Vico, as did we, built his NS using the five divisions of rhetoric — but then Vico was a professor in both senses of rhetoric.
We three are quite sensible of the relation of our efforts to words and language; our scientists do not realize that their efforts are predicated on the abstract word as the source of their every feat of abstraction. I treat these things at some length in LOM. The important thing to realise is that, the establishment aside, there is more than one valid kind of science.
Our four laws are testable and they apply in every single case. In the more than 30 years since we formulated them, I have found not one case in which one of the laws did not hold, nor have I been able to find a fifth that holds in every case. I issued a challenge years ago to the public to find an exception and thus far no-one has done so. Naturally, the results will vary from culture to culture, from environment to environment, but this is to be expected.
New science is empirical and not based on theories; Old science is theoretical, Aristotelian. New science belongs to grammar and Old science to dialectic and philosophy. We are not philosophers, and neither were Bacon and Vico, although they have been co-opted by philosophy, ignorant of the traditions of the trivium rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic.
Bacon would have been amused, or perhaps a bit miffed, by his being misread as a philosopher by our time. I will have to defer to Prof. But along the lines of philosophical enquiry, I might add that it was only several years ago, when working on another matter, I discovered that our four laws are actually an analytic of Formal Cause.
Here is a major reason why the scientific community cannot grapple with the tetrad: normal science is concerned exclusively with Efficient Cause, and has no foothold or interest in any other area. Formal Cause is almost universally misunderstood. For one thing, it is not sequential; it works outside of time and Efficient Causality is completely sequential and time-bound. And Formal Cause is exactly the mode of operation of media on culture and society.
I wrote an essay on the matter and published it in the journal, Explorations in Media Ecology. The medium is the message of any technology, and the user is the content of that environment. Nonetheless, you restrict your own concept so that it covers only human artefacts, since you interpret your own tetrad in linguistic terms. My question is this: why are you so sure that the tetrad applies only to items having the structure of language? Could you possibly be selling yourself short here?
Graham, you are putting the cart somewhat before the horse, in order to be provocative — as I know you are aware. At first, we tried the tetrad on everything in sight. It did not take very long — a day or two — to realize that it was only applicable to human artefacts. And it is equally inapplicable to trees or hurricanes or mountains or plate tectonics or supernovas or comets or tidal bores.
But it applies to every single human artifact without exception, from the smallest to the largest, from the most recent to the most ancient. And it applies equally to tangible hardware artifacts as well as to software ones, including ideas, and styles in the arts, and scientific laws, and computer programs, etc.
They obey the analogical ratios of a is to b as c is to d and all the reciprocals of those ratios. So we found that, for example, that the function of enhancement is to that of reversal as is the function of retrieval is to that of obsolescence. We were forced, at length, to present them graphically so that the rhymes ratios could be seen. The tetrad above is an example. To write the four parts linearly would simply obscure any relation between then as would, say, writing out a quatrain of poetry in paragraph form.
In the case of the tetrad, though, there are rhymes just as in a poem, but the rhymes are between situations not words or sounds.
So we stopped listing the four laws and began to present them instead in stanza-form. The tetrad gives the formal nature of its subject: it does not explain or expound — that is the job of regular science. The tetrad tells you what a thing IS by telling its effects. After a while it dawned on us that these analogical ratios also were the structure of words themselves.
Every word in every language is metaphor. The heart of LOM is the tetrad on metaphor in the fifth chapter.
We arrived at the idea that human technologies were words by this route. Understanding Media our starting point, remember has the startling subtitle, The Extensions of Man. Extensions are outerings of the body, that is, they are physical utterances — of the body itself not simply utterances through the vocal organs. This insight is confirmed over and over by our artists, and in particular by one of the greatest, James Joyce our frequent mentor.
Metaphor consists in translating one situation into another, of looking at one situation in terms of another. It is a fundamental process of knowing anything whatever. The two situations are not connected and the metaphor provides instantaneous awareness: metaphors defy translation into weaker figures such as simile or even analogy.
A metaphor is an analogy among analogies. Well, finally, to come to the question. We learned that the tetrad had the structure of metaphor, and that all words also have the structure of metaphor, and also that words and artefacts were equally utterances.
Rather, it opens up completely new avenues for understanding. For one thing, it thoroughly bridges the arts and the sciences and pushes aside their conventional separation.
The arts are sciences, and the sciences are arts. This seems at first blush a complex affair but it is in reality simple. First, observe that the self, in whatever mode, is a human artefact. Try tetrads on the various forms and you will see instantly what I mean.
Tetrads on solipsism, Cartesianism, substantial properties, accidental properties, relativism, and nihilism, will sort the confusions out instantly. Try them, side-by-side. The scriptures enjoin us to be in the world unavoidable but not of the world — a nice distinction. Bodies are no longer relevant. Electronically we are simultaneously in many places at once. If not, how can we possibly ground ourselves? That declaration applies to the new electric media which extend us into the environment.
They work on us in ways that defy merely literal or physical investigation and kinds of understanding. There is a way of course in which any technology results in a new mode of being for the user, but with electric technologies the transformation is complete. Of course we can live without a bodily identity, but the body confers a particular kind of identity. Aquinas pointed out that the principle of individuation consists in the intersection of matter and spirit. Without the body, then, individual identity is not possible.
Discarnate man is mass man; individuality is simply not possible because there is nothing on which to base it, to give it substance. Individualism and private identity are artefacts, side-effects of the phonetic alphabet and its symphony of abstraction. LOM chapter one. One of the three themes on which Take Today: The Executive as Dropout is based is that jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles.
Roles mean audiences and participation. Private identity depends first and foremost on detachment. Social media like Facebook provide identity from the in-crowd of friends that one can amass: that attention is the identity dynamic.
Take it away and the user is nobody—a nobody with no body. With private identity and detachment also comes another artefact: privacy, now a major concern. As private identity evaporates, privacy becomes a matter of great concern-and so do private ownership and copyright.
All of these things are interrelated and make no sense in isolation from each other. It is no secret that private identity is unknown in non-literate societies and equally that they have no use for privacy. Speaking of larger wholes, you edited an interesting book with a provocative title — The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion , published in Is God the Light? What do God and the electric light have in common? Well, it is not a book for the Illuminati.
The title is obviously a play on ideas, as was The Medium is the Massage. At the same time, I did not intend to suggest that there was nothing weighty in the book. Nor did I intend the reader to regard McLuhan as a sort of medium in conversation with God.
Malcolm Waddell suggested the title and I knew immediately that it was perfect, loaded with provocative resonances. A third is actually a set of five books. The main title is The Human Equation. I worked with a professional mime for a number of years and we found a way to rewrite Understanding Media from the inside out.
That is, UM , subtitled The Extensions of Man , looks at the media in relation to the body and their effects. The Human Equation begins with the body and the process of extending, so it is essentially concerned with the etymology of media. It turns out that there are only four ways of extending yes, another proportional foursome!
All of our media without exception begin their journeys outward from one or another of the modes of action. And our media invariably come in sets of four… We plan to publish over the Internet, on-demand.
First copies available in a few weeks. I have a half-dozen others, brides as yet awaiting the attentions of suitors publishers. One is a study of Egyptian art in the Old Kingdom. An internationally-known and award-winning lecturer on communication and media, Dr. He has taught at many colleges and universities throughout the United States, Canada and abroad.
In , with Roger Davies, Dr. His research and thinking have been published in books, magazines, and journals covering topics such as media, communications, perception, and literature since He is currently researching the nature and structure of renaissances, including the one that now envelops us: the first global renaissance. Several other books are currently in preparation. I am so sorry to read of the sudden passing of Eric.
He has always been fondly remembered by my children, particularly Vicky and Chris. I am sure it must be a shock to the family to happen suddenly. I remember your kindness to me when Rick died by accident. I know well how shocking it is with a sudden passing. My thoughts are with you. May Eric rest in peace. Like Like. But Eric also made significant contributions to media studies and its communities by his own deeply rooted scholarship and teaching and by his gentle, wise and creative presence in so many places and on so many occasions.
He will be sorely missed. Oh, Eric… such a generous spirit, and true friend. I first reached out to you as a McLuhan fan and received in response a kind letter written in green ink. I still remember and will always the twinkle in your eye, the joy in your voice, the eternal optimist in you. But even moreso, your curiosity and breadth of wisdom and knowledge. You did your father more than proud and now we are all at a loss as to what to do without you. But we will soldier on, as the ideas… the laws of media… are more relevant every year.
I will try sincerely to make the service. To feel your presence one more time and to wish you on your way. It has been a true privilege knowing Eric McLuhan. A true humanist and visionary representing the best of Canada. As with all the replies, communicating with Eric was a graceful and enlivening experience. Having devoured all I could get my hands on of his fathers works, I wanted to gift the books and papers to a deserving student. Eric handled that for me in We corresponded since then and it has be a special part of my life.
In gratitude. A great loss indeed. May he rest in peace and his great work be carried on. His last lecture is one of the best things ever said. Thank you for remembering Eric. His loss is felt keenly by all who knew him and worked with him……. It lasted all of 2 years but the experience left a huge impact on me to this day.
0コメント