Human attention, more and more engaged by particular material
and physical subjects, and by technical "media" of knowledge of
them, and by technological particularizations of general subjects,
is becoming atrophied in its capability of engaging itself in comprehensive
human concerns. Explanation ceases to deal with meaning: to know not
what things mean but what they "are" in terms of empirical experience
is the dominant intellectual objective of the age. There courses a passion
for seeing "it" all, having "it" all, and a frightened running away from the
possibility of understanding what "it" all means. Humanity itself becomes
a medium; it vulgarizes itself into an observing instrument, a looker-on.
Television embraces this process concentratively, reducing human existence
to a pictorializing of itself. One picture is worth a thousand words, is the
McLuhan gospel. And it corresponds gruesomely to the status of words
in the modernized human life of the era:they are as accidental, flying mites
of sound, in non-linear, i.e., accidental, arrangements, speckling the living
moving-pictures with ephemeralities of meaning that disappear too fast
to be--are, indeed, incapable of being--added up into consecutive,
substantial sense.
The widespread failure of school-children in this era to learn to read-- or the
failure of schools to educate them in reading-- has come to be recognized as an
emergency-condition, and much money, related to programmatic endeavor,
has been expended on the emergency. The cause is everywhere, not especially
in the children or in the schooling. There is scarcely any forthrightly linear speaking
of words anywhere, or forthright writing of words or forthright reading-attentiveness
to words upon pages. The children, and Mr. McLuhan, in his boisterous grown-up
way, are only reflecting, in their aversion to treating words as important (for that
is what the matter is with the children, and Mr. McLuhan), the general propensity
of minds in this era to turning away from what is to be known by words, by the
medium of meaning. There is an imbecile quality in the intelligence of people who
make light of words; it has not yet been grasped, in this era, how light those who
hold themselves of the rank "intelligent" make of their words. L(R)J
|
and physical subjects, and by technical "media" of knowledge of
them, and by technological particularizations of general subjects,
is becoming atrophied in its capability of engaging itself in comprehensive
human concerns. Explanation ceases to deal with meaning: to know not
what things mean but what they "are" in terms of empirical experience
is the dominant intellectual objective of the age. There courses a passion
for seeing "it" all, having "it" all, and a frightened running away from the
possibility of understanding what "it" all means. Humanity itself becomes
a medium; it vulgarizes itself into an observing instrument, a looker-on.
Television embraces this process concentratively, reducing human existence
to a pictorializing of itself. One picture is worth a thousand words, is the
McLuhan gospel. And it corresponds gruesomely to the status of words
in the modernized human life of the era:they are as accidental, flying mites
of sound, in non-linear, i.e., accidental, arrangements, speckling the living
moving-pictures with ephemeralities of meaning that disappear too fast
to be--are, indeed, incapable of being--added up into consecutive,
substantial sense.
The widespread failure of school-children in this era to learn to read-- or the
failure of schools to educate them in reading-- has come to be recognized as an
emergency-condition, and much money, related to programmatic endeavor,
has been expended on the emergency. The cause is everywhere, not especially
in the children or in the schooling. There is scarcely any forthrightly linear speaking of words anywhere, or forthright writing of words or forthright reading-attentiveness
to words upon pages. The children, and Mr. McLuhan, in his boisterous grown-up
way, are only reflecting, in their aversion to treating words as important (for that
is what the matter is with the children, and Mr. McLuhan), the general propensity
of minds in this era to turning away from what is to be known by words, by the
medium of meaning. There is an imbecile quality in the intelligence of people who
make light of words; it has not yet been grasped, in this era, how light those who
hold themselves of the rank "intelligent" make of their words. L(R)J
- frank 6-27-2001 7:02 pm