| Nicholas Hermann on 11 Apr 2001 17:47:21 -0000 |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| [Nettime-bold] Remember "McLuhan's Bastard Children" on nettime? |
++
This poem is very good and it's by Dan Schneider at www.cosmoetica.com
++
-1-
McLUHAN4
An Arcimboldo Armorial
WINTER
When people talk about media or society there's always a moral tone to it.
As if by making a moral statement they establish the fact that they are
moral people, and that they are serious people. McLuhan always thought
such behavior was an evasion of the worst sort*.he used to say, "Moral
indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity."1
SPRING
Velleity! And what then? What of the desire to make a big mistake, and the room
to make it? And the room to build life from it? When the motorcar was new,
it exercised the typical mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions. It broke up family
life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It separated work and domicile as never before.1
And when I was a child the criminal pleasure of the day wound its own way
through the acoustic spring; industry and all that were just places where the big men worked,
and where the carrots and tubers of youthful planting became just so much memory and loss
to the palladial hum of human things and chores, toil and sweat. It was here I
first found the meaning in silent films, and grew hoarse on the silence, and lonely too.
The bleached words of whistled tunes wound its way through Edmonton. Quicker than the raven-woven wheat
is the mind that wills the man- or the boy, a variorum of mind with time,
the nothing that is sacred to the communicopia, unknowing a west that is West, and wester
than the dynamic karma of antithesis churning through the Modern, like Edouard Manet through the Academy,
or some unknown and unpublished great poet through the New Criticism, like a hypersexual Hugo Ball
through his desires for recognition, or Apollinaire in his final moments gurgling for the real truth,
while I thumb through Robert Service, in my earliest quest through meaning- at least its start.
What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him2,
leaving an inscrutable core of adamantine woe, or so it seems, for far under it all
the eyes of Persephone stare at the world, glazed not with the accoutrements of the electric,
but with the disappointment of her age to hasten to her side, and embrace it all.
I remember the coming of springtime on the prairies, the thaw of things old made new,
and the crowds gathered for the rodeos- many years later I would remark on the similarities
to all human endeavors. Notice- Everybody at a football game is a nobody simply by virtue
of the fact of their deep involvement in an experience simultaneously shared by others.3 You see?
In such a situation, the most famous person in the world becomes a nobody.3 Elementally so,
as if the 4 classical elements engaged in some conspiracy to defraud us of our desires.
It can be no more true. This is a structural fact, and when considered in relation
to our wired planet, where everybody is involved in everybody's experience, this is the overwhelming backlash
-2-
of reaction to nonentity- the creation of mass man. The mass man is not the vulgar
or the stupid or the unthinking man, but anybody and everybody who experiences the electric situation
of instant information. Electronic man is no abstraction, but rather the existing individual3 ,unabstracted by
psychopoetries
in a simultaneous culture. Having had his private individuality erased anonymously, he is paranoiac3 , as well,
and much inclined to violence, for violence is a quest for identity, seeking to discover, "Who
am I?" and "What are my limits?"3 , even as the bulls are released, and the bodies
maintain equilibria with their passing, like the pressured webs of stars in which electrons dance millennia
away before exploding forth into the cosmos, and bouncing a trillion times off of things apparitional
as your sweater, to my eye, indulged in the prehistoric nudity of desire, and its violence-
in the sense of crossing boundaries and seeking new identities....just the general quest for knowledge
and identity- is the way we live4 for the tragic hero constantly renewing the human image
is a violent man.4 It is when we forget such things in the perfidy of culture
that it becomes uncontained and uncontainable, and the gigantism of evil, omnipresent all through unnoticed times,
suddenly dons celebrity, and the need for smaller errors takes hold, for those errors are containable,
they are organic as the shift of glaciers to the sea, or caribou to the North
Magnetic Pole, where the loss of oneself becomes not so much a goal, but an inevitability.
As the seasons churned sinuously through the millennia, so too did the banal which inhabits stars
and spaces within Man himself. It was the clock which dragged man out of the world
of seasonal rhythms and recurrence as effectively as the alphabet had released him from the magical
resonance of the spoken word and the tribal trap. This dual translation of the individual out
of the grip of nature and out of the clutch of the tribe was not without
its own penalties,5 never to be dismissed lightly, but the return to nature and the return
to the tribe are, under electric conditions, fatally simple.5 And we need be aware of those
who announce programs for restoring man to the original state and language of the race.5 Velleity
is the best definition of such a state, and these crusaders have never examined the role
of media and technology in tossing man about from dimension to dimension.5 And in this tossing
comes the little pleasures, the criminal pleasures, of 6 year olds peeping tomly through the woodshed
at their older sisters bathing in sealed oaken tubs on a warm May morning in Alberta
where acoustic space is created by our ability to hear from all directions at once. Electric
information arrives from all quarters at once....in effect, acoustic environments were created by the telegraph
and began to show up in the press as mosaics of juxtaposed and discontinuous items, all
under one dateline. Acoustic space is all touch and interplay, all resonance and sympathy. Acoustic space
is like the relationship of mother and child,6 the year to her seasons, or any other
epiphenomenal activity, the vegetation of spring after the hibernal impasse, rendering all else moot and gone,
in its passing, the fleet mechanisms of the atomic lathe, serial creation in its highest form,
and the errors hidden over, and the new ones beginning to form- and what then? Velleity!
-3-
WINTER
He was a very strong scholar. He loved his scholarship and was very
proud of it. His memory was immense. He could dip into that well and
pull out the most extraordinary stuff*.Alot of what he said didn't stand
up to scrutiny and he would get irritated if you challenged him because he
was quite vain*.his was not a carefully integrated personality.2
SUMMER
1934
"Ubi dubium ibi libertas."1
Arrange the scene so rearranged
it will seem to do what you want
it to do, melt slowly away
as the wax of day lights the room
your mind deems want.
Unsaid and unprepared it goes,
beyond the proletariat,
emitting preludes that design
the friendly thoughts within the mind,
beyond such thought.
Unresurrected and left dead,
not Blackmur makes remotely right
the care of what is first regret,
and what seems strange to minds unbound
in art's grim light.
The carrot carries so much weight,
and import that a single part
deemed false makes admiration seem
the twist of agriculture's theme
become a part
of literature's own decline,
essayed by vacant skulls in glass,
content to pass the era's grip
onto their children. In their place
the wind's impasse
gives beauty terror come anew,
with clouds that sense in five-fold ways,
the air electric to new ears
emerging from the caves that close
-4-
upon these days
selecting tenants of the world
who will create what propagates
the newer visions after we
decline to circuit memory,
and crystal freight,
suspending what we rearranged
forever in what want will give
to its new creatures. Recherche
will be what now gleams provident
within. Our lives
will capture thought. With fear and hate
alleviated, we will find
the profit of the everstate
a thousandfold improved from now,
wherein the land
our kind still milks its way by hand,
and trudges to the hour's beat,
unforgiven by the New Way's
deeper dilemma with the Past-
the hour's beat
which ridicules Shakespearean
the proletariat ensconced
by Eliot and his ilk's drear
inhuman voice made mortal. Clear
and unensconced,
what will not sing the carrot's song
devolves in that Italian's stroke,
painted four centuries ago,
when agriculture was the dream
Man held and stroked
meticulously till he woke
and drowned in the electric seas
arranged in notes, not ancient scenes,
that seem to give what seasons take.
WINTER
Marshall McLuhan was a great thinker*.There are many rooms in the
house of intellect. And different kinds of thinkers occupy different kinds
-5-
of rooms. If there's a room for those thinkers who see something quite
differently from everyone else, and forms a question that people in the
other rooms hadn't thought about, in that sense we could say McLuhan
was a great thinker.3
AUTUMN
[The medium is the proverb.]
We may be approaching the time when political and executive figures may have to be
recruited on the same basis as was formerly used
for movie stars.1 A hot medium
is one that extends one single sense
in high definition....hot media do not leave
so much to be filled in.2 And it's only when a thing has become obsolete
that everybody is sufficiently familiar with it
to make it work....This is not ordinarily understood.
Most people think obsolescence means the end.
It means the beginning.3 Every kid knows
that within 3 years, everything will have changed-
including himself and the goal.4 Automation,
which is electronic, does not
represent physical work so much as programmed knowledge.5
Why do the wheels keep hurrying us
downtown? Some people are puzzled
by this and have come up with the answer:
it's the filing cabinet
downtown in the offices that makes it still
necessary to rush back and forth
from suburb to office. That it is this obsession
with the contents of the file-
documents, contracts, data. All of these
materials actually could be just as available
on closed circuit at home.6 Tokyo isn't much farther away
than the suburbs in point of time.
So the patterns of human association vary
enormously with the amount of acceleration
possible. I now think of the city
as the planet itself, the urban village
or global village. And, in fact,
you could say that with the satellite,
the global village has become a global theater,
with everybody on the planet
simultaneously participating as actors. Students
around the globe feel an entire unity
among themselves; they feel a homogeneity
of interest. They live in an information environment
created by electricity. They share
-6-
the same information
or electric environment of information
and they share the same outlook
around the world.7 Any medium presents
a figure whose ground is always hidden
or subliminal. In the case of TV,
as of the telephone or radio, the subliminal ground
could be called the disincarnate
or disembodied user.8 The electric surround
of information that has tended to make man
a superman at the same time reduces him
into a pretty pitiable nobody by merging him
with everybody.9 The psychiatrist's couches of the world are sagging
with people who have lost
their sense of identity. They used to feel
they were clearly defined entities;
they had cards of identity, they knew
who they were. Now they go
to psychiatrists to be told or to find out,
"Who am I? What should I be doing?"10
We play the total field. The hunter plays
the field....These are the images of our time-
the hunter. All the key figures of our time are hunters.
Hunting is pure11....Where man is not nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not believ'd.12
WINTER
He did not make things easy for the reader. If the medium is the message,
he said, the user is the content, and sometimes the user doesn't work very
hard. Now that's a harsh thing to say- especially in our day and age when
everything is supposed to be so reader-friendly*.He wasn't giving you
gospel; he was giving you some tools for thinking*.4
NOTES
WINTER
1- Philip Marchand, MM's biographer, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium And the Messenger
2- Patrick Watson, actor, writer, producer, ex-chairman Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
3- Neil Postman, writer, communications professor at New York University
4- Liss Jeffrey, journalist, theater director, senior research associate, The McLuhan Program in Culture &
Technology, University Of Toronto
SPRING
1- MM, Understanding Media, 1964
-7-
2- MM, 1971 instructional video, with A.F. Knowles
3- MM, 1971 speech
4- MM, The New Majority- TV show, 1970
5- MM, Understanding Media, 1964
6- MM, 1974 interview
SUMMER
1- Latin Proverb, "Where there is doubt, there is freedom."
AUTUMN
1- MM, 1974, unpublished essay
2- MM, Understanding Media, 1964
3- MM, The New Majority, TV show, 1970
4- MM, 1971 instructional video, with A.F. Knowles
5- MM, Understanding Media, 1964
6- MM, Take 30, TV show, 1965
7- MM, The New Majority, TV show, 1970
8- MM, New York magazine, 1978
9- MM, 1974 interview with Louis Forsdale
10-MM, Take 30, TV show, 1965
11-MM, Ideas, radio show, 1969
12-William Blake, Proverbs Of Hell, lines 69-70
Copyright by Dan Schneider
it exercised
ll
life
l
_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold