Christopher Horrocks states that McLuhan reaches beyond posthumanism and simultationism because his claims of sensory harmony and immediacy are linked directly to ‘a myth of return’ via technology. (Horrocks, 40) McLuhan claimed that with the electronic age "we are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions (from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us) of a culture that preceded the invention of writing and printing." (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 63)
The concrete poets writing (and performing, recording, speaking) at the time of McLuhan’s writings were exploring a tribalization that exploded the sensory dependence of print and meaning. While poets online are struggling with how to continue with a creative and sensory revolution, they are admittedly dealing with issues of non-linear temporality and spatiality, despite the medium’s connection and historical relationship (via language and readership) with print.
But what is the ‘acoustic space’ and how does it relate to the concrete poets – including in their media sound, visual, language and otherwise? The notion of space, be it acoustic, typographic or virtual, have implications that are deeply tied to McLuhan’s sensory perceptions and observations on the oral and literary experience. Visual experimental poetry depended on the very ink and paper as the meanings rather than as a conduit.
In exploring concrete poetry and McLuhan’s notion of both the multi-sensory electric culture and the medium as the message, one might ask, what of the materiality of language? Or put another way, what of the visual nature of language?
The concrete poets writing (and performing, recording, speaking) at the time of McLuhan’s writings were exploring a tribalization that exploded the sensory dependence of print and meaning. While poets online are struggling with how to continue with a creative and sensory revolution, they are admittedly dealing with issues of non-linear temporality and spatiality, despite the medium’s connection and historical relationship (via language and readership) with print.
But what is the ‘acoustic space’ and how does it relate to the concrete poets – including in their media sound, visual, language and otherwise? The notion of space, be it acoustic, typographic or virtual, have implications that are deeply tied to McLuhan’s sensory perceptions and observations on the oral and literary experience. Visual experimental poetry depended on the very ink and paper as the meanings rather than as a conduit.
In exploring concrete poetry and McLuhan’s notion of both the multi-sensory electric culture and the medium as the message, one might ask, what of the materiality of language? Or put another way, what of the visual nature of language?
