The Making of Typographic Man

the utenberg galaxy the uten,berg galaxy the making of typographic man by Marshall McLuhan University of Toronto Press Copyright, Canada, 1962 / UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS / Printed in Canada Reprinted 1962 Contents Prologue 1 The Gutenberg Galaxy 11 The Galaxy Reconfigured 265 Bibliographic Index 281 Index of Chapter Glosses 291 The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history. The alternative procedure would be to offer a series of views of fixed relationships in pictorial space. Thus the galaxy or constellation of events upon which the present study concentrates is itself a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation— particularly in our own time. With reference to the current transformation, the reader may find the end of the book, "The Galaxy Reconfigured," the best prologue. Prologue * The present volume is in many respects complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord. Professor Lord has continued the work of Milman Parry, whose Homeric studies had led him to consider how oral and written poetry naturally followed diverse patterns and functions. Convinced that the poems of Homer were oral compositions, Parry "set himself the task of proving incontrovertibly if it were possible, the oral character of the poems, and to that end he turned to the study of the Yugoslav epics." His study of these modern epics was, he explained, "to fix with exactness the form of oral story poetry. Its method was to observe singers working in a thriving tradition of unlettered song and see how the form of their songs hangs upon their having to learn and practice their art without reading and writing."' Professor Lord's book, like the studies of Milman Parry, is quite natural and appropriate to our electric age, as The Gutenberg Galaxy may help to explain. We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experienc- ing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience. Whereas the Elizabethans were poised between medieval corporate experience and modern individualism, we reverse their pattern by confronting an electric technology which would seem to render individualism obsolete and the corporate interdependence mandatory. Patrick Cruttwell had devoted an entire study (The Shakespearean Mo- ment) to the artistic strategies born of the Elizabethan experience of living in a divided world that was dissolving and resolving at the same time. We, too, live at such a moment of interplay of contrasted cultures, and The Gutenberg Galaxy is intended to trace the ways in which the forms of experience and of mental outlook and expression have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by printing. The enterprise which Milman Parry undertook with reference to the contrasted forms of oral and written poetry is here extended to the forms of thought and the organization of experience in society and politics. That such a study of the divergent nature of oral and written social organization has not been carried out by historians long ago is rather hard to explain. Perhaps the reason for the omission is simply that the job could only be done when the two conflicting forms of written and oral experience were once again co-existent as they are today. Professor Harry Levin indicates as much in his preface to Professor Lord's The Singer of Tales (p. xiii) : 'Quoted in The Singer of Tales, p. 3. The term "literature," presupposing the use of letters, assumes that verbal works of imagination are transmitted by means of writing and reading. The expression "oral literature" is obviously a contradiction in terms. Yet we live at a time when literacy itself has become so diluted that it can scarcely be invoked as an esthetic criterion. The Word as spoken or sung, together with a visual image of the speaker or singer, has meanwhile been regaining its hold through electrical engineering. A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us—along with its immeasurable riches—snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions, but as an organic habit of re-creating what has been received and is handed on. The omission of historians to study the revolution in the forms of thought and social organization resulting from the phonetic alphabet has a parallel in socio-economic history. As early as 1864-67 Karl Rodbertus elaborated his theory of "Economic Life in Classical Antiquity." In Trade and Market in the Early Empires (p. 5 ), Harry Pearson describes his innovation as follows : This remarkably modern view of the social function of money has not been sufficiently appreciated. Rodbertus realized that the transition from a "natural economy" to a "money economy" was not simply a technical matter, which resulted from a substitution of money purchase for barter. He insisted instead that a monetarized economy involved a social structure entirely different from that which went with an economy in kind. It was this change in the social structure accompanying the use of money rather than the technical fact of its use which ought to be emphasized, he thought. Had this point been expanded to include the varying social structures accompanying trading activity in the ancient world the controversy might have been resolved before it began. In other words, had Rodbertus further explained that different forms of money and exchange structured societies in varying ways, generations of confused controversy might have been avoided. The matter was finally explained when Karl Bucher approached the classical world not from our conventional mode of historical retrospect but from the primitive side. By starting with non-literate societies and moving toward the classical world, "he suggested that ancient economic life might better be understood if viewed from the perspective of primitive rather than modern society." 2 Such a reverse perspective of the literate Western world is the one afforded to the reader of Albert Lord's Singer of Tales. But we also live in an electric or post-literate time when the jazz musician uses all the techniques of oral poetry. Empathic identification with all the oral modes is not difficult in our century. 2 Trade and Market in the Early Empires, p. 5. In the electronic age which succeeds the typographic and mechanical era of the past five hundred years, we encounter new shapes and structures of human interdependence and of expression which are "oral" in form even when the components of the situation may be non-verbal. This question is raised more fully in the concluding section of The Gutenberg Galaxy. It is not a difficult matter in itself, but it does call for some reorganization of imaginative life. Such a change of modes of awareness is always delayed by the persistence of older patterns of perception. The Elizabethans appear to our gaze as very medieval. Medieval man thought of himself as classical, just as we consider ourselves to be modern men. To our successors, however, we shall appear as utterly Renaissance in character, and quite unconscious of the major new factors which we have set in motion during the past one hundred and fifty years. Far from being deterministic, however, the present study will, it is hoped, elucidate a principal factor in social change which may lead to a genuine increase of human autonomy. Peter Drucker writing on "The Technological Revolution" of our time in Technology and Culture (vol. II, no. 4, 1961, p. 348) states: "There is only one thing we do not know about the Techno- logical Revolution—but it is essential: What happened to bring about the basic change in attitudes, beliefs, and values which released it? 'Scientific progress', I have tried to show, had little to do with it. But how responsible was the great change in world outlook which, a century earlier, had brought about the great Scientific Revolution?" The Gutenberg Galaxy at least attempts to supply the "one thing we do not know." But even so, there may well prove to be some other things! The method employed throughout this study is directly related to what Claude Bernard presented in his classic introduction to The Study of Experi- mental Medicine. Observation, Bernard explains (pp. 8-9) , consists in noting phenomena without disturbing them, but: "Experiment, according to the same physiologists, implies, on the contrary, the idea of a variation or disturbance that an investigator brings into the conditions of natural phenomena. To do this, we suppress an organ in the living subject, by a section or ablation; and from the disturbance produced in the whole organism or in a special function, we deduce the function of the missing organ." The work of Milman Parry and Professor Albert Lord was directed to observing the entire poetic process under oral conditions, and in contrasting that result with the poetic process which we under written conditions, assume as "normal." Parry and Lord, that is, studied the poetic organism when the auditory function was suppressed by literacy. They might also have considered the effect on the organism when the visual function of language was given extraordinary extension and power by literacy. And this is a factor in the experimental method which may have been overlooked just because it was inconvenient to manage. But given intense and exaggerated action, "the disturbance produced in the whole organism or in a special function" is equally observable.

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