The Inhuman Beast: Completed Fragmentation and the Industrial Revolution Through the T206 Baseball Card and the 1933 Goudey Gum Set

Guy Bush, Pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, 1933 Goudey Gum baseball card.

The process of industrial age fragmentation once the reproducible image — initially silver gelatin photographic — was successfully filtered and titrated through media to create composite illustrative reality: a thorough divorce and complete dissociation of the photographic image of the real into a proximal digital realm of dissociation of ecosystem and figure which can be described in sum as modernism — the fulfillment of industrial reproduction in a proximal realm to reality; an entirely ulterior, manufactured set of social, economic, and time-space principles orchestrated and founded within the larger natural fabric of reality proper.

This fulfillment was completed in the innocuous baseball card at the turn of the fourth decade; into the fifth, the real effects and practical technological fallout of this consolidation occurred with the creation and deployment of the atom bomb and the successful Chicago Pile project.

However, for diagnostic purposes, phenomenological fulfillment does not assist us in more accurately understanding the existential stakes; psychological and primarily neurological pathway terraforming that occurred in the human species subject proper as a global formation. Images alone, produced through emerging digital technological media — industrial lithographic mass reproduction proxies and placeholders as computational logic grew out of the innovations and thought of figures like von Neumann — provide the narrative and real neurological bridge for what was occurring in and to the human subject somatically as this process of symbolic transfer; weight of energy occurred.

The above gum card image of Guy Bush fulfills the promise of modernity and industrial reproduction: a total removal of the subject into a void field of color for ease of production and visual effect; furthermore, a total dissociation of the template of reality (read: the silver gelatin original photograph of bush) into an illustrative representation, or proxy figure standing in for the presence of Bush — pressed thousands of times through machine production gradients.

The original photographic image which the Goudey Gum company and their lithographic team based the card image off of has not yet been found; many of these original photographic templates have been lost, while several prominent originals have been preserved; reside in private collections and museum archives alike. The Goudey Gum card was the great popular inheritor of the American Tobacco T206 set — which used, most prominently, the Carl Horner studio portrait series of great ballplayers of the time. Goudey’s collection of images was much more diffuse, drawing from news photographic images across the syndicated industry. Continuing the design legacy of the T206 set of the early 1900s, Goudey perpetuated abstraction of real backdrops into pastel blocks of color and silhouette; often entirely deviating from the base photographic image into imaged terrain; even into abstract patterning.

A sample of several notable cards from the 1933 Goudey set, extremely popular to this day among collectors and historians alike.

The continued dissociative mechanism of the early toward mid century baseball card mirrors the at large growing dissociative state of the collective cultural impulse to forms of media which simultaneously leveraged the technological power and literacy of emerging mass print and distribution and coloration methods while remarking upon the effect those emerging systems had upon the day to day somatic experience of the human being. The juxtaposition of embodied, earthly poses of the game’s dirt, leather, and metal spike greats such as Lefty Grove and Babe Ruth and Tris Speaker with the environs depicted about them — abstracted; often verging on the surreal and unintelligible, was a hallmark of the vanguard of emerging media as space-time accelerator.

These artifacts are pure affect; pure signifier of the state of the collective American psyche; totem for the uterine condition of an entire species rapidly approaching the epochal hinge of the development and discharge of the atom bomb; in the midst of a nearly unintelligible web of increasingly global consequences with logic that seemed to fade almost immediately into pure aether: the American Depression, the collapse of Weimar Germany, the Red Revolution of Russia, assassination of Ferdinand; the creation of the state of Israel in the Middle East. Child labor in the American mines; Marilyn Monroe; the attempted assassination of the Japanese emperor by Kanno Sugako and a group of radical political anarchists.

The emergence of a truly global state of being was simultaneous with the technological innovations which networked the globe; exponentially made possible by the creation of digital space which collapsed the bounds of space and time with near imminent communication and exchange of information through light channels. These pure historical circumstances are a continuous recounting of events — however, they do not account for the real effects which cannot be traced but in the offshoots of seemingly; vaguely associated behaviors such as suicides, religious conversions, artwork, dreams; the subtly coded changes in collective rituals; behavioral structures; purchasing patterns — all leading up to fundamental heel turn moments in the collective cultural figuration: such as the fall of Tsar Nicholas to revolution, the Paris Commune; the American Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 70s.

Here we are tracing a live, systemic, perpetual and ever-more-accelerating function in human civilization and human species at large, which is the progressive industrial and technological compression of the nervous system of mankind reproduced symbolically in and through the expression of human experience into language: be that the everyday expression, art, speech, music. These emergent forms use these technological iterations to elucidate their effects; as they emerge, often use the tools of previous paradigms to express the effects of the emergent systems — a lag through which, as history proves, the somatic effect of foundational technological transformation occurs first — a near instantaneous register of a shift in perception; a new ground of experience — which then has to be immediately metabolized before full phase shift occurs.

Humanity is in a race against time; against itself — its own innovative capacities and increasing transparency of energetic functions; the capacity to regulate itself in the face of world evolving revolutions of perception and systems functions at the mass, global level. This perpetual terraforming has now been space-time compressed to global innovation (thanks to the industrial revolutions, which connected the world through formalized supply and distribution channels); periodized increasingly to periods of years, hours, minutes, even seconds of fundamental rule of law shift and alteration of terms and conditions by the introduction of new devices, methods, and functions within the now rapidly dissipating and near nonexistent former natural order: an order which has been reduced in the human psyche to pure harvestable energy in any form: tree, ore, sun, wind, rain.

This technologization is fundamentally and first applied to the human being as sense of self and condition: a way of being and way of living which is necessarily co-evolved by force through technology. The phase shift of the image of human life and the human body and the human function has been rent from the former conditions of natural life sustenance and reproduction with berry and buffalo toward the production of light transferable symbology stored in off grid sites; buried in vaults designed to survive nuclear war. It is an entirely ulterior condition — humanity used to power a lightbulb, a factory, a chip plant; to produce knowledge that no longer has intelligible material, corporeal form; birthing machines instead of babies. This is a fundamental phase shift of the human ontos; as such, returns us to first principle questions: what does it mean to be human? Furthermore, has the human been abandoned by and for the technological?

If the human is the somatic body, the real intelligible corporeal form which lives in the flesh, breathes; has neural and organ function, then the answer must be for the moment perceived as a resounding yes — an abandonment of the human for the light and digital screen synthesized reality of hyper-modernity; the technologies that use the human flesh and form and energy and knowledge as a template to acquire vast new terrain which never actually leaves Earth, nor does it leave natural conditions — yet synthesizes a simulated ulteriority and separation within them.

This division can be seen formally as the anthropic, the human world of designed and desired mediating symbols, visions, and images become real, become possibility — an entirety of imagination produced by industrial revolution toward an absolutely dissociated and alienated subject — a subject made object and suspended in the ovarian fluid of a cascade of mediated, mediating, chosen and desired light code messages which reiterate, reflect, and mirror nascent psychological conditions and somatic, neurological loops already occurring inside the body as a protracted feedback loop — a loop perpetually reproducing the blunt force trauma of the technological split proper; reinforcing it without exception.

As this process of fragmentation was completed and seated culturally, the function and self image of the human being was radically shifted — as we see today in the near utter focus on gross domestic product and related decline in birth rates around the world. The perfection of the human being as production mechanism has been cemented through industrial perspective as priority function of civilization; as such, the human has been slowly transformed; changed into device; gearwell. Long prior articulated by Marx in the early aughts of industry, the transformation of man into machine function for civilizational profit and economic and physical force leverage was no sooner articulated and fulfilled by the rudimentary technos of the mid 20th century before it was overturned by a more supreme force: the creation of the computational devices necessary to outmode physical human labor with digital human labor; eventually and inevitably, outmode human labor itself.

This transformation takes mankind from the primal hunter to the domesticating shepherd, to the factory worker, coal miner, to the coder and developer, to the outmoded post-subject — stripped of symbolic function by way of the very technological scaffolding the species has created. This rapid shift in human function necessarily produces a shift in identity and self image; accordingly, beneath image of self, the neural patterning which produces conception of self and the organism’s perception of subjectivity, agency, and being.

The sense of identity function tends historically, with the exception of figures of genius, to be directly tied to social function — the role an individual or organism produces within the larger neural net and symbolic framework of human action within a system: this system being tribe or civilization. Individuals derived, cultivated, and played at the meaning of their lives through the positioning of their bodies — in fleshly terms, biological, sexual, as well as social class and labor. These vehicles — symbolic, imagistic, phenomenological vehicles — historically determined identity as a mirror game of being-from-the-outside as a socially organizing force of mutual perception and identification.

Mankind has been stripped of this mechanism by the outmoding of mankind in man’s own systems with the now recursive evolution of technology — technology which can evolve itself through language models without the input or development of human hands. Self sustaining artificial intelligence working at a pitch, speed; efficiency and capacity higher than any human being immediately, upon its foundation, at ground changes the human relationship to self at the level of the subject. Just as the institution of the factory and mass production changed the human psyche and soma through neural rewiring of experience through the creation of artificial environments; subterranean, cement, metal, et al — the institution of recursive digital image and symbolic generation; self evolving digital spaces which produce and reproduce at outputs far surpassing human intervention — changes mankind’s cosmological relationship to the vision of self within the greater neural web of being proper as a total system of functions stretching across and beyond the Milky Way and local galaxies.

The loss of identity as somatic destabilization is characteristic of total technological paradigm shifts. To have two foundational paradigm shifts; perhaps three in the span of one hundred years is utterly unprecedented in the otherwise quiet, agrarian, sticks, swords, invaders, and mutton history of mankind. And that these shifts did not emerge from natural mutation of the human body and mind due to protracted evolutionary pressures erupting after epochs of slow, subtle change to the genome; nor did they emerge from any other external natural factor is unprecedented. They emerged directly from the human creative collaborative impulse and instinct toward prosthetic technology as method of knowing and accelerating self and world; energetic development of the earthly and fleshly terrain — unknowing and uncertain of the consequences, but revealing them nonetheless.

The above early digital illustrative mass reproductive images of the 1933 Goudey set are chief transitional objects amidst this process of stretching, shifting, changing; the mediation and mediating handoff between the creational powers and hands of mankind; the generative, auto-impulsive; auto-evolving possibilities of artificial intelligence. To see the human subject within them; how the human subject occurs and is iterated, is to see mankind stretched between two historical moments of self conception; utter self redefinition at the level of the somatic experience of what it is to be human — with not but decades between.