[00:00:00 - 00:00:08] McLuhan, I don't know how many of you recall him from the 60s, but he had, for a very brief [00:00:08 - 00:00:16] period of time, about five or six years, an extraordinary influence on American culture. [00:00:16 - 00:00:22] You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, [00:00:22 - 00:00:26] what he said, what he thought, what he predicted. [00:00:26 - 00:00:33] He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood, so forth and [00:00:33 - 00:00:34] so on. [00:00:34 - 00:00:42] And his influence, he died in the early 70s, and his influence died with him. [00:00:42 - 00:00:47] Even though he had founded the Center for Media Study at the University of Toronto in [00:00:47 - 00:00:58] Canada, he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors, was a unique personality [00:00:58 - 00:01:05] and breakthrough, much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality and spawned [00:01:05 - 00:01:07] very few imitators. [00:01:07 - 00:01:15] And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work before he burst onto [00:01:15 - 00:01:21] the world stage as this mysterious savant of media. [00:01:21 - 00:01:24] He did his work as a Joyce scholar. [00:01:24 - 00:01:32] That's what he was, a literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist, that sort of thing. [00:01:32 - 00:01:39] And then in the early 50s or middle 50s, he wrote a book, which I've never read, it's [00:01:39 - 00:01:50] very hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride, that was his first testing of his ideas. [00:01:50 - 00:01:59] McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist or a philosopher of media. [00:01:59 - 00:02:01] And that's what he talked about. [00:02:01 - 00:02:10] He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method on the technologies of communication, [00:02:10 - 00:02:20] printing, film, photography, dance, theater, even such things as money, he thought of as [00:02:20 - 00:02:22] forms of media. [00:02:22 - 00:02:31] And he carried out and analyzed these various forms of media and reached very controversial [00:02:31 - 00:02:32] conclusions. [00:02:32 - 00:02:37] One of the things that was puzzling to me as I went back through and read all this is [00:02:37 - 00:02:43] one of the things was McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the 60s. [00:02:43 - 00:02:47] The whole thing was, "Who can understand this guy? [00:02:47 - 00:02:52] He's like Buddha, he speaks these words that we can't understand." [00:02:52 - 00:03:02] Well, now, 25, 30 years later, it reads pretty straightforwardly, and most of what he's predicted [00:03:02 - 00:03:03] has come to pass. [00:03:03 - 00:03:10] I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed with which the Gutenberg world has been [00:03:10 - 00:03:11] overturned. [00:03:11 - 00:03:22] I mean, there's no hint in here of home computers, let alone interactive networks, virtual reality, [00:03:22 - 00:03:25] phone sex, and so forth and so on. [00:03:25 - 00:03:31] But this was all grist for the McLuhan-esque mill, and he would have had he lived had much [00:03:31 - 00:03:33] to say on this. [00:03:33 - 00:03:45] It surprised me in reading this stuff how demanding it is on your own literacy. [00:03:45 - 00:03:51] I mean, he assumes basically that the people he's talking to have read everything and have [00:03:51 - 00:03:53] understood it. [00:03:53 - 00:03:59] I mean, from Homer to Rabelais to Chaucer to Man Magazine, he assumes you have a complete [00:03:59 - 00:04:06] knowledge of modern film and popular print journalism and popular culture. [00:04:06 - 00:04:10] All of this was grist for his mill. [00:04:10 - 00:04:15] I'll show you the books I'm reading from and talking about, and then I'll actually read [00:04:15 - 00:04:22] you a section of McLuhan because it's a, like Joyce, it's a stylistic thing that you can't [00:04:22 - 00:04:26] really encompass without getting your feet wet. [00:04:26 - 00:04:34] This was his best-known book, probably, and this is the original paperback edition. [00:04:34 - 00:04:41] This book was immensely discussed when it came out and probably very little read, judging [00:04:41 - 00:04:44] by the quality of the discussion. [00:04:44 - 00:04:52] Reading media, the extensions of man, this is how most people heard of McLuhan. [00:04:52 - 00:04:58] And he followed it up with The Gutenberg Galaxy. [00:04:58 - 00:05:00] These are all first editions. [00:05:00 - 00:05:03] These books, I don't think, are in print. [00:05:03 - 00:05:11] Few intellectuals in this century have fallen so totally through the cracks as McLuhan. [00:05:11 - 00:05:16] The Gutenberg Galaxy, very interesting, I'm going to read from some of it tonight. [00:05:16 - 00:05:23] It's organized around chapter headings such as, "Does the interiorization of media, such [00:05:23 - 00:05:30] as letters, alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?" [00:05:30 - 00:05:38] Or Pope's Dunsead indicates the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic and romantic [00:05:38 - 00:05:45] revival, "Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde. [00:05:45 - 00:05:52] The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation." [00:05:52 - 00:05:56] That's a chapter heading. [00:05:56 - 00:06:02] Topography cracked the voices of silence, and one of my favorite, "Heidegger surfboards [00:06:02 - 00:06:09] along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." [00:06:09 - 00:06:17] So there's a lot of fun in McLuhan, and this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar. [00:06:17 - 00:06:20] You just can't mess with that without fun. [00:06:20 - 00:06:28] This is his third book with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry [00:06:28 - 00:06:30] and Painting. [00:06:30 - 00:06:36] And I guess I should say, a few years ago, somebody asked me to review McLuhan's letters, [00:06:36 - 00:06:39] which had been published, which I did. [00:06:39 - 00:06:43] It was Gnosis or somebody. [00:06:43 - 00:06:53] Anyway, it brought back to me, he was a convert to Catholicism, and an extraordinarily complex [00:06:53 - 00:07:02] intellectual with a medievalist who became a Joyce scholar, who became a communications [00:07:02 - 00:07:03] expert. [00:07:03 - 00:07:11] And in McLuhan, there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the medieval [00:07:11 - 00:07:15] world of what he called manuscript culture. [00:07:15 - 00:07:29] And essentially, his entire output is a critique of print and of the impact of print on culture. [00:07:29 - 00:07:36] And I think, though he attempted to be fairly even-handed, his final resolution of all this [00:07:36 - 00:07:46] was that it had had many, many detrimental and distorting effects on the Western mind. [00:07:46 - 00:07:53] This is another little book he published back in the heyday, and he experimented with topographic [00:07:53 - 00:08:02] layout somewhat harkening back to the Surrealists, whom he discusses a great deal. [00:08:02 - 00:08:06] And there was something about, it was his fascination with topographical layout that [00:08:06 - 00:08:13] also brought him into such congruence with the wake. [00:08:13 - 00:08:20] So let me read you a section from the Gutenberg Galaxy that is both interesting to think about, [00:08:20 - 00:08:29] or if you can't understand it, then an interesting example of what McLuhan's style was like, [00:08:29 - 00:08:33] and what I mean by that he was an extraordinarily demanding intellectual. [00:08:33 - 00:08:37] He doesn't cut you much slack. [00:08:37 - 00:08:46] This is a short section called "Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic." [00:08:46 - 00:08:51] Till now, we have been concerned mostly with the written word as it transfers or translates [00:08:51 - 00:08:58] the audio-tactile space of sacral, non-literate man into the visual space of civilized or [00:08:58 - 00:09:01] literate or profane man. [00:09:01 - 00:09:08] Once this transfer or metamorphosis occurs, we are soon in the world of books, scribal [00:09:08 - 00:09:09] or typographic. [00:09:09 - 00:09:15] The rest of our concern will be with books, written and printed, and the results for learning [00:09:15 - 00:09:17] and society. [00:09:17 - 00:09:24] From the fifth century BC to the fifteenth century AD, the book was a scribal product. [00:09:24 - 00:09:30] Only one-third of the history of the book in the Western world has been typographic. [00:09:30 - 00:09:34] It is not incongruous, therefore, to say, as G.S. [00:09:34 - 00:09:41] Brett does in Psychology, Ancient and Modern, and here's the quote, "The idea that knowledge [00:09:41 - 00:09:47] is essentially book-learning seems to be a very modern view, probably derived from the [00:09:47 - 00:09:54] medieval distinctions between clerk and layman, with additional emphasis provided by the literary [00:09:54 - 00:09:59] character of the rather fantastic humanism of the sixteenth century. [00:09:59 - 00:10:07] The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of cunning or the possession of wits. [00:10:07 - 00:10:14] Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas who could overcome the [00:10:14 - 00:10:19] Cyclops and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter. [00:10:19 - 00:10:26] Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success [00:10:26 - 00:10:28] in this world." [00:10:28 - 00:10:33] So that closes the quote. [00:10:33 - 00:10:39] Then McLuhan comments, "Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings [00:10:39 - 00:10:46] into any society, in addition to the split within the individual of that society. [00:10:46 - 00:10:51] The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters. [00:10:51 - 00:11:00] His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many devices, is a freelance salesman. [00:11:00 - 00:11:05] Joyce saw the parallels on one hand between the modern frontier of the verbal and the [00:11:05 - 00:11:12] pictorial and, on the other, between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture [00:11:12 - 00:11:16] and the new profane or literate sensibility. [00:11:16 - 00:11:24] Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modern Dublin, a slightly detribalized [00:11:24 - 00:11:26] Irish world. [00:11:26 - 00:11:33] Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement, congenial therefore to the [00:11:33 - 00:11:36] transitional culture of Bloom." [00:11:36 - 00:11:44] In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of Ulysses, we read, "What were habitually his final meditations [00:11:44 - 00:11:52] of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty [00:11:52 - 00:12:00] with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms, [00:12:00 - 00:12:08] not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life?" [00:12:08 - 00:12:14] In the books at the wake, James S. Atherton points out, and here's Atherton's quote, "Amongst [00:12:14 - 00:12:17] other things, Finnegan's Wake is a history of writing. [00:12:17 - 00:12:23] We begin with writing on a bone, a pebble, a ram's skin, leave them to cook in the mothering [00:12:23 - 00:12:31] pot, and Guten Morgue with his Cro-Magnon charter, tinting fats and great prime, must once for [00:12:31 - 00:12:35] omnibus step rubric red out of the wordpress. [00:12:35 - 00:12:41] The mothering pot is an allusion to alchemy, but there is some other significance connected [00:12:41 - 00:12:43] with writing. [00:12:43 - 00:12:50] For the next time the word appears, it is again in a context concerning improvement [00:12:50 - 00:12:53] in systems of communication. [00:12:53 - 00:13:02] The passages, all the Irish signics of her dip and dump help a bit, from an father hogan [00:13:02 - 00:13:04] told the mutter maskins. [00:13:04 - 00:13:13] Dip and dump help a bit, combine the def and dumb alphabet signs in the air, or Irish signs, [00:13:13 - 00:13:18] with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC and the more pronounced up and downs of Irish [00:13:18 - 00:13:20] augum writing. [00:13:20 - 00:13:27] The mason following this must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs, but [00:13:27 - 00:13:34] all I can suggest for mother is the mothering of freemasons which does not fit the context, [00:13:34 - 00:13:39] although they of course also make signs in the air. [00:13:39 - 00:13:43] That perfectly clear? [00:13:43 - 00:13:45] Now back to McLuhan. [00:13:45 - 00:13:52] Gutenmorg with his chrome magnum charter expounds by mythic gloss the fact that writing meant [00:13:52 - 00:13:59] the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audio world of simultaneous resonance [00:13:59 - 00:14:02] into the profane world of daylight. [00:14:02 - 00:14:08] The reference to the masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself. [00:14:08 - 00:14:15] On the second page of the Wake Joyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield as it were, of [00:14:15 - 00:14:21] all the themes and modes of human speech and communication. [00:14:21 - 00:14:28] By Meister Finnegan of the stuttering hand, Freeman's Mauerer lived in the broadest way [00:14:28 - 00:14:36] immorginable in his rush lit too far back for massages before Joshua and Judges had [00:14:36 - 00:14:38] given us numbers. [00:14:38 - 00:14:45] Joyce is in the wake making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the [00:14:45 - 00:14:53] human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture [00:14:53 - 00:14:55] and technology. [00:14:55 - 00:15:02] As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into [00:15:02 - 00:15:05] the night of sacral or auditory man. [00:15:05 - 00:15:13] The fin cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again then let's [00:15:13 - 00:15:17] make it awake or awake or both. [00:15:17 - 00:15:24] Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance [00:15:24 - 00:15:25] or dream. [00:15:25 - 00:15:33] He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. [00:15:33 - 00:15:42] This means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias in his colliderioscope. [00:15:42 - 00:15:49] This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology [00:15:49 - 00:15:56] as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural [00:15:56 - 00:16:08] clash, deor, savage, the oral or sacral, scope, the visual or profane and civilized. [00:16:08 - 00:16:11] So that's his comment. [00:16:11 - 00:16:15] Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. [00:16:15 - 00:16:29] These people, Joyce to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world [00:16:29 - 00:16:32] in which we now stand. [00:16:32 - 00:16:42] The world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases the [00:16:42 - 00:16:46] 17th century notion of the unconscious. [00:16:46 - 00:16:52] Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough. [00:16:52 - 00:17:04] And the remaking of the human image that required centuries for print, the transition that we [00:17:04 - 00:17:11] talked about in here from scribal culture to true book culture occupied 500 years. [00:17:11 - 00:17:19] The transition from book culture to electronic culture has occurred in less than 50 years. [00:17:19 - 00:17:27] It's eerie to read his examples of contemporaneity because there's stuff like Marilyn Monroe, [00:17:27 - 00:17:31] Perry Como, James Dean. [00:17:31 - 00:17:37] He's writing from another era and yet from his point of view he's firmly embedded in [00:17:37 - 00:17:46] a kind of super future that we are now able to look back on. [00:17:46 - 00:17:51] Here's another section that I think makes some of this more clear. [00:17:51 - 00:17:57] The name of this section is "The Medieval Book Trade was a secondhand trade even as [00:17:57 - 00:18:02] with the dealing today in old masters. [00:18:02 - 00:18:06] From the 12th century onward the rise of the universities brought masters and students [00:18:06 - 00:18:12] into the field of book production in class time and these books found their way back [00:18:12 - 00:18:18] to the monastic libraries when students returned after completing their studies. [00:18:18 - 00:18:25] A number of these standard textbooks of which approved exemplars were kept for copying by [00:18:25 - 00:18:31] the stationery of the universities naturally found their way into print quite early for [00:18:31 - 00:18:38] many of them contained in undiminished request in the 15th century as before. [00:18:38 - 00:18:44] These official university texts offer no problems of origin or nomenclature." [00:18:44 - 00:18:45] And then he's quoting Goldschmidt. [00:18:45 - 00:18:52] He adds, "Soon after 1300 the expensive vellum could be dispensed with and the cheaper paper [00:18:52 - 00:18:58] made the accumulation of many books a matter of industry rather than wealth. [00:18:58 - 00:19:04] Since however the student went to lectures pen in hand and it was the lectures task to [00:19:04 - 00:19:11] dictate the book he was expounding to his audience there is a great body of repartirata [00:19:11 - 00:19:15] which constitute a very complex problem for editors." [00:19:15 - 00:19:25] So really like for Joyce for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central [00:19:25 - 00:19:27] mystery of our time. [00:19:27 - 00:19:31] In a sense I sort of share that notion. [00:19:31 - 00:19:33] It's a very Talmudic notion. [00:19:33 - 00:19:35] It's a very psychedelic notion. [00:19:35 - 00:19:46] It's the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central overarching metaphor of [00:19:46 - 00:19:47] the age. [00:19:47 - 00:19:56] And naturally if the book is the central metaphor for reality then reality itself is seen as [00:19:56 - 00:20:00] somehow literary, somehow textual. [00:20:00 - 00:20:08] And this in fact is how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science. [00:20:08 - 00:20:15] We're always taught that the roots of modern science go back to democracy and atomism which [00:20:15 - 00:20:17] is of course true. [00:20:17 - 00:20:25] But the number of people who knew that a thousand years ago was probably very few. [00:20:25 - 00:20:35] The real notion out of which science had to divest itself is the notion of a book or if [00:20:35 - 00:20:44] that seems too concrete a story, a narrative, the story of man's fall and redemption. [00:20:44 - 00:20:53] That was what the Christian exegesis of post-Edenic time was all about. [00:20:53 - 00:21:01] With the rise of modern science the idea of narrative has become somewhat overthrown. [00:21:01 - 00:21:10] McLuhan would say that narrative persisted far beyond its utility because the biases [00:21:10 - 00:21:16] of print kept it in place for such a long time. [00:21:16 - 00:21:21] Everyone assumes that tools are tools and you use them and that's that. [00:21:21 - 00:21:30] For McLuhan the entirety of the toolkit of modern Western man can be traced to the unconscious [00:21:30 - 00:21:32] assumptions of print. [00:21:32 - 00:21:40] For example the idea of the individual which is a pretty personal notion right there in [00:21:40 - 00:21:41] close to the heart. [00:21:41 - 00:21:50] The idea of the individual is a post-medieval concept legitimized by print. [00:21:50 - 00:22:01] The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers because before newspapers [00:22:01 - 00:22:03] there was no public. [00:22:03 - 00:22:12] There were only people and rulers very rarely bothered to pass on their thinking to anybody [00:22:12 - 00:22:14] other than their closest associates. [00:22:14 - 00:22:25] And then only for utilitarian reasons the notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing [00:22:25 - 00:22:28] the governance of society. [00:22:28 - 00:22:33] This again is a print created idea. [00:22:33 - 00:22:41] The idea of interchangeable parts without which our world would hardly function. [00:22:41 - 00:22:47] There would not be automobiles, buildings, aircraft, interchangeable parts. [00:22:47 - 00:22:58] That's an idea that comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printer's block. [00:22:58 - 00:23:08] That was the first industry to ever utilize the concept of easily reformulated subunits. [00:23:08 - 00:23:14] And it's strange, the Chinese get credit for inventing printing thousands and thousands [00:23:14 - 00:23:19] of years before Europe, but they would carve a single block of wood and print it. [00:23:19 - 00:23:24] They didn't get the notion of movable type. [00:23:24 - 00:23:35] And movable type, the distribution of books becomes the paradigmatic model for the distribution [00:23:35 - 00:23:39] of any product. [00:23:39 - 00:23:52] It's produced, it's edited, it's manufactured, it's sold, and then sequels are spawned. [00:23:52 - 00:23:58] All products have followed this model, but books were one of the earliest mass manufactured [00:23:58 - 00:24:03] objects to be put through this cycle. [00:24:03 - 00:24:12] Print city planning, the linearity of it, the way in which land surveys are carried [00:24:12 - 00:24:20] out, these are all unconscious biases imbibed from the world of print. [00:24:20 - 00:24:25] And they make sense if you're a print head. [00:24:25 - 00:24:36] But one of the peculiar things, notice that animals do not possess language. [00:24:36 - 00:24:42] Many human societies do not possess writing. [00:24:42 - 00:24:49] And very few human societies, only two on earth, invented printing. [00:24:49 - 00:24:55] And yet once invented, it feeds back into the evolution of social structures and defines [00:24:55 - 00:25:01] everything and yet it's an extraordinary artificiality. [00:25:01 - 00:25:05] And we have been imprisoned in it for hundreds and hundreds of years now. [00:25:05 - 00:25:14] Now it is breaking down and we are changing to a different sensory ratio. [00:25:14 - 00:25:21] And you might suppose, if you hadn't given this a lot of thought, that the new electronic [00:25:21 - 00:25:29] media, television, and so forth, would carry us into an entirely different sensory ratio. [00:25:29 - 00:25:31] McLuhan felt differently. [00:25:31 - 00:25:39] He felt that it was restoring us to a medieval sensory ratio. [00:25:39 - 00:25:46] He felt that a television screen is much more like an illuminated manuscript than a page [00:25:46 - 00:25:47] of print. [00:25:47 - 00:25:54] The distinction may seem subtle at first, but if you're looking at an illuminated medieval [00:25:54 - 00:26:02] manuscript, notice I said looking, you must look in order to understand. [00:26:02 - 00:26:09] [ Silence ]