Polina Kolozaridi, head of the DH Center at ITMO University and senior researcher at EUSPb, has prepared a review of Lewis Mumford's book «Art and Technics», published by the Gaidar Institute Publishing House in 2025.
Art and Technology is a collection of lectures given by Lewis Mumford at Columbia University in the United States in 1951.
Context is important for understanding the book. At the same time, scientists who were shaping cybernetic shifts in all sciences were gathering, MACY conferences were being held, and the work of Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, was spreading across the planet. McCulloch and Pierce had already discovered their neuron, and John von Neumann had done a lot to reshape the sciences under the leadership of economics and mathematics.
Lewis Mumford was giving his lectures at the same time. He did not try to argue with these intellectual innovations, although he criticized McLuhan, for example, and vice versa. But it was a “humanitarian cause” — to remind his lecture audiences that language is not reducible to communication, that symbols and tools are fundamentally different things.
Mumford is known as a technopessimist who wrote extensively about cities and technology. His ideas about megamachines were popular and translated into various languages. Mumford lived to be 95, and a center for research into various technical solutions is named after him. This is, of course, remarkable.
Art and Technology is a small book, but it took me almost a month to read it. The difficulty with it is that Mumford writes arrogantly, without revealing the reasons for his arrogance. At the same time, he urges us not just to whine, but to restore the “primacy of the human personality.” Whose personality? It's not clear. Any personality. The universal human personality.
As a result, his words sound like an old man's curses, based on something incomprehensible: he proposes restoring the world to romanticism, but somehow avoiding all that is bad.
Of course, if you read this in a polemic with the hypothetical Wiener, everything falls into place. The people who invented Homo Faber write in an even more universalist way and are even less concerned with making their ideas accessible for debate.
Putting aside the old-fashioned “things were better before” argument, Mamford offers many interesting thoughts on how art (and symbols) and technology (and tools) should complement each other, but cannot. Nowadays, they have switched places: machines have become objects of worship, and art has become a way to shout about how terrible the world is for the little man.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, the author begins to talk about care and respect for tools, about how technology is not the spawn of hell, and overall his “aristocratic” position becomes friendly and thoughtful.
The central plot of the book is the introduction of book printing into practice. Mumford describes it not only as the Great Event of Democratization, but also as a factor in major changes that are still largely unrecognized today. The form and function of writing and reading have switched places, and literacy (and understanding) have become more important than interaction, which has deprived people of the ability to control their participation in reading and writing (I can't help but joke that “clip thinking,” to continue this idea, was created by Gutenberg). Mumford's second major example shows how photography turned the artist into a “sensory data specialist.” This is also interesting.
The book's conclusion suggests moving away from “humble distrust or sluggish cynicism” toward symbols. It seems to imply that people receiving technical education should not only also receive an education in the arts or humanities, but also apply it. Mamford does not explain how to do this, but being his perplexed reader is already something.