How Signs Swim - a Runt History

Media gets replaced or supplanted when folks find better ways. But media don't deliver message equally, so replacement is incomplete.

Sometimes replacement is almost total because the new medium does almost everything the old medium does and does it better or more conveniently. We don't use scrolls because we like books better. We don't generally use handcrafted text commercially because print's cheaper and more convenient -- and that was truer for a few centuries than it is today. Medieval illuminated manuscripts were wonderful, but not wonderful enough to keep those monks scribbling forever.

When some but not all of the purpose of a medium is replaced, use of the medium shifts. Users require different formal elements to perform what remains useful in the medium.

For instance, for years the form of many paintings derived from the necessity of using painting and portraiture to record visual information. Think of frescoes or, say, paintings from the American Revolution. Note that there is a kind of diorama-style compression of time that painters create. In Gottlieb's famous pic where George Washington stands in a rowboat facing into an icy gale on the Delaware, one sees all kinds of activity that represents different elements within the revolutionary army as the artist wanted to present it. The whole composition of shapes, including W's prominence, standing foolishly in the boat without his wig flapping, means something just as just as surely as the hieroglyphic beard on a queen of Egypt meant power, not androgyny.

Have a look at photos of the Civil War. How differently they represent the acts of War!

Within generations, even the art known as representational ceased to tell a story in the same way or in the same sense. Photos did it better, faster, cheaper. Painting didn't cease to exist, but clearly Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica (or any of the rest with two eyes on the same side of the face) do something different than Da Vinci's Last Supper.

The same thing happened to rhyming poetry. Alf Tennyson and Robert Browning were among the first people recorded (on little wax cylinders!) because they were poets: masters of the older mode of recorded sound. The people of their era wrote verse that rhymed or sung. Even old "free verse" like Whitman's Leaves of Grass resounds with the regularities of musical form. But look what happened by the 1920's, when phonographs and radio had become popular. TS Eliot wrote a beautifully sinuous musical line of verse, but if you listen to him read and then listen to Louis Armstrong, there's no doubt that Armstrong is a recording artist and Eliot is not. Poetry didn't cease, but it became something else.

Similar tensions operate between theater, movies, and TV -- even between radio drama and TV. One finds Pere Ubu (the Alfred Jarry, not the band) close to Birth of a Nation and Jerzy Grotwoski and the main popularity of The Living Theatre right after I Love Lucy.

As use of the partially displaced medium changes, formal requirements of highest and best of that medium shift.

This will happen -- will continue to happen -- with books.