spread - new underground guerrilla experimental art + literature

By Taylor Stoehr (reprinted from adbusters.org)

You're asleep, but you don't know it...sleepwalking, wandering along behind the little animals, to the sound of Bobby Goldsboro singing...

Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.

"A penny for your thoughts," my mother used to say, throwing me into confusion. Even if I wasn't thinking something I shouldn't be, I was reluctant to reveal my private world. Later in life my intimates did not use exactly the same expression, but I've rarely been asked to explain the faraway look on my face without feeling a little jolt.

Another intrusive saying of my mother's was "Don't study with the radio on." My own experience taught me that my mother was right. I couldn't pay attention to my favorite late afternoon shows and also to my homework.

If you ask people today why they turn on the radio when they get into the car or listen to the tape deck while washing the dishes, the answer is usually the same. The primary activity engaged in seems boring, a form of drudgery or marking time, and the background medium, usually music, allows the chores to be accomplished with less sense of their dreariness.

By far the greatest proportion of media used as background or secondary activity occurs during periods devoted to what Ivan Illich has called "shadow work," the labor that people living in modern market economies routinely do as an unpaid complement to industrial production and distribution. According to Illich, shadow work:

...comprises most housework women do in their homes and apartments, the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework of students cramming for exams, the toil expended commuting to and from the job. It includes the stress of forced consumption, the tedious and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the preparation for work to which one is compelled, and many of the activities usually labeled "family life." (Shadow Work, 1981)

Commuting, shopping, simply waiting for one's needs to be recognized and serviced by the system -- these are the categories of primary activity for which the media provide secondary background, to allay boredom, isolation, and the sense of not really "being there." The media suggest that you are somewhere else, vicariously in some other life, while you go through the required motions, or sit through the immobility of your own shadowy world. In the long history of people making music while they work, for its rhythm, for comradeship, for protest, for pleasure, and for solace -- very little of it was meant to deaden awareness of work itself. Even chain gangs and field slaves surely sang less for oblivion than to affirm their common bonds, often their bonds of discontent. By contrast, Muzak insulates workers from one another, discouraging conversation and setting a metronome beat that has nothing to do with pace of work or consciousness of other people.

Not so many decades ago shops of hand workers, cigar makers for instance, would choose someone to read aloud from newspapers and books while they worked. One is tempted to call this "literary Muzak" for the sake of the irony, but of course the living presence of a reader, and the communal nature of the event, make it an utterly different phenomenon: the "program" is produced and consumed on the spot by the community itself. As with work songs, there is no question of divided attention, foreground and background. Instead of a drone in the ears competing with a chore for the hands, we have shared imagination forwarding mutual endeavor.

A curious development in the use of media as buffer or anodyne for the rest of life is the recent channeling of television's flow into the background. Although estimates vary, it seems that people devote themselves exclusively to watching only one hour out of every five that the set is on. The rest of the time something else is happening -- eating, talking, reading. Almost a third of all television viewing is secondary, mere background for some other activity. The household set is switched on each day, like an electric fan in hot weather, and simply drones away while people do whatever they would otherwise do -- dress, eat, tend the children, converse, work, nap, read the paper. Late in life even my mother forgot her old caveat and used to listen to the radio with the television going in the same room!

This noise is now everywhere, starting with the radio-alarm in the morning and flowing along with the commuter's car radio, Muzak at the supermarket, transistor radios at the beach, and rental videos for family time on the weekends. Joggers run to the rhythms of personal stereos and trans-Atlantic flights offer continuous audio-visual stimulation to complicate your jet lag. Most people assume this situation is completely benign, part of the great panoply of choice spread before the lucky consumers in the modern half of the world. (I do not want to argue the case for regarding media dependence as addiction. Obviously there is a range of habit and reinforcement here that is very great; readers can easily test their own place on the scale by going without the media for a week or two.) My object is simply to look more closely at some of the unnoticed effects of the use of electronic media as an accompaniment, in background or foreground, to other activities.

I suggest the media have the power to entrance because they usurp the mental space of daydream and meditation, which are among the natural forms of passive attention to inner and outer worlds, along with brooding, expecting, wishing, worrying, despairing, and so on. All of these, side by side with the active attention of curiosity and appetite, and the determined pursuit of meaning, make us who we are.

It is widely accepted by sleep researchers that nocturnal dreaming, whether we think of it physiologically or psychologically, is a requirement of the organism almost as critical as sleep itself. Systematic interruption of the dreaming phase of the normal 90-minute sleep cycle (recurring all night) can cause serious psychic disturbance.

Although the evidence is sketchy, there is some indication that daydreaming occurs on the same 90-minute cyclic model, though its ocular component is the opposite, a fixed stare rather than the rapid eye movements that go with dreaming. No one has made the effort to measure the dependence of mental well-being on daydreaming, but the analogy to nocturnal psychic economy makes us suspect some connection.

Psychologists who study daydreams have usually taken Freud's lead, focusing on content and attempting to tie it to life circumstance: that daydreaming develops out of the childhood propensity for make-believe play. Freud believed that children's play was primarily rehearsal for adult behavior. The evidence is there for all to see, and we cannot doubt the importance of such play, found in every culture. In adulthood, this function of make-believe play is undermined by its own success. "What if?" impulses are no longer acted out but banished to a fantasy world where they intermingle with memory, planning, brooding, and the rest of private experience.

We might suspect that a visual medium like television, used as background experience, must either crowd out daydream and other visual imagery, or else supply the fantasy materials and be the daydream.

Also prominent among the attributes of daydream is the story like structuring of its materials. Again, there is an obvious parallel to the narrative method of television, where one might say that instead of being fantasized privately, make-believe is acted out as it was in childhood. But in childhood we acted out the stories ourselves. What is missing in these public "dreams" supplied by television or film is the element of play. The formula stories of the media pull fantasy into line and keep us from dancing off on private paths.

Most media only pretend to narrative structure, for they typically shape their materials on armatures of economic and technological convenience rather than on genuine patterns of thought and feeling. Flow substitutes for plot, commercials for complication, station breaks for closure.

Muzak is probably the purest case of seamless temporal modulation, with almost no building towards climax, yet there are many other examples of the same striving for flow without drama or story line. On television, aimless and plotless formats take up most of the hours outside prime time -- not only soap operas, but game shows, talk shows, celebrity showcases, and even the news, all of which depend for their structure on a few overarching premises and conventions within which things happen in no particular order. Measured in saleable "bites" and "slots" rather than organic units of thought or action, this glittering treadmill of potential fantasy is what keeps people watching half-heartedly while some other activity, usually just as mechanical and uninteresting, goes on in the foreground.

In short, both the visual imagery and the story like framework of daydreaming may be imitated and even replaced by television, with the possible outcome that our fantasies are no longer wholly ours. Or, given the increasingly episodic and randomly organized character of the medium, television may actively inhibit daydreams and frustrate the normal impulse towards spontaneous elaboration of fantasy life.

Although most pursuits can be accompanied by media without completely banishing fantasy life, many of the activities people think of as recreational -- hiking, bicycling, fishing, and all sorts of games -- have so much impetus of their own that they seem to resist the media and make them feel intrusive. Such activities are absorbing in themselves, mainly because they give scope to invention and the exploration of possibilities, with elements of surprise and spontaneous response -- qualities of play that frequently give rise to moments of childlike make-believe, putting forth thought and act in a single gesture, a kind of "living daydream" for the adult.

Training attention on a simple repetitive task may wean the imagination away from fantasy with its plots and desires, in which self is usually an enormous presence, and lead instead to a state of meditative repose, the spiritual condition that religions of the East have always regarded as the highest wisdom.

Although special acts of attention practiced to attain the meditative state have some similarities to those used to induce hypnotic trance, the aim is not to screw the attention down to a mindless blank. Rather, the tranquil spirit, forgetting both self and world, becomes will-less and choice-less, accepting the flow of things without attachment or interpretation but with a pure awareness that leads nowhere.

Meditation is not a matter of simply relaxing. Rigor and discipline are always present, however effortless it may seem, and if daily sitting in meditation cleanses the soul, it is because the contemplative state relinquishes every instrumentality, including its own use as psychic medicine. Unlike daydreams, meditation has few concomitants in art -- some kinds of poetry and prose, abstract music (one thinks of Bach's Partitas and Inventions), religious icons, the imageless designs of Islamic facades, the drum rhythms and chants of ritual dance. It is significant that media have borrowed so little from these in ransacking culture for material.

Nonetheless, there is a good deal in media experience to remind us of meditative practice, beginning with the tendency of audiences to slip off into a trance, becoming one, as it were, with whatever "universe" the medium represents. As the social critic Paul Goodman once said of television, "more time has been fixed by this little invention than has ever been fixed by any invention since the Tibetan prayer wheel."

Studying with the radio on presents a typical situation of divided attention, as do many common activities of modern life. Children seem quite regularly to watch television in this way, playing half-heartedly with some toy. It is possible to monitor the set without looking at it very often, but the faces tell the tale, oddly blank, preoccupied. How many hours a day can be spent this way before the media world begins to replace the usual sense we have of what is going on around us, in the room or on the street, background to every act or event? The difference, of course, is that the real world may at any time surprise us: something will swim out of the background into our awareness, and change our lives. Media backgrounds offer no such openness to the luck of the moment.

The media trance may have as much force as any fantasy or dream, though in practice it is usually a weak and easily dissipated spell, should anything interesting appear to compete with it in our own here and now. But the longer one spends in this mild trance, the more the spirit droops, and activities that accompany the media, or are accompanied by it, tend to become infected by this artificial and restless limbo of consciousness, where everything seems to be on hold.

The implications for society are disturbing. We must infer that a great deal of modern life has become so automated that the media trance can pervade it, as background or foreground, without upsetting the routines of private and public existence. And this is likely to become more and more the rule. At play or at school, the habits of children not only prepare them for the adult world they must enter, but also help determine the character of that world. The media training of the young establishes the patterns of awareness that are regarded as "normal." Those who have other habits of consciousness will seem more or less pathological -- whether they cannot learn the peculiar skill of divided attention, and are diagnosed as hyperactive or deficient in powers of attentiveness, or whether they are somehow insulated from the media during childhood, end up without the taste for trance, and become malcontents and cranks who find the culture vapid and spiritless.

To a large degree society has already reached this point. The general attitude towards work and leisure reflects the same habit of mind: life is divided into the dull routines of jobs and the pleasures of time off, comforts, and entertainments that make up for the dreary eight-hour day. Whatever the actual experience, this is the commonplace about it, and the split also appears within each realm, so that people bring their entertainment to work and engage in drudgery at home, using the devices of divided attention we have been examining.

Work that feels directly meaningful and worthwhile is hard to come by. At the same time, people are threatened by gigantic social tides -- wars, depressions and unemployment, political and cultural upheavals of surprising suddenness and vehemence. Meanwhile the side effects and backwash of the organized system never let up. People must get used to noise, noxious fumes, garbage, and other random violations of their living space. Petty demands, minor breakdowns, and endless negotiations characterize our dealings with the monstrous institutions that have taken the place of mutual aid and local association.

In such an environment of frustration and overload, lacking most of the traditional, stabilizing virtues such as patience, frugality, temperance, prudence, loyalty, and also without communally confirmed structures of aspiration and belief, the media provide a semblance of continuity and significance. They drown out much of the static of urban life, and integrate the rest into a picture of reality that is safely understood and managed by competent authorities. But since these expedients have little or no practical resonance in our lives, it is hard to really believe in them. An underlying sense of exposure and powerlessness persists, keeping us anxious for more reassurance and soothing distractions. We fear our own private thoughts, which lead either to feelings of guilt and irresponsibility or to cynicism and despair. It is less disturbing to give over these brooding daydreams to socially sanctioned fantasies of violent anger, competitive victory, sexual power, and instant gratification.

The awareness that a whole population is indulging the same fantasies, in millions of private spaces, disguises loneliness. One joins in vicariously, while protected from actual contact with threatening strangers or frightening demands. Enjoy yourself! You deserve it! as the billboards now tell us over and over.

Viewed from this perspective, as a method of coping with powerlessness, boredom, and a meaningless existence, the media function very like drugs and alcohol, whether or not one thinks of them as addictive. As with substance abuse, the kicks and highs are there, but only intermittently and precariously; for the most part it is all "tuning out," pushing the problems of life into the background, and directing attention somewhere else, in "as if" experiences that temporarily seem like the real thing. The current fuss over virtual reality represents a move of the media towards such a condition of physical transformation, without the drugs or alcohol.

Drugs and alcohol have their explosive side effects, whereas media burn off sociopathic impulses without disrupting the balance of the system. People take their thrills, fantasies, and entertainments while sitting quietly at home. Simultaneously the eccentrics and misfits among them are given continuous therapy, "safe emergency situations," reality-testing, and a kind of socializing regimen, all of which might actually work so long as they stay within the confines of the determined world.

The standardization of behavior made great strides in the United States with the development of geographic mobility (the cars and roads), the demise of rural life, the depersonalization of urban neighborhoods, and the breakup of the extended family. But the media have taken it much further, achieving almost complete cultural conformity. Local difference and regional character exist less and less anywhere in the country. If a pocket of resistance is discovered, it immediately becomes the subject of a "Special" or "Expose." Whatever foreground remains to individuals, accidents of inheritance and experience, the background is now pretty much the same for everyone, so far as language, decorum, morality, and civic life are concerned. There are no provinces, no provincial behavior.

Indeed, there is very little one could call "the past," reminders of another way of living. The constantly updated here and now of news and the ever-present flow of daydream keep us insulated from memory and history. The highly praised historical dramas and documentaries on television of the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and so forth have the quality of myth rather than history. This is partly an effect of all the hoopla that attends them, and partly a result of the attempt to convey meanings primarily through images; but most of all, audiences have simply forgotten how to think about the past except as a kind of "show."

As far as real life is concerned, we are always looking at what is happening at this moment, albeit somewhere else. The parade of fashion and fad keeps us trying new things, considering new options; few people think of themselves as following old ways or ever learning anything from past generations. Those were the failures and false starts, as uninteresting as yesterday's newspaper.

Given the blanketing of public consciousness already so complete and habitual, it seems likely that the need people have to push much of life into the background, and to divide their attention rather than to look things directly in the face, will prevail for a long time to come.

Taylor Stoehr teaches English literature at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and is the editor of many volumes of the writings of sixties social critic Paul Goodman. His recent work includes Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy (Jossey-Bass) and Format and Anxiety: Paul Goodman Critiques the Media (Autonomedia). Media Trance was written with support from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and was originally published in a somewhat longer version in The Antioch Review.