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outline,Week 3: Tarde's Fragments of a Future History
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outline,
last updated 05.10.09.
Introduction
Before starting to discuss the speculative 'fragments' by Tarde that features in your assignment, you may find it helpful to look at the following. It's a series of questions developed by David Brin intended to be applied to speculative accounts involving science and technology - as both your assignment pieces do:-
1. Does the work look forward to human progress or does it push nostalgia by lamenting a lost golden age?
2. Is science portrayed with loathing? Or is it seen as a hopeful trend that must also be watched carefully against harmful excess?
3. What role does rebellion play? Is suspicion of authority portrayed as a private thing? (The hero as lone fox among sheep.) Or is suspicion of authority portrayed as a healthy reaction by all citizens, who participate by helping to keep the mighty accountable?
4. Are ‘heroes’ portrayed as normal people – perhaps above average, but part of the human continuum? Or are they demigods, exalted above common humanity by class or genes or even by divine right? (Brin 2003: 187-188.)
Although these are presented as formal tests, Brin's wording makes it clear that there is an evaluative perspective being applied to anyone's answers which amounts to saying that the portrayal of political possibility is good, and any form of blocking is bad. This seems a reasonable demand to make of any speculative writing about society; but is a political perspective - particularly when it is couched in terms of authority and subjection - the most effective way to conduct a searching evaluation of such speculations? The two examples that you are being asked to think about both make an alternative claim: that it is from a critical examination of individual human relationships that such an evaluation should start.
As we have seen, Forster's short essay presents us with a stark contradiction: individual human relationships may be directly experienced and their unique nature acknowledged, or they may be mediated by technology and - once so mediated - are likely to become banalised so as to become indistinguishable from the rest of mediatised experience. Forster, in other words, insists that direct sensation and direct personal encounter is the original stuff of being human, and anything less than this results in a form of inhumanity. Tarde gets to a related position by rather different assumptions about technological society. A Marxist-tinged sketch of the two authors' backgrounds may be helpful at this point. England entered the industrial revolution before any other European country, and by the time that Foster was writing the striking fact of England's global empire - one built upon trade and industry - was drummed into the head of every English boy and girl almost from the moment of their birth! Forster himself was part of a loose affiliation of gifted writers, historians, artists, critics and intellectuals who are now collectively referred to as 'Bloomsbury' - getting their name from the genteel area of London that today is usually associated with the British Museum and within which the principal participants lived and worked. (Apart from Forster, you may also have come across the names of Virginia Woolf - writer - and her husband, Leonard Woolf - publisher, Maynard Keynes - economist, Lytton Strachey - historian, Roger Fry - critic, Duncan Grant - painter, etc.) All of these individuals were influential in British intellectual life before the First World War and many continued to be so during the Twenties and Thirties. As a group they were often considered rather too radical or 'advanced' in thought, and rather too questionable in their morals, to represent mainstream public opinion. Nearly all of them had enjoyed an aristocratic or upper-class liberal education and the easy access to wealth and power that went with having parents from the same exalted milieu. Much of their unquestioned access to these social 'good' was to be swept away by the effects of the Great War (1914-18), but at least during the early years of the last century Bloomsbury offered a superficial but nonetheless fascinating parallel to the intellectual and aesthetic life presented as the ideal of Tarde's essay and parodied in Vashti's Machine-mediated life-style. Forster's social and economic separation from the privations of industrial work rested upon a century of industrial progress which he vilifies in his story as the potential source of humanity's destruction as human beings. However, it is not so much that the Machine is intrinsically evil, as that its use and misuse by human beings is the source of the problem.
Tarde offers an apparent contradiction to this: without total reliance on advanced science and technology his future underground world would never have existed; and even if some remnants of humanity had managed to hide in the deepest mines they would have either died or degenerated like those in the cavern that Tarde's people discover. Unlike Forster, Tarde makes the experience of direct aesthetic work and experience the pretext for physical procreation (Forster never makes clear just why or how anybody continues to procreate). Furthermore, while for Tarde the underground world becomes a vast and ever-changing art gallery, Forster chooses to offer no examples of the unmediated experience of art, preferring to restrict direct experience between people to family and non-family social relations - and even these are attenuated by the ministrations of the Machine. Although Tarde wrote some twelve years before Forster, his enthusiasm for the benefits of technology was untarnished and as above, a Marxist diversion is instructive. France industrialised much later than England so that from a French perspective at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the benefits and transformative force of technological advance seemed both almost always to be positive and also unlimited. (Jules Verne - enormously popular and generally accepted as the father of scientific romance was both French and still writing at this time, e.g. Around the World in Eighty Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, etc.) However, there was also something distinct about Tarde that is of great significance to our own interests in Education Studies. Like Durkheim he was what the French call a 'sociologue', but he wrote before Durkheim and was severely critical of Durkheim's enthusiasms for the corrective exercise of state power over the lives of individuals. Instead of Durkheim's hierarchical analysis of society and its ills, Tarde instead emphasised the gradation and continuity of experience in human relations, in terms of immediacy, complexity, and contradiction. The anomie said to be at the centre of all worker's lives, according to Durkheim was the result of social stratification and specialisation which could be overcome by the highest level of society, i.e., the State, taking over the educative role previously assumed by the head of each family. Tarde's solution to the experience of inequality and social isolation was to argue instead for strategies that increased the level and complexity of inter-personal connections established at the individual level, i.e., the experience of the population as a whole was to be revitalised by enriching the lives of individuals. In this way, he argued, direct social contradiction and inequality could be resolved through the development of more complex and nuanced perspectives on each other's lives. (The underpinning philosophical text that Tarde relied upon was G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: the equivalent text for Forster might well have been G. E. Moore's Ethics - much loved by all the Bloomsbury set.
Tarde's Underground
Since Tarde's narrative features humanity's move underground and the complete eradication of all life apart from that of humanity itself, it is worth mentioning some literary affiliations that may be of interest. In terms of life underground, and apart from Roman and Greek descriptions of the Underworld, there are the descriptions of Hell provided by Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost; the latter title capturing exactly what is typically associated with life underground: a form of living entombment. Another theme that Tarde makes much of is the aesthetic and theoretical study of the sciences - geography, biology, astronomy, etc. are all studied by the underground researchers as an aesthetic end in themselves, a study in logic rather than a utilitarian collection of relevant truths about the world. In this respect, Herman Hesse's text The Glass Bead Game may be of interest. Written some thirty years after Tarde's essay, it pictures a future society in which all scientific and intellectual study has become reduced to sets of complex symbolism which can be strategically deployed in the Glass Bead Game - the principal intellectual focus for public life.
Tarde's text itself is divided into a number of sections: the future world before the catastrophe, the catastrophe itself, the struggle for survival, the final adoption of a survival strategy that underpins the life of the imagined writer of this account, the reconstruction of human life in its subterranean form, the centrality of love, and then a sketch of the resulting future society which includes acknowledging some of its tensions.
Background General Knowledge: Social Satires of Science and Technology as Educative
At this point it is worth asking yourself if you feel the texts featuring in the first assignment are 'political'. (And at the same time ask yourself if Lang (through his Metropolis) was serious about his confused social commentary, or was it merely a pretext for a love of spectacle?) Francis Bacon's New Atlantis had social and environmental consequences because it did not rely on magic and did not resolve itself by returning to a monarchical system of authority and control. In fact Bacon's New Atlantis effectively removed the monarch and substituted the House of Saloman - an inscrutable source of progress to those on the outside, but to insiders an intelligible engine for change. By the Seventeenth century, those on the Protestant left were ready to embrace this idea and adapt it to their own purposes. The Commonwealth reformers seized upon Bacon's text as offering insightful support for their view that God's future kingdom on earth was to be a kingdom of science and technology. It is nature which is to be colonised, rather than the New World, and this process of colonisation also involves education and science.
The various proposals stimulated by the setting up of Cromwell's Protectorate are all touched by strong utopian impulses. They fall into two categories: those directed towards the immediate reorganisation of society, and those taking a more fundamental and long-term view; we are mainly concerned with the latter. Effectively all in this second group are united through their vision of a re-constructed humanity brought about by universal education and are often referred to as the Hartlib circle (see the book reference in note 1, and view the web list attached to the module outline for information about members of the first group: Harrington, particularly his Oceana, Winstanley, and the Digger movement.) The Hartlib circle contained such prominent protestants as Comenius, Durie, Plattes, Petty, the poet Milton, and the scientist, Boyle, as well as many other lesser figures. All of these wrote influential pieces on education, but of all, it was Comenius who had the greatest influence over time. It is largely due to him that ideas about the 'teachability' of every child became more widely accepted, along with more enlightened notions of how this teaching should be conducted. More generally, his notion of Pansophia was to have a wonderfully ironic history.
As far as the Protestant left were concerned, Bacon's New Atlantis provided the founding 'myth' - the principal intertext - around which their own works could be arrayed and presented as advances and refinements. However, since Bacon was very much on the right-wing of protestant thinking (for a while the principal administrator in the earlier Stuart monarchy), this also made him attractive as a founding-father for reformers who had allied themselves to the restoration monarchy after the collapse of Cromwell's short-lived Protectorate. They too, adopted Comenius - so on the one hand Comenius' writings were used to advocate educational reform through an increased emphasis on science and utility (a term increasingly used to substitute for Bacon's 'mechanism'), while on the other the very same texts were also used to justify the setting up of hierarchical research-based institutions, the principal one being the Royal Society. In other words, the left argued for an educated citizenry: the right for an educated elite. (This dispute was not resolved until the argument itself was largely forgotten - so that Comenius and Bacon could both be taken up without political prejudice by the Nineteenth century Utilitarians.)
This sets the context for Swift, intent on exercising his wit at the expense of the earnest followers of Comenius and their version of Bacon's own ideas. Bacon had promised in his Novum Organum, that science could be used to re-establish the relationship which had once existed between mankind and nature in the Garden of Eden, i.e., Man would regain his dominion over it.. Hartlib, in particular, had been instrumental in ceaselessly attempting to initiate and sustain a dialogue amongst leading intellectuals about how to improve the life of the citizenry through education (2). The last section of Pope's Dunciad represents all these reformers and their aspirations for the improvement of Man as moral 'midgets', to use Olson's word, and their enterprises the dull fantasies of the witless. Swift's account of Gulliver's Travels is very similar in this respect, but his satire provides three excellent examples of new rhetorical devices we have not yet encountered: two instances of radically changed perspective - the human rendered gross on the island of Lilliputia, and the human rendered as pretentious pipsqueak on the island of Brobdingnag - and a final version in which inversion is extended so as to produce a complex and complete image of the world - but a world turned upside down. Here it is the dumb servant of Man, the horse, who is rendered noble in its acts and moral in its social relations and laws, while the Yahoos (Humans) are presented as ignorant, filthy savages.
Additional webnotes for
Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Book 4; A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms.
And for those of you who wish to demonstrate a level of keenness which passeth human understanding ...
Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, Book 4.
Notes
References
Brin, D. ‘tomorrow may be
different’ in Harber, K. ed. (2003) Exploring the Matrix
