Culture Without Literacy

The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike 
with himself has some explosive implications today. The perfection of 
the means of communication has given this average power-complex of the 
human being an enormous extension of expression.

The telephone, the teleprinter and the wireless made it possible for 
orders from the highest levels to be given direct to the lowest levels, 
where, on account of the absolute authority behind them, they were 
carried out uncritically; or brought it about that numerous offices and 
command centres were directly connected with the supreme leadership from 
which they received their sinister orders without any intermediary; or 
resulted in a widespread surveillance of the citizen, or in a high degree 
of secrecy surrounding criminal happenings. To the outside observer this 
governmental apparatus may have resembled the apparently chaotic 
confusion of lines at a telephone exchange, but like the latter it could 
be controlled and operated from one central source. Former dictatorships 
needed collaborators of high quality even in the lower levels of 
leadership, men who could think and act independently. In the era of 
modern technique an authoritarian system can do without this. The means 
of communication alone permit it to mechanize the work of subordinate 
leadership. As a consequence a new type develops: the uncritical 
recipient of orders.1

Perfection of the means of communication has meant instantaneity. Such an 
instantaneous network of communication is the body-mind unity of each of 
us. When a city or a society achieves a diversity and equilibrium of 
awareness analogous to the body-mind network, it has what we tend to 
regard as a high culture.

But the instantaneity of communication makes free speech and thought 
difficult if not impossible and for many reasons. Radio extends the range 
of the casual speaking voice, but it forbids that many should speak. And 
when what is said has such range of control it is forbidden to speak any 
but the most acceptable words and notions. Power and control are in all 
cases paid for by loss of freedom and flexibility.

Today the entire globe has a unity in point of mutual inter-awareness 
which exceeds in rapidity the former flow of information in a small city  
say Elizabethan London with its eighty or ninety thousand inhabitants. 
What happens to existing societies when they are brought into such 
intimate contact by press, picture stories, news-reels and jet 
propulsion? What happens when the neolithic Eskimo is compelled to share 
the time and space arrangements of technological man? What happens in our 
minds as we become familiar with the diversity of human cultures which 
have come into existence under innumerable circum-
stances, historical and geographical? Is not what happens comparable to 
that social revolution which we call the American melting-pot?

When the telegraph made possible a daily cross-section of the globe 
transferred to the page of newsprint, we already had our mental 
melting-pot for cosmic man  the world citizen. The mere format of the 
page of newsprint was more revolutionary in its intellectual and 
emotional consequences than anything that could be said about any part of 
the globe.

When we juxtapose news items from Tokyo, London, New York, Chile, Africa 
and New Zealand we are not just manipulating space. The events so brought 
together belong to cultures widely separated in time. The modern world 
abridges all historical times as readily as it reduces space. Everywhere 
and every age have become here and now. History has been abolished by our 
new media. If prehistoric man is simply preliterate man living in a 
timeless world of seasonal recurrence, may not posthistoric man find 
himself in a similar situation? May not the upshot of our technology be 
the awakening from the historically conditioned nightmare of the past 
into a timeless present? Historic man may turn out to have been literate 
man. An episode.

Robert Redfield in his recent book The Primitive World and Its 
Transformations points to the timeless character of preliterate societies 
where exclusively oral communication ensures intimacy, homogeneity and 
fixity of social experience. It is the advent of writing that sets in 
motion the urban revolution. Writing breaks up the fixity and homogeneity 
of preliterate societies. Writing creates that inner dialogue or 
dialectic, that psychic withdrawal which makes possible the reflexive 
analysis of thought via the stasis of the audible made spatial. Writing 
is the translation of the audible into the spatial as reading is the 
reverse of this reciprocal process. And the complex shuttling of eye, ear 
and speech factors once engaged in this ballet necessarily reshape the 
entire communal life, both inner and outer, creating not only the  stream 
of consciousness rediscovered by contemporary art, but ensuring multiple 
impediments to the activities of perception and recall.

So far as writing is the spatializing and arrest of oral speech, however, 
it implies that further command of space made possible by the written 
message and its attendant road system. With writing, therefore, comes 
logical analysis and specialism, but also militarism and bureaucracy. And 
with writing comes the break in that direct, intuitive relationship 
between men and their surroundings which modern art has begun to uncover.

 Compared with the evidence afforded by living tradition, says Sir James 
Frazer,  the testimony of ancient books on the subject of the early 
religion is worth very little. For literature accelerates the advance of 
thought at a rate which leaves the slow progress of opinion by word of 
mouth at an immeasurable distance behind. Two or three generations of 
literature may do more to change thought than two or three thousand years 
of traditional life.2 But literature, as we know today, is a relatively 
conservative time-binding medium compared with press, radio and movie. So 
the thought is now beginning to occur: How many thousands of years of 
change can we afford every ten years? May not a spot of culture-lag here 
and there in the great time-flux prove to be a kind of social and 
psychological oasis?

Involved with the loss of memory and the psychic withdrawal of alphabetic 
cultures, there is a decline of sensuous perception and adequacy of 
social responsiveness. The preternatural sensous faculties of Sherlock 
Holmes or the modern sleuth are simply those of preliterate man who can 
retain the details of a hundred-mile trail as easily as a movie camera 
can record it. Today our detailed knowledge of societies existing within 
the oral tradition enables us to estimate accurately the advantages and 
disadvantages of writing. Without writing there is little control of 
space, but perfect control of accumulated experience. The 
misunderstandings of Ireland and England can be seen in some basic 
respects as the clash of oral and written cultures. And the strange thing 
to us is that the written culture has very little historical sense. The 
English could never remember; the Irish could never forget. Today the 
university as a community is in large degree one in which the members are 
in regular oral communication. And whereas the university has a highly 
developed time sense, the business community operates on the very 
short-run and exists mainly by the control of space. The present divorce 
between these two worlds is only accentuated by the perfection of the 
media peculiar to each.

Faced with the consequence of writing, Plato notes in the Phaedrus:

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners souls, 
because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external 
written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you 
have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence and you give 
your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be 
hearers of many things and have learned nothing; they will appear to be 
omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome 
company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Two thousand years of manuscript culture lay ahead of the Western world 
when Plato made this observation. But nobody has yet studied the rise and 
decline of Greece in terms of the change from oral to written culture. 
Patrick Geddes said that the road destroyed the Greek city-state. But 
writing made the road possible, just as printing was later to pay for the 
roads of England and America.

In order to understand the printed-book culture which today is yielding, 
after four hundred years, to the impact of visual and auditory media, it 
is helpful to note a few of the characteristics of that manuscript 
culture which persisted from the 5th century B.C. to the 15th century 
A.D. I shall merely mention a few of the principal observations of 
scholars like Pierce Butler and H. J. Chaytor. In the first place, 
manuscript culture never made a sharp break with oral speech because 
everybody read manuscripts aloud. Swift, silent reading came with the 
macadamized surfaces of the printed page. Manuscript readers memorized 
most of what they read since in the nature of things they had to carry 
their learning with them. Fewness of manuscripts and difficulty of access 
made for utterly different habits of mind with regard to what was 
written. One result was encyclopedism. Men of learning tried, at least, 
to learn everything. So that if learning was oral, teaching was even more 
so. Solitary learning and study came only with the printed page. And 
today when learning and study are switching more and more to the seminar, 
the round-table and the discussion group, we have to note these 
developments as due to the decline of the printed page as the dominant 
art form.

The manuscript page was a very flexible affair. It was not only in close 
rapport with the oral speech but with plastic design and colour 
illustration. So the ornate examples of manuscript art easily rival and 
resemble those books in stone and glass, the cathedrals and abbeys. In 
our own time James Joyce, seeking a means to orchestrate and control the 
various verbi-voco-visual media of our own age, resorted to the page 
format of the Book of Kells as a means thereto. And even the early 
romantic poets, painters and novelists expressed their preference for 
gothic in terms of rebellion against book culture.

Recently Rosamund Tuve, in elucidating the art of George Herbert, 
discovered that the characteristic effects of metaphysical wit in the 
17th century poetry resulted from the translation of visual effects from 
medieval manuscript and woodcut into the more abstract form of the 
printed word. If the 17th century was receding from a visual, plastic 
culture towards an abstract literary culture, today we seem to be 
receding from an abstract book culture towards a highly sensuous, plastic 
pictorial culture. Recent poets have used simultaneously effects from 
both extremes to achieve witty results not unlike those of the 17th 
century. The impact of Mr. Eliots very first lines of poetry has been 
felt everywhere:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
It is the overlayering of perspectives, the simultaneous use of two kinds 
of space which creates the shock of dislocation here. For if all art is a 
contrived trap for the attention, all art and all language are techniques 
for looking at one situation through another one.

The printed page is a 16th century art form which obliterated two 
thousand years of manuscript culture in a few decades. Yet it is hard for 
us to see the printed page or any other current medium except in contrast 
to some other form. The mechanical clock, for example, created a wholly 
artificial image of time as a uniform linear structure. This artificial 
form gradually changed habits of work, feeling and thought which are only 
being rejected today. We know that in our own lives each event exists in 
its own time. Time is not the same for the speaker as for the audience. 
To the speaker it is too, too brief for what he has to say. For the 
audience it is a grim foretaste of eternity. Ultimately the medieval 
clock made Newtonian physics possible. It may also have initiated those 
orderly linear habits which made possible the rectilinear page of print 
created from movable type, as well as the methods of commerce. At any 
rate the mechanization of writing was as revolutionary in its 
consequences as the mechanization of time. And this, quite apart from 
thoughts or ideas conveyed by the printed page. Movable type was already 
the modern assembly line in embryo.

Harold Innis explored some of the consequences of the printed page: the 
break-down of international communication; the impetus given to 
nationalism by the commercial exploitation of vernaculars; the loss of 
contact between writers and audience; the depressing effect on music, 
architecture and the plastic arts.

Bela Balazs in his Theory of the Film notes some of the changes in visual 
habits resulting from the printing press on one hand and the camera on 
the other:

The discovery of printing gradually rendered illegible the faces of men. 
So much could be read from paper that the method of conveying meaning by 
facial expression fell into desuetude. Victor Hugo wrote once that the 
printed book took over the part played by the cathedral in the Middle 
Ages and became the carrier of the spirit of the people. But the 
thousands of books tore the one spirit . . . into thousands of opinions . 
. . tore the church into a thousand books. The visual spirit was thus 
turned into a legible spirit and visual culture into a culture of 
concepts. . . . But we paid little attention to the fact that, in 
conformity with this, the face of individual men, their foreheads, their 
eyes, their mouths, had also of necessity and quite correctly to suffer a 
change.

At present a new discovery, a new machine is at work to turn the 
attention of men back to a visual culture and to give them new faces. 
This machine is the 
cinematographic camera. Like the printing press it is a technical device 
for the multiplication and distribution of products of the human spirit; 
its effect on human culture will not be less than that of the printing 
press. . . . The gestures of visual man are not intended to convey 
concepts which can be expressed in words, but such . . . non-rational 
emotions which would still remain unexpressed when everything that can be 
told has been told. . . . Just as our musical experiences cannot be 
expressed in rationalized concepts, what appears on the face and in 
facial expression is a spiritual experience which is rendered immediately 
visible without the intermediary of words.

The printed page in rendering the language of the face and gesture 
illegible has also caused the abstract media of printed words to become 
the main bridge for the inter-awareness of spiritual and mental states. 
In the epoch of print and word culture the body ceased to have much 
expressive value and the human spirit became audible but invisible. The 
camera eye has reversed this process in reacquainting the masses of men 
once more within the grammar of gesture. Today commerce has channelled 
much of this change along sex lines. But even there the power of the 
camera eye to change physical attitudes and make-up is familiar to all. 
In the 90s Oscar Wilde noted how the pale, long-necked, consumptive 
red-heads painted by Rossetti and Burne-Jones were for a short time an 
exotic visual experience. But soon in every London salon these creatures 
sprouted up where none had been before. The fact that human nature, at 
least, imitates art is too obvious to labour. But the fact that with 
modern technology the entire mate-rial of the globe as well as the 
thoughts and feelings of its human inhabitants have become the matter of 
art and of mans factive intelligence means that there is no more nature. 
At least there is no more external nature. Everything from politics to 
bottle-feeding, global landscape, and the subconscious of the infant is 
subject to the manipulation of conscious artistic control  the BBC 
carries the unrehearsed voice of the nightingale to the Congo, the Eskimo 
sits entranced by hillbilly music from West Tennessee. Under these 
conditions the activities of Senator McCarthy belong with the adventures 
of the Pickwick Club and our talk about the Iron Curtain is a convenient 
smokescreen likely to divert our attention from much greater problems. 
The Russians differ from us in being much more aware of the 
non-commercial impact of the new media. We have been so hypnotized with 
the commercial and entertainment qualities of press, radio, movie and TV 
that we have been blind to the revolutionary character of these toys. The 
Russians after a few years of playing with these radio-active toys have 
tried to neutralize them by imposing various stereotypes on their content 
and messages. They have forced their press to stick to an 1850 format. 
They have imposed similar time-locks on music and literature. They hope, 
thereby, to abate the revolutionary fury of these instruments. But the 
fury for change is in the form and not the message of the new media, a 
fact which seems almost inevitably to escape men trained in our abstract 
literary culture. The culture of print has rendered people extremely 
insensitive to the language and meaning of spatial forms  one reason for 
the architectural and city horrors tolerated by predominantly book 
cultures. Thus the English and American cultures in particular were 
overwhelmed by print, since in the 16th century they had only rudimentary 
defences to set up against the new printed word. The rest of Europe, 
richer in plastic and oral culture, was less blitzed by the printing 
press. And the Orient has so far had many kinds of resistance to offer. 
But the curious thing is that Spaniards like Picasso or Salvador Dali are 
much more at home amidst the new visual culture of North America than we 
ourselves.

This division between visual and literary languages is a fact which has 
also set a great abyss between science and the humanities. Thinking as we 
do of culture in book terms, we are unable to read the language of 
technological forms. And since our earliest esthetic responses are to 
such forms, this has set up numerous cleavages between official and 
idiomatic cultural response within our own experience. We are all of us 
persons of divided and sub-divided sensibility through failure to 
recognize the multiple languages with which our world speaks to us. Above 
all it is the multiplicity of messages with which we are hourly bombarded 
by our environment that renders us ineffectual. Karl Deutsch has argued 
that a people shaped by oral tradition will respond to an alien challenge 
like a suicidal torpedo. The wild Celtic charge. A people shaped by a 
written tradition will not charge, but drift, pulled in a thousand 
different directions.

One obvious feature of the printed book is its republicanism. The page of 
print is not only a leveller of other forms of expression; it is a social 
leveller as well. Anyone who can read has at least the illusion of 
associating on equal terms with anyone who has written. And that fact 
gave the printed word a privileged place in American society and 
politics. The Duke of Gloucester could say casually to Edward Gibbon, on 
the completion of his History:  Another damned fat square book. Scribble, 
scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon! But there were no fox-hunters in 
America to put the literary upstart in his place.

So far as quantity goes the printed book was the first instrument of mass 
culture. Erasmus was the first to see its meaning and turned his genius 
to the manufacture of textbooks for the classroom. He saw, above all, 
that the printing press was a device for reproducing the past in the 
present, much like a Hollywood movie set. The nouveaux riches of Italy 
began to enact on a tiny scale the past that was being unearthed and 
printed. Hastily they ran up villas and palazzas in ancient style. 
Assisted by the newly printed exemplars they began to imitate the 
language of Cicero and Seneca. In England the new print mingled with the 
old oral tradition to produce the new forms of sermon and drama which 
were hybrids of written and spoken culture. But in the printing press 
there is one great feature of mass culture which is lacking. Namely, the 
instantaneous. From one point of view, language itself is the greatest of 
all mass media. The spoken word instantly evokes not only some recently 
conceived idea but reverberates with the total history of its own 
experience with man. We may be oblivious of such overtones as of the 
spectrum of colour in a lump of coal. But the poet by exact rhythmic 
adjustment can flood our consciousness with this knowledge. The artist is 
older than the fish.

Reading the history of the newspaper retrospectively we can see that it 
was not a mere extension of the art form of the book page. As used by 
Rimbaud, Mallarm and Joyce the newspaper page is a revolution in itself, 
juxtaposing many book pages on a  single sheet. And the news page was, 
moreover, more nearly a mass medium not only in reaching more people than 
the book, but in being more instantaneous in its coverage and 
communication. Once linked to the telegraph, the press achieved the speed 
of light, as radio and TV have done since then. Total global coverage in 
space, instantaneity in time. Those are the two basic characters that I 
can detect in a mechanical mass medium. There are other characteristics 
derivative from these, namely anonymity of those originating the messages 
or forms, and anonymity in the recipients. But in respect of this 
anonymity it is necessary to regard not only words and metaphors as mass 
media but buildings and cities as well.

The modern newspaper page is not a mere extension of the book page 
because the speed with which the telegraph feeds news to the press today 
precludes any possibility of organizing a sheet of news by any but the 
most impressionistic devices. Each item lives in its own kind of space 
totally discontinuous from all other items. A particularly vigorous item 
will sprout a headline and provide a kind of aura or theme for 
surrounding items. So that, if the book page could imitate visual 
perspective as in Renaissance painting, setting facts and concepts in 
proportions that reproduced the optical image of the three-dimensional 
object-world, the uninhibited world of the press and modern advertising 
abandoned such realistic properties in favor of weighting news and 
commercial objects by every dynamic and structural device of size and 
colour bringing words and pictures back into a plastic and meaningful 
connection. If the book page tends to perspective, the news page tends to 
cubism and surrealism. So that every page of newspapers and magazines, 
like every section of our cities, is a jungle of multiple, simultaneous 
perspectives which make the world of hot-jazz and be-bop seem relatively 
sedate and classical. Our intellectual world, by virtue of the same 
proliferation of books (over 18,000 new titles in England alone last 
year) has achieved the same entanglement which is easier to assess 
through the complexity of our visual environment. It is not just a 
quantitative problem, of course. As Gyorgy Kepes states it in his 
Language of Vision:

The environment of man living today has a complexity which cannot be 
compared with any environment of any previous age. The skyscrapers, the 
street with its kaleidoscopic vibration of colours, the window-displays 
with their multiple mirroring images, the streetcars and motor cars, 
produce a dynamic simultaneity of visual impression which cannot be 
perceived in the terms of inherited visual habits. In this optical 
turmoil the fixed objects appear utterly insufficient as the measuring 
tape of the events. The artificial light, the flashing of electric bulbs, 
and the mobile game of the many new types of light-sources bombard man 
with kinetic colour sensations having a keyboard never before 
experienced. Man, the spectator, is himself more mobile than ever before. 
He rides in streetcars, motorcars and aeroplanes and his own motion gives 
to optical impacts a tempo far beyond the threshold of a clear 
object-perception. The machine man operates adds its own demand for a new 
way of seeing. The complicated interactions of its mechanical parts 
cannot be conceived in a static way; they must be perceived by 
understanding of their movements. The motion picture, television, and, in 
a great degree, the radio, require a new thinking, i.e., seeing, that 
takes into account qualities of change, interpenetration and simultaneity.

That situation can be snapshotted from many angles. But it always adds up 
to the need to discover means for translating the experience of one 
medium or one culture into another, of translating Confucius into Western 
terms and Kant into Eastern terms. Of seeing our old literary culture in 
the new plastic terms in order to enable it to become a constitutive part 
of the new culture created by the orchestral voices and gestures of new 
media. Of seeing that modern physics and painting and poetry speak a 
common language and of acquiring that language at once in order that our 
world may possess consciously the coherence that it really has in 
latency, and which for lack of our recognition has created not new 
orchestral harmonies but mere noise.

Perhaps the terrifying thing about the new media for most of us is their 
inevitable evocation of irrational response. The irrational has become 
the major dimension of experience in our world. And yet this is a mere 
by-product of the instantaneous character in communication. It can be 
brought under rational control. It is the perfection of the means which 
has so far defeated the end, and removed the time necessary for 
assimilation and reflection. We are now compelled to develop new 
techniques of perception and judgement, new ways of reading the languages 
of our environment with its multiplicity of cultures and disciplines. And 
these needs are not just desperate remedies but roads to unimagined 
cultural enrichment.

All the types of linear approach to situations past, present or future 
are useless. Already in the sciences there is recognition of the need for 
a unified field theory which would enable scientists to use one 
continuous set of terms by way of relating the various scientific 
universes. Thus the basic requirement of any system of communication is 
that it be circular, with, of course, the possibility of self-correction. 
That is why presumably the human dialogue is and must ever be the basic 
form of all civilization. For the dialogue compels each participant to 
see and recreate his own vision through another sensibility. And the 
radical imperfection in mechanical media is that they are not circular. 
So far they have become one-way affairs with audience research taking the 
place of the genuine human vision, heckling and response. There is not 
only the anonymity of press, movies and radio but the factor of scale. 
The individual cannot discuss a problem with a huge, mindless bureaucracy 
like a movie studio or a radio corporation. On the other hand a figure 
like Roosevelt could mobilize the networks for a war with the press. He 
could even make the microphone more effective by having the press against 
him, because the intimacy of the microphone preserved his human dimension 
while the national scale of the press attack could only appear as a tank 
corps converging on a telephone booth.

Thus the microphone invites chat, not oratory. It is a new art form which 
transforms all the existing relations between speakers and their 
audiences and speakers and their material of discourse.  The great 
rhetorical tradition, which begins with Halifax and runs through Pitt to 
Channing, sent up its expiring flash in Macaulay.3 The modern manner was 
less declamatory and more closely reasoned. And the new manner which 
Gladstone handled like a Tenth Muse was based on facts and figures. 
Statistics represents a branch of pictorial expression. If the rise of 
bureaucracy and finance changed the style of public and private speech, 
how much more radical a change is daily worked in our habits of thought 
and discourse by the microphone and the loudspeaker.

Perhaps we could sum up our problem by saying that technological man must 
betake himself to visual metaphor in contriving a new unified language 
for the multiverse of cultures of the entire globe. All language or 
expression is metaphorical because metaphor is the seeing of one 
situation through another one. Right on the beam. Ill take a rain check 
on that.

One's vernacular is best seen and felt through another tongue. And for 
us, at least, society is only appreciated by comparing and contrasting it 
with others. Pictorial and other experience today is filled with 
metaphors from all the cultures of the globe. Whereas the written 
vernaculars have always locked men up within their own cultural monad, 
the language of technological man, while drawing on all the cultures of 
the world, will necessarily prefer those media which are least national. 
The language of visual form is, therefore, one which lies to hand as an 
unused Esperanto at everybodys command. The language of vision has 
already been adopted in the pictograms of scientific formula and 
logistics. These ideograms transcend national barriers as easily as 
Chaplin or Disney and would seem to have no rivals as the cultural base 
for cosmic man.

(Explorations,no.1 pp.117-27 Dec.53)