The Gutenberg Galaxy

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The Gutenberg Galaxy  
Author Marshall McLuhan
Country Canada
Language English
Genre(s) History
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Publication date 1962
Media type print (paperback)
Pages 293 p. (numbered)
ISBN 9780802060419

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a book by Marshall McLuhan, in which he analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. It popularized the term global village,[1] which refers to the idea that mass communication allows a village-like mindset to apply to the entire world; and Gutenberg Galaxy,[2] which we may regard today to refer to the accumulated body of recorded works of human art and knowledge, especially books.

McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.

Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He writes:

the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.[3]

Contents

[edit] The format of the book—a mosaic

The book is unusual in its design. McLuhan described it as one which "develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems".[4] The mosaic image to be constructed from data and quotations would then reveal "causal operations in history".[5]

The book consists of 5 parts:

  • Prologue,[6]
  • The Gutenberg Galaxy,[7]
  • The Galaxy Reconfigured,[8]
  • Bibliographic Index,[9]
  • Index of Chapter Glosses.[10]

The main body of the book, part 2, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", consists of 107 short "chapters", many of which are of one, two, or even three pages in length. Such a large collection of small chapters does fit the picture of a mosaic.

Apparently, McLuhan also had some ideas about how to browse a book. "Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book."[11] Such apparent arbitrariness fits with picking a particular piece (or part) of a mosaic and deciding if you like it. Certainly the McLuhan test can be applied to the Gutenberg Galaxy itself. Doing so will reveal a further insight into the purpose of his own book.[12]

[edit] Prologue

McLuhan declares his book to be "complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord."[6] The latter work follows on from the Homeric studies of Milman Parry who turned to "the study of the Yugoslave epics"[6] to prove that the poems of Homer were oral compositions.

[edit] Four epochs of history

The book may also be regarded as a way of describing 4 epochs of history:

«McLuhan divides history in four epochs: the oral tribe culture, the manuscript culture, the Gutenberg galaxy and the electronic age. For the break between the time periods in each case the occurrence of a new medium is responsible, the hand-writing terminates the oral phase, the printing and the electricity revolutionizes afterwards culture and society.»[13]

  1. Oral tribe culture
  2. Manuscript culture[14]
  3. Gutenberg galaxy
  4. Electronic age

Given the clue of "hand-writing" that terminates the "oral phase" one expects "printing" to terminate the manuscript phase and the "electrifying" to bring an end to the Gutenberg era. The strangeness of the use of "electrifying" is entirely appropriate in the McLuhan context of 1962. The Internet did not exist then.

McLuhan himself suggests that the last section of his book might play the major role of being the first section:

« The last section of the book, "The Galaxy Reconfigured," deals with the clash of electric and mechanical, or print, technologies, and the reader may find it the best prologue. »[15]

This "clash" of electric and print technologies has resolved itself in the Internet and on the World-Wide-Web of our times.

[edit] Oral tribe culture

The oral tradition is not dead. In schools or at home or in the street, where children are taught to learn by heart, to memorize, nursery rhymes or poems or songs, then they can be said to participate in the oral tradition. The same is often true of the children belonging to religious groups who are taught to learn to say their prayers. In other words, childhood is one of the ages of man (in Shakespeare's sense) and is essentially an oral tribal culture. The transition from this oral culture takes place when the child is taught to read and write. Then the child enters the world of the manuscript culture.

McLuhan identifies James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a key that unlocks something of the nature of the oral culture.[16]"

Of particular importance to the Oral Culture is the Art of memory.

[edit] The village

In commenting on the (former) Soviet Union,[17] McLuhan puts "the advertising and PR community" on a par with them in so far that both "are concerned about access to the media and about results."[18] More remarkably he asserts that "Soviet concern with media results is natural to any oral society where interdependence is the result of instant interplay of cause and effect in the total structure. Such is the character of a village, or since electric media, such is also the character of global village."[18]

[edit] Manuscript culture

The culture of the manuscript (literally hand-writing) is often referred to by McLuhan as scribal culture.

« Medieval illumination, gloss, and sculpture alike were aspects of the art of memory, central to scribal culture.[19] »

Associated with this epoch is the Art of memory (in Latin Ars Memoria).

[edit] Gutenberg galaxy

Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Finnegans Wake (like Shakespeare's King Lear) is one of the texts which McLuhan frequently uses throughout the book in order to weave together the various strands of his argument.

"Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols."[20]

[edit] Electronic age

The Chinese are tribal, people of the ear[21]

[edit] Hypothetical size of the Gutenberg Galaxy qua Galaxy

It is possible to estimate a hypothetical size of the Gutenberg Galaxy. In 2004/2005, the British Library claimed it held more than 97 million items, including 13.3 million monographs [1]; the Library of Congress, approximately 130 million items, including "more than 29 million books".[22]

Given an estimated average book size of 6 MB for a purely textual book containing 1 million words, the Library of Congress in this case would take up 174,000,000,000,000 bytes (174 × 1012 bytes = 174,000 GB = 174 TB) of text. Assuming the same book size of the monographs in the British Library (13.3 million), the result is 79,800,000,000,000 bytes or 79.8 TB. Ignoring duplicate holdings (probably high, in the order of 25–50%), the combined size of the Gutenberg Galaxy by this method would be around 0.25 PB, or around 250 hard disks of 1 TB each.

One contention of these calculations is that the definition of "book" is open to debate.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.31: "But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village.""
  2. ^ Note that Marshall McLuhan himself states quite clearly that "although the main theme of this book is the Gutenberg Galaxy or a configuration of events, which lies far ahead of alphabet and of scribal culture, it needs to be known why, without alphabet, there would have been no Gutenberg. McLuhan 1962, p.40"
  3. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.136
  4. ^ (McLuhan 1962, first line of the unnamed preface on "page 0")
  5. ^ (McLuhan 1962, p.0)
  6. ^ a b c McLuhan 1962, p.1
  7. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.11-263
  8. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.265-79. The full title of this "epilogue" is "THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society.
  9. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.281-89
  10. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.291-94
  11. ^ John Sutherland 2006.
  12. ^ "To show by exactly what historical process ["modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence"] was done is the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy." McLuhan 1962, p.69
  13. ^ Isabel morisse and Uwe lehmann, Marshall McLuhan Project, Philosophy, The Gutenberg Galaxy
  14. ^ McLuhan himself proposes to demonstrate that "manuscript culture is intensely audile-tactile compared to print culture; and that means that detached habits of observation are quite uncongenial to manuscript cultures, whether ancient Egyptian, Greek, or Chinese or medieval." 1962, p.28.
  15. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.0
  16. ^ "The fall (bababadalghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy." Joyce 1964, p.1
  17. ^ We have gone from the Soviet Union of McLuhan's day to the Russian Federation today.
  18. ^ a b gloss 18: "The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world." McLuhan 1962, p.21
  19. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.108
  20. ^ McLuhan 1962, p.183
  21. ^ gloss 26: Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. McLuhan 1962, p.27
  22. ^ About the Library of Congress Website {2008-08-07}

[edit] Reading Links

  1. McLuhan, Marshall (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy : the making of typographic man. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0802060412 (pbk). 
  2. McLuhan, Marshall; Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel (1967). The medium is the massage, an inventory of effects. New York: Ginko Press. ISBN 978-1584230700 (pbk). 
  3. Joyce, James (Third Edition 1964, (1939)). Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571217359 (pbk). 

[edit] E-links

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