McLuhan—The Ground Rules

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

Stereo sound...is "all-around" or "wrap-around" sound. Previously sound had emanated from a single point in accordance with the bias of visual culture with its fixed point of view. The hi-fi changeover was really for music what cubism had been for printing, and what symbolism had been for literature; namely, the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience. Another way to put it is to say that stereo is sound in depth, as TV is the visual in depth.

(p. 282)

The possibility of a multi-plane view here depends not just on the craft of the artist but also on the orientation of the viewer, which may tend towards breaking such compositions into pieces according to the illusion of three-dimensionality, or it might tend toward viewing the painting as a flat surface. I'm officially confused as to how the "lineal" print orientation could be allied to Renaissance perspective but opposed to Cubist multi-planing, since both kinds of paintings can be (mis-)rendered as one-dimensional flat surfaces in an "audile-tactile" manner. And certainly I am not equipped to evaluate McLuhan's more sweeping conjectures about the origins and impacts of each mode of perception. But I am struck by how neatly this particular conjecture encapsulates the pivot point of so much internecine curation warring, namely by eliding the potential for misreading itself to be generative.

i.e.

I wonder how many audio guides have instructed museum-goers, probably not in these words, that the key to viewing the cubist painting they are about to encounter is to evince a certain

acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience

and to abandon

the bias of visual culture with its fixed point of view.

And of course I wonder (skeptically) how many museum patrons are able to achieve this on the spot, as it were, simply by being told.

Incidentally, McLuhan's whole enterprise is to show that if you want someone to see or hear or cognize a certain way, you cannot just tell them; rather, you must condition them. Technological determinism this is called, especially here on the internet, and especially if you want to argue that he was wrong. It's a fun argument to have but ultimately it's a bit of a sideshow. Besides the question of whether you can just tell someone how to see a given painting, there remains, on the reception side, the moral question of whether you should, why you would, and to what end; and, on the production side, of what exactly is achieved by rendering the illusion of dimensionality on a flat surface versus, say, as a sculpture or objet which renders dimensionality as "tactile," literally rather than figuratively this time.

I attach the latter question specifically to the "production side" because I think it's always worth bouncing artists' pretensions back at them. The vulgarity of such questions can be permitted when it is merely a reflection of the initial pretense, and wherever this kind of pretense has been veritably institutionalized, as it has in the program note and the audio guide. But I also want to point up a certain vulgarity in McLuhan's rhetorical handling of art. This is the same vulgarity which follows around conceptual art like a lost dog once the concept du jour is extracted from the nontransferable realm of the artist's own consciousness and rendered as a concrete rhetorical statement. (For once it doesn't matter whether this statment is verbal or written.)

If we indeed take McLuhan's gloss on the cubist impulse as a settled historical fact, then this acceptance of a certain way of looking becomes the audience's equivalent of what musicians have come to call Historically-Informed Performance Practice. Adherents to historical informed-ness then will consider audiences who view cubist paintings in a Renaissance manner as akin to McLuhan's African chief with the clock strapped to his back. The funny thing is, though, unlike the clock in this scenario, many cubist paintings work two-dimensionally, just as much baroque music works on the piano or in a rock band. Often enough these latter workings are surprisingly easy, whereas achieving historically-informed spectatorship is extremely hard. And so, bringing all of this back around to the moral angle, therein lies the justified suspicion of each type of artist or audience for the other.

I would suggest that whenever such narrowly-conceived art somehow also works in ways that are rationalistically alien to it, we then have (a) a happy accident, (b) a unique achievement by the artist which is indeed worthy of a certain amount of reverence (just keep it clean, okay?), and (c) a booby trap for the small-minded and self-interested on both sides of the divide between historical and organic spectatorship.

McLuhan continues:

Perhaps it is not very contradictory that when a medium becomes a means of depth experience the old categories of "classical" and "popular" or of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" no longer obtain. Watching a blue-baby heart operation on TV is an experience that will fit none of the categories. When l.p. and hi-fi and stereo arrived, a depth approach to musical experience also came in. Everybody lost his inhibitions about "highbrow," and the serious people lost their qualms about popular music and culture. Anything that is approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest matters. Because "depth" means "in interrelation," not in isolation. Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item seen quite secondary. Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousnes does not postulate consciousness of anything in particular.
(282-283)

And later:

Again, it has been found that nonliterates do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen, or some distance in front of a photo. The result is that they move their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands. It is this same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes European men so "sexy" to American women. Only an extremely
[288]
literate and abstract society learns to fix the eyes, as we must learn to do in reading the printed page. For those who thus fix their eyes, perspective results. There is great subtlety and synesthesia in native art, but no perspective. The old belief that everybody really saw in perspective, but only that Renaissance painters had learned how to paint it, is erroneous. Our own first TV generation is rapidly losing this habit of visual perspective as a sensory modality, and along with this change comes an interest in words, not as visually uniform and continuous, but as unique worlds in depth. Hence the craze for puns and word-play, even in sedate ads.
(287-288)

Honestly, I don't really care that much about cubism or about Renaissance perspective. I've never owned a TV as an adult, but I did watch an obscene amount of TV as a kid, and I still watch sports on my iPhone from time to time. (Who else is enjoying the near-daily peripeteia of the big-money LA basketball teams?) I suspect there now exists much more, and more reliable, laboratory research on much of this, but I wouldn't know where to find it. (Nicholas Carr in The Shallows mentions some interesting stuff about the path of the eye being different on web pages than on printed books.) McLuhan could be right or wrong about all of this. It wouldn't change my basic conviction that it's quite alright to misread, mislook, mishear.