Essential McLuhan 214 would be like dreaming awake. Such may well be the prophetic meaning of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: his idea, among many others, that tribal man lived a dream and modern man is “back again Finnegan” into the cycle of the tribal involvement, but this time awake. This possibility that we are actively engaged in liquidating the unconscious for the first time in history, behooves us to pay some attention to how it is structured, and to what function it serves in human affairs. It may prove to be indispensable to sanity. One overall consideration for our time and at a conference like this is to consider how, in the past, the environment was invisible in its operation upon us. Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally. New media are new environments. That is why the media are the message. One related consideration is that antienvironments, or counterenvironments created by the artist, are indispensable means of becoming aware of the environment in which we live and of the environments we create for ourselves technically. John Cage has a book called Silence in which, very early in the book, he explains that silence consists of all of the unintended noises of the environment. All the things that are going on all the time in any environment, but things that were never programmed or intended—that is silence. The unheeded world is silence. That is what James Joyce calls thunder in the Wake. In the Wake all the consequences of social change— all of the disturbances and metamorphoses resulting from technological change—create a vast environmental roar or thunder that is yet completely inaudible. It is like heat that in organic or other systems creates “noise.” If the environment or process of change gets going at a clip consistent with electronic information movement, it becomes very easy to perceive social patterns for the first time in human history. In the pre-Electric Age patterns were imperceptible because change occurred just slowly enough to be invisible. Was it Bertrand Russell who asked, if we were in a bath whose temperature rose half a degree an hour, how would we know when to scream? The pattern recognition that is quite impossible during processes of slow change, becomes quite easy when the same changes are speeded up even to movie or cinematic levels. So, the artist, as a creator of antienvironments, or counterenvironments, created to permit perception of environments, has a very peculiar role in our society. The artist as a maker of antienvironments becomes the enemy in society. He doesn’t seem to be very well adjusted. He does not accept the environment with all its brainwashing functions with any passivity whatever; he just turns upon it and reflects his antienvironmental perceptions upon it. The artist, for the past century, has increasingly fused or merged with the criminal in popular estimation, as he has become antienvironmental. Since Baudelaire, the artist, the sleuth—the Sherlock Holmes type, the James Bond type, the Raymond Chandler-Marlowe type—these men have turned a vision onto society that is very antienvironmental, very self-conscious, and the artist has mysteriously