We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.
—PAUL VALÉRY
TOO often responses to eultural innovations are similar to William Wordsworth’s reaction to The Illustrated London News. Upon seeing one of the first issues of the new journal in 1846, Wordsworth was appalled by what he took to be its wholesale substitution of pictures for words. On the verge of the age of mass literacy, here seemed to be an obvious symptom of cultural decline. He saw in its pages not just a barbarization of culture but a return to caveman days, at least if we are to take literally his sonnet “Illustrated Books and Newspapers,” which is a kind of McLuhanesque elegy upon the disappearance of “discourse,” the “written word,” and “printing.” The sestet reads:
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood—back to childhood; for the age—
Back towards caverned life’s first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage.1
Perhaps Wordsworth sensed the treacherous superficiality of the visual. But rather than interpreting The Illustrated London News as a symptom of cultural decay it seems better to regard it as a symptom of the spread of literacy and information to the newly formed bourgeois public and urban-industrial masses. Wordsworth overlooked the fact that the new journal was full of words as well as pictures. Like Socrates’ fears of writing, his sonnet may stand as an example of negative classicism at its most irrational, condemning as regressive or decadent any innovation whose cultural potential it fails to appreciate.
At the same time, negative classicism as it has developed from the nineteenth century forward has consistently pointed to weaknesses in the emergent mass culture and to contradictions in industrialized society which are far from imaginary. The Roman circuses may be a good analogy for television, for example, for a number of reasons: they both substitute immediate, visual experience for anything deeper or less immediate; they both impinge from above or outside on mass audiences of nonparticipatory spectators; they both seem to substitute false experiences of community or “destructive Gemeinschaft” for something more genuine; and the “sex and violence” content of commercial television appeals, like the Roman games, to sadomasochistic instincts.
In dwelling upon these and other similarities between “bread and circuses” and modern mass culture, however, negative classicism often ignores the considerable differences between them. The similarities are taken to mean that we are locked in a cyclic pattern of decline and fall: after the circuses come the barbarians and a new Dark Age. To some hard-to-define extent, the structure of a mass medium like television clearly does shape history, but to suggest that it is the main or even the only shaper is to succumb to historical fatalism. To believe that the present institutional arrangements of the media are so monolithic and entrenched as to be inaccessible to change is likewise fatalistic. Avoiding these theoretical impasses, Raymond Williams has insisted upon the idea—or ideal—of a common culture as something to be achieved, rather than as something that either just happens or fails to happen as a by-product of technologies and modes of production. In Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Williams argues that all communications media—all machinery, in fact—are the results of conscious intention. Rather than the deterministic formulation: “technology alters our world,” Williams insists on another, radical formulation: “we alter our world through technology.”2 Like all technological determinisms, the first formulation reifies technology, even though technology is obviously man-made. The second formulation may exaggerate the chances for change (although Williams recognizes the great complexity and intractability of many social patterns), but it also seeks to reverse reification, to return the tools to their makers.
Such an approach leads Williams to a condemnation of McLuhanism as an ideology “welcomed by the ‘media-men’ of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance” (128). In McLuhan’s work, Williams adds, “as in the whole formalist tradition, the media were never really seen as practices” but merely as “psychic adjustments.” The result is that, for McLuhan, “intention . . . is irrelevant, and with intention goes content.” This means in turn that “all media operations are in effect desocialized,” even though, Williams notes, “it is then interesting that from this wholly unhistorical and asocial base McLuhan projects certain images of society: ‘retribalisation’ by the ‘electronic age’; the ‘global village’. [But] as descriptions of any observable social state or tendency, in the period in which electronic media have been dominant, these are . . . ludicrous” (127–28).
Williams avoids any version of negative classicism that equates television with inevitable decadence and barbarization. By his logic, any theory or any cultural medium that does not work to expand democratic choice might well be considered decadent. But the techniques of mass communications themselves are “at worst neutral. ” They are more “impersonal” than earlier techniques, but they also add to the precious human stock of cultural forms and alternatives, the machinery of our potential collective intelligence and esthetic fulfillment. Difficulties arise when these techniques are put to exploitative uses—as Williams says, when the idea of “masses” is added to the idea of “communications. ” In this manner, the whole theory of mass communications comes to depend “on a minority in some way exploiting a majority.”3 And as Williams’s Modern Tragedy makes plain, he sees no incompatibility between the machinery of television and cultural excellence or tragic vision. Television offers a range of alternative uses which, under capitalism, have narrowed to commercial exploitation. Under totalitarian socialism, they have narrowed to political exploitation. But television technology still offers the prospect of a “new universal accessibility.”
“The medium is the message,” however, to the extent that mass culture has inherent, structural tendencies that render it simultaneously liberating and totalitarian. Williams believes that it is totalitarian to the extent that it imposes a uniform product on its consumers, without real variation or choice, or to the extent that it is monologic instead of dialogic. But Williams downplays such structural features as its dependence on visual, immediate, and easily consumable images that contribute to its totalitarian monologic institutional structure. At the same time, the creation of a mass audience, increasingly on a global scale, who are both literate and knowledgeable about society at least to the extent that mass mediated news allows them to be, is an unprecedented historical achievement. “Bread and circuses” may be an apt metaphor for the sports and entertainment shows on commercial television; it does not fit the news, news documentaries, or much of what is now broadcast on educational stations around the world.
The problem to which Williams points is one partly of reducing the totalitarian and maximizing the liberating tendencies in all the mass media. The primary solution lies in the democratic control of the media. In both capitalist and communist countries, Williams believes, such democratic control would entail a radical restructuring of the institutions of mass culture. In the United States and Western Europe, it would entail the breakdown of corporate monopoly ownership and the socialization of the media at local, community, and national levels—at the very least, I would add, the treatment of the media as public utilities, with missions similar to publicly funded schools and universities. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I believe that it would entail abolishing centralized bureaucratic control and turning the machinery of mass culture over to democratic collectives like Solidarity in Poland. Because such restructurings are not now occurring and do not seem likely to occur in the near future, I also believe that some version of negative classicism is justified, although it can not be one that locates the cause of social breakdown in mass culture itself.
By itself, however, negative classicism is unlikely to offer directions for effecting the institutional changes just suggested. In neither capitalist nor communist countries, moreover, is there now a clear-cut historical agent—such as the proletariat, the public, or the intelligentsia—from whom such directions for change are emanating. But there remains the utopian promise of liberation inherent in the mass media themselves. This is the most positive, unpredictable feature in a social landscape that looks increasingly dismal and that in great measure merits the doomsaying of negative classicism. The bread and circuses analogy seems to be largely accurate insofar as it detects widespread social, cultural, and environmental decay behind the facades of technological progress; it seems to be most inaccurate when it finds in mass culture or the mass media a primary cause—in some versions, the primary cause—of that decay.
What, then, can be done—technologically, politically, educationally—to bring the liberating features of the mass media to the fore and to blunt or eliminate their totalitarian tendencies? Technological innovations that make for fuller, more varied, more democratic communications—two-way electronic hookups, satellite broadcasting, videodiscs, “communications webs,” and so on—should be encouraged. Political reform movements that attempt to break down the monopolistic or totalitarian control of the institutions of mass culture should be encouraged. And educational attempts to improve or upgrade the intellectual quality of mass culture should be encouraged. The maximization of the liberating potential of the mass media may be a long way off; but they are the only machinery through which a genuine, global, “common culture” can be achieved. Technology cannot be the cure for the ailments caused by technology; the situation that led Thoreau to proclaim that “men have become the tools of their tools” must be reversed before the promise of liberation inherent in the mass media can be realized. But it is only through the opening doors of communications systems that “the masses” enter the field of history as something more than exploitable objects—as the possible agents of social change and the potential masters of their situation. If, as Marx held, the factories first called the masses into being, then the mass media first created the possibility of their solidarity, enlightenment, and ultimate freedom.
What shapes would a liberated, global, common culture take? Besides Williams and McLuhan, a number of social theorists have speculated about such a culture. As a variety of technological optimism, McLuhan’s “electronic theodicy” can be traced back to the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, just as I have sought to trace negative classicism back to the same period. According to James Carey and John Quirk, McLuhanism is only one version of “an increasingly prevalent and popular brand of the futurist ethos that identifies electricity and electrical power, electronics and cybernetics, with a new birth of community, decentralization, ecological balance and social harmony. This set of notions is most readily associated with . . . McLuhan, but his status as a celebrity merely obscures his position in a school of thought that has been articulated . . . over many decades and that has many spokesmen in our time.”4
What Carey and Quirk call “the mythos of the electronic revolution” was expressed in the early 1970s by several writers who prophesied the emergence of a “knowledge society,” based on the mass media, computerization, and an expansion of the service sector of the economy. According to Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), large-scale heavy industry and its economy are evolving into a society in which the “service” and “knowledge” industries will be dominant. Automatization and computerization will transform much blue-collar work, freeing people for other sorts of culturally more advanced and rewarding jobs, and for greatly increased periods of leisure. Instead of a new Dark Age, Bell thinks, we are headed toward an age of potential enrichment for all. Bell’s influential “venture in social forecasting” expresses several reservations about the present social order, including the mass media, but his 1973 vision of the future is not shadowed by the threats of decadence and barbarism. The trouble with the media, Bell believes, is not that they are manufacturing one sort of darkness or another, but rather that they are eroding privacy and adding up to a “communications overload, ” a glut of knowledge.5 Both effects are distressing, but both have their positive sides as well. If “psychic distance” or privacy is being eclipsed, so is “social distance, ” including the breakdown of prejudice, racial and class divisions, and national and international conflicts. Although the “communications overload” produces bewilderment and anomie, another name for it might be cultural diversity.
Whatever else may be said about the twentieth century, it has produced the greatest bombardment of aural and visual materials that man has ever experienced in his history. To the linotype, camera, typewriter, telephone, and telegraph, the twentieth century has added radio (and radio telephone), teletype, television, microwaves, communication satellites, computers, xerography, and the like. Transistors and miniaturization not only facilitate an incredible packaging of communication senders, receivers, and recorders in the confines of a space ship, they also allow automobile telephony, walkie-talkies, portable radio and television sets, and finally, on the agenda, person-to-person communication by “wrist-watch” radio anywhere in the country (and soon the world?). [316]
Such a description suggests at least one fallacy in much writing about contemporary mass culture: although mass culture is monologic or one-way communication, the machinery of the mass media themselves is characterized by an increasing diversification. For Bell, the problem is not the narrowing of consciousness through massification and manipulation, but a kind of stupefaction by surfeit. He expresses other more familiar reservations about the effects of the mass media when he writes: “One may applaud the fact that the nature of the mass media increases the likelihood of a spectacular rise in ‘participatory democracy,' but . . . instances [of democratic involvement] are also more likely to arise out of emotional issues . . . so that the loss of insulating space may itself permit the setting off of chain reactions which may be disruptive of civil politics and reasoned debate” (316). Thus Bell suggests that the masses, or those responding to the mass media, are likely to be irrational and possibly dangerous, just as Ortega, Freud, and Le Bon said they were.
Overall, however, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society offers a moderately optimistic account of how present economic, technological, and political trends are likely to be extended in the near future. Bell sees the future in terms of more of the same, only multiplied and improved. If “post-industrial society” will not be utopia, neither will it involve the collapse of civilization. But in his next book, published three years later, Bell’s thinking turns in the direction of negative classicism. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) describes problems and crises—“the disjunction of realms“—that may prevent the evolution of a beneficent post-industrial order, leading instead to the emergence of new forms of repression and social disintegration. In his earlier book, Bell worries about how “contemporary culture, with the victory of modernism, has become anti-institutional and antinomian” (478). The values of the decadent and Bohemian artists of the nineteenth century, inimical to industrialism and the bourgeoisie, were then marginal. But the radical counterculture of the 1960s, Bell believes, shows that these same values have become dominant, so that there is a sharp “contradiction” between contemporary culture and the economic and political order. In particular, “the lack of a rooted moral belief system is the cultural contradiction of the society, the deepest challenge to its survival” (480).
In the earlier work, this problem sounds like a minor note in the context of the array of data and authorities Bell cites to flesh out the image of “post-industrial society.” In the later book, the threat to society posed by “modern culture” is at the center of Bell’s vision, which becomes correspondingly eschatological. Whereas in the earlier study “communications overload,” though problematic, could be construed as the side effect of a healthy diversification, in the later one it is symptomatic of social breakdown. Contemporary culture is in “a shambles” both because of the mass media and because of what Bell calls “modernism,” which he suggests is “demonic” and defines as “the disruption of mimesis.”6 There is “a lack of a center” in cultural affairs, and in the other “realms”—the economy and “polity”—as well. In the arts, confusion reigns partly because of a breakdown of the boundaries between high and mass culture. “High art itself is in disarray, if not ‘decadent’ (though that term has never been adequately defined); the ‘public’ is now so culturally voracious that the avant-garde, far from needing defenders among the critics, is in the public domain” (136). If high art degrades itself by entering the public domain, mass culture is already degraded, well down the road toward social disintegration. Bell offers a pessimistic version of McLuhanism, according to which contemporary culture is picture-rather than print-based:
The visual media—I mean here film and television—impose their pace on the viewer and, in emphasizing images rather than words, invite not conceptualization but dramatization. In the emphasis television news places on disasters and human tragedies, it invites not purgation or understanding but sentimentality and pity, emotions that are quickly exhausted, and a pseudo-ritual of a pseudo-participation in the events. And, as the mode is inevitably one of overdramatization, the responses soon become either stilted or bored. [108]
Bell finds McLuhan’s thesis of the unification of the world through the mass media “to be without much meaning, except on a trivial level.” He adds: “If anything, the spread of wider communication nets tends to bring about the disintegration of larger societies into fragmentary ethnic and primordial units,” and by “primordial” he seems to mean something like regressive (108).
According to Bell, both “modernism,” in the sense of avant-garde or high art, and mass culture are expressing themselves in increasingly irrational and dangerous ways. The result is a conflict between the disruptive “hedonistic” culture and the rational, technological-economic sphere, with the democratic polity as a third sphere whose dissolution the conflict threatens. Almost all the disruption comes from the culture, from modernism and the mass media together; Bell does not squarely confront the question of the possible irrationality of the supposedly rational technological order. The economic sphere “emphasizes functional rationality, technocratic decision making, and meritocratic rewards”; the culture emphasizes “apocalyptic moods and anti-rational modes of behavior,” no doubt including much negative classicism. Bell identifies this disjunction with nothing less than “the historic cultural crisis of all Western bourgeois society. This cultural contradition is . . . the most fateful division in the society” (84).
In contrast to his earlier post-industrial prophecy, the crisis Bell now predicts is similar to others in the past which were resolved only “over long historical time-frames.” “It took almost 300 years for Christianity to become established in the Roman Empire, and as Gibbon remarked of the conversion of Constantine, Rome then passed into an intolerable phase of its history, a phase that lasted for 250 years” (175). Bell hopes that the liberal reforms of “the public household” which he recommends will forestall the decline and fall of the modern world, but part of the cure he prescribes again smacks of negative classicism. In the cultural realm, “there has been a double process of decay. On the institutional level there has been secularization, or the shrinking of the institutional authority and role of religion as a mode of community. On the cultural level there has been profanation, the attenuation of a theodicy as providing a set of meanings to explain man’s relation to the beyond” (167). Bell seeks to reverse these decadent trends by a “great instauration,” or revival of the sacred. He sees religious irrationality sprouting up everywhere, but these manifestations of the sacred he identifies with “cults, ” and hence with another aspect of the destructive chaos of modern culture. “Where religions fail, cults appear. This situation is the reverse of early Christian history, when the new coherent religion competed with the multiple cults and drove them out because it had the superior strength of a theology and an organization. But when theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults” (168). What Bell is looking for is some analogue to the rise of Christianity—the “religious answer” to “the shambles of modern culture” (168).
From the cautious optimism of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell has shifted toward negative classicism, but apparently only with reluctance. Other “post-industrial” theorists have been less hesitant about aligning their theories with the mythology of decline and fall. McLuhan shows how the terms of a post-industrial eschatology can be rendered optimistically. Behind its doomsaying, negative classicism often looks forward to a barbarian renaissance or a new age of faith. In a chapter entitled “Meditation on the Dark Age, Past and Present,” William Irwin Thompson, who agrees with many of McLuhan’s ideas, argues enthusiastically that “industrial society is strangling in its own contradictions” and that “we are no longer living in civilization.”7 In common with Daniel Bell, Roberto Vacca, L. S. Stavrianos, Nicholas Berdyaev, William Morris, and many other writers back at least to Thomas Carlyle, Thompson has rediscovered “the promise of the coming Dark Age.”8
For many artists and intellectuals, the nightmare is represented not by Rome’s fall, but by its continued domination. Negative classicism becomes a hopeful, even utopian mythology to the extent that the downfall of capitalist or mass or technological society is longed for. On the one hand, a popular writer like Alvin Toffler offers an eschatological version of technological optimism that is mainly hopeful, and that therefore bears few traces of negative classicism. In “the book that makes sense of the exploding eighties,” The Third Wave, Toffler echoes many of McLuhan’s apocalyptic ideas, including his tidal imagery; his account of present and future social transformation shows that “the human story, far from ending, has only just begun.”9 On the other hand, another popular writer like Theodore Roszak, expressing more doubts about the future than Toffler, is more drawn to negative classicism. But Roszak also sees a utopian promise in the downfall of the present industrial world order, even though that promise is hard to discern behind such apocalyptic rhetoric as this:
For those of us who feel the inherited mass and class identities of our age crumbling away, it is indeed as if a desert gathered about us. We ask who we are, what we are, where we are to turn . . . and there is no one who can answer for us. We must make our own path. We must, and we do. In an era that has sent astronauts to scale the mountains of the moon, it is tempting to entertain Promethean images of ourselves, to see ourselves as space pioneers and star voyagers. But . . . another image . . . may be better suited to our condition—something humbler, more somber, yet no less heroic: that of the first desert fathers making their way beyond the walls of a failing empire, searching for their salvation in the trackless waste.10
Roszak believes that salvation can be found in the acknowledgment of “the rights of the person” and “the rights of the planet, ” but these will entail a complete restructuring of industrial society.
Those post-industrial theorists like Roszak who advocate decentralization, a return to grass-roots democracy, and the scaling down of technology envisage a culture based on leisure, community, and equality, in harmony with the natural environment. They also conceive of that culture as universal, shared on a worldwide basis, outgrowing the violent nationalisms of the last two centuries, but without liquidating ethnic and communal diversity. Those who propound this vision—Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, for instance—might be described as utopian negative classicists. According to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics,” based on the prospect of an “intermediate” “technology with a human face,” mass production “is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person. ”11 Buddhist economics instead holds forth the prospect of a decentralized, democratic, ecologically safe technology of “production by the masses” (154). In comparable terms, Illich calls for the building of a “deschooled,” decentralized society of “convivial tools.” By “conviviality,” Illich means “the opposite of industrial productivity,” entailing “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.”12 For Illich, dialogue is the measure of the presence or absence of genuine communication: mass culture by definition is a category of tools and artifacts that shut off dialogue, that are essentially monologic, that create “masses” of technicized, passive consumers divorced from authority over the means of production. The machines that we now have must be converted to convivial uses or thrown onto the junkpile of unplanned obsolescence. “Not even television must be ruled out” from the category of potentially convivial tools, however, though Illich is hesitant about making any positive claims for its dialogical possibilities—it has proved too easy for television to work for “the degradation of everyone into a compulsory voyeur” (26).
Illich finds it impossible, however, to abandon the mass media in his scheme of conviviality. In Deschooling Society, he argues that “the choice is between two radically opposed institutional types,” one of which he calls “manipulative” and the other, “convivial.”13 As society is presently constituted, manipulative institutions—those which make up bureaucratic, rationalized, “mass society”—dominate, though there are also examples of convivial institutions. Schools are Illich’s primary example of manipulation. To the world programmed for everincreasing industrial productivity and consumption through one-way, massifying, “scholastic funnels,” Illich contrasts “a world made transparent by true communication webs” (150). Such a phrase is reminiscent of McLuhan’s electronic theodicy, but Illich does not share McLuhan’s sanguine media determinism. Only through radical political consciousness and practice can convivial institutions come to outnumber manipulative ones. Like McLuhan’s, however, Illich’s vision presupposes a high level of technological finesse; the idea of a world made democratic and communitarian by “reticular structures for mutual access” (110) or “learning webs” is obviously dependent upon electronics, which are in turn obviously dependent upon mass production and heavy industry.
The same difficulty is evident in E. F. Schumacher, who in Good Work speaks approvingly of “the explosive growth of electronic media and computers that have put the world inside everyone’s living room” at the same time that he finds “the worst features of capitalist irresponsibility” in “the field of the communication media—in sections of the press, the entertainment industries, book publishing, and so forth.” The optimistic side of these statements again sounds like McLuhan, though there is no equivalent in Understanding Media, given the assumption that “the medium is the message,” for Schumacher’s belief that “the worst exploitation practiced today is ‘cultural exploitation,’ namely, the exploitation by unscrupulous moneymakers of the deep longing for culture on the part of the less privileged and undereducated groups in our society.”14 Clearly, neither Illich nor Schumacher is quarreling with machinery so much as with the uses to which machinery is put. They both share McLuhan’s sense of the utopian promise of the mass media, though without McLuhan’s belief that the media by themselves constitute a historical force making for utopia. Their questions are close in kind to McLuhan’s, however, especially insofar as they point to relatively optimistic versions of “the end of our time.”
Something like a post-industrial utopian vision also emerges from the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt Institute, particularly in the work of Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. Fromm should perhaps be viewed as a popularizer, not as an immediate peer of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. In any case, in The Sane Society (1955), Fromm presents a blueprint for a “healthy” polity, based on meaningful work, participatory culture, and “communitarian socialism.” The degradation of present mass culture, Fromm believes, is a far cry from the “collective art” that he envisages as ideal. Where are we, he asks, in comparison with this ideal? “Religious rituals have little importance any more . . . [and] secular rituals hardly exist.” There is little in contemporary culture that answers to “the needs of the total personality.” Fromm believes that “the movies, the crime reports, the liquor, the fun” are no adequate substitutes for “meaningful, shared artistic activities.”
What help is it to have almost no illiteracy, and the most widespread higher education which has existed at any time—if we have no collective expression of our total personalities, no common art and ritual? Undoubtedly a relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all—is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading, radio-listening culture.15
The change to “humanistic communitarianism” (361), Fromm says, must not occur violently, but through a cultural transformation brought about by education. According to his scheme, the “automatization of work” and other technological capabilities, including the mass media, are not to be cast aside, but will have their “communitarian” uses.
From a more abstract theoretical perspective, Marcuse is less willing than Fromm to try to specify the shapes of the future liberated society which, in Eros and Civilization, he contends is possible through the abolition of “surplus repression.” Reversing Freud, who believed that society was inevitably based on repression of the instincts, Marcuse speculates about the achievement of a “non-repres-sive civilization.” Such a utopian condition, he acknowledges, would entail “regression,” an “instinctual liberation” that, in terms of existing institutions, would be a “relapse into barbarism.”16
However, occurring at the height of civilization, as a consequence not of defeat but of victory in the struggle for existence, and supported by a free society, such liberation might have very different results. It would still be a reversal of the process of civilization, a subversion of culture—but after culture had done its work and created the mankind and the world that could be free. It would still be “regression”—but in the light of mature consciousness and guided by a new rationality. Under these conditions, the possibility of a non-repressive civilization is predicated not upon the arrest, but upon the liberation, of progress. [181]
A non-repressive order is to be achieved by the fulfillment rather than by the defeat of progress—in other words, by the realization of the utopian promise inherent in technology, including the mass media. This fulfillment is summed up in Marcuse’s conception of the “aesthetic dimension,” which in its social development will involve “the transformation of toil (labor) into play, and of repressive productivity into ‘display’—a transformation that must be preceded by the conquest of want (scarcity) as the determining factor of civilization’ (176).
Both Marcuse’s “non-repressive civilization” and Fromm’s “sane society” are utopias based on the concepts of abundance and of shared art or culture. On at least these grounds, they are similar to the postindustrial visions of Schumacher, Illich, and a number of other theorists who look forward, in Illich’s words, to “the advent of an Age of Leisure (scholē) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.”17 Ironic as it may seem in the context of negative classicism, the concept of leisure on a mass or global basis dominates contemporary social theory as a longed-for-goal, one rendered at least distantly possible by present levels of scientific and technological achievement. But the idea of leisure itself, as the Greek term scholē suggests, is rooted in classicist definitions of culture and “the good life.” In the most radical, utopian versions of post-industrial theory, the past once again serves as a model for the future.
According to Sebastian de Grazia in Of Time, Work, and Leisure (1962), “leisure” does not mean “free time” or “time off from work.” The “ideal of leisure” is in fact the opposite of “an ideal of free time,” which Grazia believes has “taken the field” in industrialized America. “There is no doubt that Americans have reached a new level of life. Whether it is a good life is another matter. This much is clear: it is a life without leisure. . . . Leisure is a state of being free of everyday necessity, and the activities of leisure are those one would engage in for their own sake. As fact or ideal it is rarely approached in the industrial world.”18 For Grazia, the place where the ideal of leisure was first and most fully realized was Periclean Athens. In contrast, modern America, with its pseudo-leisure of mass-mediated entertainments and distractions, is parallel to Rome: “Easy Street might be something like ancient Rome at the time of the rise of the plebs urbana. The workers were a dedicated and skilled few—administrators, lawyers, artisans, merchants, inventors, and military officers. The plebs were those who had free time and the vote to insure their bread and circuses. The circuses, like TV, went on at all times of the day. We are the Romans of the modern world (330).”
As Grazia recognizes, the Greek ideal of leisure or scholē, of a life of contemplation and cultural enrichment, is rooted in the sacred, free from the trammels of secular, economic motivation. Similarly, according to the Catholic theologian Joseph Pieper, “Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship.”19 Besides linking it to the sacred, Pieper like Grazia connects leisure to “the Christian and Western conception of the contemplative life,” which is “the source of the distinction between the artes liberales and the artes serviles, the liberal arts and servile work.” Modern secularization has eroded the sacred basis of leisure and consequently of genuine culture, while democratization has eroded the distinction between “liberal arts” and “servile work.” Leisure and culture alike have been swallowed up by the category of work, Pieper thinks, which in turn loses its significance as a means to transcendent ends. “There is in fact no room in the world of ‘total labour’ either for divine worship, or for a [sacred] feast. . . . There can of course be games, circenses, circuses—but who would think of describing that kind of mass entertainment as festal?” (47).
The preservation of genuine culture as a realm of values superior to bread and circuses thus appears to be identical to the search for transcendence, which can be carried out in one of two ways: either through a restoration of religious belief (Pieper, Eliot, Kierkegaard) or through a completely individualistic “transcendence” of “the world” (Nietzsche, Jaspers, Kierkegaard again). From either perspective, as we have seen, it is impossible to conceive of culture on a mass, secular basis. The ideal of a common culture or a leisure society which is shared by everyone vanishes behind religious reaction or various brands of elitist politics. (Pieper’s religious affiliation is clear; Grazia divides people into “two classes,” a minority capable of true leisure and a majority whom he imagines as forever mired in killing time at the circuses.) But Raymond Williams, Ivan Illich, and Herbert Marcuse in their very different ways suggest another possibility, the construction of a shared culture of the highest humanistic and creative value on a mass, even global scale.
If such a utopian goal is accepted as possible, we can no longer view the mass media as inevitably making for decadence or barbarism. Indeed, Williams, Illich, and Marcuse show that it is difficult to imagine how a common culture on a global scale can be established without the mass media. At the same time, however, all three wish to transform the institutions that control the media, for they believe that such a culture will not develop through the media as they are now constituted in either capitalist or communist societies. We cannot have Athens again without some form of electronic communications and without a world in which all men and women are citizens rather than slaves, barbarians, or masses. As the main instruments by which the masses—that is, all of us—communicate, the mass media today carry the theoretical burden for the failure of society to become the new Athens. They now produce ideology instead of enlightenment, circuses instead of communal festivities, distraction instead of contemplation, narcissism instead of wisdom. The media thus play the roles of both leading villain and hero in theories of both impending doom and utopian fruition. While they narcotize, delude, and distract, they also radiate a utopian promise—one which they may never fulfill—of potential leisure and prosperity for all. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger puts it, even “consumption as spectacle is—in parody form—the anticipation of a utopian situation.”20
Although McLuhan has no solid basis for his belief that the mass media will automatically lead us to the “noösphere,” negative classicism tends to underestimate the extent to which a kind of utopian anticipation pervades contemporary mass culture. The diffusion of negative classicism through the mass media themselves, as in those science fiction stories and films that foreshadow the advent of a new Dark Age, may seem more dystopian than utopian. Apocalyptic suggestions of “the last days” in television and Hollywood disaster films may be no more than the latest fad in entertainment; then again, such films may exercise an important, albeit subliminal, influence that will help to prevent the cultural, social, and ecological catastrophes they depict. In The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (1970), Philip Slater observes: “Popular songs and film comedies for fifty years have been engaged in a sentimental rejection of our dominant mores, maintaining that the best things in life are free, that love is more important than success, that keeping up with the Joneses is futile, that personal integrity should take precedence over winning, and so on. But these protestations must be understood for what they are: a safety valve.”21 Negative classicism today, however, as represented by Slater’s bestselling essay itself, involves a far more thorough and serious “rejection of our dominant mores,” and it is not yet possible to tell where its dissemination will lead. Perhaps like the educated nihilism to which Karl Löwith attributes World War I, it will only add to the mounting ruins it decries. Perhaps it is the contemporary equivalent of the “failure of nerve” that is often cited as a cause of the downfall of previous civilizations. Perhaps also, however, the citizens of Treves, though reveling in the coliseum, are at last beginning to hear the barbarians hammering at the gates.
But who are the barbarians? The most obvious and frequent answer today is: all those millions of poor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America whom the “progress” of industrialism either has not touched or has ruthlessly exploited. They are the hordes outside the walls of technological civilization, slowly besieging it. One day they will break down the gates and put an end to the circuses, along with much else. But there are also internal barbarians—the masses within industrial society. Insofar as technological “progress” has failed to transform alienated masses into enlightened publics, it has failed to be progress. Insofar as it has failed to bring prosperity, justice, and freedom to the Third World, it has also failed to be progress.22 Of course by this reasoning the new Vandals and Huns include everyone, humanity at large. Perhaps there is a hopeful note in the universality of our predicament, similar to Walter J. Ong’s observation that “barbarians turn out rather regularly to be the custodians—often the only custodians—of the culture on which they prey.”23
Partly because they are historically unprecedented and partly because of their immense power the mass media generate the feeling that they must be leading us toward either a utopian global village or a new Dark Age. The promise of the media seems incongruous beside the mythology of negative classicism that they also increasingly project. Acocalyptic hope and despair, utopia and dystopia, seem to be built into their circuitry, like a set of transistors tuning in prophecy. But our historical situation itself is torn by contradictions, on the razor’s edge between the potential “humanization” of man and “planetization” of the earth on the one hand and the complete destruction of life or at least of civilization by war and totalitarianism on the other. It is no wonder that every book of social criticism written today, if it is at all interesting, reads like a new Book of the Apocalypse. It is also no wonder that so much comes to depend on how the mass media are used in the near future: as many versions of negative classicism declare, humanity must educate itself quickly, or perish.
Some versions of negative classicism encourage the view that the downfall of modern civilization is something to be looked forward to, something even to work toward. Too often they do not ask how to prevent decadence and barbarism from running their course. Problems of democratic reform and rational social planning are submerged by apocalyptic political theories or by an equally apocalyptic religious reaction. In the same manner, versions of negative classicism that treat decline and fall as inevitable, part of the cycles of historical destiny, encourage stoic resignation in confronting a future that looks unavoidably bleak and ruinous. Though for many recent theorists like Theodore Roszak and William Irwin Thompson, negative classicism holds out a utopian prospect, it is far from offering the transcendent, positive kind of faith envisaged by Daniel Bell and the other prophets of a new age of religion. We are, it seems, going through a period of defeat and stoic resignation before the dawn of the new faith. Thompson argues that “cultural transformations do not proceed in easy transitions; they move in quantum leaps, and only a conversion experience or a revelation can give one the energy to leap across the abyss that separates one world view from another. A Roman Senator cannot become a Frankish Christian without first dying and being reborn.”24 We only have faith that we are declining and falling; we do not yet have faith in our ability to build a new civilization or to revitalize the old one. Only if it can instill in people something more than apocalyptic dread—only if it can create on a mass basis the desire, wisdom, and courage to alter the world for the better—will negative classicism succeed in doing more than contributing to the decadence and barbarism that it seems to deplore.
We, the newest barbarians, in the midst of this declining civilization, must learn to preserve what we are ravaging. To do so, we must also learn to change it and ourselves in ways that are radical, even utopian, and that, to many, will at first look decadent, or barbaric, or both. The mass media must help to teach us that these changes can and should be made.
1. William Wordsworth, “Illustrated Books and Newspapers,” Complete Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 383.
2. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1975 [1974]), p. 128.
3. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966 [1958]), pp. 301, 314.
4. James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” Part 1, The American Scholar, 39 (Spring 1970), p. 220.
5. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic, 1976 [1973]), p. 316.
6. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1976), pp. 169, 19, and 110.
7. William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 13 and 10.
8. L. S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976); Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubledav, 1973 [1971]); Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933).
9. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980), p. 1.
10. Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1978), p. 286.
11. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1975 [1973]), p. 154.
12. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1973), p. 11. See also Illich’s Toward a History of Needs (New York: Bantam, 1980).
13. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 76.
14. E. F. Schumacher, Good Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 158, 30.
15. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976 [1955]), p. 348.
16. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1962 [1955]), p. 181.
17. Illich, Deschooling Society, p. vi.
18. Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964 [1962]), p. 312.
19. Joseph Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1964 [1952]), p. 5.
20. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media (New York: Seabury, 1974), p. 112.
21. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon 1976 [1970]), p. 10.
22. For an analysis of who the next barbarians may be, see Anthony Hartley, “The Barbarian Connection: On the ‘Destructive Element’ in Civilised History,” Encounter, May 1980, pp. 20–27.
23. Walter J. Ong, The Barbarian Within (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 275.
24. Thompson, Evil and World Order, pp. 54–55.