MCLUHAN+AND+ONTOLOGY+OF+CYBERSPACE

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 * **alphabet/ideogram**
 * **joyce/pound**
 * **shannon/mcluhan**
 * **TV/Internet. --RAW, Recorso.**

= = =GLOCAL FENOLLOSA= Words by **Hwa Yol Jung.**

Annotated and remixed by //Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt//. 'email to the tribe': an interactive exploration into the tale of the tribe.
 * 'Ernest Fenollosa's Etymosinology in the Age of Global Communication' by Hwo Yol Jung.**

=I=

In the age of multiculturalism, global communication is rooted in cross-cultural understanding as shown in McLuhan’s late communication theory.

The American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa went to Japan during the Meiji Restoration when it started in earnest full-scale Westernization.

He became fascinated with the poetics of sinography manifested in etymosinology. Etymosinology reveals the depth of the Sinic cultural soul, which is this-worldly, practical, concrete and speciﬁc.

Sinism (i.e. Confucianism, Daoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism) is a species of relational ontology which is predicated upon the conception of reality as social process. This social process is always already embodied.

With the aid of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, I critically explore and examine the connection between embodiment and ‘new media’ theory.

It is not trite to emphasize that, because the language of ideograms embodies the karma of Sinism, it should be called sinography.

Language is a product of culture as much as culture expresses itself by the communicative medium of language. They are inextricably intertwined.

...and McLuhan put it, today’s shrinking world has turned into ‘a global village’ which invokes the image of communicative praxis in Homeric oral culture.

In the globalizing world of multi- culturalism, the embodied networking of more than one language as medium is a prerequisite for global communication.

Meditate upon the importance of the discovery by Fenollosa of Chinese grammatology or sinography whose etymological anatomy became known as ‘etymosinology’.

Language, thought and culture constitute an inseparable whole,

Etymosinology is the way of deciphering Sinic thought and culture by the etymological composition and decomposition of sino- grams: it is indeed a genre of cultural hermeneutics.

II
‘the medium is the message’ was written after the fashion of Fenollosa’s ars poetica.

McLuhan fancied writing his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy(1962), in the medium of sinograms or in a galaxy of sinograms, as it were.

sinography embodies a vortex of corporate energy (qi) in the double sense of the term corporate – bodily and collective at the same time.

McLuhan opens up a gateway of the ‘**New Science**’ – in the spirit of Vico (see Pietropaolo, 1995) – of cross-cultural communication for the world which has become ‘a global village’.

His theory of embodied communication, just like **Fenollosa’s etymosinology**, has a cosmopolitan outlook in that it not only emulates the performative kinaesthetics of sinography but also is pursued in the ‘posthumanist’ venture of the body as a ‘new media’.

sinography (kanji in Japanese) Fenollosa's 'The Chinese Written Char- acter as a Medium for Poetry made Fenollosa the ‘inventor’ of etymosinology.

The **Cantos** alpha- betic architecture is sporadically adorned by the columns of sinograms.

These columns purportedly shine like the glittering rays of the ‘sunrise’ (East) visible in and through the branches and leaves of trees in the early morning that signiﬁes a new dawn of poetics or poetic hermeneutics in the West.

This new dawn points to Confucius’ performativenotion of the ‘rectiﬁcation of names’ (zheng ming) in all human conduct and endeavors, that is, in speech, morals, as well as grammatology.

As Confucius emphasized in the Analects, ‘without knowing the power of language, it is impossible to know humans’ (Book XX, ch. iii, para. 3).

The motto of Paideuma, the journal devoted to Pound scholarship, is zheng ming(!") as a ‘new paideuma’.

III
Etymosinology implies the inseparable connection between the Chinese language and culture in their historical patterns.

Since time immemorial the Chinese have acknowledged the inter- relatedness of external reality and the language that describes it.

Emerson’s inﬂuence on Fenollosa’s conception of poetry seems undeniable and clearly visible

For Fenollosa, poetry and language grew up together as twins. Long before Emerson and Fenollosa, the Neapolitan philosopher who made no distinction between Egyptian hieroglyphics and sinograms, propounded the view that not only is poetry inseparable from language but also poetry is the ‘origin’ (arche) of language itself.
 * Giambattista Vico**,

What Emerson saw in hieroglyphics Fenollosa saw in sinograms. The ‘decompositional’ or ‘unpacking’ of sino-etymology:

Take the following examples of **‘hypograms**’ as the corporate and concrete insemination of other sinograms (sinograms upon and bysinograms) provided by Fenollosa himself:

‘East’b*is an entanglement of ‘sun’ with ‘tree’ (i.e. the sun entangled in the branches of a tree in the early morning at sunrise);

‘ancient’c*is a composite of ‘ten’ and ‘mouth’ (‘ten’ over ‘mouth’, i.e. presumably referring to what has come down through the mouth for ten generations);

‘ﬁdelity’d*is a composite of ‘human’ and ‘word’ (i.e. the human standing byhis/her word).

‘humanity’ or humaneness: a composite of ‘human’ and ‘two’ (i.e. ‘two persons’ standing together)

a composite of ‘ear’, ‘mouth’ and ‘king’. As the ‘king’ is the uniﬁer of heaven, man and earth, the ‘sage’ is the uniﬁer of heaven, man and earth by speaking and hearing truthfully.
 * ‘sage’ (shen ren).f

Furthermore, for the Chinese ‘nature’ is also concretely signiﬁed by two sinograms: ‘ten thousand’ (man) and ‘things’ (i.e. it is 'ten thousand things’).

IV
Carnal Hermeneutics and McLuhan’s Philosophy of Global Communication.

McLuhan became fascinated and attracted by the audio-tactile morphology of Chinese ideograms or sinograms, which were introduced by way of the ‘etymosinology’ of Ernest Fenollosa, whose literary executor was the American poet Ezra Pound.

Following the footsteps of his compatriot, McLuhan has the gift of interpreting the course of Western civilization in terms of the medium of communication.
 * Harold A. Innis**,

He proposes the way of conceiving the interplay between the medium and the sensorium in which the periodization of Western civilization is characterized as (1) **tribalization** in oral and auditory culture, (2) detribalization in alphabetic and typographic (i.e. hegemonically visualist or ‘popeyed’) culture, and (3) retribalization in electronic culture, which is quintessentially tactile.

This article explores the idea that the embodiment of language, spoken or written, is the fundamental precondition of global communication.

The ‘new science’ of Laws of Media (McLuhan and McLuhan, 1988), after the fashion of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, also contains McLuhan’s attempt at transversalizing the East and the West based on audio-tactile space in sinography in opposition to the Western hegemony of visual space as a side-effect of ‘the uniform, continuous, and fragmented character of the phonetic alphabet’

McLuhan relies heavily on the ﬁndings of Fritjof Capra which dissolve the difference or tension between physics and metaphysics in the ineffable mysticism of the East, i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and Zen, by ‘networking’ of the two radically different systems of thinking.

We hear a grim echo of Daedalus’ voice in J**ames Joyce’s** Ulysses concerning history as a nightmare.

Onewonders if the technoromanticism that folds humanity and technology into one ﬂeshfold is a dream come true or a nightmare to be continued.

Words by **Hwa Yol Jung.** Annotated and remixed by //Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt// For 'email to the tribe' an interactive exploration into the tale of the tribe

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QUOTES
"Ez, McLuhan and associates reprinted Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry " As part of their Square Dollar Series. It Anticipates some Formulations of General Semantics and NLP --**ROBERT ANTON WILSON**

"Marshall McLuhan came up with the phrase "the global village" as a way to describe the effect of radio in the 1920s in bringing us in faster and more intimate contact with each other that ever before in human experience. Ironically, today one often hears people exclaim that the global village is now "on the point of finally being achieved," or that it is "clearly getting closer to reality," and so forth. He would have said that such remarks are a reliable indicator that that condition has been displaced by some other and more potent one. The reason: by the time that the average person can see something it has ceased to be environmental and become the content of another environment. Something newer has made it visible even as it has itself taken over general control. --[]

=Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace by Mark Pesce=

http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/fa.html

"A century and a half ago man extended and superseded his organism through the use of the electric technology of the telegraph. In an instant the velocity of human communication and the ability to coordinate human activity reached its uppermost physical limit, the speed of light. This phenomenon has been described by **Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man**, as an extension, or outering, of the human nervous system.

 After three thousand years of explosion, by means  of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western  world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had  extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a  century of electric technology, we have extended our  central nervous system itself in a global embrace,  abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is  concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the  extensions of man - the technological simulation of  consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will  be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of  human society, much as we have already extended our  senses and nerves by various media. Whether the  extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers  for specific products, will be a "good thing" is a question <span class="fb_quote"> that admits of wide solution. There is little possibility of <span class="fb_quote"> answering such questions about the extensions of man <span class="fb_quote"> without considering all of them together. Any extension, <span class="fb_quote"> whether of skin, hand or foot, affects the whole psychic <span class="fb_quote"> and social complex.[1]

http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/fa.html

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