A Lyric Form of Wary Positivism

The Bias of Communication, by Harold A. Innis, the great Canadian economic-historian, tracks material constraints on communication over the course of roughly 7000 years of Western history in just under 200 pages. The terrific temporal coverage of the volume required that Innis move very rapidly through his material leading to a peculiar prose style:

The failure of the Counter-Reformation reflected the influence of force. The growth of industrialism, the interest in science and mathematics, and the rise of cities had their effects in the use of gunpowder and artillery. The application of artillery in destroying the defences of Constantinople in 1453 was spectacular evidence of the decline of cavalry and systems of defence which had characterized feudalism. The instruments of attack became more powerful than those of defence and decentralization began to give way to centralization. The limitations had been evident in the mountainous region of Switzerland and the low country of the Netherlands and in the success of movements toward independence in those regions. The military genius of Cromwell and of Gustavus Adolphus in using new instruments of warfare guarunteed the position of Protestantism in England and Germany. (Innis, The Bias of Communication, Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1951 / reprinted 2006, p. 25.)

Structurally and rhetorically, this is a strange paragraph. It has a topic sentence, and its sentences generally support that topic, but it is basically without transitions. Each sentence just accrues upon the last. Note also that there are very few agents -- living breathing people -- acting within the sentences. Instead, the sentences' subjects are typically abstract qualities or inanimate objects ("the faliure of the Counter-Reformation," "the application of artillery," "the instruments of attack"), and predicates are typically governed by state of being verbs. When humans make an apearance (Cromwell and Adolphus) it is merely to take advantage of the inanimate "new instruments of warfare" which provide the humans' agency. The paragraph ends without a conclusion, without a sense that the evidence pesented led to any specific thing.

I want to liken this to a certain approach to landscape poetry exemplified by John Ashbery's poem "Into the Dusk-Charged Air." A typical passage:

The Rhône slogs along through whitish banks
And the Rio Grande spins tales of the past.
The Loir bursts its frozen shackles
But the Moldau's wet mud ensnares it.
The East catches the light.
Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe. For centuries
The Afton has flowed.
(Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains, New York: Ecco, 1962, p. 18)

Ashbery's poem moves the way Innis's paragraph moves. In both cases, the passages are structured like a landscape in that their internal components do not have a causal relationship with one another but are related primarily through spatial arrangement. Importantly, though, Ashbery's poem is not landscape but riverscape. Its spatiality is combined with a brutal temporal element normally absent from the peaceful genre of landscape (tho not necessarily from the Hudson River school's landscapes, a fact of which Ashbery, also an art critic and resident of upstate NY, would have been keenly aware). The poem shares a forward momentum with Innis's prose, which itself hurtles through history with the unremitting undertow of the St. Lawrence surging toward Niagra.

The reader experiences this as a sort of caught-up-in-ness. We ride the crest of Innis's prose and Ashbery's poetry not quite comprehending but unable to turn back upstream or swim to shore. This a historical anxiety as well, one particularly exemplified by the lack of historical agency typically presumed to accompany the ever-increasing current of techno-sceintific innovation. Which bring me to my last exemplum: Harper's Magazine's "Findings" column, which briefly recapitulates recent scientific studies in a rhetorical fashion which will by now appear quite familiar:

During the past summer, the number of zombie computers worldwide tripled, and the number of attacks by stupid grizzly bears in Anchorage, Alaska, increased sharply. Polar-bear cannibalism continued to rise. The earth's magnetic field may weaken sufficiently by 3500 A.D. [sic] to allow the poles to reverse. Half of all mammals were in decline, and globabl warming was chasing many plant and animal species uphill. A quarter of elephants in south Indian temples were found to suffer from tuberculosis, a moose in Wyoming was found to have contracted chronic wasting disease, yellow stunt rice disease struck the Mekong Delta, and scientists determined that HIV first infected humans as early as 1884. ("Findings," Harper's Magazine 317, no. 1903 (December 2008): 104.)

The column stresses moments of non-agency (zombiedom, massive environmental change, disease outbreaks), but it does so in the context of scientific discovery. It is the constant realization that we humans are hampered in novel, nasty ways. A weird, wary positivism inheres in this format. Just as the sublime terror that suffuses the images of the Hudson River Valley was coupled with an implicit politics of exploration and expansionism. Innis, it should be added, viewed his book as a polemic for education reform: another wary positivism.