"Around the world, around the clock".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

The Image Industries. By William Lynch, S.J. Sheed and Ward. $3.50.

Father Lynch has been led by true wisdom in devoting recent years to an intensive study of contemporary aesthetic problems. This study has also taught him to see the relevance of the art forms of the new electric media. As he has meditated upon the new forces in our culture he has encountered the Maginot Line of official culture: "This surely means that an increasing group of intellectuals and generally competent people must give up what I cannot but interpret as a form of snobbishness in the face of the problems of popular culture and the mass media.... In my own visits to some dozen colleges and universities, Catholic and non-Catholic, I wish I had been able to detect any positive enthusiasm among them in the interests of this great national task."

It is curious that Father Lynch should have chosen the term "Image Industries" because the image or icon is the preference and bane of oral peoples, not of literate peoples. It is well to realize that the return of the icon (and it tends to be the mode of TV rather than of photograph or of movie) heralds the return of auditory space and auditory organizations of knowledge in the West. Malraux quite properly calls icons and sculptures the "voices of silence." For these forms do not enclose space, but model and modulate, as does music. They are non-verbal languages.

The return of our world to "auditory space" (that is, to the space created by the act of hearing, a simultaneous field of relations enclosing nothing and enclosed in nothing--the space of nuclear phenomena), is inevitable when information moves around the clock and around the world at approximately the speed of light. Visual structure and organization (one-thing-at-a-time) cannot sustain the co-presence of auditory or all-at-once structure. The visual culture is easily brainwashed by auditory pressure. The visual order necessarily dates from writing in any society, and moves towards mechanism and applied knowledge, so that in the electronic age we are at once post-literate and post-mechanical.

It would seem to be paradoxical that in the new auditory and electronic age the role of the artist should move steadily away from the ivory tower towards the control tower in society. But whether in industrial design or town planning and marketing, the highest artistic powers are in ever greater demand. As we become ever more alert to the personal and social consequences of non-verbal forms in patterning our lives, the artist becomes the key figure in providing models of larger situations which will give us power of control over change.

As the consequences of change accelerate, on the other hand, it is easier to discern causes. Another paradox of our time is the avid pursuit of a theory of change. Interest in formal causality seems to have declined after the sixteenth century, as did interest in analogy. But the artist picked up this interest where the philosophers left off and has always insisted on the formal (not just the efficient) causality of artefacts whether of individual or collective origin. (The Marxist claim to a theory of change may well be its major attraction in the West.)

One of the most crippling attitudes of our Western visual and mechanical culture is the ingrained notion that "content" is the all-important aspect of works offered to human attention. This attitude, itself a subliminal effect of the written word, has become total since print. Any artist in any field whatever knows that "form" and "content" are a bogus pair. But when such a notion is all we have with which to cope with modern entertainment (and education) we are helpless. When we hear that "the medium is the message in the long run," we think it is jabberwocky or Finneganese. And so it is. That is, such a formula speaks not of one plane of fact at a time, but is multi-leveled. And in facing the new electronic forms we have to learn how to talk and perceive on many planes at once. Analogical knowledge can not be visualized. Aquinas has no "system" and no "point-of-view," for those forms belong to the one-thing-at-a-time outlook of the merely visual culture.

Father Lynch is "convinced that the Catholic mind is beginning, under the implosion of the Holy Spirit, to approach that condition of imaginative creativity which will prevent it from ever being interpreted as a mere guardian force in the life of the nation. The Catholic must hate sin, but this is only the negative aspect of his vocation. His primary vocation is growth towards the fullness of the reality of Christ. In this growth he cannot dispense with the collaboration of the artist."

Let us add the obvious fact that art is not a lonely enterprise. Catholics above all should welcome the fact that the great new arts of our century are collective enterprises. To the Gnostic concerned with the image of lonely, individual spiritual quests it is the collective aspect of modern art that is as atrocious as liturgy.

H. Marshall McLuhan

University of Toronto

"AROUND THE WORLD, AROUND THE CLOCK" (8)

(8) Renascence 12.4 (1960): 204-205.