Trouble & Attitude 1/Trouble and Attitude - Issue 01.iso/mac/PCTEXT/MMPHATIC.TXT

Text File | 1995-06-04 | 10KB | 215 lines

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM MARSHALL MCLUHAN
As reprinted in Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs
(Toronto: Perfect Pitch c. 1992)

        This externalization of our senses creates
what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a
technological brain for the world. Instead of tending
towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has
become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in
an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our
senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.
-The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.
New York: Mentor Books, 1962.

        The owners themselves are concerned more about
the media as such, and are not inclined to go beyond
"what the public wants" or some vague formula. Owners
are aware of the media as power, and they know that
this power has little to do with "content" or the
media within the media. -Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. Mentor Books, 1964.

        Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to
commercial interests is like handing over the common
speech to a private corporation, or like giving the
earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.
Something like this has already happened with outer
space, for the same reasons that we have leased our
central nervous systems to various corporations. As
long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding
the extensions of our own bodies as really out there
and really independent of us, we will meet all
technological challenges with the same sort of
banana-skin pirouette and collapse. -Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man.

        Only puny secrets need protection. Big
discoveries are protected by public incredulity. -Take
Today: The Executive as Dropout (with Barrington
Nevitt). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

        The more you create village conditions, the
more discontinuity and division and diversity. The
global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement
on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity
and tranquillity were the properties of the global
village. It has more spite and envy. The spaces and
times are pulled out from between people. A world in
which people encounter each other in depth all the
time. The tribal-global village is far more divisive -
full of fighting - than any nationalism ever was.
Village is fission, not fusion, in depth. -McLuhan:
Hot & Cool - A Critical Symposium. Edited by Gerald
Stearn. New York: Dial Press, 1967.

        Half the world today is engaged in keeping the
other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the
hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In
the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world
had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This
old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the
world of popular entertainment. The police state is
now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating
sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage
activities of our multitudinous man hunters and
"crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but
redundant and irrelevant. -Take Today: The Executive
as Dropout

        A clichÄ is an act of consciousness: total
consciousness is the sum of all the clichÄs of all the
media or technologies we probe with. -From ClichÄ to
Archetype (with Wilfred Watson). New York: Viking
Press, 1970.

        For America, the electronic revolution from
industrial products and consumerism to information and
custom-made services, is a reversal of the entire way
of life, with goals and directions suddenly yielding
to roles and figures. America has found the paths of
industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its
taste. Living in an new environment of instant
electric information has shifted American attention
from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of
pattern recognition, a change that is manifested
directly by the TV service of the instant replay. Is
not the instant replay the externalizing of the
cognitive principle itself? For the replay would seem
to offer both cognition and re-cognition; the same
pattern of reversal, in he transition from the
industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of
Sputnik (1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made
environment. -"The Implications of Cultural
Uniformity" in Superculture: American Popular Culture
and Europe. Edited by C.W.E. Bigsby. Bowling Green:
Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975.

        For the dominant environment of our age has
itself become information or "software". Since at
electric speed any figure tends to become ground, and
anything, however trivial, can acquire infinite mass,
the temptation and the desire to gamble with
everything and anything becomes obsessive. One dollar
at the speed of light can do as many transactions as a
million at pre-electric speeds. Quantitative
projections and rational critiques cannot cope here.
-"A Media Approach to Inflation" (with Barrington
Nevitt). The New York Times, September 21, 1974.

        Joyce knew that any technology is at once
internalized by men, with a resulting shift in the
ratios among their senses. This shift is recorded
exactly in the tones and colors and interplay of
words. Language is itself the very drama of cognition
and recognition. -"Phase Two". Renascence, Vol.14,
Summer, 1962.

        Language is a technology which extends all of
the human senses simultaneously. All the other human
artifacts are, by comparison, specialist extensions of
our physical and mental faculties. -From ClichÄ to
Archetype

        The archetype is a retrieved awareness or
consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved clichÄ -
an old clichÄ retrieved by a new clichÄ. Since a
clichÄ is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a
quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment.
-From ClichÄ to Archetype

        All media of communications are clichÄs
serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns
of association and awareness. These media create
environments that numb our powers of attention by
sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of
these forms does not limit their action upon our
sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet
arranges the components of high- and low- pressure
areas, so the environments created by linguistic and
other extensions of our powers are constantly creating
new climates of thought and feeling. Since the
resulting symbolic systems are numerous, they are in
perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-light
show on an ever-increasing scale. -From Cliche to
Archetype

        Another theme of the Wake that helps in the
understanding of the paradoxical shift from clichÄ to
archetype is "pastimes are past times." The dominant
technologies of one age become the games and pastimes
of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of
past times that are simultaneously available is so
vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the
cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the
work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on
new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into
the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the
principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind
of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very
structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.
-From ClichÄ to Archetype

        Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth
of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by
the hero artist. Anything which interferes with
cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision,
or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So
that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link
between the stages of apprehension and the creative
process, he was the first to understand how the drama
of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human
ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to
incorporate at every point in his work the body of the
past in immediate relation to the slightest current of
perception. -"Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process".
Renascence, Vol. 4, No.1, 1951.

        Physically, the young seem to feel that the
planet has become their stage. They want to act
outside, in the street, on the campus. They have
shifted their dramatic quest for new identities away
from the expression of private opinions to the
enactment of a new kind of group theater. The new
program they offer for scrutiny and participation
seems to many people to be trash such as has never
been seen before - a wild orgy of "law and ordure."
        Technologies would seem to be the pushing of
the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into
social consciousness. May this not help explain why
technology as environment is typically unconscious?
The interplay between environmental and content
factors, between old and new technologies, seems to
obtain in all fields whatever. In politics, the new
conservatism has as its content the old liberalism.
Every new technology requires a war in order to
recover an image made by the old environment.
-Counterblast (with Harley Parker, via George
Thompson). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969.

        When a man-made environment circumvents the
entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no
alternative to total knowledge programming of all
human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal
at electric speeds with the superpowers released by
the new technological resources representing the full
spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival
now would seem to depend upon the extension of
consciousness itself as an environment. This extension
of consciousness has already begun with the computer
and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and
occult awareness. -Take Today: The Executive as
Dropout