Sigmoid Flexure Mundus McLuhan

[Terrance]

Looking at it from another side; is Achilles possible side
by side with powder and lead? Or is the Iliad at all com­patible with
the printing press and steam press? Do not sing­ing and reciting and the
Muses necessarily go out of exis­tence with the appearance of the
printer's bar, and do not, therefore, disappear, the prerequisites of
epic poetry? 

	--Marx, German Ideology



Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act
without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are
seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were
to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of
carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete
detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement. In the
electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically
extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the
whole of mankind in us, we necessarily
participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no
longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate
Westerner.

The Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man,
the man of action who appears not to be involved in the action. Such is
the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett's clowns. After three thousand
years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and
alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has
become compressional by dramatic reversal.
As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.
Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together
in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility
to
an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position
of the Negro, the teenager, and some other groups. They can no longer be
contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now
involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.

This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that
compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any "point of
view." The partial and specialized character of the viewpoint, however
noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the information
level the same upset has occurred with the substitution of the inclusive
image for the mere viewpoint. If the nineteenth century was the age of
the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch. As
extension of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a
sort of ablative absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the
integral being. The psychiatrist employs the couch, since it removes the
temptation to express private points of view and obviates the need to
rationalize events.

The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness
is a natural adjunct of electric technology. The age of mechanical
industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of private outlook
the natural mode of expression. Every culture and every age has its
favorite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to
prescribe for everybody and every thing. The mark of our time is its
revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things
and people
declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this
new attitude - a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.
Such is the faith in which this book has been written. It explores the
contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the
principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence
that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that will
bring them into orderly service, I have looked at them anew, accepting
very little of the
conventional wisdom concerning them. One can say of media as Robert
Theobald has said of
economic depressions: "There is one additional factor that has helped to
control depressions, and that is a better understanding of their
development." Examination of the origin and development of the
individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some
general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the
never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in
the individual and society.

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all
things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be
reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the
message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences
of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the
new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of
ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example,
the new
patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That
is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people,
which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association
that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people
would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did
with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways
in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to
ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes
or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped
by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine
technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is
integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary,
centralist, and superficial in its patterning
of human relationships.