identical men from parallel universes

Michael Jackson dab Vowels

2012-01-31T22:39:00.006+03:00

This soundfile is a layer peeled from the final section of the composition DAB, performed by Michael Jackson and composed by John Oswald back in 1989. The sonic content consists of the all the vowels Mr Jackson sang in the recording Bad.

from : http://www.pfony.com

Cage/McLuhan Letter

2012-01-30T17:57:00.001+03:00

Dear John:

It was good to have even a brief visit with you, but we didn't have a chance to talk about the matter I am going to mention now. During the past year or so, I have been trying to work out the relation between jazz and rock in the English language. For various reasons, which we can discuss at length sometime, it is impossible to have a music that is not based on the rhythms of a particular tongue or speech. Speech is the "hidden" ground for the music as figure in any culture whatever. There are specific and complex reasons why the oral tradition of American Southern speech constitute the only possible ground for jazz and rock. Some of these reasons include the fact that English is almost the only language in the world that has actual feet and not mere syllables.

Equally basic is the relation of English to the metropolitan patterns of industrial sound. New technological sounds and patterns are processed through the speech in order to become "music". To people who do not understand this complex of speech technology factors, it must seem very mysterious that Chinese and Norwegian alike are compelled to sing Rock in English rather than in their own tongues.

I have been doing a good deal of work on this subject, and hope to do a great deal more. That is why I am asking for any help or suggestions you can offer. For example, in your own music, have you employed speech rhythms and intervals, consciously or unconsciously? Do you know anybody who has ever worked on these lines?

The fact of "feet" in English relates to the power of English to incorporate complex dance rhythms which are excluded by the languages that have only syllables. The fact that only English has prosody among modern languages, whereas all the rest have only separate syllables, was mentioned to me by a Professor of Italian here when I asked him what was Dante's prosody. He said at once: "There is no prosody in Italian."

Since then, I have checked this out. It is absolutely staggering to realize that one has been a Professor of English for decades without knowing this unique fact about the English language. It is even more appalling to realize that everybody else appears to be as ignorant as I am. I feel that you and Merce Cunningham might have discovered some things in this area, and I am most eager to learn about them.

Most cordial good wishes,

yours,

Marshall

September 13th, 1972

McLuhan Letter to John Cage

slang

2012-01-11T22:20:00.001+03:00

Slang, as McLuhan notes in Culture is Our Business: "is the verbal manifestation of grievance. Slang is an exploration of the new technical and sensory environment that is shifting the speech patterns of the old environment. Slang helps to shape the new identity" (McLuhan 1970: 288).

all thumbs

2012-01-11T22:01:00.001+03:00

The medium, in ordinary use, McLuhan pointed out, refers only to the figure not the ground and hence neglects the vital environmental surround that extends beyond a mere geometric configuration (or more precisely, the graph of the communication net). This myopic approach, McLuhan notes in a letter to Edward T. Hall (August 26, 1975), is exemplified by Deutsch, Shannon, and Weaver, and in particular Weiner's use of the terms "media" and "medium":

The Shannon-Weaver model of information theory (encoder, channel and de-coder) simply ignores the law of the situation, i.e. The Shannon-Weaver model is identical to the bias of Western man which excludes the possibility of environmental influence. In fact, the environment presupposed by the activity of communication is categorized as "noise" in the Shannon- Weaver paradigm. Visual space is the only kind of space that is figure minus ground. (Edward T. Hall Collection: n.p.)

It is by attending to both figure and ground, and the interplay be- tween them, that McLuhan was able to offer a more expansive definition of media and medium. For example, radio, according to McLuhan, is merely a name for all of the electric and simultaneous services that create the instantaneous surround of information. It also allowed him to see how meaning was reconfigured in relation to intermedia dynamics or the media ecology. An example here can be found in McLuhan's consideration of the technology of writing:

In the first place, then, pre-literate societies based on a monopoly of the spoken word, are static, repetitive, unchang- ing. They are, as it is said, "time-bound." Such societies find it difficult to explore space or to extend their communications horizontally. Writing is a tremendous revolution in such a world. For writing is the translation of the vocal or audible into spatial form. Writing gives control over space. Writing produces at once the city. The power to shape space in writing brings the power to organize space architecturally. And when messages can be transported, then comes the road, and armies, and empires. The empires of Alexander and the Caesars were essentially built by paper routes. But today with instantaneous global communications the entire planet is, for purposes of inter-communication, a village rather than a vast imperial net- work. It is obvious that writing cannot have the same meaning or function for us that it had for earlier cultures. (McLuhan 1999: 161–2)

reference

2012-01-11T21:59:00.001+03:00

"A Discontinuous Chat with Marshall McLuhan", Interview by Carl Scharfe for Innis Herald, volume 10, no. 1 (25 October 1976)

"Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt with Students and Guests: A Fireside Chat" (Carl Scharfe) -- Innis Herald, volume 10, no. 4 (10 March 1977)

Interview by Jeffrey Hollender for The Skills Exchange, Innis Herald, volume 11, no. 1 (6 September 1977)

"Baseball is Culture", Innis Herald, volume 11, no. 1 (6 September 1977). Reprint of 1952 article (CBC Times, 25 October, 1 November, and 8. November 1952 -- publication of McLuhan's talk on a CBC "Wednesday Night" broadcast)

Items about McLuhan in The Innis Herald, volume 11, no. 4 (20 February 1978)

Innis Herald, volume 11, no. 5 (April 1978), containing: "Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker in Conversation. The State of the Art in Art Criticism"; "Laws of the Media"; "Alphabet, Mother of Invention"; and "All the Stage is a World in Which there is no Audience".

"A Chat with Eric McLuhan" (Carl Scharfe). The Innis Herald, volume 11, no. 5 (April 1978)

"The Early and Later Innis" (Excerpts from talks "Culture and Technology and the Innis Tradition - Eric A. Havelock - Marshall McLuhan - A Dialogue on Harold Innis," 14 October 1978). Innis Herald, volume 12, no. 1 (December 1978)

f/g

2012-01-11T21:58:00.000+03:00

"Figure" and "ground" entered Gestalt psychology from the work of Edgar Rubin, who [in] about 1915 used those terms to discuss aspects of visual perception. They have here been broadened to embrace the whole structure of perception and of consciousness. All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground). The two continually coerce and play with each other across a common outline or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously. The shape of one conforms exactly to the shape of the other. Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground, which is con-figurational and comprises all other available figures at once... Ground provides the structure or style of awareness, the "way of seeing" as Flaubert called it, or the "terms on which" a figure is perceived. (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988: 5)

That's All Folks !

2012-01-11T20:58:00.001+03:00

Enter EARman : Master of Pupils

2012-01-08T19:46:00.001+03:00

Unfinnegan : Heavy Metal Thunders

2012-01-08T19:41:00.002+03:00

Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations : The Frame

2012-01-02T17:59:00.003+03:00

Of particular note is Higgins's emphasis of the press's newfound orientation toward "exploring the ways and means of communication" — a tag used nowhere else in press publication or newsletters. However, the publications mentioned on the back cover are indeed all concerned with exploring communications:

John Cage is a well-documented compatriot of McLuhan. In Cageâ€™s introduction to the 1989 volume McLuhan: The Man and his Message he declared Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan the two thinkers best tuned to the future of the planet. (In "Network Fever," 2001, Mark Wigley has described the relationship and exchange of ideas between Fuller and McLuhan through the Delos meetings as a paradigmatic example of the network culture today.) In a feedback loop, Cage is also featured in a number of McLuhan's books, probes, and anecdotes. As a conduit between the media investigations of McLuhan and the experimental arts in writing, music, and performance, Cage charges McLuhan's book with his radiant connectivity. Notations, an experiment in collage, bears heavy resemblance to the mosaic method that would come to characterize so much of McLuhan's written work.

The description of this book by Robert Filliou and George Brecht, two of the most prominent members of the international Fluxus movement, could well be applied to The Medium is the Massage. Citing Jerome Agel's approval of these "aesthetic researches" into the "communications industry" spoken "in examples only," Higgins is boldly asserting the anteriority (what the Oulipo would call "anticipatory plagiarism") of the intermedia art of Something Else Press. It is interesting that while 'happenings' are a part of McLuhan's vocabulary, neither of these artists, nor the majority of contemporaneous experimental arts from the day, ever surfaces in McLuhan's work. Similarly, while there is an Aspen journal devoted to McLuhan, some work by Paik and a few other artists, there is a strange erasure of the McLuhan brand from 1965 on in the arts.

The single major publication of Something Else Press remains An Anthology of Concrete Poetry edited by Emmett Williams. This omnibus of visual poetry from the 60s defined a new international field of verbi-voco-visual written artistry in the mid-century. McLuhan's collaborations with Harley Parker from the 1950s until 1969, all could well be subsumed by concrete poetry as laid out in Williams's Anthology. Like McLuhan's own aesthetic background, this work is rooted in Vorticism, French symbolism, and the typographic experiments of the historical avant-garde. Indeed, the formal similarity to Parker's design in Explorations 8 explains Higgins's interest in republishing the magazine in the heyday of the press's international production and influence.

"semantic wedges"

2012-01-02T17:52:00.002+03:00

A recent article on the critical reception of Marshall McLuhan's work summarily dismissed his 1967 The Medium is the Massage and 1968 War and Peace in the Global Village as "crude publicity tracts." Yet from a design perspective, these boks are landmarks in the integration of text, image, and layout. In the values of the publishing industry, a divide persists between words and pictures, high academia and low mass media, authors and designers. Massage and War and Peace are remarkable for blurring the professional, commercial, and formal distinctions that constitute the hierarchies of publishing... To succeed, Fiore felt the book "had to convey the spirit, the populist outcry of the time, in an appropriate form. The 'linearity' of the average book wouldn't work. The medium, after all, was the message!"

The success of the project was all the more surprising considering the conditions under which it was produced: Fiore was given a tight budget and a three-week deadline for design and production. Composed of commissioned photographs as well as stock images of news events and personalities, the publication is a hybrid: part book, part magazine, part storyboard. It combines short prose passages with caption-length texts, some tied directly to images, others demanding to be read more obliquely &emdash; Fiore's visual punning is as persistent as McLuhan's wordplay.

While the typpography suggests a cool Swiss-Modern sensibility, the photography bears traces of a more diverse heritage, stretching from Moholy-Nagy's Painting, Photography, Film and the Dada collages of Heartfield and hausmann to the underground publications of the 1960s. Fiore cites such influences as Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, concrete poetry, Apollinaire's calligrammes, Fluxus, rebuses, and the "mouse's tail" of type in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Common to all of Fiore's boks is the deliberate repetition of images and text. This technique seems partly inspired by the serial forms of Pop Art; more fundamentally, repetition is an effext of the mass media which McLuhan sought to explain. Throughout his career, McLuhan described his work as a series of "probes." Bruce Powers, one of McLuhan's collaborators, has explained how these "probes" were conducted not through argument, but with "semantic wedges." Phrases like "the medium is the message" allowed McLuhan to shift attention from content to form. Fiore complemented these "semantic wedges" with a design strategy centered on repetition, reinforcing McLuhan's larger premise that America is a culture of reproduction.

Jean Baudrillard has noted the relationship between McLuhan's "medium message" and Walter Benjamin's landmark 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." As Baudrillard writes, "Benjamin (and later McLuhan) grasped technique not as productive force (where Marxist analysis remains trapped) but as medium, as the form and principle of a whole new generation of meaning." Benjamin and McLuhan both drew attention to reproduction, confronting it as a definitive aspect of modern culture. The ability to create meaning by recycling, repeating, and reframing images and texts constitutes Fiore's graphic response to McLuhan's assessments of the cultural impact of communication and technology.

Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, "McLuhan/Fiore: Massaging the Message"
Design Writing Research (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996)

Epyllion in Vivisective Dubwise

2011-12-06T18:02:00.002+03:00

A Little Epic: McLuhan’s Use of Epyllion

Andrew Chrystall, Massey University

Enculturation: http://enculturation.net/a-little-epic
(Published: December 5, 2011)

Commentary on Marshall McLuhan’s oeuvre has shifted from debating whether he was right or wrong to a deeper consideration of his rhetorical praxis. In Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Cultural Odyssey, for example, Pevere and Dymond declare:

And if McLuhan wasn't right? Well frankly, who cares? For the fact is, no North American intellectual of his era held the world's ear quite as intensely and obsessively as this incessantly talkative, grammatically impeccable, six-foot-two professor of English literature from Toronto, and none mainlined the peculiar zeitgeist of the era with such voracious, surgical precision. (132–133)

Elena Lamberti, whose work is, in some senses, also indicative of the shift, makes a persuasive case that to retrieve and make good use of McLuhan we need to understand how he wrote. We need, Lamberti argues, to “move, in fact, from the literal (what McLuhan said) to the structural (how he said what he said) and try to carry out a different exegesis that, in time, may recompose the cosmogony and reassemble the fragments” (63).

This essay makes a contribution to this theme. Here I explore how McLuhan, in a bid to create a new way of writing history and a new art that would enable his readers to relate to the present, set about “invading the old arts”—the rag and bone shop—and ravaging them for materials for “stylistic innovation” (McLuhan “Strike the Set” 7). I reveal the contours and lineaments of McLuhan’s study of a form known as the epyllion, anglicized as “little epic,” and how McLuhan retrieved the epyllion to inform and serve as the structural ordering principle of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Hopefully, I also go some ways towards showing that two of McLuhan’s major written works are not merely a heap of splendid fragments. Rather, they are deeply informed by a unity of underlying pattern.

Focusing on the epyllion is also consistent with the kind of exploration of McLuhan’s oeuvre recommended by McLuhan’s former student and, perhaps, his most comprehensive critic, Donald F. Theall. Like Lamberti, Theall has called McLuhan’s critics to address the defects of earlier attempts to engage with his works by paying attention to how he derived his insights and by what means he propagated them (Beyond the Word xvi). McLuhan’s critics and commentators, Theall asserts, need to confront the literary and artistic aspects of his work (The Virtual Marshall McLuhan 185). According to Theall, McLuhan needs to be read with a full understanding of Joyce, literary and rhetorical history, and the history of education. Theall also suggests that McLuhan’s critics and commentators acquaint themselves with the epyllion/little epic, and he intimates that the form resides at the very heart of what he calls McLuhan’s techno-poetics and Menippean or Varronian satiric-science. McLuhan’s employment of the form, Theall implies, helps give his outputs a seductive quality, and allows him to be complex, ambivalent, and transgressive (The Virtual Marshall McLuhan 28-29).

Theall, however, offers little in the way of elaboration and development on the place and significance of the epyllion/little epic for McLuhan’s work. While noting that he was complicit in McLuhan’s discovery of the significance of the epyllion, having collaborated with him on a work intended to extend the seminal work of Marjorie Crump, Theall states that the materials they developed remain housed in the Marshall McLuhan collection held at the Library and National Archives Canada. Here some of those materials will receive discussion for the first time. The value of this exploration, over and above an historical inspection of McLuhan’s foundational work in English and comparative literature, is that it serves as necessary propaedeutic for the kind of exegesis outlined and recommended by Lamberti and Theall. Hopefully, this paper also goes some ways towards provoking thought on ways of writing about the emerging “post-literate world of the hyper-sensory, the new technological artifactual cosmopolis where synaesthesia and coanesthesia produce a more inclusive, tactile space” (Theall The Virtual Marshall McLuhan 79).

1. Breakdown

Before engaging McLuhan’s study of the epyllion it is necessary to consider some background material. In 1951 McLuhan published his first major book, The Mechanical Bride. He perceived the work had failed: “Mechanical Bride is something that happened before the Flood. Assumed an audience .... It is a wedding announcement found 1000 years from now in a block of concrete” (“to Hugh Kenner, 30 January 1951” n.pag.).¹ Faced with the breakdown in his ordinary procedures in the wake of the Bride McLuhan embarked on a new exploration with a view to finding a solution to his own technical problems. He sought a way to make an audience and draw attention to the new technological dispensation and/or tactile environment of television. He also sought to explore: (1) compositional techniques, (2) different approaches to the question of transcendence (or escape from the “problem” of consciousness), and (3) how various artistic techniques, e.g. compositional techniques, achieve effects consistent with various paths of transcendence and/or escape.

McLuhan’s exploration, during this phase in his career, came to focus on a “mythic” and “motivational genre of the greatest importance in the history of European literatures” known as the epyllion/little epic (McLuhan & Watson 165).² McLuhan notes that the essence of this form, in its most basic aspect, is a pair of plots or situations, each serving as a digression or subplot for the other.

The principal structural feature of the little epic form concerns the relation of plot and sub-plot. The sub-plot was referred to as the digressio. It was considered that the sub-plot acted upon the prime plot or statement as a transmuting and spiritualizing force. The two plots were not connected, but paratactic. (Letter to William Ryan n.pag.)

In his correspondence with Kenner, McLuhan presents the case that: epyllion~double plot~heroic couplet~hokku [haiku]~ideogram (Letter to Hugh Kenner, n.d. n.pag.); where “~” designates “significant comparability” (See Levin 10). He also goes so far as to say that the mode of the epyllion, and its construction by way of interfacing two situations, constitutes a minimum system for and/or condescended essence of all artistic organization.

The greater weight of McLuhan’s study of the epyllion is taken up with the history and contexts in which the form was used. McLuhan’s history of the form is fragmentary and far from complete. Many of his reflections and meditations on the form are not fully developed. Perhaps, the incompleteness of his study reflects the fact that the debate as to whether the epyllion is an accredited form of antiquity still continues; a debate McLuhan attributed to the form’s thousand faces (“The Little Epic: The Greeks” 13).

McLuhan, however, argues that the form can be traced from its inception in antiquity. The origin of the epyllion, he asserts, is liturgical, ceremonial, and McLuhan holds that it is the basic form of the Greek pastoral. McLuhan also notes that the epyllion can be seen as a response to a new, heterogeneous public that arrived with the development of cities, commerce, and the separation of art and ritual; a situation, he asserts, the epyllion met with comedy, ambivalence, and hidden meanings for the esoterically inclined (“TheLittle Epic: The Greeks” 17).

McLuhan argues that the epyllion was often referred to as an aetiological poem given its concern with ultimate ends and ultimate causes (“Tennyson and the Romantic Epic”). The “meaning” of the epyllion, he asserts, was as speculative as modern physics is today.³ The epyllion, McLuhan held, is a representation of cosmic law and drama that we now call myth. As such, it can also be understood as an attempt at science and philosophy before the awareness of the individual, given that natural phenomenon were regularly conceived of in terms of human experience and human experience was conceived in terms of cosmic events (“Little Epic: The Greeks” 4-5).⁴

McLuhan also held that the epyllion was tied up in religious controversy involving the competing claims of Olympic and Dionysic faiths and questions pertaining to transcendence, divinization and the attainment of godhead by man. The major epic, based on heroes—children of the gods—who had assumed fixed status, McLuhan claims, tended to be allied with the Olympic. The epyllion, or little epic, with its concern for the world of change and becoming, was largely allied with the Dionysiac. In contrast with the major epic, with its concern with heroes and pushing them through the houses of the zodiac, the epyllion tends to avoid the cycle of the major epic in favour of concerning itself with a single ordeal or mental state (“The Little Epic: The Greeks” 15). The epyllion was also aligned with the Dionysic because the essence of the form, if not its raison d’être, is the manipulation of time in a bid to evoking the “eternal moment.” The action emerging from the interface of the plot, as the carrier or container, and the subplot, the older form in the role of context, spiritualized the whole in such a way that the reader experiences timelessness. The double-ness of the form is a principal means of snatching actions from time into eternity with its accompanying recurrent imagery (“Tennyson and the Romantic Epic”).

McLuhan’s survey of the epyllion reveals that the form enjoyed popularity from the Greek and Roman worlds through to medieval times. Ovid, he asserts, used the form to provide a history of technology (“to Eric McLuhan” 418), Dante uses the epyllion always and everywhere in his Commedia (Letter to S. P. Rosenbaum) and it is the basic Renaissance form for the short poem. The epyllion, McLuhan argues, also holds an important place in Christian tradition. On one hand, McLuhan notes: “the Christian bias was against the ritual efficacy of the juggling of narrative order” (“Tennyson and the Romantic Epic” 24). On the other, however, the Gospel of St. John, McLuhan asserts, opens with a perfect little epic pattern of interplay between the World and the Word, leading him to state: “what may in fact be true,” is that “this type of parallelism so dear to the arts and the ancient world, was also used as a principal mode of meditation upon the mystery of creation and redemption” (Letter to William Ryan n.pag.). Further, as McLuhan notes in “Little Epic—Notes 97/32,” the epyllion afforded Christian writers a means of using pagan mythology in a way that did not compromise Christian belief and practice.

McLuhan’s exploration of the Christian use of the form focuses on Chaucer. He argues that Chaucer adapted the structure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which are built using the epyllion, and transformed the eternalizing ritual— the ability to manipulate time—into a form directed toward Christian ends. The key to Chaucer’s Christian-humanist synthesis and subsequent transmutation, McLuhan shows, was accomplished by fusing the epyllion with the whole Christian awareness of personality—providing his natural phenomena, the pagan impersonal myth and science of both Greece and Rome, with human voice or personalities. Chaucer’s success, extending from the fusion of an essentially pagan technique with Christian anthropology and understanding of personality, McLuhan argues, enabled Chaucer to both encompass and surpass the eternalising techniques of the pagan use of the form (“Tennyson and the Romantic Epic”). The example McLuhan offers for the contemplation of Chaucer’s achievement is the bar scene where normal time is broken into and Chaucer’s pilgrims are described as he, the narrator, will come to know them. The effect, McLuhan finds, of the curious montage of past, present, and future, is that we readers are precipitated into a nebulous time and carried off toward a far-off holy place.

McLuhan also explored how various poets and writers—particularly how Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, the Elizabethans, and the Symbolists—were able to leverage the form to bring about various effects in their readers. As he considers each writer and/or period of the form’s use, McLuhan brings to light one or more resources of the form. Shakespeare, McLuhan notes, uses the interface of plot and sub-plot to obtain the emotion of multitude or sense of crowd and universality (McLuhan & Nevitt “The Argument” 15).

The book of nature contains innumerable borderlines and inter-faces. The resonant interval may be considered an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space. We all know that a frontier, or borderline, is a space between two worlds, making a kind of double plot or parallelism, which evokes a sense of the crowd, or universality. Whenever two cultures, or two events, or two ideas are set in proximity to one another, an interplay takes place, a sort of magical change. The more unlike the interface, the greater the tension of the interchange. (McLuhan & Powers 4, emphasis added.)

In the case of the Elizabethans, McLuhan notes that they had realized that the form provided an answer to the question as to how to write on many levels simultaneously and present the “ineluctable” (“The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry” 159). Juxtaposition of plot and subplot, McLuhan states in “Double Plots in the Poetry of Pope,” is never a blend but means of revealing both plus the third thing—the ineluctable. McLuhan also discusses this effect, via use of the double plot or juxtaposition of two momentary environments or digressions, in terms of hendiadys—one by means of two (“Joyce’s Use of Epyllion”).⁵

Via his meditations on the Joyce, Pound, and Eliot’s pervasive and technical use of Ovid, McLuhan reveals how the form can also be used to involve the reader and require their participation. McLuhan elaborates on Pound’s use of the form by way of meditating on Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro." McLuhan regarded Pound, in his Cantos, as being consciously bardic, oral, and belonging to the ancient tradition of the epyllion and the work of Ovid (“Pound: The Playboy of the Westend World”).

‘The apparition of these faces in a crowd/petals on a wet, black bough.’ The first line presents the situation; the second presents the effect on the sensibilities. The discovery that you could present effects directly and that one could bypass the cause of the effect, led to many developments in the arts in the past century. In a sense, it is embodied in my phrase “the medium is the message” in the way I present the effect of the medium on the sensibilities in a way that bypasses causes, at least those causes most people locate in the content. (Letter to P. Bruckner n.pag.)

Each of Pound’s Cantos, McLuhan claims in his introduction to “Great Tom” (an unpublished manuscript on poetry of T. S. Eliot), employs plot and subplot, in various combinations, and their interface constitutes a metamorphosis. Pound makes no explicit connections. Rather, in a bid to present emotional and intellectual complexes in a single instant, he sets items, ideas, texts, and phrases side by side without comment or conjunction in analogical ratios, in accord with the Aristotelian principle of metaphor (“Great Tom” 1-4).

Of all the writers who employed the form, McLuhan afforded James Joyce the most attention. He regarded Joyce to be the master of the form, albeit due to a myriad of debts to his predecessors:

Edgar Allan Poe's rediscovery of the transforming power of the interval was a retrieval of the Ovidian technique of metamorphosis by the use of double plots or actions. W. B. Yeats had discussed it as the technique for creating “the emotion of multitude.” This “magical” parallelism was the mode beloved by Dante and Shakespeare. It is the pattern used by James Joyce in Ulysses to bridge the ancient and modern worlds by a continuous parallel or interface between myth and realism, order and anarchy. In the detective story Poe discovered the missing clue as the bridge for all scientific research: the Cyclopean and encyclopaedic scanning of the total field by the omission of the private point of view. (McLuhan & Nevitt,Take Today 10)

Joyce, McLuhan apprehended, had also not only completed what Chaucer started, he went further. Joyce utilized all the resources of the form including its ability to facilitate writing on several levels simultaneously, present the ineluctable, involve the reader, energize and enliven, and evoke an emotion of multitude. He also realised that the use of two levels enabled temporal transcendence, and that when additional levels are employed, spatial transcendence automatically follows—endowing the form with a more pronounced metaphysical character (“Joyce’s Use of Epyllion”). Something of the quality and effect McLuhan is gesturing at here is echoed by Ezra Pound:

It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. (Make it New 336)

In Joyce’s hands, the form of the epyllion was a means forging a creative synthesis of the intuitive and more comprehensive faculties of the east and the visual and rationalistic as of the west. It was also leveraged by Joyce to update Ovid and Dante and present a new kind of poetic history. Joyce, McLuhan states, was “making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology” (McLuhan, Fiore & Agel 120). As McLuhan notes in “The Victorian Mode,” the simple, linear perspectives of the past that began with Petrarch ended with Gibbon. From that point on, McLuhan asserts, “history” became lost in a multiplicity of simultaneous views that awaited cubist manipulation, as was accomplished by James Joyce (3).

The continuous parallel between ancient and modern provides a “cubist” rather than linear perspective. It is a world of a “timeless present” such as we meet in the order of objections in a Thomistic article, but also typical of the nonperspective discontinuities of medieval art in general. History is abolished not by being disowned but by becoming present. “History is now,” as Eliot sees it in Four Quartets. This “cubist” sense of the past as a dimension of the present is natural in four-level scriptural exegesis and ancient grammatica. It is necessary to enjoyment of Ulysses or the Wake with its theme that “pastimes and past times,” that the popular press, popular games, and ordinary speech are charged with the full historic weight of the collective human past. (“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” 45)

McLuhan was not alone in his admiration of Joyce’s achievement. Eliot too had seen in Joyce a model that must be followed:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, say more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. (T. S. Eliot, cited in Letter to T. C. Clark n.pag.)

McLuhan frequently offered Eliot’s assessment to several of his correspondents as guide to his own rhetorical praxis. Arguably, the reason why is that, following Joyce, he had found an answer to the weight of his own technical problems he was trying to solve. The epyllion, McLuhan appears to have seen, would permit him to:

(1) Create an encyclopaedic and/or universal (post-) cubist history of “media” and survey of a variety of individual and social postures or states as they relate to various periods in media history.

(2) Manipulate and motivate his readers while, simultaneously, providing instruction and awareness of media effects—the motivation by and manipulation(s) of technological environments.

(3) Write in a way that was consonant with what he was talking about and resonant with the audiences he sought to address—a heterogeneous, public undergoing significant transformation.

(4) Create a mythic and multi-level disquisition on causation and agency (the aetiological dimension).

(5) Gesture in the direction of the ineluctable dimension of life at electric speed.

(6) Awaken his reader(s) from the repetitive nightmare of history.

2. Breakthrough

There is more that can be said regarding McLuhan’s study of the epyllion, and certainly much more rag and bone in the McLuhan Collection at the Library and National Archives Canada that warrants being brought to light. At this juncture, however, in the second part of this paper, I would like to move to explore the idea that McLuhan employed the epyllion as the dominant structural ordering principle of McLuhan’s most famous works: The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.

In the The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media McLuhan presents a comprehensive study of the psychic (individual) and social (corporate) dynamics of all media (just as he apprehended Joyce had done in the Wake). Central to his operation is to show how "media" are words, languages, myths, games, staples, and above all, metaphors.⁶ "Media," McLuhan shows, as with literary metaphors, are constituted by two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship (Understanding Media 57). The Gutenberg Galaxy is encyclopaedic. It traverses the domains of politics, business, theology (both liturgical and ecclesiological), economics, law, mathematics, physics, business, medicine, and philosophy. Fundamentally, however, it explores the entire operation of literacy, including "the print phase of alphabetic culture" (45-46), and the preceding phases, particularly the rise of the phonetic alphabet as "indispensable prelude" (152). By contrast, Understanding Media concerns itself with all forms of transport of goods and information. Together the pair provides a comprehensive, universal and encyclopaedic exploration of the impact of media on humans, from the beginning of recorded time to the early 1960s. In both works, McLuhan approaches "media" in the broadest possible way making the designation "media" include all human artefacts.

Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media are not, however, media history in a conventional mode. In other words they are not history via what he calls the naïve or direct mode —simply considering the past from the standpoint of the present. This kind of approach McLuhan deemed unhelpful and perpetuated “habitual ways of avoiding the discontinuities of present experience with their demand for sensitive inspection and appraisal” (“Literature as Material for British History” 5). Rather they are more akin to the kind of poetic history prescribed by Heidegger and the (post-) cubist history of technology realised by Joyce. Consequently, as with the weight of McLuhan’s writings of the period (barring his Report on Project in Understanding New Media), they are not orientated towards “persuasion” in the sense of producing action. Rather, while works of prose, Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media are an action and/or drama, and they are intended primarily for contemplation and exploration. In the “Hot and Cool Interview” McLuhan makes this explicit: “literally, Understanding Media is a kit of tools for analysis and perception. It is to begin an operation of discovery. It is not the completed work of discovery. It is intended for practical use” (“The Hot and Cool Interview” 59). He is equally explicit in his correspondence with Edward T. Hall, 14 May 1962: “why I wrote the Gutenberg Galaxy was in order that they [the reader] might discover from whence they have derived their assumptions about the other media” (n.pag.).⁷ In both these admissions McLuhan clearly reveals the fundamentally aetiological dimension to his work. He also reveals that he perceives himself as operating in a manner akin to Eliot, Pound and Joyce—as an artist–scientist–educator—engaged in the poetic task of improving “perception through language” (“The Meaning of Television to Children” 33).

To execute his poetic history McLuhan forgoes linear, connected, Addison-Steele equitone prose in favour of the “mosaic” pattern of the epyllion. Understanding Media is built on an interface—a frontier situation, of imposition and explosion (3–4). Gutenberg Galaxy too is built on a frontier between both the typographic and the electronic revolutions. It literally, wears its organisational pattern on its sleeve. The original cover art for the book exhibits two interlocking G’s in the image of a Vortex by way of a small “G,” in reverse, inside the curvature of a larger “G.” ⁸

McLuhan also employs this fundamental structural organising principle to manage the relationship between the two works. Understanding Media looks “back” at Gutenberg Galaxy as providing “the necessary background for studying the rapid rise of new visual values after the advent of printing from movable types” (201). Gutenberg Galaxy looks “forward” to Understanding Media (Gutenberg Galaxy 278–79). A sense of how Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media work together can be had in light of McLuhan’s correspondence with Edward T. Hall, 5 April 1962:

The Copenhagen school talks my language …. Heisenberg’s distinction between rotational and non-rotational systems as creating quite distinct spatial configurations corresponds exactly to my divisions between centre-margins and centres without margin systems …. Thus, the centre-margin system is explosive (fission), and the centre-without-margin system is implosive (fusion). The centrifugal system corresponds to that outering of sense and faculty, with all the consequent products familiar in fission, whereas implosion results in quite different products. It seems to be that an oral society is imploded, and a literate one exploded. (n.pag.)

Alternately, as Eric McLuhan has argued, Gutenberg Galaxy represents one chapter of Understanding Media properly expanded. By extension, Eric McLuhan implies that the same could be done for each of the chapters of Understanding Media (“Message to the Author”).

The structural ordering principle is mirrored again within each work. McLuhan uses several additional dichotomies in a bid to chart the “subordinate rhythms” (Letter to Lynn White n.pag.). Gutenberg Galaxy is divided in two and it is written from a frontier perspective, between the “typographic and the electronic revolutions” (141). The first section, “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” written using what McLuhan calls the mosaic style, sets out “to discover how far the visual bias of this phonetic culture was pushed, first by the manuscript, and then by typography” (108), and to “explain the configuration or galaxy of events and actions associated with Gutenberg technology” (139). The second section, “The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society,” written in a relatively linear way, looks at the new electric media and the “clash” between electric and mechanical, or print, technologies (i).

Gutenberg Galaxy also contends with several additional dichotomies including (but not limited to): eye and ear, light on and light through, hot and cool, Newton and Berkely, matching and making, simple and complex, invention and suspended judgement. Similarly Understanding Media employs the dichotomies: ear and eye, America and Europe; West and East, Euclidean and non-Euclidean, tactile and visual, sequential and simultaneous, fragmentation and involvement, square and triangle, mechanism and cybernation, mass production and custom-built, linearity and feedback. These dichotomies, all of them obsolete at the time of McLuhan’s use, are banged together with a viewing to revealing the contours and lineaments of an environment or new, post-literate technological landscape(s) that, McLuhan asserts, is just beyond the pale of the observable and grasp of our existing languages (Chrystall, “After the Global Village” 5-6).

To develop and explain McLuhan’s use of obsolete dichotomies requires an extended discussion of his various claims that he was writing Menippean satire. That said, however, a sense of McLuhan’s procedure can be had by considering his note that “print increasingly hypnotized the Western world is nowadays the theme of all historians of art and science alike, because we no longer live under the spell of the isolated visual sense” (Gutenberg Galaxy p. 183. Emphasis added). Here, McLuhan presents the recent discoveries of orality and literacy scholars as items in his inventory of effects and/or symptoms of the new electric surround. Interfacing orality and literacy serves as a mechanism to gesture in the direction of the imagistic and tactile or verbi-voco-visual, post-Sputnik “single sound-light show” (McLuhan, “Roles, Masks and Performances” 22).

McLuhan’s use of the epyllion, however, extends well beyond merely using the device of interfaced situation. Like Chaucer, and following Joyce, McLuhan fuses the epyllion with a study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media. In other words, McLuhan takes Chaucer’s fusion (of the epyllion with the whole Christian awareness of personality) further by providing the new nature (media) with “human” voice or personalities, and human personalities with the voices of new media (or new nature). It is a complex matter and can perhaps best be observed in terms of concrete particulars, e.g. McLuhan’s treatment of Spengler as a singing telegram for “Radio.” Here McLuhan reveals the dual, simultaneous action of “media” to impose their assumptions, and, “anesthetize” its user’s awareness of those “assumptions” (Understanding Media 112). ⁹

McLuhan’s reasons for using the epyllion are myriad. Perhaps, the most important being that the first base for his artistic activity, on which everything else depended, was grabbing attention. The epyllion appears to have been ideal for the task because of parallel(s) between the situation of McLuhan’s day and the periods in which the form had thrived—we had recreated, electronically, a mythic and pre-literate state:

It must often have puzzled the scholars and physicists of our time that just in the degree to which we penetrate the lowest layers of non-literate awareness we encounter the most advanced and sophisticated ideas of twentieth-century art and science. To explain that paradox will be an aspect of the present book. (Gutenberg Galaxy 26)

In other words, McLuhan apprehended that television had retrieved the epyllion. The epyllion, McLuhan states, shares the same “audile-tactile” character as R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Byzantine domes” (“Pound: The Playboy of the Westend World” 4), the sensibility of the Eastern Church (“to John Mole” 489), and more importantly, television:

Television does not present a visual image, but an X-ray icon which penetrates our entire organism. Joyce called it "the charge of the light barricade"—part of the Crimean war against mankind. Stained-glass images are not visual either, since they are defined by light through, as in Rouault paintings. The structure of these images is audile-tactile, as in abstract art, both of Symbolist and Cubist kind. (“to Barbara Ward” 466)

McLuhan appears to have held that his use of the epyllion, having been retrieved by television, not only imbues both works with vitality and energy, it also mirrors the action of “active metaphors,” creating a harmonious union between what he is talking about and how he is talking about it.

McLuhan also appears to have employed the form on account of its effects. In Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media McLuhan leverages nearly every effect that he perceived Joyce had achieved in and through the use of the form. Perhaps, the first of these is the ability of the form to not only elicit but motivate active reader participation, transforming the consumer into a producer or fellow explorer. Rather, following Joyce, and in and through use of the epyllion, McLuhan’s treatment of history is what he calls “oblique” and dramatic, and it is what I have called here poetic. At every juncture we find an action not dissimilar to how McLuhan describes the action of Finnegans Wake in “James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial”:

'One world burrowing on another' is a typical pun which invokes the two-way process of borrowing and burrowing plus the image of burial mounds and the tree-pillar cults which themselves were modes of communication between the living and the dead. Every word in the Wake is dramatically active in this kind of way, following not a road of meaning but carrying us on an every-way roundabout with intrusions from above and below. (46)

McLuhan does at the level of the sentence or paragraph or chapter what Joyce does in the Wake at the level of individual words. Every “point” of interface is explored in terms of a four-fold action or process in a variety of analogical ratios to one another. The effects that he seeks to achieve are noted in a letter to Sheila Watson: “From contemplation of the arrested image, the viewer is expected to involve himself in the elaborate re-tracing or dreaming back. This is the mythic method of Ovid and of the Symbolists alike” (Letter to Sheila Watson n.pag.). The interfaced situation is crucial as it permits the “ground” for the figures (dichotomies)—information moving at the speed of light—to be omitted or suppressed, and requires the reader to contemplate and weigh the relationships between figures with a view tracing back from effects to causes to find what is missing. This processes is repeated and required of the reader again and again in both works.

To come at this matter from another angle, McLuhan demonstrates and creates a space for his readers to recreate within themselves the processes whereby the new supplants the old by amplifying or accelerating existing processes and rendering the “slower” form obsolete (Understanding Media 8; 90). Further, at every interface he also shows how the new, in addition to rendering the old obsolete, reaches back and retrieves something from the ancient past (an action that McLuhan mimes having retrieved the epyllion under electric conditions):

We have no more difficulty in understanding the native or non-literate experience, simply because we have recreated it electronically within our own culture. (Yet post-literacy is a quite different mode of interdependence from pre-literacy). (Gutenberg Galaxy 46)

Finally, McLuhan also reveals the ineluctable—the inevitable flip—whereby anything pushed to extreme or excess reverses its characteristics (Understanding Media 30).

3. Beyond

More light can be shed on McLuhan’s procedure via his comments on Gilson in “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters.” I will quote them at length because it is as though McLuhan is describing his own work:

Gilson does not set out to produce a theory or view that will unify the philosophical disputes of the past. He reconstructs the disputes. He enables us to participate in them as though we were there. We see that they were real. The questions had to be put that way at that time. And being put that way there were no answers, only wrong answers possible. By repeating the process of participation several times we are liberated from both past and present. We don't arrive at a simple unifying concept but are put on the road to achieving a wisdom. And the road to this wisdom is by way of sympathetic reconstruction, involving the abeyance of personal prejudice and preconception. (155)

Gilson has used the method of reconstruction in the history of philosophy as a new creative technique which permits a new kind of communication between the present and the past. The reader of Gilson is typically given not a view or theory of the past but an experience of it. But the past as experience is present. It is available once more as nutriment. Previous theories of the past really amounted to a way of disowning it or of explaining it away. (158)¹⁰

In and through his use of the epyllion McLuhan both involves the reader and simultaneously creates detachment—a space-time for the reader that is, in a sense, outside history. To be involved and detached simultaneously is, of course, a paradox. But it is also the crux and precisely what McLuhan is offering in and through these two works. By having the reader involve themselves with media forms and reconstruct the flux of history within themselves, again and again, the reader is “liberated” from history and comes to see the extent to which their own biases are historically conditioned.¹¹

Perhaps, another way of presenting the matter is to say that in Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media McLuhan has tried to win for his readers the kind of victory he apprehended had been won by Joyce:

As [Joyce’s] title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. (McLuhan, Fiore & Agel 120).

McLuhan plainly states the significance of Joyce’s victory in “Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication”:

There is no need to re-immerse ourselves in again in the destructive element of the Time flux or to return to that “Primitive Past saturated with blood and incest so generally favoured.” We have, as Finnegans Wake also proclaims, the means to awaken permanently from the repetitive nightmare of history. (84)

We can, instead, by choice and by labour, move beyond mere cross-cultural awareness and towards what we might, provisionally, call inter-mythic (or media) stage dialogue, without recourse to the time-tested mode of interface we have traditionally called wars, hot or cold.

Notes

1 McLuhan also documents that he perceived that, during writing of The Mechanical Bride, he had been something of an unwitting dupe; complicit, on account of using certain compositional techniques, in sectarian quarrels between “east” and “west.” This matter can, however, only receive mention here. I have treated the matter at some length in The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan.

2 The narrative presented here is one dimensional. It needs to be remembered that McLuhan was, before anything else, a Professor of English literature. His research of the epyllion cannot solely be attributed to his goals for his Media Studies or criticism.

3 McLuhan does not elaborate on how or why this is the case. To develop the matter would require extended engagement with McLuhan’s extensive commentary on quantum physics throughout his oeuvre. While this would be fruitful, and has not yet been undertaken by any critic or commentator on McLuhan’s work, it is well beyond the scope of this essay.

4 The scholar wishing to pursue these observations would do well to start with Majorie Crump before moving through McLuhan’s contributions to Renascence.

5 McLuhan develops these observation in the “hendiadys” section in From Cliché to Archetype (108-110).

6 The theme of media as myths deserves more attention than I have afforded it. For a brief introduction to the theme see McLuhan, “Myth and Mass Media.”

7 As an aside, a more frivolous study of McLuhan’s career would not be out of place in suggesting that McLuhan’s meditations on the dual action of various liquors; to both impose their own assumptions, and simultaneously “anesthetize” its users awareness of those “assumptions” went a long way to informing McLuhan’s own understanding of the effects of media. The same study might also seek to re-examine the copious amounts of Gin (that “Spirit” in a bottle) consumed at the Monday night seminars as pedagogic aid.

8 As McLuhan notes in his introduction to Images from the Film Spiral: “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” (Etrog & McLuhan 125). McLuhan adds: “[Sorel] Etrog comes from a rich audile-tactile background and tradition in iconic art. His imagery is always of stark confrontation and his work is always multi-levelled and multi-sensuous in ways that are not easily described in conventional literary terminology.”

9 This is a complex matter that warrants its own study. Perhaps, easy entry into the matter can be had by comparing McLuhan to Dante Alighieri. Both McLuhan, in Understanding Media, and Dante, in the Divine Comedy, provide portraits of figures hung up in a series of poses and postures. In Understanding Media, McLuhan substitutes periods in media history for the seven deadly sins Dante uses.

10 In the same essay McLuhan adds that: “The role of the Catholic humanist is to cultivate a more than ordinary reverence for the past, for tradition, while exploring every present development for what it reveals about man which the past had not revealed” (158–59). A deeper discussion of McLuhan’s orientation towards history would necessarily involve a discussion of McLuhan’s reading of the work of Eric Voegelin, particularly The New Science in Politics.

11 Admittedly this is a somewhat idealised reading, probably only possible within a decade of the initial publication of these works. Today, the weight of McLuhan’s observations are out of date and this militates against the possibility of reading McLuhan in this way.

Works Cited

Chrystall, Andrew B. “After the Global Village.” Canadian Journal of Media Studies, 9, 2011. Web. 22 Sept. 2011.

———. “The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan.” Diss. Massey University, 2008. Print.

Crump, Marjorie. The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid. Oxford: Blackwell, 1931. Print.

Etrog, Sorel & Marshall McLuhan. Images from the Film Spiral. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1987. Print

Hall, Edward T. Letter to McLuhan. 9 March 1962. Edward T. Hall Collection. University of Arizona Library, Tuscon.

Lamberti, Elena. “Marshall McLuhan and the Modernist Writers’ Legacy.” At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan. Eds. John Moss & Linda Morra. Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 2004. 63–83. Print.

Levin, Richard. The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Print.

McLuhan, Eric. “Message to the Author.” 27 July 2006. Email.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry.” McNamara 157-167.

———. “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters.” The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion. Eds. Eric McLuhan & Jacek Szklarek. Toronto & New York: Stoddart, 1999. 153–174. Print.

———. “Double Plots in the Poetry of Pope.” N.d. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. “Great Tom.” N.d. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto, Buffalo & London: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Print.

———. “The Hot and Cool Interview.” Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication: Essays / Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Michel A. Moos. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997. 45–78. Print.

———. “James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial.” McNamara 23–47.

———. “Joyce’s Use of Epyllion.” N.d. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. “The Laws of the Media.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound 19. Ed. W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA.: Ginko, 2005. Print.

———. Letter to T. C. Clark. 6 December 1974. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. Letter to Peter Bruckner. 5 January 1971, H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. Letter to Edward T. Hall. 6 February 1962. Edward T. Hall Collection. University of Arizona Library, Tuscon.

———. Letter to Edward T. Hall. 5 April 1962. Edward T. Hall Collection. University of Arizona Library, Tuscon.

———. Letter to Edward T. Hall. 14 May 1962. Edward T. Hall Collection. University of Arizona Library, Tuscon.

———. Letter to Hugh Kenner. 30 January 1951. Hugh Kenner Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin.

———. Letter to Hugh Kenner. N.d. Hugh Kenner Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin.

———. Letter to S. P. Rosenbaum. 17 January 1972. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. Letter to William F. Ryan. 5 June 1964. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. Letter to Lynn White. 17 August 1970. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. Letter to Sheila Watson. 20 January 1971. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Eds. Molinaro, Matie, Corrine McLuhan, & W. Toye, Toronto, Oxford, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

———. “Literature as Material for British History.” N.d. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. "The Little Epic: The Greeks.” N.d. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. "Little Epic—Notes 97/32." N.d. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. “The Meaning of Television to Children.” Report on Children and Television: A Consultation. 11–15 January 1965, Toronto. Sponsored by the National Council of Churches. 32-48. Print.

———. The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man. New York: Vanguard, 1951. Print.

———. “Myth and Mass Media.” Myth and Mythmaking. Ed. Henry A. Murray. New York: Braziller, 1960. 288-99. Print.

———. “Pound: The Playboy of the Westend World.” 1968. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. Report on Understanding New Media. Washington: National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1960.

———. “Roles, Masks and Performances.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA.: Ginko Press, 2005. Print.

———. “Strike the Set.” McLuhan DEW-Line Newsletters 1. 11 (1969, May).

———. “Tennyson and the Romantic Epic.” c1960. MS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. “to Eric McLuhan.” 28 December 1970. Molinaro, McLuhan & Toye 417–419.

———. “to John Mole.” 29 January 1974. Molinaro, McLuhan & Toye 465–468.

———. “to Barbara Ward.” 9 February 1973. Molinaro, McLuhan & Toye 465–468.

———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964. Print.

———. “The Victorian Mode.” N.d. TS. H. Marshall McLuhan Collection. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

———. “Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication.” McNamara 83-94.

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, & Jerome Agel. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Corte Madere, CA: Gingko Press. 2001. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall & Barrington Nevitt. “The Argument: Causality in the Electric World.” Technology & Culture, 14.1, 1973: 1–18. Print.

———. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. Don Mills, ON.: Longmann, 1972.

McLuhan, Marshall & Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall & Wilfred Watson. From Cliché to Archetype. New York: The Viking Press, 1970. Print.

McNamara, Eugene, ed. The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943–1962. New York & Toronto: McGraw-Hill (in association with the University of Windsor Press), 1969. Print.

Molinaro, Matie, Corrine McLuhan, and William Toye, eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987.

Pevere, Geoff & Greig Dymond. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Cultural Odyssey. Scarborough, ON.: Prentice Hall, 1999. Print.

Pound, Ezra. Make It New: Essays by Ezra Pound. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935.

Theall, Donald. F. Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture and Communication. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Print.

———. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001. Print.

Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952. Print.

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2011-11-26T16:30:00.001+03:00

«McLuhan Caged (in Electronic Art II)»

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

" BED IN " AS HAPPENING

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

MOON CHILD

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

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

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

ANALOGICAL

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

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

His Primary Game

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

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

LOLOMGWTF

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

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

GREATEST HITS : NO THEORY ALLOWED

tricksterism

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

a new humanist movement in Hell

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

" WE'RE SOAKING IN IT ! "

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

McLuhanisme

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

LANGUAGE 'IN OUTLEX'

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

Tony Schwartz + The Responsive Chord

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

ACTIVE INTERPLAY

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

AMATEURISM FTW !

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

HOOD ORNAMENT

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

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

ZOMBIE STANCE

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

KNOWLEDGE BROKEN : Greek, symballein — to throw together

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

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

McLuhan letter to Prince Bernhard [ May 14, 1969 ]

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

NEXT EXIT

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

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

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

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

" Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin' ? "

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

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

McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, 4 October 1964

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

PAGE 69

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

CAUSES in the numbness itself, not in the media figures

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

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

My approach to the media is arbitrary ...

Big Secrets Are Protected by Public Incredulity

2011-11-18T20:07:00.003+03:00

PROBE : Canadian Content

2011-11-16T16:56:00.002+03:00

McLuhan would counter the demands of Canadian Nationalists for more 'Canadian Content' on Canadian television by pointing out that a show like Bonanza became 'Canadian Content' the moment it was viewed by Canadians.

five sovereign fingers tax the breath

2011-11-15T22:07:00.001+03:00

en français

2011-11-15T05:58:00.001+03:00

Entretien de Pierre Schaeffer avec Mac Luhan

Popnetic

2011-11-14T21:35:00.002+03:00

The interface of old hardware and the new software

2011-11-14T21:05:00.010+03:00

[NB. Sorry ... no Firefox ... Safari and Chrome browsers only ...]

new MUM logo ... (subject to approval)

2011-11-14T01:47:00.000+03:00

Jean Baudrillard : "McLuhan ... he was, I believe, a musician"

2011-11-11T21:18:00.001+03:00

CTHEORY: Your relation to McLuhan is interesting, the more so since few critics have analysed it, although they have often commented on it. What is the role of the strong presence of the visual, so real in your texts, in relation to the notion of distance, or of obscenity, and in relation to irony as distance? It is clear that the visual would be necessary to separate and distance an imaginary on which sense is founded. But how does one treat the question of the differentiation of image and sound, the latter being a much more supple, fluid, floating medium than the latter?

Jean Baudrillard: I have some difficulty replying to this question because sound, the sphere of sound, the acoustic sphere, audio, is really more alien to me than the visual. It is true there is a feeling [word spoken in English] about the visual, or rather for the image and the concept itself, whereas sound is less familiar to me. I have less perception, less analytic perception, of this aspect. That is not to say that I would not make a distinction between noise and sound, but ultimately, in terms of this ambient world's hyperreality, this noosphere, I see it much more as a visualization of the world rather than its hypersonorization.

What can I say about the difference between the two? I have the impression that cutting across the world of McLuhan - he too is very much oriented to the visual, of course, in spite of the fact that he was, I believe, a musician - there is a small problem, which is that the different sensorial, perceptual registers tend, in this media noosphere, to conflate, to fuse together into a kind of depolarization of sensory domains. We speak quite rightly today of the audio-visual; we couple them together in some sort, some kind of amalgam or "patchwork". Perhaps I am led to view space in this way by my lesser sensitivity to the acoustic, but it seems to me that everything is summed up in a logistic which integrates all the perceptual domains in a way even more undifferentiated than before. Everything is now received in a manner that is indistinct, virtually indistinct, in fact.

The virtual is the kind of concept that is a bit cosmopolitan, if one can call it that, or postmodern, I do not know. In that respect, it is not about the gaze but the visual, it is not about the acoustic, but the audio. Besides, for McLuhan in fact, everything is ultimately reduced to the tactile. Tactility is really that register of sense which is of the order of contact, not of physical or sensual contact of course, but a sort of communication contact where, right now in fact, there is a short-circuit between receiver and sender. I mean directly in individual perception, not only in the world of the media but in our bodily way of living, there is a form of indistinction, of amalgamation, of indifferentiation where all the perceptions arrive en bloc and are reduced to a tactile ambiance. In the latter there would be a lesser differentiation of registers, a lesser singularity of the gaze, a lesser singularity of sound, of music.

So, that is all one can say. That said, within this state of affairs of course there is perhaps still a way to master the tactile world. I think that McLuhan himself thought so in every way; he thought that there really was a strategy of the tactile world, and that it is not just any one. It is not at all a question of saying that it is insignificant, but simply that it is more undifferentiated.

"Tom Sawyer" - Epitome of Americanism - March 21, 1933

2011-11-11T04:24:00.004+03:00

[click to enlarge]

PROBE : ARTIST

2011-11-05T05:27:00.001+03:00

talking head : remain in light

2011-10-27T22:56:00.001+03:00

WAR + peace

2011-10-27T22:51:00.000+03:00

verbi-voco-visual

2011-10-27T22:50:00.000+03:00

counterblast 1969

2011-10-27T22:49:00.001+03:00

explorations

2011-10-27T22:47:00.000+03:00

Explorations 2

Explorations 3

Explorations 4

Explorations 5

Explorations 6

Explorations 7

Explorations 8

(Verbi-Voco-Visual)

allatonceness

2011-10-27T22:45:00.000+03:00

4chan's Chris Poole: Facebook and Google Are Doing It Wrong

2011-10-18T20:13:00.005+03:00

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_facebook_google_are_doing_it_wr.php

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

quantum locking levitation

2011-10-18T20:10:00.000+03:00

Scratch-ification !

2011-10-17T23:43:00.000+03:00

Genius Loci

2011-10-12T20:42:00.004+03:00

Genius Loci by Bernhard Living

Especially commissioned for McLuhan’s Message, the ‘Genius Loci’ project is made up of ten two-minutes pieces. Each composition is based on a sound-bite from Marshall McLuhan, which in turn is accompanied by drones, beats and pulses that have been produced by feeding McLuhan’s voice into digital Reaktor-based samplers (Debris and Flakes by Twisted Tools).

Album Preview

01 Genius Loci 02:10

02 Simultaneous Resonance 02:10

03 Rapid Change 02:10

04 Mindless Identity 02:10

05 Ghost Theory 02:10

Sleeve Notes

McLuhan often wrote about how speech and the voice would dominate over the written word in the electronic, and now digital, age – and so the ‘music’ for Genius Loci’ is made up entirely up from, and generated by, McLuhan’s own voice.

Through contemporary digital music production technology, McLuhan has been turned into a beat-boxing techno machine.

The term ‘Genius Loci’, is often translated as ‘spirit of place’. In classical pagan Roman religions it was a protective spirit.

Marshall McLuhan could be regarded as the sprit of net space and his presence, digital or not, seems to permeate not only everything that takes place there but also how we think about new digital technologies.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore

2011-10-08T05:57:00.000+03:00

"I give my readers warning, therefore, not to believe me."

2011-10-08T05:14:00.003+03:00

Lucian of Samosata (c. AD 120–180)

http://www.lucianofsamosata.info/index.html

Syrian-Greek writer responsible for the first fictional accounts of extraterrestrial life. Lucian, whose parents had hoped he might become a sculptor, made a fortune by traveling around Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and other lands giving entertaining speeches, before settling down in Athens to study philosophy. This was a time – the second century AD – when faith in the old gods had all but evaporated, Greek culture and thought was in decay, and the great literature of Greece at its height had given way to shallow novels of adventure or romance. All this was grist to Lucian's satirical mill and in his two extraterrestrial stories – precursors of science fiction – he parodies the kind of feeble fantasy that had become popular. The concluding sentence of the preface to his True History reads: "I give my readers warning, therefore, not to believe me." And with that he launches into a tale of a group of adventurers who, while sailing through the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), are lifted up by a giant waterspout and deposited on the Moon. There they find themselves embroiled in a full-scale interplanetary war between the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun over colonization rights to Jupiter, involving armies which boast such exotica as stalk-and-mushroom men, acorn-dogs, and cloud-centaurs. The human inhabitants of the Moon are also remarkable:

Amongst them, when a man grows old he does not die, but dissolves into smoke and turns to air [a convenient ploy for disposing of dead aliens also used in more recent science fiction, such as 'The Man Trap' and 'Catspaw' episodes of the original Star Trek series]. They all eat the same food, which is frogs roasted on the ashes from a large fire; of these they have plenty which fly about in the air, they get together over the coals, snuff up the scent of them, and this serves for their victuals. Their drink is air squeezed into a cup, which produces a kind of dew.

Lucian may be off here in Cloudcuckooland (or almost – the trip to the city of Nephelo-coccygia (the cloud cuckoo) actually comes later in the book) but it is interesting that, in his space odyssey, he portrays the Moon and planets as being genuine worlds with unique life-forms of their own. In fact, for many centuries, Lucian's adventure was highly regarded, not as pure fantasy but as speculative fiction, much as we might treat an SF novel by a respected scientist-author today. An example of this is buried in the footnotes of an 1887 edition of Lucian's work (Cassell's National Library series, p. 83). The original translator, one Thomas Franckling, Greek Professor at the University of Cambridge, writing in 1780, had this to say at the point where the Earth is seen suspended in the lunar sky as if it were itself a mere satellite: "Modern astronomers are, I think agreed, that we are to the moon just the same as the moon is to us. Though Lucian's history may be false, therefore, his philosophy, we see, was true." In parentheses after this, the editor of the Cassell edition has inserted the terse comment: "The moon is not habitable, 1887."

In his second space story, Icaro-Menippus, Lucian is again bound for the Moon, this time in the footsteps, or rather the wing-flaps, of his hero who has improved on the ill-fated scheme of Icarus. To his incredulous friend Menippus the hero explains: "I took, you know, a very large eagle, and a vulture also, one of the strongest I could get, and cut off their wings." Lucian, like many who followed him made no distinction between aeronautics and astronautics, assuming that normal air-assisted flight and breathing are possible on voyages between worlds. Then through his hero, he lets rip on the presumptuousness of earlier philosophers to know about the nature of the universe and life beyond the Earth:

... to think that men, who creep upon this Earth, and are not a whit wiser, or can see farther than ourselves ... should tell us the size and form of the stars ... that the sun is a mass of liquid fire, that the moon is inhabited ...

PROBE : Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of your wings

2011-10-06T19:48:00.002+03:00

McLuhan 100 : TIRED

2011-10-04T20:27:00.004+03:00

Technocean 011 by Myroslaw Bytz on Mixcloud

2011-10-04T18:19:00.000+03:00

Technocean 011 by Myroslaw Bytz on Mixcloud

a coup d'état in slow motion

2011-10-02T19:01:00.001+03:00

"Our democratic system has been transformed into what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. 'Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,' Wolin writes. 'Economics dominates politics and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.'

Inverted totalitarianism wields total power without resorting to cruder forms of control such as gulags, concentration camps or mass terror. It harnesses science and technology for its dark ends. It enforces ideological uniformity by using mass communication systems to instill profligate consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute our illusions of ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles manufacturing bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery and ships jobs to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep workers in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing patriotic slogans. 'The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed,' Wolin writes."

- Chris Hedges, https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/chris-hedges.html

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d'état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court's ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism."

Inverted totalitarianism represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by "power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions," Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people's right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the "persons" agree to a "settlement." Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not "admitting any wrongdoing." There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

a HAPPY NEW YEAR message from John Zorn

2011-09-29T22:44:00.003+03:00

identical men from parallel universes

Michael Jackson dab Vowels

Cage/McLuhan Letter

slang

all thumbs

reference

f/g

That's All Folks !

Enter EARman : Master of Pupils

Unfinnegan : Heavy Metal Thunders

Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations : The Frame

"semantic wedges"

Epyllion in Vivisective Dubwise

A Little Epic: McLuhan’s Use of Epyllion

command c, command v

HASH GIRL

typewriter man

THE WALLS HAVE EARS

o espaco na poesia e na pintura

GUERRA E PAZ

«McLuhan Caged (in Electronic Art II)»

VERBI - VOCO - VISUAL : Something Else Press 1967

MILLER : Agent of Moscow

both informative and contradictory !

“The Company of Us"

dissolving phantasmagoria

INTERMEDIA

EDIBLE SPACESHIPS

LIVE ! from wychwood park !

SIMULATION OF SIMULATION

" BED IN " AS HAPPENING

WHAT DID THE BOYSCOUT SAY TO THE NUN AFTER SHE THANKED HIM FOR HELPING HER ACROSS THE STREET ?

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

WE'RE BACK IN ACOUSTIC SPACE !

twenty twenty vision

TAKE TODAY

FOLKLORIC

80 PROOF

McLuhan's 'HIDDEN GROUND'

quantum fluctuations

KANÄLE

DIE BRAUT

DIE MAGISCHEN DIE !

"Radio: The Tribal Drum." 1964

HIGH DEFINITION

HUGO THE FREEMASON : " Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun."

MOON UNIT

MOON CHILD

DUB HOUSING

COMPRENDRE

testing ... 1, 2 , 3 ...

HOMO TYPOGRAPHICUS

WAR : what is it good for ?

WE LIVE 200 YEARS EVERY ANNUM

DOT ZERO MAGAZINE

D'OEIL A OREILLE

TWO CENTS

"MAC (SIC) LUHAN" MUTATIONS

WET T-SHIRT

French Massage : HAPPY ENDING

Explorations Four (4) Studies in Culture and Communications

WORDPRESS

TACTILITY THAT GRABS YOU !

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

CONSCIOUS MEDIUMSHIP

MEDNA

Il medium è il massaggio ?

THE CITY AS CLASSROOM

YOU'VE GOT WOOD !

" - ESQUE "

" Television is reality, and reality is less than television. "

The Game Is Discovery

ALP

ANALOGICAL

EFFECTS PRECEDING CAUSES

His Primary Game

Litter 2 Germ's Choice

scribble

PREFACE TO 4TH DIMENSION

PERE UBU

Lucifer [from Latin]
meaning "light-bearer"