#acousticspace

In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, McLuhan suggests that the mechanization of the scribal art may have been the first reduction of a handicraft to mechanical terms. “The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production.” (McLuhan, 1962:124)  This transition taught us to “read” all things as arranged according to a vanishing point, in linear geometric order. We take in most of the information we rely upon with our eyes. “Such is the power of Euclidean or visual space that we can't live with a circle unless we square it.” (McLuhan, ?:68)

This theory presents visual space structure as an artifact of Western civilization created by Greek phonetic literacy. “It is a space perceived by the eyes when separated or abstracted from all other senses. [...] It is like the “mind's eye” or visual imagination which dominates the thinking of literate Western people, some of whom demand ocular proof for existence itself.” (McLuhan, ?:71) Acoustic space, in contrast, “requires neither proof nor explanation but is made manifest through its cultural content.” (McLuhan, ?:71)

“Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and enternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary, like art and science or biculturalism.” (McLuhan, ?:71?)

There are examples of scripts that have not disturbed the “tribal bonds” of acoustic space. Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. Egyptian ideographs were directly related to particular sensuous sounds and actions. “No pictographic or ideogrammic or hieroglyphic mode of writing has the detribalizing power of the phonetic alphabet. No other kind of writing save the phonetic has ever translated man out of the possessive world of total interdependence and interrelation that is the auditory network.” (McLuhan, 1962:22) “Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code.” (McLuhan, 1962:27)

The Greek alphabet could be used to translate languages back and forth without changing form, and became the first means of translation of knowledge from one culture to another, in effect separating the reader from the original speaker and the particular sensuous event. “The oral tradition of the early Greek dramatists, of the pre-Socratics, and Sophocles, gave way very gradually to the written Pan-European tradition and set the emotional and intellectual posture of the West in concrete, as it were. We were “liberated” forever from the resonating magic of the tribal word and the web of kinship.” (McLuhan, ?:71)

Davis, Erik. Recording Angels: The Esoteric Origins of the Phonograph in Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. 2002

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. 1962

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media

McLuhan, Marshall. Visual and Acoustic Space in Audio Culture. ?