 audio: McLuhan on Cavet
“Do you talk w/ your trumpet?” – Marshall McLuhan
The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!
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[…] contends that the narcotic numbness that Marshall McLuhan used to describe our continuous embrace of our own technology, explains why […]
[…] The point of developing SCVA is that there is a lot more about all of this that we do not understand at the moment, then there are simple things to grab onto. How do you get across that complexity when people are time starved and operating with attention deficits (or what McLuhan would call “narcotic numbness“)? […]
[…] figured out why its a game, because you either lose or are frightened because of the trick this is Narcosis – you seeing yourself, now you either fight or get over it, but there is no resisting this stage. […]
[…] contends that the narcotic numbness that Marshall McLuhan used to describe our continuous embrace of our own technology, explains why […]
[…] The point of developing SCVA is that there is a lot more about all of this that we do not understand at the moment, then there are simple things to grab onto. How do you get across that complexity when people are time starved and operating with attention deficits (or what McLuhan would call “narcotic numbness“)? […]