4.7.08

jim and mac



"Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man."

Marshall McLuhan,
Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966



3 comments:

quantum retrocausality said...

"You can be quite sure that if there are going to be McLuhanites, I am not going to be one of them ... If I just keep writing with great energy, no McLuhanite will ever be able to digest it all. My areas of probing, of exploring are very personal...Most of what I have to say is secondhand, gathered however from esoteric sources. My favorite stomping grounds are areas that very few people have ever stomped...Our technologies are generations ahead of our thinking. If you even begin to think about these new technologies you appear as a poet because you are dealing with the present as the future. That is my technique."

quantum retrocausality said...

"T. S. Eliot's famous account of 'the auditory imagination' has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world."

Marshall McLuhan,
Letter to Playboy Magazine, p.18, March, 1970.

quantum retrocausality said...

"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.