The Advancement of Life

The second volume of Mumford's The Myth of the Machine marks the end of our brief detour into the philosophy of technology that reading Simondon unexpectedly inspired.  While I enjoyed seeing the continuation of Mumford's contrarian perspective as well as the powerful rhythm his writing develops as this volume progresses, I did eventually feel that reading the two books together became a bit of a drag.  Halfway through volume 2, we have well and truly got the point ... and yet there are still 200 pages to go.  This makes the latter half of the book read more like sermon than analysis, and I think in a way this was Mumford's intention -- to issue, towards the end of his career, a clear warning about the trajectory of our technical development, and provide at least some star by which to chart a new course.

For Mumford, recorded history is the story of the antagonism between the MegaMachine (MM) and Life.  In volume 1, we followed the birth of the MM in the Pyramid Age.  Based on a combination of violence and religious myth, Pharaoh invented a centralized power system capable of welding together human beings into a single massively productive machine.  While everyone could (and still can) see the impressive accomplishments of this machine, Mumford's seminal contribution is to point out that this increase in quantitative power entails a radical reduction in qualitative human potential.  The MM treats objects like humans, man!  Its rigid bureaucracy and division of labor literally mechanizes the human individual, reducing them to a source of work.  And this concentration of work is directed towards the religious project of literally sending Pharaoh out of this world.  In short, both in terms of means and ends, the ancient MM is anti-life.

Volume 2 traces the reconstitution of the MM in modern Europe following its period of medieval hibernation.  As the subtitle of the book indicates (The Pentagon of Power), this process culminates in the massive productive and destructive capacities of a globally dominant nuclear-armed nation state at the height of the cold war.  For Mumford, there's not any fundamental difference between Pharaoh and Flag.  Each has built a machine whose purposes are no longer aligned with the lived experience of the humans who compose it.  While Robert McNamara may have replaced Imhotep, each is also still giant centralized bureaucracy run by an elite priesthood.  And each must find some way of consuming its own massive overproduction, whether this be through war, conspicuous consumption, or some other immortality project like mummification and its modern equivalent, putting whitey on the moon.  Finally, each machine aspires to be cosmic and unlimited, to make number go up, to mechanize and optimize everything it touches.  This increase in quantitative power is not a means to a particular end, but becomes an end in itself.

When I state Mumford's idea in the form of such a simple analogy between Pyramid and Pentagon, there are a host of objections that crowd the mind.  We're a democracy, not some afterlife obsessed theocracy!  Capitalism is not a centralized bureaucracy!  Egyptians ate just beer and bread, not oysters and arugula!  Today our machines work for us, not vice versa!  There's undoubtedly a lot of truth in all these objections.  Indeed, when you start to look carefully, Mumford is rather vague on who exactly is responsible for the modern MM.  Is it just capitalist corporations?  The modern welfare state?  Our culture of consumption?  Nor does he really try to tease out each of these forces as individual components that interact to form a complete and closed system.  Does the MM even constitute a system?  We could use a great deal more analysis of the differences in the way power is constructed in these two cases.  Winner's book goes some of the way towards this analysis, though as I pointed out, I think his ideas need to be supplemented with something like Simondon's thoughts about reciprocal causality as the principle by which things come together as a system.

Yet, in a way, focusing on these objections risk obscuring the most important lesson that Mumford has for us.  However we analyze its construction, I think many of us are aware of something 'mechanical' about the way our modern world operates.  We sense that something is wrong with our visions and our institutions, we feel that despite all our 'goods' and our powers something is spinning out of control.  And while these might be artifacts of our anxiety, we know that we are missing out on something, that there is something more than the superficial possessions and accomplishments our society offers us as an image of the good life.  There's something deeper, larger, something ... spiritual ... that seems to be continually pushed into the background by the modern world.  This vague thing is just what Mumford means by Life.  

He never really defines this term of course, except by way of contrast with the mechanistic world view of the MM.  But obviously it has something to do with an organic model of self-organization and, perhaps more importantly, self-transcendence.  This latter is less about leaving this world than reconstructing it along new lines.  For Mumford, what ultimately defines the human is our ability (and need) to continuously transform our self, to develop beyond what we've been given.  Life is a process of qualitative transformation that only gradually expresses itself in a quantitative and material way (the epilogue sketches this 'dialectic' of etherealization and materialization).  In short, we transcend the self, not the world.  So life can never be measured by simple quantitative power.  Even though in a sense it shares the MegaMachine's obsession with more, in this case it is a more of difference and variation rather than a fixed material repetition.  Mumford's main contribution is to eloquently warn us of the MM's tremendous reduction of the power of life to a single dimension.  He recalls us instead to an ideal of organic plenitude, a constant overflowing, a sort of exuberant aesthetic overproduction that is necessarily consumed on the spot. 

In a way, this means that what's most interesting about the MM is its constant failure.  So far, it has never managed to completely regularize, reduce, or 'stamp out' life.   Its every step in this direction seems to produce new problems for it, new horizons over which it lacks control.  It reincorporates these into its system in which there is no true outside but only raw material waiting to be processed, crystalized, as it were, into the ever-growing body of the machine.  But new ones always seem to crop up, sometimes singly, and sometimes like mushrooms after the first heavy rain.  While it requires our struggle, life seems to have at least a fighting chance. 

The analogy between the MM and a crystal is an interesting one for a number of reasons.  First, it captures something of the way we've talked about technology as a sort of frozen teleology.  Machines materialize goals, but in a way that can make the end point hang around much longer than is useful.  Second, it gives us a nice image of the seemingly irresistible exponential growth of the MM that doesn't require anthropomorphizing it in the form of Pharaoh or some other all-devouring mythical beast.  A crystal just crystalizes. If conditions are right, it spreads along an expanding surface, catalyzing a phase shift in its medium.  This is just nature taking its course.  Third, as a corollary, it helps us understand how the MM can be an inorganic system.  The crystal doesn't have any negative feedback mechanism that would allow it to establish an equilibrium or sense of self identity.  If possible, it grows without limit, but this is not even the act of self replication possible for the simplest amoeba.  So while we can identify the crystal as a particular system, it's not one that has any interior, much less a center.  Perhaps this helps with the problem I brought up in discussing Winner and that we remarked on earlier in questioning the exact composition of Mumford's MM -- which one is autonomous?  While there seem to be many agents involved in the MM that we might consider autonomous entities who act as if they are preserving a self (like corporations or states), the system as a whole just seems to convert everything into the raw materials that allow these entities to 'feed'.  We're getting pretty poetic and speculative here, but can we image the MM as system like a spreading fire that roasts humans enough for digestion by the various agents that we often mistake for the system itself?  Fourth and finally, thinking of the MM as a crystal gives us a clear image of why it never succeeds in overcoming life.  Not only is there always more un-crystalized material, but material that was previously crystalized doesn't necessarily stay that way forever.  We might even wonder whether pieces breaking off the crystal are the necessary building blocks of life itself.  So the analogy might even lead us to take a more non-dual view of the relationship between the Machine and Life -- perhaps both are necessary components of the advancement of a broader life.