And that is by forcing man
To acquire the adequate technology
With which ultimately
To attain and sustain
That potential omni-success.
And until then it will be accomplished inversely—
Through activating humanity's
Death fearing instincts.
Fear forcing it to acquire
The adequate production-tool complex
As a consequence of inducing humanity
Into an investment and reinvestment
Of its best capabilities and resources
Only in preparation for war.
This inverse procedure will regenerate
To ever higher degree
Both the more-with-less energy processing
And its production equipment.
And when man learns, if he does
To initiate the more-with-lessing
Under peacefully purposed auspices
Peace then will be attained
And Universe sustained
But not until then.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Preface
The question what is life, says Norman O. Brown, turns out to be the question what is sleep. We perceive that the sky exists only on earth. Evolution and human nature are mutually exclusive concepts. We're in transition from the Industrial Age to the Cybernetic Age, characterized by many as the post-Industrial Age. But I've found the term Paleocybernetic valuable as a conceptual tool with which to grasp the significance of our present environment: combining the primitive potential associated with Paleolithic and the transcendental integrities of "practical utopianism" associated with Cybernetic. So I call it the Paleocybernetic Age: an image of a hairy, buckskinned, barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-generated holograms or krypton laser interferometry. It's the dawn of man: for the first time in history we'll soon be free enough to discover who we are.
When we saywe actually mean expanded consciousness.does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections.isn't a movie at alclass="underline" like life it's a process of becoming, man's ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialize in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationships in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind.
At this point in the Paleocybernetic Age, the messages of society as expressed in the intermedia network have become almost totally irrelevant to the needs and actualities of the organism. The situation is equivalent to one's own nervous system transmitting erroneous information about the metabolic and homeostatic condition of one's own body. It is the primary purpose of this book to explore the new messages that exist in the cinema, and to examine some of the image-making technologies that promise to extend man's communicative capacities beyond his most extravagant visions.
We'll begin with a discussion of the individual's relationship to the contemporary cultural environment in a time of radical evolution, and the way in which an irresponsible attitude toward the intermedia network contributes to blind enculturation, confusion, and disharmony. In the section of Part One titled "Art, Entertainment, Entropy" I've applied cybernetics and communication theory to the role of commercial entertainment in our radically evolving environment. The prevailing messages of the so-called popular media have lost their relevance because a socioeconomic system that substitutes the profit motive for use value separates man from himself and art from life. When we're enslaved to any system, the creative impulse is dulled and the tendency to imitate increases. Thus arises the phenomenon of commercial entertainment distinct from art, a system of temporarily gratifying, without really fulfilling, the experiential needs of an aesthetically impoverished culture.
The mass public insists on entertainment over art in order to escape an unnatural way of life in which interior realities are not compatible with exterior realities. Freedom, says Brown, is fusion. Life becomes art when there's no difference between what we are and what we do. Art is a synergetic attempt at closing the gap between what is and what ought to be. Jacob Bronowski has suggested that we "ought to act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so." This characterizes the substance of Part One, and is why I call it "The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment."
Before we can discuss that point at which the cinema requires some new technological extension we must first follow the history of conventional film language to its limits: this I have attempted to do in Part Two, "Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama." The essence of this chapter is that technology is decentralizing and individualizing the communication channels of humanity; that personalized communication means the end of "official" communication structures such as the genre of drama, resulting in a new "major paradigm" of cinematic language that I call the synaesthetic mode. Following a detailed analysis of synaesthetic cinema there's a section titled "Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass-Audience Age." Here I've attempted to illuminate some of the social and psychological potentials inherent in the decentralization of global communications facilities. The conclusion is that the art and technology of expanded cinema mean the beginning of creative living for all mankind and thus a solution to the so-called leisure problem.
In Part Three, "Toward Cosmic Consciousness," I discuss various new realities, primarily the result of scientific developments, which until recently the artist has not been able to engage in a meaningful fashion. This chapter also contains a discussion of the "new nostalgia," a post-Existential view of the human condition. Finally, I've contrasted two approaches to cinematic cosmic consciousness: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the small personal films of the master, Jordan Belson.
Two of the most important technologies that will provide access to the new realities of the Paleocybernetic Age will be discussed in Part Four, "Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films," and Part Five, "Television as a Creative Medium." I've attempted to cover these disciplines as comprehensively as possible, presenting the social, political, and psychological implications as well as their aesthetic and technical aspects. Thus the many interviews with artists and technologists are intended to counterbalance my subjective remarks and to provide a cross section of attitudes concerning the confluence of art and technology as it is today and as it will be tomorrow.
Part Six, "Intermedia," has more to do with attitude than technology. The intent here is to illuminate a universal trend toward the concept of artist as ecologist, art as environment rather than anti-environment, subsuming the eco-system of our planet itself into the art process. Finally with Part Seven, "Holographic Cinema," we arrive at the end that is also a beginning. I've tried to dispel many of the misconceptions regarding holographic movies, and to delineate some possibilities. With the perfection of holographic cinema within the next two decades, we'll arrive at that point in the evolution of intelligence when the concept of reality no longer will exist. Beyond that the cinema will be one with the life of the mind, and humanity's communications will become increasingly metaphysical.
Although I've been involved in film criticism since 1960, the major substance of this book is the result of articles published in different form in the Los Angeles Free Press from September, 1967, to December, 1969. That material was rewritten for this text, expanded and clarified, in addition to the several hundred pages that appear here for the first time. We are transformed by time through living within it, so in a sense all of this book is "new" in my work.