1. THE LAWS OF EQUILIBRIUM :
(A) Any input amplifies or intensifies some situation (inflates)
(B) Obsolesces existing homeostasis or balance
(C) Recreates an older mode of equilibrium (e.g., Eliot – “Auditory Imagination”)
(D) When pushed to its limits, the system reverses its modalities
2. METAPHOR :
(A) Enhances awareness of relations
(B) Obsolesces simile, metonymy, connected logic
(C) Retrieves understanding, "meaning" via replay in another mode
(D) Reverses into Allegory
3. TETRAD :
(A) Intensifies awareness of inclusive structural process
(B) Obsolesces logical analysis and "efficient causality"
(C) Retrieval mode: Metaphor
(D) Reversal: technology (hardware) becomes word (software)
4. VERBUM (utterance) :
(A) Intensifies and crystallizes percept - as word (thing)
(B) Obsolesces the merely sensory via perceptual interplay
(C) Retrieval: transference of power from things to word-as-vortex
(D) Reverses into the conceptual (replay of meaning-minus-the-experience )
5. SPOKEN WORD (mirror of the mind: CANON is mirror of the voice, when one voice repeats or reflects what another has stated) :
(A) "Speak that I may see thee." (Title of book by Harold Stahmer)
(B) Obsolesces the subhuman
(C) Retrieves past experience
(D) Group awareness and class structure
6. SLANG :
(A) Intensifies the new
(B) Obsolesces conventional vagueness, spectrum of meanings
(C) Retrieves unconventional primal gesture
(D) Reverses into cliché
7. TALKING DRUM :
(A) Enhances resonant interval, rhythm
(B) Obsolesces the merely vocal
(C) Retrieves gesture and dance
(D) Reverses into song, sob, or scream
8. MIRROR (“mirari” - to wonder) :
(A) Enhances ego by repetition and self-advertisement; echo-matching of a figure-MINUS-its-ground; instrument for SELF-portraiture (Rembrandt, etc.); adjunct of phonetic literacy via visual intensity; (print has the same effect for the user - i.e., self-advertisement)
(B) Obsolesces the corporate mask and corporate appearance (costume): dress replaces costume
(C) Retrieves the mode of Narcissus (magic, metamorphic tunnel vision); mirror as sitter, painter as audience and as admirer
(D) Reverses into "making" process as outlook becomes insight
9. PRINTED WORD :
(A) Amplifies private authorship, the competitive, goal-oriented individual; (letters are an extension of the teeth, the only lineal and repetitive part of the body; as Harold Innis explains, writing on paper leads to military bureaucracies)
(B) Obsolesces slang, dialects, and group identity; separates composition and performance, divorces eye and ear
(C) Retrieves tribal elitism, charmed circles, the "neck verse"; (print makes everyone a reader, and Xerox makes everyone a publisher)
(D) With flip from manuscript into mass production via print, there comes the corporate reading public and the "historical sense"
10. RADIO :
(A) Enhances simultaneous access to the entire planet: "On the air you're everywhere!"
(B) Obsolesces wires and cables and physical bodies; end of rational and lineal; end of Euclidean space; end of Western Time and Space
(C) Retrieves tribal ecological environments - trauma, paranoia, and the primacy of the right hemisphere of the brain; (radio was the hidden ground to the figure of the retrieved Prohibition of drug abuse in the television age)
(D) World reverses into "talking picture" - audience as actor participating in its own actor-experience"
- Marshall McLuhan, et cetera , June, 1977, pp.177-78
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