Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 14:26:00 -0700 (PDT)
From: { brad brace } <bbrace-AT-netcom.com>
Subject: more McLuhan via: <nettime> and Stahlman (fwd)



"The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves
constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with
complete disregard for antiseptics.  If the operations are needed, the
inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be
considered.  For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not
the incised area that is most affected.  The area of impact and incision
is numb.  It is the entire system that is changed.  The effect of radio is
visual, the effect of the photo is auditory.  Each new impact shifts the
ratio among the senses.  What we seek today is either a means of
controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios of the psychic and social
outlook, or a means of avoiding them altogether.  To have a disease
without its symptoms is to be immune.  No society has ever known enough
about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or
technologies.  Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to
provide such immunity." 

"In the history of human cultures there is no example of a conscious
adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new
extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists.  The
artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge
decades before its transforming impact occurs.  He, then, builds Noah's
arks for facing the change that is at hand . . . For in the electric age
there is no longer any sense in talking about the artist's being ahead of
his time.  Our technology is, also, ahead of its time, if we reckon by the
ability to recognize it for what it is.  To prevent undue wreckage in
society, the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control
tower of society.  Just as higher education is no longer a frill or luxury
but a stark need of production and operational design in the electric age,
so the artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis and
understanding of the life of forms, and structures created by electric
technology . . ." 

"The artist can correct the sense ratios before the blow of new technology
has numbed conscious procedures.  He can correct them before numbness and
subliminal groping and reaction begin.  If this is true, how is it
possible to present the matter to those who are in a position to do
something about it?  If there were even a remote likelihood of this
analysis being true, it would warrant a global armistice and period of
stock-taking.  If it is true that the artist possesses the means of
anticipating and avoiding the consequences of technological trauma, then
what are we to think of the world and bureaucracy of 'art appreciation'? 
Would it not seem suddenly to be a conspiracy to make the artist a frill,
a fribble, or a Milltown [an early kind of tranquillizer]?  If men were
able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope
with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would
they all become artists?  Or would they begin a careful translation of new
art forms into social navigation charts?  I am curious to know what would
happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information
of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from
our own extended faculties.  Would we, then, cease to look at works of art
as an explorer might regard the gold and gems used as the ornaments of
simple nonliterates?" 


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