THE DEMOCRATIC

SURROUND: A
CONVERSATION BETWEEN
FRED TURNER AND CLAY
SHIRKY
2.1.2014

BY FRED TURNER & CLAY SHIRKY

Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with
Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a
Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing
Without Organizations, to talk about Turner’s new book, The Democratic
Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the
Psychedelic Sixties. A prequel to the influential From Counterculture to
Cyberculture which traced digital liberationist ideas back to the 1960s Bay
Area counterculture and DIY movements, The Democratic Surround plumbs
media and thought experiments from the 1940s and ’50s to uncover the
inspirations for 1960s. Fueled by fears of fascism both in the US and abroad,
intellectuals, artists, and designers from Margaret Mead to László Moholy-
Nagy developed new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self enabled
by new, interactive models of media and interpersonal and international
collaboration. Turner argues that it was their insights and creations that
brought us some of the most significant media events of the Cold War,
including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia
performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of
the ’60s. American liberalism of the ’40s and ’50s offered a far more radical
social vision than we now remember—a democratic vision that still underlies
our hopes for digital media today. We present Turner and Shirky’s
conversation here.

Fred Turner (FT): The Democratic Surround might be an ending—even though

it is a prequel—to my last book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. In that
earlier book I traced countercultural idealism and its impact on how we think
about digital media from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. I was surprised to
discover that in the 1960s, the countercultural folks I was writing about were
reading books from the 1940s by people like Erich Fromm and Margaret
Mead. I began to wonder what was going on, especially since I’d always been
told that the counterculture had rebelled against the culture of the 1940s, not
embraced it. I especially began thinking back to Marshall McLuhan and all
the wild, psychedelic multimedia environments that were built in the ‘60s. In
that period people had tremendous faith that entering into these
environments and participating in them would make you a different kind of
person. You would experience a new kind of consciousness. I began to
wonder, “Where the heck did that come from?”
I started tugging on different historical threads and I ended up at a
really odd moment: 1939. In 1939 American intellectuals of all stripes feared
that mass media could somehow trigger our unconscious and literally make
us fascists. Now, remember that, in 1939, the idea of the Freudian
unconscious was only about 30 years old in America. The idea of the
unconscious supported a terrible fear: mass media could reach down, turn off
our reason, and cause us to become authoritarians. Germany was the living
proof. For the last century or so, Germany had been the emblem of high
culture for many Americans. And suddenly the country that had brought us
Beethoven and Goethe was being led by a wacky, mustachioed former clerk.
American intellectuals and journalists tried to explain how that happened and
one answer they came up with was mass media. They feared that media like
radio and the movies did two things. First, they put the audience in the
position of a mass being spoken to all at the same time by a single leader and
from a single source. Second, they transmitted what many believed was the
clinical insanity of fascist leaders directly into the minds of their audiences. In
this view, Hitler had taken his personal craziness, sent it out over the radio
airwaves, and infected his countrymen with it.
After World War II started, this German story presented Americans
with their own media problem. The American state and many intellectuals
wanted to rally Americans to go to war. But how could they use propaganda
on their own people without turning them into fascists? If mass media made
fascists, what kinds of media could American leaders make that would help
create democratic persons and a democratic kind of unity?
Enter the Committee for National Morale. The Committee was led by
Arthur Upham Pope, a Persian art historian, and it included 60 of America’s
most interesting thinkers—people like anthropologists. Margaret Mead and
Ruth Benedict, Mead’s husband, Gregory Bateson, the psychologists Gordon
Allport and Kurt Lewin, a refugee from Germany. Together they theorized a
new kind of media, a multi-media that could surround individuals and allow
them to practice the perceptual skills on which democracy depended: the
skills of selection, of integration, of knitting together diverse perspectives into
a uniquely individual identity that Committee members called the
“democratic personality.” This kind of personality was open to difference:
open to racial difference, open to sexual difference. It was the opposite of the
fascist personality. And it was the basis of a democratic mode of unity, a way
of being together and at the same time remaining individual.
For the Committee for National Morale, making multimedia wasn’t
really an option. They were writers. But in New York at that same time, there
were half a dozen unemployed Bauhaus artists who had come to the US in the
mid-1930s with a very highly developed multimedia, multi-screen aesthetic.
Herbert Bayer, in particular—the man who developed the all lowercase
typeface that we associate with the Bauhaus now—had developed a theory of
display that he called 360-degree vision. He imagined art exhibitions in which
images would hang from the ceiling and the walls and look up from the floor.
They would surround the viewer. And you would be like an eye encircled by
images, knitting them together into a pattern that was meaningful for you.
In Weimar-era Germany, Bayer and other Bauhaus artists imagined
that synthesizing visual and aural experiences from many sources would
allow people to resist what they thought of as the atomizing pressures of
industrial life. Bauhaus artists called the person who could do this the “New
Man.” When Bayer came to the US, he needed a job, and he offered to build
360-degree exhibition environments to help make a new “New Man”—the
democratic person. At the start of World War II, he began working with
Edward Steichen, making propaganda environments at the Museum of
Modern Art. His ideas became the basis of later shows like “The Family of
Man,” and ultimately filtered right up into psychedelic media environments of
the 1960s.
The Democratic Surround moves forward from that moment along two
tracks. One track follows multimedia environments as they are developed by
the United States Information Agency for propaganda purposes abroad. The
other track follows the development of those same environments for the
liberation of individual selves and the making of democratic community in
places like Black Mountain College right up into the happenings of the 1960s.
It ends in 1967 at the first Human Be-In, where people danced in Golden Gate
Park and saw themselves as free, liberal individuals, diverse, racially mixed,
sexually mixed, and open in every way. The Human Be-In helped bring us San
Francisco’s Summer of Love and the high counterculture of the late 1960s.
But the book shows that it was also the endpoint of the movement against
fascism that Margaret Mead and the Bauhaus artists spawned.
Clay Shirky (CS): There’s a wonderful sociological Rube Goldberg–
machine quality to the book. There’s this explosion in the 1960s that needs
some explaining. What the hell happened between ‘64 and ‘67? Pulling on
intellectual threads, you end up at the place where people fleeing both a
Europe ravaged by the first World War and the rise of fascism, relocate West
to within about a two-mile radius of where we’re sitting in Greenwich Village.
In the production of the “democratic surround,” you can see all of the
dominoes falling over as you read the book when it comes to this anxiety
about what is happening to European culture. Reading the book requires a bit
of a head shift. In a democratic surround—an immersive environment which
is polyphonic on the part of the creators and participatory on the part of the
consumers—you get to choose where to focus. You can lean in and participate
or even interact. But the examples you bring forward, like Gropius in the
Bauhaus—by the time we get to the post–Second World War era, these
environments are being designed explicitly as propaganda. “The Family of
Man”—that incredible travelling exhibition of photographs produced by the
Museum of Modern Art—is essentially an advertisement for a multi-racial,
multicultural vision of the United States. Of course we didn’t actually live up
to this vision at the time nor do we now. But this is what the ad promised. By
the end of the book, we’re reading about Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic
Inevitable and Lou Reed creating environments with primitive audiovisual
equipment. But if Walter Gropius and Edward Steichen and Andy Warhol
were on stage together—they would come to blows. Right? They did not agree
about much. Warhol didn’t have an earnest bone in his body. He would have
hated the smarminess of “The Family of Man.” The promise of
industrialization as the source of freedom had already become the American
past around the 1950s. You’re offering the idea of a democratic surround, but
the work does not look the same over the four-decade period that you discuss.
If you had to define a democratic surround as a kind of a media production,
then what is the same about it, since these artists were thinking divergently
and their output differed?
FT: Well, I’d take a little bit of issue with that. We often tell stories of
historical actors as though they were in fact making choices all on their own.
From the perspective of how they understood themselves and their work, yes,
Gropius and Warhol would be antagonists. Yet, what I describe in the book
was a kind of shared conceptual framework, one that displayed a robust
aesthetic dimension that animated what got built in lots of places by many
different artists. This kind of conceptual framework can provide orienting
points, and even artists and intellectuals who think of themselves as very
different can steer toward them. The democratic-surround vision of a
polyphonic, mediated space that could produce democratic, free, individuated
people was very widely shared—even across groups that didn’t agree on other
things.
I actually think that the aesthetics of the democratic surround are more
consistent than they might appear to be, given the diversity of artists invoking
them. Like you said, they center on visual and sonic polyphony. In “The
Family of Man” exhibition, images were hung on the wall, on the ceiling, on
the floor. “The Family of Man” is almost certainly the most widely seen
photography exhibition of all time. The catalog has never been out of print
and it has sold more than five million copies. A quarter of a million people
saw the show in its first eight weeks. Traveling versions of the exhibition went
around the world nonstop for 10 years. It is now permanently installed in a
castle in Clervaux, Luxembourg. For the people who saw the exhibit in the
late 1950s its polyphony signaled a kind of freedom, a kind of political and
psychological liberation, that many craved. Of course, it also signaled that
letting the United States dominate the globe might produce that kind of
freedom.
Anyhow, the polyphonic aesthetic is consistent across the decades I
discuss in the book and across multiple communities. At the same time that
“The Family of Man” is travelling through Europe, John Cage is breaking
apart the structure of music and performance, turning scripted events into
happenings. What unites Cage and “The Family of Man” is ultimately the
pushback against fascism. When the threat of fascism receded after World
War II, Communism took its place as the enemy of liberalism. And after the
Cold War, hierarchy itself became the enemy. That’s where I think we live
now, in a fear of hierarchy. We hear constant calls for leveled organizations,
freed individuals, more collaboration, more networks. That call was actually
born in 1939, 1940.
To give you a sense of why, I want you to remember that, in February of
1939, 22,000 Americans filled Madison Square Garden to rally in support of
fascism. Organizers hung giant banners on the wall that said, “Stop Jewish
Domination of Christian America.” That’s America, 1939. In October that year
hundreds of people marched down 86th Street in New York City with
swastikas and American flags. This was in Life magazine and now it is almost
totally forgotten. We had fascist summer camps on Long Island. You could
picnic with your family at Camp Siegfried. Fascism was a real option in the
United States in ‘39, ‘40. The tremendous efforts that went into pushing back
on that—the anti-racist campaigns, the pro–sexual diversity campaigns of the
‘40s—have all been forgotten. But they didn’t disappear. They got channeled
into two projects we’ve always seen as opposites: the cold war liberal project
represented by “The Family of Man” and the bohemian, aesthetic project of
artists like John Cage. The anti-fascist energy of the 1940s actually came
down to the counterculture of the 1960s—and through the 1960s, to us —
by both routes.
CS: In The Democratic Surround the fear of fascism is the original
motivation for the development of new media strategies. At first, this is
underwritten by the US government. By the 1960s the source of fear is often
the US government itself. How and when did that turn happen?

FT: The short answer is: when the draft was instituted and we went to
war in Vietnam. The more complete answer is actually a story about the long
1950s. In the ‘50s we moved away from a robust, pro-liberal, anti-
Communism that was grounded in an earlier anti-fascism toward a
consumerist alternative. In 1959, we built the American National Exhibition
in Khrushchev’s Moscow. We tried to surround Russians not only with “The
Family of Man” and with multimedia displays but also with all kinds of
shopping opportunities. We wanted them to experience choice in a
commercial as well as a political vein. That turn toward mingling
consumption and politics took place in the ‘50s and was available as a
strategy to folks in the 1960s. While that was going on, some of the same
people who had been working to promote the ideology of choice abroad—Walt
Rostow, folks like this—were working at the Center for International Studies
at MIT on the ideas that would become the foundation of America’s war
inVietnam. Some of the same people who were fighting for a liberated,
individuated society that would be diverse racially, diverse sexually, slowly
but surely turned into the people who brought us Vietnam. You can watch it
happen in the archives. And it’s terrifying.

CS: One of the striking things you document in the book is the
development of what we now call a pro-gay rights stance, a pro-homosexual
stance as part of the mosaic in the manner of “The Family of Man.” The more
conventional story starts with the Stonewall Riots. How did we get from this
explicitly pro-gay agenda on the part of people in power to a world in which
the Stonewall Riot was a collective surprise to the nation?

FT: To answer that question, we have to go back to my favorite year in

the 20th century, 1948. That was a year in which world federalism seemed
like a real possibility. It was a year in which the philosopher and semiotician
Charles Morris, who’s one of my heroes, published a book called The Open
Self in which he described a world that included (in the language at the time)
“ectomorphs” and “endomorphs,” straight people, gay people, everything in
between.
 In the 1940s, there was also a tremendous call for racial diversity. It was
how we pushed back on the fascists. In 1938, a book called The Nazi Primer
circulated in the United States. It was the handbook for Hitler Youth, like a
Boy Scout manual for Nazis. The first sentence in the English translation was:
“The foundation of the National Socialist outlook on life is the perception of
the unlikeness of men,” meaning racial difference and also sexual difference.
People like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead pushed very hard against that
idea of racial difference. The ‘40s were, in important ways, a very open
moment. That moment melted away between 1949 and 1952, right in there.
The closet was fully constructed by the time we were in the middle of the
Korean War.
CS: What drove that change, do you think?

FT: I think Hoover’s FBI and McCarthyism drove many gay people
underground. There’s a lot of local stuff too. You know, anti-gay enforcement
in the late 1940s and early 1950s was really peculiar. John Cage, for example,
was very out in this period, I mean, virtually married to Merce Cunningham.
They were traveling around together. But only a few years before they came to
Black Mountain College together as a couple, the rector of Black Mountain
College was arrested for apparently being caught in flagrante with a Marine.
He was fired immediately and left campus without a murmur.

CS: I’m going to now ask about the book you didn’t write. There’s a
passage in the beginning of the book where you say that the democratic
surround introduces the participatory media environment, but also paves the
way for media environments based on a managerial market culture that
correlates with American capitalism and consumerism. Reading your
description of the democratic surround, I recognize it in everything from
Burning Man to Occupy Wall Street, as well as many kinds of purely virtual,
what we have learned to call, “temporary autonomous zones,” such as the
recently shut down Silk Road or 4chan. But most of the writing about and
theorizing of those movements is, if not explicitly anticapitalist, at least
anticonsumerist. How did the democratic surround come to accommodate
consumerism? Was there a break there between what you outline here and
what we are living in today or is this continuity with modification?

FT: I think there’s a lot of continuity and very little modification. Some
of the movements that you’ve just described, Burning Man and Occupy in
particular—and I know I’m going to make some Occupiers angry—are still
operating within a framework that was defined in the late 1940s. The
framework is one of democratic individualism set against hierarchy,
bureaucracy, and ultimately behind that, fascism and totalitarianism. I think
the theory is: if you just gather together and express your individual political
or aesthetic vision using the tools that you have to hand, you will in fact build
a new kind of polity. I think that’s a fiction in two ways. I think the first fiction
is that the practice is countercultural. On the contrary, we are acting right
down the middle of American liberalism as it was articulated in the ‘40s and
after. The second fallacy is what I call the “expressivist fallacy,” and it’s an
error that haunts the web. The fantasy goes like this: If I express myself, the
world will change. That is not correct. I was so angry to see Occupy focus on
expression while the Tea Party focused on elections. Who is driving our policy
now? It’s not Occupy. Sure, we got that phrase, “the 99 percent.” That’s great.
It helps frame the debate. But framing debates is totally insufficient.
One of the legacies from the emergence of a hyper-individualized style
of media that I describe in the book, is the abdication of the management of
institutions to experts. The business of the individual is to be a free, articulate
participant among others. That’s not enough. Folks who buy into that vision
have failed to do the institution-building that actually generates change.
That’s a negative legacy on the Left, and it’s one that all sorts of New Media
companies take advantage of. Google and Facebook are counting on it. They
issue an invitation that is very profitable to them: Come connect with your
friends. Hook up. Connect. Connect. Connect. Connect. But: Don’t build
institutions. Don’t regulate us. Weare the key institutions of free expression,
free innovation—not the government. Never mind that it was government-
sponsored research that brought us the Internet in the first place.
The threats are different today than they were in the 1940s and 1950s.
Back then, American intellectuals and artists feared hierarchical institutions
and centralized bureaucracies as tools of fascism. They tended to forget that
those same structures helped bring America the New Deal. Today, many on
the Left—and many in the corporate sphere—are still pushing the pursuit of
individual satisfaction and the development of individual-centered networks
as keys to democratic unity. The trouble is, what we face today is not the
fascism of the 1930s. What we face is the dissolution of the middle class and
the predatory accumulation of wealth by a tiny fraction of our population.
What we face is the failure to band together to take action against climate
change. These are the kinds of challenges that individuals gathered together
in expression-centered networks are uniquely ill-equipped to meet.
We need to do the institutional work that builds free societies over the
long haul. And if we don’t, the Tea Party will.