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."