Cubism - McLuhan - Grammer of Print

There are several strong and several perplexing points that McLuhan makes in the Medium is the Message. I have chosen to try to clarify the points he made with the art form of cubism and "the grammer of print."

Cubism, as defined by McLuhan himself is,
"In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole."
McLuhan goes on to specify that it as the point at which "sequence yields to simultaneous," the point that the individual parts 'speak' less loudly than the entirety, the the medium has indeed become the message. The individual parts are not distinctive compared to the whole they make up; "Specialized segments of attention have shifted to the total field. "

Similarly, and perhaps slightly easier to grasp is the "grammer of print" statement McLuhan makes. To understand grammer is to understand the communicative machanics involved with a given system. McLuhan precedes the "grammer of print" with Napoleon's understanding of the "grammer of gunpowder." To understand the 'grammer' of these two worlds is, like a cubist, to view the content of the field as a part of the whole, virtually ignoring the specific parts while focusing on the message of the whole. Napoleon understood the language of war and that it did not necessarily matter what or at whom a weapon was being fired but saw the broader implications of what that shot ment. De Tocqueville understood the grammer of print so well that "he was thus able to tread off the message of coming change in France and America as if be were reading aloud from a text that had been handed to him." He knew that what was being printed did not matter as much as print was saturated throughout the culture.