Mcluhan Riding Range

McLuhan, I don't know how many of you recall him from the 60s, but he had, for a very brief period of time, about five or six years, an extraordinary influence on American culture.

You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, what he said, what he thought, what he predicted.

He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood, so forth and so on.

And his influence, he died in the early 70s, and his influence died with him, even though he had founded the Center for Media Study at the University of Toronto in Canada, he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors.

He was a unique personality and breakthrough, much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality and spawned very few imitators.

And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media.

He did his work as a Joyce scholar, that's what he was, a literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist, that sort of thing.

And then in the early 50s or middle 50s, he wrote a book, which I've never read, it's very hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride, that was his first testing of his ideas.

McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist or a philosopher of media, and that's what he talked about.

He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method on the technologies of communication, printing, film, photography, dance, theater, even such things as money.

He thought of as forms of media.

And he carried out and analyzed these various forms of media and reached very controversial conclusions.

One of the things that was puzzling to me as I went back through and read all this is one of the things was McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the 60s.

And the whole thing was, who can understand this guy, you know, he's like Buddha, he speaks these words that we can't understand.

Well, now, 25, 30 years later, it reads pretty straightforwardly, and most of what he's predicted has come to pass.

I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed with which the Gutenberg world has been overturned.

I mean, there's no hint in here of home computers, let alone interactive networks, virtual reality, phone sex, and so forth and so on.

But this was all grist for the McLuhan-esque mill, and he would have had, he lived, had much to say on this.

It surprised me in reading this stuff how demanding it is on your own literacy.

I mean, he assumes, basically, that the people he's talking to have read everything and have understood it.

I mean, from Homer to Rabelais to Chaucer to Mad Magazine, he assumes you have a complete knowledge of modern film and popular print journalism and popular culture.

All of this was grist for his mill.

I'll show you the books I'm reading from and talking about, and then I'll actually read you a section of McLuhan,

because it's like Joyce, it's a stylistic thing that you can't really encompass without getting your feet wet.

This was his best-known book, probably, and this is the original paperback edition.

This book was immensely discussed when it came out, and probably very little read, judging by the quality of the discussion.

Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man.

This is how most people heard of McLuhan.

And he followed it up with The Gutenberg Galaxy.

These are all first editions.

These books, I don't think, are in print.

Few intellectuals in this century have fallen so totally through the cracks as McLuhan.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, very interesting.

I'm going to read from it, some of it tonight.

It's organized around chapter headings, such as,

Does the interiorization of media, such as letters, alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?

Or, um, Pope's Dunciad indicates the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic and romantic revival.

Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde.

The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.

That's a chapter heading.

Um, topography cracked the voices of silence.

And one of my favorite, Heidegger surfboards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.

So, there's a lot of fun in McLuhan.

And this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar.

Uh, you just can't mess with that without fun.

This is, uh, his third book with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry and Painting.

And I guess I should say, I, a few years ago, somebody asked me to review McLuhan's letters,

which had been published, which I did.

It was, uh, Gnosis or somebody.

Anyway, uh, it brought back to me, uh, he was a convert to Catholicism.

And, an extraordinarily complex intellectual, uh, with, uh, a medievalist,

who became a Joyce scholar, who became a communications expert.

And, in McLuhan, there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the medieval world,

of what he called manuscript culture.

And, essentially, his entire output is a critique of print,

and of the impact of print on, uh, culture.

And I think, though he attempted to be fairly even-handed,

his final resolution of all this was that it had, it had, had many, many detrimental

and distorting effects, uh, on the Western mind.

This is another little book he published back in the heyday,

and he experimented with topographic layout, uh, somewhat hearkening back to the Surrealists,

whom he discusses a great deal.

Uh, and there was something about, uh, it was his fascination with topographical layout

that also brought him into such congruence with, uh, with the wake.

So, let me read you a section from the Gutenberg Galaxy

that is both interesting to think about, or, if you can't understand it,

then an interesting example of, uh, what McLuhan's style was like,

and what I mean by that he was an extraordinarily demanding intellectual.

He doesn't cut you much slack.

This is a short section called

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

Till now, we have been concerned mostly with the written word

as it transfers or translates the audio-tactile space of sacral, non-literate man

into the visual space of civilized or literate or profane man.

Once this transfer or metamorphosis occurs,

we are soon in the world of books, scribal or typographic.

The rest of our concern will be with books, written and printed,

and the results for learning and society.

From the 5th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D.,

the book was a scribal product.

Only one-third of the history of the book in the Western world has been typographic.

It is not incongruous, therefore, to say,

as G.S. Brett does in Psychology, Ancient and Modern,

and here's the quote.

The idea that knowledge is essentially book learning

seems to be a very modern view,

probably derived from the medieval distinctions between clerk and layman,

with additional emphasis provided by the literary character

of the rather fantastic humanism of the 16th century.

The original and natural idea of knowledge

is that of cunning or the possession of wits.

Odysseus is the original type of thinker,

a man of many ideas who could overcome the cyclops

and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter.

Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life

and achieving success in this world.

So that closes the quote.

Then McLuhan comments,

Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy

which the book brings into any society,

in addition to the split within the individual of that society.

The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters.

His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses,

a man of many ideas and many devices,

is a freelance salesman.

Joyce saw the parallels, on one hand,

between the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial,

and, on the other,

between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture

and the new profane or literate sensibility.

Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew,

is presented in modern Dublin,

a slightly detribalized Irish world.

Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement,

congenial, therefore,

to the transitional culture of Bloom.

In the 17th or Ithaca episode of Ulysses, we read,

what were habitually his final meditations

of some one's sole unique advertisement

to cause passers to stop in wonder,

a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded,

reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms,

not exceeding the span of casual vision

and congruous with the velocity of modern life.

In the books at the wake,

James S. Atherton points out,

and here's Atherton's quote,

amongst other things,

Finnegan's wake is a history of writing.

We begin with writing on

a bone, a pebble, a ram's skin,

leave them to cook in the mothering pot,

and Guten Morgue with his Cro-Magnon charter,

tinting fats and great prime,

must once for omnibus step rubric red

out of the word press.

The mothering pot is an illusion to alchemy,

but there is some other significance

connected with writing,

for the next time the word appears,

it is again in a context

concerning improvement

in a system of,

in systems of communication.

The passage is,

all the Irish signics

of her dip and dump help a bit

from and Father Hogam

told the Mutter Maskens.

Dip and dump help a bit

combine the deaf and dumb alphabet signs

in the air,

or Irish signs,

with the ups and downs

of the ordinary ABC

and the more pronounced up and downs

of Irish Ogam writing.

The Mason following this

must be the man of that name

who invented steel pen nibs.

But all I can suggest for Mother

is the mothering of Freemasons

which does not fit the context,

although they, of course,

also make signs in the air.

Is that perfectly clear?

Now, back to McLuhan.

Guten Morg,

with his Cro-Magnon Charter,

expounds by mythic gloss

the fact that writing

meant the emergence

of the caveman,

or sacral man,

from the audio world

of simultaneous resonance

into the profane world

of daylight.

The reference to the Masons

is to the world

of the bricklayer

as a type of speech itself.

On the second page of The Wake,

Joyce is making a mosaic,

an Achilles shield,

as it were,

of all the themes and modes

of human speech

and communication.

By Meister Finnegan

of the stuttering hand,

Freeman's Maurer

lived in the broadest way

immorginable

in his rushlet

too far back

for massages

before Joshua and Judges

had given us numbers.

Joyce is,

in The Wake,

making his own

Altamira cave drawings

of the entire history

of the human mind

in terms of its basic gestures

and postures

during all phases

of human culture

and technology.

As his title indicates,

he saw

that the wake

of human progress

can disappear again

into the night

of sacral

or auditory man.

The Finne cycle

of tribal institutions

can return

in the electric age.

But if again,

then let's make it awake

or awake

or both.

Joyce could see

no advantage

in our remaining

locked up

in each cultural cycle

as in a trance

or dream.

He discovered the means

of living simultaneously

in all cultural modes

while quite conscious.

This means

he cites

for such self-awareness

and correction

of cultural bias

in his

colliderioscope.

This term

indicates

the interplay

in colloidal mixture

of all components

of human technology

as they extend

our senses

and shift

their ratios

in the social

kaleidoscope

of cultural clash,

deor,

savage,

the oral

or sacral,

scope,

the visual

or profane

and civilized.

So,

that's his comment.

Only a fraction

of the history

of literacy

has been typographic.

These people,

Joyce,

to some degree

Pound,

McLuhan,

they were

the prophets

of the world

in which

we now stand.

The world

of integrated,

interactive media,

extraordinary data

retrieval

that erases

the 17th century

notion

of the unconscious.

Nothing

is now

unconscious

if your

data search

commands

are powerful

enough.

And

the remaking

of the human

image

that required

centuries

for print,

the transition

that we talked

about in here

from scribal

culture

to true

book culture

occupied

500 years.

The transition

from book culture

to electronic

culture

has occurred

in less than

50 years.

I mean

it's

eerie

to read

his

examples

of contemporaneity

because there's

stuff like

Marilyn Monroe,

Perry Como,

James Dean.

I mean

he's writing

from another

era

and yet

from his

point of view

he's firmly

embedded

in a kind

of super

future

that we

are

now

able

to look

back on.

here's

another

section

that I

think

makes

some

of

this

more

clear.

The name

of this

section

is

The medieval

book trade

was a second

hand trade

even as

with the

dealing

today

in old

masters.

from the

12th century

onward

the rise

of the

universities

brought

masters

and students

into the

field of

book production

in class

time

and these

books

found their

way back

to the

monastic

libraries

when students

returned

after completing

their studies.

A number

of these

standard

textbooks

of which

approved

exemplars

were kept

for copying

by the

stationari

of the

universities

naturally

found their

way into

print

quite early

for many

of them

contained

in

undiminished

request

in the

15th century

as before

these

official

university

texts

offer no

problems

of origin

or nomenclature

and then

he's quoting

Goldschmidt

he adds

soon after

the expensive

vellum

could be

dispensed

with

and the

cheaper

paper

made the

accumulation

of many

books

a matter

of industry

rather than

wealth

since however

the student

went to

lectures

pen in

hand

and it

was the

lecturer's

task

to dictate

the book

he was

expounding

to his

audience

there is a

great body

of

reporterata

which constitute

a very

complex

problem

for editors

so really

like for

Joyce

for

McLuhan

the book

is the

central

symbol

of the

age

the central

mystery

of our

time

in a sense

I sort

of share

that

notion

it's a

very

Talmudic

notion

it's a

very

psychedelic

notion

it's the

idea

that somehow

the career

of the

word

is the

central

overarching

metaphor

of the

age

and

naturally

if the

book

is the

central

metaphor

for

reality

then reality

itself

is seen

as somehow

literary

somehow

textual

and this

in fact

is how

I think

reality

was seen

until

the rise

of modern

science

we're always

taught

you know

that the

roots of

modern science

go back

to

democrataean

atomism

which is

of course

true

but the

number of

people who

knew that

a thousand

years ago

was probably

very few

the real

notion

out of

which

science

had to

divest

itself

is the

notion

of a

book

or if

that seems

too concrete

a story

a narrative

the story

of man's

fall

and redemption

that was

what the

Christian

exegesis

of

post-identic

time

was all

about

with the

rise of

modern science

the idea

of narrative

has become

somewhat

overthrown

McLuhan

would say

that narrative

persisted

far beyond

its utility

because the

biases

of print

kept it

in place

for such

a long

time

everyone

assumes

that tools

are tools

and you

use them

and that's

that

for McLuhan

the entirety

of the

toolkit

of modern

western man

can be

traced to

the unconscious

assumptions

of print

for example

the idea

of the

individual

which is

a pretty

personal

notion

right there

in close

to the

heart

the idea

of the

individual

is

a post-medieval

concept

legitimized

by print

the idea

of the

public

this concept

did not

exist

before

newspapers

because before

newspapers

there was

no public

there were

only people

and rulers

very rarely

bothered to

pass on

their thinking

to anybody

other than

their closest

associates

and then

only for

utilitarian

reasons

the notion

of an

observing

citizenry

somehow

sharing

the governance

of society

this again

is a print

created

idea

the idea

of

interchangeable

parts

without which

our world

would hardly

function

there would

not be

automobiles

buildings

aircraft

interchangeable

parts

that's an

idea that

comes from

the

interchangeability

of letters

in a

printer's

block

all

that

was the

first

industry

to ever

utilize

the concept

of

easily

reformulated

subunits

and

it's strange

you know

the Chinese

get credit

for inventing

printing

thousands

and thousands

of years

before Europe

but they

would carve

a single

block of

wood

and print

it

they didn't

get the

notion

of movable

type

and movable

type

the

distribution

of books

becomes

the

paradigmatic

model for

the distribution

of any

product

you know

it's

produced

it's

edited

it's

manufactured

it's

sold

and then

sequels

are spawned

all

products

have

followed

this

model

but

books

were

one

of the

earliest

mass

manufactured

objects

to be

put

through

this

cycle

modern

city

planning

the

linearity

of it

the

way

in which

land

surveys

are carried

out

these

are all

unconscious

biases

imbibed

from the

world

of print

print

and they

make sense

if you're

a print

head

but one

of the

peculiar

things

notice that

animals do

not possess

language

many

human

societies

do not

possess

writing

and

very few

human

societies

and only

two on

earth

invented

printing

and yet

once

invented

it feeds

back

into the

evolution of

social structures

and defines

everything

and yet

it's an

extraordinary

artificiality

and we

have been

imprisoned in

it for

hundreds and

hundreds of

years now

now it is

breaking down

and

we are

changing to

a different

sensory ratio

and you

might suppose

if you

hadn't given

this a lot

of thought

that the

new electronic

media

television

and so

forth

would carry

us into

an entirely

different

sensory

ratio

McLuhan

felt

differently

he felt

that it

was

restoring

us

to

a

medieval

sensory

ratio

he felt

that

television

screen

is much

more

like

an

illuminated

manuscript

than

a page

of print

the

distinction

may seem

subtle

at first

but

if

you're

looking

at an

illuminated

medieval

manuscript

notice

I said

looking

you must

look

in order

to

understand

reading

is not

looking

reading

is an

entirely

different

kind

of

behavior

as a

child

you learn

what an

e looks

like

what a

printed

lowercase

e looks

like

after

seeing

twenty

a hundred

a thousand

ten thousand

you know

what it

looks like

you have

an

expectation

of the

gestalt

of the

lowercase

e

and nobody

opens a

book

and looks

at print

unless there's

some

extraordinary

abstract

discussion

going on

we read

print

but we

look at

manuscript

because

manuscript

carries

the intrinsic

signification

of the

individual

who made

it

and his

or her

idiosyncrasies

have to be

parsed

through

to get

the meaning

similarly

with

television

is a

very low

resolution

media

I mean

these are

little

pieces

of light

pixels

flying

back and

forth

and they

must

be

looked at

they

cannot

be

read

and

it's

an

extraordinarily

engaging

process

that's

creates

an entirely

different

set

of

social

biases

than

print

does

and

McLuhan

called

these

biases

and this

was the

one

distinction

or one

idea

of his

that

made

its

way

into

popular

culture

he

distinguished

between

what he

called

hot

and

cold

media

and

usually

people

botch

this

every

time

because

nobody

really

to this

day

understands

exactly

what he

meant

so let

me read

you a

little

bit

about

this

distinction

this

is in

chapter

two

of

understanding

media

and

chapter

two

is

called

media

hot

and

cold

the

rise

of

the

waltz

explained

Kurt

Sacks

in the

world

history

of the

dance

was

a

result

of

that

longing

for

truth

simplicity

closeness

to

nature

and

primitivism

with

which

the

last

two

thirds

of

the

eighteenth

century

fulfilled

in

the

century

of

jazz

we

are

likely

to

overlook

the

emergence

of

the

waltz

as

a

hot

and

explosive

human

expression

that

broke

through

the

formal

feudal

barriers

of

courtly

and choral

dance

styles

but

obviously

it

was

I mean

when you

contrast

it to

what

a

movie

from a

cool

like

TV

a

hot

medium

is

one

that

extends

one

single

sense

in

high

definition

high

definition

is

the

state

of

being

well

filled

with

data

I

love

that

a

photograph

is

visually

high

definition

a

cartoon

is

low

definition

simply

because

very little

visual

information

is

provided

telephone

is a

cool

medium

or

one

of

low

definition

because

the

ear

is

given

a

meager

amount

of

information

and

speech

is a

cool

medium

of

low

definition

because

so

little

is

given

and

so

much

has

to

be

filled

in

by

the

listener

on

the

low

in

participation

and

cool

media

are

high

in

participation

or

completion

by

the

audience

naturally

therefore

a

hot

medium

like

the

radio

has

very

different

effects

on

the

user

from

a

cool

medium

like

the

television

a

cool

The school medium, like hieroglyphic or ideogamic written characters, has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet.

The alphabet, which pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography.

The printed word, with its specialist intensity, burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries,

creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.

But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation with its impersonal empire over many lives.

The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable prints intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the 16th century.

The heavy and unwieldy media, such as stone, are time binders.

Used for writing, they are very cool indeed and serve to unify the age,

whereas paper is a hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally, both in political and entertainment empires.

And he just goes on like this endlessly.

I mean, this was his metier or his media to connect and comment on this stuff.

And television really was both his own media for reaching a very large audience.

In fact, I remember the excitement that swept through.

I didn't even have a television.

I was living in Berkeley at the time and somebody said,

we have to go up to the student union at six o'clock

because Mike Wallace is interviewing Marshall McLuhan.

And it seemed an incredibly freaky notion that McLuhan would be on TV.

It shows you what a stultified, categorically different world we were living in at the time.

Here's just a little bit of McLuhan on television.

This is chapter 31 of Understanding Media, The Timid Giant.

Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image is the posture of children in the early grades.

Since TV, children, regardless of eye condition, average about six and a half inches from the printed page.

Our children are striving to carry over to the printed page the all involving sensory mandate of the TV image.

With perfect psychomimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV image.

They pour, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves in depth.

This is what they had learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic book medium.

TV carried the process much further.

Suddenly they are transferred to the hot print medium with its uniform patterns and fast lineal movement.

Pointlessly they strive to read print in depth.

They bring to print all their senses and print rejects them.

Print asks for the isolated and stripped down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium.

You see?

So often very unexpected paradoxical insights emerge from this stuff.

And in this book that he did with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry and Painting,

it's an interesting technique.

They take a number of works of art, either literature such as the Song from Love's Labour Lost by William Shakespeare,

or the Ballade de Bon Concierge of Geoffrey Chaucer, or the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

And then comment on it.

And also visual arts.

Because McLuhan really felt that the art historical and technological and architectural output of Western civilization

could be essentially psychoanalyzed, could be seen as the tracings of the mass consciousness.

And he felt that the evolution of sensory ratios within historical time had been very, very rapid.

That, for example, he talks about how St. Augustine was a person of great piety and learning.

And people doubting this would show him an open page of scripture or theological disputation.

And he would look at it for a few moments, minutes, and then they would close the book.

And he could tell them what was written there.

And this was taken as proof of his piety.

He was, as far as we can tell, the only man in Europe who could read silently at that time.

This was a period when the audio pre-scribal culture was still being assimilated.

McLuhan spends a lot of time analyzing this episode in the 14th century

when the laws of perspective spring suddenly into being.

As somewhat in the way, very similar in the way, that fractal mathematics have introduced us to a new super space.

For the Renaissance, spatial perspective was essentially a filing system for visual data.

At last they knew where to put everything and where to look for it once they had put it there.

Which, if you have a pre-perspectivist arrangement of space, you have to look, not read, look at each painting in order to locate where the information is.

This is, again, this read-look dichotomy.

McLuhan never discussed psychedelics, but psychedelics, I think, clearly are an extension of these kinds of media that you have to engage with,

that you have to look at, that you cannot read, you cannot take for granted.

And these give back a much more complex world.

I mean, notice that the world created by print is a world of gestalts, buildings, highways, bridges.

We know how these things are supposed to look.

We don't experience astonishment each time we enter a home or an institutional edifice.

There is a built-in set of syntactical expectations in linear space.

And when those are violated, this is very noticeable and becomes the basis for architectural or design innovation or something like that.

I think that what's happening, and I think that this would be McLuhan's take, is that all of these new media that attempt to suppress the appurtenances of media are, in fact, having the effect of returning us to an archaic sensory ratio.

And McLuhan was on to this. He is the one who coined the phrase electronic feudalism.

And he felt that we were headed back toward the medieval sensory ratio, because he saw television as like manuscript.

But I think had he lived into the era of VR, psilocybin, HDTV and implants, he would have seen, we're not reaching back to the medieval.

That was simply a stepping stone to the archaic and that we are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling toned kind of thing.

And all of the breakdown of linearity that you see in the 20th century, abstract expressionism, da-da, jazz, rock and roll, nonfigurative painting, LSD, all of these things on one level can be seen as, as I've said, as harking back to the archaic.

But on another level, what they can be seen as are new behaviors emerging as the cloud of print constellated constipation is lifted, it's breaking down.

An interesting question that we would put to McLuhan if we had him here tonight, I think, is to what degree can what he said about television not be applied to HDTV?

It seems to me that HDTV is television without the biases of TV.

And, you know, a perfect medium is an invisible, a perfect media is an invisible.

Print is the least invisible of all media.

I mean, print is an incredible Rude Goldberg invention for conveying information.

Here's McLuhan on this same subject rather than me dwelling on it.

This is from the Gutenberg Galaxy.

This is a section called a theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.

In other words, by media.

It is very much worth dwelling on this matter, since we can see that from the invention of the alphabet,

there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of the senses,

of functions, of operations, of states, emotional and political, as well as of tasks,

a fragmentation which terminated, thought Durkheim, in the anomie of the 19th century.

The paradox presented by Professor von Bexey is that the two-dimensional mosaic is, in fact,

a multidimensional world of interstructural resonance.

It is the three-dimensional world of pictorial space that is, indeed, an abstract illusion

built on the intense separation of the visual from the other senses.

There is here no question of values or preferences.

It is necessary, however, for any other kind of understanding

to know why primitive drawing is two-dimensional,

whereas the drawing and painting of literate human beings tends toward perspective.

Without this knowledge, we cannot grasp why people ever cease to be primitive,

or audio-tactile in their sense bias,

nor could we ever understand why men have

since Cézanne, that's in quotes,

abandoned the visual in favor of the audio-tactile modes of awareness

and of organization of experience.

This matter clarified, we can much more easily approach the role of alphabet

and of printing in giving a dominant role to the visual sense in language and art,

and in the entire range of social and political life.

For until we have upgraded the visual component,

communities know only a tribal structure.

The de-tribalizing of the individual has, in the past at least,

depended on an intense visual life fostered by literacy,

and by literacy of the alphabetic kind alone.

For alphabetic writing is not unique, but late.

There had been much writing before it.

In fact, any people that ceases to be nomadic

and pursues sedentary modes of work is ready to invent writing.

No merely nomadic people ever had writing

any more than they ever developed architecture or enclosed space.

For writing is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses.

It is therefore an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense interplay.

And whereas speech is an outtering, utterance, of all our senses at once,

writing abstracts from speech.

That's very interesting, isn't it,

that this association of nomadism to the inability to create architectonic space,

and therefore no writing.

That a word is a structure, a written word is a structure,

and therefore no nomad would ever do such a thing.

Interesting.

I think he's saying reading is not seeing.

And those who read do not see.

Even when they lift their eyes from their books,

they carry the attitude of print into the world.

They read.

They attempt to read nature.

And you can't read nature.

You must look at nature.

You must see nature.

Certainly, I think in my own life,

I was thinking about this a few months ago,

and it surprised me.

I'm trying to think of the books that really influenced my life,

and I thought of Moby Dick and Huxley's Doors of Perception.

But then when I really got down on it,

I realized that a little tiny book Huxley wrote

that my mother pushed on me when I was about 12 years old,

called The Art of Seeing,

probably shaped me as much as anything.

And in there, it's a very McLuhan-esque rap without McLuhan-esque terminology.

And he says the way to overcome,

and I think this is very, very, very intelligent and simple advice,

Huxley said the way to overcome the print bias,

and God knows, he was a Cambridge educated gentleman

steeped in the traditions of English literacy and intellectualism,

is freehand drawing.

Draw.

Train your eye.

Draw nudes.

Draw seashells.

Draw insects.

Go into nature and train the eye to see,

and you will cease to read the world.

And readers are emotionally...

A person, a seeing person,

does not want to form a relationship with a reading person.

You know this conflict that we get between men and women,

and between people,

about what we call the head-heart conflict,

is really a reading-seeing conflict.

It isn't a head and heart.

It's that readers and seers cannot relate to each other's emotional life,

because they seem to come from such different worlds.

So yeah, I think you have a very good point,

and the permission to abstract from nature that print created,

is why we have such a terrible culture crisis.

You know, because...

Well, just a kind of a trivial example,

you know, it was said by Marshall McLuhan, strangely enough,

that the Vietnam War could not be won the way an ordinary war is won,

because the citizenry of this country couldn't tolerate the sight of what war was,

and that modern warfare became impossible when it could be televised into the living room,

because war is something that you must read about.

You must not see it.

It must be this grand thing of the distant clash of armies and young heroes being created.

But when it turns into amputation and maggots and screams of pain,

the political fun goes out of it.

So war is therefore a literary activity.

And, you know, the one argument that can be made, I think, in television's favor,

is people don't like to see images of violence.

If we have to show so much violence on television, let it always be real.

The violence is only indefensible when it's vicarious.

If it's real violence, you need to see it,

because it's happening in a world for which you bear a partial moral responsibility.

And I think warfare has been remade by media in that sense.

A lot of politics has been remade,

because imperial doings are usually ugly, brutal,

and not something that you want to exhibit before the populace.

And yet, modern media makes that very difficult to avoid.

You know, you get the notion of public morality,

or, you know, the people won't stand for this.

We have to get this story out.

The people won't stand for this.

Well, now, this is a moral dimension inconceivable in medieval or Roman times.

I mean, what would it mean to say the people won't stand for this?

So there's an attempt to create, through the collectivity,

a kind of community of moral judgment.

The medium is the message means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference.

In all, every discussion you ever hear since the 60s about TV, for example,

is it good, is it bad, terrible, wonderful,

the always, the discussion hinges around what's on TV.

And people say, well, television is terrible, it just shows violence.

And then somebody else says, no, television is wonderful.

Those nature shows and news from far away and masterpiece theater.

This is a stupid argument.

What McLuhan meant by the media is the message,

is he meant that it doesn't matter what you put on TV.

TV is TV.

It has an intrinsic nature.

And whether you're showing National Geographic specials or slasher movies,

TV will do what it does.

It has certain qualities, just like driving a car or skiing,

certain muscles are going to be exercised,

certain perceptual systems enhanced, others suppressed.

And it's very hard for us to understand this because we have accepted this media so thoroughly into our life.

But in fact, it is shaping our value systems in ways that are very hard for us to suspect or even detect.

I mean, television, for example, it's a drug.

It has a series of measurable physiological parameters that are as intrinsically its signature as the parameters of heroin are its signature.

I mean, you sit somebody down in front of a TV set and turn it on.

Twenty minutes later, come back, sample their blood pressure, their eye movement rate.

Blood is pooling in their rear end.

Their breathing takes on a certain quality.

The stare reflex sets in.

I mean, they are thoroughly zoned on a drug.

And when you think about the fact that the average American watches six and a half hours of television a day,

imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and a half hours per day on average watching.

And the one thing about drugs in their defense is that it's very hard to diddle the message.

A drug is a mirror, but television isn't a mirror.

Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip.

This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.

What McLuhan wanted to become, I think, was the founder of a general new sophistication about media.

And he was essentially parodied to death by, guess what, media.

He made of him an icon of cultural incomprehensibility.

Not since Einstein has somebody, have you been so pre-programmed in advance to believe you ain't gonna understand this guy.

And that's what they said about McLuhan, and consequently his message and his insight failed.

We will have to reinvent McLuhan around the turn of the century because we are producing forms of media of such interactive power and potential social impact

that we're going to have to go back and rethink all of this.