The Image (36 page)

This suggested to my public relations counsel friend another example of the same problem. A client had decided to move his plant away, and therefore to change his public relations counsel to a firm in the city where his new plant would be located. This client telephoned my friend, explained the situation, and asked that he ghostwrite a letter to be sent to the head of the public relations firm, explaining the situation, enumerating his regrets, and generally keeping up the image which the firm had helped him build up over the years. My friend wrote the letter. A few days later the head of the public relations firm called in my ghostwriting friend, told him he had a piece of bad news, namely, that Mr. X was moving his firm away and would have to drop their services. But, the boss said, there were only the warmest feelings (as he had just learned from the letter he had received); now he wanted my friend to draft a nice letter which he as head of the firm could send, explaining
his
regrets that the business connection was being terminated. My friend remarked that he was probably the highest-paid man ever employed to write letters to himself.

We have heard ours called an age without direction—a “directionless” age. It would be better to call us the age of indirection. Everything I have described helps us produce secondhandness. We make, we seek, and finally we enjoy, the contrivance of all experience. We fill our lives not with experience, but with the images of experience. The most popular—most “functional”—styles of modern architecture are not necessarily those most comfortable to live in, but always those which photograph well. “Money,” we are told on the radio by a “friendly” personal loan company promising to give us cash without security so we can rid ourselves of
worrisome debts—“Money is the magic ingredient that gives you financial status.”

The awkward monstrosities of our everyday speech betray the secondhandness of our way of looking at everything. We no longer talk about something; we talk “in terms of” it. In an organization a man is no longer important; he is “at the policy level.” What we seek, we are told, is no longer wealth or glory or happiness, but a sociological concoction called “status.” We do not simply “believe”; instead we talk of “the values we hold.” We cannot do something in our spare time, we must cultivate it as a “hobby.” We do not study music or art or literature; we study the “appreciation” of music or art or literature. We do not rest; we “seek relaxation.” We are not asked to go see our Ford Dealer, but rather to “visit our local dealership.” We no longer do a job; we play a role. We do not learn parental virtues; instead we are prompted on how to “play the role of” parents. We less often say we like a man or find him sympathetic; instead we prefer to observe that he has “made a good impression on us.” We do not simply plan to meet again; we must arrange to “set up” another meeting. We do not find a person; we “contact” him. We do not discuss a problem; we look at it “policy-wise.”

The technology of our daily lives has, of course, prepared us for all this. When we have a letter from a person, it is no longer in his own hand (as it would have been if Franklin or Washington or Jefferson had written us); it is a typewritten, mimeographed, or Thermofaxed image of what he has written. Often it is a transcription not of his writing at all, but of the words he spoke into his dictaphone, copied by a secretary he has not seen. The voice we hear, more and more often, is not in the physical presence of the speaker, but a sound in a telephone receiver, or from a phonograph record, or over radio, or on television.

This is the age of contrivance. The artificial has become so commonplace that the natural begins to seem contrived. The natural is the “un-” and the “non-.” It is the age of the “
un
filtered” cigarette (the filter comes to seem more natural
than the tobacco), of the “
un
abridged” novel (abridgment is the norm), of the “
un
cut” version of a movie. We begin to look on wood as a “
non
-synthetic” cellulose. All nature then is the world of the “
non
-artificial.” Fact itself has become “
non
fiction.”

But people—even twentieth-century Americans—will not so supinely allow themselves to be deprived of the last vestiges of spontaneous reality. By a new residual effect, then, we become doubly interested in any happenings which somehow seem to offer us an oasis of the uncontrived. One example is the American passion for news about crime and sports. This is not simply an effect of the degradation of public tastes to the trivial and the unserious. More significantly, it is one expression of our desperate hunger for the spontaneous, for the non-pseudo-event.

Of course, many sports events become pseudo-events; and some (professional wrestling, for example) have actually flourished by exploiting their reputation for being synthetic. But there still remain many areas (for example, amateur sports and professional baseball) where we have succeeded to a certain extent in guarding the uncorrupted authenticity of the event. Our outrage when we find that a boxing match was rigged or that an amateur basketball team was bribed comes not merely from our feeling that our morality has been violated. It also expresses our angered frustration at being deprived of one of our few remaining contacts with an uncontrived reality: with people really struggling to win, and not merely to have their victory reported in the papers.

The world of crime, even more than that of sports, is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted spontaneous event. Of course there are rare exceptions (the planned “violators” of law for political purposes, like the suffragettes, or more recently the Freedom Riders in the South). But, generally speaking, crimes are not pseudo-events, however industriously they may be exploited by the press. Only seldom are they committed for the purpose of being reported. Quite the contrary, a man who commits a murder or a rape, who
robs a bank, or embezzles from his employer, hopes to get away with it. Our hunger for crime news and sports news, then, far from showing we have lost our sense of reality, actually suggests that even in a world so flooded by pseudo-events and images of all kinds, we still know (and are intrigued by) a spontaneous event when we see one.

The same quest for spontaneity helps explain, too, our morbid interest in private lives, in personal gossip, and in the sexual indiscretions of public figures. In a world where the public acts of politicians and celebrities become more and more contrived, we look ever more eagerly for happenings not brought into being especially for our benefit. We search for those areas of life which may have remained immune to the cancer of pseudo-eventfulness.

O
NE OF
the deepest and least remarked features of the Age of Contrivance is what I would call the mirror effect. Nearly everything we do to enlarge our world, to make life more interesting, more varied, more exciting, more vivid, more “fabulous,” more promising, in the long run has an opposite effect. In the extravagance of our expectations and in our ever increasing power, we transform elusive dreams into graspable images within which each of us can fit. By doing so we mark the boundaries of our world with a wall of mirrors. Our strenuous and elaborate efforts to enlarge experience have the unintended result of narrowing it. In frenetic quest for the unexpected, we end by finding only the unexpectedness we have planned for ourselves. We meet ourselves coming back. A Hollywood love triangle, according to Leo Rosten, consists of an actor, his wife, and himself. All of us are now entangled with ourselves. Everywhere we see ourselves in the mirror.

Some schools of philosophers have long told us that all experience consists only of the images we have in our mind.
This has been expressed in various forms of Neoplatonism. In the eighteenth century it was given classic modern expression by George Berkeley (1685–1753). In his
New Theory of Vision
(1709) he argued that what we see is not simply the imprinting on the mind of the characteristics of external objects, but the mind’s reconstruction of the fragmentary visual signs received, into the images which alone make sense to the mind. He went on to argue that only these mental images were “real”—and anything in the whole world was therefore real only insofar as it was held together in the mental experience of some being. According to him, the all-imaging, all-perceiving being was God. But, though we are not philosophers, we can see a difference between what bothered Berkeley and what bothers us. Even if we agree with Berkeley that all experience everywhere in some special sense consists of nothing but images, there remains a great difference between the older philosopher’s world of omnipresent images and our own. The difference is not that never in the past has it been possible persuasively to describe experience as consisting only of mental images. Rather that such an overwhelming proportion of the images
we
live among have been contrived by man himself.

More and more of our experience thus becomes invention rather than discovery. The more planned and prefabricated our experience becomes, the more we include in it only what “interests” us. Then we can more effectively exclude the exotic world beyond our ken: the very world which would jar our experience, and which we most need to make us more largely human. The criterion of well-knownness overshadows others, because the well-known is by definition what most people already know. We seek celebrities, not only among men and women, but even among books, plays, ideas, movies, and commodities. We make our whole experience a “
reader’s
digest” where we read only what we want to read, and not what anyone else wants to write. We listen for what we want to hear and not for what someone wants to say. We talk to ourselves, without even noticing that it is not
somebody else talking to us. We talk to ourselves about what we are supposed to be talking about. We find this out by seeing what other people are talking to themselves about. “All I know,” Will Rogers remarked in the earlier days of the Graphic Revolution, “is what I read in the papers.” Today he might modernize his complaint: “All I see in the papers is what I already know.”

We have all heard the story of how, once upon a time in ancient Greece, a handsome youth named Narcissus was beloved by Echo, a mountain nymph. She died of a broken heart when he spurned her love. The gods decided, then, to punish Narcissus; they doomed him to fall in love with his own image. A soothsayer predicted that Narcissus would live only until the moment when he saw himself. This was, of course, in the days before photography or television. And the only way they could make him see himself was to have him see his own reflection in the limpid waters of a spring one day as he was leaning over it. When he saw his reflection his passion for this phantom so obsessed him then and there that he could not leave the waterside. On that very spot he died of languor. His name was later given to the flower which grows at the edge of springs, whose bulbs were supposed to be a sedative. Through the Greek word which means numbness or stupor (
narke:
whence “narcotic”), love of a self-image is closely connected with languor, sleepiness, and inactivity.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

How can we flee from this image of ourselves? How can we immunize ourselves to its bewitching conceitful power?

This becomes ever more difficult. The world of our making becomes ever more mirror-like. Our celebrities reflect each of us; faraway “adventures” are the projections of what we have prepared ourselves to expect, and which we now can
pay others to prepare for us. The images themselves become shadowy mirror reflections of one another: one interview comments on another; one television show spoofs another; novel, television show, radio program, movie, comic book, and the way we think of ourselves, all become merged into mutual reflections. At home we begin to try to live according to the script of television programs of happy families, which are themselves nothing but amusing quintessences of us.

Our new New World, made to be an escape from drab reality, itself acquires a predictable monotony from which there seems no escape. This is the monotony within us, the monotony of self-repetition. Our tired palates will not let us find our way back. When we look for a “natural” flavor all we can find is one that is “non-artificial.” We become more and more like the character (described by the English wit, Sydney Smith) who had spent his youth “in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.” A juvenile critic recently said that television was “chewing gum for the eyes.” In the late nineteenth century a bitter critic called cheap novels “the chewing gum of literature, offering neither savor nor nutriment, only subserving the mechanical process of mastication.” But chewing gum (an American invention and an American expression) itself may have a symbolic significance. We might say now that chewing gum is the television of the mouth. There is no danger so long as we do not think that by chewing gum we are getting nourishment. But the Graphic Revolution has offered us the means of making all experience a form of mental chewing gum, which can be continually sweetened to give us the illusion that we are being nourished.

More and more accustomed to testing reality by the image, we will find it hard to retrain ourselves so we may once again test the image by reality. It becomes ever harder to moderate our expectations, to shape expectations after experience, and not vice versa. For too long already we have
had the specious power to shape “reality.” How can we rediscover the world of the uncontrived?

W
E ARE DECEIVED
and obstructed by the very machines we make to enlarge our vision. In an earlier age, an architectural symbol of small-town, growing America was the friendly front porch. In our day, the architectural symbol of our domestic life is the picture window. The picture window is as much to look into as to look out of. It is where we display ourselves to ourselves. When from the outside you look in, what you usually see is not people going about their business, but a large, ornate, tasteless electric lamp, which during the day prevents the natural sunlight from coming in. When we look out our own picture window, if we do not see our neighbor’s garbage pail, we are apt to see our neighbor himself. But he too is apt to be doing nothing more than looking at us through
his
picture window.