McLuhan Notes

7/29/2019 McLuhan Notes

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McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy

Prologue.

We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into thetypographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and

indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of

society and experience. Whereas the Elizabethans were poised between medievalcorporate experience and modern individualism, we reverse their pattern by confronting

an electric technology which would seem to render individualism obsolete and the

corporate interdependence mandatory. (p. 1)

In the electronic age which succeeds the typographic and mechanical era of the past five

hundred years, we encounter new shapes and structures of human interdependence which

are oral in form even when the components of the situation may be non-verbal. (p. 3)

New technologies as sense-extensions. Extending one sense to dominate the others.

Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from

one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and

also translates one skill into another. But the principle of exchange and translation, ormetaphor, is in our rational power to translate all our senses into one another. This we do

every instant of our lives Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages,

have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the

electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technologicalinstruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. (p. 5)

Effects of phonetic writing: creation of Euclidean perceptions. Detribalization. Theopen society as created by phonetic literacy and thereated with eradication by electric

media (p. 7).

That the abstracting or opening of closed societies is the work of the phonetic alphabet,

and not of any other form of writing or technology, is one theme of the Gutenberg

Galaxy. On the other hand, that closed societies are the product of speech, drum, and ear

technologies, brings us at the opening of the electronic age to the sealing of the entirehuman family into a single global tribe. (p. 8)

1) The Gutenberg Galaxy

King Lear: maps and visuality. Origins of print culture. Competitive individualism.

Transition from a world of roles to a world of jobs (king). Stripping of senses andseparation of sight from other senses.


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2) King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men

translated themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs

Chaotic transition from world of traditional roles to new world of individuality,

segmentation, and functions.

3) The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic

history in King Lear.

First appearance of three-dimensional perspective in any literature. Selection of a visual

point of view and vanishing point.

4) The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man

from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

A child in any Western milieu is surrounded by an abstract explicit visual technology

of uniform time and uniform continuous space in which cause is efficient andsequential, and things move and happen on single planes and in successive order. But the

African child lives in the implicit, magical world of the resonant oral word. (A world ofsound and touch direct interconnection and significance).

Societies that are still mainly oral-tactile: Russia, China, India. Russian stress on resultsof exercising freedom, rather than on the abstract rightto freedom of expression.

5) Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Phonetic writing: abstraction of meaning from sound. Destabilization of self. Dualism.

Split between mind and heart.

6) Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses

and change mental processes?

Plato: Phaedrus. (Compare Derrida: Platos Pharmakon).

Tribal (pre-literate) language: word is an immediate unity of sound and sense, a

momentary deity or revelation.

7) Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at

odds with the electronic world.

The depths of non-literate understand correspond with the most recent results of art and

science. To explain that paradox will be an aspect of the present book. It is a themearound which much emotion and controversy are daily engendered as our world shifts

from a visual to an auditory orientation in its electric technology. (p. 26).

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Absolute break between phonetic writing and all other kinds of writing. Chinese culture,

e.g., remains tribal. Tribal view: natural unity between word and thing, magic

connection.

8) The modern scientist is at home with oriental field theory.

Today, as electricity creates conditions of extreme interdependence on a global scale,

we move swiftly again into an auditory world of simultaneous events and over-all

awareness (pp. 28-29)

Heisenberg on technology. Rage against machines. Modern physics abandons the

specialized visual space of Descartes and Newton [and] re-enters the subtle auditory

space of the non-literate world. (p. 30). New pluralism of cultures.

But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous field in

all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a global

village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. (p. 31)

9) The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global

village

Tielhard de Chardin. Noosphere: an electronic brain for the world Terror is thenormal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

10) Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African

African students. Changes arising with literacy.

My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base in the humansensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium by technological dilation has a quite

appreciable effect in setting up new ratios or proportions among all the senses.

Languages being that form of technology constituted by dilation or uttering (outering) ofall of our senses at once, are themselves immediately subject to the impact or intrusion of

any mechanically extended sense. (p. 35)

11) Why non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.

African students: trouble getting conventions of narrative film. Pre-literate people are

with the object rather than the scene.

12) African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of

film.

Viewing films as participants. Trouble abstracting a consumer point of view.

Compare TV.

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13) When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs

as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

New technology extends on or more of our senses into the world, thus changing the ratios

among our senses. Auditory field: mosaic or two-dimensional approach. (as opposed

to three-dimensionality of the visual field).

14) A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing

sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.

primitive drawing tends to be 2-dimensional; literate drawing and painting 3-

dimensional and perspective.

First writing: enclosed spaces (end of nomadism). Literacy and melody (repetition,

enclosure, the wheel).

15) The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces ofculture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa

within.

Invention of alphabet. Seperation of process from effect. Speech as content of

phonetic writing. Pictographic and ideographic variants of writing. Formulas (e=mc2) orfigures of rhetoric. Structures with no content. Return to picture-writing.

16) Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to

auditory stress.

Growing unrest about our alphabetic dissociation of the senses. Alphabet as essential to

civilization.

17) The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures

A society that has an alphabet can translate any other society into alphabetic mode (by

writing down the sounds). But this is a one-way process.

By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape andmeaning of Western man. (p. 50)

18) The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego.

Mimesis in Plato: necessary effect of separating out the visual mode from audile-tactile

interplay of senses. Detribalization and move from sacred space of phonetic literacy toprofane space of civilized man. Movement toward individual with individual ego.

Detribalization, individualization, pictorialization. Mimesis as representation (esp.

visual); but literacy (abstract visuality) as a dimunition of Being.

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19) The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest a

people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.

Manuscript phase of alphabetic technology doesnt yet suffice to completely separate

visual from tactile. Only mass production of movable type can do that.

Present day: return to audile-tactile of radio, electricity, the Africa within.

20) The Greek point of view in both art and chronology has little in common with

ours but was much like that of the middle ages.

Greek time sense: like foreshortening WITHOUT a fixed point of view or vanishing

point. Homer: all events in foreground, uniform illumination, free expression, fewelements of psychological perspective.

Pre-socratic philosophers and post-literate scientists of today.

21) The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the

interiorization of the alphabet.

Homogeneity and repeatability: emergence from audile-tactile (to visual) matrix.

22) The continuity of Greek and medieval art was assured by the bond between

caelatura or engraving and illumination.

Paper and illumination.

23) The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the

primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the unified

field of electric all-at-onceness.

Greek art as a mosaic configuration: similar items in a field.

24) A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

Primitive art. Indifference of non-literate man to visual values. Multidirectionalorientation.

25) Primitivism has become the vulgar clich of much modern art and speculation.

Recent nostalgia for the sacral. Eliade. The art and scholarship of the past century

and more have become a monotonous crescendo of archaic primitivism.

26) The Gutenberg Galaxy is concerned to show why alphabetic man was disposed

to desacralize his mode of being.

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Making a conscious choice of whether to return to tribal mode. Blake: reaction against

the visual culture of his time.

27) The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for

experimental exploration the technique of the suspended judgment.

Mythical, pre-literate cultures experience all levels of meaning as simultaneous. As our

age translates itself back into the oral and auditory modes because of the electronic

pressure of simultaneity, we become sharply aware of the uncritical acceptance of visualmetaphors and models by many past centuries. (Ryle). Dominance of one sense =

hypnosis.

28) Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

Transition to concern with print. Joyce: parallels between todays transitional moment

(from print culture back to pictoral) and Homer. As his title indicates, he saw that the

wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man.(p. 75)

29) Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic

interiorization of their own technologies.

Most previous cultures have accepted their own cultures as fate.

30) The techniques of uniformity and repeatability were introduced by the Romans

and the Middle Ages.

Persistent compulsion to split form and content leads to ignorance of specific effects of

technological media. Repeatability built into phonetic written characters.

31) The word modern was a term of reproach used by the patristic humanists

against the medieval schoolmen who developed the new logic and physics.

Continued development of visual stress. INVENTION of movable TYPE. New

understanding of physical world: measurable quantities, uniform motion.

32) In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

Manuscripts were read aloud: oral and tactile. New strategies of modernist poets forgetting the reader to read aloud again.

33) manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience

are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

Manuscript culture and audience. Words written to be read aloud (i.e. performed).

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34) The manuscript shaped mideval literary conventions at all levels.

Effects on medieval literary conventions. Books meant to be read aloud are meant to becopied. Spelling as sacred. Reading as sequential: no scanning. Production of

techniques of memory and memorization.

35) The traditional lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and

typographic man.

Schoolchildren: transmission of nursery rhymes; community and tenacity of tradition

36) The medieval monks reading carrel was indeed a singing booth.

Reading booth as singing booth: connection to memory.

37) In the chantry schools grammar served, above all, to establish oral fidelity.

Medieval writing as inseperable from oral and oratory. Grammar as establishing the right

way to speak/read.

38) The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the

authors he read.

Method of dictations. Writing as taking dictation.

39) Aquinas explains why Socrates, Christ, and Pythagoras avoided the publication

of their teachings.

Aquinas: writing would have detracted from dignity of oral teaching. Not yet anindependent source of knowledge. Writing as essentially connected with oral

communication.

40) The rise of the schoolmen or moderni in the twelfth century made a sharp break

with the ancients of traditional Christian scholarship.

Rise of universities in 12th century. Method of disputation; abstraction from largercontext to consider particular questions. (break with ars grammatica)

41) Scholasticism, like Senacanism, was directly related to the oral traditions of

aphoristic learning.

Oral style and techniques of oral memory: rhyme, alliterations, dependence on pun,alliteration, aphorism. In oral society: text as immediate voice of auctor. Oral bias

toward aphorisms is rapidly altered in 16th century (with advent of print).

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42) Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through,

not light on.

Illumination as light through a text (stained glass). The literal level as an interplay of

light through a text. With print, by contrast: light on everything; space and time as

abstract containers. In Medieval, space not yet a container (little furniture)

43) Medieval illumination, gloss, and sculpture alike were aspects of the art of

memory, central to scribal culture.

Arts of memory: training of memory for voice. Oratory.

44) For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.

Use of dialectic to recover thoughts of author. The literal as inclusive of all possible

meanings and levels. Later (with print): separation of levels. Auditory field as

simultaneous, visual field as successive.

45) The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual

organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography.

Transition from light through to light on. POINT of VIEW or fixed position ofreader. Development of PERSPECTIVE.

46) The same clash between written and oral structures of knowledge occurs in

medieval social life.

Feudal structures. Centers without margins. Juxtaposition of specialists with new class

of tradesmen and avant-garde.

47) The medieval world ended in a frenzy of applied knowledge new medieval

knowledge applied to the recreation of antiquity.

Frenzy of specialized practices: re-creation of classical world as Hollywood sets

48) Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and

the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for

men of any class.

Transiton to age of visual. Applied knowledge provides possibility for translation of

audile-tactile experience into visual terms.

49) Medieval idols of the king.

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Distinction between private and corporate (sovereign) body of King. Analytic separation

of functions between PERSON of King and what he stands for. Intensified by move

toward visual culture. Constitution of the body politic.

50) The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of

applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the firstassembly-line, and the first mass-production.

PRINT: the first mass production. Typography as like cinema. Reduction of handicraftto mechanical terms (simple, repeatable elements). Reader in role of move projector.

Print makes reading aloud pointless. Print as first uniform, repeatable commodity.

Visual homogenizing of experience in print culture. New invention of point of view

and perspectivism.

51) A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic

organism.

There is then this great paradox of the Gutenberg era, that its seeming activism is

cinematic in the strict movie sense. It is a consistent series of static shots or fixed pointsof view in homogeneous relationship. Homogenization of men and materials will

become the great program of the Gutenberg era, the source of wealth and power unknown

to any other time or technology. (p. 127)

52) How the natural magic of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning

the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package.

Camera obscura: the separable image. Preservation and repeatability of the image in

itself.

53) St. Thomas More offers a plan for a bridge over the turbulent river of scholastic

philosophy.

Movement away from traditional scholastic dialogue (oral and conversational). Toward

invention of a visual method: New sequential processing of problems. It took a long

time for people to react appropriately to print. Producer and consumer of text as arising

from print. Failure at first to understand typography. Compare to current failure tounderstand new organic production.

54) Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by

typography.

Scribal culture: indifference to identity of the AUTHOR of a text. No standard practicesof citation or duplication. PRINT makes possible the BROADCAST of a PRIVATE

image to a PUBLIC audience. Print as the first mass medium. Print constitutes the

PRIVATE and the PUBLIC (such as we understand it).

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It is not entirely self-evident today that typography should have been the means and

occasion of individualism and self-expression in society. That it should have been the

means of fostering habits of private property, privacy, and many forms of enclosure is,perhaps, more evident. But most obvious is the fact of printed publication as the direct

means of fame and perpetual memory. For, until the modern movie, there had been in the

world no means of broadcasting a private image to equal the printed book. (p. 131)Concerns with AUTHORSHIP begin with print.

55) The medieval book trade was a second-hand trade even as with the dealing

today in old masters.

Medieval readers: indifferent to chronology of authorship. Typography and

homogeneity. But lest it be inferred that this effect of print culture is a bad thing, letus consider rather that homogeneity is quite incompatible with electronic culture. We

now live in the early part of an age for which the meaning of print culture is becoming as

alien as the meaning of manuscript culture was to the eighteenth century For the

electronic age, as de Chardin insisted, is not mechanical but organic, and has littlesympathy with the values achieved through typography, this mechanical way of writing

as it was called at first. (p. 135)

56) Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain

a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition.

Prose still remained oral rather than visual for centuries after the invention of

typography. Chaucer still has no consistent point of view. Invention of point of view

(Milton). (The novel (Cervantes, Defoe)).

57) Later medieval visual stress muddied liturgical piety as much as electronic-field

pressure has clarified it today.

Liturgy as political act (Merton). Decline of liturgical practice with advent of print.

Return of liturgical practice today.

With regard only to our new electronic technology, it might baffle many to explain why

there should be such a profound liturgical revival in our time, unless they were aware of

the essentially oral character of the electric field. Today there is a High Churchmovement within Presbyterianism as well as in many other sects. The merely individual

and visual aspects of worship no longer satisfy. (pp. 138-39)

Print as an immediate technological extension of the human person gave its first age an

unprecedented access of power and vehemence. Visually, print is very much more high

definition than the manuscript. Print was, that is to say, a very hot medium cominginto a world that for thousands of years had been served by the cool medium of script.

Thus our own roaring twenties were the first to feel the hot movie medium and also the

hot radio medium. It was the first great consumer age. So with print Europe experienced

its first consumer phase, for not only is print a consumer medium and commodity, but it

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taught men how to organize all other activities on a systematic lineal basis. It showed

men how to create markets and national armies. For the hot medium of print enabled

men to see their vernaculars for the first time, and to visualize the national unity andpower in terms of the vernacular bounds Inseparable from a nationalism of

homogenous English or French speakers was individualism. (pp. 138-39).

Liturgy of Catholic church still carries deep marks of effects of visual technology.

Visuality of hierarchy (great chain of being) Current changes in management and

industrial organization reverse this trend toward visuality. New decentralization, reversalof hierarchies, move away from pyramidal, specialist forms of organization.

The simultaneous field of electric information structures, today reconstitutes the

conditions and need for dialogue and participation, rather than specialism and privateinitiative in all levels of social experience. Our present involvement in these new kinds

of interdependence produces in many an involuntary alienation from our Renaissance

heritage. But for the readers of this book it is hoped that we can deepen our

understanding both of the typographic and the electronic revolutions. (p. 141).

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