For our class assignment, we are looking at an excerpt from a book he wrote in the 50's that shows he is years before his time. It is a suitable bridge between the manuscript culture we've been studying and the print culture that we are about to see in its infant stages. Much of the excerpt here has to do with the overlap between script and orality, and the extent to which reading in the ancient and medieval worlds was still very much an oral exercise. The study of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, focuses on memory, delivery, and diction as well as the means of presenting compelling arguments. As we trace how this art was developed in the ancient world and appropriated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, we can get a feel for the essential orality of the culture, even when writing has a major role to play.
Here are some questions for you to think about: what kinds of competencies are developed in a culture of reading such as McLuhan describes having been prevalent in the Middle Ages? Next, what does it mean to have a culture in which language is primarily a visual rather than an oral phenomenon? Is that the case today? Look at the ways in which McLuhan describes spatial relationships in regards to reading, particularly spacial metaphors (such as the "lattice"). Also, think about the contrast between light through and light on a text. And think about questions of authorship and authority in relation to oral culture and print culture, respectively.
There's a section here on the emergence of Scholastic culture in the High Middle Ages, as opposed ot the monastic culture that prevailed in the earlier period. In the context of the universities, which developed in the town culture of the twelfth and thirteenth century and were nurtured by the rediscovered texts of Aristotle's "new logic," a new approach to reading developed. McLuhan, however, will say that this isn't new at all; that the foundations for a dialectical (read scholastic) approach occurred in antiquity, with the period of the Empire. He associates this approach with the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who lived in a time when political rhetoric had no use--during a period of dictatorship.
Sic et non refers to a work by the twelfth-century philosopher Peter Abelard, who showed how various authorities in the Christian canon came to opposing conclusions (or made opposing pronouncements, theses) on important points of doctrine. This juxtaposition of opposing texts cried out for reconciliation, and the work of the scholastics was to see to it that the paradoxes came ultimately to a higher level of resolution. Logic, or dialectic, is crucial to this process, and Aristotle's newly translated texts were the tool-chest that these thinkers used.
So what you have in this excerpt is essentially a three-tiered process: we get the literary humanism of the monastic culture, the aphoristic, dialectical approach of the scholastics (both of which were primarily oral, as an aspect of scribal culture), and then what he calls the "textual positivism" of the humanists in the Renaissance. The printing press took several centuries to eliminate orality from reading, but by the end of the eighteenth century, this had happened.
And what about today? Has visual culture replaced oral culture in a new sense--or is orality returning? Before we get postmodern, however, we should stop and consider the effect of print culture as McLuhan is describing it, primarily visual and linear. My own thought here is that such a culture leads us to locate learning entirely in our heads, rather than in our bodies. The eye receives the printed word, which immediately travels to the brain; we con't stop to employ our voices, or our fingers (as we copy) with our sense of touch. What does this suggest about our approach to knowledge? To wisdom?
To be continued.