The hidden ground of every classroom is the city. Today the city has become a huge information resource. The classroom is a very minor educational resource, the city is a huge one. So it╒s an approach to the city taking it out of the hidden ground effect and giving it salience as a huge learning resource.
We devised a series of projects that would enable students to go out in teams of two or three to investigate particular aspects of the city and to come back and discuss and provide a written report on their findings.
Because the modern city is founded on the knowledge industries. Everybody goes to work to read, read, read. From morning till night. By the way the word ╥read╙ - hidden ground - means to guess. Reda, in the O.E.D., look it up, it means to guess. And one reason that you have to guess when your looking at any word whatever is that it has dozens of meanings that are not being used at that particular moment. When you look up the word ╥read╙ you╒ll find many columns of meanings for the word. Beside the word ╥Read╙ there is the word ╥Run╙. He who runs may read. Well run means rune. Run comes from rune which means a cryptic puzzle. And reading and running are close. But reading as the art of guessing leads to fast decision-making and leads to good executive work. So a good reader is automatically a good executive. He makes decisions very fast.
But the fact that reading is guessing means that every word has a hidden ground of many layers. Under every single word you utter, the word ╥utter╙ is a good example of this multi-level of hidden meanings. Every single word you use, whether it╒s cat or dog or whatever, has layer after layer of hidden meanings that are not used. But when you use the word all of them are put into resonant activity. Whenever you use a word it doesn╒t matter whether you know the meaning or not the whole word is in resonant activity; it echo╒s. The totality of the word is put into action by just using it. You don╒t have to know what it means, just hearing it is enough. So this again is an example of the hidden ground as part of our ordinary perceptual lives. Now under the conditions of electronic technology the hidden acoustic ground of language has awakened enormously. Words are much more up in the level of conscious than they ever were in many centuries. Thanks to living in an acoustic age. The visual man can suppress nearly all the meanings of a word. A highly literate person is offended when you pun using some other meaning of a rod. He groans merely to hear the acoustic dimension of the word put into play.
╥Jung and easily Freud╙ and ╥Though he might have been more humble there╒s no police like Holmes.╙ James Joyce, I╒m quoting him from Finnegan╒s Wake. Though he might have been more humble there, no police like Holmes is a very profound sociological treatise. It would take volumes to elucidate it. But Joyce is an example of the return of the oral tradition and it was from Ireland.And as most of the poetry of our time comes from oral countries and in oral forms. But the city as a classroom uses the city as a hidden ground and the classroom as a figure, conscious level to explore the hidden level of the city as an activity.
THE LAWS OF THE MEDIA:
I think one of the first I ever saw was the of money. Money intensifies transactions, it intensifies the movement back and forth of activities, goods and so on.
B - It pushes out barter, slower forms of transaction are pushed out, they are obsolesced.
C - It retrieves potlatch. Potlatch is a kind of conspicuous waste or use of goods to show off one╒s affluence.
D - Money flips into credit when pushed all the way. It ceases to be money at all.
Those four stages happen for every artifact that man ever made. Whether it is a word or hardware or a law of chemistry or anything. This is not a theory it╒s based on perception. You can test it at any point.
These four factors happen simultaneously. They don╒t happen in sequent. The four levels of the tetrad are simultaneous and there are no connections, logical or otherwise between these four levels. They are not sequential.
All technology is utterance is verbal. Apropos weaving. There is an amazing fact in that some primitive societies namely the Dogon and Bombara groups of people. The weaving apparatus is considered to be an extension of the human voice box. The shuttle and spindle are thought of as the tongue the teeth and the larynx acting. That the weaving apparatus itself is a kind of uttering or outering machine, just like the voice box.
And the word for cloth in these societies is speech. Many tribal societies use the word cloth for speech because they think of speech as woven sound. That words are structured and woven sounds. All media are extensions of the human being, body and nervous system.
All artifacts can be likened to or are words in that they are outering from the human being of something. Utter means outer, literally.
FRENCH WRITER GRIAULE:
The four parts of the tetrad are metaphor. The four parts constitute in themselves a metaphor. 2 vehicles and 2 tenors. You have two figures and two grounds in any metaphor. The relationship among these four levels turn out to be the four part structure of a metaphor.
Which part did Hegel leave out of the tetrad. His dialect triad he leaves out one. Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Hegel leaves out the ╥retrieval╙. He was a very visual man and leaves out the acoustic echo that brings back from the past forms that had earlier been pushed out. One of the most common observations in ancient times about innovation was that there was nothing new. That every innovation is actually a retrieval of something earlier. That is one of the oldest ideas of casualty. This goes way back thousands of years. There is nothing new under the sun. Every time you think something new has popped up it╒s really something very old that has come back.
Hegel is a logician but not a metaphor man. Metaphor is analogy. A is to B as C is to D is an analogy not a logical straight line. The meaning of the tetrad is that it has the parts of a metaphor of a word. Every human artifact has the metaphoric character. The word metaphor means metapheiren - to carry across. It is a kind of bridging activity. When you make a bridge from one situation to another situation you are doing a carry-over or a metaphor. The latin for metaphor is transslatzio which means to carry across, a translation. So this structural form of metaphor is not logical but analogical which means right hemisphere by the way. Hegel is left hemisphere. Any logical structure is left hemisphere. Metaphors are right hemisphere. Analogy is in the right hemisphere only. Theres no analogy in the left hemisphere. Analogy is not lineal and not connected it is ratios and resonances and proportions and metaphor is meditation.
Camera enhances the aggressive of the individual users. Going around shooting people. The camera is very much a trigger job and demands the obedience of the subject to be shot. You have to say cheese. Somebody said that photography is 32 teeth per second. Snapshot. Theres a grievance there. People don╒t like showing their teeth all the time. Camera enhances the individual aggression of the user. The lock bottle of the mind as reflection is a reference to a book by M. Turbayne on metaphor. He studies optics all the way from Euclid╒s Treatise on Optics all the way to John Locke. Locke got the idea that learning was snapshotting. That intellectual awareness was snapshot, snapshot, snapshot. Picturing in the mind. Reflection. Reflection means pictures that reflect or copy something outside. That theory of learning came in with Locke. The mind is absolutely white without anything written on it until you start snapshotting it with learning.
Though The Vanishing Point is about the coming of the electric age in which we go through the visual world of the vanishing point of perspective into the acoustical world of multiple space and multi-sensuous space where we are now. Vanishing point is of course a reference to Alice Through the Looking Glass. When you go through the looking glass you are suddenly in a world of multi-sensuousness and metaphoric changes, Non-Euclidian space. When you go through the Vanishing Point you go into a non-Euclidean world of Einsteinian relativity.Lewis Carroll was a non-euclidean geometer, a disciple of Lavischesky who was a Russian non-Euclidean geometer. The idea of reflecting must have come in only after Guttenberg, the idea of thinking as reflecting is a very strange metaphor.
The camera obsolesces the privacy of its subjects. Because once you start snapshotting people, rolling them up on film, like the data bank. It provides an ego trip for the user. It retrieves the past as the present. Big ego trip for the victim; retrieves tribal corporate image state. Like big-game hunter capturing in the zoo bring it home alive. The form of camera as a hunters kit for bringing them home alive.
The sensory equilibrium is disturbed by the introduction of any new technology.
High rise amplifies privacy, obsolesces community, retrieves the catacomb and reverses into an instant slum. Slum doesn╒t have all bad meanings. Jane Jacob╒s book LIFE AND DEATH OF THE AMERICAN CITIES she starts with the slum as an ideal form of city community, the only area in the city where there is real communication and real help available to everybody in trouble is the slum. That╒s her theme in that volume. So the slum is not all bad. It╒s a place of maximal human communication whereas privacy is a form of minimized human communication.
One of the great puzzles in the high rise world that has occured is arsonists who can go up in an elevator and can throw fire bombs down the garbage dumps on any floor. There╒s no way of catching them. There╒s no way of finding out who╒s doing it. Thanks to the communications problems raised by the high rise buildings with it╒s fast elevators and it╒s long corridors, multiple garbage drops and so on. If you were a detective, how would you grab an arsonist under those conditions? It presents many problems.I have a friend who is a video journalist who mentioned that hijacking and kidnapping are very closely related. The reason that hijackers tend to kidnap people in our time is that the speed with which they can be apprehended gives them no escape route. The bank robber today can be caught so quickly that the getaway car is useless. So instead of a getaway he grabs a hostage. The hostage is the result of improved communications. As we get faster and faster at grabbing the culprit he becomes more violent and desperate in his strategy. So the video news people are of two minds, are we the cause of the hijacking, should we stop reporting them. The answer is yes. They are the cause and they should stop. It is the reporting of the event itself that attracts most hijackers to go into the business. They just want the publicity. They usually carry whole bundles of hijacking stories with them in their wallets. One of their favorite forms of collection. But the hi-rise amplifies privacy, an unwanted privacy or is it? Retrieves the catacomb. The catacomb is a sort of underground community. Or does it? If it tends to obsolesce community, what does it tend to retrieve. Can you think of other features of human existence that have been brought back into play by high rise buildings? Do they resemble something else that we once had around that we no longer have?
Violence is a characteristic of people who are searching for identity. When people have lost their identities then they become violent. People who know who they are and are sure of themselves are never violent. It╒s the very unsure, the uncertain people, therefore the teenagers who don╒t know who they are, or some people who have lost their identity through some massive technological change. They are the violent ones. When you go out to the frontier you are anybody. When man goes out on the frontier he is a nobody. He has lost his identity. He has become tough. Not in order to show who he is but to find out who he is. He doesn╒t know who he is any more. When you╒re back home you have recognizable characteristics that gives you a niche. But on the frontier you╒re a nobody, you become tough, violent both physically and verbally (i.e. slang, to feel important.)
Today the dropout is a person who has lost his identity and that╒s a very large group of people indeed. Violence by the way means to cross boundaries. Viole means to hop over boundaries. O.E.D., look it up. To go beyond yourself. All forms of violence represent an invasion of some other territory not your territory. Going into the other person╒s territory is violent. So even using a cuss word you are endangering and invading someone else╒s decorum. Every ╥four letter word╙ is an invasion of somebody. So the people who use these four letter words are lost lonely types who have no identity and they╒re trying to find out who I am and ╥I╒ll try this word and that word on this guy and that guy to see what the reaction is.╙ It╒s a way of finding out who am I.
The satellite enlarges the planet inside a new man=made environment. Nature becomes an ╥artform╙ just as the movie became an ╥artform╙ when it went inside TV. Any medium going inside another medium becomes an artform.That╒s true of language or anything. It obsolesces nature and retrieves ecology. Man the hunter was always an ecologist. He was always very careful about his environment. Because he knew he had top come back and use it again and again. So ecology came in the day Sputnik went up, October 17, 1957. The word ecology became universally used beginning on that day. People suddenly realized that we have a responsibility to the entire planetary environment.
