Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
“McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0916870480“In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’.”
“Joyce is, in ‘The Wake’, making his own alchemeric cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology.”
“Nothing is now unconscious if your data-search commands are powerful enough.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0802060412“So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion. It’s a very Talmudic notion. It’s a very psychedelic notion. It’s the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central, overarching metaphor of the age. And, naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual. And this is in fact how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science.”
“The idea of the individual is a post-Medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers.”
“The notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print-created idea.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1584230738“Reading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. … Nobody opens a book and looks at print … We read print, but we look at manuscript, because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it.”
“[Quoting Marshall McLuhan] High definition is the state of being well-filled with data.”
“Print is the least invisible of all media. Print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information.”We are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling-tone kind of thing.”
“A perfect media is an invisible media, and print is the least invisible of all media.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0415162459“Those who read, do not see, even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world. They read. They attempt to read nature. And you can’t read nature. You must look at nature. You must see nature.”
” ‘The Medium is the message’ means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference.”
“Imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one-half hours per day, on average, watching. And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, is that it’s very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a mirror, but television isn’t a mirror. Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.”
Previous Episode
176 - Surfing Finnegans Wake Part 1
Next Episode
178 - A random walk through two great minds
Similar Episodes
- 560 - McKenna’s Thoughts About Marshall McLuhan - score: 0.97424
- 515 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 1 - score: 0.77654
- 209 - An Audio Collage of Aldous Huxley - score: 0.76916
- 275 - The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience - score: 0.75213
- 441 - The Technology of Spirituality - score: 0.75136
- 351 - What Is Truth_ - score: 0.74726
- 151 - Posthumous Glory - score: 0.74501
- 187 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 1 - score: 0.74436
- 141 - Contemplating a Visual Psychedelic Language - score: 0.74248
- 201 - Appreciating Imagination – Part 1 - score: 0.73870
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:29 ►
And again, I want to begin by thanking some people who have sent in some of their hard-earned cash to help offset the expenses that we encounter here in producing these podcasts.
00:00:35 ►
And those wonderful salonners are Zachary W., Patrick E., Alan T., Anthony D., and Sarah G.
00:00:44 ►
Almost rhymes, doesn’t it?
00:00:46 ►
And in addition, I’ve received quite a few emails from other salonners
00:00:50 ►
who somehow feel bad because they haven’t sent in a donation.
00:00:55 ►
So once again, let me say that you shouldn’t worry about that.
00:00:58 ►
Right now, I have enough set aside from donations
00:01:01 ►
to keep things humming along nicely for at least another six or seven months.
00:01:06 ►
And beyond that, I’m hoping that the sales of my new book will take care of us.
00:01:11 ►
As the release date gets a little closer, I’ll fill in more details.
00:01:15 ►
But my current plan is to sell it as an audiobook for around $12.
00:01:20 ►
And if I sell a dozen or so a month,
00:01:22 ►
the salon can continue on indefinitely without anybody feeling bad about sending in a donation or not.
00:01:29 ►
What is a lot of help right now is exactly what many of our fellow salonners are also doing.
00:01:35 ►
And that is to let their friends know about these podcasts and to encourage them to give them a listen.
00:01:42 ►
And by the way, if you’re introducing somebody to the salon who has not yet heard Terrence
00:01:46 ►
McKenna, I suggest that you get them started with the Valley of Novelty series in podcasts
00:01:52 ►
number 27 through 36.
00:01:55 ►
And please, Zachary, Patrick, Alan, Anthony, and Sarah, and all the rest of our wonderful
00:02:01 ►
donors, I hope you don’t think I’m making light of your wonderful contributions.
00:02:07 ►
That isn’t my intention at all.
00:02:09 ►
I sincerely appreciate your help,
00:02:11 ►
and all I’m trying to say here is that there are a lot of ways to become involved with the salon,
00:02:16 ►
and you don’t have to make a financial donation to do so,
00:02:20 ►
particularly if you’re strapped for funds like most of us are right now.
00:02:23 ►
In fact, one of the best things I know you can do is to become involved in the forums over at thegrowreport.com.
00:02:30 ►
Not just the salons forum, but all of them are very interesting,
00:02:34 ►
and I think you’ll find some of the best-tuned psychedelic minds that there are anywhere on the net over there at thegrowreport.com.
00:02:43 ►
So thank you one and all for being part of this grand worldwide psychedelic community.
00:02:50 ►
And now let’s get on with today’s program.
00:02:53 ►
As you already know, I titled this program Surfing Finnegan’s Wake Part 2, but I only
00:03:00 ►
did that to let you know that this is the continuation of last week’s program, because a more accurate title might be something like Surfing Marshall McLuhan, and I think
00:03:11 ►
you’ll see what I mean in just a few seconds.
00:03:14 ►
Until just now, I had never taken the time to listen to the end of this lecture, and
00:03:19 ►
so was really taken for a nice surprise at the way it ended, with him going on a rant about war and the ways in which television has changed us.
00:03:29 ►
I thought I was going to hear more about James Joyce
00:03:32 ►
and wound up feeling like I was at some kind of a rally or something.
00:03:37 ►
But why am I talking about it?
00:03:39 ►
Let’s just rejoin Terrence where he left off in the last podcast,
00:03:43 ►
just as he was beginning to read another passage from Finnegan’s Wake.
00:03:51 ►
Let us now, whether health, dangers, public orders, and other circumstances permitting,
00:03:58 ►
of perfectly convenient, if you police, after you, police, police, pardoning mine,
00:04:04 ►
if you police after you, police, police, pardoning mine,
00:04:06 ►
ich bin so fleisch be,
00:04:12 ►
drop this jitter pokery and talk straight turkey, mate to mate.
00:04:16 ►
For while the ear, be we milk-alls or Nicolists,
00:04:19 ►
may sometimes be inclined to believe others,
00:04:23 ►
the eye, whether browned or nolanced,
00:04:28 ►
finds it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself.
00:04:31 ►
Habeus aures et nun vidibis,
00:04:36 ►
habeus oculus, ad hoc manis polypobatus,
00:04:40 ►
tip, drawing nearer to take our slant at it,
00:04:45 ►
since after all it has met with misfortunes while all underground.
00:04:50 ►
Let us see all there may remain to be seen.
00:04:58 ►
But I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to police every buries,
00:05:02 ►
and duly glad when Christmas comes his once a year. You a poor Jewist unctuous to police
00:05:06 ►
nopibobbies
00:05:07 ►
and tiny belly solely
00:05:09 ►
when tis thine took
00:05:11 ►
or home gin
00:05:13 ►
we cannot say eye to eye
00:05:15 ►
we cannot smile nose from nose
00:05:18 ►
still
00:05:19 ►
one cannot help noticing that rather
00:05:21 ►
more than half of the lines run
00:05:24 ►
north south in the Nemzis
00:05:26 ►
and Bukhara-Has directions,
00:05:28 ►
while the others go west-east in search from Malazis via Bolgarab.
00:05:33 ►
For tiny tot, though it looks when Shvamp-Humph-Sling,
00:05:37 ►
alongside other Incanabula,
00:05:39 ►
it has its cardinal points for all of that.
00:05:43 ►
Tip.
00:05:44 ►
Now, this word tip, which keeps occurring throughout the text,
00:05:49 ►
no one is clear what it means,
00:05:52 ►
but Joe Camel’s guess is it’s a tree branch
00:05:58 ►
which is tapping against the window.
00:06:01 ►
And whoever is dreaming this huge hallucinatory gizmo of a dream every once
00:06:09 ►
in a while the tap of the branch breaks breaks through mclean i don’t know how many of you recall
00:06:17 ►
him from the 60s but he had for a very brief period of time, about five or six years, an extraordinary influence on American culture.
00:06:28 ►
You couldn’t pick up a magazine or turn on the TV
00:06:32 ►
without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, what he said, what he thought,
00:06:38 ►
what he predicted.
00:06:39 ►
He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood, so forth and so on.
00:06:48 ►
And his influence, he died in the early 70s, and his influence died with him.
00:06:55 ►
Even though he had founded the Center for Media Study at the University of Toronto in Canada,
00:07:02 ►
he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors,
00:07:07 ►
was a unique personality and breakthrough,
00:07:13 ►
much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality
00:07:17 ►
and spawned very few imitators.
00:07:22 ►
And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work
00:07:28 ►
before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media.
00:07:36 ►
He did his work as a Joyce scholar.
00:07:39 ►
That’s what he was, a literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist, that sort of thing.
00:07:48 ►
And then in the early 50s or middle 50s, he wrote a book, which I’ve never read,
00:07:54 ►
it’s very hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride,
00:07:59 ►
that was his first testing of his ideas.
00:08:06 ►
McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist
00:08:10 ►
or a philosopher of media,
00:08:14 ►
and that’s what he talked about.
00:08:17 ►
He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method
00:08:23 ►
on the technologies of communication,
00:08:27 ►
printing, film, photography, dance, theater,
00:08:32 ►
even such things as money, he thought of as forms of media.
00:08:38 ►
And he carried out and analyzed these various forms of media
00:08:42 ►
and reached very controversial conclusions.
00:08:49 ►
One of the things that was puzzling to me
00:08:51 ►
as I went back through and read all this
00:08:53 ►
is one of the things was McLuhan was synonymous
00:08:57 ►
with incomprehensibility in the 60s.
00:09:00 ►
I mean, the whole thing was,
00:09:02 ►
who can understand this guy?
00:09:04 ►
You know, he’s like Buddha.
00:09:05 ►
He speaks these words that we can’t understand.
00:09:09 ►
Well, now, 25, 30 years later, it reads pretty straightforwardly.
00:09:16 ►
And most of what he’s predicted has come to pass.
00:09:21 ►
I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed with which the Gutenberg
00:09:27 ►
world has been overturned. I mean, there’s no hint in here of home computers, let alone
00:09:35 ►
interactive networks, virtual reality, phone sex, and so forth and so on. But this was all grist for the McLuhan-esque mill,
00:09:47 ►
and he would have had, he lived, had much to say on this.
00:09:51 ►
It surprised me in reading this stuff
00:09:54 ►
how demanding it is on your own literacy.
00:10:03 ►
I mean, he assumes basically
00:10:05 ►
that the people he’s talking to have read
00:10:08 ►
everything
00:10:08 ►
and have understood it
00:10:11 ►
I mean from Homer to Rabelais
00:10:14 ►
to Chaucer
00:10:15 ►
to Man Magazine he assumes you have a complete
00:10:18 ►
knowledge of modern film
00:10:19 ►
and popular print
00:10:22 ►
journalism and popular
00:10:23 ►
culture all of this was grist for his mill.
00:10:29 ►
I’ll show you the books I’m reading from and talking about
00:10:33 ►
and then I’ll actually read you a section of McLuhan
00:10:36 ►
because it’s like Joyce, it’s a stylistic thing
00:10:40 ►
that you can’t really encompass without getting your feet wet. This was his best known
00:10:48 ►
book, probably, and this is the original paperback edition. This book was immensely discussed when it
00:10:57 ►
came out and probably very little read, judging by the quality of the discussion. Understanding media, the extensions of man.
00:11:07 ►
This is how most people heard of McLuhan.
00:11:12 ►
And he followed it up with the Gutenberg Galaxy.
00:11:18 ►
These are all first editions.
00:11:20 ►
These books, I don’t think, are in print.
00:11:22 ►
Few intellectuals in this century have
00:11:26 ►
fallen so totally
00:11:27 ►
through the cracks
00:11:29 ►
as McLuhan. The Gutenberg
00:11:32 ►
Galaxy, very interesting.
00:11:34 ►
I’m going to read from some of it
00:11:36 ►
tonight. It’s organized around
00:11:38 ►
chapter headings
00:11:40 ►
such as, does
00:11:42 ►
the interiorization of media
00:11:44 ►
such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?
00:11:51 ►
Or Pope’s Dunciad indicates the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic and romantic revival.
00:12:01 ►
Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde
00:12:06 ►
the box office looms as a return to the
00:12:09 ►
echo chamber of bardic incantation
00:12:13 ►
that’s a chapter heading
00:12:15 ►
topography cracked the voices of silence
00:12:21 ►
and one of my favorite Heidegger
00:12:23 ►
surfboards along on the electronic wave
00:12:26 ►
as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.
00:12:31 ►
So there’s a lot of fun in McLuhan,
00:12:34 ►
and this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar.
00:12:39 ►
You just can’t mess with that without fun.
00:12:43 ►
This is his third book with Harley Parker,
00:12:46 ►
Through the Vanishing Point,
00:12:48 ►
Space in Poetry and Painting.
00:12:52 ►
And I guess I should say,
00:12:53 ►
a few years ago,
00:12:55 ►
somebody asked me to review McLuhan’s letters,
00:12:59 ►
which had been published,
00:13:00 ►
which I did.
00:13:01 ►
It was Gnosis or somebody.
00:13:08 ►
Anyway, it brought back to me,
00:13:13 ►
he was a convert to Catholicism and an extraordinarily complex intellectual
00:13:16 ►
with a medievalist who became a Joyce
00:13:22 ►
scholar, who became a communications expert.
00:13:26 ►
And in McLuhan, there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the medieval world,
00:13:35 ►
of what he called manuscript culture. entire output is a critique of print and of the impact of print on culture and I
00:13:53 ►
think though he attempted to be fairly even-handed his final resolution of all
00:13:59 ►
this was that it had it had had many, many detrimental and distorting effects on the Western mind.
00:14:10 ►
This is another little book he published back in the heyday,
00:14:14 ►
and he experimented with topographic layout,
00:14:19 ►
somewhat hearkening back to the surrealists, whom he discusses a great deal.
00:14:26 ►
And there was something about, it was his fascination with topographical layout
00:14:30 ►
that also brought him into such congruence with the wake.
00:14:37 ►
So let me read you a section from the Gutenberg Galaxy
00:14:41 ►
that is both interesting to think about, or if you can’t understand it,
00:14:47 ►
then an interesting example of what McLuhan’s style was like, and what I mean by that he was
00:14:55 ►
an extraordinarily demanding intellectual. He doesn’t cut you much slack. This is a short section called Only a Fraction of the History of Literacy Has Been Typographic.
00:15:10 ►
Till now we have been concerned mostly with the written word as it transfers or translates the
00:15:16 ►
audio-tactile space of sacral non-literate man into the visual space of civilized or literate or profane man. Once this transfer or metamorphosis
00:15:29 ►
occurs, we are soon in the world of books, scribal or typographic. The rest of our concern will be
00:15:36 ►
with books, written and printed, and the results for learning and society. From the 5th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D.,
00:15:47 ►
the book was a scribal product.
00:15:49 ►
Only one-third of the history of the book
00:15:52 ►
in the Western world has been typographic.
00:15:55 ►
It is not incongruous, therefore,
00:15:57 ►
to say, as G.S. Brett does
00:16:00 ►
in Psychology, Ancient and Modern,
00:16:04 ►
and here’s the quote.
00:16:05 ►
The idea that knowledge is essentially book learning
00:16:08 ►
seems to be a very modern view,
00:16:12 ►
probably derived from the medieval distinctions
00:16:14 ►
between clerk and layman,
00:16:17 ►
with additional emphasis provided by the literary character
00:16:20 ►
of the rather fantastic humanism of the 16th century. The original and natural idea of
00:16:28 ►
knowledge is that of cunning or the possession of wits. Odysseus is the original type of thinker,
00:16:37 ►
a man of many ideas who could overcome the cyclops and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter.
00:16:51 ►
Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success in this world.
00:16:54 ►
So that closes the quote.
00:16:57 ►
Then McLuhan comments,
00:17:00 ►
Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings into any society,
00:17:06 ►
in addition to the split within the individual of that society.
00:17:11 ►
The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters.
00:17:17 ►
His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many devices, is a freelance salesman.
00:17:24 ►
of many ideas and many devices, is a freelance salesman.
00:17:31 ►
Joyce saw the parallels on one hand between the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial and, on the other, between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture
00:17:38 ►
and the new profane or literate sensibility.
00:17:42 ►
Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew,
00:17:46 ►
is presented in modern Dublin,
00:17:48 ►
a slightly detribalized Irish world.
00:17:52 ►
Such a frontier is the modern world
00:17:54 ►
of the advertisement,
00:17:56 ►
congenial, therefore,
00:17:58 ►
to the transitional culture of Bloom.
00:18:02 ►
In the 17th or Ithaca episode of Ulysses, we read, what were habitually his
00:18:08 ►
final meditations of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in
00:18:17 ►
wonder, a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms,
00:18:26 ►
not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
00:18:34 ►
In the books at the wake, James S. Atherton points out, and here’s Atherton’s quote,
00:18:40 ►
amongst other things, Finnegan’s Wake is a history of writing. We begin with writing
00:18:45 ►
on a bone, a pebble, a ram
00:18:48 ►
skin, leave them to cook in the
00:18:50 ►
mothering pot, and Guten
00:18:51 ►
Morg with his Cro-Magnon
00:18:53 ►
charter, tinting fats
00:18:55 ►
and great prime, must once
00:18:57 ►
for omnibus step rubric
00:18:59 ►
red out of the word press.
00:19:02 ►
The mothering pot
00:19:03 ►
is an allusion to alchemy
00:19:05 ►
but there is some other significance
00:19:08 ►
connected with writing
00:19:09 ►
for the next time the word appears
00:19:11 ►
it is again in a context
00:19:13 ►
concerning improvement
00:19:15 ►
in a system of
00:19:17 ►
in systems of communication
00:19:19 ►
the passage is
00:19:21 ►
all the airish signix
00:19:23 ►
of her dip and dump help a bit
00:19:26 ►
from Anne Father Hogan told the Muttermaskins.
00:19:31 ►
Dip and dump help a bit
00:19:33 ►
combine the deaf and dumb alphabet signs in the air,
00:19:37 ►
or Irish signs,
00:19:39 ►
with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC
00:19:42 ►
and the more pronounced up and downs of Irish Ogham writing.
00:19:47 ►
The mason following this must be the man of that name
00:19:51 ►
who invented steel pen nibs.
00:19:54 ►
But all I can suggest for mother
00:19:56 ►
is the mothering of Freemasons,
00:19:59 ►
which does not fit the context,
00:20:01 ►
although they, of course, also make signs in the air. Is that perfectly clear?
00:20:10 ►
Now back to McLuhan. Gutenmarg, with his Chromagnon Charter, expounds by mythic gloss the fact that
00:20:18 ►
writing meant the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audio world of simultaneous resonance into the
00:20:27 ►
profane world of daylight. The reference to the masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a
00:20:34 ►
type of speech itself. On the second page of the wake, Joyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were, of all the themes and modes of human speech and
00:20:46 ►
communication.
00:20:48 ►
Bygmeister Finnegan of the stuttering hand, Freeman’s Maurer lived in the broadest way
00:20:56 ►
imaginable in his rush lit too far back for massages before Joshua and judges had given
00:21:04 ►
us numbers
00:21:05 ►
Joyce is in the wake
00:21:08 ►
making his own Altamira
00:21:10 ►
cave drawings of the entire
00:21:12 ►
history of the human mind
00:21:14 ►
in terms of its basic gestures
00:21:16 ►
and postures
00:21:18 ►
during all phases of human
00:21:20 ►
culture and technology
00:21:22 ►
as his title indicates
00:21:24 ►
he saw that the wake of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress
00:21:28 ►
can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man.
00:21:33 ►
The fin cycle of tribal institutions
00:21:36 ►
can return in the electric age,
00:21:39 ►
but if again, then let’s make it awake,
00:21:43 ►
or awake, or both joyce could see no advantage in our remaining
00:21:49 ►
locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream he discovered the means of living
00:21:55 ►
simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious this means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural
00:22:06 ►
bias in his
00:22:08 ►
colliderioscope.
00:22:11 ►
This term indicates
00:22:12 ►
the interplay in colloidal
00:22:14 ►
mixture of all components
00:22:16 ►
of human technology
00:22:17 ►
as they extend our senses
00:22:20 ►
and shift their ratios
00:22:22 ►
in the social collidoscope
00:22:24 ►
of cultural clash.
00:22:26 ►
Dior, savage, the oral or sacral, scope, the visual or profane and civilized.
00:22:36 ►
So, that’s his comment.
00:22:39 ►
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan,
00:22:53 ►
they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand.
00:23:00 ►
The world of integrated interactive media
00:23:06 ►
extraordinary data retrieval
00:23:09 ►
that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious
00:23:13 ►
nothing is now unconscious
00:23:16 ►
if your data search commands are powerful enough
00:23:20 ►
and the remaking of the human image
00:23:28 ►
that required centuries for print
00:23:31 ►
the transition that we talked about in here
00:23:34 ►
from scribal culture to true book culture
00:23:38 ►
occupied 500 years
00:23:40 ►
the transition from book culture to electronic culture
00:23:44 ►
has occurred in less than 50 years.
00:23:47 ►
I mean, it’s eerie to read his examples of contemporaneity,
00:23:54 ►
because there’s stuff like Marilyn Monroe, Perry Como, James Dean.
00:23:59 ►
I mean, he’s writing from another era, and from his point of view he’s firmly embedded in a kind of super future
00:24:08 ►
that we are now able to look back on
00:24:13 ►
here’s another section that I think makes some of this more clear
00:24:18 ►
the name of this section is
00:24:21 ►
the medieval book trade was a second-hand trade
00:24:24 ►
even as with the dealing today in old masters.
00:24:30 ►
From the 12th century onward, the rise of the universities brought masters and students into the field of book production in class time,
00:24:38 ►
and these books found their way back to the monastic libraries when students returned after completing their studies
00:24:45 ►
a number of these standard
00:24:47 ►
textbooks
00:24:48 ►
of which approved exemplars
00:24:51 ►
were kept for copying by the
00:24:53 ►
stationarii of the universities
00:24:56 ►
naturally found their way
00:24:57 ►
into print quite early
00:24:59 ►
for many of them contained in
00:25:01 ►
undiminished request
00:25:03 ►
in the 15th century as before,
00:25:06 ►
these official university texts offer no problems of origin or nomenclature.
00:25:12 ►
And then he’s quoting Goldschmidt, he adds,
00:25:14 ►
Soon after 1300, the expensive vellum could be dispensed with,
00:25:20 ►
and the cheaper paper made the accumulation of many books a matter of industry rather than wealth.
00:25:26 ►
Since, however, the student went to lectures pen in hand
00:25:30 ►
and it was the lecturer’s task to dictate the book
00:25:34 ►
he was expounding to his audience,
00:25:36 ►
there is a great body of reporterata
00:25:39 ►
which constitute a very complex problem for editors.
00:25:44 ►
So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan,
00:25:48 ►
the book is the central symbol of the age,
00:25:53 ►
the central mystery of our time.
00:25:55 ►
In a sense, I sort of share that notion.
00:25:59 ►
It’s a very Talmudic notion.
00:26:02 ►
It’s a very psychedelic notion.
00:26:04 ►
It’s the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central overarching metaphor of the age. And naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual.
00:26:29 ►
And this, in fact, is how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science.
00:26:36 ►
We’re always taught, you know, that the roots of modern science go back to democratie and
00:26:42 ►
atomism, which is is of course true but the
00:26:46 ►
number of people who knew that a thousand years ago was probably very few
00:26:51 ►
the the real notion out of which science had to divest itself is the notion of a book or if that seems too concrete a story a
00:27:07 ►
narrative the story of man’s fall and redemption that was what the Christian
00:27:14 ►
exegesis of post-edenic time was all about with the rise of modern science, the idea of narrative has become somewhat overthrown.
00:27:30 ►
McLuhan would say that narrative persisted far beyond its utility because the biases of print
00:27:40 ►
kept it in place for such a long time. Everyone assumes that tools are tools
00:27:47 ►
and you use them and that’s that.
00:27:49 ►
For McLuhan, the entirety of the toolkit
00:27:54 ►
of modern Western man
00:27:56 ►
can be traced to the unconscious assumptions of print.
00:28:00 ►
For example, the idea of the individual,
00:28:08 ►
which is a pretty personal notion right there in close to the heart, the idea of the individual is a post-medieval concept legitimized by
00:28:18 ►
print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before
00:28:25 ►
newspapers.
00:28:28 ►
Because before newspapers there was
00:28:30 ►
no public. There were only
00:28:32 ►
people. And
00:28:34 ►
rulers
00:28:35 ►
very rarely bothered to pass
00:28:38 ►
on their thinking to anybody
00:28:40 ►
other than their closest associates.
00:28:42 ►
And then only for utilitarian
00:28:44 ►
reasons.
00:28:45 ►
The notion of an observing citizenry
00:28:49 ►
somehow sharing the governance of society,
00:28:55 ►
this again is a print-created idea.
00:29:01 ►
The idea of interchangeable parts,
00:29:06 ►
without which our world would hardly function.
00:29:09 ►
There would not be automobiles, buildings, aircraft, interchangeable parts.
00:29:14 ►
That’s an idea that comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printer’s block.
00:29:22 ►
letters in a printer’s block
00:29:22 ►
that was the first industry
00:29:28 ►
to ever utilize
00:29:29 ►
the concept of
00:29:31 ►
easily reformulated
00:29:34 ►
subunits
00:29:35 ►
and it’s strange
00:29:37 ►
the Chinese get credit for inventing
00:29:40 ►
printing thousands and thousands
00:29:42 ►
of years before Europe
00:29:43 ►
but they would carve a single block of wood and print it.
00:29:47 ►
They didn’t get the notion of movable type.
00:29:52 ►
And movable type, the distribution of books
00:29:58 ►
becomes the paradigmatic model for the distribution of any product you know you it’s
00:30:07 ►
produced it’s edited it’s manufactured it’s sold and then sequels are spawned
00:30:18 ►
all products have followed this model but books were one of the earliest mass-manufactured objects to be put through this cycle.
00:30:30 ►
Modern city planning, the linearity of it, the way in which land surveys are carried out,
00:30:39 ►
these are all unconscious biases imbibed from the world of print.
00:30:47 ►
And they make sense if you’re a print head.
00:30:51 ►
But one of the peculiar things, notice that animals do not possess language.
00:31:02 ►
Many human societies do not possess writing and very few human societies and only two on earth
00:31:13 ►
invented printing and yet once invented it feeds back into the evolution of social structures and
00:31:20 ►
defines everything and yet it’s an extraordinary artificiality
00:31:26 ►
and we have been imprisoned in it for hundreds and hundreds of years now now
00:31:31 ►
it is breaking down and we are changing to a different sensory ratio and you
00:31:40 ►
might suppose if you hadn’t given this a lot of thought, that the new electronic media, television, and so forth, would carry us into an entirely different sensory ratio.
00:31:55 ►
McLuhan felt differently. He felt that it was restoring us to a medieval sensory ratio.
00:32:13 ►
He felt that a television screen is much more like an illuminated manuscript than a page of print.
00:32:13 ►
The distinction may seem subtle at first, but if you’re looking at an illuminated medieval
00:32:20 ►
manuscript, notice I said looking, you must look in order to understand.
00:32:29 ►
Reading is not looking.
00:32:31 ►
Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior.
00:32:36 ►
As a child, you learn what an E looks like, what a printed lowercase e looks like. After seeing 20, 100, 1,000, 10,000, you know what it looks like. You have an expectation of the gestalt of the lowercase e, and nobody opens a book and looks at print unless there’s some extraordinary abstract discussion going on. We read print, but we look at manuscript
00:33:08 ►
because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it.
00:33:16 ►
And his or her idiosyncrasies have to be parsed through to get the meaning.
00:33:23 ►
to be parsed through to get the meaning.
00:33:25 ►
Similarly with television,
00:33:30 ►
television is a very low-resolution media. These are little pieces of light,
00:33:32 ►
pixels flying back and forth,
00:33:35 ►
and they must be looked at.
00:33:38 ►
They cannot be read.
00:33:41 ►
And it’s an extraordinarily engaging process.
00:33:45 ►
That’s why it creates an entirely different set of social biases than print does.
00:33:53 ►
And McLuhan called these biases, and this was the one distinction or one idea of his
00:34:00 ►
that made its way into popular culture.
00:34:03 ►
He distinguished between what he called hot
00:34:05 ►
and cold media.
00:34:08 ►
And usually people botch this every time because nobody really, to this day, understands exactly
00:34:16 ►
what he meant.
00:34:19 ►
So let me read you a little bit about this distinction.
00:34:22 ►
So let me read you a little bit about this distinction.
00:34:28 ►
This is in chapter two of Understanding Media,
00:34:31 ►
and chapter two is called Media, Hot and Cold.
00:34:38 ►
The rise of the waltz, explained Kurt Sachs in The World History of the Dance, was a result of that longing for truth, simplicity,
00:34:42 ►
closeness to nature and primitivism
00:34:45 ►
with which the last two-thirds of the 18th century fulfilled.
00:34:49 ►
In the century of jazz, we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz
00:34:54 ►
as a hot and explosive human expression
00:34:57 ►
that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.
00:35:04 ►
But obviously it was, I mean, when you contrast it to what came before.
00:35:09 ►
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio
00:35:14 ►
from a cool one like the telephone,
00:35:17 ►
or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV.
00:35:22 ►
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition.
00:35:29 ►
High definition is the state of being well filled with data.
00:35:34 ►
I love that.
00:35:36 ►
A photograph is visually high definition.
00:35:40 ►
A cartoon is low definition
00:35:42 ►
simply because very little visual information is provided.
00:35:47 ►
Telephone is a cool medium or one of low definition because the ear is given a meager amount of information.
00:35:57 ►
And speech is a cool medium of low definition because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.
00:36:07 ►
On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.
00:36:14 ►
Hot media are therefore low in participation and cool media are high in participation
00:36:22 ►
or completion by the audience.
00:36:28 ►
Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like the radio has very different effects on the user
00:36:31 ►
from a cool medium like the television.
00:36:34 ►
A cool medium, like hieroglyphic or idiogamic written characters,
00:36:39 ►
has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium
00:36:43 ►
of the phonetic alphabet.
00:36:45 ►
The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography.
00:36:53 ►
The printed word, with its specialist intensity, burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds
00:37:00 ►
and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. But the
00:37:07 ►
typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation with its
00:37:14 ►
impersonal empire over many lives. The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable prince
00:37:22 ►
intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the 16th
00:37:27 ►
century. The heavy and unwieldy media such as stone are time binders. Used for writing, they are very
00:37:35 ►
cool indeed and serve to unify the age, whereas paper is a hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally,
00:37:45 ►
both in political and entertainment empires.
00:37:50 ►
And he just goes on like this endlessly.
00:37:52 ►
I mean, this was his métier, or his media,
00:37:57 ►
to connect and comment on this stuff.
00:38:02 ►
on this stuff and television really was his
00:38:05 ►
both his own media
00:38:09 ►
for reaching a very large audience
00:38:12 ►
in fact I remember the excitement
00:38:15 ►
that swept through
00:38:16 ►
I didn’t even have a television
00:38:18 ►
I was living in Berkeley at the time
00:38:20 ►
and somebody said we have to go up to the student union
00:38:24 ►
at 6 o’clock
00:38:25 ►
because Mike Wallace is interviewing Marshall McLuhan.
00:38:30 ►
And it seemed an incredibly freaky notion that McLuhan would be on TV.
00:38:37 ►
It shows you what a stultified, categorically different world we were living in at the time.
00:38:46 ►
Here’s just a little bit
00:38:48 ►
of McLuhan on television.
00:38:53 ►
This is chapter 31 of Understanding Media,
00:38:57 ►
The Timid Giant.
00:38:59 ►
Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect
00:39:02 ►
of the TV image is the posture of children in the early grades.
00:39:07 ►
Since TV, children, regardless of eye condition, average about six and a half inches from the printed page.
00:39:15 ►
Our children are striving to carry over to the printed page the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image.
00:39:23 ►
With perfect psychomimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV image. With perfect psychomimetic skill,
00:39:26 ►
they carry out the commands of the TV image.
00:39:30 ►
They pour, they probe,
00:39:32 ►
they slow down and involve themselves in depth.
00:39:36 ►
This is what they had learned to do
00:39:37 ►
in the cool iconography of the comic book medium.
00:39:41 ►
TV carried the process much further.
00:39:44 ►
Suddenly they are transferred to the hot print
00:39:47 ►
medium with its uniform patterns and fast lineal movement. Pointlessly they strive to read print in
00:39:55 ►
depth. They bring to print all their senses and print rejects them. Print asks for the isolated and stripped down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium.
00:40:08 ►
You see? So often very unexpected paradoxical insights emerge from this stuff. And in this
00:40:18 ►
book that he did with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry and Painting,
00:40:21 ►
Parker through the vanishing point space in poetry
00:40:23 ►
and painting
00:40:24 ►
it’s an interesting technique
00:40:27 ►
they take a number of works of art
00:40:30 ►
either
00:40:30 ►
literature
00:40:33 ►
such as the song from Love’s Labor
00:40:36 ►
Lost by William Shakespeare
00:40:37 ►
or the Ballade des Bon
00:40:39 ►
Concieux of Geoffrey Chaucer
00:40:42 ►
or
00:40:43 ►
the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
00:40:46 ►
and then comment on it
00:40:47 ►
and also visual arts
00:40:50 ►
because McLuhan really felt
00:40:52 ►
that the art historical
00:40:55 ►
and technological
00:40:58 ►
and architectural output
00:41:00 ►
of Western civilization
00:41:02 ►
could be essentially psychoanalyzed
00:41:06 ►
could be seen as
00:41:08 ►
the tracings of the mass
00:41:10 ►
consciousness and the
00:41:12 ►
he felt that the
00:41:14 ►
evolution of sensory ratios
00:41:16 ►
within historical time
00:41:18 ►
had been very very
00:41:20 ►
rapid that
00:41:21 ►
for example he
00:41:24 ►
talks about how
00:41:25 ►
St. Augustine
00:41:27 ►
was a person of great piety
00:41:30 ►
and learning
00:41:31 ►
and people
00:41:34 ►
doubting this
00:41:35 ►
would show him an open
00:41:38 ►
page of scripture
00:41:40 ►
or theological
00:41:41 ►
disputation and he
00:41:44 ►
would look at it for a few moments, minutes
00:41:46 ►
and then they would close the book
00:41:49 ►
and he could tell them what was written there
00:41:51 ►
and this was taken as proof of his piety
00:41:55 ►
he was, as far as we can tell, the only man in Europe
00:41:58 ►
who could read silently at that time
00:42:02 ►
this was a period when the
00:42:04 ►
the audio pre-scribal culture
00:42:10 ►
was still being assimilated.
00:42:14 ►
McLuhan spends a lot of time
00:42:15 ►
analyzing this episode in the 14th century
00:42:18 ►
when the laws of perspective
00:42:20 ►
spring suddenly into being
00:42:24 ►
as somewhat in the way, very similar in the way that fractal mathematics have introduced us to a new super space. was essentially a filing system for visual data.
00:42:47 ►
At last they knew where to put everything and where to look for it once they had put it there,
00:42:50 ►
which if you have a pre-perspectivist arrangement of space,
00:42:55 ►
you have to look, not read, look at each painting
00:43:00 ►
in order to locate where the information is.
00:43:03 ►
This is, again, this read-look dichotomy. McLuhan never discussed psychedelics, but psychedelics I think clearly are an extension of these kinds of media that you have to engage with, that you have to look at, that you cannot read, you cannot take for
00:43:26 ►
granted.
00:43:27 ►
And these give back a much more complex world.
00:43:33 ►
I mean, notice that the world created by print is a world of gestalts, buildings, highways,
00:43:44 ►
bridges.
00:43:44 ►
We know how these things are supposed to look.
00:43:47 ►
We don’t experience astonishment each time we enter a home or an institutional edifice.
00:43:55 ►
There is a built-in set of syntactical expectations in linear space.
00:44:03 ►
expectations in linear space. And when those are violated, this is very noticeable
00:44:07 ►
and becomes the basis for architectural or design innovation
00:44:12 ►
or something like that.
00:44:15 ►
I think that what’s happening, and I think that this would be McLuhan’s take,
00:44:20 ►
is that all of these new media that attempt to suppress the appurtenances of media
00:44:29 ►
are in fact having the effect of returning us to an archaic sensory ratio.
00:44:36 ►
And McLuhan was on to this.
00:44:37 ►
He is the one who coined the phrase electronic feudalism.
00:44:42 ►
And he felt that we were headed back toward the medieval sensory ratio,
00:44:48 ►
because he saw television as like manuscript. But I think had he lived into the era of VR,
00:44:56 ►
psilocybin, HDTV, and implants, he would have seen we’re not reaching back to the medieval. That was simply a stepping
00:45:06 ►
stone to the archaic, and that we are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity,
00:45:16 ►
and actually reaching back to a shamanic, feeling-toned kind of thing. And all of the breakdown of linearity
00:45:26 ►
that you see in the 20th century,
00:45:28 ►
abstract expressionism,
00:45:30 ►
da-da, jazz, rock and roll,
00:45:33 ►
non-figure painting, LSD,
00:45:36 ►
all of these things on one level
00:45:39 ►
can be seen, as I’ve said,
00:45:43 ►
as harking back to the archaic
00:45:46 ►
but on another level
00:45:48 ►
what they can be seen as
00:45:50 ►
are new behaviors emerging
00:45:54 ►
as the cloud of print constellated constipation
00:45:59 ►
is lifted
00:46:01 ►
it’s breaking down
00:46:02 ►
an interesting question
00:46:04 ►
that we would put to McLuhan
00:46:06 ►
if we had him here tonight, I think,
00:46:08 ►
is to what degree can what he said about television
00:46:13 ►
not be applied to HDTV?
00:46:18 ►
It seems to me that HDTV is television
00:46:21 ►
without the biases of TV.
00:46:25 ►
And, you know, a perfect medium is an invisible.
00:46:28 ►
A perfect media is an invisible media.
00:46:31 ►
And print is the least invisible of all media.
00:46:36 ►
I mean, print is an incredible, rude Goldberg invention for conveying information.
00:46:48 ►
Here’s McLuhan on this same subject
00:46:51 ►
rather than me dwelling on it.
00:46:54 ►
This is from the Gutenberg Galaxy.
00:46:56 ►
This is a section called
00:46:58 ►
A Theory of Cultural Change is Impossible
00:47:01 ►
Without Knowledge of the Changing Sense Ratios
00:47:04 ►
Affected by Various externalizations of our senses, in other words, by media.
00:47:11 ►
It is very much worth dwelling on this matter,
00:47:14 ►
since we can see that from the invention of the alphabet,
00:47:17 ►
there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of the senses,
00:47:21 ►
in the Western world toward the separation of the senses,
00:47:24 ►
of functions, of operations,
00:47:27 ►
of states, emotional and political,
00:47:30 ►
as well as of tasks,
00:47:32 ►
a fragmentation which terminated,
00:47:34 ►
thought Durkheim,
00:47:36 ►
in the anomie of the 19th century.
00:47:39 ►
The paradox presented by Professor von Bexey
00:47:42 ►
is that the two-dimensional mosaic
00:47:44 ►
is in fact a multidimensional world of
00:47:47 ►
interstructural resonance. It is the three-dimensional world of pictorial space that is indeed an
00:47:55 ►
abstract illusion built on the intense separation of the visual from the other senses. There is here no question of values or preferences.
00:48:06 ►
It is necessary, however,
00:48:08 ►
for any other kind of understanding
00:48:11 ►
to know why primitive drawing is two-dimensional,
00:48:16 ►
whereas the drawing and painting of literate human beings
00:48:19 ►
tends toward perspective.
00:48:22 ►
Without this knowledge,
00:48:23 ►
we cannot grasp why people ever cease to be primitive
00:48:27 ►
or audio-tactile in their sense bias,
00:48:31 ►
nor could we ever understand why men have
00:48:34 ►
since Cezanne, that’s in quotes,
00:48:37 ►
abandoned the visual in favor of the audio-tactile modes
00:48:41 ►
of awareness and of organization of experience.
00:48:45 ►
This matter clarified, we can much more easily approach the role of alphabet and of printing
00:48:52 ►
in giving a dominant role to the visual sense in language and art
00:48:57 ►
and in the entire range of social and political life.
00:49:00 ►
For until we have upgraded the visual component, communities know only a tribal
00:49:07 ►
structure. The detribalizing of the individual has, in the past at least, depended on an intense
00:49:14 ►
visual life fostered by literacy, and by literacy of the alphabetic kind alone. For alphabetic writing is not unique, but late. There had been much writing before it. In fact, any people that ceases to be nomadic and pursue sedentary modes of work is ready to invent writing. ever had writing any more than they ever developed architecture
00:49:45 ►
or enclosed space.
00:49:47 ►
For writing is a visual enclosure
00:49:50 ►
of non-visual spaces and senses.
00:49:53 ►
It is therefore an abstraction of the visual
00:49:56 ►
from the ordinary sense interplay.
00:49:59 ►
And whereas speech is an outering,
00:50:02 ►
utterance of all our senses at once,
00:50:06 ►
writing abstracts from speech.
00:50:09 ►
That’s very interesting, isn’t it?
00:50:11 ►
That this association of nomadism to the inability to create architectonic space
00:50:17 ►
and therefore no writing.
00:50:20 ►
That a word is a structure, a written word is a structure,
00:50:24 ►
and therefore no nomad would ever do such a thing.
00:50:30 ►
Interesting.
00:50:31 ►
I think he’s saying reading is not seeing.
00:50:35 ►
And those who read do not see.
00:50:38 ►
Even when they lift their eyes from their books,
00:50:42 ►
they carry the attitude of print into the world.
00:50:47 ►
They read, they attempt to read nature.
00:50:51 ►
And you can’t read nature.
00:50:53 ►
You must look at nature.
00:50:55 ►
You must see nature.
00:50:56 ►
Certainly, I think in my own life,
00:50:58 ►
I was thinking about this a few months ago,
00:51:00 ►
and it surprised me.
00:51:01 ►
I’m trying to think of the books
00:51:03 ►
that really influenced my life and I
00:51:06 ►
thought of you know Moby Dick and Huxley’s Doors of Perception but then when I really got down on
00:51:14 ►
it I realized that a little tiny book Huxley wrote that my mother pushed on me when I was about 12
00:51:21 ►
years old called The Art of Seeing probably shaped me
00:51:25 ►
as much as anything and in
00:51:27 ►
there it’s a very
00:51:29 ►
McLuhan-esque graph without
00:51:31 ►
McLuhan-esque terminology and
00:51:33 ►
he says the way to overcome
00:51:35 ►
and I think this is very very
00:51:37 ►
very intelligent and
00:51:39 ►
simple advice, Huxley said
00:51:41 ►
the way to overcome the print
00:51:44 ►
bias and God knows he was a
00:51:46 ►
Cambridge educated gentleman steeped in the traditions of English literacy and
00:51:52 ►
intellectualism is freehand drawing draw train your eye draw nudes draw seashells
00:52:02 ►
draw insects and go into nature and train the eye to see,
00:52:08 ►
and you will cease to read the world.
00:52:12 ►
And readers are emotionally,
00:52:16 ►
a person, a seeing person,
00:52:19 ►
does not want to form a relationship with a reading person.
00:52:24 ►
You know this conflict that we get between men and women and between people, to form a relationship with a reading person.
00:52:28 ►
You know, this conflict that we get between men and women and between people about what we call the head-heart conflict
00:52:34 ►
is really a reading-seeing conflict.
00:52:39 ►
It isn’t a head and heart.
00:52:40 ►
It’s that readers and seers cannot relate to each other’s emotional life
00:52:46 ►
because they seem to come from such different worlds so yeah i think you have a very good point
00:52:54 ►
and the the permission to abstract from nature that print created is why we have such a terrible culture crisis. You know, because, well, just kind of a trivial example,
00:53:09 ►
you know, it was said by Marshall McLuhan, strangely enough,
00:53:12 ►
that the Vietnam War could not be won the way an ordinary war is won
00:53:18 ►
because the citizenry of this country couldn’t tolerate the sight of what war was.
00:53:25 ►
And that modern warfare became impossible when it could be televised into the living room.
00:53:34 ►
Because war is something that you must read about.
00:53:38 ►
You must not see it.
00:53:41 ►
It must be this grand thing of the distant clash of armies
00:53:45 ►
and young heroes being created.
00:53:48 ►
But when it turns into
00:53:50 ►
amputation and maggots
00:53:52 ►
and screens of pain,
00:53:54 ►
the political fun
00:53:55 ►
goes out of it.
00:53:57 ►
So war is therefore a literary
00:53:59 ►
activity.
00:54:02 ►
And, you know, the one argument
00:54:03 ►
that can be made, I think, in television’s favor is
00:54:07 ►
people don’t like to see images of violence. If we have to show so much violence on television,
00:54:13 ►
let it always be real. The violence is only indefensible when it’s vicarious. If it’s real
00:54:21 ►
violence, you need to see it because it’s happening in a world for which you bear a partial moral responsibility.
00:54:30 ►
And I think warfare has been remade by media in that sense.
00:54:37 ►
A lot of politics has been remade, because imperial doings are usually ugly, brutal, and not something that you want to exhibit before the populace.
00:54:48 ►
And yet, modern media makes that very difficult to avoid.
00:54:55 ►
You know, you get the notion of public morality,
00:54:58 ►
or, you know, the people won’t stand for this.
00:55:02 ►
We have to get this story out.
00:55:04 ►
The people won’t stand for this we have to get this story out the people won’t stand for this well
00:55:06 ►
now this is a moral dimension inconceivable in medieval or Roman times
00:55:11 ►
I mean what would it mean to say the people won’t stand for this so there’s
00:55:15 ►
an attempt to create through the collectivity a kind of community of moral judgment. The medium is the message,
00:55:27 ►
means that the medium
00:55:29 ►
is the thing
00:55:32 ►
which is making the difference.
00:55:36 ►
In all, every discussion
00:55:38 ►
you ever hear since the 60s
00:55:41 ►
about TV, for example,
00:55:43 ►
is it good, is it bad,
00:55:44 ►
terrible, wonderful, the always, the discussion hinges around since the 60s about TV, for example. Is it good? Is it bad? Terrible? Wonderful?
00:55:46 ►
Always the discussion hinges around what’s on TV.
00:55:52 ►
And people say, well, television is terrible.
00:55:54 ►
It just shows violence.
00:55:55 ►
And then somebody else says, no, television is wonderful.
00:55:57 ►
Those nature shows and news from far away
00:56:01 ►
and masterpiece theater.
00:56:03 ►
This is a stupid argument.
00:56:01 ►
from far away and masterpiece theater.
00:56:03 ►
This is a stupid argument.
00:56:05 ►
What McLuhan meant
00:56:07 ►
by the media is the message
00:56:10 ►
is he meant that
00:56:12 ►
it doesn’t matter
00:56:13 ►
what you put on TV.
00:56:15 ►
TV is TV.
00:56:17 ►
It has an intrinsic nature.
00:56:20 ►
And whether you’re showing
00:56:21 ►
National Geographic specials
00:56:23 ►
or slasher movies,
00:56:27 ►
TV will do what it does.
00:56:33 ►
It has certain qualities, just like driving a car or skiing.
00:56:47 ►
Certain muscles are going to be exercised, certain perceptual systems enhanced, others suppressed. And it’s very hard for us to understand this because we have accepted this media so thoroughly into our life.
00:56:54 ►
But in fact, it is shaping our value systems
00:56:58 ►
in ways that are very hard for us to suspect or even even detect I mean television for example
00:57:08 ►
it’s a drug it has a series of measurable physiological parameters that
00:57:17 ►
are as intrinsically its signature as the parameters of heroin are its
00:57:24 ►
signature I mean you sit somebody down in front of a TV set and turn it on 20 intrinsically its signature as the parameters of heroin are its signature.
00:57:25 ►
I mean, you sit somebody down in front of a TV set and turn it on.
00:57:28 ►
Twenty minutes later, come back, sample their blood pressure, their eye movement rate.
00:57:36 ►
Blood is pooling in their rear end.
00:57:39 ►
Their breathing takes on a certain quality.
00:57:42 ►
The stare reflex sets in. I mean, they are thoroughly zoned on a certain quality. The stare reflex sets in.
00:57:46 ►
I mean, they are thoroughly zoned on a drug.
00:57:49 ►
And when you think about the fact that the average American
00:57:52 ►
watches six and a half hours of television a day,
00:57:56 ►
imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948,
00:58:01 ►
that we all spent six and a half hours per day on average watching.
00:58:06 ►
And the one thing about drugs in their defense
00:58:09 ►
is that it’s very hard to diddle the message.
00:58:13 ►
A drug is a mirror, but television isn’t a mirror.
00:58:17 ►
Television is a billboard,
00:58:20 ►
and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip.
00:58:26 ►
This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.
00:58:31 ►
What McLuhan wanted to become, I think, was the founder of a general new sophistication about media.
00:58:43 ►
And he was essentially parodied to death by, guess what?
00:58:49 ►
Media.
00:58:50 ►
They made of him an icon of cultural incomprehensibility.
00:58:56 ►
Not since Einstein has somebody,
00:59:00 ►
have you been so pre-programmed in advance to believe
00:59:04 ►
you ain’t going to understand this guy?
00:59:06 ►
And that’s what they said about McLuhan.
00:59:09 ►
And consequently, his message and his insight failed.
00:59:16 ►
We will have to reinvent McLuhan around the turn of the century
00:59:20 ►
because we are producing forms of media of such interactive power and potential social
00:59:28 ►
impact that we’re going to have to go back and and rethink all of this
00:59:34 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:52 ►
So, what do you think about where this talk ended up? It took me by surprise, I’ll tell you.
00:59:58 ►
A pleasant surprise to be sure, but it almost sounded like Terrence had given that rap just last week. Let me just read back to you a little bit of what he said just now.
01:00:03 ►
Let me just read back to you a little bit of what he said just now.
01:00:13 ►
Imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one half hours per day, on average, watching.
01:00:19 ►
And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, is that it’s very hard to diddle the message.
01:00:22 ►
A drug is a mirror, but a television isn’t a mirror.
01:00:25 ►
Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.
01:00:33 ►
And what a perfect time it is to be reminded that television is a hard drug. And now, more than ever,
01:00:40 ►
you might want to be extremely careful about having it on too much of the time.
01:00:45 ►
Because if you do, you’re going to be inundated
01:00:48 ►
with images of Barack
01:00:50 ►
Obama. I know these are
01:00:51 ►
difficult times, and I know that he
01:00:53 ►
thinks he’s doing the right thing by bouncing
01:00:55 ►
from show to show to give the
01:00:57 ►
unwashed masses their feel-good
01:00:59 ►
moment for the day. But I have to
01:01:01 ►
admit that I’m getting a little nervous
01:01:03 ►
seeing him featured all day, every day day and not just on the news anymore.
01:01:08 ►
But hey, that’s enough of my paranoia.
01:01:11 ►
Let’s move along here.
01:01:12 ►
Nothing to see.
01:01:14 ►
By the way, now that we have Amazon to find old books for us, all of those old McLuhan
01:01:19 ►
books that Terrence mentioned just now are available once again.
01:01:23 ►
And I’ll try to remember to put links to a few of them along with the program notes
01:01:27 ►
for this podcast, which you know you can find, of course, at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:01:34 ►
And just so that you know, I haven’t lost my interest in trivia.
01:01:38 ►
When I was typing Terrence’s line for the program notes, where he called print a Rube
01:01:43 ►
Goldberg invention, I had to look up called print a Rube Goldberg invention.
01:01:45 ►
I had to look up the spelling of Mr. Goldberg’s name to be sure I had it right,
01:01:50 ►
a name I’ve always heard in conjunction with disparaging remarks like that, I must add.
01:01:55 ►
And what I learned was that besides being associated with goofy inventions that he drew in his cartoons,
01:02:01 ►
he was also a Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist.
01:02:05 ►
Now while that doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re talking about today,
01:02:08 ►
I just wanted to do my part in seeing that
01:02:10 ►
some of Mr. Goldberg’s more positive accomplishments are also remembered.
01:02:17 ►
Now I’m going to keep my remarks kind of brief here at the end,
01:02:20 ►
but one thing I do want to mention is that
01:02:23 ►
I would hope some of my fellow podcasters
01:02:26 ►
would be a little more careful in what they are saying about our sacred medicines.
01:02:30 ►
For example, I recently heard a conversation on one of the podcasts that I listened to
01:02:35 ►
where the discussion turned to the cancerous tumor that took Terence McKenna’s life.
01:02:40 ►
And they were speculating that he must have done so many psychedelics
01:02:45 ►
that they were the cause of his cancer.
01:02:48 ►
Well, for what it’s worth, that is simply an urban legend
01:02:51 ►
that has absolutely no basis in fact.
01:02:54 ►
If you listen carefully to his talks,
01:02:56 ►
you’ll discover that Terence didn’t use psychedelics very frequently,
01:03:00 ►
particularly in the last decade or so of his life.
01:03:04 ►
His recommendation was to use them sparingly, but in high doses,
01:03:08 ►
maybe a couple of times a year.
01:03:10 ►
And if you know anything at all about these medicines,
01:03:13 ►
well, you should know that they are actually among the very least toxic
01:03:18 ►
of all substances that we come in contact with.
01:03:21 ►
And as for the tumor in his brain,
01:03:24 ►
well, many of the people who knew him well
01:03:27 ►
point to the fact that on the roof of his house, just above his bed, was a huge two-way satellite
01:03:33 ►
dish that he used to connect to the internet. And what’s more, he also spent a good amount of time
01:03:39 ►
in bed and talking on his cell phone, which was one of the early models that acted like a microwave oven in his ear.
01:03:46 ►
My assumption is that between those two highly powerful radiation devices,
01:03:51 ►
he simply fried his brain.
01:03:53 ►
But to attribute his cancer to the use of our sacred medicines
01:03:56 ►
seems to me to smack of government propaganda
01:04:00 ►
aimed at scaring young people away from psychedelics.
01:04:03 ►
Now, I don’t mean to imply that any psychedelic podcaster is a government agent,
01:04:07 ►
but by repeating an unfounded supposition about psychedelics having killed Terrence
01:04:12 ►
is very unhelpful.
01:04:16 ►
Probably as unhelpful as I’m being here
01:04:18 ►
and supposing that it was overuse of a cell phone that did him in.
01:04:21 ►
The truth is, we simply don’t know what caused that tumor,
01:04:24 ►
and we probably never will.
01:04:27 ►
Well, I didn’t mean to get up on my soapbox now, particularly here at the end of the program.
01:04:33 ►
But, well, thank you for listening. I feel better already.
01:04:36 ►
But let me just say a couple more things and get out of here.
01:04:40 ►
First of all, several people have asked me why I’m initially releasing my novel as an audio book and not a paperback.
01:04:48 ►
Well, there are several reasons for that.
01:04:50 ►
One of which is the simple fact that right now I’m not in a position to hire a professional editor,
01:04:56 ►
without whom I’d never put it into print.
01:04:59 ►
I’m a firm believer in the value of a good editor.
01:05:02 ►
And so, what you’re going to hear is me reading my final pre-edited draft.
01:05:08 ►
And to be honest, I wouldn’t have had the courage to do that, but for the fact that
01:05:13 ►
my writing coach has encouraged me to do it.
01:05:17 ►
Now, one of the things he said was, don’t worry, you can get by with a lot of sins in
01:05:21 ►
an audiobook, and if some critic wants to keep rewinding to pin you down on a mistake,
01:05:26 ►
well, screw them.
01:05:27 ►
Who needs nitpickers like that?
01:05:30 ►
And for full disclosure, I guess you should probably know
01:05:33 ►
that my writing coach is Mateo,
01:05:35 ►
who you’ve heard here in the salon several times.
01:05:39 ►
So, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
01:05:41 ►
Anyway, the point I can’t seem to find a way to make is that
01:05:44 ►
after hearing some of the things Terrence was saying in reference to the constrictions of print,
01:05:49 ►
I’m now feeling even better about not publishing it in paperback.
01:05:54 ►
And just one more short thing before I go,
01:05:57 ►
and that is, as those of you who are following me on Facebook already know,
01:06:03 ►
during the past week there have been a few outages of our psychedelicsalon.org website.
01:06:08 ►
And I’m still not satisfied with the explanations that my hosting company gave me, but that’s
01:06:14 ►
just something we have to live with.
01:06:16 ►
For what it’s worth, I am looking into subscribing to one of the cloud services that will mirror
01:06:21 ►
my site out to the edges of the net in order to give everybody
01:06:25 ►
a little faster access, and that may alleviate the problem of my main server going down every
01:06:31 ►
once in a while. So thanks for bearing with me, and also thank you to all the webmasters who have
01:06:36 ►
mirrored all or some of the Salon’s podcasts, which certainly ensures that no one can pull
01:06:42 ►
a single plug and take all of these programs off the Internet.
01:06:46 ►
Well, I could go on all day, but I’ll just close for now by reminding you once again
01:06:51 ►
that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use
01:06:57 ►
in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:07:03 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the
01:07:07 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find, as you’ve heard over and over
01:07:12 ►
already, at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:07:15 ►
And that’s, of course, where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts as well.
01:07:19 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:07:23 ►
Be well, my friends.