-TOM WOLFE
What if he's right What . . .if. . .he . . .is . . . right W-h-a-t i-f h-e i-s r-i-g-h-t
W IF R H HE I A IS G ? T H T
There are currently hundreds of studs of the business world, breakfast food package designers, television net work creative department vice-presidents, advertising "media reps," lighting fixture fortune heirs, smiley patent lawyers, industrial spies, we- need vision board chairmen, all sorts of business studs who are all wondering if this man, Marshall McLuhan ... is right.... He sits in a little office off on the edge of the University of Toronto that looks like the receiving bin of a second-hand book store, grading papers, grading papers, for days on end, wearing-well, he doesn't seem to care what he wears. If he feels like it, he just puts on the old striped tie with the plastic neck band. You just snap the plastic band around your neck and there the tie is, hanging down and ready to go, Pree-Tide.
But what if-all sorts of huge world-mover & shaker corporations are trying to put McLuhan in a box or some thing. Valuable! Ours! Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game suppose he is the oracle of the modern times - what if he is right? he'll be in there. It almost seems that way. An "undisclosed corporation" has put a huge "undis closed sum" into, McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. One of the big American corporations has offered him $5000 to present a closed- circuit-ours!-television lecture on-oracle!-the ways the products in its industry will be used in the future. Even before all this, IBM, General Electric, Bell Telephone were flying McLuhan in from Toronto to New York, Pittsburgh, God knows where else, to talk to their hierarchs about . . . well, about whatever this unseen world of electronic environments that only he sees fully is all about.
They all sit in these conference rooms, under fluorescent lights, with the right air conditioned air streaming out from behind the management-style draperies. Upward-busting hierarch executives, the real studs, the kind who have already changed over from lie- down crewcuts to brush back Eric Johnston-style Big Boy haircuts and from Oxford button-downs to Tripler broadcloth straight points and have hung it all on the line, an $80,000 mortgage in New Canaan and a couple of kids at Deerfield and Hotchkiss-hung it all on the line on knowing exactly what this corporation is all about -they sit there with the day's first bloody mary squirting through their capillaries-and this man with part of a plastic neckband showing at the edge of the collar, who just got through grading papers, for godsake, tells them in an of-course voice and with I'm being-patient eyes, that, in effect, politely, they all know just about exactly . . . nothing . . . about the real business they're in-
-Gentlemen, the General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs, but it is not yet discovered that it is not in the light bulb business but in the business of moving information. Quite as much as A. T. & T. Yes. Of course-I-am-willing-to-be-patient. He pulls his chin down into his neck and looks up out of his ion' Scotch-lairdly face. Yes. The electric light is pun information it is a medium without a message as it were Yes. Light is a self- contained communications system in which the medium is the message Just think that over for a moment-I-am-willing-to-be - When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines
- but that it was in the business
of processing
information,
then it began
to navigate
with
clear
vision.
Yes.
Swell! But where did this guy come from? What is this-these cryptic, Delphian sayings: Th e electric light is pure information.
Delphian! The medium is the message. We are moving out of the age of the visual into the age of the aural and tactile . . .
Oracle!-McLuhan sits in the conference room on the upper deck of an incredible ferry boat that Walter Landor, one of the country's top package designers, has redone at a cost of about $400,000 as an office and design center. This great package design flagship nestles there in the water at Pier 5 in San Francisco. The sun floods in from the bay onto the basket woven wall-to-wall and shines off the dials of Landor's motion picture projection con sole. Down below on the main deck is a whole simulated supermarket for bringing people in and testing package impact and all sorts of optometric wonder wards for testing visual reception of metribergiarglebargle and McLuhan says, almost by the way:
"Of course, packages will be obsolete in a few years. People will want tactile experiences, they'll want to feel the product they're getting-"
But!-
McLuhan's chin goes down, his mouth turns down, his eyes roll up in his of course expression: "Goods will be sold in bins. People will go right to bins and pick things up and feel them rather than just accepting a package."
Landor, the package designer, doesn't lose his cool; he just looks- what if he is right?
". . . The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums . . ." That even, even, even voice goes on-
-McLuhan is sitting in the Lombardy Restaurant in New York with Gibson McCabe, president of News week, and several other high-ranking communications people, and McCabe tells of the millions Newsweek has put into reader surveys, market research, advertising, the editorial staff, everything, and how it paid off with a huge rise in circulation over the past five years. McLuhan listens, then down comes the chin: "Well . . . of course, your circulation would have risen about the same anyway, the new sensory balance of the people being what it is . . ."
Print gave tribal man an eye for an ear.
McLuhan is at the conference table in the upper room of Howard Gossage's advertising firm in San Francisco, up in what used to be a firehouse they're pretty great converters in San Francisco- and a couple of newspaper people are up there talking about how they are sure their readers want this and that to read-McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck: "Well . . . of course, people don't actually read newspapers. They get into them every morning like a hot bath."
Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb-with these pronouncements-"Art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age"- with all this Nietzschean certitude McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West. He is a word-of-mouth celebrity.
Corporation executives are only the beginning of the roster of people in America who stand to be shaken up -what if he is right? The university establishments, the literati-McLuhan has already earned the hostile envy of the New York literary establishment- the artists-they like him-scores of little groups of McLuhan cultists-thou sands of intellectuals are now studying McLuhan. The paperback edition of his book Understanding Media has been an "underground best seller"-that is, a best seller without benefit of publicity-for six months. City planners-
City planners are wondering what if he-McLuhan is the prophet of the New Life Out There, the suburbs, housing developments, astrodomes, domed-over shopping centers, freeways, TV families, the whole world of the new technologies that stretches out to the West beyond the old cities of the East. To McLuhan, New York is already obsolete, on its way to becoming not much more than a Disneyland discotheque for the enjoyment-not the big business or the gawking wonder, but the playing around-of the millions out there. They are already living the new life, while New York sits here choking to death in its old fashion.
McLuhan has developed a theory that goes like this: The new technologies of the electronic age, notably televi sion, radio, the telephone, and computers, make up a new environment. A new environment; they are not merely added to some basic human environment. The idea that these things, TV and the rest, are just tools that men can use for better or worse depending on their talents and moral strength-that idea is idiotic to McLuhan. The new technologies, such as television, have become a new environment. They radically alter the entire way people use their five senses, the way they react to things, and therefore, their entire lives and the entire society. It doesn't matter what the content of a medium like TV is. It doesn't matter if the networks show twenty hours a day of sadistic cowboys caving in people's teeth or twenty hours of Pablo Casals droning away on his cello in a pure -culture white Spanish drawing room. It doesn't matter about the content. The most pro. found effect of televi sion-its real "message," in McLuhan's terms -is the way it alters men's sensory patterns. The me dium is the message-that is the best- known McLuhanism. Television steps up the auditory sense and the sense of touch and depresses the visual sense. That seems like a paradox, but McLuhan is full of paradoxes. A whole generation in America has grown up in the TV environment, and already these millions of people, twenty-five and under, have the same kind of sensory reactions as African tribesmen. The same thing is happening all over the world. The world is growing into a huge tribe, a . . . global village, in a seamless web of electronics.
These are McLuhan metaphors. He started out as an English literature scholar. He graduated from the University of Manitoba in Canada and then got a doctorate in English at Cambridge in England. He wrote his dissertation on the rhetoric of Thomas Nashe, a sixteenth-century English playwright and essayist. In it he led up to Nashe with a massive study of rhetoric from the Greeks on up. He got interested in the way different kinds of speech,
written and oral, affected the history of different civilizations. Gradually his field expanded from literature to the influence of communication, all kinds, all the media, on society. He started doing research in psychology, even physiology, sociology, history, economics everything seemed to come into it. McLuhan was sort of like John Huizinga this way. Huizinga is a historian, Medieval history, chiefly, who discovered "the play element" in history. He ended up with a rather sophisticated sociological theory, in the book Homo Ludens, that in many ways is a precursor of the mathematical "game theory" that so fascinates Pentagon war strategists today. McLuhan worked on his communications theory. For about thirty years he was pretty much in obscurity in places like the University of Wisconsin, the University of St. Louis, and the University of Toronto. He published The Mechanical Bride in 1951, then The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, and with that one the McLuhan Cult really started, and what if he-?
As McLuhan sees it-in the simplest terms, here is his theory step by step: People adapt to their environment, whatever it is, with a certain balance of the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. If something steps up the intensity of one sense, hearing for example, the other senses will change intensity too, to try to regain a balance. A dentist, for example, can practically shut off pain-sense of touch-by putting earphones on a patient and pouring intense noise into his ear-sense of hearing.
Every major technology changes the balance of the senses. One of the most explosive of these technologies was the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Before that, people's senses still had pretty much the old tribal balance. That is to say, the sense of hearing was dominant. People got their information mainly by hearing it from other people. People who get their information that way are necessarily drawn closer together, in the tribal way. They have to be close to each other in order to get information. And they have to believe what people tell them, by and large, because that is the only kind of information they can get. They are interdependent.
They are also more emotional. The spoken word is more emotional than the written word. It carries emotion as well as meaning. The intonation can convey anger, sorrow, approval, panic, joy, sarcasm, and so forth. This aural man, the tribal man, reacts more emotionally to information. He is more easily upset by rumors. His and every body else's emotions-a collective unconscious-lie very near the surface.
The printing press brought about a radical change. People began getting their information primarily by seeing it -the printed word. The visual sense became dominant. Print translates one sense-hearing, the spoken word-into another sense sight, the printed word. Print also converts sounds into abstract symbols, the letters. Print is or derly progression of abstract, visual symbols. Print led to the habit of categorizing-putting everything in order, into categories, "jobs," "prices," "departments," "bureaus," "specialties." Print led, ultimately, to the creation of the modern economy, to bureaucracy, to the modern army, to nationalism itself.
People today think of print as if it were a technology that has been around forever. Actually, the widespread use of print is only about two hundred years old. Today new technologies-television, radio, the telephone, the computer-are causing another revolution. Print caused an "explosion"-breaking society up into categories. The electronic media, on the other hand, are causing an "implosion," forcing people back together in a tribal unity.
The aural sense is becoming dominant again. People are getting their information primarily by hearing it. They are literate, but their primary source is the radio, the telephone, the TV set. The radio and the telephone are obviously aural media, but so is television, in McLuhan's theory. The American TV picture has very low defini tion. It is not three-dimensional, like a movie or a photograph, but two-dimensional, like a Japanese print or a cartoon. The viewer fills in the spaces and the contours with his mind, as he does with a cartoon. Therefore, the TV viewer is more involved in the TV image than in the movie image, he is so busy running over the image with his eye, filling in this and that. He practically reaches out and touches it. He participates; and he likes that.
Studies of TV children-children of all social classes who are used to getting their information primarily by television-studies of this new generation show that they do not focus on the whole picture, the way literate adults do when they watch a movie. They scan the screen for details; their eyes run all over the screen, focusing on holsters, horses' heads, hats, all sorts of little things, even in the fiercest gun battles. They watch a TV show the way a nonliterate African tribesman watches a movie
But exactly! The TV children, a whole generation of Americans, the oldest ones are now twenty-five years old-they are the new tribesmen. They have tribal sensory balances. They have the tribal habit of responding emotionally to the spoken word, they are "hot," they want to participate, to touch, to be involved. On the one hand, they can be more easily swayed by things like demagoguery. The visual or print man is an individualist; he is "cooler," with built-in safeguards. He always has the feeling that no matter what anybody says, he can go check it out. The necessary information is filed away somewhere, categorized. He can look it up. Even if it is something he can't look up and check out-for example, some rumor like "the Chinese are going to bomb us tomorrow"-his habit of mind is established. He has the feeling: All this can be investigated- looked into. The aural man is not so much of an individualist; he is more a part of the collective consciousness; he believes.
To the literate, visual, print man, that seems like a negative quality, but to the aural, tribal man, it seems natural and good. McLuhan is not interested in values, but if anything, he gives the worst of it to the literate man who is smug in the belief that his sensibility is the only proper one. The tribal man-the new TV generation-is far more apt at pattern recognition, which is the basis of computers. The child will learn a foreign language faster than a literate adult because he absorbs the whole pattern of the language, the intonations and the rhythms, as well as the meaning. The literate man is slowed down by the way he tries to convert the sounds to print in his mind and takes the words one by one, categorizing them and translating them in a plodding sequence.
In formal learning, in schools, that is, the new TV-tribal man is at a great disadvantage, however, given the current teaching methods. As McLuhan sees it-if people think there is a bad drop- out problem in American schools today, it is nothing compared to what it is going to be like in another ten or fifteen years. There will be a whole nation of young psychic drop- outs-out of it-from the wealthy suburbs no less than the city slums. The thing is, all these TV-tribal children are aural people, tactile people, they're used to learning by pattern recogni tion. They go into classrooms, and there up in front of them are visual, literate, print-minded teachers. They are up there teaching classes by subjects, that is, categories; they've broken learning down into compartments -mathematics, history, geography, Latin, biology-it doesn't make sense to the tribal kids, it's like trying to study a flood by counting the trees going by, it's unnatural.
It's the same way with these cities the print-minded rulers keep on piling up around them, more skyscrapers, more freeways pouring into them, more people piling into them. Cities are still based on the old idea of using space efficiently, of putting as many activities into a single swath of ground as possible to make it easier for people to move around and do business with each other. To the new drop-out generation and the drop-out genera tions to come, this idea of lateral space and of moving people around in it doesn't seem very important. Even visual people have begun to lose a little of the old idea of space because of the airplane. When somebody gets on a jet in New York and flies to San Francisco in four hours, the time is so short, the idea of the space, the three thousand miles, loses its meaning. It is just like taking a "horizontal elevator," McLuhan says. In Los Angeles, with everybody traveling by car on freeways, nobody talks about "miles" anymore, they just say "that's four minutes from here," "that's twenty minutes from here," and so on. The actual straight-line distance doesn't matter. It may be faster to go by a curved route. All anybody cares about is the time.
For that matter-the drop-out generations will even get rid of the cars, says McLuhan. The car is still largely tied to the idea of space, but the TV-tribal kids aren't. It even shows up in their dances. The new American dances, the twist, the frug, and all that, ignore the geography of the dance floor. The dancers stay in one place and create their own space. They jerk, spasm, hump, and bob around in one place with the sound turned up-aural! tribal!-up into the hot-jolly hyperaesthetic decibels. Eventually, says McLuhan, they will use the same sort of pattern in the way they work. They will work at home, connected to the corporation, the boss, not by roads or railroads, but by television. They will relay information by closed-circuit two-way TV and by computer systems. The great massive American rush-hour flow over all that asphalt surface, going to and from work every day, will be over. The hell with all that driving. Even shopping will be done via TV. All those grinding work-a-daddy cars will disappear. The only cars left will be playthings, sports cars. They'll be just like horses are today, a sport. Somebody over at General Motors is saying-What if he is right?
Whole cities, and especially New York, will end too just like cars, no longer vital to the nation but . . . just playthings. People will come to New York solely to amuse themselves, do things, not marvel at the magnitude of the city or its riches, but just eat in the restaurants, go to the discotheques, browse through the galleries-
-McLuhan is having lunch at Lutece, a French restaurant at 249 East 50th Street, with four of his admirers, three journalists and a movie star. Lutece is one of the real high-powered, gleaming toothed places in New York where the culturati, the fashionati, literati, and illuminati of all sorts have lunch. The Big Boys go there. It has real wine stewards. It is so expensive, only the man who has to pay is shown the prices. Everybody else at the table gets a menu with just the dishes listed. Eat 'em up, gleaming teeth. So these people with gleaming teeth, glissando voices, lazenge-shape cuff links, peacock-colored Pucci-print dresses signed "Emilio" turn the gleams on each other and sit in there and laugh, cozzen, whisper, bat the eyes, look knowingly, slosh their jowls around at each other in the old fight to make it or make it bigger in the biggest city in the world-and McLuhan just sits out in the garden at Lutece smiling slightly, oblivious to the roiling, wearing a seersucker jacket and the plastic neckband tie, looking ahead as if . . . he were looking through walls.
Well, of course he is! The city-
"Well, of course, a city like New York is obsolete," he says. And all the gleaming teeth and glissando voices are still going grack gack grack in the same old way all around, all trying to get to the top of the city that will disappear.
McLuhan was in New York that time because two rather extraordinary men from San Francisco, Howard Gossage and Gerry Feigen, had just begun their ongoing "McLuhan Festival." The original McLuhan Festival was a kind of "happening" or "environment" in an armory at the University of British Columbia, put on by some teachers there. They were part of what is sometimes called "The McLuhan Cult"-esoteric groups of intellectuals who have . . . discovered McLuhan, in Canada and in the United States, most of them over the past three years, since The Gutenberg Galaxy came out. In the armory they suspended sheets of plastic from the ceiling, forming a maze. Operators aimed light projections at the plastic sheets and at the people walking through them, a movie projector showed a long, meaningless movie of the interior of the empty armory, goofy noises poured out of the loudspeakers, bells rang, somebody banged blocks of wood together up on a podium, somebody else spewed perfume around, dancers flipped around through the crowds, and behind a stretch fabric wall-a frame with a stretch fabric across it-there was a girl, pressed against the stretch fabric wall, like a whole wall made of stretch pants, and undulating and humping around back there. Everybody was supposed to come up and feel it-the girl up against the stretch fabric -to understand this "tactile communication" McLuhan talks about.
McLuhan Temple! McLuhan in church-the Rev. William Glenesk brings McLuhan into the pulpit of his church, Spencer Memorial, on Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights, one week night in a kind of . . . apotheosis of McLuhan cultism. Glenesk is the "hip" Presbyterian minister who has had jazz combos, dancers, sculpture graven images!-in church. He brought McLuhan in one night and put him in the pulpit and it became . . . cult! like a meeting of all the solitary souls, from the cubicles of the NYU Bronx campus to the lofts of East 10th Street, who had discovered McLuhan on their own. All these artists came in there in the great carved oak insides of the church and sat in the pews, Stanley Vander Beeck the "underground" movie-maker in an orange shirt and red polka dot tic
"It is a hot night," says McLuhan, speaking from the pulpit. "Therefore, I invite you to move forward. Heat obliterates the distance between the speaker and the audience . . ."
But of course! The heat steps up the tactile sense, diminishes the visual; the audience is no longer at ease sitting back and watching the speaker as though he is separated from them like the usual . . . visual spectacle. The artists, Vander Beeck, Larry Rivers the painter, John Cage the composer-they are all fo r McLuhan, even though McLuhan has a paradoxical attitude toward the "modern" arts. On the one hand, he says artists are geniuses who serve as "early warning systems" for changes in society's sensory balance. But at the same time, he says so -called "modern" art is always one technology behind. In the early nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution came in-the MACHINE age. The artist didn't realize that this was a new age, but they se nsed that some kind of change was taking place, and they resented it-damned machine-cog life -so they reacted by coming up with the modern art of the early nineteenth century: NATURE, all those landscapes, grazing sheep -the content of the previous technology, namely, agriculture. Modern! All these modern artists, Constable and Turner, couldn't understand why nobody had even painted these great spewy albumen cloud banks and shaggy green horizons before. In the early twentieth century the ELECTRONIC age began, and the artists, only fifty or seventy-five years behind, as usual, suddenly discovered cubism and other abstract forms, breaking up objects into planes, spheres, component parts-the content of the MACHINE age, the industrial technology of the nineteenth century. But in any case, the artist's immediately obsolete "modernism" is a sign that somethin g is changing in society's sensory balance. The artists seem to like this idea that they are the "early warning," the avant- garde, even if they are moving forward backwards.
They also like his general "culture" orientation. McLuhan started out as an English scholar, after all, and still laces his work with references to Marlowe, Rabelais, Whitman, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Joyce. McLuhan's work is really squarely in the area of biology and sociology now, but artists can take to him-he talks their language. It was the same with Freud. Pavlov never caught on with the culturati-all those damned endless clinical descriptions of dog brains. But Freud was "cultural," a lot of great business from Sophocles, Aeschylus, da Vinci, King Oedipus running around, bare-breasted Electra, all those classical lovelies. Freud wrote like an art dealer prospecting in the forbidden lands of brain physiology.
McLuhan talks the same language, and people are willing to undertake massive artistic expressions of his new science of the senses. In the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a McLuhanite named Harley Parker is designing a "pure McLuhan" gallery for displaying invertebrate paleontology, fishes and things, "a gallery of total sensory involvement," Harley Parker says, with the smell of the sea piped in, the tape-recorded sound of waves, colored lights simulating the fuzzy-plankton undersea green, "not just a gallery of data, but a total experience." In New York, Father John Culkin of Fordham University is considering sort of the same thing, a McLuhan architectural environment, only on a much larger scale, a whole communications center at Lincoln Center, the big culture temple.
But with the standard old line romantic-reactionary literati of New York-that is another story. Old doggies like Dwight Macdonald recoil from McLuhan. This man, this pop Guru McLuhan, asserts he supremacy of technol ogy, the environment, over the romantic ego. McLuhan says man succumbs to the new technologies, the new sensory balance the technologies impose, no matter how hard he fights it, even if he doesn't watch the idiot box -and I don't pay attention to ads-no matter what. The old doggies put their faces up in the air, with their eyeballs rolled back, looking for God, and moan a few howls there inside their parlor-floor brownstones at this big red fire siren going by, Marshall McLuhan.
Get this man. But if they want to get at McLuhan, they ought to forget the sanctity of the romantic ego, the last godhead of the literati, and go after him where he is actually vulnerable; one place is his idea of the sensory balance of man and the dominance of one sense over another and so forth. McLuhan is talking straight physiol ogy here, science and he has not proved that the five senses are actually set up that way. Maybe it can't be proved. As yet, there is no apparatus for measuring just how intensely the human mind is attuned to this or that sense. Knowledge about three of the senses, smell, taste, and touch, is still absolutely primitive. The sense of smell, for example, cannot be measured at all, currently. Perfume makers have to use people they call "noses" to get the right combination for different scents. They put a white smock on THE NOSE and squirt one test batch of hair spray in a tin closet and THE NOSE jumps in there, and then he jumps out of there, and they squirt another batch in the next closet, and THE NOSE jumps in there, and so on and on, with this NOSE in a white smock leaping and diving in tin cubicles-this is sensory measurement in the modern age.
The other place they might get McLuhan is in his crazy daredevil weakness for making analogies. He loves the things. He soars around making analogies. The Russians still have a basically aural, tribal sensory balance, and they like to do their spying by ear, hiding microphones in wooden American eagle seals in the American Em bassy and so forth. That seems perfectly all right to them, that's natural, but they are scandalized by something like the American U-2 flights-that is visual spying, spying by eye. Americans, on the other hand, are basically a visual people; the U-2 flights seem like the natural way to spy, but a mike in the eagle that's a scandal to the visual Americans. Beautiful McLuhan rubric -but . . .
But, all right, he may have missed the mark on this or that, but McLuhan will remain a major figure in the social sciences if for no other reason than that he has opened up the whole subject of the way the new technologies are changing people's thinking, reactions, life styles, everything. One means, well, one is in a supermarket and here comes some Adam's-apply carbuncled kid with bad hair pushing a rolling hamper full of All Detergent Man Mountain Giant Bonus boxes, and he is not looking where he is going; he is not lo oking at anything; his eyes are turned off and screened over, and there is a plug in his skull leading to the transistor radio in the breast pocket of his shirt, and he is blamming his free hand on the Giant All boxes, blam blam ble-blam blam, keeping time to the Rolling Stones, Hey You Get Offa My Cloud; somewhere inside of his skull, blam blam, plugged into some kind of electronic circuit out there, another world-and one knows, instinctively, that all this is changing people in some kind of way. Sociologists and physiologists have done practically nothing on the subject. They have done practically nothing on the way the automobile has changed Americans, as long as cars have been around. Every time sociologists have a meeting, somebody gets up and says, why doesn't somebody make a real study of the American automobile? Not just the stuff about how they're choking our cities or how they made the big housing developments possible, but how they . . . well, change people.
Not even with cars! Much less with television, radio, computers -McLuhan comes on like the only man to reach a huge, hitherto unknown planet or something, and there is so much ground to cover and so little time, all this unknown ground, mothering earthquake, swallowing everybody up and they don't even know it. That is the way McLuhan thinks of it, and he exasperates
A television executive is up in Howard Gossage's office in the firehouse in San Francisco, talking to McLuhan and saying how a couple of things he said don't fit together, they don't hold up; maybe it is the part about the Russian hidden microphones or something. McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck and opens his right hand like a century plant-
"I'm not offering this as a self-contained theory; I'm making probes. Probes. There is so much here that hasn't even been gone into, I have no interest in debating it point by point along the way. There is so much that hasn't even been explored."
Rather grand manner. He won't argue, he just keeps probing, he spins off theories and leaves them there for somebody else to debate, moving on all the time on his single track . . . but, of course. The prophet.
A lot of McLuhanites have started speaking of him as a prophet. It is only partly his visions of the future. It is more his extraordinary attitude, his demeanor, his qualities of monomania, of mission-He do esn't debate other scholars, much less TV executives. He is not competing for status; he is . . . alone on a vast unseen terrain, the walker through walls, the X-ray eye . . . TV executives. McLuhan even characterizes General Sarnoff, Generalis simo of RCA and NBC, the most powerful man in American communications, a god in the TV world, and the eyes of the government, too, for that matter-McLuhan characterizes the good General as one of the "technologi cal idiots." Sarnoff is one of those people who thinks that television is merely a wonderful tool whose impact is merely what a man chooses to do with it.
McLuhan flies all over Canada and the United States to talk to groups of five, six, twelve, well, not twelve, fourteen . . . disciples. Numbers mean nothing to him. If a thousand people suddenly turned up, it might be a bad sign-McLuhan sits in the upper room at the firehouse at a round table with six or eight people, Gossage, Feigen, Mike Robbins of Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency, Herbert Gold, the novelist, Edward Keating, editor of Ramparts magazine, not disciples-But what if he is right-and somebody asks McLuhan what he thinks of the big communications conference going on in San Francisco at that very moment, at the Hilton Hotel, a thousand people, headed by the great semanticist, S. I. Hayakawa.
"Well . . . they're all working from very obsolete premises, of course. Almost by definition."
By definition?
"Certainly. By the time you can get a thousand people to agree on enough principles to hold such a meeting, conditions will already have changed, the principles will be useless."
McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck. The Hayakawa conference . . . disappears.
McLuhan may get some of the normal chuckly human satisfaction out of putting down the General Sarnoffs and the Hayakawas of this world and bringing to package design moguls the news that packages have had it and so forth-it is hard to say. More likely, though, he is simply oblivious to the stake other people have in the things he is talking about. He seems oblivious to all the more obvious signs of status where he himself is involved. He just snaps on that Pree-Tide plastic neckband necktie in the morning and resumes his position, at the monoma niacal center of the unseen world . . .
Unseen scholars. McLuhan comes out of a world that few people know about, the world of the liberal arts scholars, the graduate schools, the carrels. It is a far more detached and isolated life than any garret life of the artists. Garret life? Artists today spend all their time calling up Bloomingdale's to see if the yellow velvet Milo Laducci chairs they ordered are in yet. Liberal arts scholars, especially in McLuhan's field, English literature,
start out in graduate school in little cubicles, known as carrels, in the stacks of the university libraries with nothing but a couple of metal Klampiton shelves of books to sustain them, sitting there making scholarly analo gies-detecting signs of Rabelais in Sterne, signs of Byron- would you believe it? in Thoreau, signs of Ovid in Pound, signs of -analogies-hunched over in silence with only the far-off sound of Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks, a townie who puts books back on the shelves-now she is all right, a little lower-class-puffy in the nose, but-only the sound of her to inject some stray, sport thoughts into this intensely isolated regimen. In effect, the graduate school scholar settles down to a life of little cubicles, little journals, little money, little chance of notice by the outside world-unless his intense exercises in analogies, mental combinations, bust out with something so . . . electrifying as Marshall McLuhan's.
Even then there is no one in the . . . outside world able to scout scholarly stars, it is all so esoteric. But McLuhan has had Gossage and Feigen, two of the most imaginative characters in San Francisco. Gossage is a tall, pale advertising man with one of the great heads of gray hair in the USA, flowing back like John Barrymore's. Feigen is a psychiatrist who became a surgeon; he is dark and has these big eyes and a gong-kicker mustache like Jerry Colonna, the comedian. He is also a ventriloquist and carries around a morbid looking dummy named Becky and is able to get into great psychological duels with strangers, speaking through the dummy. Gossage and Feigen started a firm called Generalists, Inc., acting as consultants to people who can't get what they need from special ists because what they need is the big picture. One thing that drew them to McLuhan was his belief in "generalism" -pattern recognition. McLuhan, for example, dismisses the idea of university "departments," history, political science, sociology, and so forth; he considers all that obsolete and works in four or five of the old "fields" at once. It is all one field to him. So Gossage and Feigen invested about $6000 into just taking McLuhan around to talk to people, Big Boys, all sorts, outside the academic world, on both coasts. Gossage says they had nothing particular in mind, no special goal, they just wanted to play it "fat, dumb and happy" and see what would happen.
It all turned out kind of like the way the architect in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall describes life as being like one of those whirling discs at the old amusement parks. You get on the disc and it starts spinning and the faster it goes, the more centrifugal force builds up to throw you off it. The speed on the outer edge of the disc is so fast, you have to hold on for dear life just to stay on but you get a hell of a ride. The closer you can get to the center of the disc, the slower the speed is and the easier it is to stand up. In fact, theoretically, at the very center there is a point that is completely motionless. In life, some people won't get on the disc at all.
They just sit in the stands and watch. Some people like to get on the outer edge and hang on and ride like hell-that would be Gossage and Feigen. Others are standing up and falling down, staggering, lurching toward the center. And a few, a very few, reach the middle, that perfect motionless point, and stand up in the dead center of the roaring whirligig as if nothing could be clearer and less confused-That would be McLuhan.
Gossage and Feigen were bringing McLuhan to New York last May, and McLuhan was two days late getting there. He was in Toronto grading papers for two days.
"Grading papers?" says Gossage. Gossage can see the New York panoply of lunches at the Lombardy, lunches at Lutece, men like Gibson McCabe, and God knows who all else high in the world of communications waiting for McLuhan-and McLuhan holed up imperturbably grading papers. "Listen," says Gossage. "There are so many people willing to invest money in your work now, you'll never have to grade papers again."
"You mean it's going to be fun from now on?" says McLuhan.
"Everything's coming up roses," says Gossage.
In San Francisco, Gossage and Feigen take McLuhan to a "topless waitress" restaurant, the Off Broadway, at the request of some writer from New York in a loud checked suit. Herb Caen, the columnist, is also along. Everybody is a little taken aback. There they all are in the black-light gloom of the Off Broadway with waitresses walking around wearing nothing but high-heel shoes and bikini underpants, and nobody knows quite how to react, what to say, except for McLuhan. Finally, Caen says that this girl over here is good looking-
"Do you know what you said?" says McLuhan, "Good look ing. That's a visual orientation. You're separating yourself from the girls. You are sitting back and looking. Actually, the lights are dim in here, this is meant as a tactile experience, but visual man doesn't react that way."
And everyone looks to McLuhan to see if he is joking, but it is impossible to tell there in the gloom. All that is clear is that . . . yes, McLuhan has already absorbed the whole roaring whirligig into his motionless center. And later in the day, Gossage presents the piece de resistance of the McLuhan Festival, a party in the firehouse. The first floor of the firehouse, now the lobby, is filled, and yet in there Gossage has put a twelve-piece mariachi band, with trumpets . . . En la Bodega and the mariachi players stand on the tile in their piped powder blue suits blasting away on the trumpets and Tout San Francisco is filing into the firehouse into the face of the what the hell is Gossage up to now, Santa Barranza, mariachi trumpets, the trumpet announcement of the new Darwin-Freud Einstein, Grack, En la Bodega. Then McLuhan himself arrives, filing into the firehouse, and there before him is a field of powder blue and . . . yaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhh trumpets-and Gossage sits on the stairway with his head thrown back, laughing over the spectacle, but McLuhan-well, let one see here, or, actually, not see, the auditory sense is sharply stepped up, the visual fades, just the slightest haze of powder blue-of course! one need only stop struggling with one's eyes, roil, roil, well, of course, it is clear and . . why not? serene, the new world.
from The New Life Out There by Tom Wolfe (c) 1965 The New York Herald Tribune
I. Pedagogy as a Disappearing Angel: An Introduction
My until now undeclared war with the Syracuse University administration concerning assessment and accountability began in the Summer of last year (1997). I may well have been a little late coming to the fray, given the recent appearance of an enormous literature. The deluge has been in print, in the media and on the web: for example, Robert Bellah's essay, "Class Wars and Cultures in the University Today: Why We Can't Defend Ourselves," in the July/August issue of Academe (1997); Frank Kermode's review of John Ellis' book, a review in the August Atlantic Monthly, entitled "The Academy versus the Humanities"; James Groccia's article, "The Student as Customer versus the Student as Learner," in About Campus' May/June issue; Joel Gold's article, "Student Evaluations Deconstructed," in the Chronicle of Higher Education of September 12th; Mark Edmundson's article in the September Harpers, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education as Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students"; the article in the January 16th Chronicle that reports the statistical research by Anthony Greenwald and Gerald Gilmore casting doubt upon the assumption of any value in student assessment; the article in a recent education supplement to the Sunday New York Times, "The Ivory Tower Under Siege"; the report on "Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals, and Supply-Side Higher Education," by Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter, in last Summer's issue of the journal, Social Text; and a number of remarkable recent books, including William Spanos' The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, Bill Readings' The University in Ruins, Donald Kennedy's Academic Duty, and Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.
I won't continue this litany. The data is widely known. The point is that it seemed to me in retrospect that my little battle was not a limited warfare, not a border skirmish in upstate New York. Indeed, from California and Texas to Tennessee and Connecticut, many academic professionals had personally told me that similar battles were breaking out everywhere. I suppose the convening of this third conference on values in higher education under the aegis of the thematic of assessment and accountability is itself testimony to a national tension, if not an academic not-so-civil war. Nor may the issues at stake be limited even to North America. At the end of the book, Pourparlers (translated as Negotiations), by the French theorist, Gilles Deleuze, the author bemoans the fact that education in France has turned to business for its models, that the principle of "getting paid for results" has taken over. "School," Deleuze writes, "is being replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It's the surest way of turning education into a business" (179). This is what my colleagues at Syracuse thought was happening also on this side of the Atlantic, which led me into the accountability and assessment fray.
It began as a result of my responsibilities at Syracuse University as a so-called "teaching professor" and "mentor"-a phrase and term that I absolutely repudiate as empty rhetoric and without relevance to the proper work of any university. I had mounted a July conference of colleagues at a lovely lodge in the Adirondacks. The white paper produced after three days by the two-dozen faculty in the humanities was filled with contestation and passion concerning the rhetoric of our central administration, especially having to do with calling Syracuse the number one "student-centered research university" and identifying students as customers and consumers, and faculty as service providers. The Chancellor had just before our Summer meeting written a memo to all faculty entitled: "Customer is an Eight Letter Word"! But this was not the only provocation. There had been pressure on the faculty from administrative intitiatives to identify desired learning objectives and means of assessing outcomes, a requirement to name in advance behavioral goals in the teaching of arts and ideas, that is, in courses whose aim it was precisely to remain open to discovery and surprise. I was directed by my friends at the conference to send our position-paper to the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor, the Vice President for Undergraduate Teaching, as well as to publish it on a web-page connected with my professorship. The results could not have been anticipated!
I was summoned to lengthy conversations with the Vice Chancellor and the Director of the Center for Instructional Development, attacked orally and in memoranda from the central administrative officers concerning my competence in the classroom, and addressed (or rather, dressed down) directly in three lengthy letters from the Chancellor. It seemed to be a case of kill the messenger! After the third letter from my Chancellor, I found myself in exasperation writing these irrational words to the senior officer of my University: "You cannot possibly understand the pedagogical perspectives of my colleagues and me if you cannot understand the phrase 'we have nothing to teach, no way to teach it, together with the obligation to teach.'" I meant, of course, that there are certain subject matters in arts and ideas whose nature is that they are not "things," no-things, and therefore the goals of education, at least in these particular instances. cannot be served up in a priori desired learning outcomes nor assessed as products or commodities by student-customers at the end of fourteen weeks. I was thinking that in the teaching of matters that are in principle imponderable and undecideable-subject-matters like truth, beauty, goodness, not to mention meanings and gods-commodification and thingification in assessment might be entirely inappropriate and beside the point. Many recent articulations lay behind my thought, as, for example, Mark Taylor's theological essay, "How to Do Nothing with Words," Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's chapter on Lacan by this very same title, and Jacques Derrida's now well-known Jerusalem essay, Comment ne pas parler (translated as "How to Avoid Speaking"). Also, I should add that I thought that in writing to the Chancellor I was paraphrasing a sentence by Samuel Beckett. In any case, that was the very day Professor Burstein, our host, asked me for a title for this talk.
The timing turned out to be terrible! That that sentence written in haste and in rage to my Chancellor was to become my title here was not felicitous, as will soon be apparent from my narrative. The problem was that when I searched for the reference it vanished. I could not find it anywhere! Was it a case of faulty memory, senility, or one more instance of giving a title that one would later regret, committing oneself to writing something that one could not write?
To be sure, Beckett said things something like what I thought I remembered. In Krapp's Last Tape, Krapp says: "Nothing to say, not a squeak" (25). In All that Fall, Mrs. Rooney says: "This is nothing ... nothing" (1960: 61). In Embers Henry says: "Nothing, all day nothing. All day all night nothing. Not a sound" (1960: 121). And there is the famous line in Waiting for Godot: "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" (27) There is also Estragon's line: "Nothing to be done" (14). And Vladimir's line: "There's nothing we can do" (44). They also have a back and forth in which Estragon says: "I tell you I wasn't doing anything." And Vladimir says: "Perhaps you weren't. But it's the way of doing it that counts" (38). None of this was what I sought. I had thought that Beckett had somewhere said about his vocation as an artist in our time: "Nothing to say. No way to say it. Together with the obligation to speak." Apparently he had not. What was I to do for my Tennesse talk?
I remembered a friend, Ted Estess, Dean of the Honors College of the University of Houston. He was an expert on Beckett and would surely know the referent and would be able to help. I e-mailed him my dilemma and he responded immediately. But his lead turned out to be completely off the mark. In fact, he could not find it either, and he told me that I had probably made it up. No help!
But what is a professional in the lineage of Socrates worth if she or he cannot make use of failure, or-to change the text but not the trope-is there not teacherly wisdom in the implicit advice of Lear's fool?-"What can you do with nothing, Nuncle?" This is when I thought of another dramatist, Italian rather than Irish. I mean Luigi Pirandello. When he was writing Six Characters in Search of an Author, he was presented in his imagination with six characters but no plot. So he wrote a play about that. I could do the same. I could write a speech about pedagogical responsibility and accountability using my irresponsibility and non-accountability as an example, showing that I indeed had nothing to say and no way to say it, together with the responsibility to speak. So I went to work on this nothing, only to be disappointed again. When will a person learn not to try to be clever or to force signification?
My nothing was itself naughted when my friend Estess wrote belatedly that he had found the citation! It was in a dialogue that Beckett had with Georges Duthuit. You may already suspect that I had known nothing about this source which, nonetheless, I had remembered! In the conversation Beckett and Duthuit are speaking about a surrealist French painter named Tal Coat, and they note that this artist is not painting things, but rather no-thing. Being finished with the ideals of realism, on the one hand, and symbolism and expressionism, on the other, Tal Coat-according to Beckett-had "nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." After Beckett says this, his conversation partner, Duthuit, says: "Perhaps that is enough for today" (Esslin 17).
Perhaps it should have been enough. After all, it comes close to the point that I wanted to make about teaching arts and ideas. But it was not enough for me. Who was Tal Coat, I wondered? I had never heard of this artist. There was no listing of the name in any of the art books that I owned. The art librarian and the professor of contemporary French painting at Syracuse University had neither of them heard of such a figure. Nothing, again! All of this was beginning to seem somehow like real research in the humanities, like real teaching in the humanities, where one finally never can enjoy the luxury of knowing the result, or at least one cannot ever know the final result. Gratification and closure are infinitely deferred.
However, on the virtual reality of the World Wide Web I did find a flicker. A word from an art dealer in Belgium confirmed that Tal Coat existed. He was born in 1905 in Brittany, self-taught as a painter, little understood and known, and disappeared mysteriously in 1985. He began as a realist and then became an expressionist, but moved after the war to what the web page called "allusive and fugitive manifestations" and monochromatic canvases in green, ochre and black. He loved to paint the rocks near Château Noir, the same rocks that fascinated Cezanne. I could find little else. Things were dark.
(Incidentally, I hope that you will stay with me in this narrative. There is a point here, or so I passionately hope! It's like teaching, isn't it? You never know. You just try to be accountable to the material.)
Things were indeed dark. It was literally the darkest time of the calendar year, the end of December, winter recess. I stopped trying. I tended to personal affairs instead. In fact, I believe that I was giving up on my original idea.
Christmas came with the usual tinsel and trimmings and other distractions. My mother-in-law -being accountable and responsible in regard to my wish list to Santa-gave me a new edition of the poetry of Wallace Stevens for Christmas. I thanked her appropriately and turned right away to an assessment of its contents by checking one of my favorite poems, "Angel Surrounded by Paysans." In looking at the new critical apparatus by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, I discovered a surprising footnote to the poem (1004). There was Tal Coat! When not trying, I found what I sought without knowing what I was seeking! The experience I had had was somewhat like that of the poet. Sight unseen, Stevens had in 1949 bought a still life of Tal Coat's from Paule Vidal, the daughter of a dealer who owned the Librairie Coloniale in Paris. Though it was not what he thought he was getting, Stevens became obsessed with the painting. He wrote to Barbara Church (1977a: 654): "My Tal Coat occupies me as much as anything. It does not come to rest, but it fits it." He named the painting "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" and fourteen days after receiving the Tal Coat from Vidal, Stevens wrote the poem of the same name and sent it to Nicholas Moore.
In the poem "the necessary angel of the earth" (i.e., poetry or art), through whose imaginal reality one can "see the earth again," is characterized as an "apparition" which, when we look for it, is "gone" (1975: 496-97). It is gone like the Beckett quotation, like Tal Coat, like the no-thing of ideas and imagination. Indeed, Stevens often wrote about this process of signification. "Poetry," he said, "is a pheasant disappearing in the brush." (1977b: 173) It is "the great cat that leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone" (1975: 264). It is like a "meteor" (1977b: 158), or like "an Indian [hidden] in his glade" (1975: 412), or like "a woman writing a note and tearing it up" (1975: 488). Stevens also wrote: "I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling / Or just after" (1975: 93).
I was beginning to get the hang of this, but, like some stubborn literalist or skeptic, I wanted to see the Stevens' painting in which the necessary angel which disappears when one looks for it is actually a folded napkin, or a glass of red wine, or (as Stevens thought) a Venetian glass bowl with a spray of leaves in it. I suppose that it was to be expected that I could find it nowhere. However, I did discover that Stevens' literary estate, including pictures and paintings, had been lodged in the library at Trinity College in Hartford. When I inquired after the image that I sought, a very helpful special collections librarian there told me that the Stevens' materials were no longer at Trinity. They had been moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She gave me the phone number. After some negotiation with the manuscript library at the Huntington, I was told that they would provide me with a slide of the Tal Coat painting for ten dollars and for a promise that I would use it only at this one lecture at the University of Tennessee, and with appropriate reference to the Huntington Library. I wrote a check for ten dollars and swore an oath, and so it was that I located the slide that you now see on the screen Actually, what you see is a copy (slide) of a copy (painting) of a copy (poem) of a copy (angel) of nothing, i.e., of the nothingness about which I am talking, all the while remembering the advice of Martin Heidegger that it is very difficult to talk about nothing, because in talking about it one turns it into something (19), i.e., one turns it into a desired learning objective and then it is assessable.
While searching for this image, I had located interesting comments concerning it in many of Stevens' letters. For example, Stevens wrote to Paule Vidal in Paris that he had heard that "Tal Coat is one of the few young painters from whom it seems possible to expect a new reality" (1977a: 595). To Barbara Church he commented about the painting, saying that "all of the objects have solidity, burliness, aggressiveness. ... It contradicts all one's expectations of a still life" (1977a: 654). To the French dealer the American poet wrote: "It is obvious that this picture is the contrary of everything that one would expect in a still life. Thus it is commonly said that a still life is a problem in the painting of solids. Tal Coat has not interested himself in that problem. Here all the objects are painted with a slap-dash intensity, the purpose of which is to convey the vigor of the artist. Here nothing is mediocre or merely correct. Tal Coat scorns the fastidious. Moreover, this is not a manifestation of the crude strength of a peasant.... It is a display of imaginative force: an effort to attain a certain reality purely by way of the artist's own vitality.... He [Tal Coat] ... has the naturalness of a man who means to be something more than a follower" (1977a: 655).
I hope by now you will begin to sense that all of the time-while appearing to be reporting on the Beckett, Tal Coat, Stevens triangle-I have actually been talking about teaching and about accountability and assessment in higher education, especially in the humanities. So, teaching that is properly accountable to itself and to its subject matter is like Tal Coat's painting. It is the contrary of everything that one would expect, not solid but intense, vigorous, scornful of the fastidious or the mediocre or the merely correct, a display of imaginative force, strong and natural and vital, and never following as a mere follower. It is the experience of a new reality, not what one desires or expects. Again, Stevens writes to Church, now four years later: "[Tal Coat] is so effective that the most brutal design gives one an unexpected satisfaction" (1977a: 799), i.e., not a desired learning outcome, nor anything that one can in principle assess.
II. What Counts? The Language of Accountability & Assessment
The errant wandering through Beckett, Tal Coat, and Stevens brings to mind a story told to me by my former colleague, Professor Huston Smith. Huston had taught Philosophy at MIT in the humanities program before coming to the Department of Religion at Syracuse. One day he told me about having lunch with a high-energy particle physicist at MIT. During the course of the lunch the philosopher of religion and the post-quantum mechanics scientist discovered that they had many perspectives in common on matters of cosmos, society, and self. This did not much surprise Huston, but it did surprise the physicist. What surprised Houston was the physicist's way of acknowledging his surprise. The scientist said: "Why, there is only one difference between us. You don't count!" So, counting is what counts. Assessment is what confirms value.
The play in language can provide wondrous discovery, i.e., learning and unexpected surprise in learning outcomes. There are leaps in learning hiding in words' metonymies, in the very words the people have used to name what they think that they are naming when they name things. As Martin Heidegger says: "It is not we who play with words, but the nature of language plays with us" (1968: 118-19). Wittgenstein says it this way: "A picture [ein Bild] held us captive. It lay in our language, and our language repeated it to us inexorably" (115). So, I propose for a moment to look at the two terms in the rhetoric of values assessment in the contemporary university. Take the word and the idea of "accountability," for example.
"Accountability." It goes without saying that both the noun and verb forms of the word "account" come from the noun and verb forms of the word "count," which means "enumeration" or " to compute." The family includes the words "counter" (token) and "countless," as well as the words "putative," "amputate," "compute," "deputation," "dispute," "disputant," "impute," "imputation," "repute" and "reputation." Already one can see that there is some "fight" and some disputed signification in the word before we even use it.
The base for the family is Latin putare, meaning (a) "to prune," (b) "to purify," "to correct" (an account), therefore also "to count" or "calculate." But whichever sense of putare our notion of "accounting" comes from, there is implied some pruning (downsizing?) and some implicit political correctness or Puritanical self-confidence. In the Sanskrit background, there is a relation to the family of words from which we get the word "pave," Latin paure, meaning "to beat" or "tread earth down to level it," i.e., to flatten (mediocrity, democritization). There is also a connection to the Latin puteus, meaning "a hole cut in the ground," especially "a well," from which Middle English has the word "pit," meaning a "cavity." I'll return to this cave at the end.
The compounds of putare that are relevant to English are amputare, "to prune or cut around (am- for ambi-, meaning "on both sides), so "amputation"; computare, "to count" (intensive use of con-), hence "compute" means "really to count"; deputare, "to cut downwards," so to esteem, allot, depute, as in a deputy or deputation; disputare, "to think about contentiously"; imputare, "to put into the reckoning"; reputare, "to reckon or examine accounts again and again, to think over, to credit, so to repute and reputation." There also belong to this family "recount," to count again, or to relate, by way of French reconter, since Old French conter became differentiated into French conter, to tell, and French compter, to count (Partridge 124, 476).
Think of this verbal complex in relation to the words of the poet: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." The poem actually means: Don't count! Write a poem! And don't count on it! It's the love that counts not the counting. The jazz standard says: "Will I be in that number when the saints go marchin' in?" But in the singing there is implied the advice: Don't count! The number 144,000 is not a number, not a numbering. It means to discourage adding things up, like merits. Luther mounted a reformation against that. It you start counting, you might miss the rapture! (I'm speaking about education, not religion.)
"Assessment." There are similar problems with the language of assessment. If one were to bring the perspectives from the business and commercial world, the world of "total quality management," to bear upon assessment in the university, then one might first observe that it is not very high quality management to use the word "assessment" when what one really means is "evaluation." The term "assessment" has become empty jargon, meaning nothing, a real miracle term.
The word has actually referred to courts (a judge assesses a fine) and taxation (as in the assessment of property). In the former case, guilt is assumed and it is just a question of how much one is going to have to pay. In the other case, it is assumed that one should pay and it is just a question of how much. I well realize that this term has passed from business and commerce, from law and government, into the vernacular and that it merely means "evaluation." I realize, too, that to say "evaluate" education and teaching is not a rhetoric that is inflated enough to make university administrations sound like they are doing something out of the ordinary. But does the university want to ignore precision of ideas and language? Do we really want to use a term that carries these negative, if unconscious, connotations about behavior? Are we accountable about accountability? Are we willing to assess assessment?
There are some philosophers and theorists who have argued that language speaks, not the people who use language. These thinkers have argued that, even if we wanted to, we couldn't be Alice's Humpty Dumpty, who said that words would mean whatever he intended them to mean. Confucius-during a moment of cultural confusion in ancient China-called for a "rectification of names" in the land, for a proper use of language, without which, he seemed to believe, there could be no justice, or truth, or beauty.
The point about language is linked to the story of Huston Smith, who didn't count, according to the pun of his MIT colleague! Smith has argued passionately in his later life and writings for the important value of being accountable to matters that are precisely un-countable. According to Smith, the unassessables-at least in quantifiable and empirical terms-are the following: (1) qualities, (2) invisibles, (3) meanings that are existential as opposed to cognitive, (4) purposes that are metaphysical as opposed to teleonomical, and (5) values that are normative rather than descriptive. In my view, the experiences that some teaching professionals cherish for students have precisely to do with quality, invisibility, existential meaning, metaphysical purposes, and normative values. For these professors-on Smith's view-education is in principle not assessable.
I should like for a few moments to amplify Smith's point in regard to our conference thematic. For the sake of brevity, I will put these reflections in the form of aphorisms or epigrams. I believe that it was Michelet who said that an epigram is a half-truth so said as to irritate the person who believes in the other half. Perhaps there is a half truth in Michelet's saying, but it is not my purpose to provoke you, but rather to provoke thought, things to think about and to talk about at the beginning of our deliberations together at this conference.
III. Aphorisms
* There is too much talk about teaching these days. It all leads to self-consciousness. No one knows what teaching is. It always must be thought in terms of something else. Metaphor and metonymy are need. Imagination and vision. Not counting and assessment.
* Teaching is like baseball. Even in the majors it's not baseball very often. Most of the time it's pretty boring. But sometimes it is baseball. And then it is really something. While waiting for it to be baseball, what does one do? One plays second base as best one can. Outcomes assessment implies that the value in baseball is that it be baseball all the time. It also implies that the players can control it. But that's not the way things are. Even for the pros. People who call for outcomes assessment don't understand the game. They don't understand the nature of the game.
* There are two things that one learns from baseball: (1) You don't have to swing at every pitch. (2) You know when a pitcher (professor) is tiring when the ball starts rising. It takes a lot of energy and concentration to keep it down. Letting it soar is easy.
* What is impossible is to undertake an evaluation of value in higher education if one takes one's eye off the subject matter and puts it instead on the performance of the teacher and/or the student. Education is not the passing of information from one person who has it to someone who does not. It is not the trading of databases. Rather, the subject matter is a vessel into which the professor and the student place themselves together. And then they see what happens. They observe and take note. It is like alchemy. One cares for the process in the alchemical vessel. It is like two people being in love.
* To speak of "improvement" in teaching is nonsense if the eye is really on the egos of the professor and the student rather than on the subject matter. Do we "improve" the subject matter by our activity? The irony is that attention to desired learning outcomes and to outcomes assessment produces in fact just what it sets out to eradicate: namely, emphasis on the professoriat rather than on the student. Assessment is a narcissistic endeavor. It is not student-centered. It puts the focus of consciousness on questions like "How am I doing?" and "How can I improve?" We are only student-centered when we have enough regard for the student to focus on the subject matter and to trust students to take care of themselves. They are not stupid. And they are not children.
* In education, as in love, sometimes the only way to improve the quality and value of education is to stop focusing on oneself and to stop asking, "Am I doing it well?" Such ego-consciousness can ruin learning just as it can be a pain in the neck to the lover. When the child says, "Look, Ma, I'm dancing!" she or he is no longer dancing. It is the same with teaching and learning, not to mention loving. If you ask about it, you are not doing it.
* Teaching in the humanities is like the fire-consumed stick in Buddhism. A disciple once asked the Buddha how one should approach his teachings, given that the overall aim of the Buddha's teaching was non-attachment, including non-attachment to the teachings! The Buddha replied that his teaching was like a stick that keeps the fire going, stirring the coals, until the stick is itself consumed by the fire. The stick disappears, like Wallace Stevens' angel. There is nothing in the end to assess, if the teaching is really successful.
* Confucius said: "Do not wish for quick results, nor look for small advantages. It you seek quick results, you will not attain the ultimate goal. If you are led astray by small advantages, you will never accomplish great things" (Smith 159). There are no quick results in education. If an educator seeks a quick result, the ultimate goal of great teaching is not accomplished. No assessment is worthwhile until many years have passed. And then the need for assessment has passed anyway.
* The great teachers-Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Maimondies, al-Ghazzali, etc.--- confounded expected outcomes and in principle and iconoclastically made assessment impossible. They would have failed in our current attempts to focus on values in education. Their expected outcome was to make impossible the achievement of outcomes that were expected before the teaching began. One desirable learning outcome is not to have a desired learning outcome.
* Think of the parable of the sower in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 4.3-9). It is the various soils that get in the way of the sowing. Or the birds. Not the sower. Imagine assessing the outcome of sowing by evaluating the sower!
* Teaching is improv, like good jazz. Does one ask a jazz musician for objectives, goals, outcomes, and ways to achieve outcomes assessment? Good scat is not playing it, but playing with it. In scat, as in glossolalia, the discourse is non-mimetic. Good teaching is scat. It is like speaking in tongues. The tongues of the material.
* Jazzman Wynton Marsalis, introducing Benny Carter at the Kennedy Center awards in December 1996, said: "A man should not be forced to live up to his art." The same is true of professors, which is only one thing wrong with the demand for continual assessment.
* Being interesting and enthusiastic are not necessarily marks of a good course or teacher. They may well be marks of educational fraud. A famous Rabbi, commenting angrily on reports of his renown for preaching, said: "God forbid that I should ever 'talk well'" (Ettin 183-84). This is tantamount to saying: God forbid that I should ever be a good teacher in terms of conventional criteria of assessment. Then I would not have taught at all.
* There is a sign hanging on a bulletin board down the hall from my office. It announces "Teaching Tools for the Nineties!" and it promises that if you get these tools your outcomes assessment will be more successful. This sign of our academic times puts me in mind of a line from the 1960 Phi Beta Kappa oration at Columbia University by Norman O. Brown. Brown was recapitulating the values expressed in Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa lecture entitled "The American Scholar." In the light of those values, Brown announced "Fools with tools are still fools" (9).
* Continual assessment and a demand for accountability are symptoms of a sickness, symptoms of the very sickness that they are meant to cure: namely, they are signs that the intrinsic value of education is not sensed or affirmed, that it must be proved. Even when pedagogy fails--as it did again and again with Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Jeremiah, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, and the Buddha--the attempt to assess learning outcomes is likely the worst possible indicator of accountability, at least in the case of certain pedagogies in certain subject matters. Socrates got hemlock in the assessment; Jesus, the cross; Moses, no promised lands; and so forth. It is even arguable that a negative assessment may indicate that important learning is taking place. It is like the putative course evaluation by a professor at Columbia. One of the questions he asks his students at the end is the following: Tell which text you liked the least, and explain what character flaw in you accounts for this dislike!
* The political correctness of the eighties has become the pedagogical correctness of the nineties.
* If one wanted an assessment of value in teaching and learning, one might ask the professional. That is, one might ask the professor how she or he knows when it is going well. But even here one must be careful. Long term psychoanalysis reveals that the conscious and volitional ego is almost always wrong. Or rather that it is partially correct. It is one-sided. There is always at least one other narrative of what is taking place. We egos cannot be in on it.
* Thomas Green-a renowned philosopher of education-once told me that he thought that the only useful question to ask students in course evaluation was the following: What will you now not put up with that you would have put up with before taking this course?
* Any teacher worth her or his salt makes assessments and takes account of the teaching long before making course evaluations or assessing results. Assessing goes on during teaching-mid-course, mid-class, and even often mid-sentence. I call these mid-course corrections, a phrase so crucial to aviation, without which activity the flight would not work. Defining goals or learning outcomes in advance is an unnatural way of defending against natural mid-course corrections. It is a defense against the sensitivity that makes great teaching what it is, always and already. It can make me believe that I don't have constantly to be assessing or, as Wittgenstein said about meaningful discourse, constantly having to take back what is said.
* A great teacher-Jesus-once said regarding outcomes assessment: "Judge not that you be not judged!" (Matthew 7.1)
* There is no learning outcome in ideas. Kant in the Critique of Judgment called the goal of thinking ideas a "purposeless purpose [Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck]" (55). In this sense every course in arts and ideas is purposeless. Useless, at least in a utilitarian sense. A course in ideas is in a way successful to the extent that expected learning outcomes are iconoclastically deconstructed, i.e., insofar as they are not achieved. As Plato said in the Meno: If you know what you are seeking, you are already there and there is no point to the seeking. If you don't know what you are seeking, you might discover something, but you will never know if it was what you were after (299-301). There is no way to judge it.
* A Korean dance group was touring the United States during the past year. The program announced that in Korea this group is referred to as an "intangible cultural product." Teaching in arts and ideas produces an intangible cultural product.
* Teaching is like the German word Funktionslust. This word means the pleasure of doing as distinct from the pleasure of attaining an effect or outcome.
* Looking for the uses of higher education in identifiable student outcomes is usury. We may need a Protestant Reformation in American colleges and universities. As in earlier history, usury has to do with money. So it is in the contemporary American university. (See Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology," in Margins, the discussion of "usury" at the beginning of the essay, and compare his comment on assessment in Archive Fever, page 36: "If we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come.")
* Imagine the identification of desired learning outcomes written by the chef or by Alice Waters on the menu of Chez Panisse, or announced by the conductor of the Boston Pops in the program notes before a concert, or articulated by a Zen roshi before a two-week sesshin. Try to imagine these and you will see how silly and inappropriate is the attempt to identify desired learning outcomes in the teaching of arts and ideas in any serious university, i.e., a university that takes its students and its pedagogical work seriously.
* Since every class is different, identification of desired learning outcomes based on a concept of identification that implies an unconscious metaphysics of sameness and presence is a category mistake. (See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference.)
* The colleges and universities that advertise student- or teaching-centeredness aren't. Their faculties are increasingly under pressure to prove and to assess, to name rather than to do. Their eye is off the ball. The students (as students) are losers. The students are not honored as scholars.
* In the ancient world an important distinction was made between teaching (didachê) and preaching (kêrygma). The latter is done in a loud voice, as when the herald (kêrux) announces the winner at the Olympic games, whereas the former is whispered. Preaching, is aimed at outsiders who need conversion, whereas teaching is for those already converted, as in catechetical instruction and debate. Preaching, according to old Rabbinic convention, is done while standing, whereas teaching should be done sitting down (see Miller 111-17). So preaching is "standing up for" something and its aim is to convert the student to what the preacher imagines is the true opinion or faith (orthodoxy), while teaching is, so to say, "sitting down into" the matter at hand. Preachers, on this view, can identify desired learning objectives in advance, but teachers cannot. In being asked to identify in advance desired learning objectives and assessing the results thereof, academics are being asked to be preachers, not teachers.
* I have already mentioned some great teachers of ideas whom I imagine would not do well in outcomes assessment in the contemporary university-Jesus, Socrates, the Buddha, al-Ghazzali, Dogen, Maimonides, Moses, and so on. Let me pause over one more image of accountability in higher- (or perhaps deeper-) education. I am thinking of a Greek archetypal image of great teaching: the figure of Silenos. Behind Christ the great teacher, according to Erasmus (Benz 1-31), and behind Socrates, the great teacher according to the Platonic Alcibiades (Plato 1982: 219-45), there is Silenos, tutor to Kings Midas and Solon, to the god Dionysos, as well as many others.
IV. Silenos: Archetypal Image of the Teacher & Teaching
It is not any easier to find Silenos, archetypal image of great teachers and great teaching, than it is to find a painting by Tal Coat of Stevens' disappearing angel or Beckett's nothing. The reason is that Silenos hides. He hides his real identity (a clue for teachers everywhere), being part animal, half some satyr horse, or perhaps half some goat like Pan. He sleeps in a deep cave. He does not publish, nor does he teach. (Beware teachers that like to publish and that like to teach. They may be preachers and not silenic teachers).
Though Silenos hides and has nothing to say, Aelian (Varia historia 3.18) and Virgil (Eclogue 6.14-15) say that he can be snared. Especially he can be trapped into teaching by using garlands of flowers, as do the Naiads. King Midas managed to obtain his teaching by making him drunk, as if the intoxication were already the appearance of some tutor or some tutelage (Pausanius Guide 1.4.5). The nymphs know where he is, as Apollodorus attests (Library 2.83-85). Karl Kerényi thinks that the silenic nature is the "seat of the comic" (195), as if great teaching were somehow ineluctably or deeply comedic.
Difficult as it may be to locate Silenos (i.e., teaching) in life, he nonetheless appears. He is teacher to king and fool, to lawmaker and lawbreaker, to sober hero and to mad maenad. He instructs the gods and goddesses themselves. As the Orphic Hymn (Orphica 53) witnesses, he is honored by all. He is a teachers' teacher. Perhaps it is just because of this fact that he was reticent to show himself, as if this quality goes with great teaching.
Yet Silenos' secret was not well hid. Two things are universally said about him by Pausanius, Ovid, Plutarch, Cicero, Theogonis, Bacchylides, Sophocles, Plato, and others, though at least Plutarch (Moralia 115-B-D) mentions that it would be better were we not to have ever learned these two things about the great teacher's teaching.
The first thing is that he was a drunk, a heavy man, saturnine. He was known to drink-or so goes the tale-for ten days and ten nights without stopping. However, the drunkenness was special in Silenos' case. It is, for example, to be distinguished from that of Dionysos, as Otto notes (177). In order to describe Silenos' particular drunken nature, an Orphic Hymn uses a phrase that was already employed by Aeschylus (Agamemnon 740), Euripides (Bacchae 115), and Plato (Theaetetus 153C). The phrase is galênioôn thiasoisin, i.e., a "deep stillness," like the calmness deep within a stormy sea.
The second thing known about Silenos is that he only had one teaching. He taught that the best thing for all women and men is not to be born! However, since none of us has ever succeeded very well in this lesson, the second best thing is to die as soon as possible! How can this be a great teaching of an archetypal great teacher? What can it possibly mean?
Perhaps the teaching is connecting with the teacher, with the intoxication of Silenos, the intoxication of a deep stillness. When Philo a little later is puzzling over the report in the Hebrew Bible concerning the drunkenness of Lot and Noah, how their intoxications served the purposes of God for the people of Israel, he uses an unusual phrase, nêphalios methê (Plant. 162f; Vit. Mos. 1.187; 2.162). The Greek translates literally as "sober drunkenness." It is a drunkenness, Philo says, by which the self is led to itself deeply, more deeply than ego's perspectives. This may be similar to galênioôn thiasoisin, "deep calm." What is stilled or calmed is ego's desired objectives. In the experience of a deeper intoxication, egoic attitudes, values, opinions, and beliefs are sobered, i.e., in the intoxication of authentic learning, one is sobered. The "I" goes to sleep in the cave. It has so-to-say "died" so that another sense of things can be raised up. The best thing would be that egoic perspectives would not be born at all. The next best is that they die as soon as possible in order that a breadth and depth of otherness may amplify one's views in intoxicating ways. This surely is a not insignificant teaching about teaching. (For sources to material in this section and the next, see Miller 111-53).
It is this lesson that Alcibiades thought that his teacher, Socrates, had learned. He compared Socrates to Silenos by referring to a Greek toy. In the ancient world there were little statuettes of Silenos, fat little figures that came apart in the middle. When one opened them, there were empty. Nothing there. This is the same nothing that I was referring to at the beginning. The fun of the toy was that the empty center was filled with many little figurines representing all of the gods and goddesses. Silenic emptiness was full of divinity. No wonder Silenos was intoxicated.
The archetypal image of the great teacher is that she or he be empty of preachings and preachments, ego's or society's cherished attitudes, standpoints, and beliefs. In this emptying there is a resonance, like the sound box of Wallace Stevens' blue guitar. What resonates are other melodies and harmonies, ideas and values that transcend any particular teacher or teaching.
Conclusion: The Education of a Chrysanthemum
Tao Yuan Ming seemed to know the Silenic emptiness, indicating that the lesson of nothingness is by no means limited to the Occident, to Silenos and those other silenic teachers, Socrates and Jesus. Tao Yuan Ming lived in the 14th centruy in China. He was a poet, and he loved children, chrysanthemums, and wine. He was drunk constantly, and like Pu Tai and all those other fat and laughing Buddhas to follow, he was a great teacher. He modeled his life on that of P'eng Tsu, the great grandson of Chuan Hsu, who had ninety wives and was eight-hundred years old when he went over the hills to the West (Payne 129-31). Tao Yuan Ming says of P'eng Tsu: "Ceaseless drunkenness brings forgetfulness" (Payne 135), i.e., forgetfulness of ego.
In the "Elegy for Myself," the poet writes: "All I regret is that I didn't drink like a prodigal" (Payne 142). In the poem, "Drunk and Sober," there are these lines:
A guest resides in me,
Our interests are not altogether the same,
One is always drunk,
The other, awake;
We laugh at one another,
And do not understand one another's worlds" (Payne 138).
When the part of the self that is awake is put to sleep in a cave, then out of the emptied cave can come a more intoxicating perspective.
In his poem "Chrysanthemums," Tao Yuan Ming writes:
The wine is poured,
And the cup is empty,
And everyone is silent
At the setting of the sun (Payne 143).
A full cup can't be filled. In the famous Zen story, the master served tea to the student, but he kept pouring when the cup was filled and overflowing. The student said, "But my cup is already full!" And the master bowed and said: "Yes, I can't fill a full tea cup." He sent him away, presumably to empty his cup, to die as soon as possible. This is the importance of the nothingness for true value in education.
Tao Yuan Ming wrote a poem called "The Return."
I empty the cup and lean on the window,
And joyfully contemplate my favorite branches (Payne 144).
If the cup is emptied, then out of the new openness one can see the chrysanthemums. It is seeing the chrysanthemums that is the intoxication of education, the value of education. It is to the flowers and the flowerings that we teachers must be finally accountable. It is to the intoxication that the value attaches, not to my intoxication, but to that of the flower and the blooming.
Teaching sobers ego's perspectives, for student and professor alike. As the Christian mystic, Angelus Silesius said: "The rose is without why. It blooms because it blooms" (Scheffler 54). No whys, or becauses. No assessment. How could one assess the beauty of a chrysanthemum? The intoxication of the bloom is outcome enough. That's what counts. The intoxication is where the value is. In this we die to outcomes assessment, to the desired learning objectives of students, administrations, boards of regents or trustees, parents, and especially ourselves. Finally, we are accountable to no one and to nothing, except to the subject matter and its intoxications.
This is Silenos' wisdom. Die as soon as possible, that is, give up ego's ideology, its desired learning objectives, and give it up as soon as possible so that education can take place. Or a chrysanthemum!
[The image of "Still Life" by Tal Coat from Wallace Stevens' collection of paintings and prints is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.]
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Last updated: July 10, 1998
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