Sitting at my favorite Cafe’ in/of physical space, Feet on the
Ground,Listening to the acoustics (both)& the Voices of
Friends in Cyberspace of Cosmos Cafe’ …
A Wonderous,Engaging,Vibration of Voices,Ideas in the
Everyday Experience of …
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We missed your voice and gestures yesterday but it looks like you are in a great place. Hope to see you at the next Cafe!
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And what is space before acoustic space?
And what is space before visual space?
And that’s like what?
It’s like this-
And when it’s like that…
What happens to touch?.. smell?.. taste?
And where are touch, smell, taste?
And does touch, smell, and taste have a relationship to the acoustic space and visual space?
And do touch, smell, taste have a size or shape?
And where is figure? And where is ground?
And what is the common sense that makes sense of the sensorium?
And thanks to the Cafe comrades for co-creating another coherent ‘we’ space.
We are such stuff as dreams are made of…
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Participation in the Creative Tension of:
This seems to have a Resonant Felt-Sense … Vibrations
All Around …the Cafe’ Gives a Place to BE,in/with/around
the Chaos!
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Here is the beginning of McLuhan’s book The Global Village, which was published just one year after Laws of Media. I found this introductory text to be more accessible. Maybe it was written for a different audience. The double Mobius strip illustration of the tetrad is introduced here. It reminds me of the emotional sequence “pleasure-anger-sorrow-joy” in Confucius. Perhaps that is a similar fourfold dynamic wherein enantiodromia happens.
McLuhan Global Village 1989.PDF (878.7 KB)
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During our enlightening and exciting conversation on Thursday I proposed the idea that there might be something like a fifth law of media that could not be reduced to the four laws presented by Marshall and Eric. The Mcluhan’s state that the four testable statements that apply to all media are: 1. all media are amplifications or extensions of the human, 2. when one area of experience is enhanced another is diminished, 3. every form when pushed to its limits reverses into its opposite, 4. Retrieval, all forms retrieve an earlier form. In the preface Eric is adamant that they searched and searched but discovered four laws and four laws only.
This is a bold statement, but is also quit enticing. It didn’t bother me and I was not attempting to challenge their statement. As I read on, I felt that there was something not captured in these four laws, but rather implied or presupposed. When contemplating the Tetrad I find that there is a sense of great dynamism, an expansion from strict efficient cause, into a multi-casual non-spatial whirl of transformations. From this feeling an observation arose in my mind; “all media is in a state of flux or transformation”. For me the 4 laws propose, comment or describe, media transformations, but cannot account for them. Is ‘media transformation’ the Prima Materia for Mcluhan?
After discussing this observation with the group, I’ve had some time to reflect on it, and the discussion we had. I am not so concerned as to whether this could be a fifth law or not, but rather interested in the places this Bergson-Herclitian observation has led me. I’ve been thinking a lot about media-transformations! Is it true that ‘all media transforms’? After much contemplation on my initial proposition I think that it might be better to say that: “The media sphere or environment (as opposed to individual mediums) is in a state of constant transformation”. An alteration of a single medium (if there is such a thing, for all mediums contain other mediums) has a kaleidoscope effect and changes the entire media environment. Therefore, even seemingly separate media that seems to be in a static state is transforming in relation to the entire media sphere. I’ve been asking myself question like: “How and why does media change”, “Is homeostasis in the media-sphere possible, and how does this relate to the myth of technological singularity via AI”
This has been my first time reading a text with a group, and it has been a very engaging experience. I’m hoping that (work permitting) I can attend the next session, and experience the co-creative dialogue again.
Here is a drawing of mine, that has a loose narrative, amongst other things, about the generation of what I’ve now come to refer to as visual space.
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This whirl can be ecstatic as in the whirl of the dervish or disorienting as when the third ear starts to hear things that were never physical. A good life is perhaps a combination of different kinds of whirls, set in a fractal, spinning motion, on a great stair case of ascending and descending Las Vegas showgirls.
- The Law of the Lost Cause.
The rhetoric of the opening of this Twilight zone episode, The Obselete Man, captures McLuhan’s Laws without his sense of playful irony. I saw this horror series when under ten years old, during the Vietnam war, the assasinations of MLK and JFK, and what McLuhan would call a revival of the archaiac.It’s imagery is imprinted deep in my sensorium. I remember we (my brothers and I) were on the floor, in our stiff pajamas, in a ticky tacky suburban house, watching a TV screen, bathing us in that gray light. That happened during the first wave of what would later be called the Eisenhower Era.
I remember seeing Eisenhower in person. My father hoisted me on his shoulders duing a parade in downtown Houston. I saw this bald head as he waved his hat to the crowd. I remember the image as black and white although I know that is not accurate for it was a warm, colorful day. It perhaps appears to me as gray because my early memories occurred before technicolor.
Here is a dream I had last night about your drawing.
I’m on a bike riding in a wide street filled with snow. I ride the bike backwards and forward, carving a straight line in the snow but restricted to a repetitive movement. I decide to turn left and move in a wide arc away from the line and in an indeterminate direction. Will I return to the line by making a circle intersecting the line or make a wider arc and move beyond the original straight line moving beyond the constrained movement? I’m not sure.
Then, I am indoors in a tight corridor that has two tables across from each other against the walls… There is a small space between the tables. I have a book, sitting at a table, facing an unknown man. I close the book and stand in the space between the two tables.
And another man appears at the table on my left. I am slightly behind both men and above, my left hand on a right shoulder, and a right hand on the left shoulder of the two men and I introduce the two men to each other. We are all facing the same direction. This arrangement I realize has a psycho-geometry. We are a triadic configuration. As the one in between the two I am attempting to hold the tensions between this unstable psycho-geometric configuration, feeling a live current. I wake up and contemplate the dream and then return to a long sequence that I have amesia for.
It occurs to me in my waking state that the dream sequence is about meta-communications, codes, constraints, gestures, touch. My hunch is that we are trying to create conditions for a post-materialist intersubjective knowledge framework.
I consider your drawing to be an example of Remote Perception, a difference from Remote Viewing, sponsored by the CIA. You are creating a new kind of map for a new kind of space. I find it a curious fact that in their training the CIA psychics were reqpired to read Betty Edward’s classic Drawing Upon the Right Side of the Brain. In that book she trains artists to use negative space and to let go of things" out there". Remote viewers had to learn how to extract reliable information from trance states. They were taught to avoid interpretations, as these were always biased. This program was much more accurate than the information gathered from the ground or from satelites.
We figured out somatic space before we entered the womb. The first system is the vestibular system, organized within the echo chambers of the inner ear, which orients the new life form so that embriogenesis can occur. This is not random or left to chance but highly choregraphed. It has the character of something being written down into the flesh from a Hyper-space. I imagine that your drawings and my dream are performing a kind of dialogue between sensoriums from other kinds of cognitions which we are becoming privy to. Efficient is to Final as Final is to Formal.
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This is an interesting question, to be sure. The McLuhans emphasize that these “laws” apply to all human artefacts, so are they, following your line of thinking, which I think makes sense, implying or inferring that all artefacts are in fact media? I’m having some difficulty reconciling that.
The more I look at the Tetrads, though, the more they remind me of the 2x2 matrices (regardless of which paths you chose or devise to move through them) that business strategy and marketing “gurus” are so fond of developing: taking complex phenomena and reducing them to a fairly easily understood tensions along intersecting continuua. (The old Hermetic axiom of Polarity, perhaps.) What they do not allow for, it seems to me, is the notion of generation nor destruction, which I think are worth at least thinking about, but since I’m still not clear on exactly what the laws are “telling” us (or “doing” for us), it doesn’t really matter what I think might be missing.
Looking at the examples in Chapter 4 have only served to reinforce this feeling. I mean, I can tease out any number of glosses for any given question presented by the model, and then … ? That’s pretty much fundamental, everyday analysis. Now what? What’s the next step? My guess would be synthesize those results in some way, but isn’t that what making sense is all about anyhow? Being a “law” of some kind, one gets the impression that this is the way to analyze, but it’s still only one way to analyze. Maybe I’m simply overlooking something exceedingly fundamental.
Any, and all, suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
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How to think about Laws? I’ve never taken them too seriously.
" Of the logos which is forever unaware are born humans." Herakleitos
“Name that can be named is not name.” -Dao De Jing
I’m not a German speaker but I am able to follow this lyrical logic as brought forth by Jan Zwicky in her exploration of a passage from the Tractatus. She lays it out as free verse to point out some of its lyrical qualties.
Es gibt
allerdings
Unaussprechliches. Dies
zeigt sich, es ist
das Mystiche.
Es gibt is a part rhyme with es ist which is echoed in Mystische. Zwicky claims this is not an accident but does not claim that Wittgenstien contrived the echo.
There are
indeed
unspeakables. This
shows itself, it is
the mystical.
I notice in the video that I mistakenly call Laws of Media the Laws of Form, which is the title by another author, George Spenser Brown. All of this is way over my head and I don’t intend to come off as pedantic but I have found a tetradic analysis of the human artefact 'chair’ less an analysis and more of a mapping across from an object to a novel kind of conceptual blend. A kind of Body/Chair interplay through an absent negative space, like a lucid dream object that you can put your lucid hand through or sit your lucid ass upon. Like imaginary numbers. An anolgical space.A is to B as B is to C. Our visual systems see objects and actions that are afforded by them simultaneously but this happens outside of our ‘normal’ awareness. Habit takes over quickly. We habituate. And we can survive because of this. However, it comes with a price. Our habits when habituated to can start to reverse themselves by becoming path dependencies. This is why McLuhan categorized this work as a Poetics. A different kind of logic. Non-propositional.
Perceptual space. Conceptual Space. Overlaps. Over-Souls. A part rhyme. We are a remembering and a forgetting. Laws are meant to be broken. But only a fool, warns Jesus, breaks a law without knowing what the law re-represents. I don’t think the McLuhan’s are fools .It’s a blizzard in New York. Now, having thought too much about all of this, I will go out into the blizzard and enjoy the forgetful snow.
.
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Thanks for this, John.
That’s why I put the word in quotes: I tend to agree with you. Paraphrasing Lao Tzu, not everything we call one may be one. The vocabulary in this case, however, is theirs, not mine, and I’m still not clear on what the McLuhans think “laws” are.
For me, there are two immediate senses of the term that come to mind. On the one hand, a “law” is a way of describing some phenomenon that is that way whether we know that description or not. Newton’s F=ma, it would seem, falls into this category. Few people outside physics “know” this, and I would hazard the guess that most denizens of the planet don’t care, even if they more or less take it into consideration when, say, felling a tree or digging a ditch. On the other hand, a “law” can take on a thou-shalt characteristic; that is, as a kind of guideline for groups of humans to better get along with one another. So we have a law (or maybe it’s just a set of guidelines), for example, organizing how we deal with homicide, which most often has deep-reaching impacts on us. Still, we recognize the law we’ve made isn’t an absolute (which one could argue F=ma is; at least in the sense that it always means what it means), so we accept there is a good deal of room for interpreting what that law “means”.
Zwicky is doing something very similar to what the McLuhans are doing, is she not? She’s taking something she “found out there” (Wittgenstein’s statement), so to speak, and is looking at it in her own particular way (through the lens of her lyrical logic, as she calls it). I think that’s a very legitimate approach, generally speaking. Her “logic” can help reveal more than might have been recognized otherwise, and that can be helpful. This is also “analysis” in a broad sense of the word. This is much more like F=ma than it is like “murder, no” (one of the concisest expressions of the law against homicide). While both leave room for further interpretation, I think we agree that the latter allows for more room than the former.
As Herr Wittgenstein merely used words already available to him, the “lyrical” is no accident for it arises from the words used in the statement, and this happens to be a very concise way of expressing what he’s thinking. So perhaps Ms Zwiky is showing us that sometimes there’s no way around the “lyrical”. But here, we are in the realm of what the analysis might possibly do for us. Why would we care whether Wittgenstein’s formulation was not accidental? Most of us react positively to rhyme and almost-rhyme, and it can help us remember things or to note them. And I suppose that’s what the McLuhans are desirous of as well. As you point out, it helps you remap familiar “things” into novel conceptual blends. Good for you. That’s cool.
At bottom, perhaps, I’m just wondering (out loud) why the McLuhans chose to describe this process as “lawful” in some way. The tetrads are, in a sense, a cool tool, but whether that makes them the basis of a whole new science …, well, I have my doubts, so I think that aspect of their presentation is perhaps a bit overzealous on their part that’s all.
Though not all that keen on a blizzard, I can also remember the joy of forgetful snow, and would like to experience it again. (It’s funny how in English we get “snowed in”, but “rained out”.) I trust your outing was as enjoyable as you had hoped.
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Poetry is memorable speech and we do act positively to our perception of it . And yes, it is found out there and also in here. Somewhere in between. We can’t plan it but we can plan for it. If it arrives we do get a sense of pleasure. Who’s woods these are I think I know but he lives in the village though. You can turn a verse into prose statement and tinker with it to sense what makes it tick. The jury is still out about what determines prose/poetry. I think it has something to do with visual and acoustic space. Verse on a page resonates in a special way. That is why I love when Shakespeare mixes it up. I love his prose. I can hear, through his prose, a very cosmopolitan thinker, fast, alert, finding patterns in a personal way, catching rhythms.
Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself but it does ryhme. And whether this is accidental or not or conscious or not is of vast lived significance. The presence of a mostly hidden, often obscure, resonant structure, that is vibrating silently between us, within us, all around us, in our speech and through our gesture, through the other’s tone of voice, is weird.
I’ve read Zwicky a lot but she doesn’t reference McLuhan even though they are both Canadian academics. I agree she is making something that Marshall is also making. It is found, perhaps, but someone has to be searching for it to find it. There is nothing arbitrary about it. The Tetrads share a style for de-familiarizing our habituated stance.Style is a synonym for spirit according to Hofstader. A poet or a composer share that unique quality. So do scientists. Art and Science both change our ways of perceiving and conceiving. There is a high probablity that both areas of study and practice share a field. I’m still flabergasted to discover that the world is not flat.
Yes, the snow was forgetful. Thank God. Today it has turned into mush and will be slippery. I will take these ruminations with me, Ed, out into the treacherous streets. Wish me luck.
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D’accord.
But is the very definition of “the usual”, “the everyday”, “the initial given”. No weird, no mystery; no mystery, no real life.
Agreed: we might stumble across such “tools”, but they are never arbitrary. Weirdness involves being just a little off center, if you ask me.
Just this afternoon, I read (in Viktor Klemperer’s LTI) Buffon’s sentence: “Le style c’est l’homme [même].” [Style is the man himself.] It is much more revealing than most of us would like to admit. Interesting conjunction of thoughts of style across the Atlantic on a wintry Sunday … or just weird.
Tread slowly on those streets.
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Yes, I agree. And it is when we return to center that we get that feeling renewed and reversed and we vibrate and amplify that . How odd it feels but good for us. De-centering is what art loves to do with us. Staying off center is not recommended as a long term strategy. But it can be thrilling when we return to the center, if we return. Alas, we live in a world that seems to have lost its sense of center. This may be one of those periods when the earth starts to disrupt our addiction to our cherished path dependencies. I am confident, however, that poetry and music can help us hold the tension ( usually in the brow, right between the eyes, often in the gut) and then let a soft focus re-orient us. Relax, relax, relax. And something happens in between the tensions and the release. So, the tetrads are a practice for doing this de-centering on purpose.Whether this turns into law like behavior I’m not so sure. It seems to be more about disciplined flow.
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So my Fellow Dream Weavers this why my favorite
working metaphor for skillful engaging these times
of “New Creation being Birthed” is,
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Speaking of “laws” … or rules, perhaps … here is something my youngest daughter sent me that I thought yinz (Western Pennsylvanian for “y’all”) might find interesting:
But if you want the whole – or at least more of the – story, this is from the original author of the book referenced, and well, I, for one, find it quite fascinating:
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This is very interesting. I feel that memories and dreams are especially susceptible to the lenses of various media. The photograph or the video recording is an extension of memory. What part does the photograph play in my natural process of recollection, when no photograph is involved? I believe it is hard to find the contours of its effects, but that it fundamentally shapes and tinges the way we remember. For me, memory-flows are often eclipsed by memory-images. A composition or semi-frozen quality of light often become the focal point of my memory experience. I ask myself, “does a composition imply a frame”? Although I do not remember in the form of rectangular images, there seems to be some kind of transient frame looming on the periphery. I think that this, amongst other things, could be a result of the photograph and its prominence in our everyday life via smart phones. For me, much of the musicality and richness, recede to the ground, when the retinal aspects of my memory are amplified. The phone-camera and its continuous use , urges us to see our lives as a series of images, on an unconscious level. Due to this, I’ve started to try and use the camera less and to limit my time of looking at the infinite flow of images on social media platforms. But no one can escape the image these days.
Many people tell me they dream in black and white, even people who where born into a colour-image world. I find this very peculiar, for it makes much sense that exposure to black and white images could influence one’s dreams states, but why should it affect people born in the 90’s? Yet, I still have an intuitive feeling that ‘black and white dreaming’ is related to media images. I have the feeling that someone living in the renaissance wouldn’t have described their dreams as being in black and white. I feel this concept comes from photography. Their dreams might be described as dull or grey, like a November forest on a foggy day, but probably not described as ‘black and white’. While the retinal aspect of photography dominants the flavour of my recollection, my dreams seem to be somewhat immune to this. My dreams are certainly made up of images, but these are not retinal images as seen by the eye. When people ask me if I dream in black and white or in colour, I don’t know how to answer, for it is like asking the question, “is a song in black and white or in colour?” Mcluhan might say that the resonant milieu of our increasingly acoustic world, has effected my dream life, and revealed the inherent multidimensional and mercurial nature of the dreamscape. It seems to me that ‘dreaming in black and white’ is a left hemispheric description of a right hemispheric phenomena, and that the ‘description’ is mistaken for the ‘phenomena’. Yet it is hard to even know how one dreams, let alone how others do, for even lucid dreamers must deal with the altering effects of recollection through ego-consciousness.
Speaking of dreams, it is always a pleasure when you share your dreams John. They have such a nuanced and unique feeling to them, and are always beautifully described. Your description of the bike riding at the beginning of the dream tunes me to the upper half of the drawing. This was where the drawing started. In this frame, I was studying the changing relationship of static objects as an observer moves and how that infers the position of the observer. This is what James Gibson referred to as a flow field. Considering Bergson’s idea that the image is fundamental, these flow fields and the invariance structures inferred from them, could be the process in which we come to feel we are located in our bodies, or that we peer out of our eyes. In some sense, I see this process as a continuous process of incarnation. When we start from the image and arrive at the subject, and not the other way around, we are in a resonant world of reciprocal tuning.
this statement quit reminds me of the drifting relationship between elements, that are mapped in the study of flow fields.
A quick google search for ‘remote perception’ transforms all the results into ‘remote viewing’, so I will intuit what is meant by ‘remote perception’. For me, consciousness is experience itself, pure quality. It is a contradiction in terms to locate it anywhere. This is the main problem I have with panpsychism, it treats the beyond physical as if it where physical. In this sense I believe all perception is Remote Perception; consciousness adopts a centre, much like a kid playing a video game adopts their avatar as a perceptual centre, but consciousness itself only appears as if it where located, just like the video game player is not actually located within the screen. These are very much themes I was palpating and massaging while creating this drawing in a semi- automatic fashion. Very cool that they are coming through in your experience. The drawing was titled “perpetual incarnation” and I do see it as a type of map, an exploration in creating a map for resonant space and how this resonance can solidify into the visual space.
Sorry for the late reply, I am a slow thinker, things need to grow within me, or resonant. Much of what was said is still growing, dissolving, and coagulating. Thank you for these wonderful insights. I have only had a chance to glance over the discussion that emerged between you and @achronon , but I am excited to pounder that, as we lead up to tomorrow’s video meet up!
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Yes, this can be traumatic. Media is actively shaping my dreamscapes and I am also shaping the Media through my immersion or rejection of it. I can always tell entities that are bringing a negative energy into my sensorium to get out. A great poet, Jack Spicer, driven to drink and madness, on his deathbed, confessed," My vocabulary did this to me." He was not so lucky. The word-virus corrupted his system.
We swim in a sea of unintegrated imagery during the day, produced by a physicalist, materialist orientation and this goes directly into the nervous system as noise, which we process at night. We have the noisiest nervous systems that have ever been able to survive upon this planet. Soon, we may be deleted. Very often when I feel sleep coming on, I give my attention to the darkness, rather than seek out the light. It is at the interface between dark and light that color ( according to Goethe) arises. We are the wavy line in the yin/yang symbol. If you realize this a Taoist sage once said," You are already dead." I practice becoming the wavy line.
I think our study of McLuhan has stabilized my own noisey sensorium as some of us are trying to use the media we are given in new ways, as you and I have done by sharing art and dream, and the subtle flow of concept/percept in a world of digitized overproduction. Can this be reversed? Or modified in some way? This may already be happening, as we triangulate from the margins.
William Irwin Thompson, who we plan to study, soon, said he surfed the internet, late at night, to watch how the suppressed and persecuted spirits of the magical and mythical have returned, through current media fabrications, as triicksters, who refuse to get with the program. As Thompson was a great cultural critic, as was Mcluhan, I find these observations that he made before his death highly suggestive.
There is a great deal to unpack here, Matt, and thank you for taking your time to put these ideas on the table. I think McLuhan and Thompson would be curious, too. I feel this is a turn towards the interiors and then to bring back what we experience into a collective knowing . Invariant structures we come across, ( image schemas), appear fixed but if we confornt them directly can be a harrowing experience. We discover how the set up is set up. I wonder if this is where our laws and rules come from? We have amnesia for these expereinces and learn to color in our coloring books within the pre-given structure. We are taught to color by number, which for a real artist has a mind numbing, even violent effect. I believe structure is necessery but maleable. Most of our laws are just habits, amplified by our over use of flat screens as well as chairs, cars and white sugar. We are getting plenty of feedback to confirm this.
My hunch is that some of us are exploring these flow states in a way that brings attention to the invariant structures and are playing with them, and beyond them. Who set it up? We can go beyond the dashboard metaphor that Bernardo uses but we have no vocabulary for this. Perhaps we never will. I sense that many of us are aware of the egregoric capacities our imaginations have to hijack our meta- attentions. A post-physicalist, intersubjective alternate way of knowing can by pass this tendency. When does the “I” become " We" and then observe how a " Third" arises, like the Trinity, that can negotiate with Tetrad and Pentads and feedback into a 3d orientation without crashing the system. It seems our sensoriums are under stress and McLuhan and others offer us a chance to play at a much higher levels than we have been allowed to play at due to the imposition of the Military Industrial Complex and its factory model educational policies. If we try to exclude a level as the metaverse materialists are trying to do, we create terrible distortions but we can resist, we can re-direct our meta-attentions. You have made me hopeful!Thanks again,Matt, and I look forward to the next wave. Sorry if I write too much. I have a hard time putting it into words. My vocabulary did this to me.
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This is just a quick note thank y’all (yinz) for the rich discussion. I got to read the first three chapters of Laws of Media while nestled in a hammock by the beach, and I found myself pleasantly stimulated by his thought eager for more. Ken Wilber used to describe Ken Wilber’s thought as “psychoactive,” which is a descriptor I think should apply to McLuhan as well. I think his key point about the phonetic alphabet is that it creates a unique capacity for recombination of ideas. Since the letters represent abstract sounds, arbitrarily, and not things (via gestures or pictures or gestalts) they are free to abstract away from things. I am not sure cuneiform would have been complex enough to accomplish these operations. However, I agree that latent ‘mental consciousness’ must be presupposed for using the alphabet, and that it is also catalyzed by the new environment thus created. Steve Jobs described the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Probably alphabetic language provided legs for the mind.
One the one hand, it would seem that the re-immersion in acoustic space would be a good thing; on the other hand, we lose the literary, the “meta” of the figure reimagined which creates its own space and re-orients the ground, at our own peril. The dictator loves to create an atmosphere of cacophonous chaos so that we are not able to focus on what is being done to us, so that we could do something about it. If we consider the birth of modern media occurring during a time of intense global warfare, we might posit that the rate of transformation of media has exploded because they are weaponized. @PureMemory’s "5th Law,” which draws attention to the overall qualities of transformation in media could be useful for studying these overall effects and temporal pattern-flows.
I watched and listened the whole talk and took notes. When @Douggins said, “We are the new media,” which was not said in the manner of a manifesto, but rather as a statement of fact, ala Wittgenstein, as an aspect of the world that is simply the case, I felt that summed up something about what it all means.
It just seems obvious to me that we need to use right brain and left brain capacities more or less equally, slightly off center maybe, pretty much always, but with an overall balance. Like peddling a bicyle, if we lean too far in any direction, we will crash. So it just really seems that we need both visual and acoustic forms of space, but we shouldn’t conflate or confuse the two. The figure pretending to be the ground is a disaster.
I thought @edoubleoo’s point about seeking utopias in some apotheosis of media (the metaverse, AI, the logos, the omega point) was well taken. We should be wary of any final cause that presents itself as an ultimate cause. When that becomes the case in a given state, look for the coming reversal…
Thanks also to @Lisa for reviving the notion of Socrate’s maeutic method, education as a drawing out of a priori knowing, as juxstaposed with the app-based learning we are moving torwards. If the teacher is being obsoleted in the electronic jungle, then who or what role is being revived? Perhaps the medicine man, with just the right incantations to ward off the negative spirits of the anthropocence, who maintains the open channels of the sublime?
I thought @johnnydavis54’s riff on Hamlet, his whole intro, was rather epic. And @achronon’s insights from numerology, as well reading McLuhan through Gebser, was a helpful reframing. As I was reading, I thought of Gebser too, and felt his overall account (including tranformations through archaic, magic, mythic, and mental forms) is more complete. Alphabetic space is “visual,” yes, but it would be more accurate to say that it is “mental,” with a visual bias.
I plan to read the last two chapter of Laws of Media and then watch/listen to your second session, and then give another round of response. I will hold my thumb in front of my face and make a sideways figure 8, and ask again what I’ve learned that I didn’t know before. Back to numerology, I think that have six active participants in a Café (with an average of 20 minutes each) is a good for allowing everybody to be heard. Of course, it is not just about the quanity of time (which is variable, as some speak more, others less) but the quality of the contributions, and I found that everyone easily multiplied their 20 minutes’ share in terms of the collective thought form presented. Maybe the child and the elder are forming a strange loop.
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despite the inherent sketchyness of it, here’s an experimental play with @johnnydavis54’s (frankly, stellar) audio footage with which to play; with timing and order, in order, to compose at the gentle promptings of St. Jon Baptiste,
and the greeny-wooded environs betwixt rurealities of Connecticut.
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