But just as all this is what writing "says" (regardless of what might happen to be written), so oral language—and its resurrection in Radio—has a definite "message" of its own. In writing about Radio, McLuhan has a tendency to describe certain possibilities or potentialities as if they were already facts. Making all due allowances for this, however-and for his usual exaggeration—it seems that he has something important to say about the "message" which the electronic media may bring. McLuhan's relevance to a study of Khlebnikov should be obvious:
- By surpassing writing, we have regained our sensorial WHOLEHESS, not on a national or cultural plane, but on a cosmic plane We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man.[1]
By restoring in a new form the oral cultures and priorities of the past, Radio brings a future which is also a kind of 'return' to the prehistoric past:
- Bless the electric return to the tribal paleolithic age, to the world of the hunter![2]
0r again:
- We begin to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 5,000 years of literacy divorced us.[3]
In that sense, we are back again in the beginning of the world:
- Extensions of man are the hominization of the world. It is a 2nd phase of the original creation.[4]
Or, in another sense, it is the end of the world:
- Just as history begins with writing, so it ends with TV.[5]
The basic fact of the new "language-form" is that it presupposes and in a sense creates a new awareness of unity:
- we begin to realize the depth of our involvement in one another as a total human community.[6]
0r again:
