bookclubiv

by Matthew Guerrieri

Dang, Molly got to the Kelly’s whole technology-is-inevitable argument before I did, but that’s OK, I’ll talk about it anyway, because I think it’s a good example of the interesting tension that I felt throughout the entire book. Kelly insists on inevitability to argue against throwing up cautionary roadblocks, what, in chapter 12, he calls the Precautionary Principle. One the one hand, this is, in part, fodder for the six-degrees-of-teleology game that you can play throughout the whole book. (The Precautionary Principle is bad because it slows down innovation. But why is innovation automatically good? See Progress, belief in, pp. 1-359, passim.) But, in casting technological advances as inevitable, he introduces a subtle but interesting disconnect.

Kelly defines inevitability in two ways. Here’s the first (p. 176):

[E]very realizable technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together.

Add the missing agency–that is, some mad tinkerer will choose to cobble together, &c.–and the inevitable is not quite as inevitable. Extraordinarily, even overwhelmingly likely? Certainly–but not inevitable. That’s hairsplitting, to be sure, but that tiny space between likely and inevitable is surprisingly lively philosophical ground.

Kelly’s second characterization of inevitability likens it to genetics–“Who you are is determined in part by your genes,” he writes (p. 177), and technological development is the same way, an inexorable, if sometimes irregular unfolding of a predetermined plan. A strong analogy, but when Kelly writes (p. 179)–

In our lives we have no choice about becoming teenagers

–as a former moody teenager, I am compelled to point out a flaw in his logic; we do have a choice, even if the opt-out is, to put it mildly, extreme. But it’s at those gedanken-ish margins that you can sense how Kelly, even as he sensibly qualifies his argument, nonetheless fairly consistently errs on the side of a view of human nature that I, at least, find too passive.

It’s what’s at the source of Kelly’s repeated post hoc propter ergo hoc assumptions about technological innovation (or, as I called it to my lovely wife, “that thing-following-another-thing fallacy”; she knew the actual term, having paid more attention to The West Wing). Technology begets technology, in Kelly’s view; innovations are the cause of further innovations. It’s highly suspicious, especially if, like me, you’re more inclined to the idea that people cause innovation, not technology itself–the exponential increase in invention could just as well be due to increased population density as some sort of technological Hegelian vector towards the absolute. And it leads Kelly to a bout of untoward mysticism, in the passage that Molly quoted back at the start of the week:

But can you imagine how poor our world would be if Bach had been born 1,000 years before the Flemish invented the technology of the harpsichord? Or if Mozart had preceded the technologies of piano and symphony? How vacant our collective imaginations would be if Vincent van Gogh had arrived 5,000 years before we invented cheap oil paint? What kind of modern world would we have if Edison, Greene, and Dickson had not developed cinematic technology before Hitchcock or Charlie Chaplin grew up?

This manages to be too optimistic and too pessimistic, all at the same time. The optimism is easily seen if you apply the criterion to less morally exalted acts: What kind of modern world would we have if Henry Deringer had not developed pistol technology before John Wilkes Booth grew up? But also, the idea that certain kinds of genius need particular kinds of technology in order to flourish can work against technology as well: if your genius is dependent on obsolete technology, there’s going to be far less opportunity for you to practice it, and far less likelihood that your genius will enrich the world.

But that’s assuming that the technology is what sparks, or even necessarily enables genius. Do you honestly think an imagination as fertile and prolific as Bach’s wouldn’t have found some way to express itself, harpsichord or not? The catch, of course, is that, a thousand years earlier, Bach’s genius might not have been in the position for its products to be passed down to subsequent generations. Does that mean it isn’t genius? Is genius only that which proves useful or beautiful after the creator is gone? And now we’ve opened the door to aesthetics.

And that’s as good a place as any to stop, I think. Because the aesthetics of being a classical musician in the 21st century can sometimes seem to be as much a rebuke to technology as it is enabled by it. Practitioners have shown characteristically human ingenuity in leveraging technological advances in making a musical career at the same time that the actual musical practice–instruments that still demand inefficient courses of mastery, an ideal of live, fallible performance–persistently and joyously occupies a space that, at least from one vantage, exists in spite of the human addiction to technology. Technological advance is neither good nor bad; it’s good and bad, the sort of rich gray area that, even in an era of dazzling technological power, artists will most incisively make their playground.

By Matthew Guerrieri

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.