Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/09136_Field_TCGG T901.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 915b | 15 lines

     The reversal by which the presence of the new markets
and the new masses encouraged the artist to surrender the
unique self might have seemed a final consummation for art
and technology alike. It was a surrender made almost inevitable
when the symbolists began to work backwards from effect to
cause in the shaping of the art product. Yet it was just at this
extreme moment that a new reversal occurred. The art process
had no sooner approached the rigorous, impersonal rationale of
the industrial process, in the period from Poe to Valéry, than
the assembly line of symbolist art was transformed into the
new “stream of consciousness” mode of presentation. And the
stream of consciousness is an open “field” perception that
reverses all aspects of the nineteenth century discovery of the
assembly line or of the “technique of invention.” As G. H.
Bantock writes of it: