used to capture the object in an unflattering moment; rather, you simply need enough time and a fast enough camera. The narrow area into which the expressive personality of the subject is channeled by this technology is precisely the same area where the object-agent can be violated. Just as machine art has unique and distinctive aesthetic and functional qualities, so it enables unique forms of violation which humanity didn't have to wrestle with back when it was far more difficult and technically inaccessible to hand-draw someone's spitting image quite so well. And so the internet is full of clickbait portals which compete for our attention this way: football game wrap-ups which lead with piles of players in unfortunate positions Photographers are advised to establish consent before snapping, as are those so photographed advised to seek consent before deploying the resulting artworks to their own commercial ends. This do-cee-do sounds simpler than it often is.
"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 [95]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 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. Be-[96]cause 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 dispossesion 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." And yet,
To understand the bearings of this change we must realize that it was at once a technical innovation, a social device, a means of popular education, and a way which the monopoly of art by a small group was broken down. With the invention of graphic reproduction, pictures could go into circulation like any other commodity; they could be sold at markets and fairs so cheaply that all but the poorest classes could afford to own them. (87) From the fifteenth century onward, the picture was not merely something that you saw...[Rather,] in the cheap medium of an engraving it could be carried home; and so, in a sense, what it lost in uniqueness it gained in intimacy and variety and wide distribution. ... If they [reproductions] lacked pretentiousness, they gave to the unpretentious moments, the common occupations, the daily scene, the common pasttimes, the dignity of being sufficiently memorable to be preserved. That was a victory for democracy, achieved in the arts long before its proposition, that all men are created equal, was put forward in politics. (88)
Here is a supremely pessimistic phylogenetic observation: aesthetics and memory became democratized before power. Unsurprising, then, that today's homeless have smartphones but no home.
[The bad:] The fact is that in every department of art and thought we are being overwhelmed by our symbol-creating capacity; and our very facility with the mechanical means of multifolding and reproduction has been responsible for a progressive failure in selectivity and therefore in the power of assimilation. We are overwhelmed by the rank fecundity of the machine, operating without any Malthusian checks except periodic financial depressions; and even they, it would now seem, cannot be wholly relied on. Between ourselves and the actual experience and the actual environment there now swells and ever-rising flood of images which come to us in every sort of medium... A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous. (96)
Indeed, and I would extend this observation to the aforementioned photo-will too. Photorepresentational agency is only democratically salutary at a much smaller social scale than the one which currently presents itself. IRL accountability is a necessary check upon antisocial uses of photorepresentation; at present scale, the prospective subject-as-object is too likely to remain a mere abstraction to the photographer even (perhaps especially) beyond the curation and transmission stages. This begets alternately anarchistic and fascistic phenomena, here defeating by brute force any conceit to order or reason, there furnishing the proprietors of so many top-down, self-dealing orders with the best tools yet for exploiting anyone less powerful than them. Photorepresentation has long since been made technically accessible, and some degreee of curatorial agency has always been baked into the photorepresentational process; but reception, be it a matter of contemplation or gainfulness or anywhere in between, cannot (has not yet been?) automated. The individual human being remains the basic unit of reception whether subsumed among ten thousand or ten billion others, and whether subsumed in a real or virtual community. The potential expansion of the capacities of the subject are, as the passage above hints at, wildly incommensurate with the potential expansion of the capacities of the subject-as-object. It is not merely that "progressive failure in selectivity and therefore in the power of assimilation" is an imposed failure at an impossible task, but also that the consequences of failure have changed. Overwhelmingly for the worse, I would say. That said, I find it highly counterintuitive, actually, if I may be permitted a temporary flight of ivory tower rationalism, that conditions of scarcity would be the ones under which powers of discernment would be sharpened. Insofar as scarcity means taking what one can get, do we not thereby become eminently undiscerning and less picky? Hunger is the finest sauce. A recipe for ascetic inner peace, perhaps, but not for sharpening the powers of discernment. It doesn't make sense that "old habits of careful evaluation and selection" could be superior to new ones when there was, in point of fact, far less to evaluate and select from back then. Rationalistically at least, abundance should be the condition which imposes by brute force the need to narrow the field; the condition by which we should be driven by threats to sanity and survival, no less serious than that proverbial marauding lion was to the caveman, to evolve on the fly our powers of discernment. Perhaps, then, this long pre-mechanical, pre-industrial epoch of human civilization which Mumford (and I myself along with him, I confess) is tempted to idealize for the seeming triumph of artistic discernment was not a time of scarcity at all but in fact a time of precarious adequacy. Or, perhaps he (and I) need to more fully reconcile the question of discernment and the question of class-boundedness: the elites enjoyed a barely-adequate selection of images which demanded discernment without overwhelming the discerner while, concurrently, the masses were, so to speak, starved. To wit:
We are rapidly dividing the world into two classes: a minority who act, increasingly, for the benefit of the reproductive process, and a majority whose entire life is spent serving as the passive appreciators or willing victims of this reproductive process.
...an endless succession of images passes before the eye, offered by people who wish to exercise power, either by making us buy something for their benefit or making us agree to something that would promote their economic or political interests... (97) As a result of this whole mechanical process, we cease to live in the multidimensional world of reality, the world that brings into play every aspect of the human personality... We have subsituted for this, largely through the mass production of graphic symbols...a secondhand world, a ghost-world, in which everyone lives a second-[98]hand and derivative life. (97-98)
Indeed, the "wish to exercise power" and the acting "for the benefit of the reproductive process" have only grown closer together since these passages were written. The class angle is crucial, reflecting as it must barriers both economic and social. Unlike those more basic concerns, however, photorepresentational class boundaries are increasingly permeable; or, if that is going too far, it is at least increasingly possible even for agents who have very little overall power to nonetheless wield the technics of photorepresentation against those even less powerful than they are; similarly for the utterly powerless to wrest a modicum of power via the increasing accessibility of photorepresentational record-keeping. All of which is to say that photorepresentation is a form of power, one of the few which occasionally begets drastic (if temporary) inversions of seemingly insurmountable power gradients: think undercover cameras in a corporate slaughterhouse, or in an extra-marital dalliance with the chairman. Of course the Deep Fake phenomenon is the dialectical fissure here: in one respect it threatens to facilitate an ultimately powerful merger of surface photorealism with willful/gainful wholecloth creation; in another respect, as the technics of Deep Fakes make them increasingly accessible, we will have no choice but to cease to trust photorealistic documents merely because they are photorealistic, and undoubtedly this would upend most of what we think we know about the place of photorepresentation in society and culture. That these possibilities were latent in the medium of photography from the beginning is no reason to tar the entire field with the brush of disenfanchisement. But I do think that the difference between Mumford's classical-functional conception of photography and photography in a world of fully-subverted deep fakery is one of degree rather than kind. The degree in question is that of the will, of a gainfulness which leads rather than follows aesthetics, of the subject choosing to represent the object based on unmet psychological/individual needs rather than social/collective ones. In this respect, the fact that you can no longer trust even a timestamped, photorealistic document could ultimately mean the subversion of entrenched power (assuming the wide accessibility of the technology), or it could mean the ultimate triumph of it (assuming that the powerful leverage their power to stay one or more Technical steps ahead of the rest of us). In this respect, those decades of conditioning towards passive consumption and uncritical reception could ultimately have a ripple effect even more severe than their initial impact. ------ 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...[84]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 as 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. ----- Mumford -- Art and Technics (xvi)
"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." (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 [99] 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." (98-99) "to devaluate the symbol and to reject every aspect of it but the purely sensational one" "In order to make sensations seem more important than meanings" The word "sensational" here could be read two ways, and indeed it should be read both ways to fully understand the point. Broadly, there is sensation as against intellect, feeling as against thinking, the immediate, aesthetic, intuitive, sensory, visceral part of the artistic experience as against the consciously-considered, reflective, intellectual one. More narrowly, there is the colloquialized sense borne of classic commercialism, sensation as in "sensationalism," "overnight sensation," etc., indicating an appeal that is wider, more immediate, more intense, and (probably) less rational than a mere standard-issue hit. Each cultural "sensation" raises the baseline of human sensation against which striving imagizers progressively turn up the volume in order to be heard over each other. The colloquial usage is an especially culturebound one, to be sure, idiomatic to time and place; and so the confluence of verbiage between this idiom and the more literal one gives a very strong indication about the era in which they have became conflated: in a society where the marketing orientation permeates almost every outward-directed thought and action, it is the visceral which is the most effective tool for commanding attention. To create a sensation, you must appeal to sensation. I propose that there are three co-determinative factors which explain this: (1) Reasoned response can be consciously shut down by the subject more easily than visceral response; and indeed, we tend to "plug" our ears-of-reason when the stimulus conflicts with a strong existing belief. Conversely, the Lizard Brain and the autonomic nervous system will respond, in their way, to any stimulus that is strong enough, whether we like it or not. (Or, to borrow Kahneman's verbiage, perhaps System 1 has done its deeds before System 2 has even turned itself on.) What's more, our senses are profoundly unequal in the anatomies and motor skills which are available to inhibit stimuli: the vast superiority of the eyelids to the uninnervated cartilage surrounding the ear and nasal canals shows that the relative "dominance" of the senses is mirrored in their respective mechanisms of inhibition. (Or is it simply that danger is loud and smelly?) Sensation's only kill-switch is inhibition of the stimulus, and the default setting of this switch is "on." It is thus easier to catch the target audience in a state of visceral receptivity than in one of rational receptivity. The latter is an achievement, the former is a given. (2) Reasoned response is inherently slower than the visceral kind, hence it is at a disadvantage wherever stimuli compete for attention and where response time is significant. The fabrication of urgency is a staple of classical salescraft. Making the sale means preempting reason from joining the customer's inner dialog. (3) Reasoned response is conditioned by culture, whereas visceral response is of animal origin. Reasonability differs drastically from person to person whereas viscerality is immediate, often unwilling, and far less susceptible to cultural mediation. Whereas human psychological diversity is the supreme obstacle to mass appeal, human visceral uniformity is as close to universal as any properly human phenomenon can be. At mass scale, culturally-mediated response is intractable whereas visceral response remains manageable. Hence mass manipulation must tend toward the visceral in order to be effective. [Note: Kahmeman's book would seem to support (1) and (2) vigorously, but leaves some doubt about (3). Certainly his System 1 is anything but immune to conditioning. At the same time, for Wexler there are plenty of functionally universal aspects of human neurology, and that is good enough for my purposes here.] One could say that for Mumford formal art issues from a puerile version of the marketing orientation, and that, in such market-oriented terms, modern art is a predictably perverse response to the perverse incentives that mechanical record-keeping created. There is nonetheless the great hope, in Mumford's view, of civilizing influences acting upon this puerile art-mind, of social and environmental influences by which raw unmediated desire may evolve into the desire (usually far less acute) to replace one's parents in the existing social structure. "Like sexual love" itself, however, "this development likewise brings with it the same danger of premature arrest or fixation at one of its infantile or adolescent phases" (29), thereby threatening the existing social structure with dissolution. Obviously this assessment owes something to the depth psychology of the time, and obviously adult exponents of formal art practices are bound to find that it mistakes superficial resemblance for deep-psychological machinations; perhaps also that the constellation of idiomatic expressions surrounding maturity in fact reveals a strong ambivalence about Growing Up, of which Mumford's stoic paternalism captures only the conservative extreme; perhaps also that truly selfless artists, like nice guys, finish last. I realize that this last bit is indeed quite puerile, even by my standards. What I mean to raise here, specifically, is the possibility that the external social objects to which artists might submit themselves may in fact reasonably be judged by the artists' rational faculties, if not also by the visceral ones, to be unworthy of submitting to, whether on moral, aesthetic or cultural grounds. This is the issue that drove Freud and Adler apart: when is illness properly seen as a failure to adapt, and when is it evidence of a society that is poorly adapted to people's needs? One would not know from his venomous attacks on modern art that Mumford was in fact among his century's most learned and eloquent spokespeople on the question of properly adapting the lived environment to human needs. Modern art seems to have threatened his own peace of mind so severely that he couldn't help but lash out at it as part of the problem. He would be neither the first nor the last to feel this way. In a cosmic sense, all can be forgiven in such matters of taste and culture. In this case, though, Mumford takes two tacks which on the earthly level are quite unforgivable: he rationalizes aesthetic judgments in polemical form; and he reads artworks as concrete statements with no thought given to them as abstract gestures. the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say Throughout his writings Mumford returns often to his architect friend's saying that "it takes a great client to make a great building," but here he seems to assume that "great clients" are falling from trees, and hence that child-artists who neglect to enter into partnership with one must be either stupid or crazy (and perhaps are mere products of their environment in one or both respects). He assumes the Adlerian posture and justifies it with Freudian theory. This is intellectually jarring of course, but the minutiae of that need not detain us here. The point is that he cannot fully convince even himself that artistic failures are strictly individual failures. Rather, if there are no great clients around, then only bad art will be made, even in a world where the artists are all grown up. This is fair as far as it goes; but how far is that, really? For my part, I am now racking my brain to name a single "great client" I have had during my first two decades of professional toil, and I'm having trouble coming up with one. I once asked a group of commiserating coworkers why they never tell any happy stories from their side hustles playing for contracted events, back-up bands, and recording sessions. I already knew the answer: "Because there aren't any." I have never lived in a world where Mumford's "selfless" ideal felt achievable to me, not even in the rarefied air of niche culture, and certainly not in the commercial sector. For me, working for "clients" has always involved not gentle compromise but rather total dissolution of the self, of morality, and of identity. Perhaps I am indeed a victim of structure, or perhaps I am a walking failure of agency. In any case, I suspect, though I can't know for sure, that the generation of modernists Mumford so despised did indeed have qualms of precisely this kind about the world they were thrust into. There is copious primary evidence to support this notion. Even so, this does not necessarily make it possible to read meaning into their works based on life experience. Another Freudian dissident and a member of this generation, Otto Rank, ably lit the way out of that particular darkness. It is on the surface somewhat more plausible to think that we can read the general integration or disintegration of a culture through the integration or lack thereof of artists, the freest of free-will agents, into its central conceits; this not based on particular content but rather on posture. This is also quite tenuous. I am more interested in a more basic question of hindsight: knowing what we now know about the proto-modernist milieu, is it at least understandable that someone might feel alienated from it? What, then, of the charge that modernism turns up the volume merely to be heard? Mumford's breezy treatment of Picasso's Guernica is breezy enough to deal only in the broadest of social changes and conditions, whereas really the phrase "the wounds and scars of our time" is too broad: the "wounds and scars" in this case are exceedingly specific ones, as Mumford himself surely knew from his own involvement in bringing the mural to New York around the same time these lectures were conceived. Even if this type of destruction was truly new and previously unimaginable, it is quite a stretch to think that there previously existed nothing so powerful in its own time and place as to affect artists in this way. It is impossible to believe that nothing quite so anguished ever was painted, or recognized as art, in any prior epoch; also, more to the point, that things in general were never quite bad enough to invite this possibility. Clearly things must have been bad enough plenty of times before. For Mumford, then, the mediation between the child-artist's Id and the strictures of civilization is a collegial mediation in times of imagistic scarcity, but it becomes violent in times of imagistic abundance. In the first case, any old artistic productions are inherently rare and exceptional enough to command attention, to soothe the Id, to placate the child; in the latter case, artworks must stoop to progressively baser appeals to animal instincts in direct proportion to the wider propagation of images in society. If all of this is so, then a retreat from representation might be welcome; but here Mumford can see only the same tantrum-throwing by the attention-starved child-artist, an appeal to pure novelty without even the redeeming quality of well-honed craft. If nothing else these passages lay bare just how drastically the ground would shift over the ensuing two decades. It was actually the generations after the abstract expressionists who took up explicitly the materials and techniques of advertising and salesmanship. But Mumford doesn't that this is explicit in "modern art," just that it is explicit to him. It is revealing that Mumford when discussing abstract art is most concerned with what is not there. It seems to me that in my own bailiwick of abstract music, to which this period of art was and is thought to be closely analogous, the main criticism is a version of what Mumford calls the personality's tendency to "prolong" the pleasurable moment of creation beyond a "reasonable duration;" [check quotes] in other words, what myriad pseudo-critics have called Self-Indulgence on the part of the artist. Having formed his own version of this observation (which is, it must be said, quite compelling on account of the context he presents, as opposed to pseudocriticism which simply takes the Marketing Orientation as a given virtue), he does not appeal to regarding abstract art. This omission is stange enough to be suspicious. Mumford reads Guernica because it is an eminently readable work, endowed intentionally and, it seems, successfully with this quality by its creator. But otherwise Mumford pretty much ignores both the intention and the reality of this era of art. In some ways I am paying way too much attention to these particular comments of Mumford's. They are not significant in the wider art-critical discourse, and they are not all that significant within his own oeuvre either. What I think is important about them, rather, is the possibility that (1) they are widely-shared sentiments, and (2) that they really close the walls in on modernism in tandem with the more common, learned critiques of it. Schickel's Intimate Strangers, for example, dispenses with the tandem approach and takes both sides of the issue concurrently. It is more or less explicitly through this lens that Mumford, so to speak, reads artworks, and through which he actualizes the potential (faith in which he is hardly alone in holding) to ascertain and evaluate what is going on societally by looking at (reading) what is going on artistically. And so in the case of the particular world he confronted, the worship of Technics and the weaponization of Art for marketing purposes combine to incentivize the puerile mode of expression above the mature one. This is read equally into three otherwise rather incommensurate trends in the formal art world of the time: the appeal to shock value, the appeal to total abstraction or non-representation, and the appeal to nostalgia. Before addressing each of these, note once again that the Structure-Agency question is resolved quite one-sidedly here; or at least this is so specifically in terms of the reading of artworks. Whatever unique aesthetic form this reflection of society might take, the fact that it does take form is what matters. Artists do not so much mediate with society as they are dominated by it; this is why "the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say." Alternative explanations for, say, a very intentional reluctance to "say" anything per se through one's art, are neither acknowledged nor considered. At that point, I think it is justified to label Mumford's theory of modern art a determinist theory, even if it is not a total determinism. It is undeniable that "modern art" opened up whole new vistas of exploration vis-a-vis visceral sensation and that this was quite often intentional, done for its own sake and for no better reason. That said, Mumford's axe-grinding ways have clearly gotten the better of him on this particular topic. For one thing, to appeal to an observation he veritably revels in making about all kinds of historical developments, it is undeniable that a certain visceral escalation was already detectable prior to the technical advents he writes of here, certainly in the trajectory from Mozart to Beethoven to Wagner to Mahler to cite one facile example from classical music. "the symbols that most deeply express the emotions and feelings of our age are a succession of dehumanized nightmares, transposing into esthetic form either the horror and violence or the vacuity and despair of our time" (7) Mumford appeals to Picasso's Guernica to illustrate this point; but it seems to me that "great" works are not necessarily representative simply because they are great. More likely, "greatness" is not representative of an entire milieu or historical period. (How could it be?) This is not just a gotcha technicality: the conceit of socio-deterministic reading of art depends entirely upon this notion of representativeness; otherwise it would be possible, for most any time since the mid-nineteenth century if not earlier, to cherrypick evidence in favor of just about any interpretation of the prevailing social conditions, because you would be able to find a few works here and there (probably even a few good works) with which to support your assertion. For Rudolf Arnheim, meanwhile, in his monograph on Guernica, the fact that "every work of art is symbolic by its very nature" begets a constant temptation towards "the error of reductionism: the belief that the true meaning lies always at the deepest level to which the enquirer can dig." (Ch. II) Predictably, psychoanalytic interpreters come in as the worst offenders, which serves well to illustrate the point while leaving aside that this is usually a simpler matter of misapplying techniques for studying people to the study of artworks. The immediate leap to the deepest levels of interpretation is in any case precisely what we have here from Mumford without, this time, the slightest recourse to psychoanalytic thought. For Arnheim, that is the wrong level of interpretation to apply to Guernica because the mural's "reality level", or "the level of abstraction at which an image represents reality," is closer to the surface than such farfetched interpretations are compatible with: in other words, "the "story" of the mural makes obvious sense at the level of the human implications of a military assault." So, whether or not Mumford is correct in his socio-deterministic view of art generally, it is (or ought to be) a superfluous observation to make about this particular work, whose appeal to sensation had obvious (and obviously valid) ends. This line of thinking comports well with my misgivings about Mumford's tendency to pull historical grand narratives from a tiny cross section of modern art, but I also don't find it wholly coherent. In the case of artworks whose demonstrable "reality level" is, we might say, quite low, Arnheim not only permits but in fact "requires the perceiver to look for a more abstract meaning" (my italics). And so he is here willing to accept, conditionally, even the briskest flights of psychoanalytic fancy: they "can neither be proved nor disproved. But it seems evident that the level of interpretation is correctly chosen" if the artwork is just this unnaturalistic. There is a comfortably logical flavor to all of this, always seductive as we float in the sea of subjectivity that is art, but there is no concurrent effort whatsoever to flesh out the role and justification for "interpretation" in the first place. The closest we get is that, when a work "makes obvious sense" we are to restrain ourselves; to the extent that another work makes less sense, to that same extent are we required to translate this unreality back into some other ersatz reality; it matters not which one or how real it is itself, just that it has a high "reality level," as do many psychoanalytic interpretations without, nonetheless, being scientifically testable. What all of this betokens is a set of psychological assumptions about the viewer which are, I think, not to be taken for granted quite so easily. Realism (or realistic-ness) has been made into a point of psychological equilibrium; the further a painting takes us from plausible natural events, to that same extent do we become disequilibriated, and thus to that same extent do we not just want but need to find an interpretation which, regardless of its truth value or explanatory power, makes us feel better about the whole ordeal. This is an account of art which Disturbs The Comfortable only as a prompt to return themselves as quickly as possible to comfort. If there is a higher purpose for this psychological roller coaster ride, we are not told what it is. We also won't dare complete the chiasmus by positing that the same work may Comfort The Disturbed, which would then also require a justification. "The reality level is determined by the subject matter, but also by the rendition of shape, space, and color. The deformed figures of much modern art are not monsters when they appear in an equally deformed world. Few of Picasso's deformed women and children are properly interpreted as "distorted." The creatures of Bosch or Breughel are monsters because the realistic treatment of shape, color, and space puts them in a setting of material solidity, in which their shapes and actions must be taken literally. They are not allegories in my sense of the world, however, because they are shown in a world that establishes such monsters as real—a phantastic world." (Arnheim, Ch. II) "By 1937 the art of painting had made possible a reality level at which deformities of shape and space and incongruities of subject matter portray the world as it is. At that level the broken warrior and the frightened women have equal reality status." Again, there is a seductiveness to this line of thinking in how it provides a seemingly objective anchor in the otherwise unmoored world of art. But at a steep price: the total, deterministic restraint of acceptable/valid response to viewing a given work. In that respect, I think Mumford is to be allowed his personal response to the mural, even though that response goes against the logic of contextual reading (which you would think Mumford of all people quite capable of assimilating). His error and Arnheim's are the same, perhaps, in that they present and rationalize their responses to this work in too absolute terms. Unsurprisingly given his purview, all of Mumford's examples are literary or representational. The inherent differences between, say, representational and abstract painting are at least as significant as those between handcraft and machine art, but the reader is not treated to the same lengthy excursus on the former distinction. If Mumford finds heavily abstracted or non-representational art literally "shocking" merely for its refusal of the symbol, this strikes me as itself a rather serious failure of the cultivated sensitivity he champions, and certainly also a case of strictly cultural disconnect rather than of artists running afoul of human hard wiring. Symbolic vacuity and vacuous symbolism are hardly the same thing. In any case, not to be outmaneuvered, there is a fully rationalized explanation on offer: by saying nothing, one in fact says everything. And so this seems quite unlikely indeed; more likely, modern art simply is not to his taste, and he is really just concerned with functional art anyway and finds it defensible as such to hold that form ought to follow function just this strictly. "What we settle for, since we must close our minds [to overstimulation], are the bare sensations; and that is perhaps one of the reasons that the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say." Again, I think this is to commit the fallacy of elevating one of many parallel trends to the status of a master narrative. It would not be long in any case until postmodernists, to extend the analogy, had so much to say that they couldn't shut up about it, a task for which, oddly enough, artifacts of mass culture proved exceptionally well-suited. We need a name for this phenomenon: to speak up so vociferously against the self-appointed vaguard (in this case the modernists) is, in one sense, merely to validate their pretensions to preeminence. What to make, for example, of the dixieland revival in the midst of bebop? Teleologically the revival is, literally, negligible, whereas the innovation is everything; but materially the social, geographic, and commercial reach of bebop was, for a time, significantly smaller. Under those circumstances, vociferous protest against bebop, or modernism, or fill in the blank with the vanguard du jour, only validates it. The critic doth protest too much! Of course the reason Mumford names "the modern artist" broadly rather than some smaller subgroup is because he has his own master narrative to peddle, each exception to which reduces the authority of the analysis. He finds it unremarkable that his kind of artist "has always found a cranny to grow in under the most unfavorable personal or social conditions" (148) "The healthy art of our time is either the mediocre production of people too fatuous or complacent to be aware of what has been happening to the world--or it is the work of spiritual recluses,...artists who bathe tranquilly in the quiet springs of traditional life, but who avoid the strong, turbid currents of contemporary existence, which might knock them down or carry them away. These artists no doubt gain in purity and intensity by that seclusion; but by the same token, they lose something in strength and general breadth of appeal." (147) This is the moment when the theory loses all coherence: art in anything but the best of times can never achieve both Mumford's "healthy" quality and his "general breadth of appeal." Ostensibly the desire is for a better world "to make sensations seem more important than meanings" That is to say: because artists are fundamentally vain and irrational, they choose materials based above all on the potential to attract attention. Artists are thus reactive rather than proactive, first observing the ways that material circumstances threaten to shape reception and only then choosing an aesthetic direction within one of the available attention-grabbing options. p. 99 -- "We diminish the contents of the image: we narrow the human response: we progressively eliminate the powers of human choice: we overwhelm by repetition, and, in order to stave off boredom, we have to intensify the purely sensational aspects of the image." It is irresistable given all that has already been said to notice the parallels between "narrow[ing] the human response" and narrowing the aesthetic leeway available to the machine artist to a mere "small area where it remains free." (82) Why should this be acceptable in one case and not in the other? Is this a meaningful difference between transmission and reception, that one is best strictly channeled and the other best left completely uninhibited? Is "human response" not subject to the same puritanical, functionalist dynamics as is human creativity? Moreover, what exactly about emptying a symbol of its meaning makes for a narrower range of possible responses? Are symbols in art not definitionally limiting of response? Do they not definitionally render certain responses acceptable/correct and others unacceptable/incorrect? Is that not an additional political layer which is unique to art which deals in symbols as against art which does not? ---------- p. 100 -- "We have gratuitously assumed that the mere existence of a mechanism for manifolding or mass production carries with it an obligation to use it to the fullest capacity. But there simply is no such necessity. Once you discover this, you are a free man." (Italics in original.) It would be beyond the scope of these lectures to investigate more thoroughly the origins of this imperative, but it becomes necessary to do so as soon as practical reform is envisioned. I would argue against labeling the imperative to max-capacity production as a "gratuitous assum[ption]" or an "obligation," as if it were the product of reason. It is in reality part of a larger worldview originating in particular cultures and documents, and perhaps also a comforting self-delusion built on the site of an unconscious conflict between rational knowledge that this profligacy is destructive and irrational animal desire to gorge oneself on its delicacies. -- "The great principle here is that as soon as mechanical limitations are thrown off, human restrictions must be clamped on." (100) Indeed. But may we rely solely on bottom-up self-regulation? Or is some degree of top-down regulation necessary? p. 101 -- "In one sense, this actually is a genuine triumph for popular education, for it is capable of fulfilling the otherwise demagogic promise of making every man a king, even as it in some degree reduces the king...to the level of the man on the street. "As with the entire democratic process of equalization...mechanization brings about a true leveling off in both directions, upward and downward..." ---------- p. 103 -- "My elders used to put it, somewhat smugly as it seemed when I was young, by saying that it was possible to have too much of a good thing. But the long experience of the race stands by that dictum...and indeed, the more intense, the more valuable an experience is, the more rare it must be, the more brief its duration. ... Any object that is too constantly present, however interesting or desirable it may be in itself, presently loses its special significance; what we look at habitually, we overlook." p. 104 -- "Novelty, adventure, variety, spontaneity, intensity--these are all very essential ingredients in a work of art; and a great work of art...is one that presents this feeling of shock and delight, of new things to be revealed, at every encounter with it." I certainly am inclined to agree; yet as the world has hurtled down this path of saturation seemingly ever more precipitously by the day, the "long history of the race" is extended precisely in this direction, and it is clear that not everyone is unhappy, much as Mumford and I would like to share our unhappiness with them. An unbalanced society favors the unbalanced, and it is society's favored who get to define normalcy and pathology for that society. Some do become desensitized and become thrill-seekers in all kinds of ill-advised ways; but others are quite comfortable, often even content and fulfilled, in a world which threatens few surprises. Some need to let go, others need to control everything. LM's plea for balance is well-taken; yet there is the nagging question, as always, of nature vs. nurture, and with it the possibility that balance is NOT actually healthy for everyone.(!) It is simple enough rhetorically to make an end run around this possibility by asserting, as LM does, that such ravenous, superficial consumption is definitionally perverse and pathological. I certainly am inclined to view it this way, but I also think there must be a subset of human beings, small though it may be, which thrives under such conditions; and so the fact that said conditions are inimical to the thriving of much of anyone else is, theoretically at least, a significant mechanism of devolution, for it is then the superficial consumers who are fittest to survive in the habitat towards which everything has been trending. ---------- -- "But all this in opposition to the tendency of mass production. Mass production imposes on the community a terrible new burden: the duty to constantly consume. In the arts, at the very moment the extension of the reproductive process promised to widen the area of freedom, this new necessity, the necessity to keep the plant going, has served to undermine habits of choice, discrimination, [105]selectivity that are essential to both creation and enjoyment." pp. 106-107 -- "As long as a work of art was an individual product, produced by individual workmen using their own feeble powers with such little extra help as they could get from fire or wind or water, there was a strict limit to the number of works of art that could be produced in a whole lifetime... Under such a system of production there was no problem of quantity; or rather the problem was that of too little, not too much. Natural and organic limitations took the place of rational selectivity. Only those who exercised some special political or economic monopoly were ever even temporarily in a position of being threatened by a surfeit; and so the appetites remained keen, because only rarely could they be sated. Under such conditions, there was little reason to exercise a vigilant control over quantity, for fostering a discipline of restraint and a habit of [107]studious selection; such discrimination as was necessary was that exercised on a basis of quality alone." This rather contradicts the notion that these former conditions sharpened powers of discernment. Also, to call the occasional, discerning consumption of art "artistocratic" as Mumford does later on is rather at odds with the more accurate characterization here: the former aristocrats were actually the first to demonstrate LACK of control in the face of abundance, and, customarily, to utterly fail to rein it in once it has manifested. p. 108 -- "Expressive art, just in proportion to its value and significance, must be precious, difficult, occasional, in a word aristocratic." p. 109 -- "The quanititative reproduction of art, through the advance of technics, from the woodblock print to the wire-recording phonograph, has increased the need for qualitative understanding and qualitative choice. At the same time it has imposed upon us, in opposition to the duty to participate in mass consumption, the duty to control quantity: to erect rational measures and criteria of value, now that we are no longer disciplined by natural scarcity. ... There are certain occasions in life when the aristrocratic principle must balance the democratic one, when the personalism of art, fully entered into, must counteract the impersonalism, and therefore the superficiality, of technics. We do no one any service, with our reproductive processes, if we limitlessly water the wine in order to have enough to give every member of the community a drop of it, under the illusion that he is draining an honest glass." pp. 124-125 -- "...this is not to say that the doctrine that form follows function was a misleading one. What was false and meretricious were the narrow applications that were made of this formula. Actually, functionalism is subject to two main modifications. The first is that we must not take function solely in a mechanical sense, as applying only to the physical functions of the building. Certainly new technical facilities and mechanical functions re-[125]quired new forms: but so, likewise, did new social purposes and new psychological insights. There are many elements in a building, besides its physical elements, that effect the health, comfort, and pleasure of the user. When the whole personality is taken into account, expression or symbolism becomes one of the dominant concerns of architecture; and the more complex the functions to be served, the more varied and subtle with the form be. In other words--and this is the second modification--expression itself is one of the primary functions of architecture." p. 137 -- "Our technics has become compulsive and tyrannical, since it is not treated as a subordinate instrument of life; while, at the same time, our art has become either increasingly empty of content or downright irrational, in an effort to claim a sanctuary for the spirit free from the oppressive claims of our daily life. The images of the abstract painters do justice to the blankness and disorganization of our lives; the images of the surrealists reflect the actual nightmare of human existence in an age of mass exterminations and atomic catastrophes. If they are not so pure forms of art as their admirers usually believe, they at least tell us more about the current state of the world than the newspapers or radio. Such paintings are of value as documents, even if they are sometimes almost worthless as art." pp. 139-140 -- "...though the symbols that are used in any culture must, to be understood and experienced, have some common ground, each fresh work of art is unique, because it is the representation, not of other artists' symbols...but of the unique experience of a creative moment in life." Ultimately, reading and rereading passages such as this one with unforgiving rationality and literalness, the wiggle room Mumford assumes between "common ground" and "unique experience" seems dubious. Certainly symbols can be stylized, but a truly "unique" symbol is a contradiction in terms. Mumford's whole conception of what art is, of what artists do, depends on threading the needle between symbols-as-universal and symbols-as-contingent. The ultimate ends here are moral ones, and it is this maneuver on which his moral compass is calibrated. Conversely, if, as I have been arguing, symbolism and communication are at root technical rather than artistic pursuits; if, in other words, the concreteness of the symbol can never be fully reconciled with the ineffability of individual experience, then there is no moral case to be made whatsoever as to how artists use (or do not use) symbols. I hasten to add that this conclusion in and of itself says nothing about the morality of message-sending through art, but it says much about the possbilities, dare I say the Technics, of how that might work (or, again, not work). p. 148 -- "During the last generation, the arts have taken hold of a larger province in our schools, at least up to high school, a development that was undoubtedly helped indirectly by the general encouragement given to art during the 1930s by the Works Projects Authority. For all the inroads of mechanization, thousands of youngsters are now capable of modeling and painting, of acting and singing and playing in an orchestra, with both a creative exuberance and a technical skill their predecessors never had a chance to develop. Though the results of all this are perhaps more conspicuous in music than in the graphic and plastic arts, they are beginning to manifest themselves everywhere." [lectures originally delivered in 1951]