tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44597636540063753922024-03-05T22:39:34.342-06:00Circumambient Peripherisation - " forcing meaning to the edge of awareness "My Canvasses Are Surrealist ... AND TO CALL THEM THEORIES IS TO MISS MY SATIRICAL INTENT ALTOGETHERquantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comBlogger223125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-8998572001472346882008-08-16T13:19:00.200-05:002012-07-10T08:28:28.374-05:00He was the first that ever burst into that silent sea ...<center><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.earmap.com/Thug4Life.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/myCanvassesAreSurrealist.jpg" /><br /></div><span style="font-size:180%;">My canvasses are surrealist ...</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.earmap.com/daliEYEtactility22.png" /><br /></div><br /><blockquote>"The cover of the June 8 - 14 TV Guide is a Dali masterpiece. It manifests in detail the tactile quality of the TV image. The extension of the central nervous system via electricity is environmentally indicated in the upper right corner by a segment of brain tissue. The two thumbs with the TV images on the nails are carefully separated to indicate the "gap" or interval constituted by touch. The age of tactility via television and radio is one of innumerable interfaces or "gaps" that replace the old connections, legal, literate and visual."<br />- McLuhan letter to Pierre Trudeau, June 12 1968</blockquote><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zt2O-Wz1-IY/TnYAUeRuQhI/AAAAAAAAL2A/ChFXQ7sEFRM/s1600/DaliMcLuhan.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 301px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zt2O-Wz1-IY/TnYAUeRuQhI/AAAAAAAAL2A/ChFXQ7sEFRM/s400/DaliMcLuhan.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5653706733935018514" border="0" /></a><br /><object height="800" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/hyper.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/hyper.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" height="800" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLUHAN100.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/schizo.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/MovingInStereo.png" /><br /><object height="600" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/onTV.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/onTV.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="600" width="800"></embed><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/5x.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/LeMedium.jpg" /><br /><object height="800" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/onOFF.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/onOFF.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="800" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><object height="600" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/ProphetOfSatire.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/ProphetOfSatire.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="600" width="800"></embed><br /></object><br /><object height="443" width="522"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/FRAME22.swf"><br /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/FRAME22.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="443" width="522"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/ludicrous.jpg" /><br /></center><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="never" allownetworking="internal" data="http://www.earmap.com/CROSS2.swf" height="585" align="middle" width="780"><br /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never"><br /><param name="allowNetworking" value="internal"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/CROSS2.swf"><br /><param name="quality" value="high"><br /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><br /></object><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;"> <blockquote> <p>My father decided in the sixties that he would try as much as he could to present his ideas in an aphoristic style. Aphorisms, as Francis Bacon said, are incomplete, a bit like cartoons. They are not filled-out essay writing that is highly compressed. <em>The aphorism is a poetic form that calls for a lot of participation on the part of the reader. You have to chew on a aphorism and work with it for a while before understanding it fully. A good aphorism could keep you busy for a week – kicking it around, playing with it, exploring it, taking it apart to see what you can get out of it. And applying it here, and everywhere. My father deliberately chose this form of statement because he wanted to teach, not tell or entertain.</em> He said, </p> <blockquote><p>"For instruction, you use incomplete knowledge so people can fill things in – they can round it out and fill it in with their own experience." </p></blockquote> <p>If what you want to do is simply to tell people something, then by all means spell it out in the connected essay. But if you want to teach, you don't do that. There's no participation in just telling: that's simply for consumers – they sit there and swallow it, or not. But the aphoristic style gives you the opportunity to get a dialogue going, to engage people in the process of discovery.</p></blockquote> <p>– Eric McLuhan, <em>in</em> BENEDETTI, Paul et DEHART, Nancy (1996). <em>Foward Through the Rearview Mirror: reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan</em>, Scarbourough: Prentice Hall Canada Inc., p. 45</p></span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SYiH2iMUhjI/AAAAAAAAFkI/mZNdQEbTb2Y/s1600-h/unChienMcLu.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 241px; height: 280px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SYiH2iMUhjI/AAAAAAAAFkI/mZNdQEbTb2Y/s400/unChienMcLu.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298634332562556466" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:180%;"> "My canvasses are surrealist,</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:180%;" > and to call them "theories" is to miss</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:180%;" > my satirical intent altogether</span><span style="font-size:180%;">."</span></div><center><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/image03.jpg" alt="MY CANVASSES ARE SURREALIST" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/paraMeta.jpg" alt="Para Meta" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanBackyardPhoto.jpg" /><br /><object height="800" width="600"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/twiggyXray.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/twiggyXray.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="800" width="600"></embed><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/TO.jpg" /><br /><object height="629" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/pervasiveMcLuhanism.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/pervasiveMcLuhanism.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="629" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><object height="600" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/Lufthansa.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/Lufthansa.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="600" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/5x2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/5x3.jpg" /><br /><object height="2777" width="600"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanGridBlast.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanGridBlast.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="2777" width="600"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /></center><br /><object height="673" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/tw.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/tw.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="673" width="800"></embed><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/jjmm.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/mars.jpg" /><br /><blockquote>Ezra Pound: "Nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherisation."</blockquote><br />Would you like to <span style="font-weight: bold;">START here >>></span> <a href="http://mycanvassesaresurrealist.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-canvasses-are-surrealist.html">MY CANVASSES ARE SURREALIST</a> or someWHERE in the <a href="http://mycanvassesaresurrealist.blogspot.com/2008/07/heuristic.html">MIDDLE</a>??? In any event, <span style="font-weight: bold;">when FINN-ished ! ... We invite you to Go Back to the Beginning and start again ... !? or you can read <span style="font-weight: bold;">sdrawkcab</span> or maybe skipping around randomly is the best path ? ...</span> NEW JUXTAPOSITIONS are possible BECAUSE we are always adding new 'percepts' and 'remixing' these 222 probes ... yes! IT'S ALIVE !<br /><br /><object height="800" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/thundercode.swf"><br /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/thundercode.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="800" width="800"></embed><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/PhaticCommunion.jpg" /><br /><center><br /><object height="800" width="600"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanStandUpRoutine.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanStandUpRoutine.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="800" width="600"></embed><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/nobody.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/5x4.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/5x5.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/1.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/3.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/4.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/5.jpg" /><br /><object height="800" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/mosaic.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/mosaic.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="800" width="800"></embed><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/6.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/7.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/8.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/9.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/10.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/11.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/12.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/13.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/UR_letter.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/BANANA.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/TalkingHead.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/AN.jpg" /><br /><br /><object height="300" width="400"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/discarnateManWalking.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/discarnateManWalking.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="300" width="400"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><br /><blockquote>the global village is populated with 'discarnate' human beings who no longer exist<br />as physical presences; instead the electronic or discarnate person is simply an image<br />or an information pattern, nothing more ...<br /><br />- Marshall McLuhan</blockquote><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SbwEPZD7bGI/AAAAAAAAGFs/Krr5TZEYjo8/s1600-h/ROBOTISM.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SbwEPZD7bGI/AAAAAAAAGFs/Krr5TZEYjo8/s400/ROBOTISM.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5313126322862255202" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SbwEPKiKvYI/AAAAAAAAGFk/2vllPsArANQ/s1600-h/WellAdjusted.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 357px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SbwEPKiKvYI/AAAAAAAAGFk/2vllPsArANQ/s400/WellAdjusted.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5313126318962556290" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SbwEO4lab8I/AAAAAAAAGFc/rNFxz3bQOdk/s1600-h/ServoMechanism.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 352px; height: 350px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SbwEO4lab8I/AAAAAAAAGFc/rNFxz3bQOdk/s400/ServoMechanism.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5313126314144329666" border="0" /></a><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/cheshireCAT.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/FW.jpg" /><br /><br />"... in experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter- irritants or technology. For those parts of our selves that we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter- irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to "ride with the punch," instead of "taking it on the chin." It can only be repeated that human history is a record of "taking it on the chin."<br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/thePilgrim.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/typo800.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/BumTranslation.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/TdotBRAINmap.jpg" /><br /><br /><object height="600" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/satellite.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/satellite.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="600" width="800"></embed><br /></object><br /><br /><object height="600" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/candlelight.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/candlelight.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="600" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><br /><object height="800" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/MarshallThunder.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/MarshallThunder.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="800" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/ubu.png" /><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/IRONy-ing.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/Stupid.jpg" /><br /><br /><object height="845" width="792"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/ax.swf"><br /><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/ax.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="845" width="792"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/mm1.jpg" /><br /><br /><center><br /><object height="300" width="600"><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/ff1.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/ff1.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#ffffff" height="300" width="600"></embed><br /></object><br />SSSStarting off behind with an end in view<br />prairie wet nursus came quick with a message in their mouths.<br />triangular Racketeers unfurl threelegged garbagecans<br />sworming with pomefructs ... They tally plausible whatsthats.<br />Somedivide dittoh pricker Paddy squattor<br />sumthelot bottlogger anntisquattor<br />Somedivide prittoh dicker squaddy Pattor<br />sumthelot anntilogger bottsquattor<br />oh what a meanderthalltale unleavenweight !<br /><object height="300" width="600"><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/ff.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/ff.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#ffffff" height="300" width="600"></embed><br /></object><br /></center><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/mm2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanPoundLetter1948.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CB39.jpg" /><br /><br /><center><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1uZYR3jmMng&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1uZYR3jmMng&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0ccVfit8Oqw&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0ccVfit8Oqw&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br /><br /><object><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZF8jej3j5vA?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZF8jej3j5vA?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br /></center><br /><blockquote>"<span style="font-weight: bold;">What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light</span>. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds — imagistic, sound, or tactile — from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once in the data bank. Discarnate man is as weightless as an astronaut but can move much faster. He loses his sense of private identity because electronic perceptions are not related to place. Caught up in the hybrid energy released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical “reality” that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive as any known drug. The mind, as figure, sinks back into ground and drifts somewhere between dream and fantasy. Dreams have some connection to the real world because they have a frame of actual time and place (usually in real time); fantasy has no such commitment."<br />-MM : The Global Village, page 97</blockquote><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_10.jpg" /><br /><center><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/aHKx9tMuoD4?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/aHKx9tMuoD4?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br /></center><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_11.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_9.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_8.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_12.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_7.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_13.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_6.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_14.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_5.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_15.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_4.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_16.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_3.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_17.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_18.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_19.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_1.jpg" /><br /><center><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/LetterToDon1.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/LetterToDon2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/LetterToDon3.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/Discovery.jpg" /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The following is a sample of the many "sheets" McLuhan 'mimeographed' and sent periodically to a small mailing-list of people who shared his interests. He often personalized these sheets with hand writtten comments at the end.</span><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/TV_Image_Mimeo1.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/TV_Image_Mimeo2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/MM_WatsonLetter1964.jpg" /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/S18XBkUALJI/AAAAAAAAHa4/ZO6vNFfokbc/s1600-h/WinnipegSchoolWiki.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 312px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/S18XBkUALJI/AAAAAAAAHa4/ZO6vNFfokbc/s400/WinnipegSchoolWiki.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5431084991326989458" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The Winnipeg School of Media Ecology emphasizes:</span><br /><br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>McLuhan's notion of Prairie Sky/Prairie Horizon/Prairie Space ... </li><li>McLuhan's 'Boondocks/Outsider/Pariah/Winnipigeon' perspective ... </li><li>the established themes and issues of the 'Prairie Post Modernism' of John Paizs/Guy Madden/The Winnipeg Film Group </li><li>a blinding enthusiasm for Burroughsian/Gysonian CutUps, Culture Jamming, Glitch Abuse, Speed Running, Plunderphonics/Dub/The Remix/MashUps/Turntablism/FLARF and Conceptual Poetry, Richard Meltzer's Aesthetics of Rock, Fluxus, Intermedia and Sun Ra </li><li>Menippean Satire, 'Corporate Psychaitry', Synchronistic Linguistics, Retrocausality, 'effects preceding causes', 'figures deprived of ground', Surrealism, Groucho Marxism, Pataphysics </li><li>Richard Cavell's <span style="font-style: italic;">McLuhan in Space</span> which reinvigorates McLuhan as a 'Space Theorist'... </li><li>" 'the put on' is a situation <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">we</span> study a great deal" </li><li>Arthur Kroker's <span style="font-style: italic;">Digital Humanism : The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan</span> </li><li>Don Theall's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Medium is the Rearview Mirror</span> & <span style="font-style: italic;">The Virtual Marshall McLuhan</span> </li><li>the critical importance of<span style="font-style: italic;"> The Letters Of Marshall McLuhan </span>[currently OOP]<br /></li><li>McLuhan's <span style="font-style: italic;">ESSENTIAL</span> review "Notes On Burroughs" Nation Magazine 1964</li><li>Andrew Chrystall's brilliant <span style="font-style: italic;">The New American Vortex : Explorations of McLuhan</span> [2008]</li><li><a href="http://www.earmap.com/tinynote/tinynoteChart.html"> Bob's Tiny Note Chart </a><br /></li><li>Eric McLuhan's <span style="visibility: visible; font-style: italic;" id="main"><span style="visibility: visible;" id="search">The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake</span></span></li><li>double emphasis on McLuhan's '<span style="font-style: italic;">eccentric</span>' notion of '<span style="font-style: italic;">TACTILITY</span>'</li><li>"my canvasses are surrealist ... "</li><li>" <span style="font-style: italic;">We live science fiction !</span>"</li><li>"We prefer to study the pattern rather than the theory"<br /></li><li> We prefer the term " Para-Modern" rather than Post-Modern<br /></li><li><span class="caption">"Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man." - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek, page 56, Feb.28, 1966</span></li></ul><img src="http://www.earmap.com/testsheet.jpg" /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/S8tUygnl2UI/AAAAAAAAHpA/p66d4wv-VUY/s1600/pointingdown.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 351px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/S8tUygnl2UI/AAAAAAAAHpA/p66d4wv-VUY/s400/pointingdown.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5461552199843043650" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="font-style: italic;"> note to dear reader </span> : <span style="font-weight: bold;">HERE ENDETH THE PREFACE</span> </span><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/ROTA.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/mmm.png" /><br /></center><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The following list of 'Menippean Topics' was found on several sheets of paper neatly tucked inside the record jacket of the Nino Rota soundtrack LP to Federico Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita,' which was purchased with about a dozen other records at a yard sale in The Annex neighbourhoood of Toronto, on a sunny Spring Saturday afternoon in 1986. As a sidenote, one of the other LPs purchased that day was a 'sealed copy' of Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music'2xLP, which was 'nabbed' for a measly 10 bucks. [Which co-incidently, has just been re-released in a digitally remastered edition on Sister Ray Recordings, and released on 180 gram Double Vinyl, AUDIO DVD and BLU-RAY.</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">MENIPPEAN TOPICS </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">TOPICS:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Almanackers.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Anonymous Author.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Apologiae for the Work.</span> 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).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Autonomous Author.</span> 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).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Autonomous Pen.</span> 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)."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bookseller.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Catalogs and Inventories.</span> 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).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Descent into the Underworld or Afterlife.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Diagrams and Drawings.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dialogs of the Dead.</span> A variant of the topics of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Banquet</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold;">Descent into the Underworld</span>, 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Digressiveness. </span>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 (<span style="font-weight: bold;">Dialogs of the Dea</span>d), 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Diogenes.</span> 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:<br /><blockquote>"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). </blockquote>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 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Dialogs of the Dead</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold;">Digressiveness</span> of time. It allows the Cynic spirit to be injected directly into the work.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do it Yourself.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Doggishness.</span> 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)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Euphuism.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Excess Baggage.</span> 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)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Fake books.</span> 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Fake Preface.</span> 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Fake Table of Contents.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Forcing the Reader to Think.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Gibberish.</span> 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Glosses.</span> 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 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Digressiveness</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Groping.</span> 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": <blockquote>"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)<br /></blockquote><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Honesty.</span> "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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How to Read the Book.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Inability to Edit Anything Out (feigned, of course).</span> This is related to such other topics as <span style="font-weight: bold;">Catalogs</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold;">Encyclopedism</span>. Examples: Harington, Sterne, Nashe, Swift.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Joco-seriousness--see Spoudogeloion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Kidding or Teasing of a Female Reader.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Lacunae. Cf. Digression.</span> 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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Language. </span>A variety of topics appear under this heading, which designates matters pertaining to the language found in Menippean satires.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bad Language.</span> 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)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Deluding Word.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Fake Etymologies.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Gibberish</span> as language (see above).<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Letters</span> 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.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Mixed Languages.</span> 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). 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.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Prose-Verse Mixture</span> 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 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Joco-Seriousness</span> (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.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Words as Gestures</span>, 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.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Words as Things</span>, 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): <blockquote>"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."</blockquote>The written or printed word is a thing, inarticulate in itself.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Laughter.</span> 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 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Digressiveness</span> 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Learning.</span> Cf. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Encyclopedism, Fake Books</span>. 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).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Medicinal.</span> 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: <blockquote>"… 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)</blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Memory of Time before Birth.</span> 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Method.</span> 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. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Moderns</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mock Eulogy.</span> 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)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Moderns.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Musical Notation.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mutilated Text.</span> 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 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Lacunae</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Natural Scale.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Non-sequitur.</span> 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Nothing.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Parody of New Forms.</span> 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 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Printing</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Philosophus Gloriosus.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Printing Conventions Trifled With.</span> Cf. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Parody</span>, 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..."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Projectors</span> as targets. This refers principally to the mad scientists and crazed philosophers of Swift's time (Cf. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Philosophus Gloriosus</span>): 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reader.</span> 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: <blockquote>"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)</blockquote>Evidently, Menippists, like the Cynics, regard "staying awake" as a full-time business.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Simultaneity of Past and Present.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Spoudogeloion. Cf. Joco-seriousness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tailors.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Talking Animal.</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tradition.</span> 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."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Universalizing.</span> Glib universalizing appears as the butt of many satires. Cf. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Philosophus Gloriosus</span> above. Practitioners include Cynics, Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Von Hutten, Erasmus, Flaubert.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Universal Schemes (treated variously, above).</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Whatever enters my head.</span> 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).<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">note to dear reader </span> : <span style="font-weight: bold;">THIS IS <span style="font-style: italic;">NOT </span>WHERE THE PREFACE</span> </span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">ENDETH<br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/joco.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/joyceNotes800.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/ReadingClub800.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/where.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanPoundLetter_Jan1951.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/LOLOMGWTF800.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/Carnivalesque800.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/TorontoLife800.jpg" /><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/mediaViolence.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="400" width="600"></embed><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanInnisLetter1951.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanInnisLetter1951_2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanInnisLetter1951_3.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanInnisLetter1951_4.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/FutureOfTheBook.png" /><br /><center><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Howth Castle and Environs.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hod, cement and edifices</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Haroun Childeric Eggeberth </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he calmly extensolies. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hic cubat edilis. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">How Copenhagen ended. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">happinest childher everwere. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">has its clever mechanics and each</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hush! Caution ! Echoland </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">How charmingly exquisite! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire's </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hither, craching eastuards, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hence, cool at ebb, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hatch, a celt, an earshare</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">here, creakish from age and all now quite epsilene,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hark, the corne entreats! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">homerigh, castle and earthenhouse. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hive, comb and earwax, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hung king. That you could fell an elmstree</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">have performed upon thee, thou abramanation, who comest ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he cursed and recursed and was everseen</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Humme the Cheapner, Esc, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">humile, commune and ensectuous </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hubbub caused in Edenborough. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hag Chivychas Eve, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his cronies it was equally</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Here Comes Everybody. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Habituels conspicuously emergent. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">H. C. Earwicker </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he clearly expressed </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hesitency was clearly to be evitated.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">H. C. Earwicker, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his chronometrum drumdrum and, now standing full erect,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hotel and creamery establishments </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">High Church of England </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Heidelberg mannleich cavern ethics) </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he could balbly call to memory that same kveldeve, ere</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hearings of a small and stonybroke cashdraper's executive,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hogshome they lovenaned The Barrel, cross Ebblinn's</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">He'll Cheat E'erawan </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hammerfast viking And Gall's curse on the day when Eblana</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his curtain's doom's doom. Ei</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">haardly creditable edventyres </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Haberdasher, the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">has come over the face on wholebroader E?),</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he fell for, Lili and Tutu, cork em!)</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hen and crusader everintermutuomergent, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">haughty, cacuminal, erubescent </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his limper looser. Yet certes one is. Eher</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he priest and king to that: ulvy came, envy</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">has been callit by a noted stagey elecutioner</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his revulverher in connections with ehim</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">holy nation, the common or ere-in-garden</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Humpheres Cheops Exarchas, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">had been jealous over, Lotta Crabtree or Pomona Evlyn.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">huge chain envelope, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hyde and Cheek, Edenberry, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hence these camelback excesses </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Houri of the coast of emerald,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her surrender, did not she, come leinster's even,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hatches Cocks' Eggs, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">He Done to Castlecostello, Sleeps with Feathers end</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heroic couplet from the fuguall tropical, Opus Elf,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hill and down coombe and on eolithostroton,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Howth or at Coolock or even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">haught crested elmer, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he conscious of enemies, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Ham's cribcracking yeggs, thereby at last eliminating</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his aerial thorpeto, Auton Dynamon, contacted with the expectant</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">halas, in the ordinary course, enabling</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">homelike cottage of elvanstone </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his corns either. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hesitency carried to excelcism) </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his sprogues as fail to certify whether the wartrophy eluded</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hastes and leisures, about to continue that,the queer mixture exchanged</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">highly commendable exercise, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him quatz unaccountably like the chrystalisations of Alum on Even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">high chief evervirens </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Helmingham Erchenwyne Rutter Egbert Crumwall Odin Maximus Esme Saxon Esa Vercingetorix Ethelwulf Rupprecht Ydwalla Bentley Osmund Dysart Yggdrasselmann? </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heather. Arm bird colour defdum ethnic</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">had just caused that the effect</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">H2 C E3 </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hagious curious encestor </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">had fled again (open shunshema!) this country of exile,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">had claimed endright, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Howforhim chirrupeth evereach </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Homo Capite Erectus, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">herringtons' white cravat, as, in epochs</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Handiman the Chomp, Esquoro, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">He Can Explain, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Howke Cotchme Eye, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Him Common Sex, A Nibble at Eve</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Huffy Chops Eads, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hardily curiosing entomophilust </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his belly coupled with an eye</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">happen along. In fact, under the closed eyes</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hidmost coignings of the <*page*> earth</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hanging committees, where two was enough</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heinousness of choice to everyknight</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hirish tutores Cornish made easy;</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heptagon crystal emprisoms </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his check at banck of Indgangd and endurses</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his doom at chapel exit;</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hock is leading, cocoa comes next, emery</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hatched at Cellbridge but ejoculated</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he could talk earish </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hwang Chang evelytime; </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hoveth chieftains evrywehr, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hereditatis columna erecta, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hagion chiton eraphon; </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him all life long; comm, eilerdich</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hallucination, cauchman, ectoplasm; </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he can get on as early</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hard cash earned </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hewitt Castello, Equerry, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hennery Canterel -- Cockran, eggotisters,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heard in camera and excruciated;</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heavengendered, chaosfoedted, earthborn; </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">honorary captain of the extemporised</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">H. C. Endersen </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his evenin and the crimes of Ivaun the Taurrible every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hears cricket on the earth</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">has come through all the eras</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hammurabi, or cowld Clesiastes, could espy</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">home, yeth cometh elope </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hoel of it, could such a none, whiles even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he carried me from the boat, my saviored of eroes,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hoost! Ahem! There's Ada, Bett, Celia, Delia, Ena,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his cashcash characktericksticks, borrowed for its nonce ends</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his duly mile? Or this is a perhaps cleaner example.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hypothesis on the outer tin sides), I can easily</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">haunting crevices for a deadbeat escupement</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hood! cries Antony Romeo),so one grandsumer evening,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he clanked, to my clinking, from veetoes to threetop, every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his polps were charging odours every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Heliogobbleus and Commodus and Enobarbarus</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hands! Their interlocative is conprovocative just as every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his odiose by comparison and that whiles eggs</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his most distant connections) but every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hearing a coarse song and splash off Eden</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he kept on treasuring with condign satisfaction each</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his entire low cornaille existence,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">history, climate and entertainment </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he misused and cuttlefishing every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her Cow, Adam and Ell,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Henressy Crump Expolled, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">House in Dreamcolohour, Battle of Waterloo, Colours, Eggs</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his cheeks and trousers changing colour every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his smell which all cookmaids eminently</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">He appreciates it. Copies. ABORTISEMENT.] One cannot even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">how that, arrahbejibbers, conspuent to the dominical order and exking</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">holy childhood up in this two easter</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">horrible awful poverty of mind so as you couldn't even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hear, colt Cooney? did ye ever,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Huges Caput Earlyfouler. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her but captain spliced? For mine ether</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">has a codfisck ee. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his childlinen scarf to encourage</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her catchment ring she freed them easy,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Her Chuff Exsquire! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her chapboucqs, old Mot Moore, Casey's Euclid</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her calamity electrifies </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">have charred. Kickhams a frumpier ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hibernonian market! All that and more under one crinoline envelope</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her seven crutches. And every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hircus Civis Eblanensis! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hirtly bemark, a community prayer, everyone</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">himself, and to conclude with as an exodus,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her brideness! Not Rose, Sevilla nor Citronelle; not Esmeralde,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Her beauman's gone of a cool. Be good enough</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his own cashel where every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his creature comfort was an omulette finas erbas</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his coronaichon, such as engines</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hiccups. The smartest vessel you could find would elazilee</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his near cissies, a mickly dazzly eely</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hopops so goholden! They've come to chant en</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he can eyespy </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heing in our created being of ours elvishness,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his whoozebecome woice. Ephthah! Cisamis! Examen</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heather cliff emurgency </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Howarden's Castle, Englandwales. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hulker's cieclest elbownunsense. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Housefather calls enthreateningly. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her crown pretenders, obscindgemeinded biekerers, varying directly, uruseye each</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hoots, screams, scarf drill, cap fecking, ejaculations</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">human chain extends, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hocus Crocus, Esquilocus, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hued and cried of each's</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he and what are the sound waves saying ceased ere</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">have thy children entered </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Herod with the Corm (*F2*)well's eczema</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him, a chump of the evums,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his chthonic exterior </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hoo cavedin earthwight </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hispano-Cathayan-Euxine, Castillian - Emeratic </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Haud certo ergo. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Honour commercio's energy </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">haunted. The chamber. Of errings.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">helm coverchaf emblem </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his Castlecowards never in the twowsers (*F2*)and ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">here's my cowrie card, I dalgo, with all my exes,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hce che ech, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hids cubid rute being extructed,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">habby cyclic erdor </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him, 2 while the catched and dodged exarx</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his sole salivarium. Concoct an equoangular</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his craft ebbing, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hoop ! As round as the calf of an egg!</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him! call a blood lekar! Where's Dr Brassenaarse?) Es</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hof cullchaw end </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hung cong. Item, mizpah ends.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hengler's Circus Entertainment, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">harbour craft emittences, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">harmonic condenser enginium </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">House of call is all their evenbreads</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Howe cools Eavybrolly! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">He was the carelessest man I ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him cheeringly, their encient, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Heave, coves, emptybloddy! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hoved politymester. Clontarf, one love, one fear. Ellers</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">husband's capture and either </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hero chief explunderer </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her coaxfonder, wiry eyes </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Heri the Concorant Erho, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">homey,well,that Dook can eye </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her changeable eye </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">here's the fust cataraction! As if ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hour for the chamber's ensallycopodium</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hermyn C. Entwhistle) </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his livepelts so cruschinly like Mebbuck at Messar and expousing</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">herdsquatters beyond the carcasses and I couldn't erver</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he confesses to everywheres </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">His Cumbulent Embulence, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his culothone in an exitous</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hercushiccups' care to educe. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">how comes ever a body</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hoody crow was ere. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">had contracted out of islands empire,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heaviest corpsus exemption) </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">having writing to do in connection with equitable</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hitch a cock eye, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hoax chestnote from exexive. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hearth and chem ney easy.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his chargehand bombing their eres.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hugon come er </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Horkus chiefest ebblynuncies! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hence counsels Ecclesiast. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hung Chung Egglyfella </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hired in cameras, extra! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hives the court to exchequer</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hunter, chemins de la croixes and Rosairette's egg,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hoovier, in your corpus entis</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">helo, chesth of champgnon, eye</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hulm culms evurdyburdy. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hang coersion everyhow! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hospitable corn and eggfactor, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hangars, chimbneys and equilines </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">how our seaborn isle came into exestuance,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he was completely drowned off Erin</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">How it did but all come eddaying</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">home, colonies and empire, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hear, Caller Errin!) </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heroest champion of Eren </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">highly continental evenements, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hundred and sixty odds rods and cones of this even's</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">house quay, amiable with repastful, cheerus graciously, cheer us! Ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hireark Books and Chiefoverseer Cooks in their Eusebian</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hungry will be done! On the continent as in Eironesia.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his fore feelhers, flexors, contractors, depressors and extensors,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him, compound eyes </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his smalls. As entomate as intimate could pinchably be. Emmet</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">His Christian's Em? </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Here Commerces Enville. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">House Condamned by Ediles. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Helpless Corpses Enactment. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he caught the europicolas </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">how I am extremely ingenuous at the clerking even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he could playact, collaspsed in ensemble</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">how are Bernadetta's columbillas? and Juliennaw's tubberbunnies? and Eulalina's</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hayes, Conyngham and Erobinson </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his lost angeleens is corkyshows do morvaloos, blueygreen eyes</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">happy, communionistically, among the fieldnights eliceam,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hereupon part company. So for e'er</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">home cooking everytime. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hormonies to clingleclangle, fudgem, kates and eaps</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">how I'll try and collect my extraprofessional</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his old continence and not on one foot either</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">home cured emigrant </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he could ever </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he can cantab as chipper as any oxon ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hurts and daimons, spites and clops, not even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hunkalus Childared Easterheld. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his lost chance, Emania </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">humeplace of Chivitats Ei, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his truetoflesh colours, either </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">have occasioning cause caus <*page*> ing effects</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">habit following Mezienius connecting Mezosius including was verted embracing</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hell's Confucium and the Elements!</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his conscience and every </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hullo Eve Cenograph in prose and worse every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his coglionial expancian? </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Holy snakes, chase me charley, Eva's</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his consumers? Your exagmination </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hosty's and Co, Exports, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">healed cured and <*page*> embalsemate,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hold the freedman's chareman! Christ light the dully expressed!</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hori <*page*> zon cloth! All effects</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">holy floor and culprines of Erasmus</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him circuly. Evovae! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">How culious an epiphany! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hodie casus esobhrakonton? </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">huggerknut cramwell energuman, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his feet in the usual course and was ever</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his life. Then, begor, counting as many as eleven</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">half noon, click o'clock, pip emma,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hostages and Co, Engineers, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">homosexual catheis of empathy </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hotchkiss Culthur's Everready, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his comfy estably </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him citing from approved lectionary example</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">homelies of creed crux ethics.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Human Conger Eel! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hand. Kyrielle elation! Crystal elation!</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">here and with maternal sanction compellably empanelled</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">halt! Sponsor programme and close down. That's enough,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Ho, croak, evildoer! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">has entered. Big big Calm, announcer. It is most ernst</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">handshakey congrandyoulikethems, ecclesency. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Haveth Childers Everywhere </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hodder's and Cocker's erithmatic. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hard casted thereass pigstenes upann Congan's shootsmen in Schottenhof, ekeascent?</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">highly respectable, planning new departure in Mountgomery cyclefinishing, eldest</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">haunted, condemned and execrated, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his many benefactresses, calories exclusively</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hery Crass Evohodie. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heard it by mmummy goods waif, as I, chiefly endmost</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her, arsched overtupped, from bank of call to echobank,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her aldritch cry oloss unheading, what though exceeding</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hump the body of the camell: I screwed the Emperor</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her chastener ever </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">huge Chesterfield elms </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his poor old dying boosy cough, esker,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he was cured enough </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Holiday, Christmas, Easter </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hemself and Co, Esquara, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her to silence and coort; each</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">have said better) to complore, with complete obsecration, on everybody</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his streamline secret. They care for nothing except</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Helius Croesus, that white and gold elephant</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">How chimant in effect! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Horsehem coughs enough. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Honuphrius is a concupiscent exservicemajor</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his slave, Mauritius, to ur;,e Magravius, a commercial, emulous</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his marital rights she may cause reprehensible conduct between Eugenius</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his conjunct in thirtynine several manners (turpiter! affirm ex</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">her case tomorrow for the ordinary Guglielmus even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heathen church emergency </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">held supremely that, as no property in law can exist</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hecklar's champion ethnicist. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hot and cold and electrickery</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Herenow chuck english </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Heinz cans everywhere </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">huskiest coaxing experimenter </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Humpfrey, champion emir, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hiphigh bearserk! Third position of concord! Excellent</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">How blame us? Cocorico! Armigerend everfasting</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his parasangs in cornish token: mean fawthery eastend</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his certain questions vivaviz the secret empire</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hugest commercial emporialist, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, exposition</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he was chogfulled to beacsate on earn</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">honoured christmastyde easteredman. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hand from the cloud emerges,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">holding a chart expanded. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his course, amid the semitary of Somnionia. Even</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Heliotropolis, the castellated, the enchanting.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">horned cairns erge, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Henge Ceol <*page*> leges, Exmooth,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hoseshoes, cheriotiers and etceterogenious </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hailed chimers' ersekind; </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">holiday crowd encounter; </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hygiennic contrivance socalled from the editor;</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">he; when no crane in Elga</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hullow chyst excavement; </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heat, contest and enmity. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Homos Circas Elochlannensis! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Higgins, Cairns and Egen. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hagiographice canat Ecclesia. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his borrowed chafingdish, before cymbaloosing the apostles at every</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hearable a cry and to each</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his crown on the Eurasian</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hump cumps Ebblybally! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Health, chalce, endnessnessessity! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Have we cherished expectations? </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">homely codes, known as eggburst,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">highly charged with electrons </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hophazards can effective </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">had the shames to suggest can we ever?</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hartiest that Coolock ever! </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">his pooraroon Eireen, they'll. Pride, comfytousness, enevy!</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">helpyourselftoastrool cure's easy. </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">him. But you came safe through. Enough</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">Hoteform, chain and epolettes, </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">hardest crux ever.</span><br /></center><br /></span></span><br /><a href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/1.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/sm_01.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/2.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/sm_02.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/4.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/sm_04.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/5.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/sm_05.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/6.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/sm_06.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/7.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/war/sm_07.jpg" /></a> <a 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src="http://www.earmap.com/MAGRITmm.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/mosaic2.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/computor.png" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/mosaic3.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/tmitm800.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/mosaic4.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/ProfessorMcLuhan.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/mosaic5.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/Mars.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/asciiMars800.png" /><br /><br /><object height="3200" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/eight.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/eight.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="3200" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_11.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_9.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_8.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_12.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_7.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_13.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_6.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_14.jpg" /><br /><object height="3200" width="`800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/thunderType.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/thunderType.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="3200" width="800"></embed><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhan_Tyrwhitt_Letter1964.jpg" /><br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="visibility: visible; font-weight: bold;" id="main"><span style="visibility: visible;" id="search"><em>A Media Approach to Inflation</em> </span></span></span><br /><span class="postbody"><br />By Marshall McLuhan<br /><br />September 21, 1974<br /><br />TORONTO - Until now there have been many equilibrium theories of inflation. I am going to propose a disequilibrium theory based on the discontinuous nature of the electric information of today.<br /><br />In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith got economics into orbit by linking the laws of the market to the automatism of the Newtonian universe. By this rhetorical device, the laws of economics were given a rigor and lucidity that they did not then or now possess. At least Adam Smith gave his theories some relevance to the then dominant science of astronomy.<br /><br />Today, however, in the electric age when The Word Makes The Market, inflation theory still lumbers along the wagon wheels of nineteenth-century rhetoric. The Marxists say inflation can be cured with more production, while the Keynesians say it can be cured with more money applied at the right place and time. Whereas all current inflation theories tend toward Newtonian rationality and balance, there is a huge disequilibrium factor of irrationality that results from information movement in simultaneous and instantaneous patterns.<br /><br />These patterns are sometimes mistaken for "trends" in media behavior. As Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber wrote in his book, "The Power to Inform"; <span style="font-style: italic;">"One of the most easily confirmed consequences of media activity is the instability that can be created through the media's ability to exacerbate certain trends. This happened during the world monetary crisis that took shape in the 1960s. As soon as dollars started to move en masse into Germany, the press described it as a flood. The movement did in fact take on vast proportions because even modest speculators wanted to benefit from the situation. The press in turn wrote in terms of a veritable panic. Then all holders of capital got the news and reacted accordingly, and the dam burst under a pressure that had been generate solely by the media. The same kind of psychic battering ram brought about the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 and 1973."</span><br /><br />The twentieth century opened with Max Planck's theory of quantum mechanics in 1900, stating the discontinuity of the material universe. In the same year Sigmund Freud published his "Interpretation of Dreams" stating the discontinuities of our conscious and unconscious lives. So far as I am aware, economists have not yet matched physics and psychology with any statement of the discontinuity of the economic bond. All existing theories of inflation are hardware theories, nuts and bolts theories, theories of connected and continual rational processed of supply and demand.<br /><br />The equilibrium theories of supply and demand concern the quantities of "hardware" as it were, whereas the disequilibrium realities occur at the speed of "software." "Software" is the world of electric information and also computer programming. It can, however, be understood to include the entire world of electronic service environments that began with the telegraph and which include the telephone as well as television and satellites. All of these constitute a new service environment of electronics pulsation which makes possible the dealing in "futures" and the anticipation of the gaps and intervals in supply and demand.<br /><br />At electric speeds of information movement, it is precisely these intervals that invite the dealer in "futures" to gamble. Instant information reveals a wide diversity of new patterns of change; which entice everybody to anticipate changes to come. Ordinary people are thus inspired with the mania which is born of perception, not of the connection, but of the interval between the now and the rapidly approaching new situation. This becomes a way of living "as if every moment were your next."<br /><br />The instant and simultaneous have no sequence or connections, but are characterized by resonant intervals and discontinuity. In the new world environment of instant information there is need to pay attention to the neglected factor of the gap or interval as crux in creating inflation.<br /><br />As long as there is an interval of play between the wheel and the axle, there is a rotary action. It is the interval of play that keeps the wheel and axle in touch. And the gap or interval is "where the action is." This fact has gained special attention from the new physics; and it is in the very opening of "The Nature of the Chemical Bond" that Linus Pauling explains there are "no connections" in matter. The development of the theory of quantum mechanics has also introduced into chemical theory a new concept, that of resonance ... and it is our resonant interval ..." What is most relevant here to the nature of inflation may perhaps be seen from the way in which the gap or interval in things creates the mentality of the gambler:<br /><br /></span> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="90%"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="genmed"><b>Quote:</b></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="quote"><span style="font-style: italic;">He either fears his fate too much,<br />Or his deserts are small,<br />Who fears to put it to the touch<br />To win or lose it all.</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <span class="postbody"><br /><br />It is precisely "touch that is the resonating world of the gap or interval. Touch is literally created by a resonant interval, between, say the hand and the thing. If there were any connection between the hand and the thing, there would be no hand. The gambler is above all the man who must stay in touch, and in the new "physics of the instantaneous electric environment it is precisely the resonant interval or "touch" that characterizes the information that constitutes the universal accessibility of instant information.<br /><br />•<br /><br />For the dominant environment of our age has itself become information or "software." Since at electric speed any <span style="font-style: italic;">figure</span> tends to become <span style="font-style: italic;">ground</span>, and anything, however trivial, can acquire infinite mass, the temptation and the desire to gamble with everything and anything becomes obsessive. One dollar at the speed of light can do as many transactions as a million at pre-electric speeds. Quantitative projections and rational critiques cannot cope here.<br /><br />In the new electric environment almost any situation has a structure eligible for gambling, much as Lloyds of London was prepared to insure any part of the body - busts, legs, or even states of mind and popularity - against the whims of chance. Using the language of gestalt psychology, it could be said that inflation makes everything a <span style="font-style: italic;">figure</span> against the <span style="font-style: italic;">ground</span> of public interest. <span style="font-style: italic;">Figure</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">ground</span> constitute the structure of most situations and are in perpetual interface of flux. However, in the pulsating world of the intervals in electric information, there are innumerable opportunities to seize and abstract the interval itself as a new kind of object to be exploited.<br /><br />There are days when large bodies of corporate funds are not in use, and the idea readily occurs: "Why not make them electrically available for a few hours to some other part of the world?" It was perhaps the dawning awareness of the utility of the interval that prompted the phrase "time is money." At electric speeds, however, a very little time can become a very great deal of money. Inflation makes everything a figure for the public, even as the figure obscures the ground. <span style="font-style: italic;">Play</span> is interface between a <span style="font-style: italic;">figure</span> and a <span style="font-style: italic;">ground</span> (with a suitable interval between them). Gambling is play that uses the <span style="font-style: italic;">interval itself as a thing.</span> Another way of putting it: To gamble is to project the present <span style="font-style: italic;">figure</span> into a "future" which anticipates the possession and control of more or less of the same.<br /><br />Equilibrium theory, when applied to money, seeks to relate available goods and services by maintaining a quantity of money suited to the encouragement of exchange. Government spending can intervene toward the achieving of such equilibrium. However, all equilibrium theory, whether of supply and demand of goods and services, or credit and interest rates, is based on the old quantitative assumptions of "hardware." Equilibrium theory ignores the quantum leap in the economy which occurs at electric speed of information. Gresham's Law had reported a flip in the structure of exchange which occurred when "bad money" entered the market (it drove out the good).<br /><br />In the days of "hardware" currencies when a dollar bill carried the phrase "pay to the bearer one dollar in gold," it was a way of dealing in "futures," simply to hoard the money itself. That is, the gold would increase in price simply by being held out of circulation. Now that all money is merely the promise to pay promises, it becomes "bad money" during inflation because all money diminishes in value merely by being held. Money then becomes a means of levying taxation without representation.<br /><br />The same "interval" which prompted the holder of gold coins to hoard the good ones, the unalloyed, now prompts the holder of paper money to gamble and to invest in "futures," for the present and future of money is a diminishing utility. The old impulse to hoard gold now opens the market in antiques, on the one hand, while "gambling" becomes a way of unloading the new liabilities constituted and incurred by the inflated currency. 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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />•<br /><br />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." The old journalism had aimed at the objectivity by "giving both sides at once." The new journalism seeks, rather, to immerse the reader in the total situation, using the resources of imaginative fiction to provide a multileveled experience.<br /><br />The new journalism is quite prepared to urge that "news" is necessarily a form of fiction or making. IN the same way, the new economy is based on information and gaps and promises, and precisely to the degree that the new economy is based on the simultaneous, it fosters, invites, demands the rule of the anticipatory, the role of the hunter that the blow must strike where the quarry will be.<br /><br />It is the peculiar character of the gambler that he seeks to exploit this very "nothing" or "interval" as a situation with its own laws. On this situation, or reified interval, he is prepared to make his bet. And it is the intervals in the processes of the commodity market which, at electric speed, are projected as figure or "thing." The Russian roulette player stakes his life on the intervals in the chamber. The enthralling and all-involving fascination of Russian roulette is the obsession with the gap or interval.<br /><br />Like the current dealing in "futures" at electric speeds, Russian roulette accelerates the older forms of gambling. The answer comes quickly, and the fascination is in the ratio to the speed of the answer - the fascination of the one armed bandit or slot-machine. At this point Maslow's Rule comes into play: "The closer a need comes to being satisfied, the larger an increment of additional gratification will be required to produce the same satisfaction."<br /><br />The new inflation goes beyond all markets, turning them into art form or <span style="font-style: italic;">play</span> grounds for economic playboys. The breakdown of markets into playgrounds may also point to a cure for inflation, a cure beyond economics and politics when the planet becomes a theater for the new role-players like Henry A. Kissinger. He is neither a bureaucrat nor a professor nor a politician, but all of these things at once.<br /><br />The fact that our economy is now constituted in large degree by information structures of <span style="font-style: italic;">pulsating data</span> (like that of the TV image) means that there are innumerable new intervals in every social situation which provide opportunities for new involvements and obsessions, endless games with futures in antiques, in horoscopes, fashions, and commodities.<br /><br />Such opportunities are nowhere thicker than in the old commodity markets of supply and demand, especially when they move at the speed of light. It is here that it is possible to buy up "futures" in oil, or meat, or grain, or real estate, or antiques, using the time intervals between supply and demand as the point of intervention and gambling. At electric speed it is possible to play Russian roulette with whole economies, with entire educational systems and with political regimes.<br /><br />Henry Kissinger seems to be the current triggerman in this planetary game among the intervals of first, second, third and fourth worlds, the first world being the industrialized West, the second being Russian Socialism, the third the nonindustrialized lands, and the fourth the electric world that has gone around the rest, becoming the <span style="font-style: italic;">primum mobile</span> of inflation in all the rest.<br /><br />Perhaps there is no better way of indicating the discontinuous simultaneous pattern of the new situation in economics and society than to point to the nature of the TV image, which is structured by innumerable pulsations which move toward the viewer through the monitor. The TV image is literally constituted by a mesh or mosaic of live intervals which provide an overwhelming inducement to involvement on the part of the TV audience. The entire world of electric information now presents pulsating intervals for the intervention and involvement of the world population. The Arabs had small chance for action in the old "hardware" world of specialist markets and production. The new software world of electric information offers them ample entry points and intervals.</span></div><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_5.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_15.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_4.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_16.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/type.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_3.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_17.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/wakeNotes800x673.jpg" /><br /><object height="3200" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/MMtimeline.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/MMtimeline.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="3200" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/GRIDview1.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CourseOutline.png" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_2.jpg" /><br /><object height="3200" width="800"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/symballein.swf"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/symballein.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" height="3200" width="800"></embed><br /><br /></object><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_18.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_19.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/CP800/McL0609_1.jpg" /><br /><br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">THROWING A SNOWBALL WITH A ROCK IN IT – Momentum Mori for Marshall McLuhan</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">By Gerald O’Grady</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">(Marshall McLuhan, Director of the Center for Culture and Technology</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">at the University of Toronto, died on December 31, 1980. Gerald</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">O'Grady, who remembers him here, is President of Media Study/</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Buffalo.)</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Is it what's in the jigger that makes them bigger?" - Marshall</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">McLuhan, commenting on the Lord Calvert's whiskey “Men of Distinction”</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">ad.</span></span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">There is not a moment to be lost in dumping another generation of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">readers into the drink, the stormy seas of Marshall McLuhan's mind.</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">His major books created a cultural thunderstorm throughout the 1960's.</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Every literary man of distinction - Benjamin DeMott, Dwight Macdonald,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, Harold Rosenberg, Tom Wolfe, Richard</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Schickel, Michael Arlen and scores of others - attempted to navigate</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">his waters.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">By the end of the decade, their various essays were gathered in three</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">critical anthologies, all titled "McLuhan" and subtitled "Hot and</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cool," "Pro and Con" and "Sense and Nonsense." All had got caught in</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">his maelstrom and drowned. We have had another decade to think why</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">that happened.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Their attention was almost entirely spent on misunderstanding McLuhan</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">as a popular medium rather than understanding his work. They spent so</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">much effort in falsely charging him with believing that human culture</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">was determined by technology that they missed the human-motivated</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">trajectory of his lifelong project. It went unnoticed that the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">leitmotif of his three major books was the "man" of their subtitles,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">and that each approached media from a different perspective.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Mechanical Man" (1951) attempted to</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">understand the NEW MYTHOLOGY created by newspapers, magazines and</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">advertising.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man" (1962) was</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">HISTORICAL and juxtaposed a mosaic of meditations on the cultural</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">interactions arising from the invention of the printing press.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (1964) was FORMAL,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">treating the media as models and structures shaping our physical</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">environment by extending our senses. For McLuhan, every man was a</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">center for understanding media.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">His critics seemed obsessed with deriving a theory from his writings,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">coming to them with the academic expectancy for the definitive</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">treatment of a field called communications. They never grasped that</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">his meaning was merged with his method, and that the method rested</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">entirely and completely on metaphor, that every word, sentence and</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">paragraph he wrote was part of a process to generate insight, not to</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">establish classifications. He would create new words like</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">colloidoscope by jamming together colloid and kaleidoscope. He would</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">force new identifications in sentences like “The medium is the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">message" or "The user is the content.” His books worked the same way.</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"The Gutenberg Galaxy" begins by considering a sixteenth century</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">English play, "King Lear," and then, a few pages later, thrusts it up</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">against Kikuyu love magic ceremonies in twentieth century Africa. He</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">loved to make things collide.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">We traded definitions of the symbol. He liked the one I found by the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">American architect Louis Sullivan, "a snowball with a rock in it,"</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">delighting all the more because Sullivan was unaware that the Greek</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">word "sym-ballein" literally meant "to throw with,"… "to throw</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">(things) together." He was even happier when he found Marilyn Monroe's</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">reply to an interviewer who asked if she were a sex symbol: "You mean</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">those things that bands bang together?" He was himself highly</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">sensitive to such sound effects and later defined symbolism as "a kind</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">of witty jazz." Jazz is characterized by improvisation and by special</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">features peculiar to the individual interpretation of a player. When</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">he wrote that "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave," he was clearly</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">asking to be apprehended as a poet, but his critics would not allow</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">it. He understood that the plowshares of the agricultural field had</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">been beaten into the television antennas of the electronic field, but</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">they didn't, even though the slang term of being on someone's</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"wavelength" (to understand) had already entered the language many</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">years before. No one, for example, ever saw that "Understanding Media"</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">was a poetic book, a magical number of prefatory chapters (seven)</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">being followed by 26 more dealing with the social and psychic</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">consequences of the new media, symbolically equal to the number of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">letters in the old alphabet. Such strategies and games were beyond his</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">readers even though he provided a clue, subtitling his chapter on</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">games "extensions of man,” which was also the subtitle of his book on</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">all the media.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">McLuhan’s critics persisted until his death. Last week, American</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">television</span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">networks called him “the philosopher of pop” and the New York Times</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"the prophet of grooviness.” They entirely missed the point that</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">McLuhan was a cultural conservative and that, to the extent that his</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">vision of contemporary culture was existential, it was shaped by his</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">conversion and deep commitment to Roman Catholicism. While British</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">culture knew how to understand the work of a Graham Greene and French</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">culture the writings of a Gabriel Marcel, American critics were either</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">ignorant of or embarrassed by this aspect of McLuhan. It has taken</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">time to see that this Canadian presented us with a European</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">foreignness which was not quite comprehensible. The worst joke was his</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">being called “the apostle of advertising.” He did say: "The ads are by</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">far the best parts of any magazine or newspaper. Ads are news. What is</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">wrong with them is that they are always good news." But he was aware</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">that "good news" meant "gospel" and that contemporary mechanical and</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">electronic media, just because they were financed in this country by</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">advertising, placed a tremendous emphasis on the acquisition of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">material goods. In fact, his strategy was to conVERT us from our</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">adVERTising-induced VERTigo by reading his prose VERse. He knew the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">turns of meaning of all of these words (verto – turn).</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">He made this clear in his introduction to "The Mechanical Bride." He</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">wrote: "In 'A Descent into the Maelstrom,' Poe's sailor saved himself</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">by studying the action of the whirlpool and by cooperating with it.</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The present book likewise makes few attempts to attack the very</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">considerable currents and pressures set up around us today by the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies and advertising…. It</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">his own situation that gave him a thread which led him out of the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">labyrinth. And it is in the same spirit that this book is offered as</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">an amusement."</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">McLuhan’s critics were not amused. They never saw the importance of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">the enjoyment and fun in his work and because they never took his</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">metaphoric method seriously, they were unable to apprehend that his</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">style was the result of a careful deliberation, and that he was</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">nothing if not serious. I remember going with him once to visit</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Buckminster Fuller at his World Resources Inventory office above a</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">women's beauty salon in Carbondale, Illinois, and our retreating</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">around the corner to a Dunkin' Donut shop with Fuller's colleague, the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">late John McHale. McLuhan told us a joke about a bartender's false eye</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">dropping, unnoticed, into the cocktail of a customer. Later he became</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">constipated and went to a proctologist who, upon examining him,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">eyeball to eyeball, said: "What's the matter, don't you trust me?"</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">This story turned out to be a parable (Greek PARA-BALLEIN, "to throw</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">side by side," related to our parabola) for the constipation of our</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">visual sense, one of McLuhan's basic ideas being that "the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">man from the magic world of the ear to the neutral world of the eye."</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">He felt that a culture tuned to the voice and the ear was more</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">involving and participative, while one centered on the eye was</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">individuating and alienating.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">He once told me, in the course of a telephone call, that "conversation</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">was the ‘depthiest' medium." And I can now recognize that it, too, was</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">rooted in a TURNING back and forth, a give and take, a dialogic of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">oral form. His own awareness of the pressures which the new media were</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">placing on language did not mean that he failed to note that "language</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">was the first mass medium." He meant of course, that everyone had</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">access to speaking it (the literal meaning of "infant," by the way, is</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"unable to speak"). He was ironically aware that his own message was</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">given great resonance and amplification on broadcast television</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">through "talk shows" in which everyone had access only to listening.</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">When he appeared at Rice University in 1965, he gave a lecture which</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">few were attentive enough to understand. He was consciously developing</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">a new kind of lecture performance in which the audience would overhear</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">him talking to and with himself. If the audience wished to swing and</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"turn" with him, it had to engage and involve itself, an effort which</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">he explained in terms of a popular version of a Robert Browning verse:</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a metaphor."</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Understanding McLuhan was possible only if one were open to continual</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">transpositions of language. He called slang "language on the hoof" and</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">wrote: "Slang is based not on theories but on immediate experience."</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">When I first tried to make students aware of the pattern of his work,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">it was in the context of a "free university" course offered to</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">graduate and undergraduate students at Rice University, the University</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">of St. Thomas and the University of Houston in that city, and it was</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">found that the only time they could all arrange their schedules to</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">meet was at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. The course was playfully</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">referred to as "10 o'clock Mass Culture,' and then "10 o'clock Mascom"</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">on the analogy to the title of John McHale's review of "The Gutenberg</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Galaxy" which was entitled "The Man from Mascom" (Progressive</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Architecture, 1967), and finally, by a student who had the kind of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">perception, earthiness, honesty and comic sense that McLuhan himself</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">would have appreciated "10 o'clock come." It was in his March, 1969</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">interview in Playboy (how and where else!) that McLuhan revealed that</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">his puns and hyperboles (Greek HYPER-BALLEIN, "to throw high" - to</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">exaggerate) were strategies for drawing attention to his new insights.</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">In another interview, he said: "My books are not packages, but part of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">a dialogue, part of a conversation." Never did a person give so many</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">clues as to how to understand his work.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">My own conversation with Marshall McLuhan had begun as an</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">undergraduate when I read his Cambridge University graduate</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">dissertation on "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Culture of His</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Time" (unpublished, 1942). My interest was in the rhetorical</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">strategies of late medieval prose and Nashe was an early Renaissance</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">prose writer. McLuhan's treatment was linear and sequential and clear,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">just what his later critics would have admired. They were mystified</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">when McLuhan quoted a passage from Nashe in "The Gutenberg Galaxy," a</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">description of Hero’s first seeing Leander's drowned body tossed up on</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">a shore after a storm at sea, and remarked: "Read aloud by a trained</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">rhetorician from the new grammar schools, the passage takes on the</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">brash variety of a Louis Armstrong trumpet solo." McLuhan was writing</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">about the same century, but now the whole style, not just this</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">allusion, was jazz. In the same way, my reading of a straightforward</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">and diagram-laden 1960 "Report on Project in Understanding New Media"</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">prepared me for the jazz version best-seller, "Understanding Media:</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Extensions of Man," which was not released until 1964. The style</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">of these later books, in each case, was conversational and dialogic,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">and they were calculated to be experienced heuristically, that is, to</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">engender as many insights by the reader as by the writer. Critic after</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">critic made the standard observation that the difficulty with McLuhan</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">was that he was trying to use an old medium (print) to explain about</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">new ones (movies, television), but exactly the opposite was true. He</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">had retreated to a deliberate mimesis of the oral form (language)</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">which was centered on memory in order to talk about the new recorded</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">forms (print, film, etc.) which brought us a new form of stored or</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">canned wisdom. Martin Williams' comment on phonograph records in "The</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Jazz Tradition" is apposite to an understanding of McLuhan's books:</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Thus phonograph records are in a sense a contradiction of the meaning</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">of music. That is, they tend to make permanent and absolute, music</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">that is created for the moment. On the other hand, records attest that</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">what is made up for the moment can survive the moment aesthetically."</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">As the sponsors of his research in the new media might indicate,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Marshall McLuhan was a teacher. He wanted to release us from the ad</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">world, to switch from Calvert, as it were, and he offered us a</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">stylistic highball (without eyeball) so potent that anyone taking a</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">drink had to run the risk of drowning. He was not the oracle of</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Madison Avenue but a magician of media who, like Shakespeare's</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Prospero, was willing to say "I'll drown my book," once he had saved</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">us from shipwreck and worked his "end upon our senses." When asked if</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">he himself understood what he wrote, he joked: "I don't pretend to</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult." He took his</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">definition of education, "how kids learn stuff," from the mouth of a</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">seven-year old, and Elizabethan explorer that he was, fully realized</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">that his great global village itself was an "unsubstantial pageant"</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">and that "We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Is rounded with a sleep (The Tempest. IV, i. 156-158).</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[An earlier version of this essay was published in THE BUFFALO NEWS,</span></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sunday, January 11, 1981.]</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/McLuhanPoundLetter1951.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/5x3.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/EVOLLOVE.png" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/elecutio.jpg" /><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/umCollage.png" /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rfWPw45AfhM/TqsIyvokKoI/AAAAAAAAMWA/PKE239hCSIE/s1600/83.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 305px;" 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href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/counter/72.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/counter/sm_72.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/counter/73.html"><img src="http://aphasic-letters.com/media/edit/counter/sm_73.jpg" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><img src="http://www.earmap.com/GenuineFake.jpg" /><br /></span></span></div></center>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-46915375021512815062008-08-16T13:00:00.006-05:002012-01-28T09:09:40.158-06:00window pipe<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-ndIlnClIOzpzdmZ2UO4dMet3Trpw8g9kJAIJkOLGoXZCd8n0W_Y_GS661lIjTqBcYA3ZZmx8eKAGKkyPYYwmDSKyltxEgxSqRvytQJ6PORXENs1nghp78CUlMBX7tqG6PgsP3rqmancG/s1600-h/donTheall.bmp"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 286px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-ndIlnClIOzpzdmZ2UO4dMet3Trpw8g9kJAIJkOLGoXZCd8n0W_Y_GS661lIjTqBcYA3ZZmx8eKAGKkyPYYwmDSKyltxEgxSqRvytQJ6PORXENs1nghp78CUlMBX7tqG6PgsP3rqmancG/s400/donTheall.bmp" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287889604672324450" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In the penultimate section of the penultimate book of Finnegans Wake, Joyce's dreaming hero, imagining himself to be a figure called Yawn, is submitted to an interrogation involving a variety of modes of hermeneutics-historical understanding, psychoanalytic interpretation, modem spiritual self-reflection-before emerging as the awakened "democratic" man announced by radio broadcast at the beginning of the Fourth Book, which opens with the revolutionary outcry:<br /><span style="font-size:-2;"><blockquote>Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!<br />Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array!<br />surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludy world. 0 rally,<br />0 rally, 0 rally! Phlenxty, 0 rally! (FW: 593.01).</blockquote></span><br />Here communication technology operating in the interest of a revolution oriented towards participatory democracy is related to the liberation of Ireland from England. In the process Joyce examines the images of domination and control with which he was obsessed at the beginning of his writing career: church, state, family. In a brief article it is not possible to explore such questions as: Joyce's satire of Freud and Jung (paralleling that of Deleuze or Artaud) in the figure of Alice, who is "jung and easily freudened," to use a familiar example; nor of the nationalist entrepreneur Napoleon; nor, the cynical manipulations of the Church throughout the history of Europe; nor the "papa" figure behind the "Gestapose" (FW 332.07),to mention only a few.<br /><br />Two key theoretic conceptions developed by Joyce in his youth are central to understanding these issues: his concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">epiphany</span> (a term often echoed by John O'Neill in his writings on social theory) and his concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">vivisection</span> by which <span style="font-style: italic;">poetry produces a dynamic imaginary reproduction of the everyday world. It does so by playing with the signs by which the world communicates with itself.</span> Most poetic works, in one of their aspects, present sociology in action through such a vivisective process :<br /><span style="font-size:-2;"><blockquote><br />-The modem spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient spirit accepted phenomena with a bad grace .... The modem method examines its territory by the light of day .... All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive States, [and] presumptive Redeemers and Churches. It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption. If you were an aesthetic philosopher you would take note of all my vagaries because here you have the spectacle of the aesthetic instinct in action (Joyce, 1955: 186).</blockquote></span><span style="font-style: italic;">This vivisective concept implies that the poet-artist explores communicative activity, for the community in action manifests itself in communicating.</span> The Epiphany, a moment of intense clarity, renders forth the specific nature of a material, verbal, or imaginary artefact, whether it is an object, an event or a turn of phrase.<br /><br />Read Don Theall's <a href="http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/531/437">MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND JAMES JOYCE: BEYOND MEDIA</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC4RggpIJgk6BC-pm6B7SL43n1Ex2ntbRdtuIqSip87KLwOBVrA_aAspCIET-RqFc5r-hPehnbpaZixgbg7bYTfZKBVpSTX-souWme5bXRmZ9fDOmsxcanDb9Lf3g8F-uIxMUqih27-Dc/s1600-h/windowsPipe.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC4RggpIJgk6BC-pm6B7SL43n1Ex2ntbRdtuIqSip87KLwOBVrA_aAspCIET-RqFc5r-hPehnbpaZixgbg7bYTfZKBVpSTX-souWme5bXRmZ9fDOmsxcanDb9Lf3g8F-uIxMUqih27-Dc/s400/windowsPipe.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5236658156541846226" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 14:01:10 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <dtheall@cogeco.ca><br /><br />Hi Bob,<br /><br /> I really appreciated your note on MM and the JFK matter. I never<br />realized that Wilhelmsen was Eric's link with Dallas, nor did I fully<br />appreciate the RC connection.<br /><br /> But as an added fascination Bill Buckley and Brent Bozell (now<br />deceased) who married Buckley's sister were classmates of mine, both<br />graduating from Yale, as I did, in 1950. While they were socially in<br />a<br />far different sphere from me, we had contact through the Catholic<br />organization on campus -- the St. Thomas More society, and I served on<br />the board with Buckley.<br /><br /> I never fully realized MM's associations with what I would have<br />considered the shady side of Catholicism. Although I knew he was<br />conservative and narrow in beliefs, I didn't know of the full range of<br />associations.<br /><br /> Work on MEA progresses slowly, but surely. By the way, are you<br />planning to attend Frank's talk? I mention it, because I thought our<br />setting up a Sunday meeting with Stern would probably be best. Joan<br />and<br />I now knowing of Frank's talk had planned to pack out of NYC for City<br />Island Sunday morning, closing our contact with the conference on<br />Saturday night. Our plan was to leave for home on Monday, but it is<br />flexible, since we are driving, if necessary.<br /><br /> By the way, there were three successive AP articles posted by AOL<br />which<br />made it abundantly clear that Bush wants to stage a war -- another<br />memory of "Bright College Years" and the fifties.<br /><br /> Donald<br /><br />Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 12:47:36 -0500<br />From: Donald <dtheall@cogeco.com><br /><br /> Bob Dobbs quoting McLuhan's letter to a journalism student in which<br />he<br />discusses _Finnegans Wake_ most appropriately ties Joyce's activities<br />partly to taking on H.G. Wells whose assistance he had sought in<br />becoming a promoter of the _Wake_, which Wells refused to do in a<br />long,<br />polite and complimentary letter. Joyce respected Wells work in<br />history<br />and science as well as SF, but Wells could not see that Joyce's night<br />language was even more "scienctific" than his language of daytime<br />reason. In the era in which Richard Gerlernter, the Yale computer<br />scientist, can stress the importance of analogy and dream (_The Muse<br />in<br />the Machine_) if we are to grasp a full sense of the object of study<br />of<br />cognitive science and AI, Joyce is closer to some aspects of<br />contemporary science than Wells was. In his argument Gerlernter does<br />not mention Joyce, but he does speak about the Joycean domain of<br />research and alludes to such figures as Borges.<br /><br /> When McLuhan mentions the "switch of the real world into science<br />fiction" marked by Joyce's play with language and his affinity with<br />body<br />language and games, it is clear that Joyce and in a somewhat different<br />way, McLuhan, shared an interest in language games. Gerlernter, like<br />McLuhan, is arguing for the importance of what is associated with the<br />right hemisphere, of which Joyce's later works are prime examples. It<br />should be noted that the futuristic journalism that Joyce was doing<br />has<br />come to be, but that his futuristic journalism is always already ahead<br />of that of the futuristic journalists, since he is engaged in<br />relatively<br />disinterested playfulness, or at least a playfulness that is engaged<br />in<br />a satiric multiplicity of meanings and ambivalence ñ the same game<br />that<br />McLuhan picked up from Joyce and used with his playful probes,<br />themselves a form of futuristic journalism.<br /><br /> It is useful to note that the young McLuhan ñ that is in the 1940s<br />and<br />1950s read science fiction and even later refers occasionally to SF in<br />his work. Why probably less of it occurs as he goes on is that he<br />sees<br />Joyce as providing the SF of what Gerlernter calls the "cognitive<br />spectrum" ñ the range from pure rationality to dreams and the inner<br />person. And like Joyce, McLuhan could admire the range from the<br />language of rationality which he insisted he could practice quite well<br />when he wanted to do so and demonstrates this in his literary critical<br />writings and articles associated with the trivium and yet<br />simultaneously<br />go in for the playfulness and waking dreams of his other writings.<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br />Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 13:44:02 -0500<br />From: Donald Theall <dtheall@cogeco.ca><br /><br /> Since I have been cited on a couple of occasions in the discussion<br />about McLuhan and Powers _The Global Village_, I felt that I should<br />probably clarify my views about this and the other posthumously<br />published book, __The Laws of Media_. Both of these books, whatever<br />new<br />material they may contain, hark back to the issues that meant most to<br />McLuhan at the very outset of his project in the 1950s. Neither of<br />them<br />has the "poetic" thrust of McLuhan's other works, though _The Laws_,<br />because of the tetrads is more successful at retaining some of this<br />than<br />_The Global Village_. Nevertheless both of them in their<br />direction<br />are looking back to those beginnings. For _The Laws_ this is apparent<br />in the predominance of materials relating to the trivium, to Joyce and<br />to modernism in general. In _The Global Village_ it is marked by the<br />numerous references to the work of Giambattista Vico. But more<br />important is the way the McLuhan-Powers book harks back to a key issue<br />of the early 1950s, angelism and its gnostic and esoteric<br />associations.<br /><br /> Consequently, it is fair to say if one wants to read McLuhan as the<br />poet/prophet, _The Global Village_ is the least satisfying and perhaps<br />the least close to "genuine McLuhan" if there is such a thing. But<br />what<br />strikes me as most important (and I suspect it struck Marshall that<br />way<br />as well when he was working in collaboration with his two independent<br />"notetakers") is that these are the writings of someone at the end of<br />their career trying to fill in a lot of information about the gaps.<br />It<br />would be unfortunate to write _The Global Village_ off as part of the<br />McLuhan cannon, because there is so much information here about the<br />matters that preoccupied McLuhan in the mid-1950s. I suspect he put<br />the more topical stuff in _The Laws_, (though the tetrads are really<br />not<br />really that new in _The Laws_ since MclUhan had been playing with such<br />four part diagrammatizations since the 1950s) while keeping the less.<br />immediately exciting to _The Global Village_. But we must realize<br />that<br />both books are retrospective, and as such filling in. They are made<br />of<br />the stuff of thousands of 3x5 cards which McLuhan kept in Laura Secod<br />candy boxes in the 1950s and which were the material from which he<br />made<br />his intellectual poetry.<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br /><br />Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 12:43:17 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />Hi Bob,<br /><br /> Eric certainly has a way of half-grasping what is going on with<br />Marshall. I thought you might be interested, if you did not already<br />remember, in what Pound actually says and how what Marshall says about<br />a<br />"mental dance", while it may have been inspired by it, profoundly<br />differs from it.<br /><br /> The most extended text of Pound's on "the dance of the intellect<br />among<br />words" is in _How to Read_ where he says that poetry is language<br />charged<br />or energized in various ways. There are three ways melopeia,<br />phanapoeia, and logopeia. The first is words charged with some<br />musical<br />property which directs the bearing or trend of the meeting; the second<br />"is a casting of images upon the visual imagination", as for the<br />third:<br /><br />"LOGOPEIA, `the dance of intellect among words', that is to say it<br />employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in<br />a<br />special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with<br />the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances and of<br />ironical play. . . . It is the latest come, and perhaps most tricky<br />and<br />undependable mode."<br /><br /> In other words Marshall speaking of speech as a mental dance is quite<br />different from Pound's discussion of poetry. It is also interesting<br />to<br />note that Pound was suspicious of poetry which emphasized logopoeia,<br />preferring the visual and musical energizing. The master of combining<br />logopoeia with the other two is certainly Joyce's Wake and we know<br />what<br />Pound thought of Joyce's Wake.<br /><br /> Marshall speaking of speech as "mental dance" might reflect an<br />adapting<br />of Pound, but I suspect it is rather his describing his own peculiar<br />kind of quasi-poetic speech and perhaps, although not necessarily,<br />thinking of a work in which "the scheme is like your rumba round me<br />garden" (309.7). There is considerable justification for speech as a<br />mental dance also among some of the symbolistes.<br /><br /> In fact when he speaks of "the dance of meaning" in _Cliche_, he<br />follows it with a quote from the _Wake_ (109.12-5). There are<br />discussions of these problems in my thesis with respect to Pound and<br />Joyce.<br /><br /> I sent the item off to The Boston Herald, but it probably won't get<br />used now that the action on the McVeigh affair has entered a new<br />stage.<br />If they ever have the execution, just imagine how much that video-tape<br />would be worth. I can't imagine that it wouldn't get in more general<br />circulation.<br /><br /> Best.<br /><br /> Donald<br /><br />Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 14:27:14<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />So many interesting issues have been raised in the last few days on<br />the<br />McLuhan line, it is difficult to respond to all of them as they<br />occur.<br />But there are two discussions to which I'd like to make a<br />contribution.<br /><br /> The first, I believe initially opened up by Francois Lachance,<br />involves<br />rhetoric and dialectic. What is important to complement the subsequent<br />discussion is that McLuhan as early as his notorious, but seldom read,<br />Nashe thesis stressed that the important aspects of the discussion of<br />the history of the trivium were for him related to grammar and to<br />poetics.<br /><br /> For McLuhan grammar was the primary aspect of the trivium, but the<br />most<br />important discipline was poetics. As he notes in the thesis, citing<br />Aristotle, Aquinas on Aristotle and various Renaissance thinkers,<br />poetics is the universal science ñ perhaps in Viconian terms, the "new<br />science" ("new" since it was unthought of as a science among<br />Enlightenment scientists).<br /><br /> Without going into all the details of the thesis or other references,<br />poetics embraces grammar and rhetoric as well as those aspects of<br />dialectic which do not give dialectic or logic an overwhelming place<br />(such as in many of the Scholastics [not Aquinas] and in Ramus). The<br />enemies of the poetics McLuhan promoted as he puts it in the thesis<br />are:<br /><br /> The ignorant<br /> Pretenders to learning & taste<br /> Powerful class of civil lawyers & likewise medical men<br /> Who despise it because poetry does not get wealth<br /> Philosophers, dialecticians ñ scoff at frivolity & mendacity = liars<br /> Schoolmen<br /> Most powerful foe is puritanical theologians.<br /><br /> There is much more that could and will ultimately be said, but for<br />McLuhan rhetoric matters and dialectic has place because grammatica is<br />the ground of poetics.<br /><br /> The second motif has to do with some of the implications of Zagreus<br />in<br />_The Apes of God_. While all that has been said about Zagreus's role<br />is<br />present in the action of the work, the choice of the name Horace<br />Zagreus<br />and what circles around it is very significant. Horace would seem to<br />be<br />a pun on Horus and Horace, while Zagreus-Dionysius is a name<br />associated<br />with the inner depths of the Eleusinian mysteries ñ all tied up with<br />Lewis's refrain about the freemasonry of the arts in _The Apes_ ñ a<br />theme picked up from a similar play on the mysteries and the emergence<br />of the occult in the Enlightenment in Pope's _Dunciad_ (a work which<br />provides the climax to _The Gutenberg Galaxy_).<br /><br /> McLuhan's fascination with the Eleusinian mysteries is well-known.<br />So<br />the whole motif of Dionysiac embodiment in both its pre-Christian and<br />pre-Masonic directions are implicated. One might also note the play<br />of<br />Horace (Horus) and the Dionysiac carnivalesque, which involves the two<br />aspects of the satiric.<br /><br /> Best wishes,<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br /><br />Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 19:44:21 -0400<br />Reply-To: Donald Theall <dtheall@trentu.ca><br /><br /> I thought that I should clarify what I had said about a<br />conversation with President<br />Jim Ham, since I did not make it precise enough in the original<br />mailing. My<br />conversation with Jim Ham on a walk from Convocation Hall to Hart<br />House was either<br />on the morning on which the announcement first hit the international<br />press or the day<br />after. (To the best of my recollection it was the same day.) In any<br />case, I did not mean<br />to imply that Jim did not know the program was under review and in<br />trouble, but that he<br />had not been informed that a final decision had been reached before<br />the matter was<br />released to the press. I am certain he had not been informed because<br />he had said that<br />he went into his office around 7:30 A.M. that morning and, totally<br />unprepared, had been<br />besieged by phone calls. He was visibly angry about it and Jim was<br />certainly a most<br />straightforward and honest person. I shared sympathetically with him<br />about his anger,<br />since being there in a much smaller way myself I was familiar with<br />just what the<br />problems of such an office involves.<br /><br /> I never spoke about this before, but I think that it was<br />important to do so now,<br />since it reveals the kind of internal politics around the McLuhan<br />issue at the U of T. I<br />suspect that the President was not informed about the final decision<br />before its leakage<br />or release so that there would be no further ambiguity that "this was<br />it". Obviously that<br />strategy did not work in that the Center was reconsituted.<br /><br /> With respect to what has been said about St. Michael's, even<br />though many<br />Basilians had ambivalent views about McLuhan, it was unreasonable to<br />expect the<br />College, which had to operate totally independent of public funds from<br />the Provincial<br />government (unlike the University) and whose budget was minuscule<br />compared to the<br />university, to foot the bill. This would have been doubly true, since<br />there was<br />considerable tension between the Colleges and the University during<br />this period in<br />which Claude Bissell and his successors were successfully shutting<br />down the traditional<br />college system. I can attest to this, since during the period from<br />1960 to 1964 I was the<br />College's representative on the President's Council (i.e., the<br />President's internal<br />cabinet) and was privy to the entire debate that occurred about the<br />College system.<br />Northrop Frye, (Victoria College's representative) and I drafted and<br />presented a<br />defence of the college system and a critique of the University's<br />plans. I won't go on<br />further with this, since it is not direcly relevant to McLuhan, but I<br />point it out to suggest<br />that I had a very extensive "insider's" knowledge of the finances and<br />of the feelings<br />between St. Mikes and the University. While I left St. Mike's for<br />what seemed greener<br />pastures where I could develop communications, I deeply sympathize<br />with their not<br />being able and/or willing to finance a Center from which the<br />University would largely<br />profit both in PR, prestige and financial donations.<br /><br /> As for Mark Stahlman's remarks about the broader opposition to<br />McLuhan and<br />its political impact on what he was trying to achieve, this was a<br />fundamental fact, which<br />still goes on. It certainly had its overlap with significant secret<br />and private groups which<br />did not appreciate the type of vision which McLuhan was crafting. The<br />surface effects<br />of this are well recorded, but the covert ones, less well recorded,<br />were equally<br />important. Mark's view of Marshall as a Lewis style "enemy" is dead<br />on and confirms<br />that he was not a victim in any simple sentimental sense in fact,<br />probably not at all,<br />because he and his advisors and later the estate could be rather rough<br />in their own<br />way.<br /><br /> Just as I was finishing this I got the additional note about the<br />$600M price tag on<br />the papers. That is true (though I understand the National Archives<br />paid more). Yet a<br />small university in the U.S. was promoting a bid for the papers and in<br />addition for<br />McLuhan's coming there. In 1980 Trent University (which was where I<br />was) had a<br />budget large enough that that amount was about 1% of the budget. The<br />University of<br />Toronto at that time was probably twenty-five times the size of Trent<br />and had large<br />endowment funds and a large alumnae. While no institution finds it<br />easy to raise<br />amounts in the order of half a million, considering the long term<br />value both academic<br />and promotional, it would not have been impossible to pull this off,<br />if there had not been<br />a lot of internal and external opposition. It should also have been<br />possible to negotiate<br />a long term arrangement with the family and the Estate. Nevertheless,<br />seeing that most<br />people donate papers in return for tax deductions, it is easy to see<br />how this could be<br />made to seem unreasonable. As for the University's financial<br />problems, this was the<br />Instituion promoting itself as the Harvard of the North. The bottom<br />line is that the will<br />was not there. Whether this was the correct decision or not at the<br />time depends on<br />your valuation of the McLuhan legacy, which was not appealing to the<br />scientific or<br />professional areas of the University and their view was reinforced by<br />social scientists<br />who then opposed him, because of his opposition to empiricism, and by<br />humanists who<br />did not want to foresee where the humanities would have to be<br />situating themselves to<br />remain relevant as the end of the millenium approached (as represented<br />in such works<br />as _Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality; Lev Manovich's _The<br />Language of<br />New Media_ and such updatings of modernism as Sara Danius _The Senses<br />of<br />Modernism_ as well as the work of Benedikt, Laurel, Hayles, Poster,<br />Ulmer, Tofts and<br />many others [all of which give a nod to McLuhan, but do not confront<br />his full role in their<br />projects]).<br /><br /> My apologies to those on the list not interested in these<br />details, but I felt that<br />those aspects of the record should be set straight. I still fully<br />agree with Michael<br />Edmunds that the ultimate problem was that the whole development of<br />McLuhan's<br />vision was starved and that now with the rise of media ecology, the<br />new interest in the<br />arts, the humanities and the new media languages as a result of<br />digitalization and<br />media convergence that was a great loss.<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br />Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 19:07:29 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />Dear Bob,<br /><br /> I finally can get back in touch. The final proofs and index went off<br />to<br />the publisher on Thursday night. It was quite a marathon, but it all<br />looks in good shape now. The book will appear late 2000 or in the<br />early<br />part of 2001 (certainly in time for Philadelphia).<br /><br /> Yesterday I received a note from Michael Edmunds. He mentions that<br />perhaps there is something that he and you might like to do with the<br />tapes. That might be particularly useful if it were timed for the<br />release of the book in early 2001. It could also be useful for your<br />McLuhan conference.<br /><br /> In Michael's note he included a review of a recent Canadian book on<br />founders of communication studies in Canada which if you have not seen<br />it might interest you. Let me know if you have not seen it. It is a<br />National Post review by Dennis Duffy (who wrote one of the early books<br />on McLuhan) of a book by Robert Babe of Ottawa U.ñ a rather "official"<br />view of the development of communication studies in Canada.<br /><br /> I enjoyed seeing you alerted NLC to Trudeau's death. Trudeau really<br />lured me into becoming Canadian. In 1967 we had a sign on our hill,<br />which dominated part of the Lakeshore, supporting Trudeau. Joan and I<br />were happy to be in his presence on New Year's Eve 1976 when he and<br />Michael Manley, the Prime Minister of Jamaica celebrated New Year's<br />Eve<br />at Negril Beach Village (then owned by the Jamaican government) and we<br />were amused the next day while sunning on the nude beach to see Pierre<br />accompanied by an attractive young woman strolling out to the point of<br />the beach to snorkel, followed by an obvious RCMP officer (not in<br />uniform) but in a pair of beach trunks carrying some sort of object in<br />a<br />towel, obviously his gun, while various rowboats and other small boats<br />with obvious Jamaican security patrolled the shore.<br /><br /> While we were finishing the Virtual McLuhan, I have also been playing<br />around simultaneously with Lewis; with the new project that is<br />initially<br />associated with Lewis as well as Duchamp; and with the Joyce<br />language-religion stuff I sent you before (which fits with Lewis and<br />McLuhan).<br /><br /> One aspect of the Lewis side is my remembering that he discusses the<br />relation of his approach to the cynical at the very beginning of _Time<br />and Western Man_ as well as elsewhere. A U of T thesis I'm reading<br />uses<br />this to distinguish between Lewis and the cynical by associating Lewis<br />with what Sloterdijk has described as the "kynical", but it also shows<br />that Lewis was fully aware of the grounding of his approach in the<br />cynical tradition. Nevertheless, Lewis from his perspective would<br />have<br />regarded McLuhan (but not himself) as cynical. Lewis held that his<br />position while destructive was not cynical in the sense of the Cynic<br />philosophic tradition with which Diogenes was associated. On the<br />other<br />hand, he also would have considered Joyce "cynical" ñ perhaps the<br />source<br />of the McLuhans interpretation of the _Wake_'s cynical satire.<br /><br /> But Lewis, like Marshall (both of whom have strong Puritanical<br />streaks)<br />did not appreciate the carnivalesque world of Joyce and Varro. It is<br />interesting to note that Lewis in TWM strongly prefers Thomas Nashe to<br />Rabelais, which may explain part of McLuhan's early fascination with<br />Nashe. It is, of course, more complicated in that Lewis also claims<br />that Joyce uses Nashe, but ultimately downplays this interest to that<br />of<br />Rabelais and other carnivalesque medieval and Renaissance satirists.<br />I<br />had encountered much of this before, but had forgotten it until I<br />started having to check references while reading a doctoral thesis on<br />Lewis and Vorticism as an external examiner for U of Toronto,<br /><br /> More to the point of the earlier issues I raised, though, is that<br />Lewis<br />attacks Joyce as a pantheist, confirming the observations I made about<br />his approach to the sacred as secular. Marshall shared with Lewis a<br />negativity about pantheism directed at the Romantics. While Joyce<br />was<br />not a pantheist in Marshall or Lewis's sense (based on eighteenth<br />century Deists or the New England of the 19th), he did have a<br />commitment<br />to the sacredness of Natura redefined in post-Leibnizian terms of late<br />19th and early 20th century science and mathematics. All of this has<br />complex relationships with theosophy and other occult movements,<br />although by returning it to the everyday world of ordinary life and<br />the<br />techno-scientific transformation of it, Joyce presumably thought he<br />was<br />moving it beyond cults to the mainstream vision of Anna Livia as the<br />natural world., which naturally involved satirizing religions and<br />nationalisms. Lewis and Joyce, however, were not that far apart, but<br />ultimately Lewis's up-tightness kept him from going the whole way.<br /><br /> I'd go on, but with the end of _The Virtual Marshall McLuhan_ and an<br />endoscopy I had this week, both of which have left Joan and me<br />exhausted, I'll save it for a later communication. All our love to<br />you<br />and Carolyn<br /><br /> Donald<br /><br />Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2001 20:37:30<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />Dear Francois,<br /><br /> The letter to which you refer being from 1948, I would suggest that<br />McLuhan's sense of the eighteenth century would be largely as the era<br />of<br />Cartesianism and would be strongly coloured by Jacques Maritain's<br />interpretation in The Dream of Descartes (1946). A short while later<br />McLuhan developed a much more complex understanding of the 18th<br />century,<br />which is confirmed by the way in which he uses Alexander Pope in the<br />conclusion of The Gutenberg Galaxy.<br /><br /> That being said, McLuhan's fix on Aristotle and dialectic as well as<br />his understanding of rhetoric come out of the work on his Nashe<br />thesis.<br />He was familiar with the Organon since he looked at all of the works<br />of<br />Aristotle associated with grammar, logic, rhetoric and poetics in<br />working on that project. His readings of them could be a little<br />quixotic, but basically as Carlos's remarks indicate he favoured<br />rhetoric and grammar in contradistinction to dialectics. In fact, he<br />saw the eighteenth century tradition as emerging from Ramus who as a<br />dialectician restricts rhetoric to its first wo parts: discovery and<br />invention over the other three. His Nashe thesis is a key to the<br />background of this letter for in it he analyses in each chapter the<br />nature of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric for a particular period from<br />ancient Greece to the Renaissance.<br /><br /> The other key is his having arrived in Toronto at St. Michael's'<br />College with its Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 1946<br />where<br />the doctrine of analogy in Thomas's works was a hot subject of<br />discussion. After that his understanding of four part structures of<br />analogy are all coloured by a Thomistic and/or neo-Thomistic<br />understanding of the doctrine of analogy. But it undergoes many<br />transformations from 1948 until it begins to surface in his NAEB<br />project<br />in 1960 and develops into the exposition of the tetrad rooted in the<br />late 1950s which appears in _Laws of Media_.<br /><br /> In the early 1950s when he and I explored Pope, he discovered partly<br />through Bill Wimsatt's work, the significance of the four-part<br />structure<br />of the Popean couplet with its relations to the logical square and<br />realized the relations between Pope, Montaigne and Pascal, which<br />together with Pope's playing with logic again coloured the way he<br />looked<br />at the whole problem of four part structures, analogy and dialectic.<br /><br /> Of course, dialectic does not preclude four part structure, since<br />there<br />is a dialectical basis for Aquinas's work as well as Aristotle's. But<br />in his usual hyperbolic way and in keeping with the thesis, McLuhan is<br />arguing that the dialectic as the precursor of the Newtonian-Cartesian<br />world should be set aside in favour of a grammatical (i.e., after<br />Gadamer, etc., ñ hermeneutic) and a rhetorical approach. In the<br />thesis<br />he does not reject Aristotle and certainly did not do so later in<br />terms<br />of the importance of Aristotle to the Thomistic tradition which he<br />embraced.<br /><br /> The aspect directed towards the U. S. is well covered by _The<br />Mechanical Bride_. He saw the States, launched in the eighteenth<br />century on Lockean philosophy, as mechanistic and dialectical, a<br />creation of Descartes, mechanism and the new science.<br /><br /> Naturally, there's a lot more and much needed refinement and<br />qualification. If you'd like to discuss it off-line I'd be happy to<br />do<br />so.<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br />Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 20:07:13 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />Dear Bob,<br /><br /> In view of the "difficulty" of using the original drawing, I thought<br />that you be interested in the modification of the Lewis drawing of<br />Marshall which I suggested to McGill-Queen's as one possibility. ó<br />Place a Canadian Red Maple Leaf flag on the upper part of his tie; a<br />British flag, on the right shoulder; a French flag, on the left<br />shoulder<br />and a globe of the world with a U,S, flag on top of it, in his hands.<br />This not only works for Marshall with his intense commitment to Canada<br />and its vantage point in observing the vortex; his loyalties to French<br />symbolisme, avant-garde art and French neo-Thomism; to U.K. (British<br />and<br />Irish) high modernist literature and art and British universities; and<br />his fascination with American everyday life, culture and the twentieth<br />century American arts, popular arts and new arts. It also works for<br />Lewis: born in Canada and traveling life long on a Canadian passport<br />as<br />well as having a prolonged and significant visit to Canada in the<br />1940s<br />which produced one of his most powerful novels; living his early<br />childhood in New England and returning to the States during the Second<br />World War; having his later childhood and adulthood divided between<br />Britain and France (with the British portion taking priority).<br /><br /> I have no idea whether McGill will be interested or not, but I think<br />it's one valid approach. Perhaps if they don't use it, we can produce<br />a<br />website with an image of it or a poster???!!!<br /><br /> I also wanted to pick up briefly on the "new historicism" about which<br />I<br />was not too responsive when we chatted. First of all, if you were<br />associating it with Frank Lentricchia, author of _After the New<br />Criticism_ (1968), he is certainly not generally recognized as its<br />founder, or even a major player ñ although he obviously wanted to<br />restore historical and contextual issues to critical reading of texts,<br /><br /> It is called the "new historicism", because in many ways it revisits<br />historicism that began with Herder in the 18th century and queried the<br />ways in which historians living at a given time and place may<br />legitimately study the history of another time and place. This<br />involved<br />either looking at history as solely of the past or through the present<br />being a manifestation of that past. Later in the late 19th and early<br />20th C.it became involved with the philosophy of interpretation<br />through<br />Dilthey and more recently Gadamer.<br /><br /> After the rise of the New Criticism in the 1930s with which Marshall<br />was so involved (but always a kind of closet historian and<br />historicist),<br />the use of history was so profoundly questioned that in the late<br />1960s,<br />movements arose inspired by structuralism, semiotics, etc. which<br />established a "new historicism" (frequently quite critical of<br />Derridean<br />deconstructionism).<br /><br /> New historicism is dated by some as beginning in 1972; others earlier<br />by Stephen Greenblatt and his colleagues at Berkeley. But it never<br />really became a single school, being not a doctrine but a<br />consolidation<br />of themes, preoccupations and attitudes associated with history,<br />interpretation, context, society, culture, etc. Many of them were<br />particularly critical of Foucault and DeMan. In some ways cultural<br />studies has become a new historicist kind of project. It is in a way<br />conducting historical interpretation with a constant questioning of<br />the<br />grounds of writing history and carrying out interpretation and<br />involving<br />a broad, contemporary range of disciplines ñ rhetoric, semiotics,<br />structuralism, etc. Ironically, although he would never be so<br />recognized, McLuhan should have been regarded as lured by, if not<br />practicing, a new historicism.<br /><br /> I realize this is still very unsatisfactory, but it is a large topic<br />and like many theoretical topics, partly a question of people staking<br />out space for their divergencies from others. But if you are<br />interested<br />I can discuss it more (or give you some references to encyclopedia of<br />critical theory, which will lead into it. I guess, if I were saying<br />what I think. In a non-academic context, I feel such critical writing<br />of<br />history and interpretation of texts always should have been and always<br />is the way to go and that the questions involved are pursued in the<br />debates about time by Bergson, Lewis, Joyce, McLuhan et al, including<br />some of my own work.<br /><br /> Anyway I'm still kind of rushed. Hope the first part of this amuses<br />you and this latter part is of some use. J and I send all the best<br />to<br />you City Islanders,<br /><br /> Donald<br /><br /><br />Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 19:58:08 -0500<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />Dear Francois Lachance,<br /><br /> This is the first chance I've had to respond to your questions<br />about<br />McLuhan and gnosticism. It is an extremely complex question, which<br />seems to raise all sorts of irritations in the McLuhan community, so I<br />thought I would prefer to answer you on a one-to-one basis. The<br />response will be relatively brief suggesting points of importance,<br />since<br />much of the material will be covered in my book that is coming out<br />hopefully late this year.<br /><br /> First of all, anyone interested in modernism would have had to<br />have had<br />some interest in the gnostic and the occult tradition in general. The<br />entire Yeats circle was involved in a wide variety of occult interests<br />as exemplified in Yeats's association with _The Golden Dawn_. Figures<br />such as Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Mathers and others were<br />important to the Yeats circle, known to Joyce and generally known in<br />the<br />Oxbridge literary world, which McLuhan as a Cambridge student in the<br />late 1930s and 1940s would certainly have encountered. Charles<br />Williams, a minor novelist not now well known, was read at the time<br />and<br />he wrote novels such as _The Greater Trumps_ to which Marshall<br />introduced me when I was his student.<br /><br /> Even if Marshall had not been associated with that tradition,<br />his<br />thesis on _Thomas Nashe in the Place of Learning in his Time_ would<br />have<br />required some knowledge of gnosticism, both through heretical and<br />neo-Platonic sources. Figures from that area were part of the<br />humanistic learning represented in the trivium and quadrivium. This<br />could be pursued further and perhaps at another time. But you can<br />consult books which I first read as Marshall was reading them by the<br />remarkable historian of art and culture, Frances Yates, who<br />specifically<br />interlinks gnostic, noe-platonic and other occult traditions with the<br />Art of Memory and the development of early science as well as<br />Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, which was one of Marshall's earliest<br />interests.<br /><br /> Incidentally, it is also well to remember the way the term<br />gnosticism<br />is bandied about in discussions on McLuhan and Media Ecology is often<br />as<br />a cover term for any occult movement - Masonry, varieties of Magic,<br />offshoots of Manicheanism such as the Cathars, Rosicrucianism<br />(incidentally McLuhan's mother later in life became a Rosicrucian),<br />etc.<br /><br /> As far as I know until McLuhan went to Toronto in the late<br />1940s he had<br />a relatively average interest in the subject for a scholar<br />theologically<br />involved with an interest in Medieval and Renaissance texts who also<br />had<br />an enthusiastic interest in modernism. When I met him in 1950 he was<br />just beginning to query the subject primarily because of his growing<br />interest in high modernism and especially aspects of Yeats, Pound,<br />Eliot, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis, but also because it was obviously a<br />topic of interest in a milieu such as St. Michaels's College in the<br />University of Toronto in which there was a Pontifical Institute of<br />Medieval Studies and a number of theological schools (Roman Catholic,<br />Anglicain, United Church, Presbyterian, etc.)<br /><br /> I was personally involved in his development of an intense<br />interest in<br />gnosticism, particularly as it related to modernism and to the role of<br />Masonry and Rosicrucianism in the setting of the Renaissance and the<br />rise of the Enlightenment. For better or worse, and by accident as<br />graduate students do, I sparked off considerably more of the interest<br />through research that I was doing for graduate papers on Pope and<br />Swift. These issues appear in their satire and that of their<br />associates<br />in the various writings associated with the Scriblerus group. The<br />importance of Pope's The Dunciad, a key poem in this area, as the<br />climactic conclusion of McLuhan's Galaxy rises directly out of these<br />interests.<br /><br /> The problem, though, was that McLuhan at the same time<br />encountered the<br />writings of the relatively right wing political scientist and<br />theorist,<br />Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: The University of<br />Chicago Press, 1952), who had developed a historical theory about the<br />significance of gnosticism in the unfolding of history which McLuhan<br />found to be of considerable significance in his Catholic beliefs.<br />Unfortunately he made a stronger link to specific existent cults than<br />Voegelin did and developed a concern with cults which is reflected in<br />his Letters, primarily in the 1950s, but continuing throughout his<br />writings and in some of his less well known religious writings that<br />have<br />been published recently. The connection with gnosticism and<br />occultism,<br />particularly as reflected in cults, has been seen as an embarrassment<br />by<br />some of his enthusiasts, although this is an intrinsic part of his<br />particular scholarly personae and like everything else is pervaded by<br />a<br />knowledge and intellectual curiosity,<br /><br /> In Canada and elsewhere in the early period few except those<br />of us who<br />were his students and colleagues knew of the extent of these<br />interests,<br />but some of the more literary and artistic Quebecois, such as Jacques<br />Languirand intuited this aspect of his work as Languirand's broadcasts<br />and writings of the 1960s suggest.<br /><br /> I'm afraid I've only scratched the surface, but I wanted to<br />give you<br />some sense of the complexity of the question you asked which did not<br />merit the flip answer you received. If you want to think about these<br />issues go to the sources in Crowley, Blavatsky, Yeats; but even more<br />so<br />look at some of the books that McLuhan associated with this tradition:<br />The Gates of Horn, histories of magic, the works of Frances Yates and<br />perhaps read Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God in which one aspect of Horace<br />Zagreus is Aleister Crowley, and, of course some of the histories of<br />gnosticism and occultism from the 1950s.<br /><br /> There is some confirmatory material about this in the notes to<br />Bill<br />Toye's edition of the Letters. Please feel free to contact me, if you<br />wish. Best wishes,<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br />PS - I realize that this does not cover the more theoretical questions<br />that Sontag was raising, but this constitutes a foundation of<br />McLuhan's<br />interest. Naturally the theoretic, philosophic and theological<br />aspects<br />are important, but it should be requisite to examine what McLuhan<br />himself seemed to be interested in.<br /><br /><br /><br />Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 18:53:32<br />From: Donald Theall <dtheall@trentu.ca><br /><br /> While I cannot locate my copy of the bibliography of the Nashe<br />thesis at the moment, I can attest that McLuhan was familiar with the<br />Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan Smith edition of Burton's _Anatomy of<br />Melancholy_, which we both used during our research on the epyllion<br />and Menippean (or Varronian satire) during 1952 to 1954. He also was<br />familiar at that time with the concept of seven senses, although he<br />more<br />frequently refers to the conventional five senses as well as other<br />combinations. His Thomistic-Aristotlean interests, the importance of<br />which Peter perceptively points out, with its use of the _sensus<br />communis_ or of an interactive sensorium led him to play with<br />differing<br />combinations of senses.<br /><br /> His early article on Joyce's _Portrait_ (Renascence (Autumn,<br />1951) where he speaks of the significance of Aristotle's doctrine in<br />_De<br />Anima_ of the _nous poietikos_ or agent intellect and of Thomas<br />Aquinas's commentary on the _De Anima_ is the beginning of his<br />developing his views on making and matching and of his developing his<br />theory of the significance of the _sensus communis_ interrelating<br />making<br />and knowing not inconsistent with Vico's treatment of memory's<br />creative role in the _New Science_. This is just a rough indication<br />of the<br />differing complex interplay of sensory systems which McLuhan<br />explores.<br />Differing accounts of senses were different ways of probing the<br />process<br />of discovery through poetic construction.<br /><br /> As for the intellect, though, McLuhan's primary influences were:<br />first, the modernists, particularly Lewis, T.S. Eliot and Joyce,<br />including<br />Lewis's various sources about intellectuals such as Benda; and second,<br />the neo-Thomistic tradition of Maritain and Gilson the then<br />contemporary notion of the Catholic intellectual derived primarily,<br />but not<br />exclusively from Thomas Aquinas. McLuhan it should be remembered<br />pointed out that a contemporary understanding of the significance of<br />neo-scholasticism became clear through the French symbolists and<br />modernists.<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br /><br />Subject: Five sovereigh fingers<br />Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 18:43:00 -0500<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br />To: Bob Dobbs <purple@ingress.com><br /><br />The hand that signed the paper felled a city;<br />Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,<br />Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;<br />These five kings did a king to death.<br /><br />The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,<br />The finger joints are cramped with chalk;<br />A goose's quill has put an end to murder<br />That put an end to talk.<br /><br />The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,<br />And famine grew, and locusts came;<br />Great is the hand that holds dominion over<br />Man by a scribbled name.<br /><br />The five kings count the dead but do not soften<br />The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;<br />A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;<br />Hands have no tears to flow.<br /><br /><br />Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 11:28:15 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />I posted this today at the Paramclu web site:<br /><br /> Picking up on Bob's Kroker quote on Crash music, it is interesting to<br />note that the motifs of war and the music of modernity run throughout<br />the _Wake_ and are periodically summarized in such phrases as the<br />"willingdone museyroom" which inter-relates Napoleanic wars, Irish war<br />heroes (i.e., Wellington for both) and a music room, muses and<br />museums.<br /><br /> So Kroker's account "Which is to say that culture is not a reflex of<br />political economy, but that society is now a reflex of key shifts in<br />music theory and practice. Music rules in the quantum age because<br />sound<br />moves faster than the speed of light, thus quickly eclipsing history.<br />Study music theory, then, as a laboratory of big<br />transformations in power and economy." is already present in the early<br />part of the twentieth century.<br /><br /> An Eliot quote which was recently posted on another line illustrates<br />the phenomenon of music as a lab for studying the big transformations<br />in<br />power and economy. "In art there should be interpenetration and<br />metamorphosis. Even _The Golden Bough_ can be read in two ways: as a<br />collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of the vanished<br />mind of which our mind is a continuation In everything in the<br />_SacrÈ<br />du Printemps_, except in the music, one missed the sense of the<br />present. Whether Stravinsky's music be permanent or ephemeral, I do<br />not<br />know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the<br />scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of<br />wheels,<br />the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway,<br />and<br />the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these<br />despairing noises into music. -- "London Letter." Dial 71.4 (October,<br />1921): 453.<br /><br /> Joyce placed his being a musicmaker on a par with his being a<br />philosphist and an engineer. It is perhaps significant that he sites<br />musicmaker before philosopher and engineer. McLuhan suggests Joyce<br />has<br />a greater interest in language than Eliot or Pound whom he relegates<br />to<br />Hollywood music. ("But most of the difficulties which the ordinary<br />person encounters with the poetry of Pound and Eliot disappear if it<br />is<br />viewed as a historical newsreel of persons, myths, ideas, and events<br />with thematic musical score built in. ") Of course, McLuhan realized<br />Joyce was moving beyond language, since he could say "Finnegans Wake,<br />[is] a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all<br />media,". So musicality absorbs all the media into a mobile,<br />kinesthetic<br />medley of all the arts which itself becomes absorbed in this new mode<br />of<br />digital multimedia drama.<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br />Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 15:36:13 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <dtheall@cogeco.ca><br /><br /><br />Dear Robert Amos,<br /><br /> This response has been a bit slow since I had to think a bit<br />about the<br />questions that you pose. First of all, like most Joyceans I would be<br />delighted to see a good reading of the _Wake_ available. I purchased<br />the entire set of readings by Healy (17 CDs, if I remember correctly)<br />and found it to be very poor quality. Helpful up to a point as any<br />interpretation usually is, but lacking in any quality or distinction<br />and<br /><br />delivered far too rapidly and inaccurately. Therefore, I'm sure that<br />your project is a good one, particularly since I have followed your<br />discussions of the _Wake_ and have been impressed by the aesthetic<br />sense<br /><br />manifested by the sample of your inscriptions of the text that you<br />sent<br />me.<br /><br /> As far as the copyright question is concerned, although I have<br />published on the web in a legal group and in a collection of essays<br />published by the U of T Press on copyright, I'm far from an expert.<br />My<br />own view of the Joyce Estate, as of the McLuhan Estate, is that they<br />seriously inhibit serious scholarly work. This is why my wife and I<br />prepared our scanned versions of the _Wake_ and _Ulysses_ (with the<br />help<br /><br />first of a "seed" grant from Trent and later a "real" one from SSHRC)<br />as<br /><br />soon as they were off copyright in Canada in 1991. I definitely knew<br />that we had the right to do it; even though various members of the<br />Joyce<br /><br />community in the U.S. tried to warn me off and the Oxford Text<br />Archive ?<br /><br />to which we had contributed a copy ? withdrew it for a period of time,<br />owing to pressure from Stephen Joyce and co. The Joyce Estate was not<br />pleased, but never approached me directly, I presume because I was not<br />receiving remuneration for the texts.<br /><br /> But at two points, first during the early days of the posting<br />of<br />the<br />downloadable text on the Internet and, later when Finnegans Web was<br />created by Tim Szeliga, I received letters from lawyers in the U.S.<br />purporting to be interested in Joyce and offering to buy a copy of the<br />text. I can't precisely remember whether my responding that they<br />could<br />download a version for themselves from Canada free of charge, or that<br />I<br />just told them it was not for sale. In any case, that was the only<br />sign<br />of any active intervention. It is my impression that even if I had<br />been selling it in Canada and other countries who had adhered to the<br />Berne Treaty I would still have been doing nothing they could have<br />started an action on. The one point I was never fully clear about was<br />if I had sold a copy of the text to an American, whether or not it<br />might<br /><br />have brought about some sort of action because of international trade<br />issues.<br /><br /> I go into all this, because I strongly support your project.<br />I<br />suspect<br />as long as you proceeded and only sold it in Canada and other<br />countries<br />that adhere to the Berne Convention that you should not have any<br />problems. This means certainly you could offer for sale at Joyce<br />conventions which were held in international centers in countries that<br />respected this legislation. I suspect that if you sold it by mail or<br />over the net to countries that still grant copyright to these works,<br />there might be legal difficulties, but only an international copyright<br />lawyer could answer these questions and then you would have to be sure<br />you chose one that was on the "side of the angels".<br /><br /> My other reservation is that I have never looked into whether<br />there<br />would be any difference in the regulations concerning an oral<br />reproduction as opposed to a print one. This is possibly a genuine<br />problem and again would require advice more expert and up-to-date than<br />mine. I do remember when I was working on these issues, there were<br />some<br /><br />lawyers in B.C. involved with copyright who were well disposed on<br />this<br />question. Unfortunately a decade after I don't remember their names,<br />although I will try to see if I can find them. In the meantime, you<br />might look up the book in which I contributed an article,<br />_Interpreting<br />Censorship in Canada_. One of the co-editors, Klaus Peterson, is a<br />prof at UBC and one of the contributors, Lorraine Weir, another prof<br />at<br /><br />UB. They might have some sense as to who in BC is well-disposed . In<br />the meantime I will try (no promises) to think of a way of locating<br />someone. With more expertise in this area.<br /><br /> I certainly don't want to do anything to keep your project<br />from<br />coming<br />to fruition, but I also do not want to lead you into unexpected<br />problems. An alternative route, if you need money for the project,<br />but<br />don't expect great returns, would be to get a few Joyceans to support<br />it<br /><br />and apply for a government grant to provide funding. Such Joyceans at<br />UBC as Lorraine Weir and Sherril Grace might be willing to back it. I<br />certainly would be ? and there are others elsewhere who might also<br />back<br />it.<br /><br /> Frankly I think the Joyce Estate people are idiots, since such<br />a<br /><br />reading ultimately only helps them sell books and other related<br />material; but then like most individuals with greedy instincts they<br />have<br /><br />narrow views. (I mentioned the McLuhans in this respect since you may<br />remember Eric McLuhan defending Stephen Joyce against Patrick<br />Parrinder's criticism in an issue of the _JJQ_.) In any case, my best<br />wishes for great luck with your project and my warmest regards,<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br />P.S. - I wouldn't mind seeing some of your other inscriptions, since I<br />found the one most interesting.<br /><br /><br /><br />Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 14:47:04 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <jtheall1@home.com><br /><br />Bob,<br /><br />I finally got Moholy-Nagy's _Vision in Motion_. The chart appears on<br />p. 347 in the midst of Moholy-Nagy's discussion of the _Wake_. The<br />chart was prepared for Moholy-Nagy's Chicago Institute of Design by<br />Leslie A. Lewis in conjunction with presentations about the _Wake_<br />being given to the students, but Moholy-Nagy obviously endorses it. On<br />the same page there is a char of _Ulysses_ also prepared for the same<br />purposes by Lewis.<br /><br />Moholy-Nagy's discussion of Joyce begins on p. 341. His discussion of<br />the _Wake_ on 344 ending at 351 so he devotes more than twice the<br />space to the _Wake_, which he does to he rest of Joyce, primarily<br />_Ulysses_. It is worth noting that his book was published in 1947.<br /><br />I discuss Moholy-Nagy on the _Wake_ on pp 86-9 of _Beyond the Word_<br />providing specific quotes from 349 and 350 in the process. If you have<br />access to the book it might be worth Xeroxing the text, since it shows<br />Moholy-Nagy to be quite a perceptive read of Joyce, even if he did not<br />have formal training as a literary critic.<br /><br />For your convenience my remarks from _Beyond the Word_ follow:<br /><br />While Eisenstein discerned the power of film-makers to achieve greater<br />inclusiveness and comprehensiveness in orchestrating the full range of<br />modes of expression available as his discussion of Dickens and<br />Griffith illustrates and although he recognized the importance of<br />Ulysses and its grasp of cinematic effect, he still failed to<br />understand fully what Joyce was about in his revolutionary work,<br />Finnegans Wake. Verbal texts necessarily possess a special position in<br />this process because of the peculiar problems presented to language by<br />contemporary developments in communication and because of the<br />historical critical function that language has performed in our making<br />sense out of 'things.' Joyce's use of language and signs in Ulysses<br />and the Wake demonstrates how by being aware of the influence of a<br />changing world on the role of communication, he consciously<br />contributed to the forging of a new language which would enable verbal<br />poetry to engage with the realities of the changing role of<br />communication media in the age of technology.<br />Some of the many other writers who re-examined the role of<br />communication and can be cited as reflecting on as well as<br />experimenting with communication include: Baudelaire, Proust,<br />Mallarmé, Valéry, Benjamin, Kraus, Pound, Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and<br />Tzara. A large number of the key proponents and practitioners of the<br />newer arts in the first third of this century also reflect on and<br />experiment with communication. The search for new languages by artists<br />(such as Klee in painting, Schönberg in music or Eisenstein in the<br />cinema) clearly underlines the importance of the changing<br />relationships taking place and how that necessitated the<br />transformation of the community of signs by which people communicate.<br />In Vision in Motion Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, an early Hungarian<br />constructivist who had joined the Bauhaus in 1923 and moved to the<br />U.S. to establish a new Bauhaus in 1937, describes Joyce's unique role<br />in the contemporary movements which involved 'the orchestration of the<br />arts.' A designer and experimentalist who had worked in a variety of<br />media, Moholy-Nagy was deeply sensitive to the changing relationships<br />between the arts and to their relationship with the new technologies.<br />As a constructivist and a teacher in the Bauhaus, he was familiar with<br />the affinity of the artist and engineer. As polyglot European, he was<br />equally sensitive about the new character the arts of language would<br />have to assume in the merging technoculture. Therefore, he readily<br />recognized the central importance of Joyce's contributions and of the<br />necessity for contemporary artists to try to understand them.<br />Launching into a discussion of Joyce's work, he warns his reader of<br />the<br />dangers implicit in the explanation that he is undertaking, for it can<br />destroy 'the fresh impact of surprise' of the privileged moment of a<br />first reading in which the 'fluidity' of feeling has an inexplicable<br />'plastic impact.' He denies the commonplace that puns are the lowest<br />form of humor, singling out the inaccuracy of such an idea when<br />applied to Finnegans Wake. In the Wake the reader is 'willing to go on<br />with the rather complex task involved in reading the book,' because<br />Joyce's wit is 'candid':<br /><br />'The gaiety implicit be-tween the lines, between the words and within<br />the composite words, makes one feel happy. At the same time there is a<br />feeling that the author himself enjoys most of all the great spectacle<br />of life in spite of his murderous knifing of human petulance. When he<br />scourges social and individual deficiencies, he does not sound as if<br />he were preaching in gloomy rage. His humor grows beyond the obvious<br />in word combinations with their ambivalent or multiple meanings.'<br />Quoting Joyce's phrase 'panaroma of all flores of speech,' he shows<br />how<br />it appeals to all five senses: 'There is something to see: 'panaroma';<br />but also something to smell, 'flores' (flowers) and to taste 'aroma'<br />and things to touch and feel' - such as floors, a peach, and a<br />speech.' Moholy-Nagy goes on to argue that at this point the<br />synaesthetic, the technological and new modes of communication meet:<br /><br />Has he [Joyce] achieved here the coordination and interchange of<br />senses which Rimbaud meant? Is his an X-ray technique of<br />verbalization? Probably. It is the approach to the practical task of<br />building up a completeness from interlocked units by an ingenious<br />transparency of relationships. The method parallels the cutting of<br />motion pictures. The editor of a film sometimes relates (pastes) units<br />of different shots made at different places in different times into a<br />new entity -<br />If one presupposes that there is an underlying unity of all creative<br />work in one period, one can find in Joyce's writings analogies to<br />contemporary ethnological terms. In these terms Joyce's agglutinations<br />(often constructed from German, Hungarian or other composites which is<br />normal in these languages but strange in English) appear to be similar<br />to the industrial process of assemblage by bolts, rivets and<br />screws ... outohelloutof that<br />wavyavyeavyheavyeavyeveyevy hair<br />bronzelidded<br />softcreakfooted<br />whitetallhatted<br />Joyce's fusion of words, like<br />panaroma<br />immarginable<br />erigenating<br />celescalating<br />bootiful<br />are again equivalent to the present technology of mass production it<br />occurs in welding, casting, moulding, stamping.'<br /><br />Moholy-Nagy goes on to point out that there are some approximations to<br />this strategy of fusion in some surrealist and abstract films, but<br />that it has also been adopted by the language of contemporary<br />advertising and media: ''girlesque' instead of `burlesque'; `brunch'<br />for breakfast and lunch; Pittsburgh `smog' meaning a mixture of smoke<br />and fog.<br />Moholy-Nagy's discussion merits extended consideration, since it<br />reveals the common understanding of those changes which had been<br />emerging throughout the arts and shows how Joyce provided many new<br />fundamental insights into the process. His views closely parallel<br />those of Eisenstein, up to the point where Eisenstein criticizes<br />Joyce's 'failure,' for Moholy-Nagy stress-es Joyce's success in doing<br />something unique in, for and to language which he stresses also<br />performs an essential function for all the other arts since it is the<br />special role of the verbal to provide a reflective, recollective<br />intelligibility to the underlying unity of all cultural production<br />that is undertaken during a particular period of time.<br />Both this artist-designer and the film director, Eisenstein, call<br />attention to how Joyce's concern with structural and semiotic--<br />features of the literary work is considerably in advance of their<br />time. Their observations on the Wake reveal how extensive the<br />interanimation of the arts had become and how the importance of the<br />'coordination and inter-change of senses,' the impact of technology<br />and parallels between artist's methods actually was widely recognized.<br />In film, in visual arts, in fact, across the spectrum of the arts,<br />there emerged a feeling that human communication is integrated and<br />each of the traditional modes has its own role to play in the<br />integration. Moholy-Nagy goes further and associates the contemporary<br />artistic method and Joyce's method with the joining of mechanization<br />and electricity. A 'completeness' built up from interlocked units; a<br />method parallel to montage in editing; the similarity to industrial<br />assemblage; the final goal being 'an X-Ray technique of<br />verbalization.'<br />These strategies, though, are common to surrealist and abstract films<br />(and for that matter visual art) and to advertising. Joyce goes even<br />further, for his language embraces the technological changes which<br />occur within the production of signs, which involves all of the media<br />and their shifting inter-relationships within the activity of 'the<br />orchestration of the arts.'<br /><br />Hope this helps. Best,<br /><br />Donald<br /><br /><br />Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 18:52:43 -0400<br />From: Donald Theall <dtheall@cogeco.ca><br /><br /> John just a few brief thoughts and observations on your<br />mailings<br />on<br />"Media Nations" and the other piece on the interplay of the senses<br />that<br />you sent to me.<br /><br /> It may or may not be irrelevant when one looks at the _Princeton<br />Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_ that the entry following<br />"symbolism"<br /><br />is "synaesthesia", but it is a perfectly natural move from one to the<br />other or vice versa. So it is interesting that you have moved from an<br />interest in symbolism, the subject of your present book, to<br />synaesthesia. Since in your circulation of your own remarks about<br />Media<br /><br />Nations where section 3 is "Multi-media is the message" and of a<br />cognitive science oriented article from _Scientific American_ about<br />synaesthesia entitled "Hearing, Colors, Tasting Shapes", there are<br />some<br />crucial differences between the two mailings and some necessity to<br />indicate the weakness in the latter article.<br /><br /> What I have in mind is that, as you imply in this item,<br />synaesthesia<br />has a substantial ancient history. Because of this ancient history<br />which goes back to such early texts as the bible, it is vital to<br />realize<br /><br />that synaesthesia is a phenomenon that is central not only to an<br />interest in cognitive questions dealing with the transformation or<br />transfer of information between the senses, but has long been<br />recognized<br /><br />as the foundation of an intersensory poetic which has its roots in the<br />remote past, certainly in the Greek drama and the Eleusinian<br />mysteries,<br />but perhaps even in the caves of Lascaux.<br /><br /> Aristotle's _Poetics_ illustrates the long-standing dilemma in<br />that<br />while Aristotle elevates drama, particularly tragic drama to the<br />pinnacle of the poetic art and carefully shows how that drama is an<br />orchestration of media ? music, spectacle, movement, dance, gesture,<br />mime, the arts of language and architecture (set design and setting),<br />painting and design etc. But then he went on to argue that it is<br />still<br />superior to read a play, since it is more philosophic (contemplative)<br />and hence in oral and written cultures it may be virtually realized in<br />a<br /><br />more perfect manner. But what his work primarily implies and<br />illustrates is that in ancient Greece, it was recognized that there<br />were<br /><br />possibilities of and dreams about integration of media (the<br />orchestration of the arts or cúnÊsthesia), just as there was an<br />ongoing<br />interplay of the senses (synÊsthesia). But the latter interplay was<br />also recognized in the way Aristotle and others spoke about the<br />comparison between poetry and painting. It is attributed to Simonides<br />that he spoke of poetry as a "speaking picture" and painting as "a<br />silent poem". Music, as mousike, the art of the muses, is in some<br />sense<br /><br />related to all the arts and specifically identified as preceding<br />poetry<br />and song. But the real point is that the arts were grounded in<br />notions<br />of inter-relation and integration, making synaesthesia a kind of<br />natural<br /><br />phenomenon. Its formal identification and naming at the end of the<br />nineteenth century is a question of scientific classification, but its<br />history is rooted in the beginnings of time. Later the performance of<br />the liturgy in the great cathedrals was to become such an integration,<br />as Panofsky has noted<br /><br /> In fact, what is of crucial interest today in what is called<br />"new<br />Media" and some of what is called "Multimedia" is that the merging of<br />what is discussed as virtuality and what could be talked about as<br />intersensory or synaesthetic (but seldom is) is intrinsically tied up<br />with this history of cúnÊsthesia and synÊsthesia. (These terms,<br />incidentally, can be found in I.A. Richards and CK. Ogden. The new<br />technologies creating "the new media "primarily permit a new, more<br />complex, more controllable and potentially richer set of<br />possibilities.<br />But the point then is that there is a necessity to recognize and<br />appreciate this history in order to remove the strangeness that many<br />attribute to the world of the new media and to virtuality. If people<br />are cyborgian or robotic today, it is, as you suggest in quoting<br />McLuhan's "extensions of man" that they already always were cyborgian<br />or<br /><br />robotic, but that their technologies have provided superior ways of<br />achieving this.<br /><br /> What is unfortunate is that, with recognition of the<br />re-integration of<br />the arts with the sciences and technology in exploring the new media<br />arts there are relatively few, in fact hardly any commentators who get<br />into these areas. Yet rather than speaking as Grau does about the<br />ties<br /><br />of this to the Visual Arts, we should be speaking of the connection to<br />the inter-relation of the arts, particularly since this is the way of<br />seeing how the new media are a transformation of the way that the<br />almost<br /><br />totally integrated medium will provide a new manifestation of the book<br />in which all modes of communicative experience is realized and merged.<br /><br /> I could go on at great length since this is intrinsically tied<br />up with<br />the book that I'm currently working on ? the long and shorter<br />pre-histories of digiculture. The shorter pre-history is really the<br />one<br /><br />that begins with Poe and Baudelaire and moves through Duchamp, the<br />Cubists, Futurists, etc. to the new media. Anyway, it's about all I<br />can<br /><br />do at the moment. In a way it would take a book to respond with all<br />the<br /><br />angles I have on this at the moment. Hope it helps.<br /><br /> Best wishes and warmest regards to you and your family<br />from<br />both of us,<br /><br /> Donald Theall<br /><br /></dtheall@cogeco.ca></jtheall1@home.com></dtheall@cogeco.ca></jtheall1@home.com></purple@ingress.com></jtheall1@home.com></dtheall@trentu.ca></jtheall1@home.com></jtheall1@home.com></jtheall1@home.com></jtheall1@home.com></dtheall@trentu.ca></jtheall1@home.com></jtheall1@home.com></dtheall@cogeco.ca></dtheall@cogeco.com></dtheall@cogeco.ca>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-35166881270332103992008-08-16T10:44:00.001-05:002009-03-21T13:17:38.170-05:00RUMPELSTILKSKIN = no language exists to adequately describe the post-information, para-modern age<object width="800" height="700"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/bobMovie.swf"></param><br /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"></param><br /><embed src="http://www.earmap.com/bobMovie.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="800" height="700"><br /></embed><br /></object><br /><blockquote>”the idea we cannot banish problems that plague us until they are properly identified for what they are. Knowing the name of the problem is understanding the problem.”<br />--Wikipedia article on Rumpelstilskin </blockquote><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_XbNesCHR3eRcBBJppNAWSixLAwTh6T4EfRPyunXoB-hm-rrKLz94VtPldAxYSM3tlESMv1pLjw_DxwJODlvcykURZmagcbjAvB3u2YQFHMCmQJxpA9iki1-IlldUz4Q-vfSsi7LzxCU/s1600-h/RUMPLEmushrooms.bmp"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_XbNesCHR3eRcBBJppNAWSixLAwTh6T4EfRPyunXoB-hm-rrKLz94VtPldAxYSM3tlESMv1pLjw_DxwJODlvcykURZmagcbjAvB3u2YQFHMCmQJxpA9iki1-IlldUz4Q-vfSsi7LzxCU/s400/RUMPLEmushrooms.bmp" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5235142602342640162" border="0" /></a><br /><ul> <li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/arabic-language" target="_top">Arabic</a>: <i>جعيدان</i> (Ju'aidan) </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/czech-language" target="_top">Czech</a>: <i>Rumplcimprcampr</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/danish-language" target="_top">Danish</a>: <i>Rumleskaft</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/dutch-language" target="_top">Dutch</a>: <i>Repelsteeltje</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/english-language" target="_top">English</a>: <i>Rumpelstiltskin</i> and <i>Tom Tit Tot</i> (from <i>English Fairy Tales</i>, collected & edited by <a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/joseph-jacobs-1" target="_top">Joseph Jacobs</a>, <a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/1884" target="_top">1884</a>) </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/finnish-language" target="_top">Finnish</a>: <i>Tittelintuure</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/french-language" target="_top">French</a>: <i>Grigrigredinmenufretin</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/german-language" target="_top">German</a>: <i>Rumpelstilzchen</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/hebrew-language" target="_top">Hebrew</a>: <i>עוץ לי גוץ לי</i> (ootz li gootz li) </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/hungarian-language" target="_top">Hungarian</a>: <i>Pancimanci</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/icelandic-language" target="_top">Iceland</a>: <i>Rumputuski</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/italian-language" target="_top">Italian</a>: <i>Tremotino</i> or <i>Praseidimio</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/japanese-language" target="_top">Japanese</a>: <i>ルンペルシュティルツヒェン</i>(Runperushutirutsuhyen), <i>がたがたの竹馬こぞう</i>(Gatagata-no-takeuma-kozo) </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/korean-language" target="_top">Korean</a>: <i>럼펠스틸트스킨</i> (reompelseutilteuseukin) </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/polish-language" target="_top">Polish</a>: <i>Titelitury</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/portuguese-language" target="_top">Portuguese</a>: <i>Rumpelstiltskin</i> and <i>O Anão Dançarino</i> (the dancing dwarf) </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/slovak-language" target="_top">Slovak</a>: <i>Martin Klingáčik</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/slovenian-language" target="_top">Slovenian</a>: <i>Špicparkeljc</i> </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/spanish-language" target="_top">Spanish</a>: <i>Rumpelstiltskin</i> and <i>El Enano Saltarín</i> (the jumping dwarf). </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/swedish-language" target="_top">Swedish</a>: <i>Bulleribasius</i> and <i>Päronskaft</i> (pear stalk) </li><li><a class="ilnk" onclick="assignParam('navinfo','method|4'+getLinkTextForCookie(this));" href="http://www.blogger.com/topic/greek-language" target="_top">Greek language</a> : ΡΟΥΜΠΕΛΣΤΙΝΤΣΚΙΝ</li> </ul><br />The name Rumpelstilzchen in German means literally "little rattle stilt". (A stilt is a post or pole providing support for a structure.) A rumpelstilt or rumpelstilz ("rattle stilt") was the name of a type of goblin, also called a pophart or poppart ("rapper" or "thumper") that makes noises by rattling posts and rapping on planks, similar to a rumpelgeist ("rattle ghost") or poltergeist ("noisy ghost"), a mischievous spirit that clatters and moves household objects. (Other related concepts are mummarts or boggarts that are mischievous household spirits that disguise themselves.)<br /><br />---<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf85cb1VCRZZ7vUnNLvGVI5nQD_O0-UPLL06GBpPUgKvc0ADVPfLiMDo_zkMIlXMVXO0DVL2pWUj2Spb4FPn_tQfTzF0Std7UHchxBJVczy5_-tzfeFac2BHRoRpCZJvJeYbhUsFkYDyI/s1600-h/counterblast2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 314px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf85cb1VCRZZ7vUnNLvGVI5nQD_O0-UPLL06GBpPUgKvc0ADVPfLiMDo_zkMIlXMVXO0DVL2pWUj2Spb4FPn_tQfTzF0Std7UHchxBJVczy5_-tzfeFac2BHRoRpCZJvJeYbhUsFkYDyI/s400/counterblast2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283565387227641538" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6yespXZhz3Tjj3sxl0iGwKZ8y4BRje4a2eL9Bx959-mUSlUhlqA1GJCGOSLYwTp6tBTUccV0t0fee4WH4mKzeiXdAeTCeZIOe5pBdLbKzFUKgdTH8SxS7knXGPXnlPP0_wm-q3YoA_Ak/s1600-h/counterblast1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 306px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6yespXZhz3Tjj3sxl0iGwKZ8y4BRje4a2eL9Bx959-mUSlUhlqA1GJCGOSLYwTp6tBTUccV0t0fee4WH4mKzeiXdAeTCeZIOe5pBdLbKzFUKgdTH8SxS7knXGPXnlPP0_wm-q3YoA_Ak/s400/counterblast1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283565375675889810" /></a><br /><br />PLAYBOY: If man can't prevent this transformation of himself by technology--or into technology--how can he control and direct the process of change?<br /><br />MCLUHAN: The first and most vital step of all, as I said at the outset, <span style="font-style:italic;">is simply to understand media and its revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions</span>. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Understanding is half the battle.</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us. No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide.</span> But if we diagnose what is happening to us, we can reduce the ferocity of the winds of change and bring the best elements of the old visual culture, during this transitional period, into peaceful coexistence with the new retribalized society.<br /><br />If we persist, however, in our conventional rearview-mirror approach to these cataclysmic developments, all of Western culture will be destroyed and swept into the dustbin of history. If literate Western man were really interested in preserving the most creative aspects of his civilization, he would not cower in his ivory tower bemoaning change but would plunge himself into <span style="font-weight:bold;">the vortex</span> of electric technology and, by understanding it, dictate his new environment--<span style="font-style:italic;">turn ivory tower into control tower</span>. But I can understand his hostile attitude, because I once shared his visual bias.quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-81763964847874252242008-08-16T00:01:00.002-05:002009-03-21T08:57:07.687-05:00... dressed in an ill-fitting brown tweed suit, black shoes and a clip-on necktie" Tall, grey and gangly, with a thin but mobile mouth and an otherwise eminently forgettable face ..."<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimcAYLGf7p_BaI-4GLnfQRU3rQjkn8DYZRf66CEOJltKEMeROvuCCfEKJN17uIEv0VIHRfK7RJgTrpdDfEK9lyVXgTvXlxKLKhvemJIZ-EOBqT1UKnxjIcPlDQRTFtO5MgaISbbJ5Hiic/s1600-h/twtie.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimcAYLGf7p_BaI-4GLnfQRU3rQjkn8DYZRf66CEOJltKEMeROvuCCfEKJN17uIEv0VIHRfK7RJgTrpdDfEK9lyVXgTvXlxKLKhvemJIZ-EOBqT1UKnxjIcPlDQRTFtO5MgaISbbJ5Hiic/s400/twtie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234979859129402098" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcqyIZHE0zTsARyJNPeOMSD0lhY2_XnIlobCLbCDIreT5zRJ3bWytjmwIJlL-bETfU8GPAvV8WNeFzCTa55ujI-hisEmXCcybFIu3_W44DrZORzZCZkk1jD-1sMSC5xPJBUJ9opFwuj10/s1600-h/DALItie.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcqyIZHE0zTsARyJNPeOMSD0lhY2_XnIlobCLbCDIreT5zRJ3bWytjmwIJlL-bETfU8GPAvV8WNeFzCTa55ujI-hisEmXCcybFIu3_W44DrZORzZCZkk1jD-1sMSC5xPJBUJ9opFwuj10/s400/DALItie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234976668940442482" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBm40XhNMFR_fZmPwEg2PQn6XbQv7Pca-6yadqnJmUCaB9PKSvGueoTZzhtyd1GzjI1gjP-CPUN6WwPSKi91K1WZznDjUhChVd1syS2vL4mKUwJfZqVe92AlxptlHiD6PewbyN4RCDlbA/s1600-h/tie.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBm40XhNMFR_fZmPwEg2PQn6XbQv7Pca-6yadqnJmUCaB9PKSvGueoTZzhtyd1GzjI1gjP-CPUN6WwPSKi91K1WZznDjUhChVd1syS2vL4mKUwJfZqVe92AlxptlHiD6PewbyN4RCDlbA/s400/tie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234976670954030754" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5nCKHYaTGqaWlbWZ_PQURoY9h1Xj0mpC61-SjLXta-Yq0MaECFYOq09P7gElqt3c94wBA5Ah9P9tjcrKu9hLGpGy88oCxMPe-kPexa6RBUlERLljotjPon5_iYo76fl0lzF8e96yc3AU/s1600-h/tie2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5nCKHYaTGqaWlbWZ_PQURoY9h1Xj0mpC61-SjLXta-Yq0MaECFYOq09P7gElqt3c94wBA5Ah9P9tjcrKu9hLGpGy88oCxMPe-kPexa6RBUlERLljotjPon5_iYo76fl0lzF8e96yc3AU/s400/tie2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234976672883375218" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>" He sits in a little office off on the edge of the University of Toronto that looks like the receiving bin of a second-hand book store, grading papers, grading papers, for days on end, wearing-well, he doesn't seem to care what he wears. If he feels like it, he just puts on the old striped tie with the plastic neck band. You just snap the plastic band around your neck and there the tie is, hanging down and ready to go, Pree-Tide. "</blockquote><br /><br /><blockquote>" wearing a seersucker jacket and the plastic neckband tie... "</blockquote><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/ScTxpcku3_I/AAAAAAAAGIQ/LiUTWlSayyA/s1600-h/digitaltie.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 398px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/ScTxpcku3_I/AAAAAAAAGIQ/LiUTWlSayyA/s400/digitaltie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5315639154551218162" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPZYkEJwy640nVaACPap7PVfJTZUqf9t7ij8yh_5tqBuB9n1IS0WWU2maxEjEKuaTN4UKacvcrBf18hWFupzVMToHo6NSTqJCuR6h2nkDOEWSOPFAvHUXirUBscnsIc46gM8vxoe0Ttg5S/s1600-h/web2Clip.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 398px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPZYkEJwy640nVaACPap7PVfJTZUqf9t7ij8yh_5tqBuB9n1IS0WWU2maxEjEKuaTN4UKacvcrBf18hWFupzVMToHo6NSTqJCuR6h2nkDOEWSOPFAvHUXirUBscnsIc46gM8vxoe0Ttg5S/s400/web2Clip.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5315639154613118930" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/ScTxpdkqljI/AAAAAAAAGIA/a5tWlQDEZSU/s1600-h/GlitchClipOn.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 398px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/ScTxpdkqljI/AAAAAAAAGIA/a5tWlQDEZSU/s400/GlitchClipOn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5315639154819372594" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/ScTxpHRl9eI/AAAAAAAAGH4/HofmmTQkd0I/s1600-h/cheapClinOn.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 398px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/ScTxpHRl9eI/AAAAAAAAGH4/HofmmTQkd0I/s400/cheapClinOn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5315639148833797602" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW7P3Jak61Q8NxXgcVuihOS5V7rUWr579Ab8G_CAAhLMz1yTBTtZYWHAJJUwqsvkB8zZb8F0RTdAWcZRhkBlsrbO96DTCRxs03BYmm-BfmPGwkolNzQGQOqJkPx4U65BzAHwmQ53FNkQIB/s1600-h/NarcissusClipOn.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 398px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW7P3Jak61Q8NxXgcVuihOS5V7rUWr579Ab8G_CAAhLMz1yTBTtZYWHAJJUwqsvkB8zZb8F0RTdAWcZRhkBlsrbO96DTCRxs03BYmm-BfmPGwkolNzQGQOqJkPx4U65BzAHwmQ53FNkQIB/s400/NarcissusClipOn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5315639150243427410" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-71304487910386964672008-08-15T17:21:00.002-05:002009-02-18T12:23:41.855-06:00the Analogy of Proper Proportionality<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvcGeMHg1gJNSN_MGAgCxd-rNQpthyphenhyphenrPg0kqEmlmbqMeZO9bgxSTYtknqXGUC_xe2ahMkAznrr04xMOb_J9l_UAgm8Rb1sRBlO0N7Yc94PEd_iHmc-WksHHI1vXeegAv8bdjfNMQCp6M/s1600-h/VP.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvcGeMHg1gJNSN_MGAgCxd-rNQpthyphenhyphenrPg0kqEmlmbqMeZO9bgxSTYtknqXGUC_xe2ahMkAznrr04xMOb_J9l_UAgm8Rb1sRBlO0N7Yc94PEd_iHmc-WksHHI1vXeegAv8bdjfNMQCp6M/s400/VP.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234873982107712594" /></a><br /><blockquote>Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses.</blockquote><br /><br /><blockquote>Truth to the analogist, McLuhan said, is 'a creative act': "a ratio between the mind and things, made by the shaping imagination." Truth to the logician is mere "mechanical matching" of object with object. To the analogist the world is invention itself, what McLuhan in his later shorthand would abbreviate to 'percept'. The logician by contrast will flatten, fix, nail down every percept into what McLuhan would call 'concept'.</blockquote>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-60216069081389497522008-08-15T17:18:00.001-05:002008-12-16T17:35:11.518-06:00TAZ<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIQEVLvqF5iS2uAhqJV-w6h09tMCJKM7azWQNYjnzKzDQxwIwpDYup0Sa6cHC0t_HTJ7fWs3m6Eyo5V3F6feSvq1LlJtEN-CT_LCqYJ8eH65HZ2LZT0uC9QnRBjRmN-1PQ63luS5dOkjA/s1600-h/CCCP.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIQEVLvqF5iS2uAhqJV-w6h09tMCJKM7azWQNYjnzKzDQxwIwpDYup0Sa6cHC0t_HTJ7fWs3m6Eyo5V3F6feSvq1LlJtEN-CT_LCqYJ8eH65HZ2LZT0uC9QnRBjRmN-1PQ63luS5dOkjA/s400/CCCP.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234872391617101906" /></a><br />Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.<br /><br />"The literate man is a perfect sucker for propaganda." <br />Marshall Mcluhan, 1977 TVOntario interview<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOvek5rVljjsfHRiyY_eHPUiIY-yLwmIaIzjF_TpbL-5QNSEWLXh_g7JzArDUHZ4GVHY56Mp9b46KOSrBaaN9Zxa0o57047cw7Mzeig6VYZWbHN2lNcrBRZva65qKSrA2XuyekFNiTMYs/s1600-h/stalin.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 316px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOvek5rVljjsfHRiyY_eHPUiIY-yLwmIaIzjF_TpbL-5QNSEWLXh_g7JzArDUHZ4GVHY56Mp9b46KOSrBaaN9Zxa0o57047cw7Mzeig6VYZWbHN2lNcrBRZva65qKSrA2XuyekFNiTMYs/s400/stalin.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280535464844255458" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-55743786596400327802008-08-15T15:39:00.001-05:002012-02-18T19:42:36.149-06:00Edmund 'Ted' Snow Carpenter<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv9MPT2bvw8N8SbSeH_zbJX_chH323F9SzkR6zthHl4j88F6JkSk2wcBTmburbm3qD3o0TimlGRg2O4BYlRR2gASHI-OSgNILtlDGww-lAf_z6ASsl0wQOFD7qpAH8ANy_hyci1u98uaA6/s1600/EdmundTedCarpenter.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 330px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv9MPT2bvw8N8SbSeH_zbJX_chH323F9SzkR6zthHl4j88F6JkSk2wcBTmburbm3qD3o0TimlGRg2O4BYlRR2gASHI-OSgNILtlDGww-lAf_z6ASsl0wQOFD7qpAH8ANy_hyci1u98uaA6/s400/EdmundTedCarpenter.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625539760950219762" border="0" /></a>Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s5odKImBE5k/ThHeLYy9uiI/AAAAAAAALBA/050XruFJkgo/s1600/TED.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 271px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s5odKImBE5k/ThHeLYy9uiI/AAAAAAAALBA/050XruFJkgo/s400/TED.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625521696778598946" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VU3IHbIik4g/ThHgIaCKiQI/AAAAAAAALBY/UTGdTnFFDmU/s1600/tbwtbRemix.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 368px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VU3IHbIik4g/ThHgIaCKiQI/AAAAAAAALBY/UTGdTnFFDmU/s400/tbwtbRemix.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625523844594436354" border="0" /></a><span class="caption">"Electricity has made angels of us all. Not angels in the Sunday school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit, freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere. The moment we pick up a phone, we’re nowhere in space—everywhere in spirit. That is Saint Augustine’s definition of God: a being whose center is everywhere, whose borders are nowhere."</span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><object height="421" width="522"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NVCBrzi_G48?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NVCBrzi_G48?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="421" width="522"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="421" width="522"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CGYWJGbrQbs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CGYWJGbrQbs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="421" width="522"></embed></object><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plhTMmWznQI/ThHnLc46CsI/AAAAAAAALCY/S7xMIi2h8yw/s1600/phantom.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 284px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plhTMmWznQI/ThHnLc46CsI/AAAAAAAALCY/S7xMIi2h8yw/s400/phantom.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625531593481915074" border="0" /></a>Carpenter <span class="caption">on Anthropological Method : “the approach I have recommended is generally called ‘mystical’ or ‘subjective’ or ‘insight without method....That competent fieldwork should be called ‘mystical’ and incompetent fieldwork called ‘scientific’ is one of the more remarkable features of our profession.”</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzFrPK_p0qobKg1jAnGlD0OvIJUZ0wg8XlwaNENO-WE-T4dMohs6zB7-B4qSKIKF7aGrGOVen51OAKK9yYAtBYaCOrFwKpJY5-5zsIUYfrOiZxF3H559__SqYzy6DLGQroNUBd4RanuKhk/s1600/two_essays.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 296px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzFrPK_p0qobKg1jAnGlD0OvIJUZ0wg8XlwaNENO-WE-T4dMohs6zB7-B4qSKIKF7aGrGOVen51OAKK9yYAtBYaCOrFwKpJY5-5zsIUYfrOiZxF3H559__SqYzy6DLGQroNUBd4RanuKhk/s400/two_essays.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625523835986593042" border="0" /></a><span class="caption">"In the world of electronic technology we humbly encounter the primitive as avant-garde. This search for the primitive is surely one of the most remarkable features of our age. It’s as if we feared we had carried too far our experiment in rationalism, but wouldn’t admit it. And so we called forth other cultures in exotic and disguised forms to administer all of those experiences suppressed among us."<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pZHO9JQa7LU/ThHgHqmzCKI/AAAAAAAALBI/Hcs6mJnTULk/s1600/patterns_that_connect.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 296px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pZHO9JQa7LU/ThHgHqmzCKI/AAAAAAAALBI/Hcs6mJnTULk/s400/patterns_that_connect.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625523831863183522" border="0" /></a><span class="caption">"The ability to close one eye at a time seems to be associated with literacy. Literacy involves a unique sensory pattern.It shatters the natural orchestration of the senses and permits far greater control over individual senses, especially when one sense is used in isolation."</span><br /></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Selected Bibliography</span><br /></div><br /><ul><li><i>Intermediate Period Influences in the Northeast.</i> (PhD Thesis, U Penn, 1950)</li><li><i>Eskimo.</i> (with Robert Flaherty, 1959)</li><li><i>Explorations in Communication, An Anthology.</i> (co-edited with Marshall McLuhan, 1960)</li><li><i>They Became What They Beheld.</i> (1970)</li><li><i>Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!</i> (1972)</li><li><i>Eskimo Realities</i> (1973)</li><li>"The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness." Pp. 451–461. In: Paul Hockings, ed., <i>Principles of Visual Anthropology.</i> (1975a)</li><li>"Collecting Northwest Coast Art." pp. 8–27. In: Bill Holm & William Reid. <i>Form and Freedom: A Dialogue on Northwest Coast Indian Art.</i> (1975b)</li><li><i>In the Middle, Qitinganituk: The Eskimo Today.</i> (with Stephen G. Williams, 1983)</li><li><i>Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art.</i> (with Carl Schuster; 3 Parts, 12 vols., 1986–1988)</li><li><i>Patterns That Connect:Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art.</i> (1996)</li><li>"19th Century Aivilik/Iglulik Drawings." pp. 71–92. In <i>Fifty Years of Arctic Research: Anthropological Studies.</i> Eds. R. Gillberg and H.C. Gullov. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark. (1997)</li><li>"Arctic Witnesses." pp. 303–310. In <i>Fifty Years of Arctic Research: Anthropological Studies.</i> Eds. R. Gillberg and H.C. Gullov. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark. (1997)</li><li>"That Not-So-Silent Sea." pp. 236–261. In: Donald Theall. <i>The Virtual Marshall McLuhan.</i> (2001)</li><li>"European Motifs in Protohistoric Iroquois Art." pp. 255–262. In: W.H. Merrill and I. Goddard, eds., <i>Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant.</i> (2002)</li><li><i>Norse Penny.</i> (2003a)</li><li><i>Comock: The True Story of an Eskimo Hunter.</i> (with Robert Flaherty, 2003b)</li><li><i>Two Essays: Chief & Greed.</i> (2005)</li><li>"Marshall." pp. 179–184. <i>Explorations in Media Ecology</i>, Vol.5, No.3 (2006)</li><li><i>Upside Down: Arctic Realities.</i> Ed. Edmund Carpenter. Houston: Menil Foundation/Yale U Press. (2011)</li></ul><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Htp7sV8XRHw/ThHgzWO4HvI/AAAAAAAALBg/Jq9pX1GxrRk/s1600/Carpenter_Explorations1957.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 297px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Htp7sV8XRHw/ThHgzWO4HvI/AAAAAAAALBg/Jq9pX1GxrRk/s400/Carpenter_Explorations1957.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625524582308388594" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="caption">Ted 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."</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dGHR1KneOXc/ThHj0Fq9rZI/AAAAAAAALCA/pzTN4mAyNq0/s1600/breath.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 281px; height: 351px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dGHR1KneOXc/ThHj0Fq9rZI/AAAAAAAALCA/pzTN4mAyNq0/s400/breath.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625527893577543058" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;">"In Eskimo, the word "to make poetry" is the word "to breathe"; both are derivatives of anerca--the soul, that which is eternal: the breath of life. A poem is words infused with breath or spirit ... Art and poetry are verbs, not nouns. Poems are improvised, not memorized; carvings are carved, not saved. The forms of art are familiar to all; examples need not be preserved. "<br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlqOF3JWAn6BlRk84ZdmHwNTQEteAI2KwyQh2Jg3ViI3KUc2WEivwokUNkRBr-efu07lI7EjdXCyDgowdem9-qea1Yv69C_juZbbu83Ph9XS8TOk2ry7VOiZJwpZ0XHux7UvEA4DBiwAE/s1600/Inuit2.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 260px; height: 227px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlqOF3JWAn6BlRk84ZdmHwNTQEteAI2KwyQh2Jg3ViI3KUc2WEivwokUNkRBr-efu07lI7EjdXCyDgowdem9-qea1Yv69C_juZbbu83Ph9XS8TOk2ry7VOiZJwpZ0XHux7UvEA4DBiwAE/s400/Inuit2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625527897759620914" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;">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."<br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SeZFPri6sIU/ThHjznKHPEI/AAAAAAAALB4/8oHtXZxDb04/s1600/ESKIMO.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 270px; height: 242px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SeZFPri6sIU/ThHjznKHPEI/AAAAAAAALB4/8oHtXZxDb04/s400/ESKIMO.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625527885386693698" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Carpenter on McLuhan : " 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 ..."<br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u7xtdQk0C20/ThHjzBo3x4I/AAAAAAAALBw/rWiCTvShHpo/s1600/firehose.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 260px; height: 330px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u7xtdQk0C20/ThHjzBo3x4I/AAAAAAAALBw/rWiCTvShHpo/s400/firehose.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625527875315156866" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;">" He was basically a poet ... He was a jester, a shaman ... All wonderful personas, but none of them much welcome in the Academy then -- or now. The more popular he became, the more his colleagues questioned his insights. In retrospect, the backlash seems inevitable. ”<br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mjs_PJlwhcw/ThHjyxstScI/AAAAAAAALBo/yzAU8yhPWvc/s1600/TedCarpenter.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mjs_PJlwhcw/ThHjyxstScI/AAAAAAAALBo/yzAU8yhPWvc/s400/TedCarpenter.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625527871036279234" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">US Marine Corps 1942 - 1946</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">“Intellectual Thugs” + 'Class Warfare' : "... Carpenter and McLuhan sometimes engaged in classroom dialogues with a loud tape recording of African war chants as accompaniment …."<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TJYU05zDf5Y/ThHlvDJCFhI/AAAAAAAALCQ/gV4X_jjk4dY/s1600/TedMarshall1979.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 297px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TJYU05zDf5Y/ThHlvDJCFhI/AAAAAAAALCQ/gV4X_jjk4dY/s400/TedMarshall1979.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625530006022264338" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p class="mainText">Carpenter and McLuhan would often walk around the city of Toronto indulging in their penchant for "perceiving patterns" in whatever they saw. Carpenter describes one such outing on a Toronto streetcar: </p> <blockquote class="mainText"> There were all the little widows in black, all the mean faces--it was a mean life then, and the faces reflected it--and Marshall began to talk about the ads on the streetcar in a very loud voice. He pointed to an ad of a girl drinking a Coke with some man watching her, and he said, "Coke sucker." I said, "Marshall, lower your voice." He was totally oblivious to the sound of his voice. And he went down the line and analyzed one ad after another. Everybody just looked straight ahead and pretended they didn't hear him." (qtd. in Marchand, 116)</blockquote> <p class="mainText">Here were a couple of media tricksters creating a (barely) <span style="font-style: italic;">"tolerated margin of mess."</span></p><p class="mainText"><span style="font-style: italic;">=======</span></p><p class="mainText"><span style="font-family:Palatino Linotype, serif;color:#000000;"><span style="font-size: 16pt">IF WITTGENSTEIN HAD BEEN AN ESKIMO<br /></span> </span></p><p class="mainText"><span style="font-family:Palatino Linotype, serif;color:#000000;"><span style="font-size: 10pt">by</span><span style="font-size: 12pt"> Edmund Carpenter<br /></span></span> <span style="font-size: 10pt;font-family:Times New Roman, serif;" ><br /><br /><br /></span> <img alt="" src="http://www.anderbo.com/anderbo1/anderanth/anderanthimage-01.jpg" style="width: 360px; height: 226px;" /> </p><p>The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the art historian Ernst Gombrich contend that we cannot see both rabbit and duck in a single image simultaneously. Illusion, Gombrich says, consists in the conviction that there is only one way of interpreting the visual pattern in front of us. Although we may switch rapidly from rabbit to duck, we cannot experience alternative interpretations at the same time. A shape cannot be seen apart from its interpretation.</p> <p>Discovering the rabbit in the duck produces, according to Wittgenstein, a surprise not produced by the recognition of either image alone.</p> <p>Both men, famous for their analytical investigations, chose the same visual pun for intensive analysis and they agreed on its interpretation. Moreover, they invited their readers to play the game themselves and test their conclusions. But how do people from a different background, say Eskimos, perceive visual puns? Can they see the duck and rabbit simultaneously?</p> <p>Visual punning is an ancient art. A carving from the Canadian Arctic, circa A.D. 1300, simultaneously represents a man in a hooded coat and a dog or, phrased another way, a dog-man, perhaps one popular in Eskimo tales.</p> <p>I once showed Dali’s Paranoiac Face, with its double image, to several Eskimos. Painting was alien to them, but visual punning was not; they showed a craftsman’s appreciation of skillful work.</p> <p>Eskimos love visual puns. So do Melanesians and so did the Aztecs. In our own culture, these double images were much favored by surrealists and perhaps have always and everywhere delighted children.</p> <p>Visual puns vary greatly, but all share one characteristic: each line simultaneously serves two or more images. That is, several figures occupy one space or one figure plays several roles in a single space.</p> <p>The sheer technical challenge of producing visual puns probably spurs punsters to great efforts. I have seen up to five images in one form. And that form was probably just one aspect of a multisensory pattern in which dance, music, navigation, poetry, and dreams commingled.</p> <p>Literate man wants none of this. He not only fails to create visual puns but suspects the worst of those who do. Art critic Rene Crevel, commenting on Dali’s puns, says, “It is by a frankly paranoiac process that it is possible to obtain a double image ....”</p> <p>The trouble with this view is that psychotics don’t produce double images. Nor do children, although they enjoy them. I say this with confidence because I’ve searched at length for visual puns in the art work of both and have yet to find one good example.</p> <p>Drawings by psychotics sometimes include what appear, at first, to be puns, but closer examination reveals more confusion than coherence. By contrast, Eskimo punsters demonstrate superb control of multiple perspective. “Art, being bartender,” wrote Randall Jarrell, “is never drunk.”</p> <p>And puns, being art, are rarely accidental. Of course, the punster may deny his work. A Madison Avenue designer who produced an erotic pun called it an accident. So did the designer of a 1951 West German stamp commemorating Hans Buckler: inverted, Buckler became Stalin.</p> <p>But visual puns don’t just happen. They aren’t the scribblings of children or madmen. They don’t belong in philosophical seminars or psychology labs. And they are not gimmicks designed to surprise. They are deliberate works of art.</p> <p>For years I regularly asked students to draw visual puns and keep diaries of their efforts. With rare exceptions, each student started with one image, then tried to superimpose a second image. The results, as art, were awful. and the diaries were records of frustration.</p> <p>In contrast, an Eskimo carver, having “discovered” a pun in unworked ivory, releases it: the image steps forth in all its complexity. Or a pun may appear to a dreamer, who then executes its likeness.</p> <p>Such puns are implosive, like the dreams or myths from which they come. An Eskimo myth may include both cause and effect, the way a missile’s fuel is its engine and its engine is its fuel. Entire Eskimo societies are implosive: everybody is simultaneously involved with everybody. There is no isolated self and no elevation of sight over the other senses.</p> <p>This emphasis on sight is literate man’s mark and strength, but the other senses suffer correspondingly. If used at all, they are used like sight. All experience is translated into visual models. We say, “Let’s see what we can hear.”</p> <p>The increasing number of native authors--voices from the inside--is one of the most interesting features of contemporary anthropology. These intruders into the visually oriented profession of anthropology are always writing about how things smell, taste, feel, sound: toes gripping roots along a slippery bank; peppery food burning the rectum; “he became aware of gentle heat playing on his right cheek, and a fine smoke teasing his nostrils; while on the left he heard an odd gurgling sound...”</p> <p>These inside reports, with their descriptions of sensory awareness and involvement, reveal how misleading the traditional, outside “observations” have been. My impression of much tribal art is that it should be embraced, all senses involved, not simply viewed. Putting it on display is like displaying an old, cuddly doll behind glass.</p> <p>Not long ago, when some British children were asked, “What are the twelve loveliest things you know,” one boy answered:</p> <p>The cold of ice cream.</p> <p>The scrunch of dry leaves.</p> <p>The feel of clean cloze.</p> <p>Water running into a bath.</p> <p>Cool wind on a hot day.</p> <p>Climbing up a hill, looking down.</p> <p>Hot-water bottle in bed.</p> <p>Honey in your mouth.</p> <p>Smell in a drug store.</p> <p>Babies smiling.</p> <p>The feeling inside when you sing.</p> <p>Baby kittens.</p> <p>A girl’s list went like this:</p> <p>Our dog’s eyes.</p> <p>Street lights on the river.</p> <p>Wet stones.</p> <p>The smell of rain.</p> <p>An organ playing.</p> <p>Red roofs in trees.</p> <p>Smoke rising.</p> <p>Rain on your cheeks.</p> <p>The smell of cut grass.</p> <p>Red velvet.</p> <p>The smell of picnic teas.</p> <p>The moon in clouds.</p> <p>About 1900, Enos Mills, a mountain guide, became snow-blind in the Rockies at 12,000 feet. “My faculties,” he reports, “were intensely awake.” He could not use trails because of the depth of snow. Carrying a long staff, he set out on snowshoes to find the blaze marks on trees, which he had made on his forward journey. Making his way from tree to tree, he thrust an arm into the snow, feeling the bark of the trees until he discovered the marks of the blaze. He resorted to the trees for the points of the compass. He knew that the canyon walls facing south carried pines, while those facing north carried spruce. Keeping pines on his left, he traveled to the eastern side of the range. To check this, he examined lichens on low-lying boulders and moss encircling tree trunks, concluding that the area admitted light freely from all quarters. He shouted, noted from which direction the echoes came, their intensity and cross-replies, and concluded that he was going into the head of a deep forest-walled canyon. In the night a snowslide almost smothered him; enormous rocks and entangled branches made his progress more difficult. Suddenly he caught the scent of aspen smoke. Under favorable conditions a person with a keen sense of smell can detect burning aspen for several miles. Going forward into the wind, he emerged from the woods where the smoke was strongest and knew a cabin was near. In fear of passing it, he stopped to use his ears. As he stood listening, a little girl gently, curiously asked: “Are you going to stay here tonight?”</p> <p>Children learn to separate their senses when they learn, in class, to read silently. Their legs twist, they bite their tongues, but with enormous effort they learn to fragment their senses, to turn on one at a time and keep the others in neutral. And so they are indoctrinated into that world where readers seek silent solitude, concertgoers close their eyes, and gallery guards warn, “Do not touch.”</p> <p>All this is alien to Eskimo experience. Once, with visibility zero, I traveled rapidly along a dangerous coastline, guided by an Eskimo who navigated by the feel of wind and smell of fog, by sound, of surf and nesting birds, and particularly by the feel of the pattern of waves and current against his buttocks.</p> <p>With such interplay and interpenetration of senses, no single sense can be isolated. An Eskimo hunter who relied on sight alone would return empty-handed; a traveler who ignored odors and winds and sounds would soon be lost.</p> <p>Recently, comparing paintings by blind children with those of seeing children, an experimenter found the two indistinguishable until the age of about six, at which point the seeing children moved in the direction of optical imagery.</p> <p>Patients who have undergone throat surgery are forbidden to read, for there is a natural tendency for a reader to evoke absent sounds, and the throat muscles work silently as the reader scans the page.</p> <p>Nothing was more alien to medievalism than silent reading. Reading was aloud, often as song, with gestures. Physicians prescribed reading as a form of exercise. Isolating one sense from all others calls for enormous training and self-control; it is probably never fully achieved. Test this yourself. Run water into the bath while switching the light on and off: the sound seems louder in the dark.</p> <p>Phonetic writing translated multi-sensuous speech into one sense only. The peculiar effect of translating the many senses of the spoken word into the visual mode of writing was to abstract one sense from the cluster of the human senses.</p> <p>The phonetic alphabet and all its derivatives stressed a one-thing-at-a-time analytic awareness in perception. This intensity of analysis was achieved at the price of forcing all else in the field of perception into the subliminal.</p> <p>Literacy ushered man into the world of the divided senses. The value accorded the eye at the expense of all other senses destroyed the harmonic orchestration of the senses and led to emphasis upon the individual experience of the individual sense. It created a hierarchy of senses with sight highest, touch lowest. Aristotle, in the first sentence of Metaphysics, says, of all the senses, trust only the sense of sight. Plato went further: he regarded sight as the highest and touch as the lowest.</p> <p>Sight is like no other sense: it favors detachment. I am in sound and smell; taste is within me; and touch presses against me. But with my eyes I become a detached observer, casting a hard eye on all experience.</p> <p>Literate man takes literacy for granted, as if this sensory imbalance were a natural state. Yet the silent, immobile reader needs as much food as a miner, more sleep than a farmer, and clothing to conserve his energies. You cannot teach a naked man to read.</p> <p>Literate man, observing a pun, first recognizes only the image rendered vertically relative to himself. The art historian Siegfried Giedion tells of a paleolithic carving of a horse that was on public display for decades. When the heavy stone was rolled outside to be photographed, everyone saw, for the first time, a second horse, inverted.</p> <p>In both paleolithic and Eskimo art, images are not rendered in relation to the viewer. When handed a photograph, Eskimos examine it as it is handed to them, no matter how it is oriented. They look at maps from any direction, and if they understood English, I’m sure they would enjoy James Thurber’s NOW NO SWIMS ON MON without turning it.</p> <p>One may describe the alteration from duck to rabbit as a perception, as if the object had altered before one’s eyes. But the picture doesn’t change, just the observer’s impression of it, point of view, emphasis upon one organization over another. Suppose, however, the observer has no “point of view” or, more accurately, none resembling the private, delimiting one of literate man. Suppose the observer’s art, language, and entire culture deny privacy and stress, instead, group awareness. Suppose, finally, no effort is made to suppress the “baser” senses or to make sight supreme.</p> <p>Suppose all this and you have gone a long way toward describing Eskimos, who have no private point of view because they don’t “view” life or conceive of an individual as a “point.”</p> <p>The artist M.C. Escher, whose visual puns have fascinated mathematicians, wrote:</p> <p>“The border line between two adjacent shapes having a double function, the act of tracing such a line is a complicated business. On either side of it, simultaneously, a recognizability takes shape. But the human mind and eye cannot be busy with two things at the same moment and so there must be a quick and continuous jumping from one side to the other.”</p> <p>Does the Eskimo, like Escher, switch from one reading to another? Or can an Eskimo hold two disjunctive alternate readings simultaneously? We know that a literate person can recite a poem and meanwhile solve simple arithmetical problems. But while one is attended to, the other goes below some kind of threshold.</p> <p>Other cultures seem to differ in the way they handle this kind of multiplicity of thought. Certain African groups can carry on five simultaneous rhythms: the melody and four percussion parts. All players often have their own downbeat. Three rhythms are common in preliterate music: melody, hand clapping, and foot tapping. This is extremely difficult for literates who “automatically” keep step to the music.</p> <p>And the Eskimos, do they actually see the duck and rabbit simultaneously? Perhaps not, but they certainly see them faster, and in quite a different way, than Ludwig Wittgenstein. </p> <span style="font-size: 12pt;font-family:Times New Roman, serif;" ><br /></span> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" width="339"> <tbody><tr> <td width="339"> <span style="font-size: 9pt;font-family:palatino linotype, serif;" > <i> "If Wittgenstein Had Been an Eskimo" originally appeared in the February 1980 issue of the magazine Natural History.<br /><br /> <b>Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter</b> (September 2, 1922—July 1, 2011) was an anthropologist best known for his work on tribal art and visual media. His 2011 book <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300169386"> </a></i><a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300169386"><span style="color:#808080;">UPSIDE DOWN: Arctic Realities</span></a><i> is distributed for The Menil Collection of Houston by Yale University Press. </i></span></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div></div></div></div>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-78718703891983298802008-08-15T14:59:00.000-05:002008-08-15T16:57:15.734-05:00pastimes are past times<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqEGzbnTCukMndUiRPEqy3ShXXt8nUtY7dOvsSmZhPemYpn8OXnIL0KJfP88ONt2LHkgrfmp6_uTHgsT7OrN8Y7k_ZCmf8kcmhTWY7YN_PgO3suIrCzM3KqlYxMxwqWmV3QXc6FLGrxbw/s1600-h/RMUTT.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqEGzbnTCukMndUiRPEqy3ShXXt8nUtY7dOvsSmZhPemYpn8OXnIL0KJfP88ONt2LHkgrfmp6_uTHgsT7OrN8Y7k_ZCmf8kcmhTWY7YN_PgO3suIrCzM3KqlYxMxwqWmV3QXc6FLGrxbw/s400/RMUTT.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234866905803044322" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth 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 role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. (p.99) </blockquote>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-34743780025160199792008-08-15T14:55:00.000-05:002008-09-30T07:40:46.577-05:00sputnik<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ky0SXzQivKXFnp5z4LrdyJO06kL5gHqo6bW1BGb3LNF9tIUVAVWH52FHWDos14Jj3vLWa9DYcHNCpZXpsCb1gs24Op5l-7spnZncz2CFpWqPfX8MeImYTwr_A30aBzZ2pKlapz7k5y8/s1600-h/SPUT4.10.57.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ky0SXzQivKXFnp5z4LrdyJO06kL5gHqo6bW1BGb3LNF9tIUVAVWH52FHWDos14Jj3vLWa9DYcHNCpZXpsCb1gs24Op5l-7spnZncz2CFpWqPfX8MeImYTwr_A30aBzZ2pKlapz7k5y8/s400/SPUT4.10.57.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234867703321577090" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>When we put satellites around the planet Darwinian nature ended. The earth became an artform subject to the same programming as media networks and their environments. The entire evolutionary process shifted, at the moment of Sputnik, from biology to technology. Evolution became not an involuntary response of organisms to new conditions, but part of the consensus of human consciousness. Such a revolution is enormously greater and more confusing to past attitudes than anything that can confront a mere culture or civilization.</blockquote><br /><br /><blockquote>Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere.</blockquote>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-89707237839195022002008-08-15T11:10:00.000-05:002009-01-06T08:29:20.752-06:00axenwise<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht7ftQDajbS3lrzdQbobjZW4n3bdTBoSY7vlgwyHvSw0JbDFWiRoXhBCQ1yLMvPe9G3RlK3PkRP0IcEfj5nYYqYe5HT31-QvTMAi6cYRP7djzs_MorehJeugH5oCGkk1m4yRA4KQMDtck/s1600-h/ax.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht7ftQDajbS3lrzdQbobjZW4n3bdTBoSY7vlgwyHvSw0JbDFWiRoXhBCQ1yLMvPe9G3RlK3PkRP0IcEfj5nYYqYe5HT31-QvTMAi6cYRP7djzs_MorehJeugH5oCGkk1m4yRA4KQMDtck/s400/ax.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234815603037269858" /></a><br /><a href="http://imfpu.blogspot.com/2008/04/ax.html"> Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise </a><br /><br /><blockquote>The Wake is not, like a novel, to be read all at one go, <br />but to be sampled and sipped and relished in bits. <br />And used.</blockquote>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-46386046824412625582008-08-15T10:27:00.000-05:002008-08-15T13:35:39.025-05:00PATTRECOG<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1HrubQuE85DsiLkRcy1v4nfgkBs8jFrFJBi8WzGKZ92wtcFaCKxprbzRW7H5-4aS3b_leDpIWoNxqTxoWfh51_afueO-Y4DdJM9H7gQmaqKw0S0rRtNzCNbVZWsXtvAaVck4bpQO73W0/s1600-h/macJim.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1HrubQuE85DsiLkRcy1v4nfgkBs8jFrFJBi8WzGKZ92wtcFaCKxprbzRW7H5-4aS3b_leDpIWoNxqTxoWfh51_afueO-Y4DdJM9H7gQmaqKw0S0rRtNzCNbVZWsXtvAaVck4bpQO73W0/s400/macJim.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234814841635517618" /></a><br /><a href="http://imfpu.blogspot.com/2008/08/faded.html"><br />=PATTRECOG=PATTRECOG=PATTRECOG=<br /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-78238499436061150202008-08-14T14:21:00.001-05:002009-03-05T13:51:24.482-06:0022 minutes<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-s_YvzF4w4gJqoRGTL1SH6hyphenhyphenOgpidJtu_d3rGjKZAXx2Y4Q-sAwkSZBrxCw0RqRtk4xoKA_NGlbZbnJmgnmPMPSx_LrDq8mTXl9ZWC6CfnBkluEm0BJY4UXtZWKiXRqYqDyX8iO8u2fM/s1600-h/mcluhansSoup.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-s_YvzF4w4gJqoRGTL1SH6hyphenhyphenOgpidJtu_d3rGjKZAXx2Y4Q-sAwkSZBrxCw0RqRtk4xoKA_NGlbZbnJmgnmPMPSx_LrDq8mTXl9ZWC6CfnBkluEm0BJY4UXtZWKiXRqYqDyX8iO8u2fM/s400/mcluhansSoup.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5237436053006854610" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">"I don't pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult."</span> - Marshall McLuhan </blockquote><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLpweHbBXYS6CCtEsY194mNPtG8kV_K8w9LDGajcCMNIKTDpNZZ_u18JRNd7JVUEwpws9PKLV7m5-uxTRdI3xgoaZKMSrN4Nhe814wkuSlrVDt5EkSIm99rLzSSJh2qFUHLczxQtSkZc/s1600-h/marilynMcLuhan.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLpweHbBXYS6CCtEsY194mNPtG8kV_K8w9LDGajcCMNIKTDpNZZ_u18JRNd7JVUEwpws9PKLV7m5-uxTRdI3xgoaZKMSrN4Nhe814wkuSlrVDt5EkSIm99rLzSSJh2qFUHLczxQtSkZc/s400/marilynMcLuhan.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234455811951906738" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">"In the future, everyone will have <span style="font-style: italic;">privacy</span> for 15 minutes."</span> - Bob Dobbs </blockquote>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-71760527138519804732008-08-14T12:16:00.003-05:002010-10-27T07:21:21.788-05:00mars<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/TMgZCA17PxI/AAAAAAAAImY/jT0CvQHkPlA/s1600/15minutes.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/TMgZCA17PxI/AAAAAAAAImY/jT0CvQHkPlA/s400/15minutes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532699664601267986" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">McLuhan and Recent Art History<br />by Frank Gillette </span><br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">What follows employs a mosaic pattern of observations and probes. What follows does not, as yet, aspire to the status of hypothesis. FG.</span><br /><br />The Gutenberg Galaxy, shot through with primary references to Ruskin, Gombrich, Gilson, Panofsky and Kepes, among others, is testament enough to McLuhan's fluency with art historical ways and means.<br /><br />In the meantime, the Mechanical Bride anticipates many appropriationist mix and match methods and technique. Its mix of burnt-out clichés matched with an exegesis of the early 50's oddments from advertising, book-jackets, cartoons, etc., is expressed in coy, hipster lingo, re-mixed with an astute pedagogical form. It is one frantic pedantic semantic antic. It is among the Conceptualist prototypes, a genuine Ursprache, an authentic original.<br /><br />Thus, McLuhan and that sub-culture identified as the art-world are no strangers.<br /><br />Freud's influence on the Surrealists, and McLuhan's influence on American art of the 60's are akin. Surrealism was informed and fructified by the looming rediscovery of the unconscious and it contents. While Pop art, Greenbergian formalism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism were in varying degrees, conscious and otherwise, wildly antipodean responses to McLuhan's take on the World. Each response being in main part a variance of "the medium is the message."<br /><br />Both Freud and McLuhan, while busy frying other fish, provided ideational, even mythical, backdrops for visual culture, as well as for art praxis in their respective times. Each is essential to the descriptive lexicons typifying "art-speak" in their respective times. And both reputations have endured and survived a high variety of caricature, misattribution and debasement regarding their role and stage presence in their time.<br /><br />The Surrealist mind's very activity ñ its picturesque posture and devotional irrationality ñ is, as if, a manifestation at one with the Freudian concepts of instinct, desire, and the dream. Its stupefying confidence in the liberation of desire and the exaltation of freedom is grounded in, and bracketed by, an outright catachistic embrace of psychoanalytic theories.<br /><br />Likewise with McLuhanism and the mind-set of the 1960's; where notions of hot vs. cool, perceptual rations, linear vs. non-linear, and media as materia prima permeate, in distinctly opposing patterns. The discourse encircling Pop art at one end and Greenbergian formalism at the other ñ with Minimalism and Conceptualism allied as a counterforce to both.<br /><br />But whereas Freud's influence was direct, McLuhan's was decidedly osmotic, passing through the art-world's semi-permeable membrane like some unacknowledged solvent. It was received within the art world's precincts as a particular strain of the overall "eschatological heave" (Mailer's coinage) which branded every aspect of 60-s culture ñ visual, political, theoretical and popular.<br /><br /> <br /><br />As to the specifics: or, five probes enumerated:<br /><br />ONE:<br /><br />Pop Art and Popism in general emerged with a staggering blast in the same time frame (circa. ë61-'65) that McLuhanism takes root and begins to achieve celebrity. It is the late twilight of Abstract Expressionism, the pre-eminent and dominant movement of the prior fifteen years. Televised war in Vietnam is escalating, LSD is founding a sub-culture, the Beatles have arrived. The distinctions between high and low culture is collapsing. A dazzling discontinuity prevails.<br /><br />In this dicey midst, nascent contra-stances begin to spring up. Chief among them are Minimalism, that paradoxical amalgam of Neo-Platonic and empirical interests, and polymorphic Conceptualism with its diverse and multiple embodiments of disembodiment.<br /><br />Like a protractor, McLuhanism's ethos opens out in a 180 degree sweep, encapsulating while corralling all of the above, knowingly or not, into a common arch description of novel terms. Within such terms, these various moves and subsequent counter-moves of the 60's are merely the inevitably results of an epic transitive clash. Their recalcitrant differences merely stubborn evidence of that clash's profound, though ironically received, complexity.<br /><br />Which is to say that McLuhanism's discourse ñ with particular salience on the medium/message equation ñ provided a fresh, even unexpected, way of encompassing the fragmentary contours of the four main contesting camps, which characterized the art world in the 1960's.<br /><br /> <br /><br />TWO:<br /><br />Pop Art's valorizing of the ubiquitous common image or object ñ best exemplified by Warhol's soup cans and Brillo boxes ñ dovetails with McLuhan's exploration of mass media. The mass image, prior to its appropriation by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, et al, was initially spread through the culture in a mass medium, advertising.<br /><br />Thus, both undertakings (McLuhan and the pop-artists) share a distinct ìfamily-resemblanceîÖperhaps it was the zeitgeist.<br /><br />McLuhan's notion of the receding mechanical age overlapping with an onrushing electronic one is, without a bit of stretch, analogous to the receding spirit of Abstract Expressionism and Pop's disarming arrival. McLuhan's actual words are apt here: ìThe partial and specialized view-point, however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the information level the same upset has occurred with the substitution of the inclusive image for the mere view-point.î Abstract Expressionism, if nothing else, was and is certainly a specialized noble viewpoint. And with Pop, aesthetic practice is certainly expanded with its omnivorous inclusion of all and every sundry mass image.<br /><br /> <br /><br />THREE:<br /><br />Those dual, complimentary, hegemons, Popism and electric media ñ software and hardware in current parlance ñ flooded the collective psyche with the overwhelming force of nature itself. But success invites rebellion. And such rebellions were rife. In retrospect, Greenbergian Formalism, or color-field painting, is rather marginal among these ñ yet central to our present argument.<br /><br />Cast in predicament, Greenberg's formalist aegis covers a narrow spectrum of exclusionary attitude, manifest in painting and sculpture both. Its gist is this: progress in the visual arts orbits around the core issue of material transparency. Ergo, increasing emphasis on the medium ñ that is, the physicality of pigment and the qualities of surface ñ is registered as liberation from the declared restraints of representation, inference, and pictorial illusion.<br /><br />Greenberg and his coterie held Popism's world view in pitiless disdain, claiming that it had enfeebled demands made on the viewer; that it was antithetical to the putative rigors of authentic connoisseurship; that its mimicry of kitsch, advertising, cartoons et al, was nothing more than a wanton abandon of high motive.<br /><br />The twisting irony here is, of course, that central and conspicuous attributes of McLuhanism can and have been implicitly drafted into the respective causa belli of these two camps.<br /><br />In a sense that McLuhan would have appreciated, these rambling feud is just one of the more recent manifestations of that ageless contest between demonic and hieratic, vernacular and sacerdotal.<br /><br /> <br /><br />FOUR:<br /><br />Panofsky has noted that we actually ìread what see according to the manner in which objects and events were expressed by forms under varying historical conditions.î Thus what we read when viewing a classic untitled box ñ industrially fabricate according to the precise specifications of the master Minimalist Donald Judd ñ are the historical conditions affiliated with its presentation to the world as a sculptural event. Otherwise, such a box could reasonably be taken for a very pricey, very elegant, designer-dumpster. It is the conditions of its making that assign its' status as sculpture and the pleasure derived in viewing ineluctably includes a reading of those conditions.<br /><br />In Minimalism our perceptual ratios are rearranged by a vertiginous oscillation of attentive focus, swinging to and fro between the qualities of the objects' physical presence and its idealist geometric properties. From the eye's mind to the mind's eye and back, such an object's medium empirical and ephemeral at once is its message.<br /><br /> <br /><br />FIVE:<br /><br />Cutting to the quick, Conceptualism is a message without a medium, at least with a medium in any traditional sense. Its measure of merit rests in the free-floating character of its propositions. Evidence of a particular Conceptualist enterprise usually commences with the diagrams, instructions, or floor plans preceding its temporary embodiment, and/or the record of its having existed at all, usually manifested in photographs, videotape or the detritus resulting from the event.<br /><br />Thus the installation or the event itself drops off into the void and we are left with its before and after, with its projection and trace. Often enough, these traces are fetishized, re-entering the domain of art objects and, subsequently, the economy of the art world. But since you can only have your tongue in one cheek at a time, this maneuver for having it both ways presents a novel conundrum. Should these photographs, tapes, drawings, debris, etc., be judged by their intrinsic aesthetic value in the Ding an sich, as the thing themselves, as entities with an existence independent of the installations which cause them? Or does their merit reside exclusively in the reification of phantom events?<br /><br />I suspect there are questions that McLuhan himself would have enjoyed tossing around, inasmuch and since they represent the medium/message equation with a peculiar wrinkle.<br /><br />In any case, the rhizome interconnecting McLuhan's explorations with the zigzagging tactics of 60's visual artists, of all vanguard stripes, is fecund with a shared motif index, logistical repertoire, and lexical invention. And this fortuitous confluence represents a critical juncture that, in retrospect, has set the reverberating tone of our current post-modern climate. For, in Wittgenstein's signifying phrase, "To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life."<br /><br /> <br /><br />Hence, through bend of bay and swerve of shore we return to McLuhan castle and environs once again. Where we fin again, only to begin again, for these environs posses a serious strength and their river runs very deep.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Frank Gillette<br />NYC March, 1998</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SZBf4IIVUkI/AAAAAAAAFqI/dy8FoHpbH70/s1600-h/MMobey.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 231px; height: 330px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SZBf4IIVUkI/AAAAAAAAFqI/dy8FoHpbH70/s400/MMobey.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300842179274822210" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjDY1O3dYbS3G9pzAXNucu_h0a3aOtrjk7ATw5tUqU1eoXPOPo4NW2kIqIqpXEMCWY-aL82HSDcXB-WQRcofwx9nQIFw3d14OHzf6dRZ6CA5vlCJkAFv9JSnZmPeh0ETWXfYq_vAWPFtQ/s1600-h/mcluhan.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjDY1O3dYbS3G9pzAXNucu_h0a3aOtrjk7ATw5tUqU1eoXPOPo4NW2kIqIqpXEMCWY-aL82HSDcXB-WQRcofwx9nQIFw3d14OHzf6dRZ6CA5vlCJkAFv9JSnZmPeh0ETWXfYq_vAWPFtQ/s400/mcluhan.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234551491699655282" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4vj3RkrqKU4y3HckA9dJkweLF0Skj170oTGlKcZ6U6gYwMCtgL6nN0TXh0PLXbIsKUr1czbP3a1Dzj6FJChRb8csx-uJfdS50TxkYXkKgIrRDJ9OKpXVHN5xphBHHywM3yzO61I7Ztxc/s1600-h/artificialArbitrary.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; 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cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyMnpi2KFovEldG_LGvDJuNBYiFovuJ6cek8TZ842HqY4v8NNjrbnauRC1ptjmLGNJBc0hiiDzeQdI193X5XsItr5sVGtutQmxGpOCzkc5NV7LUJLpOiEQI2J4syRi0lWAho3uRMCDQmU/s400/blather22.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247048836030580354" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfzjACuG0DUioqkw3lMm3fuiCGHHlnPlUhJwflL2mk2pswRegFue9PSekzJgLPQWEFaKu41b275BFYRb2KBnhk-RTHzRP2Z2lf_joWjk9c5luhi5eeXm6PmVmeJT3YATEVUIgcJ0JARTE/s1600-h/MCL06.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfzjACuG0DUioqkw3lMm3fuiCGHHlnPlUhJwflL2mk2pswRegFue9PSekzJgLPQWEFaKu41b275BFYRb2KBnhk-RTHzRP2Z2lf_joWjk9c5luhi5eeXm6PmVmeJT3YATEVUIgcJ0JARTE/s400/MCL06.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234423910095219986" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMNOB9nyMo6NyTy6GA6YNl_YXEzM-94Bbi_3-x5Vju471o1ghMQNQrU-Zya03NhNqm0w5k7ugdZOHHvu1ut89YdbQo4rcmL7hVjDsuEA-HEsZfr44gXvJSGzTUn-KvYAUt5rD-9gsMQZo/s1600-h/flocks.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMNOB9nyMo6NyTy6GA6YNl_YXEzM-94Bbi_3-x5Vju471o1ghMQNQrU-Zya03NhNqm0w5k7ugdZOHHvu1ut89YdbQo4rcmL7hVjDsuEA-HEsZfr44gXvJSGzTUn-KvYAUt5rD-9gsMQZo/s400/flocks.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247048841986474226" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFjcEeXAteR6iCUGdc1wfPMBgHIgVqujFu79ER8jb3O41Wjw-bnkLKihKLJRzQT3uLcq6d1Ad7F_yLpZa1zbKGYcMmM0C_STt_bIdBxNFf89MFHVFYGH5u0yhcf8-bnwpi-s8ploCQLMw/s1600-h/MCL04.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFjcEeXAteR6iCUGdc1wfPMBgHIgVqujFu79ER8jb3O41Wjw-bnkLKihKLJRzQT3uLcq6d1Ad7F_yLpZa1zbKGYcMmM0C_STt_bIdBxNFf89MFHVFYGH5u0yhcf8-bnwpi-s8ploCQLMw/s400/MCL04.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234423917561002402" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTU2z7W3wVIlfW6nvopN6UgGg3rSo18xzH1XO6QDO1hajHJSV6_oXlVqc-EwjEUqoopc7GhAnMiIf7yRxl7CchKaqWIS1NFmIPlRr-tuBZrQNmMoVVC2X6jPyvYUGnDNufWS6Yg9iBoXI/s1600-h/redhood.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTU2z7W3wVIlfW6nvopN6UgGg3rSo18xzH1XO6QDO1hajHJSV6_oXlVqc-EwjEUqoopc7GhAnMiIf7yRxl7CchKaqWIS1NFmIPlRr-tuBZrQNmMoVVC2X6jPyvYUGnDNufWS6Yg9iBoXI/s400/redhood.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247048854076952674" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SZBf4JOG0rI/AAAAAAAAFqA/ayFrofk8Ork/s1600-h/extrudeMM.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 231px; height: 280px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SZBf4JOG0rI/AAAAAAAAFqA/ayFrofk8Ork/s400/extrudeMM.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300842179567473330" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-53202332875821233822008-08-14T11:38:00.000-05:002008-08-14T11:42:31.173-05:00strategic put on of obsolete dichotomy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG2zowFXlomsb6E7EuzskUMbRodzAB4sQV9Ck0VAU89h_0P2Olpv6Aj4MxlW1N20Rt0TKm5vRvXv59m5IEVq-xDOChzR7InhjBIdR553jI9Uyli3ihXGTqiIL7Cjr6_JY1epI6gCGJR94/s1600-h/RLDog.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG2zowFXlomsb6E7EuzskUMbRodzAB4sQV9Ck0VAU89h_0P2Olpv6Aj4MxlW1N20Rt0TKm5vRvXv59m5IEVq-xDOChzR7InhjBIdR553jI9Uyli3ihXGTqiIL7Cjr6_JY1epI6gCGJR94/s400/RLDog.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234413911230496786" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-33517997543084409032008-08-14T08:20:00.001-05:002010-10-20T18:20:03.565-05:00a perfect reader<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbB5dLYHzQ-5Ql4bxQB17dwP1aX1YOf_7PUdo0HabNXj1z62gG77GVpDE8JYG6rSI08VOTvCWSWDP8mBtsNXyS1jQ8BD2whKLeNv5HIy6tqhwfEe0HMTLPkhG4xTT02dkbZnfJoS-vr8U/s1600-h/Reader.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbB5dLYHzQ-5Ql4bxQB17dwP1aX1YOf_7PUdo0HabNXj1z62gG77GVpDE8JYG6rSI08VOTvCWSWDP8mBtsNXyS1jQ8BD2whKLeNv5HIy6tqhwfEe0HMTLPkhG4xTT02dkbZnfJoS-vr8U/s400/Reader.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234362815151167426" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>McLuhan neither seeks nor deserves merely an interested reader. Rather he, as with others in the “tradition” he participates, seeks a perfect reader with a perfect case of insomnia.</blockquote><br /><br /><blockquote>sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noodle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia<br />(FW 120.12-14.)</blockquote><br /><br />------------------------------------<br /><br />Marshall McLuhan and the Book:<br />A Reconsideration<br /><br />Wayne J. Urban<br /><br />In this essay, I look briefly at the work of Marshall McLuhan, particularly the Gutenberg galaxy, in which he discusses the nature of the book and the print medium through which it is produced. McLuhan’s views on the book are contextualized in terms of his other works, including his famous Understanding Media, which was published after the Gutenberg galaxy. McLuhan’s sense of himself as an avant garde intellectual and analyst of culture is evaluated, and found to be less convincing than a more nuanced view which sees him as both backward- and forward-looking in his work.<br /><br />Dans cet essai, j’examine brièvement l’oeuvre du philosophe Marshall McLuhan, en particulier son the Gutenberg galaxy, ouvrage dans lequel il discute de la nature du livre et du moyen d’impression qui a servi à le produire. Les vues de McLuhan sur le livre sont mises en contexte avec celles qui se dégagent de l’ensemble de ses travaux, y compris son célèbre Understanding Media qui fut publié après the Gutenberg galaxy. Le sentiment qu’a McLuhan d’être un intellectuel d’avant-garde et un analyste de la culture est évalué. On lui préfère ici une opinion plus nuancée qui le considère comme un auteur doté d’un regard à la fois rétrograde et novateur.<br /><br />The work of Marshall McLuhan constitutes a provocative episode in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. When I came upon McLuhan and his work initially, as a graduate student in the 1960s, I was attracted to his ideas for their freshness, their seeming radicalism, their audaciousness, and the combination of critique and affirmation that he offered, along with a studied splashiness in his presentation.[1] The purpose of this paper is to look again at McLuhan’s work, almost four decades later, to try and place him within the intellectual universe of the twentieth, and the twenty-first, centuries. While not the most radical, or ballyhooed of McLuhan’s views, such as his paean to television as an enormously important and revolutionary medium,[2] one of McLuhan’s most important insights was his view of the book, more specifically the book as embodied in the medium of print and as initiated with the development of the printing press and refined up to the middle of the twentieth century. McLuhan’s ideas about the phenomena of print and the book were developed most completely in his own book, published in 1962, the Gutenberg galaxy.[3] My argument in this paper is that McLuhan, as seen most clearly through his views of the book and literacy, was a major figure of the twentieth century, but one who is best seen as continuous with predecessor figures such as Max Weber, Karl Marx, or John Dewey, and successor figures such as advocates of the electronic miracles of the microcomputer and the internet. This evaluation stands in contrast to McLuhan’s own view of himself as a revolutionary thinker who caught the wave of radically novel intellectual development in the western world. In fact, like Marx and Weber, and like contemporary advocates of the new electronic media, McLuhan is both critic of that which he sought to replace, and defender of what came before that which he sought to replace. Specifically, he criticized the book and advocated the virtues of television as a replacement for the book, while he defended the oral and scribal traditions that preceded the book.<br /><br />Before dealing directly with McLuhan’s work, however, a brief discussion of his life and the intellectual traditions within which he developed is in order. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 1911, Herbert Marshall McLuhan grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his father had moved the family in search of economic improvement, and enrolled in engineering at the University of Manitoba. He quickly discerned that he had erred in choosing that field as his subject and switched to a program in the Arts faculty that emphasized literature and philosophy. Attracted to the reading and study of ideas as they were expressed in the classics of western literature and philosophy, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a Gold Medal in 1933. He then took an M.A. in English at Manitoba and also earned a scholarship for further study at Cambridge University. As a colonial at Cambridge, McLuhan was forced to reprise his undergraduate studies there. His academic abilities were quickly recognized, however, and he soon earned his Cambridge B.A. He was later to receive both the M.A. and the Ph.D. (in 1943) from Cambridge. Prior to completing these degrees, however, McLuhan returned to North America to teach English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the USA, beginning in the autumn of 1936.[4]<br /><br />After one year in Madison struggling with moderately prepared and largely poorly motivated students in multiple sections of freshman English composition, McLuhan left to take a teaching position at the University of St. Louis. Coming to the faculty of this Jesuit institution enabled McLuhan to culminate a religious journey that had taken him from the Baptist faith of his childhood to the Roman Catholic Church. Along the way, he was heavily influenced by the ideas of the English Catholic convert G. K. Chesterton, whom he read while at Cambridge.[5] Chesterton, author of mystery stories featuring the Roman Catholic priest-detective, Father Brown, and an important thinker in the development of distributism, a non-Marxist critique of raw capitalism, has appealed to more twentieth-century thinkers than McLuhan.[6] The relation between McLuhan’s Catholicism and his theories of communication was direct, if not always completely understandable. It certainly pointed to the conservative aspects of his thought, an addition or perhaps a counterpoint to what he himself seemed to think was his radicalism.<br /><br />With a change in the administration of the English department at St. Louis, a change that resulted in less recognition of the talent and contributions of McLuhan by his new department chair, McLuhan moved to a new position at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, a Catholic institution, in 1944. Almost immediately, he chafed under the constraints of small-town life and the teaching of English composition to an exceedingly complacent student body. It took McLuhan two years to find a more fulfilling position and environment at the Catholic St. Michael’s College, located within the larger, non-Catholic, University of Toronto.[7] There, having finally achieved some freedom from an onerous teaching load to develop his ideas more fully, McLuhan then turned to the task of refining and honing them.<br /><br />These ideas, though brought to full flower in Toronto, had roots in his studies at Cambridge as well as in his negative intellectual encounters with students and a few positive exchanges with colleagues at Wisconsin, St. Louis, and Assumption College. McLuhan learned from G.K. Chesterton and numerous others. For example, in his graduate studies in England, I.A. Richards and others developing the British version of the New Criticism in literary studies had a profound influence on McLuhan. Others whom he also read in England included Hillaire Belloc and T.S. Eliot, as well as the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. While at St. Louis, McLuhan had a productive exchange with the noted Jesuit philosopher Walter Ong and a beneficial if somewhat bizarre encounter with the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis. Shortly after coming to Toronto, McLuhan encountered the philosopher Etienne Gilson, whose work he had long admired, as well as Harold Innis, long-time professor of political economy. Finally, in his early years at Toronto, he began a somewhat distant but real relationship with the poet Ezra Pound, whom he had studied while at Cambridge. Pound, notorious for his defence of fascism during World War II, was judged to be criminally insane and was incarcerated in a mental hospital in the District of Columbia when McLuhan first met him in June of 1948.[8] What all of these thinkers shared with McLuhan was a critical questioning of modernism and its centrifugal impact on those who subscribed to it, and a look to some aspect of the past as a counterweight to modernism.<br /><br />From nearly the beginning of his teaching of literature, McLuhan included popular media such as radio and film as part of his subject matter, at least partially in an effort to reach his students, many of whom seemed incapable of understanding serious literary effort. The more accessible media offered him the possibility of reaching into the lives of students unversed and uninterested in literature. This foray into popular culture, along with his sophisticated, though not necessarily profound, critique of modernism, constituted the major elements that were to characterize almost all of McLuhan’s mature works. He added to these a penchant for interdisciplinary study and a developing emphasis on the phenomena of various technologies, a word that he used as much to extend his understanding of media as for any other purpose. All these elements were included in The Mechanical Bride (1951), the Gutenberg galaxy (1962), and his most famous work, Understanding Media (1964), which was reprinted in several subsequent editions and translated into numerous foreign languages.[9]<br /><br />The Mechanical Bride was published a full decade before McLuhan’s other major works and had been extant in manuscript form for at least ten years prior to its publication. Thus, it bore faint resemblance to what was to come while still revealing much of what was, and was to remain, on the mind of its author. It contained at least two characteristically McLuhan qualities. It proceeded not in any linear fashion of positing and developing an argument. Rather it was described by its author as a “mosaic,” a work that embodied multiple points of view and proceeded to rain them on the reader in a blizzard of facts, descriptions, episodes, etc., each presented as provocatively as possible without attempting to build an argument carefully or systematically. Comic strips were a major focus in the Mechanical Bride, with Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner,” “Blondie”and more specifically her long-suffering husband “Dagwood,” and “Superman” all taking centre stage. Using these characters as the points of departure, The Mechanical Bride contained a critical analysis of modern humans as in various ways detached from their roots. It also focused on the ways that advertisers controlled their audiences and exercised this control through novel presentations of off-beat ideas and themes. McLuhan was at best implicitly critical of what he was describing while at many other times he seemed to celebrate the phenomena he presented. The book also exhibited some whimsy, irony, and a penchant for the novel or even the outlandish in an attempt to reach the reader in unusual ways.[10]<br /><br />McLuhan’s first book-length effort was widely, if not always positively, reviewed. He was being noticed, if not becoming as notorious as he wished, in the larger world of ideas and culture. His ideas were to get even wider circulation, and substantial refinement, with funding by the Ford Foundation in 1953 of an interdepartmental seminar in culture and communications at Toronto, and a companion journal, Explorations. Little more than a decade later, the seminar evolved into a Centre for Culture and Technology that signified, along with his subsequent books, that McLuhan was a major player in twentieth-century cultural and intellectual life in North America. The seminar and Centre involved students and faculty from several departments at Toronto, most notably psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and English, as well as engineering and medicine. These many disciplines also signified the breadth of the ideas being considered and developed by McLuhan and his colleagues as they studied the various means and modes of communication in contemporary society.<br /><br />If any one of the many aphorisms coined by McLuhan in his published works can be considered to signify many, if not all, of his ideas, it would have to be “the medium is the message.” McLuhan first used this phrase in the 1950s, but it became popularized with the publication of his Understanding Media in 1964. He later summarized the meaning of this phrase as follows: “What is implied in this phrase is that the medium consists of all the services evoked or provoked by any innovation…For literate and visually oriented people it is always a shock to learn that many of the dominant attitudes of their daily lives have been structured by subliminal factors and the psychic effects of seemingly inert or neutral forms.”[11] The warp and woof, the antecedents and consequences, the multiple connotations of that aphorism were to be explored, and played with, in McLuhan’s most famous work, Understanding Media. Privately, he could be simple and relatively clear: “All that I had to say about ‘the medium is the message’…can now be put more simply, or at least more acceptably. If one says instead that each new technology creates a new human environment, it is easy to see why this new environment modifies all previous ones. It is like the ‘last ring on the tree.’@[12]<br /><br />Summarizing Understanding Media is a task that is beyond the ability of this, or of most any, writer. Yet McLuhan seemed to want it that way, preferring to bombard the reader with a multitude of insights rather than attempt to convince him or her through a sustained and cogent argument. And yet, the book appears less unconventional than the Gutenberg Galaxy, since Understanding Media contained a standard apparatus of chapters not found in the earlier work. This resort to a more conventional style in Understanding Media was owing, in large part, to the constant attempts of the editors employed by the publishing house of the volume, McGraw-Hill, to push McLuhan into more standard modes of presentations. In a most unconventional procedure, however, not until page 329 is the theme of the book announced: “…not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary ‘closure’ of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented.”[13]<br /><br />For McLuhan, media were more than those things that bring us news, such as radio or television. Rather, media were extensions of the bodies and minds of human beings. A medium is a technology, one that extends the human being. Examples were multiple, such as clothing extends the skin, housing extends the body’s control mechanisms, the wheel extends the foot. Most importantly for his readers, McLuhan compared and contrasted television with its immediate predecessor, radio. The visual medium was different from, and superior to, its predecessor medium in its ability to control the reactions of its viewers and influence their lives. All of these insights were geared to provoke the reader into contemplating the multiple reality and causality of life in a contemporary world of many, and often competitive if not conflicting, media.<br /><br />More important for the purposes of my analysis than Understanding Media, however, was the volume that McLuhan published two years before it. It is in that volume, the Gutenberg galaxy, that McLuhan turns his attention to the medium of the book, particularly as it is expressed through the technology of print. Since it was published by a university press, the press of McLuhan’s own University of Toronto, the Gutenberg galaxy was allowed to avoid most of the publishing conventions that McLuhan honoured, at least at a surface level, in Understanding Media. the Gutenberg galaxy has no chapters. Rather it is “organized” in 107 sections titled “chapter glosses” and contains an index that lists them by title in chronological order.[14] The flavour of the volume is conveyed in some of the titles of these chapter glosses: the first title is as follows: “King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translated themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs.”[15] Literary works and their authors are frequently cited in the titles of the chapter glosses. For example, “Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, and Supra-human.”[16] Or: “Marlowe anticipated Whitman’s barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.”[17] Much less cryptic and idiosyncratic, and much more directly suggestive, if not indicative, of McLuhan’s argument are the following: “With Gutenberg, Europe enters the technological phase of progress when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life,” and “The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.”[18]<br /><br />It is this notion of trauma that reveals McLuhan’s normative position about the medium of the printed book. For him, it represented much else besides a progressive technological device that helped free, or at least individualize, western man from an environment dominated by tradition and the Church. Responding to a question in a popular magazine interview about the profound shift in values effected by phonetic literacy, the phenomenon that was highly intensified by the invention of the printing press, McLuhan noted:<br /><br />Any culture is an order of sensory preferences, and in the tribal world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell were developed for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. Into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual, linear values and fragmented consciousness. As an intensification and amplification of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminished the role of the sense of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected, and visual mode that we still consider the norm of “rational” existence.[19]<br /><br />In a conclusion to this comment, with a typically McLuhan dash of hyperbole, he noted: “The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle of and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished ‘individuals,’ or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space.”[20]<br /><br />Early in the Gutenberg galaxy, McLuhan made the point that literacy is incorrectly associated with the phenomenon of print. For McLuhan, “Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.”[21] He went on to add that, historically, the printed book had only a roughly five-hundred-year history, beginning in the fifteenth century. The book as a scribal product, however, had a history about three times as long, beginning in the fifth century BC and lasting until the printed book overtook it. Further, for McLuhan, the printed book was in a very real sense inferior to its predecessor, since print was associated with a view that “knowledge is essentially book learning.”[22] In contrast to predecessor views that saw knowledge more broadly as a way of coping with the difficulties of the world, printed books dichotomized the world into literate and illiterate sectors and institutionalized the superiority of the former over the latter by privileging the sense of sight over the other senses.<br /><br />He expanded on this point of view later in the Gutenberg galaxy when he noted that “a fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism.” The reason for this is that “print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.”[23] What print did to the sense of vision was to narrow it in a way that was not challenged until the twentieth-century invention of things such as non-representational art and experimental literature that challenged the primacy of representational image, plot, or argument.<br /><br />What McLuhan was suggesting was the substantial difference in world view between the medieval and the modern human mind and, more importantly, the severe constriction of the complex, medieval world view by the print medium that created modernity. For example, early modern writers were less alienated than their successors, since they were more in touch with the multiple perspectives of their predecessors than were their successors. McLuhan illustrates this point by showing how nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare imposed standardized punctuation on works that had been punctuated for listening, and thus could be adapted for differing audiences. Looking at Shakespeare primarily as author of works to be “read” was distinctly to limit his influence and his impact.[24]<br /><br />Even more constricting was the phenomenon that the reading of printed books involved a habit and an orientation that was transferred into other realms of life. “The mere accustomation to the repetitive, lineal patterns of the printed page strongly disposed people to transfer such approaches to all kinds of problems.”[25] In other words, the mechanization characteristic of print, and the limitation of viewpoint that this mechanization effected, quickly spread to areas of modern life such as the production of goods. For McLuhan, print was the ancestor of industrialization and a causal ancestor at that.<br /><br />The problem with print was that “it discourages minute verbal play, it strongly works for uniformity of spelling and uniformity of meaning,” both of which are concerns of the printer and the public created by print. In contrast, “a close attention to precise nuance of word use is an oral and not a written trait.”[26] Put bluntly, for McLuhan, “Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism.”[27] Along with this individualism, print privileged rationalism over other ways of human communication. The phenomenon of print dichotomized the head and the heart, a dichotomy that twentieth-century intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, were struggling to overcome.[28]<br /><br />McLuhan notes other paradoxical outcomes of print culture, such as the creation of both nationalism and individualism. He states: “Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.”[29] This paradox and the tensions it unleashed were never addressed productively. Rather, they continued to work in conflict with each other and to frustrate attempts to link the individual and the nation in productive relationships.<br /><br />Throughout the Gutenberg galaxy, McLuhan celebrates writers and thinkers such as Burke, Cervantes, de Tocqueville, Heidegger, Joyce, and Shakespeare for the different ways in which each of them saw through the limitations that the medium of the printed book was imposing on modern individuals and modern societies. These intellectuals are contrasted with more mainstream modernists such as Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Machiavelli, each of whom was seduced, though not necessarily in the same way, by the allure of the world of print and its simplifications.<br /><br />While it is clear that criticism of print and the book pervades the pages of the Gutenberg galaxy, the superiority of post-print culture that was celebrated two years later in Understanding Media was also adumbrated, if only briefly, in the earlier work. In the context of discussing the development of print, he notes: “The print phase, however, has encountered today the new organic and biological modes of the electronic world. That is, it is now interpenetrated at its extreme development of mechanism by the electro-biological…” He then argues that the electronic media such as television facilitate a successful insight into the “native or non-literate experience, simply because we have recreated it electronically within our own culture.”[30] It is clear here, as it is elsewhere in all of his work, that McLuhan is engaged in a critique of print and books and a celebration of the newer media of the late twentieth century that, in his mind, had superseded print.<br /><br />McLuhan was confronted directly with the negative connotations of his argument about print and literacy when an interviewer asked him the following question: “Isn’t the thrust of your argument, then, that the introduction of the phonetic alphabet was not progress, as has generally been assumed, but a psychic and social disaster?” His reply was characteristically ambiguous, but revealing nevertheless. “It was both. I try to avoid value judgments in these areas, but there is much evidence to suggest that man may have paid too dear a price for his new environment of specialist technology and values. Schizophrenia and alienation may be the inevitable consequences of phonetic literacy.”[31]<br /><br />In that same interview McLuhan argued that the invention of the printing press intensified drastically the stresses that began with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet. He remarked that “both nationalism and industrialism…derived from the explosion of print technology in the 16th century.” The former phenomenon, nationalism, was the outcome of the printing press, which “spread…mass-produced books and printed matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages,…and gave birth to the entire concept of nationalism.” As for the relationship between print and the industrial revolution, he concluded:<br /><br />The two go hand in hand. Printing, remember, was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes, it became the blueprint of all mechanization to follow. The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg. Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production. Movable type was archetype and prototype for all subsequent industrial development…It is necessary to recognize literacy as typographic technology shaping not only production and marketing procedures but all other areas of life, from education to city planning.[32]<br /><br />Thus, though McLuhan claimed that the printing press was both progressive and problematic, his final evaluation of the phenomena of literacy and the book, particularly as represented in the medium of the printing press, seems clearly to come down on the negative side. His ambivalence, and his invocation of it to mask a fundamentally negative view, put him in company with Max Weber, whose analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism voiced the same reluctance to make value judgements while at length exploring the negative consequences of the phenomenon he was describing. And this same ambivalence, and an even more determined negative final judgement, characterized the analysis of capitalists and capitalism by Karl Marx. What we have in McLuhan, then, is a new explanation of modernism as an outcome of changes in communication technology, a new explanation different from both the idea-oriented analysis of Weber and the economically-oriented analysis of Marx, but an explanation that aligns with both predecessors in identifying the period of the fundamental change as the latter centuries of the second millennium, AD, as well as in emphasizing its negative consequences.[33]<br /><br />The approval of the electronic medium of television in Understanding Media, just a few years after the publication of the Gutenberg galaxy, allowed McLuhan to escape his identification with Weber and Marx by positing a return to some of the virtues of pre-print culture through embracing the new medium. Such an embrace meant the possible reversal, or at least mitigation, of some of the worst excesses of individualization and abstraction that came with print.<br /><br />There is much more to be said to achieve a complete description of the contours and particulars of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. What has been presented here so far, however, is enough to let us step back from his ideas, particularly the ideas presented in the Gutenberg Galaxy, and try to locate them in the historical stream that included ideas that came before and after him.<br /><br />McLuhan’s similarity to Weber and Marx places him in the company of two of the most substantial intellects of the last two centuries, both of whom, despite real differences, sought seriously to analyze and address the problems and prospects facing contemporary humankind. McLuhan’s embrace of television and his critique of print seem to be related to his aversion to becoming known as a principled anti-modernist; rather he preferred to see the latest medium he encountered, television, as a bridge back to some of what was lost in the embrace of print. Yet there was a bit of disingenuousness in this stance. McLuhan was anxious to market himself and his ideas about communication, anxious enough to make at least this student of his ideas suspicious of his normative endorsement of television.[34]<br /><br />From the perspective of the formal educational world, there is another way to consider McLuhan and his work – one that sees him as far less original than he saw himself. In one of the chapter glosses to the Gutenberg galaxy, McLuhan states the following: “Peter Ramus and John Dewey were the two educational ‘surfers’ or wave-riders of antithetic periods, the Gutenberg and the Marconi or electronic.”[35] In developing this idea, as well as considering McLuhan’s desire to influence the educational world, he can be considered as simply one more in the long line of those thinkers who have tried to update Dewey and his progressive approach to pedagogy by linking him to the latest technological wrinkle to arrive on the scene. McLuhan’s embrace of television parallels Dewey’s use of the arts, crafts, and gardens in his experimental school as ways to catch pupils’ interests and to link them, through those interests, with the earlier development of humankind.[36] Of course, it should be acknowledged that Dewey did much more educationally than did McLuhan. Dewey did conduct his educational experiments in a school setting rather than ruminate about the effect of new technological developments on education and culture. What links the two is the desire to improve the present by looking to the past.<br /><br />My own sense of McLuhan, however, is to see his essence in his anti-modernity, a stance that fits well with his religious orthodoxy as well as with his desire to “make a splash.” In a way he can be seen as an ancestor of both contemporary technologists who see a digital revolution happening in the world, and post-modernists who see the latest revolution as simply one more way in which older notions of truth such as those proffered by science or reason are under siege.<br /><br />In regard to these contemporary movements one wonders what McLuhan might have done with the post-television creations of electronic technology such as the microcomputer and the internet. It seems quite plausible to imagine him becoming one of the loudest advocates of the electronic revolution as well as one of the many seeking to cash in on its development. The increasing anti-intellectualism of advocates of the internet who see its popularity as the “end” of books in their replacement by e-books and the demise of bookish institutions such as libraries is troubling. In the hands, or perhaps better, the fingers of students, the internet diminishes the seriousness and the comprehensiveness of the process of academic research, limiting the work involved to what can be seen on a screen and what can be accessed through key-word searches. This seems a severely truncated intellectual viewpoint, especially when compared to the processes of perusal and study of the numerous pages of books and the wealth of works contained on the shelves of libraries.[37] Though McLuhan died before these developments occurred, and the breadth of his own scholarship is clearly evident in his works, it does not seem far-fetched to see him celebrating the latest advances in electronic technology and joining with their advocates to proclaim the end of the bookish orientation that he himself had criticized so effectively in the Gutenberg galaxy. Yet it is fair also to note that McLuhan dealt with books and print substantively, rather than simply dismissing them out-of-hand as so many modern technologists seem willing to do. While these are my own elaborations of McLuhan’s ideas into a period in which he was no longer alive, they seem to be consistent with those ideas and his use of them.<br /><br />While there may be other conclusions to be drawn about McLuhan and his work than those offered here, it seems fair to say that, considered from the point of view of the intellectual history of the twentieth century, he is both less unique than he thought he was and rather nicely placeable within a part of the intellectual tradition of that century. Further, when considering the latest trends in technology and learning, those that seek to become dominant in the twenty-first century, it seems clear that they are quite compatible with, though intellectually inferior to, the McLuhan intellectual world-view. Whether or not one sees the essence of McLuhan as involving technological-pedagogical innovation, or, as argued herein, a mildly principled and rather clearly consistent anti-modernism, it is obvious that there were both innovation and tradition in his work, as well as substance, and more than a bit of bombast.<br /><br /><br />NOTES<br /><br />1 I would add that another quality that attracted me to McLuhan, initially, was the fact that he was a Canadian, and not another American caught up in the ideological battles between old and new left that characterized much of my graduate education.<br /><br />2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mc-Graw Hill, 1964).<br /><br />3 Marshall McLuhan, the Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).<br /><br />4 Biographical information is taken from W. Terence Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, Escape into Understanding: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1997).<br /><br />5 Ibid.<br /><br />6 I am thinking here especially of Garry Wills, who has spent the last four decades publishing politically astute analyses and critiques of a variety of figures in American history and American politics. Wills started out as a contributor to William Buckley’s conservative magazine, The National Review. He rather quickly left that periodical and its ideology and became more and more liberal, without abandoning, in his own mind, a genuine conservatism. For his own odyssey intellectually, as well as a discussion of how Chesterton served in his intellectual development, see Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979). For a long discussion of Chesterton, see Wills, G. K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961). Most recently, Wills has sought to develop his version of an anti-papal, and otherwise liberal in many ways, Catholicism. See Wills, Papal Sin: Structure of Deceit (NY: Doubleday, 2000) and Wills, Why I Am A Catholic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).<br /><br />7 Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding.<br /><br />8 Ibid., passim and 143-45.<br /><br />9 Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951); the Gutenberg galaxy (1962); and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). McLuhan published several other books after Understanding Media, but it seems fair to say that the three mentioned here are his major works and those subsequent efforts are refinements of the ideas contained in these three, particularly in Understanding Media.<br /><br />10 Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, Escape into Understanding, 153-57.<br /><br />11 Marshall McLuhan, “English Literature as Control Tower in Communication Study,” English Quarterly 7, 1 (1974): 4, as cited in Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, Escape into Understanding, 397.<br /><br />12 Marshall McLuhan to Charles Schultz (15 Oct. 1964), McLuhan Papers, National Archives of Canada; as cited in Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, Escape into Understanding, 398.<br /><br />13 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 329.<br /><br />14 Marshall McLuhan, the Gutenberg galaxy, 291-94.<br /><br />15 Ibid., 14.<br /><br />16 Ibid., 194.<br /><br />17 Ibid., 199.<br /><br />18 Ibid., 155, 170.<br /><br />19 “Playboy Interview,” in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 240-41.<br /><br />20 Ibid., 241.<br /><br />21 McLuhan, the Gutenberg galaxy, 75.<br /><br />22 Ibid. McLuhan here is quoting G.S. Brett, Psychology Ancient and Modern (London: Longmans, 1928), 36-37.<br /><br />23 McLuhan, the Gutenberg galaxy, 126.<br /><br />24 Ibid., 135-36.<br /><br />25 Ibid., 151.<br /><br />26 Ibid., 156.<br /><br />27 Ibid., 158, my emphasis.<br /><br />28 Ibid., 170.<br /><br />29 Ibid., 235.<br /><br />30 Ibid., 46.<br /><br />31 “Playboy Interview,” in Essential McLuhan, 242.<br /><br />32 Ibid., 243-44.<br /><br />33 Cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930; London: Routledge, 1992) and Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Modern Library, 1936).<br /><br />34 For McLuhan’s first attempt, in the 1950s, to market himself and his ideas, see Gordon, Escape Into Understanding, 168-71.<br /><br />35 McLuhan, the Gutenberg Galaxy, 144.<br /><br />36 For example, see John Dewey, The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum (1915; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).<br /><br />37 David Mash, “Libraries, Books, and Academic Freedom,” Academe 89 (May-June, 2003): 50-54.quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-10503729871072980152008-08-14T07:53:00.000-05:002008-12-30T12:52:10.877-06:00Can a constantly reiterated “wake up you idiots?” be called a philosophy ?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uJJ3urMOI6CkichBvhdNC36IddS-g5cZ6KMVZJ_g5FQtQBLSTagT6MCb0uXnwQoa0d5p6S-vaUolnKVXClcmEnfTtpYqaO45vmLmtm5cWndpkiI-NpKTusNzBo5SYCgmdfspRPDRtfI/s1600-h/ears.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uJJ3urMOI6CkichBvhdNC36IddS-g5cZ6KMVZJ_g5FQtQBLSTagT6MCb0uXnwQoa0d5p6S-vaUolnKVXClcmEnfTtpYqaO45vmLmtm5cWndpkiI-NpKTusNzBo5SYCgmdfspRPDRtfI/s400/ears.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234355771980420098" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>As the computer-satellite matrix matured, passing from anti-environment to environment, it appears that McLuhan saw that techno-cultural evolution had entered a new phase that would remain relatively constant and stable (albeit chaotically so), even with the advent of new technologies like instant replay. When everything is in flux and there is nothing but revolution, there is “no difference that makes a difference,” nothing but stasis and zero-gradient culture. In the face of a situation that either could not be satirized, or had made satire mostly useless, McLuhan registers that a new program is needed.</blockquote><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SVptxIXYiNI/AAAAAAAAFCw/Ip30AVXwS5o/s1600-h/BADtrip.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 371px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SVptxIXYiNI/AAAAAAAAFCw/Ip30AVXwS5o/s400/BADtrip.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5285657803499276498" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-41844924165797315262008-08-13T23:37:00.000-05:002008-12-30T13:25:55.028-06:00cover your ascii ... short cut to the maelstrom<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK5aNeZ7XUt0aaxjUc8RqQY0odaMmLMoEq3z4c64eTm2IGZwmJ_uMK4rPkAcPMtLVdV7213FO_Rjb1N_-bWEDvRA-wJOAeXU4F0OXfUjH7dv3SHYGxMgHJ4bkAjyh7nJA8n6pTWCc0Tps/s1600-h/mmaAscii.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK5aNeZ7XUt0aaxjUc8RqQY0odaMmLMoEq3z4c64eTm2IGZwmJ_uMK4rPkAcPMtLVdV7213FO_Rjb1N_-bWEDvRA-wJOAeXU4F0OXfUjH7dv3SHYGxMgHJ4bkAjyh7nJA8n6pTWCc0Tps/s400/mmaAscii.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234230354327965666" /></a><br /><br />MCLUHAN: There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man's consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ--Yeats' rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It's inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SVp1JH-1dNI/AAAAAAAAFDA/hVwiXY3Kds0/s1600-h/DRUGS.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SVp1JH-1dNI/AAAAAAAAFDA/hVwiXY3Kds0/s400/DRUGS.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5285665912294569170" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-34018506999048850252008-08-13T23:26:00.002-05:002010-11-14T10:58:07.115-06:001967 portable video : inevitable exploding plastic, radical software, raindance<style></style><div>" 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."</div> <div> </div> <div><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portapak">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portapak</a></span></div> <div> <h1 id="watch-headline-title"><span class="long-title" id="eow-title" dir="ltr" title="Beryl Korot: "Radical Software" 1970-74 | Art21 "Exclusive""><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></span>+</h1> <h1><span class="long-title" dir="ltr" title="Beryl Korot: "Radical Software" 1970-74 | Art21 "Exclusive""><span style="font-size:100%;">Beryl Korot: "Radical Software" : </span></span></h1><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1"></sup></div> <div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXlB1CHmOQ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXlB1CHmOQ</a></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj65E10g5VWc66VN6fhutWeO5yCRX0oB9IhoPEZ356-8G_DO2ft-d3kWy_x2sd-HQDE7eDr2Gjb_5IVO2o3NjXA2KXiuBLMlVDCA7AdtUEoO0jZrbWQ0XcY_KkSQsHH322F1GgMuaiUwCI/s1600-h/PAIKmm1.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj65E10g5VWc66VN6fhutWeO5yCRX0oB9IhoPEZ356-8G_DO2ft-d3kWy_x2sd-HQDE7eDr2Gjb_5IVO2o3NjXA2KXiuBLMlVDCA7AdtUEoO0jZrbWQ0XcY_KkSQsHH322F1GgMuaiUwCI/s400/PAIKmm1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283057650295877874" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMq60oQKePPYmFb4huDIOpAdOHFTj91zw0W9k6ASSb5znB16g2zGFUoWuQZ4Yp0rF2NHMKnCjLnwqaTOLXfuD6JvX7x3UdPcBRU3gFxiKLQ4tdTbksqWpuGWMAhfhP3mraLMaANDzsnrw/s1600-h/PAIKmm2.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMq60oQKePPYmFb4huDIOpAdOHFTj91zw0W9k6ASSb5znB16g2zGFUoWuQZ4Yp0rF2NHMKnCjLnwqaTOLXfuD6JvX7x3UdPcBRU3gFxiKLQ4tdTbksqWpuGWMAhfhP3mraLMaANDzsnrw/s400/PAIKmm2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283057650637122642" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Nam June Paik «McLuhan Caged (in Electronic Art II)»<br /><br />'Marshall McLuhan's distorted face in Paik's 'McLuhan Caged' videotape (1967)'<br /><br />Four one-man Paik shows ran in the Galleria Bonino between 1965 and 1974. For 'Electronic Art II' (1968), Paik manipulated TV pictures. These distortions – illustrated here by catalogue photos – were produced by moving magnets across the cathode ray tube or by demagnetization effected by a ‘degausser’.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhABDGUWp_KDIWU15tooaJZU2EDBwpBFcRe790rM3ezgv0Q6CGNhLH7Z2nosGwlU9hbC_1J6_Q5uDuAqp69QX08-_em0Tuly-SjtdK8E-FD-gpM0sOkA1FegQLwBow8ICPu7sJ1L4oubp0/s1600-h/EPI1.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhABDGUWp_KDIWU15tooaJZU2EDBwpBFcRe790rM3ezgv0Q6CGNhLH7Z2nosGwlU9hbC_1J6_Q5uDuAqp69QX08-_em0Tuly-SjtdK8E-FD-gpM0sOkA1FegQLwBow8ICPu7sJ1L4oubp0/s400/EPI1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234225102469026210" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_pUovpt9gefahQAuaxEvqiOxR83whlk4cHYgvv3UwT3iSNPL5YDVNIjniHLEfU6EsqFamjm45xtLMr1joPjlz1TSaVsF9oL0jNn_v_3PIdpgvAwqrR7YbRHxBOCYIWJ4NQzCK2ztTR6E/s1600-h/EPI2.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_pUovpt9gefahQAuaxEvqiOxR83whlk4cHYgvv3UwT3iSNPL5YDVNIjniHLEfU6EsqFamjm45xtLMr1joPjlz1TSaVsF9oL0jNn_v_3PIdpgvAwqrR7YbRHxBOCYIWJ4NQzCK2ztTR6E/s400/EPI2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234225017654150434" border="0" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-6393428433109143112008-08-13T21:15:00.001-05:002009-01-08T13:55:52.522-06:00dis<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyNDbR2vzn5jt3QATpfcj4E2OOWzhPn1VXV8ZQsU55Nhk_BaiMkhfxR3PhVLaBr5nw0cPfO8oQ0lKfjJA_IpjWfdM5gquPFFkWlIaBg7nMvOf-f_Dl6Af5cIXNKLj5w6ff9yWdp1MR30s/s1600-h/PRIMITIVEman.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyNDbR2vzn5jt3QATpfcj4E2OOWzhPn1VXV8ZQsU55Nhk_BaiMkhfxR3PhVLaBr5nw0cPfO8oQ0lKfjJA_IpjWfdM5gquPFFkWlIaBg7nMvOf-f_Dl6Af5cIXNKLj5w6ff9yWdp1MR30s/s400/PRIMITIVEman.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234191751774864130" /></a><br /><blockquote>McLuhan disclosed his “private” reflections on the matter to Gerald Stearn: “My own observations of our almost overwhelming cultural gradient toward the primitive — or involvement of all the senses — is attended by complete personal distaste and dissatisfaction. I have no liking for it,” (McLuhan, “The Hot and Cool Interview,” 65).</blockquote><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SWZaK8yqTzI/AAAAAAAAFKA/5prbKOQ_C30/s1600-h/WeAreThePrimitives.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 302px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SWZaK8yqTzI/AAAAAAAAFKA/5prbKOQ_C30/s400/WeAreThePrimitives.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289013956557033266" /></a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-79149480601147090142008-08-13T21:03:00.000-05:002008-09-20T11:37:58.447-05:00a detailed history of the future ...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQQmF3QALjEHisSs9f25Sc9qt9yLytI5JKqji-mcEq0zFPv9BqXrG6SZJ5ddaSc2EcsF_jUF80uZ9qx9BBBTbXm8uPWpkfSV9NN4B7WR06if0uI3VSAOhXgqzmCNRqnPB8SPZEJ4081hU/s1600-h/MENof1914.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQQmF3QALjEHisSs9f25Sc9qt9yLytI5JKqji-mcEq0zFPv9BqXrG6SZJ5ddaSc2EcsF_jUF80uZ9qx9BBBTbXm8uPWpkfSV9NN4B7WR06if0uI3VSAOhXgqzmCNRqnPB8SPZEJ4081hU/s400/MENof1914.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234189261980889634" /></a><br /><blockquote>To realise the goal, McLuhan sets his “New American Vortex” to<br />work on two tasks: (1) To digest not only the work of Wyndham Lewis,but all of the lights he saw as making up the brightest constellation in all English letters: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis, “on their own terms.” To put the work of these “Men of 1914” “in touch” with society and before an American audience. McLuhan’s rationale appears to have been that he saw and heard in the works of these “serious artists” a “detailed history of the future.”</blockquote><br /><blockquote>In view of his survey, McLuhan sided with the serious artists — the Men of 1914. Unlike Dante, whom he implies was able to hold the same road as society, McLuhan held, following Lewis, that “in a mindless age, every insight takes the character of a lethal weapon.” Both the “man of goodwill” and “serious artist,” must be “the enemy of society.”</blockquote>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-87622387780723856392008-08-13T14:54:00.000-05:002008-08-31T10:36:28.479-05:00crosshairs<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="585" width="780" align="middle" data="http://www.earmap.com/CROSS2.swf"><br /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never" /><br /> <param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" /><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/CROSS2.swf" /><br /> <param name="quality" value="high" /><br /> <param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><br /></object><br /><br />"Anybody in our culture is regarded as invited as long as he stays in one fixed position ... Once he starts moving around and crossing boundaries, he's delinquent, he's fair game."quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-84407990428560297212008-08-13T11:53:00.001-05:002008-08-13T14:29:31.996-05:00E V O L V E<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="403" width="400" align="middle" data="http://www.earmap.com/EVOL.swf"><br /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never" /><br /> <param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" /><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/EVOL.swf" /><br /> <param name="quality" value="high" /><br /> <param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><br /></object><br /><blockquote>"For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century--Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot--had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience--from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student." (March 1969)</blockquote>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-90765937917082530432008-08-13T11:05:00.002-05:002009-01-07T10:36:34.876-06:00senses working overtime<blockquote>"information overload implodes into pattern recognition..."</blockquote><br /><blockquote>"At the speed of light, objects are unobservable, only relationships and patterns among objects are observable ..."</blockquote><br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="never" allownetworking="internal" data="http://www.earmap.com/blinkin.swf" align="middle" height="403" width="400"><br /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never"><br /> <param name="allowNetworking" value="internal"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.earmap.com/blinkin.swf"><br /> <param name="quality" value="high"><br /> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"><br /></object><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICAL CHANGE</span><br /> <br />by H. M. McLuhan<br /><br />“I know about the reasons for the revolution in Mexico," wrote Karel Capek, <br />"but I know nothing at all about the reasons for my next-door <br />neighbour's quarrels. This condition of the man of today is<br />called world citizenship, and it arises from reading the papers." This is to say, <br />among other things, that no matter how much technology<br />reduces the intellectual and social isolation of people, their metaphysical <br />isolation is little affected. But the speed with which we are today abridging <br />the intellectual isolation of people is unquestioned.<br /><br />Bergson argued that if some cosmic jokester were to speed up the<br />entire universe we could detect the event by the impoverishment of<br />mind that would ensue. If only on a planetary scale, we are now in a<br />position to observe the effects of such accelerated operations<br />socially and intellectually, because modern communications have become <br />geared to the speed of light, and transportation is not too far behind.<br /><br />It is perhaps useful to consider that any form of communication<br />written, spoken, or gestured has its own aesthetic mode, and that this <br />mode is part of what is said. Any kind of communication has a great effect <br />on what you decide to say if only because it selects the<br />audience to whom you can say it. The unassisted human voice which <br />can reach at most a few dozen yards, imposes various conditions on a <br />speaker. However, with the invention of the alphabet the voice was <br />translated to a visual medium with the consequent loss of most of its <br />qualities and effects. But its range in time and space was thus given <br />enormous extension. At the same time that the distance from the <br />sender of the recipient of a message was extended, the number of <br />those able to decipher the message was decreased. Writing, in other <br />words, was a political revolution. It changed the nature of social <br />communication and control.<br /><br />Intellectually, the visualization of the word may have made possible <br />the rise of dialectics and logic as they are found in Plato's dialogues. <br />And the Platonic quarrel with the Sophists, from this point<br />of view, may represent the clash of the older oral with the new <br />written mode of communication. For the written form of communication<br />permits the arrest of a mental process for private analysis and<br />contemplation, whereas the oral form is naturally concerned with the <br />public impact on an audience. The Platonic dialogue may well represent <br />a poise between the aesthetic claims and tendencies of these two forms <br />of expression, between dialectic and rhetoric.<br /><br />The conflicting claims of dialectic and rhetoric or private and public <br />communication account for a good deal of subsequent intellectual and <br />social history. The Roman world divided the dispute in accordance <br />with the position of Seneca and of Cicero, and the mediaeval world <br />opposed the methods of study and teaching of the Fathers and the <br />Schoolmen. But the invention of printing or letterpress upset the <br />mediaeval equilibrium in this matter. For the mechanization or writing <br />reduced the effect of the spoken word even more than had the invention <br />of writing. And the cheap and rapid multiplication of books not only <br />extended the audience for books, but it changed the methods of study <br />and teaching from a social to a private mode. There arose a cult of privacy. <br />Western culture and religion became centered in the home and the book.<br /><br />Politically speaking, this social change was felt in the new intensity of <br />commercial exploitation of the vernaculars. Printing fostered nationalism <br />when the printers sought to extend their markets as widely as possible. <br />For any one vernacular market of newly-taught readers was larger than <br />the whole European community of Latin-reading and speaking scholars. <br />One obvious effect of writing and printing is to bind together<br />long tracts of time by making past writers simultaneously available.<br />Associated with this effect is the republicanism of letters. Anybody,<br />no matter what his origin or condition, has access on equal terms to the <br />written messages of "the mighty dead," so that we can readily link, as <br />most have done, the rise of democratic attitudes to the mechanization <br />of writing.<br /><br />As the mechanization of writing advanced in speed and cheapness,<br />and the daily newspaper became possible, a whole series of<br />unpredictable social and political consequences appeared. The press<br />became a source of advertising revenue, for one thing. And larger<br />circulation called for a larger range and variety of news. This led to <br />the development of news-gathering agencies and techniques of great <br />scale. And while the newspaper took on the format of a popular daily<br />book, collectively written and produced, it reversed the character of <br />the first printed books.<br /><br />At first the book had abridged time, making the reader of any<br />period the social equal and contemporary of Homer, Horace, or<br />Petrarch. However, the new book of the people, the newspaper, created<br />a one-day world utterly indifferent to the past, but embracing the<br />whole planet. The newspaper is not a time-binder but a space-binder.<br />Juxtaposed simultaneously in its columns are events from the next<br />block with events from China and Peru. And naturally the<br />technologically determined format of the press has had revolutionary<br />political consequences. It has changed everybody's way of thinking, <br />seeing, feeling. Perhaps the most significant single fact about the <br />newspaper is its date-line.<br /><br />Aesthetically speaking, a week-old newspaper is of no interest at all, <br />even though intellectually speaking it has exactly the same components <br />as today's paper. Aesthetically the newspaper creates an impact of <br />immediacy and of super-realism. Metaphysically its mode is<br />existential. Its impact is that of the very process of actualization.<br />The entire world becomes, in this way, a laboratory in which everybody <br />can watch the stages of an experiment. Everybody becomes a spectator <br />of the biggest show on earth - namely the entire human family in its <br />most gossipy intimacy. One curious aspect of the press is its willingness <br />to be as surrealist as possible in its handling of geography and space, <br />while sticking rigidly to the convention of a date-line. As soon as the <br />same treatment is accorded time as space, we are in the world of <br />Joyce's ULYSSES where it is 800 B.C. and 1904 A.D. at the same time. <br />And it is certain from even a casual glance at modern science fiction <br />that the popular mind is decades ahead of the academic mind in being <br />already prepared to drop the date-line on newspapers, and to range as <br />freely in time as in space as a means of intellectual discovery.<br /><br />This spectator mentality applied not only to the external world<br />but to history includes the habit of seeing oneself as part of the<br />scene, of participating in one's own audience participation, as it<br />were; and it receives a final degree of extension in television <br />where the participants in a show can easily see the broadcast <br />in a studio monitor while engaged in acting the show. It is noteworthy <br />that the spectator attitude is explicitly associated with one of the early<br />newspapers. For the SPECTATOR of Steele and Addison was a commentary<br />on the social and intellectual scene in the days before professional<br />news-gathering had begun. Various inventions like the telescope, the<br />microscope, the spectroscope, and the camera obscura coincided with<br />the landscape interest in painting and poetry to foster a spectator<br />attitude to the world. The very idea of "views" as a way of expressing<br />moral and political attitudes arose at this time. Popular metaphors<br />naturally provide an index to changing experience.<br /><br />For the student of the arts and of politics it is instructive to<br />observe how many of the techniques developed for example, in<br />picturesque poetry, not only appear in the popular novel but in the<br />press. In fact, most current ideas of the opposition between vulgar<br />and sophisticated art, or between popular and esoteric culture, are<br />based on a considerable ignorance of the ways in which communication<br />takes place in society. More specifically, the general concepts of<br />culture have been based on an interest in the moral and intellectual<br />content of art forms, to the neglect of the form itself as a major<br />component of the expression. As attention has widened to see any<br />culture as a communication network, it has become apparent that there<br />are no non-cultural areas in any society. There is no kind of object<br />or activity that has not some rapport with the entire network.<br /><br />The beloved detective story will serve as an example of a<br />supposedly non-cultural type of expression. Built around the character<br />of an omniscient and omni-competent sleuth whose lineage stretches<br />backwards from Holmes to Da Vinci it manages to be popular poetry<br />about the modern city. The sleuth is a master of every facet of the<br />city. With the skill of an organist at a five-keyboard instrument, he<br />can touch any note or level of metropolitan life. He is familiar with<br />all the dives and clubs. He knows the whole range of drinks, foods,<br />clothes, perfumes, as well as every intricacy of transportation routes<br />and schedules. Anybody in the future who wished to acquaint himself<br />with the full range and texture of the modern big town would not be<br />able to find in reputable novels anything comparable to the poetic<br />reportage of the detective story. The raw mechanical power that is<br />imparted to the ordinary metropolitan citizen by his milieu is found<br />in the gestures and idiom of the sleuth.<br /><br />But much more remarkable, as cultural expression, is the form of<br />the detective story. Written backwards, in order that the effect of<br />the story may always be the exact reconstruction of a crime, the form<br />is based on the same method as that employed in laboratory experiment<br />and in modem historiography, archaeology, and mechanical production.<br />But the detective story preceded these sciences in the discovery of<br />this method. It is only one striking instance of popular expression<br />which has its tap-root in the deepest intuitions of our culture.<br /><br />If the mechanization of writing had some such typical effects as<br />have been suggested, it is not too surprising that its extreme<br />development should have coincided with a tendency to switch from words<br />to pictures. This switch was already under way in the eighteenth<br />century with its spectator outlook and passion for landscape in the<br />arts. By the nineteenth century the demand for illustrations for<br />letter-press became very strong, not only in the book and newspaper<br />but also in the very form taken by the esoteric arts, as for instance<br />Rimbaud's ILLUMINATIONS. Photography and cinema may be seen as the<br />response to prolonged pressure of demand rather than as gratuitous<br />inventions. Perhaps they can be viewed as ultimate or extreme<br />mechanizations of writing. More probably, however, telegraphy has<br />claims to be considered the extreme verge of the mechanization of<br />writing beyond which one enters the Marconi world of the mechanization<br />of speech.<br /><br />Like any extreme these processes reversed the original effect,<br />and tended to separate people from the printed word. So that in<br />pictorial papers and magazines even words take on the character of<br />landscape. Variety of types is employed to build up the page as a<br />visual unit rather than as a mere linear transmission of printed<br />words. The Chinese never had an alphabet, but their ideograms are<br />pictorial translations of human gestures and relationships. As our<br />press has become more pictorial our whole culture has become more<br />sympathetic to Chinese art and expression. So that the very features<br />of our culture which have intruded disruptively into the East have<br />also brought us a basis for approaching their kinds of communication.<br />Modern advertising is a world of ideograms.<br /><br />There have been so many domestic and social revolutions<br />associated with the consequences of the mechanization of writing that<br />it is natural to wonder why so little attention has been given to the<br />matter. Without any special awareness of just what revolutions we have<br />been through we have hurried from the age of cinema into the era of<br />television. Between cinema and television we managed to squeeze in<br />radio, the mechanization of speech.<br /><br />By way of obeisance to our own ingenuity, people have often felt<br />obliged to marvel at radio and television by exclaiming: "Although<br />it's happening over there, it's also happening right here." This kind<br />of self-hypnosis is undertaken in a spirit of uneasy propitiation of<br />the new god. But the real power of these deities is exerted when we<br />aren't looking. The mechanization of speech meant that the most<br />intimate whispers or the most ordinary tones of conversation could be<br />sent everywhere instantly from anywhere. Beside the effects of this<br />revolution in communication even those associated with the invention<br />of writing and printing are trivial events. Radio meant the widest<br />dispersal of the human voice and also the ultimate dispersal of<br />attention. For listening is not hearing any more than looking is<br />reading. And all the networks of human communication are becoming so<br />jammed that very few messages are reaching their destination. Mental<br />starvation in the midst of plenty is as much a feature of mass<br />communication as of mass production.<br /><br />The stereotypes of advertising have been developed as the nexus<br />between mass consumption and mass production. Advertising has been the<br />means of organizing the mass market. For advertisements are<br />constructed scientifically as machines to stream-line and channel the<br />multiplicity of human desires until they are effectively geared to<br />production. A more effective mode of psychological collectivization<br />could not be imagined than that imposed by the giant stereotypes of<br />the desirable which are insinuated, without argument but with intimate<br />urgency, by the symbolist techniques of visual and auditory appeal in<br />advertisements. These stereotypes are not the product of chance but of<br />careful investigation and experiment with the human recipients. For<br />the present time the realities of political and social change are to<br />be studied in this area. Among other things, these changes mean that<br />events cannot be reported if they involve a degree of complexity in<br />excess of the available stereotypes, so that in modern diplomacy the<br />negotiators will naturally refuse to attempt a working agreement that<br />cannot be followed by or reported to non-professionals. There must be<br />some simple moral or national formula to hand for the diplomats to<br />depend upon, such as will justify them to the half-listening, half-<br />waking world hour by hour and day by day. In this way the new media<br />have compelled history and actuality to feign a simplicity that just<br />isn't there. Thus the magic and mythic power so characteristic of the<br />mass media, having first hypnotized the recipients of their messages,<br />have then, in effect, pronounced the real world to be an illegitimate<br />and reprehensible territory. The same sort of paradox is inherent in<br />the movie as a night-time therapy applied to the victims of dream<br />routines of daily work.<br /><br />It would be too much in the spirit of the current effect of the<br />new media to brand these and allied developments as deplorable. For,<br />if the new reality of our time is in the main a collective dream or<br />nightmare brought about by the mechanization of speech (television<br />takes the final step of mechanizing the expressiveness of the human<br />figure and gesture) then we must learn the art of using all our wits<br />in a dream world, as did James Joyce in FINNEGANS WAKE.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SWTZ_GE7L1I/AAAAAAAAFII/DJr9t8zRvS8/s1600-h/programmedTeachingMachine.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 282px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDzg8/SWTZ_GE7L1I/AAAAAAAAFII/DJr9t8zRvS8/s400/programmedTeachingMachine.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288591540426059602" /></a><br /><br />On looking closely at the newspaper once more, it becomes<br />evident that as a popular art form it embraces the world spatially but<br />under the sign of a single day. The newspaper as a late stage in the<br />mechanization of writing is handicapped in taking the next step, which<br />occurs easily in radio and television, namely to cover not only many<br />spaces but many times, or history, simultaneously. But even the<br />newspaper has long felt the pressure to take this step. In juxtaposing<br />items from Russia, India, Iran and England, it is plain that there is<br />also a diversity of historical times that are being artificially and<br />arbitrarily elucidated under a single date line. Even in so intimate<br />and influential a fact as dress design, modern archaeology has<br />increased the range of style and idiom to include in a single season<br />types of attire developed many thousands of years apart. The TIME AND<br />WESTERN MAN of Mr. Wyndham Lewis is the classic study of the romantic<br />stigmata of the enthusiastic time-traveller. But the further<br />development of communication in space as in historical time, has<br />tended to lessen the romantic appeal of distant times and customs in<br />favour of a direct stylistic interest in their immediate value and<br />relevance. The modern study of the past, as of distant places, has the<br />effect of making them as much a part of the present as our own<br />problems. So that for the modern mind history has become not a<br />receding perspective but a present burden.<br /><br />This cumulative effect of our techniques of production and of<br />communication has been felt everywhere in the world as an impatience<br />with "the dead hand of the past." As we become more familiar with the<br />components of this revolutionary state of mind we shall discover in<br />our social life as in our private life that there is no past that is<br />dead. And that "the dead hand of the past" is an indispensable guide<br />in the present.<br /><br />In other words when communication devices have achieved the<br />speed of light, there occurs a social and historical simultaneity as<br />well as a local and temporal one. And since the various societies of<br />our world comprise many ages, as well as many places, the immediate<br />effect of modern communication in overlaying all of these is to create<br />dislocation and distress. The first impulse of reason is to cry out<br />for uniformity at any cost, to prevent further waste, confusion, and<br />madness. A clean sweep, a new start, and the abolition of historical<br />differences seem to be demanded for mere survival.<br /><br />It would seem that even so superficial an examination of the<br />impact of technology on culture and politics poses some useful matters<br />for study. The great political discovery of the eighteenth century was<br />social equality. The principal insight of this century to date is<br />perhaps the anthropologist's awareness of cultural equality. Modern<br />anthropologists, deeply influenced by our new skills in communication,<br />have arrived at the conviction that all cultures are equal. That is to<br />say, that seen as communication networks, all cultures past or present<br />represent a uniquely valuable response to specific problems in<br />interpersonal and inter-social communication. This position amounts to<br />no more than saying that any known language possesses qualities of<br />expressiveness not to be found in any other language. But as a matter<br />of practical politics the awareness of cultural equality (a by-product<br />of new techniques of communication) will certainly prove as benign a<br />force as can be imagined, because it frees each society from the odium<br />of inferiority or the arrogance of superiority. Each is free to learn<br />from all the others while possessing itself in quiet.<br /><br />And by way of abating some of the dread most people feel towards<br />the power of mass communications at present it might be well to<br />consider how with radio or the mechanization of human speech, the<br />hustings and the forum have given way to the round table and face-to-<br />face discussion in the presence of small audiences. Also, with<br />television has come a weakening of the magic and myth of the movie<br />"star." It appears that the intimacy and immediacy of the flexible television <br />camera and screen are much less favourable to the star system than <br />the movie camera and its giant screen on to which are poured such <br />dreams as money can buy.<br /><br />INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Vol.7, Summer, 1952, pp.189-95<br />Toronto, June 1952.quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-74767009557860550062008-08-12T23:25:00.000-05:002008-12-04T13:40:35.859-06:00gap<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxwweataXEpWHtpArZieRRnEDVwvmEyZb4aH642iepFlv3x8_2z4KDdsM5uulrwn82y24LmsOZaiIaUJtrEGH-y-UuKg_aIUe1rH2Q88u5rgawV3Q3Ah-cWP_O4kR02CE9PEInjZsNOgE/s1600-h/MIND.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxwweataXEpWHtpArZieRRnEDVwvmEyZb4aH642iepFlv3x8_2z4KDdsM5uulrwn82y24LmsOZaiIaUJtrEGH-y-UuKg_aIUe1rH2Q88u5rgawV3Q3Ah-cWP_O4kR02CE9PEInjZsNOgE/s400/MIND.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5233853665363566690" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>Instant information reveals a wide diversity of new patterns of change; which entice everybody to anticipate changes to come. Ordinary people are thus inspired with the mania which is born of perception, not of the connection, but of the interval between the now and the rapidly approaching new situation. This becomes a way of living "as if every moment were your next." The instant and simultaneous have no sequence or connections, but are characterized by resonant intervals and discontinuity. In the new world environment of instant information there is need to pay attention to the neglected factor of the gap or interval as crux in creating inflation. As long as there is an interval of play between the wheel and the axle, there is a rotary action. It is the interval of play that keeps the wheel and axle in touch. And the gap or interval is "where the action is." This fact has gained special attention from the new physics; and it is in the very opening of "The Nature of the Chemical Bond" that Linus Pauling explains there are "no connections" in matter. The development of the theory of quantum mechanics has also introduced into chemical theory a new concept, that of resonance ... and it is our resonant interval ..." What is most relevant here to the nature of inflation may perhaps be seen from the way in which the gap or interval in things creates the mentality of the gambler: He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who fears to put it to the touch To win or lose it all. It is precisely "touch that is the resonating world of the gap or interval. Touch is literally created by a resonant interval, between, say the hand and the thing. If there were any connection between the hand and the thing, there would be no hand. The gambler is above all the man who must stay in touch, and in the new "physics of the instantaneous electric environment it is precisely the resonant interval or "touch" that characterizes the information that constitutes the universal accessibility of instant information.</blockquote><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT3J7D960cLZfGiBDuJGIEH233WmpOiUYysVHuEhcEPNejr0fuWg7VksGuyKdelNnURpYOMJ2WsCKyQ7r_abyzr9s2e6vstNK0RExVe5Ql6ZGPEqzjoHQGO17EJaTRHCLpMRVnI2BiLBs/s1600-h/inflation.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 311px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT3J7D960cLZfGiBDuJGIEH233WmpOiUYysVHuEhcEPNejr0fuWg7VksGuyKdelNnURpYOMJ2WsCKyQ7r_abyzr9s2e6vstNK0RExVe5Ql6ZGPEqzjoHQGO17EJaTRHCLpMRVnI2BiLBs/s400/inflation.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276021947674385170" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/73328/Marshall-McLuhan-A-Media-Approach-to-Inflation"><br />Marshall-McLuhan-A-Media-Approach-to-Inflation </a>quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459763654006375392.post-47657429939656884842008-08-12T20:56:00.000-05:002008-12-09T18:33:18.753-06:00It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago ...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEYciuA8Go5hlled4siH5be_VvvgV8k_XHyc9b7TkgYVO24wWBWyKF3FZfOQw37zDlTe9cwSpMBJeW3TB09JTgE3wVrDSOiykUGzFq86iP_AHuwlcxste-0I13Cay72kYID_flDHfL-Rs/s1600-h/gutenbergBible01.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEYciuA8Go5hlled4siH5be_VvvgV8k_XHyc9b7TkgYVO24wWBWyKF3FZfOQw37zDlTe9cwSpMBJeW3TB09JTgE3wVrDSOiykUGzFq86iP_AHuwlcxste-0I13Cay72kYID_flDHfL-Rs/s400/gutenbergBible01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5233815473630200738" border="0" /></a><br /><br />"I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [The Gutenberg Galaxy]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidd8TpSWD2tVCHrq3dD_TEGrgUwygRVOJE69dR3-d5tIXuun_OWdU4LqWx1qw1-tlOlS36sJimg5LPimHfGSeIYzDYhWsU8mh3qUcXsaT8rLb17CdTZfWQ0Aq7uH16SfcZv6Q-jZhs1Gg/s1600-h/GG.bmp"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 237px; height: 360px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidd8TpSWD2tVCHrq3dD_TEGrgUwygRVOJE69dR3-d5tIXuun_OWdU4LqWx1qw1-tlOlS36sJimg5LPimHfGSeIYzDYhWsU8mh3qUcXsaT8rLb17CdTZfWQ0Aq7uH16SfcZv6Q-jZhs1Gg/s400/GG.bmp" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277937878164783282" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnOERcxzN1kTdp8zuFrHmu2WEuWN_cA0tAFN7vYOJrPTmv21rPghhC50w8LVwwaCPSnaXhXEstfQbBCyxfTKXCtObJ8HX4Orszu7awS56-31d0H4VUhIA_X-HjKBeUQINIEBQrpdYUOZ0/s1600-h/GGbw.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 370px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnOERcxzN1kTdp8zuFrHmu2WEuWN_cA0tAFN7vYOJrPTmv21rPghhC50w8LVwwaCPSnaXhXEstfQbBCyxfTKXCtObJ8HX4Orszu7awS56-31d0H4VUhIA_X-HjKBeUQINIEBQrpdYUOZ0/s400/GGbw.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277952952950516434" /></a><br /><br />The original cover for the work exhibits two interlocking G’s (a smaller “G,” in reverse, inside the curvature of the lager) in the image of a Vortex: “The structural theme of Spiral presents the oscillation of two simultaneously and complementary cones or spirals, constituting the synchronic worlds of birth and death. Spiral is not a diachronic or lineal structure but synchronic and contrapuntal interplay in a resonating structure whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” (Sorel Etrog, and Marshall McLuhan, Images from the Film Spiral (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1987), 125).quantum retrocausalityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11356824142105136007noreply@blogger.com