Dilettantery

“The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for anything else….The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take or make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked.”

-Nelson Goodman

“…the Abelam do not ask what a painting means. The design elements all have names and they are assembled into harmonious compositions, which appear to act directly on the beholder without having to be named. Abelam art is about relationships, not about things. One of its functions is to relate and unite disparate things in terms of their place in the ritual and cosmological order. It does this, I would suggest, directly and not as an illustration to some text based in another symbolic system such as language. One of the main functions of the initiation system with its repetetive exposure of initiates to quantities of art is, I would suggest, to teach the young men to see the art, not so that he may consciously interpret it but so that he is directly affected by it.”

-Anthony Forge

“Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not.”

-Protagoras, fragment 80 (the Homo Mensura fragment) 

“Through logos humanity truly is the measure of everything. Only that which can be experienced as something is, and that which can not be thus experienced is not.”

-Mats Rosengren's updated, clearer version of Protagoras' fragment 

‘When a cave supports a mountain on rocks deeply eroded from within, not made by human hand, but excavated to such size by natural causes, your soul is seized by a religious apprehension.’

-Seneca, quoted in Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind by Yulia Ustinova (2009)

“Genuinely, we know nothing: the truth is in the depth”

-Democritus, fragment 117

"Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. what we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality."

-Bohm, 1977

"...without the making of theories I am convinced there would be no observation"

-Darwin, 1860 letter to Lyell

"It is only the nonbeliever who believes that the believer believes."

-Jean Pouillon

"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."

-Sartre

“Sometimes I have entered this world of darkness alone, or remained behind alone to finish taking notes or measurements. It is hard to admit, but such occasions are always accompanied by flashes of indefinable apprehension. The comfort you may find in the ray of light from the headlamp is disturbed by the pressure of the darkness that is always behind you – shadows seem to advance from all parts that are not lit up. The shaky well-being you may find in the beam of light is disrupted by the fact that it also makes you very visible, vulnerable, a highlighted eye-catcher for nameless things you are not able to see. It is ten times the uneasy feeling of being the ‘target’ in the child’s game where all the others try to get closer each time you turn your back on them, and you wait for the uneasy moment when you are touched by the winner. It is tempting to slip away from this by switching off the light, and entering a state of a peaceful nothingness that normally is not reached by living persons without the use of strong mind altering drugs. It is like being dead or unborn…On several occasions I have experienced the paralysing anxiety which today is known as ‘claustrophobia’. For me it is like a sudden horrible stench – one that is not noticeable until it is too late, at er you have inhaled it and it is inside you….Perhaps humans long ago also recognized, named, and had their own explanation for this phenomenon? Did they sense this as something coming from within themselves – or as entities in the cave itself?”

~Hein Bjerck

“At first, we are children of the darkness. Your body and your face were formed first in the kind darkness of your mother’s womb. You lived the first nine months in there. Your birth was the first journey from darkness into light. All your life, your mind lives within the darkness of your body. Every thought you have is a flint moment, a spark of light from your inner darkness. The miracle of thought is its presence in the night side of your soul; the brilliance of thought is born of darkness. Each day is a journey. We come out of the night into the day. All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover the balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm.”

~John O' Donohue

Rock art links to explore: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/10hcgv8/39_david_lewiswilliams_part_3_a_temporary_death/?

(episode 3.7 is part 1)

“People did not ‘invent’ two-dimensional images; nor did they discover them in natural marks. On the contrary, their world was already invested with two-dimensional images...The first two-dimensional images were thus not two dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed...For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions – as indeed was the case for the southern African San and the North American shamans...They were not inventing images. They were merely touching what was already there.”

-David Lewis-Williams

From far, from eve and morning/

And yon twelve-winded sky,/

The stuff of life to knit me/

Blew hither: here am I./

Now—for a breath I tarry/

Nor yet disperse apart—/

Take my hand quick and tell me,/

What have you in your heart./

Speak now, and I will answer;/

How shall I help you, say;/

Ere to the wind's twelve quarters/

I take my endless way.

~A.E. Housman

Rock art links to explore: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/10hcgaw/38_david_lewiswilliams_part_2_north_american/?

"The /Xam San spoke of the rain as an animal. A rain-bull  the thunderstorm that roared and destroyed the people’s huts; a raincow the gentle, soaking rain; columns of rain falling beneath a thunderstorm were called the ‘rain’s legs’—the rain was said to walk across the land." (discussed at 59:36: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459918418071552)

rock art discussed at 55:20: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459942589857797/photo/1

rock art discussed at 1:09:20: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459938802388992/photo/1

rock painting of trance dance: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459942589857797/photo/1

"For the makers, the paintings and engravings *were* visions, not representations of visions."

-James David Lewis-Williams

"High at the head a branching olive grows/

And crowns the pointed cliffs with shady boughs./

A cavern pleasant, though involved in night,/

Beneath it lies, the Naiades delight:/

Where bowls and urns of workmanship divine/

And massy beams in native marble shine;/

On which the Nymphs amazing webs display,/

Of purple hue and exquisite array,/

The busy bees within the urns secure/

Honey delicious, and like nectar pure./

Perpetual waters through the grotto glide,/

A lofty gate unfolds on either side;/

That to the north is pervious to mankind:/

The sacred south t'immortals is consign'd.”

-Homer, Odyssey

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/zlhzkk/37_how_19th_century_shamans_gave_the_21st_century/?

"Deep

in the timecrevasse,

in the

honeycomb-ice,

waits a breathcrystal,

your unalterable

testimony."

-Paul Celan

“When you do an archaeological excavation, you usually find what people left behind, their trash. But when you look at rock art, it’s not rubbish—it seems like a message, we can feel a connection to it.”

-Maxime Aubert

"When a cave supports a mountain on rocks deeply eroded from within, not made by human hand, but excavated to such size by natural causes, your soul is seized by a religious apprehension."

-Seneca

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/zd0ou9/36_two_beginnings_a_standard_history_of_modern/?

"Some of our most common and comforting groups no longer exist if classifications must be based on cladograms [evolutionary branching diagrams] .... I regret to report that there is surely no such thing as a fish.” 

-“What, If Anything, is a Zebra?” by Stephen Jay Gould, 1983

"To change the concept of category itself is to change our understanding of the world.” 

-Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff, 1987

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/zcz9rd/41_to_think_we_must_split_up_the_world_a_history/?

https://twitter.com/PersianPoetics/status/1261745279860080641

[The Northern Line or the Gothic Line] “is a line that passes between things and, in the process, imbues the figures of people, animals, plants, etc. with a common nervous and frenetic energy. Its movement gives birth to a dynamic and chaotic geometry of diagonals, jagged edges, and swirling lines that actively construct space rather than merely describing it. This nomadic line connects and assembles heterogeneous elements while maintaining them as heterogeneous. Thus, space is assembled piece by piece, with each piece of space having its own internal geometrical coordinates, its own temporal rhythms, and its own dramatic intensities.”

-Darren Ambrose

“Man betrayed the prophetic advice of his ancestors, who adopted the law of migration, believing the sedentary are the only dead ones, since they alone possess bodies that arouse the earth’s greed. Nomadic people, who never stay anywhere or settle down on the earth, own nothing to provoke the earth or arouse its greed. They possess nothing: no gear, no walls, no bodies, not even dreams. All they possess is their voyage, nothing more. They possess a single riddle, over which the earth holds no sway and for which the lowlands can offer no explanation. This is deliverance.”

-Ibrahim al-Koni

“He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth – though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. Such a man will, to be sure, experience bad nights, when he is tired and finds the gate of the town that should offer him rest closed against him; perhaps in addition the desert will, as in the Orient, reach right up to the gate, beasts of prey howl now farther off, now closer to, a strong wind arise, robbers depart with his beasts of burden. Then dreadful night may sink down upon the desert like a second desert, and his heart grow weary of wandering. When the morning sun then rises, burning like a god of wrath, and the gate of the town opens to him, perhaps he will behold in the faces of those who dwell there even more desert, dirt, deception, insecurity than lie outside the gate – and the day will be almost worse than the night. Thus it may be that the wanderer shall fare; but then, as recompense, there will come the joyful mornings of other days and climes, when he shall see, even before the light has broken, the Muses come dancing by him in the mist of the mountains, when afterwards, if he relaxes quietly beneath the trees in the equanimity of his soul at morning, good and bright things will be thrown down to him from their tops and leafy hiding-places, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude and who, like him, are, in their now joyful, now thoughtful way, wanderers and philosophers. Born out of the mysteries of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and the twelfth stroke of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so light-filled, so cheerful and transfigured: – they seek the philosophy of the morning.”

-Nietzsche, Human, All too Human (I, §638)

[Enlightenment philosophers] “left us with a notion of matter as passive and inert, while the human mind was seen as active and creative”

Bjørnar Olsen (2007)

Rock art threads: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/

Sources/place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y59149/35_deleuze_and_guattari_and_cave_art_part_2/?

How My Poetry Comes To Me

by Gary Snyder, 1992

"It comes blundering over the /
Boulders at night, it stays /
Frightened outside the /
Range of my campfire /
I go to meet it at the /
Edge of the light"

Warning: This episode is me trying to figure out complicated philosophy. If that's not your thing you can skip to episode 3.6 without missing anything.

Example of the "primeval magma of life": https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1541657274438914048 

“For Lorblanchet, these lines and marks indicate a clear metaphysical intention – ‘a primeval magma where all living and imaginary beings merge in formal games.’ Thus, these indeterminate lines and marks contain potentialities for the becoming of latent figural images and as such are, for Lorblanchet, a crucial element within the prehistoric figuration of a mythology of creation. Here, the figurative components are born from a formless tangle or magma, e.g., from the formless web of subsidiary lines, perhaps a hoof or an antler emerges, perhaps a muzzle or a creature’s spine, perhaps an eye stares out from the depths of the graphic chaos. The seemingly incohesive graphic chaos is seemingly vibrant with emergent forms of Life.”

-Darren Ambrose

“In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.... The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible.”

-Gilles Deleuze (Francis Bacon, 1981)

Rock art threads: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/

Sources/place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y4xaxo/34_deleuze_and_guattari_and_cave_art_part_1/?

"Amédée Ozenfant wrote of the art in the Les Eyzies caves, 'Ah, those hands! Those silhouettes of hands, spread out and stencilled on an ochre ground! Go and see them. I promise you the most intense emotion you have ever experienced.' He credited the Paleolithic artists with inspiring modern art, and to a certain degree, they did. Jackson Pollock honoured them by leaving handprints along the top edge of at least two of his paintings. Pablo Picasso reportedly visited the famous Altamira cave before fleeing Spain in 1934, and emerged saying: 'Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.'"

-Barbara Ehrenreich

"Should we not say that we make a house by the art of building, and by the art of painting we make another house, a sort of man-made dream produced for those who are awake?"

-Plato, Sophist

"The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations."

-Leo Tolstoy, Virgo

"I am a great believer in the creativity of the selective, perceptive act. I once read an article in the International Herald Tribune about a man named Jean-Claude Andrault who had an exhibit, in a small Paris museum, of various pieces of wood he had found over a many-decade span, which resembled all sorts of objects: “landscapes, writhing polyps, an erupting volcano, abstract visions and so on", to quote Michael Gibson, the author of the article. In fact, let me continue quoting Gibson’s opinions: 'He [Andrault] wanted to know if I thought these objects were art I said I did not — because they do not voice any human intention. These objects are a case of nature imitating art...But a work of art in its proper dimension is more than order, pattern, suggestion It conveys an intention and thus reveals itself to be a product and an expression of culture taken as the web of all human purposefulness.' Gibson clearly likes Andrault’s stuff — he just doesn’t consider it art. I find this absurd. In a sense I agree that art has to 'voice a human intention', but the act of selection by Andrault is a deep human intention, just as deep as a photographer’s selection of a scene or an event to capture. In fact, Gibson overlooks one further level of human intention: the very idea of collecting pieces of wood and exhibiting them is an excellent example of original human intention. Indeed, it's the invention of a whole new art form!”

-Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot

“The very first artistic act executed by man was one of adornment and, above all, the adornment of his own body. In adornment, that primordial art, we find the seeds of all subsequent art. And that first artistic act simply consisted of the union of two works of nature that nature itself had not united. Man placed a feather upon his head, or strung together tiger's teeth to hang about his neck, or clasped a bracelet of colorful stones around his wrist; and behold, the first babblings of that complex and divine discourse on art.” 

-José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on the Frame (1990)

Sources/place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y3ixbp/33_the_origin_of_art_or_homo_aestheticus_part_2_a/?

“The modern system of art is not an essence or fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old. It was proceeded by a broader, more utilitarian system of art that lasted over two thousand years, and it is likely to be followed by a third system of the arts.”

-Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001)

(What do you think this third system of the arts would look like?)

"...a therianthrope combining a feline body, human hind legs and Oryx horns.”

-Archaeologist Juergen Richter describing a figure painted on a stone slab in Namibia 25 000 years ago (New Excavations of Middle Stone Age Deposits at Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia: Stratigraphy, Archaeology, Chronology and Past Environments, (2010))

"...The artist's gift is of this order. [They are the person] who has learned to look critically, to probe [their] perceptions by trying alternative interpretations both in play and in earnest. Long before painting achieved the means of illusion, [humans were] aware of ambiguities in the visual field and had learned to describe them in language. Similes, metaphors, the stuff of poetry no less than of myth, testify to the powers of the creative mind to create and dissolve new classifications. It is the unpractical [person], the dreamer whose response may be less rigid and less sure than that of his more efficient fellow, who taught us the possibility of seeing a rock as a bull and perhaps a bull as a rock. And artist of our own day, Georges Braque, has recently spoken of the thrill and awe with which he discovered the fluidity of our categories, the ease with which a file can become a shoehorn, a bucket a brazier."

-E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1962)

“The secret of the day and night is in

The constellations, which forever spin

Around each other in the comet-dust;—

The comet-dust and humankind are kin.” 

-Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (973-1057 CE)

See many of the hunter disguises mentioned in this thread (and follow @evolving_moloch/https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/): https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1448229624899457027

Sources/place for discussion: 

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/xstblv/32_the_origin_of_art_or_homo_aestheticus_part_1/?

"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?"

-William James

“Ways of scientific seeing are where body and mind, pedagogy and research, knower and known intersect…once internalized by a scientific collective, these various ways of seeing were lodged deeper than evidence; they defined what evidence was. They were therefore seldom a matter of explicit argument, for they drew the boundaries within which arguments could take place. Atlases provide a rare and precious glimpse of ways of seeing in the making, as a place where established practices are transmitted and innovations explicitly advanced.”

-Daston and Galison

Sources and place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/xlthqx/23_was_the_concept_of_objectivity_invented_in_the/?

Chapter One: Wachtel and Superposition 0:00:00

Chapter Two: Azéma and Thaumatropes 0:22:13

Chapter Three: Gatton and Camera Obscura 0:43:48

Chapter Four: Archaeo-optics 2:16:14

Epilogue: Chauvet Cave 3:19:19

"…the shadows of man and beast flickered huge like ancestral ghosts, which since the days of the caves have haunted the corners of fantasy, but which the electric light has killed."

-Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969)

“[Lewis Mumford, in 1934,] said that film—with its moving camera, its cuts and superimpositions—displays time and motion in a unique way. Additionally, he linked film's display of time and space to what he called ‘the emergent world-view’ of the twentieth century.”

-Edward Wachtel (1993)

Follow along with visuals: 

0:00:20 The twitter thread mentioned: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1403914695128457219

0:19:50 An example of the "jumble" typical of plaquettes https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1548603870711926784

0:24:40 Azéma showing examples of animation-by-superposition in the wild https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1528654029793812480

0:33:32 Recreation of bone disc thaumatrope https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1528653193336410112

0:39:25 Liliana Janik's interpretation of thaumotrope involving bear paw https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1537167816347947008

0:44:20 Thread on Newgrange, Dowth, and Knowth https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1545398294800744450

0:49:10 Roofbox at Newgrange https://imgur.com/a/gYP01tJ

1:00:48 Balnuaran of Clava cairns, studied by Ronnie Scott and Tim Phillips in the 1990s: https://imgur.com/a/Nbn0EsH

1:14:30 Camera obscura explanatory diagram https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1281/0471/files/BONFOTON_Camera_Obscura_Diagram_W2000_WEB.jpg?v=1617094297

1:54:41 Photographs from Ronnie Scott and Aaron Watson's camera obscura experiments across Britain https://imgur.com/a/aQNnqYX

3:08:21 The Bison Man shadow animation (Spain) https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1559349567337820160

3:14:45 Pueblo shadow and light animation (thread) https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1559821120118747136

3:26:30 Chauvet cave animated: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1528640107078512641

Rock art threads: Rock art threads: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/

Sources/place to discuss: 

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/x3bh42/31_prehistoric_animation_and_protocinema_the/?

“…the atlas maker’s plight: nature is full of diversity, but science cannot be.”

-Daston and Galison

“…a race of eunuchs…neither man nor woman, nor even hermaphrodite, but always and only neuters or, to speak more cultivatedly, the eternally objective.”

-Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (1873-1876)

“What, the religions are dying out? Just behold the religion of the power of history, regard the priests of the mythology of the idea and their battered knees! Is it too much to say that all the virtues now attend on this new faith? Or is it not selflessness when the historical man lets himself be emptied until he is no more than an objective sheet of plate glass?”

-Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (1873-1876)

“The reproduction of nature by man will never be a reproduction and imitation, but always an interpretation...since man is not a machine and is incapable of rendering objects mechanically.“ 

-Champfleury (aka Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson), (1821-1889)

Sources: 

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/x0ajue/22_was_the_concept_of_objectivity_invented_in_the/?

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all/Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know

-John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn, 1819

“The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

-Thomas Huxley, 1870

"My work has always tried to unite the true with the beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other I usually chose the beautiful.”

-Hermann Weyl, 1885–1955

“Objectivity came to seem at once stranger - more specific, less obvious, more recently historical - and deeper, etched into the very act of scientific seeing, than we had ever suspected.”

-Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, 2007

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/wxt6us/21_was_the_concept_of_objectivity_invented_in_the/?

“We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space…The medium is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new age.”

-Jean Baudrillard

“The natural world is a spiritual house, where the pillars, that are alive, let slip at times some strangely garbled words”

-Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Associations, 1856

"I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for ear alone...'Write for the ear,' I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when actor or folk singer stands before an audience."

-WB Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 1961

"Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed."

-Futurist Manifesto

"There are two kinds of societies: those who animate objects, and those who turn people into objects.”

-David Graeber

“The sense of touch, as offering a kind of nervous system of organic unity in the work of art, has obsessed the minds of the artists since the time of Cezanne. For more than a century now artists have tried to meet the challenge of the electric age by investing the tactile sense with the role of a nervous system for unifying all the others. Paradoxically, this has been achieved by ‘abstract art’, which offers a central nervous system for a work of art, rather than the conventional husk of the old pictorial image. More and more it has occurred to people that the sense of touch is necessary to integral existence.”

-Marshall Mcluhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 1968

Audio clips: 

The Mcluhan song I play a bit of is called "The Medium (O Meio)" from the great album "The Beginning, the Medium, the End and the Infinite" by IKOQWE (aka Batida and Ikonoklasta, two Angolan musicians): https://batida.bandcamp.com/album/the-beginning-the-medium-the-end-and-the-infinite

David Graeber clip from an interview on the great podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episode #99 (I def recommend): https://connerhabib.com/2020/02/11/conner-habib-david-graeber-talk-supernatural-politics-on-against-everyone-with-conner-habib-99/

Clip about Bonfire and Pauline Oliveros from the podcast Weird Studies episode #112 (I recommend checking it out, especially if you want more about mcluhan) https://www.weirdstudies.com/112

Michael Garfield short story titled "An Oral History of The End of 'Reality'" is episode #91 of the Future Fossils podcast (you guessed it, I also recommend - extremely cool podcast) https://www.patreon.com/posts/21616410

(Please let me know of any audio/editing mistakes, I didn't listen to this one all the way through)

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/wxsmrg/131_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

“Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns”

-Marshall McLuhan

“There is no simple linear cause and effect relationship in the emergence of an emergent system as the components that make up the emergent system exert an upward effect on the composite system (the parts creating the whole), and vice versa the composite system exerts downward effects on its components, which form constraints on the behaviour of those components. The interactions of the components that lead to the self-organization of the emergent system are non-linear because of that upward and downward causation. The lateral non-linear causation of the components of the system among themselves actually creates the emergent system. The emergent system then in turn acts downward on those components of which it is composed.”

-Robert Logan, 2017

"Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. **A new technology does not add or subtract something. it changes everything.** In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have the old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry.”

-Neil Postman, 1992

“...there is a spiritual dimension to formal causality, as there is to all acts of creation. But for those who prefer a more scientific outlook, let me simply note that formal cause corresponds to the systems view of Gregory Bateson, to the dissipative structures of physicist Ilya Prigogine, to the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot and the metapatterns of Tyler Volk, to the autopoietic systems of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and in general to the systems concept of emergence.”

-Eric McLuhan, 2011

“From the very beginning of Western philosophy and science, there has been a tension between mechanism and holism, between the study of matter (or substance, structure, quantity) and the study of form (or pattern, order, quality). The study of matter was championed by Democritus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton; the study of form by Pythagoras, Aristotle, Kant, and Goethe. Leonardo followed the tradition of Pythagoras and Aristotle, and he combined it with his rigorous empirical method to formulate a science of living forms, their patterns of organization, and their processes of growth and transformation. He was deeply aware of the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the interdependence and mutual generation of all parts of an organic whole.”

Fritjof Capra, 2008

“[McLuhan's formal causality and tetrad] enhances media ecology, obsolesces content analysis, retrieves Einstein’s four-dimensional space time continuum and flips into the reversal of cause and effect.”

-Lance Strate, 2017

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/s437w4/130_formal_cause_part_2_chairs_memes_graham/?

“Without an understanding of formal causality, there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have all the character of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. Since environments change constantly, the formal causes of all the arts and sciences change too.”

-Marshall McLuhan

"Formal cause is still, in our time, hugely mysterious: The literate mind finds it is too paradoxical and irrational. It deals with environmental processes and it works outside of time. The effects - those long shadows - arrive first; the causes take a little while longer. Most of the effects of any medium or innovation occur before the arrival of the innovation itself. A vortex of these effects tends, in time, to become the innovation…David Hockney’s recent study, Secret Knowledge, details how Flemish and other artists of the early 15th century literally paved the way for the Gutenberg press a decade or so later with their optical experiments. Their lenses and mirrors enabled them to explore in depth as never before precision of point of view, perspective, and chiaroscuro, greatly intensifying the visual stress they could bring to bear in their paintings, and paving the way for the press. First come the effects.”

-Eric McLuhan, 2011

"History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past." 

-John Berger, 1972

“What kind of logic is there to the illogic of creativity?”

-Douglas Hofstadter, 1997

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

–Martin Luther King Jr., 1963 

“The people / want / to topple the regime!”

-Teenage boys, Dara’a, Syria, 2011

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present."

-T.S. Eliot, 1941

Sources and place to discuss: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rxdp4e/129_formal_cause_part_1_technological_determinism/?

"Human bodies are words, myriads of words..."

-Walt Whitman, Song of the Rolling Earth, 1856

"What Western philosophers, right, left, and center, have continued to ignore is that matching the old excludes making the new. Concepts always follow percepts. In fact they are a kind of ossification of percepts - endlessly releated percepts which frequently obscure invention and innovation."

-Marshall Mcluhan and Barrington Nevitt, Causality in the Electric World, 1973

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rk8rg6/128_the_tetrad_cliches_archetypes_andthe_fifth/?

"The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu."

-Marshall and Eric Mcluhan, Laws of Media (1988)

"The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit."

-Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova, 1725

sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rj2mc5/127_mcluhans_later_life_three_of_the_four_laws_of/?

“In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness...we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.”

-Marshall Mcluhan

"This is a marvel of the universe:

To fling a thought across a stretch of sky—

Some weighty message, or a yearning cry,

It matters not; the elements rehearse

Man's urgent utterance, and his words traverse

The spacious heav'ns like homing birds that fly

Unswervingly, until, upreached on high,

A quickened hand plucks off the message terse.

Toward this man moved since first with whetted stone

He carved strange symbols on the cavern wall,

And proudly turned unto his watching mate.

Through this in travail do his offspring groan

Toward an ideal's love-frought, imperious call

That bids the spheres become articulate."

-"Wireless," by Josephine Peabody (1910)

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/p3l81o/126_the_electronic_age_part_1_a_brief_history_of/?

"Then there is electricity! — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence...Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it."

-"The House of the Seven Gables," Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)

“When everything is connected to everything else, for better or for worse, everything matters.”

Bruce Mau, Massive Change

"One might have thought of sight, but who could think

Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?

Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,

But the dark italics it could not propound,

And out of what one sees and hears and out

Of what one feels, who could have thought to make

So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,

As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming

With the metaphysical changes that occur

Merely in living as and where we live."

-“Esthétique du Mal," by Wallace Stevens (1944)

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/p3kou2/125_the_electronic_age_part_1_a_brief_history_of/?

"Man is himself, is man, only at the surface. Lift the skin, dissect: here begin the machines. It is then you lose yourself in an inexplicable substance, something alien to everything you know, and which is nonetheless the essential."

-Paul Valéry, Notebook B

“‘The monsters we create by way of an advanced technological civilization are ourselves as we cannot hope to see ourselves—incomplete, blind, blighted, and, most of all, self destructive.’”

-Joyce Carol Oates 

Dead body: https://i.imgur.com/Uzosq0j.jpg

Corpse: https://i.imgur.com/gGmJo1b.png

“Spectator, specimen, spectacle belong together. They are, so to speak, the codes of a technological civilization, the signatures, as it were, of self, body, world. When the self becomes a spectator and the body a specimen, the world becomes a spectacular place.”

-Romanyshyn

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/p3k0et/124_windows_and_the_body_part_2_the_anatomical/?

“They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child up into the ship. 

The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizon became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back. 

The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.

Someone barked an order. The monks began climbing again. Soon they were all inside the ship. 

The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood up in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. ‘Sic transit Mundus,’ he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dust out of them. The glow was engulfing a third of the heavens. He scratched his beard, took one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch. 

There came a blur, a glare of light, a high thin whirring sound, and the starship thrust itself heavenward.”

-A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller

“Linear perspective is a celebration of the eye of distance, a created convention which not only extends and elaborates the natural power of vision to survey things from afar, but also elevates that power into a method, a way of knowing, which has defined for us the world with which we are so readily familiar. It is the transformation of the eye into a technology and a redefinition of the world to suit the eye, a world of maps and charts, blueprints and diagrams, the world in which we are, among other things, silent readers of the printed word and users of the camera, the world, finally, in which we have all become astronauts.”

-Robert Romanyshyn

‘Space capsules built for zero gravity, astronomical equipment for demarcating so-called black holes, atom smashers which prove the existence of anti-matter—these are the end products of the discovered vanishing point.’

-Samuel Edgerton

Linear perspective ‘made possible scale drawings, maps, charts, graphs, and diagrams—those means of exact representation without which modern science and technology would be impossible.’

-Helen Gardner

‘Many reasons are assigned for the mechanization of life and industry during the nineteenth century, but the mathematical development of perspective was absolutely prerequisite to it.’

-William Ivins Jr

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/opyhn6/123_windows_and_the_body_part_1_homo_punto_di/?

"May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep."

-William Blake

"When a man has seen a [linear perspective] picture for the first time, his book education has begun."

-Robert Laws (1851–1934)

"My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have—or rather, time, lived time. All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them—they stare back, blankly—and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world."

-David Hockney

"The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. Shakespeare seems to have missed due recognition for having in King Lear made the first, and so far as I know, the only piece of verbal three dimensional perspective in any literature. It is not again until Milton's Paradise Lost (II, 11. 1 -5) that a fixed visual point of view is deliberately provided for the reader...The arbitrary selection of a single static position creates a pictorial space with vanishing point. This space can be filled in bit by bit, and is quite different from non-pictorial space in which each thing simply resonates or modulates its own space in visually two-dimensional form. Now the unique piece of three-dimensional verbal art which appears in King Lear is in Act IV, scene vi. Edgar is at pains to persuade the blinded Gloucester to believe the illusion that they are at the edge of a steep cliff:

'Edgar. . . . Hark, do you hear the sea? 

Gloucester. No, truly.

Edgar. Why then, your other senses grow imperfect By your eyes' anguish... . Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!'

...Far from being a normal mode of human vision, three dimensional perspective is a conventionally acquired mode of seeing, as much acquired as is the means of recognizing the letters of the alphabet, or of following chronological narrative. That it was an acquired illusion Shakespeare helps us to see by his comments on the other senses in relation to sight. Gloucester is ripe for illusion because he has suddenly lost his sight. His power of visualization is now quite separate from his other senses. And it is the sense of sight in deliberate isolation from the other senses that confers on man the illusion of the third dimension, as Shakespeare makes explicit here. There is also the need to fix the gaze:

'Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful 

And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low! 

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air 

Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down 

Hangs one that gathers sampire—dreadful trade! 

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. 

The fishermen that walk upon the beach, 

Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy 

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge, 

That on th' unnumb'red idle pebbles chafes, 

Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight 

Topple down headlong.'

-Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/nvsg5u/122_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

"The Waorani [people]...were not peacefully contacted until 1958, though their homeland is scarcely 150 kms from Quito, the national capital of Ecuador and a city settled for well over 400 years. In 1957, five missionaries attempted to contact the Waorani and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs of themselves in what we would describe as friendly gestures, forgetting that the people of the forest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. The Waorani picked up the prints from the forest floor and looked behind the faces to try to find the figure. Seeing nothing, they concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, and when the missionaries arrived they promptly speared them to death."

-Wade Davis, The Wayfinders

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/nkmd27/121_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

"The evolution from evocation to narrative in seal and pottery decoration denotes different cognitive skills—preliterate topsy-turvy glyptic compositions and repetitious pottery paintings were apprehended globally, but literate linear compositions were 'read’ analytically. Art, a unique mirror of culture, reflects the schism that separates preliterate from literate societies. Glyptic and pottery art illustrate with remarkable clarity how the preliterate Near Eastern societies perceived the world circularly and all-inclusively, while literate cultures viewed it analytically and sequentially.”

-Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Sources:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/nhy2cw/120_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

“From paleolithic times to the present, all painters have been challenged by a fundamental problem: how to express the four dimensions of experience on a two-dimensional surface.”

-Edward Wachtel

"According to Andrea Stone: In Maya thought caves were a conduit into the bowels of the earth, a dangerous but supernaturally charged realm, often referred to as the 'underworld' in current literature or by the Quiché term, Xibalda. Herein dwelt the ancestors, rain gods, various 'owners' of the earth, culture heroes, nefarious death demons, animal and wind spirits. The Maya made pilgrimages to caves to propitiate these beings … post-contact sources tell us that cave ceremonies usually concerned rain and other agricultural interests, hunting, ancestor worship, renewal/New Year rites and other calendrically-timed ceremonies, and petitions for various personal needs (e.g., health problems). Caves were also used by brujos (witches) to cast spells."

-Jean Clottes

"Caves are evocative underground constructions, which take humans away from the natural light and control or transform their visions of reality. This is the context in which caves have a powerful ritual role in early societies, a role that underlies contexts as widely distributed as the power of the rites of passage of transegalitarian societies (Owens and Hayden 1997), the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic, and the architectural metaphor of the grotto of the Renaissance (Miller 1982). They are multiple places of passage that emphasize transition from one state to another, from life to death, from light to dark, and from land to earth (Hume 2007). As such, their transition parallels the passage of the day and the seasons."

-Simon KF Stoddart and Caroline AT Malone

"Science and art: Two complementary ways of experiencing the natural world - the one analytic, the other intuitive. We have become accustomed to seeing them as opposite poles, yet don't they depend on one another? The thinker, trying to penetrate natural phenomena with his understanding, seeking to reduce all complexity to a few fundamental laws - isn't he also the dreamer plunging himself into the richness of forms and seeing himself as part of the eternal play of natural events?"

-Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter Richter 

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ng1z1n/119_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

“One wrong word may now kill thousands of men”.

-Rabelais

“If science helped give birth to the printed book, it was clearly the printed book that sent science from its medieval habits straight into the boiling scientific revolution.” 

-Derek J. de Solla Price, 1967

“By seeming paradox, their most sacred festival kept Christian energies bent toward puzzle-solving of a purely scientific kind...Until the advent of printing, scientific inquiries about ‘how the heavens go’ went hand-in-hand with religious concerns about ‘how to go to heaven.’”

-Elizabeth Eisenstein

“One cannot treat printing as just one among many elements in a complex causal nexus itself. It is of special historical significance because it produced fundamental alterations in prevailing patterns of continuity and change...It made the words of God appear more multiform and His handiwork more uniform. The printing press laid the basis for both literal fundamentalism and for modern science. It remains indispensable for humanistic scholarship. It is still responsible for our museum-without-walls.”

-Elizabeth Eisenstein

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ng0p4s/118_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_4_printing_and/?

"Historians have noted that the shift from oral to written scripture often results in strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic and ethical disciplines of ritual, they can approach a text in a purely cerebral fashion, missing the emotive and therapeutic aspects of its stories and instructions.”

-Karen Armstrong

“On the elite level, laymen became more erudite than churchmen; grammar and philology challenged the reign of theology; Greek and Hebrew studies forced their way into the schools. On the popular level, ordinary men and women began to know their scripture as well as most parish priests; markets for vernacular catechisms and prayer books expanded; church Latin no longer served as a sacred language which unified all of Western Christendom...The two-pronged attack was mounted from one and the same location— that is, from the newly established printer’s workshop.”

-Elizabeth Eisenstein

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/neeh52/117_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_3_christianity_the/?

“Medieval scholars did not see the classical past from a fixed distance as we do now. They did not regard it as a container of objects to be placed in glass cases and investigated by specialists in diverse scholarly fields.”

-Elizabeth Eisenstein

"Given drifting texts, migrating manuscripts, localized chronologies, multiform maps, there could be no systematic forward movement, no accumulation of stepping stones enabling a new generation to begin where the prior one had left off. Progressive refinement of certain arts a skills could and did occur, but no sophisticated technique could be securely established, permanently recorded, and stored for subsequent retrieval. Before trying to account for an ‘idea’ of progress we might look more closely at the duplicating process that made possible not only a sequence of improved editions but also a continuous accumulation of fixed records. For it seems to have been permanence that introduced progressive change, The preservation fo the old, in brief, launched a tradition of the new."

-Elizabeth Eisenstein

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ned9qi/116_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_2_stereotypes_and/?

"[Printing] is the most beautiful gift from heaven. It soon will change the countenance of the universe… Printing was only born a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection… Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous writer!”

-Louis-Sebástien Mercier, Pre-revolutionary France

“The prospering merchant publisher had to know as much about books and intellectual trends as a cloth merchant did about drygoods and dress fashions; he needed to develop a connoisseur’s expertise about typestyles, book catalogues and library sales. He often found it useful to master many languages, to handle variant texts, to investigate antiquities and old inscriptions along with new maps and calendars. In short, the very nature of his business provided the merchant publisher with a broadly based liberal education. It also led toward a widened circle of acquaintances and included close contacts with foreigners.”

-Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980)

Sources:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n91kax/115_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_1_the_printers/?

"Books are carefully folded forests"

-Saul Williams

“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life, In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method in itself; that is the real novelty which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization…One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.”

-Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925

“For example, Isaac Newton, whose universal law of gravitation circumscribes the movement of all things under one principle, is charged in 1696 by the king of England with the task of re-minting its entire currency. All the old silver coins, whose value was constantly decreased by being worn down over time, are recalled, and in their place Newton, soon to be made Master of the Mint for his services, substitutes a new currency whose weight and value are as ‘homogeneous, stable, uniform, and predictable’ as the fall of things under the sway of gravity.”

-Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream, 1989

"The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy: Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable individual possessions. Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type reproduced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto-impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man’s sensorium. As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies toward individualism and specialization engendered 2000 years before by phonetic literacy. The schism between thought and action was institutionalized, and fragmented man, first sundered by the alphabet, was at last diced into bite-sized tidbits. From that point on, Western man was Gutenberg man."

-Marshall Mcluhan, Playboy interview, 1969

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n3u38m/114_mcluhan_on_the_revolutionary_effects_of_print/?

“What the world is to-day, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source. . . .”

-Mark Twain, 1900

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n3ruco/113_printing_technologies_in_asia_and_europe/?

Sorry for the delay, I had to relearn Garageband because it "updated." Also, this is a bit of a meat and potatoes episode, I promise things will get more interesting following this one. 

Sources:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n0c12r/112_the_manuscript_age_part_2_renascences/?

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”

-Cicero (probably apocryphal)

“The words the reader sees are not the words that he will hear.”

-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, paraphrased by Mcluhan

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/lxfj6d/111_the_manuscript_age_part_1_silent_reading_in/?

"The global village was modeled on colonial strategies intended to transform the semiotic, economic, and spatial fabric of the decolonizing world in such a way as to safeguard British economic and political interests in the aftermath of independence. Following the example of British strategy in Kenya, the global village can be understood as a mechanism for pacifying postcolonial agrarian society by absorbing people made landless by the relentless expansion of agrarian capital. The global village—like villagization—was intended to enfold dispossessed denizens into the incipient nation-form and into the global market, while simultaneously withholding the modes of semiotic power required to participate effectively in a public sphere.”

-Ginger Nolan

"The Europeans often believe paper over people..."

-Ted Chiang

"The white people never stop setting their eyes on the drawings of their speech, which they circulate among themselves pasted on paper skins. This way they just stare at their own thought and only end up knowing what is already inside their minds." 

-Davi Kopenawa

Sources and discussion:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/lg2n5x/110_jack_goody_part_3_the_vai_scribner_and_cole/?

"He was an old man who had seen life. In his village he had prepared himself to live a full life. But the change came. It was not a sudden change. A white man with a book in his hand. Every evening this white man with the book had sat at the edge of the village and played with the children."

—David Rubadiri, No Bride Price, 1967

"Because of the colonizing structure, a dichotomizing system has emerged, and with it a great number of current paradigmatic oppositions have developed: traditional versus modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies. In Africa a great deal of attention is generally given to the evolution implied and promised by the passage from the former paradigms to the latter."

—V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa

Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ldmyji/19_jack_goody_part_2_the_gonja_kingdom_and_the/?

Continuing our divergence away from Mcluhan, I introduce the work of Jack Goody, the anthropologist, and look over his and some other people's criticisms of what's called the Alphabet Effect or the Alphabetic Literacy Theory. 

Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/kabgyl/18_jack_goody_part_1_nuance_and_china/?

Follow me on twitter @DilettanteryPod

"The strongest memory is weaker than the lightest ink."

-Chinese proverb, (via Louis Lavelle, La Parole et I’ecriture, Paris, 1947)

"...the Hebrew term 'dabar' means ‘word’ and ‘event’."

-Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)

"...when we speak...we also always express a mood. There are no words uttered without this added spin. The act of saying something is part of the meaning we express, whether we like it or not. We can't separate the *what we say* from the *how we say it*...The same phrase said by ten different people will be ten different experiences - perform ten different events." 

-Daniel Coffeen and Matthew Deren, A Space For New Things (2020)

Sources and Discussion: 

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/k36jw6/17_ong_and_orality/?

“I shall not recite the hardships of my toil. More than once I cried out to the vault that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say *the tiger* is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. in time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, *all*, *world*, *universe*.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, The God’s Script (1949)

"This notion ought to trouble you very little, since your philosophy together with ancient authors mentioned by Theophrastus, plainly holds that all sense is touch, a doctrine I most easily admit as true."

-Henry More, in a letter to Descartes (December 11, 1648)

“God: the mind that generates an utterance prolonged continually.”

-Liber XXIV Philosophorum (The Book of the 24 Philosophers) (~12th century, maybe earlier)

"By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape and meaning of western man.”

-Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy (1964)

"In Indigenous philosophies, words are not simply representational; they are causal. Language can have material(izing) force." 

– Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet-Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldúa—and Beyond by AnaLouise Keating

Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ineitj/16_the_greek_alphabet_part_two_mcluhans_thoughts/?

"The nature then of the dragon and of serpents Tauthus himself regarded as divine, and so again after him did the Phoenicians and Egyptians: for this animal was declared by him to be of all reptiles most full of breath, and fiery. In consequence of which it also exerts an unsurpassable swiftness by means of its breath, without feet and hands or any other of the external members by which the other animals make their movements. It also exhibits forms of various shapes, and in its progress makes spiral leaps as swift as it chooses. It is also most long-lived, and its nature is to put off its old skin, and so not only to grow young again, but also to assume a larger growth; and after it has fulfilled its appointed measure of age, it is self-consumed, in like manner as Tauthus himself has set down in his sacred books: for which reason this animal has also been adopted in temples and in mystic rites."

-Sanchuniathon/Philo of Byblos

Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/imemgk/15_the_greek_alphabet_part_one_development/?

“When signs are written with care they attest to an interest in proclamation and durability; when they are cursive they show that a society was familiar with writing. Then they are laid out without separations the remind us that our modern page layouts are recent acquisitions. When they are written on scrolls the text unfolds like a film.”

-Henri-Jean Martin (1994)

“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space."

-Abraham Lincoln 

Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/il17l5/14_other_origins_of_writing_and_other_scripts/?