Author: Walter

Reverse Transcript – Hyperlink to Donna Haraway Now there is an interesting idea… links to people who cite… daypop does that of course, but here it is to Donna Haraway. I might make one to walter 🙂

I have only linked to this in passing before, but I refer to this essay frequently at the moment and recommend it wholeheartedly. So here it is again. And some quotes:

McLUHAN: Because all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self- protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media- induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelgänger — the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power — and courage — of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world.

But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.

Thanks Stephen, for the tips to the links I have been making. Mandala, is what we are returning to, as David Sibbet mentions here:

I knew from the start that there was a format beyond drawing, a pattern of ultimate complexity and inclusiveness. This would be the ”mandala” or circular drawing. For the brain to figure out how everything relates to everything in a central way requires the most amount of insight. In a macro kind of way, it takes us back to the point of it all—to see the world in a whole way.

This image is from here A Medicine Wheel is made of stones. There were about 20,000 medicine wheels in North America, before the Europeans came. Medicine wheels are places for energy and healing, teaching and understanding. They are used for times of reflecting on life, and for joyous celebrations. The Medicine Wheel represents all of creation. all races of people, animals, birds, fish, insects, trees,and stones, the sun, moon and earth are in the circle of the medicine wheel. Each stone tells part of the story. The circle is all of the cycles of nature, day and night, seasons, moons, life cycles, and orbits of the moon and planets.

Another site: What is a Medicine Wheel?

In discussions recently the name Erich Jantsch came up. I am on the trail: Critqiue of Economic Reason monograf:

This is why the problem of the transitional period–the period of formation of the Noosphere, the period of transition of the Biosphere into a qualitatively new state, when the character of its evolution will be determined by the systems reason of coevolution, of man and the Biosphere–is the most important problem of our time.

We shall yet have to formulate a strategy for the development of mankind. It will cover a very wide range of questions which concern practically all areas of human activity. This circumstance is stimulating intellectual life, the establishment of an array of alternative paths of human development and a new view of the world. [ Moiseev 1989:596.] It calls for a new synthetic life-affirming discipline for the theory of noo”genesis must merge natural and social forms of knowledge. [ Erich Jantsch, Design for Evolution , (New York: Brazilier Books, 1975):296.]