Beyond Media

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan came to be for the populace the prophet of the death of the book, since many commentators transformed his observations on these problems into an unqualified prediction and endorsement of that death. What actually has been implied as taking place in this process is not the movement beyond a particular medium, such as the book or print, but a movement beyond the very idea of a unique communication medium. The appearance of new methods of technological production, reproduction, and distribution permitted the possibility of transcending traditionally recognized modes and returning to the original vision of the poetic as a concept which could simultaneously embrace various modes of communication, as in Aristotle's treatment of drama in the Poetics. Joyce represents a monumental movement beyond media--itself a comic commentary on McLuhan and his commentators.


Don Theall, Beyond the Word, 1995

On Two Natures

Aristotle first noted that the Greek invention of Nature was made possible when they had left behind a savage or barbaric state (first nature) by putting on an individualized and civilized one (second nature). And A.T.W. Simeons has discussed at length how disruptive the second nature has been to the first. Made discarnate by our electric information media, the west is furiously at work retrieving its obsolesced organic first nature in a spectrum of new aesthetic modes, from feminism to phenomenology. As our second nature consists entirely in our artifacts and extensions and the grounds and narcoses they impose, their etymologies are all to be found in first nature, the wild body.

Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1988