Eclectic
Peter Ackroyd
The Body Electric. Patterns of Western Industrial Culture Jonathan Benthall (Thames and Hudson £6.50) Keywords Raymond Williams (Croon Helm £5.50, Fontana 95p) Jonathan Benthall begins his analysis of 'Western culture' with one of its more popular icons, The Eagle, a mere comic in the 'fifties, an art object in the 'sixties to be seen hanging on the walls of innumerable galleries, and now in the 'seventies an anthropologist's playground: "In summarising the bare bones of the narrative and abstracting from it the moral that the artist succeeded in conveying, we can also tease out its unexamined assumptions." And these unexamined assumptions which determine the intergalactic adventures of Dan Dare, Sir Hubert Guest and the Mekong are, by implication, also those of our industrial culture. The Body Electric is itself a timely and well-argued piece of our cultural industry, since it joins with many French, German and Italian texts in relentlessly turning over our common life, teasing its assumptions into deeper and deeper structures, distributing its meanings into binary oppositions, turning whatever exists into phenomena and epiphenomena.
Benthall's book takes as its theme the warring dualism of 'the body' and 'technology' in our culture, and the fact that we tend to 'live through' this contradiction — to resolve it at the level of simply, daily activity — is no reason why it should not be pointed out to us: "I argue throughout this book that the technological world view tends to reduce everything to objects, especially to instruments or obstacles, but our bodies persistently refuse to be so reduced; and they offer an alternative mode of experience which is more honest and in a sense more concrete and Tear." This is no doubt a dramatic and simplistic dualism (how is a body more "concrete" than a telephone?), but it is one that .works well in the dramatic and simplistic context of our public arts and sciences.
Dramatic pronouncements can also be highly effective, and one of the merits of Mr Benthall's book is that it is eclectic and fast-moving, Jumping from Verne to Rousseau, on to Ivan .I1lich and then back again to Walt Whitman. It is often surprising, and generally illuminating, to see dissimilar texts yoked violently together; although there are some academics who would prefer to read a monograph on this and a monograph on that, a general, 'cross-cultural' study can provide unexpected connections between previously unrelated phenomena, and what has been seen before in partial and divided form can take on the aspects of a living unity. It does not matter greatly that an argument conducted between texts is going to be a simplistic one, as long as Benthall can see the culture steadily and see it whole. Knowledge, in this sense, is power — for Benthall, the Power to recognise the nature of the technology and thus to "subvert" and "reclaim" it for essentially human and humane purposes. His first chapter deals with the early romance of technology", those innocent texts emanating from Wells and Verne which
celebrate. the pristine hardware, construct whole environments from a few industrial tools, describe prodigious leaps of the scientific
mind, and generally forget all of those finer human feelings which had been known only a few years before as "sweetness and light". Benthall makes some suggestive analyses of these particular writings, and notes that within them there is already an equivocal attitude toward the new technology, but I was continually wanting him to extend his analysis. He writes at one point that Verne's "preocupation with technology is surely of a piece with the limitations of his literary talent", but he never explains why this should necessarily be so. And in his second chapter, 'Recoil To The Body', Benthall's rather cavalier attitude toward imaginative writing becomes more noticeable. In a general argument about the central role of the body in an attack upon technological rationalism, he pauses briefly over the works of Blake, Rimbaud and D. H. Lawrence and discusses them in terms of their 'content' while neglecting their proper, formal characteristics. This seems to me as gross an imposition upon the language as anything that technology can wreak upon the body, since it also denies the nature of the article. .
But Benthall could properly claim that he is not so much a critic as an anthropologist and by far the most interesting parts of the book are concerned with those public events, like dancing and theatre, and those theoretical writings, such as those of Marx and Rousseau, which claim some formative role in social activity and in the growth of the human community. It is here that his humanism and his theoretical insight come together most cunningly, and provide a critique of human society which manages to be both timely and significant. Mr Benthall is not as rigorous a thinker as Edmund Husserl or even as Merleau-Ponty, both of whom established a science (and even a technology?) of the "real" and the "concrete", but only a simplified account like this can be useful as polemic, and can mobilise many texts and many general insights into the service of a "liberating technology".
In this new book, Keywords, Raymond Williams has — as befits his organic view of literature and the literary tradition — provided a gloss on certain concepts by the tactic of reverting to their origins and charting their evolution into complex words. Since such an exercise is bound to be provisional and, by its nature, incomplete, the book is more interesting for its ideological stance than for any morsels of information it might provide. Williams's first analysis, of 'aesthetics', breaks down into a codicil in a moral code: "It is an element in the divided modern consciousness of art and society". It all depends, as they used to say in Cambridge, on what you mean by 'art'.
Professor Williams takes A broadly materialist view of the language, and sees it as generated by changes in social activity and by modifications in specific, historical texts. This is not only the case with such words as 'class', but also with such complex and variable nouns as 'realism' and 'individual' — "the emergence of notions of individuality, in the modern sense, can be related to the break-up of the medieval social, economic and religous order." Despite this, Williams's social kaleidoscope can be intriguing, and these voluminous, variable, sometimes evanescent words suggest that language may alter human activity and determine specific texts in ways that Williams has yet to recognise. Interestingly, he does not include 'language' among his keywords, although it might in fact be the key to the keys.
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