As difficult as it is to read McLuhan, his seminal work Understanding Media is full of prophetic intuitions that fuse past, present and future into finally sectioned tid-bits of modern realities. We often look to mass media for clues into the human condition, to grasp the effects of our own intellectual progress, and to reconcile each new technological wave with the social preconditions of our recent past. What McLuhan does best, in a very opaque and pedantic fashion, is literate the unwieldniness of technological progress as it stands in the scope of human history. The confusion that one feels when reading McLuhan (which I now believe should be done quickly and without stopping) is the felt effect of a present projected on to the past, of the social implications of the printed text as it “cools” in order to become more habitual, only to be replaced by new mediums that demand the learning of new perceptions. It is no wonder then, that MIT chose Lewis Lapham to write the introduction for its Press Edition. From his time at Harper’s magazine to his own collections of essays, Lapham himself finds the cognates of present human failures in the dredges of human history.

Of the many themes collected in Understanding Media, the perceptual being (thinking, feeling, recognizing) is placed front and center. In Number however, his analysis of the frantic experience generator that is each new media, takes a weird and bat-shit-crazy turn. Although I buy the premise that geometric fields and mathematical models become easier to grasp visually with the power of the printed word, how this visual perception then produces a tactile sensation is beyond my own field of perception. This is, of course, a very McLuhanesque leap, and I am happy to see others in class struggling with their own selections from the book. I can, however, offer a humble summation for this numerical concept. As McLuhan shows us, when we begin to alter our understanding of perceptually difficult mathematical principles through the abstractions like calculus (in limits and infinite repeatability), we come to a point when existing perceptual fields dissolve and become intensified, giving way to the tactile. He writes, “Since we habitually translate one sense into another in our own experience, it need not surprise us that our extended senses or technologies should repeat the process of translations and assimilation of one form into another” (116). There should be more on this in my presentation tomorrow, especially in regards to the crowd and economics, as well as parallels in this chapter with Benjamin and Baudelaire.