Times of the Technoculture

From the Information Society to the Virtual Life

Kevin Robins, Frank Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134719778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Times of the Technoculture explores the social and cultural impact of new technologies, tracing the origins of the information society from the coming of the machine with the industrial revolution to the development of mass production techniques in the early twentieth century.
The authors look at how the military has controlled the development of the information society, and consider the centrality of education in government attempts to create a knowledge society. Engaging in contemporary debates surrounding the internet, Robins and Webster question whether it can really offer us a new world of virtual communities, and suggest more radical alternatives to the corporate agenda of contemporary technologies.

PART I
TECHNO-VISIONS

1
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF
PANDAEMONIUM

Humphrey Jennings (1907–50) is now remembered primarily as a documentary film-maker, associated with the Grierson school in the 1930s and creator of a series of influential patriotic films during the war. In histories of the cinema he is catalogued as the quintessential British director: ‘he had his theme, which was Britain; and nothing else could stir him to quite the same response’.¹ More precisely, he was the voice of war-time Britain, ‘for it was the war that fertilised his talent and created the conditions in which his best work was produced’.² It was against this martial background, Erik Barnouw argues, that Jennings—‘Virtually a wartime poet-laureate of the British screen’—‘performs his speciality: the vignette of human behaviour under extraordinary stress’.³ According to Lindsay Anderson, upon whose interpretation of Jennings’ films the critical orthodoxy has been built, he ‘is the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’.⁴ But, Anderson adds, ‘it needed the hot blast of war to warm him to passion’, for ‘by temperament Jennings was an intellectual artist, perhaps too intellectual for the cinema’.⁵ Poet, patriot, intellectual—these epithets identify the eccentric location of Humphrey Jennings in British film histories.

But alongside the celebratory paeans to Jennings the incomparable film-artist, one also frequently detects an uncomfortable note. There is the feeling that Jennings was only ever coincidentally a film-maker and that his real interests lay elsewhere. Jennings’ friend Gerald Noxon has suggested that his real interest was in painting and that ‘if Humphrey had inherited anything like an adequate independent income, he would have left film work and gone back to painting as the main occupation of his life’.⁶ Charles Dand believes that ‘Jennings was interested in film for art’s sake’,⁷ and sees in him the ‘painter’s eye, poet’s imagination, and critic’s mind—a powerful combination of gifts. Too powerful perhaps’.⁸ The common sentiment here is that Jennings’ restless and protean talent could not be held within the confines of documentary film-making. What both Noxon and Dand are seeking to identify is the scope, originality and complexity of Jennings’ intellectual and aesthetic endeavours. And, despite its somewhat romantic inflexion, this assessment most certainly comes closer to a true evaluation of Jennings than the narrower accounts of his cinematic ‘genius’.

Jennings’ interests and concerns were extraordinarily wide-ranging and his films were only one aspect of a larger, panoramic and kaleidoscopic, project that involved him also in Mass Observation and the Surrealist Movement, as well as the Pandaemonium enterprise with which this chapter is concerned.⁹ It is in the totality of these involvements that the coherence and importance of Jennings’ work (as both practitioner and theoretician) may be seen. What this amounts to, we shall argue, is in fact an extraordinarily original, inventive and sustained intervention in British cultural life. It was an attempt, as David Mellor argues, to ‘find paths through the morass of contemporary British culture’ in order to ‘reconstellate’ that culture.¹⁰ As such it was a Herculean project that involved Jennings in painting, photography, poetry, sociology, social history and philosophy—a perceptive contemporary observer noted ‘the encyclopaedism that he extols and seeks to express in himself’.¹¹ It was no doubt in the nature of this encyclopaedic enterprise —and not just because of Jennings’ premature death—that it should have remained fragmentary and incomplete. Only now are we becoming aware of its status as an exemplary modernist cultural undertaking, one that was animated by a constantly innovative, nomadic and transgressive spirit.

The nature and intensity of what one might almost call Jennings’ existential enterprise became all the more clear with the posthumous publication in the mid-1980s of his Pandaemonium project. This massive documentation of the cultural impact of the Industrial Revolution and of Enlightenment thinking was fundamental to his preoccupations throughout the last twelve or so years of his life—at his death, James Merralls tells us, ‘the materials collected for this work filled a tea chest’.¹² Today it appears isolated from the contexts that once made it meaningful. It speaks louder, as we shall argue, when it is relocated within the intellectual and artistic environment in which it was engendered, but even adrift in time, sixty years after its first conception, it is a powerful and vocal document. What it addresses is an issue that is of perhaps even greater concern and urgency than ever: the relation between science, technology and industrialisation, on the one hand, and the way of life, culture and subjectivity, on the other. As Murray Bookchin has written, the crucial problem we face today is that of ‘the function of imagination in giving us direction, hope, and a sense of place in nature and society’.¹³ This too was the great and overriding concern of Humphrey Jennings. George Pitman recalls a meeting: ‘Jennings was arguing with me about the basic problem that, in his view, the film director (i.e., he, himself) has to solve. “It’s the whole question”, he said; somewhat cryptically, “of imagination in an industrial society”’.¹⁴ The imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution, Pandaemonium, is Jennings’ epic and heroic exploration of this theme. It is something from which all of those engaged in attempting to understand the present super-industrial epoch may learn much. We seek here to reclaim the legacy of Humphrey Jennings almost half a century after his death, to restate the abiding relevance of Jennings’ concerns and approach to understanding change.

What Pandaemonium makes clear is that Humphrey Jennings was far more than an idiosyncratic, unclassifiable documentary film-maker. This monumental documentation of the Industrial Revolution, along with his involvement in Mass Observation and the Surrealist Movement, make up an oeuvre of considerable moral, aesthetic and political complexity. Jennings’ concerns and involvements, we believe, place him in the mainstream of British intellectual history. This is the tradition of what Fred Inglis has called ‘radical earnestness’, which has been involved over the last 200 years in ‘rewriting the deep contradictions of Romantic feeling and Enlightenment rationalism’.¹⁵ It is the ‘culture and society’ tradition that Raymond Williams so intricately traced; that line of thinking, rooted ultimately in the Romantic Movement, that has concerned itself with the historical relationship between culture, in its multiple senses, and the process of industrialisation.¹⁶ More specifically, it is Edward Thompson’s Romantic and Utopian tradition of English socialism, which, at its finest, has articulated ‘a rebellion of value, or aspiration, against actuality’.¹⁷ It is within this transformed Romantic tradition, elaborated with different emphases in the accounts of Inglis, Williams and Thompson, that Humphrey Jennings surely belongs. At its most critical and radical, moral force is transformed into Utopian imagination.

Like William Morris, Jennings sees not just the degradation of nature— human and physical—by the machinery of commerce and industrialism, but, more radically, he sees through the underlying relations of power. In the case of both internal and external nature, he is sensitive to that return of the repressed that haunts industrial capitalism in all its stages. For Jennings, again like Morris, the lessons of history inspire, not nostalgia or reaction (as with so much of the ‘Culture and Society’ tradition), but an awareness of the ‘power to come’ and of the possibilities for political and imaginative creativity and innovation.

CAMBRIDGE AND SURREALISM

The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.

(William Blake, Milton)

But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination,
Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees.

(William Blake, Letter to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799)

In order to appreciate fully Pandaemonium it is first necessary to place it in the context of Jennings’ intellectual development. Unrealised in his lifetime, this ambitious project was companion to all Jennings’ other involvements. At the heart of them all were the interrelated questions of the place of imagination under industrial capitalism, and the place of science in the total field of knowledge. Humphrey Jennings was brought up in a household strongly influenced by the Guild Socialism of A.R.Orage. The attitude to science that he experienced there was no doubt reinforced by his education at the Perse School in Cambridge under its redoubtable headmaster, W.H.D.Rouse, whose liberal and classicist ideals devalued science and technology—‘the better the machine, the less it uses our intelligence’—as against the truth of poetry: ‘Poetry cannot make a machine, but it is the food of the imagination: it expresses the highest part of man, his eternal hopes and fears, his most intimate feelings, his speculations on the universe, and on his own great end’.¹⁸ We mention these early influences to suggest the cultural and intellectual heritage of Humphrey Jennings. His background and experience exposed him particularly to that anti-industrial worldview which has been called the English ideology, and which, according to Martin Wiener, managed to create ‘a cultural cordon sanitaire encircling the forces of economic development— technology, industry, commerce’.¹⁹ It was out of, and against, this cultural nexus that Jennings’ concerns and commitments developed.

A formative moment in Humphrey Jennings’ life came with his involvement, whilst at Cambridge, in the literary review, Experiment. Here he was associated with a group of young intellectuals and artists that included Kathleen Raine, William Empson, Jacob Bronowski and Julian Trevelyan. In Kathleen Raine’s words,

the characteristic of this literary group was its ‘scientific bias’—Bronowski and Empson were mathematicians, I myself was reading Natural Sciences, and to all of us scientific raw material was regarded, without question, as part of the subject-matter of poetry.²⁰

In his perceptive biographical sketch of Jennings’ career, James Merralls observes that they were ‘fascinated by the great imaginative upsurge from which the Industrial Revolution sprang. And they read Newton, Faraday, Darwin for their poetic content, that is their intellectual vigour, as much as for their science’.²¹ Unifying the Experiment group (and informing all Jennings’ subsequent preoccupations) was a historic and heroic concern with the intellectual consequences of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution: the changed relation between science and art, reason and imagination, prose and poetry, the material and the spiritual.

A central imaginative resource and inspiration in their efforts to work on these lofty issues was the life and work of William Blake. Both Raine and Bronowski, it should be remembered, went on to become notable Blake scholars. For Jennings, Blake was a steadfast intellectual aesthetic and moral guide. Kathleen Raine, who was later to remember Jennings as an incarnation of Blake’s Los, spirit of prophecy, points to the shaping influence of Blake on the Pandaemonium project:

for the Royal Society had started the whole terrible process (such was the theme of Humphrey’s book), the mills of Satan appearing first, as Blake had long ago declared, in the mechanistic theorizings of Bacon, Newton and Locke; only later to be reflected in those machines, their expression and image, from whose relentless wheels it seems our world can no longer (whether in peace or war) extricate itself.²²

Elsewhere, Raine points again to Jennings’ indebtedness to Blake for his sense of the historical process: ‘history, as Humphrey Jennings, like Blake, conceived it, is the realisation of human imaginings’.²³ The mark of Jennings’ abilities was his capacity to absorb and develop the influence of Blake. Unlike Raine, whose work became caught in a cul-de-sac of Blakean idolatry and mysticism, Jennings was no slavish disciple.

A further, and neglected, influence on Jennings’ development was the literary critic, I.A.Richards (1893–1979). As James Merralls points out, Richards, ‘who sought to identify the relation of science and poetry in the mainstream of imaginative thought’, was a formative influence on the Experiment group.²⁴ Richards, the author of Principles of Literary Criticism and Science and Poetry in the 1920s—a writer whom Williams, moreover, places in the ‘Culture and Society’ tradition²⁵—was important for Jennings’ understanding of science and poetry as modes of knowledge, and for his exploration of the nature of imagination in industrial capitalism. At one level, Richards argued, imagination is ‘that kind of relevant connection of things ordinarily thought of as disparate which is exemplified in scientific imagination’; at another it is ‘inventiveness, the bringing together of elements which are not ordinarily connected…’. Its culmination (and here he quotes from Coleridge) is that ‘synthetic and magical power’ which ‘reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities…’.²⁶ What is brought out here—and what becomes a crucial motif in Jennings’ thought—is the creative potential and energy that comes from making connections. Through this poetic capacity it is possible to ‘outwit the force of habit’; poetic vision, through its ‘superior power of ordering experience’ liberates us from the ‘blinkers’, the ‘inhibitions’ of routine and mundane existence.²⁷

The concern with the relation between science and poetry, the emphasis on imagination, and the moral seriousness that characterised both Blake and Richards, in their different ways, remained with Jennings throughout his life. Jennings, however, was no simple Romantic or antiquarian. His own imagination was essentially modernist; his sense of history and tradition was profound, but he spoke a contemporary language in order to address the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TIMES OF THE TECHNOCULTURE
• COMEDIA
• TITLE PAGE
• COPY RIGHT
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: TECHNO-VISIONS
• PART II: GENEALOGIES OF INFORMATION
• PART III: THE POLITICS OF CYBERSPACE
• PART IV: LIVING IN VIRTUAL SPACE
• NOTES