Samuel Beckett

from the Internet Archive


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Samuel Beckett's Film
Runtime: 20 min
Country: USA
Color: Black and White
Sound Mix: Silent

A twenty-minute, almost totally silent film (no dialogue or music one 'shhh!') in which Buster Keaton attempts to evade observation by an all-seeing eye. But, as the film is based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to be perceived), Keaton's very existence conspires against his efforts

Lucky's monologue - French. "Waiting for godot" By Samuel Beckett





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CCR exercise 01

Beyond the published analysis on the web, what's going on in this song? Lyrics for: Lookin' Out My Back Door

Just got home from Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch. Imagination sets in, pretty soon I'm singin', Chorus: Doo, doo, doo, lookin' out my back door. There's a giant doing cartwheels, a statue wearin' high heels. Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn. A dinosaur Victrola listening to Buck Owens. Chorus Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band. Won't you take a ride on the flyin' spoon Doo, doo doo. Wondrous apparition provided by magician. Chorus Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band. Won't you take a ride on the flyin' spoon Doo, doo doo. Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows. Chorus Forward troubles Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn. Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows. Chorus

Robot sex and vampire energy - nah, mythology is dead.

Robot sex.
Almost not kidding.
http://www.60secondscience.com/archive/science-technology-news/robot-sex-is-the-latest-buzz.php?sc=WR_20071218







Our vampire energy sucks are on a wall switch. One toggle later and No More Suck.
That's just because we're very clever.

Voluntary Regulation

Propaganda's Launch as an art form

MULTI-media

Multi - media. Crossroads of image and word and sound and myths (Big Ideas in and through story).

Example

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Wafa Sultan - an opportunity to debug

Perhaps the 21st century mindset she implies is not as simple as she thinks. What if it were not a clash between civilization and backwardness but between, as she almost implies, a transition from doing conflict poorly to doing it well while holding unused the option to war while honoring its gravity and the passions of The Enemy, whomever is so identified at the moment. More on this to come.

Origins of Psychology

reproduced from : http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhiana.cgi?id=dv4-01

PSYCHOLOGICAL IDEAS IN ANTIQUITY Psychology is a modern term, but its components, psyche and logos, are words whose history goes back to the Indo-European parent language. For the philos- ophers of classical antiquity, giving an “account” (logos) of the psyche was a necessary part of intellectual inquiry. Greek philosophy was vitally concerned with many of the problems which exercise modern psychologists, but did not regard “study of the mind” as an autonomous subject with specific terms of refer- ence. Frequently theories about the psyche were intimately connected with ethical, physical, and meta- physical assumptions. In this article “antiquity” means the period of Greco-Roman civilization (ca. 750 B.C.-A.D. 450), and “psychological doctrines” means theories held about the psyche by philosophers. It is necessary to leave the term psyche untranslated initially, since it cannot be accurately rendered by a single English word such as “soul” or “mind.” The meaning of psyche will best appear by examining its functions and what it is used to denote. Most of this survey is devoted to a chrono- logical discussion of the major psychological doctrines, but a preliminary note on the language and popular conceptions inherited by philosophers will help to set the scene. THE LEGACY OF EARLY GREEK LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT The Homeric poems (ca. 750-700 B.C.) are the earli- est European literature. In them references to psyche are almost confined to descriptions of death or the dead. A man who has lost his psyche is either dead or unconscious (through fainting) and it is probable that the word has a primary association with breath. The precise location of psyche in the body is obscure, though there are good reasons for associating it with the head (R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought, Cambridge [1951], pp. 95-115). Psyche is sufficiently corporeal to be “breathed out” through the mouth or through a wound and to survive as a ghost when it has left the body. But though essential to the living man, psyche is not connected in Homer with any particular activity. Nous is his favorite word to describe “mental seeing” or “planning” and it can sometimes be translated “mind.” To denote emotions the important word is thumos (physically associated with breath and blood). A man may “desire in his thumos” or his thumos may “urge him to do some- thing.” Though not regarded as “organs” of the body, nous and thumos are permanent possessions of the living man to which his thinking and feeling belong. There are other words which overlap or go beyond these, but Homer does not have a single noun to denote the soul or personality. Nor does he use a single term for “body.” When the Homeric hero is under emotional stress he may externalize his heart or his thumos, scolding it or conversing with it. The notion that emo- tions or intellect are in some sense independent of their possessor is illustrated by the “psychic intervention” (Dodds [1951], pp. 5-16) seen in expressions like “Zeus took away his understanding” or “A god put courage into his heart.” The survival of the psyche in Homer appears not to possess any important ethical or religious associa- tions. Deprived of the body, the psyche lives on in Hades, a feeble transformation or residue of the living man. Essentially, the man whose psyche has left the body is dead. Merely to survive as a psyche did not make him immortal (athanatos). For to be athanatos (literally “deathless”) is to possess the property of the gods, and the Homeric psyche is so far from being divine that it is compared to smoke. The immortality of the soul was a concept which Greeks as late as the fifth century B.C. found surprising (Herodotus IV, 93ff.). The significance of the development between Homeric thought and early philosophy has been admirably analyzed by Snell (Die Entdeckung des Geistes, pp. 12ff.); but a caveat is perhaps needed against his claim that Homer gives a fully repre- sentative picture of Greek ways of thinking at a par- ticular time. Homer is the culmination of a long oral tradition which has its own highly formalized expres- sions. In the lyric poets of the next two centuries psyche came to be treated as the seat of emotions, in spite of its Homeric associations with death; and it is possible that such a use of the word is not as novel as its absence from Homer might suggest. Eventually intellectual activity was also ascribed to psyche and by the fifth century B.C. psyche has changed its relation to other words and become the name for a single thing to which consciousness and vitality in general belong. How and why this happened is impossible to answer precisely, but it is certain that religious conceptions associated with the names of Orpheus and Pythagoras were highly influential. The essence of these conceptions, which probably go back to the sixth century B.C. in northern Greece and southern Italy, is as follows: the psyche is an im- mortal (and therefore divine) being, sullied by incor- poration into a mortal body but capable by initiation and ritual observances of becoming pure and eventu- ally free of its earthly shell. Rebirth in various forms and final union with the universal divinity are essential features of this doctrine. It is clear that the Homeric concept of psyche has become quite transmuted here. Page 2, Volume 4 Now, far from signifying merely that which leaves a man when he dies, psyche must, in order to fulfill the religious belief, denote his living self or personality. The full significance of this concept was to be devel- oped by Plato, but some earlier philosophers (whether or not they accepted the religious belief) now treated psyche as the center of consciousness. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DOCTRINES OF THE PRE-SOCRATICS 1. Thales and Anaximenes. The first Greek thinkers who are conventionally called “philosophers” were more interested in cosmogony and cosmology than in the study of man. To Thales of Miletus psyche seems to have denoted both life and the source of motion. The concept of psyche as that which moves and ani- mates the body is a natural development of the view that a dead (motionless) body has lost its psyche. In Aristotle's opinion (De anima 411a 7f.) Thales may have believed the world itself to possess psyche; and many later philosophers certainly took this view. Anaximenes, Thales' younger fellow-countryman, drew a specific analogy between the human psyche and the material which he supposed to surround (and control) the cosmos (frag. 2). Both were identified with breath or air, and the point of the comparison is clearly that the psyche in man possesses a function similar to that of air in the world. Psyche or air is the life-principle. Thales and Anaximenes did not apparently discuss psychology in detail, but the assumption of an affinity between the human psyche and the cosmic principle belongs to the same climate of ideas which gave rise to beliefs in the psyche as the divine element in man and the center of his consciousness. 2. Heraclitus. In Heraclitus of Ephesus all these concepts occur and they are also associated with an interest in sense perception and theory of knowledge. To Heraclitus the senses are the first source of informa- tion about the world, but their witness can be mislead- ing (frag. 107). If the evidence of the senses is correctly interpreted by the soul (by which psyche will now be translated) it can bring about an understanding of the logos, the principle determining all things. This princi- ple, which means the unity behind opposition and change, is not directly an object of perception, though Heraclitus may have supposed it to be “drawn in” physically through the senses (Guthrie [1962], p. 430). Logos is an object of intellectual apprehension which a soul in the right condition can grasp. The principle has as its material constituent fire, and Heraclitus probably also regarded fire as the fundamental material of soul, since “it is death to soul to become water” (frag. 36), while “a dry [i.e., hot] soul is wisest and best” (frag. 118). A number of fundamental ideas are involved here. First, the soul is now treated as the recipient of sense-impressions. Second, it is able, by interpreting these, to grasp a principle which is not strictly empirical. Third, the soul at its best is analogous to, if not identical with, the fiery cosmic principle. Aristotle, much later, was to talk of “the thought which thinks itself,” and the embryo of this notion may be contained in Heraclitus' belief that the soul is both the apprehender of logos and in some sense identical with logos. These ideas were not stated in such precise terms by Heraclitus himself. Indeed he advised that the soul possesses depths which cannot be grasped (frag. 45). But they are reasonable inferences from his oracular fragments. He probably believed that the soul was immortal, and that excellence of character went along with intellectual understanding. In this he anticipated Plato, but also his near contemporary, Empedocles. 3. Empedocles. In Empedocles, science and mysti- cism are curiously blended. But though it would be improper to draw an absolute distinction between his two poems, On Nature and Purifications, the former is primarily an attempt to explain the physical world and the latter an account, in the Orphic-Pythagorean tradition, of the incarnations, rewards, and punishments of the “soul” (daimon). Since the work On Nature accounts for sense perception, emotion, and thought in purely material terms, without reference to a psyche, it is hard to know what role the immortal soul played in the mortal body. Empedocles' account of this is confined to the religious poem (in the evidence which survives) and it is safest to assume that he distinguished the source of physical consciousness from the moral, immortal self. If so, Empedocles has come nearer to the concept of a soul which is quite distinct from the body. Empedocles gave detailed explanations of sense per- ception and thought. It is difficult to summarize these, since they are intimately connected with his basic assumptions about the world. Four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and two polar forces, Love and Strife, constitute all that exists. To perceive is to receive in the pores of the sense organs effluences from the exter- nal elements, which are recognized by similar elements in the sense organs. Thought takes place primarily in the blood, which is composed of a nearly perfect mix- ture (frags. 98, 105) of the elements. It is by thought that we perceive Love and Strife, which are probably also embodied in the blood. Empedocles does not ex- plain whether or how the evidence of the senses is organized by thought. At about this time a Pythagorean philosopher, Alcmaeon, had traced perception from the senses to the brain, but Empedocles may have regarded thought itself as a category of perception which has as its function receiving through the pores and assimi- Page 3, Volume 4 lating different combinations of external elements. Even the elements are in some sense “conscious,” and all processes, including emotional and mental activi- ties, are referred to their mixture and separation. The naiveté of the theory should not obscure its achieve- ments. Empedocles has focused attention on the mech- anism of consciousness, and offered an explanation consistent with his theories about the natural world. Psychology is here related to physiology. The investi- gation of physical phenomena has aroused interest in the physical processes of sensation and thought. 4. Parmenides. Other pre-Socratic theories may be discussed more briefly. To Parmenides, whose influence on Empedocles and subsequent philosophy was pro- found, the physical world possessed no reality; for it contained no subject of which “exists” could always be truly asserted. Parmenides was unable to satisfy the claims of his logic by reference to changing phenomena and he rejected the senses in favor of nous, the mind or the application of thought: the only existent is an object of intellectual apprehension. For the history of psychology this is important. Parmenides set up the intellect as an autonomous faculty, quite independent of sense perception. Its physical basis (frag. 16) is obscure and hardly relevant to his main argument. But among philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who were concerned with the relation between soul and body, an analogous belief in the primacy and independence of the intellectual faculty persists. 5. Anaxagoras and Democritus. It is improbable that any pre-Socratic philosopher regarded mind or soul as wholly immaterial. Anaxagoras made nous the first cause of the cosmos and the controlling principle of living things. He called it the “finest and purest of all things” (frag. 12), which suggests that he was coming close to expressing its immateriality. Unlike Empedocles, Anaxagoras regarded perception as the interaction of contraries; we recognize external heat by virtue of cold in ourselves. He was also an extreme realist, taking all qualitative differences to be funda- mental differences in matter itself. This theory was opposed by his contemporary, Democritus the atomist, who referred all the qualities we perceive to changing states of the body and its interaction with atoms of different shapes. Democritus was consistent with the general pre-Socratic position in giving the soul (spherical atoms distributed over the body) the same substance as his cosmic principle. PLATO Plato's psychological theory is fundamental to his whole philosophy and only its more striking aspects can be indicated here. In regarding “cultivation of the soul” as the primary duty, Plato was certainly influ enced by Socrates and the Pythagoreans. Our knowl- edge of Socrates is largely based on the works of Plato, but it can be assumed that Socrates advocated and practiced rigorous discussion about moral concepts as the means of tending the soul and making it competent to control the body and its passions. “Soul” here means intellectual and moral self. The two attributes go hand in hand. For it is only when we know what goodness is that we can (and will) become good. Dualism. Plato presents this intellectualist position most strongly in the Phaedo. Soul and body are alien substances. It is the aim of the soul, which is simple in essence and immortal, to rid itself of the body, for while it is embodied the soul cannot attain perfect knowledge. The only objects of knowledge are Forms— unique, incomposite, immaterial entities of which the particular objects of perception are only fleeting replicas. During embodiment the soul can apprehend the Forms only by thinking as far as possible inde- pendently of the body. Soul is the thinking, rational self in direct opposition to the passions, pleasures, and sensations associated with the body. It is still part of the soul's job to animate the body during its incarna- tion, but this is a regrettable incursion on its spiritual activity and Plato does not explain how the soul acts on the body. Differentiated Soul. This extreme dualism was not Plato's final word. In the Republic (Book IV) soul loses its unity and becomes divided into nous (“intellect”), thumos (“passion”), and epithumia (“appetite”). To its appetitive part are ascribed bodily desires; thumos is the emotional element in virtue of which we feel anger, fear, etc.; nous is (or should be) the controlling part which subjugates the appetites with the help of thumos. Plato seeks justification for this theory on two counts. First, his quest for justice is based on the assumption that the state is a large-scale analogue of the individual, and therefore the components which sanction the state's division into three classes (artisans, soldiers, and guardians) are established as categories for analyzing the psychology of the individual. Second, Plato invokes the empirical fact of conflict within the individual (Republic IV, 436ff.). At one and the same time we may both desire to drink and be unwilling to drink. But the same thing cannot act in opposite ways with the same part of itself towards the same object at the same time. If such conflict is to be referred to the soul as a whole, then the soul must possess different parts to account for the clash. It is also the case that passion and appetite may conflict, for a man may be angry with that in himself which prompts him to do some- thing shameful. Hence a part of the soul different from reason and appetite is required. Like the soldiers of the ideal state, passion should be the ally of the Page 4, Volume 4 governing component. The basic conflict for Plato is still between bodily desires and intellect, between sense and reason, but the dualism of the Phaedo has been modified by locating the division which follows from incarnation within the soul itself. At the same time Plato saw the possibility of reconciliation within the divided self, for he asserts that the two lower parts have “following reason” as their function (Republic IX, 586e). The true philosopher is one in whom the rule of reason is established, and in this situation all parts of the soul conspire together for a united good. Nor is the rule of reason an exercise of cold intellection. The rational part of the soul is a lover of wisdom, and distinguished from the appetitive part not by the ab- sence of all desire but by having a different object of desire: the absolute, intelligible good. This doctrine is presented mythically in the Phaedrus (246a ff.), where the human soul is pictured as a charioteer (reason) driving a pair of horses (passion and appetite). The passionate horse is a clean, upstanding creature which follows the guide of reason, whereas its fellow horse is a shaggy, recalcitrant beast which tries to drag the chariot down from its heavenly course. Here the soul's composite nature does not depend on incarnation; but the point of the image is the imperfect human soul's moral tension, not its multiplicity of function. Plato's division of the soul persists in later works such as the Timaeus, in which the rational part of the soul is stated to be divine and immortal, and is contrasted with two mortal, irrational parts: passion and appetite (69d ff.). The rational part is located in the head and is composed of immaterial ingredients blended from the basic principles of the intelligible world and the world of physical change. The irrational parts are located in the chest (passion) and the belly (appetite). Their activities are associated with the bodily organs which house them. The blood vessels seem to be the instruments by which the different parts of the soul communicate with each other. Knowledge and Perception. Soul is self-moving, the principle of motion (i.e., animation) both in individual living things and in the world itself (Phaedrus 245c ff.). The world is an intelligent, living creature on which man himself is modelled. In its original, discarnate state the human soul has direct acquaintance with the Forms and thus acquires knowledge. This knowledge is for- gotten when the soul enters a body but it can be recalled, at least in part, by “dialectic,” rigorous philo- sophical discussion, and the judgments which we make about our perceptions presuppose it. All judgments entail the use of such terms as “exists,” “is the same as,” “is different from,” and these are not objects of perception (Theaetetus 185a ff.). Learning is a process of recollecting a priori truths, a doctrine Plato attempts to prove in the Meno (81e ff.) by an experiment in which an uneducated slave is shown how to “recall” the answer to the problem, what square has twice the area of that of a given square, by answering a series of simple questions. Since sensible objects lack the unchanging existence required by Plato of what is fully real, he took less interest in the analysis of sensation. But in later dialogues the soul is more explicitly related to the body insofar as sensations are described as movements, caused by external phenomena, which are transmitted to the soul through the body (Timaeus 43c); and pleasures which have their source in the body penetrate to the soul (Republic 457c). Plato also recog- nized a form of “judgment” in which the mind pro- nounces rightly or wrongly on what is presented to the senses (Sophist 263d-264b). Plato's psychology is not a systematic doctrine, rigidly adhered to. His view of the soul developed from the uncompromising dualism of the Phaedo to a posi- tion in which a unitary self is attainable if harmony can be established between reason, emotion, and bodily appetite. Body and mind are related to each other through pleasure and sensation. But Plato never aban- doned his belief in the priority of reason, the part of man which is akin to the fully real, unchanging world and which has as its essential function apprehending that world. ARISTOTLE With Aristotle, psychology became a subject of sys- tematic inquiry. He devoted a whole treatise (De anima) to defining soul and its functions, and a group of smaller works (Parva naturalia) covers specific topics such as memory and sleep. Aristotle regarded psychol- ogy as an aspect of physical science, and his own analysis is based on the principles which he lays down for all study of the natural world. But the De anima occupies a fundamental place in his entire philosophy. The biological works require constant reference to it, and it is highly relevant to the ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Aristotle has good claims to be the founder of “psychology,” though the word itself is not used by him. All later Greek psychological theory shows his influence, in both terminology and method. Soul as Vital Principle. Aristotle began his career as a student of Plato, and in his earliest works, of which only fragments survive, he argued for the preexistence and survival of the whole soul. According to that theory the relationship of body to soul is temporary and con- tingent. But in the De anima, a work of his later years, Aristotle takes body and soul to be two aspects, which are only conceptually distinguishable, of a single sub- stance: “a body which possesses life” (II, 1). Aristotle calls these two aspects “matter” and “form.” Soul is Page 5, Volume 4 the form which animate matter must possess. The physical matter of an animal is not its soul, for what distinguishes animate from inanimate is not physical matter but “the possession of life.” The potentiality to be alive is a natural property of certain bodies, and it is in virtue of soul that such bodies realize this potentiality. Aristotle defines soul as “the primary actuality of a natural body which potentially has life” (De anima 412a 27-28). By “primary actuality” he means the actual possession of the faculties which are necessary to life, just as an eye, in order to be an eye, must possess the faculty of vision. It is clear that with this concep- tion body and soul are necessarily related. Aristotle recognizes that emotions, desire, perception—all func- tions of the soul—are dependent on the body which contains them. But the influence of Plato remains strong enough to make Aristotle regard mind (nous) as a faculty of soul which has no physical base and which may be capable of existing apart from the body. Of this more below. Faculties of Soul. In the first book of De anima, Aristotle surveys and criticizes earlier theories of the soul. From them he draws certain general assumptions; in particular, the soul is the principle responsible for thought, sensation and perception (Aristotle's single word aisthesis covers both), and movement. His detailed analysis in the next two books is concerned with these functions of soul. Since soul is that which distinguishes animate from inanimate, Aristotle considers what characteristics are peculiar to living creatures. He nominates four: nutri- tion (the faculty of growth and reproduction); sensa- tion; locomotion; and thought. The first of these is a “form of movement,” and it is possessed by every living creature from plants upwards. Only man has all four faculties, which thus serve as a way of classifying all living things in ascending order of complexity. This method of analyzing soul is an important ad- vance on Plato's. Aristotle is not dividing the soul into parts (a procedure which he opposes) but analyzing its different functions. Possessing aisthesis means possessing at least one (touch) of the five senses, and it also entails imagination, pleasure and pain, and de- sire. The latter is not a base part of the soul, but a necessary concomitant of perception and sensation. Aristotle in some sense is a behaviorist. He wants to know how and why living creatures act, and he analyzes this in terms roughly comparable to stimulus and response. Thus an animal moves in space because its appetitive faculty is prompted by an object which presents itself as desirable (or good), and the animal is then moved to pursue it (De anima III, 432b 15-17; 433a 27-29). In man the psychology of action is more complex, since mind and desire may clash; but there is no question of man's acting independently of desire since all action is prompted by the good, as the agent sees it. What man can do, if he has himself under control, is to contemplate objects of desire or aversion without acting in consequence, though physical changes, such as rapid heartbeat, may ensue (De anima 432b 27-32). He also has the unique capacity to deliberate and thus establish a goal of action inde- pendent of his immediate environment and physical state. Sensation and Perception. Aristotle devoted consid- erable attention to the analysis of sensation and per- ception (De anima II, 5-12). His theories here, though hampered by inadequate physiology (the nervous sys- tem, commonly confused with the arteries, was dis- covered about sixty years after his death) represent a major advance on previous speculation. Aristotle takes sense perception to be an activity in which external objects so act upon each sense organ that it receives their form (perceptible properties) independently of the matter with which this form is associated in the object itself. Just as wax can be imprinted with various impressions, so the sense organ or sense can become qualified as colored, resonant, hot, etc. Neither the sense nor its (perceptible) object has any actual exist- ence except in the act of perception, and this takes place when the appropriate medium (e.g., light in the case of vision) is acted upon by the external object and passes on its perceptible properties to the sense organ. It has been observed that an explanation of aisthesis as a “process of being acted on” does not square well with the active notion of “discrimination,” which Aristotle also attributes to this faculty (Hamlyn, Classical Quarterly, 9 [1959], 12f.). Part of the difficulty arises from a lack of terms to distinguish sensation from perception. But Aristotle was not perhaps so confused as some make out. The organ is so constituted that it reacts in certain ways to the objects which fall between the ranges, light-dark, soft-hard, etc. (De anima 423b 30-424a 10). The sense is a “mean” be- tween two extremes and it is in virtue of this mean that we are made aware of (or judge) the different properties of objects. Hence the reason, according to Aristotle, why we are not aware of temperature equiv- alent to that of our own body. A more serious difficulty is how to explain the coor- dination of information received by the senses and the problem of self-consciousness. Aristotle asserts that each sense has its own object, to which it is necessarily related. (He seems to exclude the possibility of halluci- nation by connecting actual hearing with actual sounding, De anima 425b 26ff.). But there are certain properties such as motion, rest, shape, magnitude, and Page 6, Volume 4 number which are apprehended by more than one sense. Since there is no sixth sense, this “perception of common sensibles” is due to the cooperative activity of the special senses, i.e., the whole faculty, and Aristotle calls this “common sense” (De anima 425a 14-425b 11). Whereas we can never, in Aristotle's view, be deceived by the simple qualities (e.g., color, sound) reported by the special senses, we can make mistakes about the common sensibles; we can also relate any object of perception to the wrong external object (what Aristotle calls the “incidental” object of perception), i.e., take what we perceive to be Socrates when it is Plato. For perception does not tell us what something is (this is the job of the mind); it gives information about the qualities of an object. The pre- cise workings of “common sense” are obscure in the De anima. In the Parva naturalia mention is made of a single, unified sense faculty, probably located in the heart, by which the data of sense are coordinated and on which self-awareness, imagination, and dream- ing depend. But if Aristotle envisaged such a role for “common sense” in the De anima he does not say so. Thought. Artistotle's account of thought is obscure and unsatisfactory. Much of the difficulty derives from the fact that he takes thought to be an activity analogous to aisthesis, i.e., a change brought about by an object, in this case “thinkables” or “intelligibles” (De anima III, 4). Now in sensation the sense organ is acted upon by external phenomena, but these are not available to actualize the mind, which “has no organ.” Aristotle takes the mind to be in one respect analogous to a blank wax-tablet on which anything can be imprinted; in this sense mind is capable of receiving and becoming identical with any object of thought, but it has no actual existence until it thinks. In another respect, the mind is an ever-active power that actualizes its own capacity for thought in the manner of light which makes potential colors actual (ibid., III, 5). This doctrine of an active intellect is necessary, given Aristotle's theory of potentiality, if the capacity of the passive intellect is to result in an actual cognitive process. But the active intellect does not apparently create its own objects of thought. Where then do they come from? They cannot be independent substances, like Plato's Forms. But thought is concerned with “forms” or “essences”—what things really are—and it thinks them with the help of mental images (ibid., 431a 14-15). Aristotle seems to conceive of imagination as a faculty, intermediate between aisthesis and thought, which provides the mind with the data in which it can conceptualize the essential form of particular things, or, in the case of abstract thought, the form of, say, triangle without reference to any actual existing triangle. But the precise relationship between imagi nation and the two aspects of mind is very uncertain. In its active aspect mind is independent of body, eternal and immortal. It is not engendered in the phys- ical process of conception but enters the womb “from outside.” But what kind of existence the individual mind enjoys when separate from the body is not explained. God, for Aristotle, is nothing but an ever- active mind, and man has something of God present in himself through his active intellect. This doctrine does not seriously contradict Aristotle's view of soul and body as two aspects of a single sub- stance. Soul essentially is that which actualizes the body's vital capacities, but the active intellect has no physical correlate, though it temporarily unites with the passive intellect, which ultimately seems to depend on the body. The details of this theory are not Aristotle's main concern in the De anima. There he shows how the response of a living creature to its environment can be analyzed as a movement, varying in complexity from the single nutritive functions of a plant to the behavior of man, who responds by his rational and appetitive capacities to the data provided by the senses and imagination. Knowledge is the formulation of general notions by induction from the particular objects of perception. This ability to frame concepts provides man with his ethical goals and the subject matter of his scientific inquiries. Aristotle's psychology is a general analysis of the determinate capacities of the species which fall under the genus animal. It has important metaphysical and ethical applications, but unlike Plato, Aristotle emphasized the organic unity of body and soul, and established terms of reference for investigating animal behavior. POST-ARISTOTELIAN PSYCHOLOGY 1. Theophrastus and Strato. After Aristotle's death the philosophical school (Lyceum or Peripatos) associ- ated with his name won fame as a center of scientific research, under its successive heads, Theophrastus and Strato. Theophrastus' De sensu, a historical survey of theories of sensation and perception, is an invaluable source of information about the pre-Socratics, but the little that is known about his own psychological theory suggests that he followed Aristotle in most respects. He did, however, raise questions about the “external” origin of intellect and the manner of the association between the active and passive intellect (Themistius, In De an. 430a 25). In this context, and for what follows, Strato is a figure of major importance, a fact which has not always been fully appreciated. Evidence about him is scanty, but it reveals a thinker of the highest scientific quality. Strato departed radically from the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition in regarding sensa- Page 7, Volume 4 tion, perception, emotion, and thought as multiple aspects of a single, unified consciousness (Plutarch, De libidine et aegritudine 697b). This he located in a central organ (the front part of the brain) which com- municates with the sense organs and the rest of the body via pneuma (“fine air or breath”). Sensations occur not in the organs themselves but in this sensorium, whence they are projected to the particular part of the body which is affected (Aëtius, IV 23, 3). Strato thus provided a firm physiological basis for consciousness lacking in Aristotle's system, and com- pletely abandoned the distinction between rational and irrational faculties, as well as the belief in an immortal soul or a transcendent reason. Mind is not peculiar to man; rather, it is a necessary condition of sensation and perception, since the data of sense require “atten- tion” if they are to be registered (Plutarch, De sollertia animalium 961a). In this theory, thought is down- graded to “consciousness,” a thoroughly heretical no- tion in the general context of Greek philosophy. For his physiology Strato was certainly influenced by med- ical science which, probably shortly after his death, was revolutionized by the discovery of the nervous system. (See F. Solmsen, “Greek Philosophy and the Discovery of Nerves,” Museum Helveticum, 18 [1961], 150-63, 169-97.) Strato's use of pneuma as the carrier of “messages” (Aristotle in his biological works had already assigned to pneuma the function of trans- mitting bodily movement) as well as his concept of a unified consciousness found further development in the psychology of the Stoics. 2. Stoics and Epicureans. In spite of their scientific achievements the Peripatetics were not the major influence on later Greek thinking in its broader sense. Epicurus and Zeno (of Citium), who founded schools in Athens at the end of the fourth century B.C., inaugu- rated two philosophical systems which rapidly acquired rival adherents from a wider range of society than Plato and Aristotle had affected. It is customary to invoke the conquests of Alexander the Great and the collapse of the Greek city-state in accounts of the origin of these systems. The instability of the times and the inadequacy of traditional ethics may well help to explain the suc- cess and motivation of Epicurus and Zeno, who both provided a morality which stressed the self-sufficiency of the individual. But the intellectual basis of both systems is thoroughly Greek and their psychological theories develop ideas already discussed. These theories may conveniently be studied in con- cert, for Stoicism and Epicureanism possess striking similarities as well as contrasts. Both systems are a form of materialism: for Epicurus, following Democritus, all that exists is atoms, differing in size, shape, and weight (this last an innovation), which by deviating from their normal downward movement in empty space collide and form temporary compound bodies. In living things the soul itself consists of very fine atoms, resembling fiery air, which pervade the whole body. No body which lacks a soul can be alive and soul cannot be sentient or cause sensation unless it is housed in a body, a doctrine which rules out the survival of consciousness after death (Letter to Herodotus 63-64). The soul-atoms located in the human breast constitute “mind,” which controls and issues instructions to the rest of the soul (Lucretius, III, 136-44). Mind and soul are thus in permanent contact with all parts of the body. Sensation is the result of eidōla (effluences exactly reproducing external objects) striking the sense organs and thus setting up a movement in the mind. And certain par- ticularly fine “idols” (e.g., from the gods) penetrate directly to the mind. All sensations as such are true, and the only source of knowledge; but they may be misinterpreted by the mind and hence errors arise. General ideas are built up by the mind from repeated presentations of the same object, and perception occurs when individual presentations match the general idea. Scientific thought seems to operate by the juxtaposition of two sets of atoms within the mind, constituting different concepts (C. Bailey, Epicurus [1926], p. 269), but the evidence for this theory is notoriously obscure. In Stoicism the soul also permeates the whole body and finds its “thinking center” in the heart. It consists not of atoms but pneuma (“fiery breath”) in a particular state of “tension.” For the Stoics, all that exists consists of bodies differentiated by pneuma, the active force which binds the passive material qualities, earth and water, into individual things according to its tension. (Like the pre-Socratics, Stoics and Epicureans ex- plained soul in terms of the basic principle governing the universe.) Pneuma is not merely a mechanistic concept, like the Epicurean atom, but a dynamic, rational force which pervades and activates the whole world, all parts of which are thus interconnected. In perception the sense organs are acted upon by objects, either directly or through a medium, and this sets up a presentation (phantasia) which is reported to the central organ by currents of pneuma. The agent has the power to assent or not to the presentation, and his act of assent constitutes perception or “grasping” the object. The Stoics argued that presentations which completely reproduce the object are grasped as true by men of normal health, and on the basis of these, general ideas are built up by analogy, combination, etc. (Cicero, Academica posteriora I, 41-42; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos VII, 227-60; Diogenes Laërtius, VII, 45-54). Presentations can also occur without an external cause, a theory which ac- counts, inter alia, for hallucination. Like the Page 8, Volume 4 Epicureans the Stoics based their theory of knowledge entirely on perception. Both systems gave special attention to motivation. For the primary impulse the Stoics took “innate attraction towards those things which are peculiarly suited to preserve an animal's natural well-being and avoidance of their opposites” (Cicero, De finibus III, 16ff.). All living creatures are endowed with a drive, and this is naturally stimulated by awareness of the appropriate object. Without this drive no action is possible, and it follows on a mental picture stemming from something internal or external. What distinguishes man from other animals is the possession of reason. This develops through childhood, and in maturity ena- bles a man to control his drives and so make responses to the environment which are rational and moral as well as appropriate in the instinctive sense. Assent plays its part here as a means of determining the mental attitude, which is open to the individual's control. From God's viewpoint all events are predetermined, but so far as human action is concerned the causal factor (as in Aristotle) is primarily the disposition which the agent has acquired by repeatedly acting in a certain way. The Stoics underrated emotions, which they regarded as perverted judgments, except in the case of the sage. Like Strato they unified all functions of soul. For the Epicureans, by contrast, pleasure and avoidance of pain are the primary impulse of living creatures and the foundation of ethics. They constitute the objects of desire by which all action is prompted (Cicero, De finibus I, 29ff.). For any action to take place, mental images in the form of “idols” must strike the mind and obtain its attention. Then the will is activated and movement transferred from the mind to the limbs (Lucretius, II, 261-83). The freedom of the will in action is explained by reference to an indeter- minate “swerve” of atoms (Lucretius, II, 250-60). This has generally been taken to imply a spontaneous movement of soul atoms for every voluntary act. But it has recently been argued that the swerve explains not particular voluntary acts but merely the fact that character is not wholly determined by antecedent causes (D. J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, Princeton [1967], pp. 169-237). Stoicism and Epicureanism are primarily theories of ethics, and their psychology focuses attention on the motives and processes of human action. Both abandon completely any idea of an incorporeal mind; mental activity is psychosomatic activity in which the soul acts by physical processes upon the body. Human behavior is necessarily related to the environment, from which all the data used to form concepts are derived. Such materialism and behaviorism were completely abandoned by the last great pagan and early Christian philosophers. PSYCHOLOGICAL DOCTRINE IN LATE ANTIQUITY: PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY Between the foundation of Stoicism and Epicurean- ism and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire lies a span of some six hundred years. The early part of this period produced a ferment of ideas in philosophy and science. But the first two hundred years of the Roman Empire, in spite of the achievements of the anatomist Galen and the astronomer Ptolemy, were not a time in which original thought flourished. Much was done to synthesize, mod- ify, or reinterpret existing theories, but the dominance of Rome, so fruitful in many respects, was not con- ducive to philosophical speculation. Yet there were forces at work which were to produce figures of major importance in the history of ideas, in particular Ploti- nus and Augustine. In them classical philosophy and the eclecticism of the age combined with spiritual theology in a remarkable way. 1. Plotinus. As concern with moral conduct became increasingly dominant among philosophers, so interest became ever more centered on the “inner man.” Already in Stoicism it was the attitude of mind, the internal disposition, which mattered in ethical judg- ment, but Stoicism remained earthbound by its denial of any existence to the incorporeal. In Neo-Platonism, as established by Plotinus, the highest human activity is contemplation of the transcendent Good, which is the source of various grades of being. Lowest on the scale is the material universe, including the human body with which the soul forms a mysterious and temporary union. This looks similar to Platonic dualism, but in fact it is significantly different. For Plato embodiment prevents the soul from fully grasp- ing the Forms. But for Plotinus the body is not a necessary barrier to union with the One or ultimate Good, the goal of human endeavor. This follows be- cause man's soul in its highest aspect is continually engaged in intellection of the Forms; it is “illumined” by Intellect, the principle second only to the One or Good. In this activity the soul is not self-conscious, since this would detract from its attention to the object of contemplation. Plotinus notes that certain activities, such as reading, go better if we are unconscious of ourselves as acting. What “comes down” to the mate- rial world and joins with body is an irradiation from the higher soul. But this lower soul is incorporeal, and Plotinus discusses the problem of its relation to the body at length (Enneads I, 1, 1-10; IV, 3, 9-23). He rejects all previous explanations of this relationship in favor of an analogy with light: soul is present to body Page 9, Volume 4 as light to air. The living body is “illumined” by soul. In sensation the soul uses the body and reads impres- sions made on it. Hence there is no action of body on soul. The two remain “separate but in contact.” Memory and perception both belong to soul and depend on its faculty of imaging (Enneads IV, 3, 27). The soul sees when it looks out at externals. In thought the faculty of imaging is acted upon by the higher soul, and this provides the principles with which reason works. Memory is a concept of great importance for Plotinus because it provides (or is) the continuity of self-consciousness. Only by memory does the embodied soul possess an image of itself. It is through desire for the lower that soul enters into body, and it is by desire for the higher that the soul can recall memory of its activity in the intellectual sphere and aspire eventually to forget all the lower (including self-awareness) in contemplation of the divine. 2. Augustine. Plotinus was the last great pagan philosopher of classical antiquity, but it is no coinci- dence that he shares much with Saint Augustine. In interpreting the scriptures Augustine was influenced by an intellectual climate common to pagan and Christian; and inner experience as revealed by intro- spection becomes the key to psychology. In a summary it is impossible to do more than indicate some of Augustine's major doctrines on the soul. In the De quantitate animae problems of the soul's relation to the body, and the nature of sensation and thought are discussed in dialogue form. The soul is incorporeal and its substance cannot be named; rather must it be inferred from the fact that God, its creator, is its proper habitation (Patrologia Latina, 32, 1036). The soul shares in reason and is fitted to rule the body. By its presence it vitalizes the body and forms this into a harmonious unity. In this doctrine Augustine is closer to Plotinus than to Aristotle. The soul can take note of the body's changes (and this is Augustine's definition of sensus) but these do not affect the soul itself. In man the soul possesses various grades of being (ibid., 1074ff.), a ranking determined by the objects of its attention. Apprehension of any kind is a result of the mind's choosing to attend to something in its field of internal vision. God is always present to the mind (whatever its activity) and by His grace the souls of the faithful at their highest possess a stable vision of the truth. It is by divine illumination that the soul has standards of judgment “impressed” on it, for the divine mind contains eternal truths (P.L. 42, 1052). Like Plotinus Augustine laid great weight on “memory,” for this is not mere reminiscence but the storehouse of experience and the mind's knowledge of itself (ibid., 1048). In conversion the mind “remembers” God. Augustine, for all his indebtedness to Greek thought, looks forward to the Middle Ages. But it is not the business of this article to chart the subsequent history of psychology. Needless to say, modern thinking owes more than is sometimes acknowledged to ancient psy- chology. Between the materialism of Democritus and the extreme spirituality of Plotinus runs a line on which intermediate positions are taken by Descartes as well as Plato, by Gilbert Ryle as well as Aristotle. In spite of inadequate technical knowledge the Greeks devel- oped ways of analyzing mind and body and the re- sponse of an organism to its environment which con- tinue to shape much of our thinking. They knew no “science” of psychology, and were not hampered by having to confine their attention to a neatly labeled set of “mental phenomena.” BIBLIOGRAPHY For pre-philosophical psychology the best starting points are Erwin Rhode, Psyche: Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeits- glaube der Griechen, 4th ed. (Tübingen, 1970; Engl. trans. London, 1925); Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes, 3rd ed. (Hamburg, 1955), trans. as The Discovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951). Texts of the pre-Socratics are collected in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin, 1951-52). For an extended treatment see J. I. Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition (Oxford, 1906). W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vols. I, II (Cambridge, 1962, 1965) has extensive notes and bibliography. For Plato the most im- portant texts are Phaedo, Phaedrus, Philebus, Republic IV- VII, X; Theaetetus, Timaeus. For bibliography see H. Cherniss, Lustrum (1961), 340-82, and for recent discussion I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato's Doctrines, Vol. I (London, 1962). Aristotle's psychological theory is set out in De anima, ed. Hicks (Cambridge, 1907) and Parva naturalia, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1955); general discussion and bibliography in I. Düring, Aristotles (Heidelberg, 1966). See also D. W. Hamlyn, De anima Books II and III, with Certain Passages from Book I (Oxford and New York, 1968). Some basic texts for post-Aristotelian psychology are col- lected by C. J. de Vogel, Greek Philosophy. A Collection of Texts with Notes and Explanations, Vol. III (Leiden, 1959). Relevant works of Augustine are De trinitate, De liberio arbitrio, De quantitate animae, and of Plotinus, Enneads I, 1; IV. This period is well surveyed by E. Zeller, Die Philos- ophie der Griechen, Vol. III, 1, 5th. ed. by E. Wellmann (Leipzig, 1923), and A. H. Armstrong, ed., Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1956). ANTHONY A. LONG [See also Analogy in Early Greek Thought v1-09 ; Atomism v1-21 v1-22 ; Behaviorism v1-30 ; Biological Conceptions in Antiquity v1-31 ; Cosmology v1-66 v1-67 ; Dualism v2-05 ; Epicureanism v2-15 ; Imprinting v2-64 ; Neo-Platonism v3-47 ; Platonism v3-63 v3-64 v3-65 ; Pythagorean... v4-04 v4-05 ; Rationality v4-07 ; Stoicism. v4-41 ]

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comments?

Wolfe re McLuhan - what if he is right?

reproduction from : http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/course/spring96/wolfe.html

suppose he is what he sounds like,
the most important thinker since
newton, darwin, freud, einstein,
and Pavlov what if he is right?

-TOM WOLFE

What if he's right What . . .if. . .he . . .is . . . right W-h-a-t i-f h-e i-s r-i-g-h-t

   W    IF    R   H    HE    I   A    IS    G  ?   T        H           T

There are currently hundreds of studs of the business world, breakfast food package designers, television net work creative department vice-presidents, advertising "media reps," lighting fixture fortune heirs, smiley patent lawyers, industrial spies, we- need vision board chairmen, all sorts of business studs who are all wondering if this man, Marshall McLuhan ... is right.... He sits in a little office off on the edge of the University of Toronto that looks like the receiving bin of a second-hand book store, grading papers, grading papers, for days on end, wearing-well, he doesn't seem to care what he wears. If he feels like it, he just puts on the old striped tie with the plastic neck band. You just snap the plastic band around your neck and there the tie is, hanging down and ready to go, Pree-Tide.

But what if-all sorts of huge world-mover & shaker corporations are trying to put McLuhan in a box or some thing. Valuable! Ours! Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game suppose he is the oracle of the modern times - what if he is right? he'll be in there. It almost seems that way. An "undisclosed corporation" has put a huge "undis closed sum" into, McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. One of the big American corporations has offered him $5000 to present a closed- circuit-ours!-television lecture on-oracle!-the ways the products in its industry will be used in the future. Even before all this, IBM, General Electric, Bell Telephone were flying McLuhan in from Toronto to New York, Pittsburgh, God knows where else, to talk to their hierarchs about . . . well, about whatever this unseen world of electronic environments that only he sees fully is all about.

They all sit in these conference rooms, under fluorescent lights, with the right air conditioned air streaming out from behind the management-style draperies. Upward-busting hierarch executives, the real studs, the kind who have already changed over from lie- down crewcuts to brush back Eric Johnston-style Big Boy haircuts and from Oxford button-downs to Tripler broadcloth straight points and have hung it all on the line, an $80,000 mortgage in New Canaan and a couple of kids at Deerfield and Hotchkiss-hung it all on the line on knowing exactly what this corporation is all about -they sit there with the day's first bloody mary squirting through their capillaries-and this man with part of a plastic neckband showing at the edge of the collar, who just got through grading papers, for godsake, tells them in an of-course voice and with I'm being-patient eyes, that, in effect, politely, they all know just about exactly . . . nothing . . . about the real business they're in-

-Gentlemen, the General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs, but it is not yet discovered that it is not in the light bulb business but in the business of moving information. Quite as much as A. T. & T. Yes. Of course-I-am-willing-to-be-patient. He pulls his chin down into his neck and looks up out of his ion' Scotch-lairdly face. Yes. The electric light is pun information it is a medium without a message as it were Yes. Light is a self- contained communications system in which the medium is the message Just think that over for a moment-I-am-willing-to-be - When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines

- but that it was in the business

of processing

information,

then it began

to navigate

with

clear

vision.

Yes.

Swell! But where did this guy come from? What is this-these cryptic, Delphian sayings: Th e electric light is pure information.

Delphian! The medium is the message. We are moving out of the age of the visual into the age of the aural and tactile . . .

Oracle!-McLuhan sits in the conference room on the upper deck of an incredible ferry boat that Walter Landor, one of the country's top package designers, has redone at a cost of about $400,000 as an office and design center. This great package design flagship nestles there in the water at Pier 5 in San Francisco. The sun floods in from the bay onto the basket woven wall-to-wall and shines off the dials of Landor's motion picture projection con sole. Down below on the main deck is a whole simulated supermarket for bringing people in and testing package impact and all sorts of optometric wonder wards for testing visual reception of metribergiarglebargle and McLuhan says, almost by the way:

"Of course, packages will be obsolete in a few years. People will want tactile experiences, they'll want to feel the product they're getting-"

But!-

McLuhan's chin goes down, his mouth turns down, his eyes roll up in his of course expression: "Goods will be sold in bins. People will go right to bins and pick things up and feel them rather than just accepting a package."

Landor, the package designer, doesn't lose his cool; he just looks- what if he is right?

". . . The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums . . ." That even, even, even voice goes on-

-McLuhan is sitting in the Lombardy Restaurant in New York with Gibson McCabe, president of News week, and several other high-ranking communications people, and McCabe tells of the millions Newsweek has put into reader surveys, market research, advertising, the editorial staff, everything, and how it paid off with a huge rise in circulation over the past five years. McLuhan listens, then down comes the chin: "Well . . . of course, your circulation would have risen about the same anyway, the new sensory balance of the people being what it is . . ."

Print gave tribal man an eye for an ear.

McLuhan is at the conference table in the upper room of Howard Gossage's advertising firm in San Francisco, up in what used to be a firehouse they're pretty great converters in San Francisco- and a couple of newspaper people are up there talking about how they are sure their readers want this and that to read-McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck: "Well . . . of course, people don't actually read newspapers. They get into them every morning like a hot bath."

Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb-with these pronouncements-"Art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age"- with all this Nietzschean certitude McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West. He is a word-of-mouth celebrity.

Corporation executives are only the beginning of the roster of people in America who stand to be shaken up -what if he is right? The university establishments, the literati-McLuhan has already earned the hostile envy of the New York literary establishment- the artists-they like him-scores of little groups of McLuhan cultists-thou sands of intellectuals are now studying McLuhan. The paperback edition of his book Understanding Media has been an "underground best seller"-that is, a best seller without benefit of publicity-for six months. City planners-

City planners are wondering what if he-McLuhan is the prophet of the New Life Out There, the suburbs, housing developments, astrodomes, domed-over shopping centers, freeways, TV families, the whole world of the new technologies that stretches out to the West beyond the old cities of the East. To McLuhan, New York is already obsolete, on its way to becoming not much more than a Disneyland discotheque for the enjoyment-not the big business or the gawking wonder, but the playing around-of the millions out there. They are already living the new life, while New York sits here choking to death in its old fashion.

McLuhan has developed a theory that goes like this: The new technologies of the electronic age, notably televi sion, radio, the telephone, and computers, make up a new environment. A new environment; they are not merely added to some basic human environment. The idea that these things, TV and the rest, are just tools that men can use for better or worse depending on their talents and moral strength-that idea is idiotic to McLuhan. The new technologies, such as television, have become a new environment. They radically alter the entire way people use their five senses, the way they react to things, and therefore, their entire lives and the entire society. It doesn't matter what the content of a medium like TV is. It doesn't matter if the networks show twenty hours a day of sadistic cowboys caving in people's teeth or twenty hours of Pablo Casals droning away on his cello in a pure -culture white Spanish drawing room. It doesn't matter about the content. The most pro. found effect of televi sion-its real "message," in McLuhan's terms -is the way it alters men's sensory patterns. The me dium is the message-that is the best- known McLuhanism. Television steps up the auditory sense and the sense of touch and depresses the visual sense. That seems like a paradox, but McLuhan is full of paradoxes. A whole generation in America has grown up in the TV environment, and already these millions of people, twenty-five and under, have the same kind of sensory reactions as African tribesmen. The same thing is happening all over the world. The world is growing into a huge tribe, a . . . global village, in a seamless web of electronics.

These are McLuhan metaphors. He started out as an English literature scholar. He graduated from the University of Manitoba in Canada and then got a doctorate in English at Cambridge in England. He wrote his dissertation on the rhetoric of Thomas Nashe, a sixteenth-century English playwright and essayist. In it he led up to Nashe with a massive study of rhetoric from the Greeks on up. He got interested in the way different kinds of speech,

written and oral, affected the history of different civilizations. Gradually his field expanded from literature to the influence of communication, all kinds, all the media, on society. He started doing research in psychology, even physiology, sociology, history, economics everything seemed to come into it. McLuhan was sort of like John Huizinga this way. Huizinga is a historian, Medieval history, chiefly, who discovered "the play element" in history. He ended up with a rather sophisticated sociological theory, in the book Homo Ludens, that in many ways is a precursor of the mathematical "game theory" that so fascinates Pentagon war strategists today. McLuhan worked on his communications theory. For about thirty years he was pretty much in obscurity in places like the University of Wisconsin, the University of St. Louis, and the University of Toronto. He published The Mechanical Bride in 1951, then The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, and with that one the McLuhan Cult really started, and what if he-?

As McLuhan sees it-in the simplest terms, here is his theory step by step: People adapt to their environment, whatever it is, with a certain balance of the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. If something steps up the intensity of one sense, hearing for example, the other senses will change intensity too, to try to regain a balance. A dentist, for example, can practically shut off pain-sense of touch-by putting earphones on a patient and pouring intense noise into his ear-sense of hearing.

Every major technology changes the balance of the senses. One of the most explosive of these technologies was the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Before that, people's senses still had pretty much the old tribal balance. That is to say, the sense of hearing was dominant. People got their information mainly by hearing it from other people. People who get their information that way are necessarily drawn closer together, in the tribal way. They have to be close to each other in order to get information. And they have to believe what people tell them, by and large, because that is the only kind of information they can get. They are interdependent.

They are also more emotional. The spoken word is more emotional than the written word. It carries emotion as well as meaning. The intonation can convey anger, sorrow, approval, panic, joy, sarcasm, and so forth. This aural man, the tribal man, reacts more emotionally to information. He is more easily upset by rumors. His and every body else's emotions-a collective unconscious-lie very near the surface.

The printing press brought about a radical change. People began getting their information primarily by seeing it -the printed word. The visual sense became dominant. Print translates one sense-hearing, the spoken word-into another sense sight, the printed word. Print also converts sounds into abstract symbols, the letters. Print is or derly progression of abstract, visual symbols. Print led to the habit of categorizing-putting everything in order, into categories, "jobs," "prices," "departments," "bureaus," "specialties." Print led, ultimately, to the creation of the modern economy, to bureaucracy, to the modern army, to nationalism itself.

People today think of print as if it were a technology that has been around forever. Actually, the widespread use of print is only about two hundred years old. Today new technologies-television, radio, the telephone, the computer-are causing another revolution. Print caused an "explosion"-breaking society up into categories. The electronic media, on the other hand, are causing an "implosion," forcing people back together in a tribal unity.

The aural sense is becoming dominant again. People are getting their information primarily by hearing it. They are literate, but their primary source is the radio, the telephone, the TV set. The radio and the telephone are obviously aural media, but so is television, in McLuhan's theory. The American TV picture has very low defini tion. It is not three-dimensional, like a movie or a photograph, but two-dimensional, like a Japanese print or a cartoon. The viewer fills in the spaces and the contours with his mind, as he does with a cartoon. Therefore, the TV viewer is more involved in the TV image than in the movie image, he is so busy running over the image with his eye, filling in this and that. He practically reaches out and touches it. He participates; and he likes that.

Studies of TV children-children of all social classes who are used to getting their information primarily by television-studies of this new generation show that they do not focus on the whole picture, the way literate adults do when they watch a movie. They scan the screen for details; their eyes run all over the screen, focusing on holsters, horses' heads, hats, all sorts of little things, even in the fiercest gun battles. They watch a TV show the way a nonliterate African tribesman watches a movie

But exactly! The TV children, a whole generation of Americans, the oldest ones are now twenty-five years old-they are the new tribesmen. They have tribal sensory balances. They have the tribal habit of responding emotionally to the spoken word, they are "hot," they want to participate, to touch, to be involved. On the one hand, they can be more easily swayed by things like demagoguery. The visual or print man is an individualist; he is "cooler," with built-in safeguards. He always has the feeling that no matter what anybody says, he can go check it out. The necessary information is filed away somewhere, categorized. He can look it up. Even if it is something he can't look up and check out-for example, some rumor like "the Chinese are going to bomb us tomorrow"-his habit of mind is established. He has the feeling: All this can be investigated- looked into. The aural man is not so much of an individualist; he is more a part of the collective consciousness; he believes.

To the literate, visual, print man, that seems like a negative quality, but to the aural, tribal man, it seems natural and good. McLuhan is not interested in values, but if anything, he gives the worst of it to the literate man who is smug in the belief that his sensibility is the only proper one. The tribal man-the new TV generation-is far more apt at pattern recognition, which is the basis of computers. The child will learn a foreign language faster than a literate adult because he absorbs the whole pattern of the language, the intonations and the rhythms, as well as the meaning. The literate man is slowed down by the way he tries to convert the sounds to print in his mind and takes the words one by one, categorizing them and translating them in a plodding sequence.

In formal learning, in schools, that is, the new TV-tribal man is at a great disadvantage, however, given the current teaching methods. As McLuhan sees it-if people think there is a bad drop- out problem in American schools today, it is nothing compared to what it is going to be like in another ten or fifteen years. There will be a whole nation of young psychic drop- outs-out of it-from the wealthy suburbs no less than the city slums. The thing is, all these TV-tribal children are aural people, tactile people, they're used to learning by pattern recogni tion. They go into classrooms, and there up in front of them are visual, literate, print-minded teachers. They are up there teaching classes by subjects, that is, categories; they've broken learning down into compartments -mathematics, history, geography, Latin, biology-it doesn't make sense to the tribal kids, it's like trying to study a flood by counting the trees going by, it's unnatural.

It's the same way with these cities the print-minded rulers keep on piling up around them, more skyscrapers, more freeways pouring into them, more people piling into them. Cities are still based on the old idea of using space efficiently, of putting as many activities into a single swath of ground as possible to make it easier for people to move around and do business with each other. To the new drop-out generation and the drop-out genera tions to come, this idea of lateral space and of moving people around in it doesn't seem very important. Even visual people have begun to lose a little of the old idea of space because of the airplane. When somebody gets on a jet in New York and flies to San Francisco in four hours, the time is so short, the idea of the space, the three thousand miles, loses its meaning. It is just like taking a "horizontal elevator," McLuhan says. In Los Angeles, with everybody traveling by car on freeways, nobody talks about "miles" anymore, they just say "that's four minutes from here," "that's twenty minutes from here," and so on. The actual straight-line distance doesn't matter. It may be faster to go by a curved route. All anybody cares about is the time.

For that matter-the drop-out generations will even get rid of the cars, says McLuhan. The car is still largely tied to the idea of space, but the TV-tribal kids aren't. It even shows up in their dances. The new American dances, the twist, the frug, and all that, ignore the geography of the dance floor. The dancers stay in one place and create their own space. They jerk, spasm, hump, and bob around in one place with the sound turned up-aural! tribal!-up into the hot-jolly hyperaesthetic decibels. Eventually, says McLuhan, they will use the same sort of pattern in the way they work. They will work at home, connected to the corporation, the boss, not by roads or railroads, but by television. They will relay information by closed-circuit two-way TV and by computer systems. The great massive American rush-hour flow over all that asphalt surface, going to and from work every day, will be over. The hell with all that driving. Even shopping will be done via TV. All those grinding work-a-daddy cars will disappear. The only cars left will be playthings, sports cars. They'll be just like horses are today, a sport. Somebody over at General Motors is saying-What if he is right?

Whole cities, and especially New York, will end too just like cars, no longer vital to the nation but . . . just playthings. People will come to New York solely to amuse themselves, do things, not marvel at the magnitude of the city or its riches, but just eat in the restaurants, go to the discotheques, browse through the galleries-

-McLuhan is having lunch at Lutece, a French restaurant at 249 East 50th Street, with four of his admirers, three journalists and a movie star. Lutece is one of the real high-powered, gleaming toothed places in New York where the culturati, the fashionati, literati, and illuminati of all sorts have lunch. The Big Boys go there. It has real wine stewards. It is so expensive, only the man who has to pay is shown the prices. Everybody else at the table gets a menu with just the dishes listed. Eat 'em up, gleaming teeth. So these people with gleaming teeth, glissando voices, lazenge-shape cuff links, peacock-colored Pucci-print dresses signed "Emilio" turn the gleams on each other and sit in there and laugh, cozzen, whisper, bat the eyes, look knowingly, slosh their jowls around at each other in the old fight to make it or make it bigger in the biggest city in the world-and McLuhan just sits out in the garden at Lutece smiling slightly, oblivious to the roiling, wearing a seersucker jacket and the plastic neckband tie, looking ahead as if . . . he were looking through walls.

Well, of course he is! The city-

"Well, of course, a city like New York is obsolete," he says. And all the gleaming teeth and glissando voices are still going grack gack grack in the same old way all around, all trying to get to the top of the city that will disappear.

McLuhan was in New York that time because two rather extraordinary men from San Francisco, Howard Gossage and Gerry Feigen, had just begun their ongoing "McLuhan Festival." The original McLuhan Festival was a kind of "happening" or "environment" in an armory at the University of British Columbia, put on by some teachers there. They were part of what is sometimes called "The McLuhan Cult"-esoteric groups of intellectuals who have . . . discovered McLuhan, in Canada and in the United States, most of them over the past three years, since The Gutenberg Galaxy came out. In the armory they suspended sheets of plastic from the ceiling, forming a maze. Operators aimed light projections at the plastic sheets and at the people walking through them, a movie projector showed a long, meaningless movie of the interior of the empty armory, goofy noises poured out of the loudspeakers, bells rang, somebody banged blocks of wood together up on a podium, somebody else spewed perfume around, dancers flipped around through the crowds, and behind a stretch fabric wall-a frame with a stretch fabric across it-there was a girl, pressed against the stretch fabric wall, like a whole wall made of stretch pants, and undulating and humping around back there. Everybody was supposed to come up and feel it-the girl up against the stretch fabric -to understand this "tactile communication" McLuhan talks about.

McLuhan Temple! McLuhan in church-the Rev. William Glenesk brings McLuhan into the pulpit of his church, Spencer Memorial, on Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights, one week night in a kind of . . . apotheosis of McLuhan cultism. Glenesk is the "hip" Presbyterian minister who has had jazz combos, dancers, sculpture graven images!-in church. He brought McLuhan in one night and put him in the pulpit and it became . . . cult! like a meeting of all the solitary souls, from the cubicles of the NYU Bronx campus to the lofts of East 10th Street, who had discovered McLuhan on their own. All these artists came in there in the great carved oak insides of the church and sat in the pews, Stanley Vander Beeck the "underground" movie-maker in an orange shirt and red polka dot tic

"It is a hot night," says McLuhan, speaking from the pulpit. "Therefore, I invite you to move forward. Heat obliterates the distance between the speaker and the audience . . ."

But of course! The heat steps up the tactile sense, diminishes the visual; the audience is no longer at ease sitting back and watching the speaker as though he is separated from them like the usual . . . visual spectacle. The artists, Vander Beeck, Larry Rivers the painter, John Cage the composer-they are all fo r McLuhan, even though McLuhan has a paradoxical attitude toward the "modern" arts. On the one hand, he says artists are geniuses who serve as "early warning systems" for changes in society's sensory balance. But at the same time, he says so -called "modern" art is always one technology behind. In the early nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution came in-the MACHINE age. The artist didn't realize that this was a new age, but they se nsed that some kind of change was taking place, and they resented it-damned machine-cog life -so they reacted by coming up with the modern art of the early nineteenth century: NATURE, all those landscapes, grazing sheep -the content of the previous technology, namely, agriculture. Modern! All these modern artists, Constable and Turner, couldn't understand why nobody had even painted these great spewy albumen cloud banks and shaggy green horizons before. In the early twentieth century the ELECTRONIC age began, and the artists, only fifty or seventy-five years behind, as usual, suddenly discovered cubism and other abstract forms, breaking up objects into planes, spheres, component parts-the content of the MACHINE age, the industrial technology of the nineteenth century. But in any case, the artist's immediately obsolete "modernism" is a sign that somethin g is changing in society's sensory balance. The artists seem to like this idea that they are the "early warning," the avant- garde, even if they are moving forward backwards.

They also like his general "culture" orientation. McLuhan started out as an English scholar, after all, and still laces his work with references to Marlowe, Rabelais, Whitman, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Joyce. McLuhan's work is really squarely in the area of biology and sociology now, but artists can take to him-he talks their language. It was the same with Freud. Pavlov never caught on with the culturati-all those damned endless clinical descriptions of dog brains. But Freud was "cultural," a lot of great business from Sophocles, Aeschylus, da Vinci, King Oedipus running around, bare-breasted Electra, all those classical lovelies. Freud wrote like an art dealer prospecting in the forbidden lands of brain physiology.

McLuhan talks the same language, and people are willing to undertake massive artistic expressions of his new science of the senses. In the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a McLuhanite named Harley Parker is designing a "pure McLuhan" gallery for displaying invertebrate paleontology, fishes and things, "a gallery of total sensory involvement," Harley Parker says, with the smell of the sea piped in, the tape-recorded sound of waves, colored lights simulating the fuzzy-plankton undersea green, "not just a gallery of data, but a total experience." In New York, Father John Culkin of Fordham University is considering sort of the same thing, a McLuhan architectural environment, only on a much larger scale, a whole communications center at Lincoln Center, the big culture temple.

But with the standard old line romantic-reactionary literati of New York-that is another story. Old doggies like Dwight Macdonald recoil from McLuhan. This man, this pop Guru McLuhan, asserts he supremacy of technol ogy, the environment, over the romantic ego. McLuhan says man succumbs to the new technologies, the new sensory balance the technologies impose, no matter how hard he fights it, even if he doesn't watch the idiot box -and I don't pay attention to ads-no matter what. The old doggies put their faces up in the air, with their eyeballs rolled back, looking for God, and moan a few howls there inside their parlor-floor brownstones at this big red fire siren going by, Marshall McLuhan.

Get this man. But if they want to get at McLuhan, they ought to forget the sanctity of the romantic ego, the last godhead of the literati, and go after him where he is actually vulnerable; one place is his idea of the sensory balance of man and the dominance of one sense over another and so forth. McLuhan is talking straight physiol ogy here, science and he has not proved that the five senses are actually set up that way. Maybe it can't be proved. As yet, there is no apparatus for measuring just how intensely the human mind is attuned to this or that sense. Knowledge about three of the senses, smell, taste, and touch, is still absolutely primitive. The sense of smell, for example, cannot be measured at all, currently. Perfume makers have to use people they call "noses" to get the right combination for different scents. They put a white smock on THE NOSE and squirt one test batch of hair spray in a tin closet and THE NOSE jumps in there, and then he jumps out of there, and they squirt another batch in the next closet, and THE NOSE jumps in there, and so on and on, with this NOSE in a white smock leaping and diving in tin cubicles-this is sensory measurement in the modern age.

The other place they might get McLuhan is in his crazy daredevil weakness for making analogies. He loves the things. He soars around making analogies. The Russians still have a basically aural, tribal sensory balance, and they like to do their spying by ear, hiding microphones in wooden American eagle seals in the American Em bassy and so forth. That seems perfectly all right to them, that's natural, but they are scandalized by something like the American U-2 flights-that is visual spying, spying by eye. Americans, on the other hand, are basically a visual people; the U-2 flights seem like the natural way to spy, but a mike in the eagle that's a scandal to the visual Americans. Beautiful McLuhan rubric -but . . .

But, all right, he may have missed the mark on this or that, but McLuhan will remain a major figure in the social sciences if for no other reason than that he has opened up the whole subject of the way the new technologies are changing people's thinking, reactions, life styles, everything. One means, well, one is in a supermarket and here comes some Adam's-apply carbuncled kid with bad hair pushing a rolling hamper full of All Detergent Man Mountain Giant Bonus boxes, and he is not looking where he is going; he is not lo oking at anything; his eyes are turned off and screened over, and there is a plug in his skull leading to the transistor radio in the breast pocket of his shirt, and he is blamming his free hand on the Giant All boxes, blam blam ble-blam blam, keeping time to the Rolling Stones, Hey You Get Offa My Cloud; somewhere inside of his skull, blam blam, plugged into some kind of electronic circuit out there, another world-and one knows, instinctively, that all this is changing people in some kind of way. Sociologists and physiologists have done practically nothing on the subject. They have done practically nothing on the way the automobile has changed Americans, as long as cars have been around. Every time sociologists have a meeting, somebody gets up and says, why doesn't somebody make a real study of the American automobile? Not just the stuff about how they're choking our cities or how they made the big housing developments possible, but how they . . . well, change people.

Not even with cars! Much less with television, radio, computers -McLuhan comes on like the only man to reach a huge, hitherto unknown planet or something, and there is so much ground to cover and so little time, all this unknown ground, mothering earthquake, swallowing everybody up and they don't even know it. That is the way McLuhan thinks of it, and he exasperates

A television executive is up in Howard Gossage's office in the firehouse in San Francisco, talking to McLuhan and saying how a couple of things he said don't fit together, they don't hold up; maybe it is the part about the Russian hidden microphones or something. McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck and opens his right hand like a century plant-

"I'm not offering this as a self-contained theory; I'm making probes. Probes. There is so much here that hasn't even been gone into, I have no interest in debating it point by point along the way. There is so much that hasn't even been explored."

Rather grand manner. He won't argue, he just keeps probing, he spins off theories and leaves them there for somebody else to debate, moving on all the time on his single track . . . but, of course. The prophet.

A lot of McLuhanites have started speaking of him as a prophet. It is only partly his visions of the future. It is more his extraordinary attitude, his demeanor, his qualities of monomania, of mission-He do esn't debate other scholars, much less TV executives. He is not competing for status; he is . . . alone on a vast unseen terrain, the walker through walls, the X-ray eye . . . TV executives. McLuhan even characterizes General Sarnoff, Generalis simo of RCA and NBC, the most powerful man in American communications, a god in the TV world, and the eyes of the government, too, for that matter-McLuhan characterizes the good General as one of the "technologi cal idiots." Sarnoff is one of those people who thinks that television is merely a wonderful tool whose impact is merely what a man chooses to do with it.

McLuhan flies all over Canada and the United States to talk to groups of five, six, twelve, well, not twelve, fourteen . . . disciples. Numbers mean nothing to him. If a thousand people suddenly turned up, it might be a bad sign-McLuhan sits in the upper room at the firehouse at a round table with six or eight people, Gossage, Feigen, Mike Robbins of Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency, Herbert Gold, the novelist, Edward Keating, editor of Ramparts magazine, not disciples-But what if he is right-and somebody asks McLuhan what he thinks of the big communications conference going on in San Francisco at that very moment, at the Hilton Hotel, a thousand people, headed by the great semanticist, S. I. Hayakawa.

"Well . . . they're all working from very obsolete premises, of course. Almost by definition."

By definition?

"Certainly. By the time you can get a thousand people to agree on enough principles to hold such a meeting, conditions will already have changed, the principles will be useless."

McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck. The Hayakawa conference . . . disappears.

McLuhan may get some of the normal chuckly human satisfaction out of putting down the General Sarnoffs and the Hayakawas of this world and bringing to package design moguls the news that packages have had it and so forth-it is hard to say. More likely, though, he is simply oblivious to the stake other people have in the things he is talking about. He seems oblivious to all the more obvious signs of status where he himself is involved. He just snaps on that Pree-Tide plastic neckband necktie in the morning and resumes his position, at the monoma niacal center of the unseen world . . .

Unseen scholars. McLuhan comes out of a world that few people know about, the world of the liberal arts scholars, the graduate schools, the carrels. It is a far more detached and isolated life than any garret life of the artists. Garret life? Artists today spend all their time calling up Bloomingdale's to see if the yellow velvet Milo Laducci chairs they ordered are in yet. Liberal arts scholars, especially in McLuhan's field, English literature,

start out in graduate school in little cubicles, known as carrels, in the stacks of the university libraries with nothing but a couple of metal Klampiton shelves of books to sustain them, sitting there making scholarly analo gies-detecting signs of Rabelais in Sterne, signs of Byron- would you believe it? in Thoreau, signs of Ovid in Pound, signs of -analogies-hunched over in silence with only the far-off sound of Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks, a townie who puts books back on the shelves-now she is all right, a little lower-class-puffy in the nose, but-only the sound of her to inject some stray, sport thoughts into this intensely isolated regimen. In effect, the graduate school scholar settles down to a life of little cubicles, little journals, little money, little chance of notice by the outside world-unless his intense exercises in analogies, mental combinations, bust out with something so . . . electrifying as Marshall McLuhan's.

Even then there is no one in the . . . outside world able to scout scholarly stars, it is all so esoteric. But McLuhan has had Gossage and Feigen, two of the most imaginative characters in San Francisco. Gossage is a tall, pale advertising man with one of the great heads of gray hair in the USA, flowing back like John Barrymore's. Feigen is a psychiatrist who became a surgeon; he is dark and has these big eyes and a gong-kicker mustache like Jerry Colonna, the comedian. He is also a ventriloquist and carries around a morbid looking dummy named Becky and is able to get into great psychological duels with strangers, speaking through the dummy. Gossage and Feigen started a firm called Generalists, Inc., acting as consultants to people who can't get what they need from special ists because what they need is the big picture. One thing that drew them to McLuhan was his belief in "generalism" -pattern recognition. McLuhan, for example, dismisses the idea of university "departments," history, political science, sociology, and so forth; he considers all that obsolete and works in four or five of the old "fields" at once. It is all one field to him. So Gossage and Feigen invested about $6000 into just taking McLuhan around to talk to people, Big Boys, all sorts, outside the academic world, on both coasts. Gossage says they had nothing particular in mind, no special goal, they just wanted to play it "fat, dumb and happy" and see what would happen.

It all turned out kind of like the way the architect in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall describes life as being like one of those whirling discs at the old amusement parks. You get on the disc and it starts spinning and the faster it goes, the more centrifugal force builds up to throw you off it. The speed on the outer edge of the disc is so fast, you have to hold on for dear life just to stay on but you get a hell of a ride. The closer you can get to the center of the disc, the slower the speed is and the easier it is to stand up. In fact, theoretically, at the very center there is a point that is completely motionless. In life, some people won't get on the disc at all.

They just sit in the stands and watch. Some people like to get on the outer edge and hang on and ride like hell-that would be Gossage and Feigen. Others are standing up and falling down, staggering, lurching toward the center. And a few, a very few, reach the middle, that perfect motionless point, and stand up in the dead center of the roaring whirligig as if nothing could be clearer and less confused-That would be McLuhan.

Gossage and Feigen were bringing McLuhan to New York last May, and McLuhan was two days late getting there. He was in Toronto grading papers for two days.

"Grading papers?" says Gossage. Gossage can see the New York panoply of lunches at the Lombardy, lunches at Lutece, men like Gibson McCabe, and God knows who all else high in the world of communications waiting for McLuhan-and McLuhan holed up imperturbably grading papers. "Listen," says Gossage. "There are so many people willing to invest money in your work now, you'll never have to grade papers again."

"You mean it's going to be fun from now on?" says McLuhan.

"Everything's coming up roses," says Gossage.

In San Francisco, Gossage and Feigen take McLuhan to a "topless waitress" restaurant, the Off Broadway, at the request of some writer from New York in a loud checked suit. Herb Caen, the columnist, is also along. Everybody is a little taken aback. There they all are in the black-light gloom of the Off Broadway with waitresses walking around wearing nothing but high-heel shoes and bikini underpants, and nobody knows quite how to react, what to say, except for McLuhan. Finally, Caen says that this girl over here is good looking-

"Do you know what you said?" says McLuhan, "Good look ing. That's a visual orientation. You're separating yourself from the girls. You are sitting back and looking. Actually, the lights are dim in here, this is meant as a tactile experience, but visual man doesn't react that way."

And everyone looks to McLuhan to see if he is joking, but it is impossible to tell there in the gloom. All that is clear is that . . . yes, McLuhan has already absorbed the whole roaring whirligig into his motionless center. And later in the day, Gossage presents the piece de resistance of the McLuhan Festival, a party in the firehouse. The first floor of the firehouse, now the lobby, is filled, and yet in there Gossage has put a twelve-piece mariachi band, with trumpets . . . En la Bodega and the mariachi players stand on the tile in their piped powder blue suits blasting away on the trumpets and Tout San Francisco is filing into the firehouse into the face of the what the hell is Gossage up to now, Santa Barranza, mariachi trumpets, the trumpet announcement of the new Darwin-Freud Einstein, Grack, En la Bodega. Then McLuhan himself arrives, filing into the firehouse, and there before him is a field of powder blue and . . . yaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhh trumpets-and Gossage sits on the stairway with his head thrown back, laughing over the spectacle, but McLuhan-well, let one see here, or, actually, not see, the auditory sense is sharply stepped up, the visual fades, just the slightest haze of powder blue-of course! one need only stop struggling with one's eyes, roil, roil, well, of course, it is clear and . . why not? serene, the new world.

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from The New Life Out There by Tom Wolfe (c) 1965 The New York Herald Tribune