Monthly Archives: April 2014

GV and TT p22 — Commentary 2: on “true strength”

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What has happened to the planet in its trajectory through the Gutenberg galaxy is that it has become “trapped in an assumption about the nature of reality” (GV 77) which is especially blinding:

In the left hemisphere [type of experience], formal cause is translated into a kind of Platonic abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material. (GV 78)

This is an outlook that cannot break itself free from a force-field in which vision is restricted to “an abstract sequence or movement isolated from ground” (GV 80). Within this fixation, limitation and cliché are taken as negative markers indicating insignificance and lack of substance and reality. No particular instance is perceived to be “realized”, let alone “perfectly realized”. Perfect realization is held instead to characterize only an “abstract ideal” which does not actually exist and which could not actually exist. And yet it is this dead hand that is conceived to shadow all that would otherwise seem existent and alive. (This is the gnostic gambit, to be treated in later posts…)

Further, in accord with Blake’s dictum, often cited by McLuhan, that “they became what they beheld” (eg, GG 265/272), this outlook necessarily views itself in the same way as it views everything else. It senses that it, too, is “isolated from ground” and is just as unreal and dead as everything else. (One aspect of this topic is McLuhan’s thesis that the “content of any medium is always another medium” (UM 8). Far more important than the re-use of books in film or of film in TV is the implication here of the “fly in the fly-bottle” predicament. This problem will be treated in detail in later posts. Suffice it to note here that the force of this concern turns on the subject of the present post: namely, the death grip of a “Platonic abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material”. The predicament of the fly in the fly-bottle is exactly that it conceives of form (the fly-bottle) in opposition to content (the ‘outside’) and therefore cannot get to the latter on account of the former. But the fly-bottle ceases to imprison as soon as the fly realizes that form and content may be mutually implicating rather than mutually exclusive.)

Now what alone energizes this force-field is the subject’s own hold to the idea that “ideal form (…) is never perfectly realized in any material”. To break with this hold is difficult precisely because of the subject’s own (owning!) identification with it. Although it is an outlook and vision by which it itself is ultimately stripped of all reality, the subject cannot loosen its grip since this ideal appears to it to be the standard of genuine being and, therefore, all that it itself has and is.  But the strength of this hold to an “abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material” is the Gutenberg galaxy!

As discussed in The Innis Letter of 1951 (2), what is necessary in this situation is for the subject to go through its own lack of reality in which “where you are is where you are not” (as Eliot puts it following San Juan’s “para venir a lo que no eres / has de ir por donde no eres”).  Of course, this is just where the subject already is — or is not! But the modern superman cannot face this dark night of unknowing and prefers instead to flail about destroying everything alive in the name of its dead ideal. It is not able — because lacking the courage to attempt?  because caught in a net of despair? because confusing light with darkness? because taking dumb to unprecedented heights? — to attempt what McLuhan suggests over and over again:

like Alice, he must pass through the vanishing point, to see both sides of the mirror (GV xii, emphasis added)

What then comes into view for the first time is the relativity of Gutenbergian vision:

Alice went through the vanishing point into the “total field” that bridges the worlds of visual and acoustic, civilized and primal spaces. (Take Today 9-10, emphasis added)

Alice in Through the Looking Glass. Before she went through the looking glass, she was in a visual world of continuity and connected space where the appearance of things matched the reality. When she went through the looking glass, she found herself in a non-visual world where nothing matched and everything seemed to have been made on a unique pattern. (Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, 253)

Where “everything seemed to have been made on a unique pattern“, the relation of form to content aka material realization is seen not to be fixed but to be endlessly variable. What Alice learned by her experience “on both sides of the looking glass” (Take Today 121) was that “realization” is not singular but plural and that, in order to appreciate “realization”, the first thing necessary is to appreciate that plurality.

approaching letters and words from many points of view simultaneously (…) minus the assumption that any one way is solely correct. (GV 64)

Hence McLuhan’s refusal to endorse any point of view.

The end of page 22 of Take Today reads as follows:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.

“Dialogue as a process of creating the new that came before” is an original “combination” or plurality that re-peats itself (“goes beyond) into further pluralities. This is a repetition, however, that does not “merely reflect or repeat the old”, but instead is the power of “a process of creating the new” — it is that most peculiar sort of original plurality that “goes beyond” itself in such a way as to free radical difference(s) from itself: “the new”. But what is “beyond” plural dialogue in the sense of radical difference from it is only the sort of singularity for which “abstract ideal form (…) is never perfectly realized in any material” — exactly because lacking “dialogue” with it! It thus comes into view that original “dialogue” as original “dialogue” requires its own oblivion as the only way in which it can be the sort of radical plurality required by it as original and as “dialogue”.  Only so can it effect its own repetition in difference as its way of “creating the new”…

Earlier on TT page 22, McLuhan cites the I Ching on the rule of such original “innovation” (what “came before”) as “dialogue”. It is that which lies hidden in what it itself brings forth from itself in “creating the new”:

innovation “does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible.”

This is “true strength” because it is both decided and able to replicate itself as what it is not. Hence it is that what seems to be its absence is in fact its “mobile” ex-pression of itself out of itself.  This is why it remains “hidden” and is never “outwardly visible”. At the same time, this absence from itself is exactly its strength and the way it is able to “guide all happenings, but (….) never behaves outwardly as the leader.”

 

GV and TT p22 — Commentary 1: “the great quantum leap”

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The selection of GV texts given in GV and TT p22 concludes with this one:

The archetype, which depends on an overarching comprehension of the past (the mythic milieu), is retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved combination of clichés — an old cliché brought back by a new cliché. (GV 16)

This short passage goes to the very heart of McLuhan’s thought.

TT 22 and GV concern the structural form which McLuhan perceived as grounding all particular examples of human experience, individual and collective.  This structural form of media in human experience is comparable to the structural forms of the element in chemistry and of DNA in genetics.  Further commentaries on GV and TT p22 will examine this structural form, the range of its expression and its uses in the humanities and social sciences which could have the effect of reinstituting them on this new basis.

But an understanding of McLuhan’s insight must begin with an understanding of its particularity and its acknowledged fallibility. Neither what McLuhan saw nor how he saw it were de-finitive.  Just as was the case with initial insight into the formal structure of the chemical element in the nineteenth century and with initial insight into the formal structure of DNA in the twentieth, both the what and the how of McLuhan’s perception will forever be subject to adjustment, revision, correction and even revolution.

The decisive question has nothing to do with the match between McLuhan’s perception — the how — with the purported reality or truth of what he perceived. Instead, as subjectively and objectively finitive (= not de-finitive1), McLuhan’s insight was nothing more than cliché as regards both how it envisioned and what it envisioned:

It is consequently a retrieved combination of clichés — an old cliché brought back by a new cliché.

The matter of finitive particularity or cliché is explained by McLuhan and Watson (as formulated by Eric McLuhan?2) as follows:

The function of (…) cliché is to select for use one item or one feature out of a vast middenheap of (…) materials. (…) The function of (…) cliché depends upon the suppression of huge quantities of unconscious (…) materials. (…) A mind has many rationales; a cliché probe stresses only one of these at a time. The others are dismissed into the unconscious. (From Cliché to Archetype, 39-40)

A cliché is both arbitrary and utterly partial. The great question is: how is it that at the same time it can reveal?

McLuhan found it astonishing that his contemporaries could not understand this question in regard to the humanities — and especially not in regard to religion — at the same time that admittedly partial insight was spectacularly successful in the hard sciences in exploring all aspects of the physical universe and even in creating atomic weapons and going to the moon. In this respect no different from the physical sciences, of course religion is cliché — but how else, McLuhan must be understood as asking, could it possibly be?

To be anything at all is to be particular and finite! But as we know very well in our own experience, and as we know especially from the successes of hard science in the last 200 years, particular ways of addressing particular questions can indeed reveal what is going on in them.

The key to the GV p16 passage cited at the head of this post lies in the word “retrieved”: that passage has to do with “retrieved awareness or consciousness”, with “a retrieved combination”. “Retrieved” (from re-trouvé or ‘re-found’) appears over and over again in McLuhan’s work as “re-play”, “re-tracing”, “re-cognition”. What is retrieved (re-played, re-traced, re-cognized) is that initial, indeed initiating, “awareness or consciousness” through which humans first appear as humans.

Such “awareness or consciousness” is initiated by and through language:

If one must choose the one dominant factor which separates man from the rest of the animal kingdom, it would undoubtedly be language. The ancients said: “Speech is the difference of man”. Opposition of the thumbs and fingers and an erect stature were certainly key developments in the separation of man from animals, but the great quantum leap of intellectual capacity took place with speech. The work of Whorf and Sapir shows that the spoken language structures the way in which man thinks and perceives the world. It is the medium of both thought and perception as well as communication. (‘Alphabet Mother of Invention’, McLuhan and Logan, Et Cetera 34, 373-83, 1977)

Both “thought and perception”, without which humans would not be human, are enabled by language.  But language itself functions esentially through the finitive. The human ear can recognize a broad range of sounds (though not as broad as the more intelligent dog), but every particular language, even every particular dialect, recognizes only a selection of these. The repertoire of sound used in any language represents only a finite selection of the sounds potentially available to it. Further, and yet more importantly, the particular sound associated with a certain meaning in any language is arbitrary: the sound of ‘tree’ is no more fitting to its meaning than is ‘Baum’ or ‘arbre’. Further yet, the grammatical structure of any language is again arbitrary and subject to wide variation relative to other languages and even relative to itself over time: English once had cases and genders, but now it does not. This does not mean that a language might do without grammar or that grammar doesn’t matter; it means that grammar is made, not matched. Only as a result of these different finitive factors do humans speak at all and in thousands of different languages.

Language is utterly finitive and yet it is exactly through such finitude that it constitutes itself and thereby constitutes human “thought and perception”. McLuhan agreed with Heidegger that humans do not invent language — since there is no “thought and perception” prior to it and therefore no human being to do the inventing! Humans are, therefore, not the primary speakers of language. Rather, it is “language itself” that first of all speaks itself and thereby invents (= ‘brings in’) humans: die Sprache spricht.

language itself is an infinitely greater work of art than the Iliad or the Aeneid, (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, M&L 157, 1954)

it is language itself that embodies and performs the dance of being. (‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976)

James Joyce used language itself as the index of these modifications and explored them fully in Finnegans Wake. (Laws of Media 221, 1978?)

When language speaks, and when humans, consequently, have “thought and perception” and thereby first appear as humans, what results is ‘world’ — a ‘world’ which always appears in some correspondingly structured fashion and which is definitively limited by that structure:

  • The pre-neolithic art of making stone tools moved man out of the process of evolution and into a world of his own making. (GV 93)
  • The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet; it is the second phase of the original creation. (GV 93)
  • language as ground biases awareness (GV28)
  • We are all trapped in [some] assumption about the nature of reality (GV 77)

The limitation here which can be described as “bias“, or even as our being “trapped”, is also what at the same time illuminates and frees. Formation and deformation belong together here and each is as necessary as the other in bringing a world to modulated light.  ‘World’ without delimiting structure is as little possible as language without delimiting structure (such as the recognition of some particular range of audible sounds, a particular grammatical structure and particular sounds correlated to particular meanings).

When humans come to understand something, a fitting relation clicks into place between a particular way of looking and a domain.  A particular way of looking may be called ‘cliché’; a domain may be called the ‘archetype’, since it is the “overarching (…) milieu” of what is at stake in that domain. It is in relation to the archetype that a cliché must be evaluated; but at the same time only cliché can reveal a domain since only human perception, never more than finitive and so never more than cliché, can reveal domains for continued exploration. Exactly because no cliché can ever reveal an archetype fully, however, also what is known of the archetype is also finitive and is therefore itself cliché:

The archetype, which depends on an overarching comprehension of the past (the mythic milieu), is retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved combination of clichés — an old cliché brought back by a new cliché. (GV 16)

The archetype is the full or “overarching” domain — for example, the chemical nature of physical materials. No human understanding of this domain is able to comprehend it fully (which is why we can investigate it forever) and to this extent our understanding is never more than cliché in regard to it — just as it itself remains cliché in comparison to its “overarching” fullness as archetype.

The great mystery is that humans can and do come to understand. Everything in the modern world testifies to this — except our striking ignorance of what the hell we ourselves as humans are up to.

McLuhan attempted to begin an exploration of our ignorance of the human domain through the preliminary identification of the elementary structure of human experience. Of course, for him and for all following investigation forever, this would always remain cliché. But cliché can and does have an essential relation with truth exactly as retrieval.

What is “retrieved” (re-played, re-traced, re-cognized) when cliché reveals an entrance-way into a domain is that founding relation between finitive sound and finitive meaning that first manifests language and communication. Such re-traced relation to the founding relation of language (subjective genitive!) is what McLuhan calls the “retrieved combination”. Its relation of signal and meaning grounds our “retrieved combination” with it and, consequently, our own combinations yielding meanings and discoveries in language and knowledge. Relating to it, we are able to relate things as speakers and to relate to domains as investigators. 

The founding relation of language is what first constitutes “thought and perception” and thereby human being and ‘world’. What McLuhan calls “the mythic milieu” (GV 16) is the story of these developments which do not occur in historical time, but are what first enables historical time. This is the story of how the “great quantum leap” initiating “the second phase of the original creation” is first of all enabled through the “great quantum leap” of “the original creation” itself:  the archetypal “great quantum leap”. It is this original power which occurs as re-play in all language use and in all practical and theoretical knowledge — and especially in our insight into new domains. 

This “great quantum leap” which initiates “the second phase of the original creation” is itself the “retrieved combination” with “the [first] phase of the original creation”. Because the beginning is already repetition3 or dialogue, and because that origin continues to power all subsequent history, so can it be re-peated (re-trieved, re-played, re-traced, re-cognized) by us. As McLuhan notes at the end of Take Today 22:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond…

So it is that within historical time, cliché can and does open new domains.  McLuhan contended that the “electric age” was the time when “cliché probe” would at last open the human domain. And it would do so, he further contended, by consciously aligning itself through retrieval with that original “quantum leap” or “magic”,  as he often described it, through which utterly arbitrary sound was first heard to communicate meaning.

it is language itself that embodies and performs the dance of being. (‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976)

  1. De-finitive’: one of the uses of the common prefix ‘de‘ is to act as a privative, negating what follows: hence ‘defrost’, ‘defuse’, ‘definitive’. Compare ‘dis’ in ‘dishonest’, ‘disallow’, etc. ↩
  2. From Cliché to Archetype was published in 1970 and supposedly written by McLuhan and Wilfred Watson. But Watson claimed to have had little to do with the final form of the book and McLuhan himself was in no shape to have much to do with it following his brain surgery in 1968 — this aside from his increasing reluctance to play the role of the scholarly, but utterly ineffectual, academic. Philip Marchand and Fred Flahiff, a student and later colleague of McLuhan in the English department at St Mike’s, attribute the completion of the book to Eric McLuhan. ↩
  3. Repetition, cf repeat: “to say what one has already said”, from Old French repeter “say or do again, get back, demand the return of” (13c, Modern French répéeter), from Latin repetere “do or say again; attack again”, from re– “again” + petere “to go to; attack; strive after; ask for, beseech”. See petition: early 14c., “a supplication or prayer, especially to a deity”, from Old French peticion “request, petition” (12c., Modern French pétition) and directly from Latin petitionem (nominative petitio) “a blow, thrust, attack, aim; a seeking, searching”, in law “a claim, suit”, noun of action from past participle stem of petere “to make for, go to; attack, assail; seek, strive after; ask for, beg, beseech, request; fetch; derive; demand, require”, from PIE root *pet-, also *pete– “to rush; to fly” (cognates: Sanskrit pattram “wing, feather, leaf”, patara– “flying, fleeting”; Hittite pittar “wing”; Greek piptein “to fall”, potamos “rushing water”, pteryx “wing”: Old English feðer “feather”; Latin penna “feather, wing;” Old Church Slavonic pero “feather”; Old Welsh eterin “bird”). As may be seen in this etymology, the association of saying with wings is very ancient: Homer uses “winged words” over and over again.  This “combination” of words and wings is doubly significant. On the one hand, wings are always two: a bird with only one wing cannot fly. So a word must be both uttered and understood. On the other hand, the wings of words work through an intermediary space between a speaker and a hearer and between a sound and a meaning: between the two is “the gap is where the action is”. Absent this gap, twofold words with their two wings cannot fly — since without it they cannot be two and there is no medium for their back and forth. ↩

GV and TT p22

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Take Today page 22 (titled “OFF-Again — ON-Again — FINN-Again”) presents the quintessence of McLuhan’s thought, a distillation of his life’s work.  All the rest of his work may be read as commentary in various modes on this single page. Using some tags from The Global Village, the distillation and its commentary might be called:

the utterer as the etymology (GV 7)

Or:

consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52, emphasis added)

Or:

 percept instead of (…) prior assumptions. (GV 139)

 Here is TT 22 in a somewhat shortened version:

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. The extreme forms are the civilized and the tribal (eye and ear): the Cromwellian specialist and the Celtic involved. Only the civilized form is fragmented in action, whether in business or in politics or in entertainment. Hence the anarchy of the contemporary world where all these forms coexist.

Dependent upon the materials and hence the technologies available to mankind, the pattern of social organization and management swings violently from stress on the entrepreneur and the virtues of the lonely individualist to the close-knit and emotionally involved group. In the diversified scope of modern business structures, these extremes can express themselves at different levels of the same organization. (…)

By the law of change, whatever has reached its extreme must turn back. (I Ching)

It is explained in the same context of this 4,000-year-old management manual [I Ching] that innovation “does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible.” What is actually visible in new situations is the ghost of old ones. It is the movie that appears on TV. It is the old written word that appears on Telex. The hidden force of change is the new speed that alters all configurations of power. The new speed creates a new hidden ground against which the old ground becomes the figure (…)

All management theories and political ideologies follow an involuntary procedure. The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that blacks out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.

The Global Village, like all the rest of McLuhan’s work, may be read as an exegesis of this page.  Reordered and refocused on TT 22, here is an abbreviated version of it:

  • The first humanoid uttering his first intelligible grunt, or “word,” outered himself and set up a dynamic relationship with himself, other creatures, and the world outside his skin (…) a tool to reconstitute nature (…) to translate one form into another. (GV 93)
  • all words are metaphors (GV 30)
  • Structurally speaking, a metaphor is a technique of presenting one situation in terms of another situation. That is to say it is a technique of awareness, of perception. (GV28)
  • language (…) is an attempt to manipulate as well as interpret the world. (GV 130)
  • the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground, are forms of language. (GV 27)
  • all our artifacts are in fact words. All of these things are the outerings and utterings of man. (GV 7)
  • The pre-neolithic art of making stone tools moved man out of the process of evolution and into a world of his own making. (GV 93)
  • The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet; it is the second phase of the original creation. (GV 93)
  • language as ground biases awareness (GV28)
  • We are all trapped in an assumption about the nature of reality (GV 77)
  • The dominance of the left hemisphere (analytic and quantitative) — and by dominant we mean the ability of the left brain to lead the right brain in the context of Western culture — entails the submission or suppression of the right hemisphere…(GV 62)
  • dominance [means] controlling the principal problem-solving of the brain at any one time (GV 55)
  • the power to function asymmetrically (GV 50)
  • the utterer as the etymology (GV 7) (…) the user as ground (GV 10)
  • Final cause (that which is the end or purpose of a process), inherent in a thing from the outset, came to be misinterpreted in left-hemisphere terms only as the end point of a whole series of efficient causes. (GV 78)
  • In the left hemisphere, formal cause is translated into a kind of Platonic abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material. (GV 78)
  • Angelism, sometimes called discarnatism (…) floats in the abstract clouds, without any relation to ground, or environment — the besetting sin of academic hypothesis. (GV 12)
  • Angelism is being chained to a fixed point of view, without ground.
  • Angelism (…) ensures a rigidity of point of view which is largely a consequence of linear and visual logic. It is best characterized as promoting confrontation and fragmentation, some of the chief elements in the illusion of objectivity. One emphasizes the eye over the ear. (GV 69)
  • The idea of the role was gradually lost sight of — that is, the multiple holding of partial jobs signifying one’s authority over a household. The specialist can always be seen to have one salient characteristic: he is quite willing to trade his freedom of action for the security and the stability of a closed system. (GV 96)
  • Whenever two cultures, or two events, or two ideas are set in proximity to one another, an interplay takes place, a sort of magical change. The more unlike the interface, the greater the tension of the interchange. (GV 4)
  • At this stage of greatest intensity of development, there will be an unanticipated reversal: the simultaneous will emerge from the sequential, the mythic from the historic, acoustic from visual space. The old ground rules of point-to-point logic will break down. And holism will then emerge as a dominant form of thinking,.. (GV 107)
  • “what may well be the most important distinction between the left and right hemisphere modes is the extent to which a linear concept of time participates in the ordering of thought”. (GV 74, citing “The Other Side of the Brain” by Joseph Bogen)
  • time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground. (GV 10)
  • approaching letters and words from many points of view simultaneously (…) minus the assumption that any one way is solely correct. (GV 64)
  • the ability to be equally empathetic in many areas at once. (GV 57)
  • The left hemisphere of the brain is figure against the ground of the right brain in Western culture and the opposite for the Oriental. (GV 71)
  • All individuals, their desires and satisfactions, are co-present in the age of communication. (GV 94)
  • the utterer as the etymology (GV 7) (…) consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52, emphasis added)
  • For use in the electronic age, a right-hemisphere model of communication is necessary, both because our culture has nearly completed the process of shifting its cognitive modes from the left to the right hemisphere, and because the electronic media themselves are right-hemisphere in their patterns and operation. The problem is to discover such a model that yet is congenial to our culture and its residua of left-hemisphere orientation. Such a model would have to take into account the apposition of both figure and ground (left and right hemispheres working together and independently when necessary) instead of an abstract sequence or movement isolated from ground. (GV 80)
  • Electric man loses touch with the concept of a ruling center (…) based on interconnection. (GV 93)
  • We must teach ourselves to abandon the tendency to view the environment in a hierarchical and totally connective way, to center ourselves instead in the arena of interplay between the two modes of perception and analysis, which is comprehensive awareness. (GV 47)
  • The resonant interval may be considered an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space  (GV 4)
  • Connections are visual: there is actually no connection between figure and ground but only interface. (GV 21)
  • A border is not a connection but an interval of resonance (GV 149)
  • the alignment of two actions without interconnection performs a kind of magical change in the interacting components. (GV 164)
  • there is no continuity or connection in the figure-ground relationship. Instead, there is an interface of a transforming kind (…) metaphorical positioning. (GV 23)
  • we should focus on the relationship between the cortical hemispheres (GV 52)
  • the relationship between the cortical hemispheres (…) is the projection of consciousness [obj gen!], consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52)
  • Consciousness (…) may be thought of as a projection to the outside of an inner synesthesia, corresponding generally with the ancient definition of common sense. Common sense is that peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all other senses and presenting the result as a unified image of the mind. Erasmus and More said that a unified ratio among the senses was a mark of rationality. (GV 94)
  • the utterer as the etymology (GV 7) (…) consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52, emphasis added) 
  • Anyone who has been involved in gestalt [psychology], or studied primitive societies — once he or she gets over the impulse to measure these societies with Western templates — is aware that either/or is not the only possibility. Both/and can also exist. (..) the “uncivilized,” can easily entertain two diametric[ally opposed] possibilities at once. (GV 39)
  • “yes” and “no”, the essence of the excluded middle (…) allows no consideration of opposites of equal power… (GV 107)
  • either-or [vs] both-and (…) matching [vs] making (…) logic and dialectic [vs] poiesis (…) concept [vs] percept (GV 31)
  • Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and eternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary…a foot, as it were, in both visual and acoustic space…(GV 45)
  • In our desire to illumine the differences between visual and acoustic space, we have undoubtedly given a false impression: and that is that the normal brain, in its everyday functioning, cannot reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptions of both sides of the mind. (GV 48)
  • every artifact of man mirrors the shift between these two modes. (GV x)
  • within each of man’s inventions (extensions of himself) left- and right-hemisphere modes of thought struggle for dominance (GV 102)
  • No matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres… (GV 62)
  • visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation, even if Western civilization has (…) tamped down our awareness of the acoustic. The latter is the invisible counter-environment that forms the background against which the civilization of the written word is seen. (GV 55)
  • The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our predecessors lived with the figure-minus-ground. (GV 26)
  • The archetype, which depends on an overarching comprehension of the past (the mythic milieu), is retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved combination of clichés — an old cliché brought back by a new cliché. (GV 16)