Misc. Narcissus myth

[Mark Kohut]

Not all extensions are equal, fer sure.......

BUT, one baseline that McLuhan elaborates was unknown to me in my
superficial understanding of his notions....................

One that is, perhaps, quite relevant to TRPjr.........................

Namely, how any extension is 'a stress' on our nervous system....
(Quotes a genius doctor, one Hans Selye, on stress, a very popular book of the time, The Stress of Life.

Which is McLuhan's vision of the derangement of our natural self. I mean
he speaks of auto-self-amputation..................................

That vision of a humanity that was once whole naturally----by extrapolation
the organic community of humans in society before some Recent Disruptive Time,
such as the Industrial Revolution, etc. so beloved of English Lit/history scholars
and cultural critics.,...................................



----- Original Message -----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 7:03 AM
Subject: Re: Misc. Narcissus myth

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."
>