The important statement in this Third McLuhan Monday Night Seminar is: at 1:31:06—
“So what we’re seeing is that the old ground rules reverse and change, and the question is what are the new ground rules. So, there aren’t any. They’re process patterns.” – Barrington Nevitt
See bottom paragraph of p.137 of TAKE TODAY (1972).
Bob DobbsAll paradigms are traps. Any philosophy that considers sensations and concepts as mere “reflections” or “copies” of material objects in the human mind fails to account for the continual transformation of sensory inputs into outputs of quite different kinds. Food for the mind is like food for the body; the inputs are never the same as the outputs! This pattern of non-lineality is evident in every human activity, as “figures,” all senses create THEIR OWN SPACES, WHICH ARE METAMORPHOSED BY INTERACTION WITH their environmental “grounds.” “Causes” become “effects” via concepts, whereas effects merge with causes in process pattern recognition via percepts.
Marshall McLuhan, Take Today
Recovered from 1/4″ reel-to-reel recording, Marshall McLuhan and Jane Bret (Dallas, Texas, Montessori pioneer and author), Barrington Nevitt (Long-time McLuhan friend and collaborator) and guests in the room including: Dr. Arthur Hurst, Mr. (Tooky?), psychologist, group from Nairobi, ‘a group from OISE’, and unnamed others in the room discuss a range of subjects.
Topics mentioned include: ‘Opticon’ device to allow blind to read; TV image and Chinese ideogram; the obsolescence of the classroom; grandmothers; ‘Battle of the Banks’ article, Toronto Star, Saturday February 3rd; Aristotle was wrong; the rear side of a chimpanzee; Polarity; Montessori program, sensory training; visual vs audio vs tactile space; Euclidean space’s rise and fall; loss of identity; male/female; near-point distance reading in children; ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’; computers; Ivan Illich ‘De-Schooling Society’; Newton; Einstein; Quantum Mechanics; attention span; ‘the medium is the message; Rousseau; and more!
