Re: Greetings/modernist institutions/spiritual mincing machines

From: Phil Graham (phil.graham@mailbox.uq.edu.au)
Date: Thu Aug 02 2001 - 01:37:01 PDT


Apropos wiggle room, packaging, and scale:

"'Processing' has now become the chief form of metropolitan control; and
the need for its constant application has brought into existence a whole
range of inventions, mechanical and electronic, from cash registers to
electronic computers, which handle every operation from book-keeping to
university examinations. Interests and aptitudes that do not lend
themselves to processing are automatically rejected. So complicated, so
elaborate, so costly are the processing mechanisms that they cannot be
employed except on a mass scale: hence they eliminate all activities of a
fitful, inconsecutive, or humanly subtle nature--just as 'yes' or 'no'
answers eliminate those more delicate and accurate discriminations that
often lie at one point or another in between the spurious 'correct' answer.
That which is local, small, personal, autonomous, must be suppressed.
Increasingly he who controls the processing mechanism controls the lives
and destinies of those who consume its products, and who on metropolitan
terms cannot seek any others. For processing and packaing do not end on the
production line: they finally make over the human personality."

Mumford, L. (1961). _The city in history: Its origins, its transformations
and its prospects_. London: Harcourt Brace and World. (pp. 541-2)

Main argument -- reduce scale, promote subtlety and human values (as
opposed to mechanistic ones), and throw a rusted steel sausage into the
machine at every opportunity.

regards to all
Phil



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