ACT TWO
The second to jump into the post-McLuhan arena was
the publishing enterprise of the New York school of media ecology,
SEMIOTEXTE, edited by Sylvere Lotringer
(1938-). But with a twist. Ignoring the comprehensive approach of
Nevitt, Lotringer
(miming willy-nilly the strategies of the postmodern tetrad-managers)
savored ambivalently the Menippean surface of the postmodern
beachhead and sponsored an anti-postmodern debate between
(INTERVENTIONS, 1987 and FOUCAULT LIVE
[Interviews, 1966-84], 1989),
(DRIFTWORKS, 1984),
(SIMULATIONS, 1983 and IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT
MAJORITIES OR, THE END OF THE SOCIAL AND OTHER ESSAYS, 1983 and
FORGET FOUCAULT, 1987),
(PURE WAR, 1983 and SPEED AND POLITICS: An Essay
on Dromology, 1986), and
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
(ON THE LINE, 1983 and NOMADOLOGY: The War Machine,
1986).
French intellectuals irritated by McLuhan's iconic status in the
postmodern sixties, they danced on the toes of the "culture"
side of the McLuhan dialectic by foregrounding
"technological" products of the seventies and early eighties
and some of their effects.
For example, while rehearsing the Menippean stance of McLuhan,
post-nominalist Jean Baudrillard preferred
to emphasize how the telematic society bypassed the Global Theater:
"This is our problem, insofar as this electronic encephalization,
this miniaturization of circuits and of energy, this transistorization
of the environment condemn to futility, to obsolescence and almost
to obscenity, all that which once constituted the stage of our
lives." -
Jean Baudrillard,
THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION,
1988, p.17.
Before, in the late sixties and early seventies, in his quest for
a methodology that bypassed the "archetypal" McLuhan,
Baudrillard had intuited the tetrad
and its phatic, tactile manager (McLuhan's discovery of the late
fifties as the Global Theater was inaugurated):
"From this perspective, in which the production of signs
seen as a system of exchange value takes on an entirely different
meaning than in the naive utopia of their use value, design and
the environmental disciplines can be considered as one of the
branches of mass communication, a gigantic ramification of human
and social engineering. From this moment on, our true environment
is the universe of communication. It is in this that it differs
radically from the 19th century concepts of 'nature' or of 'milieu'.
While these latter referred to physical, biological (determinism
of substance, of heredity and of species) or 'socio-cultural'
(the 'milieu') laws, environment is from the beginning a network
of messages and signs, its laws being those of communication.
The environment is the autonomization of the entire universe
of practices and forms, from the everyday to the architectural,
from the discursive to the gestural and the political, as a sector
of operations and calculation, as sending-receiving of messages,
as space-time of communication.... Nothing is more false than
the limits that a 'humanistic' design wishes to fix for itself;
in fact, everything belongs to design, everything springs from
it, whether it says so or not: the body is designed, sexuality
is designed, political, social, human relations are designed,
just as are needs and aspirations, etc. This 'designed' universe
is what properly constitutes the environment...." -
Jean Baudrillard,
FOR A CRITIQUE OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SIGN,
1972, pp.200-201.
Later, as the hologrammic effect of the Global Theater "crystallized"
and became for Baudrillard "the
Object", he retained McLuhan's perception of the Menippean
character of the tactile interplay of the mixed corporate-media
(the "telematic"), which he termed "seduction":
"Seduction is the world's elementary dynamic. Gods and
men were not separated by the moral chasm of religion: they continuously
played the game of mutual seduction; the symbolic equilibrium
of the world is founded on these relations of seduction and playfulness.
All this has changed significantly for us, at least in appearance.
For what has happened to good and evil, to the true and the false,
to all these great distinctions which we need to decipher and
make sense of our world? All these terms, torn asunder at the
cost of unbounded energy, are ready at any moment to extinguish
one another, and collapse *to our greatest joy*. Seduction hurls
them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a
paroxysm of intensity and charm." -
Ibid., p.59,
and mixed it with the reversibility of McLuhan's tetrad:
"The principle of reversibility, which is also the one
of magic and seduction, requires that all that has been produced
must be destroyed, and that which appears must disappear. We have
unlearned the art of disappearance (art as such has always been
a powerful lever of disappearance - power of illusion and of a
denegation of the real). Saturated by the mode of production,
we must return to the path of an aesthetic of disappearance. Seduction
is party to this: it is that which deviates, that which turns
us away from the path, that which makes the real return to the
great game of simulacra, which makes things appear and disappear."
-
Ibid., p.71,
and McLuhan's interest in the phatic
(see the top third of p.8 in Marshall
McLuhan [edited by Eugene McNamara], THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE: The
Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, 1969, and the bottom of
p.198 in Marshall McLuhan [with Wilfred Watson], FROM CLICHÉ TO
ARCHETYPE, 1970):
"If the phatic has become hypertrophied in all our communications
systems (i.e., within the media and information processing systems),
it is because tele-distance ensures that speech literally no longer
has any meaning. One says that one is speaking, but by speaking
one is only verifying the network and the fact that one is linked
up with it. There is not even an 'other' at the other end, for
in a simple reciprocation of signals of recognition there is no
longer an identifiable transmitter or receiver, but simply two
terminals. The one terminal's signal to the other is merely an
indication that something is going through and that, therefore,
nothing is happening. Perfect dissuasion." -
Jean Baudrillard,
SEDUCTION,1990, pp.164-165
(Baudrillard used McLuhan's old theme of the "rear
view mirror" to amplify the above pattern as it affected linguistics:
"Language has no need for 'contact': it is *we* who need
communication to have a specific 'contact' function, precisely
because it is eluding us. That is why Jakobson was able to isolate
it in his analysis of language, while both the concept and the
terms to express it are absent from other cultures. Jakobson's
grid and his axiomatics of communication are contemporaneous with
a change in language's fortune - it is beginning to no longer
communicate anything. It has thus become urgent to analytically
restore the functional possibility of communication, and in particular
the 'phatic' function that, in logical terms, is a simple truism:
if it speaks, then it speaks. But in effect it no longer speaks,
and the discovery of the 'phatic' function is symptomatic of the
need to inject contact, establish connections, and speak tirelessly
simply in order to render language possible. A desperate situation
where even simple contact appears wondrous." -
Ibid., p.164).
With his concept of the "Object",
Baudrillard had again arrived at McLuhan's doorstep and intuited
the pentadic environment
(as spelled out by Frank Zingrone in Volume One,
No. 1, of McLuhan Studies [1991], the pentad adds the syncretic,
or fusion, factor to the tetrad)
where the digital "Object" subsumes, resumes, and cancels
the "designs" of the electronically-based tetrad-manager
("*The object itself takes the initiative of reversibility*,
taking the initiative to seduce and lead astray. Another succession
is determinant. It is no longer that of a symbolic order (which
requires a subject and a discourse), but the purely arbitrary
one of a rule of the game. The game of the world is the game of
reversibility. It is no longer the desire of the subject, but
the destiny of the object, which is at the center of the world."
-
Baudrillard,
THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION, p.80)
and ignores the mass's stance of irony and disconnection. The inevitable
fate of Baudrillard's "silent majorities" requires them
to respond by engaging reflexively in Menippean phatic communion
("perfect dissuasion"):
"Yet immanence left to itself is not at all random. It
deploys a connection of events or disconnection of events altogether
unexpected, *in particular this singular form which combines connecting
and disconnecting*, that of the exponential.... Moreover one finds
this connected/disconnected form in the mythic form of challenge
and seduction, of which we know that it is not a dialectical relation,
but an escalating power expressed by a potentialization of the
stakes, and not at all by an equilibrium. In seduction we re-encounter
this exponential form, this fatal quality whose destiny sometimes
chances upon us, as it does for things when they are left to their
own devices." -
Ibid., pp.55-56.
At this point it may serve as a relevant hint to remind the lurker
that McLuhan's "doorstep" always already included Baudrillard's
concept of the "rule of the game"
as determinant in the pentadic situation. This is shown in
Chapter 24 of Marshall McLuhan,
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA: The Extensions
of Man,
1964,
where the topic "Games" is given the same definition
as "Media" - "the extensions of man" - the only
other occasion in the book.
This leads naturally to the work of Michel
Foucault. As a figure in the debate presented by Lotringer,
Foucault replays the concerns in McLuhan's writings for the effects
of "visual space" during the
Gutenberg Galaxy (1500-1750) and their
internalization at the beginning of the
Marconi Galaxy (1850-1950).
"It is not a mode of language, but a hollow that traverses
like a great movement all literary languages." -
Michel Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE (Interviews, 1966-84), 1989, p.22.
"My procedure at this moment is of a regressive sort, I
would say; I try to assume a greater and greater detachment in
order to define the historical conditions and transformations
of our knowledge." -
Ibid., p.79.
McLuhan's methodology focused on making an inventory of these effects
by providing a mosaic of a wide range of activities and notions
in diverse fields during a large span of time
(see the "Centennial Metaphor" section in
FROM CLICHÉ TO ARCHETYPE, pp.35-41).
The following statements by Foucault
illustrate the parallels with McLuhan's approach:
"It's why I have tried to make, obviously in a rather particular
style, the history not of thought in general but of all that 'contains
thought' in a culture, of all in which there is thought. For there
is thought in philosophy, but also in a novel, in jurisprudence,
in law, in an administrative system, in a prison." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.9.
"I wanted to do an historian's work by showing the simultaneous
functioning of these discourses and the transformations which
accounted for their visible changes." -
Ibid., p.29.
"I wanted to displace it; to analyze the discourses themselves,
that is, these discursive practices that are intermediary between
words and things; these discursive practices starting from which
one can define what are the things and mark out the usage of words."
-
Ibid., p.51.
(In this last quotation, Foucault seeks to make the
"interval" of the discursive practices a transparent manifest
in the style of McLuhan and Nevitt's writings.)
"By archeology I would like to designate not exactly a
discipline, but a domain of research, which would be the following:
In a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas,
everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices
and police activities, mores - all refer to a certain implicit
knowledge (*savoir*) special to this society. This knowledge is
profoundly different from the bodies of learning that one can
find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious
justifications, but it is what makes possible at a given moment
the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a practice. Thus, in order
for the big centers of internment to be opened at the end of the
17th century, it was necessary that a certain knowledge of madness
be opposed to non-madness, of order to disorder, and it's this
knowledge (*savoir*) that I wanted to investigate, as the condition
of possibility of knowledge (*connaissance*), of institutions,
of practices." -
Ibid., pp.1-2.
Foucault substitutes *savoir* for
McLuhan's "ground" or "medium", and *connaissance*
for "figure" or "content". The effect of their
interplay Foucault designates as *episteme*:
"When I speak of *episteme*, I mean all those relationships
which existed between the various sectors of science during a
given epoch. For example, I am thinking of the fact that at a
certain point mathematics was used for research in physics, while
linguistics or, if you will, semiology, the science of signs,
was used by biology (to deal with genetic messages). Likewise
the theory of evolution was used by, or served as a model for
historians, psychologists, and sociologists of the 19th century.
All these phenomena of relationship between the sciences or between
the various scientific sectors constitute what I call the *episteme*
of an epoch. Thus for me *episteme* has nothing to do with the
Kantian categories.... I simply noted that the problem of order
(the problem, not the category), or rather the need to introduce
an order among series of numbers, human beings, or values, appears
simultaneously in many different disciplines in the 17th century.
This involves a communication between the diverse disciplines,
and so it was that someone who proposed, for example, the creation
of a universal language in the 17th century was quite close in
terms of procedure to someone who dealt with the problem of how
one could catalog human beings. It's a question of relationships
and communication among the various sciences. This is what I call
*episteme*, and it has nothing to do with the Kantian categories."
-
Ibid., pp.75-76.
Like McLuhan
(see bottom half of p.31 in Marshall McLuhan [with
George Thompson and Harley Parker], COUNTERBLAST, 1969),
Foucault sees this episteme as a cultural
"unconscious":
"Very schematically, it consists of trying to discover
in the history of science and of human knowledge (*des connaissances
et du savoir humain*) something that would be like its unconscious....
These laws and determinations are what I have tried to bring to
light. I have tried to unearth an autonomous domain that would
be the unconscious of science, the unconscious of knowledge (*savoir*),
that would have its own laws, just as the individual human unconscious
has its own laws and determinations." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, pp.39-40.
"One can say with confidence that we are not speaking of
an individual unconscious, in the sense that psychoanalysis generally
understands that notion. Yet neither is it a collective unconscious,
which would be a kind of collection or reservoir of archetypes
at the disposition of everyone. The 'structural' unconscious is
neither of these things." -
Ibid., p.81.
"My problem is essentially the definition of the implicit
systems in which we find ourselves prisoners; what I would like
to grasp is the system of limits and exclusion which we practice
without knowing it; I would like to make the cultural unconscious
apparent." -
Ibid., p.71.
Miming Belinda the Hen who found the letter in the middenheap of
Finnegans Wake, Foucault plunders the "archive" of what
McLuhan designated as visual space
to produce an "archeology" of this unconscious:
"... it's the analysis of discourse in its modality of
*archive*." -
Ibid., p.25.
"This other thing I have called therefore 'archeology'.
And then, retrospectively, it seemed to me that chance has not
been too bad a guide: after all, this word 'archeology' can almost
mean - and I hope I will be forgiven for this - description of
the *archive*. I mean by archive the set (*l'ensemble*) of discourses
actually pronounced; and this set of discourses is envisaged not
only as a set of events which would have taken place once and
for all and which would remain in abeyance, in the limbo or purgatory
of history, but also as a set that continues to function, to be
transformed through history, and to provide the possibility of
appearing in other discourses." -
Ibid., p.45.
This form of pattern-recognition and insight allows
Foucault to intuit McLuhan's tetrad:
"The 'archive' appears then as a kind of great practice
of discourse, a practice which has its rules, its conditions,
its functioning and its effects.
The problems posed by the analysis of this practice are the
following:
-
What are the different particular types of discursive practice
that one can find in a given period?
-
What are the relationships that one can establish between
these different practices?
-
What relationships do they have with non-discursive practices,
such as political, social or economic practices?
-
What are the transformations of which these practices are
susceptible? -
Ibid., pp.58-59.
"I'm not looking underneath discourse for the thought of
men, but try to grasp discourse in its manifest existence, as
a practice that obeys certain rules - of formation, existence,
co-existence - and systems of functioning. It is this practice,
in its consistency and almost in its materiality, that I describe."
-
Ibid., p.46.
"I have tried to do something else, to show that in a discourse,
as in natural history, there were rules of formation for objects
(which are not the rules of utilization of words), rules of formation
for concepts (which are not the laws of syntax), rules of formation
for theories (which are neither deductive nor rhetorical rules).
These are the rules put into operation through a discursive practice
at a given moment that explain why a certain thing is seen (or
omitted); why it is envisaged under such an aspect and analyzed
at such a level; why such a word is employed with such a meaning
and in such a sentence. Consequently, the analysis starting from
things and the analysis starting from words appear at this moment
as secondary in relation to a prior analysis, which would be the
discursive analysis." -
Ibid., p.52.
"I tried to define the transformations: to show the discoveries,
inventions, changes of perspective and theoretical upheavals that
could occur starting from a certain system of regularities."
-
Ibid., p.54.
Knowing that the "materiality" of visual space continues
to circulate in the contemporary mixed-media dance, Foucault,
like McLuhan, uses a Menippean strategy
by presenting the past ("visual space") as a probe of
the present:
"Placing himself at the exterior of the text, he [the contemporary
critic] constitutes a new exterior for it, writing texts out of
texts." -
Ibid., p.21.
"I try to show, based upon their historical establishment
and formation, those systems which are still ours today and within
which we are trapped. It is a question, basically, of presenting
a critique of our own time, based upon retrospective analyses."
-
Ibid., p.64.
"My book is a pure and simple 'fiction': it's a novel,
but it's not I who invented it; it is the relationship between
our period and its epistemological configuration and this mass
of statements." -
Ibid., p.20.
"My title THE ORDER OF THINGS was perfectly ironic. No
one saw it clearly; doubtlessly because there wasn't enough play
in my text for the irony to be sufficiently visible." -
Ibid., p.51.
"I dream of the intellectual destroyer of evidence and
universalities, the one who, in the inertias and constraints of
the present, locates and marks the weak points, the openings,
the lines of power, who incessantly displaces himself, doesn't
know exactly where he is heading nor what he'll think tomorrow
because he is too attentive to the present;..." -
Ibid., p.155.
Also, Foucault defines his strategy
apropos of the "game" quality of present-day cultural
generation and regeneration
(see the first ten lines at the top of p.174 in THE
MEDIUM AND THE LIGHT, 1999):
"To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the question:
what can we make work, what new game can we invent?" -
Foucault, FOUCAULT LIVE, p.209.
And he presents this with an emphasis, like McLuhan,
on a fuller understanding of "techne":
"The disadvantage of this word *techne*, I realize, is
its relation to the word 'technology', which has a very specific
meaning. A very narrow meaning is given to 'technology': one thinks
of hard technology, the technology of wood, of fire, of electricity.
Whereas government is also a function of technology: the government
of individuals, the government of souls, the government of the
self by the self, the government of families, the government of
children, and so on. I believe that if one placed the history
of architecture back in this general history of *techne*, in this
wide sense of the word, one would have a more interesting guiding
concept than by considering opposition between the exact sciences
and the inexact ones." -
Ibid., pp.276-277
(see LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN, Selected and edited
by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, 1987, last
paragraph on p.461 and first paragraph on p.541).
Other examples of their similar interests and tentative conclusions
about the effects of the Gutenberg Galaxy:
-
"Hence two problems. Power - how does it work? Is it
enough that it imposes strong prohibitions in order to function
effectively? And does it always move from above to below and
from the center to the periphery? -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.149
(see "From the time I came back from Fordham
I was studying the corporate and political world, and paying very
little attention to media." - LETTERS, p.505, and pp.4, 5,
15, 20, 60, 80, 129, 145, 182, 213, 217, 231, 255, 259, 263, and
268 in Marshall McLuhan [with Barrington Nevitt], TAKE TODAY: The
Executive as Dropout, 1972).
-
"Sex was, in Christian societies, that which had to
be examined, watched over, confessed and transformed into
discourse." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.138.
"In any case, what I would like to study for my part,
are all of these mechanisms in our society which invite, incite
and force us to speak about sex." -
Ibid., p.139
(see "The theme of sex happens to be funny at
the moment because sex is dead. Vietnam is *not* dead and, therefore,
it is not funny." - Marshall McLuhan, letter to Playboy Magazine,
December, 1969 or January, 1970, p.24. And see interview with McLuhan
in Miss Chatelaine Magazine, September 3, 1974, pp.58-59, 82-87,
90-91).
-
"I tried to pose another problem: to discover the system
of thought, the form of rationality, which since the end of
the 18th century has underlain the idea that the prison is
in sum the best means, one of the most efficient and most
rational, to punish infractions in a society." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.280
(see THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, 1967, p.61, and McLUHAN,
HOT & COOL: a primer for the understanding of & a critical
symposium with a rebuttal by McLuhan, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn,
1967, p.300 [bottom third on p.290 of paperback], and Marshall McLuhan,
CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS, 1970, p.332).
-
"What I tried to do was a history of the relationships
that thought maintains with the truth, the history of thought
insofar as it is thought about the truth. All those who say
that for me the truth doesn't exist are simple-minded."
-
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.295.
"I have sought to analyze how fields like madness, sexuality
and delinquence could enter into a certain play of the truth,
and how on the other hand, through this insertion of human practice
and behavior into the play of the truth, the subject himself
is effected." -
Ibid., p.310
(see bottom third of p.163 in FROM CLICHÉ TO ARCHETYPE,
and top of p.388 and middle of p.492 in LETTERS).
-
"In the first place, I don't think there is actually
a sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject
that one could find everywhere. I am very sceptical and very
hostile toward this conception of the subject. I think on
the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices
of subjection, or, in a more anonymous way, through practices
of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course
from a certain number of rules, styles and conventions that
are found in the culture." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.313.
"I would call subjectivization the process through which
results the constitution of a subject, or more exactly, of a
subjectivity which is obviously only one of the given possibilities
of organizing a consciousness of self." -
Ibid., p.330
(see p.458 in LETTERS, and Chapter One in LAWS OF
MEDIA).
Ignoring the technological causes of visual space as proposed by
McLuhan, ironically
Foucault still finds the same patterns of cultural effects
in his inventories.
However, isolating and highlighting the effects of military technologies
and organization that accompanied the Revolutionary circumstances
in France at the end of the eighteenth century, Paul
Virilio chooses to archetypalize the kinetic vectors in McLuhan’s
historical phase of “visual space” (the period of the phonetic alphabet
up to and through the Gutenberg Galaxy and stopping at the inauguration
of the Marconi Galaxy)
(see pp.241-243 in THE GUTENBERG GALAXY: The Making
of Typographic Man, 1962, first half of p.136 in FROM CLICHE TO
ARCHETYPE, and p.31 in TAKE TODAY)
as the *primum mobile* and primary effect in the history of Western
media up to the electric telegraph and other contemporary accelerations
of the Industrial Revolution:
“Commerce comes after the arrival of war in a place, the state
of siege, the organization of a *glacis* around an inhabitated
area, etc. It doesn’t need the city - the city in the sense of
sedentariness, the mineralization of a building. Mercantilism
is even the opposite of sedentariness: it’s the stop-over, the
rest between two flows.”
Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer,
PURE WAR, 1983, p.5
(see middle of p.343, Marshall McLuhan, UNDERSTANDING
MEDIA: The Extensions of Man, 1964 [all page numbers for this text
refer to the MIT edition, 1994]).
“But no one yet suspected that ‘the conquest of the freedom
to come and go’ so dear to Montaigne could, by a sleight of hand,
become an *obligation to mobility*. The ‘mass uprising’ of 1793
was the institution of the first *dictatorship of movement*, subtley
replacing the *freedom of movement* of the early days of the revolution.”
Paul Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS: An Essay on Dromology, 1986, p.30.
“The military class, making sure to keep the proletariat under
control, will thus allow it the illusion of being able to dominate,
to submerge the bourgeois fortress.”
Ibid., p.97.
“The time has come, it seems, to face the facts: revolution
is movement, but movement is not a revolution. Politics is only
a gear-shift, and revolution only its overdrive: war as ‘*continuation*
of politics by other means’ would be instead a police *pursuit*
at greater speed, with other vehicles.”
Ibid., p.18.
“Military science, like History, is but a persistent perception
of the kinetics of vanished bodies; inversely, bodies can appear
as vehicles of history, as its dynamic vectors. Napoleon the Third
claimed that ‘for the man of war, the ability to remember is science
itself.’”
Ibid., p.34.
Subsequently, Virilio notices a change
at the dawn of the Marconi Revolution and whereas before he could
substitute *glacis* for McLuhan’s “ground” or “medium”, and the
latest weapon for “figure” or “content”, now he sees the implosion
of their dialectical interplay. This post-kinetic, or proprioceptive
and tactile, condition Virilio designates
as the “Total War” stage of the “dromocratic revolution”, his phrase
for the phases of his archetypalized “speed”
(see bottom of p.77 and top of p.78, middle of p.170,
and bottom of p.257 in TAKE TODAY):
“For ten years I looked for elements of the ‘European Fortress’,
and that’s how I became aware of the space of war, of the spatial
dimension of Total War.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.2.
“In fact, history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, p.68.
“Let’s not forget that World War One was the first truly technical
war in Europe (in the United States, of course, there had been
the Civil War, which was already a Total War).”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.9
(see Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, WAR AND PEACE
IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic
Situations that Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward, 1968, p.36).
In the “Cold War” phase of Total War
(see Chapter 6, “Old Wars and New Overkill”, of TAKE
TODAY, pp.149-185, where McLuhan and Nevitt anticipate many of the
themes Virilio raises),
kinetic energy becomes an obligatory, programmed art form for the
tetrad-manager in Virilio’s “military class”:
“*After the war of the domestic market, the war of the military
market*. It is no longer a system of consumption/production aiming
at a democratic alliance, but the system of objects seeking to
directly elect the military class or, more accurately, a technological
and industrial development in the area of weaponry.”
Virilio, SPEED AND POLITICS, p.128.
“Once more, the market was created not by the object of consumption
but by its vector of delivery!”
Ibid., p.109.
“In short, the revolutionary figure of the worker, sketched
less by the industrial system than by the military one, fills
the kinetic disparity between slow war and rapid war. The ‘full
steam ahead through the mud’ of the nihilist Nechaiev, apostle
of systematized terrorist warfare, is not a rhetorical figure
but a serious technological proposition: compensate for the distortion
born of the destructive assault’s necessary brevity by accelerating
the rhythm of attacks. Historical evolution is then kept moving
literally *by a combustion engine*!”
Ibid., p.113.
“With the supersonic vector (airplane, rocket, airwaves), penetration
and destruction become one. The instantaneousness of action at
a distance corresponds to the defeat of the unprepared adversary,
but also, and especially, to the defeat of the world as a field,
as distance, as matter.”
Ibid., p.133.
“*Citizen Kane*, the most accomplished product of American civic
culture (later baptised ‘pop-culture’!), is less William Randolph
Hearst, the newspaper magnate who served as Orson Welles’ model,
than Howard Hughes, the invisible citizen. Hearst still delivered
information; Hughes was content to speculate indifferently on
whatever delivered it. He singlehandedly constituted the most
radical critique of Fuller’s and McLuhan’s global theories. This
completely desocialized man, who vanished from the earth, who
avoided human contact for fear of germs, who was terrified by
the very breath of his rare visitors, nonetheless thought only
of the media, from the aerospace industry to the cinema, from
gasoline to airfields, from casinos to the star system, from the
design of Jane Russell’s bra to that of a bomber. His existence
could be considered exemplary. Hughes cared only about that which
passes in transit. His life rebounded from one vector to another,
as has, for two hundred years, the power of the American nation
he adored. Nothing else interested him. He died in the open sky,
in an airplane.”
Ibid., pp.108-109.
“To the heavy model of the hemmed-in bourgeoisie, to the single
schema of the weighty Marxist *mobil-machung* (ostensibly planned
control of the movement of goods, persons, ideas), the West has
long opposed the diversity of its logistical hierarchy, the utopia
of a national wealth invested in automobiles, travel, movies,
performances... A capitalism that has become one of jet-sets and
instant-information banks, actually a whole *social illusion*
subordinated to the strategy of the cold war. Let’s make no mistake:
whether it’s the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers,
migrant workers, tourists, olympic champions or travel agents,
the military-industrial democracies have made every social category,
without distinction, into *unknown soldiers of the order of speeds*
- speeds whose hierarchy is controlled more and more each day
by the State (headquarters), from the pedestrian to the rocket,
from the metabolic to the technological.”
Ibid., pp.119-120
(see bottom of p.170 in TAKE TODAY and pp.110-111
in the Spring, 1971 issue of Explorations [insert in University
of Toronto’s Varsity Graduate], No.30, titled The Hijacking of Cities,
Nations, Planets in the Age of Spaceship Earth, written by Marshall
McLuhan).
“In the 1960s a mutation occurs: *the passage from wartime to
the war of peacetime*, to that *total peace* that others still
call ‘peaceful coexistence’. The blindness of the speed of means
of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geopolitical
servitude, but the extermination of space as the field of freedom
of political action. We only need refer to the necessary controls
and constraints of the railway, airway or highway infrastructures
to see the fatal impulse: the more speed increases, the faster
freedom decreases.
The apparatus’ self-propulsion finally entails the self-sufficiency
of automation. What happens in the example of the racecar driver,
who is no more than a worried lookout for the catastrophic probabilities
of his movement, is reproduced on the political level as soon
as conditions require an action in real time.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, p.142
(see middle of p.149 in TAKE TODAY).
In the resonance of Total War/Total Peace
(see middle of p.83 and pp.158-159 in TAKE TODAY)
Virilio sees consequences for diverse practical areas of social
and economic life similar to those noted by McLuhan:
-
“The union functions, relayed by mob associations, are entirely
supplanting the administration and services of the old bourgeois
employer. Order reigns in the Bronx thanks to the Mafia, which
is itself becoming international, aiming now at a direct collaboration
with the military class, as was revealed by a recent scandal
that called into question the relations between the Israeli
generals and members of international crime.
... The military class, increasingly distanced from its bourgeois
partner, abandons the street, the highway, those outmoded
vectors, to the small and middle-sized business of the protection
rackets. The city unions in New York are starting to replace
their members’ productive activity with simple crisis management,
by becoming administrators and bankers.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, p.102
(see pp.49, 94, and 211 in TAKE TODAY).
-
“It is enough to hear the speeches of today’s Chinese leaders
about ‘consumer goods’ to know that the old thinker [Mao -
ed.] did no more than delay the institution in China of the
West’s fearsome system of intensive growth, and whether it
is conveyed by orthodox Marxism or liberalism is of little
import!”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, p.67
(see p.3 in the May/June, 1970, issue of The McLuhan
DEW-LINE, Volume 2, No.6, titled An Interview: McLuhan on Russia).
-
“The pacifists of the 1930’s opposed real war, a war inscribed
in its practical execution. Pacifists today oppose the tendency
toward war, in other words *the war for preparation for war*.
Not a hypothetical war which could begin in France, China
or elsewhere, but war as scientific and technological preparation.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.139
(see p.152 and middle of p.153 in TAKE TODAY, and
last sentence of first paragraph of p.37 in UNDERSTANDING MEDIA).
-
“In any case, the apocalypse is here. It could happen at
any moment, but the interesting argument is that apocalypse
is hidden in development itself, in the development of arms
- that is, in the non-development of society.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.139
(see last sentence of penultimate paragraph of p.153
in TAKE TODAY).
-
“The military class is turning into an internal super-police.
Moreover, it’s logical. In the strategy of deterrence, military
institutions, no longer fighting among themselves, tend to
fight only civilian societies - with, of course, a few skirmishes
in the Third World (the role of the police played here and
there by Europe - particularly France, and elsewhere by the
United States at the time of Vietnam.)”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.94
(see last sentence of p.31 in TAKE TODAY, p.138 in
THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, and penultimate paragraph of McLuhan’s
op-ed column in The New York Times, September 23, 1976).
-
“In a social configuration whose precarious equilibrium
is threatened by any ill-considered initiative, security can
henceforth be likened to the absence of movement. The extended
proletarianization of the suppression of wills can be likened
to the suppression of gestures, for which the rise in unemployment
is the best and most obvious image. We redistribute social
work; we spotlight the performances of the physically and
mentally handicapped, their records in olympics for the disabled;
we impose the new belief that a body’s inability to move is
not really a serious problem.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, p.125
(see p.33 and middle of p.261 in TAKE TODAY).
-
“For in reality, Walesa is the priest’s man. He’s not so
much a union leader as a man of faith recognized by the Pope.
Glemp-Walesa form a couple and the warrior, Jaruzelski, stands
alone. Thus, the conflict is between two supremacies: an imperialistic
and military supremacy (Jaruzelski’s) and an imperialism in
the cosmic or mythical sense, which is Catholicism. If we
look at recent events, the fall of Lebanon, the fall of Iran
- how is it that hyper-powerful armies such as Iran’s, or
at least solid ones such as Lebanon’s, could suddenly fall,
with almost no resistance? Because they crumbled precisely
from within, because of a religious conflict.... Thus, in
my opinion, the Polish affair is especially original in the
importance it gives the religious question with respect to
the military question.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, pp.150-151
(see the second column on p.33 in McLuhan’s ‘80s:
Living at the speed of light, MacLean’s, January 7, 1980).
-
“The moon and the stars are all part of the Western imperialist
illusion: ‘The world is not finite, we have conquered America,
tomorrow we’ll conquer the moon, etc., etc....’ It’s absurd.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.71
(see bottom of p.126 and top of p.127 in WAR AND PEACE
IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE).
-
“Speed allows for progress in space, only progress in space
has been identified with progress in time, in history. And
that is really an abuse of language. We know very well that
progress in space is not necessarily progress in time. The
fact of going faster from Paris to New York doesn’t make the
exchanges any better. It makes them shorter. But the shortest
is not necessarily the best. There again it’s the same illusory
ideology that when the world is reduced to nothing and we
have everything at hand, we’ll be infinitely happy.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, pp.68-69
(see last paragraph of p.110 in TAKE TODAY).
-
“This is why the airport today has become the new city.
At Dallas-Fort Worth they serve thirty million passengers
a year. At the end of the century there will be one hundred
million. People are no longer citizens, they’re passengers
in transit. They’re in circum-navigation.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.64.
-
“For a long time the city existed just where it was. Paris
was in Paris and Rome in Rome. There was a territorial and
geographical inertia. Now there’s an inertia in time, a *polar*
inertia, in the sense that the pole is simultaneously an absolute
place (for the metaphor), absolute inertia which is geographically
locatable, and also an absolute inertia in the planet’s movement.
We’re heading toward a situation in which every city will
be in the same place - in time. There will be a kind of co-existence,
and probably not a very peaceful one, between these cities
which have kept their distance in space, but which will be
telescoped in time. When we can go to the antipodes in a second
or a minute, what will remain of the city? What will remain
of us? The difference of sedentariness in geographical space
will continue, but real life will be led in a polar inertia.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, pp.61-62
(see pp.33-37 in Edmund Carpenter, ESKIMO REALITIES,
1973, p.72 in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, pp.23-25 [pp.38-40 in paperback],
top of p.280 [bottom of p.272 in paperback] in McLUHAN: HOT &
COOL, last sentence of p.156 in TAKE TODAY).
-
“We must take hold of the riddle of technology and lay it
on the table as the ancient philosophers and scientists put
the riddle of Nature out in the open, the two being superimposed."
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.30
(see pp.429 and 431 in LETTERS).
-
“I’m saying that there’s work to be done, the epistemo-technical
work we were talking about before, in order to re-establish
politics, at a time when technology no longer portions out
matter and geographical space (as was the case in ancient
democratic society), but when technology portions out time
- and I would say: the depletion of time.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.28
(see McLuhan and Nevitt’s op-ed column in The New
York Times, September 21, 1974),
-
“No, but in fact, the Second World War never ended. Legally,
furthermore, it’s not finished. It hasn’t been put out. There
is no state of peace. It isn’t over because it continued in
Total Peace, that is in war pursued by other means. You know
Clausewitz’s statement: ‘War is politics by other means’.
I would say that the Total Peace of deterrence is Total War
pursued by other means.”
Virilio and Lotringer,
PURE WAR, p.25
(see middle of p.152 and headline at top of p.153
in TAKE TODAY).
As the Cold War is eclipsed, Virilio intuits the pentadic stage
for the global military class where the Present is necessarily
programmed as an art form:
“If over thirty years ago the nuclear explosive completed the
cycle of *spatial wars*, at the end of this century the implosive
(beyond politically and economically invaded territories) inaugurates
*the war of time*. In full peaceful coexistence, without any declaration
of hostilities, and more surely than by any other kind of conflict,
rapidity delivers us from this world. We have to face the facts:
today, speed is war, the last war.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, pp.138-139.
“History as the extensiveness of time - of time that lasts,
is portioned out, organized, developed - is disappearing in favor
of the instant, as if the end of history were the end of duration
in favor of instantaneousness, and of course, of ubiquity.”
Virilio,
PURE WAR, p.46.
“What we call *azimuthal equidistant projection* is the geography
of time. Geography of the day by speed, and no longer a geography
of the meteorological day. Already now, when you come back to
Paris from Los Angeles or New York at certain times of the year,
you can see, through the window, passing over the pole, the setting
sun and the rising sun. You have dawn and dusk in a single window.
These stereoscopic images show quite well the beyond of the geographical
city and the advent of human concentration in travel time. This
city of the beyond is the City of Dead Time.”
Ibid., p.6.
“We thus find ourselves facing this dilemma:
The threat of use (the second component) of the nuclear arm
prohibits the terror of actual use (the third component). But
for this threat to remain and allow the strategy of deterrence,
we are forced to develop the threatening system that characterizes
the first component: the *ill omen of the appearance of new performances
for the means of communicating destruction*. Stated plainly, this
is the perpetual sophistication of combat means and the replacement
of the geostrategic breakthrough by the technological breakthrough,
the great logistical maneuvers.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, pp.146-147
(see first paragraph of p.31 in COUNTERBLAST, and
the penultimate paragraph of p.156 in TAKE TODAY).
“... The continental translation that, curiously enough, we
find both in the geophysician Wegener, with the drift of land
masses, and in Mackinder, with the geopolitical amalgam of lands,
has given way to a world-wide phenomenon of terrestrial and technological
contraction that today makes us penetrate into an artificial topological
universe: *the direct encounter of every surface on the globe.*
The ancient inter-city duel, war between nations, the permanent
conflict between naval empires and continental powers have all
suddenly disappeared, giving way to an unheard-of opposition:
*the juxtaposition of every locality, all matter*. The planetary
mass becomes no more than a ‘critical mass’, a precipitate resulting
from the extreme reduction of contact time, a fearsome friction
of places and elements that only yesterday were still distinct
and separated by a buffer of distances, which have suddenly become
anachronistic. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published
in 1915, Alfred Wegener writes that in the beginning *the earth
can only have had but one face*, which seems likely, given the
capacities for interconnection. In the future the earth will have
but one interface...
If speed thus appears as the essential fall-out of styles of
conflicts and cataclysms, the current ‘arms race’ is in fact only
*’the arming of the race’ toward the end of the world as distance,
in other words, as a field of action*.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, pp.135-136.
“At the close of our century, *the time of the finite world
is coming to an end*; we live in the beginnings of a paradoxical
*miniaturization of action*, which others prefer to baptize *automation*.”
Ibid., p.140
“... Contraction in time, the disappearance of the territorial
space, after that of the fortified city and armor, leads to a
situation in which the notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ designate
only the future and the past in a form of war that causes the
‘present’ to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision.”
Ibid., pp.140-141
(see last sentence of p.94 in TAKE TODAY).
“Here we have the fearsome telescoping of elements born of the
‘amphibious generations’; the extreme proximity of parties *in
which the immediacy of information immediately creates the crisis*;
the frailty of reasoning power, which is but the effect of a miniaturization
of action - the latter resulting from the miniaturization of space
as a field of action.
An imperceptible movement on a computer keyboard, or one made
by a ‘skyjacker’ brandishing a cookie box covered with masking
tape, can lead to a catastrophic chain of events that until recently
was inconceivable. We are too willing to ignore the fact that,
alongside the threat of proliferation resulting from the acquisition
of nuclear explosives by irresponsible parties, there is a proliferation
of the threat resulting from the vectors that cause those who
own or borrow them to become just as irresponsible.”
Virilio,
SPEED AND POLITICS, pp.143-144
(see pp.149-151 in TAKE TODAY, and p.334 in CULTURE
IS OUR BUSINESS).
So, since he doesn’t ignore McLuhan as much as Foucault
does, Virilio is able to forge a larger
canvas which perceptively rebuilds and expands on the house that
McLuhan constructed for clarifying political anti-environments to
the global warlords.
Turning to Jean-Francois Lyotard,
we find a writer who, paralleling McLuhan, celebrates non-specialist
perception in art as the appropriate political mentor for revealing
the crude maintenance of the centralized, industrial, hardware environment
in the face of the services (not the disservices) of contemporary
fragmented poly-sensuality, the product of a tactile, decentralized,
software environment that Lyotard calls
“drift”:
“... Everyone knows that socialism is identical with kapitalism.
Any critique, far from transcending the latter, reinforces it.
What destroys it is the drift of desire, the withdrawal of cathexis,
not at all where the economists look for it (the kapitalists’
reluctance to invest), but the libidinal relinquishment of the
system of kapital and of all its poles, is the fact that for millions
of young people (irrespective of their social origin), desire
no longer invests the kapitalist set-up; is that they no longer
consider themselves or behave as a labor-power to be valorized
with a view to exchanges, i.e. consumption, is that they locate
what kapital persists in naming work, modern life, consumption,
nation, family, State, ownership, profession, education, all ‘values’
that they perceive as so many parodies of the one and only value,
the exchange-value. *That* is a drift, affecting all civilizations
on a worldwide scale.”
Jean-Francois Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, 1984, p.14
(see middle of p.84 and pp.259-261 in TAKE TODAY,
penultimate paragraph in the letter to H. A. Innis on p.222 in LETTERS,
and p.224 in ESSENTIAL McLUHAN, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank
Zingrone, 1995 [all page numbers for this text refer to the House
of Anansi edition]).
“Driftworks in the plural, for the question is not of leaving
*one* shore, but several, simultaneously; what is at work is not
one current, pushing and tugging, but different drives and tractions
(see last paragraph of p.4 in UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, and last sentence
of p.56 in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE).
Nor is just one individual *embarking* here, or even a collective
of individuals, but rather, as in Bosch’s Ship, a collection of
fools, each fool being an exaggerated part of the normal subject
(see bottom third of p.155 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE, and last
page of Edmund Carpenter [with Ken Heyman and Marshall McLuhan],
THEY BECAME WHAT THEY BEHELD, 1970),
libido cathected in such and such a sector of the body
(see first 14 lines of p.124 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE),
blocked up in this or that configuration of desire
(see last paragraph of p.13 in Ibid.),
all these fragments placed next to each other (the category
of *neben*!) for an aimless voyage
(see p.100 in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, and the middle of the
second column of the last page of THEY BECAME WHAT THEY BEHELD),
a collection of fragments impossible to unify for it drifts
with the Ship
(see last sentence of p.173 in TAKE TODAY),
its very drift giving the advantage of the strongest resonance
now to one *Trieb*-fool, now to another, in accordance with the
diversity of the times and sceneries wafted through
(see last sentence of first paragraph of p.145 in Ibid.).
Not at all a dislocated body, since there has never been anything
but pieces of the body and there will never be a body, this wandering
collection being the very affirmation of the non-body
(see middle of p.144 in Ibid.).
The plural, the collection of singularities, are precisely what
power, kapital, the law of value, personal identity, the ID card,
responsibility, the family and the hospital are bent on repressing.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.10
(see p.109 and pp.238-239 in TAKE TODAY, especially
concerning medical institutions).
“And we don’t want to destroy kapital because it isn’t rational,
but because it is. Reason and power are one and the same thing.
You may disguise the one with dialectics or prospectiveness, but
you will still have the other in all its crudeness: jails, taboos,
public weal, selection, genocide.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.11
(see pp.78-83, 211, and 213 in TAKE TODAY, and Marshall
McLuhan’s Forward to Donald DeMarco, ABORTION IN PERSPECTIVE: The
Rose Palace or the Fiery Dragon, 1974, pp.iv-v).
Lyotard continues McLuhan’s project
of pointing out that the artist’s traditional anti-environmental
role has been replaced by the Global Theater’s programmed tactile
environment
(see p.224 in ESSENTIAL McLUHAN):
“The poet who does no more than ‘express himself’ is completely
bound by his phantasy, and being always bound by the same elements,
he is not a poet. He produces a falsely figural text, the figural
traces of which are but those of his phantasies.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.77
(see bottom third of p.11 in THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE,
and bottom of pp.58 and 204 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE).
“Such are thus the fundamental modes of the connivance that
desire establishes with figurality: transgression of the object,
transgression of form, transgression of space.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.65
(see last sentence of p.205 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE).
But Lyotard reveals his awareness,
as McLuhan also never stopped reminding
us in his printed presentations, that his project’s translation
into print requires a corrective maneuver vis-a-vis the printed
form:
“The drift must go beyond the anchorage where this book arbitrarily
interrupts it. If reason, which has been handed over to the air-conditioned
totalitarianism of the very disputatious end of this century,
is not to be relied upon, then its great tool, its very main-spring,
its provision of infinite progress, its fertile negativity, its
pains and toiling - i.e. critique - shouldn’t be given credit
either. Let it be said very clearly: it is untrue that a political,
philosophical, artistic position is relinquished through *sublation*;
it is untrue that the experiencing of a position entails the complete
development of its content, its exhaustion, and thus its transcrescence
into another position which preserves-suppresses it, it is untrue
that, in experience and discourse, the occupation of a position
necessarily leads to its critique and impels you to adopt a new
position which will negatively include the former one and sublate
it. This description of the dialectic of Spirit by Hegel, is also
that of the capitalist’s getting richer and richer by Adam Smith,
it is the good student’s vision of life, it is in addition the
thick string on which the political jumping-jacks hang their promises
of happiness and with which they strangle us.”
Lyotard, DRIFTWORKS, pp.11-12
(see last sentence of p.190 in WAR AND PEACE IN THE
GLOBAL VILLAGE, and first sentence of Marshall McLuhan’s Forward
to the 1972 edition of Harold A. Innis, EMPIRE AND COMMUNICATIONS,
p.v).
“What is forgotten in dialectic is that one forgets and that
forgetting implies the preservation of everything, memory being
but a selection.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.12
(see bottom of p.viii, and pp.100-101 in LAWS OF MEDIA).
Similarly to McLuhan’s emphasis on the arts as meteorology, Lyotard
advocates studying the arts as “figures” revealing the contours
and rim-spins of the new pressures, or “ground”-shifts:
“Something is always happening in the arts - now the theater,
now painting, or music, or the cinema (the latter being more directly
placed on the orbit of kapital, however) - which incandesces the
embers glowing in the depths of society. It is depressive and
nihilistic to consider the region of unreality where the forms
flare up as a mere deportation camp or as a cozy shelter for irresponsible
elements, socially neutralized, hence politically null; the opposite
is to be understood, namely that ‘artists’ want society as a whole
to reach this unreality, want the repression and suppression of
libidinal intensities by the so-called seriousness, which is only
the torpescence of kapitalist paranoia, to be lifted everywhere,
and show how to do it by working and removing the most elementary
obstacles, those opposing to desire the *No* of the alleged reality,
the perception of times, spaces, colors, volumes.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, pp.15-16
(see Marshall McLuhan [with Harley Parker], THROUGH
THE VANISHING POINT: Space in Poetry and Painting, 1968, pp.29-31).
But such study is not guided by the specialized critic, in any
field:
“Critique as well is a selective activity:... This activity
is deeply rational, deeply consistent with the system. Deeply
reformist: the critic remains in the sphere of the criticized,
he belongs to it, he goes beyond one term of the position but
doesn’t alter the position of terms. And deeply hierarchical:
where does his power over the criticized come from? he *knows*
better? he is the teacher, the educator? he is therefore universality,
the University, the State, the City, bending over childhood, nature,
singularity, shadiness, to reclaim them? The confessor and God
helping the sinner save his soul? This benign reformism is wholly
compatible with the preservation of the authoritarian relationship.
Multiplying the overturns and reversals leads nowhere. The transforming
activity is underhandedly privileged in all this repair shop machinery,
which is the reason why the ultra-leftist revolutionary groups
and micro-groups have failed: they had to display their maleness,
their brawn, they had to keep the initiative. But the same idea
of efficiency drives the bosses - high-level bureaucrats, business
executives, decision-makers and officers. Do not say that unlike
them, *we* know the desire of the ‘masses’ (the criticized object):
no one knows it, for desire baffles knowledge and power. He who
pretends to know it is indeed the educator, the priest, the prince.
Nothing will have changed, therefore, if while claiming to serve
the desire of the masses you act according to your alleged knowledge
and assume their *direction*. Where do you criticize from? Don’t
you see that criticizing is still knowing, knowing better? That
the critical relation still falls within the sphere of knowledge,
of ‘realization’ and thus of the assumption of power? Critique
must be drifted out of. Better still: *Drifting is in itself the
end of all critique.*
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.13
(see p.65 in UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, and pp.238-239 in
THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT).
Just as McLuhan discovered tactility
as the prime component in most of the arts of the twentieth century,
so Lyotard features those artists who
mime tactility, which he names the “figural”, as of primary political
importance:
“In fact, the criteria of reality are those of communication
- objects are real to the extent that they are communicable on
two levels: on the level of language and on that of practice.
It is obvious, although not always explicitly stated, that Freud
considers reality to be fundamentally social, while he at the
same time always keeps it in quotation marks. This reality is
the little, even the very little ‘reality’. Which means that this
bound set of perceptions, signifiable in words, exchangeable by
gestures, has gaps, is lacunary; there are regions that remain
outside reach, that cannot be approached, that are utterly unrecognized.
There are words that are unpronounceable because they lack ‘signification’,
perceptions that are impossible, things that cannot be seen: thus,
there are screens. This is the aspect I would call ‘Dada-reality’:
reality insofar as the fabric that holds it together is missing.
It is obviously in these regions where something is lacking, either
the transformative experience or the words to exchange (because
they are impossible to say), that works of art can take place.
Figures, in Freudian terms, (not only image-figures in the plastic
sense, but also three or one-dimensional figures; a movement can
be a figure, so can a music) - that is to say objects that do
not exist according to the two criteria just stated, that are
not transformable, or at least whose reality is not measurable
by their transformability - are essentially not linguistically
communicable. (The commonplaces I am running through rapidly underlie
Freud’s characterization of dreams and the primary process, even
if they are not explicitly stated.) These objects can be characterized
as figures precisely to the extent that they belong to an order
of sense - to an order of existence - which is neither that of
language, nor of practical transformation. I tentatively suggest
calling this order an order of figure, not in the sense of figurative,
but in a sense I would like to call figural.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, pp.69-70
(see top of p.95 in “The Emperor’s Old Clothes”, an
essay by Marshall McLuhan in VISION + VALUE SERIES, Gyorgy Kepes,
ed., 1966, and bottom of p.199 and top of p.200 in FROM CLICHE TO
ARCHETYPE).
“What struck me in May 1968 was this: something happened precisely
to the extent that this type of discourse, if it kept on being
produced, at least had absolutely no relation whatsoever with
the real unsettling of things; it even had an inverse relation
to it. The people who believed in their own political awareness
continued to hold this kind of discourse, and it was easy to see
that their utterances, very far from promoting the real transformation
of things, helped to keep them as they stood. The true problem,
politically as well as from an ‘artistic’ point of view (and only
anti-art is possible), is the inverse. The system, as it exists,
absorbs every consistent discourse; the important thing is not
to produce a consistent discourse but rather to produce ‘figures’
within reality. The problem is to endure the anguish of maintaining
reality in a state of suspicion through direct practices; just
like, for example, a poet is a man in a position to hold language
- even if he uses it - under suspicion, i.e. to bring about figures
which would never have been produced, that language might not
tolerate, and which may never be audible, perceptible, for us.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.79
(see middle of first paragraph of p.448, bottom of
p.460, and last sentence of first paragraph of p.517 in LETTERS).
“An ‘artist’ is someone who presents problems of forms. The
essential element, the only decisive one, is form. Modifying social
reality is not important at all if it aims at putting back into
place something that will have the *same form*. What is important,
above all, is to cease sympathizing with artists, what must be
understood is the true problem they are putting before political
people. There is more revolution, even if it is not much, in American
Pop art than in the discourse of the Communist party.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.83
(see bottom of p.1 in THE GUTENBERG GALAXY, p.65 in
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, top of p.224 in ESSENTIAL McLUHAN, middle of
p.243 in THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT).
“It is on this very level that junctions can occur between students
and workers, on this level of an absolutely practical art which
consists, precisely, in deconstructing not the material, plastic
screen of representation - not an automobile as in the case of
pop artists - but the ideological screen of representation, a
subway station as a social space, for example, people’s relation
to the public transport system taking them to work, their relation
to subway tickets, their relation with one another, or with the
hierarchical organisation of a workshop, a factory, or a university,
etc. This has a direct connection with art, not with the avant-garde,
but with anti-art, with that capacity to seek out and to maintain
forms that are neither realist forms at the level of perception,
not signifiable within an articulated discourse."
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.81
(see Marshall McLuhan [with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric
McLuhan], MEDIA, MESSAGES & LANGUAGE: The World as Your Classroom,
pp.xix-xxv, and bottom third of p.100 in TAKE TODAY).
Following in McLuhan’s footsteps as a phenomenologist
(see top of p.540 in LETTERS, and pp.60-66 in LAWS
OF MEDIA),
Lyotard does not propose tactility, or silence, *per se* as an
aesthetic program for seduction:
“I believe that the true art-phantasy relation is not direct;
the artist does not externalize systems of internal figures, he
is someone who undertakes to free *from* phantasy, *from* the
matrix of figures whose heir and whose locus he is, what really
belongs to the primary process, and is not a repetition, not a
‘graphy’.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.74
(see “Fantasy News, Psychedelic TV” section of Marshall
McLuhan’s interview with Mark Gerzon in WORLD PAPER, Volume 1, No.
1, January, 1979).
“When this is resorted to, you have a work that is no longer
jammed by phantasy, that is no longer blocked in a repetitive
configuration, but on the contrary one that opens upon other possibilities,
that *plays*, that sets itself up in the ‘inner-world’: this is
not the world of personal phantasy (and neither, obviously, is
it that of reality); this is an *oscillating* work, in which there
is room for the play of forms, a field liberated by the reversal
of phantasy, but which still rests upon it. This has nothing to
do with aesthetics and it does not necessarily produce hermetic
works.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.75
(see middle of p.223 in LETTERS).
Citing Freud as a media analyst,
Lyotard limns McLuhan’s method of
“corporate psychiatry”:
“Freud tells the hysteric: you are seeing things, you are fantasizing,
tell me what you see, as you tell me about it, the consistency
of the images will melt away. So there is a theater of images,
of which the hysteric is the spectator, on the couch. Upon this,
Freud constructs a second set-up where the hysteric is an actress,
and the analyst, the invisible listener; radio comes after theater,
more precisely, a radio hooked up to the auditorium, the listener
not seeing the stage himself, as in radio commentary of boxing
matches, football games. The charges invested in images will be
*spent*, but in words. These words (the patient’s, the commentator’s)
will butt against the analyst’s silence: energizing silence, of
course - these words given as a request for love will remain unanswered.
If the analyst were to reply, it would be as if he himself had
stepped out onto the stage. Far from dissolving the phantasy,
this would reinforce it, which is what happens in everyday ordinary
life, where the hysteric has eyes and does not hear. But here,
in Doctor Freud’s office, what is keeping silent in and being
kept silent by the phantastic mise-en-scene must be heard. The
analyst’s silence *must* put an end (?) to the silence of the
hysteric. Obliteration of the operations of production in the
symptom, exhibition of these same operations in the analysis:
two silences with inverse functions; the silence of noise, of
the imaginary, the silence of structure, of the symbolical; and
like a springboard from one to the other, the silence of the analyst.
All three the complementary elements of a single device, that
of analysis. The words the patient addresses to the analyst carry
the murmur of the affects; they meet with the doctor’s silence,
thanks to which they will be distributed throughout the ‘pure’
silence of *ratio*, which separates distinctive units (phonemes)
and allows us to recognize the verbal signifier and to communicate.
This is why the scene described to the analyst under these conditions
will be ‘freed’, put back into circulation, liquidated, ‘redeemed’,
says Freud. The phantom-phantasy that shackled it will be removed;
the true God, Logos, will triumph.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, pp.102-103
(see bottom of p.45 in THE GUTENBERG GALAXY, and p.225
in ESSENTIAL McLUHAN).
Lyotard is writing at the beginning
of the pentadic phase of technology’s evolution when there is complete
fusion between our bodies (“first nature”) and our technological
extensions (“second nature”), creating the circumstances of an ersatz
autonomy for the after-image of one or the other. Earlier,
McLuhan wrote from this vantage but emphasized the autonomous
movements of second nature (the “media”) and consciously suppressed
first nature, as Baudrillard did later, because the printed medium
dictates an arbitrary choice, or “figure”. Lyotard emphasizes the
metamorphoses of an autonomous first nature (“desire”) as his necessary
printed figure:
“There is in every text a principle of displaceability (*Verschiebbarkeit*,
said Freud), on account of which the written work induces other
displacements here and there (within authors and readers both),
and can thus never be but the snapshot of a mobile, itself a referred,
secondary unity, under which currents flow in all directions.
By collecting texts and making them a book, one encloses them
in a protective membrane and they become part of a cell which
will defend its unity; my aim, in presenting the essays collected
here, is to break up this unity.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.9.
“The desire underlying and informing institutions composes set-ups
which are energetic investments in the body, in language, in the
earth and the city, in the difference of sexes and ages, etc.
Kapitalism is one of these set-ups.”
Ibid., p.13.
“Art, in the critique factory, is not a workshop for the making
of tools. The most modern trends - American abstracts, pop and
hyper-realism in painting and sculpture, poor and concrete musics
(Cage’s above all), free choreographies (Cunningham’s), intensity
theaters (if they exist) - place critical thought and negative
dialectics before a considerable challenge: the works they produce
are affirmative, not critical. They aver a new position of desire,
the traces of which have just been referred to. The philosopher
and the politicist (whose thinking you are about to consider)
would have been content, after Adorno, with using the arts as
formal reversal matices; they are nonetheless required to have
an eye and an ear, a mouth and a hand for the new position, which
is the end of all critique. They might find this difficult: what
if it were their own end as well.”
Ibid., pp.16-17
(see bottom third of p.243 in THROUGH THE VANISHING
POINT, and last quote from Marshall McLuhan in TIME magazine, August
9, 1968, p.40).
Lyotard also intuits McLuhan’s expose of the tetrad-manager:
“Possibility of the incompossibles, occupation of a single space
by several bodies or of a single body by several positions, simultaneity
of the successive, consequently, approach of a timelessness which
will be the chronical pendant of this ‘topological’ space.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, p.68.
“A critical political party also inhabits the silence of the
signifier, the silence of domination; it considers the surface
of experience as appearance, mere symptom, and even if it decides
not to take power, power is already taken by it to the extent
that it repeats this device of appearance and effacement, of theater,
of politics as a *domaine*. Even should ‘tonal resolution’ be
deferred endlessly, this party will be a tragic political party,
it will be the negative dialectic of the *Aufklarung*; it is the
Frankfurt School, demythologized, Lutheran, nihilistic Marxism.”
Ibid., pp.108-109
(see p.22 in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, and bottom
of first column in McLuhan’s op-ed in The New York Times, July 29,
1973).
“Transposed to *Kapital*: it is *produktion* no longer of products,
but of productions; *konsumption* no longer of objects, but of
consumptions; *musikke* no longer of sounds, but of musics. So
that the question is: the silence heard in noise, *immediately*,
*suddenly*, is it not still dominated by the unheard silence of
the Komposer-organizer, capital? *Kapital*, is it not the stage
director of noises and silences themselves, as mise-en-scene?
Destroy the work, but also destroy the work of works and *non-works*,
kapitalism as museum, as memory of everything that is possible.
De-memorize, like the unconscious.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, pp.109-110
(see bottom third of middle column of p.89 in THE
CoEVOLUTION QUARTERLY, Winter 1977/78, bottom of p.186 to top of
p.188 in THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE, and middle of p.145 in TAKE TODAY).
“I would be tempted to say that what pleases us now is what
disconcerts us, and in this sense we are really in Freud’s ‘death
drive’. What we are interested in is the dimension of otherness,
alteration. There is a constant displacement and this displacement
as such is what we are interested in, the fact that we are disconcerted,
put out of time, caught on the wrong foot... Yes, the absence
of a locus. Pontalis spoke of a Freudian utopia in the strong
sense of the word. He meant that there was a non-locus. Well,
what pleases us disconcerts us because it points to a non-locus.”
Lyotard,
DRIFTWORKS, pp.32-33
(see last sentence of p.71 in the interview with Marshall
McLuhan, Toronto Daily Star, May 6, 1967).
And this brings us to the vortex of Deleuze
and Guattari. They are not timid in
confronting the pentadic features of the miniaturization of the
post-Global Theater hologram and recognize the ambivalence it creates
for all institutions, new, old and future ones, including the medium
of print itself.
“A book has neither subject nor object; it is made up of variously
formed materials, of very different dates and speeds. As soon
as a book is attributed to a subject, this working of materials
and the exteriority of their relations is disregarded
(see middle of p.33, top of p.37, and pp.56-59 in
THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE).
A beneficent God is invented for geological movements. In a
book, as in everything else, there are lines of articulation or
segmentation, strata, territorialities; but also lines of flight,
movements of deterritorialization and of destratification. The
comparative rates of flow along these lines produce phenomena
of relative slowness and viscosity, or alternatively of precipitation
and rupture. All this, these lines and measurable speeds, constitute
an *arrangement* (*agencement*). A book is such an arrangement,
and as such unattributable. It is a multiplicity - but we still
don’t know what the multiple implies when it ceases to be attributed,
that is to say, when it is raised to the status of a substantive.
A machinic arrangement (*agencement machinique*) is oriented toward
the strata that undoubtedly make of it a kind of organism, either
a signifying totality or a determination attributable to a subject,
but it is oriented no less toward a *body without organs* that
never ceases to break down the organism, causing a-signifying
particles to pass and circulate freely, pure intensities, and
causing the attribution to itself of subjects to which it allows
no more than a name as trace of an intensity.”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
ON THE LINE, 1983, pp.2-3
(see bottom of p.36, bottom third of p.144 in TAKE
TODAY, and top of p.479 in LETTERS).
“Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with land-surveying
and map-making, even of countries yet to come.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, p.5
(see top paragraph in last column of p.4 in CAMPUS
MAGAZINE, Volume 6, No. 3, October/November 1973).
“The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed on itself;
it constructs it. It contributes to the connection of fields,
the freeing of bodies without organs, and their maximal access
onto the plane of consistency. It becomes itself part of the rhizome.
The map is open, connectable in all its dimensions, and capable
of being dismantled; it is reversible, and susceptible to constant
modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to montages of
every kind, taken in hand by an individual, a group, or a social
formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of
art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps
one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that
it always has multiple entrances.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, pp.25-26
(see p.120 in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE).
“The ideal for a book would be to display everything on such
a plane of exteriority, on a single page, on the same shoreline:
lived events, historical determinations, received concepts, individuals,
groups and social formations.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, p.17
(see bottom third of p.121 to top third of p.126 in
FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE).
“Evolutionary schemes are no longer restricted to models of
arborescent descent that go from the least to the most differentiated,
but may follow a rhizome that operates immediately within the
heterogeneous and jumps from one already differentiated line to
another.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, p.21
(see second paragraph of p.427, and p.428 in LETTERS).
Understanding the *ad hoc* nature of the constantly improvised
features of a networking crucible, Deleuze
and Guattari cite the “rhizome” as
the appropriate model for the digital environment’s inveterate simultaneous
embrace of the centralizing and decentralizing characteristics that
McLuhan stigmatized for the previously
programmed, automated society
(see MacLEAN’S magazine, Volume 87, No. 1, January,
1974, p.27).
“To be a rhizomorph is to produce stems and filaments that look
like roots, or better still, to connect with roots by penetrating
into the trunk, even if it means having them serve strange new
functions. We are tired of the tree. We must no longer put our
faith in trees, roots, or radicels; we have suffered enough from
them. The whole arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology
to linguistics. On the contrary, only underground stems and aerial
roots, the adventitious and the rhizome are truly beautiful, loving,
or political. Amsterdam, a city not rooted at all, a rhizome-city
with its canal-stems, where utility is linked to the greatest
folly, in its relationship with a commercial war machine.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, p.33
(see middle of p.49, and middle of p.94 in TAKE TODAY,
and middle of second column of p.69 in FORCES magazine, Hydro-Quebec,
No. 22, 1973).
“Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems comprised of centers
of significance and subjectivization, of autonomous centers like
organized memories. The corresponding models are such that an
element receives information only from a superior unity, and a
subjective affect only from pre-established connections. This
is easily seen in current problems with data processing and electronic
computers, which still retain the oldest models of thought insofar
as they confer power on a central organ or memory.... The authors
contrast these centered systems with a-centered systems, networks
of finite automata, where communication occurs between any two
neighbors, where channels or links do not pre-exist, where individuals
are all interchangeable and are defined only by their state at
a given moment, in such a way that local operations are co-ordinated
and the final overall result is synchronized independently of
any central authority.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, pp.36 and 38
(see top of p.110 in TAKE TODAY, and pp.356-357 in
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA).
“The margin for manoeuvre in psychoanalysis is thus very limited.
There is always a General or a boss in psychoanalysis (General
Freud), as there is in its object. Alternatively, by treating
the unconscious as an a-centered system, that is, as a machinic
network of finite automata (rhizomes), schizo-analysis reaches
another state altogether of the unconscious.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, pp.39-40
(see middle of p.223 and top third of p.239 in UNDERSTANDING
MEDIA, top half of p.86, middle of p.99, pp.161-162, bottom of p.199
and top of p.200 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE, bottom third of p.22
in TAKE TODAY, and pp.67 and 83 in THE GLOBAL VILLAGE: Transformations
in World Life and Media in the 21st Century [with Bruce Powers],
1989).
“More still, it is American literature, and before that English,
that has indicated this sense of the rhizomatic, that has known
how to move between things, to institute a logic of *and*, to
overthrow ontology and to dismiss the foundations, to nullify
beginnings and endings. It has known how to be pragmatic. The
middle is not at all an average - far from it - but the area where
things take on speed. *Between* things does not designate a localizable
relation going from one to the other and reciprocally, but a perpendicular
direction, a transversal movement carrying away the one *and*
the other, a stream without beginning or end, gnawing away at
its two banks and picking up speed in the middle.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, p.58
(see pp.6-7 in The McLuhan DEW-LINE, Volume 1, No.
4, October, 1968, top third of p.136, bottom third of p.155, and
photograph on p.156 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE, middle of p.81
in TAKE TODAY, and first full sentence at the top of p.371, bottom
half of p.392, p.461, and p.504 in LETTERS).
“America should be considered a place apart. Obviously it is
not exempt from domination by trees and the search for roots.
This is evident even in its literature, in the quest for a national
identity, and even for a European ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac
sets off in search of his ancestry). Nevertheless, everything
of importance that has happened and that is happening proceeds
by means of the American rhizome: the beatnicks, the underground,
the subterranean mobs and gangs - all successive lateral shoots
in immediate connection with an outside. Hence the difference
between an American book and a European book, even when the American
sets off pursuing trees. A difference in the very conception of
the book: ‘Leaves of Grass’.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, pp.42-43
(see pp.74-75 in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, middle
of p.457 in LETTERS, p.44 and top of p.45 in TAKE TODAY, p.66 in
FORCES magazine, Hydro-Quebec, No. 22, 1973, and first column of
p.87 in THE CoEVOLUTION QUARTERLY, Winter 1977/78).
“The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State-societies
*or* counter-State societies), but that of interior and exterior.
The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what
it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not
only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot
be reduced to ‘foreign policy’, that is to a set of relations
among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions:
huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire *ecumenon*
at any given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in
relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of
the ‘multinational’ type, or industrial complexes, or even religious
formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic
movements, etc.); but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins,
minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary
societies in opposition to the organs of State power. The modern
world can provide us today with particularly well-developed images
of these two directions, in the way of worldwide ecumenical machines,
but also a neoprimitivism, a new tribal society as Marshall McLuhan
describes it. These directions are equally present in all social
fields, in all periods. It even happens that they become partially
merged. For example, a commercial organization is also a band
of pillage, or piracy, for part of its course and in many of its
activities; or it is in bands that a religious formation begins
to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less than worldwide
organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State, and that
this exteriority necessarily presents itself as that of a diffuse
and polymorphous war machine. It is a *nomos* very different from
the ‘law’.”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY: The War Machine, 1986, pp.15-16
(see pp.120-124 in THE GUTENBERG GALAXY, pp.60-61
in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE, bottom half of p.318, top of p.360,
bottom of p.361, top half of p.368, p.468, and bottom of p.515 in
LETTERS, and pp.38-43 in TAKE TODAY).
“The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to
reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations
and easily recognizable within the limits of its poles, always
seeking public recognition (there is no masked State). But the
war machine’s form of exteriority is such that it exists only
in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation
as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit
as well as in a religious creation, in all the flows and currents
that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the
State. It is not in terms of independence, but of coexistence
and competition *in a perpetual field of interaction*, that we
must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of
metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms,
megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority
in States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States
or stands against States.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.16-17
(see The McLuhan DEW-LINE, Volume 1, No. 8, February,
1969, and p.68, top third of p.112, p.180, and top third of p.322
in CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS).
“One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels,
in a lamellar or laminar flow, but from a curvilinear declination
to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane:
the greatest slope for the smallest angle. From *turba* to *turbo*:
in other words from bands or packs of atoms to the great vortical
organizations. The model is a vortical one; it operates in an
open space throughout which thing-flows are distributed, rather
than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things.
It is the difference between a *smooth* (vectorial, projective
or topological) space and a *striated* (metric) space: in the
first case ‘space is occupied without being counted’, while in
the second case ‘space is counted in order to be occupied’.
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.18-19
(see pp.214-216 in ESSENTIAL McLUHAN, bottom quarter
of p.7 in CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS, and middle of p.5 and middle
of p.273 in TAKE TODAY).
In the style of McLuhan,
Deleuze and Guattari offer
nine dialectics as exercises to prepare their readers for a surprise:
1. “Chess is indeed a war,
but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front,
a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle
lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles
even: pure strategy, while chess is a semiology. Finally, the
space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging
a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another,
of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number
of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open
space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing
up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another,
but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure
or arrival. The ‘smooth’ space of Go, as against the ‘striated’
space of chess. The *nomos* of Go against the State of chess,
*nomos* against *polis*. The difference is that chess codes and
decodes space, while Go proceeds altogether differently territorializing
or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space;
consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent
territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory
from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going
elsewhere...). Another justice, another movement, another space-time.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, p.4
(see top half of second column of p.263 in ESSENTIAL
McLUHAN, and first two sentences at top of p.227 in TAKE TODAY).
2. “Packs, bands, are groups of
the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type which centers
around organs of power. That is why bands in general, even those
engaged in banditry or high society life, are metamorphoses of
a war machine that differs formally from all State apparatuses
or their equivalents, which, on the contrary, structure centralized
societies. One certainly would not say that discipline is what
defines a war machine: discipline becomes the characteristic required
of armies when the State appropriates them. But the war machine
answers to other rules. We are of course not saying that they
are better, only that they animate a fundamental indiscipline
of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmailing
by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor,
all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, p.13
(see p.239 in CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS, and bottom
third of p.20 in TAKE TODAY).
3. “But it needs it in a very different
form, because the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to
conduits, pipes, embankments which prevent turbulence, which constrain
movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to
be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the
solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers. The hydraulic
model of nomad science and the war machine, on the other hand,
consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space,
in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects
all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement
from one specified point to another. Democritus, Menaechmus, Archimedes,
Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, Carnot, Poncelet, Perronet,
etc.: in each case a monograph would be necessary to take into
account the special situation of these savants whom State science
used only after restraining or disciplining them, after repressing
their social or political conceptions. (p.21)... This opposition,
or rather this tension-limit between the two kinds of science
- nomad, war-machine science and royal, State science - reappears
at different moments, on different levels. (p.22)... What we have,
rather, are two formally different conceptions of science, and,
ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal science
is perpetually appropriating the contents of vague or nomad science,
and nomad science is perpetually releasing the contents of royal
science. At the limit, all that counts is the constantly moving
borderline. (p.28)
(see first column of p.5 in TV GUIDE, September, 1978)...
In any case, if the State is always finding it necessary to
repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it opposes vague essences
and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so not because
the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because
of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply
a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State. (p.30)...
In the field of interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant
sciences confine themselves to *inventing problems* the solution
of which is linked to an entire set of collective, nonscientific
activities, but the *scientific solution* of which depends, on
the contrary, on royal science and the way it has transformed
the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus and
its organization of work. This is somewhat like intuition and
intelligence in Bergson, where only intelligence has the scientific
means to solve formally the problems posed by intuition, problems
that intuition would be content to entrust to the qualitative
activities of a humanity engaged in *following* matter...” (p.40)
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.21-40
(see bottom third of p.27 and top third of p.28 in
THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE, p.271 in THE GUTENBERG GALAXY, and top third
of p.119 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE).
4. “In modern States, the sociologist
succeeded in replacing the philosopher (as for example when Durkheim
and his disciples set out to give the republic a secular model
of thought). Even today, psychoanalysis lays claim to the role
of *Cogitatio universalis* as the thought of the Law, in a magical
return. And there are quite a few other competitors and pretenders.
Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study
of images of thought, and their historicity. In a sense, it could
be said that all this has no importance, that thought has never
had anything but laughable gravity. But that is all it requires:
for us not to take it seriously. Because that makes it all the
easier for it to think for us, and to be forever engendering new
functionaries. Because the less people take thought seriously,
the more they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly,
what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible
thing - to be a thinker?
But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent
intheir acts, discontinuous in their appearances, and the existence
of which is mobile in history. These are the acts of a ‘private
thinker’, as opposed to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
or even Chestov... Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the
desert. They destroy images.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.43-44
(see bottom half of p.247 in THE GUTENBERG GALAXY,
and middle of p.184 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE).
5. “The *nomos* is the consistency
of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition
to the law or the *polis*, as the backcountry, a mountainside
or the vague expanse around a city (“either nomos or polis”).
There is therefore, and this is the third point, a significant
difference between the spaces: sedentary space is striated, by
walls, enclosures and roads between enclosures, while nomad space
is smooth, marked only by ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced
with the trajectory. Even the lamella of the desert slide over
each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes
himself in a smooth space, he occupies, inhabits, holds that space;
that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define
the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest
that the nomad is on the contrary *he who does not move*. Whereas
the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or
hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to
depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest,
where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism
as a response to this challenge. Of course, the nomad moves, but
while seated, and he is only seated while moving (the Bedouin
galloping, knees on the saddle, sitting on the soles of his upturned
feet, ‘a feat of balance’). The nomad knows how to wait, he has
infinite patience. (p.51)... The nomad is there, on the land,
wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow,
in all directions. The nomad inhabits these places, he remains
in them, and he himself makes them grow, for it has been established
that the nomad makes the desert no less than he is made by it
(see middle of p.443 in LETTERS, first italicized sentence at
bottom of p.82, and last sentence on p.205 in TAKE TODAY).
He is a vector of deterritorialization. He adds desert to desert,
steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations the orientation
and direction of which endlessly vary. The sand desert does not
only have oases, which are like fixed points, but also rhizomatic
vegetation that is temporary and shifts location according to
local rains, bringing changes in the direction of the crossings.
The same terms are used to describe ice deserts as sand deserts:
there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate
distance, no perspective or contour, visibility is limited; and
yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that does not rely
on points or objects, but on haecceities, on sets of relations
(winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the
creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both); it is a tactile
space, or rather ‘haptic’, a sonorous much more than a visual
space...” (p.53)
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.51-53
(see top half of second column of p.71 in the interview
with Marshall McLuhan, Toronto Daily Star, May 6, 1967, and p.198
in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE).
6. “It is in State armies that
the problem of the treatment of large quantities arise, in relation
to other matters; but the war machine operates with small quantities
that it treats using numbering numbers. These numbers appear as
soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing
up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject.
The independence of the number in relation to space is not a result
of abstraction, but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which
is occupied without itself being counted. The number is no longer
a means of counting or measuring, but of moving: it is the number
itself that moves through smooth space.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.65-66
(see bottom half of p.109 in UNDERSTANDING MEDIA).
7. “Weapons and weapon handling
seem to be linked to a free action model, and tools to a work
model. Linear displacement, from one point to another, constitutes
the relative movement of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation
of a space that constitutes the absolute movement of the weapon.
It is as though the weapon were moving, self-propelling, while
the tool is moved. (p.79)... What effectuates a free action model
is not the weapons in themselves and in their physical aspect,
but the ‘war machine’ assemblage as the formal cause of the weapons.
And what effectuates the work model is not the tools, but the
‘work machine’ assemblage as the formal cause of the tools. When
we say that the weapon is inseparable from a speed-vector, while
the tool remains linked to conditions of gravity, we are claiming
only to signal a difference between two types of assemblage, a
distinction that holds even if in the assemblage proper to it
the tool is abstractly ‘faster’, and the weapon abstractly more
‘weighty’. The tool is by essence tied to a genesis, a displacement
and an expenditure of force whose laws reside in work, while the
weapon concerns only the exercise or manifestation of force in
space and time, in conformity with free action. The weapon does
not fall from the sky, and obviously assumes production, displacement,
expenditure and resistance. But this aspect relates to the common
sphere of the weapon and the tool, and does not yet concern the
specificity of the weapon, which only appears when force is considered
in itself, when it is no longer linked to anything but the number,
movement, space or time, or *when speed is added to displacement*.
Concretely, a weapon as such does not relate to the Work model,
but to the Free Action model, with the assumption that the conditions
of work are fulfilled elsewhere. In short, from the point of view
of force, the tool is tied to a gravity-displacement, weight-height
system; the weapon to a speed-*perpetuum mobile* system (it is
in this sense that it can be said that speed in itself is a ‘weapons
system’.” (pp.80-81)
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.79-81
(see bottom of p.87 to top half of p.90 in LAWS OF
MEDIA, and bottom half of p.510 in LETTERS).
8. “*Metallurgy in itself constitutes
a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism.* (p.90)... Matter
and form have never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; and
yet the succession of forms tends to be replaced by the form of
a continuous development, the variability of matters tends to
be replaced by the matter of a continuous variation. If metallurgy
has an essential relation with music, it is not only by virtue
of the sounds of the forge, but of the tendency within both arts
to bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development
of form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of
matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy;
the musical smith was the first ‘transformer’. In short, what
metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life inherent to matter,
a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless
exits everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered
unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy
is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal
the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism,
metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of
matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties
of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements.
Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the
conductor of all matter. The machinic phylum is metallurgical,
or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or
guidance device. And thought is born more from metal than from
stone: metallurgy is minor science in person, ‘vague’ science
or the phenomenology of matter. The prodigious idea of *Nonorganic
Life* - the very same idea Worringer considered the barbarian
idea *par excellence* - was the invention, the intuition of metallurgy.
Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a *body* without
organs.” (pp.102-103)
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.90-103.
9. “*War does not necessarily have
the battle as its object, and more importantly, the war machine
does not necessarily have war as its object, although war and
the battle may be its necessary result (under certain conditions).*
(pp.109-110)... This explains Clausewitz’s vacillation when he
establishes at one point that total war remains a war conditioned
by the political aim of States, and at another that it tends to
effectuate the Idea of unconditioned war. In effect, the aim remains
essentially political and determined as such by the State, but
the object itself has become unlimited. We could say that the
appropriation has changed direction, or rather that States tend
to unleash, reconstitute, an immense war machine of which they
are no longer anything more than the opposable or apposed parts.
This worldwide war machine, which in a way ‘reissues’ from the
States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism,
which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself;
but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, post-fascist,
figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object
directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine
reforms a smooth space which now claims to control, to surround
the entire earth. Total war itself is surpassed, towards a form
of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken charge
of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are no longer anything
more than objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the
point at which Clausewitz’s formula is effectively reversed; to
be entitled to say that politics is the continuation of war by
other means, it is not enough to invert the order of the words
as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is necessary
to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the States,
having appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to their
aims, reissue a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates
the States and assumes increasingly wider political functions.”
(pp.118-119)
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.109-119
(see p.152 in TAKE TODAY, bottom half of p.12 to top
half of p.13 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE, and last sentence on p.xi
in Canadian National Bank [Montreal] 100th Annual Report Publication,
December, 1974).
Deleuze and
Guattari collapse the dialectic to reveal they had been playing
with the tactile interval all along, and then put the post-tactile
observer in the bull’s-eye position on the rhizome’s dartboard:
“Undoubtedly, nothing is more outmoded than the man of war:
he has long since been transformed into an entirely different
character, the military man. And the worker himself has undergone
so many misadventures...
And yet men of war reappear, with many ambiguities: they are
all those who know the uselessness of violence, but who are adjacent
to a war machine to be recreated, one of active, revolutionary
counterattacks. Workers also reappear who do not believe in work,
but who are adjacent to a work machine to be recreated, one of
active resistance and technological liberation. They do not resuscitate
old myths or archaic figures, they are the new figure of a transhistorical
assemblage (neither historical, nor eternal, but untimely): the
nomad warrior and the ambulant worker. A somber caricature already
precedes them, the mercenary or mobile military instructor, and
the technocrat or transhumant analyst, the CIA and IBM
(see p.257 in TAKE TODAY, and top half of back-cover book flap
of TAKE TODAY).
But a transhistorical figure must defend himself as much against
old myths
(see pp.140-141 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE)
as against preestablished, anticipatory disfigurations
(see bottom of first column and top of second column in McLuhan’s
op-ed in The New York Times, July 29, 1973).
‘One does not go back to reconquer the myth, one encounters
it anew, when time quakes at its foundations under the empire
of extreme danger.’ Martial arts and state-of-the-art technologies
only have value because they create a possibility of bringing
together worker and warrior masses of a new type
(see first paragraph of p.31 in COUNTERBLAST).
The shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure
possibility, a mutation. There arise subterranean, aerial, submarine
technicians who belong more or less to the world order, but who
involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowledge and
action that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for
new assemblages. The borrowings between warfare and the military
apparatus, work and free action, always run in both directions,
for a struggle that is all the more varied.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.89-90
(see pp.117-130 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE).
“We can now better understand why I said that sometimes there
are at least three different lines, sometimes only two, and sometimes
only one, all very entangled. Sometimes there are actually three
lines, because the line of flight or of rupture combines all the
movements of deterritorialization, precipitates quanta, tears
off accelerated particles that cross into each other’s territories,
and carries them onto a plane of consistency or a mutating machine.
And then there is a second molecular line, where the deterritorializations
are now only relative, always compensated for by reterritorializations
which impose on them so many loops and detours, equilibria and
stabilizations. Finally there is the molar line, with well-defined
segments, where the reterritorializations accumulate in order
to constitute a plane of organization and to pass into an overcoding
machine.
Three lines: the nomad line, the migrant line, and the sedentary
line (the migrant and nomad lines are not at all the same). Or
there might only be two lines, because the molecular line would
only appear in oscillation between the two extremes, sometimes
swept away by the combination of deterritorializations, and sometimes
contributing to the accumulation of reterritorializations (sometimes
the migrant allies himself with the nomad, sometimes with the
mercenary or confederate of an empire: the Ostrogoths and the
Visigoths). Or perhaps there is only a single line, the primary
line of flight, the border or edge that is relativized in the
second line, and allows itself to be stopped or cut in the third.
But even then, it can be conveniently presented as *the* line
born from the explosion of the other two. Nothing is more complicated
than a line or lines. This is what Melville is concerned with:
the dingys tied together in their organized segmentation, Captain
Ahab on his molecular line, becoming animal, and the white whale
in its mad flight.”
Deleuze and Guattari,
ON THE LINE, pp.93-94.
“Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We
have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in
a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective
a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen
it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts
of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy,
no longer another State, nor even another regime, but the ‘unspecified
enemy’; we have seen it put its counter-guerilla elements into
place, so that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice...
Yet the very conditions that make the State or World war machine
possible, in other words constant capital (resources and equipment)
and human variable capital, constantly recreate unexpected possibilities
for counterattack, unforseen initiatives determining revolutionary,
popular, minority mutant machines. The definition of the Unspecified
Enemy testifies to this... ‘multiform, maneuvering and omnipresent...
of the moral, political, subversive or economic order, etc.,’
the unassignable material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming
the most diverse forms. The first theoretical element of importance
is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings, and
this is *precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable
relation to war itself.*”
Deleuze and Guattari,
NOMADOLOGY, pp.119-120
(see pp.140-143 in THE GLOBAL VILLAGE).
Deleuze and
Guattari skillfully refresh the implications for autonomy
that McLuhan first articulated when he recognized the discarnate
“animal” stalking our tiny neighborhood.
So, in retospect, it appears Sylvere Lotringer
astutely mimed the pentadic when he offered five slippery pillars
to establish the foundations for the New York school of media ecology.
And, Sylvere Lotringer recently commented
on the origins of his SEMIOTEXTE project:
“If you compared theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault
to John Cage and William Burroughs, you could see a connection
between what the French were doing with concepts and what the
Americans were doing with perception.”
Time Out New York magazine,
March 7-14, 2002, p.73.
The parallels to the earlier project of the Toronto school of media
ecology are obvious, including especially the playful, satirical
aspects.
ACT
1 | ACT 2 | ACT 3 | ACT
4 | ACT 5 | ACT
6
|
ACT FOUR
In the second half of the eighties there appeared graduates from
the Toronto school of media ecology who attempted to preserve the
liberal, encyclopedic humanist features that they perceived in McLuhan’s
discoveries. Generally, what they had in common was a rejection
of the multi-media “comprehensivist” themes from the Toronto school
that Barrington Nevitt emphasized as
they wrestled with the question of the relevance of literate “generalist”,
or multi-specialist, values in the electronic maelstrom. This Diasporic
school of media ecology included:
Bruce W. Powe (A CLIMATE
CHARGED: Essays on Canadian Writers. Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press,
1984, and THE SOLITARY OUTLAW. Toronto, Ontario: Lester & Orpen
Dennys Limited, 1987),
William Irwin Thompson
(PACIFIC SHIFT. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985, GAIA: A
WAY OF KNOWING: Political Implications of the New Biology [edited
by William Irwin Thompson]. Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Lindisfarne
Press, 1987, and IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE: Making Worlds of Myth and
Science. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989),
Neil Postman (AMUSING
OURSELVES TO DEATH: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
New York: Penguin Books, 1985),
Robert K. Logan (THE
ALPHABET EFFECT: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development
of Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.,
1986), and
Derrick de Kerckhove and C.
J. Lumsden, eds., (THE ALPHABET AND THE BRAIN: The Lateralization
of Writing. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1988).
The Diasporic school celebrated the assumptions and benefits of
the Gutenberg Galaxy while cautiously recognizing, because of a
McLuhan-schooled suspicion towards the former’s disservices, the
opportunities for the renewal of humanist ideals presented by the
Marconi Galaxy. This school was indifferent to McLuhan’s disgust
with the sectarian conflicts that humanism necessarily evoked because
it genuinely believed the struggles over cultural “content” were
nutritious and invigorating. It lacked the detachment that McLuhan
encouraged towards technological “content”
(see middle of p.22 in COUNTERBLAST,
and middle of p.235 in LETTERS)
that led to his kind of diagnosis such as the following:
“Professor Mansell Jones in his
Modern French Poetry (pp.30-31) takes up this theme with reference
to two kinds of symbolism which he refers to as vertical and horizontal.
Vertical symbolism is of the dualistic variety, setting the sign
or the work of art as a link between two worlds, between Heaven
and Hell. It is concerned with the world as Time process, as becoming,
and with the means of escape from Time into eternity by means
of art and beauty. Vertical symbolism asserts the individual will
against the hoi polloi. It is aristocratic. Yeats is the perfect
exemplar. Horizontal symbolism, on the other hand, sets the work
of art and the symbol a collective task of communication, rather
than the vertical task of elevating the choice human spirit above
the infernal depths of material existence. In idealist terms,
the vertical school claims cognitive status for its symbols, because
the conceptual meanings attached to art are in this view a means
of raising the mind of man to union with the higher world from
which we have been exiled. Whereas, on the other hand, the horizontal,
or space school, appeals to intuition, emotion and collective
participation in states of mind as a basis for communication and
of transformation of the self. The vertical school seeks to elevate
the self above mere existence. The horizontal symbolists seek
to transform the self, and ultimately to merge or annihilate it.
Mr. Eliot’s position is by no means
simple or consistent within itself, but as between the vertical
and horizontal camps, his poetic allegiance is markedly horizontal
or spatial.
To Catholics, (for all of whom pre-existence is nonsense), the
anguish generated over the problems of Time and Space and the
self may well be baffling. However, if you are frantically concerned
with seeking an exit from a trap, it is of the utmost urgency
to understand the mechanism of the trap that holds you. Are you
a prisoner of time? (‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying
to awake,’ says the young esthete Stephen Dedalus.) If so, there
are specific dialectical resources which can conduct an elite
few to the escape hatch. Are you a prisoner of space? Are you
a mechanical puppet manipulated by a thread held in remote, invisible
hands? If so, you can learn the techniques of Yoga or Zen Buddhism
or some related mode of illumination which will show you the *way*.
To learn how to make perfect your will, you need to negate your
own personality and to learn that detachment from self and from
things and from persons which reveals the totally illusory character
of self, things, and persons. Existence is not so much an historical
trap in time as a wilderness of horrors multiplied by mirrors.
Existence creates itself by an endless chain of suggestions richocheting
off each other, just as a symbolist poem of the Eliot kind generates
its meanings by spatial juxtaposition. A Catholic poet like Paul
Claudel, of course, is not bound by these dichotomies of
space and time, the vertical and horizontal. But all he has written
is strongly marked with his keen awareness of the space-time controversies
in art, politics and religion. (To the European, the comparative
American ignorance of these doctrines as elaborated in art, is
precisely what constitutes American innocence.) Thus in his section
‘On Time’ in Poetic Knowledge, Claudel takes up the space position,
then appropriates the time ammunition as well:
... Claudel’s thought and poetry obviously move freely in both
time and space. As a symbolist he avails himself to the utmost
degree of the spatial techniques of inner and outer landscape
for fixing particular states of mind. This procedure makes available
to him all the magical resources invoked by the Romantics for
using particular emotions as immediate windows onto Being, as
techniques of connatural union with reality. But he values equally
the resources of dialectic and continuous discourse. He can therefore
be both Senecan or symbolist, and temporal. That would seem to
be an inevitable program for any Catholic for whom Time and Space
are not sectarian problems. Today many thoughtful people are torn
between the claims of time and space, and speak even of The Crucifixion
of Intellectual Man as he is mentally torn in these opposite directions.
As the dispute quickens, the Catholic is more and more reminded
of the inexhaustible wisdom and mercy of the Cross at every intersection
instant of space and time. These moments of intersection became
for Father Hopkins (and also for James Joyce)
epiphanies.
... It is not the purpose of this paper to explain the complex
falsehoods of the time and space schools of aesthetics, religion
and politics. For a Catholic it is easy to admire and use much
from each position. But by and large the vertical camp is rationalist
and the horizontal camp magical in its theory of art and communication.”
- Marshall McLuhan, Eliot and the
Manichean Myth as Poetry, Address to Spring symposium of the Catholic
Renascence Society, April 19 ‘54, The McLuhan Papers, Vol. 130,
File 29, Manuscript Division, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.
Even though McLuhan, in his role as a literary Menippean satirist
(see p.448 and first paragraph of
p.517 in LETTERS),
would be reluctant to tolerate the issues raised by the Diasporic
school, he still recognized the inevitable advantages they would
temporarily enjoy in the coming decades over his study of the language
of media forms because he knew that the diversification of *content*
was the new ground for pentadic life
(see the first four lines at the top
of p.248 in THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT, and the top of the first
column of p.264 in ESSENTIAL McLUHAN).
However, it was the devotion to literate “content”, profitable
as it would be, that stigmatized this school with the anemic pall
of the POB (“print-oriented bastard”, see bottom third of p.288
in TAKE TODAY) and left it helpless before the flood of post-literate
“content” fetishism (“cultural studies”). The Diasporics had been
given the ammunition to bypass the postmodern distraction via the
Toronto school’s perception that James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as
a perpetual motion machine of multi-media “content”, is hardly a
“book” or novel but a penetrating infiltration of the coming permeable
environments. Instead, they sought comfort in sifting through the
lingering afterimage of the legacy of the heroic writer, artist,
or scholar while painfully aware that this niche-marketed mirror
of Perseus is cracked - doomed to stall and stutter before the Gorgon
of digital exuberance.
Some samples of the blowing of both horns of their dilemma:
a) “For many, Shakespeare *has*
been erased from our minds and the ‘art is dead’ debate is a banality.
But it is hard to smother the human spirit and wherever there
are individuals, there is art. Fine poems, novels, stories, plays,
and essays continue to be written, defying the prophecies of the
gloom-pourers.
Still, you cannot avoid the tremors of the global climate: it
has to be faced that what was once called ‘High Cult’ has decayed
and what is considered serious has been confined to the new cloisters
of the University. There the poem and the novel are reconstructed
and deconstructed as a model or paradigm of interlocking graphs
and charts and abstracted symbols. The novel and the poem cease
to exist: they become Structures instead. The impact on Canadian
writers has been less blatant than elsewhere, but because of electric
atmospheric pressures writers have been forced to deal with nineteenth
century nationalism or have leapt ‘ahead’ to what has been dubbed
post-modernism or ‘fabulism’. And, as Louis
Dudek has shrewdly observed: ‘Modernism is something that
is still developing in Canada.’ Thus the cultural mood in the
country is a combination of the reactionary and the fashionable.”
- Bruce W. Powe, A CLIMATE CHARGED:
Essays on Canadian Writers. Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1984,
p.73.
“The literate person is an outsider today. Yet this exile, as
it were, may give the literate person an advantage. To read and
write may be as unique an accomplishment as it was in pre-literate
societies, in the thirteenth century, the time of The Name of
the Rose. Readers and writers will have the role of maintaining
the freshness and ferocity of language. They will have the job
of staying out of tune: to make certain that human beings remain
complex. The post-literate state may tell us why those writers
with nineteenth-century views of the Heroic Author sound like
anachronisms. When an author exerts the same mass-public appeal
on his time as a Romantic-Heroic author, then the relationship
with the audience is based on a sentimental nostalgia. The word
can too easily be dismissed.
Canetti has said that we cannot
permit ourselves the luxury of a sentimental hope. Instant meltdown
looms. What form can an eccentric literary influence take? To
go beyond the wordlessness, the cynicism, and the shining surface
of society, and recover the power of words. There is no way out
from a critical confrontation with our world. We must probe at
issues, ideas, and popular fronts; even at risk of losing a voice
in the consuming-consumer rush; even at risk of having the questioning
cheapened, forgotten, and flattered for the wrong reasons. Even
in Canada, in the midst of post-literacy: my place, my here.”
- Bruce W. Powe, THE SOLITARY OUTLAW.
Toronto, Ontario: Lester & Orpen Dennys Limited, 1987,
pp.187-188.
b) “The climactic work of the Atlantic
epoch is Finnegans Wake. Coming from a marginal culture at the
very edge of Europe, James Joyce very consciously finished Europe.
First, he finished the remains of the Mediterranean vision in
his Ulysses, a work that ends in the affirmation of the feminine
brought down out of Dante’s heaven and put to bed. Then, having
finished with the voyages of the solitary individual afloat on
a stream of consciousness, Joyce went on to express the transition
from print-isolated humanity in its book-lined study to H.C.E.,
Here Comes Everybody. At the time when the hardy objects of a
once materialistic science disappear into subatomic particles,
so characters as egos with discrete identities disappear to become
patterns of *corso-ricorso*, and history becomes the performance
of myth. Characterization is replaced by allusion, and as pattern
and configuration become more important than persons, Joyce brings
us to the end of the age of individualism. But like Moses on Mount
Pisgah gazing into a Promised Land he cannot enter, Joyce brings
us to the end of modernism, but he himself cannot pass over into
the hieroglyphic thought of the Pacific-Aerospace cultural ecology
to come.
McLuhan considered Finnegans Wake to be the prophetic work that
pointed to the arrival of electronic, post-civilized humanity,
the creature of changing roles who lives ‘mythically and in depth.’
Obviously, we are now only in the early days of the transition
from the Atlantic cultural ecology of the European epoch to the
Pacific-Space cultural ecology of the planetary epoch, and so
no one knows for certain just where these electronic and aerospace
technologies are taking us. But since I grew up in Los Angeles,
and not in Dublin or Paris, I have a few hunches.”
- William Irwin Thompson, PACIFIC
SHIFT. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985, pp.107-108.
“If evil announces the next level of historical order, then
evil is expressing the coming planetary culture. Unconsciously,
the world is one, for global pollution spells out a dark integration
that does not honor the rational boundaries of the nation-states.
And so, industrial nation-states in their fullest development
have contributed to their own end. Collectivization, then, must
mean that the future is some sort of collective consciousness
in which the completely individuated and conscious ego becomes
surrounded by the permeable membrane of an ecology of Mind and
not by the wall of civilization.
Rock festivals in particular, and rock music in general, seem
to express this fascination with collectivization. Since we have
become an electronic society, a society of information, it is
not surprising that the pollution of the new cultural ecology
is noise and paranoia. Rock music is about the relationship between
information and noise, and if the medium is the message, then
the requirement that rock music be loud to the point of physiological
damage clearly indicates that noise is the form that creates the
collectivization that does not honor the boundaries of biological
integrity. At a recent concert in Amsterdam, the Irish rock group
U2 was so loud that it registered as an earthquake on the seismographs
at the university.”
- Ibid., p.133.
“So if we take a good look around us, we can observe the return
of catastrophism to artistic and scientific narratives. What this
means, I think, is that the rock bottom foundation for industrial
society is giving out, and from the mathematics of Rene Thom to
the novels of Doris Lessing we are being shown a new vision of
planetary dynamics, a vision of sudden discontinuities. It is
probably no accident that Ronald Reagan has come in to invoke
all the old shibboleths of the industrial mentality, precisely
at the moment when they are becoming inadequate, for one often
sees in history that a radical shift is often preceded by an intensification
of the old. Consider warfare in the fifteenth century: right at
the moment when armor becomes most elaborate, with the knight
lifted on to his horse by levers and pulleys, is right at the
moment when the heavily armored knight is made irrelevant through
the longbow, the crossbow, and firearms. Elsewhere I have called
this kind of historical phenomenon ‘a sunset effect’, but one
can see it as a kind of supernova, an intensification of a phenomenon
that does not lead to its continuation, but to its vanishing.
So much for Reagan, but what about us? One theme that I think
this conference could consider is the ways in which the new paradigm
in science and art will relate to a new paradigm in politics.”
- William Irwin Thompson, GAIA: A
WAY OF KNOWING: Political Implications of the New Biology [edited
by William Irwin Thompson]. Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Lindisfarne
Press, 1987, p.18.
“President Reagan is the archetypal leader of our postindustrial
unconscious polity precisely because he is not a thinker. He is
almost entirely unconscious. He is indeed Walt Disney’s *Homo
ludens* and not Luther, Calvin, or Marx’s *Homo faber*. During
the rise of the middle classes and the emergence of the bourgeois
nation-state, the thinker, and not the military knight or the
prince of the church, was the architect of new polities. As Locke
was to Jefferson, so Marx was to Lenin; but now in the age of
global media, it is no longer the set of the theorist and the
pragmatist, but the artist and the actor. As Locke was to Jefferson,
so now is Disney to Reagan, for it was Disney who first constructed
a media city in which the past became a movie set and the citizen
was taken for a ride in fantasies with his own enthusiastic consent.
It was Disney who, along with McLuhan, first understood that television
would change the consciousness of literate, civilized humanity.
Cultural critics like McLuhan and Adorno issued dire warnings
about mass deception in the culture industry and the end of Western
Civilization, but Disney seemed to have a Kansan American naivete
and trust in the unifying power of popular culture. Indeed with
his Snow White, Disney himself effected the artistic transition
from the folk culture of the Brothers Grimm to pop culture; and
to be fair to Disney one must recognize that the transition from
oral folk tale to literature is as artistically presumptuous as
the transition from literature to film. With EPCOT, however, the
shadow side of Disney’s mass culture seems more apparent, as if
his ‘Imagineers’ now felt that the way to achieve a new political
collectivization was not through sad ‘communist suppression’ but
happy participation in fantasies of progress. In an age when suburban
Christianity no longer had the power of pagan rituals and frightful
rites of initiation, Disneyland created frightful rides in which
evil was distanced and laughed at, and the past became a visibly
comforting artifact in a world that was invisibly hurtling toward
a new scientific reorganization of society. The content of Disneyland
was the turn-of-the-century small town, but the invisible structure
was computerization. The content now of Disney World’s EPCOT is
the ‘World of Motion’ in which General Motors proclaims the freedom
of the individual to go where he chooses, but in the darkness
of that ride there is neither choice nor freedom. Similarly, ‘The
American Adventure’ of EPCOT brings all the American presidents
of history on stage, while two old irreverent writers (Franklin
and Twain) obligingly serve as ushers in a memorial service of
a civic religion that seeks to give the citizen an uplifting patriotic
experience. But all the automaton presidents are controlled by
a bank of computers from another place and by a small cadre of
scientists and technicians from another time.”
- Ibid., pp.174-175.
“Reagan’s Star Wars is, therefore, no sudden caprice or casual
afterthought, but a deep social and economic expression of the
Southern California world view, of that curious cultural mixture
of Hollywood fantasies and Big Science. It is neither a thought
nor a theory, but an actor’s intuition and a sense of timing of
what is implicit in the audience and in the audience’s historical
situation. Sometimes the intuition can sense the outlines of the
historical situation more quickly than the intellect, for the
intellect can become blinded by mountains of data. President Carter,
the nuclear engineer, clearly has a higher I.Q. than President
Reagan, but it was precisely Carter’s meticulousness that got
in his way. Carter approved the MX missile system, a costly behemoth
that dwarfed the pyramids as a public works project, but the MX
would have only stimulated the cement contractor’s business. Reagan’s
Star Wars, by contrast, demands the creation of whole new artificial
intelligence systems, fifth generation computers, and an integration
of universities and corporations that amounts to a complete transformation
of civilian society. Ironically, Eisenhower’s Republican nightmare
of ‘the military-industrial complex’ has become Republican Reagan’s
dream....
Reagan’s intransigence in his refusal to give up his commitment
to S.D.I. is understandable, for clearly both the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. would like to have some way of removing the threat of
punk nations that act in non-European and irrational ways, and,
obviously, space is the best place from which to monitor and control
hostile flights and launchings; but Reagan’s intransigence puts
him in the contradictory position of needing to keep the Soviets
as an enemy to support the American scientific economy, and at
the same time share information so that the Soviets do not drop
out of the competition or become a spoiler or punk nation themselves.
Since both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl demonstrate that the
high technologies of the superpowers cannot be trusted to work
without errors, it is clear that neither the U.S.A. nor the U.S.S.R.
can feel safe from an accidental misfiring on either side; therefore,
anything that makes one side feel threatened enough to move up
to a state of Red Alert is to be avoided at all costs. It would
appear that the cops and robbers game that the U.S.A. has chosen
to play with the Soviets is to challenge the Soviets with Star
Wars and secretly allow the information to be stolen to insure
that the Soviets will not become discouraged to drop out of the
competition altogether. And so we can see that ‘national defense’
is indeed an example of negation as a form of unconscious relationship,
for the end result of the arms race is a transnational militarization
that could be called the U.S.S.S.R.”
- Ibid., pp.176-178.
“A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor
is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of
unconscious relations and symbiotic processes. In these living
modes of communication in an ecology, even such irrational aspects
as noise, pollution, crime, warfare and evil can serve as constituent
elements of integration in which negation is a form of emphasis
and hatred is a form of attraction through which we become what
we hate. The Second World War in Europe and the Pacific expressed
chaos and destruction *through* maximum social organization; indeed,
this extraordinary transnational organization expressed the cultural
transition from a civilization organized around literate rationality
to a planetary noetic ecosystem in which stress, terrorism, and
catastrophes were unconsciously sustained to maintain the historically
novel levels of world integration. Through national, thermonuclear
terrorism, and, as well, through subnational expressions of terrorism
electronically amplified, these levels of stress and catastrophic
integration are still at work today. A World should not be seen,
therefore, as an organization structured through communicative
rationality, but as the cohabitation of incompatible systems by
which and through which the forces of mutual rejection serve to
integrate the apparently autonomous unities in a meta-domain that
is invisible to them but still constituted by their reactive energies.
Therefore, ideologies do not map the complete living processes
of a World, and unconscious polities emerge independent of ‘conscious
purpose’. Shadow economies (such as the drug traffic between Latin
America and the United States), and shadow exports (such as the
acid rain from the United States to Canada), and shadow integrations
(such as the war between the United States and Japan in the forties)
all serve to energize the emergence of a biome that is not governed
by conscious purpose.”
- Ibid., pp.209-210.
“Paradoxically, for my generation, one that came of age in the
revolutionary spirit of the affluent 1960s, liberation from institutions
and their systems of meanings was not a relationship with a specific
oppressive condition but a general, eternal, and absolute value
in and of itself. In challenging the rhetoric of Western Civilization,
the generation that mocked the bourgeois liberal pieties of its
fathers and mothers rather smugly took for granted a naive and
simpleminded faith in revolt against all forms of authority and
enduring value. And, as always seems to be the case in the world
of fashion, the French led the way. Roland
Barthes announced ‘The Death of the Author’ and tore down
this idol of literate civilization; Michel Foucault exposed the
‘episteme’ that bound institutions and forms of knowing into the
‘discourse’ that was itself the system of domination; and Derrida
made certain, with an ultimate Deconstruction, that no text would
ever rise up again with a pretense to ultimate meaning, or high-minded
and high-handed final authority. For an affluent and expanding
bureaucracy of academic literary critics and behavioral scientists,
this demolishing of the mystique of the solitary romantic artist
who could pretend to cosmic knowledge without the necessary university
credentials was indeed welcome news, and without much regret the
culture of Author-hood and Author-ity was shouldered aside. ‘Once
the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite
futile.... We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary
to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the
cost of the death of the Author.’
Such was the Paris of 1968. Meanwhile, back in California, people
couldn’t care less about such remote issues of European thought.
The electronic counterculture, and not literary high culture,
was giving body to the *zeitgeist* and in an elitist diminuendo,
first Aldous Huxley, then Alan Watts, then Timothy Leary, and
then Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead worked to extend explorations
with drugs to the new postindustrial masses who were about to
find themselves in the new musical economy of the global village.
Intellectual fashions, much like those of *couture*, stimulate
changes that are not so much developments as reactions and a mere
craving that signals boredom and a desire to mark the new decade
with a new style. So the liberationism of the 1960s led to the
reactionary ‘New Age’ movement of the 1970s, one in which the
counterculture became caught up in the pre-civilized ‘epistemes’
of megalithic stone circles, dowsing, witchcraft, palmistry, shamanism,
and all the esoteric schools of the world religions that were
not popular with clerical orthodoxy: namely, Kabbalah, Sufism,
Zen, Tibetan Tantra, Yoga, and the Christian mystics from Meister
Eckhart to Thomas Merton. This fashion, in turn, generated its
reaction in the 1980s, as the populace swung back to fundamentalisms
in Christianity and Islam, and capitalist neoconservatism in the
governments of Thatcher, Reagan, and Kohl.
Just as the scholarly and introverted style of Aldous Huxley
became vulgarized by Timothy Leary, so the New Age movement, initiated
by the quiet introvert David Spangler in a remote village in Northern
Scotland, became vulgarized by Shirley MacLaine in television
specials and book dumps in supermarkets. These vulgarizations
at once express the distribution of a message to its largest audience
but also an addition of noise picked up by the transmitting medium
that overwhelms the signal and indicates that the communication
has become more mess than message and has lost its integrity as
it begins to dissolve into cultural entropy. Ennui quickly follows
excitement and people begin to look around for new signals to
flash their passage through time.
With the replacement of bookstores by supermarket chains, the
only books that are now available are books by movie stars and
TV celebrities. In a *differance*, the text is a sign of being
famous, and the famous are simply those who are famous for being
famous. An appearance on a TV show is itself an achievement, an
epiphany of the culture. A text in this world is not meant to
be read: it is simply another form of currency and a means of
exchange. In the consequent breakup of culture into subcultures,
intellectual respectability must come from its unavailability
and its resistance to communication and exchange, much like the
heavy gold stored under the Paradeplatz in Zurich, and so incomprehensibility
becomes the essential value. Here, the Europeans come back into
their own, and no American professors can hope to compete with
the likes of Derrida and Habermas.”
- William Irwin Thompson, IMAGINARY
LANDSCAPE: Making Worlds of Myth and Science. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1989, pp.5-7.
c) “The first is that at no point
do I care to claim that changes in media bring about changes in
the structure of people’s minds or changes in their cognitive
capacities. There are some who make this claim, or come close
to it (for example, Jerome Bruner,
Jack Goody, Walter Ong, Marshall
McLuhan, Julian Jaynes, and
Eric Havelock). I am inclined to
think they are right, but my argument does not require it. Therefore,
I will not burden myself with arguing the possibility, for example,
that oral people are less developed intellectually, in some Piagetian
sense, than writing people, or that ‘television’ people are less
developed intellectually than either. My argument is limited to
saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse;
it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring
certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding
a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms
of truth-telling. I will say once again that I am no relativist
in this matter, and that I believe the epistemology created by
television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology
but is dangerous and absurdist.
The second point is that the epistemological shift I have intimated,
and will describe in detail, has not yet included (and perhaps
never will include) everyone and everything. While some old media
do, in fact, disappear (e.g., pictographic writing and illuminated
manuscripts) and with them, the institutions and cognitive habits
they favored, other forms of conversation will always remain.
Speech, for example, and writing. Thus the epistemology of new
forms such as television does not have an entirely unchallenged
influence....
Obviously, my point of view is that the four-hundred-year imperial
dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit.
Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were
formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education,
knowledge, truth and information. I will try to demonstrate that
as typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television
takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above
all, value of public discourse dangerously declines. On what benefits
may come from other directions, one must keep an open mind.”
- Neil Postman, AMUSING OURSELVES
TO DEATH: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York:
Penguin Books, 1985, pp.27-29.
“In 1976, I was appointed editor of ETC: The Journal of General
Semantics. For ten years, I served in that capacity, and with
each passing year, my respect for Alfred
Korzybski increased and my respect for those academics
who kept themselves and their students ignorant of his work decreased.
I here pay my respects to a unique explorer, and by implication
mean to express my disdain for those language educators who steep
their students in irrelevancies and who believe that William Safire
and Edwin Newman have something important to say about language.”
- Neil Postman, ‘Alfred Korzybski’
in CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTIONS: Stirring Up Trouble About Language,
Technology, and Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988,
p.136.
d) “Let us examine the mechanism
whereby the integration of left- and right-brain processes could
take place and see what role the alphabet effect would play in
the realization of this transformation. Just as the printing press
enhanced the alphabet through uniformity and the ability to create
multiple copies relatively cheaply, so too the computer steps
up the intensity of alphabetic writing by making it more accessible
and easily controllable through word-processing routines. The
ability to easily assemble alphabetic texts, to automatically
correct, edit, and manipulate them beginning at the first-grade
level reinforces a number of left-brain processes of analysis
and rationality without requiring slavish conformity to the patterns
of linearity and sequence. The ease with which blocks of text
can be moved about in the larger composition promotes right-brain
processes of pattern recognition and hence creates a new balance
in the production of literary materials that belongs uniquely
to the computer. It is somewhat paradoxical that it is the unique
properties of the alphabet as a writing system that enables the
computer to develop the right-brain features of pattern recognition
and formation....
This is the promise of computer technology - that the vitality
of alphabetic literacy will be not only maintained but also enhanced.
The paradox of computers is that by stepping up the left-brain
processes of linear sequencing to the speed of light, new patterns
emerge, such as cybernetics and ecological analysis. These right-brain
processes, however, still retain many of the analytic properties
of preelectric alphabetic literacy. And it is also a reflection
of the flexibility and durability of the alphabet that a machine
that was designed primarily for numbers, as an automatic computing
machine, should now emerge just as importantly as a processor
and handler of alphabetic texts, i.e., a word processor. This
transformation of the computer is another example of the ubiquity
and the potency of the alphabet effect.”
- Robert K. Logan, THE ALPHABET EFFECT:
The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western
Civilization. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986,
pp.246-247.
e) “The theory I proposed in The
Alphabet and the Brain: The Lateralization of Writing is based
on the observation that when the ancient Greeks created their
alphabet, around the eighth century BC, they changed the direction
of their written script from the left orientation of the Phoenician
model to the right orientation to which we’ve become accustomed.
A few years ago, to find out if there were corresponding features
between the inner structure of orthographies and their orientation
on the surface of writing, I surveyed all the writing systems
of the world. The results were surprising.
All writing systems that represent sounds are written horizontally,
but all systems that represent images, like Chinese ideograms
or Egyptian hieroglyphs, are written vertically. Furthermore,
the vertical columns of image-based systems generally read right
to left.
All writing systems, except for the Etruscan, are written to
the right if they contain vowels. All systems without vowels are
written to the left. To explain this, I had to study the brain
and the visual systems.
My theory, which pertains not only to the Greek situation but
also to the impact of alphabetic literacy generally, can be summarized
by three basic hypotheses. Each theoretical point is supported
by specific historical evidence.
-
It is the intrinsic structure of a language that determines
the direction of writing. Systems such as Greek, Latin or
Ethiopian, which were first modelled on right-to-left consonantal
systems, eventually changed the direction of their script,
but only after vowels were added to the original model.
-
The choice of direction depends on whether the reading process
is based on combining letters by context (right to left) or
stringing them in sequence (left to right). This is because
the typical human brain recognizes configurations faster in
the left visual field, while it detects sequences faster in
the right visual field. The change of direction in Greek script
happened soon after a full complement of vowels was added
to the exclusively consonantal Phoenician language. The presence
of the vowels made the sequence of letters continuous, whereas
the system from which they had borrowed was a discontinuous
line of symbols, which relied upon being read in context rather
than sequence.
The fact that our alphabet changed direction once it acquired
vowels supports my hypothesis: that the structure of our language
has put pressure on our brain to emphasize its sequential and
‘time-ordered’ processing abilities.
Since literacy is generally acquired during our formative years,
and since it affects the organization of language - our most integral
information-processing system - there are good reasons to suspect
that the alphabet also affects the organization of our thought.
Language is the software that drives human psychology. Any technology
that significantly affects language must also affect behaviour
at a physical, emotional and mental level. The alphabet is like
a computer program, but more powerful, more precise, more versatile
and more comprehensive than any software yet written. A program
designed to run the most powerful instrument in existence: the
human being. The alphabet found its way in the brain to specify
the routines that would support the firmware of the literate brainframe.
The alphabet created two complementary revolutions: one in the
brain and the other in the world.”
- Derrick de Kerckhove and C. J. Lumsden,
eds., THE ALPHABET AND THE BRAIN: The Lateralization of Writing,
1988 (reprinted in Derrick de Kerckhove, THE SKIN OF CULTURE:
Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Toronto, Ontario: Somerville
House Publishing, 1995, edited by Christopher Dewdney, pp.27-28).
The Diasporic school could be accused of shrinking before the task
of discovering “the means of living simultaneously in all cultural
modes while quite conscious”
(see p.120 in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE)
because they not only failed to notice that McLuhan, in his books,
satirized the pervasive twentieth-century discovery in many fields
that the “medium is the message”, but they were also unable to intuit
McLuhan’s strategy for confronting the pentadic fate of the tetrad-manager.
Nonetheless, they can be commended for creating rich packages that
stimulated the POBs with old questions inspired by the Toronto school.
ACT
1 | ACT 2 | ACT 3
| ACT 4 | ACT 5 | ACT 6
ACT FIVE
The nineties McLuhan revival.
ACT SIX
You're lookin' at it!
ACT 1 |
ACT 2 | ACT 3 | ACT 4
| ACT 5 | ACT 6
|