In reaction to the worldwide triumph of the smartphone, a few years ago I created the term screenic to designate the dominance of the screen in today’s culture. (“The Screenic.” Mimetic Theory and Film. Ed. Paolo Bubbio and Chris Fleming. New York, BloomsburyAcademic, 2019: 109-21). Any TikTok influencers reading this Chronicle are welcome to help it achieve meme status. Indeed, screenicity, as I pointed out, had been building up for some time, from its public debut with the Lumière Brothers’ first movie showing in Paris in 1895.
From the movie screen—to which sound was soon added—the screenic moved into homes with TV, and then to personal computers, followed by “personal data assistants” and iPads. But the most impactful breakthrough was the emergence of the cellphone as a privileged and soon indispensable means of communication—communication in the broadest sense, accessing the whole world of information available on the Internet while connecting one with colleagues and friends by email and message as well as by telephone.
Why didn’t screenic catch on? Well I’m not exactly an influencer, but I think the more useful answer is that the idea of the screenic is a deformation of the term scenic, which in GA, but not in standard anthropological discourse, designates the cultural space within which humans, unlike other creatures, communicate through signs—whether passive ones like clothes and grooming, or more significantly, through the signs of language. To be sure animal collectivities have ways of communicating between their members, as we see in flocks of birds or “armies” of ants, but these are essentially hard-wired, open only at the extreme limit to such things as apes teaching each other how to crack a nut with a rock. In a word, animals lack the free space of mutual communication that we call a scene.
Although the idea of the scenic, if not the word, may be said to have been introduced into Western thought with Sartre’s originally Eastern concept of the néant, nothingness, as designating in abstract terms the free, peaceful, sacred space indispensable to the scenic element of the pour-soi. This translation of Hegel’s für-sich, designates the self-conscious mind (which Hegel did not describe in scenic terms). And as I explained in Chronicles 802 and 806, Sartre never saw the connection of the néant to language and the sacred; for him, their scenic element remained confined to an intuition of the abstract emptiness/freedom of the subject’s mind. As a consequence, the notion of scenicity is absent from discussions of human culture, this fundamental element being taken for granted to the point of invisibility, and accordingly, screenicity has no preexisting hook to hang on.
Yet generative anthropology tells us that the origin of the “free space” in our minds is the free space that human conscience/consciousness opens up in the human world, where a sacred force of interdiction keeps people apart as they designate their desire-objects by signs—language—rather than come to blows over them.
The idea of reproducing—sacralizing—the human scene is central to art in its various forms, whether in the imagination of Homer’s audience as he and his successors sang the Iliad, or in the hunting scenes portrayed on the walls of prehistoric caves, not to speak of festivals, dances, and later, for individual consumption, texts that allow the reader to conjure up in solitude the scenes of a novel. This scenic element may be taken for granted, but it is at the bottom of them all, as the ur-medium of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” Yes, the scene is the underlying medium of all the arts and beyond them, of all modes of human culture, beginning with the first exchanges of language.
Yet in its drive to reproduce the entire cultural world in a form accessible privately to the individual, the screenic is something new. No doubt this goal of the private screen as a double of the human mental space was not obvious at the Lumière brothers’ film showings, but the appetite of film creators and later for those of television for bringing the whole world to the spectator whether in a theater or at home gave what can already be called information technology the ambition of becoming a universal medium, in which the screen could contain not only the narratives of cinema, but the texts of the world’s libraries, and finally every element of visualizable and/or auditory information, all at the disposal of each singular individual.
Thus with the universalization of the cell phone comes the potential 24/7 accessibility to everyone of the entire world of human knowledge. So that whereas in the not-so-distant past (that of my childhood), parents were able to keep their children relatively protected from knowledge considered inappropriate for the young, such as “dirty words” and pornography, today this has become almost impossible, with the result that pre-pubertal children are demanding to implement sex changes—and the so-called liberal left has been ready to defend them, even when parents are deliberately kept uninformed of developments in this domain that occur during school hours.
Nor is there any obvious solution for such problems. In an era where the world’s knowledge of sexuality and everything else is available to the general public with few (often easily-breached) restrictions, it is very difficult to prevent such leakage. Indeed, the need to protect children from the dangers of the adult world has seemingly grown with each generation in proportion to the accessibility of sources of potentially dangerous information. Simply to judge from my own case growing up in the Bronx, it is striking how much freer city children were in the outside world during the 40s and 50s than today—when, for example, one virtually never sees a child under 16, or even 18, out by himself performing tasks such as shopping for groceries—whereas my mother sent me to the store to pick up items like bakery goods from the age of 8 or so; and I recall that at 12 I was allowed to take the subway by myself from the Bronx down to Manhattan to make a purchase at a department store. (I need not insist that rapid transit was incomparably more civilized in those days.)
These considerations aside, the screenic age is in potential an age of universal enlightenment. Virtually any fact of common knowledge is immediately available through Google or Wikipedia or any of a number of similar sources, and much more specialized information is available, often at no cost. The totality of information available through electronic media is an ever-expanding “encyclopedia” currently approximated (according to Google) at 44×1021 bytes. A less positive concomitant feature of the screenic era’s vast accumulation of data is the overall impoverishment of the minds of even educated people, habituated to neglect their personal “memory bank” in favor of the ubiquitous Internet.
Ideally, the screenic age makes all humanity able to communicate near-instantaneously, if necessary via online translation programs. But whether this tends to bring people together or facilitates their enmity cannot be answered in terms of bytes of information. Certainly, as we have recently seen, a phenomenon like antisemitism can spread far more easily and rapidly in such a world. Both the positive and negative features of human mimeticism are enhanced by the screenic, and above all, as with children’s exposure to sexual information, it has become much more difficult to impose what were not long ago enforceable limitations dictated by ethical-moral considerations. I have mentioned the difficulty of restraining access to pornography—but it’s also easy to find out on the Internet how to build bombs or fraudulent websites, or to organize riots. And I wonder if the Woke-era trend of decriminalizing “minor” criminal activity—fortunately just voted out in California—was not influenced by a growing reluctance to interfere in others’ real-world activities, now that one’s “scene” is increasingly confined to the solipsism of one’s personal screen.
One notable result of the screenic age, greatly accelerated by the Covid pandemic of 2020-21, has been the possibility of substituting screens for physical presence in human interactions, thereby saving time and money at the expense of physical proximity. I had fortunately retired from teaching before 2020, but I know several professors who after a few semesters of online teaching made the decision to retire.
At least until Trump took office, large numbers of government and other office workers often worked several days a week from home, saving money on child-care costs but surely at the expense both of efficiency and of fostering teamwork, not to speak of in-office services.
Similarly, recent sessions of conferences and annual meetings such as those of the GASC have included a number of “Zoom” participants, speakers as well as spectators. The human scene was in its origin a face-to-face yet distanced contact mediated by signs, inaugurated in order to avoid mimetic conflicts. But online, where physical contact is impossible, it is impossible to reproduce the sense of fraternity that is created in a human group by the simple pleasure of being together in the absence of physical conflict.
Instead, today this sense of fraternity is inversely challenged from within, where among groups of people in physical proximity with each other, some or all are usually interacting with their phones rather than with their neighbors.
As with all such effects of technology, it is impossible to predict the future consequences of the screenic. Such extreme examples as virtual reality that cuts off the real world altogether to the benefit of a personalized universe seem to me unlikely to find uses beyond personal meditation. Yet it would be foolish to attempt to conceive the limitations of future means of creating simulations in which groups can work together, for example in conceiving communities on other planets. Indeed, one can imagine as a future utopia/dystopia a social universe where the entire population would interact mainly through such screenic mediations, reserving natural human communication for the rare intimate moments, and even then…
Whatever the future of human scenicity/screenicity, we should not forget their origin and foundation in the free, empty space between the pointing finger and the designated object, the sign and the referent—the néant that Sartre imported into Western philosophy from the East without realizing that he was describing the central openness to the world and to each other, pregnant with all human possibility, discovered at humanity’s birth in language and the sacred.