TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION, LEWIS MUMFORD
CULTURAL PREPARATION
the machine
clocks
space
INTRODUCTION
During the last thousand years the material basis and the cultural forms of Western Civilization have been profoundly modified by the development of the machine.
While people often call our period the ‘Machine Age’, very few have any perspective on modern technics or any clear notion as to its origin.
[…] the fact is that in Western Europe the machine had been developing steadily for at least seven centuries before the dramatic changes that accompanied the ‘industrial revolution’ took place.
Behind all the great material inventions of the last century and a half was not merely a long internal development of technics: there was also a change of mind. Before the new industrial processes could take hold on a great scale, a reorientation of wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary.
To understand the dominating role played by technics in modern civilization, one must explore in detail the preliminary period of ideological and social preparation.
[…] mechanization and regimentation are not new phenomena in history: what is new is the fact that these functions have been projected and embodied in organised forms which dominate every aspect of our existence.
All the critical instruments of modern technology – the clock, the printing press, the water-mill, the magnetic compass, the loom, the lathe, gunpowder, paper, to say nothing of mathematics and chemistry and mechanics – existed in other cultures.
They had machines: buit they did not develop ‘the machine’. It remained for the people of Western Europe to carry the physical sciences and the exact sciences and the exact arts to a point no other culture had reached, and to adapt the whole mode of life to the pace and the capacities of the machine.
How did this happen? How in fact could the machine take possession of European society until that society had, by inner accommodaiton, surrendered to the machine?
I. CULTURAL PREPARATION
‘the machine’
During the last century the automatic or semi-automatic machine has come to occupy a large place in our daily routinel; and we have tended to attribute to the physical instrument itself the whole complex of habits and methods that created it an accompanied it.
What is a machine? […] Many of the writers who have discussed the machine age have treated the machine as if it were a very recent phenomenon, and as if the technology of handicraft had employed only tools to transform the environment. These preconceptions are baseless.
In back of the development of tools and machines lies the attempt to modify the environment in such a way as to fortify ans sustain the human organism: the effort is either to extend the powers of the otherwise unarmed orgnaism, or to manufacture outside the body a set of conditions more favourable toward maintaining its equilibrium and ensuring its survival.
[…] the tool lends itself to manipulation, the machine to automatic action.
[…] when I use the term ‘the machine’ I shall empoy it as a shorthand reference to the entire technological complex. This will embrace the knowledge and skills and arts derived from industry or implicated in the new technics, and will include various forms of tool, instrument, apparatus and utility as well as machines proper.
TECHNICS OF TIME AND SPACE
the monastery and the clock
Where did the machine first take form in modern civilization?
There was clearly more than one point of origin.
But the first manifestation of the new order took place in the general picture of the world: during the first seven centuries of the machine’s existence the categories of time and space underwent an extraordinary change, and no aspect ot life was left untouched by this transformation.
The application of quantative methods of thought to the study of nature had its first manifestation in the regular measurement of time; and the new mechanical concept of time arose in part out of the routine of the monastery. [12]
It was […] in the monasteries of the West that the desire for order and power, other than that expressed in the military domination of weaker men, first manifested itself after the long uncertainty and bloody confusion that attended thye breakdown of the Roman Empire.
Benedict added a seventh period to the devotions of the day, and in the seventh century, by a bull of Pope Sabinianus, it was decreed that the bells of the monastry be rung reven times in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks were known as the canonical hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition became necessary.
If the mechanical clock did nt appear until the cities of the thirteenth century had demanded an orderly routine, the habit of order itself and the earnest regulation of time-sequences had become almost second nature in the monastery.
[…] the clock is not merely a means of keepin track of the hours, but of synchronising the actions of men. [14]
[…] by the thirteenth century there are definite records of mechanical clocks, and by 1370 a well-designed ‘modern’ clock had been built by Heinrich von Wyck at Paris.
The clouds that could paralyze the sundial, the freezing that could stop the water clock on a winter night, were no longer obstacles to time-keeping.
Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.
The clock, not the stream-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous. […] here was a new kind of power-machine, in which the source of power and the transmission were of such a nature as to ensure the even flow of energy throughout the works and to make possible regular production and a standardized product.
In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technics […]
The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science.
[…] while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time – what Bergson calls duration – is cumulative in its effects.
Around 1345, according to Thorndike, the division of hours into sixty minutes and of minutes into sixty seconds became common: it was this abstract framework of divided time that became more and more the point of reference for both action and thought, and in the effort to arrive at accuracy in this department, the astronomical exploration of the sky focussed attention further upon the regular, implacable movements of the heavenly bodies through space.
Early in the sixteenth century a young Neuremberg mechanic, Peter Henlein, is supposed to have created ‘many-wheeled watches out of small bits of iron’ and by the end of the century the small domestic clock had been introduced in England and Holland.
Now, the orderly punctual life that forst took shape in the monasteries is nt native to mankind, alhtough by now Western peoples are so thoroughly regimented by the clock that it is ‘second nature’ […]
The popularisation of time-keeping, which followed the production of the cheap standardized watch […] was essential to a well-articulated system of transportation and production.
When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of expereinces, but as a collection of hours, minutes, ans seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the inventon of labour-saving instruments.
A generalised time-conscoiusness accompanied the wider use of clocks: dissociating time from organic sequences, it became easier for men of the renaissance to indulge in the fantasy of reviving the classic past or reliving the splendours of antique Roman civilisation: the cult of history, appearing first in daily ritual, finally abstracted itself as a special discipline.
space, distance, movement
‘A child and an adult, an Australian primitive and a European, a man of the Middle Ages and a contemporary, are distinguished not only by a difference in degree, but by a difference in kind by their methods of prctorial representation.’
Dagobert Frey […] has made a penetrating study of the difference in spatial conceptions between the early Middle Ages and the Renaissance: he has reenforced by a wealth of specific detail, the generalization that no two cultures live coneptually in the same kind of time and space.
Space and time, like language itself, are works of art, and like language they help condition and direct practical action. Long before Kant announced that time and space were categories of the mind, long before the mathematicians discovered that there were conceivable and rational forms of space other than the form described by Euclid, mankind at large had acted on this premise.
During the Middle Ages spatial relations tended to be organised as symbols and values. The highest object in the city was the church spite which pointed toward heaven and dominated the lesser buildings […].
SIze signified importance: to represnet human beings of entirely different sizes on the same plane of vision and at the same distance from the observer was entirely possible for the medieval artist. This same habit applies not only to the representation of real objects but to the organisation of terrestial experience by means of the map.
One further characteristic of medieval space must be noted: space and time form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval artist introduced other times within his own spatial world, as whenhe projected the events of Christ’s life within a contemporary Italian city. […] The connecting link between events was the cosmic and religious order: the true order of space was Heaven, even as the true order of time was Eternity.
Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century a revolutionary change in the conception of space took place in Western Europe. Space as a hierarchy of values was replaced by space as a system of magnitudes.
One of the indications of this new orientation was the closer study of the relations of objects in space and the discovery of the laws of perspective and the systematic organisation of pictures within the new frame fixed by the foreground, the horizon and the vanishing point.
Perspective turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantative relation. [20]
In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance. Bodies did not existseperately as absolute magnitudes: they were co-ordinated with other bodies within the same frame of vision and must be in scale.
To achieve this scale there must be an accurate representaiton of the object itself, a point for point correspondence between the picture and the image: hence a fresh interest in external nature and in questions of fact. The division of the world into squares and the accurate observation of the world through this abstract checkerboard marked the new technique of the painter, from Paolo Ucello onward. [20]
The new interest in perspective brought depth into the picture and distance into the mind. In the older pictures, one’s eye jumped from one part to another, picking up symbolic crumbs as taste and fancy dictated: in the new pictures, one’s eye followed the lines of linear perspective along streets, buildings, tessellated pavements whose parallel lines the painter purposely introduced in order to make the eye itself travel. […] The measured space of the picture reenforced the measured time of the clock.
Within this new ideal network of space and time all events now took place […]
One further consequence of this spatial order must now be noted: to place a thing and to time it became essential to one’s understanding of it. In Renaissance space, the existence of objects must be accounted for: their passage through time and space is a clue to their appearance at any particular moment in any particular place. The unknown is therefore no less determinate than the known: given the roundness of the globe, the position of the Indes could be assumed and the time-distance calculated. The very existence of such an order was an incentive to explore it and to fill up the parts that were known. [21]
What the painters demonstrated in their application of perspective, the cartographers established in the same century in their maps.
The Hereford map of 1314 might have been done my a child: it was practically worthless for navigation. That of Ucello’s contemporary, Andrea Banco, 1436, was conceived on rational lines, and represented a gain in conception as well as in practical accuracy.
By laying down the invisible lines of latitude and longitude, the cartographers paved the way for later explorers, like Columbus: as with the later scientific method, the abstract system gave rational expectations, even if on the basis of inacurate knowledge.
No longer was it necessary for the navigator to hug the shoreline: he could launch out into the unkown, set his course toward an arbitrary point, and return approximately to the place of departure. Both Eden and Heaven were outside the new space; and though they lingered on as the ostensible subjects of painting, the real subjects were Time and Space and Nature and Man.
Presnetly, on the basis laid down by the painter and the cartographer, an interest in space as such, in movement as such, in locomotion as such, arose.
The categories of time and space, once practically dissociated, had become united: and the abstractions of measured time and measured space undermined the earlier conceptions of infinity and eternity, since measurement must begin with an arbitrary here and now even if space and time be empty.
The itch to use space and time had broken out:and once they were coordinated with movement, they could be contracted or expanded: the conquest of space and time had begun.
The signs of this conquest are many: they come forth in rapid succession. In military arts the crossbow and the ballista were provided and extended, and on their heels came more powerful weapons for annihilating distance – the cannon and later the musket.
The new attitude toward time and space infected the workshop and the counting house, the army and the city. The tempo became faster: the magnitudes became greater: conceptually, modern culture launched itself into space and gave itself over to movement.