The Gutenberg Galaxy
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"A great deal of what is said by Bernard van Groningen in his study of the Greek time sense, In the Grip of the Past, is useful in understanding the effects of visual bias as they concern the time sense."--The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) by Marshall McLuhan "Such a reverse perspective of the literate Western world is the one afforded to the reader of Albert Lord's Singer of Tales. But we also live in an electric or post-literate time when the jazz musician uses all the techniques of oral poetry. Empathic identification with all the oral modes is not difficult in our century." --The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) by Marshall McLuhan "What Montagu opens up here concerning the intense practicality of the non-literate applies perfectly as gloss to Joyce's Bloom or Odysseus, the resourceful man. What could be more practical for a man caught between the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make himself a raft of ad copy? He is behaving like Poe's sailor in the Maelstrom who studied the action of the whirlpool and survives. May not it be our job in the new electronic age to study the action of the new vortex on the body of the older cultures? " --The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) by Marshall McLuhan he present volume is in many respects complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord. Professor Lord has continued the work of Milman Parry, whose Homeric studies had led him to consider how oral and written poetry naturally followed diverse patterns and functions. Convinced that the poems of Homer were oral compositions, Parry "set himself the task of proving incontrovertibly if it were possible, the oral character of the poems, and to that end he turned to the study of the Yugoslav epics." His study of these modern epics was, he explained, "to fix with exactness the form of oral story poetry. . . . Its method was to observe singers working in a thriving tradition of unlettered song and see how the form of their songs hangs upon their having to learn and practice their art without reading and writing."' |
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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) is a book by Marshall McLuhan.
This book popularised the terms global village and Gutenberg Galaxy. McLuhan analysed the effects of various communication media and techniques on European culture and human consciousness.
McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. A propos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standartisation of culture and alienation of individuals.
Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He writes:
- the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.(136)
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