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- Robins and Webster, Ch. 1 -

Introduction

The first question that the reader might want to ask about this very difficult first chapter of Times of the Technoculture, is why the authors spend so much time talking about a relatively obscure documentary filmmaker called Humphrey Jennings. The reason is not apparent immediately and needs to be teased out as you read the chapter.

Fundamentally, authors Robins and Webster are looking for a cultural/intellectual starting point for their agenda. That agenda is simultaneously political, economic and cultural. It involves the taking back of science and technology by the people. Too many people accept scientific and technological determinism. For example, they feel that the scientific and technological revolution is something neutral, impersonal and unstoppable. People need to adjust to scientific and technological progress. They can be optimistic or pessimistic about it; but there is little that they can do to change it.

Humphrey Jennings is important because he tried to challenge that assumption in his complex and unfinished work Pandemonium. Jennings’ focus was primarily cultural, but he believed that culture, science and technology had been connected in the past and should be connected in the future. In other words, science and technology were cultural creations and not independent of humanity. If only people could see the connection, they could escape from the overly rationalist and deterministic direction that science and technology had taken. Science and technology could be reintegrated within human culture to serve human needs.

Before we unpack Jennings’ argument more fully, it may be useful to provide a couple of definitions with elaborations on the ways that these are used in the first chapter of Times of the Technoculture. The term pandemonium refers to a place full of noise and confusion; it’s the term Milton used to describe hell. For Jennings, the Industrial Revolution had resulted in the creation of a human hell. The contrasting and more positive human cities were the New Jerusalem or Xanadu - cities of pleasure and human spiritual development. Jennings was a utopian thinker in so far as he believed that Pandemonium could be transformed into a new and better world if the human imagination could only be liberated and power returned to the people.

Another term that comes up continuously in the chapter is surrealism. Surrealism was an artistic movement that began in the 1920s and that infused the works of people like Salvador Dali with his melting clocks and strange juxtapositions of things like Jesus on the Cross and mechanical machines. The surrealistic movement was predicated on the enormous power of the human subconscious as the source of imagination and creativity. The entire purpose of the surrealistic movement was to liberate the unconscious and to allow people to release a creativity that was stifled by an overly rationalistic, bureaucratic and linear society based on mechanistic cause and effect. One way to liberate the mind was to put found objects (objects trouvé) together in strange combinations. Why? Because these unusual juxtapositions shocked people out of their customary, habitual and ratio-logical ways of thinking, allowing them to see new possibilities.

In the films and writings of Jennings, surrealism and the techniques of documentary filmmaking merged. Jennings worked with found objects from a period of time and put them together. The combinations were unusual but linked by time and place, forcing the viewer or reader to see connections that might otherwise go overlooked. The artist or documentary filmmaker deliberately removes himself or herself - his or her subjective reality - from the film or piece of art. The whole idea is to force the viewer or reader to make his or her own connections.

That does not mean that there is no method and only madness in this attempt to free the unconscious mind. By putting certain things together in a picture - typically a horse and a locomotive (i.e. the iron horse) - individuals are forced to reconnect concepts that have been disconnected by science and technology (i.e. nature and machines) with interesting results.

The Importance of Imagination

A word that figures predominantly in all of Jennings writings (we might mention here that he wrote and filmed during the 1930s) is that of imagination. Imagination, like the term culture, becomes a fuzzy kind of notion in a scientific and technological society where everything is made subservient to the so-called laws of reason and to reason’s orphans - science and technology. One of Jennings’ goals was to recapture the human imagination in the subconscious. Why? The reason is not merely that the human imagination is the source of all creativity, but also that the human imagination is what will allow us to control science and technology for human needs.

Human needs imply ideals but they need not be idealistic. What Jennings wanted to do was not to build artificial worlds, but to use the human imagination to change this world. Jennings was a realist in the sense that he accepted the importance of science and technology in the modern world. He did not, however, accept the world that the historical marriage of science and technology - the Industrial Revolution - had created. Once crossing Battersea Bridge in London, he pointed to the mess and congestion - pandemonium - that the Industrial Revolution had created and said: “It will all have to go, it has been a terrible mistake.”

To be able to change something, it cannot be fixed or determined. The human imagination allows us to see all kinds of human possibilities for science and technology. It also makes science and technology subservient to a human culture that is based, not solely on reason and present reality, but on all the possibilities inherent in the human mind. Present reality and the current direction of science and technology are not the only ones that are conceivable.

For Jennings, as a documentary filmmaker and imaginative reconstructor of the Industrial Revolution, imagination needs to be historical. The historical imagination was what allowed individuals, groups and others to see a range of possibilities. If one understood how the present world had evolved, one would be better able to see its characteristics and possible alternatives. One of the reasons that Robins and Webster think that Jennings is so important is that he provides an historical perspective on the rise of science and technology. In particular, Jennings showed how science and technology related to an agenda of control. This control was once economic and political control, but its focus shifted with the mechanization of society. The rationalistic and mechanistic view of the world had become so internalized by individuals that their imagination had been blunted. They no longer had a human perspective on contemporary culture but had become slaves to rationalism.

One of Jennings’ and his Cambridge friends’ real intellectual breakthroughs was to show that there was no great gulf between science and the imagination. Science is a part of human culture and, as such, bears all the characteristics of imagination. The original investigations into nature and human nature were infused with imagination. Only gradually did science become a pre-eminently rationalist enterprise. Early scientific writings, including those of Newton and Darwin bore many of the same characteristics as the most imaginative of all forms of literature - poetry. And the world that science discovered was more wonderful than any fantasy. Scientists discovered monsters in a drop of water through the microscope. Astronomers described an infinite universe with millions of solar systems. Geologists opened us up to the possibility of huge changes over time. Similarly, new technologies, like balloon aviation provided an “angel’s view of the universe.”

Only with considerable difficulty did science move to a completely mechanistic, cause and effect view of the universe. For the longest time, it was difficult to divorce the poetic and the scientific view of the world. Animism or the tendency to view an otherwise mechanistic nature as infused with life and purpose, was only with great difficulty superceded. Similarly, technological progress - the replacement of a rural society with an industrial one - did not immediately change our consciousness. For generations, the British working class still retained its imaginative identification with the land and the concept, if not the reality, of the country was opposed to that of the city as a truly human ideal.

But the poetic and metaphorical view of the world did eventually recede in the face of rationalism. In a sense, this rationalism was not simply the effect of science and technology. Science, technology and culture were all caught up in the tendency towards increasing rationalism and the hegemony of explanations that relied on cause and effect relationships combined with facts. This represented a major paradigmatic change in the way that human beings interpreted (Robins and Webster would say appropriated) the world. Rationalism displaced imagination and, with it, the structures of feeling, the language, the images and metaphors and conceptual frameworks that allowed us to understand and humanize our world.

The poetic imagination survived but it was emaciated in the new world. Jennings believed that some writers, such as Blake, Shelly, Carlyle, Arnold and Morris retained the ability to deconstruct industrial society and to envision multiple possibilities. Many other authors, such as Tennyson retreated into a backward looking romanticism or an insipid and irrelevant sentimentalism. Culture, in effect, became an artificial retreat from the rationalistic world dominated by science and technology.

Culture and Society

Robins and Webster continually refer to the writings of Raymond Williams and the distinction that he drew between Culture and Society. Unfortunately, they never tell you what the Culture and Society debate was all about, so you may have found yourself puzzled. Not to worry; we’ll clear that up right now and show you the significance of William’s argument.

Basically, Williams argued that the Industrial Revolution, which was the product of a scientific way of thinking and technological change during the eighteenth-century, had a profound effect upon British consciousness. Many of those who were imaginative writers were appalled by the mechanistic, rationalistic society that seemed to be emerging. These writers tended to put a protective shield up against Industrial society. Instead of trying to understand it and change it, they retreated into the ideal world of culture.

The term culture, as we know it, is a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century invention. In the early eighteenth-century, culture and cultivation were horticultural terms that were used to refer to growing plants. By the late eighteenth-century, writers were beginning to use the term culture as an opposite and an antidote to the mechanistic and rationalistic world that the Industrial Revolution created. To be cultured was to be sensitive and separate from this ugly world, peopled by automatons and controlled by capitalistic philistines (i.e. the barbarian tribe that the Israelites had to fight). Culture had no reference to the present world, but related either to an idealized world of the intellect or to the ideal spirit of the people.

The most prominent writers within this new cultural critique were romantics like Shelley and Keats. These writers could not discover anything worthwhile in industrial culture. They turned to nature to discover the beauty that they could not find in human society. In order to discover anything beautiful in human relationships, they retreated into the medieval past, which they fantasized to suit their utopian ideal of a genuine community rather than an artificial and overly rational modern society. The romantic was either an elitist who held himself or herself aloof from the real world or was alienated from an ugly and mechanical world that did not appreciate art or the artist.

Raymond Williams described this retreat of artists and intellectuals -still common today - as a tragedy. In order to free human imagination and creativity, Williams - and by implication Robins and Webster - believe that it must be applied to the world, as it exists. Culture cannot be artificially divorced from the society in which it exists or it becomes a meaningless retreat from reality. Robins and Webster like Jennings precisely because this writer sought to drill modern society for insights and strange juxtapositions that could free up creativity in ways that were engaged with the modern world. Jennings wanted to capture, represent and present illuminations that expressed the human experience of the Industrial Revolution.

Instead of being a retreat from an ugly reality, Jennings great unfinished work Pandemonium brought together the human and non-human aspects of the Industrial Revolution. You might say that his goal was anti-romantic in so far as he sought to re-connect human vision with a mechanized society. As Marxist writers, Robins and Webster tend to put this agenda in the language of dialectical materialism:

Jennings’ great theme is the relation between the means of production and the ‘means of vision’; the relation of production to vision and vision to production has been mankind’s greatest problem.

In simpler language, we can say that Jennings simply wanted to reconnect man with machine, imagination with reason, possibilities with present conditions, and transform Pandemonium (a city of devil’s) into a human civilization. It goes without saying that, in the human city of the future, science and technology would be the servants rather than the masters of a human vision.

Mass Observation

You will be familiar with the discipline of sociology or the attempt to discover the laws or patterns of social behaviour within groups. When sociology originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was originally conceived as social science. The idea was that social observers could use empirical and deductive tools similar to those used by natural scientists in order to find out how human groups worked and how to make them work better.

Within sociology, however, there has always been tension between those who believe that sociology should be scientifically neutral and rely primarily on observation and statistical analysis and those who want to take into account more human factors of group life, i.e. subjective reality in the forms of ideals. The fathers of sociology demonstrated this tension in their writings. Emile Durkheim, for example, focused on social facts like suicide that could not be explained fully by any examination of individual motivation. Max Weber, on the other hand, believed that human behaviour could never be fully understood without taking motives into account.

The Mass Observation movement that Humphrey Jennings took part in during the late 1930s was an attempt to bridge the divide between objective and subjective reality. It was a brave attempt to bring together the artist and the social scientist. That this was a difficult synthesis should be obvious. There is an obvious tension, even a clear dichotomy “between scientific observation and fact-gathering, on the one hand, and artistic activity, on the other. Scientific, social investigation is seen as external to the literary-poetic.”

What Jennings strove to achieve was nothing less than bringing the ‘external world’ and the ‘imaginative mind’ together in a word where they had been divorced for almost a century. Jennings’ technique for such a synthesis was a unique re-evaluation of facts. Since science is largely about facts that can be proven, and this emphasis on facts within ratio-deductive systems severely limits the freedom for creativity, Jennings used his documentary experience and techniques to bring together subjective and objective reality. Thus, to him, the railway - the ultimate system of industrial progress - was not merely an engine on rails. It also created a completely new subjective reality in the form of new ideas about time and space. It allowed mass excursions to the seaside or a big soccer game. It created entirely new dreams now that children wanted to be railway engineers.

Jennings didn’t want to impose his own subjective reality on to others, but to make people see these kinds of connections. The railway, for him, could be many facts that he wanted to present to the eye of the beholder. It could be a machine; it could be a romantic icon; it could be an iron horse. All of these visions and cultural implications were at least as valid as the locomotive’s machine design or its purpose for transportation. Not surprisingly, however, the scientific group in the Mass Observation movement found Jennings’ ideas and juxtapositions difficult to integrate. The polarization of art and science was so ingrained by the 1930s that many of Jennings’ ideas were considered “naïve and anomalous” while the more “scientific and sociological” research of the Mass Observation movement was what got preserved.

Pandemonium

The sweeping and unfinished Pandemonium project was Jennings’ great attempt to bring all of these subjective and objective realities together in a new and modern approach. Particular images or illuminations brought together the galactic and the microscopic, the bizarre and the mundane:

It moves from spirit-rapping (psychic sessions) to Faraday on the ‘mind of Man’, to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s observations on charity school (schools for poor children) girls in Liverpool, to a bizarre banquet held inside the skeleton of an iguanodon (dinosaur), to a description of Coketown from Hard Times. The choice of texts refuses any simple reductionist understanding of the Industrial Revolution and bears testimony to its massive complexity and cultural ambiguity; it is both the ‘stupendous system of manufacture’ and the exploitation of working people. Jennings seeks to explore the period in all its facets through the juxtaposition and rotation of images to create a composite, almost cubist, intellectual collage.

What is so important about the Pandemonium project is that it attempts to reconstruct a more complex reality that, while it is grounded in historical processes that really happened, “forces insights through oblique and transversal drillings into the unconscious of history.” In a very real sense, this is a poetic and synthetic, rather than an overly analytical, approach to discovering knowledge.

Another way to describe Jennings’ Pandemonium project is as an attempt to re-enchant the world. Scientific and technological rationalism had the effect of disenchanting the world, or removing the magic, beauty, and sense of glory from life. This process began on paper with the scientific revolution of the 1600s. Gradually, the new mechanistic reasoning was applied to the natural world, removing most of its former connection with the spiritual world. Eventually, the scientific and mechanistic world was so denuded of supernatural and poetic characteristics as to become a “modern world built up out of atoms and molecules, lined by causality.”

When Jennings referred to the Industrial Revolution, he meant this entire process of over 3 centuries of mechanizing human thoughts. But it wasn’t just our thoughts that were constricted. Nature was transformed into a commodity for exploitation. The earth was desecrated and human beings exploited one another for profit. Animals were now used for scientific experiments, such as the one where a tube was stuck into the artery of a horse to measure blood pressure. As the process of mental and objective mechanization increased, argued Jennings, human beings also came to be viewed either as machines or as “objects of experimentation.” All that was divine and special in being human was evaporating on a scientific petrie dish.

Poetry, and the poetic imagination, describes the emotional link between mankind and between men and women and nature and the cosmos. In a perfectly rationalistic society, as Plato first argued, there is no place for poetry. Poetry becomes a lie, or at best a harmless fantasy, in a world where facts are king. As the poetic imagination burns out, individual minds become more mechanistic and fatalistic. For Jennings, this development represented a severe injury to the human intellect. It also made men and women more pessimistic and incapable of developing moral character. Without emotion and imagination, human life was pandemonium - noise and confusion.

For Jennings, and here he goes well beyond Freud, this severing of our emotional connection to the natural and social order was the true repression of the modern age. Science and materialism had led to a world in which humans increasingly were cut off from the roots of creativity and optimism. At the same time, Jennings was much more than a negative critic of science and technology. No one was more aware than he of the way that science and technology could provide new visions and additional material for the creative imagination. The last 300 years had “amplified and deepened our imaginative resources”. But the potential riches of the modern world could not be exploited if monolithic mechanical thinking erased the artistic or poetic consciousness.

The Message

Robins and Webster use Jennings as an example of a writer who clearly identified the problems that can occur when science and technology are separated from culture. They suggest that we need to carry on the agenda of Jennings by looking for new and “more effective cultural forms” for incorporating science and technology within a more holistic vision of what it means to be human and civilized. Moreover, they support Jennings’ measured criticism over the fatalism that first gripped the romantic critics of industrialization but that has now become a mainstream mentality. Finally, they identify the modern debate over science and technology not merely as an economic or a political debate but a ‘cultural debate’ about the kind of human city we want to create.

In order to make science and technology more subservient to social goals and visions, we need to broaden the debate, re-establish the filigree (complex web of connections) between science, technology and civilization, make connections between seemingly disparate elements in our society, and re-affirm the utopian obligation to at least try to create a more healthy and human city. Perhaps the biggest danger to such an agenda is the fatalism, or absence of hope, that characterizes our mechanical and atomistic view of life.

Many of the finest minds of the modern age are pessimistic and even fatalistic about the future. Jacques Elull in The Technological Society argued, for example, that the rationalistic ethic with its emphasis on ever increasing efficiency would continue to destroy the vestiges of humanism. Ironically, those with the greatest optimism tend to be those who, like Bill Gates, have a highly uncritical and naïve view of modern technology. They include those who assume that every problem faced by the human city has a technological fix. These people lack the synthetic imagination or intellect to reconnect culture to modern society. There idea of culture amounts to little more than the continuation of a three centuries old rationalistic agenda that has never performed the miracles that it promised. In the seventeenth century, scientific positivism could be construed as novel and exciting. In the twenty-first century, it is little more than hype.

Jennings is interesting precisely because he saw the enormity of the problems that faced humanity but did not shrink from the challenge of finding a solution. If anything, things have only gotten worse since the time Jennings was composing his Pandemonium. The forward march of scientific and technological progress is rapidly creating what Stephen Gill called the global panopticon - a place where: 1) the entire world will be brought within the framework of capitalist efficiency; 2) the distinction between public and private will be obliterated; 3) cultural critiques will have little influence in shaping alternatives; and 4) the last remaining remnants of human individuality and creativity can be monitored and controlled.

Robins and Webster, however, want to reestablish the measured but optimistic agenda of Jennings. We’ll take a look at their analyses and suggestions over the next few weeks. These guys are very smart. So, even if you don’t buy their critique of technoculture, you would be well advised to pay careful attention to what they say.

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The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/