Beginning on this new path, a consideration of the first, untitled, preface-like page of The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan.
To begin with, McLuhan explains the "mosaic or field approach" that his book will develop as "the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history." Again, a confirmation, as "mosaic" also roughly describes my plan of week by week jumping from one small bit of one book to one small bit of another to another small bit of yet another. I made the plan not really knowing, though curious to know, what such a plan of attack might reveal--who knows? Perhaps causal operations in history.
McLuhan goes on to assert the galaxy, event-constellation or environment under study "is itself a mosaic of perpetually intersecting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation--particularly in our own time" (The Gutenberg Galaxy was published in 1962) The particular kinds of events constituting this "galaxy" are changes in technology, and the ways those changes constitute not passive or neutral events but rather "active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike." As examples he asserts that alphabets and writing created the environment or ancient empires, that the stirrup and the wheel greatly expanded the scope of such empires, that printing from movable type created "the public" and nations as we understand them. Finally, in the twentieth century the shift from mechanical to electrical technology has been (and continues to be) a most active process indeed and one the major historical shifts of all time.
For McLuhan, the individual, the public and nations are all products of "an intense and visually oriented self-consciousness, both of the individual and the group," and this intense visual consciousness is itself the product of words on the printed page, hence the world of that period from the 15th into the early 20th centuries was a "Gutenberg Galaxy," since Gutenberg invented the printing press.
However, "electrical circuitry does not support the extension of visual modalities in any degree approaching the visual power of the printed word," so that, paradoxically, those processes which have nurtured and supported the individual, the public and nations are no longer with us in the same way. Since the advent of film, recordings, radio, television, computers and the internet, whatever an individual was, whatever the public was, whatever a nation was have been being dissolved or in whatever fashion, fundamentally transformed. It was to describe this transformation that McLuhan coined the term "global village." Today we are witnessing, not just in the US but all over the world, a resurgence of populist nationalism. Perhaps this resurgence has much to do with the anxiety of the sudden (in historical terms) dissolution/transformation of such basic things as our sense of individuality, of being the public, of being a nation.
https://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/144261269X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485559537&sr=1-1&keywords=marshall+mcluhan+the+gutenberg+galaxy
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Saturday, January 21, 2017
To the Bottom of Wherever
It has been quite a while (about 3 1/2 years) since my last post. That has had to do with many things, including finding ways to act politically that were not just blogging. It has also had to do with the ways in which life got extraordinarily busy.
Early in November Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, and yesterday, January 20, he was inaugurated. The advent of this presidency feels like a grave crisis for our country and for the world. This crisis has alternately thrown me into rage, despair, helplessness and bewilderment, and it became clear to me shortly following the election that I needed to find a way to intentionally and constructively act in response to this crisis.
Immediately following the election I had raged and vented and spat via Facebook posts. This raging drew Amens from many of my friends but also anger, especially from people in the very small Eastern Washington town where I grew up. One of these people unfriended me, but later messaged me that she was re-friending me, that she loved me, and that she didn't want Facebook politics to get in the way of that.
This person has known me since before I started grade school, and the interaction reminded me of what was unique about that town: there were people of widely varying points of view and those views sometimes clashed, but we didn't become enemies over such clashes; we knew each other too well. We had babysat or been babysat by each other, we had attended church together, rooted at basketball games together, changed and showered in the same locker rooms together, and that being together overrode political differences however deeply felt. The unfriending and refriending reminded me of that, and it has made me much less likely to simply vent on Facebook now.
I am less sure than I once was of the value of attempting to persuade a right wing skeptic of the truth of my left wing values. It's as if we're from different planets and there is no persuading that is going to happen. If I am honest with myself, I don't really know why I hold the values I do, nor why they happen to constitute such a standard left-liberal bouquet: pro-choice, socialist, climate change (is real), embrace of diversity: not to say I don't hold these position staunchly and fervently, but I can't say from where that fervency actually stems.
When I started this blog in 2013 I set out themes and topics, but I'm changing what I'm doing for this re-launch. My goal, perhaps unattainable, is to get to the bottom of wherever right and/or left wing values spring. Not just "perhaps unattainable," it's really not clear to me what the correct way of proceeding might be. In lieu of that knowledge, I am setting myself the following task: To undertake a leisurely and painstaking review, in very small bites, of the written work of R. Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, and John Cage. After this thought had come to me it felt like a confirmation when I remembered that Norman O. Brown, under similarly perplexing political circumstances in the early 50's had undertaken the project to critically and systematically read the work of Sigmund Freud.
To begin with, the plan is to read, in parallel, Fuller's Synergetics, McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, Brown's Life Against Death and Cage's Silence. If I can manage to post once a week, it is hoped to cycle through a brief passage from each book, with reflections connecting to our present situation, over the course of one month, returning to the beginning of the cycle at the beginning of the next month.
Early in November Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, and yesterday, January 20, he was inaugurated. The advent of this presidency feels like a grave crisis for our country and for the world. This crisis has alternately thrown me into rage, despair, helplessness and bewilderment, and it became clear to me shortly following the election that I needed to find a way to intentionally and constructively act in response to this crisis.
Immediately following the election I had raged and vented and spat via Facebook posts. This raging drew Amens from many of my friends but also anger, especially from people in the very small Eastern Washington town where I grew up. One of these people unfriended me, but later messaged me that she was re-friending me, that she loved me, and that she didn't want Facebook politics to get in the way of that.
This person has known me since before I started grade school, and the interaction reminded me of what was unique about that town: there were people of widely varying points of view and those views sometimes clashed, but we didn't become enemies over such clashes; we knew each other too well. We had babysat or been babysat by each other, we had attended church together, rooted at basketball games together, changed and showered in the same locker rooms together, and that being together overrode political differences however deeply felt. The unfriending and refriending reminded me of that, and it has made me much less likely to simply vent on Facebook now.
I am less sure than I once was of the value of attempting to persuade a right wing skeptic of the truth of my left wing values. It's as if we're from different planets and there is no persuading that is going to happen. If I am honest with myself, I don't really know why I hold the values I do, nor why they happen to constitute such a standard left-liberal bouquet: pro-choice, socialist, climate change (is real), embrace of diversity: not to say I don't hold these position staunchly and fervently, but I can't say from where that fervency actually stems.
When I started this blog in 2013 I set out themes and topics, but I'm changing what I'm doing for this re-launch. My goal, perhaps unattainable, is to get to the bottom of wherever right and/or left wing values spring. Not just "perhaps unattainable," it's really not clear to me what the correct way of proceeding might be. In lieu of that knowledge, I am setting myself the following task: To undertake a leisurely and painstaking review, in very small bites, of the written work of R. Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, and John Cage. After this thought had come to me it felt like a confirmation when I remembered that Norman O. Brown, under similarly perplexing political circumstances in the early 50's had undertaken the project to critically and systematically read the work of Sigmund Freud.
To begin with, the plan is to read, in parallel, Fuller's Synergetics, McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, Brown's Life Against Death and Cage's Silence. If I can manage to post once a week, it is hoped to cycle through a brief passage from each book, with reflections connecting to our present situation, over the course of one month, returning to the beginning of the cycle at the beginning of the next month.
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