McLuhan: Week-in-Review

First, some general observations

The shape of last week’s discussion was largely determined by the format of class: presentations on McLuhan’s different case studies. I’ve done this sort of exercise before with students in reference to McLuhan, but I thought last Thursday’s class was exceptionally successful. We covered a lot of ground, learned a lot together, and I think you guys demonstrated an admirable grasp of the material while also wrestling with McLuhan’s many, many problems.

To my mind, a few of these stood out, either as major topics of discussion, or as especially interesting and productive (to my mind, to what I anticipate we’ll deal with in the course of the semester):

• What Nathaniel calls the horse/cart problem. McLuhan himself couches this in terms of chickens and eggs: “suddenly it looked like a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.” The vicious circularity of relations to technology is a major, important theme of just about all the thinking on technology. We create technology; it changes us; the new technologies we create are now different because of how we have changed.

• The difference between the senses, and the differential effects technologies have on different senses. Todd touched on this in his blog post on the written word, with reference to the way alphabetic script effects a “unique separation of sight and sound,”” David outlines how different time-keeping regimes intervene in different senses, and this was also a major topic of discussion in class with Noah and Hassan’s presentation on “Number.”

• The aesthetic dimension of media change, especially in terms of the literary. Late in Part 1, McLuhan offers a singularly dissatisfying prescription (at least to me), that artists are the ones who can grasp the effects of media change in the moment. It feels like an evacuation of the critic’s proper role to lay that task at the feet of artists. Meanwhile, Diana and Kelly, respectively in their blog posts, and together in their presentation, touch on McLuhan’s strange but interesting claim that modernist poetry (Pound, cummings, etc.) depended on the typewriter; and in his presentation, David suggested that McLuhan’s writing itself at times enacts formally the theoretical or critical points under discussion (re: specifically, the “Clocks” chapter).

To which I will add: Of course, aesthetic is a tricky word, and includes not only “artistic” but also “sensory” or “perceptual.” It’s of course important to understand what McLuhan is on about when he talks about matters artistic and literary, but one question I have (that I previously hadn’t had) is the importance of McLuhan’s engagements with various artistic and, especially, literary texts as he works out his theory. Compared to Benjamin’s deep literary analysis (say, in the “Baudelaire” essay), McLuhan’s work of art and literature feels awfully thin. But I suspect it’s more important than I’ve previously suspected.

Meanwhile, on the blogs

I want to draw a few strands together that may not, at first, seem to have much to do with each other. Joe finds himself uncomfortable with the sweeping social analysis McLuhan gives us; it’s deeply reductionist, and even, perhaps, paranoid (à la Sedgwick). Meanwhile, both Hassan and Noah (because they got stuck with the weirdest, hardest chapter in the book) wrestled with what happens when McLuhan turns his attention to abstraction—to media that aren’t, in any straightforward way, correlated to a particular part of the body or sense modality. The reason these belong in the same thought for me has to do with ways in which McLuhan attends (or does not), or allows us to attend (or not) to questions of scale.

To put this a slightly different way, as Aden points out, McLuhan’s primary metaphor or figure for media is that they are extensions, and at various points, McLuhan makes explicit that these are not simply extensions of man, but extensions of his body. (At the center of all this tech, the body; recall Benjamin’s figure from “Experience and Poverty” of the “tiny, fragile human body”.) This is nearly axiomatic for McLuhan. Technologies are extensions of the body. But then what occurs when a technology (code, number) is abstract, seemingly de-correlated from a body and its sense ratios? He makes recourse to touch as the meta-sense, inventing or reinventing an existential sensory modality like “the inner touch” (see here Daniel Heller-Roazen’s magnificent The Inner Touch, Zone 2007).

Which is to say, McLuhan’s analysis is paranoid in the strong sense Sedgwick gives it: he discovers everywhere what he already knows he will find. Which is why games like numbers, with their element of imagination, play, and abstraction, end up being sites of resistance and difficulty for McLuhan. What Kittler lets us do, for example, is discover the abstraction at work at the heart of technologies that, for McLuhan, would be obviously perceptual, lashed to the body. Technology, at some level, may seem relentlessly concrete: physical devices extending a physical body. Abstraction will be an important theme, and it’s a bit harder to see how abstraction might matter while also remaining materialist (but not determinist!) as a baseline approach. (Nobody wants to be accuesed of being an idealist these days.)

As a final coda, a few people—to wit, Aden and Courtney emphasized, among other things, how prescient McLuhan seems to be. I must admit, I’m not quite sure to make of this particular thought: is McLuhan predictive somehow? (He saw the future.) Or is it that we’re still living in the same long historical moment to which McLuhan belonged? (Things haven’t really changed.)

This dovetails with the question we had, and which I talked about for a bit, which is: how do we read McLuhan? My parsing of the question, and the answer, in class, was something like: don’t get bogged down in the details of his system; most of it is nutty anyway. Stay focused on the big picture. But there’s another way we might want to read McLuhan, in a kind of historical-symptomatic sort of way. As others point out—e.g. in Todd’s discomfort with the language of “civilization”—this book also feels insuperably dated. It seems to me we might want to ask about the weird historicity or currency of Understanding Media. If it’s dated, perhaps that means that, to the extent that it feels current, we’re actually using old habits of mind to understand new situations. On this read, the shock of recognition coming less from the shock that a Canadian English professor in 1964 could read our future from his present, than the habit of mind we have that our situations are deeply new, in want of radically new understanding. Or, contrariwise, if it’s current, perhaps we might need to take a bit more seriously the problematic or uncomfortable colonialist, civilizing rhetoric, and not relegate that to a difficult-to-defend background. Instead, even if we don’t use or feel comfortable with some (many) of the figures, illustrations, and rhetorics McLuhan deploys to describe technology, it may well be that they remain in our ways of approaching our technology.

I suspect it’s probably both. But I’d be very careful stopping at prescience as a figure, since that also presumes progress. Perhaps more to the point, “prescience” of this kind is, more than anything else, a place to start asking more critical questions.

The Raw Notes

Here I offer the totally raw, unedited notes I made during class.

Todd & Courtney on “The Written Word”: Todd: * West African prince’s encounter w/ written word * Reading unlocks knowledge locked within books * Diminishing importance of literacy * Literacy frees folks from “family” feeling, separates the individual, gives him autonomy (civilized) * Transfer of power from priestly to military in written word * Phonetic alphabet: “Semantically meaningless letters correspond to semantically meaningless sounds” not nearly as expressive * Stark difference, strict parallelism, between visual and auditory * Tribal cultures can’t abide individuals or separate citizens * “Master connected, lineal sequences” as master-forms: military-industrial complexes

Courtney: * Consciousness isn’t linear * Western is biased towards non-linear logic (non-Euclidean geometry) * Civilization is uniform processing of culture in the visual space extended in space and time by the alphabet. * Literacy changes our cultures and habits. * Separation between literate and tribal man

Noah: McLuhan keeps going back on his word.

Hassan & Noah on “Number”: * 108: “Our mechanical technologies…” About touch as the mediation between the senses. * Number is an extension of touch which is itself as the extension of other senses * Number acts as an amalgamation and intensification of senses, especially touch: experience of crowds is touch. * The printed word has pushed us toward this new field of senses * 116: Gutenberg, the printing press: exact repeatability brings us from zero to infinity * Spengler, Decline of the West; he condemns modern mathematics for separating number from experience, it becomes representational * 117: The abstraction and visuality of calculus.

Diana, q: is number being an extension of touch like autoamputation? Hassan: abstract touch

Nathaniel: 36/24/36, Woody Allen

David & Aden, on “Clocks: The Scent of Time” * 145: 1st para: Clocks might not be about being punctual * Literate vs. preliterate understanding of time * Time is not a duration but a rhythm of human experience * Ex. 146: Japan tells time with scent * Modern, western visual use of telling time; clocks function as an extension of our eyes * Eastern cultures privileged their nose, sense of smell * “Time itself is separated from the rhythm of human experience”—”the fragmentation of life.” * The clock & literacy are mutually reinforcing * Affective correlate to precise time is anxiety. (OMG YES) * Conditions us, to experience stress. Example: insomnia * Preliterate time: not reliant on standardized time. vs organic time (we know how to do it without a clock) * The Somnambulist: sleep is suffused with activities outside of sleep * Hopi plurality of time (organic) vs. contemporary electric multiple & fragmented time—in between, mechanical, standardized time * Religious sacred sense of time: tribal man was more in tune with the sacred cosmogony (verbal); mechanized sense of time is profane (visual) (155)—and the electric is auditory (?) * The chapter isn’t linear or chronological; he moves back in forth in time—the absence of a clear chronological mode of presenting the material is McLuhan’s formal way of trying to refract the fragmentation and discontinuity of the three modalities of time * Literacy anticipates the capacity for time-telling

[Discussion of time, and about the difficulty of figuring out the relations between technology and specific “senses” when it comes to time: why is electric time accoustic as opposed to anything else? cf. number as touch, as “the inner touch,” the feeling of existence]

Nathaniel & Joe on “Games”: * Games: the game is a pressure valve for cultural anxieties: it’s “playing” out, representing the cultural ideology (even though he doesn’t use ideology) * Noam Chomsky: sports fandom is practice for fascism (conformist, irrational hatred of another team) * Where is the horse and the cart? * 239: Game is passed on between generations, rules become games * Genealogy to the technology/media of games. Or is there an ecology of them? * Poker example, 240: Poker is this kind of individualist game; it can reify and make concrete the values of a culture; but they also come after cultures have changed, a reaction or residuals of cultural phenomena (e.g. baseball and football) * The form of the sport in baseball—specialized positions—is different from the form of sport in “American football,” which putatively doesn’t have specialization (wow; he’s so wrong) * Games are a mass media, and an extension of social man