Man and Technology: Toward the Measurement of a Culture by Edward Goodwin Ballard (review)

250 Books Culture as Polyphony. An Essay of the Nature of Paradigms. James M. Curtis. Univ. of Missouri Press, London, 1978. 194 pp. $18.75. Reviewed by Nicholas Mann* The central problem facing the cultural historian, as E. H. Gombrich has remarked, is that ‘noculture can be mapped out in its entirety, and yet no element of culture can be understood in isolation’. The solutions that have been proposed have almost inevitably been aprioristic ones: from Hegel’s Volksgeist to Burkhardt’s higher principle of generality soaring above multifarious problems or Huizinga’s spirit of the age, it has been tacitly assumed that a synthesis must be present in the mind before any analysis can begin. In this, the paradigm that Curtis proposes, adapted from T. B. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, does not differ radically: It is the implicit prerequisite to perception that must itself be perceived by the historian before he can integrate the phenomena that he wishes to understand into the global vision that his paradigm permits. The culture of the ‘post-modern’ age has its own peculiar polyphony of disparateelements tracing their own melodic paths and yet somehow belonging together in harmony. Elvis Presley and Feodor Dostoyevsky, mediated (in one sense) by Marshal McLuhan, are the aspects of Curtis’s personal cultural heritage that he seeks to integrate, with others, into an overall vision of 20th-century consciousness that starts, of necessity, from the premise that ‘any contemporary paradigm that makes holistic claims must have the capacity to deal ... with popular culture as an aspect of social process.’ He begins by exploring the characteristicsof paradigms and, in particular, that of the non-linear paradigm imposed by the discoveries of Einsteinian physics, which, by breaking down the separation of space, time and matter, and fusing them into a single dynamic continuum, allows cultural historians of the 1950s and 1960s to see their material as a series of energy transformations. What were formerly seen (in Newtonian days) as linear dichotomies are now resolved into non-linear binary pairs forming (by analogy with electricity) a series of fields that are themselves structured totalities or wholes. Thus, the nonlinear paradigm is one that views the universe as a reflexive process of energy transformations, a total synthesis within which it is possible to detect a multiplicity of smaller but similar systems-including cultural ones-each of which can be investigated independently ofothers. But sciencedoes not suffice,for as Delong says, ‘no non-poetic account of the totality of which we are a part can be adequate.’ Curtis detects the first embryonic and unconscious manifestations of such a paradigm and of a holistic view of culture as a single organism in the German Romantics and explores Hegel’s belief in art as a more complete revelation of truth than ordinary experience; he notes that, when Michelson disproved the aether hypothesis in 1881, he heralded the demise of absolute space. But it is above all Nietzsche and Bergson whom he sees as undermining the Kantian belief in the homogeneity of time and space, each in his own way aware of art and laughter as forces that can integrate the old linear dichotomy of Apollonian reason and Dionysian frenzy into a single binary continuum. The same continuum, expressed as a dynamic, non-linear and allembracing ‘will to art’ affecting and synthesizing culture at all levels, from the highest abstraction to the most primitive, marks Worringer’s decisive abandonment, in Abstruction and Emputhv (1908). of the old view of Renaissance culture as the peak of a linear progression. Art history too becomes holistic: For the 20th-century, art is non-propositional cognition, integrating the individual and his environment into a single synthetic vision that is neitherdiscursive nor descriptive, sothat in T. S. Eliot’s words. ‘the great poet, in writing himself, writes his time’. In polyphonic parallel with this artistic development is the belief that technology is an extension of humans. Hinted at by Hegel, it owes its origins more directly to Ernst Kapp, who in 1877 hypothesized that ‘objectsof consciousness return to man’s interiority.. .and become part ofinteriority’, that perception is a circuit. For Bergson, the circuit embraces technology: Humans...