> Sure, capitalist society may in fact be headed back to "orality" for
> the mass of its population. If so, it will be part of a general
> rollback of the universalizing goals of the Enlightenment, which makes
> good if horrifying ruling class sense. Fits in quite nicely with the
> assault on universal public education.
Regis Debray had a very interesting but tenuous piece on all this in the New Left Review in July-August 2007, arguing that socialism was a phenomenon of print and that a key reason for its decline since WWII was the shift of cultural gravity to TV - quotes below and I'm happy to send a pdf to anyone who doesn't have access.
I think he makes a good case that socialism depended on print and epistolatory culture, but I don't agree that text is on the way out, for the same reasons you give. Debray writes:
"Bodies met less frequently but minds were in closer contact. Consider the debt owed by socialist writing to the epistolary art: Marx and Engels worked out half their theories in letters, and virtually all their political activity had to pass through a pillarbox; the First International was conceived by Marx as a central correspondence bureau of the working class. Nowadays the militants socialize more and know less of each other’s ideas. More conversation means less controversy. The telephone destroyed the art of correspondence, and in the process diminished the moral stature of attempts at rational systematization; email has not restored it."
It seems obvious to me that email _has_ restored it - people do write those kinds of emails all the time. As Michael P wrote here a couple months back, mail moved much faster in the days of Marx and Engels and was more like email in that you could potentially get more than one exchange in a day, or at least daily between London and Manchester. Nowadays you have that all over the world - it's possible, even easy and routine, to seriously collaborate across the world, and people do spend time writing long emails to people they're exchanging ideas with. If Debray is right about how crucial textual culture is to socialism, the internet gives reason for optimism, not pessimism.
Anyway, here's more of Debray's piece:
"Cultural biotopes are no less delicately balanced, and in the jungle of social ideas the survival of the fittest presupposes a certain proportion in the means of struggle. Marx benefited from the unusually temperate conditions of the pre-industrial graphosphere: a smaller world population and restricted literacy in the West meant fewer books on the market and thus an easier battle for recognition, all weapons being more or less equal. In the days of Marx, Hugo or Michelet, the circulation of a ‘difficult’ book compared to a best-seller stood at an approximate ratio of one to ten, or more commonly one to five. Today, it is one to a thousand. Around 1848, the young Marx was publishing around a thousand copies of each pamphlet or periodical (800 copies of The Poverty of Philosophy; 1,000 of the Franco-German Yearbook, in which ‘On The Jewish Question’ and ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ appeared). But first-rank writers did not go beyond three or four thousand. Despite the huge growth of the reading public, that figure is still the average for works on political theory, economic history or sociology; the author of a piece of critical research that goes against the grain can feel blessed with two thousand readers. But the massive media launch-pads at the disposal of those who dominate the sales also serve to pulverize the small, scholarly productions, more complex and thus more vulnerable, and which have no time to carve a niche for themselves due to the drastic reduction in the average life-expectancy of books—three months for a successful publication; the rest might be in bookshop windows for three weeks. Publishers’ figures have been inflated, but the mortality rate has risen too.
"The Marxist critique of capitalism would not have been able to spread, it seems, had industrial capitalism already annexed the sphere of symbolic goods. Marx profited from the backwardness of cultural circuits in relation to those of market production. A hundred years later, he would have missed his chance. All things being equal on other fronts, within the logic of image and markets (literary talkshows, weekly top-tens), Das Kapital would have remained what it was when it first appeared: a scholarly extravagance for book-lovers, not the source of a mass political current. Marx and Engels were writing at the juncture of two technological eras, that of the ‘mechanical machine’, alleviating muscular effort, and the ‘energetic machine’, harnessing natural forces. State socialism developed at a second juncture: the moving machine and the information machine, car and television. In the same way, the century of Communist waxing and waning also pivoted around two eras: two kinds of memory, literal and analogical. ‘Scientific socialism’ would not survive the shift from electro-mechanical transmission (rotary printing press, telegraph) to electronic broadcasting. The single party did not fit well with the telephone; it survived the wireless, but the transistor radio was the limit. The cathode tube and the silicon chip spelt wholesale crisis. Cross-border radio transmissions swept away the relics, and the live-broadcast satellite presided over the funeral."
Mike Beggs