Know Thyself: Action and Perception -- Book 3, The Human Equation Toolkit

By Wayne Constantineau and Eric McLuhan

The third of five books in the groundbreaking new series The Human Equation Toolkit.

In Books 1 and 2 of The Human Equation Toolkit series, mime Wayne Constantineau and scholar Eric McLuhan explore the four postures and the four modes of action. They show how the postures (standing, lying down, kneeling, sitting) combine with the modes of action (isometric pressure, displacement, configuration, articulation) to provide the basis of all developments in culture, science, activity, and media.

Now, in Book 3 of the series, they investigate the interplay between these modes and the modes of perception. "Know yourself" becomes a journey that Socrates -- and perhaps even the Delphic Oracle -- never could have imagined: a sense-opening odyssey into the pathological and physiological effects of the media -- or extensions -- of humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPS Books
• Release date: Sep 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781927483312

Wayne Constantineau

The late Wayne Constantineau was a mime and scholar who left behind him, at his death in 2006, his studies on mime and the insights of Marshall McLuhan. Eric McLuhan, who is bringing these studies to fruition in The Human Equation Toolkit, is also the author of Laws of Media (written with Marshall McLuhan), Electric Language, and The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake. He is also the editor of several collections of his father's work.

Book preview

Preface to Book 3

This third book of The Human Equation series explores the interplay between our four modes of action and the modes of perception. The interval between postures is always where the action is.

This book is thus an introduction to the study of the pathology of the extensions of man, and the physiology of those extensions as bodily forms. Each new extension of the body or the faculties instills an unconscious bias of perception and bias of modes of action.

Art is the only area where perception is fresh and not biased, where training of perception is the norm and is a continual process. Art changes its function as the mode of culture changes. In a time of rapid change such as ours the principal occupation of every artist is to educate his own sensibilities, to remain awake where and when the rest of us are numbed by fresh assaults on our senses by extensions of our senses and bodies. With the appearance of the first electric technologies in the mid-nineteenth century, our arts responded by reverting from concern with producing aesthetic objects to being a process of continual adjustment of an anti-environmental kind.

Since that time, our arts have been countercultural in their structure and operation. Their function has been to offset the bias of new media and restore equilibrium to perception. Consequently the artist in whatever field has to anticipate the effects of media: hence the truism that artists are the antennae of the race.

T. S. Eliot wrote:

[Dante provides] a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already acquainted.*

To that end, the following pages present a few loosening-up exercises.

* In What Dante Means to Me, To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965, 1970), page 134.

Know thyself, thyself in true proportion.

—The Oracle at Delphi

Art bids us touch and taste and hear

and see the world and shrink from

what Blake calls mathematic form,

from every abstract thing,

from all that is not a fountain

jetting from the entire hopes,

memories, and sensations of the body.

—William Butler Yeats, Thinking of the Body

Everybody thinks of changing humanity;

nobody thinks of changing himself.

— An old saying

Introduction

Know Thyself

All fields or universes operate in a manner parallel to the operations of the body’s four modes of action, which are the only four things the human body is capable of doing. As human media reflect and extend the human body, they invariably follow the same fourfold pattern in their structures. Human media include not just reading, television, and the Internet, but also all of our material culture, like spoons and hammers and cars; these, too, all follow the same rule, building on the four essential human modes. For example, in baseball, the actions are hit (muscular contraction), run (displacement), catch (bring to a stop; posture), and throw (articulation).

Human abstract or conceptual structures follow the same structures, as do even the discoveries of science. Posture, for example, is called inertia in one field (Newton’s), gravity in another (the not-yet-accepted unified theory of physics), and tone in yet another (music). If anger is the field of study, you will find that resentment or brooding is analogous to posture while impatience corresponds to articulation, retaliation parallels isometrics, and rage, displacement—a flying rage.

What we call isometric muscular contraction, which Newton