McLuhan media Tetrad, extension of (extract from Works in Progress)
March 11, 2014
Marshall McLuhan describes a tetrad of transformations that can be applied to culture as the technology of media changes. He summarizes the four conditions as
- Enhance
- render obsolete
- retrieve from obsolecence
- flip under extremes
The pressures of technology that McLuhan identifies is the shift from sequential to simultaneous. Linear to Aural. Print to Electronic. Bear in mind that 'electronic' media at the time meant television and the telephone...but the principle holds true.
What if we take this same model, maintain the structure, but shift the terms a bit. If we replace culture with the human body, then the tetrad of transformation becomes the impact on the individual of changes in technology. What if we also replace technology with aesthetics? The tetrad of transformation in response to aestheticc pressure. And if we continue to define a specific force of aesthetic pressure, that of a confrontation with the vectors of scale.
What happens to the medium||body when it is pushed to extremes by the aesthetic forces of the vectors of scale? The response is a flip through mortality to the medium of imagination.