Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06848_Field_TCUM T413.txt

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

merely the abrasive traction principle—runners, skids, and skis
preceded wheels for vehicles, just as the abrasive, semirotary
motion of the hand-operated spindle and drill preceded the full,
free rotary motion of the potter’s wheel. There is a moment of
translation or “abstraction” needed to separate the
reciprocating movement of hand from the free movement of
wheel. “Doubtless the notion of the wheel came originally from
observing that rolling a log was easier than shoving it,” writes
Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization . Some might object
that log-rolling is closer to the spindle operation of the hands
than to the rotary movement of feet, and need never have got
translated into the technology of wheel. Under stress, it is more
natural to fragment our own bodily form, and to let part of it
go into another material, than it is to transfer any of the
motions of external objects into another material. To extend
our bodily postures and motions into new materials, by way of