Dilettantery

"Historians have noted that the shift from oral to written scripture often results in strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic and ethical disciplines of ritual, they can approach a text in a purely cerebral fashion, missing the emotive and therapeutic aspects of its stories and instructions.” -Karen Armstrong “On the elite level, laymen became more erudite than churchmen; grammar and philology challenged the reign of theology; Greek and Hebrew studies forced their way into the schools. On the popular level, ordinary men and women began to know their scripture as well as most parish priests; markets for vernacular catechisms and prayer books expanded; church Latin no longer served as a sacred language which unified all of Western Christendom...The two-pronged attack was mounted from one and the same location— that is, from the newly established printer’s workshop.” -Elizabeth Eisenstein Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/neeh52/117_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_3_christianity_the/?

“Medieval scholars did not see the classical past from a fixed distance as we do now. They did not regard it as a container of objects to be placed in glass cases and investigated by specialists in diverse scholarly fields.” -Elizabeth Eisenstein "Given drifting texts, migrating manuscripts, localized chronologies, multiform maps, there could be no systematic forward movement, no accumulation of stepping stones enabling a new generation to begin where the prior one had left off. Progressive refinement of certain arts a skills could and did occur, but no sophisticated technique could be securely established, permanently recorded, and stored for subsequent retrieval. Before trying to account for an ‘idea’ of progress we might look more closely at the duplicating process that made possible not only a sequence of improved editions but also a continuous accumulation of fixed records. For it seems to have been permanence that introduced progressive change, The preservation fo the old, in brief, launched a tradition of the new." -Elizabeth Eisenstein Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ned9qi/116_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_2_stereotypes_and/?

"[Printing] is the most beautiful gift from heaven. It soon will change the countenance of the universe… Printing was only born a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection… Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous writer!” -Louis-Sebástien Mercier, Pre-revolutionary France “The prospering merchant publisher had to know as much about books and intellectual trends as a cloth merchant did about drygoods and dress fashions; he needed to develop a connoisseur’s expertise about typestyles, book catalogues and library sales. He often found it useful to master many languages, to handle variant texts, to investigate antiquities and old inscriptions along with new maps and calendars. In short, the very nature of his business provided the merchant publisher with a broadly based liberal education. It also led toward a widened circle of acquaintances and included close contacts with foreigners.” -Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n91kax/115_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_1_the_printers/?

"Books are carefully folded forests" -Saul Williams “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life, In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method in itself; that is the real novelty which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization…One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.” -Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925 “For example, Isaac Newton, whose universal law of gravitation circumscribes the movement of all things under one principle, is charged in 1696 by the king of England with the task of re-minting its entire currency. All the old silver coins, whose value was constantly decreased by being worn down over time, are recalled, and in their place Newton, soon to be made Master of the Mint for his services, substitutes a new currency whose weight and value are as ‘homogeneous, stable, uniform, and predictable’ as the fall of things under the sway of gravity.” -Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream, 1989 "The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy: Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable individual possessions. Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type reproduced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto-impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man’s sensorium. As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies toward individualism and specialization engendered 2000 years before by phonetic literacy. The schism between thought and action was institutionalized, and fragmented man, first sundered by the alphabet, was at last diced into bite-sized tidbits. From that point on, Western man was Gutenberg man." -Marshall Mcluhan, Playboy interview, 1969 Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n3u38m/114_mcluhan_on_the_revolutionary_effects_of_print/?

“What the world is to-day, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source. . . .” -Mark Twain, 1900 Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n3ruco/113_printing_technologies_in_asia_and_europe/?

Sorry for the delay, I had to relearn Garageband because it "updated." Also, this is a bit of a meat and potatoes episode, I promise things will get more interesting following this one.  Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n0c12r/112_the_manuscript_age_part_2_renascences/?

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” -Cicero (probably apocryphal) “The words the reader sees are not the words that he will hear.” -James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, paraphrased by Mcluhan Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/lxfj6d/111_the_manuscript_age_part_1_silent_reading_in/?

"The global village was modeled on colonial strategies intended to transform the semiotic, economic, and spatial fabric of the decolonizing world in such a way as to safeguard British economic and political interests in the aftermath of independence. Following the example of British strategy in Kenya, the global village can be understood as a mechanism for pacifying postcolonial agrarian society by absorbing people made landless by the relentless expansion of agrarian capital. The global village—like villagization—was intended to enfold dispossessed denizens into the incipient nation-form and into the global market, while simultaneously withholding the modes of semiotic power required to participate effectively in a public sphere.” -Ginger Nolan "The Europeans often believe paper over people..." -Ted Chiang "The white people never stop setting their eyes on the drawings of their speech, which they circulate among themselves pasted on paper skins. This way they just stare at their own thought and only end up knowing what is already inside their minds."  -Davi Kopenawa Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/lg2n5x/110_jack_goody_part_3_the_vai_scribner_and_cole/?

"He was an old man who had seen life. In his village he had prepared himself to live a full life. But the change came. It was not a sudden change. A white man with a book in his hand. Every evening this white man with the book had sat at the edge of the village and played with the children." —David Rubadiri, No Bride Price, 1967 "Because of the colonizing structure, a dichotomizing system has emerged, and with it a great number of current paradigmatic oppositions have developed: traditional versus modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies. In Africa a great deal of attention is generally given to the evolution implied and promised by the passage from the former paradigms to the latter." —V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ldmyji/19_jack_goody_part_2_the_gonja_kingdom_and_the/?

Continuing our divergence away from Mcluhan, I introduce the work of Jack Goody, the anthropologist, and look over his and some other people's criticisms of what's called the Alphabet Effect or the Alphabetic Literacy Theory.  Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/kabgyl/18_jack_goody_part_1_nuance_and_china/? Follow me on twitter @DilettanteryPod