a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)

[Mark Kohut]

Very interesting thread goin' 'round, as can happen. Philosophical epistemology, nature of mind
and more...Roussea said we were 'blank slates', Plato that the Forms preexisted, Kant that
space & time were apriori concepts, the existentialists that we were blank slates again, Chomsky
has his grammatical 'forms".
 
But I will blame my own insufficient posts to say: all of this philosophical pondering is irrelevant
to McLuhan on literate and pre-literate.....they have existed in societies....
 
What, if anything, flows from that fact, he offers a vision about....
 
That's all, foax. 
 
P.S. alice has alluded to Pynchon's 'use' of such 'stuff" as McLuhan's dreams were made on;
do we remember when pynchon scored on literacy/writng/printing in GR?......
 
And here's the BIG influence, I say, almost unhumbly.........the concept of linearity in Western literacy---singling up
all lines' as a narrowing---
 
 

From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>; David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 1:13 PM
Subject: Re: a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)



>> He uses 'literacy' the old-fashioned way as well. He uses it the way the anthropolgists and sociologists did when they found and wrote of pre-literate peoples., people who did not read symbolic marks as words.....
>>
>>
>>
>> Right.  And are pictures writing?
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:43 PM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> "literate" vs. "pre-literate" peoples is gray scale, not an "Us" vs. "Them".
>
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant



If we posit a dialectic of experience versus language, we create a
false dichotomy, obviously enough, but that is how McLuhan's thought
often comes across to me. Still, we can use such false dichotomies to
hone fine points of understanding. I think in images, feelings, and
words, combined in a miasma of nonsense until the discipline of logic
imposed by language frees me to select sense from the collage.
Interior literacy, or an individual's capacity to discover sense in
one's thought, is the acquired skill that makes social literacy
possible to a greater or lesser degree in whatever language, be it
English, Swahili, algebra or finance.

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 4:25 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think McLuhan would say that, even on a gray scale, black & white
> are qualitatively different......like literate vs. pre-literate even on a gray scale
>
> And young 'uns learn most languages as abstract marks on a page.
> English say.....
>
> The literate vs. pre-literate distinction is in anthropologists' work and
> is still used to the present....
>
> No one has (yet) answered whether they think mostly in words....for example,
> I watch TV....I SEE the words they are speaking...mostly...not every, I'm sure....
>
> What would it be like if I didn't? My grandson, not yet three hears lots of words,
> speaks well within his limits yet..............cannot read yet....................
>
> What is that like psychically? Is that part of the reason his speech finds more
> visual analogies, it seems?....I would say Yes......................
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Cc: David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 10:32 AM
> Subject: Re: a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)
>
> The point David Payne makes is valid no matter what McLuhan might say.
> Literate versus Pre-literate is a gray scale.  And writing "symbols"
> often start as picture symbols.
>
> On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:>
>>
>> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>> To: David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>
>> Cc: Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2011 9:37 AM
>> Subject: Re: a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)
>>
>>
>> For McLuhan, who started this the answer is No...writing is phonetic abstraction, marks signifying the form of words.  Helen Keller famously learning
>> the word for water might be a touchstone example.....
>>
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