Screen Culture vs. Book Culture
Will the People of the Book triumph in the end?
It is a third thing, looking at your phone. It is not looking outward, observing the world. Neither is it looking inward, studying the motions of the soul. It is betwixt and between, neither here nor there. It’s a bit like staring into a mirror (a magic mirror), but not quite, because other people are observing you too. The face that stares out of the mirror is not your own.
Like Christopher Lasch said, you’re crafting an image, a “winning image,” and assessing the winning images of others. It’s not really you and it’s not authentically anyone else. You have fallen into the bush of ghosts, a shade among shades…
Along these lines, I’ve been thinking about what the transition to a screen culture, away from a book culture, might mean spiritually. Our eyes slip over screens, scrolling, scanning, not fully absorbing. There’s a hunger to it, this endless scrimmage of appetite. Deep ancient unslaked thirst for recognition—Egyptians chiseling images of food and boats and slaves on the walls of their tombs.
The dawning of screen culture marks a strange shift in consciousness, one that might be as significant as the transition from an oral to a written culture (though it hopefully has a lot less staying power). This was one of Harold Bloom’s favorite subjects of lamentation. Way back in 1994 in The Western Canon he wrote the following prescient lines:
It may be that the new Theocratic Age of the twenty-first century, whether Christian or Muslim or both or neither, will amalgamate with the Computer Era, already upon us in early versions of “virtual reality” and “the hypertext.” Combined with universal television and the University of Resentment (already well along in consolidation) into one rough beast, this future would cancel the literary canon once and for all. The novel, the poem, and the play might all be replaced.
Bloom correctly intuited that the God of the Machine would emerge dominant, would plant its nodes in all our senses and glands and organs. Now, we have a more comprehensive understanding of what this looks like. We can articulate how domination by the screen re-structures our consciousness. But to fully understand it, we first need to understand how the novel altered consciousness, how it made us more keenly aware of other selves in its heyday.
It’s not a coincidence that the rise of the novel and the rise of democracies and open societies in the Americas and Europe went hand in hand. The novel became the principal means for people to share their interiority with each other, dramatically expanding the limits of human recognition. The protagonists of European literature before the novel’s invention were typically nobles; characters like Huck Finn or Jim wouldn’t have been considered worthy of significant attention. But with the novel’s rise to popularity, the “common man" suddenly takes a central role in the works of Dickens, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Twain, George Eliot, and most of the other major 19th century novelists. The novel acknowledged, for the first time, that any person, even someone who seems quite boring, is interesting if you dig under the surface.
The rise of this great “Democratic Age” in literature was very much in line with the predictions of the 18th Century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico argued in Notes on a New Science that literature had previously passed through a Theocratic Age (in which the protagonists are Odin or Zeus or Horus or god-like heroes like Achilles and Hercules) and an Aristocratic Age (in which the protagonists are King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, Roland, El Cid, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, etc.) before entering a Democratic Age, in which the protagonist is potentially anyone. It’s the same scheme Bloom uses in The Western Canon. There’s also a definite Hegelian dimension to the idea too, since it seems to show Spirit or Humanity widening and deepening its self-awareness.
With Bloom, I think screen-based culture is already changing the consciousness of the Democratic Age, leading to its collapse (which Vico predicts; his theory is cyclic). What supplants it might be a new Theocratic Age, in which the God of the Machine dominates. According to Vico, this is brought about by a “barbarism of reflection,” in which people start to critically hyper-analyze everything, destroying all social bonds and traditions.
So, what replaces the novel as a means of understanding the self? The images and short videos we are sharing with each other through Instagram and Tik Tok are not, and do not even purport to be, glimpses of our true selves or of other selves. They are performances, reflections of how we wish to be perceived, of how we wish to be evaluated in the marketplace of souls.
This performative form of consciousness is not entirely new, though technology has accelerated its growth and made it dominant. Describing life behind the Iron Curtain, Vaclav Havel gave the famous example of how a greengrocer would put up a sign expressing a sentiment he doesn’t really believe in, like “Workers of the World, Unite!” to signal compliance with the regime and keep his business running. All life in a totalitarian state ends up being comprised of these hollow gestures, which everyone secretly knows are hollow but still performs anyway. Everyone knows everyone else is lying, but they continue lying anyway. It must be done. It must be so.
My sense is that screen culture induces this same kind of consciousness in people without the formal legal structures of a totalitarian system. It creates a totalitarian consciousness—recasts all of life as the constant manufacturing of false appearances for social approval—while bypassing the totalitarian laws and social restrictions previously required to create that consciousness. This naturally acts against the effects of the novel, which push in the opposite direction, toward a deepening awareness of the reality hidden behind appearances. Of course, TV and movies already captured people’s attention to a great extent before the internet came around, but compared to messing around on Twitter or Tik Tok, they still feel closer to the novel's world and partly rely on it for ideas and energy. Plus, they don’t demand the constant maintenance of an appearance the way these newer technologies do.
Presumably, most of us would like to stay in the Democratic Age and arrest the devolutionary process. But Vico argues that we’re doomed to return, as suggested by Bloom’s quote, to the Theocratic Age. There are murmurings of this all around us. Worshippers of the machine expect AI to eventually become a new god. This might be a stretch, but I think I can see other features of the great transformation that Vico intimates. For instance, he suggests that—in addition to having gods feature as protagonists in literature—the forms of language used in the Theocratic Age tend toward the hieroglyphic. Words are visual and magical. Could this be, possibly… emojis? And what of all the varied fandoms people buy into (Marvel, Harry Potter, Star Wars and so on)? Don’t the super-powered protagonists of these franchises intimate a desire for the gods?
This might provide a slight sliver of hope. In the 20th Century, radio had a range of negative effects and helped totalitarian regimes consolidate their hold on people. Radio was also key in provoking the Rwandan genocide, for example, the same way social media was used to spur attacks on the Rohingya in Burma. But, now, I would reckon, radio doesn’t seem like a particularly threatening technology. It didn’t destroy the novel, at any rate. Even if the literary novel is becoming restricted to a smaller cult of devotees, they can help preserve it for when screen culture ultimately exposes its own massive insufficiencies (which has already been happening for quite a while). Then, maybe, screens can be integrated culturally in a more fruitful way. It’s perhaps a slim chance but not an impossible one.
Then again, people never really lived inside their radios. The radio blared into the terrain of life, altered it, but didn’t supplant it. It didn’t create its own terrain, its own plane of pseudo-reality, which is what our screens have managed to do. (The internet is a place.)
To effectively resist these changes, I think we need to Turn Off, Tune Out, and Drop Out (reversing the first two steps of the 60s mantra and keeping the third). At this point, the only real hope is to jump ship and stake out a separate peace. The idea should be to model a new way, an alternative that can float peacefully a few feet above the rest of the world as it hurtles towards Ragnarok. Then, when the radioactive dust and ash have cleared, the few surviving members of the People of the Screen will come to our doorstep—the doorstep of the last remaining People of the Book, Keepers of the Tome. They will be ready, finally, to listen, to learn.
(In the meantime, you can still write and read Substack though. That’s encouraged.)