Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06538_Field_TCUM T103.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     The concept of “idol” for the Hebrew Psalmist is much like
that of Narcissus for the Greek mythmaker. And the Psalmist
insists that the beholding  of idols, or the use of technology,
conforms men to them. “They that make them shall be like
unto them.” This is a simple fact of sense “closure.” The poet
Blake developed the Psalmist’s ideas into an entire theory of
communication and social change. It is in his long poem of
Jerusalem  that he explains why men have become what they
have beheld. What they have, says Blake, is “the spectre of the
Reasoning Power in Man” that has become fragmented and
“separated from Imagination and enclosing itself as in steel.”
Blake, in a word, sees man as fragmented by his technologies.
But he insists that these technologies are self-amputations of
our own organs. When so amputated, each organ becomes a
closed system of great new intensity that hurls man into
“martyrdoms and wars.” Moreover, Blake announces as his