luka

Well-known member
"At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theatre in which there are no spectators but only actors"

image.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
I use raw quotes from the Internet not because I endorse their message but because they work as Windows onto the world. You can see the same thing in the social engineering thread where I quote, without comment, the tweets of mad racists.
 

luka

Well-known member
"The Watergate affair makes it quite plain that the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance"

image.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
The whole of a feudal economy geared towards the production of a mounted, armoured knight. Everything else being secondary to this aim.
 

luka

Well-known member
This gives you a very clear picture of the state or polity as a war machine. An integrated whole of interlocking parts all subordinated to this overriding aim.
 

luka

Well-known member
The distinction between visual and acoustic space owes a lot to Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man
https://archive.org/stream/WyndhamL...dham Lewis - TimeandWesternMan-Book1_djvu.txt
and Joyce's response in Finnegans Wake. (Eg the ondt and the gracehopper


Which is the subject of a brilliant grapejuice essay

https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2015/12/meereschal-macmuhun-moon-child-me-3.html

"all boils down to a tale of Ear and Eye, a tale of Time and Space, of Saturn and Jupiter, of Shem and Shaun. The tale is one of warring brothers, yet even this relationship and these roles are not fixed. The rival brothers -- Cain and Abel -- can also be depicted as lovers -- Eve and Adam, Binah and Chokhmah. They can also represent the Oedipal struggle between Father and Son -- Chronos and Zeus.

As Joyce realized in the Wake, though, much more is at play than just the myth of Oedipus, than just the Freudian reduction, however powerful this is. The struggle of Ear against Eye, Eye against Ear and their occasional harmony, subsumes and transcends all myths and all relations.

McLuhan puts this bluntly in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962):

...there can be no greater contradiction or clash in human cultures than that between those representing the eye and the ear...

And this is echoed in Understanding Media (1964):

The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us.

But, prior to McLuhan, it is most candidly proclaimed in the Wake:

TELEVISION KILLS TELEPHONY IN BROTHERS BROIL"
 

luka

Well-known member
You can also find an attempt to explain the time-barrier.

"New environments inflict considerable pain on the perceiver... the confusion and pain created by radio in the twenties was lavishly expressed in the blues. Today, with television, a much more powerful medium, pain has created musical genres from rock to The Beatles that are exceedingly unpleasant to sensibilities earlier oriented to less demanding technological environments. Today, the blues sound like caressing nursery lullabies. Their daring and sophisticated qualities are no more apparent than are those in a Victorian waltz."

Which I think is both interesting and perceptive despite the frankly bizarre claim that the pain of the blues is due to the introduction of the radio.
 

luka

Well-known member
More from the Grapejuice essay

"It is a story of many millennia, and it is a story McLuhan traces through all of his books. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan introduces the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to represent the whole spectrum of the human sensory apparatus. As the kaleidoscope is twisted and turned, as the balanced "ratio" between our senses is altered through the introduction of a new media technology, our entire experience of reality is modified. The very environment in which we live is transformed.

It would seem that the extension of one or another of our senses by mechanical means, such as the phonetic script, can act as a sort of twist for the kaleidoscope of the entire sensorium. A new combination or ratio of the existing components occurs, and a new mosaic of possible forms presents itself.

The kaleidoscope, though, is not turned at a steady rate. For centuries it may not appear to move that much at all. And when there is little movement, there is little awareness of its inner workings. Quite recently in our history, however, the shifting has vastly accelerated. The process, in this way, has become observable. Patterns and rhythms can now be discerned. The senses are churning.

--That such switch of sense ratios should occur with every instance of external technology is easy to see today. Why has it been unnoticed before? Perhaps because the shifts have in the past occurred somewhat gradually. Now we experience such a series of new technologies even in our own world and, besides, have means of observing so many other cultures that only great inattention could now conceal the role of new media of information in altering the posture and relations of our senses.

The kaleidoscope has appeared in this blog before. It is one of the most revealing ways that Finnegans Wake describes itself. In the Wake it is called the "collideorscape" and like everything else in this chamber of mirrors it contains multiple meanings, manifold perspectives. Here is the passage:

9. Now, to be on anew and basking again in the panaroma of
all flores of speech, if a human being duly fatigued by his dayety
in the sooty, having plenxty off time on his gouty hands and va-
cants of space at his sleepish feet and as hapless behind the dreams
of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk, were at this auc-
tual futule preteriting unstant, in the states of suspensive exani-
mation, accorded, throughout the eye of a noodle, with an ear-
sighted view of old hopeinhaven ... what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out the ind of it! Violet's dyed! then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?
Answer: A collideorscape!

With this visual metaphor, this changing mandalic representation of the sensory ratio, we can "observe" all of human history in the mind's eye."
 

luka

Well-known member
I was listening to one of his things on YouTube last night as I cooked dinner. He's very good on telly, appropriately. (This one)


 
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