Postures and impostures of managers past 79 parallel at present in the retribalizing process of electrotechniques. While detribalizing is assigned top priority for civilized advance in all backward areas, regardless of geography or ideology, there is also occurring a complementary and hidden process of retribalization that is independent of either plotters or planners, ideology or geography. The most archaic societies now begin with our latest electric technology. They by-pass the civilized phase that occupied Western energies for thousands of years and plunge even deeper into their own tribal traditions. The Renaissance or the rebirth of pagan antiquity was the unexpected consequence of demolishing the feudal system. The return of the pagan gods and pagan humanism had not been the objective of any of the reformers. The Luthers and Calvins had sought to purge the church of its accretion of political impurities. Driving toward primal simplicity, they encountered innumerable schisms and doctrinal specialisms as the dominant figure of their actions. The hidden ground was the overwhelming new retrieval of pagan antiquity via print technology. The very technological instrument of individual “inner light” and liberation immersed them in a new environment of merely utilitarian objectives. The hateful siege of contraries. (Milton, Paradise Lost) In our own century the same siege of hateful contraries and dramatic reversals was played out in the Eastern medieval theater of the Romanoffs. The Russians sloughed off the feudal hegemony of the Romanoffs and grasped the latest means of Western organization of industrial production. The slogan was: CATCH UP AND SURPASS! Just when the West was plunging Eastward, and when the enlightened spirits had either booked a passage to India or, like Yeats, were already on the iconic route to Byzantium, cultural anthropologists like Sir James Frazer set out to retrieve the Great Mother and the mythic figures of archaic consciousness. But the anthropologists failed to note that these forms of awareness had become totally pervasive even before the jazz age of the 1920’s. The instant telegraph had established modes of social order that radio broadcasting pushed all the way to Hitler’s ovens. The same cruel paradox involves the American Negro, whose jazz rhythms integrated the cultures of the entire world for the first time in history or before. The same Negro is now expected to “integrate” with the subculture of literacy after having created a universal culture of tribal jazz. James Joyce put it all in a phrase about the heroine of Finnegans Wake. She is Anna Livia Plurabelle, musical mother of all forms, the hidden ground of being:

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