B.W. Powe
True, you have to get past the fact that it’s a hastily written, over-padded undergraduate term paper. It consists of little more than a series of lengthy, brain-cramping quotations about the alphabet and typography, and scatterings of slick bite-sized ad copy, unborn ideas and incomprehensible references. A cast of brilliant writers including Cervantes, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Plato, and Shakespeare walk across the book’s stage in roles that, while entertaining if you’re into literature, are more perplexing than illuminative.
But to dismiss it as frustrating gibberish, tempting though this may be, would be foolish. McLuhan, the crafty gadfly, knew exactly what he was doing. For the serious, patient reader, this book reveals, over time, powerful insights into the impact of communications technology on human existence.
In communicating his message, McLuhan eschews clear, linear writing for the “grotesque,” an approach that, in principle, expresses truths by throwing together collections of symbols, leaving it up to the “beholder” to make the connections; truths that would otherwise take much longer to express verbally; a kind of “witty jazz” with no point of view, no linear connection and no sequential order, where the reader participates as co-author.
This may explain why the book starts by leaping immediately to its conclusion, as McLuhan invokes William Blake to explain his delivery:
The Reasoning Spectre Stands between the Vegetative Man & his Immortal Imagination.
By beginning at the end, and throwing all sorts of ideas around in a “mosaic pattern of perception and observation” McLuhan is drawing attention to the fact that print is biased in favour of organised, logical, segmented thinking … when really there’s a whole lot more going on. Reason, he seeks to show, offers only incomplete understanding of the world.
The book’s main topic has to do with the senses we use to make sense of the world. When this orientation changes, men change. And they change when any one sense, or bodily or mental function, is externalised by technology. Imagination is the balance that exists when there is unity of experience, an entire, natural interplay among the senses; when no senses are “outered”. When outered, each sense becomes a closed system, and in “beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it”.
Plato is quoted as saying that the onset of literacy diminished ontological awareness, thereby impoverishing experience. The stated purpose of The Gutenberg Galaxy is to discover how far the restrictive visual bias was pushed by introduction of the alphabet, then manuscripts, then typography. The message of the book is not that print, or any other communications technology, is good or bad, but rather that to be unconscious of its effect is disastrous. Print-biased man, for example, is unwittingly subjected to “its remorseless power of homogenisation” and is therefore in jeopardy of losing the capacity to imagine freely and independently.
Standing on mentor Harold Innis‘s shoulders, McLuhan suggests that revolution takes place as personal and social life adjusts to new models of perception produced by new technologies. From the alphabet on, he says, there has been a continuous drive in the west toward a separation of the senses which has had a profound impact on our emotional and political existence.
Non-literate modes, says McLuhan, are implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous (much like his text). They existed in the primitive past, and as he predicted, seem to be shaping the future. (Source: https://goo.gl/2NeufV)
A Radical Updating of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is The Massage
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar discuss tomorrow via the spreads from their radical artist’s book, Age Of Earthquakes
April 6, 2015
“We see this as a kind of DIY manual.” Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine co-director, and arguably his generations finest curator, is very excited. He’s describing his new book, a radical updating of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is The Massage for our, frankly, totally insane world. “It’s also maybe a form of a cookbook – an extreme present cookbook”. He’s sat with two friends – and co-authors – Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar. Douglas Coupland defined his age with a book twenty years ago, with Generation X. British writer, artist, theorist and editor Shumon Basar midway through a day promoting their new book Age of Earthquakes, overlooking a cityscape viewable from the 15th floor of a central London business hotel bar.
Hans, Douglas and Shumon are friends: futurists by nature and artists in mind. Age of Earthquakes is equal parts self-help and art book, and, with its quotable slogan and rich imagery from artists like K_Hole, Trevor Paglen and even Michael Stipe, it’s like a very smart Tumblr, but made of wood pulp. Guidebook, map for today and mediation on the madness of our media, it’s an awesome, dizzying read. Over the course of an hour, the three thinkers talked us through 14 spreads from the book.
Immediately underneath us are the satellite dishes and turrets of Broadcasting House and the dreamy spire of John Nash’s All Souls church. From the bar’s vast windows to the horizon, cranes are strewn across the landscape, steadily, ominously building London’s tomorrow. The bar feels like a first class waiting room in a second class airport, paused in 1998, and we’re all drinking Coke. It’s the perfect place to discuss how the terrifying and wonderful future came to be all around us.
Click on the images to expand them for closer scrutiny.
Douglas Coupland: You know what’s weird? That quote has been attributed to Bataille, to McLuhan, to Andy Warhol: it’s one of those.
Shumon Basar: It’s a meme quote.
Hans Ulrich Obrist: But it’s also the classic empty page, and in a way the book is a medium. There is a long history of that – from Tristram Shandy’s black page and throughout art history. For the avant garde of the 60s, the artist book is very much at the call of conceptual art: you need to credit Lucy R Lippard: she’s one of the great inventors of this idea that you are curating what happens within a book. She did this amazing exhibition in Vancouver – all roads always lead to Canada!….. Read the rest and see the page spreads at https://goo.gl/V89Ker
I have posted articles about The Age of Earthquakes before. See the following links:
Massage Received: From McLuhan to the Digital Age (More about The Age of Earthquakes) (2015) – https://goo.gl/Lwswq5
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