Marshall McLuhan 1968 - Iconic and Pictorial Space -Fordham University Tape

Title: Iconic and Pictorial Space
Date: 29 April 1968
Location: Fordham University
Introduction: by John Culkin
Speakers: Marshall McLuhan, Harvey Parker

During the 1967-1968 academic year, McLuhan, the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities, oversaw an alternative curriculum of lectures, film showings and independent study assignments for students. Within two months of his appointment in 1967 he is hospitalised and underwent the longest brain surgery the world has known until that date (2 1/2hours and removal of benign brain tumou. McLuhan’s appointment came about through communications professor John Culkin, S.J., a longtime colleague of McLuhan’s and himself a media expert.

John Culkin (b. 1928), who was a Jesuit priest until 1969, first met McLuhan at a seminar Brandeis University in 1963, while he was working on his doctorate at Harvard, where one of his project was to write a clear explication of McLuhan’s ideas. (He found this difficult until he was directed to McLuhan’s fourteen-chapter Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960): see page 255-6). In 1965 Culkin was appointed Director of the Centre for Communication at Fordham University and was instrumental in arranging for McLuhan’s appointment to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fortham in 1967-8. Culkin later founded in New York City the Centre for Understanding Media, and a graduate-school program in media studies at the New School for Social Research, both of which are explicitly based on McLuhan’s work. He is acclaimed to have invented the field of Media Literacy.

Founded in 1841, Fordham is the Jesuit University of New York, offering exceptional education distinguished by the Jesuit tradition to more than 15,100 students in its four undergraduate colleges and its six graduate and professional schools.

Concepts: 6:27 Altamira cave art (iconic space) vs. pictorial space and relevance to SDS riots failure of the Chinese experiment in Western literacy 8:55 one can't have a critical attitude toward Art today 11:26 describes the students/hippies at Columbia Culkin disagrees with Harley McLuhan on the new retrieved "guerilla activity" (the hunter) in all areas of life 12:59 the present "Bucky Fuller kind of space" 16:19 the solution for education is training in percept (via the hunter) not concept 16:44 Harley rebuts Culking 17:52 electricity is like charity 18:07 the electric age is a "university of Being" (Meister Eckhart) 18:48 Art is not a subject but a way of life (like religion) 19:20 no goals (only involvement) in modern warfare (only images in politics [see Hubert Humphrey]) 21:37 integration (in the 1920s via jazz ["the greatest form of poetry created in the 20th Century"]) vs. Black Power 25:45 "The Jolly Green Giant" (as icon vs. illustration/picture on Madison Avenue) 28:28 Harley on midtown kids as acoustic/tribal with cameras (didn't know there was a Hudson River) 30:22 non-literate should study film (not TV) to become literate 30:36 more on the failure of the Chinese experiment in Western literacy