the cyclical nature of history
“Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.” — from the book “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” by media analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by Jerome Agel. It was published in March 1967
see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7
“The newspapers have to have bad news, otherwise there would be only ads, or good news. Without bad news we could not discern the ground rules of the environment. This does not necessarily mean the environment is bad, but it means its operation upon us is total and ruthless. The environment is always the brainwasher, so that the well-adjusted person, by definition, has been brainwashed. He is adjusted.” - Marshall McLuhan, Vision 65 (October 1965)
So the curated environment is setting the stage in which the proscribed narrative cannot exist and the prescribed narrative must exist.
Interesting. Could do without all the links though.
Interesting. Could do without all the links though.
What many people do in year 2024 and year 2025 on social media is use ChatGPT and ask it to strip out all the stuff that they don’t desire and give them a ELI4 / TLDR summary. Very popular.
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“Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - University of Toronto’s Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966 … LSD drugs are a book by James Joyce? Huh: www.LazyWake.comNot my thing. I might read or reread the book though, I know I’ve read of his.
