VERBO QUE EXPRESA EL ACTO DE “CREER” EN JUAN

Before looking at Seeger, we will recall a central feature of medium theory. Harold Adams Innis explores what he terms “space-” and “time-biased” media across the history of Western civilization, from Ancient Sumeria to the contemporary United States (Innis, 1991, 2007). According to Innis, the degree to which a medium is either durable but immobile, on one hand, or easily transportable but ephemeral, on the other, has far- reaching effects on the cultures and societies in which it is deployed. Time-biased media such as pyramids or clay tablets foster tradition and decentralization; the adoption of

18_{“Hot media are … low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the}

space-biased media, however, has tended to have disruptive effects on time-biased “monopolies of knowledge,” and has rather made possible the emergence of markets, industry, and secularization (Innis, 2007). Thus an analysis of both political and economic power requires a consideration of the specific material systems of communication that ground a given social assemblage:

Large-scale political organizations such as empires must be considered from the standpoint of two dimensions, those of space and time, and persist by overcoming the bias of media which over-emphasize either dimension. They have tended to flourish under conditions in which civilization reflects the influence of more than one medium and in which the bias of one medium towards decentralization is offset by the bias of another medium towards centralization. (Innis, 2007, p. 27) It was partly the introduction of print, then, that ended the monopoly of the church and led to the Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Innis, 2007).

McLuhan’s work on media takes up Innis’s concern with materiality and medium specificity. McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message” (2003, p. 19) urges us to look, not only at the content or information of a communicative situation, but also at the particular channels grounding it. Yet, McLuhan sets aside Innis’s time/space heuristic for his own “hot” and “cool” categories (2003, p. 39). Hot media like print and radio are characterized by high definition and by the passive mode of reception they therefore require, and they tend to work on distinct senses (e.g. print on the eye, radio on the ear). Cool media, on the other hand, are corporate and participatory, and they tend to involve all of the senses simultaneously. Although print had all but eroded any trace of oral consciousness in the West, McLuhan believed that the postwar electronic ecology— the television-fostered “global village”—offered a potential return to a cool, interactive

culture. Despite their differences in emphasis, however, McLuhan and Innis see particular media hybrids as crucial agents in various forms of struggle; just as print challenged the

hegemony of the ancien régime according to Innis, television and rock music—the media

of the sixties counter-culture—were perceived by McLuhan (and by many who read him, including the Yippies, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and early video artists) to be threats

to the hegemony of modern bureaucratic and industrial culture.19

Seeger was not an academic, and he never offers as systematic a vision of historical change as either Innis or McLuhan. Still, despite his rejection of “The

McLuhanites,”20 Seeger’s essays and aphorisms for Sing Out!, Broadside and other

publications did ruminate on the question of media. His understanding of medium

specificity was central to his thoughts on tactical media warfare. First, he often points out the particularities of print, often considering the medium’s limitations:

A song is ever moving and changing. A folk song in a book is like a picture of a bird in mid-flight printed in a bird book. The bird was moving before the picture was taken, and continued flying afterward. It is valuable for a scientific record to know when and where the picture was taken, but no one is so foolish as to think that the picture is the bird. Thus also, the folk song in the book was changing for many generations before it was collected, and will keep on changing for many generations more, we trust. It is valuable for a scientific record to know when and where it was collected, but the picture of the song is not the song itself. If you think of folk music as a process, you know that words and melodies may

19 _See

Bodroghkozy (2001) for a discussion of how and why the counterculture appropriated various aspects of McLuhan’s arguments about television.

20 _{“If any McLuhanites are listening, I challenge them to let me visit their mailbox every morning for a}

month, and remove the contents of all their letters, presenting them only with the empty envelopes. The envelope is not the message. Just a part of it.” (Pete Seeger, 1972, p. 296)

not be so important as the way they are sung, or listened to. The process includes not only the song, but the singer and the listeners, and their situation. (1972, p. 145)

Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries in American folklore (see Bendix, 1997; Sterne, 2003), and like medium theorists (e.g. McLuhan, 2003; Ong, 1982), Seeger sometimes privileges embodied, experiential speech over abstracting and alienating print. The folk process is fluid and variable, and the flux of the folk stream cannot be wholly captured by mere signifiers:

Think of folk music as a process; then the history of any folk song will show continual change, contradictions, action and interaction of opposing influences. Now, this might be called, in the term of my mother-in-law (a wonderful woman), diabolical materialism. (1972, p. 145)

The community of singers and participants called into being by the act of folksinging involves not just the passive exchange of narratives or words, for there are affective registers to the folk process that printed texts can never quite capture: “Words, words, words. Sometimes the most eloquent song I can sing is ‘Wimoweh,’ with no words at all. Just melody, rhythm, and a great bass harmony” (1972, p. 320).

Despite his fascination with the murky material below “words, words, words,” Seeger acknowledged that a hybrid relationship between print and folksong could prove fruitful: “If we can force [the media] open, masses of people can learn from the printed

page” (1972, p. 428). He spearheaded People’s Songs Bulletin in the late forties, the

mimeographed publication that would eventually become Sing Out! Actually, his first

for topical songs (Seeger, 1972). His experience of briefly working at the Library of Congress under Alan Lomax in the late thirties (his job was to listen to the volumes of recordings of folk music that Lomax himself did not have time for), and the influence of his father (the folk-loving and leftwing composer and musicologist Charles Seeger), seem to have broadened his media horizons beyond print. But he was sensitive to both the limitations and possibilities of chirographic and print culture, and he recognized that distinct media—including multimedia networks, which he seems to anticipate in the following quotation—might have distinct roles to play in his project of prodding the whole world to sing together:

The printed page is a handy device, and there is value in being able to count on a certain number of pages appearing regularly with up-to-date information on a certain subject. … The basic idea would be better if we could afford to include a phonograph record with every issue. Or a roll of video tape you could play through your TV set. But this will come in time. The scientists will come to our aid if they don’t blow us up first. (1972, p. 21)

Although Seeger’s experience with mass-media institutions would often lead him pragmatically to privilege speech and singing, he grasps the position of these media in a hybrid and dynamic ecology, which, as we will see below, one can come to harness or wield like a weapon.

Importantly, Seeger was not against electric instruments per se:

Nowadays the [loud]speaker gives out more twang. But even so, I don’t think the range of tone, or the flexibility, can beat a good acoustic guitar. And all that equipment to lug around! Ugg. Of course, me, I’ve been playing electrified music for a long time. Ever since I started using microphones. (1972, p. 288)

Seeger preferred acoustic guitars and banjos not because he wished to be “behind the times” like the pastoral folk, and he acknowledges that his own “live” performances often rely on modern technological media. Rather, it seemed to him that heavy electronic gear

is simply not fast enough. A DIY techno-nomad, Seeger was willing to take up any tool

(acoustic guitars, television programs, axes, etc.) fit for the task at hand and the situation. The hybrid assemblages called “songs” were his favourite, but only because they were able to cross so many channels and territories at such high velocity: “Songs can go places and do things and cross borders which people cannot” (1972, p. 209). This pragmatic medium specificity, this willingness to proceed “by any media necessary,” is pithily articulated in one of Seeger’s most well known compositions, “If I Had A Hammer,” co- written with Lee Hays.

“If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning. / I’d hammer it in the evening, all over this land,” Seeger sings (Seeger & Hays, 2009, p. 38). But there are other tools with which one can transmit particular effects: “If I had a bell, I’d ring it in the morning”; “If I had a song, I’d sing it in the morning” (p. 38). Each of these distinct channels is used to transmit “love between my brothers and my sisters,” and thus the song’s emphasis is also on content. Yet, the verses revel in the particularity of the makeshift weapons and in translation itself. The song revels in the specificity and materiality of particular acts of mediatized resistance. One sings songs, one swings hammers, and “to every thing … there is a season,” as he puts it elsewhere. Or, the medium is the message.