Thinking Through Moving Media
This is an academic paper I wrote 13 years ago to push forward some ideas about the future of moving images—ideas I had first proposed in my book the rise of the image the fall of the word (Oxford).
Mitchell Stephens
New York University
22 September 2011
What Revolution Is It, Anyway?
That we are in the midst of a major communications revolution is hard to miss nowadays. Individuals who only had a decade or so to get used to sitting at their desks and accessing an overwhelming collection of information, products, news and entertainment can now sit in a restaurant and involve themselves in what has grown to include much of the world’s available supply of information, products, news, entertainment and people. We have begun to divert ourselves, socialize with each other, educate ourselves and update ourselves in ways that did not exist when anyone over twenty today was born. Our old communications machines – typewriters, music discs, film, landline telephones, wireless transmitters and the printing press – have been overthrown or are tottering.
But what exactly is perpetrating this revolution?
It was not difficult to determine what in Plato’s time was allowing the youth to think they might learn, as he has Socrates put it, “without benefit of a teacher’s instruction,” thereby making them “difficult to get on with.” It was a relatively new “invention.” Plato attributes it to the Egyptians (we credit the Sumerians) and names it: “writing” (grammata). (Plato Phaedrus:68-69.)[i] Nor was it difficult to name the force behind the communications revolution that helped transform early modern Europe: “the invention of printing,” Alexander Pope labeled it in the eighteenth century, adding that “Paper also became so cheap and Printers so numerous, that a deluge of Authors covered the land. (Stephens 1998:35)
But there are many candidates for the “invention” of our time – the one that seems to have pressed the “refresh” button on a significant stretch of human culture. What was the key breakthrough? Was it the computer, the personal computer, the Internet, the World Wide Web, Google, the smart phone or perhaps even Facebook? Or was it the digital coding of information, in general, that has been leading us into a new era? This paper will employ a historical perspective in an attempt to sort out some of these contributions, and it will propose that the truly revolutionary invention of our time may turn out to be none of the above. Instead it may prove to be an invention with older roots: the moving image and its younger companion, the moving word.
Looking back it is not difficult to see the vast transformative power of writing and print. But what is our communications revolution doing to us? Certainly, it is – as did writing and print – radically easing our access to information. Certainly, it has – as did writing and print – made possible entrancing new ways for us to communicate with and entertain each other. Certainly, it is in the process of eradicating – as writing and print began to do – geographical and financial boundaries to information and communication.
But my thesis is that this communications revolution, like those led by writing and print, will have a more profound effect, a more thoroughly revolutionary effect than merely facilitating our access to wisdom, diversions or each other. This paper will argue that this communications revolution in its most radical manifestations will help us develop new ways of thinking.
What are those radical manifestations? One way of approaching that question is to consider the curious incident of the old men in the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The Old Men Who Didn’t Grumble
New communications technologies inspire complaints. Usually the attacks are launched by those most attached to the old communications technology, those whose power, indeed, rests on the old technology. For most of history that has meant that most such complaints have emanated from old men.
The classic example is to be found in Plato’s Phaedrus. Here a nested series of bearded old men – Plato writing about Socrates, who claims to be quoting an Egyptian king, Thamus – participate in a takedown of writing: as not producing “wisdom” but “only a semblance of it,” not “wide knowledge” but only “the delusion” of having it. Writing, for these men, is illegitimate, a “bastard,” because it escapes its “father.” Meanwhile, the established and threatened form of communication – a conversation “under a teacher’s instruction,” under an old man’s instruction – is celebrated as “a discourse inscribed with genuine knowledge in the soul of learner.” As is often the case with old men grumbling, this epistemological critique barely conceals concerns about etiquette and power: a piece of writing, Plato has Socrates warn, is capable of “falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it…; it has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid.” (Plato 1956:68-69)
Many passages in the Bible – which, of course, is chockablock with bearded old men – can be read as devaluing a then still relatively new technology – though not a communications technology: agriculture. Note the many times characters, seeking spiritual renewal, return to the “wilderness.” This, for example, from Exodus: “They turned toward the wilderness, and there, in a cloud appeared the Presence of the Lord.” And, on the face of it, the second commandment, as revealed in Exodus, is not just an attack on a still relatively new communications technology; it is an explicit and unambiguous prohibition of it: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.” (Tanakh 1985:110,115)
Few technologies have inspired as much grumbling, in their extended youths, as print. Pope dismissed “Printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned.” Near the end of War and Peace Leo Tolstoy calls “the dissemination of printed matter” the “most powerful of ignorance’s weapons.” In my book the rise of the image the fall of the word, I collect numerous examples of similar grumbling by old men, with or without beards: against opera (“chromatic tortures,” it was dubbed in eighteenth-century England), against theater (“the sewer in which the rebellious vices exhaust themselves,” proclaimed Ralph Waldo Emerson), against radio (“has means of appealing to the lower nerve centers and of creating emotions which the hearer mistakes for thoughts”) and even against the pencil with an eraser when that was new (“It might almost be laid down as a general law that the easier errors may be corrected, the more errors will be made”).
By the 1980s women certainly had won the right to have their grumbling heard: Tipper Gore’s campaign against violent or sexual music lyrics or videos, under the aegis of the Parents Music Resource Center, is an example. And those of us currently becoming old, will remember the unisex and almost universal grumbling that greeted television: “pablum,” “the boob tube,” “the idiot box,” “a vast wasteland,” which was “turning brains to mush.” (Stephens 1998: 27, 31-36) There’s a cycle to this, and it always ends the same: once a form of communication is itself threatened by a powerful and even newer form, the grumbling about it stops. After the arrival of TV, it is very difficult to find Pope-like or Tolstoy-like critiques of print. And even the chorus of complaints against television now seems suddenly to be quieting.
My book was written in 1998, before the Internet had begun to display its powers, so it did not deal with a curiosity in regard to our current communications revolution: the fact that old men and women have not been emitting all that much grumbling. Yes, some exceptions have been taken: Op-ed pages and the Web itself have featured a few attempts, for example, to rebut the argument that the successful protests against the Mubarak regime in Egypt can be credited entirely to social media, though the arguments they were rebutting, giving social media that much credit, proved difficult to locate. (Rosen 2011) Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, is among those who has made clear that he is a Twitter skeptic: “the enemy of contemplation,” he calls it, adding the hardly controversial charge that Twitter is “ephemeral.” Keller also quotes the novelist Meg Wolitzer describing today’s technology-suckled high-schoolers as, “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.” (Keller 2011)
Similarly, there are plenty of examples of the affection for forms like printed books (oh the smell!) or newspapers (…with a cup of coffee in the morning…) that one would expect to accompany their gradual demise: “Newspapers dig up the news,” insists John. S. Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times. “Others” – presumably bloggers and websites like Huffington Post – “repackage it.” (Stephens 2010) However, old-fashioned, decline-of-civilization grumbling – “semblance,” “bastard,” “you shall not,” “scourge,” “ignorance’s weapons,” “tortures,” “sewer” – has been conspicuous in its absence. Keller for example, though well positioned for the role of prophet of doom, not only is temperate, even whimsical, in his critique but goes out of his way to list good points of social media.
Yes, you can find more heated criticism if you look hard enough. The Web is so capacious that just about everything gets said there sometime by someone. (I was even able to locate one seventy-year-old retired sportswriter in Arizona, who had just been criticized on the Internet, proclaiming: “The Internet is like a sewer.” Garber 2009) Still, the curious fact is this: our old men and women, at least those who can manage a touch screen, seem reasonably fond of a lot of what appears on such screens. Is there something about this communications revolution that has caused them to surrender their historical role?
Setting Cicero in Type
Among Marshall McLuhan’s more interesting and more reliable points is the observation that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.” He explains that “the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print.” (McLuhan 1995:151) Each new medium “imitates,” as McLuhan did not quite say, a medium that came before. Plato, the point is, wrote dialogues. And early printers simply set old handwritten manuscripts in type. By the year 1500 – in the first half-century of printing, in other words – 317 different printed editions of Cicero, who had been dead for a millennium and a half, appeared in Europe. (Stephens 1998:47)
A new medium must, of course, add something of value; otherwise, no one would bother. Printing enabled hundreds of copies of each of those editions of Cicero to disburse themselves across the continent. But there was little to distinguish the copies themselves from their handwritten model: they were printed in a black typeface intended to mimic the script used by copyists, and they lacked such amenities as tables of content, indexes, title pages, Arabic page numbers and standardized spellings.
What McLuhan fails to note in his formula is that the “content” of a new medium does not remain a previous medium. Media do eventually stop imitating. They eventually acquire their own varieties of content, finding in the process new ways of justifying their existence. Reprints of Cicero would eventually be nudged aside in Europe and its colonies by two mostly new forms: the printed newspaper and the novel. Those tables of content, indexes, title pages, Arabic page numbers, standardized spellings and more legible typefaces all also arrived, for the most part, after the printed book and periodical. But this process of figuring out new, original forms to exploit the considerable potential of a new medium inevitably takes a while. The first printed newspaper and the first printed novel appeared in Europe a century and a half after Gutenberg.
Usually, the more imitative the content the less old men grumble. Pope had nothing against reprints of the “Ancients”; it was all that new stuff from the “Moderns” that was scourging the “learned” for their “sins.” Movies had an early burst of respectability when – in a movement called film d’art, begun in Paris in 1908 – their imitation of theater grew most reverent and their choice of plays at which to aim a camera grew most refined. Even television, that most grumbled about of media, managed to please the critics and even be accorded a “golden age” when for a few years in the 1950s it began broadcasting live plays.
Is the reason we are not hearing more grumbling about the Internet and its cousins because we are still in the setting-Cicero-in-type phase – the film-d’art phase, the showing-live-plays-on-TV phase? Our digital gizmos seem to possess all the glamour and impudence we associate with the cutting edge. It is hard to think of them as imitating. But all new forms of communication once seemed poised on the cutting edge. And all new forms of communication have imitated.
Somewhere in every one of our smart devices – from laptop to iPhone to iPad – is something that serves as a keyboard: a reworking of the typewriter. The “graphical user interface” on our various screens has featured the accouterments of desktops: files, scissors, a clipboard – another form of imitation (a “metaphor,” it was initially called). The Web has organized itself into “sites,” as if pretending to be a neighborhood filled with shops. Email is, to say the obvious, imitation mail – super-swift, super-convenient mail. Instant messages and texts are even swifter mail. YouTube places a miniature TV screen on our computer, smart phone or tablet screens. Blogs look a lot like journals or diaries, turned upside down. Facebook, too, has diary-like elements, as well as scrapbook-like elements and letter- or telegram-like elements. We use Twitter to “curate” – to direct each other to attractive songs, videos and writings in this world full of wonders, this world become museum. We use Twitter, too – along with all those swift messages, texts and scrawlings on Facebook “walls” – curate, as well as to engage in what once might have been called “chitchat.” But the earlier form of communication that has probably been most imitated on Web, smart phone and tablet “pages” has been old, respectable and endangered print.
Most news sites online are essentially tables of content, which justify their existence with one impressive addition: the ability to skip instantly to any story listed or previewed there. Commercial websites mimic the printed catalog – with, again, that remarkable ability to hop, step and jump. Wikipedia is, of course, a version of another form original to print, which first appeared in Paris in the eighteenth century: the encyclopedia – though one of unprecedented size, composed by an unprecedented number of authors. Spell check, track changes, those hundreds of fonts, the great convenience of the online dictionary and the online thesaurus – this is print that has died and gone to heaven. And Google, with its sleek, minimalist design; Google, this newly minted verb; Google, which appears for the moment to have placed itself at the heart of this communications revolution; Google, which increasingly looks like a compendium of all the world’s knowledge; Google is what? I think it is pretty clear that this “search engine” is just a version of the original search facilitator – the index that eventually started appearing at the back of printed books. Google, in its magnificence, is a universal index.
In 2008 the Atlantic did have a go at grumbling about Google. Nicholas Carr, though not even fifty at the time, undertook the challenge, falling back, notwithstanding some perfunctory nods in the direction of cognitive science, upon the same sort of critique that has been leveled against all media that are more efficient than their predecessors: that too easy and too fast threaten to make us lazy, skittish and superficial. Google, Carr fretted, is “chipping away” at the “capacity for concentration and contemplation.” (Carr 2008)
But Carr’s effort, too, is halfhearted: he admits that he might be a “worrywart” and acknowledges the limits of his own argument by noting that there were similar critiques of writing and print. The truth is that it is hard even for middle-aged or old men and women not to be impressed with the dozen or so fine answers, along with 41,700,000 other mostly useless answers, you can get in .26 seconds in response to a Google query. Given the number of crotchety critics wondering the planet these days and their propensity for working themselves into a lather about anything from a video to a vaccine, Google and company have gotten off remarkably easy.
The phrasing I have leaned upon in this article is borrowed from Sherlock Holmes, of course – speaking in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, "The Adventure of Silver Blaze." The great detective deduces from a dog’s “curious” failure to bark in the night that the animal must have been familiar with the perpetrator. Our old men and women, I am arguing, are relatively content with so much that is happening in our new media because they are familiar with it, because it has so much in common with their beloved print.
So far.
“Another Time, Then Socrates”
Socrates might not have been the fellow you wanted to encounter as you went about your business in fifth century BCE Athens. The old philosopher was a great enthusiast, of course, of discourse – arguably the most important proponent of this form of communication the world has seen. But he had an odd way of going about a conversation.
If Plato’s dialogues can be taken as an accurate reflection of Socrates’ conversation, we know that he could upon occasion simply tell and hear news. In the Charmides Socrates, having returned from a battle, goes to a gymnasium, which, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation, he describes as one of his “old haunts.” The friends who greet him ask for “the story” of that battle, and Socrates dutifully provides “the news from the army” and answers their questions. Socrates, in turn, proceeds to ask them “about matters at home.” The matter in which he seems most interested: “whether any of” the young men are “remarkable for wisdom or beauty, or both.”
But Socrates, in Plato’s account, does not indulge in news or gossip for long. The young man who seems most to excel in beauty, and perhaps also wisdom, Charmides, sits down besides the old philosopher at that gymnasium, and soon Socrates, as is his wont, has confronted him with a philosophic question: “what, in your opinion, is temperance (sophrosyne)?” Charmides answers: “quietness.” Socrates demonstrates at some length that “quickness and cleverness” are better than “quietness.” Charmides then proposes “modesty” as his definition of “temperance.” Socrates, with help from Homer, dismisses that suggestion, too.
In taking on the young man’s next attempt at a definition, Socrates also ends up taking on Critias, Charmides’ older “guardian and cousin.” Indeed, Socrates interrogates Critias, his friend and student, with such vehemence, that Critias accuses him of merely “trying to refute me, instead of pursuing the argument.” Socrates doesn’t dispute the accusation: “And what if I am?” (Plato, Charmides)
To engage in a conversation with Socrates – whose name appears in many definitions of irony – is to have your words turned inside out and against each other. “Whatever statement we put forward always somehow moves round in a circle, and will not stay where we put it,” complains Euthyphro, another young man who has fallen into a conversation with Socrates. (Plato, Euthyphro:13) One learns. Charmides certainly learns, though they never do settle on a definition of temperance [CK]. Euthyphro has much to learn.
But talking with Socrates is quite a different experience from what most residents of Athens or anywhere else have come to expect from a conversation. He rarely shot the breeze. He engaged in few pleasantries. Instead, he jumped on contradictions. He bore in. He mocked. He tore apart. This description, which echoes that of Euthyphro, is from Plato’s Laches:
Whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and has any talk with him face to face, is bound to be drawn round and round by him in the course of the argument—though it may have started at first on a quite different theme—and cannot stop until he is led into giving an account of himself, of the manner in which he now spends his days, and of the kind of life he has lived hitherto; and when once he has been led into that, Socrates will never let him go until he has thoroughly and properly put all his ways to the test. (Plato, Laches)
Socrates is certainly aware that he can be a handful: “All day long and in all places [I] am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me….” (Hulse 1995:21) There is something intemperate, if you will, about the way Socrates converses. Alcibiades acknowledges that often “I act like a runaway slave and keep out of his way.” (Parker 1979:14) Euthyphro eventually unfastens himself, “Another time, then Socrates. I am in a hurry now….”
I want to argue that there is a larger explanation for Socrates’ odd and difficult conversation, that it was not just due to this singular man’s odd and difficult personality – or, as Plato would have us believe, his exalted ethical standards. My point is that thought in fifth-century BCE Athens – the kind of thought that Socrates exemplified – was outgrowing the oral tradition, outgrowing mere conversation. It was a kind of thought formed, in part, by writing – or, more precisely, by a kind of proto-writing. Socrates, as was typical of Athens’ free-born males, was literate. Indeed, Greece, where vowels were first added to the alphabet, was the first country to have widespread literacy (for free-born males). And writing, thinkers two and half millennia later have come to believe, encourages analysis (including ethical analysis), encourages turning ideas inside out and against each other.
But unlike his contemporary Thucydides, his student Plato or Plato’s student Aristotle, Socrates did not write out his thoughts. Instead he tried to force literate ways of thinking into an earlier form of communication. It was a sometimes awkward attempt, requiring “fastening on,” full of “arousing and persuading and reproaching,” not always welcome: “Another time, then Socrates.” It left the old philosopher sufficiently unpopular that a majority of his fellow citizens voted that he be executed. (It didn’t help that his students Critias and Charmides proved intemperate, vicious actually, when they imposed an oligarchy on Athens.) Socrates was in no position to understand that he was asking too much of discourse. But the thoughts in Socrates’ conversation – despite his reverence for discourse – were looking for another medium in which to express themselves. They were looking for writing.
“No innovation,” writes the French historian Fernand Braudel, “has any value except in relation to the social pressure which maintains and imposes it.” (Braudel 1984:431) Here I am talking about an intellectual pressure – the pressure to analyze – which flowed from, imposed and then maintained this astoundingly powerful innovation: writing. With Thucydides, Plato and, in particular, Aristotle – with writing – the Greeks obtained, to take out of context a line from Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, “wisdom” that “once they could not think.”
A Better Gazetta
Eventually, there would be an even newer wisdom for humankind to begin trying to think. In due time (a couple of millennia), a new kind of thought began to push up against the limits of writing. I will try to make this point with regard to my research on journalism.
By 1566 a newssheet was being distributed, weekly, in Venice. I found copies hidden amongst diplomatic letters in London. It was called, among other names, the gazetta, which may have been the name of the coin for which it sold: hence, the title of so many of the world’s newspapers; hence, the Russian word for newspaper. And since the European newspaper has spread around the world and since the European newspaper descends from these Venetian newssheets, every newspaper in the world today has DNA that can be traced to 1566 in Venice. (Stephens 2007:133-139)
Where was the new thought here? With weekly, and therefore more established and reliable, distribution of news a mostly new political force was being created: a public, increasingly as informed on events as its leaders. And this public was gaining an increasingly comprehensive and reliable view of the world as a well-lit, comprehensible place – the stage upon which a series of discrete but connected events, a week’s news events, occurred.
This way of thought came, in part, from printing – or, again more precisely, a proto-printing. The letterpress had arrived in Venice almost a century earlier. Literacy was on the rise, now that there were so many more books around to read. And all those reprints of Cicero and his contemporaries, as they were imbibed by Europe’s literate, were beginning to increase the continent’s knowledge levels. One-shot printed newsbooks and news ballads had also been appearing, featuring glimpses, however uncomprehensive and unreliable, of events far away. Copies of Columbus’ own letters on his discoveries had even begun appearing, shortly after his return in 1493, in multiple editions across the Continent. The flow of news and ideas had been increasing in volume and speed.
But those 1566 Venetian newssheets were not printed. Each copy was handwritten. This comprehensive and reliable view of the world could only display itself, consequently, in some hundreds of copies. Given limits in distribution, the public in question was so small it barely deserved the name. And this comprehensible and reliable view of the world had to pass through the hands of slow and potentially inaccurate copyists.
The kind of thinking exemplified by the gazetta, in other words, was not well served by the gazetta. This way of thought was pushing past, through, beyond the limitations of the handwritten. And some other new – and connected – religious, scientific, geographic, mercantile and literary worldviews were also bumping up against those limitations in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. They each had their own dissatisfactions with writing. Scientists, for example, needed more regular and reliable information on new discoveries than even the most industrious letter writers could provide; merchants – at least those not wealthy enough to hire their own correspondents – needed better information on events that might influence markets. They, too, required a new form of communication to illuminate, examine and sustain the new rounder, plainer, more realistic, more knowable world they were espousing.
The wanted form of communication began to arrive when the printing press turned away from reprints of Cicero and began devoting itself to forms that made better use of its capabilites. As Socrates’ way of thinking began to find its true home in the writings of Plato, the worldview initially inscribed in the gazetta began to find its true home with the appearance of the world’s first printed weekly in Strasbourg in 1605. Don Quixote also appears in 1605. A way of thought was facilitated by the new newspaper, the new novel, the new scientific journal (later in that century). It became a dominant way of thought in Europe and America up until the twentieth century.
Eisenstein Meets Joyce in Paris
One way of looking at twentieth-century thought – and I belated apologize for skipping so blithely over centuries and philosophies – is as a rebellion against the well-lit, comprehensive, reliable, comprehensible worldview, which had long been promulgated by the printing press and the periodical. It was too static, too rigid, too narrow, too certain, too “linear,” to borrow a term from Marshall McLuhan: one point after another, one point leads to another. Cubism, abstract art, futurism, dada, stream of consciousness, pop art, op art, postmodernism and their various cousins helped lead this rebellion.
Their revolutionary ways of looking at the world came, in part, from the arrival of a new form of communication, on the cusp of this new century: early film – or, to use the vocabulary introduced here, proto-moving media. For early film was fluid, jumpy, capable of zooming in and out, and inevitably self-sonscious about its perspectives. Just before she drafted the remarkable modernist middle section of To the Lighthouse in the spring of 1926, Virginia Woolf composed a short essay on “the Cinema.” The words and phrases she uses to describe this new medium and its potential are revealing, for they are words and phrases of modernism: “burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears”; “speed and slowness; dartlike directness and vaporous circumlocution”; “violent changes of emotion”; “thought in its wildness”; “collision”; “cascades”; “the chaos of the streets.” (Woolf 1926)
But cinema, as is typical, was slow to understand and express its new powers. It had taken years for the close-up to be accepted. It had taken years for parallel editing to be accepted. It had taken years to overcome the impulse to imitate theater sufficiently so that the camera could wander beyond “the best seat in the house.” The most adventurous silent filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, eventually managed to fill screens with some of Woolf’s “quivers, “dartlike directness,” “violent changes of emotion,” “collision,” “cascades” and “chaos.” Eisenstein made the Battleship Potemkin in 1925. But in the world of moving images a technological step forward is inevitably followed by an artistic step back: the arrival of sound in 1927 led to more sluggish camera work and more filmed plays.
We tend to conclude that new forms of communication are more mature than they really are. Virginia Woolf thought that of film: “For a strange thing has happened,” she writes in that essay, “– while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say.” (Woolf 1926) Woolf was wrong to assume some sort of precocious wisdom on how film might best communicate but right about its struggle to figure out what it might communicate. Both efforts continue today. Film, like all new media, was born naked.
The revolutionary perspectives that were inspired, I am arguing, in part by film were most often realized, instead, on the painted canvas or the printed page. Twentieth-century literature, art, philosophy and (I add with less confidence) physics can be seen as attempts, often not conscious, to escape the rigidity of the canvas or page – to escape their frustrating, infuriating regularity, clarity and flatness. These white rectangles had once provided a bright, even brilliant stage for the most real, most exotic dramas, but the page, the canvas had now begun to seem too predictable, too sluggish, too confining, too stiffly realistic, too brashly knowing to really know. Yet cubism, abstract art, futurism, dada, stream of consciousness, pop art, op art, postmodernism and all the rest of the twentieth-century rebellions were launched on the same canvases and pages they were trying to overthrow.
And the results – like Socrates’ conversation, like the handwritten gazetta – often proved less than satisfying. How to say this without sounding like a philistine? Despite its manifold insights and splendors twentieth-century art still sometimes looks like attempts, shall we say, at a new way of looking at the world, not like that new way of looking at the world itself. Twentieth-century literature as it dances and dwells, veers and sputters, displays no shortage of beauties. However, in straining to burrow back into the mostly unexamined flit and flux of our thoughts, it has sometimes tended – again, no disrespect intended – to be a little too unsteady, unmoored and agitated to be enjoyably read: another time, then Finnegans Wake. It is possible to look upon twentieth-century thought as not yet having found its medium.
In 1929 in Paris, James Joyce meets Sergei Eisenstein – an early partisan of and wizard of montage, among the most radical of cinematic techniques. Joyce’s sight has deteriorated by then, but he and Eisenstein discuss a joint project: a film. One hopes – I have located no report on what sort of film they had in mind – that Joyce and Eisenstein sensed that film was the natural home for the stream of consciousness: consciousness being, to say the obvious, full of sights and sounds, as well as run-on sentences. One hopes that they understood that what Woolf called “thought in its wildness” might best be captured in a medium that was not static, narrow, regular or rigid.
Joyce and Eisenstein never made their film. Others, of course, have tried recreating the stream of consciousness in moving images – with varying degrees of success. But maybe this latest revolution in thought is still in the process of learning to express itself. After all, the great triumphs of print – the Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment itself, Tolstoy himself – did not arrive for centuries after print’s invention. Maybe the struggle against the immobile, the certain, the linear still has decades to go, even centuries to go. Maybe this struggle has outlived modernism and postmodernism and is still with us in the mostly unnamed movements of culture and thought of this new of century.
But do we possess, as we engage in this great cultural and philosophic undertaking, that most valuable and necessary of tools: the appropriate form of communication.
Disentangling the Web
If computers, smart phones and whatever other devices Apple designs for us are to be used just to better communicate with each other – hundreds of each others; all around the world; sharing thoughts; photos, likes and dislikes; “friending”; online dating; well, that’s fine. The old ways of socializing have faded considerable now that such a large percentage of humanity has made its way into anonymous cities, now that television and computers themselves have drawn us into rooms by ourselves. Communication is good. Communication without geographical boundaries or extra expense is even better. And if you’re not reduced to merely taking in what Leo Tolstoy or Walter Cronkite want to tell you, if you can post your own thoughts, photos, likes and dislikes out there for anybody interested to see – if you can, as we used to say, “interact” – well that is real added value. Socializing without the inconvenience or embarrassment of having to lug along your physical body is pretty weird but may have some advantages, too.
If we are also to use these increasingly powerful and increasingly thin digital devices just to get better access to information, that’s also fine. Being awash in knowledge is certainly better than being deprived of knowledge. As the price of such devices falls and access to them spreads, the latest political, scientific and medical information is becoming available to people in towns little as well as large, in places out of the way as well as in the center of things. Although you wouldn’t always know it from our politics, the case can be made that we are living through a watershed moment in human history: the end of the era of insufficient information. There is no arguing with the importance of that.
But this is all – I’ll hazard the word “just” again – an expansion of the mission of print. Print – joined by the postal service, the telephone and television – allowed us to socialize with numerous folks (Pierre Bezukhov, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Rachel and Ross) who are not physically there. Print – along with the postal service, the telephone and television – opened up worlds we could enter without our bodies. And print – along with those other forms of communication and with a nod, as always, to writing – was once the great information dispenser, the great knowledge spreader.
I don’t want to underplay the importance of finishing and improving upon print’s mission, but I do think we have a right to wonder if improved communication and access to information are really to be the great accomplishments of our current communications revolution, which, at first glance, looks to be a profound one. Or are we still missing something: the true “killer app,” the facilitator of a new way of thought.
We can see the beginnings of such a new way of thought, I am arguing, in Joyce’s writing, in Picasso’s paintings, even in Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s physics – in the twentieth century’s encounter with the uncertain, the unresolvable, the diverse, the ironic, the multiperspectival. And, I believe, the twenty-first century is bringing forms of communication that will help us think such thoughts – think them through.
Who’s Ready for Virginia Woolf?
In the rise of the image the fall of the word I argue for the potential, as yet mostly unexplored, of moving images. My point does not assume that we might replace words with a new language of images (which was part of what Virginia Woolf imagined in her essay on the cinema). Umberto Eco has well demonstrated the persistence and futility of that dream. (Eco 1995:144-177) Instead my argument is built upon an analogy to the way writing made words into objects, enabling them to be reorganized in lists, compared, analyzed. Fast-cut moving images, I suggest, enable little splinters of the world – things, faces, places, moments, tiny scenes – to be converted into objects, objects that can then be reorganized, compared, analyzed. And such images can easily be combined with language.
Splinters of the world in motion, and working together with words, can more easily explore the ways in which life is uncertain and unresolvable. Such splinters and their sidekicks are unavoidably diverse, ironic by inclination and naturally multiperspectival. And because they can more easily and more entertainingly convey concepts that are not fixed or tied down, they have the ability – once we master the art – to help us learn to navigate the uncertain and unresolvable.
Here again is Virginia Woolf from that essay, imagining a new cinema:
Then, as smoke pours from Vesuvius, we should be able to see thought in its wildness, in its beauty, in its oddity, pouring from men with their elbows on a table; from women with their little handbags slipping to the floor. We should see these emotions mingling together and affecting each other. We should see violent changes of emotion produced by their collision. The most fantastic contrasts could be flashed before us with a speed which the writer can only toil after in vain; the dream architecture of arches and battlements, of cascades falling and fountains rising, which sometimes visits us in sleep or shapes itself in half-darkened rooms, could be realized before our waking eyes. No fantasy could be too far-fetched or insubstantial. (Woolf 1926)
Woolf is imagining this in 1926. I had the considerable advantage of writing my book seventy-two years later. But it was still too early. The Web – where it now appears this new cinema is most likely to flourish – was then still an infant. Moving images, in the intervening thirteen years, have indeed become more and more important on the Web. But these moving images – on YouTube for example – have not much occupied themselves with Woolf’s “thought in its wildness.” That is not surprising. Moving images, which took another large step backwards after their initial move to television have taken a step backwards again in beginning to establish themselves on the Web. Some video online seems to have condemned itself to recapitulating the history of silent film, as much television initially did. So we are mostly still stuck in the pre-Eisenstein stage. Some of those who produce video for the Web do not yet seem even to have mastered the power of montage. It is still very early.
But the Web is large. Cameras and editing software are getting cheap. The percentage of the global population in a position to make art expands. We have begun to see – in this still very young medium – early signs of new and intriguing kinds of communication, of motion. For images are not the only entities that can move, when converted into bits and subject to the proper software. Their companions and ancient competitors, words themselves, can scurry about.
In spoken language words slither and slide out of our mouths in all sorts of interesting and fun ways. But in writing, words have been bolted into those thin black lines on white pages – unable to budge. It had, therefore, never been possible to combine the cognitive power of written language with the power of motion. There was some evidence that words might be set free in late twentieth-century television commercials and the work of directors like Mark Pellington for MTV. But online – using the program Flash, for example – written words have most definitely been allowed to escape the prison of the page and perform all sorts of new tricks: flying here and there, changing color, morphing into each other. This is something new in the history of human communication.
Isn’t this dynamic language what twentieth-century poets like e. e. cummings were reaching for, if not prophesying? Doesn’t this mix of moving images and moving words – moving media – give us a chance finally to capture the whirls, rushes and eddies of our thoughts in a way that is not at all a chore to follow? Moving media may be at their most entertaining when they flit and flux. Don’t these signifiers in motion offer us a chance to look at a face, at a scene, at an issue from many sides at once?
The case can be made that we are searching, as we enter this new century, for a new philosophy: that we need to think through how our identities now often seem to shift with our surroundings, with our wardrobes; that we need to understand the way we modulate irony to signify varying degrees of seriousness; that we need to consider the way we dance in and out of belief. How hard it is to approach these ideas with words or images that just sit there on the page or screen. How much more effectively they might be approached with words and images that themselves can shift, dance and modulate. The wanted form of communication, from this perspective, is not Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, the iPhone, the iPad or Twitter – any more than it was MS-DOS, Excel, Word, Windows or the Huffington Post. Our chance to gain “wisdom” that “once” we “could not think,” if this analysis is at all correct, rests with moving media.
Technologically it gets easier and easier. The exertions necessary to think such thoughts come naturally, it turns out, to digital media. Indeed, all the necessary kinds of movement can be found today in one corner of the Web or another.[ii] But our current “sites,” “pages” and little television screens may not be sufficient to contain these essays in motion. We may need forms that do for moving media what the newspaper and the novel did for print.
If this indeed is where the more radical phalanxes of this communications revolution are heading, there may indeed be plenty about which our equivalent of bearded old men might grumble: enlightening but unfamiliar and perhaps disturbing forms, enlightening but unfamiliar and perhaps disturbing thoughts: disposed to undercut our certainties, our senses of identity, that which we take seriously and our beliefs – or what is left of our certainties, identities, seriousness and beliefs. For – more than a century after film brought us the first moving media, decades after the first stirrings of digital media – this would be something new. And enlightening and disturbing are what new forms of communication do.
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[i] My reading of this classic passage from the Phaedrus has been informed by Derrida 1972:75-134.
[ii] See, for some quick examples, the work of Billy Collins and Julian Grey/Head Gear http://www.bcactionpoet.org/budapest.html; Steven Johnson and RSA animate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU; Craig Stephen http://vimeo.com/3070130; Will Herrmann and Benjamin Zephaniah http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL8jYA8Ho1U; Chris Milk http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/; and Sir Moving Images http://vimeo.com/7062481 .