McLuhan's New Sciences
(Cameron McEwen)
McLuhan and Plato 1 – Phaedrus and Er
from a letter of McLuhan's, age 23, on T.S. Eliot:
the poems I am reading have the unmistakable character of greatness. They transform, and diffuse and recoalesce the commonest every day occurrences of 20th century city life till one begins to see double indeed — the extremely unthinkable character, the glory and the horror of the reality in life (yet, to all save the seer, behind life) is miraculously suggested.
Seeing double here being identified as a common theme of Plato and McLuhan.
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The gap between or without different modes of perception is isomorphic with the gap experienced within different modes of perception. So it is that the latter may be taken to map the former (one of the keys to McLuhan’s new sciences) and so it is that what is definitively out of experience as prior to it (in “the other world”) is just as much decisively in it.
McLuhan and Plato 2 – When is myth?
Forgetting that our “modes of awareness” have been produced in a process subject to a double oblivion — we forget that we have forgotten — we take over the reins of the planet in a movement that proceeds faster and faster, in a more and more uniform manner, with greater and greater effect, all utterly blindly. ...
It is grim irony that this occurs at a time when we know...more and more about the variety of our “modes of awareness” such that, as McLuhan says, having reached “the technological stage of communicability and repeatability” we can now produce “new media” at will. The fundamental fact about contemporary history is that we do not know — and are determined not to know — what we are doing even now.
McLuhan’s project was therefore just that of Freud in regard to dreams and other unconsciously produced phenomena, but applied to “languages old and new”, to “modes of awareness”, to — media.
McLuhan and Plato 3 – the wild horses of passion
human being is always a “composite” of two factors:
quoting McLuhan:
visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation, even if Western civilization has (…) tamped down our awareness of the acoustic.
every artifact of man mirrors the shift between these two modes.
Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and eternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary...
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Plato calls these factors the two horses of a chariot or two wings of the soul or (combining these) “winged horses”. But because they “have innumerable variants or parti-colored forms”, as McLuhan says, there must be a third factor at stake which accounts for this variety.
... While the two horses can never be one horse, they can act as one in a coordinated way. This sort of coordinated movement characterizes the chariots of the gods (or the wings of their souls) and it is what allows them to circulate in the region of “true being”. The horses of mortal creatures, by contrast, are ill-matched: one of them is “ignoble” and “has not been thoroughly trained” and is therefore “vicious”. ...
This Platonic contrast between divine pairs of horses and human pairs appears in McLuhan as the difference between the “complementary” and the “incommensurable”..., or as “inclusive” relation versus “exclusive”,...
...the “innumerable variants” between the performance of the two horses may be referred to the “charioteer” who drives them. ... Not only the “descent” and “breeding” of the horses determines the sort of relation they have, then, but also how they are driven and controlled and trained relative to one another by their “charioteer”.
In McLuhan, the “charioteer”, the third factor, appears as the sensus communis which produces, or reflects, a certain “sensory closure”:
McLuhan:
Common sense is that peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all other senses and presenting the result as a unified image of the mind. Erasmus and More said that a unified ratio among the senses was a mark of rationality.
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the key question concerns the nature of the gap between the horses or between wings of the soul or between the senses of eye and ear. For both Plato and McLuhan, these ratios depend in turn upon insight into the nature of “being itself” as metaphorical...and into the resulting implication that an inclusive relation of the horses/wings/senses is both possible and proper to humans as reflecting such “true being”. Because “being itself” is metaphorical, it is possible for humans to relate metaphorically to it. And because they can relate metaphorically to it, it is possible for them to order their awareness after it metaphorically as well.
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An important aspect of McLuhan’s concern with communication therefore had to do with the question of how these matters were at long last to be communicated such that they might play a regulative role in human governance (individual and collective). He called this the needed transformation of the ivory tower into the control tower and the key to this transformation, he saw, was the initiation of science, or sciences, in the human domain.
As I read I find myself almost involuntarily reducing this talk of seeing double and rationality to the global (no pun intended) question of reality and illusion. There's certainly more going on here, but there are some familiar problems too. Namely, the devil is in the details when it comes to sense-ratio assuming a regulative role in human governance (individual and collective) . The potential for this certainly is transparent enough. What is problematic, I think, is drawing the line between the helpful and hurtful sense-ratios. And of course, drawing this line for individuals is one thing, generalizing it is something else entirely. ( A previous encounter with McLuhan led to the same objection.) If this is not actually what is being suggested here, then I need someone to help me understand what is.
This third factor , the charioteer , the human being , this lowly piece of throbbing flesh does seem to me, really, to have been reduced here to something less than it is. Ever so slightly less, granted, but lesser than the goodly quest for truth and justice will permit, any degree of which reduction easily ramifies into full-blown oppression. The mistake is to assume that we find the human being here in some ignorant, pre-rational(izing) state, that they have not already undertaken some ratio-finding, maybe even a lot of it. What if they have done this? What if they have thus been led into much illusion and little truth? That is certainly a problem to be confronted on way or another. But we cannot therein take any such condition in which we find our pre-McLuhanized subject to be a priori either (1) arbitrary, or (2) amenable to (any given) change; this on account of what I must, for now, inelegantly and bullheadedly call individual psychological factors.
McLuhan and Plato 4 – Narcissus
McLuhan speaks of “the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible”. The usual reading takes this to be a “point” in diachronic time when some new technology (like the wheel or the smart phone) somehow takes over the (the?) experience of some or all of mankind. But this reading is senseless on many grounds... Instead, as the Plato posts suggest, this “point” of awareness-shift takes place, usually in an “invisible” manner, in synchronic time and concerns the drama of the individual and social sensus communis aka “sensory balance”. And the “media” which “induce” this “transmogrification” are not empirical technological devices (which function more like catalysts) but are the fertile “words”...churning “in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” which exercise an “evocative power” (TVP 33) on the soul in the “interior landscape”. That this process is “invisible” to the very persons undergoing it is a great mystery which thinkers like Plato have considered without visible effect for millennia now.
McLuhan's "Narcissus" analogy:
This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. (…) He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. (Understanding Media, 41)
Similarly,
The Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!”
[ibid]
McLuhan, ‘The Agenbite of Outwit’ (1963):
As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body. Driving a car or watching television, we tend to forget that what we have to do with is simply a part of ourselves stuck out there. Thus disposed, we become servo-mechanisms of our contrivances, responding to them in the immediate, mechanical way that they demand of us.
This suggests a connection to Rank-Brown-Becker. But not only are individuals more or less conscious of this process, they also are (for many reasons) not equally susceptible or resistant to it; this on account of what they project, i.e. individual differences. Social Media, e.g., stand in different relations to the misanthrope, the entrepreneur, the depressive, etc.
It seems to me that to deny this relativity of reference is to deny any human variability in the areas under consideration; at which point the recovery of some independence of the gimmicks is rendered superfluous, this for lack of any diversity of need or purpose that might guide our "independence." If we were all the same, there would be no need for personal autonomy, real or illusory. In fact we feel this need acutely at the slightest inhibition, and this alone casts grave doubt on the severity of the above pronouncements. Though there is much "reality" we are able to ignore, it is especially dubious to assume our total narcosis where autonomy is concerned, and/or to assume that our projections are not themselves means to autonomy and that this is not evinced in the art-and-craft of our projection-making activities. The phallus is indeed an idol, its representations in mind and art may amount to the same, but the dildo is not an idol. No one worships the dildo as a phallus-idol because the dildo does not represent either the phallus or the penis. It is both more and less than a representation; that is, vis-a-vis phallus or penis. If the dildo has become an idol, it is in some other connection!
McLuhan often asserted that “all our artifacts are in fact words”...so that “the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground, are forms of language”... But if technology is language and is also “idolatry” (as the worship of the work of our own hands) it follows...that “sin (…) is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering”.
McLuhan, UM:
amplification [aka extension] is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception. This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The young man’s image is a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.
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Combining these texts from the 1950s and 1960s, the contention is that “our individual humanity” consists in the capability of “standing aside from any structure or medium” thereby “avoiding [the] subliminal state of Narcissus trance” aka identification with “pseudo-simplicities”. This demands our becoming “sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms” and therefore to the finitude, guilt and pain implicated in that discontinuity. And this is just what McLuhan claimed...to be doing:
I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.
Interest “in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities” demands a twofold recognition: that the forms are plural and that they have a “life” aka “evocative power” that determines us (not we them). The road to these recognitions, according to McLuhan, lies in an interrogation of our subjectivity which would recall (replay, recollect, retrieve, etc) the journey of the soul through the “other world” (right here, right now) through which the shape of our experience has been determined in such a way that the marks of that journey may be read in it if we dare probe for them...
Such probing is the only way to confront the “basic issue, the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness” and this, in turn, is the only way “for human beings to have some autonomy, some independence of the gimmicks”.
So, some autonomy is in fact the aim. But until this paragraph you could have fooled me.
In ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’, also in 1954, McLuhan continued to stress the importance of this exchange:
Manuscript technology fostered a constellation of mental attitudes and skills of which the modern world has no memory. Plato foresaw some of them with alarm in the Phaedrus:
“The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Plato is speaking for the oral tradition before it was modified by literacy. He saw writing as a mainly destructive revolution. Since then we have been through enough revolutions to know that every medium of communication is a unique art form which gives salience to one set of human possibilities at the expense of another set. Each medium of expression profoundly modifies human sensibility in mainly unconscious and unpredictable ways.
(The post reproduces and discusses many and various instances of McLuhan citing from this passage.)
[footnote] 2 ... Derrida’s dismissal of McLuhan as a logocentrist (as discussed elsewhere in this post) is simply lazy. In fact, on McLuhan’s analysis, it is Derrida who is the logocentrist since “merger” may be effected either by final consolidation or by final deferral (aka anti-consolidation). McLuhan, in fundamental contrast, would inquire about the natures, plural, of the gap between these — “the medium is the message”
Just going to file this one away for now and hope to understand it later.
[footnote] 7 The phrase Innis uses here, “a better kind of word or speech”, shows that he (and the same is true of McLuhan), did not simply oppose speech and writing (as Derrida would have it) and therefore they were not forced to privilege one of the other (as Derrida would have it). Instead, both looked to a third power — “a better kind of word or speech” — a third power that McLuhan called Logos or “dialogue” or “inclusion” among many other names. Through this third power, speech and writing (aka ear and eye) might be perceived to communicate originally (“the medium is the message”). Now this perception would necessarily be a replay (retrieval, re-cognition, etc) since it would depend on the third power, not the third power on it. The great question implicated here, already posed explicitly by Plato, concerns how it is that human perception can relate at all to all such fundamental powers (pace Derrida), aka how it is that media do not simply mirror other media indefinitely (“the overwhelming extension of writing”), aka how it is that a diachronic process like learning can come to understand a synchronic process like the contest of the fundamental powers.
McLuhan and Plato 7 – “a poise between”
The Platonic dialogue may well represent a poise between the aesthetic claims and tendencies of these two forms of expression, between dialectic and rhetoric.
[footnote to this] McLuhan uses ‘poise’ here not to indicate a posture or role, but in the sense of something having weight, something equally substantial with the forms it mediates.
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For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities,... In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. (Playboy interview)
The incoherence of this position was especially to be seen in this admission from 1954:
When I wrote The Mechanical Bride some years ago I did not realize that I was attempting a defense of book-culture against the new media. I can now see that I was trying to bring some of the critical awareness fostered by literary training to bear on the new media of sight and sound. My strategy was wrong, because my obsession with literary values blinded me… (‘Sight, Sound and the Fury’, Commonweal Magazine, April 9, 1954)
This observation is odd, even comical, since the main contention of McLuhan’s early work (as repeatedly seen above) was that “dialectic” aka “literary values” aka “book-culture” should be “subordinated” to the “Ciceronian humanism” of “rhetoric”. ...
What has happened here is that McLuhan has become conscious of a tendency (first of all in himself and then generally) to conceive everything in terms of a dualistic form structured by (a) antagonistic claims (b) necessitating the valorizing or privileging or identification with one of them (exactly on account of their basic quarrel or agon concerning the fundamental nature of reality). In the early 1950’s McLuhan came to call this experiential form ‘gnosticism’...McLuhan was shocked, once he could see this form (instead of seeing with it), both at its extent and influence in the world and at the undisguised manner in which it propagated itself. It was hidden in plain sight in a way which cried out for investigation — but somehow eluded it despite recurrent efforts since Heraclitus and Plato to expose it.
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This movement away from found objects to their underlying structure had...already been initiated in McLuhan’s earlier work... But he had not turned such investigation on itself with the reflexive questions: if human experience can be studied through focus on underlying structures, what is the structure which the investigation itself has? and what is the structure which it should have? These questions then precipitated a series of others: what is the nature(s) of time if it is somehow possible to get ‘before’ experience? And: what is the pathway to experience (apparently through very strange times and spaces) that has always already been taken among its possible approaches? And: if this pathway is always being taken, even now, how can it not be recognized? how can it take place in complete oblivion? how can it be forgotten even as it is happening? And: in the attempt to recover the ‘before’ of experience, how avoid the infinite regress of mirror image in mirror image in mirror image (in which the experience of every ‘before’ has its own ‘before’)?
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In the first place, McLuhan would have to attempt in his own probes always to assume the “poise” of the third position between...“eye and ear”. This ‘double privilege’ position was always possible for the investigating subject as an approach to experience and in regard to the object of experience represented an inherent respect for (aka correlate privileging of) its value and complexity. In the second place, this position as a way of of “preserving the (…) spoken word on the written page” could not avoid the “inconclusiveness” and “limitation” and “freedom of arrangement” of that form. It could never itself be, or aspire to be, a “closely ordered system”. In the third place, this movement away from dualism could not take place if it retained a dualistic view of dualism itself. But just how to take a non-dualistic view of dualism (while avoiding it on principle) was and is one of the deepest questions of human existence.
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[footnote 7] In chemistry or genetics or physics, there is the time and level of “innumerable variants” and there is the different time and level of their lawful explanation. The modern world is above all characterized by a determination to withhold from the investigation of human being exactly that approach that is known to provide the only way of understanding anything.
McLuhan and Plato 8 – Gigantomachia
There is no more “past” under electric culture: every “past” is now. And there is no future: it is already here. You cannot any longer speak geographically or ideologically in one simple time or place. Now, today, we are dealing with universal forms of experience. (‘Electric Consciousness and the Church’, 1970)5
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[footnote 5] As detailed already by Plato and Aristotle, and then as taken up as the central contention of his work by Hegel, “universal forms of experience” and “universal forms of Being ” are mutually implicating. This is because “universal forms of experience” is a dual genitive. These forms belong to, or characterize, experience as a subjective genitive. What we can know of these forms depends upon our experience of them. But ‘at the same time’ these forms generate experience in being as an objective genitive: it depends on them. The same considerations are at stake in “the forms of Being”. These forms belong to Being as a subjective genitive, but Being belongs to these forms as an objective genitive. The key question, as specified by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and also McLuhan, is whether the “both together” aka “two-way bridge” of this genitive is accorded its fitting weight.
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The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that blacks out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before (Take Today 22)
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we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sense we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression constitutes the sort of mythic type of consciousness of ‘once-upon-a-timeness’ which means all time, out of time. (‘Electric Consciousness and the Church’, The Medium and the Light, 88)
McLuhan and Plato 9 – on the plain of oblivion
the artist (…) lives perpetually on this borderland between (…) worlds, between technology and experience, between mechanical and organic form (…) [exercising] the spirit of play which is necessary to maintain the poise between worlds of sensibility (McLuhan to Wilfrid Watson, Oct 8, 1959, Letters 257, emphasis added)
McLuhan and Plato 10 – on the child and the child’s perception
McLuhan:
We can never see the Emperor’s new clothes, but we are staunch admirers of his old garb. Only small children and artists (…) perceive the new environment. Small children and artists are anti-social beings who are (..) little impressed by the established mores (‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes’, 1966, in György Kepes, The Man-made Object)
When the Emperor appeared in his new clothes, his courtiers did not see his nudity, they saw his old clothes. Only the small child and the artist have (…) perception of the environmental. (‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, 1968, in Through the Vanishing Point, 254, emphasis added).
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The imperial setting concerns the whole — not only some particular environment, but all environments. And not only all particular (ontic) environments, but all environments per se — ie, the ontological environment (of environments). This is “the environmental” that “only small child and the artist have (…) perception of”.
Well enough. But what of all these appeals to canonical literature and folk tales? It's clear enough that both Narcissus and the Emperor (and, elsewhere, the Maelstrom) present and hinge upon questions of perception; that is a common theme that can be identified. But insisting on a particular interpretation in order to cinch some weightier point is not going to get us very far.
And again, when it comes to countervailing such a well-known and much-maligned dynamic as that of groupthink vis-a-vis established mores , it's tough to believe that anything like this degree of obscurantism is required.
McLuhan and Plato 11- on the perception of the child (obj gen)
If a child learned language gradually, it would never come to learn it. Zeno’s paradox would apply. Instead, a moment of illumination must occur in which a new structure of experience is sensed suddenly — a new structure for the child which is the existing structure of the child’s environment. As McLuhan continued the citation of Aristotle (following Thomas) in his letter to Maritain:
et in ultimo instanti illius temporis, quod est primum instans
The last moment of the old time suddenly becomes the first moment of the new. But this ‘first’ (“primum”) is not only the start of a new diachronic series in correspondence with the child’s environment, it is above all the “recall” of what ‘first’ has to be in place in order for such a new series to be possible at all: the medium of the “both together” (word and object, mind and thing, language and world, speaker and hearer and, in particular here, the child’s old world and its new one). It is this enabling medium, this copula, that is the message.
McLuhan considered these complications of time especially in his 1974 essay, ‘The Medieval Environment’. The first sentence of this essay declares:
I want to explore a theme concerning a new inter-relationship of past and present.
Such “a new inter-relationship of past and present” implicates that loop in time through which the diachronic order of “of past and present” is reversed:
in all structures of a simultaneous or acoustic character “effects” always precede “causes” (…) Acoustically, causes and effects are “simultaneous” or, in the practical order, effects really precede causes. (‘The Medieval Environment’)
In learning a language, a child somehow senses its “effects” long before it comes to understand (ie, speaks) the “cause”. Considered diachronically, the language was ‘first’ in place in the child’s environment, indeed as the child’s environment; but what the child ‘first’ experiences are the “effects” of that “cause” (such as the significance of certain sounds like ‘mama’). Considered synchronically, however, the two are “simultaneous” since language is just such “effects”:
The synchronic approach (…) regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied. (…) In synchronic terms (…) the effects [are] exercised simultaneously on whole situations, (‘The Medieval Environment’)
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[footnote 6] It is no part of these McLuhan and Plato posts to claim that McLuhan was a Plato scholar. He certainly was not. The point is rather that the very different enterprises of the two are to be understood in regard to one and the the same underlying complex.
On the opening of a new domain
The designation of the elementary structure of a domain [e.g. "After the chemical element was gradually defined over the course of the nineteenth century..."] initiates a process which, once begun, continues forever through an evolving dynamic of new dark and new light.
... the domain which is predicted [in Take Today (1972)] to be capable of rigorous investigation is variously characterized as “all the principal features and postures inherent in the life of the community” (5), “psychic artifacts and social organizations” (8), people’s “sensory and mental lives” (9), “the ‘total field’ that bridges the worlds of visual and acoustic, civilized and primal space” (10), “the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties” (14), [etc., etc.]...
What McLuhan saw as misguided in the Marxist explanation of history was the fact that it couldn’t account for itself as a possible view of things. What was missing...was investigation of the whole domain of the possible views of things and only then to proceed to an analysis of, say, social classes or economic relations,...
Where Marx might say that the truth or value of his theory is to be found in the light it throws on the social and economic world before it, McLuhan held that such theory belongs first of all to a fundamentally different domain, that of our “sensory and mental lives” (Take Today 9) where media are the atomic elements.
So, there is a massive, intricate, seemingly endless preliminary methodological project to be undertaken before anyone can conduct any analysis or make any predictions about anything. But what time's lunch?
As a materialist, Marx considered that the scientific domain which would provide the foundation for his theories was already in place. ... Such a consolidation or merger of realms [the "urge to merge"] McLuhan saw as typical of the modern age, something that Marx shared with Adam Smith and many others. ...[neither] could...perceive that the difference between physical materials and human views — the fact that the latter are in some way optional — meant that they belong to fundamentally different domains of investigation and explanation. . They ["views"] are what they are only as something which some human being, or group of human beings, “select”.
Indeed. Elsewhere the "urge to merge" has been labeled "dedifferentiation."
I am very unclear as to the basis for heaping the full weight of the fallacy of consolidation of realms upon materialism.
The true view of the world would come down, somehow, to the physical sciences.
Is that what materialism says? Is that what it means-what-it-says?
Where fundamental change is exterior to physical materials and is unusually possible only under extraordinary conditions of temperature and pressure (resulting in fusion or fission), fundamental change is interior to the human domain and is usual under normal conditions.
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if potential views are radically plural (constituting a “spectrum”) and are adopted or “selected” in some essential fashion belonging to their nature, bias is not only (and not first of all) a phenomenal characteristic of (say) this person or that TV network or even of whole material media like print or radio; It is also, and primarily, a constitutional quality of the “interplay of mutual transformation that occurs between man and his world” (Take Today 96) at the elementary atomic level of media.
Bias is built into the atomic structure of media in a way which is utterly lacking in the atomic structure of the physical elements. The latter vary according to the atomic weight of their proton-electron-neutron components and therefore according to the different structures necessary to accommodate these component particles. But the former vary by the “preference“ of their bias and by the intensity or “stress“ of that “preference“.
In Take Today, “preference“ is usually indicated by example:
the pattern of (…) management swings violently from stress on the entrepreneur and the virtues of the lonely individualist to the close-knit and emotionally involved group (22).
Here “preference“ (or the quality of its “stress”) reportedly “swings violently” between individual and group, hence between inner and outer direction, between innovation and norm, between thought and emotion, etc. McLuhan’s point is that the elementary structure here is constant (a ≠ b) but that it has at least two different “preference” states — (a ≠ b) and (a ≠ b) — where the underlining indicates “preference” and where ‘a’ indicates ‘individual’, ‘inner’, ‘innovation’, ‘thought’ etc and ‘b’ indicates ‘group’, ‘outer’, ‘norm’, ’emotion’, etc.
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McLuhan:
Two complementary modes are thus at work in all parts of the world. Previously, the cultures of the world had known only one of these modes at a time. There had been a stress on “hardware” and weaponry or on “software” and knowledge. These forms are no longer mutually exclusive and the specialist must now become the comprehensivist (Take Today 293)
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As McLuhan has it in the Nina Sutton interviews:
You can push any sense all the way into the opposite sense.
McLuhan calls this “merging”. Instead of resulting in a stabilized ontology (as it intends), this unlimited increase in “stress” results in destabilized nihilism and “sterility”:
When the individual is entirely at one with his world or organization, he is headed for a hang-up of merging and unconsciousness, which is sterility in life or in business. (Take Today 282)
This is tough to parse. There is no explicit appeal to "dualism" or "binary", but the notion of preference here constructed (esoteric as always) certainly is presented as between the two sides of a binary.
The idea that, if I may take a stab at stating it crudely, there are no more binaries vis-a-vis the interplay of mutual transformation that occurs between man and his world , this of course is both widely discussed and widely observable nowadays. Yet subjected to the same obscurantist logic as brought us here (this time), the mere fact of this wide awareness looks suspicious and almost certainly wrong, since it is not the McLuhanite enterprise which is responsible for this awareness (how could it be?) but rather the ever-ongoing "RVM" (rear-view mirror) of modern science and philosophy against which he (and our author here) sets himself.
Instead of holding human subjects constant, like Ptolemaic earths, with views circling around them in complex movements like so many planets (including the sun), McLuhan’s suggestion is that we hold views constant, like Copernican suns, and study humans as revolving around them. This is one of the meanings of his remark that “we ‘make sense’, not in cognition but in recognition or replay” (Take Today 4). That is, ‘sense’ is something that is already there; so we ‘make sense’ not by constituting it, “but in recognition or replay” of it.
...the addition of a revisioned domain of human sciences to the domain of physical sciences and the replacement of the latter (ie, the disappearance of nature) by the former in the investigation of any situation where human experience is implicated. In this human domain all individual and social action would appear as a ‘role’ selected in some way from the full spectrum of possible roles. ...
But all this remained for McLuhan, and remains for us today, a new continent seen from afar. Unavoidably, it still appears (to an unknowable extent) in the RVM. Only future research will be able, gradually, to filter the more reliable findings from the less.
About this RVM business...what of Taleb et al and the basic observation that there is more certainty available via hindsight than foresight?
his new colleague at the University of Toronto, Harold Adam Innis (1894-1952), was able to supply the decisive clue in the very title of his April 1949 lecture — ‘The Bias of Communication’.
(1) All human action and experience presupposes a certain style or structure of communication.
(2) Communication is inherently biased and therefore inherently plural, since bias is inherently plural (bias would not be ‘bias’ if it were singular).
(3) The full range of communication, hence the full range of human action and experience, can be mapped on the range of bias.
(4) Bias ranges over 3 settings or “preferences”: (a) exclusive preference for one side of a communicative pair; (b) exclusive preference for the other side of that communicative pair; (c) dual or inclusive preference for both sides of that communicative pair (an inclusive preference which is possible precisely because exclusive preferences for both sides are just as possible).
(5) That humans are capable of mapping the range of bias is fundamentally related to the plurality of bias. Bias could not be plural (and bias would not be ‘bias’ if it were singular) if humans were not capable, somehow, of navigating between biases: “the executive as dropout”. From the navigational position between biases (“the gap is where the action is”), humans can achieve understanding not only for both sides of any one communicative pair (thereby exercising dual or inclusive “preference” in regard to it) , but in fact for all possible preference states or biases for that pair (where “stress” or “emphasis” differences introduce further variations even within a single “preference”). The same holds for all such pairs.
Harold Innis
Minerva's Owl
(1947)
To quote Jefferson, "The printers can never leave us in a state of perfect rest and union of opinion." In the words of Victor Hugo the book destroyed the "ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mayence." Architecture which for six thousand years had been "the great handwriting of the human race" was no longer supreme. It was significant that printing spread most rapidly in those regions in Europe in which the cathedral was not dominant and in which political division was most conspicuous—in Italy and in Germany. In Italy, with its access to Constantinople, emphasis had been given to the classics; in Germany emphasis was given first to bulky theological volumes and in turn, with the shift of the industry to Leipzig, to the small polemical publications which characterized the writings of Luther and his successors of the Reformation and to the Bible in High German dialect. In the words of Hume, "The growth and surprising progress of this bold sect [Lutherans] may justly in part be ascribed to the late invention of printing and revival of learning." "The books of Luther and his sectaries, full of vehemence, declamation and rude eloquence were propagated more quickly and in greater numbers." "One of the first effects of printing was to make proud men look upon learning as disgraced by being brought within reach of the common people" (Southey).
...
American authors with lack of copyright protection turned to journalism. Artemus Ward stated that "Shakespeare wrote good plays but he wouldn't have succeeded as the Washington correspondent of a New York daily newspaper. He lacked the reckisit fancy and imagination."
...
The cable compelled contraction of language and facilitated a rapid widening between the English and American languages. In the vast realm of fiction in the Anglo-Saxon world, the influence of the newspaper and such recent developments as the cinema and the radio has been evident in the best seller and the creation of special classes of readers with little prospect of communication between them. Publishers demand great names and great books particularly if no copyright is involved. The large-scale mechanization of knowledge is characterized by imperfect competition and the active creation of monopolies in language which prevent understanding and hasten appeals to force.
I have tried to show that, in the words of Mark Pattison, "Writers are apt to flatter themselves that they are not, like the men of action, the slaves of circumstance. They think they can write what and when they choose. But it is not so. Whatever we may think and scheme, as soon as we seek to produce our thoughts or schemes to our fellow-men, we are involved in the same necessities of compromise, the same grooves of motion, the same liabilities to failure or half-measures, as we are in life and action." The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.
...
Mechanized communication divided reason and emotion and emphasized the latter.
...
The Industrial Revolution and mechanized knowledge have all but destroyed the scholar's influence. Force is no longer concerned with his protection and is actively engaged in schemes for his destruction. Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult. Even science, mathematics, and music as the last refuge of the Western mind have come under the spell of the mechanized vernacular. Commercialism has required the creation of new monopolies in language and new difficulties in understanding. Even the class struggle, the struggle between language groups, has been made a monopoly of language. When the Communist Manifesto proclaimed. "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!" in those words it forged new chains.
...
we might end by a plea for consideration of the role of the oral tradition as a basis for a revival of effective vital discussion and in this for an appreciation on the part of universities of the fact that teachers and students are still living and human. In the words of Justice Holmes, "To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man" but the same wise man in Abrams v. United States stated "that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market" without appreciating that monopoly and oligopoly appear in this as in other markets.
APPENDIX A Mechanisation has emphasised complexity and confusion; it has been responsible for monopolies in the field of knowledge; and it becomes extremely important to any civilisation, if it is not to succumb to the influence of this monopoly of knowledge, to make some critical survey and report. Science, technology and the mechanisation of knowledge are in grave danger of destroying the conditions of freedom of thought, and, in destroying the conditions of freedom of thought, bringing about the collapse of what we like to think of as western civilisation.
...
dependence on the work of Graham Wallas will be evident. He pointed to the danger that knowledge was growing too vast for successful use in social judgment, since life is short and sympathies and intellects are limited. To him the idol of the pulpit and the idol of the laboratory were hindrances to effective social judgment, arising, as they do, from the traditions of organized Christianity and the metaphysical assumptions of professional scientists. He assumed that creative thought was dependent on the oral tradition and that the conditions favourable to it were gradually disappearing with the increasing mechanisation of knowledge. Reading is quicker than listening and concentrated individual thought than verbal exposition and counter exposition of arguments. The printing press and the radio address the world instead of the individual. The oral dialectic is overwhelmingly significant to subjects whose subject matter is human action and feeling and is important in the discovery of new truth, but is of very little value in disseminating it. The oral discussion inherently involves personal contact and a consideration for the feelings of others, and it is in sharp contrast with the cruelty of mechanised communication and the tendencies which we have come to note in the modern world. Quantitative pressure of modern knowledge has been responsible for the decay of oral dialectic and conversation. The passive reading of newspapers and newspaper placards and the small number of significant magazines and books point to the dominance of conversation by the newspaper and to the pervasive influence of discontinuity, which is, of course, the characteristic of the newspaper, as it is of the dictionary. Familiarity of association, which is essential to effective conversation, is present but is not accompanied by the stimulus which comes from contacts of one mind in free association with another mind in following up trains of ideas. As Graham Wallas pointed out, very few men who have been writing in a daily newspaper have produced important original work. We may conclude with the words of Schopenhauer, "To put away one's thoughts in order to take up a book is the sin against the Holy Ghost".
...
It has been held that the scientific mind can adapt itself more easily to tyranny than the literary mind, since "art is individualism and science seeks the subjection of the individual to absolute laws",
...
Henry Adams wrote: "Any large body of students stifles the student. No one can instruct more than half a dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money".
...
we must keep in mind the limited role of Universities and perhaps recall the comment that "the whole external history of science is a history of the resistance of academies and Universities to the progress of knowledge". Leslie Stephen, referring to the period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England, when there was no system of education, said: "There is probably no period in English history at which a greater number of poor men have risen to distinction". "Receptivity of information which is cultivated and rewarded in schools and also in Universities is a totally different thing from the education, sometimes conferred even by adverse circumstances, which trains a man to seize opportunities either of learning or of advancement," to mention only the names of Burns, Paine, Cobbett, William Gifford, John Dalton, Porson, Joseph White, Robert Owen, and Joseph Lancaster. Compulsory education increases the numbers able to read but does not contribute to understanding. Some of you may remember the comment in a discussion on literature by University graduates: "Literature? Sure; we took it in the senior year. It had a green cover".
N.B.: these are "Extracts from a paper presented to the Conference of Commonwealth Universities at Oxford. July 23rd. 1948." So presumably he was sticking his neck out a bit!
Referring to the dangers of centralisation, Scott wrote over a century ago: "London licks the butter off our bread, by offering a better market for ambition. Were it not for the difference of the religion and laws, poor Scotland could hardly keep a man that is worth having".
RVM or through the looking glass?
Reading McLuhan, everything depends on whether his texts are seen in the RVM or “through the looking glass”.
On the one (RVM) hand: “whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend (…) the use of the present as a nostalgic mirror of the past” (‘The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest’, 1967, 176).
On the other (through the looking glass) hand: “Once science went through the vanishing point into acoustic or resonant space, both scientists and economists were left on the wrong side of the looking glass, because they were mostly unable to make what Bertrand Russell cited (on the first page of his ABC of Relativity) as the indispensable preliminary act needed for grasping Einstein: “What is demanded is a change in our imaginative picture of the world…” (TT 69).
...
When McLuhan is read via such in-sight, ‘media’ are not, or are not only, print, radio, television, etc, they are also the elementary structures of the now fundamentally revisioned domain of human sciences.
And the ‘senses’ are not, or are not only, sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch, they are also the structural components of the atomic elements of this domain — media.
And ‘managers’ are not, or are not only, business functionaries, they are also the shadowy “executive” through whom — as whom — humans, all humans, have the strange power to “flip” identities and worlds:
As all monopolies of knowledge break down in our world of information speed-up, the role of executive opens up to Everyman. There are managers galore for the global theater. (TT 295)
...
“The organization” is the world or, indeed, the universe. The human need is to “feel quite at home” in it, “anywhere, anytime”. McLuhan proposes investigation of the “managing process” as the way in which this might eventuate.
McLuhan speaks to us from across a fundamental divide. He speaks to us from an inclusive position where everything in the human domain is always both phenomenal and ontological at once. (See ‘RVM or through the looking glass?‘)
This same phenomenal/ontological inclusivity holds in the physical realm where every material is both something that can be handled as it is found or made and something that can be represented, precisely, by a chemical formula.
McLuhan’s language 2 (Lamberti)
for McLuhan there is no such thing as that diachronic sequence of discrete ear and eye perceptual modes so loved by McLuhan scholarship:
Everybody who exists within any man-made service environment experiences all the effects that he would undergo in any environment as such. (TT 90)
Compare: any chemical question of course involves all of chemistry. So with media analysis.
...
as McLuhan never tires of insisting, only limitation and ignorance provide the needed signposts. For if we cannot let go of previous standpoints and certainties, if we cannot acknowledge their limitation, if we cannot see through our wisdom to its ignorance, we remain bound to the RVM. And this encloses us within a bubble with no possible perception of reality. Hence it is that:
All solutions are in the very words by which people confuse and hide their problems. (TT 103)
Only by interrogating what we do not know, first requiring perception of it, can we find our way.
If all of this is so,
then
how did it NOT
turn McLuhan skeptical
of the Forward Process
?
Chrystall opens his essay ‘A Little Epic: McLuhan’s Use of Epyllion’ with the statement: “Commentary on Marshall McLuhan’s oeuvre has shifted from debating whether he was right or wrong to a deeper consideration of his rhetorical praxis.” ...
an essential dimension of McLuhan’s thought — the fundamental plurality of time. In a word, there is no single ‘historical’ level to his work. Aside from his constant critique of “lineality” and his insistent recourse to figure and ground in his later work, note should be made that rhetoric in his earlier work is only one of the disciplines of the trivium whose “ancient quarrel” is always also contemporary.
The importance of menippean satire in McLuhan’s work is overrated. While he did have a great (typically western Canadian) sense of humor and certainly did not disdain satire,...reading his work from this vantage brings with it a series of problems. [Namely,]...one understands all of McLuhan by understanding the understandable parts and not understanding the not understandable parts.
Commenter QR chimes in:
The idea that
“The importance of menippean satire
in McLuhan’s work is overrated”
is overrated.
some counterblast to the idea that the importance of menippean satire in McLuhan’s work is overrated. McLuhan is cited as follows:
I don’t see any point in making anything but controversial statements …There is no other way of getting attention at all. I mean you cannot get people thinking until you say something that really shocks them; dislocates them.
...
[but] McLuhan was hardly an advocate of shock. In fact, he might well be imagined as addressing the difficult question of how to wake people up from the repeated shocks of modernity without resorting to the contradictory and doubtless useless strategy of attempting to administer one more dose of it.
They situate ignorance as a figure on the ground of human action. It is (taken to be) what results from our limited perspective, or from our hasty presupposition, or from our failed sympathy, etc. But for McLuhan, “ignorance” is that border or interval or gap whose dynamic life (“where the action is”, “the massage”) is first of all ontological. It is that abysmal gap through which ontological possibilities can first be plural because bordered or gapped by ‘im-possibility’. It is the “medium” (between fundamental possibilities) which is “message” exactly on account of this originality. It is this strange ground on which human action and experience secondarily figures.
Is there anything here beyond the good ol' outflanking maneuver?
Continuing,
The dynamic power of ignorance in human life has its spring-board in this foundation. Properly perceived, ignorance provides the bond via which the social is generated and maintained. Since ignorance/impossibility both holds apart and bonds the fundamental possibilities of being, so can its gap bond humans with God, individual with individual, one generation with the prior generation and with the next generation, one people with another people, humans with nature, and so on.
It is this power which first enables language and which McLuhan treats over and over again in terms of logos.
As a general rule, however, whenever words like ‘extend’, ‘extension’ etc are used in reference to McLuhan to indicate a desirable end..., there is something amiss. For McLuhan, ‘extensions’ are not a good thing (or, for that matter, a bad thing), they are a problematic thing. They are at work to further only at the generally unconsidered expense that they are at work at the same time also to limit. So, eg, no increased sight without an implicated blindness. Similarly for any other sense or for all the senses together.
More is always also less for humans — ‘odos ano kato. (“The way up is the way down” from Heraclitus,...
why we can’t start with a known fact — viz, McLuhan’s consulting work. The short answer is that McLuhan agrees with Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations. Starting with any ‘fact’ is to start with the RVM. (Why? Because the RVM supplies a direct relationship to something. Once indirection is allowed, once the question of interpretation is allowed, the RVM is relativized and this shatters it. Relativity and the RVM are incompatible.)
Where McLuhan diverges (or reverses) from Nietzsche (like Eliot in this respect) is his finding that the ubiquity of interpretation leads into the tradition rather than out of it. Most of the howling from McLuhan’s critics about his deficiencies has its root just here. Unable or unwilling to probe their own positions with radical questioning, therefore unable to follow him in this reversing maneuver, attention is directed instead at certain ‘facts’ which are alleged to disqualify his perceptions:...
Well, his perception of the technique of "starting with the effect..." does seem to me quite wrong.
McLuhan (UM):
[62] It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement. A.N. Whitehead, on the other hand, explained how the great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Namely, the technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the desired object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other.
But the "technique of the suspended judgment" goes further . It anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood on an adult, and offsets the effect before it happens. In psychiatry, it is the technique of permissiveness extended as an anaesthetic for the mind, while various adhe-
[63]
sions and moral effects of false judgments are systematically eliminated.
This is a very different thing from the numbing or narcotic effect of new technology that lulls attention while the new form slams the gates of judgment and perception. For massive social surgery is needed to insert new technology into the group mind... Now the "technique of the suspended judgment" presents the possibility of rejecting the narcotic and of postponing indefinitely the operation of inserting the new technology in the social psyche. A new stasis in prospect.
I'm having a bit of trouble telling these two techniques apart. As for "...then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other," indeed this is a conceit that certain artists have held, and they have said so. Evidently these are the artists who have solved "The Problem of Induction,"
i.e., those willing to assume that
the observations we make are able to justify some expectations or predictions about observations we have not yet made.
(SEP)
i.e. those willing to deny that
it is far easier to analyze Amaringo than to synthesize him. ... The greatest obstacle to consilience by synthesis, the approach often loosely called holism, is the exponential increase in complexity encountered during the upward progress through levels of organization.
(E.O. Wilson, Consilience)
and also willing to deny that
the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe."
(PW Anderson, "More Is Different")
also that
Markings that have the form of a cat are rarely intended to represent dogs. When we couple these constraints with equally powerful constraints imposed by current social usage, very little room may be left for multiple interpretations. This process works;... But this is a pragmatic, not principled, solution to the problem of the correctness of the perception of markings, and it can be wrong.
(WIlLIAM H. ITTELSON, "Visual perception of markings")
and that
from the pool of water you can build infinite possible ice cubes, if there was in fact an ice cube there at all.
(N.N. Taleb, The Black Swan)
McLuhan writes here of a process of "working back, step by step." This already, alone, can be confusing. This is "working back" only in the sense that art is, whether really or metaphorically, something transmitted. (Broadcast?) Sender (artist) is upstream of receiver (audience), "effect" is downstream of "poem, painting, or building", etc. i.e. Transmission is the "forward" process. "Starting with the effect" is "working back." Meanwhile,
synthesis;
upward progress;
constructionist;
these imply forward-ness, progression.
Taleb uses "build.". And later he says:
The first direction, from the ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction, the backward process, is much, much more complicated.
So, in a vaguely McLuhanish turn, we could observe that the "forward" or "upward" direction seems to be the default metaphor for the direction of synthesis; and at the same time, the whole polemic hinges upon there being two imaginable (but not necessarily possible!) directions of synthesis which are, nonetheless, ontologically and epistemologically incommensurate.
In Taleb's hands, puddle-to-ice-cube turns up as the "backward process" not because all ice cubes are destined to melt someday, and not because puddles-which-were-formerly-ice-cubes betoken some such march of progress. Presumably he says this because, even after the discovery of relativity , he is someone who accepts his own human limitations vis-a-vis time, which for him (and for us here) moves in only one direction, i.e. "forward." Rhetorically it matters not a lick whether he appeals to melting or freezing. Water can freeze as well as ice can melt. What matters, rather, is to heed the fundamental incommensurability of the two directions of synthesis. But of course this matters not a lick for Conceptual Artists, la même avant ou après la lettre.
To choose one's desired effect, one needs to know (already) two things: (1) that there exists any path "back" to any artwork (presumably one in your own medium/metier); (2) that there is not any path from this artwork to any other effect. What are these two unknowns if not "observations not yet made"?
From here, "the "technique of the suspended judgment" goes further." How? "It anticipates the effect,...and offsets the effect before it happens."
I'm obviously lacking either or both of the temperament and the learnedness to make of this what McLuhan intends. All I can see is the same epistemological arrogance, once in service of realizing "the effect", twice in service of "offset[ting it] before it happens."
Exploring ignorance (7) – Humpty Dumpty
In McLuhan’s view, modernity is the time in world history when humans press their case for merger, especially...the merger of ontic or phenomenal reality with itself, in such a way that its essential relation with the ontological fails to be observed. This fulcrum falls into obscurity and the world enters its night.
This failure of observation...is subject to a range of expression varying from outright rejection of the possibility of ontological-ontical relation to unconsidered lack of notice. Nearly always it is subject to a fateful sort of double forgetfulness where the forgetting is itself forgotten.
...the gap between the two [phenomenal and ontological?], “where the action is”, becomes displaced — if not erased — within the phenomenal. [e.g.] “dialogue” (although always presupposing some kind of gap between different persons and different views) is not seen as an original power to which humans are subject, but as a “resource” which humans can and should turn to advantage.
...humpty, instead of falling into the inherent fractures of human being — fractures which, once passionately explored, are revelatory of ontological relation — instead rises into an ethereal unity with himself.
...the one thing which might save — falling, fracturing — is what is most feared. And the one thing that is unavoidable is what is to be avoided “at all cost”.
Fracturing
as in
the differentiation of forms
??
As for
the merger of ontic or phenomenal reality with itself,
I can't help but think of Lasch here:
Our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality. ...a complete indifference even to the mechanics of illusion announces the collapse of the very idea of reality, dependent at every point on the distinction between nature and artifice, reality and illusion. This indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self.
(The Culture of Narcissism, p. 87)
The reality-illusion duality here seems to me superficial, though I haven't yet been able to say exactly why. Perhaps it's because the real (important) distinction is actually ontic-phenomenal, e.g., as in the notion that "people don’t have to suspend practical activity" to achieve the aesthetic point of view "because any ‘person who is in his right mind’ knows that watching a play in a theatre is not a practical activity." (See here, ctrl-f "Dickie") Contra Lasch, I think that the "willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality" may actually be part and parcel of the "narcissism" he identified. This is one way narcissists "press their case for merger." Whereas during the heroic phase of Euro-American narrative and theatrical arts no one "in his right mind" thought he was watching an actual murder or an actual wedding any more than we today would think there are cats and dogs inside of our iPhone. In yet other words: I don't know what "taken in" is even supposed to mean if it does not mean "merger" (which it clearly doesn't, but perhaps it should).
Our writer here, meanwhile, suggests a few different times that McLuhan, basically, is poking around the bulging seams of phenomenal reality, hoping to catch a fleeting ontic glimpse. Best of luck to all of you who are packing your bags for that expedition.
Exploring Ignorance (8) – “Nothing completely packaged”
The strangest thing about this night of the world...is that it manifests itself as light. It is a time in which the light of human understanding and inventiveness is projected as never before onto — indeed, ultimately as — the entire planetary environment.
...
The scrabbled bits of information that come on TV are like symbolist poems or pointillist paintings. They have to be completed at every moment by the reader or viewer. There is nothing tied in. Nothing completely packaged. And this is what gives the TV image its tremendous power, as compared with radio, which gives a sharp, high definition image (‘Prospect’ 364).
...
the “completion” which humans supply in their “cool” or “low definition” use of television. They have to ‘fill in’ the gaps through which the medium operates: they have to ‘connect the dots’ of its images.
...
When Sputnik went around the planet in 1957 the earth became enclosed in a man-made environment and became thereby an “art” form. The globe became a theatre enclosed in a proscenium arch of satellites. From that time the “audience” or the population of the planet became actors in a new sort of theatre. Mallarmé had thought that “the world exists to end in a book.” It turned out otherwise. It has taken on the character of theatre or playhouse. Since Sputnik the entire world has become a single sound-light show. (‘Roles, Masks, and Performances’, New Literary History 2:3, 1971, pp. 517-531, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #12, 3-26, here p 22, emphasis added)
[similarly...]
In 1957 Sputnik put the planet inside a man-made environment for the first time in human history. When Sputnik went around the planet, creating a new information environment, the planet was transformed and Nature ceased to exist. The planet then became an art-form, and to use Bucky Fuller’s phrase it became “Spaceship Earth” where everybody is a crew-member and there are no passengers. Now, Spaceship Earth has to be totally programmed. (…) The idea that everything on the planet must be controlled and programmed was born at the moment of Sputnik, and this manifested a new hidden ground of information which has transformed the figure of the planet. (Address to The Festival of Life 1977, emphasis added)
Well,
what is the antidote to total
control
and
programming
?
To the
theatre
which our
globe
has become
?
It can often seem
as if he's not actually looking for an antidote
because
he rejects the most obvious solutions as impractical.
Taleb again:
people invoke an expression, "Balkanization," about the mess created by fragmented states, as if fragmentation was a bad thing, and as if there was an alternative in the Balkans—but nobody uses "Helvetization" to describe its successes.
(Antifragile, p. 97)
Continuing:
The old natural “hidden” ground of original “dialogue” or “innovation” (aka “nothing”) becomes figure(d) within human designs. At the same time, human designs which used to be figure(d) in relation to that original “dialogue” or “innovation” become the “new hidden ground of information” (subjective genitive) — “The idea that everything on the planet must be controlled and programmed...”.
That McLuhan’s project was the quixotic attempt to reverse this profound reversal is explained on the first page of Take Today:
Nothing has its meaning alone. Every figure must have its ground or environment . A single word, divorced from its linguistic ground, would be useless. A note in isolation is not music. Consciousness is corporate action involving all the senses (Latin sensus communis or “common sense” is the translation of all the senses into each other). The “meaning of meaning” is relationship. (3)
Well,
quixotic attempt to reverse this profound reversal
does
sound like the search for an antidote
;
also that he didn't
expect
to find one
even if he did want to.
Exploring ignorance (9) – The Concept of Dread
the first sentence of Take Today...: “The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things.” (3) But McLuhan goes on to note in the same place that:
To naïve classifiers a gap is merely empty (…) With medieval dread they abhor vacuums.
Where gaps are (held to be) no “resonating bond”, but only “empty (…) vacuums”, merger becomes the order of the day: “All boundaries now gone” (Take Today 209)...
For “classifiers” such complex forms are infected by a vacuous and dreadful emptiness at the axis of their purported connections and “bonds”. Indeed, difference and coherence are held by them (knowingly and unknowingly) to be mutually exclusive in a fundamental sense: the im-possibility of the conjunction of fundamentally different relata dominates their experience “in all things”.
Hmm. If related-ness is a human rather than a "natural" phenomenon, then it is standpoint-dependent, "phenomenal" rather than "ontic," and there is not much more to be said about it. But sure, let's say some more.
What on earth can be purported of a connection in the eyes of someone who doesn't see it?
we’re merely obsessed, fascinated with a little bit of ourselves, stuck out there, in another material. I think it is very important to know that it is a bit of yourself out there because otherwise you are never going to get off the hook. You’re always going to be a servo-mechanism. The servo-mechanism is the perfect feedback. You echo exactly the thing that’s out there like a thermostat jumping to the heat variations. When we are completely unaware of the nature of television or radio or telephone, we are merely servo-mechanisms of those forms. We respond to them in the immediate mechanical way that they demand of us. In this way, each of us is merely a Narcissus dancing around in love with his own image. (‘Prospect’ 365, emphasis added)
Merger, which McLuhan saw as a, or the, form of madness is the structural energy, the fateful dynamic, at work here. The collapse of the ontological gods and powers and of nature into a collapsed human being results in a state of “perfect feedback” where “you echo exactly the thing that’s out there” — and what is “out there” is “the brains and nerves of man” (‘Prospect’ 366). We come to function “like a thermostat jumping to the heat variations” where there is no “gap” of consideration between the external “variations” and our response to them. We react simply “in the immediate mechanical way that they demand of us”.
When...McLuhan is concerned to probe “the nature” of media “by directing perception on (…) interfaces” as “prime sources of discovery”, he is above all concerned with restoring what he calls the “evitable” dimension (Take Today 6) of human being:
I take it we consider it more desirable for human beings to have some autonomy, some independence of the gimmicks. (‘Prospect’ 365)
To free himself from servitude to his own artifacts has become the main program of the new ecological age that began with Sputnik. (Take Today 7)
Well okay, cool, this is DEF not obvious, esp not from the hallowed "maelstrom" metaphor, wherein the harder we writhe the faster we sink.
these restorative re-cognitions must begin in the “electric age” with human being, because...literally everything (even itself) has collapsed into human being. ... “We have put the brains and nerves of man around the globe” (‘Prospect’ 366); “nature [has] disappeared” (Florida State University lecture, 1970; cf Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic, 35). “The Viewer is Monarch of All He Surveys” (Take Today 142). ...
Hence the imperative to expose boundaries and gaps in human nature as the “areas of maximal abrasion and change” where, alone, evitability might be reborn. ...limitations and boundaries are fundamental and therefore revelatory...
McLuhan thought, or rather hoped...that the investigations in geology, biology, anthropology and psychology, which had been vastly extended in time and space beginning in the nineteenth century, would bring re-cognition of the fin-itude of human being (objective genitive) by exposing its incredible variety. No finitude, no real variety. And conversely, if real variety, then real finitude.
Yes! Variety-within-finitude is the (valid) Woke reclamation of Human Nature that no Wokists seem willing or able to carry out. Probably this is because it first requires, in Lasch's "populist" words, "a sense of limits" which is entirely foreign to people in their teens and twenties.
once fin-itude were deeply acknowledged, “evitability” might relaunch.
But the fin-itude of human being could not be, cannot be, re-cognized on account of an intervening curtain of dread...
The boundaries which constitute fin-itude are taken to be “empty (…) vacuums” and this emptiness, as Pascal already saw, excites a repulsive horror and a general state of “anxiety”:
when you put the nervous system outside [and equate it with all there is], fear is no longer the problem. Anxiety is the problem. Fear is specific, anxiety is total. (…) You don’t know now precisely what you’re dreading, rather it’s a pervasive state. The condition of man is what you dread. You no longer dread that animal, that famine, and so on, but this condition. (‘Prospect’ 366)
But,
I'm not sure how new this can possibly be.
Won't we find something to
dread
,
or
(to Becker's various points)
invent it if we can't find it?
It is just because “all boundaries now gone” (Take Today 209) that human being can expand into being “all there is”. Conversely, only some featureless “all there is” can be without borders: if there were anything else, anything specific or discrete, borders would be required. The condition of such nebulous inflation (Hegel’s night in which all cows are black) is at the same time, however, the condition of — that which introduces — “total anxiety” and dread.
Well, Becker argues that certain boundaries were already gone the moment we so much as had names for each other. Whether it was our arm or our brain that was thus projected actually makes no difference.
Becker and Rank (and Mumford!) suggest that the history of primitive agriculture and warfare, e.g., shows well enough that limit less expan sion will be pursured no matter the technology or the projection du jour.
when we put our nerves outside, we become of course vulnerable to the nth degree; in fact, we barely survive from day to day. Mere existence becomes one of perpetual anxiety. (…) We now have an unimaginably harassed [‘life’] by putting our nerves outside ourselves; it is like living without a skin. So what we do is go numb. When we put our nerves outside we can only survive by anaesthesia. And so we live in the unconscious. This is the age of the unconscious because it is the age when the nervous system is totally exposed. (…) Man is now in a somnambulant state because this offers him his only possibility of survival and sanity. He couldn’t bear a fully conscious existence under the frenetic conditions that he is exposed to by his own technology. He could not register these terrible shocks directly and survive. He’d go mad. (‘Prospect’ 366)
This is stated much more clearly than what I recall from the McLuhan books I surveyed. It is also merely a dressed up version of something that has been said by a lot of other people, brilliant and idiotic people both. And they have said this, it must be pointed out, without recourse to anything so intricate as putting our nerves outside ourselves or the age of the unconscious .
Certainly we do acclimate and thereby become unaware of that which lands short of the new acclimation point. But this is true on the basest lizard-brained level. It's operation on the more subtle levels is not so obviously a case for taking the subtle levels more seriously. The opposite could just as easily be argued.
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