Stumbling Between Apocalypse and Paradise:
Northrop Frye as Cultural Critic in the Age of Information
By
Ian Alexander Robson
Supervisor:
Reader:
Date:
Dr. Jeffery Donaldson
Dr. Joseph Adamson
September, 11/2015
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Dr. Susie O'Brien for her very helpful guidance, counsel and feedback
over the term; Dr. Jeffery Donaldson for sparking my interest in Frye and for his willingness to advise
and edit this project (and the philosophical conversations which occurred as a result); and Dr. Joseph
Adamson for his advice as to where to look regarding research for this project and for his willingness to
be a reader.
Abbreviations of Texts Cited
AD:
The Age of Discontinuity
Peter F. Drucker
BNWR:
Brave New World: Brave New World Revisited
Aldous Huxley
BPF:
Between Past and Future
Hannah Arendt
DG:
Data and Goliath
Bruce Schneier
EM:
Essays on Metaphor
Warren A. Shibles
GS:
The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche
IF:
Interpretations and Forecasts
Lewis Mumford
INF:
Interviews with Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
LMM:
Letters of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
LN:
Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990
Northrop Frye
MC:
The Modern Century
Northrop Frye
MOI:
The Myths of Information
Kathleen Woodward
MU:
Man, the Unknown
Alexis Carrel
NFIC:
Northrop Frye in Conversation
Northrop Frye/David Cayley
PF:
The Plague of Fantasies
Slavoj Zizek
PP:
Pascal's Pensees
Blaise Pascal
RH:
The Revolution of Hope
Erich Fromm
SS:
The Stubborn Structure
Northrop Frye
TC:
Technics and Civilization
Lewis Mumford
TN:
The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory
Dorothy Hale
VS:
The View from Serendip
Arthur C. Clarke
WB:
World Brain
H.G. Wells
WP:
Words with Power
Northrop Frye
WTP:
The Will to Power
Friedrich Nietzsche
YNG:
You Are Not A Gadget
Jaron Lanier
Stumbling Between Apocalypse and Paradise:
Northrop Frye as Cultural Critic in the Age of Information
We use language to ponder and describe the world around us. As the world around us changes,
the language we use to ponder and describe it changes as well. Before the advent of scientific thinking,
one could not think scientifically. Over generations, human imagination and mythic thinking
eventually laid a foundation which allowed for the rise of scientific thinking. Today, in 'advanced
societies', with scientific and technological progress influencing almost every aspect of our daily life, it
is almost impossible not to view the world through a scientific or technological lens (e.g. media, a car
window, a brain treated with pharmaceuticals). Technology serves to make our functioning in the
world more efficient by shrinking space and time and saving us energy; this allows for an increase in
quantity of information and goods. With the constant barrage of new information, it is increasingly
difficult to ascertain all of the facts in order to attain a rational still point from which to reason
effectively; one is forever seeking more information, and new information arrives hourly. If ancient
cultures approached science by imaginative and mythic thinking, modern culture may approach
imaginative and mythic thinking via science. As useful as science can be, it can only ever represent but
one perspective of the world around us (i.e. the scientific perspective). Thus, if we limit our total
imaginative potential to within scientific thinking, to what is technically possible, we are limiting our
thought to within a closed system of human artifice. Language itself is already a limited system with
which we muse and describe our (non-linguistic) world; specialized scientific language is necessarily
even more limiting.
Northrop Frye's concept of verbal modes helps to clarify our use of language and thus serves to
illuminate our thought processes. Very briefly, Frye's modes are kerygmatic (religious, existential),
poetic or imaginative (the realm of literature and imagination), ideological or rhetorical (persuasion in
argument), conceptual or dialectical (reason in argument), and descriptive (the realm of facts and thus
of science and technology). Frye writes: “Every verbal structure is likely to have its chief center of
gravity in one of these modes, though aspects of all the others will be included or implied” (WP 17).
Below, I assume a fairly clear separation between modes in order to illustrate more readily the idea that
we are seeing a shift from the presently dominant dialectical mode (which itself usurped the once
dominant imaginative mode) to the increasing use of a fusion between the descriptive and rhetorical
modes. Scientific and technological advancements allow for the further refinement of the descriptive
mode and this evermore refined descriptive mode, in turn, allows for further technological
advancements (e.g. the theory and practical science of particle physics). I will argue that as we become
more dependent upon the products of technology for daily living, we are inadvertently becoming more
subsumed in the products of the descriptive mode. However, purely descriptive data (e.g. information)
is only useful when utilized with another mode. Since there is no reasoning with facts, the rhetorical,
rather than the dialectical, is the mode with which we most often animate descriptive data. An example
might be a government appealing to financial 'facts' (descriptive) to implement an ideological agenda
(rhetoric) thus limiting (dialectical) debate. Or social media limiting opinions to like/dislike/report.
Since rhetoric does not require time-consuming laborious reasoning, it is more efficient in this world of
shrinking time, space, and energy. As Paul Valery said in 1927: “it is almost as if the decline of the
idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort” (as quoted by Benjamin, TN
368).
Furthermore, I suggest the increased use of the descriptive mode animated by the ideology of
rhetoric leads to what Frye calls a “closed myth of concern.” Continuity and security are the focus of
the myth of concern; within it we lose spontaneity and thus the opportunity to change our situation.
One example of this “closed myth” is that our communication technologies that we use for socializing,
school, and entertainment (among other things) may serve to act both as surveillance devices for
authority (by recording our personal information) and to influence our perceptions through advertising
and propaganda (two “suspect” traits of the rhetorical mode). The imaginative mode allows us to
imagine and create our world; thus if we allow this mode to erode by becoming increasingly subsumed
within the descriptive and rhetorical modes, we lose our ability to formulate a vision for a different
society. In the information age, the meta-narrative has been replaced by the meta-data.
As Frye states in a 1979 interview:
I believe that one of the intellectual activities of our time consists in trying to see what is
behind the social and political facade of authority. The fact that this exists underlines the fact
that we are all surrounded by a mythology which is for the most part false: that of publicity,
advertising, propaganda, and all the other means which deceive man and reduce him to the role
of a docile and obedient citizen. The role of the critical act, then, is that of tearing down the
wall of false mythology to reach the structure of serious convictions that each of us must have
in order to be a responsible member of society. (INF 454)
The Age of Information:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot: The Rock 1934
The Oxford English Dictionary defines life as “being alive”; living: “livelihood, maintenance.”
Knowledge is defined as “facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the
theoretical or practical understanding of a subject; the sum of what is known; information held on a
computer system; (in philosophy) true, justified belief; certain understanding, as opposed to opinion.”
Information is defined as “facts provided or learned about something or someone; what is conveyed or
represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things; (in computing) data as processed, stored,
or transmitted by a computer.” Thus we see acquiring knowledge is an active process whereas
acquiring information is a passive process. Furthermore, the Oxford English dictionary notes that the
word information is derived from French meaning “accusatory or incriminatory intelligence against a
person” which, although outdated, still leaves remnants of this meaning in the terms “informant” and
“informer.”
Frye differentiates between wisdom and knowledge saying that knowledge is “of the actual”
and wisdom is “rather a sense of potential” of what could be known; Jesus and Buddha were wise as
opposed to knowledgeable (INF 271). Knowledge is “continuous in structure” and this structure
constitutes the subject which has authority “over both teacher and student”. “One cannot think at
random; one cannot just start to think” since one's skill in thinking is based on “previous practice” (INF
83). Knowledge can lead to wisdom as information can lead to knowledge. Since “knowledge is
consecutive” every bit of information is connected to the next “so all knowledge is a gradual unfolding
of a structure” (INF 193). Thus, one would think, one must have the knowledge of a conceptual
structure within which to fit the bits of information.
In a 1968 interview with Frye, the interviewer summed up “the current argument” that “the only
thing constant now is change.” With this accelerating progress comes “the vast accumulation of
knowledge in the world” and since no one can learn all the facts, people conclude “there is no point in
learning facts anymore.” Frye responds that such a view is “naked anti-intellectualism”; adaptability to
change itself “means nothing at all.” “I think that a statement such as, 'You have to develop an
adaptability to change,' without saying where you are going to change or what form the change is going
to take, is an expression of panic or hysteria” (INF 146). Thus again, if one does not have a conceptual
structure of knowledge, “change itself” simply leads nowhere regardless of whether one can know all
the facts or not.
That same year, Peter Drucker (a philosophy professor who became a management consultant
for large corporations) published his book The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to our Changing
Society. Drucker coined the term 'knowledge worker'. “Since the computer first appeared in the late
1940's the information industry has been a certainty. But we do not have it yet. [...] What we still have
to create is the conceptual understanding of information” (AD 25). Here again we see the need for a
conceptual structure—knowledge—with which to understand information.
As Frye warns in his late notebooks: “Industry-based to information-based society cliché: what
it appeals to. But information isn't a placid river of self-evident facts: it comes to us pre-packaged in
ideological containers, and many of those containers are constructed by professional liars. Information
involves extricating oneself form a spiderweb of misinformation” (LN 598). Thus, a knowledge is
necessary.
However, Drucker clarifies:
'Knowledge' as normally considered by the 'intellectual' is something very different from
'knowledge' in the context of 'knowledge economy' or 'knowledge work.' For the intellectual,
knowledge is what is in a book. But as long as it is in the book, it is only 'information' if not
mere 'data.' Only when a man applies the information to doing something does it become
knowledge.
Importantly: “The emergence of the knowledge economy is not, in other words, part of
'intellectual history' as it is normally conceived. It is part of the 'history of technology'” (AD 269).
Thus the knowledge industry is dependent upon technology, not intellectualism. As we will see in the
outline of Frye's verbal modes below, the descriptive mode includes pure information and is dependent
upon technological progress. The ascendent modes (conceptual, rhetorical, imaginative) all concern
intellect. The ideal descriptive mode alone, like pure information, only comes alive when utilized with
the influence of another mode.
Jaron Lanier, who helped develop 'virtual reality' in the 1980's (and coined the phrase), defines
information in this way as well: “Information is alienated experience. [...] Experience is the only
process that can de-alienate information” (YNG 28-29). Thus, he says, a common culture is required
between the one who stores and the one who retrieves the information. However, if one wants to shift
between the old religion “where you hope God will give you an afterlife,” to the new religion “where
you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe
information is alive.” For such believers, our social institutions “like art, the economy, and the law”
will have to be redesigned in order to “reinforce the perception information is alive” (YNG 29). Here,
information comes alive not by being uploaded into an individual's knowledge construct, but by
changing the very social constructs themselves to render pure information useful. Lanier concludes:
“You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.”
In the mid-1970's, Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 A Space Odyssey, describes his
contemporary surroundings in the evolving information age:
We have all seen unbuttoned beer-bellies slumped in front of the TV set, and transistorised
morons twitching down the street, puppets controlled by invisible disk jockies. These are not
the highest representatives of our culture; but, tragically, they may be typical of the near future.
As we evolve a society oriented towards information, and move away from one based primarily
on manufacture and transportation, there will be millions who cannot adapt to the change. We
may have no alternative but to use the lower electronic arts to keep them in a state of drugged
placidity. (SCT 257)
Past visions of the coming information age were more optimistic than Clarke's observations.
World Brain by H.G. Wells is a collection of essays and speeches Wells delivered in the 1930's. Wells
spoke in England, France, and America proposing a Permanent World Encyclopaedia allowing for the
world-wide storing and accessing of information. To summarize Wells' musings, the World Brain
would be a file system of information deemed most significant by intellectuals and made available to
all. It would be continually revised, curtailed in times of conflict and rejuvenated when “liberalism and
reason return”; it would eradicate illiteracy and misinformed people, employ thousands of workers,
have multiple uses such as historical, technical, scientific, and artistic. It would intellectually unify the
entire human race: “a sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which (when it is fully
developed) will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the entire human race” (WB
91).
The World Brain would not just be an index but could be accessed at “prepared” locations. At
the designated spot, “A microfilm, coloured where necessary, occupying an inch or so of space and
weighing little more than a letter, can be duplicated from the records and sent anywhere, and thrown
enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail” (WB 86).
You see how such an Encyclopaedic organization could spread like a nervous network, a
system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world
through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more
conscious co-operating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity, informing without
pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny. (WB 33)
Wells claims that one great advantage of the World Brain is “It need not be vulnerable as a
human head or a human heart is vulnerable” (WB 86). Wells does see one vulnerability of the World
Brain: the slickness of salesmen over “Simple Simon” scientists and various invasive “opinionated
cults and propagandists”:
A greater danger, as I have already suggested, will come from attempts at the private
mercenary exploitation of this world-wide need—the raids of popular publishers and heavily
financed salesmen, and in particular attempts to create copyright difficulties and so to corner the
services and prestige of this or that unwary eminent person by anticipatory agreements. [...]
And there will be a constant danger that some of the early promoters may feel and attempt to
realize a sort of proprietorship in the organization, to make a group or a gang of it. But to
recognize that danger is half-way to averting it. (WB 30)
Three decades later, Drucker speaks of the future of increasing availability and access to
information “in which a great many users have their data on one and the same computer, with complete
privacy but also with complete and immediate access at all times” (AD 26). Before the personal
computer was even built, before 'the cloud' was even a dream, Drucker highlights privacy as an
important aspect of accessing information.
Regarding Wells' concern of salesmen and Drucker's concern of privacy, on April 14, 1969
Marshall McLuhan wrote to the Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau: “Under electric conditions
there can be no privacy. The privacy invaders are the bulwark of the new knowledge industries, from
the pollsters, to the insurance companies, and the credit ratings, 'the eye in the sky,' the age of the
'snoop'” (LMM 367). Almost half a century after McLuhan's letter, and seven decades since Wells'
utopian World Brain free of tyranny, Jaron Lanier's You are not a Gadget deals explicitly with these
problems. Lanier writes about how some aspects of the world wide web lull us into patterns of
behaviour that degrade existence, how the web simply treats people as “relays in a global brain,” and
how there are profound spiritual, political, and economic consequences. All of these concerns are
directly antipodal to Wells' utopian World Brain and directly in line with his own concerns of salesmen
or others making “a group or gang of it.” Lanier warns that although access to free information sounds
ideal, there are unintended consequences: “all the clout and money created online has begun to
accumulate around the people close to only certain highly secretive computers, many of which are
essentially spying operations designed to gain information to sell advertising and access or to pull
money out of a marketplace as if by black magic” (YNG x).
Add to this the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations of the NSA spying on foreign and domestic
citizens, collecting all 'meta-data', recording all electronic communication. Indeed, Snowden is one of
Wells' “thousands of workers” within the World Brain. Snowden leaked top secret documents to alert
Americans and the world to a certain “group or gang'” influence (like the NSA and all the
communication companies in collusion with them) on the World Brain. Snowden warns that “No one
can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they'll get you in time.” However, as Wells
himself said: “But to recognize that danger is half-way to averting it.” Still, Snowden's biggest fear, he
says in his first public interview in 2013 with Glen Greenwald, is that Americans will learn of the
revelations and not do anything:
(American citizens) know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves
powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they
won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their
representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.
And [in] the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse [...] And there
will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.
(Snowden)
In Data and Goliath (2015), security technologist Bruce Schneier paints a rather tyrannical
picture of our present day situation, let alone the future. Very generally, Schneier observes that in
addition to the ubiquity of smart phones and surveillance cameras, there is an increase in 'smart'
internet technology being built (by for-profit companies) into almost everything from clothing to
sidewalk squares. There are drones “the size of insects and soon the size of dust” (DG 29) and, rather
oddly, cameras that can “'listen' to phone conversations by focusing on nearby objects like potato chip
bags and measuring their vibrations” (DG 30), among other things. The companies creating these
products often work in collusion with governments to gather data and meta-data to essentially create a
behavioural file (with the goal of creating predictability) for everyone who uses, or even interacts with
others who use, such technologies. Schneier proposes that if the government were to force us to carry a
tracking device or notify them every time we meet a new friend or to reveal our private conversations
or writings we would rebel. However, all of this is accomplished through private enterprise without
major protest. “The primary goal of all this corporate Internet surveillance is advertising” (DG 47). Of
course, the primary goal of advertising is the attempt to influence your thinking to change your
behaviour (political campaigns are now using similar tactics). Thus, if they can predict your behaviour
through surveillance they can be more effective in their goal. Maintaining anonymity is virtually
impossible concludes Schneier. “In Washington, knowledge is currency, and the intelligence
community is hoarding it” (DG 100).
For an immediate example, the university email account I am obliged to use during my studies
for both my personal and scholastic communications (e.g. emailing an essay such as this one to a
professor) is “powered by Google.” Every time one signs into their account one is forced to press “I
agree” to the privacy statement in order to continue. If one bothers to read the privacy statement it
clearly says the university is “committed to respecting the privacy of its students' personal
information...Use of this system constitutes your consent to transfer your personal information out of
Canada and acknowledgement that your data may be disclosed to, among other governments, the
United States governments, law enforcement or regulatory agencies through the laws of the United
States.” One learns that their personal information is subject to the Patriot Act which (continues the
privacy statement) “expands the authority of US law enforcement agencies for the stated purpose of
fighting terrorism in the United States and abroad and includes the ability of law enforcement agencies
to search e-mail communications, telephone, medical, financial and other records of those institutions
within US jurisdiction without the owner's permission or knowledge.”
Notice that at the outset of the information age, Drucker was concerned with both privacy and
the creation of a “conceptual understanding of information.” Today we see no concern for privacy and
a desire for a behavioural understanding of information (e.g. “In 2014, former NSA and CIA director
Michael Hayden remarked, 'We kill people based on metadata'” [DG 23]). Thus there is a reversal of
direction in the approach to information; from Wells' and Drucker's past philosophical concerns of
literacy and learning to today's corporations' and governments' more practical concerns of sales and
security.
Northrop Frye's conceptual construct of verbal modes serves to clarify our understanding of
how we use language. By reviewing some definitive traits of these verbal modes, then applying them
to our “communication age”, we may gain a perspective with which to view and critique our present
situation. Frye did not live to see the yet still further depths of the flood of the information age. The
fact that Frye's modes and concepts can be applied to today's technologically saturated world is
indicative of their enduring insights.
Characteristics of the Verbal Modes:
Frye defines a “mode” as the point where our use of a verbal structure moves in two opposite
directions:
One direction is centripetal, trying to make sense of the words we are reading: the other is
centrifugal, gathering up from memory the conventional meanings of the words used in the
world of language outside the work being read. This relation of signifiers to signifieds is
variable, and the variants develop into different kinds of verbal structures, and different
emphases in meaning. I am calling these variants modes. (WP 17)
Frye states that his theory of modes is of course “a hierarchical metaphor used for convenience”
and is “imposed on the subject, not...something inherent in the subject” (WP 17). However, any
theoretical concept which serves to clarify rather than obscure one's thinking is constructive and thus
valuable. The “hierarchical metaphor” of the verbal modes certainly serves to clarify our use of
language and thus illuminates our thinking process. In the electronic age the telephone, radio, film, and
television (and now the internet) may be “distinctive arts” but “they are not actually new arts: they are
new techniques for receiving the impression of words and pictures” (SS 45). Thus the classification of
verbal modes is still very relevant (if not more so) in this age of “new techniques” of communication in
the information age.
Frye's verbal modes are: kerygmatic, imaginative or poetic, rhetorical or ideological, dialectical
or conceptual, and descriptive. The relationship between modes may be clarified by the “excluded
initiative” inherent within each mode (save for the ultimate kerygmatic mode). The excluded initiative
is a distinctive characteristic within a particular mode which is “assumed but not the focus of attention”
(WP 21). For example, in the dialectical mode of argument, the excluded initiative is the desire of the
speaker to win the argument. One may divulge the rhetoric of the logician and move out of the
dialectical mode into the rhetorical mode. Conversely, if one challenges the dialectical speaker by
demanding data or facts to further supplement the logic of the argument, one may move into the more
refined descriptive mode.
Generally, the descriptive concerns what are considered to be objective environments and “the
compulsion to accept ascertained facts”, the dialectical/conceptual concerns “the compulsion to accept
the logic of an argument”, and the rhetorical/ideological is concerned solely with “the compulsion to
accept social and authoritative pressure.” The imaginative and kerygmatic modes are uniquely
concerned with a realm where there is no “compulsion” to accept facts, arguments, or social pressure.
“Anything in the imaginative world can be assumed to be true for the duration of the individual work”
(WP 116).
When defining the modes in Words with Power, Frye points out that his sequence of
presentation “is not historical—in fact it is practically the reverse of the historical.” He claims he
presents them from the less inclusive and most recently matured to the evermore inclusive (WP 18).
What follows is a more detailed outline of Frye's verbal modes. Though Frye explicitly delineated his
theory of modes in Words with Power, his earlier writings and interviews anticipate this theory and are
referenced below where relevant to supplement the definitions.
Descriptive Mode:
The descriptive mode “was the last [mode] historically to become fully mature” (WP 18). This
mode is an attempt at “transmuting something non-verbal into a verbal structure” and is initiated by
“the ordering of words” which remains an “unexamined function” of this mode (i.e. its excluded
initiative). The descriptive mode attempts to achieve a one-to-one relationship between the signifier
and the signified. “The overriding criterion of descriptive writing is, speaking practically, objective
truth” (WP 19). Figures of speech and metaphor are avoided. “The descriptive writer normally wants
his non-verbal facts to 'speak for themselves'” (WP 21). This mode is dependent on “certain social and
technological developments that took a long time to become fully functional” and thus this mode came
to the fore most recently and is closely aligned with science. The descriptive mode attempts to avoid
argument by stating facts or data. “The prestige of the words truth and facts have caused the
descriptive mode of writing to be regarded as the most fundamental and essential mode of all” (WP
19). However, Frye warns that “a highly technological society may conscript some scientists into
working for its interests...” (WP 47) thus presumably nullifying any potential objectivity provided by
the descriptive mode. Though science represents the epitome of the descriptive mode, other examples
Frye provides are textbooks, works of reference, histories, or a telephone book. As well, Frye classifies
photography as a descriptive mode since its emphasis “is still on the pictorial transmission of an
external model” (WP 22). Television often relays a “history” in consecutive photographic images; thus
much popular programming could be considered descriptive: how-to shows, cooking, homedecoration, sports and sports commentary, science, history, news, and reality T.V. are each a “pictorial
transmission of an external model.” Often entire stations are devoted to one of these topics such as the
“history channel” or “home and garden TV”. Common time-killing distractions on the internet such as
trivia, lists, and amateur video clips of an event could be considered descriptive. As well, considering
the 1:1 relation of signifier to signified as a defining trait of the descriptive mode, economics could be
considered a descriptive field; one dollar equals one dollar, prices are “facts”, stock markets are data,
and it is a conceit of economics that it is an objective science representing reality and capable of
predictability. The ideological undercurrent of economics is seldom recognized; the classification and
ordering of the data (money) is often done to the advantage of one party and thus necessarily to the
disadvantage of another.
Ideally, descriptive writing is democratic writing in that it is factual and readily questioned; if a
reader disagrees with the descriptive writer, the reader may challenge the writer by checking the facts
or repeating the experiments (WP 20). “Arrangement means selecting for emphasis, and selecting for
emphasis can never be definitively right or wrong” (WP 24). Thus the recognition and examination of
the descriptive mode's excluded initiative of syntax (the ordering of facts or data) leads one
centrifugally into the conceptual or dialectical mode which can then challenge the descriptive mode
through reasoning and argument.
Dialectical or Conceptual Mode:
The evolution of the dialectical mode is summed up by Frye in a 1985 interview: “You can't
stay at the mythological level, because you can't argue about a story. You can merely say whether you
think it's true or false. But as soon as the secondary ideological development takes place, then you're in
the realm of proposition and theses, where every statement implies its own counter-statement” (INF
754). It is this refinement which allowed for “the most impressive achievements in this mode [which]
are the great metaphysical systems, the structures that seek to present the world to the conscious mind”
(WP 23). The advantage of this mode over the kerygmatic, imaginative, and rhetorical is that “reason
can do what faith, hope and even love by themselves cannot do: present us with the model or pattern of
an authority which appeals to the mind rather than to the body, which compels but does not enforce”
(SS 242). The conceptual writer relies on logic, on one statement following from another, so that the
reader is compelled to accept the writer's argument (WP 22). Furthermore, the dialectical mode has
two significant traits which differentiate it from the more refined descriptive mode: ambiguity and
speculation. The ambiguity of philosophical terminology may become a positive force in this mode
(allowing for metaphorical expression in conceptual thought), and the speculation of abstract concepts
which are not directly related to the concrete world. Thus, unlike the one-to-one relationship between
signifier and signified sought in the descriptive mode, what is expressed in this mode is “related
immediately to the verbal construct itself and withdrawn to some degree from the external world” (WP
23).
Ideally, conceptual writing would be objective and “an argument would not depend for its
validity on the person who advanced it: it would be the same argument no matter who worked it out.
But nobody quite believes this: there is always some glimpse of relation to a personality” (WP 25).
Thus it is the desire of the dialectical or conceptual writer which is the excluded initiative (in effect but
not analyzed) of this mode. As the speaker's desire comes to the fore and begins to dominate the
discourse, “dialectic is transmuted into rhetoric, and in place of the conceptual we have the ideological,
the verbal structure that appeals to commitment rather than reason” (WP 26). Importantly, the
dialectical mode can serve to discipline both the rhetorical mode (by challenging the logic of the
rhetorician) and the descriptive mode (by focusing on the actual 'word order' of this latter mode) (WP
21). Though the rhetorical mode can be disciplined by the reasoning of the dialectical mode, Frye
stresses that “when an established social authority insists that certain ideological postulates are
essential” one sees the subordination of the dialectical mode to rhetoric (WP 29).
Rhetorical Mode:
The rhetorical “is not an imitation of dialectic, but an incorporation of it into another mode”
(WP 28). Unlike the more refined dialectical mode which, though speculative, at least addresses the
external world conceptually, in the rhetorical mode the focus is “on figurative or purely verbal
language.” Features of this mode are “metaphor, allegory, simile, antithesis, and above all repetition”
(WP 29). The rhetorical is “peculiarly logocentric, where even written authorship points to a speaking
personality addressing a listening audience” (WP 27). Whereas the dialectical mode is characterized
by its issuing from an individual “I” trying to achieve social consensus through appealing to impersonal
reason, the rhetorical mode issues from an “I” trying to identify with and persuade the “we” in order to
foster a “response of conviction”. Significantly, the “tactics of ideology are incorporated in works of
rhetoric” (WP 29; Frye's italics). Most importantly, when rhetoric is used for attaining an immediate
aim:
[T]here is a deliberate attempt to put the watchdog of consciousness to sleep, and the steady
battering of consciousness becomes hypnotic, as the metaphor of 'swaying' an audience
suggests. A repetition of cliche phrases is designed to bring about a form of dissociation. The
dead end of all this is the semi-autonomous monster called the mob, of which the speaker is
now the shrieking head. For a mob the kind of independent judgement appealed to by dialectic
is an act of open defiance, and is normally treated as such. (WP 30)
Two “suspect” forms of rhetoric are advertising and propaganda. “They are suspect because
their approach is ironic” (WP 36). An advertiser does not necessarily mean what they say, nor do they
expect the intended audience to necessarily believe their message. Propaganda is ironic when its
ideology is enforced by “threats and penalties” (WP 36). It is the devices of imaginative and
metaphorical language used by the rhetorical speaker which are the excluded initiative of this mode.
By emphasizing such uses of language, one moves outward to the more encompassing imaginative
mode.
Imaginative Mode:
In a 1968 interview, Frye was asked if literature was the language of the imagination. Frye
responded that “it is one of the languages of the imagination, along with painting and music. [...] The
imagination is in general the creative power. It is the power which is concerned with man's building
his own human world.” Frye proposed that the “imaginative faculty” is “one in which the human mind
is totally engaged,” one which “incorporate[s] everything which is at once feeling and logic” (INF
170). Thus, within this mode “the distinction between the emotional and the intellectual has
disappeared” and “ordinary consciousness” is on par with “the fantastic and dreamlike”: “the
conceivable, not the real...the hypothetical or assumed, not the actual” (WP 33). Thus it is that
literature is spawned within this realm. In a 1977 interview, Frye was asked if literature isolates
individuals and he responded that “the book is a safeguard of privacy” and helps in “saving one's
imaginative life” by turning away from the “panic” of our technological age (INF 347). At the same
time, “it is your imagination that attaches you to society, and that to assume responsibility is the
product of a certain vision of society” (INF 268). Of course, “what we think and imagine has a great
deal to do with a kind of total conditioning that we're in” (INF 371). Thus there is a reciprocal
influence of society on our imagination. To exemplify the metaphorical aspect of the imaginative or
poetic mode, Frye noted that science tends to have a formula of a – b = 0, whereas literature's formula
is a = b (INF 530). “The scientist quantifies his data; the poet, so to speak, qualifies his: he expresses
its whatness, its impact on concrete experience, and at a certain point they start going in opposite
directions” (NFMC 320). This description of “going in opposite directions” is in keeping with Frye's
image of the centrifugal/centripetal movement between modes. The excluded initiative of the
imaginative mode is the recognition of the myth which inspired it. Here we move into the kerygmatic
mode since a “myth to live by” can only be founded in this mode (WP 116).
Kerygmatic Mode:
The kerygmatic is most encompassing verbal mode and all other modes precipitate from this
one. Kerygma is “not ordinary rhetoric but a mode of language that takes account of the mythical and
literary qualities which cannot be separated from the Biblical texture. In short, a mode of language on
the other side of the poetic” (WP 102). In The Stubborn Structure Frye provides an illustration of the
inclusive nature of the kerygmatic mode: “Revelation from God accommodates itself to man primarily
in the form of reason. Reason manifests itself in the decisive acts of a free life [...] and as revelation is
the opposite of mystery, there is no conflict between spiritual authority and reason. A revelation from
an infinite mind may transcend the reason of a finite one, but does not contradict or humiliate it” (SS
243). Indeed, the kerygmatic “insists on becoming a part of us” (WP 113). Examples of the
kerygmatic mode might be the Sermon on the Mount, Muhammad revealing the Koran, or any
situation, including in contemporary writing, where “it seems to be language that uses man rather than
man that uses language” (WP 116). Frye highlights a key trait of kerygma as being “You are what you
identify with” (116).
In The Stubborn Structure, Frye observes that for a good part of human history “the study of
nature was also the study of a revelation of God.” As science advances, the assumed religious aspects
of human thought are called into question: “We tend to feel that whatever is objective or external
belongs only to the spatial world of science: every other 'there' is a metaphor derived from that spatial
world, and such metaphors no longer carry much conviction. [...] God is certainly not 'there': he has
been deprived of all scientific function and he has no status in the spatial world of science, including
the temporal one that can be divided and measured” (50). The verbal mode most suited for science is
the descriptive mode. However, an example of the kerygmatic mode encompassing 'primitive science'
may be those biblical passages wherein laws for health and diet are decreed, as in Deuteronomy 14:21
where Moses declares: “Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself.” “The implications for the
conception of the kerygmatic are, first, that kerygmatic writing normally demands a literary, that is, a
mythical and metaphorical, basis; second, that the kerygmatic does not, like ordinary rhetoric, emerge
from direct personal address, or what a writer 'says'” (WP 115). Frye has observed that all myths are
spawned in some way from the “primary concerns” of survival: food, shelter, clothing, sexuality, and
freedom of movement. The kerygmatic mode, as evinced from surviving ancient myths and biblical
stories, is the verbal mode in which humans express these ever-present “primary concerns” most
directly.
Given the above outline, Frye's reverse presentation of these verbal modes elucidates how the
modes become ever more enveloping. The encompassing nature of the modes is readily demonstrated
if one considers the process of programming a robot for artificial intelligence: firstly, one programs a
base of facts and data (descriptive); then the ability for logical argument using these facts and data
(dialectical); then the ability for the robot to convincingly persuade (rhetorical), as in the Turing test
(programmers are presently stumped at this level); then the ability to imagine and create (imaginative);
finally one would attempt to program the robot with the ability to feel connected to, and take
responsibility for the world it creates (kerygmatic). It is interesting that human intelligence can easily
be seen as most naturally evolving from the spiritual (and inclusive) kerygmatic mode toward the
technical refinement of the descriptive mode whereas artificial intelligence is necessarily engineered
from terrestrial descriptive data toward the ideal of eventually programming “spirit” into the machine.
This raises the following question: If a descriptive verbal structure, such as binary code programming,
is an attempt at exorcising the spiritual ambiguity from the imaginative and kerygmatic modes, how
does one then conceive spirit from a necessarily spiritless descriptive program? As Job beseeched to
his god: “How can a clean thing come from an unclean thing?” How can a spontaneous free spirit
come from the closed pre-determinism of data programming? Interestingly, Frye stated in a 1972
interview that “the religious perspective is the only one that doesn't give the human mind
claustrophobia” (INF 268).
The Shift in Modes: Quantity over Quality
Frye argues that in the past there has been a shift in modes from the poetic (imaginative) to the
dialectical. Considering Plato banished the poets from his ideal Republic, and that Aristotle refers to
mythological thinking with contempt in his Metaphysics, Frye reasons there has been “a subordination
of poetic and metaphorical to dialectical language which has dominated Western culture ever since.”
More recent examples of the dialectical mode include “the secular ideologies of our own time,
democratic or Marxist or whatever...” (WP 43). Considering the descriptive mode is dependent upon
“certain social and technological developments” (WP 19), and that there has been an exponential
progress in science and technology since the industrial revolution, this evolution would affect the
development of the descriptive mode with equal force akin to the developments in reason affecting
poetic mythical thinking in ancient Greece. We are seeing the effects of an increasing dominance of
the descriptive mode in tandem with the increasing dominance in science and technology. However,
since the descriptive mode is only effective when fused with one or more other modes, it is animated
most often by the rhetorical mode (for reasons outlined below). Again, this phenomenon is on a mass
level and thus we can be certain there are still individuals throughout society utilizing all modes in
various combinations to great intellectual and spiritual effect. However, just as Frye argued that the
dialectical mode has been dominant in mass society for a couple of thousand years, it is conceivable
there would be yet another shift in verbal modes at some point in our social evolution. Today, given
our increasing (individual and societal) dependence upon mass communication technologies, this shift
will be most reasonably from the dialectical to a fusion of the descriptive and rhetorical modes.
In a 1954 essay entitled Technics and the Future, American historian Lewis Mumford points
out that many technological developments are “devices for saving time, for shrinking space, for
enhancing energy, for speeding motions, for accelerating natural processes... releasing people from the
constraints of here and now” (IF 281). The saving (or shrinking) of time, space, and energy due to
technological advancements allows for an increase in quantity; quantity of time saved, of space
traversed or communicated across, of personal energy conserved, of speed.
From this point of view norms, patterns, ideals, were wholly unimportant: the only intelligent
questions one could ask about the physical world were those relating to quantity, and the only
acceptable answers those ascertainable by measurement. Hence the capitalist's interest in
quantity—his belief that there are no natural limits to acquisition—was supplemented, in
technology, by the notion that quantitative production had no natural limits either: norms,
limits, optimum amounts, goals, were out of the picture. (IF 284)
Mumford reasons that the history of humanity's struggles for survival amidst scarcity explains
this animal's interest in hording sheer quantity (IF 284). However, with scientific and technological
advancements there is also an increase in the quantity of (descriptive) information culled from the
world including information about information (e.g. meta-data, big data, reviews, opinion pieces, polls,
etc.). In light of the exponential increase in technological progress since the Industrial Revolution, and
particularly since the spark of the electronic age, it is this mechanical acceleration of life, this shrinking
of time, space and energy (and the resultant increase in “quantity” of all kinds) which inspires or even
demands a mass social shift from the once dominant dialectical mode to a fusion of the descriptive and
rhetorical modes, if only as a psychological coping mechanism; in an attempt to process the increasing
speed and proliferating quantity of descriptive information and spinning rhetoric we're fed we may
come to mirror such verbal structures cognitively. Frye states:
Looking into the mirror is the active mind which struggles for consistency and continuity of
outlook, which preserves its memory of its past and clarifies its view of the present. Staring
back at it is the frozen reflection of that mind, which has lost its sense of continuity by
projecting it on some mechanical social process, and has found that it has also lost its dignity,
its freedom, its creative power, and its sense of the present, with nothing left except a fearful
apprehension of the future. (MC 48-49)
Of course, Frye's verbal modes are not exclusive and can co-exist to some degree within a
single verbal structure. Thus a shift from the dialectical to a fusion of descriptive and rhetorical does
not mean the other verbal modes are completely ostracized. However, the contemporary trend of the
decline in the belief of a meta-narrative is indicative of a trend away from the older more inclusive
spiritual modes of imaginative and kerygmatic to the more specialized, non-spiritual, more “modern”
modes. The increase in specialization of language and the reliance on “the number” (particularly
statistics and economics) can be interpreted as a symptom of increasing dependence on the descriptive
mode. Again, the meta-narrative is replaced by the meta-data. As Mumford said in 1934: “In timekeeping, in trading, in fighting, men counted numbers; and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers
counted” (IF 278).
Frye views higher education (which would include conceptual and imaginative thinking as well
as descriptive and rhetorical) as a means of escaping the world's accelerated changes (SS 7). “[A]
knowledge of the more permanent principles of the arts and sciences turns out to be more practically
useful than the kind of technical training that becomes obsolete as soon as one has learned it.”
But as long as we accept, even unconsciously, a vision of society in which the machinery of
production assumes an overwhelming and inescapable urgency, our defences of the liberal arts
and sciences will continue to have a panic-stricken tone. There is residual panic even in the
question of what knowledge is most worth while, for in the time-word 'while' lurks the thought
'so little time', with its suggestion that a pathetically small part of one's life is spent in acquiring
knowledge. (SS 13)
In the 1880's, Nietzsche describes social conditions similar to the “panic” of the present day,
including the recent concern of FOMO (fear of missing out) which is a contemporary term created to
express the social anxiety in the information age due to a relentless demand 'to be up to date' on
everything occurring in the virtual world. Nietzsche wrote:
Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad
conscience. One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while
reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always ‘might miss out on
something’. ‘Rather do anything than nothing’: this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle
all culture and good taste....Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than
someone else. (GS 259)
Here Nietzsche stresses the sense of shrinking time and the replacing of imaginative “prolonged
reflection” with the descriptive information of clock and stock numbers.
By the 1930's, we find more evidence that the acceleration of daily life was of prominent
psychological concern. In Society and its Discontents, Freud questions the satisfaction gained by
progress: “But [humanity seems] to have observed that this newly-won power over space and time, this
subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfilment of a longing that goes back thousands of
years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has
not made them feel happier” (38). And in 1935, Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Alexis Carrel states: “The
principles of the greatest convenience and the least effort, the pleasure procured by speed, change, and
comfort, and also the need of escaping from ourselves, are the determining factors in the success of
new inventions. But no one ever asks themselves how we would stand the enormous acceleration of
the rhythm of life” (MU 36).
Thus how do we stand this enormous acceleration of the rhythm of life? Are we superior to
those in the past in our adaptation to functioning at a quickening pace? Have we proven Freud wrong
and since found happiness in our instant electronic world? Or have we changed our thinking and
behaviour to match our social conditions and simply learn to function in a corporate sponsored
technological society (the fusion of rhetorical and descriptive modes)? Nietzsche would have probably
suspected it is the latter: “Means of relief: absolute obedience, machine-like activity, avoidance of
people and things that would demand instant decisions and actions” (WTP 28). Considering the
common refrain in this age of increasingly efficient time saving devices is that 'there is no time', it is
doubtful we are unaffected by the acceleration of daily life and the changes technology brings. In a
1982 interview, Frye himself confesses: “The world is changing itself much faster than I could ever
keep up with it, not being a computer expert, for example...Wars start, and technological developments
throw everything out of balance. The technology of the twentieth century has introduced so many
imponderable factors” (INF 573).
Frye speaks of the “general sense” in society of “the panic of change. The variety of things that
occur in the world, combined with the relentless continuity of their appearance day after day, impress
us with the sense of a process going by a little too fast for our minds to focus on anything in it” (MC
22). Furthermore, there is “a type of consciousness frequent in the modern world, obsessed by a
compulsion to keep up, reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of the total movement. It is
a type of consciousness which I shall call the alienation of progress. Alienation and progress are two
central elements in the mythology of our day” (MC 23).
In the late 1880's, Nietzsche muses “modernity” using the metaphor of digestion. He highlights
the challenge of trying to digest the sheer quantity of “things that occur in the world” daily, as Frye too
has noted:
[T]he abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever; cosmopolitanism in foods,
literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo;
the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything
deeply, to ‘digest’ anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind of
adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous actions, they
merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength partly in assimilating things,
partly in defence, partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity; the historian, critic,
analyst, the interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader—all of them reactive talents—all
science. (WTP 47)
Here we see Nietzsche witnessing “a kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions” including
the loss of spontaneity and a tendency toward “scientific” thinking. Lewis Mumford also has concerns
about the increase of information and in creating specialization in an attempt to control information
overload; specialization necessarily leads to “the same paralyzing overproductivity” of yet more
information. Due to this excess of information, it is impossible to ever comprehend enough to reach a
point where one may gain a perspective and consider the information rationally: “Either to explore the
past or keep up with the present becomes increasingly impossible: so that our capacity for assimilation
may be said to vary inversely with our capacity for production; and eventually this will have an
unfortunate effect upon our creativity, indeed on our very rationality” (IF 286).
More recently, in a 1981 essay entitled The Implosion of Meaning, Jean Baudrillard proposes
that modern media (pre-internet notably) produces excessive information, a “bombardment of signs,”
which leads to “the obliteration of distinctions and oppositions between terms, including the distinction
between the medium and the real. Hence any mediation or dialectical intervention between the two, or
by one on the other, becomes impossible.” As a result, “meaning becomes impossible” and it is “futile
to dream of a revolution through either form or content, since both the medium and the real now form a
single inscrutable nebula” (MOI 142). Of course, rather poetically, information today is stored in “the
cloud”: a massive nebula accumulating world-wide data, every second of every day, in such quantities
as to make establishing a dialectical polarity within such a cloud of information impossible. Jaron
Lanier (whose term virtual reality describes the fusion between “the medium [virtual] and the real
[reality]” in keeping with Baudrillard's observation above) reveals the following about his occupation
of computer programming (italics mine):
We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (web cams and mobile
phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become
the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can
change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct
manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a
tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human
experience with incredible speed. (YNG 5)
Jonathan Crary, in his 2013 essay 24/7, concludes that with the speed of technological
innovation “There never will be a 'catching up' on either a social or individual basis...” (37). Thus, like
Mumford, Crary sees no still point where one may be able to take stock and assess one's situation
rationally. However, Baudrillard counters that the masses are “resistant to this imperative [of finding
meaning] of rational communication” and prefer “entertainment”, and “signs and stereotypes” in a
“dramatic sequence” (similar to certain defining traits of descriptive and rhetorical verbal structures).
Importantly, “What they reject is the dialectic of meaning...They intuit the terrorizing simplification
behind the ideal hegemony of meaning and they react in their own way, by reducing all articulate
discourse to a single irrational, groundless dimension, in which signs lose their meaning and subside
into exhausted fascination” (142-143 MOI).
“It is very tiring,” Frye admits, “to keep on being open to involuntary sense impressions, to be
detached and clear-headed, to weigh evidence and fit judgements to it, and very easy to relapse into an
emotional colouring of experience...” (SS 43). Indeed, the knowledge and reflection necessary to
operate within the dialectical mode requires time, space, and (one's own) energy. In keeping with
Baudrillard's observation of the devaluation of “all articulate discourse” and a reliance on
“stereotypes”, it is worth noting here what Frye considers to be the importance of the relationship
between thinking, articulation, and individuality. According to Frye, “thinking is the practice of
articulating ideas until they are in the right words...Most of us spend very little time doing this, and that
is why there are so few people who we regard as having any power to articulate at all.” Furthermore,
the main purpose of teaching literacy in our society is not to refine thinking and articulation. Rather:
It is compulsory to read and write because society must have docile and obedient
citizens...And when we look at our day-to-day existence we can see that there are strong
currents at work against the development of powers of articulateness...Articulate speech marks
you out as an individual, and in some settings this can be rather dangerous because people are
often suspicious and frightened of articulateness. So if you say as little as possible and use only
stereotyped, ready-made phrases you can hide yourself in the mass. (747 INF)
Critical thinking, argues Baudrillard, “judges, discriminates, and produces differences” and thus
it is the “guardian of meaning.” The masses, however, are indifferent. And a fascination of the media,
which has become the definitive realm of the social, is preferred over the message. “Fascination is
their law and the violence that is specific to them, a brutal violence perpetrated on meaning, which
cancels out communication via meaning in favour of another mode. The question is, which one?” (146
MI). Baudrillard clarifies his use of mode as “not a mode of communication or of meaning but a state
of perennial emulsion, of input-output and controlled chain reactions” (MOI 140). Obviously,
Baudrillard is not using the word 'mode' in the same way Frye uses the term. However, I would
suggest that with the erosion of the dialectical mode the new mode favoured by the masses is a fusion
of the descriptive and rhetorical. And again this may simply be a survival tactic of the herd cognitively
regurgitating what its fed. “The surest way to destroy freedom is to destroy the capacity to articulate
freely” (744 INF) says Frye.
Concerning the increasing quantity of information, Aldous Huxley speaks of the “Will to
Order” as an attempt to organize “within the realms of science, art, and philosophy” and such ordering
is usually “beneficent”. However, Huxley warns “It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and
economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous” (BNWR 255). Politics falls under the
rhetorical mode, and economics the descriptive mode. “In politics the equivalent of a fully developed
scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a
beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly
adjusted to the machines. The Will To Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear
up a mess” (BNWR 255). A poignant example of this might be the National Security Agency in the
United States monitoring all electronic communications in an attempt to “clear up the mess” of
terrorism.
In keeping with the proposition that we may be seeing a decline in the kerygmatic and
imaginative modes, Huxley warns “Too much organization transforms men and women into automata,
suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom” (BNWR 255). Indeed, Frye
specifies that when the use of rationality in the dialectical mode is taken to an extreme it is no longer
rational: “Hence reason, given its full deductive and speculative head, is not an emancipating but a
destructive and ultimately enslaving power in politics”. Society requires an aspect of “spiritual
authority,” outside of reason to stay “held together” (SS 246). The absence of spiritual authority fosters
coercive authority. Huxley observes that “Big Government” and “Big Business” have the means of
mind manipulation via propaganda and advertising (Frye's two “suspect” rhetorical modes) and “will
not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion [rhetorical] by economic coercion
[descriptive] and threats of physical violence” (BNWR 327).
The rhetorical mode is well suited to keep pace with our accelerating surroundings since it is
focused “on figurative or purely verbal language” (WP 29) and is derived from a “personality” who is
not obliged to address reality but rather addresses, and persuades, an audience (WP 27). Rhetoric may
be imaginative but it does not have to be logical; thus one may speedily skip over all the timeconsuming reasoning and debate and appeal directly to emotion. Rhetoric depends upon “A repetition
of cliche phrases [and] is designed to bring about a form of dissociation. The dead end of all this is the
semi-autonomous monster called the mob, of which the speaker is now the shrieking head. For a mob
the kind of independent judgement appealed to by dialectic is an act of open defiance, and is normally
treated as such” (WP 30). Again, two main media expressions of the rhetorical mode are advertising
and propaganda; the goal of each being to consolidate a mob mentality. Now, since the descriptive
mode “attempts to escape from argument” (WP 24) and is “regarded as the most fundamental and
essential mode of all” (WP 19), a rhetorical appeal to the authority of the descriptive mode is a very
effective way to orate an authoritarian ideology backed by numbers while at the same time bypassing
the scrutinizing logic of the dialectical mode. (Rhetoric overriding reality is “an element in all lying”
[CP 118].) An average day in an advanced society requires that we manoeuvre within (and trust) the
conceptually derived structures of government, corporations, advertisers and finance, if not physically
then virtually. Yet the conceptual ossification of these structures (due to their continuity of
organization) fosters the ascendance of the rhetorical and descriptive modes (as opposed to
conceptual/dialectical or imaginative/poetic). The fusion of these modes is materialized in partisan
political ideologies, consumerism, advertising and propaganda, and the increasing influence of the
stock market. This results in the proliferation of pure information production due to meta-data
collection, incessant polling, algorithmic decision making (especially in social media and stock
markets), and economically and ideologically (rather than conceptually) justified political rationale.
One might sum up this state of affairs with the old cliche 'there's no time for debate.' Indeed, Frye
notes that “The natural drive of the producing society is not democratic but oligarchic or managerial
[Will to Order]; it increases inequalities of privilege instead of reducing them, and in itself is not longer
capable of leading us to the vision of the just state” (SS 13).
Developing a vision is the function of the imaginative mode. If we are, as a society, focused
daily on “keeping up” with the quantity of descriptive “information” while being forced to disentangle
this information from the rhetoric by which it is delivered, our mundane cognitive abilities are thus
monopolized and imaginative vision is relegated to a luxury of leisure (if we can find the time). Of
course, as our time saving devices encourage the perception of shrinking space and time, spare time is
becoming ever more of a rarity. Crary observes that “Billions of dollars are spent every year
researching how to reduce decision-making time, how to eliminate the useless time of reflection and
contemplation. This is the form of contemporary progress—the relentless capture and control of time
and experience” (24/7 40) It is a “given” that the “limitless” quantity of information and images
“override any human-scale communication or exploration of ideas” (24/7 59).
The imaginative arts “qualify” life while descriptive science “quantifies” our existence (SS 44).
With a world of increased quantification made possible by scientific and technological advancements,
thinking 'pragmatically' in a concrete quantitative way (rather than 'dreamily' in an abstract qualitative
way) tends to invade our imagination and thus verbal expressions as well. “We are constantly using
quantitative expressions (e.g. 'I love you very much') as metaphors for things that are not quantities”
(SS 49). Indeed, humanity's adopting an increasingly scientific or technological view of the world
necessarily inspires certain metaphorical thinking and dispels old metaphorical fancies. Since the arts
are concerned with “internal” and “existential” issues “We tend to feel that whatever is objective or
external belongs only to the spatial world of science: every other 'there' is a metaphor derived from that
spatial world, and such metaphors no longer carry much conviction” (SS 49-50).
It was the “end of metaphysics” when humans entered space, says Baudrillard, since “once we
put men in space, the metaphor of 'out there' became quotidian...What I mean is this: what was
projected psychologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as metaphor, as mental or
metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, in to an absolute
space which is also that of simulation” (EC 128). Frye agrees that “...God is certainly not 'there': he has
been deprived of all scientific function and he has no status in the spatial world of science, including
the temporal world that can be divided and measured” (SS 50). Scientific progress may address aspects
of our immediate physical needs but it does not address our eternal existential needs: “To fly, to talk at
a distance, to overcome natural forces, these things we have achieved, thanks to exact science and the
associated arts. But the myth-making functions, which produced Prometheus, not fire, and Icarus, not
light, are still left untouched by the machine: what we will to be is still left unanswered by our will to
do, or by our success in controlling and manipulating external forces” (IF 239).
However, though the myth-making functions are “untouched by the machine”, if the quality of
our imaginative thinking (whose excluded initiative is our ability to create “myth”) is increasingly
dominated by quantitative and scientific thinking, our metaphors will be as well. Indeed, the goal of
the descriptive verbal structure is to limit or even eradicate the need for metaphors in order to achieve
an unambiguous one-to-one relation of signifier to signified. In a 1981 interview entitled Scientist and
Artist, Frye states “It is that metaphorical imagination that gives you a sense of quality in the sense of
the whatness of the things” (INF530). Thus if our thinking becomes ever more influenced by the
closed and “absolute space” of science and technology, we are increasingly reduced to thinking
(metaphorically) in terms of the quantity of things, the measurable, the known, and we lose that quality
of thinking found in imaginative and artistic thinking. If we interact with our surroundings primarily
through technological devices, our thinking becomes limited to within the realm of capabilities of the
device itself. Thus as we use science to decipher the mysteries of our universe, the ambiguity of the
“real” world is refined and defined. This is the goal of science and technology. However, when we
become accustomed to using technology to minimize ambiguity in mundane existence (like pointing
one's phone at the night sky and having the constellations described instantly, or viewing online photos
describing our vacation destination before we even embark) instead of allowing for wonder we weaken
our imaginative faculty. When one has a hammer, everything becomes a nail; when one has a
computer-phone, everything becomes a reason for the “application” of the computer-phone (including
social processes). And due to atrophy we lose the imaginative thinking necessary for visualizing an
alternative to the closed system of quantifiable scientific progress and its technological appendages.
Recall, Frye said “the religious perspective is the only one that doesn't give the human mind
claustrophobia” (INF 268).
Lanier stresses (italics mine) that intellectuals in Silicon Valley are embracing prior
“speculations as certainties, without the spirit of unbounded curiosity that originally gave rise to them.
[...] The first tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information
system...The meaning of life, in this view, is making the digital system we call reality function at everhigher 'levels of description'.” Lanier illustrates these “levels of description” by noting a letter is less
descriptive than a web page, and a web page less descriptive than a brain. “An increasingly common
notion is that the net as a whole is or soon will be a higher level [of description] than a brain. There's
nothing special about the place of humans in this scheme” (YNG 27). Alas, once again, for humans
“there's no there there” (to quote Gertrude Stein’s witticism). However, as Lanier astutely points out:
“What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion” (YNG 34).
An all-encompassing descriptive verbal structure minimizes the potential for creating metaphor.
Baudrillard describes a closed system of meaning in a technological society “where all the terms must
continually communicate among themselves and stay in contact, informed of the respective condition
of the others and of the system as a whole, where opacity, resistance or the secrecy of a single term can
lead to catastrophe” (EC 128). (Though published in 1981, this sounds like a terse summary of today's
“internet of things” where one's icebox communicates with the toaster, or one's jogging shoes with
one's life insurance company.) Such a closed technical environment does not allow for any
spontaneity. Nietzsche speaks of how humans adapt to the 'modern' flood of impressions: “men
unlearn spontaneous actions, they merely react to stimuli from outside” (WTP 47). Baudrillard claims
the changes in both “objects and the environment” are the result of “an irreversible tendency towards
three things:
[A]n ever greater formal and operational abstraction of elements and functions and their
homogenization in a single virtual process of functionalization; the displacement of bodily
movements and efforts into electric or electronic commands, and the miniaturization, in time
and space, of processes whose real scene (though it is no longer a scene) is that of infinitesimal
memory and the screen with which they are equipped. (EC 128-129)
Here Baudrillard stresses the shrinking of time and space due to a growing dependence on
technology which increasingly envelops various aspects of our functioning in the world into a singular
virtual process projected on a screen and stored forever in memory; and all this occurs while our body
is sedentary. Taken to the extreme, as Baudrillard is fond of doing, such a process makes our
environment, both our body and our world, seem useless to us (EC 129). With such condensing of
space (body and environment) and time “There is no longer any ideal principle for these things at a
higher level, on a human scale. What remains are only concentrated effects, miniaturized and
immediately available. [The body is useless] since everything is concentrated in the brain and in
genetic codes, which alone sum up the operational definition of being” (EC 129).
Translating Baudrillard's observations using Frye's verbal modes finds Baudrillard noticing
advancements in technology increasing the utilization of the descriptive mode in our perceptions of and
interactions with the world around us to the point that the human body and its pleasures and imaginings
are reduced to the scientific descriptive base of neuronal functioning and genetic codes. Crary draws a
parallel between the ingestion of electronic media and pharmaceuticals in that both are solutions to
“pseudo-necessities” and a means of control. “[T] he pharmaceutical industry, in partnership with the
neurosciences, is a vivid example of the financialization and externalization of what used to be thought
of as 'inner life'” (24/7 54-55). Thus the meta-narrative of the spiritual (kerygmatic and imaginative)
inner-life is divulged and revealed to be but chemicals and sequence of codes (descriptive).
Baudrillard argues private space is “no longer a secret” and public space “is no longer
spectacle.” Space (body and landscape) and time “all progressively disappear as scenes.” As public
space disappears advertising “invades everything” monopolizing public life.” (EC 130).
Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its
pure circulation. This is what I call (potentially) ecstasy. [...] All functions abolished in a single
dimension, that of communication. That's the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces
and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That's obscenity. (EC 131)
For Baudrillard, the conclusion is: “Speech is free perhaps, but I am less free than before: I no
longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who
want to make themselves heard.” A human becomes “a pure screen, a switching center for all the
networks of influence” (EC 132). One could summarize this scenario as follows: If the medium is the
message the message is 'you stare at a screen all day'. Crary continues Baudrillard's line of thought
saying “As the opportunity for electronic transactions of all kinds becomes omnipresent, there is no
vestige of what used to be everyday life beyond the reach of corporate intrusion. An attention economy
dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information,
all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7”
(24/7 75).
Frye seems to be more optimistic than Baudrillard and Crary concerning society's use of
technology. Though he admits “there's a great pressure in all mass media toward mediocrity” and that
the screen of television is “like a shark's maw” devouring “a vast block of time” and “everything that's
thrown into it,” Frye has faith intelligent people will tire of “idiot programs”. Media evolve and find
their place. “People have developed a capacity for using the newspaper as they want, and I think the
same thing will happen with the other media” (INF 342).
However, in 1968 in The Modern Century, Frye (sounding much like Baudrillard) warns:
If certain tendencies within our civilization were to proceed unchecked, they would rapidly
take us towards a society which, like that of a prison, would be both completely introverted and
completely without privacy. The last stand of privacy has always been, traditionally, the inner
mind. It is quite possible however for communications media, especially the newer electronic
ones, to break down the associative structures of the inner mind and replace them by the
prefabricated structures of the media. A society entirely controlled by their slogans and
exhortations would be introverted, because nobody would be saying anything...The triumph of
communication is the death of communication: where communication forms a total
environment, there is nothing to be communicated. (38)
Toward a Closed Myth of Concern:
Nietzsche summarizes how we view and attempt to comprehend the relations in Nature by
adding to it “time, space, i.e., relations of sequence and numbers” (defining traits of the descriptive
mode). These Laws of Nature which inspire marvel and guard against idealism lie “really and solely in
the mathematical rigour and inviolability of the conceptions of time and space,” yet we are being
impressed by the “qualities that we ourselves attach to those things, so that it is we who thereby make
the impression upon ourselves” (TF 9-10). As Frye says, scientists and philosophers should not be
“surprised to discover that nature has a mathematical form. Of course it has: they put it there” (SS 47).
Frye claims this is the power of mathematics as a descriptive language; it can “render the world
of primary qualities” and serve to “explain the human situation” rather than “merely expressing it as
literature does.” But science is necessarily always connected to the human situation. “The conception
of science, as a systematic understanding of nature under law for which the appropriate language is
mathematics is, of course, a relatively recent one” (SS 48). Thus, our relatively recent dependence on
“relations of sequence and numbers” may be influencing a shift in the dominant verbal structures we
use to think about the world around us. Nietzsche noticed just such a shift: “As we saw, it is language
which has worked originally at the construction of ideas; in later times it is science.” Frye notices an
effect with this increased dependence on science; the “spiritual world is a metaphorical verbal object”
but “With the rise of science, words have become more limited in their range” (SS 49). Nietzsche
recognizes the “authority” with such descriptive, scientific language when “the seeker after truth builds
his hut close to the towering edifice of science in order to collaborate with it and to find protection”
(TF 10). Frye echos this sentiment, specifically regarding literature: “In our day the writer defends
himself in language parallel to the language of science and other objective disciplines” (SS 53). Thus
we see an increased dependence upon the descriptive mode in the imaginative realms of both
philosophy and literature.
Two decades before Frye formalized his theory of verbal modes, he describes poetry as being at
the center of literature, and imaginative prose as directly circling this center. Circling prose, in turn, is
utilitarian language (“language you use for writing committee reports and that kind of thing”). Frye
notices (in 1968) “There is a tendency to start the wrong way around—to start with utilitarian prose (or
communications arts) and then gradually work your way into a novel or drama, and then, if you can get
around to it, perhaps some poetry. This is backing into literature the wrong way” (INF 165). One sees
in this analogy the germination of Frye's 'centrifugal/centripetal' movement in language. In this earlier
conception, poetry is at the center of the circle and utilitarian language is further from the poetic core.
Despite not having conceived of his verbal modes proper at this point, Frye does notice a social shift in
approach to literature which he regards as “backwards”; starting from a limited descriptive utilitarian
language and attempting to move from there into the poetic.
In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek sees a similar “backwards” approach developing.
Zizek argues that “audiovisual media” cause a plague of fantasies, “images which blur one's clear
reasoning”. It is interesting that in the following quote Zizek implies a change in what we consider the
'abstract' pinnacle over time, that is from “religious, legal” to “the abstraction that increasingly
determines our lives (in the guise of digitalization, speculative market relations, etc.).” Zizek explains
the “backwards” movement as follows:
In the good old days of traditional Ideologiekritik, the paradigmatic critical procedure was to
regress from 'abstract' (religious, legal...) notions to the concrete social reality in which these
notions were rooted; today, it seems more and more that the critical procedure is forced to
follow the opposite path, from pseudo-concrete imagery to abstract (digital, market...) processes
which effectively structure our living experience. (PF xxiii)
(Of course, 'descent' from the religious abstract to the mundane infuses the mundane with
religious abstract thinking; 'ascent' from the quotidian to abstract heights means this abstract is
constructed from the mundane. This is likely why Zizek replaces the top-down “religious, legal”
abstract with the bottom-up “digital, market” abstract. How can “spiritual” thinking come from a mind
obsessed with digital images and economic anxiety? Again, one's reminded of Job's lament of “how
can a clean thing come from an unclean thing?”)
Frye notes the movement from utilitarian to poetic imitates how the humanities “evolve” from
the most recent and most specialized descriptive language of the natural sciences out toward the more
encompassing verbal structures. This is because we take the techniques of natural science and utilize
them in the social sciences to lend them the authenticity provided by the descriptive mode. Though the
social sciences depend on statistical prediction, “the subject tends to be organized verbally rather than
mathematically.” Then from the social sciences we move into the humanities (SS 42). Each field
appeals to the descriptive mode, granted in lesser degrees, due to the credibility this mode provides.
Yet humans are the ones who invested the universe with numbers and relations of sequence and then
we use these formulae we invented and invested in things to prove our 'objectivity'.
The descriptive mode matures with technological advances and, in turn, technological
advancements influence our linguistic constructs, our metaphors, with which we view the world. If the
effect of machinery is to shrink our perception of space and time then one could imagine our linguistic
constructs may come to mirror this perception: this would explain our popular present-day perception
that 'there is no time'.
In 1934, Mumford observed that though the machine assisted in the human's “desire to order”
(or “Will To Order” to use Huxley's phrase), “in a subtle way he thus set a new standard for his
personal life and his more organic attitudes. Unless he was better than the machine he would only find
himself reduced to its level: dumb, servile, abject, a creature of immediate reflexes and passive
unselective responses” (TC 324). Eight decades later, Lanier sees this same pattern occur in the field
of virtual reality and social media: “You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just
lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart...While it's
to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new
technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their
mooring to reality.”
“Most gradualist myths”, says Frye, “assume a greater freedom in the future through the
shifting of drudgery from men to machines; experience notices an increase of legislative restriction in
response to every major technological change, such as the invention of the automobile, a steady
pressing of life into the mechanistic patterns suggested by the machines themselves” (CP 89). In a
1970 letter to the Office of the Prime Minister, Marshal McLuhan uses the example of the bureaucracy
inspired by the increased acceleration of the automobile as giving rise to “the extreme instance of
police state” by introducing “helicopters and computers” to monitor the faster traffic (LMM 401). In
the future with self-driving cars one will simply be entirely at the mercy of the bureaucratic program
while telling their children about the days of “free will” when one could still choose both the speed and
the route to one's destination. Crary observes that today our communication technologies impose an
ever increasing regime of bureaucracy of “self-administration” and “there is an ever-growing number
of routines and needs that constitute this life that no one has actually chosen...The illusion of choice
and autonomy is one of the foundations of this global system of auto-regulation” (24/7 46). Erich
Fromm, in 1968, noticed similar behaviour and marked it as a symptom of those who are attracted to
what he calls the “non-alive”: they prefer “bureaucratic to spontaneous methods, gadgets to living
beings, repetition to originality...They want to control life because they are afraid of its uncontrollable
spontaneity” (RH 45).
Thus if the increased use of the descriptive language of science and technology serves to limit
the range of meaning for words, and the increased use of technological devices serves to limit one's
actions either due to the machine acting for you or the increased legislative restrictions which arise
from the use of the machine (such as loss of privacy in online communication for “security” reasons),
then we are progressing toward a society where our thinking and movements are potentially being
limited by technology. With the limited ability for articulation and the once-removed interaction with
one's environment, how can one spontaneously elevate one's thinking from this technical realm to the
imaginative mode (not to mention the kerygmatic mode)?
Frye warns that our reality is “what we create, not what we contemplate,” and it is “more
important to know how to construct a human world than to know how to study a non-human one.”
Science construes a world under law which necessarily renders its vision incomplete (like Lanier's
observation quoted above that “What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it
to completion”), it merely masters a “mechanical and unconscious world.” If we elevate science from a
“mental construct” into “an oracle of reality, the logical conclusion is that man ought to adjust himself
to that reality on its terms” (SS 51), as we have seen we do for the machines which are derived from
science. Thus, if we were to view the world primarily through the descriptive mode of science,
scientific law would replace moral law and “What begins as reason ends in the conditioned reflexes of
an insect state, where human beings have become cerebral automata.” (Erich Fromm feared such a
world would exist by the year 2000 A.D. [RH 29].) Frye argues the existential attitude of the world
being chaotic and absurd allows for us to constantly create it, the scientific attitude is one where we
constantly observe and interact with an indubitable construct.
[H]uman life is at its most mathematical and automatic in military operations...Every advance
in technology is likely to cause an immense legal complication in life, as the automobile has
done, and the sheeplike panic-stricken stampeding of modern life, of which the totalitarian state
is a by-product, is part of a technological way of life. (SS 52)
The desire to keep things as they are inhibits change. Yet “it is man's right to create his world that
must be safeguarded, and every creation is likely to require a transvaluation of the past” (SS 52). Thus,
every change will threaten the status quo; and when the status quo is an expensive technological and
bureaucratic infrastructure, the easiest rhetorical argument against change is simply to appeal to
descriptive numbers by saying 'it will cost too much and take too much time.'
Frye's conception of the hierarchy of modes allows for the movement from the modes of
kerygmatic and imaginative toward the rhetorical, reasoning, and descriptive modes. However, if we
start “backwards”, as Frye (and Zizek) mentioned above, from the utilitarian thinking and action of the
technological and bureaucratic society, how does one then evolve toward the spiritual modes of
imaginative and ultimately kerygmatic? Recalling T.S. Eliot's verse above, how do we program life
into information? It is as though as soon as humanity invented the mathematics and science of the
descriptive mode, we became enamoured, even addicted to it for its authority; and the spiritual modes
were left to atrophy, remaindered to such things as self-help books, declining church attendance, and
yoga classes. A similar phenomenon was the introduction of the so-called 'smart' phone where it has
socially become the final arbitrator in conversation of all facts and much opinion, and serves as a
window through which to view the rest of the world, even the stars above. Frye optimistically points
out that mass media does not have to completely “blur our sense of reality.” One's perception is
influenced by how much one relies on mass media and to what extent one applies “the mediascape to
the actual environment.” A “sane and responsible person” is aware “how much of it is an illusion” and
“how much...can contribute towards your mental construct, which is actually all you can get from
reality. There is no natural environment in human consciousness except what the human consciousness
has constructed” (INF 769). However, drawing from Pascal's famous advice that if you don't believe,
act as though you do believe and you will come to believe (PP 68), if we don't believe in mass media
and yet act as though we do by attending to it daily, perhaps we essentially do believe in mass media.
To illustrate how a fusion of the descriptive and rhetorical modes may serve to engender a
closed versus open myth in society, a brief outline of Frye's myth of concern and myth of freedom, and
how they relate to closed and open myth societies, is necessary here. The myth of concern is the
unifying social myth and is divided into primary concern (e.g. food, sex, shelter, movement; “life is
better than death, happiness better than the misery, freedom better than slavery. These apply to
everyone” [LN 434].) and secondary concern (“...based on the specific community: its structure of
authority, its class system, its status codes and laws and beliefs. It includes the desire of a privileged
class to maintain its privileges and the desire of the non-privileged classes to get along as best they can
in such an arrangement” [LN 434]). It is within the realm of secondary concern where a social
structure is developed and thus it is the main concern considered here. Frye allows that “Many of my
readers would call what I am calling a myth of concern an ideology” and though he utilizes “myth” for
“specific” reasons, “those who prefer ideology may substitute it in most contexts” (CP 112). “The
language of concern is the language of myth, the total vision of the human situation, human destiny,
human inspirations and fears” (SS 30). The myth of concern “reaches us at different levels”, the lowest
level being the values that an individual absorbs through “elementary education, from one's
surroundings...popular proverbs and cliches...stock responses that [soak] into our early life and [are]
constantly reinforced, in our day to day, by the mass media. [...] This body of acceptances gradually
evolves into a complete mythology stretching from past golden age to future apocalypse” (SS 30).
Thus we have the mythic being reinforced by the rhetoric of repetition of cliches, proverbs, and
stock responses reinforced by mass media (which is driven, to a large extent, by advertising). The
descriptive mode is evident in that “Such a popular mythology is neither true nor false, neither right or
wrong: the facts of history and social science that it contains are important chiefly for the way in which
they illustrate certain beliefs and views” (SS 30). In Words with Power, Frye highlights that one trait
of the descriptive mode is the selection and arrangement of facts: “Descriptive writing, in contrast [to
dialectical], attempts to escape from argument. Here are the data, the descriptive writer says: they
should be established facts if they are right, and nothing at all if they are wrong.” However,
“Arrangement means selecting for emphasis, and selecting for emphasis can never be definitively right
or wrong” (24). Thus the dialectical mode arises when the excluded initiative of the descriptive mode
is revealed and society debates, for example, which 'facts' of history or social science should be
selected and arranged for educational purposes. “The purpose of social mythology is to create the
adjusted, that is, the docile and obedient citizen, and it occupies an overwhelming proportion of
American elementary education” (SS 20).
In particular, the dialectical mode is ignited when the myth of freedom challenges the myth of
concern. The myth of concern could be seen as the myth of the mass (corporate body), and the myth of
freedom as the myth of the individual (though, Frye specifies, these 'counter-balancing' myths may be
present within a single individual and within a single society). “The institutions to which man is
attached are mainly products of concern, and they form the complex of temporal authority.” However,
it is through these institutions one may learn of the authority of the myth of freedom which “has only
an internal or inherent compulsion” (similar to the imaginative mode). The myth of freedom is:
The authority of the rational argument, the accurate measurement, the repeatable experiment,
the compelling imagination. Out of this comes the community of those who appeal to the
largely non-mythical features of civilization, the features which suggest an environment outside
the immediate society and its enemies... (CP 162)
A simple analogy to illustrate the differences and interdependence of each myth might be a
university building: the (corporate) myth of concern is necessary to build and organize and discipline
the institution in order to house and nurture further creations spawned by the (individual) myth of
freedom within the institution. Indeed:
“When a myth of concern has everything its own way, it becomes the most squalid of tyrannies,
with no moral principles except those of its own tactics, and hatred of all human life that
escapes from its particular obsessions. When a myth of freedom has everything its own way, it
becomes a lazy and selfish parasite on a power-structure” (WP 55).
It is worth noting, in an essay entitled What Is Authority (1958), Hannah Arendt precedes Frye's
thoughts concerning the 'liberal' myth of freedom and the 'conservative' myth of concern.
“Liberalism [...] measures a process of receding freedom, and conservatism measures a process
of receding authority; both call the expected end-result totalitarianism and see totalitarian trends
wherever either one or the other is present. [...] [B]oth are primarily concerned with restoration,
with restoring either freedom or authority, or the relationship between both, to its traditional
position. It is in this sense that they form the two sides of the same coin” (BPF 100).
Perhaps, as these myths have interacted over the past few decades, they have since become
more crystallized, more extreme, and thus more readily identifiable, as with Zizek's summary of
Lacan's “fool” and “knave” metaphor:
In short, the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of
the given order as an argument for it, and mocks the Left on account of its 'utopian' plans, which
necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who
publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative
efficiency of his speech.
Zizek, via Lacan, claims the knave is a “neoconservative...advocate of the free market” rejecting
“social solidarity” as “counterproductive sentimentalism.” And the fool is a “deconstructionist cultural
critic” who, while trying to “'subvert' the existing order, actually serves as its supplement” (PF 56).
Frye anticipates Zizek's observations in The Critical Path noting that “There is also of course a
right wing that would like to make the American way of life a closed myth, but its prospects at the
moment do not seem bright” (140). (One could argue the prospects have improved since.)
Furthermore, the “more serious conservative acceptance of the social contract throws a strong emphasis
on what is now called 'commitment' [a trait of rhetoric] or 'engagement.' These are not only largely
uncritical attitudes, but also somewhat humourless: their instinct is to rationalize whatever they find
existing in society” (CP 160). (Similarly, Nietzsche observed that “It is characteristic of every
'progress' that the strengthened elements are reinterpreted as 'good' [WTP 76]). Due to the desire for
continuity of how things are, such a conservative view considers the present state superior to any
individual and thus they have little sympathy for those caught up in this system. Such an authority is
void of ideals and thus “keeps ideals in an empty world of wish or hope or promise, at best in a vague
and unspecified future.” One who does not identify with such an authoritarian view succumbs to a
“resigned cynicism” (CP 160). Furthermore, when one sees profit as a motive in society “a myth of
concern is developing” (WP 54). And “whenever a new and powerful myth of concern develops, we
can see a dark age [...] as soon as it turns from exhortation to organization” (CP 54). Exhortation at
least allows for some form of debate, ossified organization does not. Again, we hear echoes of
Huxley's “Will to Order” in Big Business and Big Government. As Schneier observes, regarding the
extent of the corporate and governmental organization toward a Will to Order today: “For the first time
in history, governments and corporations have the ability to conduct mass surveillance on entire
populations. They can do it with our internet use, our communications, our financial transactions, our
movements...everything” (DG 28). Like Huxley, Frye sees the “impersonal” nature of the
organizational tendency of the myth of concern as being initially beneficent if it is honest and does not
manipulate evidence, but “it seems to be easy for it to lose its sense of social perspective” and then lose
sight of “human values” (CP 155).
One way for Big Business to limit the amount of variables affecting projected financial gain is
to reduce as many variables as possible within the equation into constants: thus the attempt to make the
individual consumer conform into a predictable constant. As Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, said at the
2010 Washington Ideas Forum: “We don't need you to type at all; because we know where you are,
with your permission, we know where you've been, with your permission, we can more or less guess
what you're thinking about. Now is that over the line?” (Schmidt). Schmidt goes so far as to say that
such a system could predict and curtail potentially undesirable behaviour. Here is a clear example of
the “descriptive mode” (algorithmically monitored online behaviour and global positioning tracking)
being used as a fundamental source to predict, and then to influence, higher cognitive functioning in
individuals. From (descriptive) data, the company then targets advertising (rhetoric) at the individual
in an attempt to influence their imagination (imaginative) and thus their reasoning (dialectical). (It is
interesting that we produce such information for Google by clicking what is called a 'mouse', similar to
behaviourist conditioning experiments where mice learn to click a bar for reward. As well, 'web', 'net',
and 'online' are all metaphors related to being ensnared.)
One way for Big Government to limit the amount of variables affecting their projected stability
of power is to 'stay on message' (loss of articulation) and limit (dialectical) debate by shrinking the
scope of vision of possibilities through the (rhetorical) repetition of an agenda and through (descriptive)
bureaucracy and calculated economic action. Consistency is a defining trait of the closed myth of
concern. “The tendency of a closed myth is to move from such broad general principles to more
specific ones, prescribing more and more of a citizen's beliefs, and obliterating the varieties of social
attitude” (CP 106).
Almost half a century ago, Erich Fromm observed how conformity results from the loss of
privacy. Privacy is necessary for psychological well-being. Among the “pathogenic effects” of
technology are “the disappearance of privacy and of personal human contact” (Fromm's italics).
Fromm claims privacy is “necessary to collect oneself and to free oneself from the constant 'noise' of
people's chatter and intrusion. [...] If all private data are transformed into public data, experiences will
tend to become more shallow and more alike. People will be afraid to feel the 'wrong thing'; they will
become more accessible to psychological manipulation...” Revealing one's private information is “now
an almost general condition for getting a good job” and this “constitutes a severe infringement on the
citizen's freedom” (RH 47-48). (Today, it is not an uncommon occurrence for someone to lose their
job due to opinions they have posted online, whether or not the comments were related to their
employment.)
Frye does not explicitly link his later writings on verbal modes with his earlier theories of open
and closed myths within society. However, Frye's modes are arguably a refinement of certain aspects
of his earlier conceptual thinking regarding society and this connection inspired the argument herein
that we are seeing a shift in mass use of verbal modes (from dialectical to the fusion between rhetorical
and descriptive modes) and that this shift tends toward a closed myth of concern. A concentrated
example of this connection is evident in the following quote from The Critical Path:
When a myth of concern claims truth of correspondence as well as truth of vision, and assumes
that its postulates are or can be established as facts, it can hardly produce any 'dialogue' except
the single exasperated formula: 'But can't you see how wrong you are?' (CP 107-108)
Here we see the tendency for the myth of concern to attempt to gain credibility by appropriating
traits of the descriptive mode (“truth correspondence”, “facts”), limiting dialectical reasoning by
reducing “dialogue”, and relying on the repetitive persuasion of a single sided argument of “But can't
you see how wrong you are?” Furthermore, “Once a myth of concern is socially established, the
personal focus falls on the leader or interpreter who is centrally responsible for sustaining the myth in
history” (CP 121). The focus on a personality persuading the group is a defining trait of rhetoric (WP
27). Regarding rhetoric and the closed myth of concern:
In all societies the pressure in the direction of a closed myth is also the tendency within society
to become a mob, that is, a social body without individuals or critical attitudes, united by
slogans or cliches against some focus of hatred. (CP 108)
And:
But even serious concern has to pick one issue out of many, and sometimes the disproportion
between the concern and the chosen issue indicates the ascendancy of rhetoric over reality that
is an element in all lying. [...] As Orwell's 1984 in particular has so trenchantly shown, lying
weakens the will power, and therefore the will to resist being taken over by a police state. (CP
119)
Here we see the tendency for a uniform mass or mob to develop within a closed myth of
concern, the use of slogans and cliches (rhetorical devices), and the need for a scapegoat (e.g. terrorists
thus the Patriot Act). The ultimate closed myth society would be one of a police state with mass
surveillance of its citizens and with bureaucratic limitations imposed upon their actions. Importantly,
there is an “encyclopaedic drive of concern” where “there is nothing that is not the concern of concern,
and similarly there is nothing that can be excluded from free inquiry and the truth of correspondence.
Concern and freedom both occupy the whole of the same universe...” (CP 109). Frye reasons that the
constant dialectical challenge of (individual) freedom against (mass) concern keeps concern in check
and helps prevent a completely closed myth society. However, it may be possible that under our
present day temporary authority (with its “encyclopaedic drive of concern” in the information age) the
two-sided dialectical mode (concern versus freedom) is being increasingly usurped by the one-sided
(non-dialectical) fusion of the descriptive and rhetorical modes (concern over freedom). In today's
information age (or, “from now on...”) we know that, if desired, authorities can construct a file on any
individual, calling up all their communications and recorded physical movements. The very ideology
of authority today normalizes such use of descriptive data. This certainly serves to dampen one's
enthusiasm for envisioning a revolutionary myth of freedom to challenge this “encyclopaedic drive of
concern.” However, somewhat optimistically, Frye surmises that our age is so “precariously
balanced...that a closed myth can only maintain a static tyranny until it is blown to pieces, either
externally in war or internally through the explosion of what it tries to suppress” (CP 155). (Note: only
a few years after the Arab Spring, which many believe was significantly aided by social media, Egypt
has recently passed new anti-terror laws which are more restrictive [regarding challenging authority]
than before the uprising.)
The information age has many advantages “But the growth of knowledge cannot in itself
provide us with the social vision which will suggest what we should do with our knowledge” (CP 110).
However, as of late, individuals and corporations and governments alike seem intent on maximizing the
“growth of knowledge” (via information) as an end in-and-of-itself and thus establishing this end as
being our “social vision.” (In a 1976 address to M.I.T., Arthur C. Clarke jocularly claims he has solved
all the great philosophical and spiritual questions of humanity: “'The purpose of life is information
processing.' Indeed, you may even retort, 'Well, what is the purpose of information processing?'” [SCT
265]. This he does not answer.) The present day cliche that 'to keep up in the information age we all
must go online' is indoctrinated into us and “the public indoctrination of any myth tends to close it”
(CP 135).
The plethora of descriptive data produced within the internet of things is promoted (rhetorical)
as potentially improving every aspect of our lives. Google's CEO says these advancements mean we
do not have to remember as much, we do not have to learn facts, “...you're never lonely, and you're
never bored now.” But as Frye warns:
For all our dislike of the word totalitarian, we have to recognize that there is a profound and
genuine, if ultimately specious, appeal in any form of social activity which promises to expand
into a complete way of life, engaging all aspects of one's interests and providing fulfilment for
one's cultural, spiritual, and intellectual as well as social needs. (MC 100)
Schneier sums up the present day relationship between the information age and social vision as
follows: If technology tracks and stores all of our communications and movements, and this stored
information may be recalled in the future by “whatever authority has then become focused upon our
once private and innocent acts,” we conform our behaviour to accepted norms “and society stagnates.
We don't question or challenge power. We become obedient and submissive. We're less free...
Freedoms we now take for granted were often at one time viewed as threatening or even
criminal by the past power structure. Those changes might never have happened if the
authorities had been able to achieve social control through surveillance. This is one of the main
reasons all of us should care about the emerging architecture of surveillance, even if we are not
personally chilled by its existence. (DG 97-98)
“The vision of things as they could or should be certainly has to depend on the vision of things
as they are” (CP 104). Thus, what is the vision of things as they are today in the information age, in
this age of communication? With the exponential increase in descriptive information and the ideology
which animates it, we resort to an increase in the use of the descriptive and rhetorical modes to function
in such an environment. Furthermore, as we become increasingly dependent upon technology for
mundane functioning and distraction, as we continue to 'outsource' our memory, imagination, and
social interaction to machines, we increasingly erode our internal structure of knowledge (which is
fully dependent upon personal memory and imagination) with which we process, prioritize, and
position new information. With the tendency to externalize our thinking to machines, we lose our
privacy since our internal machinations become increasingly exposed to whomever has the desire and
ability to access such personal information, whether it be parents (monitoring their children online),
strangers (perusing others' social media sites), employers (monitoring employee productivity),
corporations, advertisers, government spy agencies, hackers, and/or police. This necessarily creates a
closed system: firstly, our imagination is limited to the capabilities of the technology itself and,
secondly, this technology simultaneously serves as a means of surveillance by authority. As a result,
we tend to curtail our actions and conform to mass societal norms of accepted behaviour and thus of
thought (“mob”). This limits our ability to even imagine a change in our situation. Further exploration
of these ideas may lead to finding that an ironic perspective results (due to one thinking they are free
though behaving as if they are not—or vice versa), leading to cynicism (imagining this situation will
not change) and apathy (“why bother even trying if you can't change anything?”).
If this is the “vision of things as they are” what is the vision of “things as they could be”? One
recent and sadly typical example of a vision for the future comes from a recent Globe and Mail article
by Dr. Yoni Freedoff of the University of Ottawa (“Technology can make it safe to play outdoors
again”, The Globe and Mail, August 17/2015). As a doctor of family medicine (and an award winning
“blogger”), his concern is that children do not play outside enough and their health is suffering as a
result. Dr. Freedoff has little hope we will make parks more attractive for children, or lessen
prohibitive playground rules in order to promote more physical play. Rather, he is “holding out hope”
for the newest developments in augmented reality “where the word 'augmented' refers to the use and
wear of specialized glasses that beam images directly to our retina and in turn allow those images to
seem part of reality itself.” Thus, says the doctor, children would once again go outside and be able to
play baseball at their local diamond and it would appear to them as Fenway park. Or children could
play hockey against “virtual” images of their heroes. Here we have a man of science concerned with
the future well-being of growing children arguing for the use of forthcoming technologies to stimulate
a child's imagination by virtually blocking the reality of their actual world by projecting images directly
on their retinas. Though I have concerns about what this might do to the developing imagination of
children, I imagine there is fertile opportunity here for advertisers.
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Online References:
Freedof, Yanni. "Technology can make it safe for children to play outdoors again." The Globe and
Mail. Globeandmail.com. April 17, 2015.
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