Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06770_Field_TCUM T335.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 909b | 16 lines

of all things in a flux. We now realize that this anxiety was a
natural literary and visual response to the new nonvisual
technology.

     J. Z. Young, in Doubt and Certainty in Science , explains
how electricity is not something that is conveyed by or
contained in anything, but is something that occurs when two
or more bodies are in special positions. Our language derived
from phonetic technology cannot cope with this new view of
knowledge. We still talk of electric current “flowing,” or we
speak of the “discharge” of electric energy like the lineal firing
of guns. But quite as much as with the aaesthetic magic of
painterly power, “electricity is the condition we observe when
there are certain spatial relations between things.” The painter
learns how to adjust relations among things to release new
perception, and the chemist and physicist learn how other