‘The Inward Revolt of the Native Creatures of the Soul’

In 1909 E. M. Forster, (1879–1970), published ‘The Machine Stops’, a story set in the future and which is remarkably prophetic, telling as it does of a world functionally directed toward information, much like ours; although not quite so prophetic, at least not yet proven so, in that it is a post-apocalyptic world in which most of the human race are no longer able to live on the Earth’s surface and are underground, each one isolated in their own cell, every cell adjacent to another cell, like a beehive, all enclosed within immense subterranean cities, the various strata of which encompass the entire world; and all their material and immaterial needs are catered for by a supreme, much revered, universal Machine.

The story focuses on Vashti, ‘a swaddled lump of flesh…with a face as white as a fungus’, a lecturer who, as the story begins, is about to deliver a lecture on ‘Music during the Australian period’, whatever ‘the Australian period’ might be. After sitting in the dark while conversing with her son, Kuno, (by a kind of video link, of course; her son lives on the other side of the world), she is feeling lonely. However:

‘Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world’.

Despite her isolation, Vashti has plentiful occasions for correspondence with others by electronic means; either one-to-one, or one-to-many, and in real time, with audio and visual display. Forster, in effect, foretells of the internet and of instant messaging. And of video conferencing, as lecturers continuously beget and disseminate second-hand ideas; Forster’s prophetic skills are markedly perspicacious here, (one could almost venture to say, anticipatory of Google search):

‘Beware of first-hand ideas!’ exclaimed one of the most advanced of [the lecturers]. ‘First hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution’…. ….. ….. ‘And in time’ — his voice rose — ‘there will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation

seraphically free

From taint of personality

which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would have liked it to happen, but as it would have happened had it taken place in the days of the machine’.

In every cell there is an instruction manual, the Book of the Machine, with instructions on which buttons to press, to mitigate any disquiet that may surface through living in dependency on the Machine. But anxieties persist, as they must, in particular when having to cope with the anticipation of a non-virtual encounter. Kuno, the rebel, for every dystopian tale needs at least one, persuades his reluctant mother to brave a voyage by airship to his cell, (and to brave also the consequent disagreeable personal interaction); he has something to say, and he insists that it is to be said to her in person. Forster relates an incident that occurs on the airship, as Vashti is disturbed by sunlight through the window:

‘People were almost exactly alike all over the world, but the attendant of the air-ship, perhaps owing to her exceptional duties, had grown a little out of the common. She had often to address passengers with direct speech, and this had given her a certain roughness and originality of manner. When Vashti swerved away from the sunbeams with a cry, she behaved barbarically — she put out her hand to steady her.

‘How dare you!’ exclaimed the passenger. ‘You forget yourself!’

The woman was confused, and apologized for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine’.

Forster is foreshadowing Jean Baudrillard’s, (1929–2007), theories of mediatization; the mass mediated simulation of reality, and in particular the mass mediated manufacture of non-communication, (as opposed to the view of the media as an open forum of immediate communication).

But what is meant by ‘communication’, and what are the necessary conditions fot it to be successful. Roman Jakobson, (1896–1982), produced a model of communication functions that are necessary if communication is to be accomplished:

1.CONTEXT

2. TRANSMITTER — — — — — -) 3. MESSAGE — — — — — — — ) 4. RECEIVER

5. CHANNEL

[ENCODER] 6. CODE [DECODER]

One of these six functions always predominates in any given communicative sign system. For instance, with №5. CHANNEL, the so-called ‘phatic function’, if I say ‘hello’ I am opening a communication channel, or if I remark on the weather, ‘turned out nice again’, I am merely checking the channel, or if I say ‘goodbye’, I am closing the channel. Or №6, CODE, the so-called ‘metalingual function’, in which language is being used to characterize itself. And so on.

But this, it may be objected, is to formulate lived experiences as abstract ideological categories. And for actual communication to occur, there has, of course, to be a reciprocal sphere for both speech and response to be effected. Yet №2. TRANSMITTER, (the ‘poetic function’, how the message is encoded and used, which is the operative function of poetry), and №4. RECEIVER, (the ‘conative function’, a direct engagement with the receiver by the transmitter) are, according to Baudrillard, severed and then reconnected factitiously through the media; it is a simulation model of communication:

‘Each communication process is thus vectorized into a single meaning, from the transmitter to the receiver: the latter can become transmitter in its turn, and the same schema is reproduced. Thus communication can always be reduced to this simple unity in which the two polar terms are mutually exclusive’.

There is speech, but there is no response:

‘…they speak, or something is spoken there, but in such a way as to exclude any response anywhere. This is why the only revolution in this domain — indeed, the revolution everywhere: the revolution tout court — lies in restoring this possibility of response’.

But what is meant by ‘response’? What about polls, letters to the editor, TV or radio phone-ins, etc.? Not to mention comments that I may or may not receive for this post (a scathing or abusive response is always to be preferred to no response at all, in my view, not that I am wanting to put ideas into anyone’s head, not those sort of ideas anyway). The internet is, however, a mere speeded up rendering of non-communication. Genuine response implicates the possibility of reciprocity, that is real communication; not the interplay of codes, nor the feedback typical of TV or radio, nor YouTube comments; nor YouTube videos, for that matter: ‘everyone making their own cinema: a kind of personalized amateurism, the equivalent of Sunday tinkering on the periphery of the system’, as Baudrillard said, (in 1981, long before YouTube). The code still prevails.

‘The medium is the message’, Marshall Macluhan, (1911–1980), famously said. Rather, the medium is not the message, the medium is the model. Or, ‘the map precedes the territory’, as Baudrillard, also famously, said.

‘The danger with TV’, said J. G. Ballard, (1930–2009), in 1988, ‘is that it predigests and pre-empts any kind of original response by the viewer. It just feeds the viewer a kind of reality. (It has in fact become the new reality, just like processed food has become the staple diet of many people in the West). This force feeding makes us rather like a lot of bullocks in pens’.

Or like Vashti and Kuno in their cells.

J. G. Ballard’s, (1930–2009), ‘The Intensive Care Unit’, published in 1982, takes the mechanization of human relationships and our dwindling responses to real, unmediated life as its theme; and, like Forster’s story, it depicts a world in which everyone is isolated, living alone and communicating via their television sets, (anticipatory of webcams). In this world, for reasons of security and hygiene, human contact is only possible through the medium of television; all interaction is mediated, through personal cameras; conversation even with an intimate, (if that word has any real meaning here), requires logging onto a personal TV channel; couples meet through video link up, they conduct their courtship and eventual marriage ‘within the generous rectangle of the television screen’, they produce their children by artificial insemination. Ballard writes:

‘These admirable conventions eliminated all the dangers of personal involvement, and this liberating affectlessness allowed those who so wished to explore the fullest range of sexual possibility and paved the way for the day when a truly guilt-free sexual perversity and, even, psychopathology might be enjoyed by all’.

But, every dystopian tale needs its rebel; in this case it is the narrator, a paediatrician, compelled by that all too human trait of curiosity, who begins to entertain the improper notion of meeting his family in the flesh. He should have been forewarned, by his first attempted meeting with his wife Margaret, not so much an encounter as a mere viewing of one another from a distance: ‘I knew from her expression that Margaret was as surprised by my appearance as I was by her own. In addition, there was a curiously searching look in her eye, an element almost of hostility that I had never seen before’.

‘During the next few days’, the narrator recounts, ‘I reflected painfully on the experience. Far from bringing us together, the meeting had separated us. True closeness, I now knew, was television closeness — the intimacy of the zoom lens, the throat microphone, the close-up itself. On the television screen there were no body odours or strained breathing, no pupil contractions and facial reflexes, no mutual sizing up of emotions and advantage, no distrust and insecurity. Affection and compassion demanded distance. Only at a distance could one find that true closeness to another human being which, with grace, might transform itself into love’.

Nevertheless, curiosity compels. The narrator pushes against the confines of his mediated life, despite his fondness for it, only to discover the perilous social and psychological state of affairs that technology delivers; a serviceable rationality so easily annihilated by the turbulence it aspires to subdue. The narrator’s family is brought together, and the effect of an unmediated interaction is even more extreme than it is for the characters of Forster’s story. Overloaded by too much reality, they try to kill each other, hacking at each other with scissors, or whatever other weapons are to hand. The narrator concludes the tale, while awaiting another attack: ‘With my right arm I am probably strong enough to take on whoever survives the last confrontation between my wife and daughter. Smiling at them affectionately, rage thickening the blood in my throat, I am only aware of my feelings of unbounded love’.

Ballard anticipates reality TV, in which the borders between the private and public spheres disappear; the sense of self as modified by electronic media; YouTube, the medium through which every one of us can fabricate and assume top billing in our very own situation comedy (or perhaps tragi-comedy); and, of course, social media, that enables us to transmit to the world the interior of our own heads.

‘We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves’, said Gilles Deleuze, (1925–1995). ‘In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying ‘What’s wrong? Say something…’, or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. … Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements’.

And the prophecy within Forster’s prophetic story, that ‘there will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless’, has come to pass’.

‘For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys’, said D. H. Lawrence, (1885–1930), ‘minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces’.

Baudrillard, while not conceding a triumph to technology over humanity, describes a communications technology that has a function to perform to our advantage; the endless circulation of self-referential mediatized codes, within which circulate the simulacra, or images and signs that are no longer weighed down by the burden of the real. But in both Forster’s and Ballard’s stories, the individual is dehumanized, immersed within a domain of absolute mental and physical self-sufficiency that in each case proves to be unfeasible and unliveable. And in Forster’s story, the Machine eventually stops, grinding to a halt, and bringing civilization, if that is an appropriate term here, down with it. Vashti and Kuno encounter one another outside of their ruined cells; and, before their ultimate demise, they succumb to the realization that it is men and women and their attachment to the natural world that is of real importance; and now it rests with those living on the surface to reconstruct the human race, and to prevent the aberration that was the Machine from recurring.

‘They talk of the triumph of the machine’, D. H. Lawrence wrote, ‘but the machine will never triumph’. He continues:

Hard, hard on the earth the machines are rolling,

but through some hearts they will never roll.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

…. against this inward revolt of the native creatures of the soul

mechanical man, in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine

will be powerless, for no engine can reach into the marshes and depths of a man.

So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine

will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day

the machines will turn to run into one another

traffic will tangle up in a long drawn-out crash of collision

and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life

will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down.

Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate, remote places

the swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head

and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his wings

will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky glitter of a new day

and the lark will follow trilling, angerless again

and the lambs will bite off the heads of the daisies for very friskiness

But over the middle of the earth will be the smoky ruin of iron

the triumph of the machine.