It is not necessary to accept all of McLuhan's positions in order to concede that his views are of some importance to an understanding of much modern art. In his view, the habits and conventions of literacy have imposed their own assumptions on Western consciousness to a much greater degree than has been supposed. When communicating through writing, the individual senses his isolation, his separation in space from other "I's", to a much greater degree than when communication is through the spoken word.[1] The emphasis which literacy places on the visual sense—to the exclusion of hearing and touch-again helps underline this spatial separateness, since it is the eye above all which permits the sense of perspective and orientates the individual in space. By placing a new emphasis on the ear, Radio tends to dissolve the sense of spatial separation. And, as McLuhan argues,
- As visual space is superseded, we discover that there is no continuity or connectedness, let alone depth and perspective, in any of the other senses. The modern artist—in music, in painting, in poetry—has been patiently expounding this fact for some decades, insisting that we educate our
long neglected senses of touch and taste and hearing.[2] In McLuhan's view, the 'return', by means of Radio, to a new form of oral culture similar in many respects to the pre-literate tribal cultures of the past—makes possible a transcendence of the spatial separateness which has been a characteristic of the literate "I":
- An oral or tribal society has the means of stability far beyond anything possible to a visual or civilized and fragmented world. The oral and auditory are structured by a total and simultaneous field of relations describable as "acoustic space". Quite different is the visual world where special goals and points of view are natural and inevitable.[3]
