Presentation of the Brazilian edition (Prof.Anisio Teixeira) (11)
Introduction (15)
Prologue (17)
The Gutenberg Galaxy (31)
King Lear is a perfect illustration of the process of dispossession suffered by men as they move from a world of roles or functions to a world of occupations or tasks. (35)
King Lear is the first verbal manifestation in the history of poetry of third-dimensional anguish (37)
The assimilation and internalization of phonetic alphabet technology transports man from the magical world of hearing to the neutral world of vision, (40)
Schizophrenia may be inevitable consequence of literacy (45)
Does the internalization of media, such as letters, altering the relationship between our senses, revolutionize mental processes? (48)
The civilization that moves the barbarian or tribal man from the universe of the ear to the eye is now struggling with the electronic world. (51)
The modern physicist is at ease with the theory of the field, which is of oriental or non-western rigor (54).
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village (58)
Literacy affects African physiology as well as psychic life (60)
Because non-literate societies cannot “watch” movies and photos without proper training (64)
African audiences cannot accept our passive role as consumers in the presence of the movie (67)
When technology extends or extends one of our senses, culture transposes as fast as the process of internalizing the new technology is rapidly (70)
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 (73).
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 (76)
The current trend of reforming the alphabet or spelling is to accentuate the auditory sense rather than the visual (79).
The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures, as Harold Innis was the first to show (82)
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 (96)
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.
A nomadic society cannot have the experience of enclosed space (100)
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In much of modern art and thought, primitivism has become the common cliche and fashion (104)
“The Gutenberg Galaxy” is intended to show why the culture of the alphabet predisposes man to desecrate his way of being. (107)
The twentieth century method is to use not one but many models for experimental exploration – the suspended judge technique (109).
Typography dominates only one period (the final third) of the history of reading and writing (113)
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.
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.
Manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels (129)
Rei Lear é perfeita ilustração do processo de despojamento sofrido pelos homens, ao passarem de um mundo de papéis ou funções para um mundo de ocupações ou tarefas (35)
Rei Lear é a primeira manifestação verbal, na história da poesia, da angústia da terceira dimensão (37)
A assimilação e interiorização da tecnologia do alfabeto fonético traslada o homem do mundo mágico da audição para o mundo neutro da visão, (40)
Esquizofrenia pode ser conseqüência inevitável da alfabetização (45)
Será que a interiorização de meios de comunicação, tais como as letras, alterando a relação entre nossos sentidos, revoluciona os processos mentais? (48)
A civilização que traslada o bárbaro ou homem tribal do universo do ouvido para o da vista está agora em dificuldades com o mundo eletrônico (51)
O físico moderno sente-se à vontade com a teoria do campo, de origem em rigor oriental, ou não-ocidental (54)
A nova interdependência eletrônica recria o mundo à imagem de uma aldeia global (58)
A alfabetização afeta a fisiologia bem como a vida psíquica do africano (60)
Porque sociedades não-alfabetizadas não podem “ver” filmes e fotos sem que para isto sejam devidamente treinadas (64)
A platéia africana não pode aceitar nosso papel passivo de consumidores na presença do filme (67)
Quando a tecnologia estende ou prolonga um de nossos sentidos, a cultura sofre uma transposição tão rápida quanto rápido for o processo de interiorização da nova tecnologia (70)
É impossível construir-se uma teoria de mudança cultural sem o conhecimento das mudanças do equilíbrio relacional entre os sentidos resultantes das diversas exteriorizações de nossos sentidos (73)
O confronto no século vinte entre as duas faces de cultura – a alfabética e a eletrônica – empresta à palavra impressa papel crucial em deter o retorno à África Interior (76)
A tendência atual de reforma do alfabeto ou da ortografia é a de acentuar o sentido auditivo mais do que o visual (79)
O alfabeto é um absorvedor e transformador agressivo e militante de culturas, conforme Harold Innis foi o primeiro a mostrar (82)
O herói de Homero transforma-se em um homem dividido, ambivalente, ao assumir um ego individual (83)
O mundo dos gregos demonstra por que as aparências visuais não podem interessar um povo que não tenha antes “interiorizado” a tecnologia alfabética (87)
O ponto de vista dos gregos tanto em arte como em cronologia pouco tem em comum com o nosso, mas assemelha-se muito ao da Idade Média (90)
Os gregos inventaram suas novidades artísticas e científicas depois da interiorização do alfabeto (93)
A continuidade das artes medieval e grega foi assegurada pelo elo entre caelatura ou gravação e iluminura(96)
A crescente importância do visual entre os gregos os desviou da arte primitiva que a idade eletrônica agora reinventa depois de ter interiorizado o campo unificado da simultaneidade elétrica (99)
Uma sociedade nômade não pode ter a experiência do espaço fechado (100) . Em muito da arte e do pensamento modernos, primitivismo fez-se o clichê comum e da moda (104)
“A Galáxia de Gutenberg” tem o propósito de mostrar por que a cultura do alfabeto predispõe o homem a dessacralizar seu modo de ser (107)
O método do século vinte é usar não um único porém muitos modelos para a exploração experimental – a técnica do juiz suspenso (109)
A tipografia domina apenas um período (o terço final) da história da leitura e escrita (113)
Até agora cada cultura tem constituído para as sociedades uma fatalidade mecânica: a interiorização automática de suas próprias tecnologias (115)
As técnicas de uniformidade e repetibilidade foram introduzidas em nossa cultura pelos romanos e pela Idade Média (117)
A palavra moderno foi termo de reproche usado pelos humanistas patrísticos contra os escolásticos medievais que desenvolveram a nova lógica e a nova física (120)
Na Antigüidade e na Idade Média ler era necessariamente ler em voz alta (124)
A cultura manuscrita é uma espécie de conversação, mesmo porque o escritor e seu auditório se achavam fisicamente ligados pela forma de recitação que era o modo de publicação dos livros (126)
Manuscrito deu forma às convenções literárias medievais em todos os níveis (129)
At the S.Carlos Production Engineering School they had installed a room equipped with some 30 personal computers and, looking for the best way to use it to teach, I discovered Marshal McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, which made me realize what was behind the process change when you go digital. This book was originally published in 1962 by the University of Toronto and in Brazil had its first edition in 1972, by USP being the copyright of Companhia Editora Nacional. The translation was a joint work of Leônidas Gontijo de Carvalho and Anísio Teixeira, being his the presentation of the Brazilian edition. I had left IBM after 22 years and had no conception of doing anything without the use of a computer, be it personal or Main Frame. The scholarship contemplated study visits to check the state-of-the-art education and we went to MIT, Harvard,Ohio State and others in the US, Cranfield in England and Aachen in Germany. It became very clear that computer-supported case studies were the way forward. USP had set up a complete classroom with enough computers for a whole class, but there was a backlash against that from teachers and students, for reasons that do not matter here. I was devising a way to make some practical use that could overcome this barrier and be academically palatable. That’s how I discovered McLuhan, because the Gutenberg Galaxy is nothing more than the story of how books, in the way we know today, were introduced to humanity and how McLuhan thought they were ending and we were being launched in an era similar to the era which existed when books were invented by Gutenberg. I did a project, which became a Quality Course for Production Engineering students, we loaded the machines in the computer room with software specially designed for that, which I ordered from the United States , creating a virtual manufacturing operation . Everybody liked it and we overcame that obstacle. The Gutenberg Galaxy is a patchwork quilt and I discuss the mosaic style more thoroughly in this site blog. I have not done every chapter or tablets of the book as I would have wished, but I have done enough for the purpose I set myself and I am finally fulfilling here something that I promised myself there, when the Internet was still too incipient for something of that dimension. The Internet has improved, we became an Electronic Global Village and I have adapted myself to it, as all of this has a lot of similarity to the way we handled information within IBM. In 1995 Internet was still in its infancy, but when it improved and spread in the early 2000’s, I realized that its basic structure was entirely based on the system we used at IBM to create manuals to make use of the Main Frame diagnostics to which I was involved when there, and the communication it was kind of an improved VM. I left USP in 98 and went back to work on this in 2011. I retired and only now I could put everything in a meaningful order. With the help of Internet and as a perfect example of things which are to come.
Another confusing and kind of obscure subject of McLuhan in his The Gutenberg Galaxy is the influence of the printing press and literacy.
The problem starts with with the framing of the subject. Nowadays we have a tendency to measure the illiterate rate, i.e., how many illiterates, or persons without the ability to read and supposedly to write, there is to a particular population of a determined area.
People which notably approached the subject of literacy in the Middle Ages, tend to observe the opposite, i.e., the rate of literate people. Take a look in the article: What level of literacy was there in Europe during the Middle Ages? How did a person become literate? which is a good start. You will notice, although it is arguable, that the author establishes literacy as the ability to read Latin or vernacular, what it seems to me it is not the case. There is the excellent indication of two seminal works to have the subject under scrutiny: M. T. Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307 (3rd edition, 2013), which explore just how the transition to writing and wider reading happened and with what consequences in England, and Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh an Twelfth Centuries (1983), which is a ground-breaking work that introduced the idea of “textual communities,” people with social identities centered on written texts (like the Bible) even though not all of them could read.
I had limited access to these books but enough to come up with a general idea.
He concentrates his studies between 1066 and 1307, justifying that it is a distinctive period for the development of literate ways of thinking and how to deal with it and the fact that most authors tend to give attention only to the invention of printing. He is concerned only with manuscripts. To his opinion, printing succeeded because there was already a literate public created by the manuscrips. His particular argument is the unprecedented scales (in England) production and retention of records and the existence of documents, no matter how difficult it is to balance how many once existed compared to what exists today. He suggests also that an original literate culture was created distinguished especially by its illuminated manuscripts of parchment, taking shapes which would last for generations. He notes also that it was not only in quantity, but in the spread of literate modes, both territorially and socially. He stresses that this is not to mean that everybody was literate, but that literacy was not unusual and people were familiar with it. He arranges the book in two parts:
The first part describes the making of records of all sorts, which spread throughout the country fertilizing the ground in which literacy could germinate;
The second part describes the growth of a literate mentality halting the acceptance of literate modes by the rulers, clerical and lay and the use of it for elementary rules of business, such as dates on letters identifying the writer’s place in temporal order. He observes that the traditional oral procedures, such as reading aloud rather than silently scanning a text with the eye, persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. There were also special problems with the different status of the languages after the Norman Conquest.
From Michael T. Clanchy Preface I discovered an early work on the subject, published in 1945, From Script to Print: An Introduction To Medieval Literature Paperback – June 20, 2013, by H. J. Chaytor, which is also outstanding. In this book the author makes interesting remarks about the changing of views of literary art and style, new ideas about originality and literary property, i.e., copyright, which did not existed at the age of manuscript. Last but not least, printing modified the psychological process by which we use words for the communication of thought . We have such a bias having lived with books for so long and since we tend to take up a printed edition of a medieval text, provided with an introduction, a critical apparatus of variant readings notes and glossary, we bring unconsciously to its perusal the prejudices and prepossessions which years of association with printed matter have made it habitual to us. We do not take into consideration that we are dealing with an age when orthographical standards varied and grammatical accuracy was not highly esteemed, being the language fluid and not necessarily meant as a mark of nationality added to the fact that style meant the observance of fixed and complicated rules of rhetoric. As far as copyright, to copy and circulate another man’s book probably was seen as a meritous action, while in our age of print, such action results in law suits and damages. If we want to understand it, we have to resist to the involuntary biased to which we are accustomed in a way that we demand that medieval literature must conform to our standards of taste or regard it as of interest purely antiquarian. The aim of his book is to show the importance and the difference between the literary and critical methods of the early middle ages and those of modern times. He then details how he intended to achieve it. The vernacular, which was basically a spoken language, when printed had to accommodate to the Latin style and rhetoric. Vernacular, when printed, was mostly to be recited orally. .
Reading and writing
In the Middle Ages, those who could read and write were the few, and I checked at Internet and it was around 5% of the population. To that it should be added that they did it not read with our methods or with our facility and, most of all, with our mental process. Their mental process involved spoken language and written speech. The following accounts for the implications:
When we hear the phrase ‘give me that book’, the word ‘book’ is recognised as a familiar collocation of sounds; in psychological language, we gain an ‘acoustic image’ which experience enables us to identify. This experience includes not only the recognition of particular sounds, but also takes into account pitches, emphasis and intonation; the individual word ‘book’, spoken in isolation, would evoke an image, but would convey no information stimulating to action, unless such information were provided by gesture or emphasis or intonation. In some languages the isolated word has different meanings, according to the ‘tone’ used by the speaker. All languages are, to some extent, ‘tone’ languages, the simple phrase, ‘Good morning’, may mean, according to the manner of its utterance, ‘I’m delighted to see you’, or ‘Here’s that infernal bore again’. It may mean, ‘Thank goodness, he’s going’, or ‘Come again when you can’.
Experience, therefore, takes into account other matters than the sounds which compose an individual word; but for the purpose of this analysis, we confine our attention to the word as such. The acoustic image may be translated into the visual image of a book, and if the hearer is illiterate, this is probably the end of the process. If the hearer can read, he will substitute for the visual image of a book the printed word ‘book’, and in either case there may be a half-felt tendency to articulate the word, a feeling known to psychology as a ‘kinesthetic’ or ‘speech-motor’ image.
When, therefore, a child is learning to read, his task is to construct from printed symbols an acoustic image which he can recognise. When recognition has been achieved, he pronounces the word, not only for the satisfaction of his teacher, but also because he cannot himself understand the printed symbols without transforming them into sounds; he can read only loud. If he reads faster than he can speak, pronunciation becomes a rapid muttering, en eventually ceases entirely. When this stage has been reached, the child has substituted a visual for an acoustic image, and so long as he continues to be dependent upon printed matter, as most of us are, this condition is never likely to change.
When we read, the visual image of the printed word-form instantaneously becomes an acoustic image; kinesthetic images accompany it, and if we are not reading aloud, the combination of the two produces ‘inner speech’, which, in the case of most people, includes both inner speaking and inner hearing. It may be that inner pronunciation falls below the threshold of consciousness in the case of those greatly occupied with printed matter; but it will rise to the surface, inf the individual begins to read a foreign language in a script with which he is not entirely familiar, or to learn by heart a difficult passage which must be orally reproduced verbatim. It is said that some doctors forbid patients with severe throat affections to read, because silent reading provokes motions of the vocal organs, though the reader may not be conscious of them. So also when we speak or write, ideas evoke acoustic combined with kinesthetic images, which we are at once transformed into visual word images. The speaker or writer can now hardly conceive of language, except in printed or written form; the reflex actions which the process of reading or writing is performed have become so ‘instinctive’ and are performed with such facile rapidity, that the change from the auditory to the visual is concealed from the reader or writer, and makes analysis of it a matter of great difficulty. It may be that acoustic and kinesthetic images are inseparable, and that ‘image’ as such is an abstraction made for purposes of analysis, but which is non-existent considered in itself and as pure. But whatever account the individual may render of his own mental processes, and most of us are far from competent in this respect, the fact remains that his idea of language is irrevocably modified by his experience of printed matter.
The result is that we cannot think of language without reference to its written or printed form, and many prefer the printed to the written.
Note (Roque E. de Campos): I had an experience that only now I understand what was happening. I’m Brazilian, but we lived in the USA in the 70’s and my youngest son became literate there. When we returned to Brazil the school wanted to take a test to check if he could read and he readily agreed. When the teacher showed an orange, which for us in Portuguese is “laranja”, but he wrote orange. When he read Portuguese phrases, he read with the American spelling and accent, for example, “Coelho” which for us is “Rabbit”, he read Coelro, because of the pronunciation of “h” in English. It was a funny thing and we laughed at what we saw, to his distress, that didn’t understand what was going on. For a while he became a novelty, reading things in Portuguese with pronunciation of the letters as in English, to which he had been literate and the effect was very curious. Over time he realized the differences, adapted his reading to Portuguese and only now I understand what has happened to him through this explanation.
From the presentation of Brian Stock’s The implications of Literacy, I quote:
This book explores the influence of literacy on eleventh and twelfth-century life on social organization, on the criticism of ritual and symbol, on the rise of empirical attitudes, on the relationship between language and reality, and on the broad interaction between ideas and society.
Medieval and early modern literacy, Brian Stock argues, did not simply supersede oral discourse but created a new type of interdependence between the oral and the written. If, on the surface, medieval culture was largely oral, texts nonetheless emerged as a reference system both for everyday activities and for giving shape to larger vehicles of interpretation. Even when texts were not actually present, people often acted and behaved as if they were.
The book uses methods derived from anthropology, from literary theory, and from historical research, and is divided into five chapters:
The first treats the growth and shape of medieval literacy itself. The other four look afresh at some of the period’s major issues:
Heresy,
Reform,
The Eucharistic controversy, the thought of Anselm, Abelard, and St. Bernard, together with the interpretation of contemporary experience–in the light of literacy’s development.
The study concludes that written language was the chief integrating instrument for diverse cultural achievements.
Printing Revolution and its Impact on Social and Cultural Formations
Printing revolution ushered in the era of modern Europe by making both ancient and medieval texts available to a broader audience which produced a fertile ground for new ideas and new theories. Marshall McLuhan rightly notes that the shift from predominantly oral culture to print culture also affected the nature of human consciousness in that print represented an abstraction of thought which gave precedence to linearity, sequentiality and homogeneity. This mode of thinking is very much evident not only in rationalist philosophy, realistic fiction, but also in the rise of scientific materialism in the following centuries. Printing also led to the standardization of various European languages as works began to be published in these languages. Eventually this standardization of vernacular languages contributed toward promoting literatures which were used to create national mythologies. Whereas maps were in circulation since ancient times, cartography as a science is the child of print revolution. And cartography was not only important in demarcating national boundaries, but also mapping the territories that were colonized in the new world.
In order to understand the deep changes that were the result of printing revolution, we need to focus our attention at the transition from the scribal to the print culture which brought the book culture from inside the monasteries to outside into the universities. This outwards movement got lay people involved in reading and writing activities. During the Middle Ages, the book production in the manuscript form was confined to monasteries and other ecclesiastical centers which had thus direct control of the resulting book culture. The scribal culture of the Middle Ages depended on the meticulous copying of manuscripts by scribes who spent hours at their task in scriptoria. Such a labor intensive task could not lead to large scale duplication and hence, access to manuscripts was confined to chiefly the clerics who became custodians of the book culture. In the feudal social structure, therefore, the scholarly activities were confined to monasteries and reading was usually the occupation of clerics.
The modes of communication transform modes of production as well as modes of consumption. In the preprint era, when only a small percentage of the population had access to written sources of information or knowledge, both public and private affairs were primarily conducted through oral communication. The primacy of physical presence in communication promoted community formations that were very much dependent on geographical togetherness and within that constraint further determined by communities based on parochial and family bonds. Printing revolution changed all that–for the first time, it was possible for political, economic, and culture producers to reach people who were dispersed geographically. As a result new types of communities were formed that were based on personal or professional interests, or political affiliations.
Even though printing involved a different mode of production, early printers used conventions of the scribal culture as they produced books. Printing was seen initially as a more efficient way of mass copying of manuscripts rather than as a totally new medium which would transform the way people read, wrote, as well as handled texts. Just as manuscript copyists showed preoccupation with surface appearance making sure that the copy was as close to the original, so did the early printers aim at producing printed books which looked very similar to manuscripts in surface appearance. Soon however, printers started seeing the advantages inherent in the print medium that allowed more things than possible through hand copying. Mechanical reproduction led to freeing of time that could be devoted to the other aspects of text production. This included appearance, meaning, as well as ease of reading which led to editing conventions very different from those used in manuscript production. Since a small mistake could be reproduced in thousands of copies, so a great deal of attention was given to proof reading and editing. Even the readers got involved by sending in the errors they detected which were corrected by issuing errata pages in the already printed editions and using corrected future editions. We now stand at another divide–between the print and the electronic culture-and we see a similar conflation of two very different modes of production. Print practices and standards are used to evaluate or produce texts in a totally different medium. Only slowly are we beginning to realize that inherent ephemerality, and transmutability of the electronic text changes the text’s relationship to both the reader as well as the writer.
Elizabeth Eisensteinargues that printing brought about a revolutionary change in the ways in which knowledge was preserved, used and passed on to the succeeding generations. Unlike the print era, copying in the scribal era was a laborious process and it was almost impossible to get exactly similar copies of the original manuscripts. Thus, a number of variant manuscripts would be in circulation. Due to limited number of copies, each manuscript was unique and had to be guarded in public places, usually chained to bookshelves, or stowed away in vaults and other safe places, so it was not lost or destroyed. The distinction that we make now between the original and the copy came into existence with the rise of the print culture. Printing made it possible for the mass production of identical copies which could be distributed widely amongst people separated geographically as well as historically. As printing made ancient as well as medieval texts available, it also allowed opportunities to future scholars, literary men, or scientists to be able to study, compare, and synthesize this knowledge and come up with their own theories. Describing “typographical fixity”as necessary for “rapid advancement of learning,” Eisenstein notes that what chiefly distinguished the print era from the preprint was the accumulation of knowledge made possible through the preservative powers of print. In the preprint era due to the scarcity of manuscripts it was not possible for the general public to have recourse to the accumulated knowledge of the past. Thus, even before the close of the sixteenth century, the areas of charting the planets, mapping the earth, synchronizing chronologies, codifying laws or compiling bibliographies underwent a major change in that the old knowledge was retrieved and given typographical fixity which made it available for broader study and perusal, soon to be replaced by new schemes and charts which were continually corrected and refined by the following generations. The error free compilation and distribution of technical literature, for example, astronomical or geographical data, maps, charts and so on, freed the technical personnel to engage in observation and data collection. Eisenstein finally concludes, that printing by making simultaneous viewing of identical data by people geographically separated “constituted a kind of communication revolution in itself.”
In their exhaustive study The Coming of Book ,Febvre and Martinnote that the book trade through mass copying of manuscripts turned books into commodities of exchange which could be sold for profit. Gutenberg’s invention of printing press, as scholars point out, perhaps was one of the successful experiments by people in that era to find mechanical means of reproduction so that increasing demand for books could be met expeditiously. Printing has indeed been described as the first assembly line industry where a team of typographers produced a finished product that could be copied for mass distribution.
As the book trade became more lucrative and the reading public increased in number, publishers invested in printing books that would appeal to a broader audience. Initially, religious and devotional literature constituted a higher percentage of literature that was printed, but this changed by the eighteenth century when new forms of literature slowly established themselves. The society based on print culture relied on individual acts of writing as well as reading which promoted notions of individuality, originality, and creativity which was reflected in new literary forms. The romantic movement in Germany and England further promoted the idea of the inspired writer who produces a totally unique and original work which is different from other works. It was in the late eighteenth and beginning of nineteenth century that authors actively campaigned for intellectual right or copyright to their own work.
With the publication of his November, 1965 New York magazine article, “What If He’s Right?” Tom Wolfe’s place in the McLuhan mythos was assured. Others may have worked harder and contributed more to bring Marshall McLuhan’s work to the public’s attention. But Wolfe’s prior (and future) reputation, coupled with his elegance as a writer, and applied to McLuhan’s thought in the year following the publication of Understanding Media, together generated a milestone in McLuhan’s career as a public intellectual. Moreover, with a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University and experience as a working journalist, Wolfe had the background to interpret McLuhan for the masses, and the credentials to affirm and validate his work.
“What If He’s Right?” also reflects Wolfe’s affection for McLuhan, and the friendship that was beginning to form between the two (and would continue for the remainder of McLuhan’s lifetime). Wolfe’s affinity for McLuhan and his work has endured over the two decades since McLuhan’s death, and is evident, for example, in the 1996 documentary,The Video McLuhan, produced by Stephanie McLuhan-Ortved, and written and narrated by Wolfe. Clearly, Wolfe recognized a kindred spirit in McLuhan.
Like McLuhan, Wolfe has been something of an intellectual maverick, working across scholarly, journalistic, and artistic boundaries, and thereby defying categorization. Both individuals have been outsiders, McLuhan having been rejected by the academic establishment until recently, Wolfe still being viewed with skepticism by the literacy establishment, despite such accomplishments asThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Pump House Gang, Radical Chic,The Painted Word,The Right Stuff,From Bauhaus to Our House, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and last year’s A Man In Full. Given their iconoclastic (one might say non-Euclidean) tendencies, McLuhan and Wolfe might well be characterized as parallel lines that did in fact meet.
Thus, when the Canadian Consulate in New York approached us about sponsoring an annual McLuhan Lecture at Fordham University (motivated in part by the success of the McLuhan Symposium we hosted in 1998) Tom Wolfe seemed like the ideal choice to launch the series. Wolfe agreed with this assessment, and gave the Inaugural Marshall McLuhan Fordham University Lecture on Understanding Media on February 25th, 1999, at Fordham Law School’s McNally Auditorium in New York City, across the street from Lincoln Center. Over three hundred people were in attendance, with an overflow crowd viewing the event from outside the auditorium via closed-circuit television. The media were out in full force, interviewing Wolfe before the lecture, while C-SPAN taped the event.
Wolfe wore his trademark white suit, and when he entered the auditorium the audience greeted him with the kind of applause normally reserved for rock stars. Wolfe was introduced by Fordham University President, Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., who took the opportunity to good-naturedly scold Wolfe for his depiction of the Bronx (the site of Fordham’s main campus, where McLuhan spent the 1967-1968 school year as our first Albert Schweitzer Professor) in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Canada’s Consul General also spoke, declaring McLuhan Canada’s greatest intellectual.
Wolfe’s lecture was extemporaneous and enthralling, combining personal anecdotes (including the often-repeated story of Wolfe and McLuhan’s trip to a topless restaurant in San Francisco, told in unprecedented detail), biographical information, and a explication of McLuhan’s key insights. James Carey, CBS Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University and the author of numerous articles on McLuhan and Harold Innis, commented to me that after going over the extensive notes he had taken during the talk, he realized with admiration that behind Wolfe’s string of memories, anecdotes, and observations was “a marvelously coherent logical structure.” The event itself was a great success, due to the generosity of the Canadian Consulate and the hard work of my colleague John M. Phelan, and the dean of our Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Robert Himmelberg and his staff.
As for the content of Wolfe’s talk, the material would be familiar to anyone who has read “What If He’s Right?” and/or viewed The Video McLuhan. In fact, there was a bit of irony in the fact that the audience included no small number of McLuhan scholars who knew more about McLuhan’s work than Wolfe, and who became slightly miffed at factual errors in his lecture. I would suggest, however, that in this case the significance of the event was in the medium rather than the message. What mattered was Wolfe’s rhetorical prowess, and his eloquence as a speaker. Lending his style and his celebrity status to the cause of McLuhan studies and media ecology scholarship, Wolfe’s appeal was one of a ritual re-enactment of his earlier McLuhan milestone. And when asked, “What if he’s right?” Wolfe still responded that we won’t really know the answer until neuroscience is much further advanced than it is right now. I should add that for those who were not familiar with McLuhan, the lecture served as a wonderful introduction to his life and work.
The most controversial aspect of Wolfe’s talk was his emphasis on the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as one of the major influences on McLuhan’s thought. McLuhan certainly was familiar with Teilhard de Chardin, and his concept of the global village may well have evolved from Teilhard’s noosphere. The idea that Teilhard’s influence was of the same weight as, say, that of Harold Innis or I.A. Richards seems to be idiosyncratic to Wolfe, however, and most certainly misleading. After all, others aside from Teilhard contributed to the genesis of the global village, which in all fairness represents only one of McLuhan’s innumerable probes and insights. And while it is one of his most successful memes, it is less significant than such ideas as the medium is the message, media as human extensions, technologies as human environments, sense ratios, and the laws of the media. Wolfe may be projecting his own fascination with Teilhard onto McLuhan, and his reading may be debatable, but it is also mostly harmless.
Anyone interested in understanding media or understanding McLuhan will not find all that much that is helpful in Teilhard de Chardin, but those who are interested in Teilhard may benefit from being directed to McLuhan. And as Carey noted in his keynote address “Where Do We Go With Marshall McLuhan?” delivered at the 1998 New York State Communication Association Convention (October 9-11, Monticello, NY), McLuhan has become something of a Rorschach test, open to being interpreted as a postmodernist, as a cyberspace pioneer, and as a dialectical materialist. This sort of ferment is a sign of McLuhan’s importance as a scholar, and is a fate he shares with other noteworthy intellectuals.
Wolfe’s McLuhan is one of many, it is true. But his McLuhan stands out because Wolfe is one of our century’s great mythmakers, and the tale he weaves of McLuhan’s intellectual odyssey is of Homeric proportions. The song he sings of McLuhan may not be the most accurate, nor the most detailed, but it is the poetic truth, not the facts, that concerns him. Wolfe’s McLuhan is larger than life, part of a pantheon that includes Darwin, Einstein, and Pavlov, a giant on whose shoulders we can feel proud to stand.
The Black Stain ; Alsace-Lorraine was the black stain of France. The ceding of the region to the German Empire in 1871 deeply hurt the French people. The desire for revenge in France was wide-spread.
One rather confusing and kind of obscure tenures of McLuhan in his The Gutenberg Galaxy is the influence of the printing press in the appearance of nationalism and its most important product; countries or homeland. If you try to find out about the origins of nationalism and the modern state, there is a preference, and I quote from Wikipedia, to go under three paradigms for understanding the origins and basis of nationalism:
Primordialism(perennialism) proposes that there have always been nations and that nationalism is a natural phenomenon.
Ethnosymbolism explains nationalism as a dynamic, evolutionary phenomenon and stresses the importance of symbols, myths and traditions in the development of nations and nationalism.
Modernism proposes that nationalism is a recent social phenomenon that needs the socio-economic structures of modern society to exist.
In other words, shallow and broad notions which are more a set of questions than answers. After careful screening it seemed to me that two authors came up with better ideas about the subject and incidentally, they went in the same direction that McLuhan did, and they can be considered as better explanations of his ideas: Benedict Anderson and his book Imagined Communitiesand Elizabeth Eisenstein and her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Since I will introduce other ideas to the ones those authors expose I will quote, synthesize and sometimes expand their Wikipedia entry:
Perhaps Benedict Anderson most significant idea is the one which originate the Title: Due to the fact that all persons from a particular nationality or community cannot be acquainted with each other, their relation can only exist as something imagined and I quote him:”it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. Having in mind that there were and there are hundreds, if not thousands of dialects spoken in groups of people, which now we could generally refer as vernacular, or language spoken at home, the need of a language that could be communicated all over was perhaps one of the main reasons of the use of Latin which inevitably was of privileged access. With the advent of the printing press, and the movement to abolish the ideas of rule by divine right and hereditary monarchy, it gave birth to what is called printing press capitalism, which was the convergence of capitalism and print technology. It had embedded the standardization of national calendars, clocks and language all of which was embodied in books and the publication of daily newspapers. Benedict Anderson coined the expression printing press capitalism which is a theory underlying the concept of a nation, as a group that forms an imagined community, that emerges with a common language and discourse that is generated from the use of the printing press, proliferated by a capitalist marketplace. Capitalist entrepreneurs printed their books and media in the vernacular (instead of exclusive script languages, such as Latin) in order to maximize circulation. As a result, readers speaking various local dialects became able to understand each other, and a common discourse emerged. Anderson argued that the first European nation-states were thus formed around their “national print-languages”. It seems to me that he stressed the capitalist entrepreneurs more because of his Marxist ideas because it is a fact that other groups, such as the religious, or academic be it protestant or catholic or anything else, also shared the same way the possibility he pointed out for the capitalists. A perfect example is the publication of the 95 Theses in 1517 which sparked the reformation, under which Europe went through 200 years of warfare that led to the gradual establishment of the nation-state as the powers that were dominant, over the previous dominance of the Roman Catholic Church and the God’s will of self appointed Kings confirmed by the Popes. Summarizing, Anderson begins his work by bringing up three paradoxes of nationalism that he addresses in his work:
Nationalism is a recent and modern creation despite nations being thought of by most people as old and timeless;
Nationalism is universal in that every individual belongs to a nation, yet each nation is supposedly completely distinct from every other nation;
Nationalism is an idea so influential that people will die for their nations, yet at the same time an idea difficult to define.[2]
In Anderson’s theory of nationalism, the phenomenon only came about as people began rejecting three key beliefs about their society:
That certain languages such as Latin were superior to others in respect to access to universal truths;
That divine right to rule was granted to the rulers of society, usually monarchs, and was a natural basis for organizing society;
That the origins of the world and the origins of humankind were the same.[2]
Anderson argued that the prerequisites for the rejection of these beliefs began in Western Europe through the numerous factors that led to the Age of Enlightenment, such as the power of economics, the scientific revolution, and the advent of improvements in communication brought about by the invention of the printing press under a system of capitalism (or as Anderson calls it, print capitalism).[2] Anderson’s view of nationalism places the roots of the notion of “nation” at the end of the 18th century when a replacement system began, not in Europe, but in the Western Hemisphere, when countries such as Brazil, the United States, and the newly freed Spanish colonies became the first to develop anational consciousness.[2]
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
Like Benedict Anderson imaginary concept, Elizabeth L.Eisenstein in the preface stresses an idea that has the same metaphoric power: “I decided that cataloguing would be simplified if I referred to the tool rather than its user. Of course not one tool but many were involved in the new duplicating process. As I try to make clear in the first chapters, the term printing press in the context of this book serves simply as a convenient labelling device as a shorthand way of referring to a larger cluster of specific change entailing the use of movable metal type, oil-based ink, etc. My point departure, in any case, is not one device invented in one Mainz shop, but the establishment of print shops in many urban centers through Europe over the course of two decades or so.”
Eisenstein’s best-known work is The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, a two-volume, 750-page exploration of the effects of movable typeprinting on the literate elite of post-Gutenberg Western Europe. In this work she focuses on the printing press’s functions of dissemination, standardization, and preservation and the way these functions aided the progress of theProtestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution. Eisenstein’s work brought historical method, rigor, and clarity to earlier ideas of Marshall McLuhan and others, about the general social effects of such media transitions.[4
From a Review by Shannon E. Duffy (Department of History, University of Maryland-College Park) Published on H-Ideas (June, 2000)
The Unacknowledged Revolution
Her goal is to show how intellectual and social reactions to the new print technology had long-term and frequently unintended consequences, and, as a result, why this period marked a crucial turning point in western history. Eisenstein’s thesis is that the capacity of printing to preserve knowledge and to allow the accumulation of information fundamentally changed the mentality of early modern readers, with repercussions that transformed Western society. With the establishment of printing presses, accumulation of knowledge was for the first time possible. According to Eisenstein, the shift to printing reversed the whole orientation of attitudes towards learning. The book has three main sections. In the first section, Eisenstein explains why print culture represented such a fundamental break with the past. In the other two sections, she examines the impact of printing on the Renaissance and its revival of classical literature, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. Eisenstein stresses the interrelated nature of cultural developments within these three areas of study, which she believes are too often kept separate by modern historians. She also emphasizes her belief that historians have underestimated the role of the printing press, due to their focus on its impact only as it pertained to the dissemination of “new” ideas. The assumption, both with regard to biblical writings and to classical treatises on science, was that each revised work that further sorted out the jumbled legacy would help make this wisdom clearer. But revised editions of scripture, which took increasing advantage of the greater linguistic learning available in printed language dictionaries, revealed inconsistencies and ambiguities in the texts which could not be easily resolved. Laying inherited scientific works side by side for the first time also pointed up discrepancies and contradictions. At the same time, the new ability to convey maps, charts, and pictures in a uniform and permanent way meant that older theories in cartography, astronomy, anatomy, and botany could be checked against new observations. The use of this new technology produced unexpected results. How the differing reactions to the changes brought about by printing shaped subsequent European society is most clearly seen in Eisenstein’s extended discussion of the role print culture played in shaping religious debates before and after the Protestant Reformation. There had been many earlier heretical movements within the Catholic Church before Luther’s posting of his 95 theses. But the dissemination and greater permanence of print culture allowed his challenge to have a much greater impact. Moreover, the competitive nature of the printing industry, which was driven by a desire for sales, provided a new, more public outlet for controversies, and insured that what began as a scholarly dispute between theologians gained an international audience. Reformation impulses and the printing industry fed off and accelerated one another in an age where religious materials were popular sellers. In Protestant lands, approval of vernacular bibles led to encouragement of greater lay literacy and a closer tying of biblical lore with developing national cultures. In Eisenstein’s view, the differences in Catholic and Protestant reactions to printing were not due solely to theological differences, or to Protestants being more enlightened or trusting of their congregations. Some individual Protestant leaders were hostile to the changes wrought by printing, particularly the wider dispersal of controversial books to lay audiences. But areas under Protestant control were generally less able to implement censorship of the presses than the more centralized governments of Catholic areas. While the main focus of The Printing Press is limited to a relatively small group of already-literate elites, Eisenstein believes that the changes which print culture brought to the early modern world eventually transformed Western society at large. By focusing on a fundamental shift in mentality, which came about due to a basic change in communication and collective memory, and the advent of uniform duplication, Eisenstein’s book anticipates many areas of interest in recent intellectual history. Her conception of a cosmopolitan “Republic of Letters” created by the new printing technology that transcended national borders has been carried on by historians of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century thought such as Dena Goodman.[1] Her emphasis on the need to look at the impact of the clandestine book trade operating on the periphery of the Catholic dynasties has also figured prominently in the works of Robert Darnton and Jack Censor, and in her own more recent work on eighteenth-century France. While the main focus of The Printing Press is limited to a relatively small group of already-literate elites, Eisenstein believes that the changes which print culture brought to the early modern world eventually transformed Western society at large. By focusing on a fundamental shift in mentality, which came about due to a basic change in communication and collective memory, and the advent of uniform duplication, Eisenstein’s book anticipates many areas of interest in recent intellectual history. Her conception of a cosmopolitan “Republic of Letters” created by the new printing technology that transcended national borders has been carried on by historians of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century thought such as Dena Goodman. Her emphasis on the need to look at the impact of the clandestine book trade operating on the periphery of the Catholic dynasties has also figured prominently in the works of Robert Darnton and Jack Censor, and in her own more recent work on eighteenth-century France. On the other hand, Eisenstein in 1992 expressed frustration that many of the artificial borders in intellectual history that she had tried to bridge in The Printing Press still dominated discussions of European development. Studies of Renaissance and early European print culture generally remain unrelated to work on the Enlightenment tradition and eighteenth-century thought.[3] Furthermore, while she applauded the recent interest in the production and dissemination of books, including the investigation of printed materials which were formerly considered too “low-brow” to merit academic interest, she remained dissatisfied with the continuing split between the history of ideas and the history of book publication. According to Eisenstein, recent work on the printing industry, such as that done by Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier, has greatly expanded practical knowledge of book production, but these studies generally treat books chiefly as a commodity, with little reference to the ideas they contain, or the views held by their propagators. Eisenstein’s approach in The Printing Press still holds potential as a promising approach to some of the more vexing questions of European early modern history. While her interpretation idealizes somewhat the figure of the early printer and his print-shop, looking at the differing reactions to this new mode of knowledge dissemination as well as the individuals engaged in this new business continues to provide a concrete and challenging starting point for discussing the cultural and intellectual transformations of the early modern era. As she noted in her conclusion, “[t]o ask historians to search for elements which entered into the making of an indefinite ‘modernity’ seems somewhat futile. To consider the effects of a definite communications shift which entered into each of the movements under discussion seems more promising. Among other advantages, this approach offers a chance to uncover relationships which debates over modernity only serve to conceal” .
Although this information mixes up Harold Innis with Marshall McLuhan in a perhaps biased way, as I discuss at the end of this entry, it is one of the best all around comprehensive source about his ideas and himself:
Host: I’d like now just to ask you about the distinction that you draw between different kinds of media within the electric technology you call some such as television cool and some such as radio hot. Now what does this means? McLuhan: It has to do with the slang. The slang phrases the hot and the cool of which have puzzled many people. The way it is used in slang reverses the meaning of cool. Cooler in the slang form has come to mean involved, deeply participated, deeply engaged. Everything that we had formally meant by heated argument is now called cool Host: Yeah.. McLuhan: in slang (is) about the idea that cooler it has reversed its meaning, I think (it) has some bearing on the fact that our culture has shifted a good deal of its stress into a demand that we be more committed, more involved, in the situations in which we ordinarily work and Host: a cool media is one in which the definition is low and the audience has to work and supply the gaps like McLuhan: like a cartoon usually the mentioning before is a real cool Host:Yes McLuhan: whereas as compared with classical music it has many of these aspects of discontinuity and very much room for filling Host: Yes McLuhan: but where the information or data acquire content level is low. The filling or participation is high if you fill the situation with a complexity of data the opportunity for completion filling is less and by participation is less
Last but not least, one final word about Innis vs McLuhan
It became kind of standard approach to put McLuhan together with Innis, as it can be seen in the National Archives of Canada. I would have many objections to that which as anything McLuhan is kind of blurred and difficult to cut straight and have some sort of base to compare, but I would leave this Augean stables cleaning to some Hercules which I am not and use the very simple observation Donald Theall made writing his The Virtual Marshal McLuhan at the end of the first paragraph on page 9, and I quote: “McLuhan had not read the works of Harold Innis before he wrote the Bride; but he did read them in 1951-52” Perhaps Theall was the Hercules that cleaned the stables where lies the confusion of mixing up McLuhan with Innis when he wrote, at the same place of the above book: “As the 1950s unfolded, leading up to the publication of his two major works in the 1960s, McLuhan turned his rhetorico-poetic technique to issues that centered around human communication, media and technology – sensing, but not yet saying, that these areas were rapidly moving together as an inter-related cluster. A few of the probes that were launched then and have now become relative commonplaces are orality and literacy; acoustic space and visual space; participational (‘cool’) and non-participational media (‘hot’); the printed book and lineality; the history of communication as a history of artefactual form (media) rather than content (i.e., history as ‘tehe medium is the message’) tactility and the central nervous system; technology and the extension or ‘outering’ of the senses; the interior landscape’ the global village and the global metropolis’ figure/ground; interface and pattern rather than point of view; technological artifacts as effects; writing, the alphabet, and the printing press as media involving codes; interdisciplinary vs specialism; electricity and the encyclopedic; paradox and ambivalence” To me the only thing and perhaps the most important, if you ad under the original “electricity” computers, iPhone and Internet, which Theal left out, it is the similarity of the impact and the change the printing press had in our human affairs back in the 15th century, which is to be repeated again today with the change of the medium and the media. Obviously you can find some Innis here, but very, very faint to say a kind word. To me, The Star Editorial commemorating his 100th anniversary summarizes it.
Perhaps the most famous creation of McLuhan is his mosaic style in his book the Gutenberg Galaxy. Discussion here is based on “glosses’ or “probing experiences” there.
Although it is presented as a printed subject as in a book, having only one figure, it is always a description, although in a obscure way, of multidimensional realities.
It makes more sense to figure out what McLuhan intended if we turn it to a dynamic mode from the static format that is characteristic of printed matters. My idea of the Mosaic is:
As you probably saw on YouTube, Mosaic is like the Revolving Ball, but you have to imagine for each reflecting square some subject or area of knowledge, tridimensionally and with sound, ending up with millions of glosses that reach us as probing lights and sounds and the outcome, if we are in the same room it is happening, and I mean intellectually, it is to decode it with our senses and make sense and use of it.
Each of these tiles are presented to our senses and may be apart in space and time limitlessly. In McLuhan’s time, without Internet, youtube. etc., there were practically no images or sound, what in our case, has been added.
An allegory of five senses. Still Life by Pieter Claesz, 1623. The painting illustrates the senses through musical instruments, a compass, a book, food and drink, a mirror, incense and an open perfume bottle. The tortoise could be a possible illustration of touch or an allusion to the opposite, screening of or shielding the senses (the the tortoise isolating in its shell).
If you have the patience to go through the article above, you only have to come up with the idea that any and all of the senses share the following process to do the probing of the above mosaic, (or any thing):
1 Interface or sensory tips (skin, nose, ear, tongue and eyes); 2 Link-driven interface to the brain, 3 Physical Brain and, more importantly, 4 How the brain involved “processes” the stimulus based 5 In imagination and what was learned, is stored, and is managed by the 6 Idiosyncrasy of the holder of the entire set.
This is better and more detailed explained in Reality Perception. Let’s use McLuhan’s “tiles” to understand how that is related to our context. What this project is trying to achieve, besides discovering the literary man in McLuhan is:
The artist is the man (or woman) in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his (or her) actions of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man or woman of integral awareness.
The term counterblast does not imply any attempt to erode or explode blast. Rather it indicates the needs for a counter environment as a means to perceive the dominant one.Placing an environment inside another one through a paratextic elaboration
We are going to deal withpattern recognition, the meaning of what we experience, because, and it is amazing to perceive that literate society, specially the Ivory Tower, is something like this:
“I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.”[1]
—Marshall McLuhan, 1966
Perhaps no figure is more emblematic of both the triumphs and trials of popular academics in the media age than Marshall McLuhan, who arrived on the scene like a comet in the mid-’60s and blazed across the skies, drawing both inordinate praise and inordinate disdain.[2] No comparable academic figure before his time comes readily to mind, for the few that preceded him either came before the age of electronic celebrity, or were notorious not for their ideas, but for falling from grace for political or ethical reasons, such as Alger Hiss and Charles Van Doren. While others, like Mark Van Doren, Dwight Macdonald, and Alfred Kazin, may have achieved the status of America’s house intellectuals (mostly in the houses of other intellectuals), McLuhan was probably the first to have achieved the possibly dubious distinction of becoming a pop icon whose name for a time was on almost everyone’s lips—a figure whose ideas and persona were recognizable by a large proportion of the public, both those interested in intellectual matters and those who were not.
But the case of Marshall McLuhan as a popularizing academic is fraught with ironies, the greatest of which is that his reputation as a thinker is tied to a medium—television—whose effects he thoroughly mistrusted and even decried. Many (though not all) supporters and critics alike have mistakenly seen him as a television “guru,” a proselytizer for the electronic faith whose attitude towards electronic media was akin to that of drug guru Timothy Leary, with whose philosophy his was sometimes confused: “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Indeed, it may well be that without McLuhan’s celebrity for writing and talking about television in the particular way that he did, Leary might never have come up with quite the same formulation for his proselytic slogan, nor might it have achieved quite the cachet that it did. When we examine the entire range of McLuhan’s thought about the impacts of media on society, we come to realize that the image of electronic boosterism associated with him could not be farther from the truth.
McLuhan once said to his friend and colleague Tom Langan, while watching television, “Do you really want to know what I think of that thing? If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you’d better get an ax and smash all the sets.”[3] And he was no more accommodating to the electronic beast in his advice to his son Eric regarding one of Eric’s daughters in a 1976 letter: “Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.”[4]
This irony has two major aspects. First, McLuhan found it necessary to use TV as a means of spreading his message, as a concomitant of the very analysis he was presenting. Like Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim Abbey, who in 1494 had his tract In Praise of Scribes printed,[5] McLuhan had to use the most advanced technology available to reach the widest possible audience, despite the seeming contradiction. When his first book, The Mechanical Bride, was published (1951), it was widely reviewed and caused somewhat of a stir among people interested in advertising as a mirror of society, but it came along before television was the theater in every home, and it confined its discussion to the contents of print advertisements. Eleven years later, when his second major work, The Gutenberg Galaxy, was published, the only stir it caused (whether positive or negative) was mainly among other academics. Certainly this result was partly the consequence of the book’s use of erudite sources, as a reflection of the years of scholarly research that went into its creation. Even though McLuhan wrote the book in what he characterized as a “mosaic” style[6] meant to reflect the multilinear mode of awareness fostered by electronic technology, his intent was resolutely oriented toward saving the inherited values of print culture:
“We now live in the early part of an age for which the meaning of print culture is becoming as alien as the meaning of manuscript culture was to the eighteenth century. ‘We are the primitives of a new culture,’ said Boccioni the sculptor in 1911. Far from wishing to belittle the Gutenberg mechanical culture, it seems to me that we must now work very hard to retain its achieved values.”[7]
The publication of Understanding Media in 1964 achieved the kind of blockbuster status every author and publisher dreams of and catapulted him into the public arena. For several years his two main ideas dominated the public discussion about the impact of media, for which they are largely responsible in starting. The first, “The medium is the message,” was soon misconstrued as saying that the content of any message is meaningless, and that we should simply groove on the medium itself. The second, the notion of an “electronic global village,” was likewise rendered into self-parody by his detractors, who accused him of peddling the snake oil of a Utopian electronic paradise to the masses.
The second ironic aspect of McLuhan’s fame is a natural consequence of the first: once his use of the televised interview achieved a kind of critical mass (Joycean readings of that phrase are encouraged), McLuhan thence became a denizen (Naturalized foreignter) of the very medium whose effects he wanted to counteract, an example of Daniel Boorstin’s definition of a celebrity: “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”[8] The apogee (or nadir) of this status was probably reached when McLuhan became the subject of a Henry Gibson “poem” on the quintessential television program, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In: “Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin’?”[9] The title of the 1969 Playboy interview —“Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation With the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”[10]—over and above the fact that he was chosen to be interviewed at all, is emblematic of his “elevation” (unlikely for a tweedy, donnish Professor of English at the University of Toronto) into the pop pantheon peopled by such paragons as Leary and his sidekick Richard Alpert (later to become Baba Ram Dass), the Beatles, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Peter Max, Mary Quant, Twiggy,Roy Liechtenstein, and Andy Warhol.
The New Media Age
The reasons for this apotheosis are many and varied, but the most essential one is that, simply by addressing the concept of the effects of media on culture, and taking seriously the forms of popular culture as the true mirror of the times, McLuhan tapped an underground well of energy that had been building up for more than a decade, since television’s invasion of the home after W.W. II. Previous commentators had not touched this wellspring, partly because of their school-ma’amish tut-tutting about the harm being done by television’s content, encapsulated in Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech. In avoiding the moralizing stance of other critics and adopting the role of a neutral observer exploring media’s effects, McLuhan seemed to imply that it was all right to appreciate television in its own right. Thus, mistakenly, his aphorism “The medium is the message” was taken as a rallying cry, or an advertising slogan, for television itself.
Naturally, as McLuhan’s comet shone, he was bound to attract many critics as well as supporters.[11] He was asked to be interviewed not just on the earnestly intellectual shows on the CBC and the BBC, but also by such popular figures as Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder; Jack Paar was likewise an early devotee. While he was championed by the glitterati, particularly Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe, as well as more obscure intellectuals like George Steiner and (initially) Jonathan Miller, his ideas soon drew the scorn of other more public intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Christopher Ricks, and probably more disdain than support among the academic establishment.
The possible consequences of the reaction in the academy could have been much more severe than they turned out to be, and such reaction is emblematic of the problems inherent in an institution whose foundations reach back to the Middle Ages. The university not only survived the transition from manuscripts to print but throve in the new environment, feeding off of the energy released by the printing press and redefining itself as the conservator of the new print canon. But the pressures of the challenge wrought by the new electronic media have been not only intense but extremely challenging to the self-definition of the academy, and so anyone like McLuhan appearing to preach the new gospel of the electronic faith would seem to them not only an apostate but the incarnation of Satan himself. As a result, both individual and concerted efforts were brought to bear in trying to suppress McLuhan’s new doctrine and to stanch its spread. At the University of Toronto in particular, the reaction to McLuhan’s celebrity was most intense. It got to the point that McLuhan warned his graduate students to erase any trace of his work in their theses and dissertations for fear of reprisals by their review committees.[12] According to Eric McLuhan, “there were at least two concerted efforts (quiet ones, of course) to collect enough signatures to have his tenure revoked.”[13] Such efforts would seem to put the lie to the shopworn contention of the academy that the rationale for the institution of tenure is the protection of freedom of thought; in reality, there is no more hidebound apparat devoted to thought control than the self-perpetuating survival of the medieval guild known as the academic tenure committee.
Much of the criticism seemed validated in the minds of McLuhan’s critics by several characteristics of his approach that went decidedly against the academic grain. The fact that McLuhan developed, or intensified, these characteristics specifically as part of his point that traditional modes of learning were dead served only further to madden his detractors. One of these characteristics was the peculiarly gnomic nature of his pronouncements, formed specifically in imitation of the aphoristic style of Francis Bacon (see also about his aphorisms) in probing the contours of any question, as distinguished from adopting a fixed point of view and proceeding linearly from there. A second was his often blithe attitude toward strict factual accuracy; as he once stated to Richard Kostelanetz, “If a few details here and there are wacky,…[i]t doesn’t matter a hoot.”[14] Another was his refusal to explain himself any further than his original pronouncement; he was often taken to say to a objector, “OK, if you didn’t like that one, here’s another one.”[15] There also may have been reaction against McLuhan’s apparent lack of concern with social justice and the impacts that media were having on people’s rights, which McLuhan parried by asserting that if people allowed themselves to be manipulated by media, then they had no rights left worth talking about.[16] McLuhan felt that it was enough to make people aware of media pollution and fallout and to give them some tools for recognizing their effects—the rest was up to them.
During the ’70s and ’80s, despite a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, McLuhan’s comet seemed to fade from our ken, especially in the United States, as Watergate, the two oil shocks, (see also the general picture) the Iranian hostage crisis, a major recession, and the engineering of an economic boom drew people’s attention to matters other than media in themselves. In fact, it could be said that McLuhan’s ideas became so well known that they were eventually taken for granted, with MTV seeming to have the last word. Such an impression might have been reinforced by the fact that from 1968 onwards all of his books were co-authored with people unfamiliar to the public and in diverse fields,[17] which may have diffused the focus on him as a figure in his own right. An eventually salutary, but posthumously published, foray into cognitive science (brain hemisphere research) and modern physics as validations of his original insights took him into areas of thought even more recondite for the average reader than his prior ones. Although this collaboration with his son Eric on Laws of Media, published in 1988, represented a brilliant capstone to his intellectual career, the book was not widely understood or appreciated,[18] being aimed primarily at an academic audience and returning to the highly intellectual mode that characterized The Gutenberg Galaxy. By the time Laws of Media appeared, hardly anyone was paying attention any more. In fact, upon his death in 1980 most reactions seemed more along the lines of “Whatever happened to…” rather than the felt loss of a contemporary figure.
But since the entrance of the Internet and the World Wide Web into the public’s consciousness, McLuhan’s reputation has experienced an astounding upsurge. The main reason for this renascence of interest is that both the Web and the creation of global television networks such as CNN have made manifest to anyone with eyes and ears the trends he tried to make us aware of thirty years before. The globalization of consciousness he alerted us to and the cultural effects he spoke of are now matters of everyday concern. Adopted as the “patron saint” of Wired magazine (and unfortunately the subject of a pair of embarrassingly wrongheaded and pretentious articles about him, one pretending to be a posthumous “interview,”[19] he has been the subject of more than a dozen books since 1989,[20] including a recent intellectual biography written with the cooperation of the McLuhan Foundation Trust,[21] a revised edition of the first biography,[22] an interactive CD-ROM,[23] a six-part video series of his television appearances and lectures,[24]and most recently a work specifically outlining the relevance of his ideas to the Internet and the World Wide Web.[25]
Media as Environments
McLuhan’s aim was not to be the prophet of a coming or returning Golden Age, but to jolt people into an awareness of the psychic and social effects of the electronic media, so that we might be prepared to come to terms with them. His further aim was to create awareness that all human artefacts, extensions, or amplifications of our faculties—any technologies, whether involving communication or not—create a ground or complex of environmental conditions and related technologies of which we are mostly unaware, because we take them as givens. As he wrote in Culture Is Our Business, “Fish don’t know water exists till beached.”[26] Of course, he isn’t referring to fish but to humans, who are blissfully unaware of the environments created by our technologies until something goes wrong with them, such as pollution; or someone—notably the artist—creates an anti-environment that shocks us into seeing the environment as a figure, rather than as the invisible ground working subliminally in the background. The effects of these hidden grounds vastly overwhelm the social and cultural significance of the original technology or message—for individual messages and messengers may contradict and cancel one another out, but the messaging environment remains.
In this sense McLuhan considered himself a media ecologist, trying to create an awareness about the hidden effects of electronic technologies, in much the same way that Rachel Carson exposed the unintended effects of pesticides in Silent Spring. More recently, Jane Holtz Kay has made a similar effort with Asphalt Nation, developing notions about the impact of the automobile on cultural, social, and city forms that McLuhan had broached over 30 years before in Understanding Media:
When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions. It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It separated work and domicile, as never before. It exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become non-stop cities. It created the asphalt jungles, and caused 40,000 square miles of green and pleasant land to be cemented over. With the arrival of plane travel, the motorcar and truck teamed up together to wreck the railways.…The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser..…The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate men, and it will continue to do so for a decade more, by which time the electronic successors to the car will be manifest.[27]
Seeing McLuhan in his true light as a technological environmentalist exposes the narrowness of his misperceiving critics who saw him as a booster of technology; in truth, he was no more so than Rachel Carson was a promoter of DDT, or than Jane Holtz Kay is a flack for General Motors.
The problems raised by misapprehending the aims of McLuhan’s efforts and his contributions to thought can be likened to those that would have been raised if we had misunderstood or ignored Rachel Carson’s evidence and conclusions concerning pesticides. It may not seem, at first blush, that the consequences would be nearly so dire, but this is largely because we are used to thinking that “truths” of science can be demonstrated; by contrast, those of the humanities are “subjective” and contingent. McLuhan’s insights about the invisibility of our mental environments, conditioned by the communications media that help to shape it, anticipate this difficulty in apprehending the changes in perception he wished to make.
What is more, Carson’s intent in attempting to change our attitudes towards pesticides were less likely to have been misperceived, primarily because she was a scientist working according to the paradigm of induction, whereby her findings could be sifted for inconsistencies and inadequacies and her conclusions could be subjected to the process of falsification.[28] This is not to assert that the validity of her conclusions was assured by token of the methodology within her intellectual community; indeed, she was strongly vilified by the vested interests, and her motives, competency, and science were all called into question.[29] But whatever the uncertainties of determining truth in science, at least there are recognized procedures within scientific research that can serve as tests for what is being asserted and with what objectives—that is, the claims of her detractors could be falsified. This is also not to deny the often key role played by intuition or other analogical means of perceiving scientific truth, but instead to say that such flashes of “pattern recognition,” to borrow a term from McLuhan, stand out as a figure against the ground of what Thomas S. Kuhn calls “normal science,”[30] which provides a probabilistic foundation supporting such visionary leaps.
By contrast, working in the humanities, where no similar procedures of verification and falsification exist, McLuhan was working in a profoundly different mode of inquiry, that created by literary criticism; most particularly, the so-called Practical Criticism, with whose avatars I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis McLuhan studied at Cambridge. Significantly, according to his son Eric, Understanding Media “was deliberately titled in order to place it beside [Cleanth] Brooks’ and [Austin] Warren’s Understanding Poetry, a key text in introducing Practical Criticism to these shores.”[31] The essence of Practical Criticism was the interfusion of sound and sense, and of form and content—the notion that what a work of verbal art communicates is through the shape of the language and the way that shape subliminally alters our consciousness. Verbal artistry lies in having the form of the utterance enact in the audience a psychic response that mirrors or reinforces its sense. This makes artistic productions experiences in their own right that aim to change the audience’s consciousness, as distinguished from informing, persuading, or indoctrinating them. Artists may use doctrine as their manifest content (one thinks foremost of Milton), but the artistic effects they achieve—in Milton’s case, the atonement of God and Man—are gained not through the doctrine per se, but through the audience’s participation in the psychic drama by which the words are enacted. In sum, the medium is the message, and the audience, by participating in the fulfillment of the medium’s purposes, identifies with both medium and message.
Obviously, such a participatory mystique cannot be verified in the same sense as “normal science”; it can only be appreciated and experienced by immersion in the incantatory power of the Word. However, such an appreciation can be and has been taught, and the principles that underlie it are capable of a degree of demonstration and certain forms of inductive logic. But the evidence used in such inductive processes has its roots not in logical positivism but in the humanistic tradition embodied in the unification of the three branches of the medieval trivium—grammar (study of language and literature), dialectic (logic and disputation), and rhetoric (moving an audience through the shape of language). Contemporary students (not to mention many, if not most, professors) are unaware that the trivium was the foundation of higher education in the West from before the time of Cicero up through the latter part of the nineteenth century, when American universities began to adopt the fragmented departmental structures established by the German concept of the university.
The Rhetoric of Modernism
For McLuhan, in sympathy with his religious convictions (he was raised a Protestant and converted to Catholicism at twenty-six), in the beginning truly is the Word—and in the end, as well as in between. Indeed, this has been the stance of Western education from its beginnings up through all but the last hundred and twenty-five years, but our subsequently compartmentalized system of knowledge—not only in the sciences and social sciences but the humanities as well—has alienated us from the wellsprings of this tradition. Such an assumption that knowledge is a series of fragmented “disciplines” rather than a unitary whole serves to make McLuhan appear an oddball, even a crank and a “visionary,” simply because he chose to retrieve the core values of Western culture and discuss how they have been conditioned by our evolving technologies, particularly those that most directly affect the essence of what makes us human—the partnership of cognitive behavior and language. In light of the intellectual traditions not only of the West but of all great cultures, it is we who are the oddballs in thinking that knowledge and experience can be subdivided and dissected without somehow being made whole once again.
In this spirit McLuhan wanted us to appreciate that human technologies, like all other artefacts, are outerings, or “utterings,” of our human faculties. Technologies, whether they be devoted to communication or not, are thus extensions of our humanity, not the cold, alien, external forces envisioned by the paranoia of bad science fiction. Seen as utterings (to advert to the word’s Middle English roots), technologies can thus be seen as utterances, as rhetorical tropes we use to express and enhance our humanity, and can therefore be read and analyzed for their cognitive, social, and cultural effects. True also to the medieval philosophy he knew so well, he wanted us to see that Nature, including humankind, is a book that we can read, if we can only know and decode its language and analyze its significance. Such a methodology should have an interpretive power akin to that of the medieval four-level exegesis of the Book of God—the literal, the figurative (allegorical), the tropological (moral), and the anagogical (eschatological) levels. We will see later a method of analysis based on what McLuhan terms the tetrad as his contribution to such an interpretive effort.
But McLuhan created a more fundamental means to a more organic understanding in the very aphoristic style in which he chose to convey his ideas—one consciously embodying the concept that the medium is the message. Its means is not to follow a continuous, linear, and unbroken line of thought, but to create a tessellated pattern of ideas, with each of the tiles in the mental mosaic a particular facet of the overall pattern. Like fractals, an analogue that has gained currency only since McLuhan’s last work,[32] the grand, overall pattern is contained in miniature in each of the parts. He also took as models for this style writers in the symbolist and modernist movements, particularly Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce.
Fractals
Tesselation – M C Escher
McLuhan chose this style because he saw it as organic to the modern era, which is under the invisible stresses created by the pressures of electronic communication on the smooth continuities of thought fostered by the visual bias of print. Hence, his use of slogan, aphorism, bon mot, repetition, and probe as ways of jolting his audience into new modes of awareness necessary for perceiving such changes in their cognitive environment. As Eric McLuhan describes it in the Preface to Laws of Media,
“The style of UM [Understanding Media] had been deliberately chosen for its abrasive and discontinuous character, and was forged over many redraftings. It was designed deliberately to provoke the reader, to jar the sensibilities into a form of awareness that better complemented the subject-matter. This is poetic technique (science, if you will) of a high sort – satirizing the reader directly as a means of training him.”[33]
He thought that the great symbolist and modern artists were creating insights into the age by discontinuities, for which he liked to claim, “[t]hat’s what Symbolism means—it comes from the Greek symbaline—break things into single bits and reassemble them into patterns”.[34] The fact that the actual Greek root sumbolon meant a token for identification through comparison with a counterpart[35] detracts nothing from McLuhan’s concept, since in both cases, signification is achieved through juxtaposition of images.
But it may fairly be asked why these methods of discontinuity should be appropriate to, and be an outgrowth of, the modern age and the supposed clash between print and electronic sensibilities. The answer to this question hinges on two ideas: that there are fundamental differences between oral and literate cultures, and that electronic communication is retrieving patterns of thought and culture fostered by orality. The first idea can be explored in modern ethnographic, literary, and linguistic research done on primary oral cultures and on literatures containing residues of their origins in orality. The second idea depends upon the contrast McLuhan posits between the sense of “acoustic space” predominant in oral cultures and the “visual space” characteristic of writing and print cultures. To McLuhan, these ideas are intimately connected, and they lead to his assertion that television, as an “audile–tactile,” rather than visual medium, is leading this “charge of the light brigade” to a reversion to many of the cultural forms of orality. McLuhan gives typical expression of this idea in explaining the distinction he draws between “hot” and “cool” media:
A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammatic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when 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 print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century. …Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.[36]
Awareness of the contrasts between purely oral cultures and those in which literacy has either been developed or introduced has never been part of the academic and scholastic mainstream, and in fact in modern times there have been strong pressures to marginalize this type of inquiry. Ever since Milman Parry was told by the classics faculty at Berkeley in the 1920s that there was no chance he would get a Ph.D. by following up on his Master’s thesis on oral formulary patterns in Homer, the idea that there is a strong correlation between the patterns of a culture and its primary means of communication has only seldom been able to put a dent in the easy identification, in the general run of academe, between literacy and high levels of culture. The notion that high literacy is the normative state of language and civilization, and that its only alternative is the fallen state of illiteracy, and hence darkness and ignorance, seems to occupy the vital center of humanistic studies with remarkable energy and intensity. As Eric A. Havelock puts it,
The overall presumption is that civilizations to be worth the name have to be based on writing of some sort, have to be in some degree literate ones. Probably a majority of specialists who have considered these matters still share this view, including classicists. It is certainly true of the layman. When some advanced cultures like those of the Incas of Peru are observed to be wholly nonliterate, the lesson that might be drawn, namely that a civilized society with its own art, architecture, and political institutions need not depend on writing for its existence, is quietly passed over.[37]
This state of affairs is responsible for much of the resistance to McLuhan’s ideas, but it has also meant that other researchers doing work in this area have not always gained the recognition that they should, given the cogency of their work. None of them have been nearly as “visible” as McLuhan, probably because they weren’t inclined to take McLuhan’s route of popularizing their ideas in such striking ways. None have gained widespread recognition as intellectual icons or placement as leaders in the canon of criticism within their fields, nor are they the “brand names” that have all but guaranteed success for the book clubs, such as Edith Hamilton in classics, S.I. Hayakawa in linguistics, Jacques Barzun in literary studies, John Kenneth Galbraith in political economy, Margaret Mead in anthropology, Lewis Mumford in the history of technology, Arnold Toynbee in history, and Mortimer J. Adler as tout for the Great Books.
To be sure, all those who have dealt with the impacts of communication on culture, McLuhan included, were able to establish niches for themselves in the traditional academic establishment and have achieved high levels of achievement within them, without becoming household names. In this group we may include Jack Goody in ethnography, Harold Innis in political economy, Milman Parry and Havelock in classics, Albert B. Lord and Ian Watt in the humanities, Father Walter J. Ong in communication studies, and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein in history. There are, of course, many other researchers who have made significant contributions to the field but who remain even farther in the background, despite the inspiration McLuhan and others have derived from their work. Most notable in this regard are Siegfried Giedion, Georg von Békésy, H.J. Chaytor, Lucien Febvre, Henri–Jean Martin, and E.H. Gombrich.
Despite their relative obscurity, seeing McLuhan as a fellow–traveler, as it were, with these researchers may help us appreciate that, far from being some kind of lone figure on a wind-swept intellectual promontory, or especially some pushing a solipsistic monomania, McLuhan is part of an established intellectual movement of which the vast majority of his detractors and perhaps some of his cybernaut “disciples” seem unaware. Such an understanding will help us gauge the epistemological biases that underlie both kinds of responses to his legacy and that reveal what McLuhan would consider the “somnambulism” lying at their heart. It will also help us see the intellectual foundations for his true followers who, disparate as they are, have used the inspiration of his vision to help establish solid intellectual approaches to the impacts of technology on culture and broaden the arena of discourse.
The most appropriate place to start in surveying the development of this field is with the work of Milman Parry in the 1920s and ’30s on the formulary structure of the Homeric poems, particularly his dissertation written at the Sorbonne.[38] Parry’s discovery of the way in which the Iliad and the Odyssey were created and performed was to have significant implications concerning the cognitive and cultural differences between totally oral cultures and those in which writing is the normal means of recording and passing on knowledge and wisdom.[39] Parry noted that the fabled Homeric epithet or formulary phrase (such as those translated into English as wily Odysseus, wise Nestor, and the like) was actually one of a variety of phrases that differ according to the metrical requirements created by where they may fall in the strict hexameter unit, with its regular pattern of long and short vowels. The performer of the verse apparently had at hand a repertoire of ready-made phrases that could be stitched together to suit the varying circumstances under which the poems were performed, answering to an economy of form that could be created only under the conditions of relatively extemporaneous delivery of traditional materials. Such a repertoire could have been devised only because the poems were not written but memorized—and not verbatim, as in writing- and print-oriented cultures, but flexibly according to standard themes and formulary situations. Thus, far from fulfilling the model of the totally original poet, which has been engrained in our consciousness from the cumulative effect of two and a half millennia of writing and printing, the Homer that Parry revealed was instead, from our point of view, a tailor of ready-made pieces off the rack, a vendor of what we now consider to be clichés.
But the concept of a cliché, with its pejorative connotation, is a product of print culture and thus would lack meaning in an oral universe, where any thoughts worth having and saving would need to be memorized if they were not to be lost. The word cliché itself is a printing term that comes from stereotyping, the past participle of the French clicher, which is an imitation of the sound of dropping a matrix into molten metal to make a plate.[40] To us Western, secular moderns, a cliché is a shopworn expression unworthy of serious consideration because of its overuse. To an oral culture, triteness is inconceivable, for only those thoughts that can be formulated into sayings, apothegms, proverbs, and other dicta are likely to survive the entropic effects of oral transmission; conversely, idiosyncratic, abstract, unique expressions and lists that are not tied to action or human agency do not survive, because they lack the characteristics of rhythm, metre, balanced antithesis, and repetition crucial to their being remembered. But once writing comes on to the scene, the cognitive environment is changed. While the onset of writing by no means erases the expressionistic structures fostered by oral memorization (in fact, at first it tends to preserve and reify them in fundamentalist formulae), gradually the powerful storage function of writing, and later of print, provides means by which more idiosyncratic and “original” (reversing the primordial meaning of the word) forms of expression can be preserved. Eventually, the cultural values of traditional and unique expressions become switched, so that today we unconsciously project onto Homer the traits of “creation” that only centuries of internalizing the values of writing and print could make us take for granted.
In the same year that the Galaxy was published, an equally notable extension of the Parry–Lord thesis appeared in the form of Jack Goody and Ian Watt’s extended article, “The Consequences of Literacy.” Both authors had had personal experience with conditions of almost total nonliteracy, Watt being forced to survive without reading materials as a prisoner of the Japanese in Malaysia during W. W. II, and Goody working as an ethnographer in Africa observing nonliterate tribes that had had only limited contacts with a writing culture, Islam. The essay, as well as the volume which it heads, deals with not only the persistence of orality in modern culture but, more to the point, the cultural transformations that take place when an oral culture comes in contact with literacy.
Havelock sees McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, dealing with primary orality only indirectly, as he focuses on the cultural impacts of the invention of movable type on medieval scribal culture. According to Havelock, McLuhan asserts that this new technology “fastened on the (presumably) European mind a print mode of consciousness which by implication he saw as constricted and (though he is ambiguous here) regressive”.[41] However, “behind the ‘linear’ consciousness of modernity, derived from the linearity of typography, could be discerned an oral consciousness which follows its own distinct rules of thinking and feeling…now being revived through modern technology….”[42] But Havelock’s understanding of McLuhan is restricted, as he seems not to have fully grasped the distinction McLuhan makes between the “content” of a medium (always another medium) and its “message” (the unconscious cognitive bias it fosters in its users), as well as his observation that the manifest content of any communication (its data or ideas) is always less important than the cognitive impact: “[The Gutenberg Galaxy] asserted, and largely demonstrated from examples, the fact that technologies of communication exercise a large measure of control over the content of what is communicated (‘The medium is the message’).”[43]
Extensions of Man
Central to McLuhan’s mode of inquiry into the relationship between humans and their technologies is that all technologies are extensions of our faculties. Indeed, how could they be otherwise? If they have been imposed on us from outside, as inferred from such imaginative vehicles as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, then either they are extensions of those agencies who imposed them on us, or they had been imposed on those agencies by other agencies, which gets us into an infinite regression resolvable only by the deus ex machina of an Aristotelian Prime Mover. Rather than relying on complicating assumptions, it is better to use Occam’s razor and prefer the simplest explanation possible: Our technologies are means of enhancing or amplifying a particular function that has use to us (whether for good or for ill: think of both prosthetics and atom bombs). If it is useful, then we naturally embrace it and are moved to incorporate it into our ways of interacting with the world. Thus, our sensorium, which is the totality of all our faculties, becomes a combination of all our senses plus their extensions.
In the case of reading, alphabetic writing is so efficient in encoding speech, readers of it become almost exclusively dependent on the eye; the resources of the ear, and hence of the memory, are correspondingly diminished. Plato discusses this effect in the Phædrus, where he recounts the story of the god Theuth (or Toth) presenting writing, only one of his clever inventions, to the king of upper Egypt, Thamus (otherwise known as Ammon), claiming that it is a specific for memory and wisdom. Thamus replies that by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, [you] have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.[44]
Alphabetic writing, and even more so print, because of its regularity, becomes an extension of the eye, which no longer has to have recourse to a fund of residual orality to complete the effect of the speech encoded all but completely in the sequence of letters. A new ratio of the senses is created, in which the eye comes to dominate. Thus, the medium of writing and, a fortiori, (denoting or based on a conclusion for which there is stronger evidence than for a previously accepted one) print, carries with it a lesson, which is not to rely on the ear for confirmation of truth, but to depend on the eye instead. “Seeing is believing,” whereas in oral cultures, and as preserved in the system of English common law, hearing is believing, because you can always cross-examine a person, but, as Socrates says, you cannot interrogate a text.[45]
But what is more important, this lesson works not manifestly but subliminally. The lesson referred to above has been termed differently by Harold Innis as the “bias” of communication media, while Neil Postman has referred to their “epistemology.”[46] However one refers to this lesson, its significant characteristic is that it operates subconsciously, or it could not work at all. There are those who contend that, in fact, there is no such thing as a media effect, and that all media are neutral vessels into which we simply pour our reflections and disperse them on the multitudes. However, McLuhan considers this view naive; while our conscious minds are occupied by the manifest content, our subconscious is left vulnerable to the subliminal effects of the medium. His favorite analogy was of the content as the juicy hunk of meat the media burglar uses to distract the watchdog of the mind.[47] Unconsciously, our sensorium becomes molded by the medium and thus becomes the filter through which we select percepts and experience “reality.” Without such filters we would go insane from an overload of input. As McLuhan puts it,
Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute. The “censor” protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology.[48]
Concomitantly, we come to identify the characteristics of our particular filter with sanity itself—or, at the very least, with the “natural” structures of knowledge, wisdom, and truth. Those with differing, competing, or conflicting filters are seen as lacking those qualities which our filters have persuaded us are “universal.” Hence, clashes of cultures, whether these be ethnic, ideological, historiographic, or generational.
The bias of print is towards smooth continuity, linearity, sequentiality, homogeneity, interchangeability, and efficiency, while the biases of other scripts, and of the discontinuous electronic universe, tend in opposite directions. Hence it is understandable why McLuhan’s critics have found it difficult or impossible to comprehend or accept both his medium—aphoristic probes arranged in a mosaic structure—and his message, because of the way our minds have been shaped by typography, invisibly and subliminally. It is also easier then to understand why both his critics and some of his cybernaut enthusiasts—whose mental filters have been shaped just as strongly by electronics—have mistakenly seen his probes as an enthusiastic embrace of electronic media, rather than as the purely detached and descriptive efforts they actually are. While his intent was always to help preserve the positive cultural values that have been fostered by writing and its amplification via Gutenberg technology, he has been mistaken by both camps as a celebrant of the electronic galaxy, simply because he tried to shock people, by means of the probe, out of their complacent unawareness of the ways in which media “massage” consciousness.
Nonlinear Causality
McLuhan’s probes depend for their insights upon recognition of overall patterns of interrelationship as the means for understanding. They are not linear or syllogistic explanations of the focus of inquiry but multifaceted explorations, analogous to the way that a cubist painting presents many sides of the object at once. Hence, they do not promote single points of view but invite many views simultaneously, while abandoning the smooth spatial continuities implied in vanishing-point perspective, or visual space, in favor of the sometimes jarring discontinuities of acoustic space. They forsake the exclusive dependence, characteristic of modern thinking, on efficient cause as a means of explaining phenomena, in favor of formal cause, which McLuhan equates with pattern recognition.
Since the abandonment of the medieval trivium as the basis of education, we have lost sight of the fact that, from the ancients up through the Enlightenment, causality was recognized not as the linear, unitary actions of a billiard-table universe, but as being fourfold in nature. Bertrand Russell, in his description of Aristotle’s metaphysics, elucidates this concept:
“To understand what Aristotle means, we must take account of what he says about causes. There are, according to him, four kinds of causes, which were called, respectively, material, formal, efficient, and final. Let us take…the man who is making a statue. The material cause of the statue is the marble, the formal cause is the essence of the statue to be produced, the efficient cause is the contact of the chisel with the marble, and the final cause is the end that the sculptor has in view. In modern terminology, the word “cause” would be confined to the efficient cause.”[49]
For medieval thinkers, this fourfold conception of causality, applied to the Book of Nature, was “in perfect correspondence” to the fourfold exegesis of the Book of Scripture, as set out by St. Bonaventure.[50] Thus, according to McLuhan, formal cause corresponds with the literal level, material cause with the figurative (allegorical) level, efficient cause with the tropological (moral) level, and final cause with the anagogical (eschatological) level:
It is hardly surprising then that present-day media analysts find it impossible not to moralize, or that they substitute moralism for understanding. Old Science affords only abstract method and the Shannon–Weaver pipeline and its variants – both of these are based on left-hemisphere elaborations of efficient cause and lack the ground that is supplied by formal cause and by interaction with the other causes. Since the four levels, like the four causes, are simultaneous, it is obvious that to perform any one level to the exclusion of the others, as a visual figure minus a ground, is to produce grievous distortion. This goes far towards explaining…the helplessness of Old Science or philosophy to deal with the new transforming ground of electric information.[51]
Efficient cause is the basis of modern logical positivism and its extensions, such as the social “sciences.” The positivistic epistemology has by no means stopped there, and has extended itself into the humanities, forming the basis for the attitudes of those critics of McLuhan who claim that he hasn’t “proven his case.” The vocabulary of proof has no real place in the humanities, nor in the social sciences or even the hard sciences, as the New Science of Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg has manifestly shown, and as chaos theory confirms. It is the vocabulary of formal logic, of closed systems, not of living, open systems, where the proper aim of investigation and argument is not to establish proof but to increase the probability of assent.[52]
McLuhan’s probes are aimed not at deductive logic, which he saw as satisfying the purely visual conception of a pleasing arrangement of elements, but at training the perceptive mind in pattern recognition. Such recognition is above all of the grounds of perception, against which the figure of concentration stands out. In the case of any medium, its manifest content, of which we are conscious and on which we tend exclusively to focus, is the figure, while the grounds are the total environment created by the system of services and disservices any technology creates. McLuhan’s critics and some of his “disciples” have concentrated on the “content” of his work in a positivistic vein, and have ignored the grounds of awareness his approach attempts to establish.
Thus, as an example, complaints about his “misreadings” of Shakespeare or Joyce entirely miss the point—in place of the standard, and standardized, “interpretations” based on positivistic models of evidence and “proof,” he offers re-readings whose aim is to reveal the ground of effects fostered in the minds of the authors by media change that are either latent, in the case of Shakespeare, or manifest, as in Joyce. The critics are most unconsciously revealing the visual bias underlying their misperception of McLuhan’s intent when they say they don’t “see the connections” McLuhan does. His aim was to get entirely beyond the visual principle—at the very least, in order to appreciate it for what it is—and to encourage people to realize that the electronic age of instantaneous awareness and involvement dethrones efficient causality and restores formal causality as the means of understanding, or re–cognizing, patterns of relationships within the conscious field.
This effort has a close parallel in Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity: that at any given moment in time, any part of the universe resonates with the whole, and that changes in the whole can be perceived by reading changes in any of the parts—and vice-versa—in a kind of figure–ground relationship.[53] Other parallels can be seen in Einstein’s complementary General and Specific Theories of Relativity,Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, quantum physics,[54] and, most recently, chaos theory.[55] In a similar vein, Richard Dawkins’s “selfish gene”[56] can be seen as a kind of reversal of the conventional figure–ground relationship, and a notion which McLuhan anticipated in Understanding Media: “Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.”[57] So, far from being outside the mainstream of modern thinking, McLuhan is clearly within the flow of contemporary currents of thought. His theories have particularly found confirmation in brain hemisphere research, and he has used the unsolicited contacts with prominent researchers in that field as a springboard for further development of his ideas in Laws of Media.[58]
The Tetrad
In Laws of Media, as a means of examining the interactions between human artefacts and their environments, the McLuhans, father and son, propose a fourfold process of examination which they call the tetrad:
More of the foundation of this New Science consists of proper and systematic procedure. We propose no underlying theory to attack or defend, but rather a heuristic device, a set of four questions, which we call a tetrad. They can be asked (and the answers checked) by anyone, anywhere, at any time, about any human artefact. The tetrad was found by asking, ‘What general, verifiable (that is, testable) statements can be made about all media?’ We were surprised to find only four, here posed as questions:
What does it enhance or intensify?
What does it render obsolete or replace?
What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?
What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?[59]
To use the tetrad on McLuhan’s work itself, his attempts at understanding media have enhanced our recognition of all human technologies, whether devoted to communication or not, as media that shape our patterns of perception and human interaction;
obsolesced the rigid dichotomy of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”;
retrieved the concept of physics as natural philosophy; and, pushed to their extreme, reversed into scientific inquiry.
The inclusion of Postman in this group might seem anomalous, given his extreme skepticism about the positive value and impact of electronic media on human cognition—which strongly contrasts with the views of some of the others, most especially Richard Lanham. Indeed, in one of the essays collected in The Electronic Word, “Operating Systems, Attention Structures, and the Edge of Chaos,” Lanham lights into Postman for the ideas expressed in Amusing Ourselves to Death, in a counter-polemic of remarkable ferocity.[60] Lanham and Postman represent the polar extremes of interpretation invited by McLuhan’s neutral stance in examining media effects without moralizing—the former being representative of most of McLuhan’s metaphorical children, who plump for the possibilities of hypermedia in establishing a more complete synesthesia, or balanced ratio of the senses, the latter more in spirit with McLuhan’s sympathy for the values of Gutenberg technology. It seems that, for both his detractors and supporters, McLuhan serves as a kind of Rorschach test.
While McLuhan definitely is in sympathy with preserving the “achieved values” of “mechanical Gutenberg culture,” the possibility lies open of his being receptive, had he lived longer, to a configuration of media that might promise to recapture such a balance among the senses in fuller cultural expressions. The question thus arises: Can such a restoration be achieved through evolving forms of multimedia and hypermedia? Is the “real” Marshall McLuhan therefore the one read by Lanham, Kroker, Levinson, Moulthrop, and Murray, and not necessarily the one read by Postman?[61] Or is he, in the spirit of the Rorschach test, neither and both? Which is the figure, and which the ground?
Hypermedia as Synesthesia?
Perhaps answers to these questions are forthcoming if we are willing to probe and explore what is going on with these vortices of power—how they affect the sensorium. To do so we need to ask some further questions:
What are the cognitive effects of multimedia, hypertext, and hypermedia?
Does virtual reality take us towards or away from true synesthesia?
Is, as the hypertext author Michael Joyce has put it,[62] hypermedia the revenge of text upon television, or do hypertext and hypermedia simply turn text into television?
Do hypermedia turn image and sound into simply other forms of text to be manipulated as such, as Jay David Bolter claims,[63] or do they do just the opposite—relegate text to the status of image?
If the latter is the case, are virtual reality and hypermedia overstimulating the right hemispherical cortex of the brain, hindering communication between right and left cortices?
What changes in educational curriculum would be needed to compensate for such an unbalanced state of affairs?
If current multimedia and hypermedia systems are unsatisfactory in achieving synesthesia, what changes and developments would have to be made in order to do so?[64]
McLuhan has shown that the best means of arriving at answers to such questions is to use the probe and the tetrad, rather than depending on the ideological blinders of both his critics and some of his champions (I’m thinking here particularly of the Wired crowd).
Use of such means reveals that McLuhan was no prophet, nor did he mean to be one. The prophetic mode, when it comes to media and other technologies, participates in the fallacies of futurology, which depends exclusively on efficient causality by extrapolating current trends in a straight line. Prime examples of such vulgar prognosticators are John Naisbitt and the Tofflers. The insufficiency of this approach lies in its overlooking the ground in favor of the figure—ignoring the environmental effects of technological change.
Unlike such computer “visionaries” as Michael Dertouzos, who is confident in telling us What Will Be, McLuhan always focused on What Is, and therein lies his value; for instead of inviting the embarrassment of being proven wrong by the course of events, he gave us a heuristic by means of which we could examine what is, so as to determine for ourselves what should be. Through such methods as the probe and tetrad we have means of evaluating our current situation and anticipating effects in real time, rather than somnambulistically embracing illusory visions of the future, in unreal time. Those who embrace McLuhan as a visionary, or patron saint, of the electronic future are thus just as misled as those for whom he represents a cultural Antichrist, for they miss the critical dimensions of his method. Given the tunnel vision of both McLuhan’s detractors and some of his adherents, we can appreciate the wisdom of Matthew 13:57: “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.”
Endnotes
[1] Benedetti, Paul, & deHart, Nancy. (1997). Forward through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 70.
[2] Philip Marchand (1998) titles one of his chapters “Canada’s Intellectual Comet,” after the title of a Harper’s magazine article by Richard Schickel on McLuhan published in November 1965.
[11] The most comprehensive collections of commentaries on McLuhan are Stearn (1967) and Rosenthal (1968). Apparently publishers at the time felt that McLuhan’s cachet demanded the ample use of ampersands. There is some redundancy between the two volumes. The former is by far the better, since it provides a sort of codex version of the medieval disputation, with McLuhan and his supporters provided almost equal space in rebuttal of his detractors. The last chapter is an interview between McLuhan and the editor, in which McLuhan provides his most conclusive refutation of his critics’ misconceptions. As a habit, McLuhan tended simply to ignore his critics in public and change the subject, so this interview provides a rare insight into his thinking. The latter volume is much less balanced; not only are the Cons given dominance over the Pros, but the editor’s Introduction is unusually obtuse, transparently revealing the uncomprehending prejudice behind his stacking the deck against McLuhan in the proportion of essays. Rather than being a vehicle for clarification and understanding, the volume amounts to little more than an intellectual mugging behind a mask of fairness.
[12] Bruce Powe, in a comment made during a panel discussion on “McLuhan’s Life” at the reThinking McLuhan Conference, York University, North York, Ontario, March 21, 1997.
[15] Philip Marchand, in a talk presented on “McLuhan’s Life” at the reThinking McLuhan Conference, York University, North York, Ontario, March 21, 1997.
[28] See Kuhn, 1996, pp. 146–147, for his use of Sir Karl Popper’s definition of a scientific statement as not one that can be verified, but one that can be falsified. Popper’s contrast between closed and open societies was influential in McLuhan’s thinking about oral and literate societies, respectively.
[39] Much of what follows depends upon Walter J. Ong’s presentation of these matters in Orality and Literacy (1982, pp.16–36). I am particularly indebted to Father Ong’s work for whatever understanding of the orality–literacy interaction may shine through my dross.
[61] To be fair, Postman recognizes that McLuhan’s answers to questions Postman poses about media effects would be “quite different” from his own (1985, p. 161); still, the McLuhan who inspired Postman’s career is the one who seeks not to belittle Gutenberg culture.
[64] Eric McLuhan addresses these issues and more in Electric Language (1988), which he characterizes as a popularized version of Laws of Media (1988) (personal communication).
Quando a tecnologia estende ou prolonga um de nossos sentidos, a cultura sofre uma transposição tão rápida quanto rápido for o processo de interiorização da nova tecnologia (Tablete 70)
Embora o tema principal desse livro seja a Galáxia de Gutenberg ou uma configuração de eventos, que está muito além do mundo do alfabeto e da cultura da escrita, é preciso saber-se por que, sem o alfabeto, não teria havido Gutenberg. E, portanto, precisamos ter certo conhecimento das condições de cultura e percepção que tomaram possível primeiro, a escrita, e depois, talvez, de algum modo o alfabeto. O relato de Wilson sobre os anos de treinamento perceptual necessário para habilitar os adultos africanos a verem filmes cinematográficos tem perfeita analogia com as dificuldades que os adultos ocidentais experimentam com a arte “abstrata”. Em 1925, Bertrand Russell escreveu seu ABC of Relativity (ABC da relatividade) assinalando na primeira página que:
“Muitas das novas idéias podem ser expressas em linguagem não matemática, mas nem por isso se tornam elas menos difíceis de compreender. O que se exige é uma modificação da imagem, da reapresentação imaginativa, que fazemos do mundo. (. . .) A mesma espécie de modificação impunha Copérnico ao ensinar que a terra não está imóvel. (. . .) Para nós não existe dificuldade nesta idéia, porque a aprendemos antes de nossos hábitos mentais se tornarem fixos. Do mesmo modo, as idéias de Einstein parecerão mais fáceis para as gerações que crescem com elas; para nós, é inevitável certo esforço de reconstrução imaginativa.”
Um trabalho recente de Georg von Bekesy, Experiments in Hearing (Experiências em audição), apresenta solução exatamente oposta à que acabam de nos dar Carothers e Wilson quanto ao problema do espaço. Enquanto estes últimos procuram falar acerca da percepção de povos analfabetos em termos da experiência de alfabetizados, o professor von Bekesy prefere começar sua exposição sobre o espaço acústico em si mesmo. Como alguém proficiente em espaços auditivos, ele está nitidamente cônscio das dificuldades que existem em falar sobre o espaço da audição, pois o espaço acústico é forçosamente um universo em “profundidade” (Ver “Espaço Acústico). É extremamente interessante que, ao procurar esclarecer a natureza da audição e do espaço acústico, o professor von Bekesy tenha evitado deliberadamente à posição do ponto de vista e da perspectiva em favor do Campo mosaico. E, para este fim, recorre à pintura bidimensional, sem perspectiva, como meio de ilustrar a profundidade ressonante do espaço acústico. Eis suas próprias palavras (pág. 4): .
“É possível discutir duas formas para abordar um problema. Uma, que se pode denominar de método teórico, consiste em formular o problema nos termos do que já se conhece, fazer acréscimos ou extensões na base de princípios aceitos, e depois proceder à comprovação dessas hipóteses experimentalmente. Outra, que se pode chamar de método mosaico, considera cada problema por si mesmo, com pouca referência ao campo no qual se encontra, e procura descobrir relações e princípios existentes na área circunscrita.”
Von Bekesy passa depois a apresentar suas duas formas de pintura:
“Uma estreita analogia com esses dois métodos pode encontrar-se no campo da arte. No período entre os séculos onze e dezessete os árabes e os persas desenvolveram um alto domínio das artes de descrição. (…) Mais tarde, durante a Renascença, desenvolveu-se nova forma de representação na qual se tentou dar unidade e perspectiva à pintura e representar a atmosfera. (. . .)
Quando já se tenha alcançado grande progresso no campo da ciência e já conhecida a maioria das variáveis pertinentes aos seus múltiplos problemas, pode-se facilmente resolver um novo problema tentando-se enquadrá-lo no conjunto dos dados conhecidos. Mas, quando o quadro de referência é incerto, e grande o número de variáveis, o método mosaico é muito mais fácil.”“.
Duvidosa esta afirmação que o método mosaico é “muito mais fácil” no estudo do simultâneo que é o campo auditivo, porem é a abordagem que McLuhan usou. Com efeito, o mosaico ou pintura “bidimensional” é o modo pelo qual há a suavização do campo visual como tal, a fim de que possa haver o máximo de intercambio entre todos os sentidos. Tal foi a estratégia dos pintores “desde Cézanne”: pintar como se estivessem segurando os objetos e não como se os estivessem vendo. Aparentemente foi isto que motivou McLuhan fazer este livro da maneira que o fez. (REC)
É impossível construir-se uma teoria de mudança cultural sem o conhecimento das mudanças do equilíbrio relacional entre os sentidos resultantes das diversas exteriorizações de nossos sentidos (Tablete 73)
Convém muito nos determos nessa questão, porquanto veremos que, a partir da invenção do alfabeto, desenvolveu-se no Ocidente um contínuo movimento para a separação dos sentidos, de funções, estados emocionais e políticos, bem como de tarefas – fragmentação que terminou – pensou Durkheim – na anomia (falta de objetivos) do século dezenove. O paradoxo da tese apresentada pelo professor von Bekesy está em que o mosaico bidimensional é, de fato, um mundo multidimensional de ressonância interestrutural. É o mundo tridimensional do espaço pictórico que é, realmente, uma ilusão abstrata, produzida pela intensa separação do sentido da vista dos demais sentidos. Não se trata de questionar valores ou preferências. O que é necessário, contudo, para qualquer outra compreensão diferente, é saber-se porque o desenho “primitivo” é bidimensional, ao passo que. o desenho e a pintura do homem alfabetizado tendem para a perspectiva. Sem tal conhecimento, não podemos compreender por que o homem deixou de ser “primitivo” ou audiotáctil na tendência de seus sentidos. Nem poderíamos chegar a entender porque o homem” desde Cézanne” abandonou o visual em favor dos modos audiotácteis de percepção e. de organização da experiência. Esclarecida essa questão, podemos abordar mais facilmente o papel que tiveram o alfabeto e a tipografia na atribuição de função dominante ao sentido da vista na linguagem e na arte e em toda a extensão da vida política e social. Com efeito, enquanto o homem não elevou desse modo o comportamento visual do seu sensorium, as comunidades não. conheceram senão a estrutura tribal. A destribalização do indivíduo, pelo menos no passado, dependeu de uma intensa vida visual promovida e alimentada pela cultura letrada e de letras somente do tipo alfabético. Porque a escrita alfabética não é apenas única, mas tardia. Houve muita escrita antes dela. De fato, qualquer ,Povo que cessa de ser nômade e passa a seguir modos sedentários de trabalho está propenso e a caminho de inventar a escrita. Todos os nômades não só não tiveram escrita como não desenvolveram arquitetura, nem o “espaço fechado”, pois escrita é um modo de fechar, visualmente, sentidos e espaços não-visuais. É, portanto, uma forma de abstrair o visual do intercurso comum dos sentidos em globo. E, enquanto a linguagem é uma exteriorização (manifestação) de todos os sentidos ao mesmo tempo, a escrita é uma abstração da palavra. Atualmente é mais fácil aprender essa tecnologia especifica da escrita. Os novos institutos para ensino de leitura rápida, ou dinâmica, trabalham na base da dissociação ‘entre os movimentos dos olhos e a verbalização interior. Veremos mais adiante como toda leitura nos mundos antigo e medieval era em voz alta. Com a palavra impressa, os olhos aceleraram-se e silenciou-se a voz. Mas a verbalização interior era tida como inseparável do seguimento horizontal das palavras pela linha na página. Hoje em dia, sabemos que se pode separar a leitura da verbalização por meio da leitura vertical. Esta prática, naturalmente, lança a tecnologia alfabética da separação dos sentidos a um extremo de inanidade, mas é importante para se compreender como teve início a escrita em qualquer dos seus tipos. Num ensaio intitulado A History of the Theory of lnformation (História da teoria da informação), lido perante a Sociedade Real, em 1951, E. Colin Cherry, da Universidade de Londres, observou que “nos primeiros tempos, a invenção foi grandemente dificultada pela incapacidade do homem de dissociar a estrutura mecânica da forma animal. A invenção da roda foi um primeiro notável esforço desse tipo de dissociação. O grande surto das invenções que começou no século dezesseis apoiou-se na gradual dissociação da máquina da forma animal”. A tipografia foi a primeira mecanização de um antigo artesanato e levou facilmente à crescente mecanização de todo o artesanato. As fases modernas desse processo constituem o tema de Mechanization Takes Command (A mecanização assume o comando), de Siegfried Giedion. Giedion,entretanto, preocupa-se em traçar, com minúcia, as fases pelas quais, no século passa:do, usamos mecanismos para recuperar a forma orgânica:
Em seus célebres estudos sobre os movimentos dos homens e dos animais por volta de 1870, Edward Muybridge colocou uma série de trinta câmaras em intervalos de doze polegadas, disparando os obturadores eletromagneticamente assim que o objeto em movimento passava diante da chapa (…) Cada quadro mostra o objeto numa fase isolada conforme fora captado em cada câmara (pág. 107).
Quer isso dizer, o objeto é trasladado da forma orgânica ou simultânea para um modo estático ou pictórico. Ao girar uma seqüência desses espaços estáticos ou pictoriais com sufi-ciente velocidade, cria-se a ilusão de inteireza orgânica, ou uma interação de espaços. Assim, a roda passa finalmente a ser o meio de afastar nossa cultura da máquina(Uma vez que mostra que a máquina reproduz a forma animal. (N. do Trad.) Mas foi por meio da eletricidade aplicada à roda que esta mais uma vez se fundiu com a forma animal. De fato, a roda é agora obsoleta na era da eletricidade e dos mísseis. Mas a hipertrofia é o sinal de obsolescência, conforme veremos repetidas vezes. Justamente porque a roda está agora voltando, no século vinte, à forma orgânica, faz-se agora muito fácil compreender como o homem primitivo a “inventou”. Qualquer criatura em movimento é uma roda, no sentido de que a repetição de movimento tem em si um princípio cíclico e circular. Assim as melodias de sociedades letradas são ciclos que se repetem. Mas a música de povo não-alfabetizado não tem tal forma abstrata cíclica e repetitiva como ,a melodia. A invenção, numa palavra, é translação de uma espécie de espaço para outra. Giedion dedica certo tempo à obra do fisiologista francês, Etienne Jules Morey (1830-1904), que criou o miógrafo para registrar os movimentos dos músculos: “Morey muito conscientemente se refere a Descartes, mas ao invés de representar graficamente seções, traduz o movimento orgânico em forma gráfica” (pág. 19).
O confronto no século vinte entre as duas faces de cultura – a alfabética e a eletrônica – empresta à palavra impressa papel crucial em deter o retorno à África interior *(Tablete 76)
* Referência à expressão de Conrad “The Africa within” – a África que está no “interior” da experiência ocidental.
A invenção do alfabeto, à semelhança da invenção da roda, foi a primeira tradução ou redução de um complexo e orgânico intercâmbio de espaços num único espaço. O alfabeto fonético reduziu o uso simultâneo de todos os sentidos, que é a expressão oral, a um simples código visual. Hoje, pode-se efetuar essa espécie de translação numa ou noutra direção, através de uma variedade de formas espaciais, as quais chamamos de “midia”, ou “meios de comunicação”. Mas cada uma dessas formas de espaço tem propriedades particulares e incide sobre nossos outros sentidos ou espaços de modo também particular. Hoje, não é difícil compreender a invenção do alfinete porque – como assinalou A. N. Whiteheadem Science and the Modern World (A ciência e o mundo moderno) (pág. 141) – o método de descobrir foi a grande descoberta do século dezenove:
A maior invenção do século dezenove foi a invenção do método de inventar. Entrou em existência um novo método. Para compreendermos nossa época, podemos deixar de lado todos os detalhes de mudança, tais como estradas de ferro, telégrafos, rádios, teares, tinturas sintéticas. Temos que concentrar-nos no método em si; isto é, na verdadeira novidade que rompeu com os fundamentos da antiga civilização. (. . .) Um dos elementos do novo método é justamente a descoberta da maneira de transpor a distância existente entre as idéias científicas e o seu produto final. Trata-se de um processo de ataque disciplinado a cada dificuldade, uma após outra.
O método da invenção, como demonstrou Edgar Poe em sua “Filosofia da Composição”, consiste simplesmente em tomar como ponto de partida a solução do problema, ou o efeito visado. Recua-se, depois, passo a passo para o ponto de onde se teria de começar a fim de alcançar a solução ou efeito. Tal é o método dos romances policiais, do poema simbolista e da ciência moderna. Precisa-se, entretanto, do passo dado pelo século vinte para além desse método de invenção, se queremos compreender a origem e a ação das formas novas tais ‘como a roda ou o alfabeto. E esse passo não é o de voltar para /trás, recuando do produtO’ até o seu ponto de origem, o de acompanhar e seguir o processo em si mesmo sem referencia ao produto. Acompanhar os contornos do processo, como se faz na psicanálise, onde esse método proporciona o único meio de evitar o produto do processo, isto é, neurose ou psicose. É propósito deste livro estudar primariamente a fase tipográfica da cultura alfabética. Esta fase, entretanto, encontrou hoje em dia os novos modos orgânicos e biológicos do mundo eletrônico. Quer isto dizer que, no extremo do seu desenvolvimento mecanicista, vê-se interpenetrada pela ação eletrobiológica, conforme De Chardin explicou. E é essa reversão de caráter que torna nossa era “conatural”, por assim dizer, das culturas não-alfabetizadas. Não temos mais dificuldades em compreender a experiência de primitivos ou de, não-alfabetizados simplesmente porque a estamos recriando’ eletronicamente em nossa própria cultura. (A pós-alfabetização, entretanto, é um modo de interdependência completamente diferente da pré alfabetização.) Por conseguinte, deter-se sobre as primeiras fases da tecnologia alfabética não deixa de ser importante para se compreender a era de Gutenberg. Colin Cherry teve isto a dizer sobre os primórdios da escrita:
Uma história detalhada das linguagens falada e escrita seria irrelevante para o nosso estudo, mas, ainda assim, há certas questões de interesse que podem ser consideradas como ponto de partida. As primeiras escritas das civilizações do Mediterrâneo ,eram por meio de desenhos de imagens ou figuras, ou escrita “logográfica”: simples figuras para reapresentar objetos e também” por associação, idéias, ações, nomes, etc. Além disto, o que é muito mais importante, desenvolveu-se a escrita fonética, na qual se criaram símbolos para os sons. Com o decorrer do tempo, as figuras foram reduzidas a símbolos mais formais conforme determinava a dificuldade de se empregar um cinzelou um pincel de caniço, ao mesmo tempo que a escrita fonética se simplificava com a formação de um grupo de duas ou três dúzias de letras de alfabeto, divididas em consoantes e vogais. Temos nos hieróglifos egípcios um exemplo supremo do que agora se chama redundância em linguagens e código; uma das dificuldades em decifrar a pedra de Roseta reside no fato de que uma palavra polissilábica poderia dar a cada sílaba não um único símbolo, porém, certo número de outros diferentes comumente usados a fim de que a palavra pudesse ser perfeitamente compreendida. (O efeito, quando literalmente transcrita para o inglês, é o de tartamudeio.) Por outro lado, as línguas semíticas revelam, em seus primórdios, admitir a redundância. A antiga escrita hebraica não tinha vogais: o hebraico moderno não as tem também, salvo em livros infantis. Muitas outras escritas antigas não têm vogais. O russo eslavo avançou mais um passo na condensação: nos textos religiosos, palavras comumente ’empregadas eram abreviadas em poucas letras, de modo semelhante ao emprego atual do sinal U&”, de abreviações tais como lb (pound – libra) e o crescente uso de iniciais, e.g., EUA, UNESCO, O.K.
Não está no evitar-se a redundância a chave para o alfabeto fonético e seus efeitos sobre as pessoas e a sociedade. “Redundância” é um conceito de “conteúdo”, ele próprio um legado da tecnologia do alfabeto. Isto é, qualquer escrita fonética é um código visual para a fala. A fala é o “conteÚdo” da escrita fonética. Não é, entretanto, o conteúdo de nenhuma outra espécie de escrita. Variedades pictográficas e ideográfica de escrita são Gestalts ou instantâneos de várias situações pessoais ou sociais. De fato, podemos ter uma boa idéia das formas não-alfabetizadas de escrita pelas equações matemáticas modernas, como E = MC2, ou pelas antigas “figuras de retórica” gregas e romanas. Tais equações ou figuras não têm conteúdo, mas são estruturas como uma melodia individual que evoca seu próprio mundo. As figuras de retórica são posturas da mente, como a hipérbole, ou a ironia, ou a litotes, ou o símile, ou a paronomásia. Escrita pictorial de toda espécie é um balé dessas posturas que ,delicia muito mais nossa tendência moderna para a sinestesia e riqueza audiotáctil de experiência que a forma alfabética simples é abstrata. Seria conveniente hoje em dia que se ensinasse às crianças muitos ideogramas chineses e hieróglifos egípcios como meio de intensificar sua apreciação de nosso alfabeto. Escapou, portanto, a Colin Cherry, esse caráter único de nosso alfabeto, que é não apenas o de dissociar ou abstrair a vista e o som, mas o de retirar todo e qualquer significado do som das letras, salvo na medida em que letras sem sentido se relacionam com os sons sem sentido também. Na medida em que qualquer outro significado é emprestado à visão ou ao som, a separação entre o sentido visual e os outros sentidos fica incompleta, como é o caso em todas as formas de escrita salvo a do alfabeto fonético.
A tendência atual de reforma do alfabeto ou da ortografia é a de acentuar o sentido auditivo mais do que o visual (Tablete79)
E interessante notar que existe hoje em dia crescente insatisfação em relação à dissociação entre nossos sentidos e as formas alfabéticas. À página 81 (abaixo) damos uma amostra de recente tentativa de criação de novo alfabeto, capaz de dar caráter mais fonético à nossa palavra escrita. O traço mais notável a observar na amostra é sua semelhança, senão identificação com página altamente textura e táctil de um manuscrito antigo. Em nosso desejo de restaurar cena unidade de intercurso entre nossos sentidos, tateamos’ em busca de antigas formas de manuscritos que têm de ser lidos em voz alta ou então não ser lidos. Lado a lado com esse desenvolvimento extremado está o dos novos institutos de ensino da leitura rápida (dinâmica). Neles educa-se o leitor para comandar a vista de modo que os olhos acompanhem a página verticalmente pelo centro, evitando toda verbalização e Os movimentos incipientes da laringe que acompanham a série de instantâneos colhidos pelos olhos, quando percorrem as linhas da esquerda para a direita, a fim de comporem o filme sonoro mental que chamamos de leitura. A obra mais definitiva que temos sobre as letras fonéticas é The Alphabet, de David Diringer. me assim começa sua exposição (pág. 37): O alfabeto é o último em data dos sistemas de escrita, sendo o mais altamente desenvolvido, o mais conveniente, o mais facilmente adaptável. É agora usado universalmente pelos povos civilizados; aprende-se facilmente sua técnica na infância. É óbvio que existe enorme vantagem no uso de letras que representam sons simples ao invés de idéias ou sílabas; nenhum sinólogo conhece todos os 80.000 ou mais símbolos chineses, mas também está longe de ser fácil aprender aproximadamente os 9.000 símbolos chineses utilizados pelos seus escolares. Quanto mais simples é escrever usando apenas os 22 ou 24 ou 26 sinais ou letras do nosso alfabeto! Além disto, o alfabeto permite passar-se de uma língua para outra sem grande dificuldade. O nosso alfabeto, agora utilizado para as línguas inglesa, francesa, italiana, alemã, espanhola, turca, polonesa, holandesa, checa, croata, gaulesa, finlandesa, húngara e outras, originou-se do alfabeto outrora usado pelos antigos hebreus, fenícios, aramaicos, gregos, etruscos e romanos. Graças à simplicidade do alfabeto, a escrita generalizou-se e se fez pràticamente comum; não mais é privilégio quase exclusivo das classes sacerdotais ou de outras classes privilegiadas como acontecia no Egito, na Mesopotâmia ou na China. O ensino reduziu-se, em grande parte, a uma questão de leitura escrita, e fez-se acessível a todos. O fato de haver a escrita alfabética sobrevivido por três e meio milênios, com modificações relativamente pequenas, e a despeito da introdução da máquina de impressão e da máquina de escrever e do uso extensivo da escrita estenográfica, é a melhor prova de sua eficiência e aptidão para atender às necessidades de todo o mundo moderno. Foi tal simplicidade, adaptabilidade e conveniência que garantiram o triunfo do alfabeto sobre os outros sistemas de escrita. A escrita alfabética e suas origens constituem uma história em si mesmas; oferecem novo campo para pesquisas que estudiosos americanos estão começando a chamar de “alfabetologia”. Nenhum outro sistema teve história assim tão extensa, tão complexa e tão interessante. A observação de Diringer de que a escrita alfabética é “agora empregada universalmente pelos povos civilizados” é um pouco tautológica, porquanto foi somente pelo alfabeto que Os homens se destribalizaram ou individualizaram para criar a “civilização”. As culturas podem elevar-se artisticamente muito acima de civilização, mas sem o alfabeto fonético permanecem tribais, como se dá com as culturas chinesa e japonesa. É necessário acentuar que minha preocupação é pelo processo de dissociação sensorial pela qual se efetiva a destribalização dos homens. Se é uma “boa coisa” essa emergência do indivíduo e destribalização do homem, não cabe a nenhum indivíduo determinar. Mas, identificar-se e reconhecer-se o processo pelo qual isto se operou pode desembaraçar a questão das névoas e miasmas morais que agora a envolvem. Figura 1, de New York Times, 20 de julho de 1961.
O novo ALFABETO DE 43 UNIDADES: Esta é uma página extraída de uma obra denominada “Jesus, o Auxiliador”, impressa na Grã-Bretanha, no alfabeto romano experimental e aumentado. O alfabeto, baseado em grande parte na fonética, contém o alfabeto convencional, com as letras “q” e “x” eliminadas e dezenove letras novas a ele adicionadas. Não há letras maiúsculas. Pelo sistema, a letra “o” é imutável no som de “long”, mas “ago” é escrito “agoe” com o “o” e o “e” ligados. Outra letra nova é o “z” invertido, para sons com “trees”. O “s” convencional é usado em palavras como “see”. Outras letras novas incluem “i” e “e” ligados por uma barra transversal par,a palavras tais como “blind”; “o” e “u” ligados para palavras tais como “flowers” ‘e dois “o” que ficam unidos. Em setembro, cêrca de 1.000 crianças inglesas começarão a aprender a ler com êste alfabeto fonético experimental.
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.
Comentário (Roque):
A única referencia a esta experiência na Internet é a citação de McLuhan e para todos efeitos práticos, parece cretinice.
Porém, pesquisas posteriores, que poderiam ser evidencia de pontos que McLuhan percebeu, indicam que o cérebro integra e extrai informação de forma não de todo compreendida e muito interessante:
Este pequeno texto Serve apenas para Mostrar como nossa Cabeça consegue Fazer coisas Impressionantes!!! No começo estava Muito complicado Mas nesta linha Sua mente vai Decifrando o Código quase Automaticamente Sem precisar pensar Muito, certo? Pode ficar bem Orgulhosos disto!!! Sua capacidade merece! Parabéns!!!
O alfabeto é um absorvedor e transformador agressivo e militante de culturas, conforme Harold lnnis foi o primeiro a mostrar (82)
Uma outra observação de Diringer, em seu livro, merece destaque. Esta observação é a de que uma tecnologia que se utiliza de letras para representar sons mais do que idéias ou “silabas” é acessível a todos os povos. Em outras palavras, quer isto dizer que, qualquer sociedade que possua alfabeto, pode traduzir quaisquer culturas vizinhas para seu sistema alfabético. Este processo, porém, somente é válido para culturas alfabéticas. Nenhuma cultura não-alfabética pode adotar uma cultura alfabética; porque o alfabeto não pode ser apenas assimilado; ele chega para modificar, liquidar ou reduzir. Contudo, nesta era eletrônica, talvez tenhamos descoberto os limites da tecnologia do alfabeto. Já não nos deve surpreender que povos, como o grego e o romano, que haviam passado pela experiência do alfabeto, tenham também sido levados à conquista e à organização-a-distância. Harold Innis, em Empire and Communications (Império e comunicações) foi o primeiro a tratar desse tema e a explicar com precisão o verdadeiro significado do mito de Cadmo. O rei grego Cadmo, que introduziu o alfabeto fonético na Grécia, segundo se conta, teria semeado os dentes do dragão e deles brotaram homens armados. (Os dentes do dragão talvez se refiram às antigas formas dos hieróglifos.) Innis também explicou a razão por que a palavra impressa gera nacionalismo e não tribalismo; e por que cria sistemas de preços e mercados tais que não podem existir sem a palavra impressa. Em suma, Harold Innis foi o primeiro a perceber que o processo de mudança estava implícito nas formas da tecnologia dos meios de comunicação. Este meu livro representa apenas notas de pé de página à sua obra, visando explicá-la. Diringer não põe em relevo senão um aspecto em relação ao alfabeto, pouco importando como ou quando foi ele alcançado:
Seja como for, deve-se acentuar que o grande feito dessa invenção não foi a criação dos sinais. Foi, sim, a adoção de um sistema puramente alfabético o qual, além disso, denotava cada som por meio de um único sinal. Por esse achado, simples como possa parecer-nos agora, seu inventor, ou inventores, devem figurar entre os maiores benfeitores da humanidade. Nenhum outro povo, no mundo, salvo o desses inventores, foi capaz de desenvolver uma verdadeira escrita alfabética. Os povos mais ou menos civilizados do Egito, Mesopotâmia, Creta, Asia Menor, Vale do Indo e América Central alcançaram um estádio adiantado na história da escrita, mas não foram além de uma fase de transição. Alguns povos (os antigos cipriotas, os japoneses e outros) desenvolveram um silabário. Mas somente os semitas sírio-palestinos produziram o gênio, ou gênios que criaram a escrita alfabética, da qual se originaram todos os alfabetos passados e atuais. Cada civilização importante modifica seu alfabeto, e o tempo pode tornar sua relação com alguns de seus parentes mais próximos quase irreconhecível. Assim, o brâmane, a grande matriz dos alfabetos da índia, o alfabeto coreano e os alfabetos mongóis derivam da mesma fonte que o grego, o latim, o rúnico, o hebraico, o árabe e o russo, embora seja praticamente impossível a um leigo perceber real semelhança entre eles (págs. 216-217).
Por meio do sinal sem significação própria ligado ao som igualmente sem significado, construímos a forma e o sentido do homem ocidental. Nas próximas páginas procuraremos delinear, mais ou menos sumariamente, os efeitos do alfabeto na cultura manuscrita nas sociedades antiga e medieval. Depois disso, examinaremos mais detidamente as transformações que a máquina de impressão tipográfica trouxe à cultura alfabética.
O herói de Homero transforma-se em um homem dividido, ambivalente, ao assumir um ego individual (83)
O mundo dos gregos demonstra por que as aparências visuais não podem interessar um povo que não tenha antes “interiorizado” a tecnologia alfabética (87)
O ponto de vista dos gregos tanto em arte como em cronologia pouco tem em comum com o nosso, mas assemelha-se muito ao da Idade Média (90)
Os gregos inventaram suas novidades artísticas e científicas depois da interiorização do alfabeto (93)
A continuidade das artes medieval e grega foi assegurada pelo elo entre caelatura ou gravação e iluminura(46)
A crescente importância do visual entre os gregos os desviou da arte primitiva que a idade eletrônica agora reinventa depois de ter interiorizado o campo unificado da simultaneidade elétrica (99)
Nestes seis “tabletes” do mosaico ele volta a abordar a questão da maneira como a visão forma a idéia da realidade, como o fez em A Galáxia de Gutenberg (31) e, novamente, não consegue passar uma idéia que deixe claro e nos convença do que ele está falando. Por ex.,, ele passa batido na questão do Partenon, que sabemos que tem uma construção para corrigir a perspectiva, que apresento em seqüência. Porém, ele apresenta uma discussão interessante quanto a questão de um ponto de vista da Idade Média e dos gregos serem o mesmoe não o nosso, a relação que tem o alfabeto com novidades artísticas e ciência, as iluminuras como algo a parte e a recuperação atual pela tecnologia eletrônica destes aspectos, que de certa forma é o que estamos fazendo aqui.
O ponto de vista da Idade Média e dos gregos é o mesmo e não o nosso, a relação que tem o alfabeto com novidades artísticas e ciência, as iluminuras como algo a parte e a recuperação atual pela tecnologia eletrônica (90)
Para nossas finalidades, que é navegar a favor da corrente e fazer exatamente isto que estes seis tabletes indicam, isto é, usar a eletrônica de forma a devolver ao homem atual a perspectiva que existiu um dia, estes conceitos apresentados são de suma importância, não importando o quanto certo ou errado estejam. Isto é, se McLuhan tem dificuldade em demonstrar o ponto, porém ele esta carregado de razão em ter descoberto o que é um fato: a eletrônica nos devolveu a um tempo anterior que já existiu e no qual foram feitas muitas coisas na criação ou educação, ou o que seja que envolva comunicação.
O elemento “misterioso” por assim dizer, que afeta nossa percepção é a noção de tempo.
McLuhan cita Bernard van Groningen, do seu trabalho In the Grip of the Past(Nas garras do passado), que tem duplo sentido, pois não é apenas examinar o passado, mas a noção de passado, pois, segundo ele, os gregos e todas as sociedades não alfabetizadas, tinham uma concepção cósmica, mítica do tempo como simultâneo, ao que acrescento, instante presente, verdade psicológica, que é o que sentimos a eventos que nos afetaram profundamente, ou seja, existem o tempo todo instantaneamente. Como conseqüência disto, a idéia de passado, Van Groningen acrescenta “Os gregos freqüentemente se referem ao passado e, ao fazê-lo, ligam o assunto em questão a uma concepção cronológica. Mas assim que investigamos, o verdadeiro significado, evidencia-se que a idéia não é temporal, mas usada num sentido geral.”
Isto, em relação ao tempo, é o mesmo que, em relação ao espaço, reduzir o tamanho da figura na pintura, sem um ponto de vista ou de fuga para a perspectiva.
A visualização de seqüências cronológicas é desconhecida nas sociedades orais, como agora é irrelevante na era da eletrônica do movimento da informação.
O “fio da narrativa” é tão revelador quanto a linha na pintura ou escultura, pois explica exatamente até que ponto se processou a dissociação do sentido de visão dos outros sentidos. Erich Auerbach, no seu trabalho The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, que se dedica a análise estilística da arte da narrativa nas literaturas do Ocidente, desde Homero até hoje, nos diz que, por ex, Aquiles e Ulisses e Aquiles, de Homero, são apresentados em quadros verticais e planos, por meios de descrições plenamente exteriorizadas, sob iluminação uniforme e conexão ininterrupta, nas quais a livre expressão situa tosos os incidentes em primeiro plano, revelando significados incontestáveis, com um mínimo de desenvolvimento histórico e de perspectiva psicológica.
Ou seja, o visual tende ao explicito, ao uniforme e ao conseqüente na pintura, na poesia, na lógica, na historia.
Os não alfabetizados ou não letrados, tendem ao implícito, simultâneo e descontinuo, seja no passado primitivo ou no presente eletrônico. (grifo meu, REC)
Totalmente contrario ao que, por exemplo na física de Newton, conforme Sir Edmundo Whittaker escreve em seu livro Space and Spirit (pg 86)
“O newtonianismo, como o aristotelismo, procura compreender o mundo tentando descobrir a ligação dos eventos entre si, e isso se efetua por meio da ordenação de nossas experiências de conformidade com a categoria de causa e efeito, descobrindo-se para cada fenômeno seus agentes determinantes ou antecedentes. A afirmação que essa ligação é universal e que nenhum evento acontece sem causa, é o postulado de causalidade.”
Homogeneidade, uniformidade e repetibilidade eis as notas componentes e básicas de um mundo novo a emergir da matriz audiotáctil.
A questão central que está por trás desta “tendência” do que Mcluhan chama de globalismo sensorial anterior à invenção de Gutenberg, que os sentidos humanos impuseram ao ser humano, ou melhor, a única forma disponível, que é “aprender” no sentido de captar, através do táctil e dos outros sentidos, sem o isolamento característico do visual da cultura alfabética que Gutenberg introduziu pela massificação dos livros.
Este aspecto talvez seja o mais difícil de entender das idéias de McLuhan e vale a pena nos estendermos mais um pouco.
McLuhan não discute, ou melhor, discute prolixamente de outra forma algo que William M.Ivins, Jr, em seu livro Prints and Visual Communication, que McLuhan indica ter usado, trazendo um conceito para objetos que eu gostaria de estender para toda a realidade, que é a Ipseidade, ou a particularidade da natureza de um objeto. Ou o ser isto e não aquilo, ou como fazer se quisermos comunicar a alguém sem ter o objeto em mãos, o que seria.
Penso num plural de ipseidades, incluindo subjetividade ou coisas que não são materiais, como sensações ou idéias que temos quando nos submetemos a certas situações.
Em condições ideais, seria a criação de uma virtualidade sobre as coisas a que submetemos nossos sentidos.
No caso do filme apresentado aos africanos, que gerou deles a percepção de apenas verem uma galinha e não o que um europeu, ou americano educado, veriam, que é o aspecto de como o acumulo de lixo e a água parada tem a ver com a saúde, a ipseidade deles é totalmente diversa da dos alfabetizados, pois que eles usam um meio de se aperceber das coisas que o cercam e como pensar sobre elas e os alfabetizados usa outro.
Ivins introduz este conceito para uma situação objetiva em que ele quer explorar o efeito que a técnica de gravação permite reproduzir por exemplo imagens visuais de plantas, eventualmente medicinais, de forma que uma pessoa do séc XX possa se beneficiar das mesmas propriedades curativas desta mesma planta como o fizeram no século XVI, por exemplo. Ou seja como comunicar de uma pessoa para outra o saber (no sentido do conceito disponível e sacramentado seja pelo que seja) sobre elas associado com o conhecimento, que é o uso e a convivência e a obtenção dos efeitos esperados.
Por exemplo como distinguir por qualquer tipo de descrição a diferença entre mandioca brava e a comestível, que não é medicinal, mas evidencia o ponto?
Como distinguir, numa mata que imagino exista na África, os sinais de que eventualmente você pode estar na mira do jantar de algum leão?
Com decidir se você, brasileiro, vive atualmente nos Estados Unidos se é melhor largar tudo e voltar para o Brasil ou ficar lá?
Nos três casos, nossa ipseidade ou a de quem nos poderia nos aconselhar é totalmente diferente e depende da forma como foi obtido o conceito e conhecimento sobre o que esta sendo tratado.
Existe uma tremenda diferença entre conhecimento sensorial e conceito intelectual obtido pela leitura ou descrição do que está em jogo.
Neste caso, o que esta em jogo na questão do ponto de vista, é que a ipseidade obtida pelos sentidos todos juntos, que é o caso anterior à tecnologia de Gutemberg que monopolizou a forma de conhecer, e a que vingou e prevalece hoje, que é a cultura alfabetizada.
A grande sacada de McLuhan é que o computador, os meios de comunicação, a Internet enfim, geram uma ipseidade similar a que existia antes da alfabetização e meu objetivo neste estudo, é entender isto para tirar maximo partido dele na direção que eu desejar.
Uma coisa que me chamou particularmente a atenção, foi o efeito que isto possa ter tido na lógica de Aristóteles, da qual McLuhan apenas pontua a questão da silogística, isto é, segundo Aristóteles, o requerimento é apenas que os termos sejam homogêneos no tocante a suas possíveis posições como sujeitos e predicados, que fazia com que Aristóteles omitisse os termos singulares, alias citado da obra de Jan Lukasiewicz, Aritotle´s Syllogistic.
Esta falha, na analise de Lukasiewicz residia no fato de que os gregos buscavam as novidades de ordem visual e homogeneidade linear. McLuhan indica ainda que este autor observa sobre a natureza da “lógica” e da faculdade visual e abstgrata:
“A lógica formal moderna esforça-se por obter a maior exatidão possível. Esse alvo só pode ser alcançado por meio de uma linguagem precisa, formada de sinais estáveis e visualmente perceptíveis. Tal linguagem é indispensável para qualquer ciência” ao que McLuhan acrescenta: Mas tal linguagem é feita pela exclusão de tudo que não tenha sentido visual, até mesmo as palavras. (grifo meu, REC)
Vale a pena citar ipsis literis o que McLuhan tem a dizer sobre isto, na pág 94:
“A única preocupação aqui é determinar o grau de influencia que o alfabeto teve sobre os que primeiro o usaram. Linearidade e homogeneidade das partes foram “descobertas”, ou antes mudanças na vida sensória dos gregos sob o novo regime da escrita fonética. Os gregos expressaram esses novos modos de percepção visual nas artes. Os romanos estenderam a linearidade e a homogeneidade pelas esferas civis e militares e pelo mundo do arco e do espaço visual, ou fechado. Não somente estenderam as “descobertas” gregas, como sofreram o mesmo processo de destribalização e visualização. Estenderam a linearidade por todo um império e a homogeneização para o processamento-em-massa de cidadãos, da estatuária e dos livros. Hoje os romanos sentir-se-iam bem a vontade nos Estados Unidos e os gregos, em comparação, prefeririam as culturas “atrasadas” e orais de nosso mundo, tais como a Irlanda e o Velho Sul da América do Norte.”
Uma sociedade nômade não pode ter a experiência do espaço fechado (100)
Um efeito das culturas não alfabetizadas sobre a percepção sensorial é não euclidiana, ou seja, intuitiva. O efeito mais marcante é a falta de perspectiva. Sem perspectiva não há como representar infinitude e a concepção de espaço fica radicalmente prejudicada ou alterada. Porem existem ganhos, sendo um deles a possibilidade, por exemplo, de cogitar da forma como fez Einstein com sua teoria da Relatividade.
O grande problema da Geometria Euclidiana é a suposição que todos espaços são planos e que tudo ao mesmo tempo é homogêneo – cujas propriedades não se alteram em qualquer local definido no seu espaço – e isotrópico – cujas propriedades não se alteram consoante a direção em que são consideradas, coisa que a modernidade amplamente sabe que não é assim..
Porém, ela esta de tal forma inserida na cultura alfabetizada, que os primeiros matemáticos a cogitarem de espaços curvos e outro tipo de geometria, foram severamente repudiados, sendo o caso de Lobachevski ter sido enterrado sem a presença de seus alunos como foram de protesto contra suas idéias algo que dá a medida em quanto isto afeta a concepção das pessoas.
Creio que vale a pena explorar um pouco mais o que esta em jogo, aplicando esta preocupação com a literatura e a pintura. Encontrei as seguintes consideraçõesfeitas por António Andrade, que frequenta a Licenciatura em Design de Comunicação na Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto: (Ver<)
Em muito da arte e do pensamento modernos, primitivismo fez-se o clichê comum e da moda (104)
Uma conseqüência muito interessante da aplicação do conceito visual alfabético vs oral não alfabético é a idéia religiosa de quem os usa.
A suposição do autor Mircea Eliade, que trata disto, O Sagrado e o Profano, quando não leva em conta este aspecto, comete, segundo McLuhan, grosseiro engano, pois o homem da Internet estaria mais que nunca “sacralizado” e fica, para mim, se por trás desta enorme ameaça que a diferença de concepção religiosa ou natureza do Deus de cada um se constitui hoje, não estaria tudo sendo alavancado pela entrada na era da comunicação e do computador.
Ou seja, paradoxalmente, contrariando uma idéia corrente, a Internet “sacraliza” o homem e, no próximo bloco, McLuhan desdiz outra tradição que é imaginar que a invenção de Gutemberg, que iniciou-se pela impressão da Bíblia, teria efeito exatamente inverso..
“A Galáxia de Gutenberg” tem o propósito de mostrar por que a cultura do alfabeto predispõe o homem a dessacralizar seu modo de ser (107)
McLuhan nos surpreende neste tablete, pois revela o que ele pensa ser o tema central do livro, já que pela própria forma como foi redigir sugere ser um emaranhado de tabletes que podem ou não formar alguma lógica, já que a idéia é que funcionem como fotografias e apenas indiquem um ambiente.
“Na parte final deste livro aceitaremos o papel que Eliade declinou, quando disse: “Não nos cabe mostrar por quais processos históricos (…) o homem moderno dessacralizou seu mundo e adotou urna existência profana”. Mostrar exatamente por qual processo histórico isso foi feito constitui o tema de A Galáxia de Gutenberg. E, tendo mostrado o processo, po-demos, pelo menos, tomar decisão consciente e. responsável sobre se vamos escolher mais urna vez o modo tribal que tanta fascinação exerce sobre Eliade:
O abismo que divide as duas modalidades de experiência – sagrada e profana – tornar-se-á aparente quando passarmos a descrever o Espaço sagrado e a construção ritual da morada humana, ou as variedades das experiências religiosas do tempo, ou as relações do homem religioso com a natureza e o mundo de instrumentos, ou a consagração da própria vida humana, a sacralidade com que se pode impregnar as funções vitais do homem (alimento, sexo, trabalho, etc.). Bastará que nos lembremos do que a cidade ou a casa, a natureza, as ferramentas ou o trabalho passaram a ser para o homem moderno e não-religioso, ver-se-á para podermos ver com meridiana clareza tudo que distingue esse homem de outro que pertença a qualquer sociedade arcaica, ou mesmo de um camponês da Europa cristã. Para a consciência moderna, o ato fisiológico – comer, sexo, etc. – é em alguns tão-só um fenômeno orgânico. (…) Mas para o primitivo, tal ato não é simplesmente fisiológico; é, ou pode tornar-se, um sacramento, isto é, urna comunhão com o que é sagrado.
O leitor perceberá bem cedo que sagrado e profano são dais modos de ser ,no mundo, duas situações existenciais adotadas pelo homem no decurso da história. Esses modos de ser no mundo não são de interesse tão-só para a história de religiões ou para a sociologia; não são objeto tão-somente de estudo histórico, sociológico ou etnológico. Em última análise, os modos sagrado e profano de ser dependem das diferentes posições que o homem conquistou no cosmo; não interessam, por conseguinte, ao filósofo nem a qualquer pessoa que procura descobrir as possíveis dimensões da existência humana (págs. 14-15)”
Eliade prefere qualquer homem oral ao homem dessacralizado ou alfabetizado; mesmo “um camponês da Europa cristã” retém algo da antiga ressonância auditiva e da aura do homem sacro, conforme os românticos insistiram há mais de dois séculos. Na medida em que uma cultura não é letrada, ou alfabetizada, ela tem para Eliade os indispensáveis ingredientes sacros (pág. 17):
É óbvio, por exemplo, que os simbolismos e cultos da Mãe Terra, da fecundidade humana e agrícola, do caráter sagrado da mulher, e de coisas semelhantes, não podiam desenvolver-se e constituir um sistema religioso rico e complexo senão através da descoberta da agricultura; é igualmente óbvio que urna sociedade pré-agrícola, dedicada a caça, não podia sentir a qualidade sagrada da Mãe Terra do mesmo modo ou com a mesma intensidade. Há, portanto, diferenças na experiência religiosa, explicadas por diferenças em economia, cultura e organização social – em suma, pela história. Existe, no entanto, entre os caçadores nômades e os agricultores sedentários urna semelhança em conduta que nos parece infinitamente mais importante que suas diferenças; ambos vivem num cosmo sacralizado, ambos compartilham de uma qualidade cósmica sagrada, manifestada igualmente no mundo animal e no mundo vegetal. Basta-nos apenas comparar tais situações existenciais com a do homem das sociedades modernas que vive num cosmo dessacralizado, para percebermos imediatamente tudo que o separa deles.
Já vimos que o homem sedentário ou especializado, contrariamente ao homem nômade, está a caminho de descobrir o modo visual da experiência humana. Mas enquanto o homo sedens evita as espécies mais potentes de condicionamento óptico, tais como as que se encontram na alfabetização, as meras sombras de vida sacra, como as que se mantém entre o homem nômade e o sedentário, não desconcertam Eliade. Preferir Eliade chamar o homem oral de “religioso” é, naturalmente, tão fantasioso e arbitrário quanto chamar as louras de bestiais. Mas isto não produz qualquer confusão para os que compreendem que “religioso” para Eliade é – conforme insiste desde o começo – o irracional. Ele se encontra nessa companhia muito grande de vítimas da alfabetização que aquiesceram em supor que o “racional” é o explicitamente linear, seqüencial e visual. Vale dizer, ele prefere mostrar-se como um espírito do século dezoito em rebelião contra o modo visual dominante que, naquele tempo, era novidade. Foi o que se deu com Blake e urna legião de outros. Hoje, Blake seria violentamente anti Blake, porque a reação de Blake contra o visual abstrato é agora o clichê dominante e a claque dos grandes batalhões, a movimentarem-se arregimentados em rotinas de sensibilidade.
“Para o homem religioso o espaço não é homogêneo; ele sente interrupções e falhas nele” (pág. 20). A .mesma coisa com o tempo. Para o físico moderno, como também para o não-alfabetizado, o espaço não é homogêneo, tampouco o tempo. Em contraste, o espaço geométrico inventado na ambigüidade, longe de ser diferente, único, pluralista, sacro, “pode ser contado e delimitado em qualquer direção; mas nenhuma diferenciação qualitativa e, por conseguinte, nenhuma orientação são dadas em virtude da estrutura que lhe é inerente” (pág. 22). A asserção seguinte aplica-se inteiramente a ação recíproca e relativa dos modos óptico e auditivo na modelação da sensibilidade humana:
Deve-se acrescentar ao mesmo tempo que essa existência profana jamais é encontrada em estado puro. Em qualquer grau que tenha dessacralizado o mundo, o homem que se decidiu em favor de urna vida profana jamais consegue eliminar completamente a conduta religiosa. Isto tornar-se-á mais claro a medida que prosseguirmos; parece mesmo que a existência mais dessacralizada preserva ainda traços de urna valorização religiosa do mundo (pág. 23).
O método do século vinte é usar não um único porém muitos modelos para a exploração experimental – a técnica do juízo suspenso (109)
A discussão do tablete 86 volta aqui, particularizando o que McLuhan chama de técnica do juízo suspenso.
Da citação que McLuhan faz na pág. 110, transcrita de William Ivins Jr, vale notar e citar:
“O fato, que não deixa de ser divertido, é que as palavras e sua ordem sintática necessariamente linear não nos permite descrever os objetos, compelindo-nos a tentar listas pobres e inadequadas de ingredientes teóricos, que lembram concretamente as receitas de pratos dos manuais de cozinha.”
Eu consegui uma cópia deste livro de Ivvins e acho que vale a pena transcrever outra coisa que ele disse (pg 51)
“ No Museu (MOMA,NY, do qual ele era Curador de Impressões), eu aprendi de maneira amarga o quanto as palavras são inadequadas como ferramentas para definição e classificação de objetos os quais são singulares e únicos. Eu descobri que enquanto eu não estava interessado nos processos internos que vão dentro do cérebro do homem e do seu sistema nervoso, eu esta desesperadamente interessado no limite pelo qual ele conseguia comunicar os resultados destes processos. Aprendi que Batismo não é explicação, descrição, ou definição. Batismo é dar um nome, meramente juntar uma palavra ou qualidade particular a um objeto.”
McLuhan enfatiza um aspecto ainda pior, que é o de qualquer cultura de alfabeto fonético cair no habito de criar a impressão de que o leitor através do código escrito tem uma experiência de “conteúdo”, coisa que a linguagem falada tem muito mais.
Ele exemplifica a questão dos mitos nos trabalhos de Jung e Freud, cujas explicações não fazem sentido para os usuários não alfabetizados, que vêem instantaneamente os significados, na declaração verbal. Freud e Jung traduzem em termos da consciência de letrados estados de consciência de iletrados e, como toda tradução, deturpam e omitem o significado.
O grande desafio é traduzir o auditivo para o visual, que provoca fermentação criativa, que a nossa época de Internet vive como o faziam os gregos na Grécia clássica ou quem os redescobria na Renascença.
A comunicação via eletrônica (Internet, computador), tem a característica de instantaneidade que os mitos requeriam ou requerem das culturas não alfabéticas.
Especialistas em analise lingüística, como Gilbert Ryle, de Oxford, citado, acham impossível criar modelos pois não há como comunicá-los.
McLuhan cita ainda que percebemos isto principalmente quando dominamos varias línguas e no caso ele cita Grego, latim, Inglês e Francês e a situação de que o mundo oriental não tem conceito de “substancia” ou “forma substancial”, por que não experimenta a pressão visual para dividir a experiência em tais parcelas.
Sobre este efeito na palavra impressa, Williams Ivins, Jr, expressou a significação da tipografia de maneira como ninguém jamais o fez (afirma McLuhan) e eu transcrevo, como principio geral:
“Assim, quanto mais precisamente pudermos circunscrever nossos dados para o raciocínio sobre o mundo dos dados que nos venham através de um só e mesmo canal sensorial, tanto mais aptos ficaremos para a correção do nosso raciocínio, muito embora seu alcance possa ser muito mais restrito. Uma das coisas mais interessantes em nossa prática cientifica moderna foi a invenção e a perfeição de métodos pelos quais os cientistas podem adquirir grande parte de seus dados; básicos, através de um mesmo canal sensório de percepção. Compreendo que na física, por exemplo, os cientistas se sentem mais satisfeitos quando podem obter seus dados com a ajuda de algum disco ou outro engenho que possa ser lido pela vista. Assim, o calor, o peso, as dimensões e muitas outras coisas que na vida comum são apreendidas através dos sentidos, sem ser o da visão, tornaram-se para a ciência questões de percepção visual das posições de apontadores mecânicos.”
McLuhan nos informa que Blake considerava a interpretação cientifica da realidade como apenas uma distorção, pois levava em conta um único sentido e comentava que fora isto que ocorrera no século 18 e que era preciso libertar-se “da simples visão e do sono de Newton”.
Einstein iria fazer isto no século XX.
Não consigo me furtar que o único livro que conheço que razoavelmente integra todos os sentidos na compreensão da realidade é a Bíblia e a visão cientifica que esta sendo apresentada atualmente como proposta única e insubstituível para isto, não passa de um sono como foi o de Newton e a humanidade tem ainda que acordar para perceber isto…
A tipografia domina apenas um período (o terço final) da história da leitura e escrita (113)
Neste ponto, se McLuhan tivesse estruturado este livro, começaria uma Parte II, pois ele passa apenas a se preocupar com a palavra escrita, ou melhor impressa, no âmbito de sua capacidade de transferir o espaço áudio-tactil do homem civilizado ou alfabetizado ou “profano”.
Uma informação muito importante é que do séc 5 ao 15, livro era trabalho de escriba ou copista e somente uma terça parte da historia do livro no mundo ocidental foi tipográfica.
E eu acrescentaria que está rapidamente se transformando em eletrônica.e pela quantidade de produção em cinema, TV, mídias audiovisuais, logo terá mais informação desta forma que na do livro impresso.
Vale reproduzir a menção que McLuhan faz de G S Brett em Psicologia antiga e moderna, pág 36-37:
“A idéia de que o conhecimento é essencialmente saber de livros parece ser muito noção da época moderna, provavelmente derivada da distinção medieval entre clérigos e leigos, à qual veio dar nova ênfase ao caráter literário e um tanto extravagante do humanismo do século dezesseis. A idéia primitiva e natural de conhecimento é a de “sagacidade ou astúcia”, ou do homem de recursos e espírito. Ulisses é o tipo original de pensador, do homem cheio de idéias, capaz de vencer os Ciclopes e alcançar importantes triunfos do espírito sobre a matéria. Saber ou conhecimento, portanto, é capacidade de vencer as dificuldades da vida e. obter êxito neste mundo.”
Brett, nesse ponto, especifica a dicotomia natural que o livro traz para qualquer sociedade, além da divisão ou ruptura interior que produz no indivíduo dessa sociedade. Em suas obras James Joyce revela no assunto clarividência rica e complexa. Em Ulisses, seu personagem Leopold Bloom, o homem de muitas idéias e estratagemas, é um agente de publicidade. Joyce viu as semelhanças ,entre a fronteira moderna. do verbal e do pictórico, de um lado, e de outro, o mundo de Homero, equilibrado entre a velha cultura sacra e a nova sensibilidade letrada ou alfabetizada, ou profana. Bloom, judeu recém-destribalizado, vive na moderna Dublin, no mundo irlandês parcialmente destribalizado. Tal fronteira é o mundo moderno da propaganda, congenial , portanto, da cultura em transição de Bloom. No episódio de Itaca, ou décimo sétimo de Ulisses, lemos: “Quais eram habitualmente suas reflexões finais? ,As de um anúncio, só e único, que fizesse o transeunte parar admirado, uma novidade de cartaz, do qual todos os acréscimos estranhos fossem excluídos, ficando reduzido aos termos mais simples e eficientes, não excedendo o campo da visão casual e rápida, de acordo com a velocidade da vida moderna”.
Em Books at the Wake (Livros na vigília) (págs. 67-68), James S. Atherton assinala:
“Entre outras coisas Finnegans Wake é uma história da escrita. Começamos escrevendo sobre “Um osso, um seixo, uma pele de carneiro (…) leave them to cook in the mutthering pot: and Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfats and great prime must once for omniboss stepp rubrickredd out of the wordpress” (20.5). O “mutthering pot” é uma alusão à alquimia, mas há algum outro sentido ligado à escrita, pois na vez seguinte que a palavra aparece é num trecho relativo a melhoria em sistemas de comunicação. O trecho é: “All the airish signics of her dipandump helpabit from an Father Hogam till the Mutther Masons…” (223.3). “Dipandump helpabit” combina os sinais no ar com os dedos do alfabeto de surdos e mudos com os altos e baixos do ABC comum e os mais pronunciados altos e baixos da escrita “ogham” irlandesa. O Mason, que se segue a isso, deve ser o homem desse nome que inventou as penas de aço. Mas tudo que posso sugerir para “mutther” é o “cochichar” dos maçons que não se adapta ao contexto, embora eles também façam sinais no ar(*).”
Neste asterisco, o cultíssimo Prof. Anísio Teixeira, tradutor, explica:
(*) Foram deixadas no texto original as citações de Joyce. É que Joyce utiliza em seu livro todos os recursos dos diversos jargões de Dublin, dissonâncias, calemburgos e jogos de palavra para compor um todo refratário à tradução exata. Ora, o propósito do Autor de tirar dessa forma de composição particular uma significação especial é incompatível com uma tradução em que naturalmente não se poderia obter os mesmos efeitos de alusão e transfiguração dos sons. Daí o Tradutor preferir deixar as citações no original, traduzindo apenas o que lhe pareceu traduzível. O mesmo fez o tradutor francês, apesar da singular plasticidade de sua língua. (N. do Trad.)
E McLuhan acrescenta, no melhor estilo que eu Roque, gostaria de anotar Joyce:
“Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter” expressa por meio de uma glosa mítica, o fato de que a escrita significou a emergência do homem da caverna, ou sacro, de dentro do mundo auditivo de ressonância simultânea para o mundo profano da luz do dia. A menção aos pedreiros (Masons) refere-se ao mundo dos assentadores de tijolos como o próprio modo do uso das palavras. Na segunda página de Wake, Joyce faz um mosaico, um escudo de Aquiles, por assim dizer, com todos os temas e modos da fala e comunicação humanas: “Bygmeister Finnegan of the Stuttering Hand, jreemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in bis ruchlit todfarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers (…)” Joyce faz, em Wake, seus próprios desenhos da caverna de Altamira, configurando toda a história da mente humana, em termos de suas atitudes e ações fundamentais no curso de todas as fases da cultura e da tecnologia. Como o título que escolheu indica, ele viu que a vigília (wake) do progresso humano pode desaparecer novamente na noite do homem sacro ou auditivo. O ciclo Finn (Finnegans Wake) de instituições tribais pode voltar na era da eletricidade, mas se voltar novamente, façamos dêle uma vigília (Wake) ou um despertar (Awake) , ou ambas as coisas. Joyce não via vantagem em ficarmos fechados em cada ciclo de cultura como num transe ou sonho. Descobriu os meios de viver simultaneamente em todos os modos de cultura ao mesmo tempo e completamente consciente. O meio que menciona para essa auto consciência e correção da distorção cultural é o seu “colideoroscópio”. Esse termo indica o intercâmbio em mistura coloidal de todos os componentes da tecnologia humana ao estenderem eles nossos sentidos e mudar o equilíbrio de suas inter-relações no caleidoscópio social do entrechoque cultural: “deor”, selvagem, o oral ou sacro; “scope”, o visual, ou profano, e civilizado”.
O grifo em vermelho é meu, Roque e é a afirmação mais importante que este livro de McLuhan contém.
Até agora cada cultura tem constituído para as sociedades uma fatalidade mecânica: a interiorização automática de suas próprias tecnologias (115)
As técnicas de uniformidade e repetibilidade foram introduzidas em nossa cultura pelos romanos e pela Idade Média (117)
A palavra moderno foi termo de reproche usado pelos humanistas patrísticos contra os escolásticos medievais que desenvolveram a nova lógica e a nova física (120)
Na Antigüidade e na Idade Média ler era necessariamente ler em voz alta (124)
A cultura manuscrita é uma espécie de conversação, mesmo porque o escritor e seu auditório se achavam fisicamente ligados pela forma de recitação que era o modo de publicação dos livros (126)
Manuscrito deu forma às convenções literárias medievais em todos os níveis (129)
Marshall McLuhan & Gutenberg 