"The White Plague" & Mumford and the Slothrop Paper Company

[Mark Kohut]

Ish,

I salute you. Great stuff and I might argue a direct source of
influence, since we "know" TRP has read Mumford.

Sent from my iPhone



> On Dec 18, 2018, at 2:58 AM, Jemmy Bloocher <jbloocher at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I love this, it flows like fiction. I had to check that it isn't as I
> hadn't heard of it before. Beautiful. Plioo?
>
>> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 12:39 PM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_00bbE9oxQ
>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 6:26 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> from Mumford's _The City in History_
>>>
>>> To believe, therefore, that human culture has reached a marvelous final
>> culmination in the modern metropolis one must avert one‘s eyes from the
>> grim details of the daily routine. And that is precisely what the
>> metropolitan denizen schools himself to do: he lives, not in the real
>> world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment by means
>> of paper and celluloid and adroitly manipulated lights: a world in which he
>> is insulated by glass, cellophane and film from the mortifications of
>> living. In short, a world of professional illusionists and their credulous
>> victims.
>>>
>>> The swish and crackle of paper is the underlying sound of the
>> metropolis. What is visible and real in this world is only what has been
>> transferred to paper or has been even further etherialised on a microfilm
>> or a tape recorder. The essential daily gossip of the metropolis is no
>> longer that of people meeting face to face at a cross-roads, at the dinner,
>> table, in the marketplace: a few dozen people writing in the newspapers, a
>> dozen or so more broadcasting over radio and television, provide the daily
>> interpretation of movements and happenings with slick professional
>> adroitness. Thus. even the most spontaneous human activities come under
>> professional surveillance and centralized control. The spread of
>> manifolding devices of every sort gives to the most ephemeral and mediocre
>> products of the mind a temporary durability they do not deserve: whole
>> books are printed to justify the loose evacuations of the tape recorder.
>>>
>>> All the major activities of the metropolis are directly connected with
>> paper and its plastic substitutes; and printing and packaging are among its
>> principal industries. The activities pursued in the offices of the
>> metropolis are directly connected with paper: the tabulating machines, the
>> journals, the ledgers, the card-catalogues, the deeds, the contracts, the
>> mortgages, the briefs, the trial records: so, to, plioo, the prospectuses,
>> the advertisements, the magazines, the newspapers. As early as the
>> eighteenth century Mercier had observed this metropolitan form of the White
>> Plague. Modern methods of manifolding have not lessened the disease: they
>> have only exchanged easygoing slipshod ways, which often sufficed, for a
>> more exact record, whose elaboration and cost are out of all proportion to
>> the value of what is recorded. What was a mere trickle in Mercier’s day has
>> now becoming a ravaging flood of paper.
>>>
>>> As the day’s routine proceeds the pile of paper mounts higher: the
>> trashbaskets are filled and emptied and filled again. The ticker tape
>> exudes its quotation of stocks and its report of news; the students in the
>> schools and universities fill their notebooks, digest and disgorge the
>> contents of books, as the silkworm feeds on mulberry leaves and
>> manufactures its cocoon, unraveling themselves on examination day. In the
>> theatre, in literature, in music, in business, reputations are made on
>> paper. The scholar with his degrees and publications, the actress with her
>> newspaper clippings, and the financier with his shares and his voting
>> proxies, measure their power and importance by the amount of paper they can
>> command. No wonder the anarchists once invented the grim phrase:
>> ‘Incinerate the documents!’ That would ruin this whole world quicker than
>> universal flood or earthquake, if not as fatally as a shower of hydrogen
>> bombs. That life is an occasion for living, and not a pretext for supplying
>> items to newspapers, interviews on television, or a Spectacle for crowds of
>> otherwise vacant bystanders these notions do not occur in the metropolitan
>> mind. For them the Show is the reality, and ‘ the show must go on!’ This
>> metropolitan world, then, is a world where tears and blood are less real
>> than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of
>> people, unable to achieve a more fullbodied and satisfying means of living,
>> take life vicariously, as leaders, spectators, listeners, passive
>> observers. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from
>> the nature that is outside them, and no less remote from the nature that is
>> within, it is no wonder that they turn more and more of the functions of
>> life, even thought itself, to the machines that their inventors have
>> created. In this disordered environment only machines retain some of the
>> attributes of life, while human beings are progressively reduced to a
>> bundle of reflexes, without self-starting impulses or autonomous goals:
>> ‘behaviourist man’.
>> --
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> --
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