Comic
I find it necessary to cast doubts upon the generally accepted theories of man’s basic nature which have been implicit during the past century in our constant overrating of the role of tools and machines in the human economy. I shall suggest that not only was Karl Marx in error in giving the instruments of production a central place and a directive function in human development, but that even the seemingly benign interpretation by Teilhard de Chardin reads back into the whole story of man the narrow technological rationalism of our own age, and projects into the future a final state in which all further possibilities of development would come to an end, because nothing would be left of man’s original nature, which had not been absorbed into, if not suppressed by, the technical organization of intelligence into a universal and omnipotent layer of mind.
. . . I am aware that the following summary must, by its brevity, seem superficial and unconvincing. At best I can only hope to show there are serious reasons for reconsidering the whole picture of human and technical development upon which the present organization of Western society is based.
Lewis Mumford, “Technics and the Nature of Man” (1966)
I was glad to go to a presentation yesterday by Michelle Kendrick which focused on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I suppose I have to actually buy the book. Like Roxanne, I just don’t get comics (or graphic novels, or theoretical exposition for that matter told in panel-by-panel form). Evidently, McCloud traces the history of comics back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia—I don’t buy that at all. I think they are pretty much a twentieth century thing, and don’t see them as the great media revolution which will reshape our consciousness as implied in the title of McCloud’s sequel, Reinventing Comics : How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. Sometimes, history reads more like fiction.
