Re: <documenta X><blast>Still

Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 15:24:04 -0400

At 11:01 AM 7/27/97 -0400, you wrote:
>
>
>It might be worthwhile critiquing that glib statement of McLuhan's, which
>doesn't take much into account - like issues of oppression, gaze, multi-
>culturalism, virtuality, simulacrum, recuperation. I find it empty, just
>as I wonder if it's necessary to point out that all of us operate within
>regimes of poetics.
>
>Alan

quite glib, as was much of McLuhan. He had an effective strategy of making
you think you weren't getting somthing that you should be. I've got several
hours of him speaking, or being interviewed, on videotape... where he folds
together sound thinking with the simulacrum of it into an inseperable
taffy. He purported that television was redesigning the neurology of a
generation raised on it, a very questionable assertion indeed. However, he
did anticipate hypertextualization nicely, and managed to become the patron
saint of silicon valley, much as duchamp became the patron saint of pop
art. Both are highly overrated, based on the actual strengths of their
work, but both had the knack of inserting themselves into the flow of ideas
at the exactly critical point.
Or maybe they filled some kind of iconic function that the culture needed
at the moment, and were placed in that zone out of a collective need for a
celebrity fetish object. The Medium Is The Scalp Masssager !