Happy 100th Birthday, Marshall McLuhan!

[redcomrad]

 Thus the Romantic poets were consciously in revolt against printedbooks as shackles on the human spirit. They turned to landscapeand the pictorial presentation of experience long before the arrival ofphotography. And Poe’s discovery about writing poems and storiesbackwards contained, years in advance, not only the secret of modernlaboratory science but of the movie. One reason for dwelling on this point is in order to suggest a deeprelation between letters and non-literary forms of expression. For ifsuch inter-relations have previously obtained, it may provide hopeand comfort for those who wish to see literature maintained at pre-sent. The movie camera is a means of rolling up the daylight worldon a spool. It does this by rapid still shots. The movie projector unrollsthe spool and recreates the daylight world as a dark dream world. Inreversing the process of perception even the mechanical camera andprojector bring about a mysterious change in everyday experience.The movie reconstructs the external daylight world and in so doingprovides an interior dream world. Hollywood means "sacred grove",and from this modern grove has issued a new pantheon of gods andgoddesses to fashion and trouble the dreams of modern man. Another way of seeing this mysterious medium for transformingexperience is to consider it as the exact embodiment of Plato’s Cave.The dreaming eye of the movie god casting his images on the darkscreen corresponds to that image of human life offered to us by Platoin the Republic: existence is a kind of cave or cellar on the back wall ofwhich we watch the shadows of real things from the outside worldof reality. In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating withinthemselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This mir-acle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect -- that is,the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant ofperception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. Andin this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experienceimmediately that dance of Being within our faculties which providesthe incessant intuition of Being. I can only regard the movie as themechanization and distortion of this cognitive miracle by which werecreate within ourselves the exterior world. But whereas cognition pro-vides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being,the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a dream worldwhich is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality.---- On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:59:19 -0500 Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote ----  Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980) http://marshallmcluhan.com/ http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan 
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