Post by unknownSo again, he says that the medium is the message, and repeats himself,
and then for good measure he repeats himself. The man made a career
out of one cryptic wise-sounding quote.
[... Games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing
release of particular tensions. They are collective and popular art
forms with strict conventions. Ancient and nonliterate societies
naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or of
the outer cosmic drama. The Olympic games were direct enactments of
the agon, or struggle of the Sun god. The runners moved around a track
adorned with the zodiacal signs in imitation of the daily circuit of
the sun chariot. With games and plays that were dramatic enactments of
a cosmic struggle, the spectator role was plainly religious. The
participation in these rituals. kept the cosmos on the right track, as
well as providing a booster shot for the tribe. The tribe or the city
was a dim replica of that cosmos, as much as were the games, the
dances, and the icons. How art became a sort of civilized substitute
for magical games and rituals is-the story of the detribalization
which came with literacy. Art, like games, became a mimetic echo of,
and relief from, the old magic of total involvement. As the audience
for the magic games and plays became more individualistic, the role of
art and ritual shifted from the cosmic to the humanly psychological,
as in Greek drama. Even the ritual became more verbal and less mimetic
or dancelike. Finally, the verbal narrative from Homer and Ovid became
a romantic literary substitute for the corporate liturgy and group
participation. Much of
the scholarly effort of the past century in many fields has been
devoted to a minute reconstruction of the conditions of primitive art
and ritual, for it has been felt that this course offers the key to
understanding the mind of primitive man. The key to this
understanding, however, is also available in our new electric
technology that is so swiftly and profoundly re-creating the
conditions and -attitudes of primitive tribal man in ourselves.
The wide appeal of the games of recent times-the popular sports of
baseball and football and ice hockey-seen as outer models of inner
psychological life, become understandable. As models, they are
collective rather than private dramatizations of inner life. Like our
vernacular tongues, all games are media. of interpersonal
communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning
except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. If we take a tennis
racket in hand, or thirteen playing cards, we consent to being a part
of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially contrived situation. Is this
not the reason we enjoy those games most that mimic other situations
in our work and social lives? Do not our favorite games provide a
release from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine? In a
word, does not Aristotle's idea of drama as a mimetic reenactment and
relief from our besetting pressures apply perfectly to all kinds of
games and dance and fun? For fun or games to be welcome, they must
convey an echo of workaday life. On the other hand, a man or society
without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automation. Art
and games enable us to stand aside from the material pressures of
routine and convention, observing and questioning. Games as popular
art forms offer to all an immediate means of participation in the full
life of a society, such as no single role or job can offer to any man.
Hence the contradiction in "professional" sport. When the games door
opening into the free life leads into a merely specialist job,
everybody senses an incongruity.
The games of a people reveal a great deal about them. Games are a
sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland, or some Utopian vision by
which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives. In
games we devise means of nonspecialized participation in the larger
drama of our time. But for civilized man the idea of participation is
strictly limited. Not for him the depth participation that erases the
boundaries of individual awareness as in the Indian cult of darshan,
the mystic experience of the physical presence of vast numbers of
people.
A game is a machine that can get into action only if the players
consent to become puppets for a time.. For individualist Western man,
much of his "adjustment" to society has the character of a personal
surrender to the collective demands. Our games help both to teach us
this kind of adjustment and also to provide a release from it. The
uncertainty of the outcomes of our contests makes a rational excuse
for the mechanical rigor of the rules and procedures of the game....]
- Marshall McLuhan and Ted Carpenter, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA: THE
EXTENSIONS OF MAN, 1964, p.237-8 (MIT Press Edition)
The GREAT Bob Dobbs