Just wrapped a fantastic talk with Gerry Fialka, Duncan Echelson, Rob Dew on the human scale, proportionality, apes striving for godhood, gnosticism, education, and more!
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The Nashe Thesis
I have been setting up to make the case that a) a sense of proportion is lacking from our perception of the material world, both natural and artificial, and that b) Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) gives us the fastest and easiest way to restoring that proportional sensibility via the slow and difficult study of his work—studies I’ve been diligently undertaking since 2017.
To make my point, I must begin by hyping the first “book” he wrote, one which virtually nobody outside the circles of Media Ecology has read.
I suspect that Marshall McLuhan’s doctoral thesis for the University of Cambridge, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time is the most audacious and erudite historical overview of philosophy and intellectual history ever written. It’s nothing less than a total synthesis of everything in …
This is the beginning of a series explaining the road-not-taken in the academic field of literary criticism. The result has been the academic dominance of critical theory and a century of post-modernism (or Baudrillardian Simulation, or Orwellian historical revision, or however else you might put it).
Thee Thy, Though Thumb
The missing ingredient in all contemporary media analysis is appreciation for analogical proportionality. The reason this factor has been lacking, I think, is the catch-22 of requiring the faculty in order to develop it further. The difficulty is like that of Tom Thumb were he to hitch a ride with Jack up the beanstalk on a mission to educate the giants on the apples and the oranges: implicit barriers between a whole stack of several differing orders of magnitude must be overcome merely to put any modern situation into fluent …
That was a lot of fun! Here’s my presentation to the Free Software Foundation at this year’s LibrePlanet conference. The audio, it seems, was being picked up by the wrong microphone, so I’ve plans to re-work and expand the topic in a series of videos, having benefited from a lot of helpful feedback and criticism. So keep your eye on this space, follow me on Twitter or YouTube, and buckle up for a content-ful 2022! 😀…
A4:20 Eastern (😏) I’ll be giving a talk about media ecology and McLuhan to the great group of folks at Libreplanet 2022, the annual convention organized by the Free Software Foundation! You can find my talk streaming in the Neptune Room (the third video tab). Come check it out!
Viewers interested in learning more about Media Ecology can visit:
The McLuhan Institute (run by Andrew McLuhan): https://themcluhaninstitute.com/
New Explorations Journal (academic journal): https://newexplorations.net/
The Media Ecology Association (annual conventions): https://www.media-ecology.org/
The McLuhan Foundation (educational resources): https://mcluhanfoundation.org/
Conversely, read more about free software at https://fsf.org!
In my talk, I am suggesting Free Software users and Media Ecologists alike delve into the rich past of computing, and uncover the “anonymous history” of our digital world. Here are three highly-recommended books, each available free online courtesy of their authors:
Those unfamiliar with …
I’ve been thinking a lot about how much Apple and Microsoft have sucked up all the air in the room regarding the history of microcomputers. Docudramas, biographies, and news stories exalt the dominance of the two major corporations creating our PC environments.
What culture needs is the larger picture, the fuller story of the way these machines entered into our world. I remembered a series of articles I had read over a decade ago regarding the history of Amiga Computers. Just like the mythos around Woz and Jobs in the garage, wiring up the first Apple machines, the story of the Amiga is charged with wonder and marvels.
I rediscovered those articles today, and discovered that the series has tripled in length since I first read them. Since they’re spread throughout the site, I’ve compiled the “chapters”, as it were, …
I’m listening to Klaus Schulze and he’s really good at creepy ambient stuff.
I feel like, had technology been around to allow the production of this sort of music, it would have been perfectly on-time 50 years earlier. That’s a mismatch between the artistic aspiration and the faculties of the time to meet the requirements. Maybe painting and stage-play was then at where this music arrives later.
We have to consider the time-fractured sensorium, owing technological disparities, as a player in the defeat over the holistic human individual and their own coherent emotional expression. This is the trauma of the bomb, and the post-war ear.
Jackhammers and machines created Jazz with all its discontinuities out of environmental impetus. Le Corbusier called the staggered skyline of Manhattan “hot jazz in stone.” But perhaps ambient music was something ideal to counteract all …
VoegelinView, the website for the Eric Voegelin Society, is running a 4-part special series on the correspondences of Marshall McLuhan and the German-American political philosopher. The series is written by Cameron McEwen of the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog.
Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1952) posits a continuity of form between the ancient Gnostic beliefs and contemporary political movements. A year after the release of The Mechanical Bride (1951), McLuhan had, shall we say, a “breakthrough” into the nature of the poetic techniques he had been studying from Romantic poetry, through Symbolism, into the Modern styles as a process of psychology. A useful adumbration of his scholarly “perspective” on this development can be found in Through The Vanishing Point (1968), by McLuhan and Harley Parker:
…Concern with the processes in the arts led some nineteenth-century aestheticians to consider that
I was asked by the Maniphesto Media Academy to give a talk on Marshall McLuhan, and decided to take the opportunity to be as radical as possible in re-writing the book!
I want to re-record this with a pre-written script, so as to avoid all the umming and stuttering, so please provide as much feedback, corrections, and opinions as you can to help me make this a solid introduction to Media Ecology!…
or
The Psychopathology of ‘Time’ and ‘Life’
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The Ballet Luce
by Marshall McLuhan, 1947
It would seem a very good time to take stock of the performance of this trio now that Mr. Luce has begun to think seriously of adding a fourth star to his stable. The fourth member is to be definitely high-brow, if it appears. And in passing from glorified spot-news (Time) to nursery entertainment (Life) to managerial grand opera (Fortune) to high-brow criticism, Mr. Luce must still have an eye on Der Verlag Ullstein from whose activities and methods his own are so largely derivative. Thus Ullstein Querschnitt printed Pirandello, Proust, Cocteau, Woolf, Mann, and others in their original languages, and aimed to be “a monthly for the literary gourmet” and for “the intellectually indulgent, the well read, the …