I’ve been obsessing a bit about Lewis Mumford lately, partly because I always encounter his writing in oft-anthologized inflammatory “theory bites.” I couldn’t help but think that there was more to it than a simple case of iconophobia. A used copy of Art and Technics, the source for Vickie Goldberg’s anthologized snippet I blogged about a few days ago, showed up yesterday. I don’t often just rip through things like I ripped through this book (a series of lectures)— but I read a hundred pages in about two hours. When it’s had time to digest a bit (and I finish the remaining 50 pages), I’d like to say more. But for now I have to comment about this bit:
Each art has its technical side, and technics involves calculation, repetition, laborious effort, in short, what would often be, were it not for the ultimate end of the process, sheer monotony and drudgery. But in the period when handicraft dominated, the artist and the technician arrived, as it were, as a happy compromise, because, for one thing, their roles were assumed by the same person. By this modus vivendi, the artist submitted to the technical conditions of fabrication and operation, schooling himself to do a succession of unrewarding acts in return for two conditions: first, the comradeship of other workers on the job, with the chance for chaffer and song. companionship and mutual aid in performing the work; and second, the privilege of lingering with loving care over the final stages of the technical process and transforming the efficient utilitarian form into a meaningful symbolic form. That extra effort, that extra display of love and esthetic skill, tends to act as a preservative of any structure; for, until the symbols themselves become meaningless, men tend to value, and if possible save from decay and destruction, works of art that bear the human imprint. (49)
The distinctions that Mumford strives to make in his binary art/techic framework make for an interesting grid: arts are subjective, technics are objective; arts are human, technics are inhuman; arts are orphic, technics are promethean; arts are symbolic, techics are utilitarian; etc. He doesn’t argue for the abolition of either, but rather suggests that they are codependent and in danger of losing balance in the contemporary (1952) world. The case that he makes in this section is that symbolic value has greater durability than utilitarian value. Which reminded me of a photographic series I was working on in the mid 1990s.
Songs from the Valley Towns was my name for a group of mostly square format images taken with my Rollei as I drove back and forth between Bakersfield and Fresno visiting my friend Slim, who had recently completed a collection of songs with the same title. What became clear to me was that there was a symbolic San Joaquin Valley, and there was an actual one. The two things were often at odds with each other. I remember passing through Riverdale, which was primarily a two or three block stretch of nondescript stucco strip malls and open farm fields, and laughing inside.
Riverdale was famous! This was the ancestral home of Archie and Jughead in the comics. I didn’t see any sign of Riverdale high, where Betty and Veronica would have hung out though. Just a TV dealership, and I think a gas station on the corner. The symbolic content of the place (false documents, after all, because comic books don’t exist) overwhelmed its actuality for me. Riverdale wasn’t the only revelation, there was also Pixley, which I blogged as far back as 2002. Pixley was the home of Petticoat Junction on TV.
There was no sign of a railroad track for miles, just a note on the door of the unattended used car lot that payments could be made at the Pixley Cafe next door. There was a playful dissonance to all this. I remember reading somewhere that Paul Henning, creator of Petticoat Junction, Green Acres (coincidentally a suburb of Bakersfield) and The Beverly Hillbillies, had simply looked at a road map and pulled his place names from that. Many of the places in the popular imagination could be found, in their less than symbolic form, scatted across the San Joaquin. The symbol, as Saussure has so assuredly demonstrated, is strictly arbitrary.
This amused me greatly then. It still does now; one of these days I need to do some decent scans/ fresh prints of these images. But, back to Mumford:
Now, the dynamic equilibrium on which all life depends is a difficult one to maintain, and nowhere has this been more true than in the balance between art and technics. Esthetic symbolism for a long time seemed to man either a short-cut to knowledge and power or an adequate substitute. So he applied it, not merely to things that could properly be created or formed by these methods—works of poetry and art, systems of conceptual knowledge like mathematics, or patterns of law and custom—but also to the physical environment and to natural forces: he foolishly invoked art and ritual to bring on rain or to increase human fertility. Without the counterbalancing interests and methods of technics, man might have easily gone mad, in that his symbols might have progressively displaced realities and in the end have produced a blind confusion that might have robbed him of his capacity for physical survival. At some point in his existence man must leave his inner world and return to the outer, must wake up, so to say, and go back to work. [emphasis mine] The tool tended to produce objectivity or matter-of-factness, as my old teacher, Thorstein Veblen, used to call it, and objectivity is a condition for sanity. (50-51)
Thinking about Slim’s semi-fictional songs, and the semi-fictional nature of the San Joaquin Valley tended to suggest that the world was filled with facades, and behind these facades there are a lot of ghosts. Mumford’s insights are not wholly negative and technophobic, they are strikingly insightful and progressive for their age. I am drawn to Mumford’s thinking, which tends to steer across the poles of print culture, photography, and sound reproduction technologies as lightning rods for productive discussion. There are no hard and fast lines between art and techics, between subjectivity and objectivity, and it seems a shame that he is colored as a curmudgeon.
Human history, unfortunately, discloses many symbolic aberrations and hallucinations. Perhaps the fatal course all civilizations have followed so far has been due, not to natural miscarriages, the disastrous effects of famines and floods and diseases, but to accumulating perversions of the symbolic functions. Obsession with money and neglect of productivity. Obsession with the symbols of centralized political power and sovereignty, and neglect of the processes of mutual aid in the small face-to-face community. Obsession with the symbols of religion the neglect of the ideal ends or the daily practices of love and friendship through which these symbols would be given an effective life. (51)
I think this anticipates Habermas’s concern with systematically distorted communication and the disjunction between system and lifeworld. The real treat for me is that Mumford faults not the systems, but the deployment of symbols inside them.
In a lot of ways, California was a sustained hallucination that lasted 37 years for me. My means of coping with it was primarily photography.
