Eleven
years ago I watched a documentary on the IFC broadcasting network that absolutely
blew my mind.
fiction
utopia we had long been promised, that is that the technology that surrounds
daily life were returned to their original splendor, as relics of the future. I
remember reading passages like, "The instance of the electric light may
prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure
information." And not knowing at all what it meant, but feeling like it
was some kind of sacred knowledge that if I could understand would open up new
worlds for me. I thought, what a wonderful couple of sentences! The bulb flickered
in my head, I was encountering a whole new world of ideas. But I didn't
understand them, it took years for me to begin to understand them, but I
enjoyed them. The effect of watching an interview with McLuhan or reading his
work is similar to watching a vintage sci-fi movie, all this weird jargon
flying at you at a million miles per second, and soon realizing that each word is
drenched with meaning, that the crew understands the orders. It's a fun
experience when you really get into it.
"Instead, it is more feasible to "present" TV as a
comples Gestalt of data gathered almost at random."
McLuhan really is alien when being interviewed, the interviewer will ask him
a seemingly strait foreword question like... well... I'm thinking of one lady,
(not really an interviewer exactly) from a live studio audience asked him, (so
smartly), "I would like to ask him(McLuhan) if he would agree with that
nuclear energy represents; mass suicide, the ultimate expression of the death
wish, or more in line with his terminology the last ditch fight to the death of
the left hemisphere world of the military industrial complex(...)I'm curious to
know how he expects they are going to lose."(check out 7:39) McLuhan
responded in characteristic "coded" fashion, "...But
the...hu...main development in these electric media is the loss of privet
identity, mass man means man as related to all other men simultaneously, so
that the nuclear world is a kind of rip off as far as privet identity and
privet values and goals are concerned(...) and ha...just how that relates to
the atom bomb, and so on, would take a little while to develop." He went
on to say that the patterns can be discerned. McLuhan wasn't trying to evade
the question here. Basically he's revealing his method. McLuhan studied
mid-evil literature in grad school, part of his approach to analyses is to
examine the roots of the words that make up a concept, this is a very old
method, but McLuhan applies it to modern technology. It's kind of like he
answered, personal creativity is being hijacked for the ends of mass
destruction, and, well…I don’t know…we could go on a million tangents. The
point is that, part of what makes McLuhan so awesome is that he can deal with
real world social problems as if he's a technician of the Starship Enterprise.
In his chapter on radio in Understanding media he said that if TV where
invented before 1933 Hitler would have never come to power and WWII would have
never happened, because he would have been shown for the raving lunatic he was. If it seems like McLuhan didn't care about nuclear threat, this
wasn't the case, Marshall McLuhan’s stated scholarly interest was to prepare
people for the extreme effects of technology. It's just that the level of
awareness that this requires is far deeper then saying the left hemisphere of
the brain is going to destroy the world. McLuhan seeks to understand how
technology works in a larger context. Some times his context is so far out
that it seems like he's missed the whole point, but bar with him he eventually
ties it all together. McLuhan is cool because he is an alien. He's here to help
us.
One way to understand a thinker like Marshall McLuhan is to take some of his
concepts and explain them until they start to connect into a larger vision.
McLuhan's most fames concept is, the medium is the message, some of his other
concepts include, the global village, hot and cool media, Affect (something
that was later pick up by Gilles
Deleuze), and figure and a ground, put
all together these concepts make up a vision of the world in which technology
comes alive and begins to take an active and not just a passive role in our
lives.
In this sense McLuhan wasn't only a mystic but also an existentialist, the
media is the message, means the same as "existence
precedes essence," but as applied to a thing (in-itself) and not just
a people(for-itself). People always used to ask McLuhan, "The medium is
the message; does that mean the content isn't important, to what is be
conveyed?" To this McLuhan would usually say that each media will tend
toward a different content, but that's not the thing to focus on, it's what these
things do to us, that we should analyze. This begins to explain why he sounded
so alien, it's because he wasn't looking at these things like a person would,
he was looking at it the why we might look at an ant hill, or a bee hive, he
was looking at things from a distance. This is way when people would ask him
about his perspective he would say he had none, he would say he was being objective.
In a sense he must have known the difficulties of a claim to objectivity in
this regard, but he had a point in insisting on it. The point as McLuhan would
say is not to get hung up. He was engaged in observation, just like a
biologist. He certainly would have been familiar with the primacy of
subjectivity in the work of "other existentialist" like Jean-Paul
Sartre, he made reference to them quite often. He just wants to
stress a sense of dis-interestedness in observation.
One of his main concepts, Figure/ground, was lifted from the work of Gestalt Therapist like Fritz and
Laura
Perls. For McLuhan the way to understand the essence of a medium is to
analyze the effects it has on the wider environment. Perhaps this confused a
lot of people because we're used to hearing about the environment in a
different way. We usually use it to refer to plants and animals, but when McLuhan
uses it he means something more basic, he means our surroundings, but what he
wants to avoid is to think of the ground or environment as a back drop of a
play. He says, "all the world is a sage" instead of a stage. McLuhan
understands a figure through its ground, and a medium through its affects,
that’s part of what he means by, the medium is the message. You don't
understand a medium like TV or a car until you analyze its effect on its
surroundings or environment, the first generation to grow up after the advent
of TV was less eager, (like a paper boy might be) more laid back, more
gestural, less emphatic, you know that greaser thing. When the car was first
invented "city slickers" would take it out for a country drive, later
under the influence of TV They decided they could just move away altogether.
So what's the big deal? Why
should we care if the medium is the message, or the message is the message, or
a medium is just something to hold something else? Isn't it in a way obvious that
the experience of listening to the radio is different from watching TV, even if
it were the same program being broadcast? Well yeah, that’s great if that is
obvious, but what fallows from this observation might not be so obvious. The
implication is that the things we use have a kind of power aside from what we
bring to them. This is a radically different kind of perspective from the one
that see's matter as inert, or dead. McLuhan’s view of the world is one in
which the things of this world have a life of their own. McLuhan is in a very
real sense a modern animist. Animism is a world view in which physical
entities—including animals, plants, and inanimate objects possess
spiritual power.
As a modern animist McLuhan
can help us understand a world view that humans have held for the vast
majority of our existence on this planet. In a way though, according to
McLuhan’s own philosophy he doesn’t really need to teach us this, because the
technology will eventually teach us this, any way. Each technology teaches us
about the environment it creates. What McLuhan is really trying to teach us is
how to stay vigilant, so that these new technological circumstances don’t catch
us off guard. In a sense McLuhan’s project is similar to the psychologist Carl Jung who analyses myths and dreams in
order to uncover the subconscious forces that disrupts modern life. This new
world, ever more animated by things then ever, is part of what McLuhan means by
the global village. It's often been pointed out that technology will bring us
together, but what a lot of people miss about the Global Village is that it’s a
place where inanimate things become animated, where the tools of man become
caricatures in a vast cosmic drama, a new epoch where the world once again
becomes enchanted by Angles and Demons, messages and mediums.
A prominent student of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, was
once asked if there were a mythic tail that could illuminate the struggles of
our own time, to which Campbell replied,
technological development is moving too fast for such a story to be told just
yet, it would be out of date before it could shine its light on our ever
changing social environment--(or
something to that effect), maybe though we do have such a myth, one that stands
high enough to illuminate the hidden mysteries of our ever changing times. Many
have referred to McLuhan as a prophet, for his anticipation of the decline of traditional forms of literacy and the increases of globalized connectedness, maybe the secret of his prophetic power
lies in his discovery of this new kind of story. Perhaps The Extensions of
Man is the myth
of our time. The Cosmic story that shines a light on our on going struggle with Being.
Extra Link:
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, By Marshal McLuhan.
Daniel Coffeen’s teachings on the work of Marshal McLuhan.
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