Stumbling Between Apocalypse and Paradise

53 Pages·2015·0.3 MB·English

Stumbling Between Apocalypse and Paradise:
Northrop Frye as Cultural Critic in the Age of Information

By
Ian Alexander Robson

Supervisor: Dr. Jeffery Donaldson
Reader: Dr. Joseph Adamson
Date: September, 11/2015

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Dr. Susie O'Brien for her very helpful guidance, counsel and feedback
over the term; Dr. Jeffery Donaldson for sparking my interest in Frye and for his willingness to advise
and edit this project (and the philosophical conversations which occurred as a result); and Dr. Joseph
Adamson for his advice as to where to look regarding research for this project and for his willingness to
be a reader.
Abbreviations of Texts Cited

AD: The Age of Discontinuity Peter F. Drucker
BNWR: Brave New World: Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley
BPF: Between Past and Future Hannah Arendt
DG: Data and Goliath Bruce Schneier
EM: Essays on Metaphor Warren A. Shibles
GS: The Gay Science Friedrich Nietzsche
IF: Interpretations and Forecasts Lewis Mumford
INF: Interviews with Northrop Frye Northrop Frye
LMM: Letters of Marshall McLuhan Marshall McLuhan
LN: Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990 Northrop Frye
MC: The Modern Century Northrop Frye
MOI: The Myths of Information Kathleen Woodward
MU: Man, the Unknown Alexis Carrel
NFIC: Northrop Frye in Conversation Northrop Frye/David Cayley
PF: The Plague of Fantasies Slavoj Zizek
PP: Pascal's Pensees Blaise Pascal
RH: The Revolution of Hope Erich Fromm
SS: The Stubborn Structure Northrop Frye
TC: Technics and Civilization Lewis Mumford
TN: The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory Dorothy Hale
VS: The View from Serendip Arthur C. Clarke
WB: World Brain H.G. Wells
WP: Words with Power Northrop Frye
WTP: The Will to Power Friedrich Nietzsche
YNG: You Are Not A Gadget Jaron Lanier
Stumbling Between Apocalypse and Paradise:
Northrop Frye as Cultural Critic in the Age of Information

We use language to ponder and describe the world around us. As the world around us changes,
the language we use to ponder and describe it changes as well. Before the advent of scientific thinking,
one could not think scientifically. Over generations, human imagination and mythic thinking
eventually laid a foundation which allowed for the rise of scientific thinking. Today, in 'advanced
societies', with scientific and technological progress influencing almost every aspect of our daily life, it
is almost impossible not to view the world through a scientific or technological lens (e.g. media, a car
window, a brain treated with pharmaceuticals). Technology serves to make our functioning in the
world more efficient by shrinking space and time and saving us energy; this allows for an increase in
quantity of information and goods. With the constant barrage of new information, it is increasingly
difficult to ascertain all of the facts in order to attain a rational still point from which to reason
effectively; one is forever seeking more information, and new information arrives hourly. If ancient
cultures approached science by imaginative and mythic thinking, modern culture may approach
imaginative and mythic thinking via science. As useful as science can be, it can only ever represent but
one perspective of the world around us (i.e. the scientific perspective). Thus, if we limit our total
imaginative potential to within scientific thinking, to what is technically possible, we are limiting our
thought to within a closed system of human artifice. Language itself is already a limited system with
which we muse and describe our (non-linguistic) world; specialized scientific language is necessarily
even more limiting.
Northrop Frye's concept of verbal modes helps to clarify our use of language and thus serves to
illuminate our thought processes. Very briefly, Frye's modes are kerygmatic (religious, existential),
poetic or imaginative (the realm of literature and imagination), ideological or rhetorical (persuasion in
argument), conceptual or dialectical (reason in argument), and descriptive (the realm of facts and thus
of science and technology). Frye writes: “Every verbal structure is likely to have its chief center of
gravity in one of these modes, though aspects of all the others will be included or implied” (WP 17).
Below, I assume a fairly clear separation between modes in order to illustrate more readily the idea that
we are seeing a shift from the presently dominant dialectical mode (which itself usurped the once
dominant imaginative mode) to the increasing use of a fusion between the descriptive and rhetorical
modes. Scientific and technological advancements allow for the further refinement of the descriptive
mode and this evermore refined descriptive mode, in turn, allows for further technological
advancements (e.g. the theory and practical science of particle physics). I will argue that as we become
more dependent upon the products of technology for daily living, we are inadvertently becoming more
subsumed in the products of the descriptive mode. However, purely descriptive data (e.g. information)
is only useful when utilized with another mode. Since there is no reasoning with facts, the rhetorical,
rather than the dialectical, is the mode with which we most often animate descriptive data. An example
might be a government appealing to financial 'facts' (descriptive) to implement an ideological agenda
(rhetoric) thus limiting (dialectical) debate. Or social media limiting opinions to like/dislike/report.
Since rhetoric does not require time-consuming laborious reasoning, it is more efficient in this world of
shrinking time, space, and energy. As Paul Valery said in 1927: “it is almost as if the decline of the
idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort” (as quoted by Benjamin, TN
368).
Furthermore, I suggest the increased use of the descriptive mode animated by the ideology of
rhetoric leads to what Frye calls a “closed myth of concern.” Continuity and security are the focus of
the myth of concern; within it we lose spontaneity and thus the opportunity to change our situation.
One example of this “closed myth” is that our communication technologies that we use for socializing,
school, and entertainment (among other things) may serve to act both as surveillance devices for
authority (by recording our personal information) and to influence our perceptions through advertising
and propaganda (two “suspect” traits of the rhetorical mode). The imaginative mode allows us to
imagine and create our world; thus if we allow this mode to erode by becoming increasingly subsumed
within the descriptive and rhetorical modes, we lose our ability to formulate a vision for a different
society. In the information age, the meta-narrative has been replaced by the meta-data.
As Frye states in a 1979 interview:
I believe that one of the intellectual activities of our time consists in trying to see what is
behind the social and political facade of authority. The fact that this exists underlines the fact
that we are all surrounded by a mythology which is for the most part false: that of publicity,
advertising, propaganda, and all the other means which deceive man and reduce him to the role
of a docile and obedient citizen. The role of the critical act, then, is that of tearing down the
wall of false mythology to reach the structure of serious convictions that each of us must have
in order to be a responsible member of society. (INF 454)

The Age of Information:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot: The Rock 1934

The Oxford English Dictionary defines life as “being alive”; living: “livelihood, maintenance.”
Knowledge is defined as “facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the
theoretical or practical understanding of a subject; the sum of what is known; information held on a
computer system; (in philosophy) true, justified belief; certain understanding, as opposed to opinion.”
Information is defined as “facts provided or learned about something or someone; what is conveyed or
represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things; (in computing) data as processed, stored,
or transmitted by a computer.” Thus we see acquiring knowledge is an active process whereas
acquiring information is a passive process. Furthermore, the Oxford English dictionary notes that the
word information is derived from French meaning “accusatory or incriminatory intelligence against a
person” which, although outdated, still leaves remnants of this meaning in the terms “informant” and
“informer.”
Frye differentiates between wisdom and knowledge saying that knowledge is “of the actual”
and wisdom is “rather a sense of potential” of what could be known; Jesus and Buddha were wise as
opposed to knowledgeable (INF 271). Knowledge is “continuous in structure” and this structure
constitutes the subject which has authority “over both teacher and student”. “One cannot think at
random; one cannot just start to think” since one's skill in thinking is based on “previous practice” (INF
83). Knowledge can lead to wisdom as information can lead to knowledge. Since “knowledge is
consecutive” every bit of information is connected to the next “so all knowledge is a gradual unfolding
of a structure” (INF 193). Thus, one would think, one must have the knowledge of a conceptual
structure within which to fit the bits of information.
In a 1968 interview with Frye, the interviewer summed up “the current argument” that “the only
thing constant now is change.” With this accelerating progress comes “the vast accumulation of
knowledge in the world” and since no one can learn all the facts, people conclude “there is no point in
learning facts anymore.” Frye responds that such a view is “naked anti-intellectualism”; adaptability to
change itself “means nothing at all.” “I think that a statement such as, 'You have to develop an
adaptability to change,' without saying where you are going to change or what form the change is going
to take, is an expression of panic or hysteria” (INF 146). Thus again, if one does not have a conceptual
structure of knowledge, “change itself” simply leads nowhere regardless of whether one can know all
the facts or not.
That same year, Peter Drucker (a philosophy professor who became a management consultant
for large corporations) published his book The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to our Changing
Society. Drucker coined the term 'knowledge worker'. “Since the computer first appeared in the late
1940's the information industry has been a certainty. But we do not have it yet. [...] What we still have
to create is the conceptual understanding of information” (AD 25). Here again we see the need for a
conceptual structure—knowledge—with which to understand information.
As Frye warns in his late notebooks: “Industry-based to information-based society cliché: what
it appeals to. But information isn't a placid river of self-evident facts: it comes to us pre-packaged in
ideological containers, and many of those containers are constructed by professional liars. Information
involves extricating oneself form a spiderweb of misinformation” (LN 598). Thus, a knowledge is
necessary.
However, Drucker clarifies:
'Knowledge' as normally considered by the 'intellectual' is something very different from
'knowledge' in the context of 'knowledge economy' or 'knowledge work.' For the intellectual,
knowledge is what is in a book. But as long as it is in the book, it is only 'information' if not
mere 'data.' Only when a man applies the information to doing something does it become
knowledge.

Importantly: “The emergence of the knowledge economy is not, in other words, part of
'intellectual history' as it is normally conceived. It is part of the 'history of technology'” (AD 269).
Thus the knowledge industry is dependent upon technology, not intellectualism. As we will see in the
outline of Frye's verbal modes below, the descriptive mode includes pure information and is dependent
upon technological progress. The ascendent modes (conceptual, rhetorical, imaginative) all concern
intellect. The ideal descriptive mode alone, like pure information, only comes alive when utilized with
the influence of another mode.
Jaron Lanier, who helped develop 'virtual reality' in the 1980's (and coined the phrase), defines
information in this way as well: “Information is alienated experience. [...] Experience is the only
process that can de-alienate information” (YNG 28-29). Thus, he says, a common culture is required
between the one who stores and the one who retrieves the information. However, if one wants to shift
between the old religion “where you hope God will give you an afterlife,” to the new religion “where
you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe
information is alive.” For such believers, our social institutions “like art, the economy, and the law”
will have to be redesigned in order to “reinforce the perception information is alive” (YNG 29). Here,
information comes alive not by being uploaded into an individual's knowledge construct, but by
changing the very social constructs themselves to render pure information useful. Lanier concludes:
“You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.”
In the mid-1970's, Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 A Space Odyssey, describes his
contemporary surroundings in the evolving information age:
We have all seen unbuttoned beer-bellies slumped in front of the TV set, and transistorised
morons twitching down the street, puppets controlled by invisible disk jockies. These are not
the highest representatives of our culture; but, tragically, they may be typical of the near future.
As we evolve a society oriented towards information, and move away from one based primarily
on manufacture and transportation, there will be millions who cannot adapt to the change. We
may have no alternative but to use the lower electronic arts to keep them in a state of drugged
placidity. (SCT 257)

Past visions of the coming information age were more optimistic than Clarke's observations.
World Brain by H.G. Wells is a collection of essays and speeches Wells delivered in the 1930's. Wells
spoke in England, France, and America proposing a Permanent World Encyclopaedia allowing for the
world-wide storing and accessing of information. To summarize Wells' musings, the World Brain
would be a file system of information deemed most significant by intellectuals and made available to
all. It would be continually revised, curtailed in times of conflict and rejuvenated when “liberalism and
reason return”; it would eradicate illiteracy and misinformed people, employ thousands of workers,
have multiple uses such as historical, technical, scientific, and artistic. It would intellectually unify the
entire human race: “a sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which (when it is fully
developed) will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the entire human race” (WB
91).
The World Brain would not just be an index but could be accessed at “prepared” locations. At
the designated spot, “A microfilm, coloured where necessary, occupying an inch or so of space and
weighing little more than a letter, can be duplicated from the records and sent anywhere, and thrown
enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail” (WB 86).
You see how such an Encyclopaedic organization could spread like a nervous network, a
system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world
through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more
conscious co-operating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity, informing without
pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny. (WB 33)

Wells claims that one great advantage of the World Brain is “It need not be vulnerable as a
human head or a human heart is vulnerable” (WB 86). Wells does see one vulnerability of the World
Brain: the slickness of salesmen over “Simple Simon” scientists and various invasive “opinionated
cults and propagandists”:
A greater danger, as I have already suggested, will come from attempts at the private
mercenary exploitation of this world-wide need—the raids of popular publishers and heavily
financed salesmen, and in particular attempts to create copyright difficulties and so to corner the
services and prestige of this or that unwary eminent person by anticipatory agreements. [...]
And there will be a constant danger that some of the early promoters may feel and attempt to
realize a sort of proprietorship in the organization, to make a group or a gang of it. But to
recognize that danger is half-way to averting it. (WB 30)

Three decades later, Drucker speaks of the future of increasing availability and access to
information “in which a great many users have their data on one and the same computer, with complete
privacy but also with complete and immediate access at all times” (AD 26). Before the personal
computer was even built, before 'the cloud' was even a dream, Drucker highlights privacy as an
important aspect of accessing information.
Regarding Wells' concern of salesmen and Drucker's concern of privacy, on April 14, 1969
Marshall McLuhan wrote to the Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau: “Under electric conditions
there can be no privacy. The privacy invaders are the bulwark of the new knowledge industries, from
the pollsters, to the insurance companies, and the credit ratings, 'the eye in the sky,' the age of the
'snoop'” (LMM 367). Almost half a century after McLuhan's letter, and seven decades since Wells'
utopian World Brain free of tyranny, Jaron Lanier's You are not a Gadget deals explicitly with these
problems. Lanier writes about how some aspects of the world wide web lull us into patterns of
behaviour that degrade existence, how the web simply treats people as “relays in a global brain,” and
how there are profound spiritual, political, and economic consequences. All of these concerns are
directly antipodal to Wells' utopian World Brain and directly in line with his own concerns of salesmen
or others making “a group or gang of it.” Lanier warns that although access to free information sounds
ideal, there are unintended consequences: “all the clout and money created online has begun to
accumulate around the people close to only certain highly secretive computers, many of which are
essentially spying operations designed to gain information to sell advertising and access or to pull
money out of a marketplace as if by black magic” (YNG x).
Add to this the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations of the NSA spying on foreign and domestic
citizens, collecting all 'meta-data', recording all electronic communication. Indeed, Snowden is one of
Wells' “thousands of workers” within the World Brain. Snowden leaked top secret documents to alert
Americans and the world to a certain “group or gang'” influence (like the NSA and all the
communication companies in collusion with them) on the World Brain. Snowden warns that “No one
can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they'll get you in time.” However, as Wells
himself said: “But to recognize that danger is half-way to averting it.” Still, Snowden's biggest fear, he
says in his first public interview in 2013 with Glen Greenwald, is that Americans will learn of the
revelations and not do anything: