Paradoxically, when the Greeks approached alphabetic technology using their oral habit of mimesis, they put on its visual stress instead.¹

the old experience of being was retrieved on the new terms of visual space…²

Although McLuhan certainly appreciated Eric Havelock’s description in Preface to Plato of the transition in Greek culture from orality to literacy, it was the mimesis of orality that particularly engaged him in the work. For this amounted to an historical depiction of how contemporary insouciance operates. The irony is profound. The thoughtless “state of total personal involvement”, of “emotional identification with the substance of the poetised [journalistic!] statement”, and “total loss of objectivity” characteristic of orality came to characterize literacy as well.³ And — strangely enough — this strangle-hold of mimesis remains the case today when literacy is quickly being superseded by a new digital orality and the mimetic “[im]possibility of objectivity and detachment of figure from ground” remains common to both.⁴ As ever. But how does this auto-identification function across fundamental divides? How can humans remain the same when even they have become fundamentally different?⁵

From Cliché to Archetype, 1970
Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato (…) explains the pre-Platonic function of mimesis: “Plato is describing a total [oral] technology of the preserved word (…) a state of total personal involvement and there­fore of emotional identification with the substance of the poetised statement.  (…) Such enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity (…) This then is the master clue to Plato’s choice of the word mimesis to describe the poetic experience. It focuses initially not on the artist’s creative act but on his power to make his audience identify almost patho­logically and certainly sympathetically with the content of what he is saying (…) what [Plato] is saying is that any poet­ised statement must be designed and recited in such a way as to make it a kind of drama within the soul both of the reciter and hence also of the audience. This kind of drama, this way of reliving experience in memory instead of analysing and understanding it, is for him the ‘enemy’.”⁶

Laws of Media, 1988
For the preliterate, mimesis is not merely a mode of representation but ‘the process whereby all men learn’; it was a technique cultivated by the oral poets and rhetors and used by everybody for ‘knowing’ via merging knower and known. (…) Using mimesis, the ‘thing known’ ceases to be an object of attention and becomes instead a ground for the knower to put on. It violates all the properties of the visual order, allowing neither objectivity, nor detachment, nor any rational uniformity of experience, which is why Plato was at pains in the Republic to denounce its chief practitioners. Under the spell of mimesis the knower (hearer of a recitation) (…) is transformed by and into what he perceives. It is not simply a matter of representation but rather one of putting on a completely new mode of being, whereby all possibility of objectivity and detachment of figure from ground is discarded. Eric Havelock devotes a considerable portion of Preface to Plato to this problem. As he discovered, mimesis was the oral bond by which the tribe cohered. (…) Paradoxically, when the Greeks approached alphabetic technology using their oral habit of mimesis, they put on its visual stress instead.¹

Laws of Media, 1988
In the Republic Plato vigorously attacked the control exercised through mimesis for it “constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of cause and effect. That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable. He is entering the lists against centuries of habituation in rhythmic memorised experience. He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it. that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the ‘subject’ who stands apart from the ‘object’ and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just ‘imitating’ it.” (Preface to Plato, 47)⁸

Laws of Media, 1988
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.⁹

Laws of Media, 1988
Mimesis was turned from a making process into representational matching, and the old experience of being was retrieved on the new terms of visual space…¹⁰

What is missing across cultures and across their correlated media divides is nothing less than the very essence of human being, an essence that is “pre-tribal” and “extremely ancient”.

Libraries: Past, Present and Future, 1970
A close friend and student of Harold Innis, Eric Havelock. devoted his Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963) to studying the disappearance of the ancient and oral poetic educational establishment under the impact of the phonetic alphabet. He also recognized that the phonetic alphabet not only abolished Homer and the “tribal encyclopedia”, but also retrieved an extremely ancient and long-forgotten human fact, the recognition and awareness of the individual metaphysical substance of the private person. Plato saw that the consequences were basic:: “Since he is now equipped, and has equipped his reader, with the doctrine of the autonomous personality and identified it as the seat of rational thought, he is in a position to re-examine “mimesis” from the basis of this doctrine, and he finds the two [mimesis and the autonomous personality] wholly incompatible. (Preface to Plato, p. 207)”

For discussion and further quotations concerning “the individual metaphysical substance of the private person”, see Pre-tribal awareness.

Is it too much to say that, in McLuhan’s view, history is the epoch of the missing “individual metaphysical substance of the private person”?

But how can “metaphysical substance” go missing?