Beckett and Television: In a Different Context

Sociologist Manuel Castells's sweeping 1,445-page, three-volume study, under the general title The Information Age, details the ways in which the rapid development and proliferation of information technology over the past two decades has created radically new social paradigms that call into question traditional societal structures and individuals' relations to communal organizations as well as their personal perceptions of self. "Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self," Castells writes in his introduction to volume 1. "The Net," a term covering the ever-expanding networked communication media, he defines as fluid and constantly changing, while the "Self" is in a constant search for some fixity or certainty, now that the primary markers of identity - sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial - are no longer clearly delineated or self-evident. This bipolarity between Net and Self has given rise to a condition Castells describes as "structural schizophrenia," in which "patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress" (3).

Although Samuel Beckett died in the late 1980s, just at the dawn of the period Castells surveys, when the information highway was still little more than a two-lane road, his writing already reflected the bipolarity and resultant social and personal schizophrenia technological advances brought in their wake. Beckett's earliest fictional narrator, Belacqua Shuah, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, may call for "[t]he facts - let us have facts, facts, plenty of facts" (32), but his narrative illustrates that the more he knows the less he understands and can tell about himself or the world. Under a deluge of details, the very scaffolding of the fictional form itself collapses, burying with it - Beckett makes clear - the belief that information can clarify. In 1949, two years before Marshall McLuhan published his first media study, The Mechanical Bride, Beckett had already written a play that staged the impending confrontation between the new technology and the individual: Lucky, in Waiting for Godot, caught in "a net," suffering from informational overload, spewing out facts and regurgitating the words and ideas of others, his thinking reduced to performance on demand, with accompanying dance steps, ending, finally, in silence. The image, no less than the play itself, illustrated Beckett's awareness of how all fact-based systems (like the one he had experienced close up in Vichy France) and like the languages on which they are built, have the potential to entrap and render mute those caught in their "net."

Beckett and Castells seem to be addressing similar concerns about the estrangement and disorientation caused by modern technology's impact on social institutions and personal identity. However, whereas Beckett focuses on the malady, Castells in his massive study makes a case for the amelioration of the "dis-ease." After ranging the globe for examples, he concludes that the proliferation of information systems allows for the possibility of new social and political groups to develop and thrive in "the culture of real virtuality" technology has created, which facilitates "the human spirit reunit[ing] its dimensions in a new interaction between the two sides of the brain, machines, and social contexts" (1: 328). Committed as Castells is to a belief in rationality and "the chances of meaningful social action, and transformative politics" (1: 4), he sidesteps any shadow of scepticism that might threaten to destabilize the solid foundations upon which his data rest.

Beckett also talked of "spirit," telling Patrick Bowles in 1955 that "[w]hat counts is the spirit" and that "people are not in touch with their spirit"; but he defined the condition not as "the contemporary malaise" but rather as "the malaise of all time" (qtd. in Knowlson and Knowlson 110), the artist incapable of "reunit[ing] its dimensions" through technology, as Castells posits, able only to point to the chaos or "mess" (qtd. in Driver 218). That does not mean that Beckett avoided the use of technology in his plays. On the contrary, technology became one of the means by which he attempted to "admit the chaos and ... not try to say that the chaos is really something else" (qtd. in Driver 219...