THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

1
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

• Marshall McLuhan
• Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked "I don't
  pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is
  very difficult."
• Playboy Magazine 1969

2
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

• Last chapter of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
• Typographic technology caused a shift in Western
  thought
• Gutenberg as a starting point for understanding
  the current shifts

3
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

• William Blake Externalization of the sense,
  bodily or mental function in technological form
• In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to
  become it
• Blake had the insights but not the technological
  resources for rendering his vision.

4
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

• The best of all possible worlds was merely a
  quantitive idea of a bag crammed to the utmost
  with goodies
• Mechanical matching, not imaginative making
• The intellectual is no longer to direct the
  individual perception and judgment but to explore
  and to communicatie the massive unconsciousness
  of collective man.

5
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

• A market economy can exist only in a market
  society.
• Absurdity in the present time of trying to
  institute market economies in countries like
  Russia or Hungary.
• A long period of psychic transformation.

6
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

• The method not of closure and perspective but of
  the open field
• Shift Bag crammed full of goodies ? open
  field
• open field Reverses all aspects of the 19th
  century discovery of the assembly-line

7
THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

• What will be the new configurations of mechanisms
  and of literacy as these older forms of
  perception and judgment are interpenetrated by
  the new electric age?
• Trauma and tension to every living person.