The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Man fulfills his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera—and himself. He is impressed, not by what he sees, nor by the forms that can be made or found. Rather by the extreme and ever-growing cleverness of his way of seeing it. Fidgeting with his camera, he becomes less concerned with what is out there. Photography, as practiced by the millions of do-it-yourself photographers, is not, oddly enough, a way of producing images with a life of their own detached from their maker (which, as T. S. Eliot observes, is a true characteristic of a work of art). Instead photography becomes a form of narcissism. “Have you seen my snapshots of the Mona Lisa?”

  Photography, by enabling any mechanically adept amateur to produce a kind of “original”—that is, a unique view of an unrepeatable moment of what was really out there—confuses our sense of what is original and what is a copy of experience. The moment is gone, yet somehow the photograph still lives. By the almost forgotten axiom which once made (but now dissolves) art, the image is again more vivid than the original. We live willy-nilly in a world where every man is his own artist. Using a camera, every man can feel somehow that what he has made is “his” image, even though it has almost nothing of him in it.

  X

  IN MUSIC, too, the Graphic Revolution has worked its dissolutions. The photographer who enjoys fidgeting with his light meters, filters, and electronic flashes, finally takes a picture of nothing at all: his machinery is his activity. So too the hi-fi addict puts together his precision components—woofers, tweeters, pre-amplifiers, and stereophonic speakers—for their own sake. We are quite precise when we describe him as a devotee of hi-fi rather than of music. In the recorded words of “At the Drop of a Hat” (Michael Flanders and Donald Swann):

  With a tone control at a single touch

  I can make Caruso sound like Hutch,

  I never did care for music much—

  It’s the high fidelity!

  The addict demonstrates his machinery by records of approaching locomotives, of sneezes, coughs, street sounds, and animal calls. His investment in musical records is only a minute fraction of that in his machinery. Of course, this is all obvious.

  It is not only, however, in directing attention from the music itself to the machinery of reproduction that the Graphic Revolution has had its effect. In quite another way the new means of reproducing music have dissolved the form of particular musical works.

  Until very recently, every performance was unique. Skilled musicians had to be gathered, they had to practice together. Before the invention of the phonograph in 1877 a performance could be heard only if offered by live artists. It was impossible ever to reproduce precisely any particular performance. In the long run, the phonograph had a revolutionary effect, not only on the number of people who could enjoy music, but on the very nature of everybody’s musical experience. Thomas A. Edison first perfected the cylindrical wax record in 1888. Within a half century Americans were buying records as casually as they bought books or magazines. Recent American dictionaries define “best seller” as peculiarly applicable to records as well as books. In a single year at the end of World War II over 225,000,000 records were sold. This demand had been created in part by rapid improvements in the techniques of sound reproduction. Until 1924 commercial records were made by the “acoustical” process: sound vibrations were directly inscribed on the disc without intervention of electrical amplifying devices. Record surfaces were scratchy, and all sounds were distorted. After the development of radio, the electric microphone, and high-fidelity electrical transcripts, home hi-fi systems well within a middle-class budget could give out sounds hard to distinguish from those of the original instruments.

  An obvious consequence in our musical experience has been to confuse the relationship here, too, between the “original” and its “copy,” between the script and the performance. Of course the relationship between a novel and a movie that has been made from the novel is very different from that between the printed musical score and the phonograph recording made from it. But a comparable new confusion has appeared in the American experience. The phonograph record of a composition has become more widely accessible, and is vivid to a far greater number of people, than the musical notations from which it is made or than scattered live performances. People begin, then, to think of certain recordings, say by Leopold Stokowski, which they can play over and over again in their own homes, as being themselves somehow the true “originals,” by which other performances of a Beethoven or Brahms symphony are to be judged. The image of Stokowski overshadows the ideal of Beethoven. This inevitably becomes the case among the new music-listening masses of unmusical amateurs. Even though live symphonic performances by orchestras still are very special occasions, a mere flick of the switch brings the recorded symphony into our living rooms. Recording technique itself becomes an art. It is said that some of Stokowski’s great influence on listeners of his era was due to his willingness to work closely with engineers to make a product which, mechanically speaking, would be a good recording.

  Some professional devotees, like Paul S. Carpenter, have lamented the decline of those whom they call “first-hand consumers” of new music (that is, those who use the composer’s notation to perform the music themselves) at the same time that the number of “secondhand consumers” (that is, auditors) through phonograph, radio, and television has vastly increased. Today it is generally more expensive to print a piece of music on paper in musical notation than to put it on records. The record-buying public is, of course, many times the size of the market for printed music (other than popular song sheets). And the record market has been constantly increasing. It is obviously misleading, however, to call the printed notation of music (grasped through the eye) “firsthand” and to stigmatize the recording of an actual performance (grasped through the ear) as “secondhand.” The question is much more complicated than that. Our new confusion comes, rather, from the fact that, since the Graphic Revolution, the very notion of an “original” or of a “performance” of music has been transformed.

  The phonograph record, in one way at least, does to the musical performance what the motion picture does to the dramatic performance: it makes it infinitely and precisely and conveniently repeatable. But in order to make this product, the wholeness and spontaneity of the actor’s or the musician’s performance may be shattered. The movie actor in the studio may re-enact a scene a dozen times so that the director or film editor can select the best “take,” then to be pieced together with others similarly filmed. The actor himself engaged in this piecemeal repetition finds it difficult to keep his sense of the whole. “The performance” (which exists now only metaphorically) is no longer a unique, spontaneous experience even for the actor. So, too, with the musical performer. For recordings also can be edited. Neither the film actor nor the recording musical performer then does his work in the physical presence and under the responsive stimulus of an audience. Filmed and recorded performances themselves become a species of pseudo-event, with all the attendant characteristics and overshadowing powers of other pseudo-events. The dubbed-in laughter and applause on taped television shows are only the crudest example of the new pseudo-eventfulness which plagues actor and audience alike. Can we any longer speak so confidently of the “original”? Music, like drama and almost all other experience, now reaches us in a new limbo—floating somewhere between the form and the performance.

  We have come a long way from the time when music was heard only on unique, formal occasions. When people heard music in concerts by live artists they expected the music itself to make the atmosphere. The event was the music. In a concert hall they listened to hear precisely what the composer or the performer had to offer at that particular moment. At home they listened while they themselves, a member of the family, or a friend sang or played an instrument. Nowadays, of course, we still have our occasional home concerts and special performances by part
icular artists in concert halls and auditoriums. Many of us play instruments. But this is no longer the commonest way music reaches us. Far commoner is the sound from the car radio as we drive along; or from the AM-FM radio while we cook a meal, wash the dishes, or work in our basement; or from the automatic-record-playing hi-fi as we play cards, read a book, or make conversation. A normal feature of upper-middle-class domestic architecture today is the hi-fi radio-phonograph system with a speaker in every room. We are music-soothed and music-encompassed as we go about our business. Now the appropriate music for any occasion is that which need not be followed but can simply be inhaled.

  Music, in a word, ceases to be primarily something which comes in individual compositions, each with a form all its own. Instead it becomes an endless homogeneous stream. It is usually subordinate to something else. When actors become “entertainers,” drama is only entertainment, and music, too, is “entertainment.” We all want “mood music.” In the actual titles of a new record series: “Music to Relax By,” “Music for Lovers,” “Music to Dine By,” “Music to Read By,” etc., etc. There has grown up a flourishing business which pipes music into offices, factories, and public places. Music has taken its place somewhere between engineering and interior decoration: alongside air conditioning, sound-proof ceilings, indirect lighting, and contour chairs.

  The Muzak Company, which became a large business operation between 1940 and 1960, is a spectacular example of these developments. In the early 1930’s a scheme was developed for using telephone circuits to pipe music into places which leased the Muzak service. By the mid 1950’s “functional” background music could be heard, among other places, in Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, Slenderella reducing salons, cemeteries in Los Angeles and San Angelo (Texas), a Kansas City puppet factory, a Chicago sausage plant, pet hospitals, the vaults of the Federal Reserve banks, an olive-stuffing plant in Cincinnati, a uranium company in Denver, and under water in the swimming pool at Eaton’s Motel, Hamilton, Ohio.

  In 1957 the Muzak library consisted of 49,000 selections (about 7,500 of which were in use at any one time), each recorded on a 16-inch disk. In the New York office, housed in the large Muzak Building, these selections were combined and made up into groups of three eight-hour reels of magnetic tape, each group comprising a twenty-four-hour sequence. Sets of reels were shipped to the seven different Muzak central offices around the country. Each central office had about twenty franchisers serving subscribers in their own areas. Reels went from one central office to another. When each area had heard the tapes, they were returned to the New York office to be erased and reused. This vast operation, employing a record library valued at ten million dollars, played approximately two hundred million miles of tape per year. Muzak became the world’s largest user of telephone line networks. It was conservatively estimated that in one way or another, music by Muzak was being heard by about fifty million Americans daily.

  What these millions of Muzak-listeners heard was not, however, a set of musical compositions in the old sense of the word. “We don’t sell music,” explained Donald O’Neill, who for over twenty years designed and packaged the Muzak tapings in their New York headquarters, “we sell programming. We believe that the best results are attained when you consider the factors of time, environment and activity. Take restaurants, for example. Breakfast programs usually consist of novelty numbers without too much brass. For lunch, we play a lot of ballads with plenty of strings. During dinnertime, the program calls for standards, usually given concert arrangements. Then, after dinner, we begin to speed things up a bit with some pretty lively tunes.” Once individual musical items have been dissolved into different programming streams, the proper stream can be prescribed for any desired purpose.

  The most satisfactory offering is not any series of separate, well-rounded musical dramas. These would be too apt to distract the hearer from his main concern, which in each of these cases is anything but the music. The object is instead to bathe an already half-conscious patient in an anesthetic or a tonic aural fluid. In factories or offices, for example, as Mr. O’Neill has explained, the stream must “go counter to the industrial fatigue curve. When the employee shows up in the morning he’s usually in good spirits, and, accordingly, the music is relatively calm. By ten-thirty he’s getting a little tired and feels a bit of tension, so we hit him with something that will give him a lift. Around noontime he’s looking forward to lunch, which calls for melodies in a more relaxed mood. Then toward the middle of the afternoon, fatigue is likely to set in again, and once more we pep him up with something rhythmic, usually with an even stronger beat than in the morning. That’s what we call programming.… We always have to be careful that arrangements aren’t too intrusive. After all, this is basically music to hear, not to listen to.”

  The desirable effects on selling or production seem pretty well demonstrated. The proprietor of a Long Island supermarket who had installed Muzak reported that most of his customers “said it made the time go faster. Funny thing, though, we now find they spend more time here since we put in the music than before.” During World War II, Muzak developed a music-for-industry program which was approved by the War Production Board. After the war, despite growing competition, Muzak steadily expanded. In some places, say in offices, Muzak alternated fifteen-minute periods of music with similar periods of silence, to prevent possible irritation from a steady stream of sound. Such periods were, of course, dictated by functional considerations or by the clock, not by the length of any individual composition.

  Muzak has always looked for new ways of dissolving old musical units. “The point is,” Mr. O’Neill once explained, “we just can’t let ourselves get into a rut. A short while back we were looking for a type of music that would sound classical to people who like popular music and popular to people who prefer the classics. So we decided to record themes from movies—Lydia, Blythe Spirit—music like that. We received a lot of favorable response.”

  With the growing use of Muzak and other piped-in systems of musical programming, with juke-boxes and the universal installation of hi-fi systems in bars, restaurants, railroad stations, railroad trains, airports, airplanes, and shops, it becomes ever harder to avoid the flood of musical pseudo-events, the sounds which do not say what they seem to, but are only vehicles for personal moods and commercial images. In 1949 the management of Grand Central Terminal in New York installed a small broadcasting studio and eighty-two loudspeakers to flood with canned music and commercials the half-million commuters who daily passed through the station. Exasperated commuters appealed to the New York Public Service Commission. A psychiatrist, testifying for the Terminal management, declared that no normal person would be permanently harmed by the noise. Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, testifying for the commuters, confessed that he was thinking of having an eardrum punctured; a woman commuter vowed to protect herself by growing “earlids.” After these protests, broadcasting in the Terminal stopped for a time. Perhaps some mid-twentieth-century Edison will develop for installation in public places a device by which a person who inserts a dime can purchase (or have piped in) a few minutes of silence. Then we could be comforted that, in this branch of technology at least, no further improvement would be possible.

  XI

  THE GRAPHIC REVOLUTION has produced a new fluidity in all experience. We are not quite clear where the air conditioning ends and where the Muzak begins. They flow into each other. The forms of books and magazines and dramatic offerings merge. “Through the pages of McCall’s,” reads a full-page advertisement in The New York Times (August 18, 1960), “pass the most exciting books of our time.” “Read any good books lately?” it asks. And answers by naming twenty-one books that had gone from pre-publication in McCall’s to best-sellerdom. Three quarters of these were the ghostwritten lives of celebrities—what should more accurately have been called “non-books.”

  The more different forms it becomes possible to cast any work into, the more vague and wraithlike become all the forms
. Is a hardcover book simply an unhatched paperback? Or rather is a paperback a hardcover book that has not yet grown a shell? “Do you know War and Peace?” “Yes.” “Did you like it?” “Yes, pretty much.” “Which, the movie or the book?” Was it the unabridged original (the negative is significant)?—or the “definitive modern abridgment”? Nobody is quite clear. Was it the 1931 or the 1961 version of Cimmaron? The “original” may mean the motion picture, the novel, the comic book (Prince Valiant and many other movies have derived from comics), the magazine article, the musical score, the phonograph record, the radio program, or the television show.

  Not long ago I approached one of the best publishers in the country with a proposal for a book. The book I outlined, it seemed to me, was much needed. The climax of the publisher’s consideration of my proposal was a conference in the firm’s board room with several vice presidents and the heads of numerous departments. As we went around the table, the chiefs of different divisions debated whether the book could be taken apart and marketed in different pieces. Could it be made into an “Executive Gift”? Could it be made into pamphlets and sold separately, chapter by chapter? Could it be printed piecemeal on the back of maps? Could it be marketed as a premium for a mail order house? No one asked whether it could be shredded into a marketable breakfast food. We hardly discussed the need for the book itself, and that came to seem beside the point.