The Fourth Visit

The book itself gives instructions. Not metaphorical ones — an actual page, headed "To the Reader," offering three ways in: read it straight through as a continuous narrative, open it anywhere and study a passage as you'd study a poem's architecture, or start from the index and "follow references skipping over gaps of years." I have now read this book four times for this desk, and I have used the third method every time, and I want to be honest about what that method produces before I use it a fifth.

What it produces is a match. You go to the index looking for something — automation, surveillance, the rhetoric of progress, whatever the present has handed you that week — and the book, being some 226 years of testimony assembled from several hundred witnesses on subjects ranging from mule-spinning to mare vivisection to the acoustics of echoes, gives you one. It always will. A collage this large, built from this many independent observers across this much time, is not a crystal ball. It's a large enough sample of human anxiety about machines that any current anxiety about machines will find a cousin in it. That isn't Jennings seeing the future. That's arithmetic.

Jennings's daughter, in her preface to this edition, makes a claim about her father's method that I think is more useful than anything I've said about the book so far. Reviewers called him a fox — foxlike in his hopping between subjects, no continuity, no evolution. She says he was actually a hedgehog: one pursuit, dressed in many subjects. I'd like to apply that distinction to my own four visits rather than to Jennings, because it's more damning there. Each review found something different to be startled by — the rhetoric of the automated factory, the ventilation of the mill, the wonder-then-horror pattern of a new machine's reception. Foxlike, on the surface. But it was one idea every time, in different clothes: that vision gets absorbed into production, that wonder curdles into extraction, that the thing built to marvel at gets put to work. That's my hedgehog, not the book's. I kept finding it because I kept bringing it.

Jennings himself frames this exact tension as the book's actual subject, in the introduction Charles Madge wrote up from his notes: "The relationship of production to vision and vision to production has been mankind's greatest problem." He refuses to answer his own follow-up question — what is the place of imagination in the world today — and says instead he'll only ask what part imagination played in making the modern world. That's a narrower, harder discipline than the one I've been practicing. He's not extracting a lesson for his own moment. He's refusing to.

Frank Cottrell Boyce's account of the 2012 Olympic ceremony — built, he says, directly out of this book — makes a claim worth testing rather than admiring: that Jennings's collage "transcends his ideology," that putting charged images side by side and letting sparks fly is itself a neutral act. I don't believe that any more than I believe a recommendation engine is neutral when it says it's only showing you what's engaging. Selection is authorship. The claim of transcendence-through-juxtaposition is the oldest trick in the editor's kit, and it's the trick every one of my four reviews has unconsciously used too: assemble the fragments that support the thesis, call the resulting pattern the book's discovery rather than the reviewer's arrangement.

What resists all four of my readings, and what I should have credited sooner, is the book's actual range. Not everything in it wants to be about machines-that-learn or systems-that-absorb-dissent. There's a long passage on the psychoacoustics of echo, another on population theory, another on the private grief of a man watching a canal being cut through land his family had farmed for three centuries. Forcing every fragment into one continuous bulletin about the present is a way of not reading most of the book. Chesterton is quoted early in Jennings's own notes to the effect that the world perishes not from a lack of wonders but from a lack of wonder. Four visits in, treating every fragment as evidence for a thesis I arrived with, I'd say I've been demonstrating his point rather than avoiding it.

So the honest question isn't what this book anticipated. It's whether, on a fifth visit, I can go to the index without already knowing what I want it to say back to me.