McLuhan's method is exaggeration. when he claims that "civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy"[1], or that "the invention of Euclidean space is, itself, a direct result of the action of the phonetic alphabet on the human senses"[2], one has to allow for the exaggeration in order to appreciate the element of truth in what he says. According to McLuhan, the invention of writing coincided with the appearance of the bureaucrat—and hence the state:
- A goose quill put an end to talk, abolished mystery, gave us enclosed space and towns, brought roads and armies and bureaucracies.[3]
This new form of "language", in other words, had certain social or political correlates which were inherent in the language-form as such, regardless of what was actually being "said". This is what McLuhan means when he says "the medium is the message": in a long-term historical sense, written language always "says" the same thing, not by virtue of its content but by virtue of its form. No matter what was written on it, papyrus as such
- meant control and direction of armies at a distance from a central bureaucracy.[4]
Literacy divorced men from the living web of social reciprocity; it gave men "the power to act without reacting."[5] The "I" was no longer in a reciprocal relationship with other "I‘s"—it could now assert itself one-sidedly, bureaucratically, from above. On a less political level, writing meant a parallel "fossilization" of emotions and being:
- Writing meant that the acoustic world with its magic power over the being of things was arrested and banished to a humble sphere. Writing meant the power of fixing the flux of words and of thought.[6]
