Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/09024_Field_TCGG T789.txt

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

no longer on the scene. For the supereminent role of the first
cause we find substituted the play of second causes. In place
of God there are feelings, sensations, and whatever causes
sensations.” Well, what causes sensations such as the above is
unmistakably print technology with its power like Lear’s “darker
purpose” to divide the little kingdom of man into a batch of
jarring atoms, and uniformly homogenized components.
Existence becomes, then, not being  but only “flux, shadow, and
perpetual variation”; “I do not depict being,” says Montaigne; “I
depict passage.” Nothing could be more cinematic than that.
Renouncing the depiction of what is favor of an illusion
achieved by a sequence of static “shots”—this is typography in
extenso . Let us recall King Lear  as a live model of the stripping
of human institutions, and consciousness itself, by the
progressive isolation of the senses. Parallel to this
psychological experiment in our time is the deprivation of sense