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.