Squids and Skulls

Á propos our earlier note, “Point of Method,” it is with interest that we monitor the current fixation on the "translucent skull." Today, the image of the "chemical" brain, albeit in a variety of guises, appears to be getting a lot of attention. Dispassionate survey and appraisal of the situation would seem to be warranted, even if it is a little to hard to find (particularly after decades of perpetual motion and emotion).

“The U.S., the only great country in the world based on a written Constitution, has no way of coping legally or politically with the new oral and acoustic situa­tions created by the electronic bugging and the general X-ray procedures in the entire private sector. Man-hunting has become the biggest business on the planet in the electronic age, and is a return to the Paleolithic conditions of the hunter.” McLuhan, To Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 26 March 1974. Emphasis mine.

“When the movies were new, they used literature as content. When TV was new, it used movies as content. The laser beam will use human dreams and the audience of the intellect right off the court decks. They will be scrubbed, but good!” Marshall McLuhan, “Response to New Media,” Explorations in University of Toronto's Varsity Graduate, November, 1968.

And then...(these letters are from the late 1960s and early 1970s).