The U.S. South was an intensely oral culture. Irritated by the presence of a literate culture. The South wanted out. Just as in Canada the French want out. So do the Scots want out, the Irish want out, the Welsh want out of nationalistic ties that bind them. There╒s umpteenth separatist groups around the world and they╒re all written cultures fighting oral cultures.
The American South was given new vitality by the advent of the telegraph, which is acoustic although it appears to use the printed word, it is basically acoustic because it is instantaneous. And the instantaneous is always acoustic. The simultaneous is not visual, but acoustic.
Lineal space, connected, extended is visual. Whereas simultaneous space is acoustic because when you hear what your hear you hear from all directions at once which creates a sphere whose center is everywhere and margins are nowhere. The peculiar character of acoustic space is this simultaneous presence of echo and of verbal sound simultaneously coming from all directions creating this strange space which is spherical and musical, all directions at once equals right hemisphere vs left hemisphere of the brain.
The right hemisphere is the only one that has the simultaneous power of pattern recognition. The left hemisphere being lineal, logical, connected, has no ability to recognize a human face. A person using only the left hemisphere cannot see a face, because a face has so many components that have to be simultaneously apprehended.
Information overload equals pattern recognition. At electric speeds pattern-recognition tends to be acoustic. Under information overload conditions data classification yields to pattern-recognition.
Aristotle and Plato have no right hemispheres, they are all left hemisphere. Western philosophy is almost 100% left hemisphere, entirely concerned with logic, connection and classification. (All specialists are left hemisphere). Classification is left hemisphere, if it is not pattern-recognition at all. The only part of philosophy that is right hemisphere (R.H.) is formal causality and there is none of it in Plato or Aristotle.
Formal causality has to do with the hidden ground that shapes situation. In the case of Aristotle and Plato, the hidden ground shaping their philosophy was the new literacy based on the phonetic alphabet. The moment that 4th Century literacy came in, Parmenedes came in, and the pre-Socratics were pushed out. Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics were pushed out and the new logic and new classification became possible.
And Homer was pushed out very quickly. The old acoustic poets, the Bardics, the Rhapsodes and so on, the performers of poetry. They had been the educational establishment for centuries. They were pushed out in just a couple of decades.
The hidden ground that Plato and Aristotle were totally unaware of was literacy. Phonetic literacy. There is no other kind of literacy that has the effects that we relate to literacy. There are many kinds of writing which are not phonetic and which have none of the effects of phonetic literacy.
Phonetic literacy has the amazing power to separate the visual faculty from our other senses. It╒s the only alphabet that has the power to seperate the visual from all the other senses of which there are several. Some psycologists say that there are as many as 35 senses. But the visual faculty is pulled out into high definition by phonetic literacy.
Phonetic literacy has this capacity of linking letters with meaningless sounds. The phonemes in the alphabet are meaningless. They have no semantic meaning A - B - C - D are not phonemes, those are morphemes,
Ah - Bu - Cu - Duh is phonetic. A - B - C - D is morphemic, it has meaning. ╥He knows his A-B-C╒s╙ is a meaningful statement but Ah-Bu-Cu is not.
When the separation of meaning from the visual came into play, it split western man wide open for the first time in human history. The visual part of man came alive in isolation from the rest of man.
It was reading phonetically, in which you were able to put into these meaningful forms, the oral tradition. Homer could be put down visually after centuries of being sung. The moment the poets became visual, Plato began to yell to get rid of the poets. He was absolutely anti the poetic establishment because it was acoustic, irrational, non-logical. But, only now are the pre-socratics back, Heraclitus and the oral tradition have returned now thanks to electricity. In fact the philosophers of today have made a great cult of reviving the pre-socratics. Sartes and Heidigger make a big play with the pre-socratics. The whole of the phenomenology movement in Europe is pre-socratic, is pre-literate. As soon as literacy arrived, Parmenides arrived with his logic machine and connected space, which is visual, became dominant.
Visual space is the only connected space there is. There are no connections in tactile space, or olfactory space, osmic space, kinetic space, no connections. Acoustic space has no connections, just vibrations.There is only one space in the world that is connected and logical, and that is visual - and that is Euclid. Euclid appeared immediately with the phonetic alphabet. Overnight! Euclid is entirely visual; visual minus the other senses, and as we know Euclidian space is connected, it is only visual.
Historians of culture do not know that the phonetic alphabet has this magical effect of splitting people up into bits. Splitting up their sensibilities, fragmenting, and analytically classifying. Analytic classification is all in the left hemisphere, not the right. So with the coming of the alphabet, the left hemisphere of man moved into dominance for the first time in human history.
Of course, the left hemisphere technology of the alphabet led to writing as a means of social communication organizing space. So that written forms on paper were used for control of armies. Both Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and those great generals were able to use the roads and the courier systems of the papyrus world for the first time to control big groups of men at distance. Control at a distance became possible with the phonetic alphabet and papyrus. You cannot write on brick and stone and control armies at a distance. Papyrus and the phonetic alphabet made possible the Greek and Roman Empires. When papyrus dried up, as it did in the 6th Century, the Roman Empire in the west collapsed. Just like gasoline disappearing today, it would cause quite a revolution with regards to the highway. If there were no cars on the highway it would be an amazingly different world. That╒s what happened to the Romans. Their papyrus dried up and their armies stopped. But the Eastern Empire did not dry up. In the East they didn╒t use roads. They used ocean and sea routes and used parchment. They didn╒t use paper. So, Byzantium and the Eastern Empire remained alive throughout the Dark Ages. So, there was no Dark Ages in the east, only in the west thanks to the loss of writing and papyrus.
At the speed of light there is no time or space; there is just space-time. Literally, when the telegraph came in, the space and time intervals between people were pulled out. That was shortly followed by cubism, which pulled out the space intervals in painting. The visual connections in painting were pulled out by the cubists. Art in general gives you about a generation of warning, or notice in advance of technological change. The artforms themselves will take on characteristics that really belong to something that hasn╒t surfaced yet or been invented yet. Seureat and Rouault were painting television long before television. The Seureat pointillism technique uses little dots, discontinuous dots, light dots with light coming through the picture towards the viewer, and that was in the 1880╒s, long before television was conceived. Symbolism, which also pulls out the connections in poetry, was certainly part of the telegraph.
The instantaneous forms of communication that came in with the telegraph, permitted a sort of simultaneous, acoustic character, and it was exactly that which E.A. Poe, the southerner, latched onto in poetry. Poe became the avante garde of French symbolism. Beaudelaire was the first to understand Poe and to adapt him to French use. But, Poe the southerner, the oral tradition man, is as significant a figure from that point of view as anybody.
Another peculiarity from the south in this regard, is that Rock and Roll and Jazz all came out of the deep south, and could not ever possibly have come from Boston or Chicago, because there is no oral tradition there to hold them up. Jazz and Rock are acoustic forms that do not depend on a written culture. And where there is no oral tradition, and there is no oral tradition in the industrial north, there is no basis for Jazz or Rock.
There is a hidden ground that makes possible any technological change. The figure of that change is supported by a hidden ground of other changes. (A set of Customs p. 53 - Krober). Another hidden factor in music is that sounds of the environment are filtered through the language in order to create music. What is called music, whether it is in Italian, German, or other language, is that the technological sounds of the human environment are being filtered through the language or transformed in the language. The language is the metamorphic power that creates music. German music is closely related to the German language, French to the French language, English music to the English language. Rock and Roll cannot be sung in any other language except English. In China they learn English in order to sing Rock. You cannot sing Rock in Chinese or French or Finnish, or any other language.
There is another hidden factor here. English is the only language that has feet. All other languages only have syllables. So, dancing feet or rock and roll feet are only available in the English language. (What is the prosody of Dante ? There is no prosody in Italian. Iambic trochaic - long and short. Two syllables necessary for a foot is prosody.
Apropos hidden ground on page 53 of Harbinger, ╥The quality of unconscious seems to be a trait not specifically limited to linguistic causes and processes, but to the whole principal of culture generally. It is only that the unconscience pervades speech farther. A custom, a belief, an art, however, deep down it springs from, sooner or later rises into social consciousness. It then seems deliberate, planned, willed, and is construed as rising from conscious motives╙. (unquote)
What he is saying is that all artforms really resonate from hidden grounds that are there in depth at all times. That all the possible musics are latent in the English language, all the possible musics for our world and the same for Chinese or any other language or linguistic group. They are all latent in the acoustic forms of the language itself and are just waiting for some new technology to release them.
The Laws of media are to push up into consciousness a lot of what╒s happening in media. For some reason psychologists refuse to examine ╥visual space╙ or ╥acoustic space╙. There is nothing in any psychology book on these subjects. They will not examine them. Now, why ? They obviously have a phobia ! There is a reluctance, they shy away from this thing. It╒s so obvious. You╒d think that visual space would be something studied by scientists. No ! Not at all. But visual space is the only continuous and connected space there is. You think that you are in a visual space here in this room. Actually there is very little visual space in this room. It is nearly all kinetic or acoustic, or multi-sensuous, but the visual and lineal and connected relates to the walls and flat planes, and so on and the ceiling. But, visual space is the only space that is connected and continuous and static. By the way visual space is also static. Euclidian. The only kind of space that has these properties is visual. Acoustic space is likewise shunned by psycologists. When you touch something, you create an interval, not a connection. That is resonant. When you touch anything you create a resonant interval. When you press down that╒s kinetic that is not touch. Tactile space is interval, and that╒s the area you can tune. You say he has a fine touch. You can tune that. When you press down hard, you can╒t tune the kinetic, it╒s not acoustic. But touch is acoustic, acoustic interval. If there were any connection between my finger and that book, I would not have a finger. The book would be part of my finger and I could wave it around.
All senses have unique spaces related to them and therefore if you want to understand your sensory life, you have to know the kinds of space that they manifest. Obviously, the space of dreams is not visual or acoustic necessarily, but is a mix of senses, kinetic. The space of movies, totally different from the space of television. Television has no visual space related to it at all. It is acoustic, audio-tactile. Tony Schwartz in the ╥Response Chord╙, page 14 - ╥Television uses the eye as an ear, not as an eye.╙ Television is not a visual experience, it is acoustic and therefore it is an inner trip. Our sensory lives are very much involved in space.
Incidentally, Einstein had a lot of trouble with his own theories because he was always trying to visualize that which is non-visualizable. Relativity means that all measurement of space and time is by the yardstick of the speed of light. He had great trouble because he was a very visual man in some ways, and he had great trouble seeing the proof of his own theories. He got a lot of help from artists and others, but relativity could only have come in an electric age. Because, we now live at the speed of light. Our ordinary communications, whether by telephone, TV or radio, are all instantaneous.
We in North America who go outside to be alone and have to be social, reverses the pattern of the rest of human kind. No sociologist has ever studied this, so it is a wide-open subject. It has never been studied in American literature and yet it affects every book ever written in America profoundly. Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, they all go outside to be alone. You don╒t meet any people in their books. It╒s like American landscape painting, there are no people, just landscape. Whereas the French and European painters fill their landscapes with people. They go outside to be social. They go to cafes and pubs, etc., to socialize and intellectualize. The French measure their level of intellectual life by the number of people at cafes. When the number declines, they feel that they are in an intellectual slump. TV put them into an intellectual slump for a while in Paris. They have now recovered.
That simple fact of going outside to be social is unknown in America, except that it tends to be changing with television. Television is bringing the outside indoors and taking the indoors outside in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. He was the only architect who understood that we go outside to be alone. Wright put waterfalls in the sitting room and put the sitting room out in the patio. He reversed the spaces of the American thing, and it became a very startling, new international idiom. By simply manifesting American space habits, he invented a new international idiom. Nobody understood this, including the architects.
The British fill their movies with ads while Americans do not like advertising in their movies. The British fill their concert halls and operas with advertisements and do not hesitate to break up the time of the play with ads. This is unthinkable in America. Why ?
In America we take our dates out to be alone. We don╒t want advertising interrupting our solitude. This desire to be alone out of doors is very deep and was part of the Romantic Movement. But, at that time it was introduced as a way of testing one╒s morale. Could you get along without people ? Could you have people or could you do without them ? The Noble Savage pitch - Rousseau. But North Americans came here to fight nature, to subdue the continent, to tame the wilderness. So we have spent over two centuries fighting against the environment. We╒re are the only people who ever did this. Other continents had already been tamed before anybody arrived there. Two centuries of taming the wilderness taught us to go outside to be alone, and to fight. This was transferred to our business practices. The businessman goes outside to be alone, not to socialize. When I make these remarks, I don╒t intend to sound dogmatic, all I am doing is making observations which I think can be tested. I don╒t intend to merely assert them dogmatically. I mean to say that the above is an observation. You can test it, you can bounce a ball off it, or do anything you like with it. I╒m merely putting it forth as an observation rather than a concept. I don╒t tend to use concepts. I tend to use percepts.
My own way of approaching the media is perceptual not conceptual. That╒s why I╒m not much interested in the ╥content╙ of the media. The medium itself is something that has to be perceived in order to be understood. What you put into the medium is like what you say on the telephone, it couldn╒t matter less. The effect of the telephone is quite independent of what you say on the telephone. The same is true of radio, TV or movies, and the printed word. The power of the printed word to shape your awareness has nothing to do with what you print. That is a big clash in the minds of many people. It hurts a lot of people. It hurts their idea of what they think they are.
The American gets into his car in the morning to in order to do his thinking, as a think-tank in which to do his work. The American does not like public transit. Transit is a degradation. It means going outside to be social. Getting into a vehicle with a lot of other people is an exact violation of the man╒s deep need to be alone when outside. This unspoken reluctance to use public transit is universal in North America. It is not so in the old countries.
There is a story about a G.I. chewing a large wad of gum, who got into an English railway car and sat down across from an old lady. After a few minutes of watching him, she leaned over and said, ╥I appreciate your desire to be social and to converse, but the fact is that I am stone deaf╙.
Now, he got in there to be alone and chew gum, and she thought he was being social, which any Englishman expects of someone sitting beside him on a vehicle. People think that the English are non-social, but not in vehicles or in pubs, (╥On The Buses╙).
Think about how uncomfortable people are in elevators. What to do ? Are you supposed to speak to each other, or, look at the numbers over the door ? Being in an elevator is being alone.We go into an elevator to be private and not be public. Bell telephone blew one billion dollars on the video telephone. They perfected it and then has to scrap it. They discovered that Americans would not pick up a video phone because the moment you pick up the videophone you are on-stage being social. With the audiophone you are still private, but with the videophone you are outside in the public domain, so Bell had to scrap it.
On the other hand, you might have thought that Bell should have tried it in some other country. There╒s no reason why it might not have worked in France or England. But, they didn╒t understand this syndrome of the American attitude to space.
Here╒s an example of a hidden ground. In every situation or in every joke, there is a hidden ground. In the above joke, the G.I. and the English lady, there is a clash of their attitudes toward space. She thought he was being social, he thought he was being alone. In every joke there is a hidden grievance. without which there would be no joke, because it is the rub of the story against the grievance that creates the laughter. This is true of all jokes.
An advertisement for theatre schools - ╥We cure hams╙. Now, what╒s the grievance ? There has to be a grievance in order for it to be funny. Every funny man is a man with a grievance. All the funny men who ever lived are really very sour-pussed characters. The hidden ground is what creates the humour. Try to tell a joke in another country and you will soon find yourself explaining why it is funny.
The Polock jokes or the Italian jokes are jokes about stupid people, where one group makes fun of another group and all are based on irritation created between minorities. Where there is an irritation or abrasive area of sensitivity, there will be lots of funny stories.
Sociologists could go to work and pinpoint abrasive teritories simply by studying the jokes. They don╒t do this. On the other hand you could get rid of the abrasive areas by deliberately pouring out humour like balm of Gilead, or oil on troubled waters. Humour is a kind of oil for troubled waters, but it depends upon this interplay between figure and ground. The joke is the figure, and the hidden ground of grievance is the cause of the laughter. All fun has a certain sadism in it. There is a sadistic or masochistic quality in all jokes. I╒m trying to reveal the peculiar function of hidden ground in all media and situations.
Studying jokes is a means of exploration of the society around us, and is no laughing matter. Another form of exploration is slang. Slang is hastily improvised ways of communicating in new situations. It is a way of bridging across gaps that are created suddenly by technological change. And so, slang is the frontier where the bridging and word invention is going on a pace. To invite students in a classroom to study the latest slang, the stuff they use themselves as a form of social bridging and ingenuous invention of needs to bridge gaps in situations is itself a very relevant activity. But, jokes are a form of slang too. The word slang originally meant flashy clothing. If you look it up in the O.E.D., the big dictionary, you╒ll find the word means outrageous, flashy clothing, and the fact that it got transferred to the spoken word is itself a bit of slang.
The City as a Classroom is intended for high school use in Ontario.
The bureaucrats of Ontario are very leery of anything interesting.
Advertising is the great folk art of our time, the 20th Century. It╒s folk art-anonymous; using all the skills of the community. For good or for ill. But using them all anonymously. Fifty-one and a half billion per annum. Paid largely to artists and media people. The greatest folk art of our time. An area requiring the utmost attention for students in our schools. Not the claims of the product but simply the art forms themselves that are being employed. One of the richest areas for the training of perception that exists.
You know if it went into the schools as a form of training, the advertisers would be out of business in no time because their work is intended to be invisible. All advertising is deliberately designed not to be noticed. One of the first tests the ad agencies apply to an ad is was it noticed. If it is then its a bad advertisement. They want the ad to be noticed two or three weeks later after you╒ve first seen it. It╒s called The Poetzle effect. The Potzle Effect is the psycological effect whereby the impact of something is delayed for two or three weeks. They try to build all advertisements on the principal of delayed perception so that you will not begin to argue with the ad right off. You see if you notice the ad you╒re likely to say ╥It╒s bunk, there╒s not a word of truth in it.╙ And the advertiser trys to avoid that reaction by hiding the ad.
