The Futuristic!

Well, blast it. The link to the Harris essay I wanted you to read has broken since the last time I taught this piece and I can find no other. Here are the first few paragraphs of the essay at least...

Why does the telephone no longer ring? The strident peals of archaic rotary telephones have been replaced by throbbing, high pitched electronic bleeps that are no more effective--and, for many people, far less pleasant--than the familiar clamor of the old-fashioned bell. Well into the 1980s, the ring of the telephone was produced by the physical vibrations of a hollow piece of metal struck rapidly by a small clapper, a sound that was as mechanically comprehensible as any other noise in our daily environments. The new ring, however, does not suggest a simple physical activity of thumping or pounding, the percussive racket of something banging against something else, but is an otherworldly trill that is completely unrecognizable. Every time the telephone rings we unconsciously ask ourselves "what is that?"--a question that Bell Atlantic and Sprint have deliberately left unanswered, thereby mystifying the operation of an old appliance through the subtle manipulation of a key aspect of its aesthetic.

It is not as if the function of the telephone has changed; it does not do more things, enable us to talk to more people at greater distances. And yet this new computer generated sound suggests that the telephone is more "advanced" simply because its ring is different, a tonal adjustment that implies greater capacity. Manufacturers exploit our naive confusion of aesthetics and utility, instilling awe through gratuitous variations of form that deceive us into believing that the novel appearance of cars with three wheels and toasters that resemble speeding chrome bullets necessarily enhances performance and efficiency. The futuristic stands the modernist dictum of "form follows function" on its head: form does not follow function, form pretends to follow function but is actually an aesthetic end in itself, a decorative feature that ostentatiously proposes itself as a useful one. Staplers that look ready for take-off and hair blowers designed like Martian ray guns are now dressed in a kind of utilitarian drag, a high-tech costume that, while completely unnecessary to an appliance's operation, contributes to its intimidating aura as a state of the art invention. It is far easier, after all, to manipulate a product's incidental embellishments in order to create the impression of strength and durability than it is to make that stereo speaker shaped like a NASA space capsule intrinsically more powerful.

The futuristic creates its imagery through willful disobedience, an almost bratty, aesthetic misbehavior rather than through a genuine spirit of inventiveness, of artistic prescience about the appearance of tomorrow. Tea kettles are round so futuristic tea kettles are square; chairs have four legs so futuristic chairs have three; houses are opaque cubes so futuristic houses are transparent fish bowls; windows are rectangles that open from the bottom so futuristic windows are portholes that open from the side. The futuristic is often an exercise in perversity. It is not a new aesthetic so much as the denial of an old one. It does not involve a clairvoyant vision of tomorrow but an ever clearer sense of the obsolescence of the past which, through a crotchety series of negations and disavowals, it seeks to cancel out by creating a world of torturously unnecessary aesthetic euphemisms in which a coffee cup is no longer a coffee cup but a menacing zirconium sphere and a door is no longer a door but a retractable aperture as complex as a camera's shutter. Guesswork about the future, oracular predictions about the shape of appliances to come, are all but irrelevant to the real purpose of the futuristic (and, ironically, of its opposite, quaintness): to document how far the present has superseded the past, whose ungainly inventions and decorative cliches serve as flattering foils to the ingenuity of our own LaserKaraoke players, accordion flashlights that can be twisted like pretzels, and electronic skateboards with digital read-outs for mileage and speed. Impatience with yesterday is thus misconstrued as a presentiment of tomorrow.

The false aesthetics of utilitarianism play upon the consumer's ignorance, which has become a fallow breeding ground for superstitions, the legends that circulate among the ever-growing class of the technologically illiterate whose misapprehensions about machines have inadvertent pictorial consequences, giving rise to the primary graphic conventions of the futuristic. If Greek myths are attempts to explain the mysteries of nature, the new myths of cyberspace are attempts to explain the mysteries of appliances, which have become so incomprehensible that they are now the principal fetishes of an animistic religion that takes us on a fantastic voyage through fiber optic cables, circuit boards, and electrostatic storage units.

Not sure if it would be of any use to any of you, but I have discussed this essay myself online in an informal way a little bit here, for some more context.