Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  At the level of slang, the turnover rate is so rapid that it has forced dictionary makers to change their criteria for word inclusion. "In 1954," says Flexner, "when I started work on the Dictionary of American Slang, I would not consider a word for inclusion unless I could find three uses of the word over a five-year period. Today such a criterion would be impossible. Language, like art, is increasingly becoming a fad proposition. The slang terms 'fab' and 'gear,' for example, didn't last a single year. They entered the teen-age vocabulary in about 1966; by 1967 they were out. You cannot use a time criterion for slang any more.

  One fact contributing to the rapid introduction and obsolescence of words is the incredible speed with which a new word can be injected into wide usage. In the late 1950's and early sixties one could actually trace the way in which certain scholarly jargon words such as "rubric" or "subsumed" were picked up from academic journals, used in smallcirculation periodicals like the New York Review of Books or Commentary, then adopted by Esquire with its then circulation of 800,000 to 1,000,000, and finally diffused through the larger society by Time, Newsweek and the larger mass magazines. Today the process has been telescoped. The editors of mass magazines no longer pick up vocabulary from the intermediate intellectual publications alone; they, too, lift directly from the scholarly press in their hurry to be "on top of things."

  When Susan Sontag disinterred the word "camp" and used it as the basis of an essay in Partisan Review

  in the fall of 1964, Time waited only a few weeks before devoting an article to the word and its rejuvenator. Within a matter of a few additional weeks, the term was cropping up in newspapers and other mass media. Today the word has virtually dropped out of usage. "Teenybopper" is another word that came and went with blinding speed.

  A more significant example of language turnover can be seen in the sudden shift of meaning associated with the ethnic term "black." For years, dark-skinned Americans regarded the term as racist. Liberal whites dutifully taught their children to use the term "Negro" and to capitalize the "N." Shortly after Stokely Carmichael proclaimed the doctrine of Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966, however, "black" became a term of pride among both blacks and whites in the movement for racial justice. Caught off guard, liberal whites went through a period of confusion, uncertain as to whether to use Negro or black. Black was quickly legitimated when the mass media adopted the new meaning. Within a few months, black was "in," Negro "out."

  Even faster cases of diffusion are on record. "The Beatles," says lexicographer Flexner, "at the height of their fame could make up any word they like, slip it into a record, and within a month it would be part of the language. At one time perhaps no more than fifty people in NASA used the word 'A-OK.' But when an astronaut used it during a televised flight, the word became part of the language in a single day. The same has been true of other space terms, too – lik 'sputnik' or 'all systems go.'"

  As new words sweep in, old words vanish. A picture of a nude girl nowadays is no longer a "pin-up" or a "cheesecake shot," but a "playmate." "Hep" has given way to "hip"; "hipster" to "hippie." "Go-go" rushed eagerly into the language at breakneck speed, but it is already gone-gone among those who are truly "with it."

  The turnover of language would even appear to involve non-verbal forms of communication as well. We have slang gestures, just as we have slang words – thumbs up or down, thumb to nose, the "shame on you" gesture used by children, the hand moving across the neck to suggest a throat-slitting. Professionals who watch the development of the gestural language suggest that it, too, may be changing more rapidly.

  Some gestures that were regarded as semi-obscene have become somewhat more acceptable as sexual values have changed in the society. Others that were used only by a few have achieved wider usage. An example of diffusion, Flexner observes, is the wider use today of that gesture of contempt and defiance – the fist raised and screwed about. The invasion of Italian movies that hit the United States in the fifties and sixties probably contributed to this. Similarly, the upraised finger – the "up yours" gesture – appears to be gaining greater respectability and currency than it once had. At the same time, other gestures have virtually vanished or been endowed with radically changed meaning. The circle formed by the thumb and forefinger to suggest that all goes well appears to be fading out; Churchill's "V for Victory" sign is now used by protesters to signify something emphatically different: "peace" not "victory."

  There was a time when a man learned the language of his society and made use of it, with little change, throughout his lifetime. His "relationship" with each learned word or gesture was durable. Today, to an astonishing degree, it is not.

  ART: CUBISTS AND KINETICISTS

  Art, like gesture, is a form of non-verbal expression and a prime channel for the transmission of images. Here the evidences of ephemeralization are, if anything, even more pronounced. If we regard each school of art as though it were a word-based language, we are witnessing the successive replacement not of words, but of whole languages at once. In the past one rarely saw a fundamental change in an art style within a man's lifetime. A style or school endured, as a rule, for generations at a time. Today the pace of turnover in art is vision-blurring – the viewer scarcely has time to "see" a school develop, to learn its language, so to speak, before it vanishes.

  Bursting on the scene in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Impressionism was only the first of a sequence of shattering changes. It came at a time when industrialism was beginning its climactic forward surge, bringing with it a notable step-up in the tempo of everyday life. "It is above all the furious speed of [technological] development and the way the pace is forced that seems pathological, particularly when compared with the rate of progress in earlier periods in the history of art and culture," writes the art historian Arnold Hauser in describing the turnover of art styles. "For the rapid development of technology not only accelerates the change of fashion, but also the shifting emphases in the criteria of aesthetic taste. ... The continual and increasingly rapid replacement of old articles in everyday use by new ones ... readjusts the speed at which philosophical and artistic revaluations occur ..."

  If we roughly date the Impressionist interval from 1875 to 1910, we see a period of dominance lasting approximately thirty-five years. Since then no school or style, from Futurism to Fauvism, from Cubism to Surrealism, has dominated the scene for even that long. One after another, styles supplant one another. The most enduring twentieth-century school, Abstract Expressionism, held sway for at most twenty years, from 1940 to 1960, then to be followed by a wild succession – "Pop" lasting perhaps five years, "Op" managing to grip the public's attention for two or three years, then the emergence, appropriately enough, of "Kinetic Art" whose very raison d'etre is transience.

  This phantasmagoric turnover is evident not merely in New York or San Francisco, but in Paris, in Rome, in Stockholm and London – wherever painters are found. Thus Robert Hughes writes in the New Society: "Hailing the new painters is now one of the annual sports in England ... The enthusiasm for discovering a new direction in English art once a year has become a mania – an euphoric, almost hysterical belief in renewal." Indeed, he suggests, the expectation that each year will bring a new mode and a new crop of artists is "a significant parody of what is, in itself, a parodical situation – the accelerated turnover in the avant-garde today."

  If schools of art may be likened to languages, then individual works of art may be compared to words. If we make this transposition, we find in art a process exactly analogous to that now occurring in the verbal language. Here, too, "words" – i.e., individual works of art – are coming into use and then dropping out of the vocabulary at heightened speeds. Individual works flash across our consciousness in galleries or in the pages of mass magazines; the next time we look they are gone. Sometimes the work itself quite literally disappears – many are collages or constructions built of fragile materials that simply fall apart after a short time.


  Much of the confusion in the art world today arises from the failure of the cultural establishment to recognize, once and for all, that elitism and permanence are dead – so, at least, contends John McHale, the imaginative Scot, half artist/half social scientist, who heads the Center for Integrative Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton. In a forceful essay entitled The Plastic Parthenon, McHale points out that "traditional canons of literary and artistic judgment ... tend to place high value on permanence, uniqueness and the enduring universal value of chosen artifacts." Such aesthetic standards, he argues, were appropriate enough in a world of handcrafted goods and relatively small taste-making elites. These same standards, however, "in no way enable one to relate adequately to our present situation in which astronomical numbers of artifacts are mass produced, circulated and consumed. These may be identical, or only marginally different. In varying degree, they are expendable, replaceable, and lack any unique 'value' or intrinsic 'truth.'"

  Today's artists, McHale suggests, neither work for a tiny elite nor take seriously the idea that permanence is a virtue. The future of art, he says, "seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks." Rather, artists work for the short term. McHale concludes that: "Accelerated changes in the human condition require an array of symbolic images of man which will match up to the requirements of constant change, fleeting impression and a high rate of obsolescence." We need, he says, "a replaceable, expendable series of ikons."

  One may quarrel with McHale's contention that transience in art is desirable. Perhaps the flight from permanence is a tactical error. It can even be argued that our artists are employing homeopathic magic, behaving like primitives who, awed by a force they do not comprehend, attempt to exert control over it by simple-mindedly imitating it. But whatever one's attitude toward contemporary art, transience remains an implacable fact, a social and historic tendency so central to our times that it cannot be ignored. And it is clear that artists are reacting to it.

  The impulse toward transience in art explains the whole development of that most transient of art works, the "happening." Allan Kaprow, who is often credited with originating the happening, has explicitly suggested its relationship to the throw-away culture within which we live. The happening, according to its proponents, is ideally performed once and once only. The happening is the Kleenex tissue of art.

  This so, kinetic art can be considered the aesthetic embodiment of modularism. Kinetic sculptures or constructions crawl, whistle, whine, swing, twitch, rock or pulsate, their lights blinking, their magnetic tapes whirling, their plastic, steel, glass and copper components arranging and rearranging themselves into evanescent patterns within a given, though sometimes concealed, framework. Here the wiring and connections tend to be the least transient part of the structure, just as the gantry cranes and service towers in Joan Littlewood's Fun Palace are designed to outlive any particular arrangement of the modular components. The intent of the kinetic work, however, is to create maximum variability and maximum transience. Jean Clay has pointed out that in a traditional work of art "the relationship of parts to a whole had been decided forever." In kinetic art, he says, the "balance of forms is in flux."

  Many artists are working with engineers and scientists today, in the hope of exploiting the latest technical processes for their own purpose, the symbolization of the accelerative thrust in society. "Speed," writes Francastel, the French art critic, "has become something undreamt-of, and constant movement every man's intimate experience." Art reflects this new reality.

  Thus we find artists from France, England, the United States, Scotland, Sweden, Israel and elsewhere creating kinetic images. Their creed is perhaps best expressed by Yaacov Agam, an Israeli kineticist, who says: "We are different from what we were three moments ago, and in three minutes more, we will again be different ... I try to give this approach a plastic expression by creating a visual form that doesn't exist. The image appears and disappears, but nothing is retained."

  The final culmination of such efforts, of course, is the creation of those new and quite real "fun palaces" – so-called total environment nightclubs in which the fun-seeker plunges into a space in which lights, colors and sounds change their patterns constantly. In effect, the patron steps inside a work of kinetic art. Here again the framework, the building itself, is only the longest lasting part of the whole, while its interior is designed to produce transient combinations of sensory in-puts. Whether one regards this as fun or not depends on the individual, perhaps; but the overall direction of such movements is clear. In art, as in language, we are racing toward impermanence. Man's relationships with symbolic imagery are growing more and more temporary.

  THE NEURAL INVESTMENT

  Events speed past us, compelling us to reassess our assumptions – our previous formed images of reality. Research topples older conceptions of man and nature. Ideas come and go at a frenetic rate. (A rate, that, in science at least, has been estimated to be twenty to one hundred times faster than a mere century ago.) Image-laden messages hammer at our senses. Meanwhile, language and art, the codes through which we transfer image-bearing messages to one another, are themselves turning over more rapidly.

  All this cannot – and does not – leave us unchanged. It accelerates the rate at which the individual must process his imagery if he is to adapt successfully to the churning environment. Nobody really knows how we convert signals from outside into images within. Yet psychology and the information sciences cast some light on what happens once the image is born. They suggest, to begin with, that the mental model is organized into many highly complex image-structures, and that new images are, in effect, filed away in these structures according to several classificatory principles. A newly generated image is filed away with other images pertaining to the same subject matter. Smaller and more limited inferences are ranged under larger and more inclusive generalizations. The image is checked out for its consistency with those already in file. (There is evidence of the existence of a specific neural mechanism that carries out this consistency-checking procedure.) We make a decision, with respect to the image, as to whether it is closely relevant to our goals, or whether, instead, it is remote and hence, for us, unimportant. Each image is also evaluated – is it "good" or "bad" for us? Finally, whatever else we do with the new image, we also judge its truth. We decide just how much faith to place in it. Is it an accurate reflection of reality? Can it be believed? Can we base action on it?

  A new image that clearly fits somewhere into a subject matter slot, and which is consistent with images already stored there, gives us little difficulty. But if, as happens increasingly, the image is ambiguous, if it is inconsistent, or, worse yet, if it flies in the face of our previous inferences, the mental model has to be forcibly revised. Large numbers of images may have to be reclassified, shuffled, changed again until a suitable integration is found. Sometimes whole groups of image-structures have to be torn down and rebuilt. In extreme cases, the basic shape of the whole model has to be drastically overhauled.

  Thus the mental model must be seen not as a static library of images, but as a living entity, tightly charged with energy and activity. It is not a "given" that we passively receive from outside. Rather, it is something we actively construct and reconstruct from moment to moment. Restlessly scanning the outer world with our senses, probing for information relevant to our needs and desires, we engage in a constant process of rearrangement and updating.

  At any given instant, innumerable images are decaying, dropping into the black immensity of the forgotten. Others are entering the system, being processed and filed. At the same time, we are retrieving images, "using them," and returning them to file, perhaps in a different place. We are constantly comparing images, associating them, cross-referencing them in new ways, and repositioning them. This is what is meant by the term "mental activity." And like muscular activity, it is a form of work. It requires high energy to keep the system operating.

  Change, roaring throug
h society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to reflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increasingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, withdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis – or even death.

  To maintain our adaptive balance, to keep the gap within manageable proportions, we struggle to refresh our imagery, to keep it up-to-date, to relearn reality. Thus the accelerative thrust outside us finds a corresponding speed-up in the adapting individual. Our imageprocessing mechanisms, whatever they may be, are driven to operate at higher and higher speeds.

  This has consequences that have been as yet largely overlooked. For when we classify an image, any image, we make a definite, perhaps even measurable, energy-investment in a specific organizational pattern in the brain. Learning requires energy; and relearning requires even more. "All the researches on learning," writes Harold D. Lasswell of Yale, "seem to confirm the view that 'energies' are bound in support of past learning, and that new energies are essential to unbind the old ..." At the neurological level, he continues, "Any established system appears to include exceedingly intricate arrangements of cell material, electrical charges and chemical elements. At any cross section in time ... the somatic structure represents a tremendous investment of fixed forms and potentials ..." What this means in brief is very simple: there are costs involved in relearning – or, in our terminology, reclassifying imagery.