Living in an Acoustic World - Part 2
In the world of simultaneous information, when the unconscious becomes the new environment, the world doesn't end; it becomes infinitely more interesting.
Picking up where I left off in Part 1, this post provides further annotations of a 1974 lecture by Marshall McLuhan, in which he describes the “acoustic world” — the world of simultaneous information.
The Big Flip
1. The Historical Context
In the ‘Big Flip’ from the eye to the ear, we are leaving the visual world and suddenly confronting the ineffable realities of the acoustic world. As a result, we may at times find ourselves epistemically adrift, and it helps to situate this transition in a historical context. In McLuhan's view, the visual world took shape in the 16th century, and it started to end in the 19th. By 1974, the effects of electricity on our media were old news, at least to McLuhan. However, even in 2024, the institutional resistance to this message seems amazingly strong.
2. Why the ‘Big Flip’ Matters: The Story of Fragmentation
McLuhan describes the visual world as continuous, connected, homogeneous (all parts alike) and static (if you have a point of view, it rarely changes). By contrast:
The acoustic world, which is the electric world of simultaneity, has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, and no stasis. Everything is changing.
Given this stark contrast, the ‘Big Flip’ certainly matters. The real question is how complex societies remain blind to its implications.
In sketching out the implications, McLuhan points to learning, teaching, social life, politics and entertainment. To set the context, he starts with how we became visual in the first place. He points out that it was only the Western, Greco-Roman, Hellenistic world that became visual. Circa 500 BC, the development of the phonetic alphabet flipped humans out of the old acoustic world of tribal, bardic Homeric Greece into the rational, logical, connected, private, individualistic, civilized world.
The origin of the phonetic alphabet isn't well understood. But we can observe the effects of this innovation.
The people who used it underwent a kind of fission. Their sensory life exploded, and the visual part of it was cut off from the kinetic, acoustic and tactile parts.
We can also hypothesize about the mechanism of action: e.g., the phonetic alphabet disconnected sound from meaning through the use of meaningless bits called phonemes. Under the fragmenting spell of the phonetic alphabet, human civilization has produced:
Platonic conceptions of abstract truth and ideas
The idea of imperial domination
The Western man's compulsion to impose his worldview by spreading literacy
The codification of laws for uniform and universal application.
Perhaps the clearest example of why the ‘Big Flip’ into phonetic literacy matters is that it helps explain the rise of Christianity.
Christianity has exactly nothing to do with the Greco-Roman idea of civilization. So, it is very mysterious that Christianity should have undertaken the job of spreading the Greco-Roman alphabet. At the present time, the Church is very doubtful about the matter of spreading Greco-Roman ideas any further than they’ve gone, and the Third World doesn’t want them.
McLuhan argues that “it helps to know the origin of the alphabet and rationality and civilization because, in the 20th century — after 2,500 years of phonetic literacy — we have reached the end of that road.
3. The Alternative: Unified Sensations
We may have reached the end of that road, but the disconnection of sound from meaning remains woven into the governance of our social and institutional sphere. Inescapably, the question arises: What's the alternative?
McLuhan discusses the Chinese idiogram to illustrate the morphemic alternative to the fragmenting tendency of the phonetic alphabet. The ‘bits’ of morphemic alphabets (e.g., Arabic, Hindu, Hebrew, Chinese, etc.) carry meaning, however small. In parts of the world using morphemic alphabets…
…Visual life has remained associated with the acoustic life and the tactile life and the kinetic life. The Chinese idiogram is a wonderful instrument of unified sensations. It is so richly unified that people in the 20th century have begun to study it very carefully as a corrective to our specialized alphabet.
Nothing to Fear
As I continue to annotate this lecture and consume related sources, I realize that any material about the unconscious becoming the new environment can easily trigger fearful resistance.
Fear warps perceptions. It leads to violence. To me, that's neither a reason to run and hide nor to defensively trivialize the meaning of the ‘Big Flip’. Instead, the idea is to continue the inquiry at the personally suitable pace.
Not sure when or if there will be a third, fourth or fifth part of these annotations, but this lecture certainly offers many threads worth pulling, including:
New Theories and Cartographies of Sensory Space — Unlike other sensory spaces, visual space is adequately described by Euclidian geometry. In the electric age, we inevitably turn to non-Euclidian geometry.
The Future of Private Identity — Before phonetic literacy, there was no private identity, only the tribal group. Homer knew nothing of private identity. His world of the acoustic epic, the tribal encyclopedia, and memorized wisdom preceded literacy. This world was phased out by literacy.
The War on Oral Traditions — Before phonetic literacy, an educated Greek was one who could memorize Homer and sing it to his harp in public. Then came the phonetic alphabet, and Plato seized on it to wage a war on the oral tradition.
Retrievals of Orality — If Homer was wiped out by literacy, literacy can be wiped out by ‘Rock’. “We're playing the old story backwards, but we should know what the stakes are: civilization versus tribalism, private identity versus corporate identity, private responsibility versus the tribal mandate.”
Theories of Information: Transportation vs. Transformation — How to move data from point A to point B with minimal distortion isn't the interesting question. The interesting question is how media tranform people.
Joke Styles — What do prevailing joke styles reveal about the state of our media?
Beyond Connections — What do quantum mechanics and abstract art have in common?
Obedient Little Bitches — I know people who often appear highly contumacious, but they're also tangled up in a movement famed for its slogan WWG1WGA (Where We Go One, We Go All).
Not Frequently Quoted
In addition to the widely circulated quotes from McLuhan, consider these gems.
“You cannot have objective journalism about Mardi Gra. You just have to immerse.”
“Job-holding is giving way to role-playing because, at electric speed, it's impossible to specialize…Isolated subjects have become almost a menace to education.”
“The alphabetic man is a very aggressive man, a very specialized man.”
“The visual man always has a goal. The ear man never has a goal. He just wants to do his thing wherever he is.”
“Another strange effect of this electric environment is the total absence of secrecy. No form of secrecy is possible at electric speed.”
“Watergate is simply a nice parable or example of how secrecy was flipped into show business. The back-room boys suddenly found themselves on the stage.”
“Why is knowledge so easy backwards and so hard forward?”
“The effects come before the causes.”
What Are You Hearing?
I'd love to know what you hear in this lecture and in any other sources easing your adjustment to the Age of Resonance. Feel free to leave a comment here or email me at daasnow@proton.me.