Specialisms

Some time ago now I started reading the book at reference 1. This led to reference 2, which led in turn to reference 4, by one Marshall McLuhan, a short book of some 280 not very big pages of text, broken into short sections by around 100 rather loud ‘chapter glosses’. One of which, chosen at random from the list supplied at the end of the book is ‘The Machiavellian mind and the merchant mind are at one in their simple faith in the power of segmental division to rule all-in the dichotomy of power and morals and of money and morals’. The opening pages are snapped above. I think the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ refers to what happened in the five centuries which came between the invention of printing with moveable, alphabetic type and the arrival of electromagnetic and electrical media.

McLuhan was a twentieth century Canadian who got converted to Catholicism and went through various institutions, initially majoring on English, including Cambridge University (and Leavis) before going on to settle down for the rest of his career at Toronto – where he tutored Ong of reference 1 for a while. He was influential, particularly in media studies, in the 1960s and 1970s – although I had somehow managed to avoid him until hitherto. This from Wikipedia at reference 5. 

There are subject matter links to reference 7, where just one reference to McLuhan is to be found. It seems quite likely that Gallivan had come across the present book, although he never mentioned it.

Reference 4 is a rather odd book, to which I shall return in due course, but for the present, the interest in McLuhan’s use of the word ‘specialize’ and its relations. It seemed to me that he was making heavy use of this word and that I needed to try to get to the bottom of what he meant by it. From the outset, in his hands, the word had acquired a negative flavour: all this specializing was a bad thing.

I started by searching the text, using the Acrobat search function. Searching for ‘special’ gives 96 results. Searching for ‘speciali’ – speciality, specialize, specialist – gives 46 or one every six pages or so. Searching for ‘especial’ gives 34. The rule for searching looks to be startswith.

But next some background, before I get back to usage.

Argument

The argument of the book – so far as I have got – seems to be that the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet (around 500BC) and to an even greater extent the invention of the moveable type printing press (around 1450), triggered changes in the human conditions which can be assembled under the head ‘specialisation’.

The invention of perspective at about the same time as the invention of the printing press was very much part of the same tendency. Which came to something of a head at about the time that Shakespeare was active.

Both involved massive simplifications, reducing important aspects of the complicated life of humans to one or two dimensions. To one or two overly visual dimensions, with other modalities losing out. With the move from the spoken to the printed word being an important example.

Specialisation might have made for lots of progress, particularly of the scientific and technological variety, but there were downsides. Downsides which are now being mitigated by the return – some might say regression – to orality, to face-to-face, a return which has been facilitated by radio, television and all the rest of it.

Dictionary

The word ‘special’ and variants earns about three, three column pages in OED, of which more than a page is given to special, an old word from the 13th century, closely related to the originally French ‘especial’. Adjective, adverb and noun.

Some of the variants appear to be quite new, from the 19th century, but speciality, specialize, specially and specialty all appear to be quite old.

I did not spot any bizarre or off-piste usages. No parts of boats or unusual animals. Nor do McLuhan’s various usages look off-piste. Just odd.

Specie and species, which come next, both get substantial entries, are both old, but are from different roots.

Given the prominence of moveable type in the book, I also thought to look that one up, initially online. I found that OED offer a much better website than I remember – the only catch being that one has to pay to get properly in. So I consulted the print version downstairs instead.

It seems that while ‘type’ is quite an old word with usage going back to the 14th century, type to do with printing does not appear until the early 18th century – a date which has moved back to the early 17th century online. Someone has done some more digging in the century between the two editions.

It seems that type started out denoting a single bit of type, then generalising to its modern usages. I wondered if the connection with the other kinds of types is that it is like the type species of taxonomy, the species which best stands for the genus concerned. Type as in typical. So here, a single fixed way of doing the letter which has to stand in for all the other ways that the letter might be written. Fonts aside, the forcing of the letter into a singular, standard form.

Word search

Looking at the present book, as noted above, searching for ‘special’ gives 96 results. Searching for ‘speciali’ – that is to say words like speciality, specialize and specialist – gives 46. For ‘especial’ gives 34. The rule for searching looks to be startswith. In what follows, I have looked mostly at the 46.

Then, given the attention given to King Lear, I wondered about the use of the words ‘book’ and ‘letter’ in Shakespeare. Which led me to reference 10 which contained a feature which could do exactly that. ‘Book’ produces 141 results, one from Lear.

I also noticed one from ‘Julius Caesar’, in a speech by Cassius in Act IV Sc III, checking up on which told me that I did not know the play anything like as well as I thought I did. This speech being part of a flare-up between Brutus and Cassius before Philippi.

‘Letter’ does rather better with 356 hits – with quite a lot in Lear, and a lot of those to do with either Edgar or Edmund. Suggesting that the upper classes, at least by the end of 16th century, could mostly read if not write. And that Shakespeare’s audience, while not necessarily able to read or write themselves, would know all about it, would know what reading and writing could do.

It seems odd, given the weight put on Lear, that McLuhan attempts no analysis of this sort of thing. Maybe it will turn up later.

Digression to Yeats and others

At one point specialise digresses to Yeats who we are told understands all about the problem, which led to references 8 and 9. Reference 8 is a Irish literature resource put together by an international Irishman, one Bruce Stewart. While reference 9 is part of an essay on Yeats, which references the present book, by one Denis Donoghue. Maybe the sort of thing which would have engaged Richard Church, the poet and literary gent of recent interest.

All of which leads, inter alia, to Peter of Spain (or Portugal), nominalism and a dispute between Locke and Berkeley. All of which goes to reinforce the impression that McLuhan had ranged far and wide to produce the present book, the present argument. One wonders whether he had spread himself a bit thin.

For myself, I find it hard to take a serious interest in the status of things, of concepts, which do not exist as substantial objects in the regular world; the sort of things that children engage with verbally in the first instance. In the status of the concept of dog in general as opposed to the various particular dogs that I come across in my travels.

But I notice in passing that our Lord has the same sort of existence as the concept ‘dog’. In the sense that neither have bodily existence, but both have continuing existence in the brains of lots of people. We can talk about both, more or less as if they did have bodily existence. One day we might find out exactly how the brain does this.

Usages

McLuhan starts with the opening of King Lear, with both his attempt to become a constitutional monarch – I had never thought of it in this way before – and his daughters’ competitive declarations of love being examples of specialising. Or, in Cordelia’s case, lack of it. With the reduction of his world to a map being another. I associate to all the rights which used to cut across maps, for example hunting rights, mineral rights and the rights to the walnuts from certain trees. With my understanding here being that first, in this country, you can retain hunting rights over land that you have let to a farmer. And that second, in parts of France, you can own the walnuts from a tree without owning the land on which the tree is growing.

We have the observation: ‘… We can ask ourselves later why the fanatic specialism of the Phoenicians, which hacked the alphabet out of the hieroglyphic culture, did not release any further intellectual or artistic activity in them…’. But I not yet found the answer – so as things stand, we have a counter example.

One of the spin-offs of specialization is the machine. On page 29, McLuhan tells us of an ancient Chinese anecdote about why using a nifty device to make it much easier to draw water from a well is a bad thing. ‘… He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul…’.

There is some discussion of Chinese ideograms and printing and why these did not generate specialization and progress in the way that the phonetic alphabet and printing did in the west. We are told that ‘… The ideogram affords none of the separation and specialization of sense, none of the breaking apart of sight and sound and meaning which is the key to the phonetic alphabet…’. In which there may be something, but rather more than what is offered here would have been better. And I remain to be convinced that this use of the word specialization helps.

Senses

Reading ideograms and reading words written in phonetic alphabets are both matters for the eyes alone. One cannot hear the written word and one does not stroke it.

Notwithstanding, my present belief is that the master copy of a word, as it were, in the human brain, is held in sound form, perhaps as the sequence of motor commands needed to articulate the word. With one piece of evidence here being the tendency to articulate words when silently reading them, although not usually to the point of audibility. So, in order to identify a written word, the brain needs to be able to map from the visual to the spoken form.

On the other hand, it is also the case that the written word is tactile in a way that the printed word is not. An ideogram painted with a brush does stir up tactile sensations, albeit via the eyes. The same is probably true of the elaborate and decorative calligraphy of the Muslims.

Contrariwise, the ideogram does not stir up aural sensations in the same way that a word written phonetically does. Such a written word does not contain the whole story of the sound, but it certainly helps. The brain is given acoustic material to assist with its mapping of the written word to something in the master copy of the vocabulary of the person concerned.

And it is reasonable to say that the visual sense has been adapted or enlarged to deal with written words. But has this got anything to do with specialization, in the ordinary sense of the word?

I further associate to the subroutines of computer programs. So one might have a subroutine which computes the elapsed time between two time-date stamps, with a parameter saying in what units you want the answer – thinking here of the Excel datedif function. One might want, for example, the difference between 6/9/2007 10:35:12 AM and 7/9/2007 3:30:07 PM expressed as the nearest number of minutes. A good subroutine will do this every time, will never fail, without paying any attention to the context or any other properties of the dates in question; it will be exclusively focussed on difference. It will not care, for example, that one of the dates is your birthday or the day that you are supposed to be going to the dentist. Maybe this sort of focus is related to what McLuhan calls specialization.

More usages

We are told that ‘… As Emile Durkheim had insisted, men could not take much more of the fragmentation of work and experience by visual specialization…’. I had no prior knowledge of Durkheim, but reference 11 seemed to be a reasonable place to start. However, online perusal of the introduction (starting at his page 39, snapped above) has not been very helpful. It is true that Durkheim writes extensively of the unhealthy degree of division of labour and specialization, but it still seems a bit of a stretch to bring visual specialization into it.

A few pages later (at page 66) the argument is developed to the point where until the transition to sedentary life enabled specialization, in particular visual specialization, there were not going to be any rectangles.

Cathedral schools did not have the time to specialize their Bible studies in a modern way; they had other matters to attend to (page 110). While I did not understand the point being made, this does seem to be a more ordinary use of the word ‘specialize’.

Perspective with its points of view was invented by Alberti at about the same time as the printing press – and it would not have succeeded while people were still locked into the manuscript culture. They needed the sensory specialization brought about by their consuming the printed word rather than the written word, writing which was still impregnated with all kinds of non-visual cues.

[From page 125 – complete with one of the chapter glosses mentioned above]

It seems that this specialisation, whether or not it was driven by the invention of printing, was a two-edged weapon. On the one hand it facilitated material and other kinds of progress – but on the other it reduced our experience of the world to something rather minimal, perhaps one or two dimensional.

Which seems a reasonable place to stop for now.

Aside

At at least one place, McLuhan writes of the complexity of classical Chinese writing, of all the elaborate conventions which go into such writing. I think that he regarded this as a bad thing, an impediment to progress. From which I associate to the care and effort that some civil servants used to pour into their written work, into their minutes. Crafting the perfect minute became something of an end it itself, perhaps becoming rather detached from its nominal purpose. I associate further to reading of an eighteenth century French aristocrat explaining that a good conversationalist could construct a wonderful conversational edifice while actually saying more or less nothing; certainly nothing pointed or offensive. It was just an elaborate and pleasurable game.

Microsoft Word irritates again by ticking me off for not putting a hyphen between eighteenth and century. Just like some pedantic Victorian school teacher of old.

Conclusions

The specialism word seems to me to have been rather overworked and used to corral together all kinds of things for the purposes of the argument without adequate justification. I do not find any convincing linkage of alphabet and printing to the sorts of specializations that McLuhan writes about. Furthermore, I suspect that while he may well have a point, that he probably overdoes it, overstates it, that he neglects other aspects of the matter. In fact, very much a victim of the very tunnel vision of the specialist that he complains of.

But perhaps I will get on better if I manage to read the book properly.

[Some more chapter glosses]

References 

Reference 1: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word – Walter J. Ong, S.J. – 1982.

Reference 2: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present – Eric A Havelock – 1986. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Havelock. 

Reference 4: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man – Marshall McLuhan – 1962. Book_226. I have used a pdf version.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan. A long entry. 

Reference 6: The Order of the Letters in the Greek Alphabet – John L. Myres – 1942.

Reference 7: Shakespeare and perspective – Colum Gallivan – 2012. Unpublished, this draft, lightly edited, was recovered by chance from gmail.

Reference 8: http://www.ricorso.net/. 

Reference 9: http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/major/Yeats_WB/Donogue_D/Donoghue_D2.htm. 

Reference 10: https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php. 

Reference 11: The division of labour in society – Émile Durkheim – 1933.