Sense: Proxemics and Prosthetics 1.20

1.20 - 1.27 Proxemics and Prosthetics
1.20	Based on the quotation from Hall, tools can be considered as extensions from two possible loci. They are extensions of "what man once did with his body [or part of his body]" or extension of "some specialized part of his body." McLuhan chooses the latter parsing. He does not analyse the crucial category of doing.	1.20
1.21	In all instances of The Silent Language including the one McLuhan cites, Hall's focus is upon the temporality of extension not its prosthetic dimension. Hall treats extension in terms of continuity of activity. What was once done by one means is now done by another. McLuhan in grafting disturbance on extension posits a shift not in duration but in kind of activity. Extension is narrowed to synonymity with prosthesis (n5). As well it is construed as irritation through its association with disturbance. This combination, prosthetic disturbance, is erected upon a strict impermeability of sensory modalities.	1.21
1.22	The strict separation establishes a sensorium devoid of devices for self-regulation. Environment determines all. Sensory modalities and types of action exist in a one-to-one correspondence. His stimulus-response model positions some senses as tending to inertia, others, to motion. Sight pinpoints, takes up a point of view, stabilizes. Sound surrounds, penetrates, perturbs. For McLuhan, one is the sense of rational detached print culture; the other, excitable tribal involvement. Just as he argues some times from effects of the sense organ (sight) and at other times from those of the percept (sound), the parallel piling of sundry elements, so necessary for McLuhan's evaluative statements and chiasmic substitutions, reiterates the founding tautology. Disturbance and extension are not only the marks of change; they are also its motors. Change leads to change. The world as perpetual motion machine offers endless chains of causation which in McLuhan's case is really mimesis: sense imitating what is sensed.	1.22
1.23	Causation becomes more complex and predictability is impaired, if one turns to the identification of disturbances in a universal flux. Such metacritical questions are foregrounded in the authority on disturbance cited in full by McLuhan, J.Z. Young: The effect of stimulations, external or internal, is to break up the unison of action of some part or the whole of the brain. A speculative suggestion is that the disturbance in some way breaks the unity of the actual pattern that has been previously built up in the brain. The brain then selects those features from the input that tend to repair the model and to return the cells to their regular synchronous beating. I cannot pretend to be able to develop this idea of models in our brain in detail, but it has great possibilities in showing how we tend to fit ourselves to the world and the world to ourselves. In some way the brain initiates sequences of actions that tend to return it to its rhythmic pattern, this return being the act of consummation or completion. If the first action performed fails to do this, fails that is to stop the original disturbance, then other sequences may be tried. The brain runs through its rules one after another, matching the input with its various models until somehow unison is achieved. This may perhaps only be after strenuous, varied, and prolonged searching. During this random activity further connexions and action patterns are formed and they in turn will determine future sequences. (Gutenberg Galaxy 4 ) In Young's "speculative suggestion" stimulations disturb not limbs or sense organs but "unison of action". As in Hall, activity in its temporal dimensions is the category of analysis. The citation culled by McLuhan is in Young sandwiched between discussions of the learning child. As intersubjective process, learning takes place in the presence of parents or peers and is characterized as gradual, incremental and open. Such a scheme is alien to McLuhan. As mentioned above, "closure" and "completion" are terms he introduces. Furthermore what he characterizes as an inevitable drive towards equilibrium between self and environment is in Young a tendency not a necessity: "we tend to fit ourselves to the world and the world to ourselves." This tentative telos is consonant with the intersubjective core of Young's discourse (n6).	1.23
1.24	Pace McLuhan, Young offers dialectical formulations. In his model, rhythmic pattern is both recognized and established. Even within a biological process such as brain function, the confirmation of recognition permits the establishment of pattern. One person can do both but not at the same time. The two distinct procedures are what Young calls doubt and certainty. They govern knowledge production: The brain is continually searching for fresh information about the rhythm and regularity of what goes on around us. This is the process that I call doubting, seeking for significant new resemblances. Once they are found they provide us with our system of law, of certainty. We decide that this is what the world is like and proceed to talk about it in those terms. Then sooner or later someone comes along who doubts, someone who tries to make a new comparison; when he is successful, mankind learns to communicate better and to see more. ( Doubt and Certainty 11 ) Proper use of analogies, for Young, serves learning and serves progress. Assured of its power to improve communication and produce knowledge, he privileges resemblance seeking. As implied by the metacritical accent heard if but sub voce in the hiatus between recognition and establishment, the identification of resemblance is but part of reasoning by analogy.	1.24
1.25	McLuhan makes analogies. He finds resemblances. However, to test an argument by analogy one also examines the terms of the comparison according to their unshared properties. That is one seeks differences. Unmaking analogies is not a McLuhan activity.	1.25
1.26	Analogies lead to laws of media. Their legitimation is founded upon the generative powers McLuhan grants metaphors. He equates them with technologies. The principle of extension is central to this process: [A]ll human artefacts are extensions of man, outerings or utterings of the human body or psyche, private or corporate. That is to say, they are speech, and they are translations of us, the users, from one form into another form: metaphors. (Laws of Media 116 ) The relation between technology and metaphor is itself a metaphor but not one of substitution, either species for genus or vice versa. For McLuhan, "all metaphors have four components in analogical ratio" (28 ). The four terms in McLuhan's formulation are technology, metaphor, extension and translation. How are they to stand in relation to each other? The succinct declaration "technologies, like words, are metaphors" (Global Village 8 ) suggests the terms, technology and metaphor, belong to separate ratios of the proportional equation and the analogy is to be read as: artefact is to extension as metaphor is to translation.	1.26
1.27	If the analogy were to stand alone, his project, the translation of artefacts (into media into senses) through the extension of metaphor would be obliged to contend with a counter-motion: the restriction of metaphor. The analogy as artefact stands to extension so does metaphor to translation can not be read back into the relation of artefact to extension. Analogy (or metaphor) is not an artefact. As a ratio, it is a relation.	1.27

1.20 - 1.27

Proxemics and Prosthetics