Under the influence

Under the influence

Surprised, I answered –“Oh, she is there, only further away.” My daughter looked at me as though I’d lost my head. Why had I stated that the Snow Queen was farther away when she patently wasn’t — when she remained an arm’s length away, still on the page?
My jumbled explanations made me realise that I had been taking for granted that the capacity for viewing view on a two-dimensional page. But linear perspective is no more than the usual convention, and for this to be understood requires training your eyesight to reevaluate and make sense of this convention. Specifically, it requires that you envision yourself occupying a fixed point-of-view, where the dimensions of these objects in the image appear not as complete but as relative sizes — comparative to this imagined stage in space. The bigger the item, the farther it is from the fanciful stage. The bigger the object — well, you get the idea. For most of us, linear perspective is so familiar that this sort of incremental explanation feels unworthy. But for the daughter whose picture books, I realise, seldom feature the technique — the effect simply does not register. Her attention hasn’t been trained.
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan tells a similar story in his seminal book The Gutenberg Galaxy. A missionary reveals a film about mosquito control to a distant community. In the movie, a guy slowly overturns pots and other vessels which may contain water. Afterwards, the missionary asks the audience what they saw. Instead of mentioning the man, all of them discuss a chicken. But there was not any chicken in the film. Just once he moves over the movie frame by frame does the missionary notice that, in a top corner, a poultry looks in shot before disappearing . McLuhan describes what happened: instead of studying the film as we might look through a window, the untrained eyes of the viewer scanned each framework,segment by segment. And because each framework moved on so fast, the crowd never watched the film’s narrative. Like linear view, watching movie requires a fixed, and detached, point of view. You need to concentrate a little way in front of the screen to take in the entire picture. But for this specific audience, there is no detachment. The display is not so much a screen as an object, and, in McLuhan’s words, they are”wholly with the object. They move into it”.
It is not just that the viewers weren’t familiar with movie. They didn’t possess a detached point of view since they came out of an oral society — one without the technology of printing and writing. Crucially, these extensions aren’t additive.
Rather, each invention alters the delicate balance in what McLuhan calls the economy of the human sensorium. Extending one sense dulls others.
McLuhan graphs how western societies came into privilege vision over the rest of the senses, and how that reorganisation of the sensorium altered the way westerners thought. In nonliterate societies, even where talking is the principal form of communication, people’s perceptions are fully engaged since speech is embodied. Oral societies are interdependent and intersubjective — an issue of villages and tribes.
The change towards vision began with the invention of writing. And compared to this spoken word, the written inscription is bounded, linear, ordered, and structured. These general features of composing were supercharged from the invention of phonetic alphabets — such as our very own Latin alphabet — which break apart entirely the relationship between sight, sound and meaning. McLuhan contrasts letters in an alphabet with an ideogram such as the ones utilized in Chinese. The ideogram, he says, is read as a Gestalt — an entire pattern or configuration which, like an individual melody,”evoke their own world”. Letters within an alphabet don’t represent thoughts, nor even pictures or words but sounds which in and of themselves are useless. Still, composing, in its early types, retained a certain tactility in addition to its emphasis on the visual. This is readily apparent in the continuing significance of calligraphy in ideogrammatic writing systems, in which the artistry of brushstrokes is thought to show the character of the calligrapher. Even in alphabetic systems the expressiveness of lettering has been significant — consider the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, hand-drawn by committed monks. Whatever tactility and uniqueness of lettering remained in the manuscript age was stamped out from the media’s need for homogeneity and uniformity. According to McLuhan, this produced an extreme imbalance in the sensorium, privileging vision and separating it from the other senses. Printing allowed electricity to be projected farther than ever before far further than when electricity was stored at the spoken word by charismatic leaders, and further still than when power was held in painstakingly lettered manuscripts. Through print, power was also depersonalised, separated from the individual behind the words. The experience of reading alone, and owning one’s own books, encouraged the evolution of a feeling of individuality.
What’s all this got to do with linear view? McLuhan’s argument is the fixed point of view required to make sense of perspective emerges around the exact same period as — and partly as a consequence of — the emergence of this print-reading individual. Vision is a feeling that works over distance. In western societies, the privileging of vision generated all sorts of new distances, including between individuals that were independent of each other, and between those folks and the objects they viewed. Thus the non-literate audience viewing the missionary’s film weren’t just unfamiliar with the conventions of movie — they had not been primed by centuries of print-culture to think of themselves as a watch drifting through space.
The results of print-culture run far deeper than viewing linear view. It conditioned not only the bodily eyes but also the inner one. Or rather, it generated the inner eye by conditioning thought into a visually dominated form. Under the sway of print, western thought became linear and specialised. And as mass reproducibility was the hallmark of the media, therefore replicability became the basis for the scientific method. In short, print-culture produced the form of believing we would recognise today as rationality. Although he celebrates some of the achievements of print-culture — for example, the way it freed people from the oppressive interdependence of vegetation — he was also clear-eyed about its costly distortions into the human sensorium. Like the Romantic poets, McLuhan was worried about the reduction of a”unified field” of understanding for what William Blake disparaged as”single vision and newtons sleeping”. Today, the negative effects of western rationality’s only vision are readily apparent. Consider, by way of example, the separation of humankind from our environment. No more enmeshed with the environment through each physiological feeling, the environment has become something to be considered — and commanded — in a distance. As Blake put it,The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & if separated From Imagination and closing itself in steel…It thence frames Laws & Moralities To destroy Imagination.

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