Trouble & Attitude 1/Trouble and Attitude - Issue 01.iso/pc/pctext/mmnotes2.txt

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Chapter 2

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.