Marshall McLuhan
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition)
[orig. 1951]

p. v [original preface]—

Poe's sailor says that when locked in by the whirling walls and the numerous objects which floated in that environment:

"I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below."

[Poe, "A Descent Into The Maelstrom"]

It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth. And it is in the same spirit that this book is offered as an amusement. Many who are accustomed to the note of moral indignation will mistake this amusement for mere indifference. But the time for anger and protest is in the early stages of a new process. The present stage is extremely advanced. Moreover, it is full, not only of destructiveness but also of promises of rich new developments to which moral indignation is a very poor guide."

Curious. Seems like the ultimate rationalization for later Media Theorists reared in the wastes, whom, dare I say, may be in search of a reconciliation between (1) their operant-conditioned Stockholm Syndrome vis-a-vis the above "maelstrom" and (2) the "destructiveness" of this (their own) maelstrom which becomes fully apparent to them only upon making a break for the city and the academy. Theirs is a perspective which YES must be included, taken seriously, accounted for, given space, and which NO must not under any circumstances be allowed to take over, must not be accorded the status of an autonomous discipline, must not be allowed to rot existing macro-disciplines like History and Applied Art from the inside out. Artists cannot afford to lounge about the foam, circling the drain and anxiously awaiting "rich new developments" which may ultimately be nothing but "promises." I have seen and heard this work at a certain McLuhanite hotspot out in the wastes. These cats leave a lot of meat on the bone!

This really is quite a curious passage. Like so much of McLuhan, it straddles the line between brilliant and crazy, straddles it in an ironic splay while making that Mona Lisa hipster face at you, mustache optional. It is undergirded by a piece of literature which permits limitless metaphorical excursus and which bears the sandy pawprints of a Heavy Cat. But the metaphor itself is appealed to narrowly, laser-focused on making a very specific point, as one does in the literary realm. Not to be lost in that shuffle: Poe's protagonist saves himself. McLuhan imagines all of us and all we hold dear to be riding in the boat along with himself and Mr. Ravenstuchus, the calm. He wishes for us too to remain still and calm, so that we will all be saved together. No rocking the boat. The thread runs through his later work too:

"all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media. On a moving highway the vehicle that backs up is accelerating in relation to the highway situation. Such would seem to be the ironical status of the cultural reactionary."

(Understanding Media, p. 199)

But we could just as easily imagine that Herb-Marsh and Ravenstuchus are the only ones in the boat and are thus saving themselves here, while the rest of us and all that we hold dear continue to circle the drain, writhing in fits of Adornoish "moral indignation," eventually sinking to the bottom, and... The indignant sink while the equanimious media hipster rises. I was just kind of trolling when I wrote the original post here, but, uh...I'm just sayin', this whole circling-the-drain/how-to-save-yourself business kind of leaps of the page and hits you in the teeth when you have previously written a post such as the above prior to any acquaintance with this passage or the several dozen others throughout McLuhan.

["Front Page", pp. 3-4]

p. 4—

Certainly if an observer were to consider only the quality of intellectual analysis shown in a particular item or editorial, he would have cause for gloom. Certain habits of mind have led to a natural exaggeration about the value, and even necessity, of "correct views." The same habits of mind lead to the condemnation of modern art because of its lack of a "message." These habits blind people to the real changes of our time. Conditioned in this way, people have been taught to accept opinions and attitudes of the press. But the French symbolists, followed by James Joyce in Ulysses, saw that there was a new art form of the universal scope present in the technical layout of the modern newspaper. Here is a major instance of how a by-product of industrial imagination, a genuine agency of contemporary folklore, led to radical artistic developments. To the alerted eye, the front page of a newspaper is a superficial chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies of a very high order. Yet when these harmonies are more sharply stylized by a Picasso or a Joyce, they seem to give offense to the very people who should appreciate them most. But that is a separate story."

["The Ballet Luce", pp. 9-10]

p. 9—

As long as England was a recognized top dog, it was easy for her clubmen to emit a jolly old guffaw at the ways of those who weren't. Much humor consists of this sense of confident superiority. It is certainly so with The New Yorker, for instance. Snobbery based on economic privilege consitutes the mainstray of its technique and appeal. Just notice the kinds of people it holds up to ridicule. Take a quick guess at their salary scale. Like Punch, it is read by top dogs, but especially by the much greater public of underdogs who wish to share top-dog emotions. From the first, Time was conceived on similar lines. Time readers were somehow taught to think of themselves as "different." They are in the know. They are not like other people. They are an exclusive little coterie of millions and millions of superior people. Just why a man who observes these unitentionally amusing aspects of The New Yorker and Time should be regarded as unable to read and enjoy them is not so easy to see. The old romantic [10] notion that you shouldn't understand what you enjoy is still with us. Dale Carnegie would not recommend that anybody "knock" at these props of our complacency.

Again, as with so many of K. Gann's similar pronouncements, I cannot convince myself that I learned this "old romantic notion" from elders; rather, it jumped off the stage and hit me in the face several times, a few of them painful, before I accepted it as a truth about myself.

p. 10—

What remains to be recognized is that a very able person may often choose to freeze or anesthetize large areas of his mind and experience for the sake of social and practical success or the pleasures of group solidarity. Nothing is more familiar, for instance, than the spectacle of the eminent scientist with the emotional patterns and reading preferences of a bloodthirsty child.

Or, as above, the free-marketeer who is only too willing to write 5-star online reviews for his fellow tribesmen.

["Know-How", pp. 32-34]

p. 34—

Instead of an intelligible map of man and creation, modern technology offers immediate comfort and profit. But it is still paradoxically permeated with a medieval spirit of religious intensity and moral duty, which causes much conflict of mind and confusion of purpose in producers and consumers alike. So that the Marxists urge that technology be finally cut loose from religion as a means of resolving these conflicts; but this is merely to repudiate the parent while idolizing the offspring. More common and hopeful is the effort to modify the social and individual effects of technology by stressing concepts of social biology, as Lewis Mumford and others do. But in this conception there is the dubious assumption that the organic is the opposite of the mechanical. Professor Norbert Wiener, maker of mechanical brains, asserts that, since all organic characteristic can now be mechanically produced, the old rivalry between mechanism and vitalism is finished. After all, the Greek word "organic" meant "machine" to them.

p. 34—

The symbolist esthetic theory of the late nineteenth century seems to offer an even better conception than social biology for resolving the human problems created by technology. This theory leads to a conception of orchestrating human arts, interests, and pursuits rather than fusing them in a functional biological unit, as even with Giedion and Mumford. Orchestration permits discontinuity and endless variety without the universal imposition of any one social or economic system. It is a conception inherent not only in symbolist art but in quantum and relativity physics. Unlike Newtonian physics, it can entertain a harmony that is not unilateral, monistic, or tyrannical. It is neither progressive nor reactionary but embraces all previous actualizations of human excellence while welcoming the new in a simultaneous present.

This conception is suggested, particularly in "Front Page," as effectively present in several features of industrial folklore. But it is especially evident in the best modern art, poetry, and music, to which the merely technological man finds himself so poorly attuned.

This is curious but ultimately mystifying. The word "orchestrate" is utterly mystifying here. The phrase "neither progressive nor reactionary but embraces all previous actualizations" of course prefigures one tentpole of Postmodern thought. But beyond that I am stumped.

["Market Research", pp. 48-50]

p. 50—

Since current art and science alike show that we have entered a new era, it is now especially important to recognize the intellectual limitations of the past era of mechanization. Market research today is a useful instance of new methods being employed in the old mechanical spirit. Dr. Margaret Mead, on the other hand, is using the same methods with that full sense of responsibility and respect for the vital interests and the harmonic relations of an entire society. Market research and opinion polls are not carried on in this spirit but rather with an eye to local and particular interests.

Descartes, as much as any one person, can be said to have initiated the stress on mechanization and rationalism which fostered the era of Newtonian physics and the allied notions of a self-regulating market and social institutions. He was explicitly motivated by a passion for exactitude and universal consent. He expressed his disgust with the age-old disagreements of philosophers and suggested that universal agreement was only possible in mathematics. Therefore, he argued, let mathematical laws become the procedure and norm of truth. Scientists and philosophers such as A.N. Whitehead and J.W.N. Sullivan are agreed that it was to this procedure that we owe our present mastery of the physical world and our equal helplessness in managing social and political affairs. Because mathematics can only provide descriptive formulas for practical material purposes. Entirely different methods are necessary if we are to escape from an inhuman specialism and to discover the means of orchestrating the arts and sciences in the fullest interest of individual and social life. Such new methods are utilized by Siegfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command. In his section on "The Assembly Line and Scientific Management" he notes that "the growth of the assembly line with its labor-saving and production-raising measures is closely bound up with the wish for mass-production." Similarly, at the beginning of a whole era of mechanization there stands Descartes with his passionate wish for a universal mathematical unity in thought and society.

So, the "orchestration" which has now become a theme/go-to for HMM is here opposed to "inhuman specialism." A clue, perhaps, but still the concept is quite fuzzy.

["Men of Distinction", pp. 56-59]

p. 59—

In his admirable book Music Ho! Constant Lambert notes again and again that "the most striking feature of the art of our time is the way in which the popular, commercial and low-brow arts have adopted the technical and spiritual sophistication of the high-brow arts." Jazz, he argues, was born from Debussy, and Debussy is to music what Mallarmé is to poetry. Further analysis would have revealed to Mr. Lambert that this process is not just filtering down from high-brow to low-brow arts but equally a nourishing of the esoteric by the popular. The few must depend on the many as much as the many stand to gain from the few. That, it is to be hoped, is shown many times in this book.

Well, here is a Satanist trapped in Christianity! He argues for the symbiotic view rather than the parasitic one which so many others have espoused. What's funny though is that the high-low binary is maintained intact. The pluralism here, then, is a binary rather than a decentered pluralism. The symbiosis arises from a differentiation which is flattened by a more radical pluralism. The differentiation, then, is itself generative, or at least it creates conditions under which the two polities very much "depend on" and can "stand to gain from" each other. Under radical pluralism, then, perhaps we "stand to gain" less from each other, and not incidentally also "depend on" each other less too.

Marshall McLuhan
"The Poor Rich"
in The Mechanical Bride
2002 Gingko Press edition [orig. 1951]
pp. 55-56

p. 56—

The very conditions of success render the rich suspicious of those failures whom they might be expected to assist. They have no training or taste which would enable them to select struggling artists or writers who might be worthy of aid. In these matters, therefore, they work through the dealers in old pictures or distribute many tiny gratuities through bureaucratic foundations which are run on the most finicky, academic lines. This, of course, overlooks these endowments for hospitals and libraries which are intended as family monuments. And it is not true to say that the rich are niggardly. The point here is simply that they are timid and unresourceful in a way which stands in stark contrast to the zip and push that has put them where they are.

The relative helplessness, social isolation, and irresponsibility of the rich highlights the same situation among those who are striving toward that goal. The circumstances of the struggle insure that the winners will arrive in no condition to enjoy their advantages.

Except in an economic sense, the rich do not even form a class, as, for example, the "film colony" does. So that when distinguished foreigners come to America they naturally seek the company of movie stars rather than of the wealthy. The stars have a personal symbolic relation to the currents of national life which the remote and anonymous figures of celestial finance do not. The stars are distinct individuals wearing human masks that represent some aspect of the collective dream. But the rich are dim and obscure, sharing the tastes and make-up of the very people above whom they have risen, and yet deprived of the satisfactions of mass solidarity in an egalitarian society.

There is a similar passage re: the "film colony" in Understanding Media, to the effect of: photography revealed the rich to be obscene, hence only film stars can actually enjoy living like rich people without shame.

Marshall McLuhan
"Looking Up to My Son"
pp. 76-77
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]

Pictorially, the ad links the most lofty sentiments of motherly devotion and sacrifice to a dream that is unconsciously crude and base. This helps to explain how it occurs that refined and idealistic women in our world are so often the mothers of ruthless men who enslave themselves to the low drudgery of avarice or who live in thrice-heated furnaces of passion for dubious distinction. The objectives of a commercial society, when filtered through the medium of maternal idealism, acquire a lethal intensity. For women don't invent the goals of society. They interpret them to their children. In her

[77]

Male and Female, Dr. Mead explores the American paradox of "conditional love," showing from many points of view the emotional structuring which results, especially in boys and men, from affection that is tendered or withdrawn as a reward or penalty, at first for eating and toilet habits, later for assertiveness at school and in business. In this prevalent situation a child or adult merits love only when he is successful. The present ad is that entire drama in capsule form. But the drama is not of recent origin, as Dr. Mead is aware.

[pg##??]

All question of morality aside, it is evident that exuberant feminine nudity does not constitute an environment in which the adolescent or the adult male is going to develop his powers of rational detachment and appraisal. There will be no intellectual flowering or emotional maturity in such a milieu. To see things steadily and to see them whole means something rather specialized to the patrons of a burlesque show, and likewise to the kids who grow up in an environment swarming with pictorial sirens and synthetic, seductive perfumes.

The average male educated in and by this environment tends to be not so much conscious of distinct physical and intellectual objects as he is of a variable volume of registered excitement within himself. Jazz provides such an analogy. Its patterns, too, swell or contract as a volume of kinesthesia, or muscular excitement. Jazz selections are numbers; gals are numbers. Some are hot; some, not so hot. Some are sweet, some are sophisticated. Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering [80] and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

Marshall McLuhan
"Woman in a Mirror"
pp. 80-81
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]

This ad employs the same technique as Picasso in The Mirror. The differences, of course, are obvious enough. By setting a conventional day-self over against a tragic night-self, Picasso is able to provide a time capsule of an entire life. He reduces a full-length novel (or movie) like Madame Bovary to a single image of great intensity. By juxtaposition and contrast he is able to "say" a great deal and to provide much intelligibility for daily life. This artistic discovery for achieving rich implication by withholding the syntactical connection is stated as a principle of modern physics by A.N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World.

In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life. ...my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time.

Which is to say, among other things, that there can be symbolic unity among the most diverse and externally unconnected facts and emotions.

The layout men of the present ad debased this technique by making it a vehicle for "saying" a great deal about sex, stallions, and "ritzy dames" who are provided with custom-built allure.

Debased because of all the sex? Or because the "syntactical connection" is throttled rather than caressed?

Working title for my next record: "Wherein all syntactical connections are withheld."

["Magic the Changes Mood", pp. 85-87]

In Music Ho! Constant Lambert argues that syncopation in modern music is the symbolist technique of getting cosmic coverage by omission of syntactical connections... That, of course, is the literal Greek sense of "symbol"—the putting together of two unconnected things. The abrupt apposition of images, sounds, rhythms, facts is omni-

[87]

present in the modern poem, symphony, dance, and newspaper. Jazz, Lambert suggests, derives from Debussy via New York, rather than from Africa. True or not, it is easy to see that the basic techniques of both high and popular arts are now the same. (85)

We confess ignorance of the Lambert character and, in any case, find this totally unconvincing vis-a-vis "syncopation," which is sort of comically not all like the Picasso stuff, not even a little bit. We really wish people would stop saying so. To get syncopation you must first have a grid, which is the epitome of "spatial location" and the antithesis of spatio-temporal relativity. Syncopation per se is pure syntax, actually. It's precisely the opposite of what these two proto-hipsters have jointly decided it is. It's more like Mondrian, maybe even Rothko if we're feeling bold. Too literal?

Whatever "cosmic coverage" is, it sounds like a second-order effect. Syncopation is first-order, granular, atomic.

Marshall McLuhan
"The Corpse as Still Life"
pp. 104-106
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]

A generation later Edgar Allan Poe hit upon this principle of "reconstruction," or reasoning backwards, and made of it the basic technique of crime fiction and symbolist poetry alike. Instead of developing a narrative straight forward, inventing scenes, characters, and description as he proceeded, in the Sir Walter Scott manner, Poe said: "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect." Having in mind the precise effect first, the author has then to find the situations, the persons, and images, and the order which will produce that effect and no other.

That, for example, is that way T.S. Eliot composes his poems. Each is slanted to a different effect. So that it is not something his poems say but something that they do that is essential about them. And the same is true of most significant painting and poetry since Poe and Baudelaire. Yet the baffled sections of the audience still seem to expect such work to deliver some message, some idea or other, and then they kick the cigarette machine, as it were, when it won't deliver the peanuts. (106)

Kicking the cigarette machine MUST enter the lexicon!

ee.gg.

"David's crit was totally unfair. The BFA-1s kept kicking the cigarette machine and the instructor just sat there and let them."

"The notice for Julia's opening was really positive, but the final paragraph kicks the cigarette machine pretty hard. Makes me wonder if the critic secretly hates ceramics and was trying to be polite."

"When he heard Li's chamber concerto, the visiting composer from State University kicked the cigarette machine so hard I thought he was going to break his foot."

"I wouldn't bother going to ITEC this year. It's just going to be a bunch of orchestra cats carefully disassembling the cigarette machine, scribbling PEANUTS on each pack, and then trying to sell it to you at the merch table."

All of that being as it is...

This "reconstruction" business is pretty hilarious. How's this working out for y'all? Still got a lot of

baffled sections of the audience?

ha[d] in mind the precise effect first

find the situations, the persons, and images, and the order which will produce that effect and no other.

reconstruct[ed]

reconstructing

Marshall McLuhan
"The Tough as Narcissus"
p. 141-144
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]
[SK's boldface]

...the unofficial nation-wide agencies of education, production, distribution, entertainment, and advertisement are friendly neither to diversity nor to inner resistance. The monopolistic trends of intense competition are unfavorable to local talent and tradition alike. And as for resistance, every success drive and sales drive is committed to erasing this in all its varieties. In short, the capital of individual resistance and autonomous existence is being used up at a very visible rate. Is it being replaced? Or is the power of inner renewal increasing in proportion to the increasingly numerous mechanisms for anticipating and controlling the thoughts and feelings of many millions with which the present book is much concerned? It is really impossible to say, but there is no room for complacency. At some point in the mechanistic drama of our time each individual experiences to some degree the attractions and even the fact of submission and surrender. The price of total resistance, like that of total surrender, is still too high.

Consequently, in practice, everyone is intellectually and emotionally a patchwork quilt of occupied and unoccupied territory. And there are no accepted standards of submission or resistance to commercially sponsored appeals either in reading or living habits. All the more, then, is it urgent to foster habits of inspection until workable standards of securely civilized judgment emerge from those habits. Nation-wide agencies of mental sterilization now make it impossible to repose in mere habits of laissez faire. The low quality of mental habit engendered thus far by universal literacy, when confronted with the extreme complexity of current affairs, cannot be said to produce thought. So that the exhortation to "think for yourself" is, in these circumstances, a cause of discouragement only. It positively encourages a plunge into any collective myth that happens to have appeal. (144)

Marshall McLuhan
"The Tough as Narcissus"
p. 141-144
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]

The low quality of mental habit engendered thus far by universal literacy, when confronted with the extreme complexity of current affairs, cannot be said to produce thought. So that the exhortation to "think for yourself" is, in these circumstances, a cause of discouragement only. It positively encourages a plunge into any collective myth that happens to have appeal. (144)

["The Great Books", pp. 43-45]

Why has it not occurred to Dr. Hutchins that the only practical answer to the "storm of triviality and propaganda" is that it be brought under control by being inspected. It's baneful effects are at present entirely dependent on its being ignored. In launching such a part-time program of uninhibited inspection of popular and commercial culture Dr. Hutchins would find himself on a radical tack at last. Why shouldn't the young in school and college be invited to scrutinize widely selected examples of this unofficial education? Their studies and their lives would be considerably enlivened thereby. Best of all, this procedure would help to promote that unprecedented self-awareness which harmonious life in an industrial society requires. The study of the great books would then be pursued with a fuller sense of the particularity of cultural conditions, past and present, without which there is no understanding either or art, philosophy, or society. (45)

I accidentally paired McLuhan with Taleb and ended up thankful for the happenstance once this thread in the former's thought became visible. I suspect that the event under discussion (a ritualized academic vivisection of the "Great Books" and the supposedly comprehensive inventorying of the Big Ideas contained in them) is no less distasteful to Talebians than to McLuhanites. The problem is that McLuhan here, and the faux-McLuhanite nerd-mafia of the past several decades after/in spite of him, is far too confident in our powers of inference vis-a-vis "popular and commercial culture." The wish here for the burgeoning post-industrial culture machine to be "brought under control" also appears toward the conclusion of The Gutenberg Galaxy: "The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves." At this point, I nominate Mr. Taleb to put a mouse down Professor McLuhan's shirt. The arts illustrate as well as finance or economics the proposition that it is more destructive to think we know more than we do than it is to accept the limits of our knowledge and act strictly within what those limits (in combination with our moral compass) allow. "Unconsciousness of the effect of any force" may indeed be a "disaster." That point in and of itself needs no further scrutiny. But it is our disaster. It is endemic. Its paths of travel cannot be foreseen well enough for mere "inspection" by media theorists to be translated into proactive corrective measures. And, per Taleb, I am inclined to think that our situation in this regard can be exaggerated, fragilized, etc. by overeager reverse-engineers intent on unfrying the egg.

It is more than anything else the dreaded then in McLuhan's concluding sentence above which prefigures the later, fully-formed academic turf wars over the Great Books and everything they (can be made to) represent. I am wary of reading too literally here, and of imposing contemporary context retrospectively on the past. With those caveats issued, suffice it to say that the rheotical maneuver here is unmistakable to a contemporary reader, doubly so if that reader is also a practitioner of some craft where one traditionally must first learn the rules in order to break them. No one who actually cares about what comes after the then says things like this. If they did, they would not say such things in such words. Taleb may be a punk, but he is again helpful here: practitioners accumulate skills as new challenges arise; this progression almost never resembles any rationalist pedagogical ideal, but it's hard to argue that it can't work (more like the other way around, actually). McLuhan finds it no less than "dangerous" for these academics to ignore mass media and culture. Taleb, meanwhile, doesn't read the newspaper. And when it comes to the Great Books, both are exceptionally well-read erudites.

["Market Research", pp. 48-50]

The long-established anthropological techniques for observing life in primitive societies, as explained by the popular Margaret Mead in Male and Female, are extremely interesting. The object is for the anthropologist to become just like the audimeter in the present ad. To be inconspicuous and yet to have central position commanding as many views as possible. No Pinkerton snoop-sleuth ever had a more bizarre assignment than Dr. Mead imposed on herself in order to get to see and feel, from the inside, exactly how a primitive society functions. To these techniques of observation is added the psychoanalytic insight that the most valuable data are yielded by individuals or groups involuntarily, in moments of inattention. It is that latter consideration which makes popular culture so valuable as an index of the guiding impulses and the dominant drives in a society. (50)

Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg Galaxy
2011 U of Toronto edition [orig. 1962]

W. Terrence Gordon
"McLuhan's Compass for the Voyage to a World of Electric Worlds"
(vvi-xxiv)

p. xl—

The old medium stays around but it is reshaped according to the new potentialities embedded by the new media. Learning from previous avant-garde movements such as symbolism, futurism, or vorticism, McLuhan understood that the written page had to become the interface through which the new electric simultaneity would reveal itself at a time when hypertexts were but a speculative possibility among a limited group of researchers. The paradox underpinning the elaboration of the mosaic style of writing is how to open the old medium—writing—to new media in order to preserve the thought processes of the old medium itself. But it is, in turn, part of another paradox which is implicit in the very form of the electric media. The new acoustic perception must, in fact, be expressed through a form which is inevitably (and here is the paradox) visually rendered and shaped. The new electric age comes after the literate age, and could even be interpreted as its ultimate product; by necessity, according to McLuhan, it must take the literate age as its content. Individuals cannot cancel centuries of literacy—even if they think they can—because the orality induced by the new electric media is, in fact, itself a literate secondary orality. Instead of asking the old question, can Dick and Jane read? we must now ask: are they media literate?

As Ong reminded us, secondary orality is a sort of "impure" and "hybrid" orality since in it both writing and printing stay as fundamental components of the new technological language. It is, in fact, a parole, a word or spoken language determined by acoustic and tactile means. Secondary orality is so called because by its very nature or "physiology" it is both spoken-as-written and/or written-as-spoken and is the related interplay of speech and text, that is, the perceptive dynamics which take place between media and its users on the computer screen; or when text messaging; or when activating applications through image and touch on iPhones. The acoustic aspect, as implied by McLuhan, means the remodeling of the environment by turning it from a visual bias to an oral bias while, at the same time, using older media as fundamental components of the ongoing communicative process: old media integrate into new media and are re-elaborated into new formal combinations and hybrids. "NEW MEDIA DO NOT REPLACE EACH OTHER, THEY COMPLICATE EACH OTHER." A new medium often enhances the subtler properties of old ones which one has so far neglected because of a standardized use. McLuhan called this paradox "the rear-view mirror effect."

p. 6—

the price we pay for special technological tools, whether the wheel or the alphabet or the radio, is that these massive extensions of sense constitute closed systems. Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call con-sciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.

Seems as good a representative as any of the numerous similar passages throughout the McLuhan oeuvre. One big question, of course, is: does "a ratio of interplay" necessarily mean the gesamkunstwerk, or can it also mean a balance (McLuhan often says "orchestration") of the various fragmented media?

p. 9—

It is Popper's view that tribal or closed societies have a biological unity and that "our modern open societies function largely by way of abstract relations, such as exchange or co-operation." That the abstracting or opening of closed societies is the work of the phonetic alphabet, and not of any other form of writing or technology, is one theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy. On the other hand, that closed societies are the product of speech, drum, and ear technologies, brings us at the opening of the electronic age to the sealing of the entire human family into a single global tribe.

p. 20—

The stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synesthesia may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology.

p. 21—

Psychologists define hypnosis as the filling of the field of attention by one sense only. At such a moment "the garden" dies. That is, the garden indicates the interplay of all the senses in haptic harmony. With the instressed concern with one sense only, the mechanical principle of abstraction and repetition emerges into explicit form. Technology is explicitness, as Lyman Bryson said. And explicitness means the spelling out of one thing at a time, one sense at a time, one mental or physical operation at a time. Since the object of the present book is to discern the origins and modes of the Gutenberg configuration of events, it will be well to consider the effects of the alphabet on native populations today. For as they are in relation to the phonetic alphabet, so we once were."

Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg Galaxy
2011 U of Toronto edition [orig. 1962]

p. 31—

That the Greeks were able to do more with the written word than other communities such as the Babylonian and Egyptian was, according to H.A.L. Fisher (A History of Europe, p. 19) that they were not under "the paralysing control of organized priestcraft." But even so, they had only a brief period of exploration and discovery before settling into a clichéd pattern of repetitive thought. Carothers feels that the early Greek intelligentsia not only had the stimulus of sudden access to thr acquired wisdom of other peoples, but, having none of its own, there were no vested interests in acquired knowledge to frustrate the immediate acceptance and development of the new. It is this very situation which today puts the Western world at such a disadvantage, as against the "backward" countries. It is our enormous backlog of literate and mechanistic technology that renders us so helpless and inept in handling the new electric technology. The new physics is an auditory domain and long-literate society is not at home in the new physics, nor will it ever be.

p. 40—

The purpose of printing among the Chinese was not the creation of uniform repeatable products for a market and a price system. Print was an alternative to their prayer-wheels and was a visual means of multiplying incantatory spells, much like advertising in our age.

But we can learn much about print from the Chinese attitude towards it. For the most obvious character of print is repetition, just as the obvious effect of repetition is hypnosis or obsession. Moreover, printing ideograms is totally different from typography based on the phonetic alphabet. For the ideograph even more than the hieroglyph is a complex Gestalt involving all of the senses at once. The ideogram affords none of the separation and specialization of sense, none of the breaking apart of sight and sound and meaning which is the key to the phonetic alphabet. So that the numerous specializations and separations of function inherent in industry and applied knowledge simply were not accessible to the Chinese. Today they appear to be proceeding along the lines of the phonetics alphabet. This ensures that they will liquidate their present and traditional culture in toto. They will then proceed by the paths of schizophrenia and multiply dichotomies in the direction of physical power and aggressive organization, on a centre-margin or Roman pattern.

The quite irrelevant ground that Carothers assigns to explaining the earlier Chinese indifference to industrialism is that Chinese writing—or printing—requires much erudition for its understanding. The same is true in varying degrees of all non-alphabetic forms of writing. The comment of Latourette on this point will help here as well as later:

The greater part of the voluminous literature in Chinese has been written in the classical style ... The Chinese classical language presents difficulties. It is highly artificial. It is often replete with allusions and [41] quotations and to appreciate and even to understand much of it the reader has to bring to it a vast store of knowledge of existing literature ... It is only by going through a prodigious amoung of literature and especially by memorising quanities of it that the scholar obtains a kind of sixth sense which enables him to divine which of several readings is correct. Even the perusal of the classical language, therefore, requires long preparation. Composition is still more of a task. Few Occidentals have achieved an acceptable style and many a modern Chinese who is the finished product of the present-day curriculum is far from adept.

The concluding observation of Carothers is that genetic studies of human groups offer no certainty and very small data, indeed, compared to cultural and environmental approaches. My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base in the human sensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium by technological dilation has a quite appreciable effect in setting up new ratios or proportions among all the senses. Languages being that form of technology constituted by dilation or uttering (outering) of all of our senses at once, are themselves immediately subject to the impact or intrusion of any mechanically extended sense. That is, writing affects speech directly, not only its accidence and syntax but also its enunciation and social uses.

p. 61—

Berkeley was concerned to refute Descartes and Newton, who had wholly abstracted the visual sense from the interaction of the other senses. On the other hand, the suppression of the visual sense in favour of the audile-tactile complex, produces the distortions of tribal society, and of the configuration of jazz and primitive art imitations which broke upon us with radio, but not just "because" of radio.

p. 63—

It would seem that the extension of one or another of our senses by mechanical means, such as the phonetic script, can act as a sort of twist of the kaleidoscope of the entire sensorium. A new combination or ratio of the existing components occurs, and a new mosaic of possible forms presents itself. That such switch of sense ratios should occur with every instance of external technology is easy to see today. Why has it been unnoticed before? Perhaps because the shifts have in the past occurred somewhat gradually. Now we experience such a series of new technologies even in our own world and, besides, have means of observing so many other cultures that only great inattention could now conceal the role of new media of information in altering the posture and relations of our senses."

p. 179—

Hamlet is repeating a commonplace conflict of his century, that between the old oral "field" approach to problems and the new visual approach of applied or "resolute" knowledge. And "resolution" is the cant or conventional term used by the Machiavellians. So the conflict is between "conscience" and "resolution," not in our sense at all, but between an over-all awareness and a merely private point of view. Thus, today the conflict goes the other way. The highly literate and individualist liberal mind is tormented by the pressure to become collectively oriented. The literate liberal is convinced that all real values are private, personal, individual. Such is the message of mere literacy. Yet the new electric technology pressures him towards the need for total human interdependence. Hamlet, on the other hand, saw the advantages of corporate responsibility and awareness ("conscience") with each man in a role, not at his private peephole or "point of view." Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds?"

p. 180—

Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism will also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But," someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.

So, this is the dreaded "determinism" of McLuhan. A "complaint" about what technology has wrought is merely a "moral fog."

p. 262—

Structuralism in art and criticism stemmed, like non-Euclidean geometrics, from Russia. Structuralism as a term does not much convey its idea of inclusive synesthesia, an interplay of many levels and facets in a two-dimesional mosaic. But it is a mode of awareness in art language and literature which the West took great pains to eliminate by means of Gutenberg technology. It has returned in our time, for good or ill...

p. 263—

In our time it is extremely evident that man is language, though he now recognizes many non-verbal languages as well as the language of forms. And this structuralist approach to experience engenders the awareness that "unconsciousness in relation to the one who knows is nonexistence." That is to say, that in so far as print structured language and experience and motivation in new ways not recognized in conscious ways, life was impoverished by mesmerism. Earlier in this volume, Shakespeare was shown as providing his contemporaries with a working model of print technology in action. For the separation of functions by mechanical inertia is the foundation of movable types and applied knowledge in all domains. It is a technique of reduction to a single level of problems, talents, and solutions alike. Thus Dr. Johnson "was scandalized by the untimeliness of many of Shakespeare's puns. For a character to quibble in the teeth of death, as many do in the plays, was contrary to 'reason, propriety and truth.'"

p. 280—

The last sentence ["For those who were loyal to Descartes, all that was not conscious in man was material and physiological, and therefore not mental."-citation not recorded] will suggest to some that the present book is material and physiological rather than mental in its assumptions. That is not the case, nor is it the theme. The point is, rather, how do we become aware of the effect of alphabet or print or telegraph in shaping our behaviour? For it is absurd and ignoble to be shaped by such means. Knowledge does not extend but restrict the areas of determinism. And the influence of unexamined assumptions derived from technology leads quite unnecessarily to maximal determinism in human life. Emancipation from that trap is the goal of all education. But the unconscious is no escape-hatch from a world of denuded categories any more than Leibnitzian or any other monism is a resolution of Cartesian dualism. There is still the full ratio or interplay of all the senses in concert, which permits light through. That concert comes to an end with the stepping up of one sense by technology, and by the insistence of light on. The nightmare of light on is the world of Pascal: "Reason acts slowly and with so many views upon so many principles which always must be present, that at any time it may fall asleep or get lost, for want of having all its principles present."

p. 281—

The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves. And it is quite easy to test the universal effects of print on Western thought after the sixteenth century, simply by examining the most extraordinary developments in any art or science whatever.

Hmm...could it be, rather, that the "most extraordinary developments" are actually quite misleading when it comes to making such sweeping pronouncements? They show what became possible, not what become probable and, more to the point, prevalent.

And again, we may do well to conjure Mr. Taleb here. "Unconsciousness of the effect of any force" is most of the time simply the reality. It is often worse to THINK we know when in reality we cannot know this kind of thing with any confidence.

p. 307—

A market economy "can exist only in a market society." But to exist, a market society requires centuries of transformation by Gutenberg technology; hence, the absurdity in the present time of trying to institute market economies in countries like Russia or Hungary, where feudal conditions obtained until the twentieth century. It is possible to set up modern production in such areas, but to create a market economy that can handle what comes off the assembly lines presupposes a long period of psychic transformation, which is to say, a period of altering perception and sense ratios.

Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg Galaxy
2011 U of Toronto edition [orig. 1962]

p. 308—

That every generation poised on the edge of massive change should later seem oblivious of the issues and the imminent event would seem to be natural enough. But it is necessary to understand the power and thrust of technologies to isolate the senses and thus to hypnotize society. The formula for hypnosis is "one sense at a time." And new technology possesses the power to hypnotize because it isolates the senses. Then, as Blake's formula has it: "They became what they beheld."

How about this: when some combination of nature/nurture begets the hypertrophy of one or more of the senses, then a certain "isolation" of certain senses may be a source of equilibrium rather than hypnosis.

cont.—

Every new technology thus diminishes sense interplay and consciousness, precisely in the new area of novelty where a kind of identification of viewer and object occurs. This somnambulist conforming of beholder to the new form or structure renders those most deeply immersed in a revolution the least aware of its dynamic. What Polanyi observes about the insentience of those involved in the expediting of the new machine industry is typical of all the local and contemporary attitudes to revolution. It is felt, at those times, that the future will be a larger or greatly improved version of the immediate past. Just before revolutions the image of the immediate past is stark and firm, perhaps because it is the only area of sense interplay free from obsessional identification with new technological form.

No more extreme instance of this delusion could be mentioned than our present image of TV as a current variation on the mechanical, movie pattern of processing experience by repetition. A few decades hence it will be easy to describe the revolution in human perception and motivation that resulted from beholding the new mosaic mesh of the TV image. Today it is futile to discuss it at all.

***romantics***
***self***
***the mass audience***

p. 314—

It is a characteristic chiasmus that waits upon the utmost development of any process that the last phase shall show characteristics opposite to the early phases. A typical example of massive psychic chiasmus or reversal occurred when Western man fought the harder for individuality as he surrendered the idea of unique personal existence. The nineteenth century artists made a mass-surrender of that unique selfhood, that had been taken for granted in the eighteenth century, as the new mass pressures made the burdens of selfhood too heavy. Just as Mill fought for individuality even though he had given up the self, the poets and artists moved towards the idea of impersonal process in art production in proportion as they berated the new masses for impersonal process in the consumption of art products. A similar and related reversal or chiasmus occurred when the consumer of popular art was invited by new art forms to become participant in the art process itself.

This was the moment of transcendence of the Gutenberg technology. The centuries-old separation of senses and functions ended in a quite unexpected unity.

The reversal by which the presence of the new markets and the new masses encouraged the artist to surrender the unique self might have seemed a final consummation for art and technology alike. It was a surrender made almost inevitable when the symbolists began to work backwards from effect to cause in the shaping of the art product. Yet it was just at this extreme moment that a new reversal occurred. The art process had no sooner approached the rigorous, impersonal rationale of the industrial process, in the period from Poe to Valéry, than the assembly line of symbolist art was transformed into the new "stream of consciousness" mode of presentation. And the stream of consciousness is an open "field" perception that reverses all aspects of the nineteenth century discovery of the assembly-line or of the "technique of invention."

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

***determinism***

11—

In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad..." Again, "firearms..." [Funny, this last one, because it has in fact been uttered and written thousands upon thousands of times.] That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. [Uh...ditto.] If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form. General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.

This is McLuhan's infamous "determinism," as against the "instrumentality" of Sarnoff and others. What makes McLuhan maddening to read is statements like the concluding one above, which can be parsed to support either side of this opposition: "what we already are" can be either monistic (hence determinism) or dualistic (good and evil and every shade of grey, hence instrumentality).

p. 16—

We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation

p. 18—

***artists, elevated***

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

Or he was, until "serious art" gave way to science experiments in synaesthesia.

p. 23—

The hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.

My note says: previously caution, now absolute.

p. 35—

***interdisciplinarity***
***scale***

The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion. In our present electric age the imploding or contracting energies of our world now clash with the old expansionist and traditional patterns of organization. Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as "explosive," or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about the population explosion and the explosion in learning. In fact, it is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives. In education, likewise, it is not the increase in numbers of those seeking to learn that creates the crisis. Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sover-

[36]

eignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed. Obsession with the older patterns of mechanical, one-way expansion from centers to margins is no longer relevant to our electric world. Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. It is like the difference between a railway system and an electric grid system: the one requires railheads and big urban centers. Electric power, equally available in the farmhouse and the Executive Suite, permits any place to be a center, and does not require large aggregations.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 42—

Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as "autoamputation," and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has many expressions that indicate this self-amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of "wanting to jump out of my skin" or of "going out of my mind," being "driven batty" or "flipping my lid." And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and stresses of real life under controlled conditions of sport and play.

...

In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. For example, in the case of the wheel as an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was the immediate occasion of the extension or "amputation" of this function from our bodies. The wheel as a counter-irritant to increased burdens, in turn, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation). Such

[43]

amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception. This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The young man's image is a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.

WOW, this is precisely the connection between Rank's theory of equilibrium and the contemporary "narcissistic" turn in the arts.

p. 46—

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By contininuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.

p. 55—

The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.

My note says: but this "narcosis" is equilibriating?! so why snap out of it?

Now: in other words, this "meeting of media" effect would seem to be quite transient, quickly devolving into a different "narcosis", possibly so quickly that we never get to enjoy (or even be aware of) the fact that we have snapped out of something.

This passage is really hard to parse. Perhaps because rather than in spite of that, it would seem quite the superficially attractive rationale for a/any "hybrid"-ization of existing disciplines. But note that HMM seems more skeptical of that on p. 35 above.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 62—

It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement. A.N. Whitehead, on the other hand, explained how the great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Namely, the technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the desired object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other.

But the "technique of the suspended judgment" goes further [than the "discovery of the technique of discovery"]. It anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood on an adult, and offsets the effect before it happens. In psychiatry, it is the technique of total permissiveness extended as an anaesthetic for the mind, while various adhe-[63]sions and moral effects of false judgments are systematically eliminated.

This is a very different thing from the numbing or narcotic effect of new technology that lulls attention while the new form slams the gates of judgment and perception. For massive social surgery is needed to insert new technology into the group mind... Now the "technique of the suspended judgment" presents the possibility of rejecting the narcotic and of postponing indefinitely the operation of inserting the new technology in the social psyche. A new stasis in prospect.

Yes folks, the guy is a nut. Really hard to follow. But the surgery analogy is about to blossom into something pretty interesting, kind of like that cactus that only blooms once a decade. McLuhan is very interested in morality, but he also hates it when people moralize about technology. He rejects instrumentality (p. 46: "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world")

This same incongruity resurfaces all throughout his writings.

p. 64—

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that it changed. The effect of radio is visual, the effect of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios among all the senses. What we seek today is either a means of controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios of the psychic and social outlook, or a means of avoiding them altogether. To have a disease without its symptoms is to be immune. No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.

To have a disease without its symptoms is to be immune.
Sounds like a pretty good epigram for my blog, ca. 2021.

Does anyone else find it funny that in a mere coupla pages we have gone from

starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other

No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies

epistemic arrogance

limitations that prevent us from unfrying an egg

art may be able to provide such immunity

controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios

effect

Perhaps this is not, actually, a totally crazy idea. Controlling the reception of a work can be considered a problem of organized complexity whereas the sense-ratio issue, being a bird's-eye-view concern, can be considered a problem of disorganized complexity .

I'm borrowing from Jane Jacobs here, who borrowed thusly from Dr. Warren Weaver:

"The classical dynamics of the nineteenth century was well suited for analyzing and predicting the motion of a single ivory ball as it moves about on a billiard table . . . One can, but with a surprising increase in difficulty, analyze the motion of two or even three balls . . . But as soon as one tries to analyze the motion of ten or fifteen balls on the table at once, as in pool, the problem becomes unmanageable, not because there is any theoretical difficulty, but just because the actual labor of dealing in specific detail with so many variables turns out to be impractical.

"Imagine, however, a large billiard table with millions of balls flying about on its surface . . . The great surprise is that the problem now becomes easier: the methods of statistical mechanics are now applicable. One cannot trace the detailed history of one special ball, to be sure; but there can be answered with useful precision such important questions as: On the average how many balls per second hit a given stretch of rail? On the average how far does a ball move before it is hit by some other ball? . . .

" . . . The word 'disorganized' [applies] to the large billiard table with the many balls . . . because the balls are distributed, in their positions and motions, in a helter-skelter way . . . but in spite of this helter-skelter or unknown behavior of all the individual variables, the system as a whole posesses certain orderly and analyzable average properties."

certain orderly and analyzable average properties

So what are the orderly and analyzable average properties of a minimally-regulated marketplace of rational, affluent art consumers?

What are the orderly and analyzable average properties of Southern California day laborers vis-a-vis instrumental music making liberal use of dissonant counterpoint?

What are the orderly and analyzable average properties of holders of graduate jazz performance degrees when playing from an unmetered performance score with a high degree of independence among the parts, and how does this first set of orderly and analyzable average properties compare with those of the same cohort when playing from The Reak Book (Fifth Edition)?

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 64—

In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of [65] artists. The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models of Noah's arks for facing the change that is at hand. "The war of 1870 need never have been fought had people read my Sentimental Education," said Gustave Flaubert.

It is this aspect of new art that Kenneth Galbraith recommends to the careful study of businessmen who want to stay in business. For in the electric age there is no longer any sense in talking about the artist's being ahead of his time. Our technology is, also, ahead of its time, if we reckon by the ability to recognize it for what it is. To prevent undue wreckage in society, the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control tower of society. Just as higher education is no longer a frill or luxury but a stark need of production and operational design in the electric age, so the artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures created by electric technology.

Well...this last part doesn't comport too well with the stuff about autoamputation. Seems to me that the former is proactive/prospective, whereas the latter is reactive/retrospective.

(cont.)
p. 65—

The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably muttered clichés about the impracticality of artists and their fanciful preferences. But in the past century it has come to be generally acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, "The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

Timeout. HMM at this point in his career had a tremendous body of learning and research under his belt. It is rather disappointing to find him appealing so redundantly to literary aphorisms.

Also, at the risk of repeating myself to an obnoxious degree, I must reiterate: once such special powers of the artist or the athlete or the politician or the pastor are "generally acknowledged," the party is over, the ark has sailed, etc. The mere awareness (to say nothing of expectations) that this "general acknowledgment" creates in artist and audience alike is sufficient in and of itself to obliterate any hope of such a process continuing to function as HMM claims it does here.

(cont.)

Knowledge of this simple fact is now needed for human survival. The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old. Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence, to recognize their need of the artist. To reward and to make celebrities of artists, can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

[the point about celebrity=>ignoring has been posted to the Over 100 Prize]

(cont.)

The artist can correct the sense ratios before the blow of new technology has numbed conscious procedures. He can correct them before numbness and subliminal groping and reaction be

[66]

gin. If this is true, how is it possible to present the matter to those who are in a position to do something about it? If there were even a remote likelihood of this analysis being true, it would warrant a global armstice and period of stock-taking. If it is true that the artist possesses the means of anticipating and avoiding the consequences of technological trauma, then what are we to think of the world and bureaucracy of "art appreciation"? Would it not seem suddenly to be a conspiracy to make the artist a frill, a fribble, or a Milltown? If men were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts?

YIPES. Two TERRIBLE options! The first running afoul both of Taleb's unfrying-an-egg problem and of the all-none problem; the second very much in evidence today without seeming to have made a lick of difference.

(cont.)
p. 66—

I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties. Would we, then, cease to look at works of art as an explorer might regard the gold and gems used as the ornaments of simply nonliterates?

—

...those parts of ourselves that we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to "ride with the punch," instead of "taking it on the chin." It can only be repeated that human history is a record of "taking it on the chin."

Hmm...does Rank say anything about this "drug habit" aspect of things?

p. 68—

When we are deprived of our sense of sight, the other sense take up the role of sight in some degree. But the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as breathing—a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep radio and TV going more or less continuously. The urge to continuous use is quite independent of the "content" of public programs or of the private sense life, being testimony to the fact that technology is part of our bodies. Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves. This question would be like asking people what sort of sights and sounds they would prefer around them in an urban metropolis! Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. ... As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

--

Arnold Toynbee has devoted much of his A Study of History to analyzing the kinds of challenge faced by a variety of cultures during many centuries. Highly relevant to Western man is Toynbee's explanation of how the lame and the crippled respond to their handicaps in a society of active warriors. They become

[69]

specialists like Vulcan, the smith and armorer. And how do whole communities act when conquered and enslaved? The same strategy serves them as it does the lame individual in a society of warriors. They specialize and become indispensible to their masters. It is probably the long human history of enslavement, and the collapse into specialism as a counter-irritant, that have put the stigma of servitude and pusillanimity on the figure of the specialist, even in modern times. The capitulation of Western man to his technology, with its crescendo of specialized demands, has always appeared to many observers of our world as a kind of enslavement. But the resulting fragmentation has been voluntary and enthusiastic, unlike the conscious strategy of specialism on the part of the capitves of military conquest.

It is plain that fragmentation or specialism as a technique of achieving security under tyranny and oppression of any kind has an attendant danger. Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a kind of static terminus for a creature. Even slight changes in the environment of the very well adjusted find them without any resource to meet new challenge. Such is the plight of the representatives of "conventional wisdom" in any society. Their entire stake of security and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that innovation is for them not novelty but annihilation.

p. 70—

...to point back to the day of the horse or to look forward to the coming of antigravitational vehicles is not an adequate response to the challenge of the motorcar. Yet these two uniform ways of backward and forward looking are habitual ways of avoiding the discontinuities of present experience with their demand for sensitive inspection and appraisal. Only the dedicated artist seems to have the power for encountering the present reality.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

--

When the technol-

[71]

ogy of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust. The implosion of electric energy in our century cannot be met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers. For example, the rush of students into our universities is not explosion but implosion. And the needful strategy to encounter this force is not to enlarge the university, but to create numerous groups of autonomous colleges in place of our centralized university plant that grew up on the lines of European government and nineteenth-century industry.

Sadly it is the centralization which creates the prestige, and it is the prestige and not the lurnun' which is driving the implosion. The content of the medium "university" is prestige, not lurnun'.

But yes, "decentralism", "groups of autonomous colleges", etc.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 79—

in speech we tend to react to each situation that occurs, reacting in tone and gesture even to our own act of speaking. But writing tends to be a kind of separate or specialist action in which there is little opportunity or call for reaction. The literate man or society develops the tremendous power of acting in any matter with considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.

p. 82—

Suppose that, instead of displaying the Stars and Stripes, we were to write the words "American flag" across a piece of cloth and to display that. While the symbols would convey the same meaning, the effect would be quite different. To translate the rich visual mosaic of the Stars and Stripes into written form would be to deprive it of most of its qualities of corporate image and of experience, yet the abstract literal bond would remain much the same. Perhaps this illustration will serve to suggest the change the tribal man experiences when he becomes literate. Nearly all the emotional and corporate family feeling is eliminated from his relationship with his social group. He is emotionally free to separate from the tribe and to become a civilized individual, a man of visual organization who has uniform attitudes, habits, and rights with all other civilized individuals.

I'm not sure how fair it is to say that "the symbols would convey the same meaning," actually. Seems to me that you could get much closer (certainly not all the way) to the full effect of the flag in print format if you wrote a book rather than a flag-sized, two word slogan. McLuhan's "translat[ion]" here is also a tremendous reduction, i.e. from a "rich visual mosaic" to something far less rich. In other words, he commits the fallacy of incomplete evidence.

Certainly images are "rich" in ways that written language is not; we have a well-worn saying about precisely how much richer. But you cannot argue that, say, the sum total of twenty canonical books about U.S. history is not "rich." Pick any five, actually, or maybe just one if it is thoughtful and extensive, and you may well emerge with something much richer than any image. If you're taking the saying literally then all you really need is a short essay. I'm belaboring the point because while there is much aphorism and conjecture in McLuhan's books, I have not found very many outright logical fallacies, which I think this one is.

In this example the flag is, most of all, concise. The difference between being "rich" and being "concise" is rather irrelevant to McLuhan's larger thrust here, just one tree in a forest of penetrating insight. Still, it is a tactic which invites a particular corollary: when all you have to work with is a flag, the image is indeed

It's not that the full meaning of the flag cannot be communicated in print, just that it cannot be communicated concisely in print.

p. 83—

The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds. This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written word sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyph and the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and uniform visual medium. Many centuries of ideogrammatic use have not threatened the seamless web of family and tribal subtleties of Chinese society. On the other hand, a single genera-[84]tion of alphabetic literacy suffices in Africa today, as in Gaul two thousand years ago, to release the individual initially, at least, from the tribal web. This fact has nothing to do with the content of the alphabetized words; it is the result of the sudden breach between the auditory and the visual experience of man. Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving its user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship.

p. 107—

Just as writing is an extension and separation of our most neutral and objective sense, the sense of sight, number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch.

This faculty of touch, called the "haptic" sense by the Greeks, was popularized as such by the Bauhaus program of sensuous education, through the work of Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and many others in the Germany of the 1920s. The sense of touch, as offering a kind of nervous system or organic unity in the work of art, has obsessed the minds of the artists since the time of Cézanne. For more than a century now artists have tried to meet the challenge of the electric age by investing the tactile sense with the role of a nervous system for unifying all the others. [108] Paradoxically, this has been achieved by "abstract art," which offers a central nervous system for a work of art, rather than the conventional husk of the old pictorial image.

p. 109—

Since Henri Bergson and the Bauhaus group of artists, to say nothing of Jung and Freud, the nonliterate and even antiliterate values of tribal man have in general received enthisiastic study and promotion. For many European artists and intellectuals, jazz became one of the rallying points in their quest for the integral Romantic Image. The uncritical enthisiasm of the European intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in stone."

Availability heuristic, anyone?

p. 111—

A closely integrated tribal culture will not easily lead to the division of labor, and then to such accelerated forms as writing and money. On the other hand, Western man, were he determined to cling to the fragmented and individualist ways that he has derived from the printed word in particular, would be well advised to scrap all his electric technology since the telegraph.

p. 127—

Recently an imaginative school principal in a slum area provided each student in the school with a photograph of himself. The classrooms of the school were abundantly supplied with large mirrors. The result was an astounding increase in the learning rate. The slum child has ordinarily very little visual orientation. He does not see himself as becoming something. He does not envisage distant goals and objectives. He is deeply involved in his own world from day to day, and can establish no beachhead in the highly specialized sense life of visual man. The plight of the slum child, via the TV image, is increasingly extended to the entire population.

p. 128—

Not many ages ago, glass windows were unknown luxuries. With light control by glass came also a means of controlling the regularity of domestic routine, and steady application to crafts and trade without regard to cold or rain. The world was put in a frame. With electric light not only can we carry out the most precise operations with no regard for time or place or climate, but we can photograph the submicroscopic as easily as we can enter the subterranean world of the mine and of the cave-painters.

Lighting as an extension of our powers affords the clearest-cut example of how such extensions alter our perceptions. If people are inclined to doubt whether the wheel or typography or the plane could change our habits of sense perception, their

[129]

doubts end with electric lighting. In this domain, the medium is the message, and when the light is on there is a world of sense that disappears when the light is off.

p. 146—

The sense of smell is not only the most subtle and delicate of the human senses; it is, also, the most iconic in that it involves the entire human sensorium

[147]

more fully than any other sense. It is not surprising, therefore, that highly literate societies take steps to reduce or elimiate odors from the environment. B.O., the unique signature and declaration of human individuality, is a bad word in literate societies. It is far too involving for our habits of detachment and specialist attention. Societies that measured time scents would tend to be so cohesive and so profoundly unified as to resist every kind of change.

[147]

Lewis Mumford has suggested that the clock preceded the printing press in order of influence on the mechanization of society. But Mumford takes no account of the phonetic alphabet as the technology that had made possible the visual and uniform fragmentation of time. Mumford, in fact, is unaware of the alphabet as the source of Western mechanism, just as he is unaware of mechanization as the translation of society from audile-tactile modes into visual values. Our new electric technology is organic and nonmechanical in tendency because it extends, not our eyes, but our central nervous systems as a planetary vesture. In the space-time world of electric technology, the older mechanical time begins to feel unacceptable, if only because it is uniform.

p. 148—

now that we live electrically in an instantaneous world, space and time interpenetrate each other totally in a space-time world. In the same way, the painter, since Cézanne, has recovered the plastic image by which all of the senses coexist in a unified pattern. Each object and each set of objects engenders its own unique space by the relations it has among others visually or musically. When this awareness recurred in the Western world, it was denounced as the merging of all things in a flux. We now realize that this anxiety was a natural literary and visual response to the new nonvisual technology.

This implies, as so often with McLuhan, that there is in some cosmic sense nothing better or worse about "the merging of all things in a flux" (the clumsy neologism "dedifferentiation" perhaps best caputures this idea as manifested in the arts) than about the former compartmentalization; perhaps also/instead that both of these notions are mere perceptions which may or may not be reality. If so, seems to me that there truly is no reality at that point.

--

in the ancient world the only means of achieving power was getting a thousand slaves to act as one man. During the Middle Ages the communal clock extended by the bell permitted high coordination of the energies of small communities. In the Renaissance the clock combined with the uniform respectability of the new typography to extend the power of social organization almost to a national scale. By the nineteenth century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable [149] from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automaton. Now in the electric age of decentralized power and information we begin to chafe under the uniformity of clock-time. In this age of space-time we seek multiplicity, rather than repeatability, of rhythms. This is the difference between marching soldiers and ballet.

Weird analogy. Holds only for the audience/onlooker. From the perspective of the soldiers and dancers themselves, both are HIGHLY regimented. The parallels are more than incidental, actually, as many postmodern theorists have enjoyed pointing out re: classical art traditions.

p. 155—

The clock dragged man out of the world of seasonal rhythms and recurrence, as effectively as the alphabet had released him from the magical resonance of the spoken word and the tribal trap. This dual translation of the individual out of the grip of Nature and out of the clutch of the tribe was not without its own penalties. But the return to Nature and the return to the tribe are under electric conditions, fatally simple. We need beware of those who announce programs for restoring man to the original state and language of the race. These crusaders have never examined the role of media and technology in tossing man about from dimension to dimension. They are like the somnabulistic African chief with the alarm clock strapped to his back.

Mircea Eliade...is unaware...that a "sacred" universe in his sense is one dominated by the spoken word and by auditory media. A "profane" universe, on the other hand, is one dominated by the visual sense. The clock and the alphabet, by hacking the universe into visual segments, ended the music of interrelation. The visual desacralizes the universe and produces the "nonreligious man of modern societies.

Historically, however, Eliade is useful in recounting how, before the age of the clock and the time-kept city, there was for tribal man a cosmic clock and a sacred time of the cosmogony itself. When tribal man wanted to build a city or a house, or cure

[156]

an illness, he wound up the cosmic clock by an elaborate ritual reenactment or recitation of the original process of creation. Eliade mentions that in Fiji "the ceremony for installing a new ruler is called 'creation of the world.'" The same drama is enacted to help the growth of crops. Whereas modern man feels obligated to be punctual and conservative of time, tribal man bore the responsibility for keeping the cosmic clock supplied with energy. But electric or ecological man (man of the total field) can be expected to surpass the old tribal cosmic concern with the Africa within.

Primitive man lived in a much more tyrannical cosmic machine than Western literate man has ever invented. The world of the ear is more embracing and inclusive than that of the eye can ever be. The ear is hypersensitive. The eye is cool and detached. The ear turns man over to universal panic while the eye, extended by literacy and mechanical time, leaves some gaps and some islands free from the unremitting acoustic pressure and reverberation.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

Primitive man lived in a much more tyrannical cosmic machine than Western literate man has ever invented. The world of the ear is more embracing and inclusive than that of the eye can ever be. The ear is hypersensitive. The eye is cool and detached. The ear turns man over to universal panic while the eye, extended by literacy and mechanical time, leaves some gaps and some islands free from the unremitting acoustic pressure and reverberation.
(p. 156)

p. 158—

***Taleb on blue***

All the words in the world cannot describe an object like a bucket, although it is possible to tell in a few words how to make a bucket. This inadequacy of words to convey visual information about objects was an effectual block to the development of the Greek and Roman sciences. Pliny the Elder reported the inability of the Greek and Latin botanists to devise a means of transmitting information about plants and flowers:

Hence it is that other writers have confined themselves to a verbal description of the plants; indeed some of them have not so much as described them even, but have contented themselves for the most part with a bare recital of their names . . .

We are confronted here once more with that basic function of media—to store and to expedite information. Plainly, to store is to expedite, since what is stored is also more accessible than what has to be gathered. The fact that visual information about flowers and plants cannot be stored verbally also points to the fact that [159] science in the Western world has long been dependent on the visual factor. Nor is this surprising in a literate culture based on the technology of the alphabet, one that reduces even spoken language to a visual mode. As electricity has created multiple nonvisual means of storing and retrieving information, not only culture but science also has shifted its entire base and character. For the educator, as well as the philosopher, exact knowledge of what this shift means for learning and the mental process is not necessary.

p. 159—

The great law of bibliography...: "The more there were, the fewer there are." It applies to many items besides printed matter—to the postage stamp and to the early forms of radio receiving sets.

Medieval and Renaissance man experienced little of the separation and speciality among the arts that developed later. The manuscript and the earlier printed books were read aloud, and poetry was sung or intoned. Oratory, music, literature, and drawing were closely related. Above all, the world of the illuminated manuscript was one in which lettering itself was given plastic stress to an almost scuptural degree.

p. 172—

Any student of the social history of the printed book is likely to be puzzled by the lack of understanding of the psychic and social effects of printing. In five centuries explicit comment and awareness of the effects of print on human sensibility are very scarce. But the same observation can be made about all the extensions of man, whether it be clothing or the computer. An extension appears to be an amplification of an organ, a sense or a function, that inspires the central nervous system to a self-protective gesture of numbing of the extended area, at least so far as direct inspection and awareness are concerned.

p. 173—

Perhaps the most significant of the gifts of typography to man is that of detachment and noninvolvement—the power to act without reacting. Science since the Renaissance has exalted this gift which has become an embarassment in the electric age, in which all people are involved in all others at all times. The very word "disinterested," expressing the loftiest detachment and ethical integrity of typographic man, has in the past decade been increasingly used to mean: "He couldn't care less." The same integrity indicated by the term "disinterested" as a mark of the scientific and scholarly temper of a literate and enlightened society is now increasingly repudiated as "specializiation" and fragmentation of knowledge and sensibility. The fragmenting and analytic power of the printed word in our psychic lives gave us that "dissociation of sensibility" which in the arts and literature since Cézanne and since Baudelaire has been a top priority for elimination in every program of reform in taste and knowledge. In the "implosion" of the electric age the separation of thought and feeling has come to seem as strange as the departmentalization of knowledge in schools and universities. Yet it was precisely the power to separate thought and feeling, to be able to act without reacting, that split literate man out of the tribal world of close family bonds in private and social life.

Typography was no more an addition to the scribal art than the motorcar was an addition to the horse. Printing had its "horseless carriage" phase of being misconceived and misapplied during its first decades, when it was not uncommon for the purchaser of a printed book to take it to a scribe to have it copied and illustrated. Even in the early eighteenth century a "textbook" was still defined as a "Classick Author written very wide by the Students, to give room for an Interpretation dictated by the master, &c., to be inserted in the Interlines" (O.E.D.) Before printing, much of the time in school and college classrooms was spent in making such texts. The classroom tended to be a scriptorium with a commentary. The student was an editor-publisher.

p. 174—

Margaret Mead has reported that when she brought several copies of the same book to a Pacific island there was great excitement. The natives had seen books, but only one copy of each, which they had assumed to be unique. Their astonishment at the identical character of several books was a natural response to what is after all the most magical and potent aspect of print and mass production. It involves a principle of extension by homogenization that is the key to understanding Western power. The open society is open by virtue of a uniform typographic educational processing that permits indefinite expansion of any group by additive means.

p. 175—

Another significant aspect of the uniformity and repeatability of the printed page was the pressure it exerted toward "correct" spelling, syntax, and pronounciation. Even more notable were the effects of print in separating poetry from song, and prose from oratory, and popular from educated speech. In the matter of poetry it turned out that, as poetry could be read without being heard, musical instruments could also be played without accompanying any verses. Music veered from the spoken word, to converge again with Bartók and Schoenberg.

p. 176—

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the

[177]

emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar. Political unification of populations by means of vernacular and language groupings was unthinkable before printing turned each vernacular into an extensive mass medium. The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men homogenously trained to be individuals. Nationalism itself came as an intense new visual image of group destiny and status, and depended on a speed of information movement unknown before printing. Today nationalism as an image still depends on the press but has all the electric media against it. In business, as in politics, the effect of even jet-plane speeds is to render the older national groupings of social organization quite unworkable.

p. 177—

Once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated. Typography has permeated every phase of the arts and sciences in the past five hundred years. It would be easy to document the processes by which the principles of continuity, uniformity, and repeatability have become the basis of calculus and of marketing, as of industrial production, entertainment, and science. ...

Directly associated with these expansive qualities was the revolution in expression. Under manuscript conditions the role of being an author was a vague and uncertain one, like that of a minstrel. Hence, self-expression was of little interest. Typography, [178] however, created a medium in which it was possible to speak out loud and bold to the world itself, just as it was possible to circumnavigate the world of books previously locked up in a pluralistic world of monastic cells. Boldness of type created boldness of expression.

p. 181—

Perhaps the main feature of all tools and machines—economy of gesture—is the immediate expression of any physical pressure which impels us to outer or to extend ourselves, whether in words or in wheels. Man can say it with flowers or plows or locomotives. In "Krazy Kat," Ignatz said it with bricks.

p. 182—

By an enormous speed-up of assembly-line segments, the movie camera rolls up the real world on a spool, to be unrolled and translated later onto the screen. That the movie re-creates organic process and movement by pushing the mechanical principle to the point of reversal is a pattern that appears in all human extensions, whatever, as they reach a peak of performance. By speed-up, the airplane rolls up the highway into itself. The road disappears into the plane at take-off, and the plane becomes a missile, a self-contained transportation system. At this point the wheel is reabsorbed into the form of bird or fish that the plane becomes as it takes to the air.

p. 183—

Humpty-Dumpty is the familiar example of the clown unsuccessfully imitating the acrobat. Just because all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again, it doesn't follow that electromagnetic automation couldn't have put Humpty-Dumpty back together. The integral and unified egg had no business sitting on a wall, anyway. Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemes of integral beings like eggs. Humpty-Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.

The same nursery rhyme comments on the consequences of the fall of Humpty-Dumpty. That is the point about the King's horses and men. They, too, are fragmented and specialized. Having no unified vision of the whole, they are helpless. Humpty-Dumpty is an obvious example of integral wholeness. The mere

[184]

existence of the wall already spelt his fall. James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake never ceases to interlace these themes, and the title of the work indicates his awareness that "a-stone-aging" as it may be, the electric age is recovering the unity of plastic and iconic space, and is putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

p. 185—

The wheel and the road are centralizers because they accelerate up to a point that ships cannot. But acceleration beyond a certain point, when it occurs by means of the automobile and the plane, creates decentralism in the midst of the older centralism. This is the origin of the urban crisis of our time. The wheel, pushed beyond a certain intensity of movement, no longer centralizes. All electric forms whatsoever have a decentralizing effect, cutting across the older mechanical patterns like a bagpipe in a symphony.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 189—

Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes. If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode. Yet if there had been no prints or woodcuts and engravings, there would never have come the photograph.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 194—

Perhaps the great revolution produced by the photograph was in the traditional arts. The painter could no longer depict a world that had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the inner process of creativity in expressionism and in abstract art. Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or happenings for readers who already knew what was happening by photo, press, film, and radio. The poet and novelist turned to those inward gestures of the mind by which we achieve insight and by which we make ourselves and our world. Thus art moved from outer matching to inner making. Instead of depicting a world that matched the world we already knew, the artists turned to presenting the creative process for public participation. He has given to us now the means of becoming involved in the making-process. Each development of the electric age attracts, and demands, a high degree of producer-orientation. The age of the consumer of processed and packaged goods is, therefore, not the present electric age, but the mechanical age that preceded it. Yet, inevitably, the age of the mechanical has had to overlap with the electric, as in such obvious instances as the internal combustion engine that requires the electric spark to ignite the explosion that moves its cylinders. The telegraph is an electric form that, when crossed with print and rotary presses, yields the modern newspaper. And the photograph is not a machine, but a chemical and light process that, crossed with the machine, yields the movie. Yet there is a vigor and violence in these hybrid forms that is self-liquidating, as it were. For in radio and TV—purely electric forms from which the mechanical principle has been excluded—

[195]

there is an altogether new relation of the medium to its users. This is a relation of high participation and involvement that, for good or ill, no mechanism had ever evoked.

Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and condescension to "pop kulch" and "mass entertainment." It was in this spirit of bulldog opacity that the scholastic philosophers failed to meet the chalenge of the printed book in the sixteenth century. The vested interests of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been by-passed and engulfed by new media. The study of this process, however, whether for the purpose of fixity or of change, has scarcely begun. The notion that self-interest confers a keener eye for recognizing and controlling the processes of change is quite without foundation, as witness the motorcar industry. Here is a world of obsolescence as surely doomed to swift erosion as was the enterprise of the buggy- and wagon-makers in 1915. Yet does General Motors, for example, know, or even suspect, anything about the effect of the TV image on the users of motorcars? The magazine enterprises are similarly undermined by the TV image and its effect on the advertising icon. The meaning of the new ad icon has not been grasped by those who stand to lose all. The same is true of the movie industry in general. Each of these enterprises lacks any "literacy" in any medium but its own, and thus the startling changes resulting from new hybrids and crossings of media catch them unawares.

p. 198—

To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to a movie travelogue. For the untrained awareness, all reading and all movies, like all travel, are equally banal and unnourishing as experience. Difficulty of access does not confer adequacy of [199] perception, though it may involve an object in an aura of pseudo-values, as with a gem, a movie star, or an old master. This now brings us to the factual core of the "pseudoevent," a label applied to the new media, in general, because of their power to give new patterns to our lives by acceleration of older patterns. It is necessary to reflect that this same insidious power was once felt in the old media, including languages. All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.

p. 199—

all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media. On a moving highway the vehicle that backs up is accelerating in relation to the highway situation. Such would seem to be the ironical status of the cultural reactionary.

p. 200—

The complex network of media, other than the photograph that appears in the world of merchandising, is easier to observe in the world of sports. In one instance, the press camera contributed to radical changes in the game of football. A press photo of battered players in a 1905 game between Pennsylvania and Swarthmore came to the attention of President Teddy Roosevelt. He was so angered at the picture of Swarthmore's mangled Bob Maxwell that he issued an immediate ultimatum—that if rough play continued, he would abolish the game by executive edict.

p. 202—

To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible...without grasping its relations to other media, both old and new. For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur. In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices. The photo and visual worlds are secure areas of anesthesia.

p. 204—

The massive theme of the press can be managed only by direct contact with the formal patterns of the medium in question. It is thus necessary to state at once that "human interest" is a technical term meaning that which happens when multiple book pages or multiple information items are arranged in a mosaic on one sheet. The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view." The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. It can "color" events by using them or by not using them at all. But it is the daily communal exposure of multiple items in juxtaposition that gives the press its complex dimension of human interest.

p. 205—

Both book and newspaper are confessional in character, creating the effect of inside story by their mere form, regardless of content. As the book page yields the inside story of the author's mental adventures, so the press page yields the inside story of the community in action and interaction. It is for this reason that the press seems to be performing its function most when revealing the seamy side. Real news is bad news—bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody. In 1962, when Minneapolis had been for months without a newspaper, the chief of police said: "Sure, I miss the news, but so far as my job goes I hope the papers never come back. There is less crime around without a newspaper to pass around the ideas.

p. 207—

Those who deplore the frivolity of the press and its natural form of group exposure and communal cleansing simply ignore the nature of the medium and demand that it be a book, as it tends to be in Europe. The book arrived in Western Europe long before the newspaper; but Russia and middle Europe developed the book and newspaper almost together, with the result that they have never unscrambled the two forms. Their journalism exudes the private point of view of the literary mandarin. British and American journalism, however, have always tended to exploit the mosaic form of the newspaper format in order to present the discontinuous variety and incongruity of ordinary life.

p. 209—

A friend of mine who tried to teach something about the forms of media in secondary school was struck by one unanimous response. The students could not for a moment accept the suggestion that the press or any other public means of communication could be used with base intent. They felt that this would be akin to polluting the air or the water supply, and they didn't feel that their friends and relatives employed in these media would sink to such corruption. Failure in perception occurs precisely in giving attention to the program "content" of our media while ignoring the form, whether it be radio or print or the English language itself. There have been countless Newton Minows (formerly head of the Federal Communications Commission) to talk about the Wasteland of the Media, men who know nothing about the form of any medium whatever. They imagine that a more earnest tone and a more austere theme would pull up the level of the book, the press, the movies, and TV. They are wrong to a farcical degree. They have only to try out their theory for fifty consecutive words in the mass medium of the English language. What would Mr. Minow do, what would any advertiser do, without the well-worn and corny clichés of popular speech? Suppose that we were to try for a few sentences to raise the level of our daily English conversation by a series of sober and serious sentiments? Would this be a way of getting at the problems of improving the medium? If all English were enunciated at a Mandarin level of uniform elegance and sententiosness, would the language and its users be better served? There comes to mind the remark of Artemus Ward that "Shakespeare wrote good plays but he wouldn't have succeeded as the Washington correspondent of a New York daily newspaper. He lacked the reckisit fancy and imagination."

p. 210—

Superficially, this may seem cynical, especially to those who imagine that the content of a medium is a mtter of policy and personal preference, and for whom all corporate media, not only radio and the press but ordinary popular speech as well, are debased forms of human expression and experience. Here I must repeat that the newspaper, from its beginnings, has tended not to the book form, but to the mosaic or participational form. With the speed-up of printing and news-gathering, this mosaic form has become a dominant aspect of human association; for the mosaic form means, not a detached "point of view," but participation in process. For that reason, the press is inseparable from the democratic process, but quite expendable from a literary or book point of view.

[211]

Again, the book-oriented man misunderstands the collective mosaic form of the press when he complains about its endless reports on the seamy underside of the social garment. Both book and press are, in their very format, dedicated to the job of revealing the inside story, whether it is Montaigne giving to the private reader the delicate contours of his mind, or Hearst and Whitman resonating their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world. It is the printed form of public address and high intensity with its precise uniformity of repetition that gives to book and press alike the special character of public confessional.

The first items in the press to which all men turn are the ones about which they already know. If we have witnessed some event, whether a ball game or a stock crash or a snowstorm, we turn to the report of that happening first. Why? The answer is central to any understanding of media. Why does a child like to chatter about the events of its day, however jerkily? Why do we prefer novels and movies about familiar scenes and characters? Because for rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. The press repeats the excitement we have in using our wits, and by using our wits we can translate the outer world into the fabric of our own beings. This excitement of translation explains why people quite naturally wish to use their senses all the time. Those external extensions of sense and faculty that we call media we use as constantly as we do our eyes and ears, and from the same motives. On the other hand, the book-oriented man considers this nonstop use of media as debased; it is unfamiliar to him in the book-world.

p. 214—

The first harrowing experience for the press man visiting Moscow is the absence of telephone books. A further horrifying revelation is the absence of central switchboards in government departments. You know the number, or else. The student of media is happy to read a hundred volumes to discover two facts such as these. They floodlight a vast murky area of the press-world, and illuminate the role of telephone as seen through another culture. The American newspaperman in large degree assembles his stories and processes his data by telephone because of the speed and immediacy of the oral process. Our popular press is a near approximation to the grapevine. The Russian and European newspaperman is, by comparison, a littérateur. It is a paradoxial situation, but the press in literate America has an intensely oral character, while in oral Russia and Europe the press has a strongly literary character and function.

p. 222—

When Europeans used to visit America before the Second War they would say, "But you have communism here!" What they meant was that we not only had standardized goods, but everybody had them. Our millionaires not only ate cornflakes and hot dogs, but really thought of themselves as middle-class people. What else? How could a millionaire be anything but "middle-class" in America unless he had the creative imagination of an artist to make a unique life for himself? Is it strange that Europeans should associate uniformity of environment and commodities with communism? And that Lloyd Warner and his associates, in their studies of American cities, should speak of the American class system in terms of income? The highest income cannot liberate a North American from his "middle-class" life.

[223]

The lowest income gives everybody a considerable piece of the same middle-class existence. That is, we really have homogenized our schools and factories and cities and entertainment to a great extent, just because we are literate and do accept the logic of uniformity and homogeneity that is inherent in Gutenberg technology. This logic, which had never been accepted in Europe until very recently, has suddenly been questioned in America, since the tactile mesh of the TV mosaic has begun to permeate the American sensorium. When a popular writer can, with confidence, decry the use of the car for travel as making the driver "more and more common," the fabric of American life has been questioned.

In other words, the widespread literacy remarked upon by Gatto, Postman, et al is the/a root cause of a "standardization" of goods and worldview which in fact is scandalous to the more class-stratified European. This is subversive shit!

p. 227—

Many people have expressed uneasiness about the advertising enterprise in our time. To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective unconsciousness. When all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success.

[228]

Since the advent of TV, the exploitation of the unconscious by the advertiser has hit a snag. TV experience favors much more consciousness concerning the unconscious than do the hard-sell forms of presentation in the press, the magazine, movie, or radio. The sensory tolerance of the audience has changed, and so have the methods of appeal by the advertisers. In the new cool TV world, the old hot world of hard-selling, earnest-talking salesmen has all the antique charm of the songs and togs of the 1920s. ... Will Rogers discovered years ago that any newspaper read alound from a theater stage is hilarious. The same is true today of ads. Any ad put into a new setting is funny. This is a way of saying that any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. ... Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials. ... Since highly skilled and perceptive teams of talent cooperate in the making of an ad for any established line of goods whatever, it is obvious that any acceptable ad is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience. No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data.

But what if the aforementioned numbing effect of media as extensions of certain body parts makes it difficult for us to read advertising this way?

p. 229—

It is true, of course, that ads use the most basic and tested human experience of a community in grotesque ways. They are as incongruous, if looked at consciously, as the playing of "Silver Threads among the Gold" as music for a strip-tease act. But ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frogmen-of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. Their mere existence is a testimony, as well as a contribution, to the somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis.

p. 230—

***training/media studies/mcluhan makes his stump speech to the administrators of the English department***

Advertising got into high gear only at the end of the last century, with the invention of photoengraving. Ads and pictures then became interchangeable and have continued so. More important, pictures made possible great increases in newspaper and magazine circulation that also increased the quantity and profitability of ads. ...both the pictorial ad or the picture story provide large quantities of instant information and instant humans, such as are necessary for keeping abreast in our kind of culture. Would it not seem natural and necessary that the young be provided with at least as much training of perception in this graphic and photographic world as they get in the typographic? In fact, they need more training in graphics, because the art of casting and arranging actors in ads is both complex and forcefully insidious.

p. 231—

Those who have spent their lives protesting about "false and misleading ad copy" are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protestors are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent, as the "meaning" of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song. Highly literate people cannot cope with the nonverbal art of the pictorial, so they dance impatiently up and down to express a pointless disapproval that renders them futile and gives new power and authority to the ads. The unconscious depth-messages of ads are never attacked by the literate, because of their incapacity to notice or discuss nonverbal forms of arrangement and meaning. They have not the art to argue with pictures. When early in TV broadcasting hidden ads were tried out, the literate were in great panic until they were dropped. The fact that typography is itself mainly subliminal in effect and that pictures are, as well, is a secret that is safe from the book-oriented community.

p. 239—

The social practices of one generation tend to get codified into the "game" of the next. Finally, the game is passed on as a joke, like a skeleton stripped of its flesh. This is especially true of periods of suddenly altered attitudes, resulting from some radically new technology. It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while, at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. ...

In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general [240] acceptance. It agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in the electric age.

p. 240—

poker is a game that has often been cited as the expression of all the complex attitudes and unspoken values of a competitive society. It calls for shrewdness, aggression, trickery, and unflattering appraisals of character. It is said women cannot play poker well because it stimulates their curiosity, and curiosity is fatal in poker. ... It is in this perspective that it is easy to see why war has been called the sport of kings. ... What disqualified war from being a true game is probably what also disqualified the stock market and business—the rules are not fully known nor accepted by all the players. Furthermore, the audience is too fully participant in war and business, just as in a native society there is no true art because everybody is engaged in making art. Art and games need rules, conventions, and spectators. They must stand forth from the over-all situation as models of it in order for the quality of play to persist. For "play," whether in life or in a wheel, implies

[241]

interplay. There must be give and take or dialogue, as between two or more persons and groups. ...

Art is not just play but an extension of human awareness in contrived and conventional patterns. Sport as popular art is a deep reaction to the typical action of the society. But high art, on the other hand, is not a reaction but a profound reappraisal of a complex cultural state. ... Seen as live models of complex social situations, games may lack moral earnestness, it has to be admitted. Perhaps there is, just for this reason, a desperate need for games in a highly specialized industrial culture, since they are the only form of art accessible to many minds. Real interplay is reduced to nothing in a specialist world of delegated tasks and fragmented jobs. Some backward or tribal societies suddenly translated into industrial and specialist forms of mechanization cannot easily devise the antidote of sports and games to create countervailing force. They bog down into grim earnest. Men without art, and men without the popular arts of games, tend toward automatism.

p. 243—

In the electric age, the closing of the gaps between art and business, or between campus and community, are part of the over-all implosion that closes the ranks of specialists at all levels. Flaubert, the French novelist of the nineteenth century, felt that the Franco-Prussian War could have been avoided if people had heeded his Sentimental Education. A similar feeling has since come to be widely held by artists. They know that they are engaged in making live models of situations that have not yet matured in the society at large. In their artistic play, they discovered what is actually happening, and thus they appear to be "ahead of their time." Non-artists always look at the present through the spectacles of the preceeding age. General staffs are always magnificently prepared to fight the previous war.

p. 245—

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

p. 247—

The Crippen case [ship captain wiring Scotland Yard about a murder suspect on board] illustrates what happens to the best-laid plans of mice and men in any organization when the instant speed of information movement begins. There is a collapse of delegated authority and a dissolution of the pyramid and management structures made familiar in the organization chart. The separation of functions, and the division of stages, spaces, and tasks are characteristic of literate and visual society and of the Western world. These divisions tend to dissolve through the action of the instant and organic interrelations of electricity.

Former German Armaments minister Albert Speer, in a speech at the Nuremberg trials, made some bitter remarks about the effects of electric media on German life: "The telephone, the teleprinter and the wireless made it possible for orders from the highest levels to be given direct to the lowest levels, where, on account of the absolute authority behind them, they were carried out uncritically . . ."

p. 248—

the mechanization of a task is done by segmentation of each part of an action in a series of uniform, repeatable, and movable parts. The exact opposite characterizes cybernation (or automation), which has been described as a way of thinking, as much as a way of doing. ...

It is this same provision of interacting places in the electric media that now compels us to react to the world as a whole. Above all, however, it is the speed of electric involvement that creates the integral whole of both private and public awareness. ...the world of public interaction has the same inclusive scope of integral interplay that has hitherto characterized only our private nervous systems.

p. 249—

Electricity is only incidentally visual and auditory; it is primarily tactile.

...

As the age of electricity began to establish itself in the later nineteenth century, the entire world of the arts began to reach again for the iconic qualities of touch and sense interplay (synesthesia, as it was called) in poetry, as in painting.

p. 251—

Any innovation threatens the equilibrium of existing organization. In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so that they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses. When one is found, it is assigned to a group for neutrializing and immunizing treatment. It is comical, therefore, when anybody applies to a big corporation with a new idea that would result in a great "increase in production and sales." Such an increase would be a disaster for the existing management. They would have to make way for new management. Therefore, no new idea ever starts from within a big operation. It must assail the organization from the outside, through some small but competing organization. In the same way, the

[252]

outering or extension of our bodies and senses in a "new invention" compels the whole of our bodies and senses to shift into new positions in order to maintain equilibrium. A new "closure" is effected in all our organs and senses, both private and public, by any new invention. Sight and sound assume new postures, as do all the other faculties. With the telegraph, the entire method, both of gathering and of presenting news, was revolutionized. Naturally, the effects on language and on literary style and subject matter were spectacular.

p. 253—

The horrors that William Howard Russell relayed by wire to The Times were normal in British military life. He was the first war correspondent, because the telegraph gave that immediate and inclusive dimension of "human interest" to news that does not belong to a "point of view." It is merely a comment on our absent-mindedness and general indifference that after more than a century of telegraph news reporting, nobody has seen that "human interest" is the electronic or depth dimension of immediate involvement in news.

p. 254—

The "human interest" dimension is simply that of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that occurs with instant information. People become instant, too, in their response of pity or of fury when they must share the common extension of the central nervous system with the whole of mankind. Under these conditions, "conspicuous waste" or "conspicuous consumption" become lost causes, and even the hardiest of the rich dwindle into modest ways of timid service to mankind.

...

For many people, then, who have had their sensibilities irremediably skewed and locked into the fixed posture of mechanical writing and printing, the iconic forms of the electric age are as opaque, or even as invisible, as hormones to the unaided eye. It is the artist's job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

p. 255—

By many analysts, the electric revolution has been regarded as a continuation of the process of the mechanization of mankind. Closer inspection reveals quite a different character. For example, the regional press, that had had to rely on postal service and political control through the post office, quickly escaped from this center-margin type of monopoly by means of the new telegraph services. Even in England, where short distances and concentrated population made the railway a powerful agent of centralism, the monopoly of London was dissolved by the invention of the telegraph, which now encouraged provincial competition. The telegraph freed the marginal provincial press from dependence on the big metropolitan press. In the whole field of the electric revolution, this pattern of decentralization appears in multiple guises. It is Sir Lewis Namier's view that telephone and airplane are the biggest single cause of trouble in the world today. Professional diplomats with delegated powers have been supplanted by prime ministers, presidents, and foreign secretaries, who think they could conduct all important negotiations personally. This is also the problem encountered in big business, where it has been found impossible to exercise delegated authority when using the telephone. The very nature of the telephone, as all electric media, is to compress and unify that which had previously been divided and specialized. Only the "authority of knowledge" works by telephone because of the speed that creates a total and inclusive field of relations. Speed requires that the decisions made be inclusive, not fragmentary or partial, so that literate people typically resist the telephone. But radio and TV, we shall see, have the same power of imposing an inclusive order, as of an oral organization. Quite in contrast is the center-margin form of visual and written structures of authority.

Many analysts have been misled by electric media because of the seeming ability of these media to extend man's spatial power of organization. Electric media, however, abolish the spatial dimension, rather than enlarge it. By electricity, we everywhere resume person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a [256] relation in depth, and without delegation of functions or powers. The organic everywhere supplants the mechanical. Dialogue supersedes the lecture.

Well...the face-to-face part really is quite wrong. Abolishing the spatial dimension is not the same as being brought face-to-face.

p. 263—

Northcote Parkinson had discovered that any business or bureaucratic structure functions by itself, independently of "the work to be done." The number of personnel and "the quality of the work are not related to each other at all." In any given structure, the rate of staff accumulation is not related to the work done but to the intercommunication among the staff, itself. (In other words, the medium is the message.) ...

"Work to be done," of course, means the transformation of one kind of material energy into some new form, as trees into lumber or paper, or clay into bricks or plates, or metal into pipe. In terms of this kind of work, the accumulation of office personnel in a navy, for example, goes up as the number of ships goes down. What Parkinson carefully hides from himself and his readers is simply the fact that in the area of information movement, the main "work to be done" is actually the movement of information. The mere interrelating of people by selected information is now the principal source of wealth in the electric age. In the preceding mechanical age, work had not been like that at all. Work had meant the processing of various materials by assembly-line fragmentation of operations and hierarchically delegated authority. Electric power circuits, in relation to the same processing, eliminate both the assembly line and the delegated authority.

p. 264—

The historian Daniel Boorstin was scandalized by the fact that celebrity in our information age was not due to a person's having done anything but simply to his being known for being well known. Professor Parkinson is scandalized that the structure of human work now seems to be quite independent of any job to be done. As an economist, he reveals the same incongruity and comedy, as between the old and the new, that Stephen Potter does in his Gamesmanship. Both have revealed the hollow mockery of "getting ahead in the world," in its old sense. Neither honest toil nor clever ploy will serve to advance the eager executive. The reason is simple. Positional warfare is finished, both in private and corporate action. In business, as in society, "getting on" may mean getting out. There is no "ahead" in a world that is an echo chamber of instantaneous celebrity.

p. 267—

Only the visceral and audile-tactile Teuton and Slav have the needed immunity to visualization for work in the non-Euclidean math and quantum physics. Were we to teach our math and physics by telephone, even a highly literate and abstract Westerner could eventually compete with the European physicists.

p. 268—

In the 1920s a popular song was "All Alone by the Telephone, All Alone Feeling Blue." Why should the phone create an intense feeling of loneliness? Why should we feel compelled to answer a ringing public phone when we know the call cannot concern us? Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension? Why is that tension so very much less for an unanswered phone in a movie scene? The answer to all of these questions is simply that the phone is a participant form that demands a partner, with all the intensity of electric polarity. It simply will not act as a background instrument like radio.

p. 271—

One of the most startling consequences of the telephone was its introduction of a "seamless web" of interlaced patterns in management and decision-making. It is not feasible to exercise delegated authority by telephone. The pyramidal structure of job-division and description and delegated powers cannot withstand the speed of the phone to by-pass all hierarchical arrangement, and to involve people in depth. In the same way, mobile panzer divisions equipped with radio telephones upset the traditional army structure. And we have seen how the news reporter linking the printed page to the telephone and the telegraph created a unified corporate image out of the fragmented government departments.

p. 272—

If delegated chain-of-command authority won't work by telephone but only by written instruction, what sort of authority does come into play? The answer is simple, but not easy to convey. On the telephone only the authority of knowledge will work. Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive. To act, the delegated person must always get clearance from the chain-of-command. The electric situation eliminates such patterns; such "checks and balances" are alien to the inclusive authority of knowledge. Consequently, restraints on electric absolutist power can be achieved, not by the separation of powers, but by a pluralism of centers. This problem has arisen apropos of the direct private line from the Kremlin to the White House. President Kennedy stated his preference for teletype over telephone, with a natural Western bias.

p. 273—

Art Seidenbaum, in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, "Dialectics of Unlisted Telephone Numbers," said:

[274]

Celebrities have been hiding for a long time. Paradoxically, as their names and images are bloated on ever widening screens, they take increasing pains to be unapproachable in the flesh or phone. . . . Many big names never answer up to their numbers; a service takes every call, and only upon request, delivers the accumulated messages. . . . "Don't call us" could became [sic] the real area code for Southern California.

"All Alone by the Telephone" has come full circle. It will soon be the telephone that is "all alone, and feeling blue."

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 279—

The word "jazz" comes from the French jaser, to chatter. Jazz is, indeed, a form of dialogue among instrumentalists and dancers alike. Thus it seemed to make an abrupt break with the homo-

[280]

geneous and repetitive rhythms of the smooth waltz. In the age of Napoleon and Lord Byron, when the waltz was a new form, it was greeted as a barbaric fulfillment of the Rousseauistic dream of the noble savage. Grotesque as this idea now appears, it is really a most valuable clue to the dawning mechanical age. The impersonal choral-dancing of the older, courtly pattern was abandoned when the waltzers held each other in a personal embrace. The waltz is precise, mechanical, and military, as its history manifests. For a waltz to yield its full meaning, there must be military dress. "There was a sound of revelry by night" was how Lord Byron referred to the waltzing before Waterloo. To the eighteenth century and to the age of Napoleon, the citizen armies seemed to be an individualistic release from the feudal framework of courtly hierarchies. Hence the association of waltz with noble savage, meaning no more than freedom from status and hierarchic difference. The waltzers were all uniform and equal, having free movement in any part of the hall. That this was the Romantic idea of the life of the noble savage now seems odd, but the Romantics knew as little about real savages as they did about assembly lines.

In our own century the arrival of jazz and ragtime was also heralded as the invasion of the bottom-wagging native. The indignant tended to appeal from jazz to the beauty of the mechanical and repetitive waltz that had once been greeted as pure native dancing. If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational, it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition. It is a truism among jazz performers that recorded jazz is "as stale as yesterday's newspaper." Jazz is alive, like conversation; and like conversation it depends upon a repertory of available themes. But performance is composition. Such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike. Put in this way, it becomes obvious at once that jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with the many allied forms in painting and in music.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 282—

Stereo sound...is "all-around" or "wrap-around" sound. Previously sound had emanated from a single point in accordance with the bias of visual culture with its fixed point of view. The hi-fi changeover was really for music what cubism had been for printing, and what symbolism had been for literature; namely, the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience. Another way to put it is to say that stereo is sound in depth, as TV is the visual in depth.

I want to propose that this alleged "multiple" quality of cubism cannot be taken for granted. It itself seems dependent on the "lineal" orientation of the viewer, i.e. the orientation which tends towards breaking such compositions into "multiple facets and planes." The audile-tactile viewer, on the other hand, might be assumed to view the painting as an organic whole. Perhaps this is precisely McLuhan's point. I am not equipped to evaluate his more sweeping conjectures about the origins and impacts of each mode of perception. But I am struck by how neatly this particular conjecture encapsulates so much of the internecine curation wars of the art worlds I have been thrust into. I wonder how many audio guides have instructed museum-goers, probably not in these words, that the key to viewing the cubist painting they are about to encounter is to evince an "acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience" and to abandon "the bias of visual culture with its fixed point of view." And of course I wonder (skeptically) how many are able to achieve this on the spot, as it were, simply by being told.

If we indeed take McLuhan's gloss on the cubist impulse as a settled historical fact, then this "acceptance" of a certain way of looking becomes the audience equivalent of what Historically-Informed Performance Practice is for today's baroque music stylists. Adherents to historical informed-ness then will consider audiences who view cubist paintings in a two-dimensional, organic way as akin to McLuhan's African chief with the clock strapped to his back. The funny thing is, though, unlike the clock in this scenario, many cubist paintings work two-dimensionally, just as much baroque music works on the piano or in a rock band. Often enough these latter workings are surprisingly easy, whereas achieving historically-informed spectatorship is extremely hard. Therein lies the justified suspicion of each camp by the other. I would suggest that whenever such narrowly-conceived art somehow also works in ways that are rationalistically alien to it, we then have (a) a happy accident, (b) a unique achievement by the artist which is indeed worthy of a certain amount of reverence (just keep it clean, okay?), (c) a booby trap for the small-minded and self-interested on both sides of the divide between historical and organic spectatorship.

[282, cont.]

Perhaps it is not very contradictory that when a medium becomes a means of depth experience the old categories of "classical" and "popular" or of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" no longer obtain. Watching a blue-baby heart operation on TV is an experience that will fit none of the categories. When l.p. and hi-fi and stereo arrived, a depth approach to musical experience also came in. Everybody lost his inhibitions about "highbrow," and the serious people lost their qualms about popular music and culture. Anything that is approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest matters. Because "depth" means "in interrelation," not in isolation. Depth means insight, not point of view; [283] and insight is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item seen quite secondary. Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousnes does not postulate consciousness of anything in particular.

Again, it has been found that nonliterates do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen, or some distance in front of a photo. The result is that they move their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands. It is this same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes European men so "sexy" to American women. Only an extremely

[288]

literate and abstract society learns to fix the eyes, as we must learn to do in reading the printed page. For those who thus fix their eyes, perspective results. There is great subtlety and synesthesia in native art, but no perspective. The old belief that everybody really saw in perspective, but only that Renaissance painters had learned how to paint it, is erroneous. Our own first TV generation is rapidly losing this habit of visual perspective as a sensory modality, and along with this change comes an interest in words, not as visually uniform and continuous, but as unique worlds in depth. Hence the craze for puns and word-play, even in sedate ads. (287-288)

Honestly, I don't really care that much about cubism or about Renaissance perspective. I've never owned a TV as an adult, but I did watch an obscene amount of TV as a kid, and I still watch sports on my iPhone from time to time. (Who else is enjoying the near-daily peripeteia of the big-money LA basketball teams?) I suspect there now exists much more, and more reliable, laboratory research on much of this, but I wouldn't know where to find it. (Nicholas Carr in The Shallows mentions some interesting stuff about the path of the eye being different on web pages than on printed books.) McLuhan could be right or wrong about all of this. It wouldn't change my basic conviction that it's quite alright to misread, mislook, mishear.

p. 289—

All Salvador Dali had to do to create a furor was to allow the chest of drawers or the grand piano to exist in its own space against some Sahara or Alpine backdrop. Merely by releasing objects from the uniform continuous space of typography we got modern art and poetry. We can measure the psychic pressure of typography by the uproar generated by that release. For most people, their own ego image seems to have been typographically conditioned, so that the electric age with its return to inclusive experience threatens their idea of self. These are the fragmented ones, for whom specialist toil renders the mere prospect of leisure or jobless security a nightmare. Electric simultaneity ends specialist learning and activity, and demands interrelation in depth, even of the personality.

p. 292—

Typographic man took readily to film just because, like books, it offers an inward world of fantasy and dreams. The film viewer sits in psychological solitude like the silent book reader. This was not the case with the manuscript reader, nor is it true of the watcher of television. It is not pleasant to turn on TV just for oneself in a hotel room, nor even at home. The TV mosaic image demands social completion and dialogue. So with the manuscript before typography, since manuscript culture is oral and demands dialogue and debate, as the entire culture of the ancient and medieval worlds demostrates. One of the major pressures of TV has been to encourage the "teaching machine." In fact, these devices are adaptations of the book in the direction of dialogue. These teaching machines are really private tutors, and their being misnamed on the principle that produced the names "wireless" and "horseless carriage" is another instance in that long list that illustrates how every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the new effect is secured by the old method, amplified or modified by some new feature.

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio, and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as industry went its ever more specialized fragmented course, it demanded more and more teamwork in sales and supplies. The symphony orchestra became a major expression of the ensuing power of such coordinated effort, though for the players themselves this effect was lost, both in the symphony and in industry.

In other words, just because the orchestra is a "major expression" of teamwork doesn't necessarily mean that the musicians themselves experience teamwork.

McLuhan would not have been surprised at the now-infamous job satisfaction survey which found extremely low contentment among symphony players. But he may have been surprised at the suggestion (I know not if it has since been studied, but I find it totally believable) that it is mostly the string players who are discontented, solists subsumed within a shapeless mass, inaudible individually unless they screw up (seriously, what might this teaching our precious children?!); whereas the wind and brass players are living a certain kind of dream, collaborative artists thrust into a certain unavoidable degree of soloist prominence and scrutiny.

Undeniably, it is possible to extend this idea to the backlash against the orchestral conceit which has since arisen independently in several different stylistic guises. Nowadays the thing is to (a) get your friends together, and (b) each of simply you do what you do at the same time and in the same place as the others. Out of this way of working, where both the friends and the what you do are determined before the performance and by factors wholly extraneous to it, the outmoded orchestral ideal arises only slightly more often than one among infinite chimps randomly hammering at typewriter produces War and Peace. Also, curiously, aside from the dinosaur repertory institutions themselves, is commercial pop music not itself the most rigidly specialized and controlled musical performance environment still in existence? Is the Super Bowl Haltime Show not the very apotheosis of "art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action" wherein nevertheless (for better of worse I must merely imagine this part to myself) for "the players themselves this effect was lost"?

The funny thing about rebelling against something like the orchestral concept is that to be thorough about it you must be sure you are rebelling against the medium-message of "effect" on the players themselves and not against the message-message of teamwork which can be read into the orchestral enterprise only from the nosebleed seats in the back of the hall (or perhaps via YouTube). When Ornette said he found it unthinkable to tell a whole orchestra's worth of people what and how to play at all times, he was in one way much more in tune with the reality of the orchestra than are the professional educators who extol its ability to teach values based on the nosebleed-seat or YouTube-borne understanding of what an orchestra is. But I confess that Ornette's sentiment, though I don't doubt its sincerity in his case, also is rather far off from where I find myself at these days. I have done a whole lot of improvising, checked a whole lot of records, done a whole lot of long tones, invested a decent amount of my life force in being able and willing to both play what I'm told and play what I feel; perhaps because of this, perhaps in spite of it, being asked to stare into the abyss of freeplay is not less of a demand or an imposition than being handed a fully-scored tuba part. Not being told what to play is also an imposition. Not telling people what to play does not elide the making of demands on them; rather, it makes a different kind of demand. The only way this is not so is if the outcome is unimportant; but even then the expectation of some outcome per se is itself a demand, at which point the performer must do something, must decide what to do.

In a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, I did not feel this way in 2003, just as so many did not feel it in 1959; but a lot has happened to me since 2003, to say nothing of society broadly since 1959. In saying this I mark myself as a recuperator, a consolidator, a reformer, as against the more heroic identities of the innovator and the revolutionary. Apropos of McLuhan's alleged "determinism," some have suggested that we are simply living in an age of recuperation, of consolidation rather than expansion, hence that there is nothing else to do. Others find in the same analysis all the more reason to double down on their revolutionary fervor. I have previously written enough about how difficult it is to stay in the good social graces of both types of musician.

p. 283—

The telephone: speech without walls.

The phonograph: music hall without walls.

The photograph: museum without walls.

The electric light: space without walls.

The movie, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.

Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors.

p. 285—

Movies as a nonverbal form of experience are like photography, a form of statement without syntax. In fact, however, like the print and the photo, movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and prove baffling to the nonliterate. Our literate acceptance of the mere movement of the camera eye as it follows or drops a figure from view is not acceptable to an African film audience. If somebody disappears off the side of the film, the African wants to know what happened to him. A literate audience, however, accustomed to following printed imagery line by line [286] without questioning the logic of lineality, will accept film sequence without protest.

p. 287—

...they cannot make the literate assumption that space is continuous and uniform. Nonliterate people simply don't get perspective or distancing effects of light and shade that we assume are innate human equipment. Literate people think of cause and effect as sequential, as if one thing pushed another along by physical force. Nonliterate people register very little interest in this kind of "efficient" cause and effect, but are fascinated by hidden forms that produce magical results. Inner, rather than outer, causes interest the nonliterate and nonvisual cultures. And that is why the literate West sees the rest of the world as caught in the seamless web of superstition.

...

Again, it has been found that nonliterates do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen, or some distance in front of a photo. The result is that they move their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands. It is this same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes European men so "sexy" to American women. Only an extremely

[288]

literate and abstract society learns to fix the eyes, as we must learn to do in reading the printed page. For those who this fix their eyes, perspective results. There is great subtlety and synesthesia in native art, but no perspective. The old belief that everybody really saw in perspective, but only that Renaissance painters had learned how to paint it, is erroneous. Our own first TV generation is rapidly losing this habit of visual perspective as a sensory modality, and along with this change comes an interest in words, not as visually uniform and continuous, but as unique worlds in depth. Hence the craze for puns and word-play, even in sedate ads.

p. 293—

Room at the Top is the story of how the higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his backside.

p. 294—

Film was, as a form, the final fulfillment of the great potential of typographic fragmentation. But the electric implosion has now reversed the entire process of expansion by fragmentation. Electricity has brought back the cool, mosaic world of implosion, equilibrium, and stasis. In our electric age, the one-way expansion of the berserk individual on his way to the top now appears as a gruesome image of trampled lives and disrupted harmonies. Such is the subliminal message of the TV mosaic with its total field of simultaneous impulses. Film strip and sequence cannot but bow to this superior power. Our own youngsters have taken the TV message to heart in their beatnik rejection of consumer mores and of the private success story.

p. 298—

"I live right inside the radio when I listen. I more easily lose myself in radio than in a book," said a voice from a radio poll. The power of radio to involve people in depth is manifested in its use during homework by youngsters and by many other people who carry transistor sets in order to provide a private world for themselves amidst crowds.

p. 298—

It was no accident that Senator McCarthy lasted such a very

[299]

short time when he switched to TV. Soon the press decided, "He isn't news anymore." Neither McCarthy nor the press ever knew what had happened. TV is a cool medium. It rejects hot figures and hot issues and people from the hot press media. ... Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly. Had TV come first there would have been no Hitler at all. When Khrushchev appeared on American TV he was more acceptable than Nixon, as a clown and a lovable sort of old boy. His appearance is rendered by TV as a comic cartoon. Radio, however, is a hot medium and takes cartoon characters seriously. Mr. K on radio would be a different proposition.

p. 300—

That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and public-address systems. This is not to say that these media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His thoughts were of very little consequence. Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization. For tribal peoples, for those whose entire social existence is an extension of family life, radio will continue to be a violent experience. Highly literate societies, that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in business and politics, have managed to absorb and to neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so, those communities that have had only brief or superficial experience of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.

p. 302—

The ear is hyperesthetic compared to the neutral eye. The ear is intolerant, closed, and exclusive, whereas the eye is open, neutral, and associative. Ideas of tolerance came [303] to the West only after two or three centuries of literacy and visual Gutenberg culture. No such saturation with visual values had occurred in Germany by 1930. Russia is still far from any such involvement with visual order and values.

p. 304—

To the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to social effects of these radical forces. The phonetic alphabet and the printed word that exploded the closed tribal world into the open society of fragmented functions and specialist knowledge and action have never been studied in their roles as a magical transformer. The antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written word. The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed. 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. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.

The history of radio is instructive as an indicator of the bias and blindness induced in any society by its pre-existent technology. The word "wireless," still used for radio in Britain, manifests the negative "horseless-carriage" attitude toward a new form. Early wireless was regarded as a form of telegraph, and was not seen even in relation to the telephone. ... Even after broadcasting had been in existence for some years, there was no commercial interest in it. It was the amateur operators or hams and their fans, whose petitions finally got some action in favor of the

[305]

setting up of facilities. There was reluctance and opposition from the world of the press, which, in England, led to the formation of the BBC and the firm shackling of radio by newspaper and advertising interests. This is an obvious rivalry that has not been openly discussed. The restrictive pressure by the press on radio and TV is still a hot issue in Britain and in Canada. But, typically, misunderstanding of the nature of the medium rendered the restraining policies quite futile. Such has always been the case, most notoriously in government censorship of the press and of the movies. Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the "content," which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming. To those who have never studied media, this fact is quite as baffling as literacy is to natives, who say, "Why do you write? Can't you remember?"

Thus, the commercial interests who think to render media universally acceptable, invariably settle for "entertainment" as a strategy of neutrality. A more spectacular mode of the ostrich-head-in-sand could not be devised, for it ensures maximal pervasiveness for any medium whatever. The literate community will always argue for a controversial or point-of-view use of press, radio, and movie that would in effect diminish the operation, not only of press, radio and movie, but of the book as well. The commercial entertainment strategy automatically ensures maximum speed and force of impact for any medium, on psychic and social life equally. It thus becomes a comic strategy of unwitting self-liquidation, conducted by those who are dedicated to permanence, rather than to change. In the future, the only effective media controls must take the thermostatic form of quantitative rationing. Just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media fallout. Education will become recognized as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defense is the print medium. The educational establishment, founded on print, does not yet admit any other responsibilities.

[306]

Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world into village size, and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice. But while radio contracts the world to village dimensions, it hasn't the effect of homogenizing the village quarters. Quite the contrary. In India, where radio is the supreme form of communication, there are more than a dozen official languages and the same number of official radio networks. The effect of radio as a reviver of archaism and ancient memories is not limited to Hitler's Germany. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have undergone resurgence of their ancient tongues since the coming of radio, and the Israeli present an even more extreme instance of linguistic revival. ... Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and animosities, but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all electric power and media.

p. 314—

To contrast it with the film shot, many directors refer to the TV image as one of "low definition," in the sense that it offers little detail and a low degree of information, much like the cartoon. A TV close-up provides only as much information as a small section of a long-shot on the movie screen. For lack of observing so central an aspect of the TV image, the critics of program "content" have talked nonsense about "TV violence." The spokesmen of censorious views are typically semiliterate book-oriented individuals who have no competence in the grammars of newspaper, or radio, or of film, but who look askew and askance at all non-book media. The simplest question about any psychic aspect, even of the book medium, throws these people into a panic of uncertainty. Vehemence of projection of a single isolated attitude they mistake for moral vigilance. Once these censors became aware that in all cases "the medium is the message" or the basic source of effects, they would turn to suppression of media as such, instead of seeking "content" control. Their current assumption that content or programming is the factor that influences outlook and action is derived from the book medium, with its sharp cleavage between form and content.

p. 315—

it would be misleading to say that TV will retribalize England and America. The action of radio on the world of resonant speech and memory was hysterical. But TV has certainly made England and America vulnerable to radio where previously they had immunity to a great degree. For good or ill, the TV image has exerted a unifying synesthetic force on the sense-life of these intensely literate populations, such as they have lacked for centuries. It is wise to withhold all value judgments when studying these media matters, since their effects are not capable of being isolated.

p. 322—

From the first, America took to heart the print technology for its educational, industrial, and political life; and it was rewarded by an unprecedented pool of standardized workers and consumers, such as no culture had ever had before.

p. 324—

Life magazine for August 10, 1962, had a feature on how "Too Many Subteens Grow Up Too Soon and Too Fast." There was no observation of the fact that similar speed of growth and precociousness have always been the norm in tribal cultures and in nonliterate societies. England and America fostered the institution of prolonged adolescence by the negation of the tactile participation that is sex. In this, there was no conscious strategy, but rather a general acceptance of the consequences of prime stress on the printed word and visual values as a means of organizing personal and social life. This stress led to triumphs of industrial production and political conformity that were their own sufficient warrant.

p. 333—

The ordinary inability to discriminate between the photographic and the TV image is not merely a crippling factor in the learning process today; it is symptomatic of an age-old failure in Western culture. The literate man, accustomed to an environment in which the visual sense is extended everywhere as a principle of organization, sometimes supposes that the mosaic world of primitive art, or even the world of Byzantine art, represents a mere difference in degree, a sort of failure to bring their visual portrayals up to the level of full visual effectiveness. Nothing could be further from the truth. This, in fact, is a misconception that has impaired understanding between East and West for many centuries. Today it impairs relations between colored and white societies.

pp. 336—

The banal and ritual remark of the conventionally literate, that TV presents an experience for passive viewers, is wide of the mark. TV is above all a medium that demands a creatively participant response. The guards who failed to protect Lee Harvey Oswald were not passive. They were so involved by the mere sight of the TV cameras that they lost their sense of their merely practical and specialist task.

p. 346—

Automation is information and it not only ends jobs in the world of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. It does not end the world of learning. The future of work consists of earning a living in the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in general. In ends the old dichotomies between cul-[347]ture and technology, between art and commerce, and between work and leisure. Whereas in the mechanical age of fragmentation leisure had been the absence of work, or mere idleness, the reverse is true in the electric age. As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the artists in all ages.

[347]

In terms of the industrial age, it can be pointed out that the difference between the previous mechanical age and the new electric age appears in the different kinds of inventories. Since electricity, inventories are made up not so much of goods in storage as of materials in continuous process of transformation at spatially removed sites. For electricity not only gives primacy to process, whether in making or in learning, but it makes independent the source of energy from the location of the process. In entertainment media, we speak of this fact as "mass media" because the source of the program and the process of experiencing it are independent in space, yet simultaneous in time. In industry this basic fact causes the scientific revolution that is called "automation" or "cybernation."

In education the conventional division of the curriculum into subjects is already as outdated as the medieval trivium and quadrivium after the Renaissance. Any subject taken in depth at once relates to other subjects. Arithmetic in grade three or nine, when taught in terms of number theory, symbolic logic, and cultural history, ceases to be mere practice in problems. Continued in their present patterns of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they still live.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

p. 230—

Advertising got into high gear only at the end of the last century, with the invention of photoengraving. Ads and pictures then became interchangeable and have continued so. More important, pictures made possible great increases in newspaper and magazine circulation that also increased the quantity and profitability of ads. ...both the pictorial ad or the picture story provide large quantities of instant information and instant humans, such as are necessary for keeping abreast in our kind of culture. Would it not seem natural and necessary that the young be provided with at least as much training of perception in this graphic and photographic world as they get in the typographic? In fact, they need more training in graphics, because the art of casting and arranging actors in ads is both complex and forcefully insidious.

p. 349—

Automation brings in real "mass production," not in terms of size, but of an instant inclusive embrace. Such is also the character of "mass media." They are an indication, not of the size of their audiences, but of the fact that everybody becomes involved in them at the same time. Thus commodity industries under automation share the same structural character of the entertainment industries in the degree that both approximate the condition of instant information. Automation affects not just production, but every phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer becomes producer in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of the mosaic telegraph press makes his own news, or just is his own news.

[350]

But there is a component in the automation story that is as basic as tactility to the TV image. It is the fact that, in any automatic machine, or galaxy of machines and functions, the generation and transmission of power is quite separate from the work operation that uses the power. The same is true of all servo-mechanist structures that involve feedback. The source of energy is separate from the process of translation of information, or the applying of knowledge. This is obvious in the telegraph, where the energy and channel are quite independent of whether the written code is French or German. The same separation of power and process obtains in automated industry, or in "cybernation." The electric energy can be applied indifferently and quickly to many kinds of tasks.

p. 355—

As artists began a century ago to construct their works backward, starting with the effect, so now with industry and planning. In general, electric speed-up requires complete knowledge of ultimate effects. Mechanical speed-ups, however radical in their reshaping of personal and social life, still were allowed to happen sequentially. Men could, for the most part, still get through a normal life span on the basis of a single set of skills. That is not at all the case with electric speed-up. The acquiring of new basic knowledge and skill by senior executives in middle age is one of the most common needs and harrowing facts of electric technology. The senior executives, or "big wheels," as they are archaically and ironically designated, are among the hardest pressed and most persistently harassed groups in human history. Electricity has not only demanded ever deeper knowledge and faster interplay, but has made the harmonizing of production schedules as rigorous as that demanded of the members of a large symphony orchestra. And the satisfactions are just as few for the big executives as for the symphonists, since a player in a big orchestra can hear nothing of the music that reaches the audience. He gets only noise.

curious in light of The Gutenburg Galaxy:

"Despite Emperor Frederick's patronage of Fibonacci's book...introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numbering system provoked intense and bitter resistance up to the early 1500s. ..."

"Part of the resistance stemmed from the inertial forces that oppose any change in matters hallowed by centuries of use. Learning radically new methods never finds an easy welcome."

"The second factor was based on more solid ground: it was easier to commit fraud with the new numbers than with the old. Turning a 0 into a 6 or a 9 was temptingly easy, and a 1 could be readily converted into a 4, 6, 7, or 9..."

(Bernstein, Against the Gods, p. XXXV)

GR comment to John Pistelli's review of UM

@John Thanks for this essay, and please pardon my verbosity.

About the passage on Poe, I've noticed several versions of this general thesis scattered throughout McLuhan's oeuvre, and it is a thesis which I think, at the risk of missing the forest for the trees, is badly in need of a corollary. Namely, I propose that the notion of artists beginning their creative process with the "effect" they want to elicit is a trope which has dominated writing and criticism about art and artists throughout McLuhan's "electric" era somewhat more than it has dominated actual artmaking, especially if we are thinking on the same sort of cosmic scale as McLuhan rather than limiting ourselves to the (famous) artists that we are able to discuss and cite because we expect others will know them. Something very much like the process McLuhan describes here is adduced by David Galenson, in Old Masters and Young Geniuses, to belong to one side of a grand binary, namely "conceptual" as against "experimental" artists. Unfortunate choice of terms here, as Galenson does not mean anything like the genres/styles/cliques of Conceptual Art or Experimental Music; but literally they are very good descriptors: McLuhan's "effect" is one example of starting from a "concept," and this is rather different than an "experimental" approach such as improvising or doodling until something emerges that seems interesting enough to seize upon for further development, at which point the ultimate "effect" emerges from the process rather than having been decided upon at the outset by the artist.

This binary need not be rigid, but if you hang around enough creative people and talk shop with them of course you will meet plenty who can be located pretty firmly in one or the other camp; in other words, you will indeed meet a few people raised on TV who somehow also "have accommodated themselves to the completed packages" the way that for McLuhan only "literary brahmins" still do; eventually you will be treated to conflict between collaborators which arises from the difference in the conceptual and experimental ways of working; and the point of Galenson's study is that there is evidence for this divergence among famous/historical artists too. Hence I wonder if this dynamic has actually remained fairly constant throughout the electric age; and, if it has, then I'm not sure how seriously we can take any of McLuhan's assertions which rest on the conceptual process having become the dominant factor. And, to further beat this dead horse, there is plenty of room to question whether artists have ever been very successful in ensuring that their cherished "effect" is *actually* achieved uniformly on everyone, given that people are different and all. Speaking of literary folks, they seem to me uniquely prone to this "intentional fallacy," whereas among musicians (my tribe) it is more hotly debated, usually (and totally unsurprisingly) along the precise lines of Galenson's conceptual-experimental binary. (You can guess by now which side I am on.)

And so, I love your idea of "participation" in a paperback via taking notes, underlining, etc. Same here. Books per se can indeed be quite passive, but turn them into learning machines, sparring partners, etc. and books can indeed be participatory. This is something we can still choose for ourselves, even in the age of Instagram. Sadly you start to get an idea of how few people really engage this way with books when you read the online reviews to a book like this! If that was our only evidence, then it would support McLuhan's fatalism big time. But as you and a few others here have noticed, we have to participate in this book to get anything useful from it, and it seems like that itself might be part of the "concept" here.

GR comment to thread following Kaelan's review of UM

@Miklós The funny thing about "Menippean satire" (raise your hand if you already knew what that is) is that it virtually guarantees you'll be widely misunderstood, especially prospectively. If truly "The condemnation of McLuhan cannot be done on the same grounds as other theorists for the precise fact that he is not a theorist in this sense," then by the same token you can't really hold it against any reader who reads him too literally and/or just doesn't get it.

I used to have a friend who knew somewhat how to notate music but could not write rhythms quite the way she wanted them to sound. She would put very precise and detailed music in front of me in rehearsal, then she would play something rather different from what I was looking at...and then of course she would insist that I should be able to figure it out. It's actually harder to figure it out, though, when you're looking at one thing and hearing something else.