Gutenberg Galaxy
* Book: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. By Marshall McLuhan. University of Toronto Press, 1962
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Description
From the Wikipedia:
"The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan, in which he analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. It popularized the term global village, which refers to the idea that mass communication allows a village-like mindset to apply to the entire world; and Gutenberg Galaxy, which we may regard today to refer to the accumulated body of recorded works of human art and knowledge, especially books.
McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls the Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.
Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view".
He writes:
- the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gutenberg_Galaxy)
Discussion
The Main Argument of The Gutenberg Galaxy
FEDERICO PONZONI:
The Gutenberg Galaxy is a book about the effects of the introduction of a movable type press on practically any- and everything conceivable, from politics to economy, from science to art, from society as a whole to the individual’s perception of time and space. McLuhan’s book is based on a core argument: the human being’s five senses are organized as a whole into a sensorium. The internal organization of the sensorium functions according to laws that prioritize one sense or group of senses over the others. These laws, according to McLuhan:
a) change in relation to a given communication technology;
b) govern the way in which the individual perceives and appraises the world;
c) and therefore give shape to the whole cultural landscape of a given culture.
All this means that if you communicate only orally (i.e., if you live in a culture that has not discovered writing), your sensorium will be organized by laws that give priority to hearing and touch over that of sight. This, in turn, leads the individual to perceive and appraise the world in a way that is not only influenced but completely shaped by this priority. This means that persons from cultures where the oral way of communication organizes the sensorium by hearing and touch live in a world that McLuhan repeatedly describes as “magical.”
It should be noted that by “magical” McLuhan means inhabited by obscure forces that act unpredictably. Examples of oral magic can be found in many different cultures that range from the daily life of the Azande tribe to the Homeric hero. Evans-Pritchard describes in colorful detail how the Azande attribute every “unfortunate event” in their life to witchcraft [iii]: “If blight seizes the ground-nut crop, it is witchcraft; if the bush is vainly scoured for game; if women laboriously bale water out of a pool and are rewarded by but a few fish it is witchcraft.” A Zande boy hurts himself knocking his foot on a stump. He was careless—argued the anthropologist. The stump wasn’t placed there by witchcraft. But it was witchcraft that made him careless—argued the Zande boy.[iv]
Homeric characters lived lives dominated by gods. Their action was unpredictable, capricious, and often malevolent. Moeller, for instance, holds the view that Homeric heroes cannot be fully held morally responsible for their actions and reactions because the gods somehow take hold of them. The Homeric hero perceives the gods as forces driving him irresistibly, like Heracles who slaughters his own sons after being induced by Pallas to believe they were his enemies, or like Helen irresistibly drawn to Paris by Aphrodite.
What it is that causes a particular hero to take a certain course of action are mysterious personal forces acting at the same time as the hero’s actions.[v] Both in the example of the Azande boy and the examples of the Homeric heroes, an unseen malevolent force acting at the same time as the event or action is seen as the true cause of it. This is due to the fact—McLuhan seems to suggest—that the auditory field is characterized by simultaneity: different sounds are all perceived at the same time. Sight, by contrast, is successive: things are seen one at a time. Magic can only happen in a simultaneous field, one that doesn’t allow the perception of cause as prior to effect. A lineal perception of time—McLuhan argues—allows seeing causal, mechanical, and logical connections between events. Priority given to sight thus destroys the very core of the magic conception of the world. Heracles slaughtered his offspring due to some temporary psychiatric condition that you can find in the DSM-V, such as a brief psychotic disorder associated with hallucination and violent behavior, and the Zande boy was really careless, in a culture dominated by the visual field.
In other words, the communication technology a given culture uses determines how individuals belonging to that culture perceive the world. The way in which the individual perceives the world in turn determines the whole cultural landscape in which the individual lives in terms of values, social organization, beliefs, practices, etc."