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When technology extends or expands one of our senses, culture transposes as fast as the speed of the process of internalizing the new technology (Tablet 70).
Although the main theme of this book is the Gutenberg Galaxy, or an event setting, which is far beyond the world of the alphabet and the writing culture, one must know why, without the alphabet, there would not have been Gutenberg. And so we need to have some knowledge of the conditions of culture and perception that made writing possible first, and then, perhaps, somehow the alphabet.
Wilson’s account of the years of perceptual training required to enable African adults to see motion pictures bears a perfect analogy to the difficulties that western adults experience with “abstract” art. In 1925 Bertrand Russell wrote his ABC of Relativity on the front page that:
“Many of the new ideas may be expressed in non-mathematical language, but they are no less difficult to understand. What is required is a modification of the image, the imaginative representation we make of the world. … The same kind of modification imposed upon Copernicus in teaching that the earth is not motionless. … For us there is no difficulty in this idea, because we learn it before our mental habits become fixed. Likewise, Einstein’s ideas will seem easier to the generations growing up with them; for us, some imaginative reconstruction effort is inevitable. ”
A recent work by Georg von Bekesy, Experiments in Hearing, presents a solution exactly opposite to what Carothers and Wilson have just given us about the problem of space. While the latter seek to talk about the perception of illiterate peoples in terms of literacy experience, Professor von Bekesy prefers to begin his exposition of acoustic space itself. As someone proficient in auditory spaces, he is clearly aware of the difficulties that exist in speaking about the hearing space, since acoustic space is necessarily a universe in “depth” (See “Acoustic Space”). It is extremely interesting that, in seeking to clarify the nature of hearing and acoustic space, Professor von Bekesy deliberately avoided the position of viewpoint and perspective in favor of the Mosaic Field. And to this end, it uses two-dimensional painting, without perspective, as a means of illustrating the resonant depth of acoustic space. Here are his own words (p. 4):.
“You can discuss two ways to approach a problem. One, which may be called the theoretical method, consists in formulating the problem in terms of what is already known, making additions or extensions on the basis of accepted principles, and then proving these hypotheses experimentally. Another, which may be called the mosaic method, considers each problem for itself, with little reference to the field in which it is located, and seeks to discover relationships and principles existing in the circumscribed area. ”
Von Bekesy goes on to present his two forms of painting:
“A close analogy with these two methods can be found in the field of art. In the period between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries the Arabs and the Persians developed a high command of the arts of description. (…) Later, during the Renaissance, a new form of representation was developed, in which an attempt was made to give unity and perspective to painting and to represent the atmosphere. (…)
When great progress has already been made in the field of science and most of the variables pertaining to its multiple problems are known, a new problem can easily be solved by trying to fit it into the set of known data. But when the frame of reference is uncertain and the number of variables is large, the mosaic method is much easier. ”
It is doubtful that the mosaic method is “much easier” in the study of the simultaneous auditory field, but it is the approach McLuhan used. Indeed, the “two-dimensional” mosaic or painting is the way in which the visual field is smoothed as such, so that there can be the maximum exchange between all the senses. Such was the strategy of painters “from Cezanne”: to paint as if they were holding objects and not as if they were seeing them. Apparently this is what motivated McLuhan to make this book the way he did. On the other hand, I happened to be involved in sound reproduction through high fidelity equipment and had a chance to work at IBM in an acoustic chamber specially built to measure noise level of IBM equipment under extremely controlled environment. I projected and installed a Public Address System for the Manufacturing facility we worked, with some 28000 square meters or 300 000 square feet an had to find out the amount of power necessary to overcome noise and reach people in the premises in such a way they could understand what was being transmitted. The question is that Von Bekesey was concerned about the mechanics of how we humans perceive sound, as something that reach our senses, specially the ear. It seems to me that the question of acoustic oral culture is concerned to what the human mind does with the sound that reaches us in terms of recognizing, interpreting , reacting and most of all, classifying what it is and what to do with it, things that Von Bekesy barely touches, or yet, does not touch at all (REC)
It is impossible to construct a theory of cultural change without knowledge of the changes in the relational balance between the senses resulting from the various exteriorizations of our senses (Tablet 73).
We need to dwell on this, because we will see that from the invention of the alphabet a continuous movement developed in the West towards the separation of the senses, functions, emotional and political states, as well as tasks – fragmentation that has ended – as thought Durkheim – in the anomie (lack of goals) of the nineteenth century. The paradox of the thesis presented by Professor von Bekesy is that the two-dimensional mosaic is, in fact, a multidimensional world of inter-structural resonance. It is the three-dimensional world of pictorial space that is really an abstract illusion, produced by the intense separation of sense from sight from other senses.
It is not about questioning values or preferences. What is needed, however, for any other different understanding is to know why the “primitive” design is two-dimensional, whereas the drawing and painting of the literate man tend toward perspective. Without such knowledge, we cannot understand why man has ceased to be ‘primitive’ or audiotactile in the tendency of his senses. We could not even understand why the man “since Cezanne” has abandoned the visual in favor of the audiotactile modes of perception and the organization of experience. Having clarified this question, we can more easily address the role that the alphabet and typography played in the attribution of the dominant function to the sense of sight in language and art and in the full extent of political and social life. Indeed, while man did not thereby elevate the visual behavior of his sensorium, communities did not. They knew only the tribal structure. The destribalization of the individual, at least in the past, depended on an intense visual life promoted and nurtured by literate culture and only of the alphabetic type. Because alphabetic writing is not only unique but late. There was a lot of writing before it. In fact, any people who cease to be nomadic and goes on to sedentary ways of working is prone to invent writing. Not only all nomads didn’t have writing, they didn’t develop architecture, nor the “closed space,” for writing is a way of visually closing non-visual senses and spaces. It is therefore a way of abstracting the visual of the common intercourse of the senses on the globe. And while language is an externalization (manifestation) of all the senses at the same time, writing is an abstraction of the word.
It is now easier to learn this specific writing technology. The new institutes for fast reading, or dynamic reading, work on the basis of the dissociation between eye movements and inner verbalization. We will see later how all reading in the ancient and medieval worlds was aloud. With the word printed, his eyes quickened and his voice fell silent. But the inner verbalization was taken as inseparable from the horizontal following of the words by the line on the page. We now know that reading can be separated from verbalization by vertical reading. This practice, of course, throws the alphabetical technology of sense separation to an extreme of inanity, but it is important to understand how writing began in any of its types.
In an essay entitled The History of the Theory of Information, read before the Royal Society in 1951, E. Colin Cherry of the University of London noted that “in the early days, invention was greatly hampered by man’s inability to dissociate the mechanical structure from the animal form. The invention of the wheel was a remarkable first effort of this kind of decoupling. The great surge of inventions that began in the sixteenth century was based on the gradual dissociation of the machine from the animal form. ” Typography was the first mechanization of ancient craftsmanship and easily led to the increasing mechanization of all craftsmanship. The modern phases of this process are the subject of Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command. Giedion, however, is concerned with tracing in detail the phases through which, in the past century, we use mechanisms to recover the organic form:
In his celebrated studies of the movements of men and animals around 1870, Edward Muybridge placed a series of thirty cameras at twelve-inch intervals, firing shutters electromagnetically as the moving object passed before the plate(…) Each picture shows the subject in an isolated phase as captured in each camera (p. 107).
That is to say, the object is translated from the organic or simultaneous form to a static or pictorial mode. Rotating a sequence of these static or pictorial spaces with sufficient speed creates the illusion of organic wholeness, or an interaction of spaces. Thus, the wheel finally becomes the means of turning our culture away from the machine (since it shows that the machine reproduces the animal form.)
But it was through the electricity applied to the wheel that it once again merged with the animal form. In fact, the wheel is now obsolete in the age of electricity and missiles. But hypertrophy is the sign of obsolescence, as we will see again and again. Precisely because the wheel is now returning to the organic form in the twentieth century, it is now very easy to understand how primitive man “invented” it. Any creature in motion is a wheel, in the sense that repetition of movement has a cyclic and circular principle in it. Thus the melodies of literate societies are repeated cycles. But non-literate folk music has no such cyclic and repetitive abstract form as the melody. Invention, in a word, is translation from one kind of space to another.
Giedion devotes some time to the work of French physiologist Etienne Jules Morey (1830-1904), who created the myograph to record muscle movement: “Morey very consciously refers to Descartes, but instead of graphing sections, translates movement organic food in graphic form ”(p. 19).
Twentieth-century confrontation between the two faces of culture – the alphabetical and the electronic – lends to the printed word a crucial role in stopping the return to inner Africa * (Tablet 76)
*Reference to Conrad’s expression “The Africa within” – Africa that is “in” the western experience.
The invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel, was the first translation or reduction of a complex and organic exchange of spaces into a single space. The phonetic alphabet has reduced the simultaneous use of all senses, which is oral expression, to a simple visual code. Today, this kind of translation can be effected in one direction or another, through a variety of spatial forms, which we call “media,” or “midia.” But each of these forms of space has particular properties and affects our other senses or spaces in a particular way.
Today, it is not difficult to understand the invention of the pin because – as A. N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World has pointed out (p. 141) – the method of discovery was the great discovery of the nineteenth century:
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the inventing method. A new method came into existence. To understand our times, we can set aside all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, looms, synthetic dyes. We have to focus on the method itself; that is, in the true novelty that broke with the foundations of the ancient civilization.
(…) One of the elements of the new method is precisely the discovery of the way to bridge the gap between scientific ideas and their final product. It is a disciplined attack process at each difficulty, one after another.
The method of the invention, as Edgar Poe demonstrated in his “Philosophy of Composition,” is simply to take as its starting point the solution of the problem, or the intended effect. Then you step back step by step to where you would have to start in order to achieve the solution or effect. Such is the method of police novels, symbolist poem, and modern science. However, the twentieth-century step beyond this method of invention is needed if we are to understand the origin and action of new forms such as the wheel or the alphabet. And this step is not going backwards, backing from the product to its point of origin, to follow and follow the process itself without reference to the product. Accompanying the contours of the process, as in psychoanalysis, where this method provides the only means of avoiding the product of the process, ie neurosis or psychosis.
It is the purpose of this book to study primarily the typographic phase of alphabetic culture. This phase, however, has now found the new organic and biological modes of the electronic world. This means that, at the extreme of its mechanistic development, it is interpenetrated by electrobiological action, as De Chardin explained. And it is this reversal of character that makes our age “conatural,” as it were, of non-literate cultures. We no longer have difficulty understanding the experience of primitive or non-literate people simply because we are recreating it electronically in our own culture. (Post-literacy, however, is a completely different mode of interdependence than pre-literacy.) Therefore, dwelling on the early stages of alphabetic technology is still important for understanding the Gutenberg era.
Colin Cherry had this to say about the beginnings of writing:
A detailed history of spoken and written languages would be irrelevant to our study, but nonetheless, there are certain issues of interest that can be considered as a starting point. The earliest writings of the civilizations of the Mediterranean were through drawings of images or figures, or “logographic” writing: simple figures to represent objects and also “by association, ideas, actions, names, etc.” In addition, much more importantly, phonetic writing was developed, in which symbols were created for sounds. Over time, the figures were reduced to more formal symbols as determined by the difficulty of employing or chiseling a reed brush, while phonetic writing was simplified by forming a group of two or three dozen letters. of alphabet, divided into consonants and vowels.
We have in Egyptian hieroglyphics a supreme example of what is now called redundancy in languages and code; One of the difficulties in deciphering the Rosetta stone lies in the fact that a polysyllabic word could give each syllable not a single symbol, but a number of different ones commonly used so that the word could be perfectly understood. (The effect, when literally transcribed into English, is that of stammering.) On the other hand, Semitic languages reveal in their early days admitting redundancy. Ancient Hebrew writing had no vowels: modern Hebrew does not have them either, except in children’s books. Many other ancient writings do not have vowels. Slavic Russian went one step further in condensation: in religious texts, commonly used words were abbreviated in a few letters, similar to the current use of the U & ”sign, abbreviations such as lb (pound) and the increasing use of initials eg USA UNESCO OK
Avoiding redundancy is not the key to the phonetic alphabet and its effects on people and society. ‘Redundancy’ is a concept of ‘content’, itself a legacy of alphabet technology. That is, any phonetic writing is a visual code for speech. Speech is the “content” of phonetic writing. It is not, however, the content of any other kind of writing. Pictographic and ideographic varieties of writing are Gestalts or snapshots of various personal or social situations. In fact, we can get a good idea of the non-literate forms of writing by modern mathematical equations, such as E = MC2, or by ancient Greek and Roman “rhetorical figures”. Such equations or figures have no content, but are structures like an individual melody that evokes their own world. Rhetorical figures are postures of the mind, such as hyperbole or irony or lithotes or simile or paronomy. Pictorial writing of every kind is a ballet of these postures that delights much more our modern tendency toward synesthesia and audiotactic richness of experience than the simple alphabetic form is abstract. It would be convenient today for children to be taught many Chinese ideograms and Egyptian hieroglyphics as a means of intensifying their appreciation of our alphabet.
Colin Cherry, therefore, has escaped this unique character of our alphabet, which is not only to dissociate or abstract sight and sound, but to remove all meaning from the sound of letters, except that letters without sense relate to meaningless sounds as well. To the extent that any other meaning is lent to sight or sound, the separation between the visual sense and the other senses is incomplete, as is the case in all forms of writing except that of the phonetic alphabet.
The current trend of reforming the alphabet or spelling is to accentuate the auditory sense rather than the visual (Tablet79).
It is interesting to note that there is now growing dissatisfaction with the dissociation between our senses and the alphabetic forms. Page 81 (below) gives a sample of a recent attempt at creating a new alphabet that could give our written word a more phonetic character. The most striking feature to note in the sample is its resemblance, if not the highly textured and tactile page identification of an ancient manuscript. In our desire to restore scene unity of intercourse between our senses, we grope ‘for ancient forms of manuscripts that have to be read aloud or not read at all. Side by side with this extreme development is that of the new institutes for reading fast (dynamic).
In them the reader is educated to command the view so that the eyes follow the page vertically through the center, avoiding all verbalization and the incipient movements of the larynx that accompany the series of snapshots taken by the eyes as they traverse the lines from left to right. in order to compose the mental sound movie we call reading.
The most definitive work we have on phonetic lyrics is The Alphabet, by David Diringer. This is how his exposition begins (p. 37):
The alphabet is the latest in writing systems, being the most highly developed, the most convenient, the most easily adaptable. It is now universally used by civilized peoples; One learns easily its technique in childhood. Obviously there is a huge advantage in using letters that represent simple sounds rather than ideas or syllables; no synologist knows all 80,000 or more Chinese symbols, but it is also far from easy to learn about the 9,000 Chinese symbols used by his students. How much simpler it is to write using only the 22 or 24 or 26 signs or letters of our alphabet! In addition, the alphabet allows you to move from one language to another without much difficulty. Our alphabet, now used for the English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Czech, Croatian, Gaulish, Finnish, Hungarian and other languages, originated from the alphabet formerly used by the ancient Hebrews, Phoenicians, Aramaic, Greek, Etruscan and Roman.
Thanks to the simplicity of the alphabet, writing became widespread and practically common; It is no longer the almost exclusive privilege of the priestly classes or other privileged classes as it was in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China. Teaching was largely reduced to a matter of reading written subjects and made accessible to all. The fact that alphabetic writing has survived for three and a half millennia, with relatively minor modifications, and despite the introduction of the printing press and typewriter and the extensive use of shorthand writing, is the best proof of its efficiency and aptitude. to meet the needs of the modern world. It was such simplicity, adaptability and convenience that ensured the triumph of the alphabet over other writing systems.
Alphabetical writing and its origins constitute a story in themselves. They offer new ground for research that American scholars are beginning to call “literacy.” No other system has had such a long, complex and interesting history.
Diringer’s observation that alphabetic writing is “now universally employed by civilized peoples” is a little tautological, because it was only by the alphabet that men became deribulated or individualized to create “civilization.” Cultures may rise artistically far above civilization, but without the phonetic alphabet they remain tribal, as with Chinese and Japanese cultures. It is necessary to emphasize that my concern is for the process of sensorial dissociation by which the destabilization of men is effected. Whether this emergence of the individual and the destabilization of man is a “good thing” is not for any individual to determine. But identifying and recognizing the process by which this has worked can clear the issue of the mists and moral miasmas that now surround it.
Figure 1, New York Times, July 20, 1961.
The new 43-unit Alphabet: This is a page from a work called “Jesus the Helper,” printed in Great Britain in the experimental and enlarged Roman alphabet. The alphabet, based largely on phonetics, contains the conventional alphabet, with the letters “q” and “x” eliminated and nineteen new letters added to it. There are no capital letters. By the system, the letter “o” is unchanging in the sound of “long”, but “ago” is spelled “agoe” with “o” and “e” on. Another new letter is the inverted “z” for tree sounds. Conventional “s” is used in words like “see”. Other new letters include “i” and “e” linked by an even crossbar, to words such as “blind”; “O” and “u” linked to words such as “flowers” ‘and two“ o ”that are joined together. In September, about 1,000 English children will begin to learn to read from this experimental phonetic alphabet.
Helping the blind man
Long ago there lived a
Blind man. He lived where
Trees and flowers grew; but
The blind man could not see
The trees or flowers.
The poor man had to feel
the way to go with his stick.
Tap-tap-tap went his stick on
The road. He walked slowly.
The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures, as Harold lnnis was the first to show (82)
Another note by Diringer in his book deserves attention. This observation is that a technology that uses letters to represent sounds rather than ideas or syllables is accessible to all peoples. In other words, this means that any society with an alphabet can translate any neighboring cultures into its alphabetic system. This process, however, is only valid for alphabetic cultures. No non-alphabetic culture can adopt an alphabetic culture; because the alphabet cannot just be assimilated; it comes to modify, settle or reduce. However, in this electronic age, we may have discovered the limits of alphabet technology. It should come as no surprise to us that peoples such as the Greek and Roman who had gone through the experience of the alphabet were also led to conquest and organization at a distance. Harold Innis in Empire and Communications was the first to address this topic and explain precisely the true meaning of the Cadmo myth. The Greek king Cadmus, who introduced the phonetic alphabet into Greece, is said to have sown the dragon’s teeth and sprouted armed men. (The dragon’s teeth may refer to ancient hieroglyphic forms.) Innis also explained why the printed word generates nationalism rather than tribalism; and why it creates pricing systems and markets such that they cannot exist without the printed word. In short, Harold Innis was the first to realize that the process of change was implicit in the forms of media technology. This book of mine represents only footnotes to his work, in order to explain it.
Diringer only emphasizes one aspect of the alphabet, no matter how or when it was achieved:
In any case, it should be emphasized that the great achievement of this invention was not the creation of signs. It was, rather, the adoption of a purely alphabetic system which, moreover, denoted each sound by a single sign. From this finding, as simple as it may seem to us now, its inventor, or inventors, must figure among the greatest benefactors of mankind. No other people in the world except these inventors have been able to develop true alphabetic writing. The more or less civilized peoples of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, Asia Minor, Indus Valley, and Central America reached an early stage in the history of writing, but did not go beyond a transitional phase. Some peoples (the ancient Cypriots, the Japanese, and others) developed a syllabary. But only Syrian-Palestinian Semites produced the genius, or geniuses who created the alphabetic writing, from which all past and present alphabets originated.
Each major civilization changes its alphabet, and time can make its relationship with some of its closest relatives almost unrecognizable. Thus, Brahmin, the great matrix of the Indian alphabets, the Korean alphabet, and the Mongolian alphabets derive from the same source as the Greek, Latin, Runic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian, although it is virtually impossible for a layman. perceive real similarity between them (pp. 216-217).
By means of the sign without meaning of its own, connected to the equally meaningless sound, we construct the form and meaning of Western man. In the following pages we will try to outline, more or less briefly, the effects of the alphabet on manuscript culture in ancient and medieval societies. After that, we will look more closely at the transformations that the printing press has brought to alphabetic culture.
Homer’s hero becomes a divided, ambivalent man by assuming an individual ego (83)
The world of Greeks demonstrates why visual appearances cannot interest a people who have not “internalized” alphabetic technology before (87)
The Greeks’ point of view in both art and chronology has little in common with ours, but it closely resembles that of the Middle Ages. (90)
The Greeks invented their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet (93)
The continuity of the medieval and Greek arts was ensured by the link between caelature or engraving and illumination (46)
The growing importance of visuals among the Greeks has led them away from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after having internalized the unified field of electric simultaneity (99)
In these six “tablets” of the mosaic he again addresses the question of how vision forms the idea of reality, as he did in The Gutenberg Galaxy (31) and again fails to convey an idea that makes it clear and convincing what he is talking about.
For example, he goes overboard with the Parthenon issue, which we know has a perspective-correcting construction, which I present in sequence.
However, he presents an interesting discussion as to whether the point of view of the Middle Ages and the Greeks are the same and not our modern way, the relationship that the alphabet has with artistic novelties and science, the illuminations as something apart, and the actual recovery by the electronic technology of these aspects, which in a way is what we are doing here.
The point of view of the Middle Ages and the Greeks is the same and not ours, the relationship that the alphabet has with artistic novelties and science, illuminations as something apart, and the current recovery by electronic technology (90).
For our purposes, which is to sail downstream and do exactly what these six tablets indicate, that is, to use electronics in order to give back to man the perspective that once existed, these concepts presented are of paramount importance, no matter how right or wrong they are. That is, if McLuhan has a hard time demonstrating the point, he is right to have discovered what is a fact: electronics has brought us back to an earlier time that already existed and in which much has been done in creation or education, or whatever involves communication.
The “mysterious” element, as it were, that affects our perception is the notion of time.
McLuhan quotes Bernard van Groningen from his work In the Grip of the Past, which has a double meaning, as it is not just examining the past, but the notion of the past, because, according to him, the Greeks and all non-literate societies had a cosmic, mythical conception of time as simultaneous, to which I add present moment, psychological truth, which is what we feel to events that have profoundly affected us, that is, they exist all the time instantaneously. As a consequence of this, the idea of the past, Van Groningen adds, “The Greeks often refer to the past and, in doing so, link the subject matter to a chronological conception. But as soon as we investigate, the true meaning becomes evident that the idea is not temporal, but used in a general sense. ”
This, in relation to time, is the same as, in relation to space, reducing the size of the figure in the painting without a point of view or escape from perspective.
The visualization of chronological sequences is unknown in oral societies, as it is now irrelevant in the electronic age of information movement.
The “narrative thread” is as revealing as the line in painting or sculpture, because it explains exactly how far the dissociation of the sense of sight from the other senses has taken place.
Erich Auerbach, in his work The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which focuses on the stylistic analysis of narrative art in Western literatures from Homer to the present, tells us that, for example, Homer’s Achilles and Ulysses and Achilles, they are presented in vertical and flat frames, by means of fully externalized descriptions, under uniform illumination and uninterrupted connection, in which free expression situates incidents in the foreground, revealing undeniable meanings, with a minimum of historical development and psychological perspective.
That is, the visual tends to the explicit, the uniform and the consequent in painting, poetry, logic, history.
Those who are not literate or illiterate tend to be implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, either in the early past or in the electronic present. (emphasis mine, REC)
Quite contrary to what, for example in Newton’s physics, as Sir Edmundo Whittaker writes in his book Space and Spirit (p. 86).
“Newtonianism, like Aristotelianism, seeks to understand the world by trying to discover the connection of events to each other, and this is done by ordering our experiences according to the cause and effect category, each agent finding its agents. determinants or antecedents. The claim that this connection is universal and that no event happens without cause is the postulate of causality. ”
Homogeneity, uniformity and repeatability are the basic and component notes of a new world emerging from the audiotactile matrix.
The central issue behind this “trend” of what Mcluhan calls sensory globalism prior to Gutenberg’s invention, which the human senses have imposed on the human being, or rather the only available form, which is to “learn” in order to grasp , through touch and other senses, without the characteristic isolation of the look of the alphabetic culture that Gutenberg introduced by the massification of books.
This may be the hardest thing to understand from McLuhan’s ideas, and it is worth going a little further.
McLuhan does not discuss, or rather prolixly discuss otherwise, something William M.Ivins, Jr., in his book Prints and Visual Communication, which McLuhan claims to have used, bringing a concept to objects that I would like to extend to all of reality, which is the Ipseity, or the particularity of the nature of an object. Either being this and not that, or how to do it if we want to communicate to someone without the object in hand, what it would be.
I think of a plurality of needs, including subjectivity or things that are not material, such as sensations or ideas we have when we submit to certain situations.
Ideally, it would be the creation of a virtuality over the things to which we submit our senses.
In the case of the film presented to Africans, which generated their perception of only seeing a chicken and not what an educated European or American would see, it is the aspect of how garbage accumulation and standing water has to do with In their health, their needs are totally different from those of the literate, as they use one way of understanding the things around them and how to think about them and the literate use another.
Ivins introduces this concept to an objective situation in which he wants to explore the effect that the technique of recording allows to reproduce visual images of plants, possibly medicinal, so that a person of the 20th century can benefit from the same healing properties of this same plant as they did in the sixteenth century, for example. That is, how to communicate from one person to another the knowledge (in the sense of the concept available and proven for whatever it is) about them associated with knowledge, which is the use and coexistence and the attainment of the expected effects.
For example, how can we distinguish by any kind of description the difference between wild and edible cassava, which one is medicinal and which one is edible, but highlights the point?
How to distinguish, in a forest I imagine exists in Africa, the signs that you may eventually be in the sights of a lion’s dinner?
With deciding if you, Brazilian, currently live in the United States if it is better to drop everything and return to Brazil or stay there?
In all three cases, our own or who might advise us is totally different and depends on how the concept and knowledge about what is being dealt with was obtained.
There is a tremendous difference between sensory knowledge and intellectual concept obtained by reading or describing what is at stake.
In this case, what is at stake in the point of view is that the wisdom obtained by the senses all together, which is the case prior to the Gutemberg technology that monopolized the way of knowing, and the one that has prevailed and prevails today, which It is the literate culture.
McLuhan’s big draw is that the computer, the media, the Internet, at last, generate a similarity to what existed before literacy, and my goal in this study is to understand this to make the most of it in the direction I want.
One thing that particularly struck me was the effect this may have had on Aristotle’s logic, of which McLuhan only points out the question of syllogistics, that is, according to Aristotle, the only requirement is that the terms be homogeneous with respect to his possible positions as subjects and predicates, which caused Aristotle to omit singular terms, alias quoted from Jan Lukasiewicz’s work, Aritotle’s Syllogistic.
This flaw in Lukasiewicz’s analysis lays in the fact that the Greeks sought the novelties of visual order and linear homogeneity. McLuhan further points out that this author remarks about the nature of “logic” and the visual and abstatent faculty:
“Modern formal logic strives for the highest possible accuracy. This target can only be achieved through precise language, made up of stable and visually perceptible signals. Such language is indispensable for any science ”to which McLuhan adds: But such language is made by the exclusion of anything that has no visual sense, even words. (emphasis mine, REC)
It is worth quoting ipsis literis what McLuhan has to say about this on page 94:
“The only concern here is to determine the degree of influence the alphabet had on those who first used it. Linearity and homogeneity of the parts were “discovered”, or rather changes in the sensory life of the Greeks under the new phonetic writing regime. The Greeks expressed these new modes of visual perception in the arts. The Romans extended linearity and homogeneity across the civil and military spheres and the world of arch and visual space, or enclosed. Not only did they extend the Greek “discoveries”, they suffered the same process of destribalization and visualization. They extended linearity throughout an empire and homogenization for mass-processing of citizens, statuary, and books. Today the Romans would feel comfortable in the United States, and the Greeks would, by comparison, prefer the “backward” and oral cultures of our world, such as Ireland and the Old South of North America. ”
A nomadic society cannot have the experience of enclosed space (100)
One effect of non-literate cultures on sensory perception is non-Euclidean, that is, intuitive. The most striking effect is the lack of perspective. Without perspective there is no way to represent infinity and the conception of space is radically impaired or altered. But there are gains, one being the possibility, for example, of thinking about the way Einstein did with his theory of relativity.
The big problem with Euclidean geometry is the assumption that all spaces are flat and all at the same time homogeneous – whose properties do not change anywhere in their defined space – and isotropic – whose properties do not change according to the direction in which they are. considered, which modernity widely knows is not so.
However, it is so embedded in literate culture that the first mathematicians to think of curved spaces and other geometry were severely repudiated, and Lobachevski’s case was buried without the presence of his students as they were protesting against it. your ideas something that gives the extent to which it affects people’s conception.
I think it is worth exploring a little more what is at stake, applying this concern with literature and painting.
I found the following considerations made by António Andrade, who attends the Degree in Communication Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto: (See <)
In much of modern art and thought, primitivism has become the common cliche and fashion (104)
A very interesting consequence of the application of the alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic visual concept is the religious idea of those who use them.
The assumption of the author Mircea Eliade, who deals with this, The Sacred and the Profane, when he does not take this aspect into account, makes, according to McLuhan, a gross mistake, because the Internet man would be “sacralized” more than ever. I think that maybe behind this enormous leverage it will make a difference in one’s religious conception about God, by the entry into the age of communication and the computer.
In other words, paradoxically, contrary to a common idea, the Internet “sacrifices” man, and in the next block McLuhan dismisses another tradition of imagining that the invention of Gutemberg, which began with the printing of the Bible, would have exactly the opposite effect. .
“The Gutenberg Galaxy” is intended to show why the culture of the alphabet predisposes man to desecrate his way of being. (107)
McLuhan surprises us on this tablet because it reveals what he thinks is the central theme of the book, as the very way it was written suggests to be a tangle of tablets that may or may not form some logic, since the idea is that they work as photographs. and just indicate an environment.
“In the final part of this book we will accept the role Eliade declined when he said, ‘It is not for us to show by what historical processes… Modern man has desecrated his world and adopted an unholy existence.’ Showing exactly by what historical process this was done is the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy. And, having shown the process, we can at least make conscious decision and be responsible for whether we will once again choose the tribal mode that so much fascination has over Eliade:
The gulf that divides the two modalities of experience – sacred and profane – will become apparent when we come to describe sacred space and the ritual construction of the human dwelling, or the varieties of religious experiences of time, or the relations of religious man. with nature and the world of instruments, or the consecration of human life itself, the sacredness with which one can impregnate the vital functions of man (food, sex, labor, etc.). We will only have to remember what the city or the house, the nature, the tools or the work have become for the modern, nonreligious man, will be seen to be able to see with meridian clarity everything that distinguishes this man from another. belonging to any archaic society, or even to a peasant in Christian Europe. For modern consciousness, the physiological act – eating, sex, etc. – is in some just an organic phenomenon. … But to the primitive, such an act is not simply physiological; it is, or may become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.
The reader will soon realize that sacred and profane are two ways of being in the world, two existential situations adopted by man in the course of history. These ways of being in the world are not of interest only to the history of religions or to sociology; they are not merely objects of historical, sociological or ethnological study. Ultimately, the sacred and profane ways of being depend on the different positions man has conquered in the cosmos; therefore, they do not interest the philosopher or anyone seeking to discover the possible dimensions of human existence (pp. 14-15). ”
Eliade prefers any oral man to the desecrated or literate man; even “a peasant of Christian Europe” retains something of the old auditory resonance and aura of the sacred man, as the Romantics insisted more than two centuries ago. Insofar as a culture is not literate or literate, it has for Eliade the indispensable sacred ingredients (p. 17):
It is obvious, for example, that the symbolisms and cults of Mother Earth, human and agricultural fecundity, the sacred character of women, and the like could not develop into a rich and complex religious system except through the discovery of agriculture; It is equally obvious that a pre-farm hunting society could not feel the sacred quality of Mother Earth in the same way or with the same intensity. There are therefore differences in religious experience, explained by differences in economy, culture and social organization – in short, by history. There is, however, between the nomadic hunters and the sedentary farmers a resemblance in conduct that seems infinitely more important to us than their differences; both live in a sacralized cosmos, both share a sacred cosmic quality manifested equally in the animal world and the plant world. All we have to do is compare these existential situations with those of the man in modern societies who live in a desecrated cosmos, and we immediately realize all that separates him from them.
We have already seen that sedentary or specialized man, unlike nomadic man, is on his way to discovering the visual mode of human experience. But while homo sedens avoids the most potent kinds of optical conditioning, such as those found in literacy, the mere shadows of sacred life, such as those held between nomadic and sedentary men, do not disconcert Eliade. To prefer Eliade to call oral man “religious” is, of course, as unrealistic and arbitrary as to call blondes bestials. But this does not produce any confusion for those who understand that “religious” to Eliade is – as he insists from the beginning – the irrational. He finds himself in this very large company of literacy victims who acquiesced in supposing that the “rational” is the explicitly linear, sequential, and visual. That is to say, he prefers to show himself as an eighteenth-century spirit rebelling against the dominant visual mode that was new at the time. That’s what happened with Blake and a legion of others. Today, Blake would be violently anti-Blake, because Blake’s reaction against the abstract look is now the dominant cliché and cheerleader of the big battalions, moving regimented in sensitivity routines.
“For the religious man, space is not homogeneous; he feels interruptions and failures in him ”(p. 20). The same thing with time. For the modern physicist, as well as the non-literate, space is not homogeneous, nor is time. In contrast, the geometric space invented in ambiguity, far from being different, unique, pluralistic, sacred, “can be counted and delimited in any direction; but no qualitative differentiation, and therefore no guidance, is given by virtue of its inherent structure ”(p. 22). The following assertion fully applies to the reciprocal and relative action of the optical and auditory modes in shaping human sensitivity:
It should be added at the same time that this unholy existence is never found in its pure state. To any degree that has desecrated the world, the man who has decided for an unholy life can never completely eliminate religious conduct. This will become clearer as we proceed; indeed it seems that the more desecrated existence still preserves traces of a religious appreciation of the world (p. 23).
The twentieth century method is to use not one but many models for experimental exploration – the suspended judgment technique (109).
The discussion of tablet 86 comes back here, particularizing what McLuhan calls the suspended judgment technique.
From McLuhan’s quote on p. 110, transcribed by William Ivins Jr, is worth noting and quoting:
“The fun fact, however, is that words and their necessarily linear syntactic order do not allow us to describe objects, compelling us to try poor and inadequate lists of theoretical ingredients, which concretely resemble manual dish recipes. of kitchen.”
I got a copy of this book from Ivvins and I think it’s worth transcribing something else he said (page 51):
“At the Museum (MOMA, NY, of which he was anPrinting Curator), I learned bitterly how inadequate words are as tools for defining and classifying objects that are singular and unique. I found that while I was not interested in the internal processes that go into the man’s brain and nervous system, I was desperately interested in the extent to which he could communicate the results of these processes. I learned that Baptism is not an explanation, description, or definition. Baptism is giving a name, merely adding a particular word or quality to an object. ”
McLuhan emphasizes an even worse aspect, which is that any phonetic alphabet culture falls into the habit of creating the impression that the reader through the written code has a “content” experience, which spoken language has much more. He exemplifies the question of myths in the works of Jung and Freud, whose explanations make no sense to non-literate users who see meanings instantly in the verbal statement. Freud and Jung translate in terms of the awareness of literate states of consciousness of illiterates and, like all translations, misrepresent and omit meaning.
The big challenge is to translate the auditory into the visual, which provokes creative fermentation, that our Internet age lives as did the Greeks in classical Greece or who rediscovered them in the Renaissance.
Electronic communication (Internet, computer) has the instantaneous characteristic that myths required or require of non-alphabetic cultures.
Specialists in linguistic analysis, such as Gilbert Ryle of Oxford, cited, find it impossible to create models because there is no way to communicate them.
McLuhan also mentions that we realize this mainly when we master several languages and in this case he mentions Greek, Latin, English and French and the situation that the eastern world has no concept of “substance” or “substantial form”, why not experience the pressure visual to split the experience into such plots.
Concerning this effect in the printed word, Williams Ivins, Jr, expressed the meaning of typography in a way that no one has ever done (McLuhan says) and I transcribe as a general principle:
“Thus, the more precisely we can circumscribe our data for reasoning about the world of data that comes to us through one and the same sensory channel, the more apt we will be for correcting our reasoning, even though its scope may be much narrower. . One of the most interesting things in our modern scientific practice has been the invention and perfection of methods by which scientists can acquire much of their data; through the same sensory channel of perception. I understand that in physics, for example, scientists are most pleased when they can get their data with the help of a disk or other device that can be read by sight. Thus heat, weight, dimensions, and many other things which in ordinary life are grasped through the senses, other than vision, have become for science issues of visual perception of mechanical pointer positions. ”
McLuhan informs us that Blake regarded the scientific interpretation of reality as merely a distortion, as it took into account only one meaning and commented that this was what had happened in the 18th century and that it was necessary to break free from “Newton’s simple vision and sleep.” .
Einstein would do this in the twentieth century.
I cannot shy away from the fact that the only book I know that reasonably integrates all the senses in understanding reality is the Bible, and the scientific view that is currently being presented as the sole and irreplaceable proposition for this is just a sleep like Newton’s. and humanity has yet to wake up to realize this…
Typography dominates only one period (the final third) of the history of reading and writing (113)
At this point, if McLuhan had structured this book, he would begin Part II, for he is concerned only with the written word, or better printed, within his ability to transfer the audio-tactile space of civilized or literate man or “ profane”.
A very important piece of information is that from the 5th to the 15th century, the book was the work of scribe or copyist and only a third of the history of the book in the western world was typographic.
And I would add that it is rapidly turning into electronics. And because of the amount of production in film, TV, audiovisual media, you will soon have more information this way than in the printed book.
It is worth reproducing McLuhan’s mention of G S Brett in Ancient and Modern Psychology, pp. 36-37:
“The idea that knowledge is essentially book knowledge seems to be a very notion of modern times, probably derived from the medieval distinction between clerics and laity, which has brought new emphasis to the literary and somewhat extravagant character of sixteenth-century humanism. The primitive and natural idea of knowledge is that of “wit or cunning,” or the man of resources and spirit. Ulysses is the original type of thinker, the man full of ideas, capable of overcoming the Cyclops and achieving important triumphs of spirit over matter. Knowledge or knowledge, therefore, is ability to overcome life’s difficulties and. succeed in this world. ”
Brett, at this point, specifies the natural dichotomy that the book brings to any society, beyond the division or inner rupture it produces in the individual of that society. In his works James Joyce reveals on the subject rich and complex clairvoyance. In Ulysses, his character Leopold Bloom, the man of many ideas and stratagems, is an advertising agent.
Joyce saw the similarities between the modern frontier. from the verbal and the pictorial, on the one hand, and on the other, Homer’s world, balanced between the old sacred culture and the new literate or profane sensibility. Bloom, a newly destabilized Jew, lives in modern Dublin, in the partially deribulated Irish world. Such a frontier is the modern world of propaganda, therefore congenial to Bloom’s transition culture. In the episode of Itaca, or seventeenth of Ulysses, we read: “What were your final thoughts usually? , Those of a single ad, which made the passerby stop in awe, a poster novelty, from which all strange additions were excluded, reduced to the simplest and most efficient terms, not exceeding the field of casual and swift vision, according to the speed of modern life ”.
In Books at the Wake (pp. 67-68), James S. Atherton points out:
“Among other things Finnegans Wake is a history of writing. We begin by writing about “A bone, a pebble, a sheepskin (…).” 20.5 ). The mutthering pot is an allusion to alchemy, but there is some other meaning attached to writing, because the next time the word appears it is in a passage relative to improved communication systems. The excerpt is: “All the airish signs of her dipandump help from a Father Hogam till the Mutther Masons…” (223.3). Dipandump helpabit combines the signs in the air with the deaf and dumb alphabet fingers with the ups and downs of the common ABC and the most pronounced ups and downs of the Irish ogham script. The Mason that follows this must be the man of that name who invented the steel feathers. But all I can suggest for “mutther” is the “whispering” of Masons that does not fit the context, although they also make signs in the air (*). “
In this asterisk, the highly educated Anísio Teixeira, translator, explains:
(*) Joyce quotes were left in the original text. Joyce uses in her book all the resources of Dublin’s various jargon, dissonance, calemburg, and word games to compose a whole refractory to exact translation. However, the author’s intention to derive from this particular form of composition a special meaning is incompatible with a translation in which of course the same effects of allusion and transfiguration of sounds could not be obtained. Hence the Translator would prefer to leave the quotes in the original, translating only what seemed translatable. So did the French translator, despite the singular plasticity of his language. (Trad. No.)
And McLuhan adds, in the style I Roque, I would like to annotate Joyce:
“Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter” expresses, through a mythical gloss, the fact that writing meant the emergence of the caveman, or sacral, from within the auditory world of simultaneous resonance to the profane world of daylight. Mention of masons refers to the bricklayer world as the very mode of use of words. On Wake’s second page, Joyce makes a mosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were, with all the themes and modes of human speech and communication: “Bygmeister Finnegan of the Stuttering Hand, jreemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in Joy ru makes, in Wake, his own drawings of the cave of Altamira in Wake, shaping the whole history of the human mind, in terms of its fundamental attitudes and actions in the course of all. the phases of culture and technology. As the title he chose indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress may again disappear in the night of the holy or hearing man.
The Finnegans Wake of tribal institutions may return in the age of electricity, but if we do it again, let it wake or Awake, or both. Joyce saw no advantage in being closed in every culture cycle like a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all modes of culture at the same time and fully conscious. The medium you mention for this self-awareness and correction of cultural distortion is your “colloidoroscope.” This term indicates the colloidal interchange of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and change the balance of their interrelationships in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: “deor”, wild, oral or sacred; Scope, the visual, or profane, and civilized.
The red underline is mine, Roque, and is the most important statement this McLuhan book contains.
So far each culture has constituted a mechanical fatality for societies: the automatic internalization of their own technologies (115)
Uniformity and repeatability techniques were introduced into our culture by the Romans and the Middle Ages (117)
The word modern was a reproach term used by patristic humanists against the medieval scholastics who developed the new logic and new physics. (120)
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud (124)
Manuscript culture is a kind of conversation, even because the writer and his audience were physically linked by the form of recitation that was the mode of publication of books. (126)
Manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels (129)
Marshall McLuhan & Gutenberg 