• Telegram from modernism

From The Essential McLuhan

HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT’S TIME!

Assuary as there’s a bonum in your ossthealogy! (FW)

Time was perhaps the first magazine to apply the format of the telegraph press (i.e., the mosaic of items without connection) to the periodical. Just a dateline. The Time formula of mosaic in place of connected editorial features permits the juxtaposition of esoteric and trival—the formula for creating environments, not just a point of view.

Mosaic transparency and simultaneity appears in the ad itself. The mosaic as such is an acoustic, tribal form, feathers in the hat of Time.

“Only Time lets advertisers select three occupational cross-sections of its readers… (Note how the tribal caste system here bloometh.)

Never put it past the prose of McLuhan to enact his thesis. As seen here. And in Mechanical Bride. Eliot and Joyce send telegrams from the wasteland and the wake - modernist mosaics composed of telegraphic tesserae.

“the telegraph press (i.e., the mosaic of items without connection).” But in FW and WL everything connects. Every move is motivated. Non-arbitrary. Intent permeates every note. The works themselves are extensions of semiotic sense.

How is it that Time’s telegraphs share time and space with the master mosaics of modernism? Media co-exist. This is how media co-exist. Succession is not in the cards. Simultaneity is the trope of dialectic.

——

McLuhan on the Headline

Semiotic connection.