The trick (and McLuhan is nothing if not a trickster, as others have noted) is that the plighting cannot be straightforward or “lineal,” lest it not be a genuine pledge or an authentic weaving. His very writing is obviously a plight for many readers<\/a>, but it’s also a brave (and sometimes wacky) attempt to do a plighting of the plaiting kind as a sort of pledge of responsibility. He writes these stirring words for our consideration:<\/p>\n For myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a\u00a0complex\u00a0group\u00a0of causes and effects. In an age of\u00a0fragmented\u00a0 lineal awareness, such as produced and was in turn greatly exaggerated by Gutenberg technology, mythological vision remains quite opaque. The Romantic poets fell far short of Blake’s\u00a0mythical\u00a0or simultaneous vision. They were faithful to Newton’s single vision and perfected the picturesque outer landscape as a means of isolating single states of the inner life.<\/p>\n From which I draw these conclusions regarding McLuhan’s argument (or plighting):<\/p>\n 1. “Lineal” does not mean “synthesized” or “unified.” The straight path or bounded area leads only to fragmentation and reduction. It is not a weaving and cannot be. The lineal and the fragmented are perilously broken promises.<\/p>\n 2. Mythological vision is a technology for enlarging awareness of complexity. Mythological vision is both plighted-woven and a means for plighting-weaving.<\/p>\n 3. Fragmented, lineal awareness invents technologies of self-propagation that reinforce more lineality, more fragmentation, while giving the illusion of doing quite the opposite. Single-point perspective is not the same as a unifying vision or a simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. It is, instead, reductive while pretending to be unified.<\/p>\n 4. Even self-consciously or self-proclaimed liberatory movements such as Romantic poetry (or any number of other such apparently radical departures) may quail before the complexity and simply reinscribe a slightly shifted set of boundaries, thus perpetuating a reduction of complexity and a lack of awareness that dooms our technologies to reproducing our failures.<\/p>\n What technologies might reveal, restore, or help us co-construct a mythological vision, a species-wide simultaneous\u00a0awareness of a complex group of causes and effects?<\/a> It’s a political question that reaches into the realm of complexity science, art, and potentially even philosophy or (gasp) theology. Does Doug Engelbart’s idea of “augmentation” and complex symbolic innovation answer such a call? Does Bill Viola’s anti-condominium campaign? Is there an eternal golden braid to be had, or woven? What loom should we choose, or make?<\/p>\n “Plight” is an interesting word. We are in a plight, meaning we’re in a tangle, a mess, a terrible fix, with “fix” itself an ironic noun in this context. Yet we also plight our troth, meaning “pledge our truth.” Plight-as-peril … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.telegraph.co.uk\/multimedia\/archive\/01746\/godel-escher-bach_1746389c.jpg?resize=460%2C288\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"