"Before the advent of printing, it was quite natural for the means of communication to be regarded as extensions of a single body. In an increasingly literate society, money and the clock assumed a high degree of visual or fragmented stress." So McLuhan wrote on page 136 of Understanding Media.
Q: What is "visual or fragmented stress?"
A: "Visual stress" is non-representational and bends the brittle rules of perspective, like the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. De Chririco is chock full of visual stress. On the other hand, "fragmented stress" is strongly associated with cubism.
Q: What does this have to do with money and the clock?
Da Vinci and Networked Earth
A: Ask anyone who ever painted clocks or money, for example Salvador Dali once said "Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory." Eventually we, the public, listened, although the American transformation to a paper money society was actually made for chiropractic reasons, to end the rash of spinal assymetry caused by coin-laden purses.
The globe gets smaller, becomes a single body, McLuhan's metaphor (media as physical extensions of the human body) incorporates itself in the specatcle of the Australian performance artist, Stelarc, a born-again Terminator cyborg. The single body phenomenon is a golem devouring the tangible tokens of trade. The rise and fall of the "smart chips" which had been implanted in credit cards during the late 90's (only to fall by the wayside in the next millenium) pave the way for credit implants, extensions of future earnings which literally inscribe the boundaries of scientific prediction. If Gutenberg were alive today, he'd have already placed a GPS cyber-chip implant underneath his dog's neck.
Poetry
"M
uch of Donne's twentieth-century vogue was due to his challenging the authority of the new Gutenberg age to invest him with the stigmata of uniform repeatable typography and with the motives of precise visual meaurement. In like manner, Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' was full of contempt for the new spirit of measurement and calculation of time and virtue." (Understanding Media, page 150)
In another like manner, marvel at Andrew Marvell's epic love poem, "The Gallery." He decries Gutenberg's literary mechanization, canonically damning his printing press:
(thy fertile shop of cruel arts,)
Engines more keen than ever yet
Adorned tyrant's cabinet."
Saint Francis of Assissi Receiving Stigmata and "Jesus Is Lord" Pen
Marvell's protagonist prescribes the revolutionary fervor that followed the wake of Gutenbergian repeatable type, and Marvell personfies the dawning new information age in the figure of Aurora, the light-imbued "drawn … enchantress." This explosion of information ("Art grown to a numerous colony, and a collection choicer far / than or Whithall's, or Mantua's were") detoured the avenue of mediated power away from religion and through the burgeoning middle class neighborhoods of London's West End, a political reality which carried even Marvell himself into the halls of Parliament when he entered the House of Commons as a member from the district of Hull.
Politically and poetically Marvell promoted Cromwell's rise to power, eulogizing the New Model Army in speech and verse, stoking the movement that would eventually remove the very head of British government. Poetry gave Romantic individualism a place at the table, but Marvell passed it the butter.
