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1.38 |
However no centre is not a centre everywhere. Acoustic space for McLuhan is finite. Where McLuhan goes astray is in his gloss on his quotation from Cornford's remarks on Parmenides's sphere of being: We naturally ask, what is outside this finite sphere of being? Parmenides does not raise the question; apparently it did not occur to him that such a question could be asked. (Cornford 228) McLuhan strongly suggests that Parmenides ear-dominated oral culture did not allow him to ask. "There is no infinity: to the ear faculty, the question is unintelligible" (Laws of Media 35). However, the silence of Parmenides may be scripturally induced rather than determined by oral context. Plato, the recorder, might have a hand in it. Paradoxically, though not uncharacteristically, McLuhan maintains a muteness concerning alternative explanations, in particular that of his authority on paradox, Colie: But not even Parmenides, as Plato's dialogue so ironically suggests, could legislate about speculative subjects: for minds of the dialectical habit, once "being" had been postulated, "not-being" and "nothing" inevitably came to attention. (Colie 220) |
1.38 |
|
1.39 |
As unasked questions rattle about the perimeter of McLuhan's acoustic space, at its epicentre clinks a masked question. McLuhan brings metaphor into the ambit of acoustic space with the statement that "while common-sense acoustic space held sway, the cosmos was perceived as a resonant and metaphoric structure informed by logos" (Laws of Media 37). To say metaphor's terms are discontinuous yet in ratio to each other is equivalent for McLuhan to saying "that the basic mode of metaphor is resonance and interval the audile-tactile" (Global Village 29). McLuhan cites a passage from De Anima to claim Aristotle pointed out this discontinuity: It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things. (De Anima III, viii, 432a) The same Aristotelian passage in From Cliché to Archetype "points to the analogy between art and knowledge" and McLuhan adds:
The Aristotelian text does read "The soul is
in a
way all existing things." However, it
continues for several clauses and concludes" in
what way we must inquire"
(431b).
The answer is not things in
themselves but their forms. Only then,
follows
the hand-soul analogy. However doctored,
Aristotle cannot be made to mention
extension.
That a tool is an extension is a McLuhan
axiom.
He introduces it as he says "by way of
resonance
and repetition". Of course, he cannot
say
his way includes an invisible silence. He
admits
no disappearance nor indicates with suspension
marks,
ellipsis.
|
1.39 |
|
1.40 |
Since McLuhan mixes an anti-visual with an anti- rational bias, the basis for his reification of resonance is the repression of conceptual work. (Global Village 187, n. 14; Cliché 82) In particular McLuhan's reading of quantum mechanics elides the role of abstraction. He ignores the fact that mathematical representations of resonating vibrations are abstractions applicable to either visual or acoustic media. He invokes the technical term "harmonic oscillators" as proof positive of the primordial centrality of sound. He attributes to Linus Pauling the insight of "acoustic and mimetic resonance as the essential structure of matter" (Global Village 187). McLuhan skips a page from the history of science that wave function equations build upon the Hamiltonian analogy between optics and dynamics. Furthermore he neglects the warnings against empirical reduction given by Pauling who writes in The Nature of the Chemical Bond, "It has become conventional to speak of a system as resonating between structures" (10) and he is very clear as to the ontological status of these structures: A substance showing resonance between two or more valence-bond structures does not contain molecules with the configurations and properties usually associated with these structures. The constituent structures of the resonance hybrid do not have reality in this sense. [emphasis in original] (408) |
1.40 |
|
1.41 |
To document more of McLuhan's silent cuts risks
redundancy. Only two other cases require
comment. Both, again, in regard to
extension. Unlike McLuhan's treatment of the
Pauling text, they do not operate on a principle
of
empirical reduction. The following
authorities,
Hass and Emerson, constructed by McLuhan's
citational
practice, operate in his discourse less to
establish
the validity of the concept of extension than to
dress
a pedigree for it.
|
1.41 |
|
1.42 |
What bits and pieces (Laws of
Media 94, 97)
McLuhan quotes
sometimes
indicating ellipsis, sometimes not, from Ralph
Waldo
Emerson's essay "Works and Days" do lend
some
credence to the claim that "the notion is of
respectable age". The title of the
essay, an
allusion to Hesiod, certainly adds to the
impression of
antiquity. However, the figure of Hesiod
does not
function in Emerson's essay to justify work and
tool
use as the primordial essence of human nature but
to
reawaken forgotten appreciation for days, to
harken to
a golden pre-industrial past. Emerson writes
"you must treat the days respectfully, you
must be
a day yourself" (Emerson
180). Each day,
each human
is to be
special. This celebration of the uniqueness
of
the moment and of the individual points to the
possibility of extending holidays rather than
technologies, increasing the time of being human
over
the duration of toiling in order to achieve a
finer
equilibrium between labour and leisure.
|
1.42 |
|
1.43 |
The emancipatory dimension is evident in the
opening
paragraph. It figures a constellation of
Aristotelian notions somewhat differently than
McLuhan's reading of the philosopher's text on the
soul. Drawing on a commonplace in regards to
the
measure of all things, Emerson does consider the
human
body as the template for the development of
tools. He cites the passage from De
Anima referring to the hand as the
instrument of
instruments and the mind as the form of
forms.
However, unlike McLuhan, he treats extension
strictly
analogically. The creation cannot usurp the
creator, in whole or in part. "Machines
can
only second, not supply, his [man's]
unaided
senses" (167). McLuhan
stops short of quoting this sentence. In
his
subsequent reference to Emerson, he omits "If
you
do not use tools, they use you" and fails to
indicate the ellipsis. Where he does
indicate the
ellipsis, the restoration of Emerson's sentence
("The political economist thinks 't [sic] is
doubtful if all the mechanical inventions that
ever
existed have lightened the day's toil of one human
being") challenges not only the utopian tone
of
McLuhan's formulations but also his presumption of
the
natural inevitable drive to technological
innovation.
|
1.43 |
|
1.44 |
Whether or not for McLuhan all tool use is work,
he can
not draw attention to Emerson's separation of work
from
days as the separation addresses the issue of the
control of technology in a fashion diametrically
opposed to his own. Emerson puts technology
in
the sphere of human control; McLuhan,
outside. If in Emerson humans compel others
to
use tools, in McLuhan the compulsion and its
attendant
negative connotations are interiorized.
"To
put it briefly, man cannot trust himself when
using his
own artefacts" (Laws of
Media 95).
|
1.44 |
|
1.45 |
The singular universal human being, lacking the
grace
of control, is figured as incapable of inhibiting
unwanted aggression. In this particular
instance, McLuhan aligns his tale in order to
appropriate into his discourse Konrad Lorenz who
in
On Aggression speculates that human
aggression is a product of the ability, through
tools,
to act at a distance and thus not suffer the
consequences of body to body contact. For
Lorenz
distance is the prerequisite of desensitization
which
enables uncontrolled aggression.
|
1.45 |
|
1.46 |
What McLuhan forgets even as he cites his own
authority
to this effect (Laws
of
Media 96) is that
Lorenz does
supply a
control mechanism. McLuhan does not
distance
himself from the Lorenz statement that
"inventions
and responsibility are both the achievements of
the
same specifically human faculty of asking
questions." Asking questions sounds a
lot
like the activity of dialectic. However
McLuhan
collects authorities rather than asks
questions.
McLuhan does not investigate where or when this
capacity to ask questions, this power of
dialectic, can
be inhibited. Unless, one is to conclude,
as
McLuhan wishes, that technological innovation
itself
triggers an atrophy of reasoning and questioning.
|
1.46 |
