https://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&feed=atom&action=historySeptember 20, 2019 - Revision history2024-03-29T16:00:20ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.39.0https://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=10576&oldid=prevGrlucas: Tweaks.2020-06-18T17:30:20Z<p>Tweaks.</p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 13:30, 18 June 2020</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{Large|The Psychology of the Machine: Some Thoughts on Mailer and McLuhan}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{Large|The Psychology of the Machine: Some Thoughts on Mailer and McLuhan}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{cquote|There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications-the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. The machine would work, grinding out mass man and his surrealistic wars until the machine was broken.|author=<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer</del>|source=''The Armies of the Night''<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1994 |orig-year=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History |location=New York |publisher=Plume |page=176 |ref=harv }}</ref>}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{cquote|There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications-the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. The machine would work, grinding out mass man and his surrealistic wars until the machine was broken.|author=<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">{{NM}}</ins>|source=''The Armies of the Night''<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1994 |orig-year=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History |location=New York |publisher=Plume |page=176 |ref=harv }}</ref>}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[File:Mailer-McLuhan.png|thumb]]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[File:Mailer-McLuhan.png|thumb]]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the end of the sixties, Mailer was observing the end of the world. For <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer</del>, the sixties brought with it the steady erosion of the artist’s world <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">to that of </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">scientist</del>. Mailer observed that the novel was becoming less significant than the TV, that protest <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">had </del>culminated <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">into violent demonstrations </del>in <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">civil rights and politics</del>, that technological progress seemed to be gutting a more genuine existence of sensuality, risk, and self-discovery and replacing it with a sterile world of “computer-logic”:<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2014 |orig-year=1971 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url=https://amzn.to/2oU0M81 |edition=Kindle |location=New York |publisher=Random House |page=139 |ref=harv }}</ref> plastic and circuits that promised efficiency and equality but portended totalitarianism at best and apocalypse at worst. </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the end of the sixties, Mailer was observing the end of the world. For <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">him</ins>, the sixties brought with it the steady erosion of the artist’s world <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">replaced with </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">scientist’s</ins>. Mailer observed that the novel was becoming less significant than the TV, that protest <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">often </ins>culminated in <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">violence</ins>, that technological progress seemed to be gutting a more genuine existence of sensuality, risk, and self-discovery and replacing it with a sterile world of “computer-logic”:<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2014 |orig-year=1971 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url=https://amzn.to/2oU0M81 |edition=Kindle |location=New York |publisher=Random House |page=139 |ref=harv }}</ref> plastic and circuits that promised efficiency and equality but portended totalitarianism at best and apocalypse at worst. </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">now </del>any prognostications about the future <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">are </del>truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.{{efn|Perhaps one of the greatest distinction in their analyses is that while McLuhan feels the world is already a product of media saturation, Mailer still feels that there’s a genuine-ness to be <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">gleaned </del>and fought for.}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since any prognostications about the future <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">seemed at the time </ins>truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.{{efn|Perhaps one of the greatest distinction in their analyses is that while McLuhan feels the world is already a product of media saturation, Mailer still feels that there’s a genuine-ness to be <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">experienced </ins>and fought for.}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now a technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through electronic media.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now a technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through electronic media.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In McLuhan’s view, artists deal in simulacra: in creating or programming our relationship to the external world. Perhaps, when the content takes a back seat to the medium, that all art is just the manipulation of the medium. McLuhan does assert that the “serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity,” seemingly because she is intimately aware of the medium because she uses it to order reality.{{sfn|McLuhan|1964|p=18}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In McLuhan’s view, artists deal in simulacra: in creating or programming our relationship to the external world. Perhaps, when the content takes a back seat to the medium, that all art is just the manipulation of the medium. McLuhan does assert that the “serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity,” seemingly because she is intimately aware of the medium because she uses it to order reality.{{sfn|McLuhan|1964|p=18}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer, however, still sees the artist as a type of mage that can penetrate the surface to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">get to </del>what’s genuine beneath. Mailer’s hero is the novelist, but one that is being superseded at a rapid pace by the hero of the late-sixties: the scientist. Mailer’s concerns are later developed in ''Of a Fire on the Moon''. </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer, however, still sees the artist as a type of mage that can penetrate the surface to <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">uncover </ins>what’s genuine beneath. <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">In this sense, </ins>Mailer’s hero is the novelist, but one that is being superseded at a rapid pace by the hero of the late-sixties: the scientist. Mailer’s concerns are later developed in ''Of a Fire on the Moon'' <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">(1971) and ''The Faith of Graffiti'' (1974)</ins>. </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Herein</del>, Mailer becomes like the epic poet recounting the heroic expansion of humanity into space. It’s interesting to note that Mailer does not seem to question the undertaking of the moonshot itself, but the scientific ''zeitgeist'' used to accomplish it. The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined is a machine”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=160}}<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">; </del>and earlier: “Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, the entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}} <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">This </del>resonates with McLuhan’s proclamation that “Nature from now on has to be programmed.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">In ''Fire''</ins>, Mailer becomes like the epic poet recounting the heroic expansion of humanity into space. It’s interesting to note that Mailer does not seem to question the undertaking of the moonshot itself, but the scientific ''zeitgeist'' used to accomplish it. The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined is a machine”<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">;</ins>{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=160}} and earlier: “Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, the entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}} <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">To me, this idea </ins>resonates with McLuhan’s proclamation that “Nature from now on has to be programmed.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>For Mailer, the responsibility of the artist is to penetrate that programming to get at an essence — a truth that is not determined by the machine but that is <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">existential</del>. This, to Mailer, is what separates the human from the machine. This is a moral imperative for Mailer, as can be seen in his conversation with McLuhan. <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">This </del>distinction seems to be the greatest difference in <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the Mailer’s perspective from McLuhan’s</del>: while Mailer asserts that getting to the truth is the job of the artist in order to pass a moral judgement on a particular time, place, or situation, McLuhan is content to neutrally observe and record the new world.{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=11}} For Mailer, the artist is the fulcrum of change; for McLuhan she merely uses the media of the time to further program the time.{{efn|McLuhan further develops this idea in chapter four of ''Understanding Media'': “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis” where he asserts that the “use of technology, conforms men to them.”{{sfn|McLuhan|1964|p=45}}}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>For Mailer, the responsibility of the artist is to penetrate that programming to get at an essence — a truth that is not determined by the machine but that is <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">existential—unpredictable</ins>. This <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">quality</ins>, to Mailer, is what separates the human from the machine. This <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">genuineness </ins>is a moral imperative for Mailer, as can be seen in his conversation with McLuhan. <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">The </ins>distinction seems to be the greatest difference in <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> perspectives</ins>: while Mailer asserts that getting to the truth is the job of the artist in order to pass a moral judgement on a particular time, place, or situation, McLuhan is content to neutrally observe and record the new world.{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=11}} For Mailer, the artist is the fulcrum of change; for McLuhan she merely uses the media of the time to further program the time.{{efn|McLuhan further develops this idea in chapter four of ''Understanding Media'': “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis” where he asserts that the “use of technology, conforms men to them.”{{sfn|McLuhan|1964|p=45}}}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In other words, for McLuhan we live in a programmed world in which we are part of the program, like a cybernetic loop. For Mailer, it’s the moment of crisis that’s definitive: “He cannot define himself in any environment which has been programmed for him. He can only define himself by getting into situations which are brand new for him.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=16}} This is the opposite of NASA’s approach to the moon landing, where every contingency is calculated and programmed, including the astronauts, so that they become like computers who were unaware of their own programming and cannot think beyond it. For Mailer, the moon landing represented the apotheosis of technology worship which coded out the magic of the existential moment by predicting and programming the future.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=159}} The space race has killed the Hemingways and replaced them with the Armstrongs.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In other words, for McLuhan we live in a programmed world in which we are part of the program, like a cybernetic loop. For Mailer, it’s the moment of crisis that’s definitive: “He cannot define himself in any environment which has been programmed for him. He can only define himself by getting into situations which are brand new for him.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=16}} This is the opposite of NASA’s approach to the moon landing, where every contingency is calculated and programmed, including the astronauts, so that they become like computers who were unaware of their own programming and cannot think beyond it. For Mailer, the moon landing represented the apotheosis of technology worship which coded out the magic of the existential moment by predicting and programming the future.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=159}} The space race has killed the Hemingways and replaced them with the Armstrongs.</div></td></tr>
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</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=5452&oldid=prevGrlucas at 15:03, 28 December 20192019-12-28T15:03:23Z<p></p>
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</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4649&oldid=prevGrlucas: Added image.2019-11-21T12:22:14Z<p>Added image.</p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{cquote|There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications-the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. The machine would work, grinding out mass man and his surrealistic wars until the machine was broken.|author=Mailer|source=''The Armies of the Night''<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1994 |orig-year=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History |location=New York |publisher=Plume |page=176 |ref=harv }}</ref>}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{cquote|There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications-the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. The machine would work, grinding out mass man and his surrealistic wars until the machine was broken.|author=Mailer|source=''The Armies of the Night''<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1994 |orig-year=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History |location=New York |publisher=Plume |page=176 |ref=harv }}</ref>}}</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the end of the sixties, Mailer was observing the end of the world. For Mailer, the sixties brought with it the steady erosion of the artist’s world to that of the scientist. Mailer observed that the novel was becoming less significant than the TV, that protest had culminated into violent demonstrations in civil rights and politics, that technological progress seemed to be gutting a more genuine existence of sensuality, risk, and self-discovery and replacing it with a sterile world of “computer-logic”:<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2014 |orig-year=1971 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url=https://amzn.to/2oU0M81 |edition=Kindle |location=New York |publisher=Random House |page=139 |ref=harv }}</ref> plastic and circuits that promised efficiency and equality but portended totalitarianism at best and apocalypse at worst. </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the end of the sixties, Mailer was observing the end of the world. For Mailer, the sixties brought with it the steady erosion of the artist’s world to that of the scientist. Mailer observed that the novel was becoming less significant than the TV, that protest had culminated into violent demonstrations in civil rights and politics, that technological progress seemed to be gutting a more genuine existence of sensuality, risk, and self-discovery and replacing it with a sterile world of “computer-logic”:<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2014 |orig-year=1971 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url=https://amzn.to/2oU0M81 |edition=Kindle |location=New York |publisher=Random House |page=139 |ref=harv }}</ref> plastic and circuits that promised efficiency and equality but portended totalitarianism at best and apocalypse at worst. </div></td></tr>
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</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4586&oldid=prevGrlucas: Added BE note.2019-11-05T16:03:23Z<p>Added BE note.</p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In other words, for McLuhan we live in a programmed world in which we are part of the program, like a cybernetic loop. For Mailer, it’s the moment of crisis that’s definitive: “He cannot define himself in any environment which has been programmed for him. He can only define himself by getting into situations which are brand new for him.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=16}} This is the opposite of NASA’s approach to the moon landing, where every contingency is calculated and programmed, including the astronauts, so that they become like computers who were unaware of their own programming and cannot think beyond it. For Mailer, the moon landing represented the apotheosis of technology worship which coded out the magic of the existential moment by predicting and programming the future.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=159}} The space race has killed the Hemingways and replaced them with the Armstrongs.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In other words, for McLuhan we live in a programmed world in which we are part of the program, like a cybernetic loop. For Mailer, it’s the moment of crisis that’s definitive: “He cannot define himself in any environment which has been programmed for him. He can only define himself by getting into situations which are brand new for him.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=16}} This is the opposite of NASA’s approach to the moon landing, where every contingency is calculated and programmed, including the astronauts, so that they become like computers who were unaware of their own programming and cannot think beyond it. For Mailer, the moon landing represented the apotheosis of technology worship which coded out the magic of the existential moment by predicting and programming the future.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=159}} The space race has killed the Hemingways and replaced them with the Armstrongs.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">(Mailer expands a bit more on this in ''The Big Empty'', asking whether machines might have an “inner life” that transcends their programming — almost like a “temperament.”<ref>{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |last2=Mailer |first2=John Buffalo |date=2006 |title=The Big Empty |url= |location=New York |publisher=Nation Books |pages=147–148 |ref=harv }}</ref> He argues, as he has elsewhere, that technology dulls the senses, like plastic, and makes us more powerful in certain ways, but also more inert and soulless.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=149}})</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td></tr>
</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4533&oldid=prevGrlucas: Added cat.2019-10-19T14:09:13Z<p>Added cat.</p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[Category:New Media]]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[[Category:New Media]]</div></td></tr>
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</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4516&oldid=prevGrlucas: Updates.2019-10-11T12:38:47Z<p>Updates.</p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since any prognostications about the future are truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.{{efn|Perhaps the greatest distinction in their analyses is that while McLuhan feels the world is already a product of media saturation, Mailer still feels that there’s a genuine-ness to be gleaned and fought for.}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">now </ins>any prognostications about the future are truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.{{efn|Perhaps <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">one of </ins>the greatest distinction in their analyses is that while McLuhan feels the world is already a product of media saturation, Mailer still feels that there’s a genuine-ness to be gleaned and fought for.}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now a technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through electronic media.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now a technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through electronic media.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">For McLuhan</del>, artists deal in simulacra: in creating or programming our relationship to the external world. <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer, however</del>, <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">still sees </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">artist as </del>a <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">type of mage that can penetrate the surface </del>to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">get to what’s genuine beneath. Mailer’s hero is </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">novelist</del>, <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">but one </del>that is <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">being superseded at a rapid pace by </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">hero </del>of the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">late-sixties: </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">scientist. Mailer’s concerns are later developed in ''Of a Fire on </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Moon''</del>. </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">In McLuhan’s view</ins>, artists deal in simulacra: in creating or programming our relationship to the external world. <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Perhaps</ins>, <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">when </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">content takes </ins>a <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">back seat </ins>to the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">medium</ins>, that <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">all art </ins>is <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">just </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">manipulation </ins>of the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">medium. McLuhan does assert that the “serious artist is </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">only person able to encounter technology with impunity,” seemingly because she is intimately aware of </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">medium because she uses it to order reality</ins>.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">{{sfn|McLuhan|1964|p=18}}</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Herein</del>, <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer becomes like </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">epic poet recounting the heroic expansion </del>of <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">humanity into space. It’s interesting to note </del>that <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer does not seem to question </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">moonshot itself, but the scientific ''zeitgeist'' used </del>to get <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">us there</del>. <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined </del>is <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">a machine”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=160}} and “Obviously, </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent</del>, <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">and Armstrong was </del>a <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">shining knight of technology.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination </del>of <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">engineering that looked “to </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought</del>-<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad</del>.<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}} This sounds similar to McLuhan’s proclamation that “Nature from now </del>on <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">has to be programmed</del>.<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</del></div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer</ins>, <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">however, still sees </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">artist as a type </ins>of <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">mage </ins>that <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">can penetrate </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">surface </ins>to get <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">to what’s genuine beneath</ins>. <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer’s hero </ins>is the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">novelist</ins>, <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">but one that is being superseded at </ins>a <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">rapid pace by </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">hero </ins>of the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">late</ins>-<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">sixties: </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">scientist</ins>. <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer’s concerns are later developed in ''Of a Fire </ins>on <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the Moon''</ins>. </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">For </del>Mailer<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">responsibility </del>of <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the artist is </del>to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">penetrate </del>that <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">programming </del>to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">get at an essence — a truth that is not determined by </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">machine </del>but <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">that is existential</del>. <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">This, </del>to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer, is what separates the </del>human <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">from the machine. This </del>is a <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">moral imperative for </del>Mailer<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">. This distinction seems to be the greatest difference in the Mailer’s perspective from McLuhan’s</del>: <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">while Mailer asserts that getting to </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">truth is the job </del>of <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the artist in order </del>to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">pass a moral judgement</del>, <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">McLuhan is content to observe </del>and <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">record the new world</del>.{{sfn|<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Foley</del>|<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">1968</del>|p=<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">11</del>}} For Mailer, the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">artist is </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">fulcrum </del>of <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">change; for McLuhan she merely uses </del>the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">media </del>of <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the time </del>to <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">further program</del>.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Herein, </ins>Mailer <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">becomes like the epic poet recounting </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">heroic expansion </ins>of <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">humanity into space. It’s interesting </ins>to <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">note </ins>that <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer does not seem </ins>to <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">question the undertaking of </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">moonshot itself, </ins>but <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the scientific ''zeitgeist'' used to accomplish it</ins>. <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities </ins>to <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">that of programming: “A </ins>human <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">being totally determined </ins>is a <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">machine”{{sfn|</ins>Mailer<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">|2014|p=160}}; and earlier</ins>: <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">“Obviously, </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">natural aim </ins>of <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">technology was </ins>to <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">make intuition obsolescent</ins>, and <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Armstrong was a shining knight of technology</ins>.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">”</ins>{{sfn|<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Mailer</ins>|<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">2014</ins>|p=<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">38</ins>}} For Mailer, the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument </ins>of <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since </ins>the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">ardors </ins>of <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}} This resonates with McLuhan’s proclamation that “Nature from now on has </ins>to <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">be programmed</ins>.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In other words, for McLuhan we live in a programmed world in which we are part of the program, like a cybernetic loop. For Mailer, it’s the moment of crisis that’s definitive: “He cannot define himself in any environment which has been programmed for him. He can only define himself by getting into situations which are brand new for him.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=16}} This is the opposite of NASA’s approach to the moon landing, where every contingency is calculated and programmed, including the astronauts, so that they become like computers who were unaware of their own programming and <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">could not </del>think beyond it. For Mailer, the moon landing represented the apotheosis of technology worship which coded out the magic of the existential moment by predicting and programming the future.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=159}} The space race has killed the Hemingways and replaced them with the Armstrongs.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">For Mailer, the responsibility of the artist is to penetrate that programming to get at an essence — a truth that is not determined by the machine but that is existential. This, to Mailer, is what separates the human from the machine. This is a moral imperative for Mailer, as can be seen in his conversation with McLuhan. This distinction seems to be the greatest difference in the Mailer’s perspective from McLuhan’s: while Mailer asserts that getting to the truth is the job of the artist in order to pass a moral judgement on a particular time, place, or situation, McLuhan is content to neutrally observe and record the new world.{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=11}} For Mailer, the artist is the fulcrum of change; for McLuhan she merely uses the media of the time to further program the time.{{efn|McLuhan further develops this idea in chapter four of ''Understanding Media'': “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis” where he asserts that the “use of technology, conforms men to them.”{{sfn|McLuhan|1964|p=45}}}}</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>In other words, for McLuhan we live in a programmed world in which we are part of the program, like a cybernetic loop. For Mailer, it’s the moment of crisis that’s definitive: “He cannot define himself in any environment which has been programmed for him. He can only define himself by getting into situations which are brand new for him.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=16}} This is the opposite of NASA’s approach to the moon landing, where every contingency is calculated and programmed, including the astronauts, so that they become like computers who were unaware of their own programming and <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">cannot </ins>think beyond it. For Mailer, the moon landing represented the apotheosis of technology worship which coded out the magic of the existential moment by predicting and programming the future.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=159}} The space race has killed the Hemingways and replaced them with the Armstrongs.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td></tr>
</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4512&oldid=prevGrlucas: Updates.2019-10-06T16:15:22Z<p>Updates.</p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 12:15, 6 October 2019</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Herein, Mailer becomes like the epic poet recounting the heroic expansion of humanity into space. It’s interesting to note that Mailer does not seem to question the moonshot itself, but the scientific ''zeitgeist'' used to get us there. The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined is a machine”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=160}} and “Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, the entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}} This sounds similar to McLuhan’s proclamation that “Nature from now on has to be programmed.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Herein, Mailer becomes like the epic poet recounting the heroic expansion of humanity into space. It’s interesting to note that Mailer does not seem to question the moonshot itself, but the scientific ''zeitgeist'' used to get us there. The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined is a machine”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=160}} and “Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, the entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}} This sounds similar to McLuhan’s proclamation that “Nature from now on has to be programmed.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">For Mailer, the responsibility of the artist is to penetrate that programming to get at an essence — a truth that is not determined by the machine but that is existential. This, to Mailer, is what separates the human from the machine. This is a moral imperative for Mailer. This distinction seems to be the greatest difference in the Mailer’s perspective from McLuhan’s: while Mailer asserts that getting to the truth is the job of the artist in order to pass a moral judgement, McLuhan is content to observe and record the new world.{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=11}} For Mailer, the artist is the fulcrum of change; for McLuhan she merely uses the media of the time to further program.</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">In other words, for McLuhan we live in a programmed world in which we are part of the program, like a cybernetic loop. For Mailer, it’s the moment of crisis that’s definitive: “He cannot define himself in any environment which has been programmed for him. He can only define himself by getting into situations which are brand new for him.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=16}} This is the opposite of NASA’s approach to the moon landing, where every contingency is calculated and programmed, including the astronauts, so that they become like computers who were unaware of their own programming and could not think beyond it. For Mailer, the moon landing represented the apotheosis of technology worship which coded out the magic of the existential moment by predicting and programming the future.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=159}} The space race has killed the Hemingways and replaced them with the Armstrongs.</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td></tr>
</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4511&oldid=prevGrlucas: Updates.2019-10-06T15:48:53Z<p>Updates.</p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 11:48, 6 October 2019</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{cquote|There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications-the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. The machine would work, grinding out mass man and his surrealistic wars until the machine was broken.|author=Mailer|source=''The Armies of the Night''<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1994 |orig-year=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History |location=New York |publisher=Plume |page=176 |ref=harv }}</ref>}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{cquote|There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications-the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. The machine would work, grinding out mass man and his surrealistic wars until the machine was broken.|author=Mailer|source=''The Armies of the Night''<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1994 |orig-year=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History |location=New York |publisher=Plume |page=176 |ref=harv }}</ref>}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the end of the sixties, Mailer was observing the end of the world. For Mailer, the sixties brought with it the steady erosion of the artist’s world to that of the scientist. Mailer observed that the novel was becoming less significant than the TV, that protest had culminated into violent demonstrations in civil rights and politics, that technological progress seemed to be gutting a more genuine existence of sensuality, risk, and self-discovery and replacing it with a sterile world of plastic and circuits that promised efficiency and equality but portended totalitarianism at best and apocalypse at worst. </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>By the end of the sixties, Mailer was observing the end of the world. For Mailer, the sixties brought with it the steady erosion of the artist’s world to that of the scientist. Mailer observed that the novel was becoming less significant than the TV, that protest had culminated into violent demonstrations in civil rights and politics, that technological progress seemed to be gutting a more genuine existence of sensuality, risk, and self-discovery and replacing it with a sterile world of <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">“computer-logic”:<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2014 |orig-year=1971 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url=https://amzn.to/2oU0M81 |edition=Kindle |location=New York |publisher=Random House |page=139 |ref=harv }}</ref> </ins>plastic and circuits that promised efficiency and equality but portended totalitarianism at best and apocalypse at worst. </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since any prognostications about the future are truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.{{efn|Perhaps the greatest distinction in their analyses is that while McLuhan feels the world is already a product of media saturation, Mailer still feels that there’s a genuine-ness to be gleaned and fought for.}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since any prognostications about the future are truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.{{efn|Perhaps the greatest distinction in their analyses is that while McLuhan feels the world is already a product of media saturation, Mailer still feels that there’s a genuine-ness to be gleaned and fought for.}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the screen</del>.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">a </ins>technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">electronic media</ins>.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>For McLuhan, artists deal in simulacra. Mailer, however, still sees the artist as a type of mage that can penetrate the surface to get to what’s genuine beneath. Mailer’s hero is the novelist, but one that is being superseded at a rapid pace by the hero of the late-sixties: the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">astronaut</del>. Mailer’s concerns are <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">detailed </del>in <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">his last book of the sixties: </del>''Of a Fire on the Moon''. </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>For McLuhan, artists deal in simulacra<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">: in creating or programming our relationship to the external world</ins>. Mailer, however, still sees the artist as a type of mage that can penetrate the surface to get to what’s genuine beneath. Mailer’s hero is the novelist, but one that is being superseded at a rapid pace by the hero of the late-sixties: the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">scientist</ins>. Mailer’s concerns are <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">later developed </ins>in ''Of a Fire on the Moon''. </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Herein, Mailer becomes like the epic poet recounting the heroic expansion of humanity into space. It’s interesting to note that Mailer does not seem to question the moonshot itself, but the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">technology </del>used to get us there. The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined is a machine”<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"><ref></del>{{<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">cite book </del>|<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">last=</del>Mailer |<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">first=Norman |date=</del>2014 |<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">orig-year=1969 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url=https://amzn.to/2oU0M81 |edition=Kindle |location=New York |publisher=Random House |page</del>=160 <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">|ref=harv </del>}}<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></ref> </del>and “Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, the entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Herein, Mailer becomes like the epic poet recounting the heroic expansion of humanity into space. It’s interesting to note that Mailer does not seem to question the moonshot itself, but the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">scientific ''zeitgeist'' </ins>used to get us there. The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined is a machine”{{<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">sfn</ins>|Mailer|2014|<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">p</ins>=160}} and “Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, the entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}} <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">This sounds similar to McLuhan’s proclamation </ins>that <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">“Nature from now on has to be programmed</ins>.”{{sfn|Foley<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">|1968</ins>|p=<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">4</ins>}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">In his discussion with McLuhan, Mailer states it like this: “I think </del>that <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">there’s a kind of totalitarian prinicple present in this sort of avalanche of over-information, if you will</del>.”{{sfn|Foley|p=<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">6</del>}}</div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td></tr>
</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4510&oldid=prevGrlucas: Updates.2019-10-05T22:05:34Z<p>Updates.</p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 18:05, 5 October 2019</td>
</tr><tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l11">Line 11:</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through the screen.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through the screen.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>For McLuhan, <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the </del>artists deal in simulacra. Mailer, however, still sees the artist as a type of mage that can penetrate the surface to get to what’s genuine beneath. Mailer’s hero is the novelist, but one that is being superseded at a rapid pace by the hero of the late-sixties: the astronaut. Mailer’s concerns are detailed in his last book of the sixties: ''Of a Fire on the Moon''. Herein, Mailer becomes like the epic poet. . .</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>For McLuhan, artists deal in simulacra. Mailer, however, still sees the artist as a type of mage that can penetrate the surface to get to what’s genuine beneath. Mailer’s hero is the novelist, but one that is being superseded at a rapid pace by the hero of the late-sixties: the astronaut. Mailer’s concerns are detailed in his last book of the sixties: ''Of a Fire on the Moon''. </div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Herein, Mailer becomes like the epic poet <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">recounting the heroic expansion of humanity into space. It’s interesting to note that Mailer does not seem to question the moonshot itself, but the technology used to get us there. The astronauts seem less like humans and more like cyborgs — reducing any heroic and vital qualities to that of programming: “A human being totally determined is a machine”<ref>{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2014 |orig-year=1969 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url=https://amzn.to/2oU0M81 |edition=Kindle |location=New York |publisher=Random House |page=160 |ref=harv }}</ref> and “Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology</ins>.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=38}} For Mailer, the entire NASA apparatus was a horrific culmination of engineering that looked “to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad</ins>.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=148}}</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">In his discussion with McLuhan, Mailer states it like this: “I think that there’s a kind of totalitarian prinicple present in this sort of avalanche of over-information, if you will</ins>.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">”{{sfn|Foley|p=6}}</ins></div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===Notes===</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===References===</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>===References===</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{Reflist}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{Reflist<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">|20em</ins>}}</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{2019|state=expanded}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{2019|state=expanded}}</div></td></tr>
</table>Grlucashttps://grlucas.net/index.php?title=September_20,_2019&diff=4509&oldid=prevGrlucas: Lost what I wrote today. Tried to make it up a bit. More to do.2019-10-05T00:01:59Z<p>Lost what I wrote today. Tried to make it up a bit. More to do.</p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 20:01, 4 October 2019</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Mailer’s misgivings are evident in his conversation with Marshall McLuhan in 1968.<ref>{{cite AV media |people=Foley, Ken (Moderator) |date=1968 |chapter=Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer |title=The Summer Way |type=Television production |language=English |url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman-mailer/index.html |chapter-url=http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6yS.pdf |access-date=2019-09-20 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Canadian Broadcasting Corporation |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref= }}</ref> This is an odd “conversation” in that Mailer seems genuinely interested in debating the consequences of an increasingly high-tech world, while McLuhan seems aloof and de-centered — much like his writing — interested only in espousing pithy aphorisms and germane quotations to make himself look clever. Mailer here is smart and ready to get dirty while McLuhan is barely in the room.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since any prognostications about the future are truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>What’s potentially interesting about this conversation is that both men have something to contribute about the effects of science and technology on the contemporary world, but it ultimately seems to go nowhere. Maybe that’s the only place it could go, since any prognostications about the future are truly unique, having no historical analog for reference. While McLuhan has been regarded as a prophet of the Internet Age (suggesting his advocacy of it), his work offers a warning about the effects of technology on the unwary, so in this regard, he and Mailer are both cautious of the world’s increasing reliance on how modern conveniences are changing society.<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">{{efn|Perhaps the greatest distinction in their analyses is that while McLuhan feels the world is already a product of media saturation, Mailer still feels that there’s a genuine-ness to be gleaned and fought for.}}</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through the screen.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>McLuhan’s most famous assertion “[[McLuhan's Medium & Message|the medium is the message]]” gives technology a kind of agency that has the “power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.”<ref>{{cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |date=1964 |title=Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man |url=https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=7, 15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}</ref> McLuhan’s world is one already mediated by technology to such an extent that we only understand nature though our representations of it, so that “the environment is now technological thing.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=8}} McLuhan extends this observation into space: a world observed through the ubiquitous eyes of satellites ceases to be a part of nature, but becomes “an artwork” — information gleaned through the screen.{{sfn|Foley|1968|pp=3–4}} For McLuhan the “environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.”{{sfn|Foley|1968|p=4}}</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>==References==</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">For McLuhan, the artists deal in simulacra. Mailer, however, still sees the artist as a type of mage that can penetrate the surface to get to what’s genuine beneath. Mailer’s hero is the novelist, but one that is being superseded at a rapid pace by the hero of the late-sixties: the astronaut. Mailer’s concerns are detailed in his last book of the sixties: ''Of a Fire on the Moon''. Herein, Mailer becomes like the epic poet. . .</ins></div></td></tr>
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<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">{{notelist}}</ins></div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"></del></div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br/></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{2019|state=expanded}}</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>{{2019|state=expanded}}</div></td></tr>
</table>Grlucas