Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08452_Field_TCGG T217.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 931b | 16 lines

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art
and speculation.

*     It is possible that the entire group influenced by Marinetti
and Moholy-Nagy has been as beguiled by a misunderstanding
of the origins and causes of the profane configuration of life, on
one hand, as of the “sacral” configuration, on the other. On the
contrary, it is possible that even admitting the merely
mechanical operation of technology in “sacralizing” and
“desacralizing” human life, that the entire group of
“irrationalists” in our century would still elect the “sacral” or
auditory mode of organization of experience. For one thing, it is
the emergent mode of the electro-magnetic or electronic, as de
Chardin stresses. And for many the new, as such, is a mandate
from outer space, even when it is a plunge back into nonliterate
patterns of awareness. Though we see no inherent religious