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15 November 2006
{ Progress, part 1 }
The idea of human progress informs the decisions and actions of civilizations, societies, and cultures. Faith in progress legitimizes moral codes, strengthens belief systems, and justifies nearly every human pursuit. Especially from the perspective of Western civilization, whose history is marked by a deep-rooted fixation on the prospect of individual and collective progress, it may seem intrinsic to “human nature.” Hunters become farmers, communities form, languages evolve, religions spread, laws are made and broken, nations devour nations, science expands and is articulated, technologies are born, and man consumes; the story of human development plays out as an inevitable and relentless process. (Those who have proposed to resist or reverse this momentum, as did Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, have found their ideas highly criticized by their contemporaries.)From a theoretical standpoint, the idea of progress is anything but innately human. Rather, its conception accompanied the birth of the historical perspective—or in other words, the birth of the idea of linear time. This, of course, implies a period of existence “predating” historical consciousness. Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser (whose communication theory will be discussed at length in this paper) describes prehistory as a “whirling time.” Circular in structure, this period was marked by the supremacy of patterns, whose perpetuation enabled mediation of—and ultimate control over—existence. Flusser explains:
“In the whirling time of prehistory, everything kept repeating, like day and night and day, or like sowing and reaping and sowing… Whenever something or someone left its or his appropriate place in the universal order, he was returned to the right place in the course of time and by means of time.”
The transition from prehistorical to historical consciousness (by way of an intermediary period that Flusser refers to as “proto-history”) was fueled by an evolution in the way man visually oriented himself in the world. Prehistorical societies created images to facilitate comprehension of man’s position among all other things. Although these images were originally created as representations of things, their significance in man’s experience of the world eventually began to overshadow the significance of the things themselves. To a certain degree, this “image crisis” was the result of confused authorship: “As people ‘forget’ that they have created the images,” Flusser writes, “the images begin forcing people to view the concretely experienced world as an orientation in the images.”
As a remedy to the image crisis, which had precipitated an “existential detachment from the world,” proto-historical societies began creating new codes that they could use to orient themselves within their images (and thereby within the world that they represented). Thus the alphabet, along with linear writing, was developed as a means of describing images, the intent being that it would make them once again “transparent” and purely representational. As the new linear codes solidified, the messy proto-historical period gave way to historical consciousness: “Script projected its own linear structure, its lines, upon the world, just as images had once projected their own scenic structure, their surface upon it. Time stopped whirling, and it began to stream in an unambiguously linear direction.”
Returning to the idea of human progress, it becomes clear that a prehistorical consciousness (at least as defined by Flusser) would work in opposition to any attempt made by man to alter his relationship with nature or to evolve socially. Cyclical inevitability, the “Ultimate Judge” of prehistory, would eventually return all things to their places. The birth of historical consciousness replaced this circularity with linearity, putting into practice theories of cause and effect, origin and destination, past and present, then and now. The accumulation of time, experience, and growth could be recorded and stored in the public memory. With a linear model in place, the story of human progress could begin.
In the thousands of years that followed the birth of history, linear models were employed extensively and proved incredibly efficient and productive, giving rise to new agricultural and industrial methods and shaping government systems and religions. They were, in a word, progressive. Very gradually, however, the imperfections of linear models began to surface, causing, among other things, the subtle deterioration of agricultural resources and leading to the dramatic overthrow of various governments. And although the breakdown of linear systems was neither universal nor universally recognized, there arose a need for new models of progress.
The failure of linear models can be explained—and new models can be proposed—from the perspective of Flusser’s theory of communication.
to be continued...
[ posted by Matthew Chrislip at 21:42 : 0 comments :
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