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THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED. Marshall McLuhan Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: "I don't pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult." Playboy Magazine 1969. THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED. Last chapter of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
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THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED Marshall McLuhan Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: "I don't pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult." Playboy Magazine 1969
THE GALAXYRECONFIGURED • Last chapter of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) • Typographic technology caused a shift in Western thought • Gutenberg as a starting point for understanding the current shifts
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • William Blake: Externalization of the sense, bodily or mental function in technological form • In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it • Blake had the insights but not the technological resources for rendering his vision.
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • The best of all possible worlds “was merely a quantitive idea of a bag crammed to the utmost with goodies…” • Mechanical matching, not imaginative making • The intellectual is no longer to direct the individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicatie the massive unconsciousness of collective man.
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • A market economy “can exist only in a market society.” • Absurdity in the present time of trying to institute market economies in countries like Russia or Hungary. • A long period of psychic transformation.
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • The method not of closure and perspective but of the open “field” • Shift: Bag crammed full of goodies open “field” • [open field] Reverses all aspects of the 19th century discovery of the assembly-line
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • What will be the new configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of perception and judgment are interpenetrated by the new electric age? • Trauma and tension to every living person.