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THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

"The Galaxy Reconfigured," the concluding chapter of McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy," examines how typographic technology reshapes Western thought. McLuhan's assertion that exploring collective unconsciousness is essential reflects William Blake's vision of humanity's relationship with technology. As society evolved, mechanical matching overshadowed imaginative creation. The text addresses absurdities in market economies within transitional cultures and emphasizes a shift from 19th-century perspectives to an open "field" in understanding media and literacy. McLuhan invites us to navigate the complexities of the electric age.

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THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED

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  1. THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED Marshall McLuhan Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: "I don't pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult." Playboy Magazine 1969

  2. THE GALAXYRECONFIGURED • Last chapter of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) • Typographic technology caused a shift in Western thought • Gutenberg as a starting point for understanding the current shifts

  3. THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • William Blake: Externalization of the sense, bodily or mental function in technological form • In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it • Blake had the insights but not the technological resources for rendering his vision.

  4. THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • The best of all possible worlds “was merely a quantitive idea of a bag crammed to the utmost with goodies…” • Mechanical matching, not imaginative making • The intellectual is no longer to direct the individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicatie the massive unconsciousness of collective man.

  5. THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • A market economy “can exist only in a market society.” • Absurdity in the present time of trying to institute market economies in countries like Russia or Hungary. • A long period of psychic transformation.

  6. THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • The method not of closure and perspective but of the open “field” • Shift: Bag crammed full of goodies  open “field” • [open field] Reverses all aspects of the 19th century discovery of the assembly-line

  7. THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED • What will be the new configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of perception and judgment are interpenetrated by the new electric age? • Trauma and tension to every living person.

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