Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08724_Field_TCGG T489.txt

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

viewpoints.” That is to say, Rabelais is a scholastic in his
mosaic procedures, consciously juxtaposing this ancient
farrago with the new individual single-point-of-view technology
of print. Like the poet John Skelton at the same time in
England, of whom C. S. Lewis writes, “Skelton has ceased to be
a man and become a mob,” (46) Rabelais is a collective rout of
oral schoolmen and glossators suddenly debouched into a
visual world newly set up on individualist and nationalist lines. It
is just the incongruity of these two worlds as they mix and
mingle in the very language of Rabelais that gives us a special
feeling of his relevance for us, who also live ambivalently in
divided and distinguished cultures. Two cultures or technologies
can, like astronomical galaxies, pass through one another
without collision; but not without change of configuration. In
modern physics there is, similarly, the concept of “interface” or
the meeting and metamorphosis of two structures. Such