McLuhan—Wherein the Effect for the Players Themselves is Lost

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

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio, and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as industry went its ever more specialized fragmented course, it demanded more and more teamwork in sales and supplies. The symphony orchestra became a major expression of the ensuing power of such coordinated effort, though for the players themselves this effect was lost, both in the symphony and in industry.

(p. 292)

Electricity has not only demanded ever deeper knowledge and faster interplay, but has made the harmonizing of production schedules as rigorous as that demanded of the members of a large symphony orchestra. And the satisfactions are just as few for the big executives as for the symphonists, since a player in a big orchestra can hear nothing of the music that reaches the audience. He gets only noise.

(p. 355)

So,

just because the orchestra is a

major expression

of some value,

this doesn't mean
that

the players themselves

experience
either the sensation
or the fact
of that value.

McLuhan would not have been surprised at the now-infamous job satisfaction survey which found extremely low morale among symphony players. But he may have been surprised at the suggestion (I know not if it has since been tested, but I find it totally believable) that it is mostly the string players who are discontented, meticulously cultivated soloists buried deep in a shapeless mass, inaudible individually unless they screw up. (And what lesson might this be teaching our precious children?) Conversely, the wind and brass players are living a certain kind of dream, collaborative artists thrust into a certain unavoidable degree of soloist prominence and scrutiny, and important enough to be saved for special occasions.

Were all of this indeed to be the case, the "deterministic" view could only halfway account for it. Something about the different players and their different roles would be leading them to experience the same orchestra differently.

For the players themselves, then

the effect

is

role-determined,

not

whole-determined
;

whereas the audience,

unless they are exceptionally inquisitive
(or somehow in on the ruse themselves),

are apt to get hung up on the whole.

Where audiences think they see people
playing together,
often enough what they are
actually
laying ears on
is
people playing at the same time.

---

Why are we still so apt to make this mistake when it comes to the large new symphony orchestras even as the jig has been up on industry for some long time? Because people comprise industry. Conversely, musicians comprise orchestras.

This is why the only political allegory of the orchestra which I find the least bit compelling or actionable is that which inheres on the production side rather than the reception side.

i.e. musicians just playing for themselves

i.e. making music for other musicians, not for an audience

i.e. music that is self-indulgent and/or self-referential

Not that these are "good" qualities in and of themselves. But they are permissible choices. They follow logically from certain general moral frameworks and certain specific understandings of the limits of performer-audience communication. And, they have specific benefits for the players themselves, who more often than not are also people.

Specific Understanding #1A bullet point with a star:
musicians are people too.

This is called "self-indulgence" only when for some already-exisiting reason you have an already-existing dislike of the people who are striving for it. If you can so much as tolerate them, you would want them (and everyone else) to have it. When you say that musicians should always play for an audience, what you're really saying is that the role of the musician in society is as a servant wage slave with no human needs. Someone lied to you (or you to yourself) with this business about following our passion. It is no one's passion to play cover songs for you and your drunk friends to dance to. That is work. In the parlance of the players themselves, this is itself an industry. I am willing to work for a certain price. But if you want music to bear any weightier pretentsions than that, i.e. if you agree that musicians are people and that "the arts" "matter," then you had better buckle up and toss back a few more drinks.

For better or worse, all of this applies just as well to the jazz combo and the dance band after the roles in those ensembles came to rival the orchestra in their rigidity. I dare you to find two people born in the 1980s or after who sincerely felt the spirit of democracy entering their bodies once they really started to get the hang of Blue Bossa. Sure, go on calling it democratic (jazz), anarchic (free jazz), fascist (dixieland)...let it be a major expression of whatever the hell you want. Negotiate all the private meanings you can handle. Just be a good McLuhanite about it in your actions.

---

Undeniably, it is possible to extend McLuhan's riff to the various backlash aesthetics which have arisen independently in several different stylistic guises. e.g. Nowadays the thing is to (a) get your friends together, and (b) each of you do what you do at the same time and in the same place as the others. Out of this way of working, where both the friends and the what you do are as rigidly predetermined and closed to revision as any abstract compositional schema, the outmoded orchestral ideal emerges only slightly more often than one among infinite chimps randomly hammering at a typewriter produces War and Peace. The effect pursued through this Conceptual Art is that of being together, the properly musical aspect of which is playing together. Yet by elevating the alleged social element of the performance to the level of surface content, it becomes excruciatingly obvious that the musicians are merely playing at the same time; and it is not nearly as obvious, given the initial emphasis on social as against technical considerations, that they are being honest when they later claim this palpable lack of musical togetherness as an affirmative choice under the rubric of "mediocore" or some such Gen-Z absurdity.

The effect of merely being together is easily kept, yet for the players themselves most everything else is lost in exchange for keeping fulfillment of this non-demand right where it is; for making sure no party to the relationship begins to want more. Mere coincidence in time and space is easy, if that's all you are after. Togetherness is difficult. Togetherness means, in Laschian terms, both being allowed to make demands on others and also allowing others to make demands on you. Seen through that lens, both the demand to "play something we can dance to" and to "play something everyone can participate in" appear as "narcissistic" demands in most (not all) of the situations which tend to elicit them.

Not for nothing did McLuhan insist on a somewhat esoteric definition of

mass media. . .

[as]

. . .an instant inclusive embrace. . .

. . .an indication, not of the size of their audiences, but of the fact that everybody becomes involved in them at the same time.

(UM, 349)

Curiously enough, aside from the dinosaur repertory institutions themselves, commercial pop music might be the most rigidly specialized and controlled musical together-ness environment still in existence. Is the Super Bowl Haltime Show not the very apotheosis of

art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action

wherein nevertheless

(for better or worse I must merely imagine this part to myself),

[for]
the players themselves this effect was lost

?

---

The funny thing about rebelling against the Euro-Classical version of playing together that to be thorough about it you must be sure you are rebelling against the medium-message of effect on the players themselves and not (only) against the message-message of teamwork which can be read into the orchestral enterprise only from the nosebleed seats in the back of the hall or via YouTube. From these latter distances, the terrifying corporeality of all those bows moving in lockstep can only obscure the presence of the people operating them, people who, to reiterate, may or may not find this state of affairs worthy, interesting, or indeed even tolerable; and this in spite of any strictly relative privilege in comparison to other workers. Mumford: "repetition without variation and re-creation is fatal to the existence of the humane arts," whereas "The capital danger in the arts of the machine is misplaced creativity." Only metaphorically can the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century be called "machines;" the point stands, though, that the metaphor is more or less apt depending on whose role is under consideration.

When Ornette said he found it unthinkable to tell a whole orchestra's worth of people what and how to play at all times, he showed that he was much more in touch with the reality of the orchestra than are the professional educators who extoll its ability to teach values based on a nosebleed- or YouTube-level understanding of what an orchestra is. But I confess that Ornette's sentiment, though I don't doubt its sincerity in his case, also is rather far off from where I find myself at these days. I have done a whole lot of improvising, checked a whole lot of records, done a whole lot of long tones, invested a decent amount of my life force in being able and willing to both play what I'm told and play what I feel. Only in midlife, after quite a few lean years, have I found myself working enough that the challenge of maintaining conditioning has been exchanged for the challenge of finding opportunities for rest. Perhaps because of all of this, or perhaps in spite of it, being asked to stare into the abyss of freeplay is not less of a demand or an imposition than being handed a fully-scored tuba part. Not being told what to play is also an imposition. Not telling people what to play does not elide the making of demands on them; rather, it makes a different kind of demand.

This is good news for those of us who find Lasch's chapters on the arts to be uncharacteristically errant. There is in fact plenty of room for contemporary and avant-garde art, for both minimal and maximal aesthetics, for both popular and elite milieux, for music made to order and made for the drawer, for all of these musics to steer clear of "narcissistic" dynamics among the principals and among the principles. The only truly undemanding musical environment is one where the outcome is unimportant. It is very meaningful that the realization of this "indeterminate" Concept itself often requires a degree of pre-conception and intentionality to rival any lines-and-dots schematist, so difficult is it to prevent the players themselves from finding some experimental results more "important" to them than others.

Like any other cultivated pursuit, I did not experience this freedom as a demand until I had exhausted all of the low-hanging fruit and found that reaching any higher was going to be much more difficult than I had expected. As it turns out, even the expectation of some outcome or other is itself a demand, at which point the performer must do something, must decide what to do.

As McLuhan observes elsewhere:

The low quality of mental habit engendered thus far by universal literacy, when confronted with the extreme complexity of current affairs, cannot be said to produce thought. So that the exhortation to "think for yourself" is, in these circumstances, a cause of discouragement only. It positively encourages a plunge into any collective myth that happens to have appeal.

"The Tough as Narcissus"
pp. 141-144
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]
p. 144

In a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, I did not feel this way in 2003, just as so many did not feel it in 1959; but a lot has happened to me since 2003, to say nothing of things in general since 1959. In saying this I mark myself as a recuperator, a consolidator, a reformer, as against the more heroic identities of the innovator and the revolutionary. Apropos of McLuhan's alleged "determinism," some have suggested that we are simply living in an age of recuperation, of consolidation rather than expansion, hence that there is nothing else to do. Others find in the same analysis all the more reason to double down on their revolutionary fervor. I have previously written enough about how difficult it is to stay in the good social graces of both types of musician.