The Democratic Surround

Book on the rise of liberal thought in America.

Quotes

• Adorno, Thompson, and their fellow journalists and scholars varied in their accounts of how the transformation would occur, but by 1938, virtually all agreed: Mass communication could turn the individual personality and, with it, the structure of society as a whole in a totalitarian direction.
• According to Adorno and Simpson, music facilitated “adjustment” to mainstream society in two ways, each “corresponding to two major socio-psychological types of mass behavior toward music in general and popular music in particular, the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type and the ‘emotional’ type.”48 By the first group, Adorno meant young radio listeners and especially those who danced the jitterbug. For Adorno, dance was a mode of accommodation. To dance to popular music was to rehearse one’s alienation and at the same time, by attaching oneself emotionally to the pleasure system of the existing society, to increase that alienation. In the frantic footwork of the jitterbugs, Adorno seemed to hear the mechanical drumbeat of goose-stepping soldiers. The “rhythmically obedient” types, he wrote, were the “most susceptible to a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism.”
• And if they start to come to adult awareness, the entertainment industry will quickly put them back in the nursery: “Together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening help to make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible,” declared Adorno
• During the three years that Adorno worked on the Princeton project, he applied his critique of the psychological power of media with a ferocious rhetorical bite.40 He steadily attacked both popular music and the radio as if they were themselves the Nazi forces that had driven him from Europe. “The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation,” he exclaimed in a 1938 essay for the reconstituted Institute for Social Research’s Zeitschrift, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.”41 Written in the same year that saw the anti-Jewish pogrom of Kristallnacht and the German annexation of Austria, Adorno’s essay echoed with despair: It can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility. Everywhere it takes over, unnoticed, the deadly sad role that fell to it in the time and the specific situation of the silent films. It is perceived purely as background. If nobody can any longer speak, then certainly nobody can any longer listen
• In the 1930s, few critics expressed this view more articulately than Theodor Adorno. Like many of his colleagues at Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, Adorno had fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s.
• By a crowd, Le Bon meant not a simple gathering of people, but what he called “a psychological crowd.”29 Such a gathering had a “mental unity” and was characterized by two distinct features. First, the individuals in such groups had suffered “the disappearance of conscious personality”;
• In the chaotic decades of the Third Republic that followed, Le Bon came to see crowds as an increasingly common social phenomenon and as emblems of a new mass society. He also saw them as a threat—to collective social order and to individual reason. In his 1895 volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Le Bon linked their rise to the coming of modernity itself.
• To be able to understand the world and change it, Chase argued, Americans needed to break down language itself, to dissolve its terms from their material-world referents, and so distinguish the pictures in their heads from reality. And nothing made the importance of that work clearer than the omnipresence of mass communication, propaganda, and the threat of a second world war. In 1941, linguist and future Senator S. I. Hayakawa’s volume Language in Action brought Chase’s argument and Korzybski’s theories into the public eye. Like Chase, Hayakawa argued that “we live in an environment shaped and partially created by hitherto unparalleled semantic influences: commercialized newspapers, commercialized radio programs, ‘public relations counsels,’ and the propaganda technique of nationalistic madmen.”22 To survive this onslaught, citizens needed scientific techniques for interpreting and resisting semantic assaults.
• his popular 1938 volume The Tyranny of Words, economist Stuart Chase summed up the historical importance of semantic analysis thus: “First a war that killed thirty million human beings. Then a speculative boom which, after producing more bad language to sell more fantastic propositions than in the entire previous history of finance, exploded like the airship Hindenburg. Finally, when a little headway has been made against economic disaster, the peoples of Europe, more civilized than any other living group, prepare solemnly and deliberately to blow one another to molecules. . . . Confusions persist because we have no true picture of the world outside, and so cannot talk to one another about how to stop them.”
• The term “general semantics” was coined by Polish philosopher and mathematician Alfred Korzybski in the early 1920s. Korzybski had published a series of articles and books in which he argued that human beings’ ability to pass knowledge down through time via language was what made them unique as a species. In 1933 he published an exceptionally influential extension of his early theories, entitled Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. At its core, the book argued that much human unhappiness in both the psychological and social realms could be traced to our inability to separate the pictures in our heads and the communicative processes that put them there from material reality itself. To solve this problem, Korzybski offered a course in close scientific reasoning and linguistic analysis. To alleviate the power that symbols and their makers have over us, he argued, human beings needed to parse the terms in which language presented the world to them. Having done so, they could begin to recognize the world as it was and thus to experience some degree of mental health.
• The Institute for Propaganda Analysis emerged in 1937 out of a class in “Education and Public Opinion” taught by Dr. Clyde Miller at Columbia’s Teacher’s College.
• What has disappeared is the deeply democratic vision that animated the turn toward mediated environments in the first place, and that sustained it across the 1950s and into the 1960s. This book aims to recover that vision
• For that reason, members and friends of the committee advocated a turn away from single-source mass media and toward multi-image, multi–sound-source media environments—systems that I will call surrounds. They couldn’t build these systems themselves. With a few exceptions, they were writers, not media makers. But they knew people who could build surrounds: the refugee artists of the Bauhaus. Since the early 1930s, Bauhaus stalwarts such as architect Walter Gropius and multimedia artists László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer had fled Nazi Germany and settled in New York, Chicago, and other centers of American intellectual life. They brought with them highly developed theories of multiscreen display and immersive theater. They also brought the notion that media art should help integrate the senses, and so produce what they called a “New Man,” a person whose psyche remained whole even under the potentially fracturing assault of everyday life in industrial society.
• "Were the world we dream of attained, members of that new world would be so different from ourselves that they would no longer value it in the same terms in which we now desire it. . . . We would no longer be at home in such a world. . . . We who have dreamed it could not live in it. MARGARET MEAD, 1942"
• Across the 1930s, committee members such as anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and psychologist Gordon Allport had worked to show how culture shaped the development of the psyche, particularly through the process of interpersonal communication. In the early years of the war, they turned those understandings into prescriptions for bolstering American morale. First, they defined the “democratic personality” as a highly individuated, rational, and empathetic mindset, committed to racial and religious diversity, and so able to collaborate with others while retaining its individuality.