grammatico-rhetorical (a poetic) exploration

23.7.08

grammatico-rhetorical (a poetic) exploration

"Media ecology means using the media so that they help each other instead of just wiping each other out." He expresses it more precisely in Take Today where he notes: "Ecology is the simultaneous awareness of the interplay of the total field of processes. The simultaneity pushes the most banal situations into high relevance."_ Seeing that the Toronto school was grounded on a foundation of critique and correction (in McLuhan’s case, utilizing satire as an instrument) this was the main thrust of what they began in the mid-twentieth century, preparing for the millennium Yet for McLuhan and Carpenter the intellect and art were crucial as instruments and methods in achieving the rescue effort.

In 1991 the French philosopher, Giles Deleuze, in collaboration with the psychotherapist and media analyst, Félix Guattari, analyzed human thinking in such a way as to establish that artistic process in its involvement with percepts and affects is just as much an activity of thinking as the cognitive process of the philosopher is with its development of concepts or that of the scientist and technologist, with their .development of functives and propositions._ Such an approach finally permits a recognition of McLuhan and Carpenter’s continuous assertions that while being thinkers and intellectuals, they were working with percepts and implicitly affects. This makes most of their writings appear poetic and aphoristic in terms of the tradition of Francis Bacon’s Essays to which McLuhan frequently alluded throughout his career._ In a techno-scientific age, the Toronto School was developing a way of reinserting into intellectual discourse the value of grammatico-rhetorical (a poetic) exploration of media, culture and technology.

"... puns, verbal play, paradox, amibiguity, tricks with language such as paralellisms, anthitheses and play with vowels and consonants. Their method of writing was directed towards increasing the reader’s or listener’s perceptual and affective understanding of the phenomena under consideration."

"Most of my writing is Menippean satire, presenting the actual surface of the world we live in as a ludicrous image."_ Such a comic critique of the contemporary world is central to the approach which the leaders of the Toronto School adopted in their own writings..."

Like the Menippean satirists he admired, McLuhan felt that all "moralization" should be implicit and should arise from the way the sensitization to percepts and affects intensified the individual’s awareness of the contemporary maelstrom of a society nearly totally dominated by technologies managed by a few. So the style of McLuhan and of Carpenter was one that intensified perceptions and contextualized them in an affective ambience of comic critique.

So this is the future of a vision that began in a relative international backwater in 1950 where the accidental presence of several remarkable people and a small dedicated group of faculty and students sparked the launching of an adventure, which was to come to fruition half a century later. That adventure contributed to other academic futures as well by being one of the first major interdisciplinary projects in the humanities and human sciences with a long term impact that eventually led to the emergence of a wide variety of research and academic programs in communication, as well as the beginnings of media ecology.

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quantum retrocausality said...: MENIPPEAN TOPICS

The chief techniques of defining a work as Menippean satire have been three: either (a) simply by the formula, "a mixture of verse and prose," or (b) by a comparison of its contents with those of a known Menippean satire, or (c) by means of a "definitive" list of features. Each of these is inadequate to deal with the problem of definition of the form, Menippean satire. The first is inadequate both because it allows for the inclusion of works that are not Menippean, and because it excludes a great variety of works that are - that are either wholly in verse or wholly in prose. The second is inadequate because it too makes no provision for innovation. While the third (and most popular) likewise does not provide for innovation, it is also inadequate because critics have not agreed upon what such a list should contain and because, as this appendix illustrates, a complete and thereby definitive list would be unwieldy if it were in fact possible to compile one. Further, in all probability, no Menippean satire would use all of the ingredients of such a list. Moreover, all three techniques are inadequate because they result from appraising Menippean satire abstractly and descriptively, from a distance, and because they ignore the interaction of the satire with the reader.As has been shown in Part One, descriptive or abstract approaches fail to come to grips with Menippean satire for the reason that it is inseparable from its effect on its audience. All of the features hitherto used to describe the form, or any example of it, may be regarded as tactics chosen by a Menippist to engage and retune the sensibilities of a reader by deliberately violating his sense of decorum in one or another way. If the catalog of features appears to grow with each period of Menippism, then, it does so because the Menippist has a new, or at least a different, audience sensibility to contend with. For each change of sensibility implies both an intensifying of awareness in some areas of experience and a blunting of awareness in others. Furthermore, the catalog may be enlarged for the Menippist by the development, either through his own work or others', of new literary patterns and techniques. This may in some measure account for the paradoxical fact that Menippean satire is at once highly experimental and highly conservative of tradition (it is mimetic). The following list of Menippean topics does not attempt to be exhaustive: it includes little more than the commonplace features - e.g., those discussed by Frye, Williams, Bakhtin and Korkowski. While its size may demonstrate the futility of a merely descriptive approach, the list may serve another purpose. A structural study of these and other Menippean topics may eventually yield basic patterns of Menippean decorum which will in turn provide greater knowledge of how human perception is altered and managed.; April 16, 2010 at 1:00 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: TOPICS:

Almanackers. They were often used as the butts of the satires, as street-level philosophi gloriosi. Cf. The Owle's Almanacke by L.L. (Laurence Lyly).

Astrologers have been attacked regularly by Menippists since Lucian's Astrologia. Cf. Nashe ("Adam Fouleweather"), Rabelais, Dekker.

Anonymous Author. The author's anonymity is apologised for in a fake introduction, for example, one written by the printer or bookseller who might plead any of several reasons. A common reason is that the author, a man of quality, does not wish to reveal himself as a writer of this sort of production. E.g.: Donne's Ignatius, His Conclave, Swift's Tale. In a variant, Joyce would often aver that his interlocutors in conversation, or passersby in the street, were composing and writing Finnegans Wake, not he.

Apologiae for the Work. One or more apologies are often used to establish relations to other Menippists, by citation, by reference, or by plagiarism. They can be used to establish tone, to banter with the reader, or to lay trails of red herrings. They may appear at the beginning of the work (as in Donne's Ignatius or in French editions of La Satyre Menippée) or anywhere inside as a digression (as in Harington's Ajax and Sterne's Tristram Shandy).

Autonomous Author. The author exults in a freedom to do whatever occurs to him. This topic is frequent. Examples include Lucian, Seneca, Fronto, Synesius, Erasmus (Folly), the Obscure Epistolers, Agrippa, Despérieres' dogs, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Byron. Sterne: "I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy. - Accordingly I set off thus." (Tristram, p.74).; April 16, 2010 at 1:00 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Autonomous Pen. The pen, or the act of writing, is remarked to take control of the author or narrative and to pursue its own course, observed and commented upon by the author who feigns powerlessness to control it. Ancient mock-eulogists had similarly feigned powerlessness to control their rambling oratory. E.g.: Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum (1516); Swift, Tale of a Tub; Sterne, Tristram; Nashe, Lenten Stuffe. Sterne has: "In a word, my pen takes its course... I write a careless kind of civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good...." And: "But this is neither here nor there - why do I mention it? - ask my pen - it governs me – I govern not it." Tristram Shandy, ed., Work, pp.436, 416)Banquet. A favored Menippean device for displaying gluttony and other excesses, this topic also serves as both a strategy and a symbol of Menippean encyclopedism. The range of users is from Petronius (Trimalchio) through Rabelais to Finnegans Wake. (In the ballad, the party at the Wake becomes so rowdy that the corpse rises and joins in the fun.) The Wake is a banquet in many senses: of history, of learning, of languages, of personae, of words and puns, etc. Other examples may be found in Lucian, Convivium, the symposia of Varro, Athenaeus' Deipno-sophists, Macrobius, Beroalde's (Francois Beroalde de Verville's) Moyen de Parvenir (a philosophic banquet of the dead), La Satyre Menippée and Bouchet's Les Serées (1583-4). In the sixteenth century, the French seem to have enjoyed Menippean banquets particularly. Perhaps this topic is a direct link to the derivation of "satire" from satura lanx. See also Michael Coffey's article in the Oxford Classical Dictionary for a brief conspectus of ancient symposium literature.Blustering Narrator. The author asserts his authority (extreme), an assertion often couched in Herculean terms. This is often accompanied by a teasing of the reader and chitchat or feigned worry about the book's organization. Swift's is perhaps the most complete example. The hack, in Tale of a Tub, claims "Absolute Authority in Right, as the freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotic Power over all Authors before me..." and so on. This remark is contained in a "Panegyrical Preface," which is put in Section V of the Tale. The long line of Menippean precedents includes Lucian's Alexander the False Prophet, Cornelius Agrippa's De Incertitudine, Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, Burton's Anatomy (e.g., II.4.2.1, III.2.3, and I.2.4.7), and John Taylor. In A Voyage Round the World, Dunton demands, as he opens a new chapter, "Room for a Rambler - (or else I'll run over ye)."

Bookseller. The bookseller is used as an alternative persona by the (sometimes anonymous) author. In this guise, remarks can be made that bridge lacunas (q.v.) in the text, to provide prefaces or editorial marginalia or footnotes, or all of these. Swift's Tale is a representative example; others include John Taylor and Dunton ("Nimshag's" treatise on gingerbread). The anonymously-provided Catalog appended to C.G. Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao is a more recent example; April 16, 2010 at 1:01 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Catalogs and Inventories. This digressive device shatters narrative and disrupts any attempt to establish single point of view or logical sequence. The arch-practitioners are Rabelais and Joyce. In the more learned writers, it is used as a device for moving the basis of the discussion from efficient to formal cause of an event or situation. It can also become a linguistic activity of the text itself, as with Joyce's thunders. Korkowski (p.242) cites Rabelais as the inventor of this topic and attributes its invention to the "new directions" in reading made possible by printing. This topic would seem to be another descendant of satura lanx, and to be writ large in other topics such as the banquet and encyclopedism. In its relation to the latter, it is often used to lampoon the cullings, anthologies and sham learning (reduced and systematized for efficiency) promoted by the gloriosi. The catalog technique is essentially grammatical. Catalogs can (and do) include anything - the contents of pockets, grocery lists, pawnshop receipts, ships' names, book titles (real or fake or both).

Descent into the Underworld or Afterlife. This topic is related to those of the tour through hell (or heaven), the fantastic journey, travel to the moon, Dialogs of the Dead and imaginary conversations (Cf. Landor). A fundamental Menippean strategy directly related to Cynicism, the descent is useful for exposing folly and pretension in this life by way of the "democratic" levelling and occasional comeuppances of the next. Swift's tour of the madhouse is a variety of the tour through hell: several of his "madmen" are doing, by their own inclination, exactly what the damned in other Menippean satires - particularly Dunton's Second Part of the New Quevedo - were doing as a punishment in the next world. This topic is especially used against the philosophi gloriosi, intellectual and social cranks, and snobs of all kinds. Menippus probably wrote one: certainly his two greatest ancient imitators did so - Varro and Lucian. Seneca's Claudius is of this type.

Diagrams and Drawings. The author reproduces in the text engineering plans for assembly of real or imagined machines, that may or may not be referred to in the text of the satire, and that may or may not work when assembled according to instructions (which may or may not be provided). This topic is often used to lampoon physicists, engineers and other "projectors" and schemers. In Harington's Ajax, to cite one example, none of the parts in the "disassembled" drawing can be found in the "assembled" drawing.; April 16, 2010 at 1:02 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Dialogs of the Dead. A variant of the topics of Banquet and Descent into the Underworld, this device allows a cast of characters widely separated in time to be brought together. Their conversation, sometimes with the narrator, may run to matters concerning the audience for the satire, or each other, or trifles, or all of these.Digressiveness. This has been called the heart and soul of Menippean satire. It is achieved in many ways. Nearly every Menippean topic is a form of digression from the normal or expected, ranging from violations of stylistic decorum to violations of narrative sequence, of time (Dialogs of the Dead), of probability (the author writes before birth or after death), of physical size or capacity (Rabelais), and so on. This can also take the form of repeatedly promising to come to the point, and never doing it, as in Harington, Dunton, Swift and Sterne, for example. The point of a passage in Finnegans Wake is seldom found except after extreme labors with the text, and then it may be an irrelevancy. For the Menippist, the labors are the point. In a variant, John Fowles provided several alternative endings to The French Lieutenant's Woman. Inherent in the structure of the frame tale (Milesian tale) and the double-plot epyllion, digressiveness is a strategy for attacking and adjusting the reader's sensibilities. It is a form of structural ambiguity.Diogenes. He and other Cynic philosophers may be used in a satire as key characters, or may just be referred to now and then, or they can be used to provide running commentary from the sidelines on a satire. Rabelais gives his reader "licence" concerning his "pantagrueline Sentences" (a satire on Peter Lombard et al.) "to call them Diogenical." He parodies and greatly expands the account in Lucian's How to Write History of Diogenes' tub (Prologue to the Tiers Livre). The Tub, far more to Menippists than just clothing, reappears in Swift's Tale. A "tale of a tub" was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an epithet for a kind of writing "suited to flimflam, idle discourse and a tale (sic) of a roasted horse" (A.C. Guthkelch and D.N. Smith, eds. of A Tale of a Tub). Equally, doggishness is invoked, as by Dunton: "There stood Diogenes the Cynic, snarling at two Devils, that were going to Muzzle him, for he was so abominable Currish, he bit the Devils that came near him, His chief Clamour was... the Devils to quiet him, had promis'd to release him in Fifty years." (Second Part of the New Quevedo, p.78). Menippus also appears frequently in Menippean literature, e.g., in Lucian, or in Butler's "Hudibras in Prose," Mercuriis Menippeus. Burton's use of Democritus is proverbial. This topic is related to the establishment of the pedigree of a satire, as to Dialogs of the Dead and Digressiveness of time. It allows the Cynic spirit to be injected directly into the work.; April 16, 2010 at 1:02 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Do it Yourself. The reader is told to add to, subtract from or rearrange the materials of the text to suit himself. In a muted form, the reader is advised to skip certain chapters or sections of the work as worthless or as potentially offensive (as Sterne, to his sensitive female reader). In another variation, the reader is told to refer immediately to other places in the text, which may be real or imaginary, apposite or not. An aspect of digressiveness, this device breaks narrative and continuity and helps to attract attention to the act of reading and to the text as an artefact. Thus it is related to the topics, lacuna-making and lacuna-pretending. Swift: "The necessity of the Digression will easily excuse the length; and I have chosen for it as proper a Place as I could readily find. If the judicious Reader can assign a fitter, I do here empower him to remove it into any other Corner he pleases. And I so return with great Alacrity to pursue a more important Concern." Sterne opens Vol. V, Chapter X by inviting the reader to fill in his own reasons for the pause in Trim's oration.

Doggishness. This topic includes dog-conversation, dog-philosophy, and other references to dogs. Directly related to the Greek pun on dog and Cynic, this topic serves to establish Menippean pedigree and to introduce the Cynic attitude and tone into a satire. Cf., Lucian, Rabelais, Byron, and others. "The fourth dialogue in the Cymbalum Mundi of Despérieres is a conversation between two dogs, Hylactor, or 'Barker,' and Pamphagus, or 'Devour-all,' who are well-versed in the anti-conventional sentiments of early Greek Cynicism; they look upon the human race with snarling disdain." (Korkowski, p.231; April 16, 2010 at 1:02 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Euphuism. Though not necessarily a Menippean topic, Euphuism yet has the potential to be one and exhibits a number of Menippean features including the display of learning, the use of incidental verses, and (sometimes) the dialog form. Euphuism was practised chiefly by John Lyly, William Painter, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene and Nicholas Breton. Greene moved on to Menippism, with his Planetomachia and a series of "deathbed" productions. Whereas Menippean epistolary writings tend to come from the next world, Euphuistic "letters" are exchanged between romantic heroes and heroines, their friends, rivals, parents, and enemies. There is little mock or ridicule of learning in Euphuism.

Excess Baggage. Under this topic may be grouped all manner of illusions, pretensions, false learning or assumptions, etc., that are to be shed. This topic is a typically Cynic aspect of Menippism. Antisthenes, a student of Socrates and the man generally regarded as the first Cynic (in belief if not in outlandish behavior) replied, on being asked what learning was most necessary, "how to get rid of having anything to unlearn." Lucian's Charon observes, "... Hermes, you see what they [normal people] do and how ambitious they are, vying with each other for offices, honours, and possessions, all of which they must leave behind them and come down to us with but a single obol... Nothing that is in honour here is eternal, nor can a man take anything with him when he dies; nay, it is inevitable that he depart naked..." (Lucian, Vol. II, p.437)

Fake books. In some Menippean satires, these are promised to the reader (and never delivered). In variations, they are alluded to or cited as authorities, or whole libraries are invented (as Rabelais' Thélème). Mock erudition is one of the devices for satirizing academic or learned pretentiousness. Examples of this topic include: Harington's "tenth decad" of "the reverent Rabbles;" A Catalogue of Books of the Newest Fashion, "to be sold by Auction, at the Whigs Coffee-House, at the Sign of the Jackanapes, in Prating Alley" (included in The Harleian Miscellany, V.6); Thomas D'Urfey's An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World... (etc.); Burnet and Duckett's A Second Tale of a Tub: or, the History of Robert Powel the Puppet-Show-Man (they "refer the Dispute" - over whether the dead have sensation - "to my Eighteen Volumes in Folio coming out as a Comment upon Duns Scotus"); Johann Fischart's Catalogue Catalogorum perpetuo durabilis. Das ist: Ein Ewigwerende, Giordianischer, Pergamischer und Tirraninoschar Bibliotecken gleichwichtige und richtige Verzeichnuss und Registratur (1590), and countless others including the Obscure Epistolers, Erasmus, Swift, Sterne, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Finnegans Wake. Swift opens the Tale with a list of fake treatises, "which will be speedily published."; April 16, 2010 at 1:03 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Fake Preface. Let this topic include all manner of fake prefatory and introductory material. The locus classicus for this topic is Swift's Tale: it presents the reader with a (digressive) dedicatory note "to the right Honourable John Lord Sommers" (by "the Bookseller," as the Tale was anonymous); a note from "the Bookseller to the Reader," citing Menippean relatives; "the Epistle Dedicatory, to His Royal Highness Prince Posterity" using the Senecan/Lucianic claim of truth; "the Preface," lengthy and digressive; and "Sect. 1 - the Introduction," lengthy, digressive, and replete with (fake) lacunae, citations and descriptions of fake texts. Sterne places a (digressive) dedication at the end of Vol. I, ch. VIII, and uses the next chapter to comment upon and slightly emend it: "... the rest I dedicate to the MOON, who... has most power to set my book a-going, and make the world run mad after it..." His "the Author's Preface" appears in Vol. III, ch. XX. See also D'Urfey's Essay: the section "Of Prefaces" is not a preface; near the end of the book a pointing hand indicates the centred message, "HERE ENDETH THE PREFACE."

Fake Table of Contents. This topic is of a piece with the preceding one and includes misplaced Tables of Contents (as in Du Cliche´ á l'Archetype: la Foire du Sens, where the chapters are in alphabetic order, and the Table under T). Principally, however, this topic refers to a Table of Contents that lies, that promises matter and chapters not in the book. D'Urfey sets out a prefatory table of contents for his Essay, announcing "sections" never to be found, or given in vastly different form.

Forcing the Reader to Think. This is basic to all Menippean strategy and derives from the Cynic demand to "wake up!" A sure means of accomplishing this is by challenging the reader's assumptions and by violating his expectations about narrative continuity, truthfulness, decorum of style, and literary conventions (e.g., that diagrams refer to textual matter, or that promises will be fulfilled). One means is Joco-Seriousness (q.v.), the expenditure of lavish erudition on trifles and vice-versa. Another means is using paradox (including paradoxical encomia) to involve and intrigue the reader, for intellectual detachment and reflection.Gibberish. Properly one of the language topics, this includes nonsense words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs. The result can be hilarious. E.g., the scholarly labor thus far expended in attempts to decipher the "languages" in Gulliver's Travels are a Menippean "side effect" of that satire whereby the scholars' efforts and reports become an additional "chapter," in which they satirize themselves unwittingly and unmercifully (because they're not playing). Users range from Rabelais' "Corrective conundrums" (Gargantua, 2: gibberish punctuated by gaps), to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, to Finnegans Wake, which some critics argue is entirely gibberish, "a monstrous joke."; April 16, 2010 at 1:03 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Glosses. This topic embraces fake glosses, false erudition, irrelevant glosses, and includes similar play with footnotes and other marginalia and "editorial" digression from the text. Examples: Lyly, The Owle's Almanacke (mock-serious marginalia), Swift, Dunton. Sterne used a variation by putting his characters into tableaux (his "Shandean way of writing") for sentences, paragraphs or even chapters at a time, so he could mount digressive hobby-horses. Joyce used it all in the "Triv and Quad" chapter of the Wake. Often fake and real are interspersed, leaving matters to the reader to sort out. Swift glossed the Tale with one of the Tale's critics' remarks. This topic is clearly related to Digressiveness.

Groping. There are several forms: one is for the "mot juste." Alternatively, the author either pretends to have lost his way, perhaps due to digressions, and to be unable to find it again (often in Sterne); or he pretends to reach for the ineffable and to lose it, while remarking to the reader that in any case no direct understanding is possible. Korkowski points out (p.281) that Beroalde goes a stage further in noting that his own work, which admits only of being a "moyen de parvenir" and not an actual arrival, "is more honest than other books which offer definitive statement but no comment on the lack of ontological certainty in reading and language": "Sur quoy je vous diraiy un grand secret, et puis l'autre; c'est que vous ne trouverez point en cecy du truandage de pedantisme, comme des autres, pleins du ravaudage de folle doctrine qui n'aporte pointe á disner. Et davantage, je vous diray le secret des secrets; mais je vous prie, afin qu'il soit secret, de vous embeguiner Ie museau du cadenac de taciturnité, et ecoutez: CE LIVRE EST LE CENTRE DE TOUS LES LIVRES. (Le Moyen de Parvenir, p.32)

Honesty. "I promise you purest truth," followed by whopping lies. A basic and frequent topic, this includes all the varieties of misrepresentation, misleading and fakery. Lucian's True Story is the touchstone.

How to Read the Book. The reader is given clues or instructions by the author. A feature of most Menippean satires. E.g., Sterne Vol. I, ch 13 (instructions promised), Rabelais, Byron, Joyce.

Inability to Edit Anything Out (feigned, of course). This is related to such other topics as Catalogs and Encyclopedism. Examples: Harington, Sterne, Nashe, Swift.Joco-seriousness--see Spoudogeloion.; April 16, 2010 at 1:03 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Kidding or Teasing of a Female Reader. Digressive chitchat with female readers (of delicate sensibilities), which may include lines that the writer supposes will come from the reader. This topic is best exemplified in Beroalde and Sterne. Cf. Tristram Shandy I.vi; I.xviii, and passim, to "Sir," "your Lordships," "Madam," or "Dear Jenny." Cf. especially the thinly-veiled hints of sexual horseplay he gives her, at p.226, facing the Marbled page (Word, ed.). Beroalde litters the Moyen with such asides, as does Bouchet. Dunton does the same.Lacunae. Cf. Digression. The fake lacuna, a form of caprice with narrative continuity and order, is used commonly by Menippeans to tease the reader (Cf. Beroalde, Swift, Sterne). Sterne is the handiest English paradigm. He used blank pages, black pages, marbled pages ("motley emblem of my work," III.xxxvi), and omitted chapters.Carlyle used a new variation: he told the reader that the materials for the 'Autobiography with "fullest insight"' of Teufelsdrókh arrived in the editor's hands in six "considerable PAPER-BAGS, carefully sealed, and marked... with the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal signs." These contained a hopeless jumble of assorted Sheets, Shreds and Snips on every imaginable trivial and inconsequential subject. (Sartor Resartus, ch.XI) D'Urfey is replete with chasms, even to a section titled "the Method of Making a Chasm or Hiatus, judiciously; the great Reach of thought requir'd for the Contrivance thereof, together with the Difference between the French Academies and the English."Language. A variety of topics appear under this heading, which designates matters pertaining to the language found in Menippean satires. Bad Language. Mis-users of language are often a target of Menippean satires: this is an aspect of the Menippists' relation to grammar and its concerns. Korkowski: "One particular fraternity pretending to learning that has incurred Menippean censure, regardless of periods, is the mis-users of language: the rigid grammarian, the sophist who deals in glittering speech, the hack poet, the fanciful etymologist, the word-torturer, and the 'systematizer' of language are the genuine bétes-noires of the Menippist... on the theme of correct language and in degree of linguistic brilliance, Menippism as a species of controversy has no equal in quality. Bonaventure Despérieres' Cymbalum Mundi, Beroalde de Verville's Moyen de Parvenir and Swift's Tale of a Tub are to the problems of words what the very greatest thinkers' works have been to problems of philosophy." (pp.61-62) Cf. Pope's Peri Bathous (part of the "Martinus Scriblerus" project that produced other, independent Menippean productions, e.g., Gulliver's Travels). Finnegans Wake uses every rhetorical and grammatical device known, and every resource of the language-as-storehouse-of-experience. Joyce noted that he had to "put the language to sleep" to obtain the necessary freedom. The linguistic hi-jinx of the Wake are not without precedent, however. Rabelais used the Menippean form of language-tinkering. Apuleius, Martianus Capella and Alan of Lille wrote the most playful (to a Menippean; "tortured" to the sober critic) Latin extant. Following Rabelais, Etienne Taburot published his Les Bigarrures, a playful and exhaustive tampering with the humorous possibilities of disrupting the ordinary conventions of logical structure, sentence structure, word ordering and even letter orders; puns, obscenities, parodies of printed symbols, and relentless para-logical hoppings from one word to some strange equivalent or associated term, occur. His displays, however, tend to be little more than catalogs, set out one after the other, of ingenious lingual transpositions. (Korkowski, p.267); April 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Kidding or Teasing of a Female Reader. continued :
Deluding Word. Words' numinosity is related to the topic of their correct usage and is persistent in Menippean satire. (All of the language topics - chief Menippean concerns - show the direct relation of these satirists to grammar.) Cf. the Obscure Epistolers, Martianus Capella (the aptness of the marriage of Mercury and Philology - rhetoric and grammar), Alan of Lille's De Planctu. Fake Etymologies. This kind of grammatical horseplay by Menippists satirizes the sober ineptitude, clumsiness or superficial learning of the dialectician who tries to take over grammar with logic and philosophy. Equally, it is used to lampoon the inept or unlearned grammarian. Mostly in use since the nominalist/realist debate, it is related to the definition or the absolute meaning, or the absolute nature of things. Cf., Beroalde, Despérieres, Rabelais, Sanford's Mirror of Madness, Swift (e.g., "Antiquity of the English Tongue"). Its use is frequently accompanied by a display of erudition (real or fake, or both) of authorities in support of or contending about the etymologies. "The abnihilization of the etym" (FW 353.22). Related to Nothing. Gibberish as language (see above). Letters of the alphabet, as things, as praised, blamed, at peace or at war with each other, etc. This topic occurs often, from Lucian (The Consonants at Law) to Joyce (FW 119-123). Punctuation is also a topic, similarly handled (FW 124, for example), as are parts of speech. Cf. Guarnas' Bellum Grammaticale, Sterne on verbs (copular; copulation) and "auxiliaries," Alan of Lille. Mixed Languages. This topic refers to the use of more than one language in a text, perhaps without adequate (or any) justification. A form of digressiveness, it can be related to tactics of violating decorum, as each language embodies the perceptions and experiences of the user culture, and it can include fake language (as in Gulliver's Travels).; April 16, 2010 at 1:09 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Kidding or Teasing of a Female Reader. continued :
Among others, Varro and Burton display polyglottism. Sterne provides Slawkenbergii Fabella at the outset of Vol. IV (Tristram Shandy), accompanied by a simultaneous translation on the facing pages that is six times as long as the Latin. Joyce inserted sections in Latin and in French into Finnegans Wake, in "Finneganese," and his puns and thunders use fifty or more languages. Prose-Verse Mixture was used in antiquity as the hallmark of Menippean satire and is still adhered to as a sine qua non by many classicists and critics. A digressive technique related structurally to both etymologies of satire, the mixing of verse with prose constituted a violation of decorum calculated to shock the sensibilities of the percipient reader or hearer into alertness. It is often combined with Joco-Seriousness (and related topics) as high style is employed on base matters, and vice-versa. A variation was the sprinkling, through a prose text or dialog, of lines and verses misappropriated (and misapplied, used on quite different subjects) from ancient or epic poets. Cf. Lucian's Charon. Words as Gestures, and vice-versa. Words and language are used on a supra-semantic level where they shed their "contents" of usual meanings and function as eloquent acts. This topic is an aspect of all Menippean language-tinkering: the prime example is Joyce's thunders. For the reverse, gestures as words, see Rabelais, Gargantua 2; Pantagrual 19. In either variation it is a form of digression from normal accidence and syntax. Words as Things, and vice-versa. The preceding topic draws attention to eloquence inherent in the formal character of utterance: this topic deals with the relation between language and artefacts. Both topics are grammatical and formal; though serious, this device is most often used ludicrously. Cf. Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Tale of a Tub. Things-as-words (or events) stand in direct relation to the Medieval grammarian's techniques of exegesis of the Liber Natura, a parallel text to the Liber Scriptura, echoes of which survive and persist in the poets. Cf. Don Juan, III.88 (note the Menippean-Cynic tone): "But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; T'is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail men, when paper - even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his."The written or printed word is a thing, inarticulate in itself.; April 16, 2010 at 1:09 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Laughter. Laughter may be Democritean (e.g., Lucian and Burton), Diogenical (e.g., Rabelais), Wakean ("Lots of fun at Finnegans Wake") or routinely Cynic-Menippean. Both a topic and a tactic, laughter is indispensable to Cynic joco-seriousness, to retuning the reader's sensibilities by means of an engendered playfulness, and to curing him of undue or misplaced sobriety. In this regard it is related to topics of Digressiveness and of violations of decorum. Bakhtin has this as the quintessence of carnivalism, which he identifies with Menippism. Burton resounds with Democritus' laughter. Cynic laughter and wit runs through Beroalde, who notes in his first chapter that he directs laughter at the philosophers "because mirth must be restored." There's "lots of fun at Finnegans wake."

Learning. Cf. Encyclopedism, Fake Books. Respect for maintenance of the traditions (grammatical) of genuine learning and encyclopedic wisdom is concealed under attacks on all forms of easy, simplified or systematized "learnedness," pseudo-intellectual and philosophical extremism and universalising. Examples: Menippus, Varro, Petronius, Seneca, Lucian, Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, Flaubert, Joyce. The Scriblerians (Pope, Arbuthnot, Swift, Gay) aimed to produce periodically a Works of the Unlearned: Flaubert got somewhat farther with the project with Bouvard. Cf. Sterne on noses (gnosis).

Medicinal. This topic is related both to the sanative powers of satire in general, and to those of Menippean satire in particular. Menippean authors frequently refer to their satires as having curative properties. This can range from generalities, such as "Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind" (Swift, title page of the Tale, spoofing the gloriosi), to more pointed claims that the work is a "medicine," as in Rabelais, or in Burton, or Dekker: "… more potent, and more precious, than was ever that mingle-mangle of drugs which Mithridates boyld together. Feare not to tast it... the Receipt hath beene subscribed unto, by all those that have to do with Simples, with this moth-eaten motto: Probatum est: your Diacatholicon aureum... pledge me, spare not... take a deep draught of our homely counsel." - Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke (Non-Dramatic Works, Vol. II, pp.213-214)Memory of Time before Birth. The author discusses (as a spectator) events that occurred before his birth. Sterne (Tristram Shandy is not born until well into the third book) presents a mass of irrelevant detail on the events that preceded and surrounded both his narrator's conception and his birth. Dunton rambles through memoirs of his earliest years, including the years before he was born: chapter one of Vol. I treats "Of my Rambles before I came into my Mother's Belly, and while I was there." His rambling narrator, Kainophilus, adds a twist to the theme, complaining that he made no notes on the moment of his birth (though he made, somehow, plenty of notes in utero) as he was born without anything to write with - in fact, "Because I was dead born, I can't remember anything on it to save my life."; April 16, 2010 at 1:09 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Method. Dialectical systematizing and universalizing is a common butt of Menippists, and as such continues the grammarians' attacks in the battle of Ancient vs. Modern. Cf. the Cynic disdain for all forms of easy or systematic (abstract) answers to any of life's problems, which result in the individual not thinking for himself. E.g., Swift spoofs the gloriosus lightly in presenting the Tale "for the Universal Improvement of Mankind," and savagely in the stupidity of his hack. Sterne lightly but thoroughly dissects Locke, Carlyle the German gloriosi. The structure of Burton's Anatomy parodies post-Ramist branched-logic systems. Cf. Moderns.Mock Eulogy. Taken directly from epideictic rhetoric and the topics of laus et vituperatio, the paradoxical encomium goes back at least as far as Gorgias' Praise of Helen. Just at what point this enters Menippean lists is hard to say. One of Varro's Menippean satires has the title, "Two asses will praise each other" - Mutuum muli scabunt. Lucian wrote many mock-eulogies, e.g., Phalaris I and II, Peregrinus, Alexander, Saltatio and Muscae Laudatio. Cf. also Erasmus' Praise of Folly, Panurge's "Praise of Debtors" (in Le Tiers Livre, ch. 22), the "harangues" of La Satyre Menippée (1594), Burton's Anatomy (III.2.l.l), Swift's praise of Madness in the Tale, Nashe's praise of the red herring in Lenten Stuffe. Further examples in Rabelais and others are discussed in Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica. Sterne is careful always to praise Locke while he demolishes his theories. Korkowski notes that "after Lucian (and even before him) the satirical eulogy is identified with this Menippean tradition by knowledgeable authors. To men of the Renaissance, for example, Lucian's mock-praises appeared germane to snarling Cynicism; almost anything by Lucian, for that matter, was regarded as proceeding from a common Menippus-Lucian temperament... That the mock-encomium and 'other' Menippean forms were perceived as identities can be gathered from Erasmus' epistle to Thomas More, introducing the Praise of Folly..." (p.98)

Moderns. The "moderns," or dialecticians (gloriosi) in all ages, are a target of Menippists. The line of attack runs through Menippus, Varro, Petronius, Lucian (e.g., The Sale of Philosophers), Erasmus, Cervantes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Butler, Dekker, Nashe, Swift, Sterne, Carlyle, Flaubert and Joyce. Cf. Method.; April 16, 2010 at 1:10 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Musical Notation. The verses interspersed with the prose frequently have the potential of being used independently as songs. However, this topic refers particularly to an interruption of the running text by offering the reader the notes and musical notation of songs, with or without the verses, and which may or may not be musical or euphonious. Examples include Bishop Francis Godwin's (1638) The Man in the Moon (the moon-giants discourse in a wordless language of music made up of standardized tunes, several pages of which are presented to the reader as a message of moment to Englanders) and Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil (his moon-people are like Godwin's: they speak a language of tunes that appears in the text as musical notation). Korkowski notes (p.330), "this was not new in Menippean satire" and refers the reader to the Sermo Quodlibeticus de Podagrae Laudibus in Dornavius, and Taburot's Bigarrures for precedents. Harington includes pages of music in Ajax. Joyce includes the written melody for "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" in Finnegans Wake (pp.44-47), and two other written melodies in the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses.

Mutilated Text. The author, either as himself or in the person of a publisher or editor or critic, presents or comments upon a text that he claims is corrupted, mutilated or otherwise interrupted by lacunae. See Lacunae.

Natural Scale. Inseparable from the other Cynic topics, this one refers to Cynic insistence on not exceeding the limits of human scale, which includes constant attention to our human frailties, limitations, susceptibilities to pride, self-aggrandizement, and so on. In Menippean satire, this is an aspect of the Cynic wind that blows through the satire as much as it is an aspect of the purposes of the satire. The reader's sensibilities are to be so revivified that he becomes aware of his deviation from, and will develop a preference for restoring, human or natural scale in his activities, psychic and social.

Non-sequitur. Deliberately used by Menippists, the non-sequitur is related to lacuna-making, digressiveness and all forms of interruption of narrative sequence, q.q.v. Non-sequiturs are the order of Beroalde's book. To make his reader aware that "straight-line" narration is a purely arbitrary order, Sterne, sending up Locke, denies his reader what is expected, interrupts the continuity of narrative logic at every turn, displays the pieces, and then asks innocently what they are and how they should go back together. In Ulysses, Joyce found new variation on this topic in the technique of "simultaneous parallels" with Homer, as well as in the discontinuities of "stream of consciousness."; April 16, 2010 at 1:10 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Nothing. This topic, a frequent subject in Menippean satires, includes writing on recondite trivialities ("nothings"), often with a display of immense erudition, or, literally, writing whole chapters on "nothing." This latter is related to satirizing gloriosi logic-choppers who cut matters so fine that their weighty systems are brought to bear on "nothings." Dunton's Voyage offers "admirable and surprizing Novelty of both Matter and Method; a Book made, as it were, out of nothing, and yet containing every thing..." Ulysses and Finnegans Wake may equally be said to be made of "nothings" and yet to "contain everything." Cf. also Nashe, Sterne. Most Menippeans try their hand at this topic at one time or another as sustaining it calls for high wit and inventiveness. Swift: "I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors; which is, to write upon nothing; when the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen still move on; by some called the ghost of wit, delighting to walk after the death of its body..." (etc., from the "Conclusion" to the Tale). Rabelais lavishes formidable amounts of attention upon bagatelles (as does Macrobius on the egg, and Athenaeus on odd kinds of fish). Panurge's decision to marry, for another example, becomes the focus of an enormously prolonged, prolix and pettifoggish debate leading to nothing.

Parody of New Forms. The chameleon-like and mimetic nature of Menippean satire, which contributes to the impossibility of accounting for it descriptively, gives it immense flexibility and adaptability to new forms and new situations. As soon as new genres or modes or media for expression appear, Menippists quickly adapt to the new form and begin to explore its satirical possibilities. This was done, for example, by Rabelais, Nashe, Dekker and Aretino, as Korkowski points out (p.225). Rabelais puts on the pretensions of the new "learned" genres made popular by printing. Somewhat later, Swift creates hiatuses with a new symbol, the asterisk, and Sterne toys with all the devices of the book, even to turning it inside out by putting the marbled end-papers in the middle. Flaubert aped the popular press in declaring his ideal novel would be all style and no content. Joyce used cinematic technique in Ulysses and remarked that the Wake was written "after the style of television." The study of Menippism in modern media has not yet begun. I suggest that there is no reason why it should not have expanded beyond the confines of written or printed texts once audiences were formed by and could be hypnotized by other-than-literate media. One might begin such a study with Orson Welles (Radio), Woody Allen (Film), and Steve Allen or Norman Lear (Television). The mind boggles at what havoc a determined (Cynic) Menippean might wreak with the telephone, or computer data-bases and systems analysis, or satellites. We may yet find out. See Printing.; April 16, 2010 at 1:10 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Philosophus Gloriosus. He is the favorite Menippean whipping-boy. Philosophers (dialecticians) are open to Menippean attack on several grounds. First, their whole enterprise is traditionally based upon abstraction of ideas and reasoning, which the Menippist can castigate as a form of undue exaggeration and equally as a retreat from reality. Second, their reliance on logic as a tool and the fine distinctions and rare abstraction into which that often leads also fuels the Menippean fire. The grammatical side of Menippean satire would have at the gloriosi in any case, as a skirmish in the quarrel of Ancient with Modern. Those are general terms: particular targets are more usually members of fashionable and pseudo-intellectual groups, as in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (the ignoramus Claudius and his retinue of hack poets) or Petronius' Satyricon, or in Erasmus or Lucian, in Hudibras, or Tristram Shandy. Swift sent up one group in the Tale, quite another (the equivalent of the mad scientist) in Gulliver. Carlyle takes aim at the invasion of German philosophy in Sartor Resartus (tailors are second only to philosophers as Menippean targets), and Wyndham Lewis at Bloomsbury pretentiousness in his Apes of God. The pseudo-learned of all sorts are the favorite quarry: these fakes - the real gloriosi - have usurped the place of the genuinely learned, have bamboozled the less educated, and have used the appearance of learning and wisdom for worldly gain. They are as thieves and polluters. In our time, the bestseller writer is as much a gloriosus as was Locke in Sterne's.

Printing Conventions Trifled With. Cf. Parody, above. This topic concerns horseplay with the conventions of printed books. Practitioners include Rabelais, Nashe, Harington, Sterne, Joyce. In a variant, Rabelais (as Swift, etc.) claimed that his text had been botched by incompetent printers (a common enough complaint even now by authors): "For the benefit of the warriors I am about to rebroach my cask, the contents of which you would sufficiently have appreciated from my two earlier volumes if they had not been adulterated and spoiled by dishonest printers..."Projectors as targets. This refers principally to the mad scientists and crazed philosophers of Swift's time (Cf. Philosophus Gloriosus): they seem to be accounted as of the same family as astrologers, alchemists, etc. Swift's "Grand Academy of Lagado" has an ancestor in Joseph Hall's Mundus alter et idem, an account of travels to and the fabulous goings-on at "Terra Australia Incognitis." The most populous region of Australia, Fooliana, has a university, called "whether-for-a-pennia," where specimen sciences are taught, including penny astrology. In one college, "Gewgawiasters" are busy inventing a way to blow soap bubbles from walnut shells: they have also invented projects and novelties in "games, buildings, garments and governments," and have devised a new language, the "Supermonicall tongue."; April 16, 2010 at 1:10 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Reader. He is the real target of Cynic Menippism. The reader is kidded, cajoled, threatened, flattered, etc. by turns, and if the satire is successful he will enter into or put on the spirit of the work. Frequently, the author himself (or wearing one or another narrator's persona) will engage in lively discourse with the reader on any topic that comes to mind, including the right arrangement of the book, the reader's habits or his dress, etc. Like Swift before him, and Sterne after, D'Urfey's Gabriel John empowers his reader to transpose things to his own liking (in the section "Which end of a Book to begin at"). As Finnegans Wake is written in a circle, the reader can begin anywhere. Joyce expected his reader to abandon all other pursuits and devote full time to studying the Wake. Rabelais makes the same demand: "I intend every reader to lay aside his business, to abandon his trade, to relinquish his profession, and to concentrate wholly upon my work. Rapt and absorbed, all might then learn these tales by heart, so that if ever the art of printing perished and books failed, these tales might be handed down, like mystic religious lore, through our children to posterity! Is there not greater profit in them than a rabble of critics would have you believe?" (Prologue to the Second Book)Evidently, Menippists, like the Cynics, regard "staying awake" as a full-time business.

Simultaneity of Past and Present. The cast of characters in a Menippean satire will often include persons widely separated by chronological time. Linear, chronological time may be circumvented by a device such as setting the scene in the afterworld (Dialogs of the Dead, etc.) or may simply be ignored altogether as in Beroalde's Moyen de Parvenir, in some of Landor's Imaginary Conversations, in Pound's Cantos, and in Finnegans Wake, to mention but four. This same attitude to the irrelevancy of mere chronology was present in the translatio studii of the grammarians, and marks another affinity between their enterprise and the Menippean one. As already pointed out, this topic is also implicit in the mimetic nature of Menippean satire. In our time it has received explicit statement in T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and has been used extensively in his poetry, notably in "The Waste Land" and in Four Quartets.Spoudogeloion. Cf. Joco-seriousness.; April 16, 2010 at 1:11 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Tailors. Tailors are common as the butts of Menippean satires; in some periods they are second only to philosophers as objects of attention. Carlyle mounts a combined attack in Sartor Resartus. Tailors receive attention via Cynic attacks on pomposity and pretentiousness, for covering up bodily defects or for taking attention away from real matters to waste it on illusory corporal beauty - a kind of seduction. Diogenes wore his tub; Dunton has his Parable of the Top-Knots; Swift his Shoulder-Knots. Satires on tailors are to be found in L'Estrange's Quevedo and in Greene's and Dekker's treatments of tailors in Hell. (Dekker weighed the old world's tailors and the new together in The Guls Horne-Booke.) In the Wake, Joyce explores the seduction-via-clothing theme with his Prankquean, and riots with the story of Kersse the tailor trying to fit a suit to a hunch-backed Norwegian ship's captain.

Talking Animal. Korkowski notes (p.170, n.49) that "the talking animal, in ancient literature, hardly appears outside of Menippean writings (i.e., Lucian's Gallus, Apuleius' ass, Plutarch's Gryllus)." In Menippean satires, anything and everything, including animals, and even words or letters, may give voice. In the Circe chapter of Ulysses, speeches are delivered by a gong, a bar of soap, wreaths, gulls (birds, not fools), a timepiece, the quoits of a brass bed, bells, chimes, a crab, a hollybush, bronze buckles, a cap, a gramophone, a gas-jet, a doorhandle, a fan, a hoof, the sins of the past, Sleepy Hollow, Yews, a waterfall, halcyon days, a mummy, characters' voices, Orange Lodges, a pianola, bracelets, "the hue and cry," the voices of "all the damned" and "all the blessed," and a horse.

Tradition. Tradition may be singled out as object of attack: the Menippist impersonates an enemy of (grammatical) tradition, of the Ancients, and bungles the job. Cf. Dekker (The Guls Horne-Booke) and Swift in his "Digression in praise of Digressions."; April 16, 2010 at 1:11 PM
quantum retrocausality said...: Universalizing. Glib universalizing appears as the butt of many satires. Cf. Philosophus Gloriosus above. Practitioners include Cynics, Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Von Hutten, Erasmus, Flaubert.Universal Schemes (treated variously, above). This refers to Menippean mockery of dialectical or scientific universalizing by projecting crazy schemes of their own, as in Sanford's Mirrour of Madnes, Swift's Modest Proposal or his "Digression concerning the original, the use and improvement of madness..." (which derives from Sanford). Such schemes are proposed, as are many of the satires, "for the universal improvement of mankind." Rabelais and Cervantes are thoroughgoing and merciless, as is Flaubert.Whatever enters my head. An aspect of the autonomous author, this topic is related to pretended inability to manage a discourse. Seneca has: "dicam quod mihi in buccam venerit." A host of others followed suit, including Burton, D'Urfey, Sterne and the writers of Finnegans Wake (the public, the users of the language whom Joyce patiently studied).; April 16, 2010 at 1:11 PM

POST-EUCLIDEAN GRUNGE

The chief mark of Menippean style was unconventional 'diction'. Neologisms, portmanteau words, macaronics, preciosity, coarse vulgarity, catalogues, bombast, mixed languages, and protracted sentences were typical of the genre, sometimes appearing all together in the same work. In outward structure, Menippean satire was a medley – usually a medley of alternative prose and verse, sometimes a jumble of flagrantly digressive narrative, or again a potpourri of tales, songs, dialogues, orations, letters, lists, and other brief forms, mixed together. Menippean topical elements included outlandish fictions (i.e. fantastic voyages, dreams, visions, talking beasts) and extreme distortions of argument (often ‘paradoxes.’)

As an active form, a Menippean satire goes to any extreme necessary in order to frustrate objectivity or detachment on the part of the reader ...

will not be televised ...

Electronics as E.S.P., Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, Section 3, October, 1957

et cetera : LOVE [1977]

"The artist is engaged constantly in building anti-environments. (And, by the way, the Courtly Love people were engaged in making love itself into an art form.) The artist is engaged typically in creating situations and images that will vivify or revivify the ordinary scene. The ordinary scene tends to dull and numb the sensibilities. If you think of art as primarily concerned with perception and awareness, you can easily see why, when ordinary routinized forms tend to numb awareness, the role of art is to keep faculties alert."

Junkyard and Museum

Recipe : Mix aesthetics, rhetoric, paradox, mimesis, and parody ... Blend well.

From Cliché to Archetype (McLuhan & Watson, 1970) satirizes both readers and the effects of the phonetic alphabet – and hence the book form itself – in yet a new way. The book’s chapters are arranged in alphabetical order according to the chapter title. As a broad signal indicating what should be expected, the book commences with “Absurd, Theatre of the” and positions the “Introduction” and “Table of Contents” deep within. The last chapter, fittingly, is “Theatre,” a reminder that the entire opus, from beginning to end, is a staged put on.

poètes maudits

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century style of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. During the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and art.

Walter Glanze: “though I wasn’t based in New York until the following year, I believe that the process was not unlike that followed in War and Peace [which I experienced first hand]: Jerry would sketch out units, draw up questions, assemble and edit textual fragments from McLuhan and other sources, as well as generating copy of his own, which he submitted to McLuhan for approval before sending them on to Quentin. At a second stage, Quentin added his own materials and touches, both visual and verbal, in the process of roughing out page layout sequences which were then worked over with Jerry. These were then submitted to McLuhan, who, naturally, had the right of final approval.”

Eric McLuhan: “As I recall, Jerry proposed the book and he and Dad worked up a list of topics. That list became the head[ing]s in the book. Jerry started the list; Dad added to it and revised it and so on. Dad then took the list and wrote a small essay under each heading. I was present at several meetings between the three of them. Those meetings always went smoothly and amiably. Quentin was quite professional about his work, not the emotional artiste; so he was easy to work with. Jerry, too, was full of suggestions. Consequently, meetings tended to become lively idea sessions, until Jerry broke in with an item of business.”

EGG-zactly !

" By contrast, a point of view is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is a sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction. An insight is a contact with the life of forms. Students of computer programming have had to learn how to approach all knowledge structurally. In order to transfer any kind of knowledge to tapes it is necessary to understand the form of that knowledge. This has led to the discovery of the basic difference between classified knowledge and pattern recognition. It is a helpful distinction to keep in mind when reading Innis since he is above all a recognizer of patterns."

Symballein — to throw together

Innis changed his procedure from working with a “point of view” to that of the generating of insights by the method of “interface” as it is named in chemistry. “Interface” refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of “symbolism” (Greek, symballein—to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse. In writing, the tendency is to isolate an aspect of some matter and to direct steady attention upon that aspect. In dialogue, there is an equally natural interplay of multiple aspects of any matter.

Les Yeux De Nadja [unpublished]

" ... I have no theories whatever about anything. I make observations by way of discovering contours, lines of force and pressures. I satirize at all times and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer. If you study symbolism you will discover that it is a technique of rip-off by which figures are deliberately deprived of their ground. You do not seem to have grasped that the message as it relates to the medium, is never the content, but the corporate effects of the medium as an environment of service and disservice ... "

Explorations Five : Studies in Culture and Communication

Issue Five (June 1955) of the tri-annual periodical edited by Edmund Carpenter. Associate editor Marshall McLuhan and others. Contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, Daisetz T. Suzuki, W.R. Rodgers, E.R. Rodgers, E.R. Leach, Rhoda Métraux, Roy Campbell, Claire Holt, Joan Rayfield, D. Lerner, D. Riesman, J. Tyrwhitt, D. Williams, Kenneth Boulding, W.T. Easterbrook, Jean Piaget, and Harcourt Brown. "Explorations is designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envisage a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communication are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each the four winds of humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man." -- Editors statement.

Explorations Three : Studies in Culture and Communication

Issue Three (August 1954) of the tri-annual periodical edited by Edmund Carpenter. Associate editor Marshall McLuhan and others. Contributions by H.J. Chaytor, Kamo Chomei, Ray Birdwhistell, Martha Wolfenstein, Dorothy Lee, Kenneth MacLean, D.C. Williams, I. Potekin, M. Lewin, H. A. Innis, W.H. McCulloch, Marshall McLuhan, Anthony F.C. Wallace, G.L. Trager, and E.T. Hall. "Explorations is designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envisage a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communication are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each the four winds of humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man." -- Editors statement.

Explorations Two : Studies in Culture and Communication

Issue Two (April 1954) of the tri-annual periodical edited by Edmund Carpenter. Associate editor Marshall McLuhan and others. Contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, D.S. Savage, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Dorothy Lee, Donald Theall, Lord Raglan, David Riesman, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and A. Irving Hallowell. "Explorations is designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envisage a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communication are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each the four winds of humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man." -- Editors statement.

no objection

" At present the entire mammalian world has become the microoganismic. It is the total individual cultures of the world, linguistically and politically, that have become the mammals, according to the old classifications of evolutionary hypothesis. It is the cultural habitat in which we have long been accustomed to think that people were contained that has become the mammal itself, now contained in a new macrocosm or 'connubium' of a super-terrestrial kind. Our technologies or self- amputations, and the environments or habitats which they create, must become that matrix of that macrocosm connubial bliss derided by the evolutionist."

"If it seems to good to be true, it probably is" : A MEDIA APPROACH TO 'THE BIG CON' ...

" A peak in a poke and a pig in a pew " : When money itself becomes an irresistible form of arbitrary taxation, a situation develops which feeds the gambling mania to anticipate events by trading in futures and promises and "intervals." Again, it is the speed and "replay" of information movement which creates a new kind of pattern recognition which, in turn, makes it possible to see innumerable "software" gaps (information gaps) in the old "hardware" situation of goods and services. To fill in these gaps speculatively is one aspect of the passion for "Development," an aspect which has become inseparable from The Big Con. • The new economic situation, in which the game is to anticipate events at every turn and at every level, using the interval between the present and the coming events as if this interval were a tangible thing, this new situation in comparison with the older nuts-and-bolts economy presents a contrast somewhat similar to the "old journalism" and the "new journalism."

PIED PIPERS [MARSH] ALL

" The user of any medium or any technology is the content of that form. The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on. The process of putting these on involves the reader in an imaginative exploration by which he discovers the possible extent and limitations of a medium. To the specialist or visual man, this put-on or play that is inherent in every moment of consciousness appears unreal, a sham. It is very easy for the Pirandellos or Genets to startle the literal-minded visual man with the evidence that his life is necessarily faking and making."

BEATNIK GUEST SPEAKER ...

"When President Kennedy was newly elected, the editor of the Christian Science Monitor said to Philip Deane, 'We now have our first beatnik President.' I am sure that when I was chosen as guest speaker for this occasion many felt inspired to observe that 'We now have our first beatnik guest speaker.' McLuhan will not only show the relation between electronics and the Humanities, but between the small car and Bridget Bardot. He will take off in all directions at once, proving that since the disappearance of seams from nylons there is no value in lineality. The disappearance of the line in hosiery he will make to appear to be related to the disappearance of the chorus line, the receiving line, the stag line, and the party-line. He may point to the dread omen that no child would roll the hula hoop. He will probably suggest that skin-diving and TV-viewing are the same thing. That the teaching machines perfect the procedure of archetypal criticism. That the wrap-around space of the small car and the wrap-around audience of the new platform stage are not only the same form, but that North America is undergoing a massive Bauhaus program of haptic innovation which causes the leering teenager to spring up where before had grown the docile adolescent."

- from a transcription of a speech McLuhan delivered to the Learned Societies Canada conference in Montreal in June, 1961

POST TACTILE : the interplay between synaesthesia and coenaesthesia as hendiadys

" tactile" meant not so much the sense of touch as
the interplay of all the senses ... "

"The new art form of our time is the media themselves, not painting, not movies, not drama, but the media themselves have become the new art forms.... I write cartoons.... I have wanted to write a play, for a long time, on the media. And the media themselves are the avant-garde area of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting and music and poetry, it's in the media themselves. Not in the programs. Avant-garde is not in hockey, not in baseball or any of these entertainments. It's in the media themselves."
- McLuhan, Forces Magazine, Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.68, 1973

ENTER THE DRAGON : SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES ...

HEYOKA : the Lakota concept of a contrarian, jester, satirist or sacred clown.

The Heyókȟa symbolize and portray many aspects of the sacred, the Wakȟáŋ. Their satire presents important questions by fooling around. They ask difficult questions, and say things others are too afraid to say. By reading between the lines, the audience is able to think about things not usually thought about, or to look at things in a different way.

Principally, the Heyókȟa functions both as a mirror and a teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others, thereby forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weaknesses.

SKELETON KEY : "APPLIED JOYCE"

Don Theall : " The irony of all the complex contradictions of Marshall McLuhan's variegated career apparently is that he failed to successfully communicate the insights of contemporary poetry and art to communications researchers. Whatever else McLuhan was up to in his sometimes exasperating and often enigmatic writings, he developed a theory of communication which he considered to be "applied Joyce," in the same sense that he had analyzed Joyce as developing an aesthetic which was "applied Aquinas." http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/download/531/437

" I do some of my best work lying down ... "

charge of the light brigade : "WITH IT" + "IN TOUCH"

Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization. By surpassing writing, we have regained our WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural, but cosmic plane. We have evoked a super-civilized subprimitive man. NOBODY yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present. We are back in acoustic space. We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3,000 years of literacy divorced

In television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight alone. You have to be "with" it. But in all electric phenomena, the visual is only one component in a complex interplay. Since, in the age of information, most transactions are managed electrically, the electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component, in his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses.

" Assuary as there's a bonum in your ossthealogy ! "

Sheep In Wolfe's Clothing ... McLuhan's alternate title for Wolfe's essay " What If He's Right ? " :
" I'd Rather Be Wrong. "

The experience with Wolfe held forth the pattern for future reversionings of the McLuhan myth by future pundits. Theall says it well. "Wolfe is indicative of what McLuhanism was to become, since he creates a virtual McLuhan, who will be re-created again and again, a situation McLuhan invites because, a pop poet, he is also crafting Marshall McLuhan as the pop poem. While others who follow may produce differing McLuhan’s, in a way they will all be different, as most of the varying exegeses of a modernist poem differ."

metheg in your midness, this man is mountain and unto changeth doth one ascend...

more Hidden ground [re:Bride] : the "flippancy" of tone seemed just "right"

McLuhan observed that our technological society [1950] vitiated family life and the free human expression of thought and feelings. The plan for The Mechanical Bride, which was to reproduce an ad or comic strip as an exhibit and then attach a short essay analyzing it, was a printed form of McLuhan's 'slide-and-lecture' series on the same subject; ultimately the plan was inspired by Leavis's Culture and Environment and reinforced by the use of similar exhibits in Wyndham Lewis's 1932 book The Doom of Youth.

SPOT THE LOONEY !

Carpenter : " Each medium, if its bias is properly exploited, reveals and communicates a unique aspect of reality, of truth. Each offers a different perspective, a way of seeing an otherwise hidden dimension of reality. It's not a question of one reality being true, and others distortions. One allows us to see from here, another from there, a third from still another perspective....New essentials are brought to the fore, including those made invisible by the "blinders" of the old language....This is why the preservation of book culture is as important as the development of TV. This is why new languages, instead of destroying old ones, serve as a stimulant to them. Only monopoly is destroyed....The appearance of a new medium often frees older media for creative effort."

CUB REPORTER 1930 -1934

Macaulay: What a Man! 28 October 1930.
Public School Education. 17 October 1933.
Germany and Internationalism. 27 October 1933.
Germany's Development. 3 November 1933.
German Character. 7 November 1933.
George Meredith. 21 November 1933.
Canada and Internationalism. 1 December 1933.
De Valera. 9 January 1934.
Not Spiritualism but Spiritism. 19 January 1934.
The Groupers. 23 January 1934.
Adult Education. 16 February 1934.
Morticians and Cosmeticians. 2 March 1934.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow. 16 May 1934.

“a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.”

NO BASE

Carpenter from Eskimo Realities : " A distinctive mark of the traditional art is that many of the carvings, generally of sea mammals, won't stand up, but roll clumsily about. Each lacks a single, favored point of view, hence, a base. Indeed, they aren't intended to be set in place and viewed, but rather to be worn or handled, turned this way and that. I knew a trader with a fine, show-piece collection of such carvings who solved this problem by lightly filing each piece on "the bottom" to make it stand up, but alas he also made them stationary, something the carver never intended."

ESKIMO REALITIES + acoustic space

In their co-authored piece “Acoustic Space,” Carpenter and McLuhan discussed how pre-literate tribal societies such as the Inuit primarily rely on speech in their interactions. Depending upon the harmonious balance of all five senses, such oral cultures exist in “acoustic space.” Such space “isn’t pictorial, boxed-in, framed: it’s resonating, in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It’s a world in which the eye hears, the ear sees, & all the five & country senses join in a concert of interweaving rhythms” (Carpenter 1972:31). When the phonetic alphabet was introduced, this allenveloping sense of space was breached and a more detached, linear perspective emerged—the eye, as opposed to the ear, became the dominant sensory organ.

FIRE HOSE

Carpenter : " Nothing could stop him.… I tell you, the ideas would just start pouring out. People used to shun him on the campus, because even though he was extremely friendly, when he would capture someone, it would be like a fire hose of the ideas coming out.... Marshall couldn’t stop talking. He couldn’t stop thinking. I mean, it just went on from one thing after another. You had to skip to keep up with him. And, of course, you can imagine the chaos that created in this conventional faculty in Toronto”

“If a few details here and there are wacky,… it doesn’t matter a hoot.”

At the University of Toronto in particular, the reaction to McLuhan’s celebrity was most intense. It got to the point that McLuhan warned his graduate students to erase any trace of his work in their theses and dissertations for fear of reprisals by their review committees. According to Eric McLuhan, “there were at least two concerted efforts (quiet ones, of course) to collect enough signatures to have his tenure revoked.” Such efforts would seem to put the lie to the shopworn contention of the academy that the rationale for the institution of tenure is the protection of freedom of thought; in reality, there is no more hidebound apparat devoted to thought control than the self-perpetuating survival of the medieval guild known as the academic tenure committee.

The "extremely important message" was "Please BUY this Magazine !"

" Relativity theory in 1905 announced the dissolution of uniform Newtonian space as an illusion or fiction, however useful. Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or "rational" space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx brothers and MAD Magazine."

An agent of screwball subversion : " MAD magazine instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements; it warned me that I was often merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual humans charged with my care ever bothered to."

DISINFOTAINMENT + ITS POST INFORMATION DISCONTENTS

Michael Moore : We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth.

But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept ... as secrets.

What if the public in 2003 had been able to read "secret" memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the "facts" he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched -- or rather, wouldn't there have been calls for Cheney's arrest?

Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that's the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you're up to. You simply can't be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.

Post Euclidean Space has a 'centre without margins'

"Acoustic space" as a McLuhan percept originally emerged from the description of "auditory space" in the behavioural psychology of E.A. Bott of the University of Toronto, which was brought to McLuhan's attention by a colleague in the Ford Foundation Culture and Communication seminars, psychologist Karl Williams. Bott's idea, that auditory space "has no centre or no margins since we hear from all directions simultaneously," immediately attracted McLuhan, who had already been immersed in then-contemporary writers concerned with space, including art and architecture historian Sigfried Giedion, visual artist and designer Laszlo Mohly-Nagy and classicist Francis Cornford, author of "The Invention of Space." With Ted Carpenter, co-founder of the seminars and of the early multidisciplinary journal Explorations, McLuhan gradually expanded the idea of auditory space, christening it "acoustic space" to dramatize its abstract nature. Carpenter contributed Aboriginal, especially Inuit, conceptions of an acoustic space; McLuhan worked out its relation to the contemporary arts and poetry affected by four-dimensional geometry and the new physics.

McLuhan's toolkit

McLuhan's toolkit includes a firm knowledge of the entire written tradition, the translatio studii, from Homer to the present. Add to that a firm knowledge of the Trivium (Rhetoric, Dialectic and Grammar), an extensive knowledge of English Literature, prose and poetry, a profound knowledge of the English language, an immense vocabulary, and a deep and abiding curiosity about etymology, nourished by a knowledge of French, Latin, German, Greek, etc. The aphoristic style, learned from Bacon and from modern ad-men, provided much more than a way of expressing things. It supplied a way of thinking in outlines and seeing whole structures. Being able to perform traditional multi-level exegesis made short work of assessing complexity in prose and verse, old and new, and gave swift entry into a range of texts. Equally, long practice with Practical Criticism meant a quick and sure means of entry into any human “text” product or service.

Practical Criticism ... the ideal Grammarian’s tool !

Practical Criticism is not theory-based. It is performance-based. ... Practical Criticism relies on observation and critical judgment — learned skills ... Without a theory as a guide McLuhan was influenced by artists and poets in developing the analytical and conceptual tools he relied upon to examine media and communication. He referred to his procedure as starting with a problem and digging into the toolkit for something to open the matter up for elucidation. Chief among his tools of analysis was Practical Criticism, which he viewed as a kind of critic’s Swiss-Army Knife that worked equally incisively across all of the arts and through all areas of culture, from high-brow to low. The argument that emerges from this analysis of McLuhan’s investigative techniques is that many of the conundrums of modern media and culture are understood most effectively through research that transcends the constraints imposed by seeking to make the case for or against the truth of a particular theory. Begin with theory, you begin with the answer; begin with observation, you begin with questions.

zombie stance of the technological idiot

Because of today's terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us--and thus win back control of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot. It's to escape this Narcissus trance that I've tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

420

"TV intensifies the already numerous forms of inner-tripping. Colour TV is psychedelic input. The kids are simply putting jam on jam when they take to drugs. ... In the 20's booze created a huge police state as we tried to prop up the old form of social arrangements. Drugs likewise provide a field-day for the Mafia as we try to maintain the patterns of the pre-electric age while the kids are miming electric speeds and the externalization of their nervous systems created by electric circuitry"

a short cut into the electric vortex

The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian literary theorist and critic

Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary theorist and critic, identified fourteen distinct characteristics that are typical of Menippean satire throughout the ages. These include a comic or “carnival” element; freedom from accuracy with inventive plots and philosophical approaches; absurd situations used to seek, reveal, and test the truth of ideas rather than the human character; altered observational standpoints or states of consciousness that enable new perspectives on situations and life; deliberate violations of social conventions to create new awareness of old forms; mixed media forms and genres in which the medium itself assumes a significance beyond its content; and a heightened concern for contemporary issues and salient topics of the day.

NEW MEDIA creates NEW 'NEWS', NEW SPEEDS, NEW RELATIONSHIPS, NEW PATTERNS

“A spectacular paradigm of the information revolution has been developed for the world at large by the Watergate affair. While it seems to specialize in matters of political espionage and image- building, it also draws attention to the fact that the entire educational and commercial establishments, as much as the political and military establishments, depend on data banks of total information concerning both producers and consumers, both the governors and the governed. The Watergate affair makes it quite plain that the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance. The FBI includes among its responsibilities keeping under surveillance individual members of the CIA. We thus have a complete scheme of baby-sitters for the baby-sitters — chaperons for chaperons — and it is the business of every commercial establishment to keep all other commercial establishments under surveillance as a minimal condition of survival.”

wikileaks as "scientific journalism" + "information activism" vs "information terrorism"

“Position papers are secret or confidential documents for the attention of committees, and any office boy can publish these, no matter how top secret they may be. The Pentagon Papers were position papers which may or may not have been studied or discussed by a Congressional committee. They are “the news behind the news”, which used to be considered muckraking but has now become an ordinary dimension of journalism, such as nourishes the underground press and which, in turn, affects the forms and publics of the regular press. What has happened since the old muckraking days of the 1920′s is that espionage, whether political or commercial, has become the largest business in the world, and we take it for granted that the modern newspaper depends on “bugging” the whole community. In fact, we expect the press to “bug” the world and to challenge and penetrate all privacy and identity, whether private or corporate.”

Ww3 will be a global information war with no division between civilian and military participation

INSIDE THE FIREWALL

The 22 year old was described by former classmates as a "trouble-making, authority-hating computer geek"

" Manning : I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like "Lady Gaga"… erase the music… then write a compressed split file ... no-one suspected a thing ... perfect example of how not to do INFOSEC ... listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history ... pretty simple, and unglamorous ... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm."

Thomas Nashe : Pierce Penilesse, His Svpplication to the Divell (1592)

" Nor so, nor so, good brother bottle-ale, for there are other places besides where money can bestow it selfe: the signe of the smock will wipe your mouth cleane; and yet I haue heard yee haue made her a tenant to your tap-houses. But what shall hee doo that hath spent himselfe? where shall hee haunt? Faith, when Dice, Lust, and Drunkennesse, and all haue dealt vpon him, if there be neuer a Playe for him to goe too for his pennie, he sits melancholie in his Chamber, deuising vpon felonie or treason, and howe he may best exalt himselfe by mischiefe."

TORONTO IS A HAPPENING ! ?

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan’s technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic…still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city…a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal…There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)…was government owned."

The Tool Kit

Literally, Understanding Media is a kit of tools for analysis and perception. It is to begin an operation of discovery. It is not the completed work of discovery. It is intended for practical use. Most of my work in the media is like that of a safecracker. In the beginning I don’t know what’s inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work. I grope, I probe, I listen, I test — until the tumblers fall and I’m in. That’s the way I work with all these media.

I’m perfectly prepared to scrap any statement I ever made about any subject once I find that it isn’t getting me into the problem. I have no devotion to any of my probes as if they were sacred opinions. I have no proprietary interest in my ideas and no pride of authorship as such. You have to push any idea to an extreme, you have to probe. Exaggeration, in the sense of hyperbole, is a major artistic device in all modes of art. No painter, no musician ever did anything without extreme exaggeration of a form or a mode, until he had exaggerated those qualities that interested him.
- McLuhan Hot + Cool, Stearn, 1967: 58, 62-63

' The Tool Kit ' in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man consists of the seven chapters in Part One. They detail seven general principles of media in shaping culture and society. Understanding Media was conceived and written as a companion to a volume that had appeared a short while earlier, Understanding Poetry (1960) by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. It was the first American text to employ techniques of Practical Criticism. From the first, McLuhan continued to insist that Understanding Media was not a finished product but a group of beginnings, a tool kit and some preliminary forays into new territory.

Les prolongements technologiques de l'homme

Le fait essentiel de la communication, c'est la communication elle-même et ses " média " (langage, argent, imprimé, mode, télévision ou cybernétique), plutôt que le message communiqué. Le "message", c'est à dire le contenu de la communication, n'est qu'un leurre qui détourne l'attention pendant que le "médium" exerce une action d'autant plus profonde qu'elle nous échappe. Cet ouvrage analyse d'une façon intuitive et parfois familière la nature des technologies qui constituent notre "environnement"; elles sont les prolongements de nos organes physiques et de notre système nerveux, destinés à en accroître la force et la rapidité.
"Nous sommes tout à coup désireux de voir les gens et les choses se montrer tels qu'ils sont. Il faut voir dans cette attitude nouvelle une foi profonde en l'harmonie fondamentale de tout l'être. C'est avec cette foi que j'ai écrit le livre que voici". - Marshall McLuhan

magical priesthood : ELIOT, JOYCE, LEWIS + POUND

" Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at The Diabolical Principle just now I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever. Ergo, the VORTEX = the totally environmental .… Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. There must be no art as content of some other set of skills or interest.…I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs. They made of the world a perception Lab .… The mode of great Art. The environment as ultimate artefact."
McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, 4 October 1964

“ There’s Money In Comics ”

Stan Lee : " DON’T WRITE DOWN TO YOUR READERS! It is common knowledge that a large portion of comic magazine readers are adults, and the rest of the readers who may be kids are pretty sharp characters. They are used to seeing movies and listening to radio shows… a great deal of thought goes into every story; and there are plenty of gimmicks, sub-plots, human interest angles…. "

McLuhan : " This happens to be true. In the matter of intellectual quality there is little to choose between Dare Devil Comics and Gone With the Wind and between the claims made for the romantic movie of our day, just as in the emotional pattern there is little or no difference between the ‘middle-brow’ and the ‘low-brow.’ The difference is mainly in the amount of lush verbiage and opulence of turnout. There is no question of perception or taste in the genteel movie or novel or in the pulps. But the superiority of the pulps is in their absence of pretentiousness, and the readers of this form of entertainment are altogether undeceived by it. They are never under the impression of having bought or read anything with ‘class.’ "

MEME HOUSE

Eric McLuhan is more specific about the role Menippean satire plays in creating awareness among an otherwise oblivious public.

As an active form, a Menippean satire goes to any extreme necessary in order to frustrate objectivity or detachment on the part of the reader. … Cynics, and Diogenes in particular … were often referred to as ‘laughing philosophers,’ for they refused to take seriously any political, private, social, intellectual, or other kind of pretentiousness. (McLuhan, 1997, p. 5)

Instead they create what Eric McLuhan calls the “cynic effect” – a satirical response that creates new awareness by awakening the dulled perception of the reader. Thus, Menippean satire is not merely humour or irony, but humour or irony with a specific intentionality.

VORTOGRAPHS - Alvin Langdon Coburn

In 1916, Coburn met Ezra Pound, who introduced him to the short-lived Vorticism movement in Britain. These new visual aesthetics intrigued Coburn and, provoked by his growing spiritual quest, he began to re-examine his photographic style. He responded by making a bold and distinctive portrait of Pound, showing three over-lapping images of differing sizes. Within a brief period he moved from this semi-representative image to a series of abstract images that are among the first completely non-representative photographs ever made.

To make these images Coburn invented a kaleidoscope-like instrument with three mirrors clamped together, which when fitted over the lens of the camera would reflect and fracture the image. Pound called this instrument a "Vortescope" and the resulting photographs "Vortographs". He made only about 18 different Vortographs, taken over a period of just one month, yet they remain among the most striking images in early 20th century photography.

turntablism

" In his own case, Edison's determination to give the phonograph, like the telephone, a direct practical use in business procedures led to his neglect of the instrument as a means of entertainment. Failure to foresee the phonograph as a means of entertainment was really a failure to grasp the meaning of the electric revolution in general. In our time we are reconciled to the phonograph as a toy and a solace; but press, radio, and TV have also acquired the same dimension of entertainment. Meantime, entertainment pushed to an extreme becomes the main form of business and politics. Electric media, because of their total "field" character, tend to eliminate the fragmented specialities of form and function that we have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and mechanization. The brief and compressed history of the phonograph includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word. It was the advent of the electric tape recorder that only a few years ago released the phonograph from its temporary involvement in mechanical culture. Tape and the l.p. record suddenly made the phonograph a means of access to all the music and speech of the world. Before turning to the l.p. and tape-recording revolution, we should note that the earlier period of mechanical recording and sound reproduction had one large factor in common with the silent picture. The early phonograph produced a brisk and raucous experience not unlike that of a Mack Sennett movie."

post information studies

"Deception is the new discourse. Electric light only offers a convincing illusion of daylight, its 'content' being all the activities that are now permitted to take place after dark. As such it represents a complex simulation of experience that passes virtually unnoticed at a time when digital technology is in the process of rendering itself invisible. Hardware and software are converging to the point of total dematerialization. The old configurations of data streaming will eventually vanish into one another, leaving the replication of sound and vision as the sole industry standard for communication. Information ceases to be an intelligible part of the environment, but functions as an element instead: boundless, formless, creating vast artificial ecosystems out of networked systems."
from "The Future is Back" by Ken Hollings 19 Feb 2010

services, disservices, 'allatonceness', figures 'detached' from ground + side effects

All situations are composed of an area of attention [figure] and a very much larger (subliminal) area of inattention [ground] ….Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground….for example, at a lecture, the attention will shift from the speaker’s words to his gestures, to the hum of the lighting or street sounds, or to the feel of the chair or a memory or association or smell, each new figure alternatively displaces the others into ground…The ground of any technology is both the situation that gives rise to it as well as the whole environment (medium) of services and disservices that the technology brings with it. These are side effects and impose themselves willy-nilly as a new form of culture.

"The sounds we utter are structured in acoustic space by noise spaced in silence."

Explorations explored the grammars of such languages as print, the newspaper format and television. It argued that revolutions in the packaging and distribution of ideas and feelings modified not only human relations but also sensibilities. It further argued that we are largely ignorant of literacy's role in shaping Western man [and woman], and equally unaware of the role of electronic media in shaping modern values. Literacy's vested interests were so deep that literacy itself was never examined. And the current electronic revolution is already so pervasive that we have difficulty in stepping outside of it and scrutinizing it objectively. But it can be done, and a fruitful approach is to examine one medium through another..."

RADICAL SOFTWARE = BERYL KOROT

SONY PORT-A-PAK = PORTABLE VIDEO
1967 : the first portable video recording device was the Sony CV-2400 Video Rover.
" The Portapak would seem to have been invented specifically for use by artists. Just when pure formalism had run its course; just when it became politically embarrassing to make objects, but ludicrous to make nothing; just when many artists were doing performance works but had nowhere to perform, or felt the need to keep a record of their performances; just when it began to seem silly to ask the same old Berkleean question, 'If you build a sculpture in the desert where no one can see it, does it exist?'; just when it became clear that TV communicates more information to more people than large walls do; just when we understood that in order to define space it is necessary to encompass time; just when many established ideas in other disciplines were being questioned and new models were proposed - just then the Portapak became available."

"I'm not really here, I just stick around for my friends."

"Consequently, the steady announcement of new telematic 'discoveries' - such as, molecular computer chips, cell-sized nano bio-engines for 'invisible travel' through the blood stream, new genetic hybrids from the labs of all the recombinant geneticists - attracts not a ripple of discontent nor a muted cry of ideological discord because these manifestations of 'technology outreach' into the body electronic are less a brave new horizon of telematic wilderness clear-cutting, than an already nostalgic sign of our (wired) past."
Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash, 1994, p.74

Revolution for the hell of it !

NO DOME FOR HOME

Gerald O'Grady : " The American Pavilion was a celebration of Pop Art housed in a resplendent geodesic dome designed by R. Buckminister Fuller, a structure which McLuhan tried to purchase to house his Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. "

Unfortunately, funding was nowhere to be found. McLuhan was undaunted: "We shall concentrate upon achieving an intellectual identity rather than a physical one," he maintained. Thus, the Centre's physical incarnation remained McLuhan's small office in the English Department at St. Michael's College until Professor Arthur Porter, the acting director of the Centre while McLuhan was at Fordham U. in 1967 - 68, obtained the Coach House for McLuhan's Centre.

UNPUBLISHED 1952

"If we grant that human existence is the state of damnation, two possibilities follow. Either we can learn to retrace the stages of our fall into matter, and so escape, or we can devise some means of extinction of personality. The pagan art and culture of the world, past and present, is divided in the pursuit of these alternatives. On one hand art is followed as a continuous labyrinth in which by blind, dogged persistence we may struggle upward by means of will power and ethical struggle. On the other hand there is the intellectual course presented by Mr. Eliot, in which we move from one intensity to another, towards a final flash of awareness and extinction. In the one art - that linked with Plato's cave man - Time, continuity, dialectic, are of the essence. In the other, time is lost in simultaneities and juxtapositions."

Master of Implosion

" Less an idiot than intellectual jester in the humanist tradition of Erasmus's folly, Joyce's wit, and Rabelais's bawdiness, McLuhan played the clown in order to infiltrate specialist discourses and cross the wires of disciplines and satirise them in a mode he called 'anti-environmental'. While McLuhan may have lacked the sense of folly as a philosophical vocation, by playing the clown he was also playing at being an artist. He chose eclecticism over the effort to synthesize. He used probes, puns, blasts and counterblasts, and the mosaic method instead of interrative strategies. He was a media artist who created the new form that Donald Theall (1971) dubbed "the concrete essay" with its collide-oscopic principles of typographic play, surrealistic juxtaposition of images, and unfortunately, heavy doses of technological mystification."

boom !

BababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnukPerkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkununKlikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkotBladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanachThingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmindlookingatedLukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapukBothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnupPappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodledHusstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaractUllhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar

McLuhan = " Applied Joyce "

" Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art. «The prouts who will invent a writirig there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Joyce is, in the «Wake,» making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both, Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious."

TRIBAL DRUM

The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive. The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written--conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear--tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.

Exaggeration, in the sense of hyperbole, is a major artistic device in all modes of art.

I’m perfectly prepared to scrap any statement I ever made about any subject once I find that it isn’t getting me into the problem. I have no devotion to any of my probes as if they were sacred opinions. I have no proprietary interest in my ideas and no pride of authorship as such. You have to push any idea to an extreme, you have to probe. Exaggeration, in the sense of hyperbole, is a major artistic device in all modes of art. No painter, no musician ever did anything without extreme exaggeration of a form or a mode, until he had exaggerated those qualities that interested him. (Stearn, 1967: 58, 62-63)

"Reach Out and Touch Someone"

N.W. Ayer, one of America's oldest advertising agencies, needed a creative approach to help AT&T soften its image in the face of growing concerns about AT&T's potential monopoly. So Ken D'Ambrosio helped develop the concept for a print and TV campaign that incorporated the now famous "Reach Out and Touch Someone" tag line. We can credit Marshall McLuhan for creating the tagline "Reach out and touch someone" for Ma Bell. This campaign was designed to soften AT&T's image and position the company as an indispensable element of everyday American life.

" We Shall Not Cease from Exploration ! "

The New American Vortex by Andrew Chrystall (2008) : As McLuhan notes in the "Typhon in America" the great mistake, of course, is to suppose that what went on physically in Birkenau does not go on psychologically in America and England. "Intellectually, spiritually and emotionally this is precisely what we have been doing for some decades." "There is no difference in result between our entertainment industry and Asian or Soviet brainwashing programs. Our revulsion at these is irrational as we have developed more complex and subtle ways of achieving the same end. Far from being a conscious conspiracy, this is a nightmare dream from which we would do well to awaken at once..."

«McLuhan Caged (in Electronic Art II)»

Fluxus is similar in spirit to the earlier art movement of Dada, emphasizing the concept of anti-art and taking jabs at the seriousness of modern art. Fluxus artists used their minimal performances to highlight their perceived connections between everyday objects and art, similarly to Duchamp in pieces such as Fountain. Fluxus art was often presented in "events", which Fluxus member George Brecht defined as "the smallest unit of a situation". The events consisted of a minimal instruction, opening the events to accidents and other unintended effects. Also contributing to the randomness of events was the integration of audience members into the performances, realizing Duchamp's notion of the viewer completing the art work. The Fluxus artistic philosophy can be expressed as a synthesis of four key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work:
1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
4. Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

" BED IN " AS HAPPENING

McLuhan: Language is a form of organized stutter. Literally, you chop your sounds up into bits in order to talk. Now, when you sing, you don't stutter, so singing is a way of stretching language into long, harmonious patterns and cycles. How do you think about language in songs?
John: Language and song is to me, apart from being pure vibrations, just like trying to describe a dream. And because we don't have telepathy or whatever it is, we try and describe the dream to each other, to verify to each other what we know, what we believe is inside each other. And the stuttering is right - because we can't say it. No matter how you say it, it's never how you want to say it.

MOON CHILD

"I naturally feel flattered that Apollo 11 is scheduled to put a man on the moon on my birthday, July 21. Of course the reason for choosing July, the moon month, is derived from occult symbolism of Zodiac signs. The 12:12 a.m. touchdown will establish a new chemical bond of resonance with space-capsule moon. The reverberations will alter all earthly music and patterns for all time to come. The innovators and perpetrators, now as always, are innocent of any awareness of the consequences of their images." (Marshall McLuhan, "Kahn-Frontation," unpublished MS., 2-3)

" the magazine article as performance" Roles, Masks and Performance, New Literary History 2.3, 1971

" The overwhelming fact about Time is its style. It has often been said that nobody could tell the truth in Time style. Time is a nursery book in which the reader is slapped and tickled alternately. It is full of predigested pap, spooned out with confidential nudges. The reader is never on his own for an instant, but, as though at his mother's knee, he is provided with the right emotions for everything he hears or sees as the pages turn. The complex issues of politics and international relations are reduced to a newsreel, with accompaniment by Spike Jones. Biographer Noel Busch has said that the march of events in Time, instead of resembling a ragged mob shuffling down the side street of perception, becomes a glittering parade with flags waving, bands playing, and the ranks keeping step. Time's readers are the enthusiastic kids lining the curbs as Time marches on. Totalitarianism engendered by the mass hypnosis of power, glitter, and the spectacle of regular ranks rather than insight or intelligibility is the object of all of Time's technical brilliance. Meanwhile, the editors of Time stand at mock attention in the reviewing stand, thumbing their noses at humanity."

ANALOGICAL

"The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere. So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement results in radical distortion.(p.33)... It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for 'simple explanations' is the yearning for univocity."(p.36-7)

Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, pp.33 and 36-7, 1969

His Primary Game

" What McLuhan contributed were not ideas, arguments, theories or critiques, but intuitions, perceptions, wandering explorations of unexplored terrain, satiric responses and poetic reactions...His primary game: teasing people into believing his percepts to be theoretical concepts..."

Donald Theall's The Virtual Marshall McLuhan is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those…who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization’s demise.

LOLOMGWTF

The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view".

McLuhan : "the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age."

GREATEST HITS : NO THEORY ALLOWED

tricksterism

The legendary trickster that Theall pursues in his quest is full of paradox, contradictions and ambiguities. Not because McLuhan tried to be ambiguous but rather because he believed that truth lingered somewhere within the enveloping haze of ambiguity. McLuhan’s method, Theall observes, was one of the "satiric poet" and that this allowed him to freely "construct his paradoxical probes, so that they may have multiple, often contradictory meanings." It was used more as a strategy of rhetoric rather than as a method of building a bullet-proof theory. The problem, though, is that over the years many have looked for rules and laws in McLuhan’s "paradoxical probes." As Theall notes, "The potential weakness appears when his rhetorico-poetic project becomes fact or formula rather than insight and intuition." ... "a great part of every human experience is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot."

a new humanist movement in Hell

"Wyndham Lewis is perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media en bloc as modes of artistic and social control. (Joyce and Eliot have done so on a smaller scale.)(p.17)... With the help of modern scientific medicine he (Lewis-ed.) re-edits and refurnishes the various levels of Dante's Inferno in a startling way. The Devils appear as film stars perturbed by the ease with which their supernatural dimensions are mimicked by modern publicity devices. It's this power of the new media which fosters a new humanist movement in Hell." (p.18)
Marshall McLuhan, Third Program in the Human Age, Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, p.17-8, October, 1957

" WE'RE SOAKING IN IT ! "

" Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come to us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't wash over us and then go "out of mind." It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious....Such experiences are difficult to describe in words. Like dreams or sports, they evade verbal classification. "

McLuhanisme

"Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy."
- Marshall McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype

LANGUAGE 'IN OUTLEX'

" The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or "applied" knowledge, of "points of view" and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers--a simultaneous, "all-at-once" world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electrical field, a world in which energy is generated and perceived not by the traditional connections that create linear, causative thought processes, but by the intervals, or gaps, which Linus Pauling grasps as the languages of cells, and which create synaesthetic discontinuous integral consciousness."

Tony Schwartz + The Responsive Chord

"In watching television, our eyes function like our ears. They never see a picture, just as our ears never hear a word. The process differs from film in that it requires much faster processing of information and more visual recall. With film, the brain has to process 24 distinct inputs per second. With television, the brain has to process thousands of distinct inputs per second. Watching television, the eye is for the first time functioning like the ear. With television, the patterning of auditory and visual stimuli is identical."

ACTIVE INTERPLAY

"...Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening."... "Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay."

AMATEURISM FTW !

"Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put." - Marshall McLuhan

HOOD ORNAMENT

"The car has lost its place in the heart of the people. That doesn't mean it's going to disappear overnight. Not at all. All it means is the effects of the car are disappearing. And privacy and service environment are part of the effects. When I say the medium is the message, I'm saying that the motor car is not a medium. The medium is the highway, the factories, and the oil companies. That is the medium. In other words, the medium of the car is the effects of the car. When you pull the effects away, the meaning of the car is gone. The car as an engineering object has nothing to do with these effects. The car is a figure in a ground of services. It's when you change the ground that you change the car. The car does not operate as the medium, but rather as one of the major effects of the medium. So 'the medium is the message' is not a simple remark, and I've always hesitated to explain it. It really means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation. And the hidden environment of services is the thing that changes people. It is the environment that changes people, not the technology." - McLuhan, Marshall. UNDERSTANDING ME: Lectures and Interviews. Eds. David Staines and Stephanie McLuhan. Boston: MIT Press, 2003, pp.241-2

"We don't know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn't a fish...."

ZOMBIE STANCE

KNOWLEDGE BROKEN : Greek, symballein — to throw together

KNOWLEDGE BROKEN : Greek, <i>symballein </i> — to throw together

" [He] changed his procedure from working with a “point of view” to that of the generating of insights by the method of “interface” as it is named in chemistry. “Interface” refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of “symbolism” (Greek, symballein—to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse..."

My first TV show idea came back in the early
1970s. It was called Up Against the Wall, and
was almost produced. Contestants were to
have explained to the audience how they got
into a financial pickle. The more entangled
their financial disaster, the more energetically
the audience would applaud. At the end of
every episode, a cheque would be issued to
the most dismal contestant. This emphasis on
misfortune would have been appreciated by
advertisers, since they need a big dose of
"bad news" in all programs in order to bal-
ance the "good news" in the ads. If TV
actually were to broadcast more good news,
as some cultural reactionaries want, the
advertising market would collapse, and the
ensuing economic crisis would probably
lead to some sort of popular dictatorship,
which they do not want.

McLuhan letter to Prince Bernhard [ May 14, 1969 ]

"As you know, I was a rather bad boy at Bilderberg. Frankly I was staggered at the very low level of awareness of the contemporary world exhibited by all guests present. As my friend Wyndham Lewis, the painter, put it : "The artist is writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present." Ordinary people live thirty years back in a state of of motivated somnambulism. Such was the state of the delegates at Bilderberg. Without a knowledge of all the poets and painters and artists from Baudelaire to Joyce, it is futile to attempt any appraisal of the formal or efficient causes initiated by the evolutionary extensions of our bodies which we call technology."

NEXT EXIT

McLuhan: The new environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound– from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electrical environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water. Acoustic space is created by our ability to hear from all directions at once. Electric information arrives from all quarters at once. Thus, in effect, acoustic environments were created by the telegraph and began to show up in the press as mosaics of juxtaposed and discontinuous items all under one dateline. Acoustic space is all touch and interplay, all resonance and sympathy. Acoustic space is like the relationship of mother and child, which is audile-tactile, sound and touch. The cooing and handling and touching– this is the kind of world the electric media put around us. The electric media are a mom-and-child or rock-and-roll relationship. The acoustic or simultaneous space in which we now live is like a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margins are nowhere. Acoustic space cannot be cut up into pieces, as visual space can. It is both compressed and indivisible.

TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICAL CHANGE, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Vol.7, Summer, 1952, pp.189-95

Marshall McLuhan - “Notes on Burroughs” in The Nation, Dec. 28, 1964 (pages 517-519)

2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed.

" Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin' ? "

McLUHAN: Sometimes I wonder. I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.

But I've never presented such explorations as revealed truth. As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory -- my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker's. I don't know what's inside; maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences -- until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, 4 October 1964

Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at The Diabolical Principle just now I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever. Ergo, the VORTEX = the totally environmental .… Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. There must be no art as content of some other set of skills or interest.…I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs. They made of the world a perception Lab .… The mode of great Art. The environment as ultimate artefact.

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Finnegans Wake: Page 69 Part:1 Episode:3 Page:69 not, has been the expression, direct or through an agent male, of womanhid offended, (ah! ah!), has not levy of black mail from the times the fairies were in it, and fain for wilde erthe blothoms followed an impressive private reputation for whispered sins? Now by memory inspired, turn wheel again to the whole of the wall. Where Gyant Blyant fronts Peannlueamoore There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wallhole did exist. Ere ore or ire in Aaarlund. Or you Dair's Hair or you Diggin Mosses or your horde of orts and oriorts to garble a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended with aves. Armen? The doun is theirs and still to see for menags if he strikes a lousaforitch and we'll come to those baregazed shoeshines if you just shoodov a second. And let oggs be good old gaggles and Isther Estarr play Yesther Asterr. In the drema of Sorestost Areas, Diseased. A stonehinged gate then was for another thing while the suroptimist had bought and enlarged that shack under fair rental of one yearlyng sheep, (prime) value of sixpence, and one small yearlyng goat (cadet) value of eightpence, to grow old and happy (hogg it and kidd him) for the reminants of his years; and when everything was got up for the purpose he put an applegate on the place by no means as some pretext a bedstead in loo thereof to keep out donkeys (the pigdirt hanging from the jags to this hour makes that clear) and just thenabouts the iron gape, by old custom left open to prevent the cats from getting at the gout, was triplepatlockt on him on purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and possibly enaunter he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the peoplade's eggday, unused as he was yet to being freely clodded. O, by the by, lets wee brag of praties, it ought to be always remembered in connection with what has gone before that there was a northroomer, Herr Betreffender, out for his zimmer holedigs, digging in number 32 at the Rum and Puncheon (Branch of Dirty Dick's free house) in Laxlip (where the Sockeye Sammons were stopping at the time orange fasting) prior to that, a Kommerzial (Gorbotipacco, he was wreaking like Zentral Oylrubber)

CAUSES in the numbness itself, not in the media figures

"So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain (p.304)... Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society." (p.6)

- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, pp.304 and 6, 1964.

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