Reading and the Future of Private Identity.
Marshall McLuhan

At a recent Ph.D. oral the candidate was defending a thesis written 
on "The Quest for the Iconic Mode in the Work of W.B. Yeats".  In the 
course of explaining the development of his study of Yeats, he 
explained Yeats' lifelong concern with the oral tradition of Irish 
culture and the world of legend and tales and song and dance which 
had preoccupied not only Yeats but many of this contemporaries.  Most 
people are familiar with the extraordinary power of the Irish 
colloquial idiom which has been manifest in Irish poetry and drama in 
Synge and O'Casey and Joyce from the beginning of the twentieth 
century.  "Sailing to Byzantium" for Yeats had involved the dream of 
a corporate culture that merged secular and religious forms in a 
single ritual:

			Once out of nature I shall never take
			My bodily form from any natural thing,
			But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
			Of hammered gold and gold enameling
			To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
			Or set upon a golden bough to sing
			To lords and ladies of Byzantium
			Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

In these verses Yeats is quite explicit about the sculptural forms of 
the goldsmiths as being a means of bringing the spiritual and the 
material into immediate rapport and also of involving the audience in 
deep participation through the art of the audile-tactile sculpture.  
When asked to explain why sculpture was not a visual form, the 
candidate explained the special character of the bounding lines and 
surfaces of sculpture as involving all of the senses in interplay.  
He cited the work of Linus Pauling on The Nature of the Chemical Bond 
in which the studies of Heisenberg and others have stressed the 
character of the "resonant interval".  In a new plant opened in 
January, 1972, seven assembly groups have replaced the continuous 
production lines; ... In effect, the seven groups follow along a 
spectrum of decreasing specialization.  At one end is a group of 
workers with little or no experience in group assembly, and at the 
other end is a group of workers with total experience.  It is hoped 
that ultimately both groups will have the opportunity to assemble the 
entire engine.  For a more complete description of this plant, see 
Jan-peter Norsdedt's Work Organization and Job Design at Saab-Scandia 
in Sodertalje (Stockholm Technical Department, Swedish Employee's 
Confederation, December, 1970).

There was something close to consternation among the faculty 
examiners when it was proposed that they should consider sculpture 
not as primarily visual form but as an audile-tactile experience of 
resonance and involvement.  The candidate cited the work of Jacques 
Lusseyran, And There Was Light, in which the effects of blindness 
include the enormous enhancement of the audible- tactile awareness of 
people and things.  The candidate cited the statement of Yeats 
himself that he had spent his life striving to eliminate every 
vestige of the visual from his poetry.  For Yeats the visual sense 
appeared as one of extreme specialism and deprivation for the artist 
and poetry alike.  Perhaps it would be simpler to draw attention to 
the work of Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato where he explains the 
relation of Homer to the "tribal encyclopedia".  In presenting the 
bard as the tradition educator of the Greeks, Havelock indicates that 
poetic performance was a kind of group ritual that involved the 
public as much as any jazz or rock festival.  As Perry and Lord have 
indicated in The Singer of Tales, in an oral culture, performance is 
also composition.  Havelock devotes much of his book to explaining 
the effect of the phonetic alphabet on the Greek sensibilities and 
culture, pointing to the rise of self awareness and identity as an 
immediate result of this unique form of codifying experience.  What 
especially needs to be noted about the phonetic alphabet in our time 
is its power to impose its own assumptions on wide fields of 
operation and experience.  I have tried to explain this matter 
somewhat in The Gutenberg Galaxy but I now know a few basic things 
that I did not know at the time I wrote that book.

The phonetic alphabet is the only one in which the letters are 
semantically neutral, lacking verbal structure or force.  Since the 
visual image presented in these letters is acoustically and 
semantically neutral, they have had the extraordinary effect upon 
their users of supporting the visual faculty independently in large 
degree, from the other senses of touch and hearing, and so on.  The 
power to isolate the visual faculty with resulting high intensity 
fostered the rise of Euclidean geometry as well as images of separate 
individual and private identity.  So isolated, the spaces and forms 
congenial to vision acquired an almost separate character which has 
been much identified with both rationality and civilization.  Visual 
space as manifested in Euclidean forms is the basic character of 
uniformity, continuity and stasis.  Visual space, unlike the spaces 
which relate to or emanate from touch and taste and hearing, has a 
stable and enduring character.  Visual space is not characteristic of 
the child's world nor of the pre-literate or post-literate worlds.  
The little boy on his first plane ride who asked:  "Daddy, when do we 
start to get smaller?" was actually highlighting this problem.  When 
a plane leaves the ground it quickly diminishes in size and the 
little boy was justified in asking his question.  If the plane gets 
smaller from the outside, why shouldn't it get smaller from the 
inside?  Perhaps the answer is in the fact that the enclosed space of 
the cabin is visual and static.  In fact, visual space is a figure 
without a ground, having abstracted itself from the ground of the 
other senses.  Acoustic space, for example, has quite different 
properties from visual space.  Acoustic space is a sphere whose 
centre is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere.  Acoustic space is 
discontinuous and non-uniform and dynamic.  Tactile space is the 
world of the interval or gap of experience, and may be brought to 
mind by the relation to wheel and axle, where the character of "play" 
is the all-important structural factor without which there would be 
neither wheel nor axle.  It will repay prolonged meditation to 
consider that "play" is not characteristic of visual space.  In his 
classic study of play in Homo Ludens, J. Huizinga reveals the 
indispensable quality of a mobile relation between figure and ground 
which creates patterns of deep involvement and participation for the 
users (see For Whom the Bell Tolls).

The little boy's question about when would the space change would not 
have occurred to him had he been in the open cockpit of a small 
plane, and perhaps would not occur to an astronaut.  On a visit to 
Nasa, I asked Al Sheppard whether there was any upside-down in outer 
space.  He replied, after some moments of reflection:  "Where your 
feet are, that's down."  This seems to have some bearing on other 
matters, since for most small children there is no upside-down in a 
picture book.  This relationship is discovered later by our children, 
but seems not to be part even of the adult Eskimo experience.  For 
the adult Eskimo there is no upside-down for pictures such as he puts 
on the walls of his igloo from magazines, and nothing entertains him 
more than to watch the anthropologist visitor straining his neck to 
get pictures in focus, right-side-up.  In the same way, the cave 
painters did much of their work completely out of sight, under rock 
ledges.  In any event, there seems to be some relation between 
right-side-up and literacy.

Although it has not been specially studied, there is still the 
mystery of the Stratton glasses which draw attention to the human 
habit of turning the world right-side-up, although, in fact, we 
receive it on the retina upside-down.  When first put on, the 
Stratton glasses turn the world upside down for the wearer.  However, 
after a few hours the wearer finds that the world flips right-side-up 
again.  Then, when he removes the glasses, the world goes upside down 
again and remains so for a few hours.  It was this factor that 
prompted my question to Al Sheppard, but it appears that sensory 
psychologists have not studied the Stratton glasses effect in outer 
space where a state of weightlessness makes right-side-up meaningless.

I want to draw attention at once to a similarly drastic reversal of 
figure-ground conditions for all of us at the present time.  
Electronically, we live in a world of simultaneous information in 
which we share images that arrive instantly from all quarters at 
once.  If acoustic space is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and 
whose margin is nowhere, this character of acoustic spare now extends 
to all information structures experienced in environments constituted 
by electric technology.  That is, Western and civilized man long 
accustomed to private and individual outlook and similar legal and 
political structures, now finds himself acoustically environed.  It 
is as if the little boy in the aeroplane cabin were suddenly to 
experience himself situated in a boundless and silent surround, 
"wishing upon a star", as it were.  The orientation of the visual 
man, with his private outlook and individual point of view and 
personal goals, would all seem to be somewhat irrelevant in the new 
electronic environment.  There is another feature of this 
simultaneous environment with its instant access to all pasts and all 
futures alike, communication takes place not by mere transportation 
of data from point to point.  It is, in effect, the sender who is 
sent, and it is the sender who becomes the message, as it were.

The electric or simultaneous world began to manifest its patterns and 
influences on our awareness by the middle of the 19th century.   
There is a strange property about innovation and change that can be 
stated by saying that the effects tend to precede the causes.  
Another way of putting it is to say that the ground tends to come 
before the figure.  In a recent issue of Scientific American (March, 
1973) the piece on "Bicycle Technology" explains how "the bicycle 
quite literally paved the way for the automobile".

(1973 typecript, presented in Dallas, April 1973 ?)