5cense Automation, self-amputation + obsolescence: notes on reading Understanding Media

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5 Aug 2020> Herein are misc notes on reading Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man:

  • A chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs
  • Light is the purest of all information
  • What light exposes becomes the content of electric light
  • TV is reprocessing
  • Machines turn Nature into an art form. New technologies turns their predecessors into art forms [if not kitschy skeuomorphs]
  • As Edward T. Hall explains in The Silent Language, men [sic] are never aware of the ground rules of their environmental systems or cultures.
  • The language McLuhan uses is rather sexist + ethnocentric (granted it was written in 1964), refers to "western man" a lot + uses "African" to denote primitive thinkers….
  • Testing distorts evidence of what its testing for
  • Art as an "early warning system"
  • We have already discovered the futility of changing our goals as often as we change our technologies
  • If it works, it’s obsolete
  • The message, it seemed, was the "content," as people used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or dress was about.
  • Talks at length about the typographic principles of uniformity and continuity, repeatability
  • The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he [sic] is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception
  • He uses the terms "hot" (high-fi) and "cool" (lo-fi) a lot, not sure we toetilly buy into this reductionist approach
  • The hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the colling of all sense tends to result in hallucination.
  • Deals a alot w/ pattern recognition + information overload 
  • As in his The Lost Tetrads (which he originally wanted to include in a subsequent version of Understanding Media), he thinks of things in terms of what they:
    • obsolesce
    • retrieve
    • enhance/amplify
    • reverse into
  • Uses the terms "tribal" and "extensions" a lot
  • Specialist technologies detribalize. The non-specialist electric technology retribalizes. The process of upset resulting from a new distribution of skills is accompanied by much culture lag in which people feel compelled to look at new situations as if they were old ones, and come up with ideas of "population explosion" in an age of implosion.
  • Myth is contraction of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes. 
  • One can stop anywhere after the first few sentences and have the full message, if one is prepared to "dig" it (and how this inspired Guggenheim architecture [+ subsequent art shows]).
  • The effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it appears to create boredom. We have been through the three stages of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion that occur in every disease or stress of life, whether individual or collective. 
  • Refers to Joyce by far more than anyone else… The title of his Finnegans Wake is a set of multi-leveled puns on the reversal by which Western man enters his tribal, or Finn, cycle once more, flowing the track of the old Finn, but wide awake this time as we re-enter the tribal night. It is like our contemporary consciousness of the Unconscious. 
  • Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
  • How Narcissus was misconstrued, comes from Greek word narcosis, or numbness. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. It is our narcotic culture that interprets the Narcissus story to mean he fell in love with himself. 
  • Any extension of ourself is regarded as autoamputation. 
  • Self-amputation forbids self-recognition
  • To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.
  • This was all reinforcement for our selfish machines theory: Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motor car (and then planes, and now phones + computers have become literal extensions of our hands).
  • The FX of media hybirds
  • The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.
  • The quip in Finnegans Wake, "what bird has done yesterday man may do next year," is a strictly literal observation of the courses of technology.
  • All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
  • In this electric age we see ourselves as being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. 
  • Under electric technology, the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an "economy" (Greek word for household), this means that all forms of employment become "paid learning" and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information. 
  • The deeper meaning of phrases like "keeping in touch" or "common sense"
  • When the next phase of the same specialist stress involved much reliance on slave labor, there was spectacular increases in production. But the armies of technologically specialized slaves working the land blighted the social existence of the independent yeomen and small farmers, and led to the strange world of the Roman towns and cities crowded with rootless parasites. [He is talking about Rome, but we can’t help but to think how this applies now to America, or automation, "manufacture by mono-fracture".]
  • He also references Henri Bergson a lot, this in regards to language: Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and spee ane ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech. 
  • The term "communication" has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it become transfomed into "information movement" in the electric age. 
  • The word "metaphor" is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to carry across or transport. 
  • Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms the sender, the receiver, and the message. 
  • The modern traveller will only begin to travel after [s/he] lands.
  • When information moves at the speed of signals in the nervous system, man [sic] is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness. The old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant. 
  • The drive toward unlimited growth inherent in any kind of crowd, heap, or horde would seem to link economic and population inflation. 
  • The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of "common sense" that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on [people].
  • Both of these spatial ideas—lineality and point of view—come with writing, especially with phonetic writing; but neither is necessary to an electric technology (nor is conventional mathetmatics).
  • Goes on about discovery of zero (which we've obssessing over lately, as evidenced by our i.0 project), how it comes from sifr, the Arab word for "gap" or "empty" was latinized and added to our culture as "cipher" and finally became the Italian zero. Zero really meant a positional gap (the difference between 203 and 23).
  • Print gave to men the concept of indefinite repletion so necessary to the mathematical concept of infinity. 
  • The same Gutenberg fact of uniform, continuous and indefinitely repeatable bits inspired also the related concept of the infinitesimal calculus. Gutenberg technology of moveable types gave rise to calculus (which in turn gave rise to modern physics, economics, etc.)
  • Clothing: Psychologists have long taught us that much of our hearing takes place through the skin.
  • Housing: Anthropologists have often noted this change from round to square without knowing its cause. 
  • Money: Canetti explains how the ambition to see numbers mounting up was typical of Hitler’s speeches. 
  • Clocks: The clock and the alphabet, by hacking the universe into visual segments, ended the music of interrelation. 
  • The world of the ear is more embracing and inclusive than that of the eye can ever be. The ear is hypersensitive. The eye is cool and detached. The ear turns man over to universal panic while the eye, extended by literacy and mechanical time, leaves some gaps and some islands free from the unremitting acoustic pressure and reverberation. 
  • Goes on at length about MAD mag + print + comics
  • The printed book based on typographic uniformity and repeatability in the visual order was the first teaching machine, just as typography was the first mechanization of a handicraft. Yet in spite of the extreme fragmentation or specialization of human action necessary to achieve the printed word, the printed book represents a rich composite of previous cultural inventions. 
  • Wheels, bicycles, airplanes: Humpty-Dumpty is an obvious example of integral wholeness. The mere existence of the wall already spelt his fall. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake never ceases to interlace these themes and the title of the work indicates his awareness that "a-stone-aging" as it may be, the electric age is recovering the unity of plastic and iconic space and is putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.
  • Photography: In the daguerreotype process there was the same stippling or pitting with minute dots that was echoed later in Seurat’s pointillisme, and is still continued in the newspaper mesh of dots (and now w/ TV and computer screen pixels).
  • Joyce knew more about the effects of photography on our senses, our language, and our thought processes than anybody else. His verdict on the "automatic writing" is that photography was the abnihilization of the etym. He saw the photo as at least a rival, and perhaps a usurper of the word.
  • All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. 
  • All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of persona and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. 
  • The Press: As automation takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to information movement. 
  • Goes on about "mosaic" media
  • We have seen already that the telegraph is the factor that has done most to create the mosaic image of the modern press, with its mass of discontinuous and unconnected features. 
  • Motorcar: For forty years the car bad been the great leveler of physical space and of social distance as well. The tlak about the American car as a status symbol has always overlooked the basic fact that is is the power of the motorcar that levels all social differences, and makes the pedestrian a second-class citizen. 
  • Gutenberg created Henry Ford and the assembly line and standardized culture.
  • Again, this all further propagates our selfish machine theory, the car as selfish machine, a viral parasite wanting to keep us alive for it’s own propagation.
  • Whereas all previous technology had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself, including the brain (could be true of computers)
  • Talks about how the medium itself effects the message, for eggsample "how the typewriter has altered English [sic] verse and prose, and, indeed, the very mental habits, themselves, of writers", but what about word processors? Software in general, there is no undo
  • Obviously there is so much more McLuhan would have to say about computers + tehcnology had he written this now instead of 1964... he could scarcely imagine! Phones have become literal "extensions"
  • What makes a mechanism is the separation and extension of separate parts of our body as hand, arm, feet, in pen, hammer, wheel. And the mechanization of a task is done by segmentation of each part of an action in a series of uniform, repeatable, and moveable parts. The exact opposite characterizes cybernation (or automation), which has been described as a way of thinking, as much as a way of doing. Instead of being concerned with separate machines, cybernation looks at the production problem as an integrated system of information handling. 
  • The original telephone line was between Baltimore and D.C.
  • The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of [her] audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes. 
  • The fact is that, from the alphabet to the motorcar, Western man [sic] has been steadily fashioned in a slow technological explosion that has extended over 2,500 years. From the time of the telegraph onward, however, [people] began to live an implosion. [S/he] began suddenly with Nietzschean insouciance to play the movie of his 2,5000-year explosion backward. But [s/he] still enjoys the results of the extreme fragmentation of the orginal components of [her] tribal life. 
  • Telephone (or "talking machine") spurned the idea of recording: Edison was delayed in his approach to the solution of its problems by considering [the phonograph] first as a "telephone repeater"; that is, a storehouse of data from the telephone, enabling the telephone to "provide invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication". [before that we only had writing and art to record sound, to "document"]
  • We went into our thoughts on recording sound mediums in Confessions of a Cassette Head
  • Joyce made Finnegans Wake a tone poem that condensed in a single sentence all the prattlings, exultations, observations, and remorse of the entire human race. He could not have conceived of this work in any other age than the one that produced the phonograph and the radio.
  • Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man [sic] is no less a nomad than [her] paleolithic ancestors.
  • TV makes for myopia
  • There is no longer any tendency to speak of electricity as "contained" in anything. Painters have long known that objects are not contained in space, but that they generate their own spaces.
  • Bergson’s famous treatise on laughter sets forth the idea of mechanism taking over life-values as the key to the ludicrous
  • Feedback is the end of lineality that came into the Western world with the alphabet and the continuous forms for Euclidean space. 
  • The programming can now include endless changes of program. It is the electric feedback, or dialogue pattern, of the automatic and computer-programmed "machine" that marks it off from the older mechanical principle of one-way movement.
  • This makes the attempt to create the effect of organic unity quite pointless. Electronic music must seek other goals.
  • Men [sic] are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before—but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.
  • In the same way, the social and education patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

Coincidentally, we just happened to read the above-mentioned Bergson piece on laughter the other day, in Latham's Quarterly Comedy issue from 2014 (that someone left in our liebury boox). We're accumulating books a lot faster than we can read them, they're piling high near our desk, 4 piles deep. It's a wonder we get anything done! Here are some books we haven't read, but are putting out in our liebury boox (ain't no way we're putting the McLuhan book in our box btw, that's a keeper for our personal liebury that wheel likely refer to over + over) to lighten our lode:

  • The Vonnegut + Kingsolver we have other books of theirs in our to-read pile so parting with these
  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne—held on to this cuz we've never read it, but skimming thru it doubt we could ever get into it
  • The Possessed by Elif Batuman—this seemed intresting, but it presupposes too much knowledge of Russian literature, she starts going on about all these books we've never read
  • Condomnauts by Yoss—a science fiction book by a Cuban that also fronts a heavy metal band sounded intresting, but the allure wore off a few pages in
  • Baroque-a-Nova by Kevin Chong—also marketed as a hip writer too cool for shcool, but perhaps too cool for us

Our pile of books to go into our liebury boox is also mounting... people stuff books in there faster than we can replace them (which we do daily... just checked now + there was 4 more Vonneguts!). Here's what's destined for the box (not including Calamari which we also slip in here + there):

Our brother has also been sending us stuff from our mom's house, including these books (including the Ishi book we was talking about recently)... needless to say, we're drowning in books!


772 <(current)> 774> The weight of just breathing in your sleep w/a teeth mask up the Missouri to North Dakota (DC)
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