Misc. Narcissus myth

[alice wellintown]

The mirror, of course, is an essential part of many telescopes and
microscopes, and both extend the human eye. Bu this is another matter.
Fix it to a mars rover and what have you got?

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 8:03 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> We might marry this mechanical bride to love and death in the american
> novel, the idea that the american novels are not like the european
> novels and are, as Fiedler claims, "boys; books," and this men to boys
> trend, one of the the targets of 21st century american feminists, has
> as much to do with romance (love in the western world, Denis de
> Rougemont  ), as with narcissus (the american narcissus, Joyce W.
> Warren).
>
> I doubt that all technology is an equal extension of our humanity.
> Reaching into my tool box I find some Heideggerian hammers, some are
> broken, others have been re-tooled for a special job, like a jig a
> carpenter makes, others are as they were forged and fixed to their
> handles in the factory shop. I can use them with great skill, and in
> ways most would never imagine a hammer may be used for neccessity has
> invented many purposes for these entensions of my person. The mirror,
> the projection of the image with photography, the multiplication of
> these images through mass production, not Van Gogh's shoes but Andy's
> silkscreens photographed and mass produced, is not the same as that
> hammer, those shoes, for the machine is not an extension of our
> humanity as the tools are.
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 7:23 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> McLuhan interprets the Narcissus myth this way:
>> not that he fell in love with himself but with a technological
>> extension of himself (in that mirror)
>>
>> This is what all our technology is like, he sez, from writing thru
>> whatever.
>>
>> From Chap 4, The Gadget Lover we read "one of the merits
>> of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex
>> relation to the motorcar."
>>
>