Marc has already pointed out one of the most immediate connections between the proliferation of technology and music-making, that is, the evolution and development of instruments. He’s exactly right–there’s a deep, sometimes invisible relationship between the musical technology we choose to adopt and the music that results. (There’s also Kelly’s own what-if-Bach-didn’t-have-the-harpsichord contrafactual, which I find mildly ridiculous for reasons I might get into before week’s end.) But is there a connection to be made on a more abstract scale? I think there is-and is has to do with the whole idea of the Technium.
Whether you buy it or not, or even treat it as a metaphor or not, the Technium is an othering strategy: it puts technology out there, in its own realm, a realm related to–but not necessarily contained within–the realm of human behavior and responsibility. Kelly is aware of the impulse behind othering; he mentions it in his discussion of the Industrial Revolution (p. 41):
The worst by-products of the industrial age-black smoke, black river waters, blackened short lives working in the mills-were so remote from our cherished self-conception that we wanted to believe the source itself was alien…. When technology appeared among our age-old routines, it was set outside ourselves and treated like an infection.
Kelly’s remedy for this illusion, though, still keeps technology outside, only as as “action”: “No longer a noun, technology was becoming a force–a vital spirit that throws us forward or pushes against us.”
Going back to the Industrial Revolution, there’s a pair of nice examples (which I’m borrowing from Julie Wosk’s fascinating Breaking Frame: Technology and Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century) hinting at how making technology something other reinforces the sort of intellectual entropy I talked about in my last post, the way the choices we make regarding technology can collapse our thinking into comparatively impoverished channels. The examples have to do with the English town of Coalbrookdale, a kind of advance guard of the Industrial Revolution, a town that became famous (and infamous) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a center for iron production. By all accounts, Coalbrookdale was a fairly hellish place-something you nevertheless wouldn’t gather from the painter William Williams’ 1777 landscape A Morning View of Coalbrookdale:
The town can be identified in the distance by the graceful plumes of smoke rising into the clear sky. This is about as obvious an example of othering as you can get: the farther away you set yourself from technological disruption, the prettier it looks.
Now, here’s another painting: Philip James de Louthenberg’s 1801 Coalbrookdale by Night:
This is a much more complicated view. On the one hand, it’s a dramatically infernal picture, the vantage designed to maximize both the bright blaze of the smelting fires and the silhouetted darkness surrounding it. But it is also a beautiful artifact, a virtuoso performance, a dazzling play of color, with a kind of thrill-ride you-are-there effect, putting the viewer in the thick of Coalbrookdale’s unearthly landscape.
In other words, it’s a textbook example of the sublime. Given the terms of this particular blog post, a good way to think about the sublime and its intent is that it’s something that inspires us to other ourselves, a dialectic between our everyday experience and an experience that pushes us out of our comfort zone, with the end result an expanded sense of the world. (Last weekend, for example, I was able to take in a live performance of Jean Barraqué’s Piano Sonata, a monument of abstract, atonal modernism. The Barraqué Sonata takes the idea of the sublime to an extreme: it ruthlessly others you, the listener.) For a couple of centuries now, the ideal of the sublime has pretty well permeated the way we talk about music, any music. This is a little bit strange, because I think one of the things the course of history teaches us is that human beings, left to their own devices, have a greater propensity for othering people and things outside of themselves than othering themselves.
Why do people do this? Laziness, I think–it’s less work to interpret the world in such a way that doesn’t involve re-making one’s own self-identity the way the sublime would have you do. Now, I’m the last person in the world who should be criticizing laziness, and I know the fact that self-othering doesn’t feel like work to me (I enjoy Barraqué highly) puts me in a curious minority, not on a higher artistic or moral plane. But one of the reasons I know I’m in a curious minority is because the collective choices we’ve made about the technological progress of mass media has resulted in an ecology where, the more self-othering a bit of content is likely to inspire, the less likely it is to have widespread distribution.
Of course, the technology helps, too–I can go into my laptop hard drive and pull up no fewer than five recordings of the Barraqué Sonata whenever I want. But I’m already inclined to push my own envelope of artistic comfort. The experience of sublimity can be a learned experience–I learned it, somwhere along the line–but the explosion of information technology over the past century has not produced any indication that human beings are developing any more capacity for self-reflection.
The current peak of information technology is the Web, which Kelly loves–rather explicitly, on pp. 322-23. “I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet,” he writes. “It is a steadfast benefactor, always there. I caress it with my figety fingers; it yields to my desires, like a lover.” It’s interesting to read how much more equivocal early predictions about the World Wide Web were, for instance, than Kelly is–and how much those early predictions hinted at the epistemic closure that is the dark side of Kelly’s yielded-to desires. Edward Tenner, for example, from 1994:
Any future information network will help unhappy people secede, at least mentally, from institutions they do not like, much as the interstate highway system allowed the affluent to flee the cities for the suburbs and exurbs. Prescribing mobility, whether automotive or electronic, as an antidote to society’s fragmentation is like recommending champagne as a hangover remedy.
(My favorite is this anonymous anagram of information superhighway: “New Utopia? Horrifying sham.”) The Web has made it easier than ever to experience the self-othering of sublimity–but also has made it easier than ever to avoid the possibility of self-othering at all. Technology wants whatever we want it to want–even what we might not like to admit that we want.