N.
“8. There are considerable antecedents for the Burroughs attempt to read the language of the biological theatre and the motives of the Subliminal Kid. Fleurs du Mal is a vision of the city as the technological extension of man. Baudelaire had once intended to title the book Les Limbes. The vision of the city as a physiological and psychic extension of the body he experienced as a nightmare of illness and self-alienation. Wyndham Lewis, in his trilogy The Human Age, began with The Childermass. Its theme is the massacre of innocents and the rape of entire populations by the popular media of press and film. Later in The Human Age Lewis explores the psychic mutations of man living in ‘the magnetic city’, the instant, electric, and angelic (or diabolic) culture. Lewis views the action in a much more inclusive way than Burroughs whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure….”
O.
“… Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university. The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision.
P.
“11. It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.” – Marshall McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs”, THE NATION Magazine, December 28, 1964, pp.517-519.
10.
SELF CONDEMNED, 1954
“He would not dream of describing himself to Mrs. Harradson as a ‘hero’, would he? No, but he had just committed that absurdity with his sister, the best woman in the world, but completely deluded. The delusion under which the majority sleepwalked its way from decade to decade, from disaster to disaster, had numbed her mind as much as that of any other Mrs. Everyman. His mother, too, was numbed, was part of the same somnambulism, and age now was super-added. No means of enlightening HER. She was the dearest person in the world, but, to come down to brass tacks, it was SHE who was the fool, not he. This he agreed sounded very conceited, and he had not the least idea how it was that he came to be awake, while all these others slept. It was an explicable accident, it signified no superiority. He just had suddenly woken up.
“However, faced with this overwhelming difficulty, he had made use of the term hero, as a stimulus to the imagination. His sister, of course, would regard what he was doing as heroic – that would be her way of thinking of it if she could understand; if her intelligence were not numbed and doped groupishly by mass hypnotism. And her intelligence was quite a good one, as a matter of fact.
“So he picked his way among people who could not see: dealing in this way with the blind produced in him sometimes the sensation of being an Invisible Man; at others, of being brutally concrete in an unsubstantial universe. During this period he began to acquire a consciousness of his physical presence which was extremely disagreeable. He thought of himself as an animal among delicate and vapourish humans. Even his hairiness embarrassed him. At times his acute self-consciousness would take the form of feeling that he was on view, an exhibit. He had thought once or twice that Essie had been looking at him in an odd kind of way. And in fact so she had. But the reason for that was not what he supposed, but was merely that she had seen that he was concealing something. Anyone who is inexpertly engaged in covering something up is bound to attract attention, and also to appear absurd. There was nothing he dreaded so much as the absurd, in himself, a part of his French idiosyncratic legacy, exaggerated if anything in the course of its grafting to a British stock. But his growing sense of the absurd in everything was painful and to suspect its presence in himself supremely uncomfortable.”, pp.28-9
“’In my lifetime’, he began, ‘the attitude to violent death has completely changed.’
‘In mine too. We have become like the Orientals’.”, p.61
“Such a literary workshop belonged to the ages of individualism…. The Individualist Age, composed of a multiplicity of small paradises, is no more…. Both of them knew that this was the last year of an epoch, and that such men as themselves would never exist on earth again, unless there were, after thousands of millennia, a return to the same point in a cosmic cycle. They knew that as far as that quiet, intelligent, unmolested elect life was concerned, they were both condemned to death: that the chronological future was, in fact, A FUTURE LIFE, about which they both felt very dubious. They might survive as phantoms in a future England: or they might learn to live in some other way. It was with gravity that these friends sat talking, upon the brink of a chasm, in comfortable armchairs, but not with pathos. Once the fatality is recognized pathos is a disagreeable vulgarity. Even the atmosphere appeared to be thinning out. Parkinson and his visitor did not resort to words, merely for words’ sake.”, pp.76-9
“’Now, why Professor Harding’s history is, as we have said, pessimistic, is because man in general ignores, misuses or misreads these various products of the creative mind, a mind not possessed by man in general’…. The world war (1914-18), is like a mountain range in the historic landscape. It is, at once, composed of mountains of criminal destructiveness, and a piling-up of tremendous creative inventiveness. Those four years marked in fact the mass-arrival of the cinema, the aeroplane, the motor-car, the telephone, the radio, etc. This is, as it were, a perpendicular wall of great height, a mountainous barrier, behind which the past world lies.
“‘The history of our century would not be one mainly of personalities (though, alas, they are there as ever). What we should see would be big, ideologic currents, gaudily coloured, converging, dissolving, combining or contending. It would look like a chart of the ocean rather than a Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks; though there would be faces (one with a toothbrush moustache), like labels of one or other of the big currents of ideas. Then there would be the mountainous blocks of all kinds, as though raised up by an earthquake: there would be the piling up of tremendous inventions, their instant conversion to highly unsuitable uses: the criminality of man rioting in the midst of these unnumbered gadgets. Then there would be the growth, in every society, of the huge canker of Debt. In more and more insane proportions, the Credit System would be apparent, developing its destructive bulk. One would sense nebulous spiders, at the heart of wider and wider webs of abstract simulacras of wealth, suspended over everything: hordes of men engaged for years in meaningless homicide: and vast social revolutions as the culmination of a century of plots, and propaganda of brotherly love at the point of a pistol, and LA HAINE CRÉATRICE. So there would be arabesques of creation and of destruction, the personal factor unimportant, the incarnations of ideas, the gigantic coloured effigies of a Hitler or a Stalin, no more than the remains of monster advertisement.”, pp.89-90
“‘Well, a dragon has made its appearance in this century. It is not a reptilian animal about fifty yards long which spits fire. It is a far bigger animal than that, and a far more subtle one. It is, if you like, a mental animal: one may identify it, almost see its fiery being in the minds of men. I have seen it, I have felt it. For a long time now I have known of its existence. I know why it is here, I am afraid of it. I recommend you very earnestly not to interfere with it, pretend you do not see it, and if you do so, you have nothing to fear from it. Sidestep if you can its tumults, its earthquakes, its thunderbolts.’
“‘Oh dear me. This is terrifying. Do explain!’
“‘There would be no point whatever in my doing that. We are little, powerless, shortlived creatures. What I am speaking about is supernatural, of vast powers, and ageless. We cannot possibly know why, at certain periods, these monstrous things appear among us and then disappear again. Only, it is the best and only advice. Mind your own business.’ He looked sharply round at her. ‘But stop. For you there is an alternative: you can RIDE this monster. You have one of its scales quite handy. Why not become IT?’”, pp.133-4
“Nothing so much as the American radio, with all its wonderful gusto, the many-sidedness of its interests, provided the necessary anaesthesia.”, p.394
Q.
“The Wyndham Lewis idea of the VORTEX as a mask of power relates both to art and to technology as an organizing centre for the absorption and expression of human energies. Whether it be a city, a newspaper, a poem, or a painting, Lewis regarded it as a vortex, a significant expression of human energy….”
R.
“… Machiavelli, with his ‘divide and rule’ approach to power, fascinated and terrified the sixteenth century, if only because he compressed all that the new science and technology of his age was expanding into explosive cultural reality. Underpinning Machiavelli’s formula was the fragmentizing power of print, on one hand, and a bit later, of the infinitesimal calculus, on the other. Letters, the language of civilization, and number, the language of science, both assumed a new fragmentizing intensity that multiplied the means of both analysis and of applied knowledge.
“The new instruments of analysis were extensions of our physical powers that confronted a traditional structure of social roles and of corporate images. The private wits or senses of men were unleashed from their corporate restraints. The Fox was pitted against the Lion. The individual found new means of rivalry with collectively organized energies….
“… In LEAR and OTHELLO, demonstrations of private wit leaping free from traditional obligations and constraints are vivid dramatizations of the principal trauma of the Renaissance. Today we experience it in reverse. The explosive individual energies are being compressed and imploded by electric circuitry. Knowledge is being speeded and compressed into mythic forms of multiple but simultaneous determinancies. Jobs are being shaped into integral roles by team play. The fragmented work patterns of the mechanical age are being rolled up onto the synchronized tapes that have swallowed the assembly-line. We move into a sphere ‘where the hand of man has never set foot’ (James Joyce, FINNEGANS WAKE, 1939, p.203)….
S.
“… The trauma of our present time is that of fragmented and mechanical man suddenly confronted by the seamless web of human kinship and responsibility in an electric and organic age. Browning was, perhaps, the first English writer to encounter this vision of our condition artistically, and to devise corporate masks or poems to body it forth. In his SORDELLO, he explored the role of the artist as ‘crowd-master’, or as the manipulator of corporate energies. As the corporate social roles collapsed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the role-less man, the BONNETE HOMME, without a mask, came forward as the type of the sincere and unaffected person. Earlier, as in the case of ‘honest Iago”, this bare-faced, role-less individual, this new breed of respectable BONNETE GENS, appeared to a traditional society as dubious and ambivalent. But even for Moliere, the role-less malcontent or individualist misanthrope has begun to appear as the only viable pattern for the gentleman. The faithful mask-wearers, or conventional role-players, lack adaptability and mobility and have begun to look cartoonish and Blimpish husks. In an increasingly specialist and individualist world, the man in the mask began to seem hypocritical….
“… Beginning with MADAME BOVARY Flaubert turned to making corporate masks based on study of the popular attitudes of his audience. The ILLUMINATIONS of Rimbaud owed much to the popular art of the press and the illustrated magazines. Above all, LES FLEURS DU MAL of Baudelaire is both a study of the corporate life and limbs of the industrial metropolis, and an assuming of this corporate life as a new mask of poetry:
”Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre delicat,
‘- Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frere!’….
T.
“… Lewis turned his observation to the popular art vortex of London and especially Bloomsbury in the early twentieth century. THE APES OF GOD shows him manipulating and commenting on this massive artefact fed from Paris and Vienna. Beginning with THE CHILDERMASS however, and followed by MONSTRE GAI and MALIGN FIESTA, Lewis turned first to the newspaper and then to radio as magical instruments of instant transportation. Whether it is the telegraph, the telephone, radio or TV, men and events are translated and transported everywhere instantly. In THE HUMAN AGE Lewis turned to study the new ANGELISM of man and the Magnetic City. Electrically, man’s struggles are with principalities and powers. Lewis presents the struggle more vividly than any writer of the twentieth century. In the matter of seeing human organization as both vortex and mask, Lewis is the bridge from Baudelaire to the present.” – Marshall McLuhan, “THE LEWIS VORTEX: ART AND POLITICS AS MASKS OF POWER”, WYNDHAM LEWIS: LETTERATURA/PITTURA a cura di Giovanni Cianci, 1982, pp.167-70
U.
“Throughout FINNEGANS WAKE Joyce plays some of his major variations on this theme of ‘abcedmindedness’ in ‘those pagan ironed times of the first city… when a frond was a friend.’ His ‘verbivocovisual’ presentation of an ‘all nights newsery reel’ is the first dramatization of the very media of communication as both form and vehicle of the flux of human cultures. Most of the problems of reading the WAKE dissolve when it is seen that he is using the media themselves as art forms as in a “phantom city phaked of philm pholk’.” – Marshall McLuhan, “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press” (THOUGHT, 1953), in THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, Edited by Eugene McNamara, 1969, p.7
V.
“All technologies are collective unconscious. All arts, science and philosophy are anti-environmental controls that are ever merging into the environmental and losing their power to create awareness of environment. When arts fail to cope with the environment by being anti-environment then there can be a shift to a rapid succession of innovations as ersatz anti-environments.” – Marshall McLuhan, COUNTERBLAST, 1969, p.31W.
“Communications has emerged as a necessary object of attention in the 20th century, not because it’s new, but because it’s that portion of the social organism now undergoing elephantiasis.
“To reduce this unwieldy growth is going to require great surgical attention and skill.
“OUR AGE IS AN ESTHETE OF THE METHODOLOGIES OF ALL OTHER AGES.” – Marshall McLuhan, COUNTERBLAST, 1969, p.64
X.
“All the types of linear approach to situations past, present or future are useless. Already in the sciences there is recognition of the need for a unified field theory which would enable scientists to use one continuous set of terms by way of relating the various scientific universes, Thus the basic requirement of any system of communication is that it be circular, with, of course, the possibility of self-correction. That is why presumably the human dialogue is and must ever be the basic form of all civilization. For the dialogue compels each participant to see and recreate his own vision through another sensibility. And the radical imperfection in mechanical media is that they are not circular. So far they have become one-way affairs with audience research taking the place of the genuine human vision, heckling and response. There is not only the anonymity of press, movies and radio but the factor of scale. The individual cannot discuss a problem with a huge, mindless bureaucracy like a movie studio or a radio corporation. On the other hand a figure like Roosevelt could mobilize the networks for a war with the press. He could even make the microphone more effective by having the press against him, because the intimacy of the microphone preserved his human dimension while the national scale of the press attack could only appear as a tank corps converging on a telephone booth.
“Thus the microphone invites chat, not oratory. It is a new art form which transforms all the existing relations between speakers and their audiences and speakers and their material of discourse.” – Marshall McLuhan, EXPLORATIONS, Number 1, December 1953, pp.126-7
DAW later asked:
[[ Is McLuhan commenting on the “mass culture and Lewis” theme we are discussing here or is this just the theme of “technology and Lewis” or both themes? ]]
The impressive clairvoyance in Lewis has become considerably easier to appreciate in the last 15 years because of the obvious overwhelming “media” intrusions into the public’s “peace of mind” in McLuhan’s “global theatre”.
The debate between James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis about the media/cultural ecology of their day (“the Men of 1914”) is now perhaps more important than the Copenhagen arguments in Physics in 1927 and the replays in the 60’s of the “culture wars” – from feminism through queerdom to ”Black Lives Matter”.
And Physics is not an inappropriate “reach” or comparison in my statement above.
Just as Einstein’s E=MC2 was a Physics icon that engaged the public’s attention in the first half of the twentieth century, McLuhan’s multi-discipline formula – “the medium is the message” – has proven to be the most useful practiced social-survival balm, personally and collectively, in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Trump Era, the “Trump phenomenon”, has renewed public curiosity, on a global scale, about the work of – not Tim Leary, Alan Watts, Norman Mailer, Wilt Chamberlain, Northrop Frye, Gloria Steinem, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler, Sir Winston Churchill, or President John F. Kennedy – Marshall McLuhan (starting in the 90’s after the supposed end of the “Cold War” [realization of the “global village/theatre”] and the publishing of dozens of books, documentaries, and articles on McLuhan, and still going strong in the 2020’s).
McLuhan explains, via his “tetrad” (see his book, LAWS OF MEDIA [1988]), the “retrieval” aspect of all cultural and technological developments wherein what is retrieved (a forgotten cliché) is not exactly coterminous with the new extended “archetype”.
The unnoticed “Lewis” (”father of media ecology”) has new dimensions and relevance that sideline the past sixty years of “clichés” categorizing Lewis.
As David Bowie once observed, “Lewis is the first cyber-punk”, wherein “punk” is Lewis archetypal and “cyber” is Lewis cliché.
But not just that: Lewis anticipated the new “bodies” that required a whole new Science – a new extension (McLuhan’s First Law in his tetrad).
As I explained almost 20 years ago:
[[ Joan: In your website materials you talk about our five bodies. What are those bodies and how did they arise?
BOB: Our communication environments from the printing press on were layered over and through our older linguistic environments. Humans were inevitably servomechanisms of those massive landscapes. The satellite technology, both an interior and external landscape, was the last of that kind. As digital communication environments developed, they gradually shrunk those massive techno-environments and inaugurated a new kind of autonomy for our Chemical Body in relation to the previous scapes. Now, radio-, TV-, newspaper-, bookscapes are inside your personal mobile – tiny and invisible. These older media become after-images (or memes) as well as huge bureaucracies to preserve the wealth they’d created. They don’t go away – just as ye olde speech never disappeared. They are as real and insistent as our own bodies. They must be fed and housed. However, what once were large corporate vestments now are small enough to be considered as organs, like lungs, that are new additions to our archetypal Chemical Body and Astral Body.
The Chemical Body is what most people consider to be their “physical body.” The dominant model for this is the product of Western science since the telegraph. The Astral Body is what pervades all cultures – the belief there is more to our makeup than the Chemical Body. It is a huge storehouse of religious and spiritual energy. The third organ is the TV Body – the repository of historical one-way broadcasting. The fourth is the Chip Body – the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media. The fifth is the Mystery Body – what we’re still excavating and whose lineaments we cannot fully assess yet, if ever. We now know it’s made up of the previous four bodies but we don’t know what more we will discover about its constituents, affects, and effects. The Android Meme is the resultant of the interplay, violent and ecstatic, of the first four bodies. I claim this five-body paradigm is a lot more useful or comprehensive when applied to our post-9/11 scene than Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” probe.
Joan: So we operate within these media landscapes to the point where we no longer have “first nature” bodies?
BOB: In the past 20 years the “media landscapes” have transformed into additional miniaturized bodies attached to our original body, like barnacles. The original body was made by “first nature.” Our descriptions of that “first nature” constitute our human-made “second nature.” Some claim to be getting past our “second-nature” descriptions of “first nature” and are subsequently witnessing “first nature.” Others accept the organisms created by our “second-nature” descriptions and consider them to be improvements on our “first nature.” I say we don’t yet completely know what “first nature” is, so I wouldn’t say we no longer have “first-nature” bodies. But our Chemical Body (the dominant “second-nature” description of our “first-nature” body) is presently subsumed by the TV and Chip Bodies – our invisible barnacles. – Interview in PARANOIA magazine/website, No.44, Two Parts, 2006 – 2007 ]]
http://web.archive.org/web/20100222050210/http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/bobdobbsawake.html
Here’s author and McLuhan student, Arthur Kroker, on the “Chip Body”:
“A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to.” – Arthur Kroker, SPASM: VIRTUAL REALITY, ANDROID MUSIC, AND ELECTRIC FLESH, p.53, 1993.
For those, who insist on media “content”, Lewis has also novel approaches to the issues inflaming “legacy media” everywhere, today.
McLuhan deigned to comment on media “content”, also.
I also see that Lewis anticipates my term for a present-day condition, “quadrophrenia”:
And while I’m explaining the Android Meme and the “Tech Body”, the following is the sequence of new recent “media” environments (that lead to the “Tech Body”) that I claim Lewis anticipated (you won’t believe what I found in 2020 which is copied at the end of PART FIVE – eager readers can go there now and see if they can locate it) and McLuhan got the closest to articulating (those who are more interested in Lewis’s creations can ignore this section):
The “Digital” (the Internet, the Worldwide Web, the Mobile, and the Android Meme [a more comprehensive term as I uniquely define it above]) retrieved every era, culture, and meme of the Chemical Body extensions. Starting in the 80’s, it is not limited to retrieving just the “Medieval”.
The “Digital” was superceded by the Tech Body (introduced by iON along with “endless electricity”*** and globally shattering [for the AMA et al. – see Robert Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA] health products) after 2012, approximately. Our studies done at Purdue University five years ago confirm the revolutionary/transformative “Pico” size of our “medicines”+++.
The Tech Body “dominated” the “post-human” (the post-Chemical Body, in my terms) until the new environment of “A.I.” became the GROUND (quoting from McLuhan who used Gestalt Psychology terms from Wolfgang Köhler – FIGURE and GROUND – throughout his later work in the 70’s).
Essentially, the Tech Body was the “teenager” phase of the iONic GROUND, and “A.I.” is now the “adult” phase of the iONic GROUND (fast becoming the FIGURE since 2022).
“FIGURE”? Yes.
Every major global institution in the world and most “billionaires” have met with us over the last 5 years and are pleading to get in on our “ground floor”.
We are “kind” to them.
But here is my essay on the “Trump” phenomenon as it pertains to the Tech Body:
[ It focuses on McLuhan’s attention to the potential Tech Body but remember, he “got it from Wyndham Lewis” (McLuhan, artscanada Magazine, November, 1967 ]
http://ionbob.com/pdf/bob/dobbs-trump.pdf
Here’s an interesting statement by iON on Sept.27, 2019:
[[ Bob: Now, you said that the only thing Marshall McLuhan predicted was the Tech Body. So, was he the only person to predict it?
iON: Now that’s not fair. Marshall McLuhan’s counterpart is Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa sang about it. Frank Zappa tried to portray it. He acted out the Tech Body. His music tried to emulate what Marshall McLuhan prescribed. So, Frank Zappa was the compounding pharmacy for the prescription that Herbert Marshall McLuhan prescribed! ]]
Here’s my first interview/exchange with the Tech Body – in the Spring of 2019:
http://ionbob.com/audio2/first_interview_tech_body_spring2019.mp3
*** [[ Here is our press release for “endless electricity” on June 4, 2024:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/southern-company-again-named-prestigious-150000462.html
SOUTHERN COMPANY is our company.
Dr. Carolyn Dean, JW, iON, and Bob Dobbs did this (FINNEGANS WAKE and Marshall McLuhan anticipated this… and perhaps Frank Zappa, too):
It is a new energy source – nothing to do with nuclear reactor energy.
We don’t let them say what the source is.
That will come out later. ]]
+++ “health products”
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/5/1245
NOTE: Privately, Marshall McLuhan was a Thomist (see the first sentence on p.240 of THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT).
But in his artistic creations McLuhan was more a Scotist (Duns Scotus, 1265/66–1308) than a Thomist.
One can see the dichotomies tiered throughout his works: Winnipeg vs. Toronto, Catholic vs. Protestant, South vs. North, French-Canadians vs. English-Canadians, Gnostic vs. Positivist, Form vs. Content, Ear vs. Eye, Tactile Space vs. Kinetic Space, Ground vs. Figure, Programming vs. Accidents/Chance, etc.
“Publicly”, McLuhan was a contrarian (“anti-environmental”) and seemed to contradict himself at first and second glances. But he was always communicating TECHNICALLY: his audience and the set (“set” being the longest entry in the Oxford dictionary he would point out) determined his posture. The phrase, “the medium is the message”, was the clue to deciphering his motives in his aesthetic efforts.
So, there was no consistent McLuhan regarding his apparent preferences in public matters (and the “private” was increasingly invaded by the “public”). This applied to his Catholicism, too. People who knew him well (George Thompson, Ted Carpenter, Harley Parker, Barry Nevitt, Joe Keogh, Marg Stewart, and Don Theall), if they deigned to open up to one (as they did with me), all expressed the opinion that McLuhan was not a “Catholic”, at least not in any “regular” way.
The tetrad is a snapshot of McLuhan’s personal methodology… of his consciousness… and of how he would respond to you.
That’s the understanding that led me to coin the neologism, “quadrophrenia”. McLuhan was acting out, in an auspicious way, the natural instincts of the present Millennial Generation.
McLuhan got to the “post-media” world before Baudrillard:
“Baudrillard’s prescient concluding paragraph throws down the McLuhanesque gauntlet to modernism, and indeed to the survival of critique beyond Adorno’s negative dialectical view of the culture industry.” – DAW, above in the first quotation at the beginning of PART ONE
(starts at 7:22)
Therefore, I’m thinking of McLuhan’s quoting of Rabelais in THE GUTENBERG GALAXY when I suggest: they, the Millennials, would do well to put down their tools and study me:
“Like James Joyce, another modern master of medieval tactile mosaic, Rabelais expected the public to devote its life to study of his work. ‘I intend each and every reader to lay aside his business, to abandon his trade, to relinquish his profession, and to concentrate wholly on my work.’ Joyce said the same thing, and like Rabelais, was free with the new medium in an especial way. For Joyce, throughout FINNEGANS WAKE, television is ‘the Charge of the Light Brigade’, and the whole world is comprised in a single book.” – Marshall McLuhan, THE GUTENBERG GALAXY: THE MAKING OF TYPOGRAPHIC MAN, 1962, p.150
