McLuhan’s appreciation of oral cultures and the sensory experience, and thus the thrust of the connection between concrete poetry and the theorist’s work is possibly most evident in the Gutenburg Galaxy. In the introduction to Galaxy, McLuhan delineates the differences between traditional, pre-literate oral cultures and a post-print culture as well as the changes occurring at the onset of an overloaded electric culture. He begins with a focus on Elizabethan poets and culture:
"We are today as far into the electric culture as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographic and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience." (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995, 97)
He insists that the some senses are extended and privileged by technologies at the detriment of other senses. He calls this an ‘outering’ or ‘uttering’ of sense, which creates ‘closed systems’: meaning that a simultaneous experience of senses is knocked off balance. (101)
In the case of literacy, the eye became the privileged sense, creating a linear rather than simultaneous sensory experience, canceling out the opportunity of sensory interplay. But while McLuhan laments the onset of an eye-dominance, contradictorily he also states: “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.” (117) While the tribal man experiences sensory simultaneity and community, McLuhan concludes that the phonetic alphabet offered individualism, but at the cost of confusion and sensory imbalance. The ‘freedom’ which literacy offered came with individualism, a product of writing and the mechanization of writing.
"We are today as far into the electric culture as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographic and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience." (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995, 97)
He insists that the some senses are extended and privileged by technologies at the detriment of other senses. He calls this an ‘outering’ or ‘uttering’ of sense, which creates ‘closed systems’: meaning that a simultaneous experience of senses is knocked off balance. (101)
In the case of literacy, the eye became the privileged sense, creating a linear rather than simultaneous sensory experience, canceling out the opportunity of sensory interplay. But while McLuhan laments the onset of an eye-dominance, contradictorily he also states: “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.” (117) While the tribal man experiences sensory simultaneity and community, McLuhan concludes that the phonetic alphabet offered individualism, but at the cost of confusion and sensory imbalance. The ‘freedom’ which literacy offered came with individualism, a product of writing and the mechanization of writing.
