Art, Technology, and Resistance
A new series in which we explore why beauty is no Mickey Mouse exercise
The creation of art in our modern technopoly1 is no Mickey Mouse exercise.
At least as Mickey Mouse is understood in the present day.
Hop on YouTube and compare one of the original Mickey Mouse cartoons, like the brilliant 1928 “Plane Crazy” (now almost 100 years old) to episodes from the more recent Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (see the snippet from the “Little Parade” episode available on YouTube).
On Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, the characters solve anodyne problems (finding missing pieces of a toy) with the help of a Mickey Mouse-shaped iPad. Alternative solutions are served up by the computer, and all the characters have to do is choose their preferred solution from a menu and execute.
In “Plane Crazy,” by contrast, Mickey, Minnie, and the rest of the barnyard animals are attempting something big. They want to make and fly an airplane. The results are both calamitous and hilarious.
In both cartoons, characters attempt to solve problems with technology. But that is where the sameness ends. For on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, technology fairly effortlessly produces the solution without the users of the technology ever having to face the harsher contingencies of the world. In the modern cartoon, as Matthew Crawford writes, “There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world.”
But in “Plane Crazy,” there is always deep conflict between Mickey’s will and the world. He is constantly slamming into trees, nearly falling out of the sky, practically torturing the animals that try to help him or chance to get in his way.
The technology of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse invites its users into a kind of fantasy life, an escape from reality. The technology of “Plane Crazy” requires a constant effort to adjust invention to the often negative, indeed brutal, conditions of an all-too-real world. (I owe this comparison between the two Mickey Mouse cartoons to Matthew Crawford’s magnificent book, The World Beyond Your Head, chapter 3, “Virtual Reality as Moral Ideal.” When it comes to understanding contemporary technology, Crawford’s book is one of the best available.)
My students laugh heartily as they watch “Plane Crazy.” They sink into a stupor as they watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Comedy requires real stakes.
But, to be fair, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse isn’t trying to be funny. It is trying to make the world less scary. It is trying to give children a model of how technology removes all the friction from life.
A telling scene in “Plane Crazy” is when Mickey turns for inspiration to a picture in a magazine of Charles Lindbergh (Lindbergh was in the news at the time for making the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris on May 20-21, 1927). Mickey even takes a mirror and attempts to ruffle his hair (fur?) so that he looks more like Lindbergh. Lindbergh is his hero. Lindbergh is the achiever of great things whom Mickey desires to emulate. For Mickey, Lindbergh is a summons to magnanimity, “greatness of soul.”
There is no such summons on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. A toy soldier is missing one of its pieces. An iPad helps the characters realize that a magnet will help them find it. The missing piece is retrieved with hardly a hint of real difficulty. Yawn.
One of the several dangers of this latter kind of technology is summed up well by Crawford: “To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy [i.e., the harshness and “authority” of the world beyond our head] through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.”
The prospect of technology-as-magic, in brief, tempts us to give up on skill.
For an artist this is death. For it means giving up on the difficult good of the habit of art.
Recently I came across two unusually thoughtful articles exploring the theme of technology-as-magic and its relation to art. I recommend them to you highly. One is Luke Burgis’s “The Mortification of Ornette Coleman” (on his Substack, The Anti-Mimetic), and the other is Alan Jacobs’ “Resistance in the Arts—Why Substack Won’t Save Us,” available on The New Atlantis website.
Both articles examine the importance of resistance for the making of art, and how frictionless, digital, algorithmic technology-as-magic is tempting us to believe that beauty is possible without resistance.
(And even as I open this morning the Substack app to upload this piece, I see Katy Carl heralding Ted Gioia’s latest article on his The Honest Broker Substack, “The Most Dangerous Thing in Culture Right Now is Beauty,” which, though I haven’t yet read it, seems to be ploughing a similar furrow as Burgis and Jacobs.
Also this morning, I find that Cal Newport’s latest episode on his Deep Questions podcast is entitled, “Don’t Get Started.” In his opening monologue Newport argues against the advice that, when it comes to pursuing a skill, the most important thing is to “just get started.” Far more important, argues Newport, is to immerse oneself in the sometimes harsh disciplines of a real artistic practice.)
Clearly, a lot of sharp minds are converging on this problem.
What is the resistance required for great art?
It is the positive resistance provided by tradition, by apprenticeship, by the inherited forms of artistic practice, by fellow practitioners with counter-ideas of their own, by editors and critics, by a paying public with lots of places to spend their entertainment dollar.
It is the positive resistance to the old siren song of money, fame, power, and luxury.
It is the positive resistance to artistry-as-magic offered in particular by digital technology—and, if Jacobs is right, even by Substack.
This idea of resistance and its connection to the making of great works of art within the context of our technopoly is so important, so fecund, that I aim to explore it more deeply in the weeks ahead.
It is a vital discussion, both for artists and for those who enjoy art.
I thank you in advance for joining me.
Definition: technopoly (noun)
1. : A “grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique.”
2. : “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements.”
3. : Technopoly is the replacement of moral and religious authority by technological authority. (See Neil Postman’s marvelous book, Technopoly, which, with Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, discussed above, is one of the handful of crucial books on modern technology.)
If you've read about the production of Plane Crazy, you'll know that the animation was certainly a lot of hard work, mostly by one person.
Amazing! It’s a masterpiece of early animation.