Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: August 1993
In today’s podcast Terence McKenna waxes eloquent about the writing of Marshall McLuhan, whose work in the 1960 was considered a revolutionary break with traditional ways of thinking about media. As Wikipedia says about McLuhan, he “was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. … McLuhan is known for coining the expression “the medium is the message” and the term global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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So, I have a question for you.
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Have you ever had one of those days when, well, you just couldn’t seem to find the energy to get back to work?
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Well, I seem to be having one of those years.
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Here it is, the 12th of January, and I’m only now getting this first podcast of 2018 out to you.
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I’m only now getting this first podcast of 2018 out to you.
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However, there are among us some fellow salonners who have decided to not let my lethargy impact them,
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and so they’ve made financial contributions to the salon
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to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And these fine souls are
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Dr. Dan Oh, my salonner friend from the Midwest.
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Also, we received a donation from Samuel G.
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And from my dear friend with whom I’ve shared many ayahuasca adventures, Kai,
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who I haven’t seen in person for quite a while, but who will always be in my heart.
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So it is to these dear fellow salonners and to all of our other donors over the years
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to whom I dedicate yet another year of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon.
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Now, today I’m going to play another Terrence McKenna talk,
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but to be honest, one of the reasons that I’ve been dragging my feet on this one
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is the fact that, well, I’m not necessarily somebody who is devoted to the works of Marshall McLone.
00:01:44 ►
the fact that, well, I’m not necessarily somebody who is devoted to the works of Marshall McLuhan.
00:01:50 ►
It isn’t because I don’t think he was an important figure in the history of human thought.
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The real reason I’m not all that excited about McLuhan’s work is that, as hard as I try,
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I simply don’t grok his story all that well. The irony for me is that I can perfectly recall the very first time that I learned about the work of
00:02:05 ►
Marshall McLuhan. It was in February of 1966, and I was in Heathrow Airport in England, and at the
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time I was on my way back to the States after spending a month or so traveling in Europe,
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just before I was to report to the U.S. Navy for a multi-year tour of duty.
00:02:23 ►
While waiting for my flight, I picked up a
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magazine that somebody had left in the lounge, and in it was a long article about this new intellectual
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who was taking America by storm. His name was Marshall McLuhan. I must admit that the article
00:02:37 ►
made me want to rush out and buy a copy of his latest book right then. Unfortunately for me,
00:02:43 ►
three days later I was in the Navy and I all but
00:02:46 ►
forgot about Marshall McLuhan. Now many years later I finally got around to reading two or
00:02:51 ►
three of his books, but to be honest, I don’t feel as if I ever actually understood all that he was
00:02:57 ►
saying. So I’m going to join you now and see if I can figure his work out a little better with the
00:03:03 ►
help of Terrence McKenna, who recorded this talk in August of 1993.
00:03:11 ►
McLuhan, I don’t know how many of you recall him from the 60s,
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but he had, for a very brief period of time, about five or six years,
00:03:20 ►
an extraordinary influence on American culture.
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six years an extraordinary influence on American culture. You couldn’t pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, what he said, what he thought, what he predicted. He was
00:03:36 ►
consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood, so forth and so on. And his influence, he died in the early 70s,
00:03:49 ►
and his influence died with him.
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Even though he had founded the Center for Media Study
00:03:55 ►
at the University of Toronto in Canada,
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he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors.
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It was a unique personality and breakthrough,
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much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality
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and spawned very few imitators.
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And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work before he burst onto the world stage
00:04:26 ►
as this mysterious savant of media.
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He did his work as a Joyce scholar.
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That’s what he was, a literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist, that sort of thing.
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And then in the early 50s or middle 50s,
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he wrote a book, which I’ve never read,
00:04:49 ►
it’s very hard to find,
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called The Mechanical Bride,
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that was his first testing of his ideas.
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McLuhan is primarily understood
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as a communication theorist or a philosopher of media.
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And that’s what he talked about.
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He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method on the technologies of communication,
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printing, film, photography, dance, theater even such things as money
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he thought of as forms of media
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and he carried out and analyzed these various forms of media
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and reached very controversial conclusions
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one of the things that was puzzling to me
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as I went back through and read all this is
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one of the things was McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the 60s. And the whole
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thing was, who can understand this guy? You know, he’s like Buddha. He speaks these words that we
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can’t understand. Well, now, 25, 30 years later, it reads pretty straightforwardly,
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and most of what he’s predicted has come to pass. I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed
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with which the Gutenberg world has been overturned. I mean, there’s no hint in here of home computers, let alone interactive
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networks, virtual reality, phone sex, and so forth and so on. But this was all grist
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for the McLuhan-esque mill, and he would have had, he lived, had much to say on this. It surprised me in reading this stuff
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how demanding it is on your own literacy.
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I mean, he assumes basically
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that the people he’s talking to have read everything
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and have understood it.
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I mean, from Homer to Rabelais to Chaucer to Man Magazine,
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he assumes you have a complete knowledge of modern film
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and popular print journalism and popular culture.
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All of this was grist for his mill.
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I’ll show you the books I’m reading from and talking about,
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and then I’ll actually read you a section of McLuhan,
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because it’s like Joyce, it’s a stylistic thing
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that you can’t really encompass without getting your feet wet.
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This was his best-known book, probably,
00:07:39 ►
and this is the original paperback edition.
00:07:43 ►
This book was immensely discussed when it came out
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and probably very little read, judging by the quality of the discussion.
00:07:53 ►
Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man.
00:07:56 ►
This is how most people heard of McLuhan.
00:08:01 ►
And he followed it up with The Gutenberg Galaxy.
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These are all first editions.
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These books, I don’t think, are in print.
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Few intellectuals in this century have fallen so totally through the cracks as McLuhan.
00:08:20 ►
The Gutenberg Galaxy, very interesting.
00:08:23 ►
I’m going to read from some of it tonight. It’s organized around chapter headings such as, does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?
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Or Pope’s Dunciad indicates the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic and romantic revival.
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Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.
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That’s a chapter heading.
00:09:10 ►
incantation. That’s a chapter heading. Topography cracked the voices of silence, and one of my favorite, Heidegger surfboards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes
00:09:16 ►
rode the mechanical wave. So there’s a lot of fun in McLuhan, and this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar. You just can’t
00:09:27 ►
mess with that without fun. This is his third book with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing
00:09:35 ►
Point, Space in Poetry and Painting. And I guess I should say, a few years ago somebody asked me to review McLuhan’s letters which had been
00:09:47 ►
published, which I did. It was Gnosis or somebody. Anyway, it brought back to me, he was a convert
00:09:57 ►
to Catholicism and an extraordinarily complex intellectual with a medievalist
00:10:07 ►
who became a Joyce scholar, who became a communications expert.
00:10:12 ►
And in McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia
00:10:17 ►
for the essence of the medieval world, of what he called manuscript culture.
00:10:24 ►
of the medieval world, of what he called manuscript culture. And essentially his entire output is a critique of print
00:10:31 ►
and of the impact of print on culture.
00:10:38 ►
And I think though he attempted to be fairly even-handed,
00:10:42 ►
his final resolution of all this was that it had had
00:10:48 ►
many, many detrimental and distorting effects on the Western mind.
00:10:55 ►
This is another little book he published back in the heyday, and he experimented with topographic layout, somewhat hearkening back to the surrealists,
00:11:08 ►
whom he discusses a great deal.
00:11:11 ►
And there was something about, it was his fascination with topographical layout
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that also brought him into such congruence with the wake.
00:11:22 ►
So let me read you a section from the Gutenberg Galaxy
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that is both interesting to
00:11:28 ►
think about or
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if you can’t understand it
00:11:32 ►
then an interesting example
00:11:34 ►
of what McLuhan’s
00:11:37 ►
style was like and
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what I mean by that he was an
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extraordinarily demanding
00:11:42 ►
intellectual. He doesn’t cut you
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much slack.
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This is a short section called
00:11:48 ►
Only a Fraction of the History of Literacy Has Been Typographic.
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Till now we have been concerned mostly with the written word
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as it transfers or translates the audio-tactile space of sacral non-literate man
00:12:05 ►
into the visual space of civilized or literate or profane man.
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Once this transfer or metamorphosis occurs,
00:12:14 ►
we are soon in the world of books, scribal or typographic.
00:12:19 ►
The rest of our concern will be with books, written and printed,
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and the results for learning and society
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from the 5th century
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BC to the 15th century
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AD the book
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was a scribal product
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only one third of the history
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of the book in the western world
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has been typographic
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it is not incongruous therefore
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to say as G.S.
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Brett does in psychology, Ancient and Modern,
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and here’s the quote,
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the idea that knowledge is essentially book learning seems to be a very modern view,
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probably derived from the medieval distinctions between clerk and layman,
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with additional emphasis provided by the literary character of the rather fantastic
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humanism of the 16th century. The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of cunning
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or the possession of wits. Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas
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who could overcome the cyclops and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter.
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Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success in this world.
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So that closes the quote.
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Then McLuhan comments,
00:13:44 ►
then McLuhan comments Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy
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which the book brings into any society
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in addition to the split within the individual of that society
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the work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters
00:14:00 ►
his Leopold Bloom of Ulysses
00:14:03 ►
a man of many ideas and many devices, is a freelance
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salesman. Joyce saw the parallels on one hand between the modern frontier of the verbal and
00:14:15 ►
the pictorial, and, on the other, between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral
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culture and the new profane or literate sensibility.
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Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modern Dublin,
00:14:32 ►
a slightly detribalized Irish world.
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Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement,
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congenial, therefore, to the transitional culture of Bloom.
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In the 17th or Ithaca episode of Ulysses we read,
00:14:50 ►
what were habitually his final meditations?
00:14:54 ►
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder,
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a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded,
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reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms,
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not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
00:15:17 ►
In the books at the wake, James S. Atherton points out, and here’s Atherton’s quote,
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amongst other things, Finnegan’s Wake is a history of writing.
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We begin with writing on a bone, a pebble, a ram’s skin,
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leave them to cook in the mothering pot,
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and Guten Morg with his Cro-Magnon charter,
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tinting fats and great prime,
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must once for omnibus step rubric red out of the wordpress.
00:15:45 ►
The mothering pot is an allusion to alchemy,
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but there is some other significance connected with writing,
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for the next time the word appears,
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it is again in a context concerning improvement
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in systems of communication.
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The passage is,
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all the airish signics of her dip and dump help a bit
00:16:09 ►
from, and Father Hogan told the Muttermaskins,
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dip and dump help a bit
00:16:16 ►
combine the deaf and dumb alphabet signs in the air,
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or Irish signs,
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with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC
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and the more pronounced up and downs of Irish Ogham writing.
00:16:30 ►
The mason following this must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs.
00:16:36 ►
But all I can suggest for mother is the mothering of freemasons
00:16:41 ►
which does not fit the context although they of course also
00:16:45 ►
make signs in the air. Is that perfectly clear? Now back to McLuhan. Gutenmarg with
00:16:56 ►
his Cro-Magnon charter expounds by mythic gloss the fact that writing meant
00:17:01 ►
the emergence of the caveman or sacral man
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from the audio world of simultaneous resonance into the profane world of daylight.
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The reference to the Masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself.
00:17:18 ►
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 communication.
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Beigmeister Hinnigan of the stuttering hand, Freeman’s Maurer lived in the broadest way,
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inmarginable in his rush lit too far back for massages before Joshua and judges had given us numbers.
00:17:48 ►
Joyce is, in the wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind
00:17:55 ►
in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology.
00:18:04 ►
during all phases of human culture and technology.
00:18:06 ►
As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again
00:18:11 ►
into the night of sacral or auditory man.
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The thin cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age,
00:18:20 ►
but if again, then let’s make it awake, or awake, or both.
00:18:27 ►
Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream.
00:18:35 ►
He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. This means he cites for such self-awareness and correction
00:18:46 ►
of cultural bias in his colliderioscope. This term indicates the interplay and colloidal
00:18:55 ►
mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash,
00:19:07 ►
Dior, savage, the oral or sacral, scope, the visual, or profane and civilized.
00:19:18 ►
So, that’s his comment.
00:19:20 ►
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
00:19:25 ►
These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan,
00:19:34 ►
they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand.
00:19:41 ►
The world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases
00:19:51 ►
the 17th century notion of the unconscious image that required centuries for print, the transition that we talked about in here from scribal culture to true book culture occupied 500 years. The transition from book culture to electronic culture has occurred in less than 50 years
00:20:27 ►
I mean if it’s eerie to read his
00:20:31 ►
examples of
00:20:33 ►
Contemporaneity because there’s stuff like Marilyn Monroe
00:20:37 ►
Perry Como
00:20:38 ►
James Dean I mean he’s writing from another era, and yet, from his point of view, he’s firmly embedded in a kind of super future that we are now able to look back on.
00:20:55 ►
Here’s another section that I think makes some of this more clear.
00:21:10 ►
The name of this section is, The Medieval Book Trade was a Secondhand Trade Even as with the Dealing Today in Old Masters.
00:21:19 ►
From the 12th century onward, the rise of the universities brought masters and students into the field of book production in class time,
00:21:26 ►
and these books found their way back to the monastic libraries when students returned after completing their studies.
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A number of these standard textbooks, of which approved exemplars were kept for copying by the stationarii of the universities,
00:21:46 ►
naturally found their way into print quite early, for many of them contained in undiminished request in the 15th century as before these official university texts offer no problems of origin or
00:21:51 ►
nomenclature and then he’s quoting Goldschmidt he adds soon after 1300 the
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expensive vellum could be dispensed with and the cheaper paper made the
00:22:02 ►
accumulation of many books a matter of industry
00:22:05 ►
rather than wealth. Since
00:22:08 ►
however the student went to
00:22:10 ►
lectures pen in hand and
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it was the lecturer’s task to dictate
00:22:14 ►
the book he was expounding
00:22:16 ►
to his audience. There is a great
00:22:18 ►
body of reporterata
00:22:20 ►
which constitute a very
00:22:22 ►
complex problem for
00:22:24 ►
editors.
00:22:29 ►
So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan,
00:22:33 ►
the book is the central symbol of the age,
00:22:36 ►
the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion.
00:22:40 ►
It’s a very Talmudic notion.
00:22:43 ►
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. metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow
00:23:06 ►
literary, somehow
00:23:08 ►
textual. And this
00:23:10 ►
in fact is how I think reality
00:23:12 ►
was seen until the rise
00:23:15 ►
of modern science.
00:23:17 ►
We’re always
00:23:18 ►
taught, you know, that the roots
00:23:20 ►
of modern science go back to
00:23:22 ►
democratian atomism,
00:23:24 ►
which is of course true. But the number of modern science go back to democrataean atomism, which is, of course, true.
00:23:26 ►
But the number of people who knew that a thousand years ago
00:23:30 ►
was probably very few.
00:23:33 ►
The real notion out of which science had to divest itself
00:23:41 ►
is the notion of a book,
00:23:44 ►
or, if that seems too concrete, a story, a narrative,
00:23:49 ►
the story of man’s fall and redemption. That was what the Christian exegesis of post-edenic time was all about.
00:24:07 ►
the next Edenic time was all about. With the rise of modern science, the idea of narrative has become somewhat overthrown. McLuhan would say that narrative persisted far beyond its utility
00:24:17 ►
because the biases of print kept it in place for such a long time.
00:24:26 ►
Everyone assumes that tools are tools and you use them and that’s that.
00:24:30 ►
For McLuhan, the entirety of the toolkit of modern Western man
00:24:37 ►
can be traced to the unconscious assumptions of print.
00:24:42 ►
For example, the idea of the individual, which is a pretty personal notion right there and close to the heart, the idea of the individual is a concept did not exist before newspapers,
00:25:09 ►
because before newspapers there was no public.
00:25:12 ►
There were only people, and rulers very rarely bothered to pass on their thinking
00:25:21 ►
to anybody other than their closest associates, and then only for utilitarian reasons.
00:25:27 ►
The notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print-created idea. The idea of interchangeable parts, without which our world would hardly function. There would not be automobiles, buildings, aircraft, interchangeable parts. That’s an idea that comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printer’s block.
00:26:04 ►
of letters in a printer’s block.
00:26:12 ►
That was the first industry to ever utilize the concept
00:26:17 ►
of easily reformulated subunits.
00:26:21 ►
And it’s strange, you know, the Chinese get credit for inventing printing thousands and thousands of years before Europe,
00:26:26 ►
but they would carve a single block of wood and print it.
00:26:30 ►
They didn’t get the notion of movable type.
00:26:34 ►
And movable type, the distribution of books,
00:26:41 ►
becomes the paradigmatic model for the distribution of any product.
00:26:45 ►
You know, it’s produced, it’s edited, it’s manufactured, it’s sold,
00:26:57 ►
and then sequels are spawned.
00:27:01 ►
All products have followed this model,
00:27:12 ►
are spawned. All products have followed this model, but books were one of the earliest mass manufactured objects to be put through this cycle. Modern city planning, the linearity of it, the way in which land surveys are carried out, these are all unconscious biases imbibed from the world of print.
00:27:29 ►
And they make sense if you’re a print head.
00:27:34 ►
But one of the peculiar things, notice that animals do not possess language.
00:27:53 ►
do not possess language. Many human societies do not possess writing, and very few human societies, and only two on earth, invented printing. And yet once invented, it feeds
00:28:00 ►
back into the evolution of social structures and defines everything.
00:28:05 ►
And yet it’s an extraordinary artificiality.
00:28:10 ►
And we have been imprisoned in it for hundreds and hundreds of years now.
00:28:14 ►
Now it is breaking down.
00:28:17 ►
And we are changing to a different sensory ratio.
00:28:23 ►
And you might suppose, if you hadn’t given this
00:28:26 ►
a lot of thought, that the new electronic media, television, and so forth, would carry
00:28:33 ►
us into an entirely different sensory ratio. McLuhan felt differently. He felt that it was restoring us to a medieval sensory ratio.
00:28:47 ►
He felt that a television screen is much more like an illuminated manuscript than a page of print.
00:28:56 ►
The distinction may seem subtle at first,
00:28:59 ►
but if you’re looking at an illuminated medieval manuscript,
00:29:04 ►
notice I said looking, you must look in order to understand.
00:29:12 ►
Reading is not looking.
00:29:15 ►
Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior.
00:29:19 ►
As a child, you learn what an E looks like, what a printed lowercase E looks like. After seeing
00:29:27 ►
20, 100, 1,000, 10,000, you know what it looks like. You have an expectation of the gestalt
00:29:35 ►
of the lowercase E and nobody opens a book and looks at print unless there’s some extraordinary abstract discussion going on.
00:29:46 ►
We read print, but we look at manuscript,
00:29:51 ►
because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it.
00:29:59 ►
And his or her idiosyncrasies have to be parsed through to get the meaning.
00:30:05 ►
Similarly with television, television is a very low-resolution media.
00:30:11 ►
I mean, these are little pieces of light, pixels flying back and forth,
00:30:17 ►
and they must be looked at.
00:30:19 ►
They cannot be read, and it’s an extraordinarily engaging process.
00:30:26 ►
That’s why it creates an entirely different set of social biases than print does.
00:30:34 ►
And McLuhan called these biases, and this was the one distinction or one idea of his that made its way into popular culture.
00:30:44 ►
He distinguished between what he called hot and cold media.
00:30:48 ►
And usually people botch this every time
00:30:52 ►
because nobody really to this day understands exactly what he meant.
00:30:59 ►
So let me read you a little bit about this distinction.
00:31:04 ►
This is in Chapter 2 of Understanding Media,
00:31:07 ►
and Chapter 2 is called Media, Hot and Cold.
00:31:11 ►
The rise of the waltz, explained Kurt Sachs in The World History of the Dance,
00:31:17 ►
was a result of that longing for truth, simplicity,
00:31:21 ►
closeness to nature and primitivism
00:31:24 ►
with which the last two-thirds of the 18th century fulfilled.
00:31:28 ►
In the century of jazz, we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz
00:31:33 ►
as a hot and explosive human expression
00:31:36 ►
that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.
00:31:42 ►
But obviously it was, I mean, when you contrast it to what came before.
00:31:47 ►
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone,
00:31:55 ►
or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV.
00:32:00 ►
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition.
00:32:07 ►
High definition is the state of being well filled with data.
00:32:11 ►
I love that.
00:32:13 ►
A photograph is visually high definition.
00:32:17 ►
A cartoon is low definition simply because very little visual information is provided.
00:32:23 ►
simply because very little visual information is provided.
00:32:28 ►
Telephone is a cool medium or one of low definition because the ear is given a meager amount of information.
00:32:34 ►
And speech is a cool medium of low definition
00:32:37 ►
because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.
00:32:43 ►
and so much has to be filled in by the listener.
00:32:50 ►
On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are therefore low in participation
00:32:54 ►
and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
00:33:01 ►
Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like the radio
00:33:04 ►
has very different effects on the user from a hot medium like the radio has very different effects on the user
00:33:06 ►
from a cool medium like the television. A cool medium like hieroglyphic or idiogamic written
00:33:14 ►
characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet.
00:33:21 ►
The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography.
00:33:28 ►
The printed word, with its specialist intensity, burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries,
00:33:36 ►
creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly but the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly
00:33:46 ►
brought back the corporation
00:33:48 ►
with its impersonal empire
00:33:50 ►
over many lives
00:33:51 ►
the hotting up of the medium of writing
00:33:54 ►
to repeatable prince intensity
00:33:56 ►
led to nationalism
00:33:58 ►
and the religious wars of the 16th century
00:34:01 ►
the heavy and unwieldy media
00:34:03 ►
such as stone are time binders. Used for writing,
00:34:08 ►
they are very cool indeed and serve to unify the age, whereas paper is a hot medium that
00:34:15 ►
serves to unify spaces horizontally, both in political and entertainment empires. And he just goes on like this endlessly.
00:34:26 ►
I mean, this was his métier or his media
00:34:29 ►
to connect and comment on this stuff.
00:34:35 ►
And television really was both his own media
00:34:40 ►
for reaching a very large audience.
00:34:43 ►
In fact, I remember the excitement that swept through.
00:34:47 ►
I didn’t even have a television.
00:34:49 ►
I was living in Berkeley at the time,
00:34:50 ►
and somebody said,
00:34:52 ►
we have to go up to the student union at 6 o’clock
00:34:55 ►
because Mike Wallace is interviewing Marshall McLuhan.
00:35:00 ►
And it seemed an incredibly freaky notion
00:35:04 ►
that McLuhan would be on TV.
00:35:08 ►
It shows you what a stultified, categorically different world we were living in at the time.
00:35:16 ►
Here’s just a little bit of McLuhan on television.
00:35:23 ►
This is chapter 31 of Understanding Media,
00:35:27 ►
The Timid Giant.
00:35:29 ►
Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image
00:35:33 ►
is the posture of children in the early grades.
00:35:36 ►
Since TV, children, regardless of eye condition,
00:35:40 ►
average about six and a half inches from the printed page,
00:35:44 ►
our children are striving to carry over to the printed page
00:35:48 ►
the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image.
00:35:52 ►
With perfect psychomimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV image.
00:35:58 ►
They pour, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves in depth.
00:36:03 ►
This is what they had learned to do
00:36:05 ►
in the cool iconography of the
00:36:07 ►
comic book medium.
00:36:09 ►
TV carried the process much further.
00:36:12 ►
Suddenly they are transferred
00:36:13 ►
to the hot print medium
00:36:15 ►
with its uniform patterns
00:36:17 ►
and fast lineal movement.
00:36:19 ►
Pointlessly they strive to
00:36:21 ►
read print in depth.
00:36:23 ►
They bring to print all their senses and print rejects them.
00:36:27 ►
Print asks for the isolated and stripped down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium.
00:36:35 ►
You see?
00:36:37 ►
So often very unexpected paradoxical insights emerge from this stuff.
00:36:44 ►
Paradoxical insights emerge from this stuff. And in this book that he did with Harley Parker,
00:36:48 ►
Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry and Painting,
00:36:52 ►
it’s an interesting technique.
00:36:54 ►
They take a number of works of art,
00:36:57 ►
either literature such as the song from Love’s Labor Lost by William Shakespeare
00:37:04 ►
or the Ballade des Bon Consieux of Geoffrey Chaucer
00:37:08 ►
or the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
00:37:12 ►
and then comment on it and also visual arts
00:37:16 ►
because McLuhan really felt that the art historical
00:37:21 ►
and technological and architectural output of Western civilization
00:37:28 ►
could be essentially psychoanalyzed,
00:37:32 ►
could be seen as the tracings of the mass consciousness.
00:37:36 ►
And he felt that the evolution of sensory ratios within historical time
00:37:43 ►
had been very, very rapid.
00:37:46 ►
For example, he talks about how St. Augustine was a person of great piety and learning,
00:37:57 ►
and people doubting this would show him an open page of scripture or theological disputation
00:38:07 ►
and he would look at it for a few moments, minutes,
00:38:11 ►
and then they would close the book and he could tell them what was written there.
00:38:15 ►
And this was taken as proof of his piety.
00:38:19 ►
He was, as far as we can tell, the only man in Europe who could read silently at that time.
00:38:26 ►
This was a period when the audio pre-scribal culture was still being assimilated.
00:38:37 ►
McLuhan spends a lot of time analyzing this episode in the 14th century
00:38:42 ►
when the laws of perspective spring
00:38:45 ►
suddenly into being
00:38:48 ►
as
00:38:49 ►
somewhat in the way, very similar
00:38:52 ►
in the way that
00:38:53 ►
fractal mathematics
00:38:55 ►
have introduced us to a new
00:38:58 ►
super space
00:38:59 ►
for the renaissance
00:39:01 ►
spatial perspective was essentially
00:39:04 ►
a filing system for visual data.
00:39:07 ►
At last they knew where to put everything and where to look for it once they had put it there,
00:39:13 ►
which if you have a pre-perspectivist arrangement of space, you have to look, not read, look at each painting in order to locate where the information is.
00:39:25 ►
This is, again, this read-look dichotomy.
00:39:29 ►
McLuhan never discussed psychedelics,
00:39:33 ►
but psychedelics, I think, clearly are an extension
00:39:37 ►
of these kinds of media that you have to engage with,
00:39:43 ►
that you have to look at, that you cannot read,
00:39:46 ►
you cannot take for granted. And these give back a much more complex world. I mean, notice
00:39:57 ►
that the world created by print is a world of gestalts, buildings, highways, bridges.
00:40:06 ►
We know how these things are supposed to look.
00:40:08 ►
We don’t experience astonishment each time we enter a home or an institutional edifice.
00:40:16 ►
There is a built-in set of syntactical expectations in linear space.
00:40:29 ►
expectations in linear space and when those are violated this is very noticeable and becomes the basis for architectural or design innovation or something like that I think that what’s happening
00:40:37 ►
and I think that this would be McLuhan’s take is that all of these new media that attempt to suppress
00:40:46 ►
the appurtenances
00:40:48 ►
of media are
00:40:50 ►
in fact having the effect of returning
00:40:52 ►
us to an archaic
00:40:53 ►
sensory ratio
00:40:55 ►
and McLuhan was on to this
00:40:57 ►
he is the one who coined the phrase
00:40:59 ►
electronic feudalism
00:41:01 ►
and he felt that
00:41:02 ►
we were headed back toward the medieval sensory ratio because
00:41:08 ►
he saw television as like manuscript but i think had he lived into the era of vr psilocybin hd tv
00:41:18 ►
and implants he would have seen we are not reaching back to the medieval. That was simply a stepping stone to the archaic,
00:41:27 ►
and that we are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity
00:41:34 ►
and actually reaching back to a shamanic, feeling-toned kind of thing.
00:41:41 ►
And all of the breakdown of linearity that you see in the 20th century,
00:41:46 ►
abstract expressionism, da-da, jazz, rock and roll, non-figure painting, LSD, all of these things
00:41:56 ►
on one level can be seen as, as I’ve said, as harking back to the archaic but on another level what they can be seen
00:42:07 ►
as our new behaviors emerging as the cloud of print constellated constipation
00:42:16 ►
is is lifted it’s breaking down an interesting question that we would put
00:42:23 ►
to McLuhan if we had him here tonight, I think,
00:42:25 ►
is to what degree can what he said about television not be applied to HDTV?
00:42:35 ►
It seems to me that HDTV is television without the biases of TV.
00:42:42 ►
And, you know, a perfect medium is an invisible, a perfect media is an invisible media.
00:42:49 ►
And print is the least invisible of all media. I mean, print is an incredible
00:42:54 ►
Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information.
00:43:07 ►
Here’s McLuhan on this same subject rather than me dwelling on it.
00:43:10 ►
This is from the Gutenberg Galaxy.
00:43:13 ►
This is a section called
00:43:14 ►
A Theory of Cultural Change is Impossible
00:43:17 ►
Without Knowledge of the Changing Sense Ratios
00:43:20 ►
Affected by Various Externalizations of Our senses, in other words, by media.
00:43:27 ►
It is very much worth dwelling on this matter, since we can see that from the invention of
00:43:32 ►
the alphabet, there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation
00:43:38 ►
of the senses, of functions, of operations, of states, emotional and political, as well as of tasks, a fragmentation
00:43:48 ►
which terminated, thought Durkheim, in the anomie of the 19th century. The paradox presented
00:43:55 ►
by Professor von Bexey is that the two-dimensional mosaic is in fact a multidimensional world
00:44:02 ►
of interstructural resonance. It is the three-dimensional world of pictorial space
00:44:07 ►
that is indeed an abstract illusion
00:44:11 ►
built on the intense separation of the visual from the other senses.
00:44:17 ►
There is here no question of values or preferences.
00:44:20 ►
It is necessary, however, for any other kind of understanding to know why primitive
00:44:28 ►
drawing is two-dimensional, whereas the drawing and painting of literate human beings tends toward
00:44:34 ►
perspective. Without this knowledge, we cannot grasp why people ever cease to be primitive or audio-tactile in their sense bias,
00:44:48 ►
nor could we ever understand why men have,
00:44:50 ►
since Cezanne, that’s in quotes,
00:44:55 ►
abandoned the visual in favor of the audio-tactile modes of awareness and of organization of experience.
00:44:59 ►
This matter clarified,
00:45:01 ►
we can much more easily approach the role of alphabet and of printing in giving
00:45:07 ►
a dominant role to the visual sense in language and art and in the entire range of social
00:45:12 ►
and political life.
00:45:14 ►
For until we have upgraded the visual component, communities know only a tribal structure.
00:45:21 ►
The detribalizing of the individual has, in the past at least,
00:45:26 ►
depended on an intense
00:45:28 ►
visual life fostered by
00:45:30 ►
literacy and by literacy
00:45:32 ►
of the alphabetic kind
00:45:34 ►
alone. For alphabetic
00:45:36 ►
writing is not unique, but
00:45:38 ►
late. There had been
00:45:39 ►
much writing before it. In fact,
00:45:42 ►
any people that ceases
00:45:44 ►
to be nomadic and pursues sedentary modes
00:45:47 ►
of work is ready to invent writing. No merely nomadic people ever had writing any more than
00:45:56 ►
they ever developed architecture or enclosed space, for writing is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses.
00:46:06 ►
It is therefore an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense interplay.
00:46:12 ►
And whereas speech is an altering, utterance of all our senses at once,
00:46:18 ►
writing abstracts from speech.
00:46:21 ►
That’s very interesting, isn’t it?
00:46:23 ►
This association of nomadism to the inability
00:46:27 ►
to create architectonic space and therefore no writing. That a word is a structure. A
00:46:34 ►
written word is a structure and therefore no nomad would ever do such a thing. Interesting.
00:46:42 ►
such a thing interesting.
00:46:46 ►
I think he’s saying reading is not seeing.
00:46:50 ►
And those who read do not see.
00:46:53 ►
Even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world.
00:46:59 ►
They read, they attempt to read nature.
00:47:02 ►
And you can’t read nature.
00:47:04 ►
You must look at nature.
00:47:05 ►
You must see nature.
00:47:07 ►
Certainly, I think in my own life,
00:47:09 ►
I was thinking about this a few months ago
00:47:11 ►
and it surprised me.
00:47:12 ►
I’m trying to think of the books
00:47:14 ►
that really influenced my life
00:47:16 ►
and I thought of, you know,
00:47:18 ►
Moby Dick and Huxley’s Doors of Perception.
00:47:22 ►
But then when I really got down on it,
00:47:24 ►
I realized that a little tiny book Huxley’s Doors of Perception, but then when I really got down on it,
00:47:28 ►
I realized that a little tiny book Huxley wrote that my mother pushed on me when I was about 12 years old
00:47:32 ►
called The Art of Seeing
00:47:33 ►
probably shaped me as much as anything.
00:47:37 ►
And in there, it’s a very McLuhan-esque graph
00:47:41 ►
without McLuhan-esque terminology.
00:47:43 ►
And he says the way to overcome, and I think this is very, very, very intelligent and simple advice,
00:47:51 ►
Huxley said the way to overcome the print bias, and God knows he was a Cambridge educated gentleman
00:47:59 ►
steeped in the traditions of English literacy and intellectualism, is freehand drawing.
00:48:07 ►
Draw. Train your eye.
00:48:09 ►
Draw nudes, draw seashells, draw insects and plants.
00:48:13 ►
Go into nature and train the eye to see,
00:48:18 ►
and you will cease to read the world.
00:48:21 ►
And readers are emotionally a person a seeing person does not want to form a relationship
00:48:31 ►
with a reading person you know this conflict that we get between men and women and between
00:48:37 ►
people about which we call the head heartheart conflict, is really a reading-seeing conflict.
00:48:47 ►
It isn’t a head and heart.
00:48:49 ►
It’s that readers and seers cannot relate to each other’s emotional life
00:48:54 ►
because they seem to come from such different worlds.
00:48:59 ►
So, yeah, I think you have a very good point.
00:49:02 ►
And the permission to abstract from nature that print created
00:49:07 ►
is why we have such a terrible culture crisis, you know,
00:49:12 ►
because, well, just kind of a trivial example, you know,
00:49:17 ►
it was said by Marshall McLuhan, strangely enough,
00:49:20 ►
that the Vietnam War could not be won the way an ordinary war is won
00:49:26 ►
because the citizenry of this country couldn’t tolerate the sight of what war was.
00:49:33 ►
And that modern warfare became impossible when it could be televised into the living room
00:49:41 ►
because war is something that you must read about.
00:49:45 ►
You must not see it.
00:49:48 ►
It must be this grand thing of the distant clash of armies and young heroes being created.
00:49:55 ►
But when it turns into amputation and maggots and screams of pain,
00:50:01 ►
the political fun goes out of it.
00:50:04 ►
So war is therefore a literary activity. And, you know,
00:50:09 ►
the one argument that can be made, I think, in television’s favor is people don’t like to see
00:50:14 ►
images of violence. If we have to show so much violence on television, let it always be real.
00:50:21 ►
The violence is only indefensible when it’s vicarious.
00:50:26 ►
If it’s real violence, you need to see it,
00:50:30 ►
because it’s happening in a world for which you bear a partial moral responsibility.
00:50:36 ►
And I think warfare has been remade by media in that sense.
00:50:43 ►
A lot of politics has been remade
00:50:45 ►
because imperial doings are usually ugly, brutal,
00:50:50 ►
and not something that you want to exhibit before the populace.
00:50:55 ►
And yet, modern media makes that very difficult to avoid.
00:51:00 ►
You know, you get the notion of public morality,
00:51:03 ►
or, you know, the people won’t stand for this.
00:51:07 ►
We have to get this story out. The people won’t stand for this.
00:51:12 ►
Well, now, this is a moral dimension inconceivable in medieval or Roman times.
00:51:17 ►
I mean, what would it mean to say the people won’t stand for this?
00:51:20 ►
So there’s an attempt to create, through the collect collectivity a kind of community of moral judgment.
00:51:29 ►
The medium is the message means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference.
00:51:41 ►
In all, every discussion you ever hear since the 60s
00:51:45 ►
about TV for example
00:51:47 ►
is it good, is it bad, terrible, wonderful
00:51:50 ►
the always
00:51:51 ►
the discussion hinges around
00:51:53 ►
what’s on TV
00:51:55 ►
and people say well television is terrible
00:51:58 ►
it just shows violence
00:51:59 ►
and then somebody else says no television is wonderful
00:52:02 ►
those nature shows and news
00:52:04 ►
from far away and masterpiece theater.
00:52:07 ►
This is a stupid argument.
00:52:10 ►
What McLuhan meant by the media is the message
00:52:15 ►
is he meant that it doesn’t matter what you put on TV.
00:52:19 ►
TV is TV.
00:52:21 ►
It has an intrinsic nature.
00:52:24 ►
And whether you’re showing National Geographic specials or slasher movies, TV will do what it does.
00:52:31 ►
It has certain qualities, just like driving a car or skiing.
00:52:37 ►
Certain muscles are going to be exercised, certain perceptual systems enhanced, others suppressed.
00:52:46 ►
And it’s very hard for us to understand this
00:52:50 ►
because we have accepted this media so thoroughly into our life.
00:52:58 ►
But in fact it is shaping our value systems
00:53:01 ►
in ways that are very hard for us to suspect or even detect.
00:53:08 ►
I mean, television, for example, it’s a drug.
00:53:14 ►
It has a series of measurable physiological parameters that are as intrinsically its signature
00:53:24 ►
as the parameters of heroin are its signature.
00:53:28 ►
I mean, you sit somebody down in front of a TV set and turn it on.
00:53:31 ►
Twenty minutes later, come back, sample their blood pressure, their eye movement rate.
00:53:39 ►
Blood is pooling in their rear end.
00:53:42 ►
Their breathing takes on a certain quality, the stare reflex
00:53:47 ►
sets in. I mean, they are thoroughly zoned on a drug. And when you think about the fact
00:53:53 ►
that the average American watches six and a half hours of television a day, imagine
00:53:59 ►
if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and a half hours per day on average watching.
00:54:08 ►
And the one thing about drugs in their defense is that
00:54:13 ►
it’s very hard to diddle the message.
00:54:15 ►
A drug is a mirror,
00:54:18 ►
but television isn’t a mirror.
00:54:20 ►
Television is a billboard,
00:54:22 ►
and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip.
00:54:29 ►
This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.
00:54:33 ►
What McLuhan wanted to become, I think, was the founder of a general new sophistication about media.
00:54:45 ►
And he was essentially parodied to death by, guess what?
00:54:51 ►
Media.
00:54:52 ►
They made of him an icon of cultural incomprehensibility.
00:54:57 ►
Not since Einstein has somebody,
00:55:02 ►
have you been so pre-programmed in advance to believe you ain’t going to understand this guy?
00:55:08 ►
And that’s what they said about McLuhan, and consequently his message and his insight failed.
00:55:17 ►
We will have to reinvent McLuhan around the turn of the century, because we are producing forms of media of such interactive power and potential social impact,
00:55:30 ►
that we’re going to have to go back and rethink all of this.
00:55:40 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:55:47 ►
Well, I wish that I could say that I now have a full understanding of the thinking of Marshall McLuhan.
00:55:53 ►
But to be honest, I’m still unable to explain him, other than to say that the way I see McLuhan is that
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he seemed to think that the way in which we receive information through various forms of media
00:56:06 ►
has more to do with the medium through which we receive the information than the actual information itself.
00:56:12 ►
But please don’t repeat this, because I don’t feel that this is actually what he said in his books.
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I guess that I’m just going to have to leave the thoughts of Marshall McLuhan
00:56:22 ►
to other people with more studious minds
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than mine is at this point in my life. If I was a younger man, I might be inclined to spend more
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time untangling the threads of McLuhan’s thinking in my mind, but at this point in my life, I’ve
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decided to move on to books that I can follow a little bit better. And one of those books is one
00:56:42 ►
that we heard about last spring when I posted two podcasts featuring the work of Dr. Rachel Harris.
00:56:48 ►
At the time of those podcasts, number 7 in the Salon 2 series
00:56:52 ►
and number 541 in the Salon 1 series,
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well, back then I still hadn’t had an opportunity to read Rachel’s book.
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But after listening to those two interviews with her,
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I decided that I’d better read her book as well.
00:57:05 ►
As you may know, Rachel’s latest book is titled,
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Listening to Ayahuasca, New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety.
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Now I ask you, do you suffer from one of those afflictions, or do you know someone who does?
00:57:21 ►
If so, I highly recommend Rachel’s wonderful book to you. But you don’t
00:57:26 ►
have to take my word for it, because one of our foremost elders, Jim Fadiman, had this to say
00:57:31 ►
about Rachel’s book, and I quote, finally, finally, finally, an ayahuasca book I can recommend without
00:57:39 ►
reservation, end quote. Now one of the things that struck me most about this book is the wide
00:57:46 ►
variety of people she has spoken with and worked with using ayahuasca as a healing substance.
00:57:52 ►
My guess is that anyone who is thinking about exploring the use of ayahuasca as a healing
00:57:57 ►
element in their lives, well they’ll find an example in this book of someone in a very similar
00:58:03 ►
situation. And I’ll link to the Amazon
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page for this book in today’s program notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.
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And there you can page through the first part of it for free and see if the book is really for you.
00:58:17 ►
My guess is that if you are interested in ayahuasca and don’t have any personal experience
00:58:22 ►
with this marvelous substance, well then Rachel Harris’ book is a perfect place to begin your education about ayahuasca.
00:58:30 ►
Well, even though I have several more things that I’d like to pass along today,
00:58:34 ►
I’ve been putting off doing this podcast for too long already,
00:58:38 ►
so I’m going to sign off for now and begin working on my next podcast,
00:58:42 ►
which I hope to post early next week.
00:58:44 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. and begin working on my next podcast, which I hope to post early next week.
00:58:48 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:12 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.