[00:00:00 - 00:00:06] McLuhan, I don't know how many of you recall him from the 60s, but he had, for a very brief [00:00:06 - 00:00:13] period of time, about five or six years, an extraordinary influence on American culture. [00:00:13 - 00:00:20] You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, [00:00:20 - 00:00:27] what he said, what he thought, what he predicted. He was consulting with Madison Avenue, [00:00:27 - 00:00:37] with politicians, with Hollywood, so forth and so on. And his influence, he died in the early 70s, [00:00:37 - 00:00:44] and his influence died with him. Even though he had founded the Center for Media Study at the [00:00:44 - 00:00:51] University of Toronto in Canada, he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors. He was a [00:00:51 - 00:01:01] unique personality and breakthrough, much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality [00:01:01 - 00:01:09] and spawned very few imitators. And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his [00:01:09 - 00:01:18] journeyman work before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media. [00:01:19 - 00:01:26] He did his work as a Joyce scholar. That's what he was, literary critic, [00:01:26 - 00:01:36] Joyce scholar, medievalist, that sort of thing. And then in the early 50s or middle 50s, he wrote a [00:01:36 - 00:01:43] book, which I've never read, it's very hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride, that was his [00:01:43 - 00:01:53] first testing of his ideas. McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist or a [00:01:53 - 00:02:04] philosopher of media. And that's what he talked about. He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist [00:02:04 - 00:02:13] method on the technologies of communication, printing, film, photography, dance, theater, [00:02:13 - 00:02:22] even such things as money, he thought of as forms of media. And he carried out and analyzed [00:02:22 - 00:02:31] these various forms of media and reached very controversial conclusions. One of the things that [00:02:31 - 00:02:37] was puzzling to me as I went back through and read all this is one of the things was McLuhan [00:02:37 - 00:02:44] was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the 60s. And the whole thing was, "Who can understand this [00:02:44 - 00:02:53] guy? You know, he's like Buddha, he speaks these words that we can't understand." Well, now, 25, 30 [00:02:53 - 00:03:01] years later, it reads pretty straightforwardly. And most of what he's predicted has come to pass. [00:03:01 - 00:03:09] I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed with which the Gutenberg world has been overturned. [00:03:09 - 00:03:18] I mean, there's no hint in here of home computers, let alone interactive networks, virtual reality, [00:03:20 - 00:03:27] phone sex, and so forth and so on. But this was all grist for the McLuhan-esque mill, [00:03:27 - 00:03:34] and he would have had he lived, had much to say on this. It surprised me in reading this stuff, how [00:03:34 - 00:03:46] demanding it is on your own literacy. I mean, he assumes basically that the people he's talking to [00:03:46 - 00:03:55] have read everything and have understood it. I mean, from Homer to Rabelais to Chaucer to [00:03:55 - 00:04:01] Mad Magazine, he assumes you have a complete knowledge of modern film and popular print [00:04:01 - 00:04:10] journalism and popular culture. All of this was grist for his mill. I'll show you the books I'm [00:04:10 - 00:04:15] reading from and talking about, and then I'll actually read you a section of McLuhan because [00:04:15 - 00:04:23] it's a, like Joyce, it's a stylistic thing that you can't really encompass without getting your [00:04:23 - 00:04:31] feet wet. This was his best-known book, probably, and this is the original paperback edition. [00:04:31 - 00:04:38] This book was immensely discussed when it came out and probably very little read, [00:04:38 - 00:04:45] judging by the quality of the discussion. Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, this is [00:04:45 - 00:04:57] how most people heard of McLuhan, and he followed it up with The Gutenberg Galaxy. These are all [00:04:57 - 00:05:03] first editions. These books, I don't think, are in print. Few intellectuals in this century have [00:05:03 - 00:05:11] fallen so totally through the cracks as McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy, very interesting. I'm going [00:05:11 - 00:05:19] to read from some of it tonight. It's organized around chapter headings such as, "Does the [00:05:19 - 00:05:27] interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?" [00:05:28 - 00:05:37] Or, "Pope's duncead indicates the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic and romantic revival. [00:05:37 - 00:05:45] Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde. The box office looms as a [00:05:45 - 00:05:51] return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation." That's a chapter heading. [00:05:54 - 00:06:01] "Topography cracked the voices of silence, and one of my favorite, Heidegger surfboards along on the [00:06:01 - 00:06:09] electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." So there's a lot of fun [00:06:09 - 00:06:17] in McLuhan, and this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar. You just can't mess with that [00:06:17 - 00:06:25] without fun. This is his third book with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in [00:06:25 - 00:06:32] Poetry and Painting. And I guess I should say, a few years ago, somebody asked me to review [00:06:32 - 00:06:41] McLuhan's letters which had been published, which I did. It was Gnosis or somebody. Anyway, [00:06:41 - 00:06:50] it brought back to me he was a convert to Catholicism and an extraordinarily complex [00:06:50 - 00:07:02] intellectual with a medievalist who became a Joyce scholar, who became a communications expert. And [00:07:02 - 00:07:10] in McLuhan, there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the medieval world, [00:07:10 - 00:07:18] of what he called manuscript culture. And essentially his entire output is a critique [00:07:18 - 00:07:30] of print and of the impact of print on culture. And I think though he attempted to be fairly even [00:07:30 - 00:07:41] handed, his final resolution of all this was that it had many, many detrimental and distorting [00:07:41 - 00:07:48] effects on the Western mind. This is another little book he published back in the heyday, [00:07:48 - 00:07:56] and he experimented with topographic layout, somewhat hearkening back to the Surrealists, [00:07:56 - 00:08:03] whom he discusses a great deal. And there was something about it was his fascination with [00:08:03 - 00:08:12] topographical layout that also brought him into such congruence with the wake. So let me read you [00:08:12 - 00:08:20] a section from the Gutenberg Galaxy that is both interesting to think about or, if you can't [00:08:20 - 00:08:28] understand it, then an interesting example of what McLuhan's style was like and what I mean by that [00:08:28 - 00:08:36] he was an extraordinarily demanding intellectual. He doesn't cut too much slack. This is a short [00:08:36 - 00:08:44] section called "Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic." "Till now, [00:08:44 - 00:08:51] we have been concerned mostly with the written word as it transfers or translates the audio-tactile [00:08:51 - 00:08:59] space of sacral non-literate man into the visual space of civilized or literate or profane man. [00:08:59 - 00:09:06] Once this transfer or metamorphosis occurs, we are soon in the world of books, scribal or [00:09:06 - 00:09:13] typographic. The rest of our concern will be with books, written and printed, and the results for [00:09:13 - 00:09:21] learning and society. From the fifth century BC to the 15th century AD, the book was a scribal [00:09:21 - 00:09:28] product. Only one-third of the history of the book in the Western world has been typographic. [00:09:28 - 00:09:36] It is not incongruous, therefore, to say, as G.S. Brett does in Psychology, Ancient and Modern," [00:09:36 - 00:09:43] and here's the quote, "The idea that knowledge is essentially book learning seems to be a very [00:09:43 - 00:09:49] modern view, probably derived from the medieval distinctions between clerk and layman, with [00:09:49 - 00:09:56] additional emphasis provided by the literary character of the rather fantastic humanism of [00:09:56 - 00:10:04] the 16th century. The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of cunning or the possession of [00:10:04 - 00:10:13] wits. Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas who could overcome the Cyclops [00:10:13 - 00:10:20] and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter. Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming [00:10:20 - 00:10:28] the difficulties of life and achieving success in this world." So that closes the quote. [00:10:31 - 00:10:38] Then McLuhan comments, "Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings into any [00:10:38 - 00:10:45] society, in addition to the split within the individual of that society. The work of James [00:10:45 - 00:10:52] Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters. His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of [00:10:52 - 00:11:00] many ideas and many devices, is a freelance salesman. Joyce saw the parallels on one hand [00:11:00 - 00:11:07] between the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial, and on the other between the Homeric [00:11:07 - 00:11:15] world poised between the old sacral culture and the new profane or literate sensibility. Bloom, [00:11:15 - 00:11:24] the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modern Dublin, a slightly detribalized Irish world. [00:11:24 - 00:11:30] Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement, congenial therefore to the [00:11:30 - 00:11:38] transitional culture of Bloom. In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of Ulysses we read, [00:11:39 - 00:11:47] what were habitually his final meditations of some one sole unique advertisement to cause [00:11:47 - 00:11:55] passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to [00:11:55 - 00:12:02] its simplest and most efficient terms, not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous [00:12:02 - 00:12:11] with the velocity of modern life. In the books at the wake, James S. Atherton points out, and here's [00:12:11 - 00:12:17] Atherton's quote, "Amongst other things, Finnegan's Wake is a history of writing. We begin with [00:12:17 - 00:12:24] writing on a bone, a pebble, a ram's skin, leave them to cook in the mothering pot, and Guten Morgue [00:12:24 - 00:12:32] with his Cro-Magnon charter, tinting fats and great prime, must once for omnibus step rubric red out [00:12:32 - 00:12:39] of the wordpress. The mothering pot is an allusion to alchemy, but there is some other significance [00:12:39 - 00:12:46] connected with writing. For the next time the word appears, it is again in a context concerning [00:12:46 - 00:12:54] improvement in a system of, in systems of communication. The passages, all the Irish [00:12:54 - 00:13:03] sydnics of her dip and dump help a bit from an father hogan told the mutter muskins dip and dump [00:13:03 - 00:13:12] help a bit combined the deaf and dumb alphabet signs in the air or Irish signs with the ups and [00:13:12 - 00:13:19] downs of the ordinary abc and the more pronounced up and downs of Irish ogham writing the mason [00:13:19 - 00:13:26] following this must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs but all i can suggest [00:13:26 - 00:13:33] for mother is the mothering of free masons which does not fit the context although they of course [00:13:33 - 00:13:45] also make signs in the air is that perfectly clear now back to mclean guten morgue with his [00:13:45 - 00:13:52] chrome magnum charter expounds by mythic gloss the fact that writing meant the emergence of the cave [00:13:52 - 00:13:58] man or sacral man from the audio world of simultaneous resonance into the profane world [00:13:58 - 00:14:07] of daylight the reference to the masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself [00:14:07 - 00:14:14] on the second page of the wake joice is making a mosaic and achilles shield as it were of all the [00:14:14 - 00:14:22] themes and modes of human speech and communication by meister finnegan of the stuttering hand [00:14:22 - 00:14:31] freeman's mower lived in the broadest way immorginable in his rush lit too far back for [00:14:31 - 00:14:40] massages before joshua and judges had given us numbers joyce's in the wake making his own altamira [00:14:40 - 00:14:48] cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures [00:14:48 - 00:14:57] during all phases of human culture and technology as his title indicates he saw that the wake of [00:14:57 - 00:15:05] human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man the fin cycle of tribal [00:15:05 - 00:15:15] institutions can return in the electric age but if again then let's make it awake or awake or both [00:15:15 - 00:15:22] joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance [00:15:22 - 00:15:29] or dream he discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while [00:15:29 - 00:15:37] quite conscious this means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias [00:15:37 - 00:15:46] in his collideria scope this term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components [00:15:46 - 00:15:54] of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of [00:15:54 - 00:16:04] cultural clash deor savage the oral or sacral scope the visual or profane and civilized [00:16:04 - 00:16:13] so that's his comment only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic these [00:16:13 - 00:16:25] people joyce to some degree pound mclean they were the prophets of the world [00:16:25 - 00:16:38] in which we now stand the world of integrated interactive media extraordinary data retrieval [00:16:38 - 00:16:46] that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious nothing is now unconscious if your [00:16:46 - 00:16:59] data search commands are powerful enough and the the remaking of the human image that required [00:16:59 - 00:17:07] centuries for print the transition that we talked about in here from scribal culture to true book [00:17:07 - 00:17:14] culture occupied 500 years the transition from book culture to electronic culture has occurred [00:17:14 - 00:17:23] in less than 50 years i mean it's eerie to read his examples of contemporaneity because there's [00:17:23 - 00:17:31] stuff like maryland monroe perry como james dean i mean he's writing from another era and yet [00:17:32 - 00:17:41] from his point of view he's firmly embedded in a kind of super future that we are now able to look [00:17:41 - 00:17:50] back on here's another section that i think makes some of this more clear the name of this section [00:17:50 - 00:17:58] is the medieval book trade was a secondhand trade even as with the dealing today in old masters [00:18:00 - 00:18:05] from the 12th century onward the rise of the universities brought masters and students into [00:18:05 - 00:18:11] the field of book production in class time and these books found their way back to the monastic [00:18:11 - 00:18:18] libraries when students returned after completing their studies a number of these standard textbooks [00:18:18 - 00:18:26] which of which approved exemplars were kept for copying by the stationary of the universities [00:18:26 - 00:18:32] naturally found their way into print quite early for many of them contained in undiminished [00:18:32 - 00:18:39] request in the 15th century as before these official university texts offer no problems [00:18:39 - 00:18:47] of origin or nomenclature and then he's quoting goldschmidt he adds soon after 1300 the expensive [00:18:47 - 00:18:53] vellum could be dispensed with and the cheaper paper made the accumulation of many books a matter [00:18:53 - 00:19:00] of industry rather than wealth since however the student went to lectures pen in hand and it was [00:19:00 - 00:19:07] the lecturer's task to dictate the book he was expounding to his audience there is a great body [00:19:07 - 00:19:17] of report orata which constitute a very complex problem for editors so really like for joys for [00:19:17 - 00:19:26] mclewyn the book is the central symbol of the age the central mystery of our time in a sense i sort [00:19:26 - 00:19:35] of share that notion it's a very talmudic notion it's a very psychedelic notion it's the idea [00:19:35 - 00:19:45] that somehow the career of the word is the central overarching uh metaphor of the age and [00:19:45 - 00:19:55] naturally if the book is the central metaphor for reality then reality itself is seen as somehow [00:19:55 - 00:20:04] literary somehow textual and this in fact is how i think reality was seen until the rise of modern [00:20:04 - 00:20:12] science the we're always taught you know that the roots of modern science go back to democratian [00:20:12 - 00:20:19] atomism which is of course true but the number of people who knew that a thousand years ago [00:20:19 - 00:20:30] was probably very few uh the the real uh notion out of which science had to divest itself is the [00:20:30 - 00:20:41] notion uh of a book or if that seems too concrete a story a narrative the story of man's fall and [00:20:41 - 00:20:52] redemption that was what the christian exegesis of of post-edenic time was all about with the rise [00:20:52 - 00:21:01] of modern science the idea of narrative has become somewhat overthrown mclewyn would say that [00:21:01 - 00:21:13] narrative persisted far beyond its utility because the biases of print kept it in place for such a [00:21:13 - 00:21:21] long time everyone assumes that tools are tools and you use them and that's that for mclewyn the [00:21:21 - 00:21:29] entirety of the toolkit of one of modern western man can be traced to the unconscious assumptions [00:21:29 - 00:21:37] of print for example the idea of the of the individual which is a pretty personal notion [00:21:37 - 00:21:47] right there in close to the heart the idea of the individual is a post-medieval concept legitimized [00:21:47 - 00:21:58] by print the idea of the public this concept did not exist before uh newspapers because before [00:21:58 - 00:22:08] newspapers there was no public there were only people and rulers very rarely bothered to pass [00:22:08 - 00:22:14] on their thinking to anybody other than their closest associates and then only for utilitarian [00:22:14 - 00:22:26] reasons the notion of an observing citizenry somehow uh sharing the governance of society [00:22:26 - 00:22:37] this again is a print created idea the idea of interchangeable parts which without which our [00:22:37 - 00:22:44] world would hardly function there would not be automobiles buildings aircraft interchangeable [00:22:44 - 00:22:52] parts that's an idea that comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printer's block [00:22:55 - 00:23:05] all that was the first industry to ever utilize the concept of easily reformulated subunits [00:23:05 - 00:23:12] and it's strange you know the chinese get credit for inventing printing thousands and thousands of [00:23:12 - 00:23:19] years before europe but they would carve a single block of wood and print it they didn't get the [00:23:19 - 00:23:31] notion of movable type and uh movable type the distribution of books becomes the paradigmatic [00:23:31 - 00:23:42] model for the distribution of any product you know uh you it's produced it's edited it's uh [00:23:42 - 00:23:52] manufactured it's sold and then sequels are spawned all products have followed this model [00:23:52 - 00:24:00] but books were one of the earliest mass manufactured objects to to be put through this [00:24:00 - 00:24:10] cycle modern city planning the linearity of it uh the way in which land surveys are carried out [00:24:10 - 00:24:20] these are all unconscious biases imbibed uh from the world of print and they make sense [00:24:20 - 00:24:31] if you're a print head but one of the peculiar things notice that animals do not possess language [00:24:34 - 00:24:45] many human societies do not possess writing and very few human societies and only two on earth [00:24:45 - 00:24:52] invented printing and yet once invented it feeds back into the evolution of social structures [00:24:52 - 00:24:59] and defines everything and yet it's an extraordinary uh artificiality and we have [00:24:59 - 00:25:06] been imprisoned in it for hundreds and hundreds of years now now it is breaking down and uh [00:25:06 - 00:25:15] we are changing to a different sensory ratio and you might suppose if you hadn't given this a lot [00:25:15 - 00:25:24] of thought that the new electronic media television and so forth would carry us into an entirely [00:25:24 - 00:25:34] different sensory ratio mclean felt differently he felt that it was restoring us to a medieval [00:25:34 - 00:25:43] sensory ratio he felt that a television screen is much more like an illuminated manuscript [00:25:43 - 00:25:51] than a page of print the distinction may seem subtle at first but if if you're looking at an [00:25:51 - 00:26:00] illuminated medieval manuscript notice i said looking you must look in order to understand [00:26:00 - 00:26:11] reading is not looking reading is an entirely different kind of behavior as a child you learn [00:26:11 - 00:26:20] what an e looks like what a printed lowercase e looks like after seeing 20 100 1000 10 000 [00:26:20 - 00:26:28] you know what it looks like you have an expectation of the gestalt of the lowercase e and nobody opens [00:26:28 - 00:26:37] a book and looks at print unless there's some extraordinary abstract discussion going on we read [00:26:37 - 00:26:46] print but we look at manuscript because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the [00:26:46 - 00:26:55] individual who made it and his or her idiosyncrasies have to be parsed through to get the meaning [00:26:55 - 00:27:02] similarly with television television is a very low resolution media i mean these are little pieces [00:27:02 - 00:27:12] of light pixels flying back and forth and they must be looked at they cannot be read and it's an [00:27:12 - 00:27:20] extraordinarily engaging process it's that's why it's uh creates an entirely different set of [00:27:20 - 00:27:29] social biases than print does and mclellan called these biases and this was the one distinction or [00:27:29 - 00:27:35] one idea of his that made its way into popular culture he distinguished between what he called [00:27:35 - 00:27:44] hot and cold media and usually people botch this every time because nobody really to this day [00:27:44 - 00:27:52] understands exactly uh what he meant so let me read you a little bit about this distinction [00:27:52 - 00:28:00] this is in chapter two of understanding media and chapter two is called media hot and cold [00:28:01 - 00:28:08] the rise of the waltz explained kurt fax in the world history of the dance was a result of that [00:28:08 - 00:28:15] longing for truth simplicity closeness to nature and primitivism with which the last two-thirds [00:28:15 - 00:28:22] of the 18th century fulfilled in the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of [00:28:22 - 00:28:29] the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of [00:28:29 - 00:28:36] courtly and choral dance styles but obviously it was i mean when you contrast it to what came before [00:28:36 - 00:28:43] there is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the [00:28:43 - 00:28:52] telephone or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like tv a hot medium is one that extends [00:28:52 - 00:29:01] one single sense in high definition high definition is the state of being well filled with data i love [00:29:01 - 00:29:11] that a photograph is visually high definition a cartoon is low definition simply because very [00:29:11 - 00:29:19] little visual information is provided telephone is a cool medium or one of low definition because [00:29:19 - 00:29:27] the ear is given a meager amount of information and speech is a cool medium of low definition [00:29:27 - 00:29:35] because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener on the other hand hot [00:29:35 - 00:29:42] media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience hot media are therefore [00:29:42 - 00:29:50] low in participation and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience [00:29:50 - 00:29:57] naturally therefore a hot medium like the radio has very different effects on the user from a cool [00:29:57 - 00:30:04] medium like the television a cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogamic written characters [00:30:04 - 00:30:10] has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet [00:30:10 - 00:30:17] the alphabet when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity became typography [00:30:17 - 00:30:24] the printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and [00:30:24 - 00:30:32] monasteries creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly but the typical [00:30:32 - 00:30:39] reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation with its impersonal empire [00:30:39 - 00:30:47] over many lives the hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable prince intensity led to [00:30:47 - 00:30:55] nationalism and the religious wars of the 16th century the heavy and unwieldy media such as stone [00:30:55 - 00:31:03] are time binders used for writing they are very cool indeed and serve to unify the age whereas [00:31:03 - 00:31:11] paper is a hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally both in political and entertainment [00:31:11 - 00:31:21] empires and he just goes on like this endlessly i mean this was his metier or his media to connect [00:31:21 - 00:31:32] and comment on this stuff and television really was his both his own media for reaching [00:31:32 - 00:31:39] a very large audience in fact i remember the excitement that swept through i didn't even [00:31:39 - 00:31:44] have a television i was living in berkeley at the time and somebody said we we have to go up [00:31:44 - 00:31:52] to the student union at six o'clock because mike wallace is interviewing marshall mclellan and it [00:31:52 - 00:32:02] seemed an incredibly freaky notion that mclellan would be on tv it shows you what a stultified [00:32:02 - 00:32:09] categorically different world we were living in at the time here's just a little bit of [00:32:09 - 00:32:19] of mclellan on television this is chapter 31 of understanding media the timid giant [00:32:19 - 00:32:26] perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the tv image is the posture of children in [00:32:26 - 00:32:33] the early grades since tv children regardless of eye condition average about six and a half [00:32:33 - 00:32:39] inches from the printed page our children are striving to carry over to the printed page [00:32:39 - 00:32:47] the all-involving sensory mandate of the tv image with perfect psychomimetic skill they carry out [00:32:47 - 00:32:55] the commands of the tv image they pour they probe they slow down and involve themselves in depth [00:32:55 - 00:33:01] this is what they had learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic book medium tv carried [00:33:01 - 00:33:07] the process much further suddenly they are transferred to the hot print medium with its [00:33:07 - 00:33:14] uniform patterns and fast lineal movement pointlessly they strive to read print in depth [00:33:14 - 00:33:21] they bring to print all their senses and print rejects them print asks for the isolated and [00:33:21 - 00:33:30] stripped down visual faculty not for the unified sensorium you see so often very unexpected [00:33:30 - 00:33:38] paradoxical insights emerge from this stuff and in this book that he did with harley parker [00:33:38 - 00:33:46] through the vanishing point space in poetry and painting it's an interesting technique they take [00:33:46 - 00:33:54] a number of works of art either um literature such as the song from love's labor lost by william [00:33:54 - 00:34:03] shakespeare or the ballad de bon concieu of jeffrey chaucer or the ruby art of omar qayyam [00:34:03 - 00:34:10] and then comment on it and also visual arts because mclewyn really felt that the [00:34:11 - 00:34:21] art historical and technological and architectural output of western civilization could be essentially [00:34:21 - 00:34:30] psychoanalyzed could be seen as the tracings of the mass consciousness and the he felt that the [00:34:30 - 00:34:40] evolution of sensory ratios within historical time had been very very rapid that for example [00:34:40 - 00:34:51] he talks about how san augustine was a person of great piety and learning and people doubting this [00:34:51 - 00:35:00] would show him an open page of scripture or theological disputation and he would look at [00:35:00 - 00:35:06] it for a few moments minutes and then they would close the book and he could tell them what was [00:35:06 - 00:35:13] written there and this was taken as proof of his piety he was as far as we can tell the only man [00:35:13 - 00:35:22] in europe who could read silently at that time this was a period when the the audio uh pre [00:35:22 - 00:35:31] scribal culture was still being assimilated mclewyn spends a lot of time analyzing this [00:35:31 - 00:35:39] episode in the 14th century when the laws of perspective spring suddenly into being [00:35:39 - 00:35:48] as somewhat in the way very similar in the way that fractal mathematics have introduced us to a [00:35:48 - 00:35:57] new super space for the renaissance spatial perspective was essentially a filing system [00:35:57 - 00:36:03] for visual data at last they knew where to put everything and where to look for it once they [00:36:03 - 00:36:09] had put it there which if you have a pre-perspectivist arrangement of space you [00:36:09 - 00:36:16] have to look not read look at the at each painting in order to locate where the information is this [00:36:16 - 00:36:27] is again this read look dichotomy mclean never discussed psychedelics but psychedelics i think [00:36:27 - 00:36:35] clearly are an extension of these kinds of media that you have to engage with that you have to look [00:36:35 - 00:36:45] at that you cannot read you cannot take for granted and these give back a much more complex [00:36:45 - 00:36:55] world i mean notice that the world created by print is a world of gestalts buildings highways [00:36:55 - 00:37:03] bridges we know how these things are supposed to look we don't experience astonishment each time [00:37:03 - 00:37:14] we enter a home or an institutional edifice there is a built-in set of syntactical expectations in [00:37:14 - 00:37:21] linear space and when those are violated this is very noticeable and becomes the basis for [00:37:21 - 00:37:29] architectural or design innovation or something like that i think that what's happening and i [00:37:29 - 00:37:37] think that this would be mclean's take is that all of these new media that attempt to suppress [00:37:37 - 00:37:44] the appurtenances of media are in fact having the effect of returning us to an archaic [00:37:44 - 00:37:52] sensory ratio and mclean was on to this he is the one who coined the phrase electronic feudalism [00:37:52 - 00:38:00] and he felt that that we were headed back toward the medieval sensory ratio because he saw [00:38:00 - 00:38:10] television as like manuscript but i think had he lived into the era of vr psilocybin hd tv and [00:38:10 - 00:38:16] implants he would have seen we're not reaching back to the medieval that was simply a stepping [00:38:16 - 00:38:26] stone to the archaic and that we are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually [00:38:26 - 00:38:36] reaching back to a shamanic feeling toned kind of thing and all of the breakdown of linearity that [00:38:36 - 00:38:45] you see in the 20th century abstract expressionism da da jazz rock and roll non-figurative painting [00:38:45 - 00:38:56] lsd all of these things on one level can be seen as as i've said as harking back to the archaic but [00:38:56 - 00:39:05] on on another level what they can be seen as our new behaviors emerging as the cloud of print [00:39:05 - 00:39:13] constellated constipation is is lifted it's breaking down an interesting question that we [00:39:13 - 00:39:21] would put to mclean if we had him here tonight i think is is to what degree can what he said about [00:39:21 - 00:39:32] television not be applied to hd tv seems to meet that hd tv is television without the biases of tv [00:39:32 - 00:39:40] and you know a perfect medium is an invisible a perfect media is an invisible media and [00:39:40 - 00:39:46] print is the least invisible of all media i mean print is an incredible uh [00:39:48 - 00:39:58] rude rude goldberg invention for conveying information here's mclean on this same subject [00:39:58 - 00:40:06] rather than me dwelling on it this is from the gutenberg galaxy this is a section called a theory [00:40:06 - 00:40:13] of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios affected by various [00:40:13 - 00:40:21] externalizations of our senses in other words by media it is very much worth dwelling on this matter [00:40:21 - 00:40:27] since we can see that from the invention of the alphabet there has been a continuous drive in the [00:40:27 - 00:40:35] western world toward the separation of the senses of functions of operations of states emotional [00:40:35 - 00:40:43] and political as well as of tasks a fragmentation which terminated thought dirkheim in the anomie [00:40:43 - 00:40:50] of the 19th century the paradox presented by professor von beckse is that the two-dimensional [00:40:50 - 00:40:57] mosaic is in fact a multi-dimensional world of interstructural resonance it is the three-dimensional [00:40:57 - 00:41:05] world of pictorial space that is indeed an abstract illusion built on the intense separation [00:41:05 - 00:41:12] of the visual from the other senses there is here no question of values or preferences [00:41:12 - 00:41:20] it is necessary however for any other kind of understanding to know why primitive drawing is [00:41:20 - 00:41:27] two-dimensional whereas the drawing and painting of literate human beings tends toward perspective [00:41:27 - 00:41:34] without this knowledge we cannot grasp why people ever cease to be primitive or audio tactile in [00:41:34 - 00:41:43] their sense bias nor could we ever understand why men have since saison that's in quotes abandoned [00:41:43 - 00:41:50] the visual in favor of the audio tactile modes of awareness and and of organization of experience [00:41:50 - 00:41:57] this matter clarified we can much more easily approach the role of alphabet and of printing [00:41:57 - 00:42:04] in giving a dominant role to the visual sense in language and art and in the entire range of social [00:42:04 - 00:42:11] and political life for until we have upgraded the visual component communities know only a tribal [00:42:11 - 00:42:19] structure the detribalizing of the individual has in the past at least depended on an intense visual [00:42:19 - 00:42:28] life fostered by literacy and by literacy of the alphabetic kind alone for alphabetic writing is not [00:42:28 - 00:42:36] unique but late there had been much writing before it in fact any people that ceases to be nomadic [00:42:36 - 00:42:44] and pursues sedentary modes of work is ready to invent writing no merely nomadic people ever had [00:42:44 - 00:42:52] writing any more than they ever developed architecture or enclosed space for writing [00:42:52 - 00:42:59] is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses it is therefore an abstraction of the [00:42:59 - 00:43:07] visual from the ordinary sense interplay and whereas speech is an altering utterance of all [00:43:07 - 00:43:15] our senses at once writing abstracts from speech that's very interesting isn't it that this [00:43:15 - 00:43:22] association of nomadism to the inability to create architectonic space and therefore no writing [00:43:22 - 00:43:29] that a word is a structure a written word is a structure and therefore no nomad would ever [00:43:29 - 00:43:40] do such a thing interesting i think he's saying reading is not seeing and those who read do not [00:43:40 - 00:43:48] see even when they lift their eyes from their books they they they carry the attitude of print [00:43:48 - 00:43:56] into the world they read they attempt to read nature and you can't read nature you must look [00:43:56 - 00:44:01] at nature you must see nature certainly i think in my own life i was thinking about this a few [00:44:01 - 00:44:07] months ago and it surprised me i'm trying to think of the books that really influenced my life and i [00:44:07 - 00:44:16] thought of you know moby dick and huxley's doors of perception but then when i really got down on it [00:44:16 - 00:44:22] i realized that a little tiny book huxley wrote that my mother pushed on me when i was about 12 [00:44:22 - 00:44:30] years old called the art of seeing probably shaped me as much as anything and in there it's a very [00:44:31 - 00:44:37] mclean-esque rap without mclean-esque terminology and he says the way to overcome and i think this [00:44:37 - 00:44:45] is very very very intelligent and simple advice huxley said the way to overcome the print bias [00:44:45 - 00:44:52] and god knows he was a cambridge educated gentleman steeped in the traditions of english [00:44:52 - 00:45:03] literacy and intellectualism is freehand drawing draw train your eye draw nudes draw sea shells draw [00:45:03 - 00:45:12] insects and go into nature and train the eye to see and you will cease to read the world and [00:45:13 - 00:45:23] readers are emotionally a person a seeing person does not want to form a relationship with a reading [00:45:23 - 00:45:30] person do you know this conflict that we get between men and women and between people about [00:45:30 - 00:45:39] which we call the head heart conflict is really a reading seeing conflict it isn't a head and [00:45:39 - 00:45:46] heart it's that it's that readers and seers cannot relate to each other's emotional life because they [00:45:46 - 00:45:55] seem to come from such different worlds so yeah i think you have a a very good point and the the [00:45:55 - 00:46:02] permission to abstract from nature that print created is why we have such a terrible culture [00:46:02 - 00:46:09] crisis you know because uh uh well just a kind of a trivial example you know it was said by marshall [00:46:09 - 00:46:17] mclellan strangely enough that the vietnam war could not be won the way an ordinary war is won [00:46:17 - 00:46:25] because the the citizenry of this country couldn't tolerate the sight of what war was and that [00:46:26 - 00:46:33] modern warfare became impossible when it could be televised into the living room because war [00:46:33 - 00:46:42] is something that you must read about you must not see it it must be this grand thing of the distant [00:46:42 - 00:46:50] clash of armies and young heroes being created but when it turns into amputation and maggots [00:46:50 - 00:46:59] and screens of pain the political fun goes out of it so war is therefore a literary activity [00:46:59 - 00:47:05] and you know the one argument that can be made i think in television's favor is people don't like [00:47:05 - 00:47:12] to see images of violence if we have to show so much violence on television let it always be real [00:47:12 - 00:47:20] the violence is only indefensible when it's vicarious if it's real violence you need to see [00:47:20 - 00:47:27] it because it's happening in a world for which you bear a partial moral responsibility and i i think [00:47:27 - 00:47:37] warfare has been remade by media in that sense a lot of politics has been remade because imperial [00:47:38 - 00:47:45] doings are usually ugly brutal and not something that you want to exhibit before the populace [00:47:45 - 00:47:53] and yet uh modern media makes that very difficult to avoid you know you get the notion of public [00:47:53 - 00:48:01] morality or you know the people won't stand for this we have to get this story out the people [00:48:01 - 00:48:07] won't stand for this well now this is a moral dimension inconceivable in in medieval or roman [00:48:07 - 00:48:13] times i mean what would it mean to say the people won't stand for this so there is an attempt to [00:48:13 - 00:48:22] create through the collectivity a kind of community of moral uh of moral judgment the medium is the [00:48:22 - 00:48:34] message means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference in all every discussion [00:48:34 - 00:48:43] you ever hear since the 60s about tv for example is it good is it bad terrible wonderful the always [00:48:43 - 00:48:50] the discussion hinges around what's on tv and people say whoa television is terrible it just [00:48:50 - 00:48:55] shows violence and then something else says no television is wonderful those nature shows and [00:48:55 - 00:49:03] news from far away and masterpiece theater this is a stupid argument it i the what mclean meant by [00:49:03 - 00:49:10] the message the the media is the message is he meant that it doesn't matter what you put on tv [00:49:10 - 00:49:18] tv is tv it has an intrinsic nature and whether you're showing national geographic specials or [00:49:18 - 00:49:27] slasher movies tv will do what it does it has certain qualities just like driving a car or [00:49:27 - 00:49:34] skiing certain muscles are going to be exercised certain uh perceptual systems enhanced [00:49:34 - 00:49:42] others suppressed and uh it's it's very hard for us to understand this because [00:49:42 - 00:49:52] because we have accepted this media so thoroughly into our life but in fact it is shaping our value [00:49:52 - 00:50:00] systems in ways that are very hard for us to suspect or even even detect i mean television [00:50:00 - 00:50:11] for example uh it's a drug it has a series of measurable physiological parameters that are as [00:50:11 - 00:50:20] intrinsically its signature as the parameters of heroin are its signature i mean you sit [00:50:20 - 00:50:26] somebody down in front of a tv set and turn it on 20 minutes later come back sample their blood [00:50:26 - 00:50:35] pressure their eye movement rate blood is pooling in their rear end their breathing takes on a [00:50:35 - 00:50:43] certain quality the stare reflex sets in i mean they are thoroughly zoned on a drug and when you [00:50:43 - 00:50:49] think about the fact that the average american watches six and a half hours of television a day [00:50:50 - 00:50:58] imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and a half hours per day on [00:50:58 - 00:51:05] average watching and the one thing about drugs in their defense is that it's very hard to diddle [00:51:05 - 00:51:13] the message a drug is a mirror but television isn't a mirror television is a billboard and [00:51:13 - 00:51:21] anybody who pays the their money can put their message into the trip this is an extraordinarily [00:51:21 - 00:51:32] insidious situation what mclellan wanted to become i think was the founder of a general [00:51:32 - 00:51:41] new sophistication about media and he was essentially parodied to get to death by guess what [00:51:42 - 00:51:53] media they made of him an icon of cultural incomprehensibility not since einstein has [00:51:53 - 00:51:59] somebody have you been so pre-programmed in advance to believe you ain't gonna understand this guy [00:51:59 - 00:52:07] and that's what they said about mclellan and consequently uh his uh his message and his [00:52:07 - 00:52:13] insight failed and we will have to reinvent mclellan around the turn of the century [00:52:13 - 00:52:22] because we are producing forms of media of such interactive uh power and potential social impact [00:52:22 - 00:52:34] that we're going to have to go back and and rethink all of this [00:52:34 - 00:52:39] [ Silence ]