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More McLuhan
Submitted by marmalade on 12 October 2006 - 9:13am.
Okay, so I've been reading some of this book by Marshall McLuhan (of "the message is the medium" fame), and (in addition to being an even more trippy read than Understanding Media) it's a pretty amazing document. The book is called The Gutenberg Galaxy and was (obviously?) published sometime back in the sixties when Star Trek fervor was still running strong.
Now there's a million cool (and naturally underdeveloped) ideas running around in this book. One of them has to do with materiality, and McLuhan conjectures as follows:
"As our age translates itself back into the oral and auditory modes because of the electronic pressure of simultaneity, we become sharply aware of the uncritical acceptance of visual metaphors and models by many past centuries ... We become extremely conscious of cultural models and bias when moving from one dominant form of awareness to another, as between Greek and Latin or English and French. So we are no longer amazed that the oriental world has no concept of 'substance' or of 'substantial form,' since they experience no visual pressure to break up experience into such packages [because their alphabet is symbolic rather than syllabic]."
Okay, so, now that's a somewhat ... stereotyped?... mildly racist?... statement about the 'oriental' mindset, but I just wondered about the differences in materiality of different types of print themselves--how much more or less material is a language like Chinese, where words are (more) direct symbolizers of the thing they represent--recall magoo's pipe example in class on Monday? Are such languages inherently closer to oral/auditory modes? Is the idea of hypermedia moving us in that direction--turning our totally abstract script into a more "symbolic" (and therefore more "material") creation?
But besides all of that, the format of McLuhan's book is also especially awesome. The man refuses to provide an index--instead his book is jam-packed with little gem-like McLuhan-aphorisms (i.e. "With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life" or "Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African" or "Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy"), and he organizes his book around about sixty or so of these witty/objectional/incomprehensible sayings. There is no index. There is no table of contents. There are just these "glosses" as he calls them (which he does kindly list in back), and the reader must try to infer what the bejesus the man is going to talk about in each section by reading these titles.
Anyway, it's a bit cool. Maybe even a bit hypertexty--argument by association, just picking an aphorism (=?a link?) and sort of seeing where it goes, trying to follow the obscure mental processes of Marshall McLuhan...
I mean, what more could you ask for in this world? :)
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"So we are no longer amazed
"So we are no longer amazed that the oriental world has no concept of 'substance' or of 'substantial form,' since they experience no visual pressure to break up experience into such packages [because their alphabet is symbolic rather than syllabic]."
I really wish that McLuhan would do his research and place himself outside of the dominant Western framework of understanding language, materiality, and orality before making such racist statements. What I find problematic, besides the suggestions that "oriental" nations are backwards because of their language cultures, is the fact that McLuhan assigns value to concepts that should inherently be neutral. What privileges literacy over orality? What privileges syllables over symbols?
I feel like the processes by which different cultures experience language and materiality do not need to be evaluated based on the working Western model. "Substance," in McLuhan's mind (and please correct me if I'm wrong), seems to involve the process by which languages like English create words based on syllables, which are comprised of letters--a formative process which he suggests is very "substantial" as it literally builds literate concepts from the ground up, instead of having a more direct oral-to-print translation like "oriental" cultures. I cannot speak for other languages, but in Chinese, the process by which words and concepts are formed cannot be explained as simple, direct symbolized translations of meaning. There is substance in that language, but not substance as McLuhan would define it. Instead, the substance derives from the process in which certain meaningless strokes or actual words are combined to make a new concept. If I had to use the language of Western discourse as an analogy, I would say that it's like using letters (aka meaning strokes) or actual words to make up a new word; for example: using "conscious" and "ness" to make the word "consciousness." That's the best way I can describe the similarity of process, even though that's really not an entirely analogous explanation.
My point is, our understanding of substance and meaning should not be based on one framework. McLuhan's statement that certain cultures cannot understand "substance" should be reworded as "certain cultures have processes of defining and constructing 'substantial form' that are different from those models conceived by the Western world." I feel like this is similar to our current approaches to understanding hypertext: we need to step outside of our conventional definitions and models, and realize that there are other forms of literature (and language) out there that should also be judged by their own standards and not by only conventional (and Western) definitions. But that's always easier said than done, in my experience, and I'm definitely guilty of judging hypertext by my own standards of linearity and sequence instead of giving it more credit.
McLuhan and Orientalism
If it's easier said than done, we'd best continue pointing out each other's errors.
McLuhan crashes through the china shop pretty handily sometimes. Pointing out difficulties shouldn't mean that one ignores some the wonder in his work, including its moves against some prejudices as well -- the prejudice that people in other cultures do not in some ways see or perceive the world differently than people in our culture do, as well.
There is always this danger in classifying. And, I suppose, in not classifying. Ouch.
McLuhan
Two years before Star Trek, if I recall!
Pretty remarkable, despite gaffs like those Lulu deals with in her comment here. What an age of manifestos!