Electric Literacy Playground
by mark wallace . (hm) headmine.net . 2008
comments, questions: s h o u t [at] headmine [dot] net
comments, questions: s h o u t [at] headmine [dot] net
In A Theory of Greek Tragedy, de Kerckhove shows that the ancient Greek theater was not just an art form or a source of recreation but also served as a sensory training ground for literacy. The theater "transformed the sensory life of the Athenian community"; It gave the illiterates of Athens a "rehearsal area for many of the prototypes of experiences, attitudes, emotions and mental processes" that would eventually become the "basis for Western life". (de Kerckhove)
In the 20th century, youth culture gave birth to a new sensory training ground that helped us explore and adapt to the emerging electronic environment.
Two thousand years of literacy and all of its biases have created a thick filter through which we try to understand the oral tradition that preceded writing. Today we barely recognize our alphabet as technology. We find it difficult to divorce the sounds of speech from the letters we use to encode them. But our alphabet is no more a part of speech than the pixels on a screen are part of the objects we see in a digital photograph.
The written word captures only a fraction of speech and encodes it exclusively for the eye. The intimate relationships between the word and the entire body and all of our senses are completely lost in writing. And yet preliterate society depended on these relationships for its cultural survival. The epic poetry of preliterate Greece used the spoken word to create a living cultural encyclopedia that the entire population participated in. As Havelock shows in Preface to Plato, the memory of the community depended not just on the memory of the poet but on all members of society actively participating in the oral tradition. The poet used his entire body as an instrument that resonated with his words, his memories and the bodies and minds of the audience. Together the community created a collective reservoir of knowledge in motion — the scope and meaning of which far exceeded the capabilities of any one person.
"To think of such a culture as 'preliterate' is already to distort it. It is like thinking of a horse as an automobile without wheels." - Walter Ong
Plato went to battle with the poets because he recognized that the oral tradition had helped shape not only the way that people communicated but also the "Greek state of mind and consciousness." (Havelock, 1963: 142) "Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror." (McLuhan, 1967: 48) Literacy introduced an entirely new set of pressures on the Greek psyche and culture.Written language is a sphere unto itself, existing not only alongside spoken language but also alongside material reality. The abstract, immaterial, 'mental' character of written language has major consequences for the consciousness of the literate. Writing detaches knowledge from the knower. Written knowledge is something one can look at, criticize, deconstruct, reorder, or improve from a distance. [...] All knowledge turns out to belong to someone, to the one who knows, and thus to an individual, in place of the community of storytellers and listeners who were responsible for the preservation and transfer of knowledge in the oral culture phase. (Mulder, 2004: 108)de Kerckhove shows that the theater helped condition the mostly illiterate population of Greece to the pressures of literacy. Confined to their seats, eyes fixed on a stage where action took place at a distance, the theater audience was removed from the multi-sensory sphere of their oral culture. Theater allowed the illiterate to experience many of the sensory and cognitive effects of reading without being able to read or write.
While they were attending stage productions illiterates might be deemed to develop their attention span, their concentration, their critical faculties and their capacity for abstraction, their manipulation of language, and even train their visual skills from peripheral to centralized and directional vision. (de Kerckhove)The role that Greek theater played in conditioning the Greek psyche to the pressures of literacy reveals a remarkable human capacity to collectively cushion the blows of technological change. The origins of the theater show that we can develop sensory environments that help us adapt to major cultural upheavals.
Since we are, like the ancient Athenians, living through the beginning of a major technological revolution that is putting pressures on every aspect of our cultural fabric, de Kerckhove's study of the Greek theater should make us pause and ask ...
"What would a playground for electric literacy look like?" and "Have we already created such an environment?"
Print accelerated the visual bias of the written word towards its limits. It encouraged us to see the entire world in the image of the printed page: straight, uniform lines and right angles where everything happens one-thing-at-a-time. The printing press broke up the written word into uniform, repeatable pieces; the assembly line was born. Together moveable type and the mechanical clock helped give rise to a Newtonian vision of the world (McLuhan, 2005: 12) where causes and effects link together in tidy chains that can be studied in isolation from their environment. Under the intense visual pressures of the printed word we began to think that our new ratio of senses dominated by the eye was the only ratio-nal way of being. Seeing became believing. Logic became truth. The spoken word became hearsay.
Today, under the pressures of electric media, we are re-imagining and reshaping our world in the image of a circuit. The one-thing-at-a-time-ness of text is giving way to the 'allatonceness' of the loop. We are no longer the detached observer of a printed page but an active node in a network. Our electric media demand our participation just as a circuit demands involvement from every node. McLuhan revealed these shifts and recognized in them a return to the acoustic world of the oral culture:
We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us. [...] At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective. (McLuhan, 1967: 63)With the arrival of the internet and a global web of instantaneous information, many of the pressures of electricity that McLuhan revealed are becoming obvious. In a little over a decade, the web has evolved from a digital repository of static pages to a dynamic social platform in constant motion. Online, even the most passive consumer becomes an active producer. Our actions are monitored and analyzed by almost every site we visit and ultimately our own experience of the web - even if we are just surfing or reading - shapes the experience for everyone else. Our clicks through the jungles of Amazon create a library for our neighbours to explore.
"When people understand that this generation gap is really a technological gap, it will help them to get things in some sort of order again." (McLuhan, 1967: 63)
Like the Athenians at the dawn of literacy, we are once again primitives in our own culture. The keys to understanding the present and the future can no longer be found in the recent past. Our elders don't seem to have the answers or even the questions that are needed. Everything is once again unknown.
Prometheus Bound: "The figure of Aeschylus' Prometheus tied and bound to his rock is the very image of the spectator bound to his uncomfortable seat in the theater rows.Prometheus is the archetypal figure of Western man, repressed, long-winded, uptight, narcissistic and morbidly intellectual. He is the Woody Allen of Greek tragedy. He is the actor who does not move, let alone dance. The title of the play and the elaborate enactment of Prometheus' binding in the very first scene indicate that this immobilization of the central figure should be granted the utmost attention." (de Kerckhove)
He does not move, let alone dance.
What would a
sensory training ground
for electric literacy
feel like?
"In August 1956, a Florida judge called [Elvis] Presley a "savage" and threatened to arrest him if he shook his body while performing in Jacksonville. The judge declared that Presley's music was undermining the youth of America. Throughout the performance (which was filmed by police), he kept still as ordered, except for wiggling a finger in mockery at the ruling." (Wikipedia)
Elvis Presley shook his hips so hard that Prometheus' shackles broke off. It wasn't long until the audience tore the chairs out of the Theatron. Within a decade the Beatles were taking acid, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were traveling around America handing out electric kool-aid, and Andy Warhol was experimenting with the drug-fueled multimedia show Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Woodstock illuminated some of the radical transformations that were taking place by giving us 'the theater without walls'. A place to see had become a place to be.
The 20th century gave birth to a powerful youth culture. Youth here is not just about age or experience but also points to a vital force to explore and adapt to changing environments. It is a force that often fades as we grow older - but not always. As our electric media ushered in an era of constant change, youth became the only group in society, apart from artists, with the flexibility needed to explore rather than retreat from the psychic violence brought on by new technologies. Youth found shelter in electric music where older generations could only hear noise.
The 20th century gave birth to a powerful youth culture. Youth here is not just about age or experience but also points to a vital force to explore and adapt to changing environments. It is a force that often fades as we grow older - but not always. As our electric media ushered in an era of constant change, youth became the only group in society, apart from artists, with the flexibility needed to explore rather than retreat from the psychic violence brought on by new technologies. Youth found shelter in electric music where older generations could only hear noise.
"Wouldn't it be nice to get on with me neighbours?
But they make it very clear they've got no room for ravers..."
Lazy Sunday - The Small Faces 1968
But they make it very clear they've got no room for ravers..."
Lazy Sunday - The Small Faces 1968
The term rave became a popular way of labeling the subversive elements of youth culture once music was electrified: from the bohemian parties of the 50s, to the mods in the 60s, and on to the 80s and 90s, when rave became synonymous with the explosion of techno. In recent years the word rave has become fixed to that image of glow sticks, ecstasy and djs. But rave culture is really the culmination of more than fifty years of collective exploration at the frontiers of electric culture; it is best understood in the context of the entire evolution of youth culture from rock to reggae, punk to disco, folk to hip hop to trance. By the time acid house emerged in the 80s, there were decades of exploration to borrow and steal from.
Rave remixed half a century of exploration at the frontiers of electric culture with an electronic soundscape. The result was a playground stretching over the entire globe where ravers could explore many of the emerging patterns of perception and consciousness. Like the Greek theater, rave was more than just entertainment or social ritual, it also served as a sensory experiment during a time of intense social and technological change. Ravers enthusiastically embraced the modes of awareness at the cutting edge of electric culture.
The sensory education provided by rave has been a complete reversal of the lessons of ancient Greek theater. This should come as no surprise since our electric media are reversing many of the visual pressures that the theater promoted.
The theater encouraged illiterates "to define and fragment experience in sequences and reorganize its patterns in a unified visual space". (de Kerckhove) Rave encouraged us to embrace the opposite: an unstructured, multi-sensory experience that obliterated the distinctions between spectator and spectacle, consumer and producer, beginning, middle, and end.
And while the theater, as de Kerckhove points out, required a "neutral, abstract container" for delivering its spectacle, rave continuously searched for unknown venues where the uniqueness of each space (a warehouse, a beach, a film studio, a church) was not ignored or hidden but celebrated and allowed to inject meaning into the event.
Rave remixed half a century of exploration at the frontiers of electric culture with an electronic soundscape. The result was a playground stretching over the entire globe where ravers could explore many of the emerging patterns of perception and consciousness. Like the Greek theater, rave was more than just entertainment or social ritual, it also served as a sensory experiment during a time of intense social and technological change. Ravers enthusiastically embraced the modes of awareness at the cutting edge of electric culture.
The sensory education provided by rave has been a complete reversal of the lessons of ancient Greek theater. This should come as no surprise since our electric media are reversing many of the visual pressures that the theater promoted.
The theater encouraged illiterates "to define and fragment experience in sequences and reorganize its patterns in a unified visual space". (de Kerckhove) Rave encouraged us to embrace the opposite: an unstructured, multi-sensory experience that obliterated the distinctions between spectator and spectacle, consumer and producer, beginning, middle, and end.
And while the theater, as de Kerckhove points out, required a "neutral, abstract container" for delivering its spectacle, rave continuously searched for unknown venues where the uniqueness of each space (a warehouse, a beach, a film studio, a church) was not ignored or hidden but celebrated and allowed to inject meaning into the event.
"Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in." —Aldous Huxley, Island
Rave replaced the rock star with a constellation. The spotlight was torn down from the rafters and handed over to the crowd as a glow-stick. Armed with whistles and drums, portable lights and elaborate costumes, the 'audience' became the performer, the music, the light show, the celebrity and the spectator all rolled into one.The lines between audience and performance had been dissolving for decades:
From the very beginning there was going to be a movie made of Woodstock. As it started out, every one of us was paying our eighteen dollars for the weekend. Gradually, so many people came, they just abandoned that and let them all come in. But actually they should have paid them all eighteen dollars as they came in because they became the show. And Ken Kesey and his group, the merry Pranksters, their whole idea when they started these acid tests in California where they would get five hundred people in a hall and give everyone LSD and have these lights, was there would no longer be a separation between the performer and the audience. Kesey himself said that he was no longer going to write novels, that he was tired of being a seismograph. He wanted to be a lightning rod. —Tom Wolfe (Mcluhan, 2003: 64)Pushed to its limits, in-depth participation produces a paradox of intense introspection and collective unity:
Although ravers don't feel the need to give their superhuman power a name or personality, when a rave 'goes off', everyone has a shared experience of connectedness and hundreds or even thousands of people can feel like one being with a shared purpose and direction. (Fritz 1999: 179)
In 1992, as rave was expanding into a global movement, U2 launched Zoo TV - "the most spectacular rock tour staged by any band" (Doyle 2002). Zoo TV was an enormous artistic experiment that explored the sensory overload of new media: Dozens of giant video screens and a mobile tv broadcasting station below the stage created a frenzied backdrop of video clips, and random information stolen in real time from the airwaves. Zoo TV tried hard to break down the barriers between the audience and the performance: it gave us the first satellite stage reaching out into the middle of the crowd, video confessions from the audience played on the giant screens during the show, and satellite hook ups with fans from around the globe.
In-depth involvement is a prerequisite for understanding our digital world. While there have been plenty of attempts in modern theater to redefine the relationship of audience and performer, the theater environment (as well as the rock star) always create barriers between the two. When the separation between the audience and performance disappears we no longer have theater but something entirely new; The theater, as de Kerckhove points out, is literally a place "from where one can see". The arena rock show, even in the hands of artists, is stuck being a planetarium: a place where one can see the stars.
"The last of the rock stars // when hip hop drove the big cars // in the time when new media was the big idea." —U2, Kite
But ultimately Zoo TV remained a spectacle. While rave was rewiring our sensibilities by dissolving the lines between audience and performer, Zoo TV could only show us just how out of touch our sensibilities were with the new information landscape.In-depth involvement is a prerequisite for understanding our digital world. While there have been plenty of attempts in modern theater to redefine the relationship of audience and performer, the theater environment (as well as the rock star) always create barriers between the two. When the separation between the audience and performance disappears we no longer have theater but something entirely new; The theater, as de Kerckhove points out, is literally a place "from where one can see". The arena rock show, even in the hands of artists, is stuck being a planetarium: a place where one can see the stars.
A few years ago a handful of satirical web pages sprung up congratulating visitors for reaching the 'End of the Internet". "To get back to the Beginning of the Internet," we were told, "please click your browser's back button 2,436,018 times."
If there is an end to be found on the internet, it is the end of the beginning, middle and end. Narrative structures of information have become irrelevant and in many cases meaningless in the age of hypermedia and instant communication. We can point to the last page of Encyclopedia Britannica, but not of Wikipedia; nor can we point to the beginning or end of the uninterrupted, circular flow of electrons in an electric circuit. When we are bombarded with information from all directions at the speed of light, it is unrealistic to try to organize experience in a straight line.
Rave echoed this shift away from 'a-then-b-then-c' by creating an environment where our traditional notions of time and sequence became irrelevant. Beat-matching allowed DJs to create a seamless soundscape that could envelope an entire night. After-parties extended a single event into days of submersion in techno culture. The break - a short, sudden jump from one musical pattern or theme to another - added the dynamics of hypertext to music. Melodies and vocals were used sparingly, removing any narrative from the soundscape. Drugs were used to distort any rational sense of time and space. In short, the entire rave experience created a sense of endless now.
In Generation Ecstasy, Reynolds explores this new sense of time created by techno music:I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.
The quest for immediacy has been a common theme in the Western world throughout the last century. It is one of the driving forces behind our growing interest in Eastern religion, yoga and meditation. It is at the heart of Pirsig's journey in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which captured the zeitgeist of the 60s. It is part of the lure of backpacking around the world. When we stop trying to fit our experiences into an 'a-then-b-then-c' framework, the journey becomes the destination.
Techno music is made up of a mosaic of repetitive musical patterns that compete for attention while simultaneously giving way to a greater whole. The focus of the music is not a melodic or lyrical journey but the texture of the sounds themselves and the intersections of minimalist riffs. As attention shifts effortlessly between adjacent patterns, the soundscape exposes a dynamic, endless interplay between figure and ground. What is in the foreground at one moment disappears into the background and is quickly replaced by a new sound or pattern that will eventually go unnoticed as well. This soundscape "lures the listener into a sound world honeycombed with chambers that each have their own acoustics. [It] is "like walking through a maze-whose walls rearrange themselves with every step you take.'" (Reynolds, 1999: 44) Here Reynolds finds himself borrowing a description of the non-linear mathematical equations used in chaos theory to capture the essence of techno music.
As we entered an age of ubiquitous, instant communication, rave created a sensory environment that celebrated immediacy, drowning ravers in an endless now.
If there is an end to be found on the internet, it is the end of the beginning, middle and end. Narrative structures of information have become irrelevant and in many cases meaningless in the age of hypermedia and instant communication. We can point to the last page of Encyclopedia Britannica, but not of Wikipedia; nor can we point to the beginning or end of the uninterrupted, circular flow of electrons in an electric circuit. When we are bombarded with information from all directions at the speed of light, it is unrealistic to try to organize experience in a straight line.
Rave echoed this shift away from 'a-then-b-then-c' by creating an environment where our traditional notions of time and sequence became irrelevant. Beat-matching allowed DJs to create a seamless soundscape that could envelope an entire night. After-parties extended a single event into days of submersion in techno culture. The break - a short, sudden jump from one musical pattern or theme to another - added the dynamics of hypertext to music. Melodies and vocals were used sparingly, removing any narrative from the soundscape. Drugs were used to distort any rational sense of time and space. In short, the entire rave experience created a sense of endless now.
In Generation Ecstasy, Reynolds explores this new sense of time created by techno music:
Timbre-saturated, repetitive but tilted always towards the next now, techno is an immediacy machine, stretching time into a continuous present - which is where the drug technology interface comes into play. Not just because techno works well with substances like MDMA, marijuana, LSD, speed, etc., all of which amplify the sensory intensity of the present moment, but because the music itself drugs the listener, looping consciousness then derailing it, stranding it nowhere/nowhen, where there is only sensation, 'where now lasts longer'. (Reynolds, 1999: 55)
I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.
—Albert Hoffman, Inventor of LSD
The quest for immediacy has been a common theme in the Western world throughout the last century. It is one of the driving forces behind our growing interest in Eastern religion, yoga and meditation. It is at the heart of Pirsig's journey in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which captured the zeitgeist of the 60s. It is part of the lure of backpacking around the world. When we stop trying to fit our experiences into an 'a-then-b-then-c' framework, the journey becomes the destination.
Techno music is made up of a mosaic of repetitive musical patterns that compete for attention while simultaneously giving way to a greater whole. The focus of the music is not a melodic or lyrical journey but the texture of the sounds themselves and the intersections of minimalist riffs. As attention shifts effortlessly between adjacent patterns, the soundscape exposes a dynamic, endless interplay between figure and ground. What is in the foreground at one moment disappears into the background and is quickly replaced by a new sound or pattern that will eventually go unnoticed as well. This soundscape "lures the listener into a sound world honeycombed with chambers that each have their own acoustics. [It] is "like walking through a maze-whose walls rearrange themselves with every step you take.'" (Reynolds, 1999: 44) Here Reynolds finds himself borrowing a description of the non-linear mathematical equations used in chaos theory to capture the essence of techno music.
"To dance is not just to experience music as time, but to experience time as music." (Melbourne, 1999: 103)
Rave urged us to embrace the leading edge of experience by amplifying the common pressures of electronic music and drugs. Any simple dismissal of the hallucinogenic world as meaningless escapism is difficult to take seriously. McLuhan saw hallucinogenic drugs as an "artificial mimesis of the electrical information environment". Our explorations into the hallucinogenic world, he said, are an effort to match the 'speed and power' of our electric technologies by 'intensifying our inner nervous system'. (McLuhan, 1999: 93) Reynolds uses remarkably similar language when he writes that the breakbeats of drum&bass music trigger "kinesthetic responses, gradually hot-rodding the human nervous system in readiness for the rapid fire reaction time required in the info-dense future." (Reynolds, 1999: 347)As we entered an age of ubiquitous, instant communication, rave created a sensory environment that celebrated immediacy, drowning ravers in an endless now.
Information pours upon us instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by newer information. (McLuhan, 1967: 63)
If the Greeks bound Prometheus to a rock in the Theatron in response to the new visual pressures of the written word, the 20th century unleashed the raver - a 'mad wanderer or stray' - in its return to the acoustic.
The first generation of ravers grew up before the ubiquitous web of information we already take for granted. Within a few years, they would be living alongside the so-called "digital natives" - a new generation that grew up never knowing a world without the internet, cell phones, instant messaging or the social web. Rave allowed the generations that missed the opportunity to develop a 'native' digital tongue to experiment with many of the modes of awareness and perception they would soon encounter in the emerging digital landscape. But the sensory experiments of the 20th century continue to be valuable. Even the digital natives are not a truly digital generation. Despite the pervasiveness of information technology, today's youth still spend the majority of their formative years in a school system that was designed hundreds of years ago to preserve the printed word.
In the future, if our sensory and cultural lives are completely dominated by digital media, will we be in danger of losing the cognitive lessons of writing and print? Will we require a new sensory education aimed at producing a better balance between the visual and acoustic modes of awareness? Will adjusting our senses be the responsibility of the artist or will we collectively build a new sensory playground? Perhaps our digital media themselves will provide the necessary training. Certainly the distinctions between art and utility are already beginning to blur in our digital world.
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Notes
de Kerckhove, Derrick. (1981) A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Retrieved May 2008, from University of Toronto, The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology Web Site: http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/article_greektragedy.htmDoyle, Tom. (2002, October 10). 10 Years of Turmoil Inside U2. Q Magazine.
Fritz, J. (1999). Rave Culture, An Insider's Overview, Canada: Small Fry Press.
Havelock, Eric (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Malbon, Ben (1999). Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. Routledge, 82-103.
McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. 3rd ed. Toronto: Penguin Books.
McLuhan, Marshall (1999). The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion. Ed. Eric McLuhan, Jack Szklarek. Toronto: Ed. Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited.
Mcluhan, Marshall (2003). understanding me / Lectures and Interviews. Ed. Stephanie Mcluhan, David Staines. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd..
Mcluhan, Marshall (2005). Unbound 06: Culture Without Literacy. Ed. Eric McLuhan, W. Terrance Gordon. United States: Ginkgo Press.
Mulder, Arleen (2004). Understand Media Theory trans. Laura Mart. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers.
Ong, Walter (1972, April 10). The End of the Age of Literacy. Retrieved August 2008, from Saint Louis University, The Walter Ong Collections Web Site: http://libraries.slu.edu/sc/ong/digital/texts/lectures/lecture7.pdf
Reynolds, Simon (1999). Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Rout-ledge.
Images
Cumming, Ben. Guz Scream. Retrieved from flickr.com:
http://flickr.com/photos/givingkittensaway/85477841/ Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Woodward, Tom. Holding On. Retrieved from flickr.com:
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Drexler, David. Business Men. Retrieved from flickr.com:
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Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.comRetrieved from flickr.com: http://flickr.com/photos/oskay/504276595/in/set-72157601306433724/
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tbutanol. Sine Wave Generator. Retrieved November 15, 2008 from flickr.com:
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Baburen, Dirck van. Vulcan Chaining Prometheus (detail), 1623. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Retrieved September 2008 from Wikipedia Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Prometheus.jpg Public Domain
Zoo-Tv-Silence-Death. Retrieved November 2008 from u2fanlife.com:
http://u2fanlife.com/tag/u2-zoo-tv
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monome. monome 256. Retrieved November 2008 from monome.org:
http://monome.org/series/image Promotional product image.