Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Wed 04 Mar 2009 10:08 AM PST
Editors' Note: Marshall McLuhan was never the technotopian that
contemporary technophiles like to portray. To read McLuhan is to
discover a thinker who had a decidedly ambivalent perspective on
technoculture. Thus, while McLuhan might be the patron saint of
technotopians, his imagination is also the memory that should haunt
them. As a way of understanding McLuhan anew, CTHEORY is publishing
this account of McLuhan's ambivalent relationship to technology.
Titled "Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan,"
this excerpt is from Arthur Kroker's Technology and the Canadian Mind:
Innis/McLuhan/Grant.
Arthur Kroker
Not the least of McLuhan's contributions to the study of technology
was that he transposed the literary principle of metaphor/metonymy
(the play between structure and process) into a historical
methodology for analysing the rise and fall of successive media of
communication. In McLuhan's discourse, novels are the already
obsolescent content of television; writing "turned a spotlight on
the high, dim Sierras of speech;"8 the movie is the "mechanization
of movement and gesture;"9 the telegraph provides us with
"diplomacy without walls;"10 just as "photography is the
mechanization of the perspective painting and the arrested eye."11
To read McLuhan is to enter into a "vortex" of the critical,
cultural imagination, where "fixed perspective" drops off by the
way, and where everything passes over instantaneously into its
opposite. Even the pages of the texts in Explorations, The Medium
is the Massage, The Vanishing Point, or From Cliche to
Archetype are blasted apart, counterblasted actually, in an effort
to make reading itself a more subversive act of the artistic
imagination. Faithful to his general intellectual project of
exposing the invisible environment of the technological sensorium,
McLuhan sought to make of the text itself a "counter-gradient" or
"probe" for forcing to the surface of consciousness the silent
structural rules, the "imposed assumptions" of the technological
environment within which we are both enclosed and "processed". In
The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan insisted that we cannot
understand the technological experience from the outside. We can
only comprehend how the electronic age "works us over" if we
"recreate the experience" in depth and mythically, of the processed
world of technology.
All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in
their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological,
moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part
of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the
massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is
impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as
environments.12
And McLuhan was adamant on the immanent relationship of technology
and biology, on the fact that "the new media... are nature"13 and
this for the reason that technology refers to the social and psychic
"extensions" or "outerings" of the human body or senses. McLuhan
could be so universal and expansive in his description of the media
of communication - his studies of communication technologies range
from writing and speech to the telephone, photography, television,
money, comic books, chairs and wrenches - because he viewed all
technology as the pushing of the "archetypal forms of the
unconscious out into social consciousness."14 When McLuhan noted
in Counter Blast that "environment is process, not container,"15
he meant just this: the effect of all new technologies is to impose,
silently and pervasively, their deep assumptions upon the human
psyche by reworking the "ratio of the senses."
All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or
physical.16
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios
of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the
way we think and act - the way we perceive the world. When
these ratios change, MEN CHANGE.17
For McLuhan, it's a processed world now. As we enter the electronic
age with its instantaneous and global movement of information, we
are the first human beings to live completely within the mediated
environment of the technostructure The "content" of the
technostructure is largely irrelevant (the "content" of a new
technology is always the technique which has just been superseded:
movies are the content of television; novels are the content of
movies) or, in fact, a red herring distracting our attention from
the essential secret of technology as the medium, or environment,
within which human experience is programmed. It was McLuhan's
special genius to grasp at once that the content (metonymy) of new
technologies serves as a "screen", obscuring from view the
disenchanted locus of the technological experience in its purely
"formal" or "spatial" properties. McLuhan wished to escape the "flat
earth approach" to technology, to invent a "new metaphor" by which
we might "restructure our thoughts and feelings" about the
subliminal, imperceptible environments of media effects.18
In this understanding, technology is an "extension" of biology: the
expansion of the electronic media as the "metaphor" or "environment"
of twentieth-century experience implies that, for the first time,
the central nervous system itself has been exteriorized. It is our
plight to be processed through the technological simulacrum; to
participate intensively and integrally in a "technostructure" which
is nothing but a vast simulation and "amplification" of the bodily
senses. Indeed, McLuhan often recurred to the "narcissus theme" in
classical mythology as a way of explaining our fatal fascination
with technology, viewed not as "something external" but as an
extension, or projection, of the sensory faculties of the human
species.
Media tend to isolate one or another sense from the others. The
result is hypnosis. The other extreme is withdrawing of
sensation with resulting hallucination as in dreams or DT's,
etc... Any medium, by dilating sense to fill the whole field,
creates the necessary conditions of hypnosis in that area. This
explains why at no time has any culture been aware of the
effect of its media on its overall association, not even
retrospectively.19
All of McLuhan's writings are an attempt to break beyond the "Echo"
of the narcissus myth, to show that the "technostructure" is an
extension or "repetition" of ourselves. In his essay, "The Gadget
Lover", McLuhan noted precisely why the Greek myth of Narcissus is
of such profound relevance to understanding the technological
experience.
The youth Narcissus (narcissus means narcosis or numbing)
mistook his own reflection in the water for another person.
This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions
until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or
repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with
fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had
adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed
system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once
become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any
material other than themselves.20
Confronted with the hypnotic effect of the technological sensorium,
McLuhan urged the use of any "probe" - humour, paradox, analogical
juxtaposition, absurdity - as a way of making visible the "total
field effect" of technology as medium. This is why, perhaps,
McLuhan's intellectual project actually circles back on itself, and
is structured directly into the design of his texts. McLuhan makes
the reader a "metonymy" to his "metaphor": he transforms the act of
"reading McLuhan" into dangerous participation in a radical
experiment which has, as its end, the exploration of the numbing of
consciousness in the technological massage. Indeed, to read McLuhan
is to pass directly into the secret locus of the "medium is the
massage"; to experience anew the "media" (this time the medium of
writing) as a silent gradient of ground-rules.
No less critical than George Grant of the human fate in
technological society, McLuhan's imagination seeks a way out of our
present predicament by recovering a highly ambivalent attitude
towards the objects of technostructure. Thus, while Grant writes
in William James' sense of a "block universe" of the technological
dynamo, seeing only tendencies towards domination, McLuhan
privileges a historically specific study of the media of
communication. In an early essay (1955), "A Historical Approach to
the Media", McLuhan said that if we weren't "to go on being helpless
illiterates" in the new world of technology, passive victims as the
"media themselves act directly toward shaping our most intimate
self-consciousness", then we had to adopt the attitude of the
artist.21 "The mind of the artist is always the point of maximal
sensitivity and resourcefulness in exposing altered realities in the
common culture."22 McLuhan would make of us "the artist, the
sleuth, the detective" in gaining a critical perspective on the
history of technology which "just as it began with writing ends with
television."23 Unlike Grant's reflections on technology which are
particularistic and existential, following a downward spiral (the
famous Haligonian "humbug") into pure content: pure will, pure
remembrance, pure duration, McLuhan's thought remains projective,
metaphorical, and emancipatory. Indeed, Grant's perspective on
technology is Protestant to the core in its contemplation of the
nihilism of liberal society. But if Grant's tragic inquiry finds its
artistic analogue in Colville's To Prince Edward Island then
McLuhan's discourse is more in the artistic tradition of Georges
Seurat, the French painter, and particularly in one classic
portrait, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
McLuhan always accorded Seurat a privileged position as the "art
fulcrum between Renaissance visual and modern tactile. The
coalescing of inner and outer, subject and object."24 McLuhan was
drawn to Seurat in making painting a "light source" (a "light
through situation"). Seurat did that which was most difficult and
decisive: he dipped the viewer into the "vanishing point" of the
painting.25 Or as McLuhan said, and in prophetic terms, Seurat
(this "precursor of TV") presented us with a searing visual image of
the age of the "anxious object."26
Now, to be sure, the theme of anxiety runs deep through the liberal
side of the Canadian mind. This is the world of Margaret Atwood's
"intolerable anxiety" and of Northrop Frye's "anxiety structure."
But McLuhan is the Canadian thinker who undertook a phenomenology of
anxiety, or more precisely a historically relative study of the
sources of anxiety and stress in technological society. And he did
so by the simple expedient of drawing us, quickly and in depth, into
Seurat's startling and menacing world of the anxious, stressful
objects of technology. In his book, Through the Vanishing Point,
McLuhan said of Seurat that "by utilizing the Newtonian analysis of
the fragmentation of light, he came to the technique of divisionism,
whereby each dot of paint becomes the equivalent of an actual light
source, a sun, as it were. This device reversed the traditional
perspective by making the viewer the vanishing point."27 The
significance of Seurat's "reversal" of the rules of traditional
perspective is that he abolished, once and for all, the medieval
illusion that space is neutral, or what is the same, that we can
somehow live "outside" the processed world of technology. With
Seurat a great solitude and, paradoxically, a greater entanglement
falls on modern being. "We are suddenly in the world of the "Anxious
Object" which is prepared to take the audience inside the painting
process itself."28 Following C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image,
McLuhan noted exactly what this "flip" in spatial perspective meant.
Rather than looking in according to the traditional spatial model of
medieval discourse, modern man is suddenly "looking out. " "Like one
looking out from the saloon entrance onto the dark Atlantic, or from
the lighted porch upon the dark and lonely moors."29 The lesson of
Seurat is this: modernity is coeval with the age of the "anxious
object" because we live now, fully, within the designed environment
of the technological sensorium.30 For McLuhan, we are like
astronauts in the processed world of technology. We now take our
"environment" with us in the form of technical "extensions" of the
human body or senses. The technostructure is both the lens through
which we experience the world, and, in fact, the "anxious object"
with which human experience has become imperceptibly, almost
subliminally, merged.31
Now, McLuhan often remarked that in pioneering the DEW line, Canada
had also provided a working model for the artistic imagination as an
"early warning system"32 in sensing coming shifts in the
technostructure. Seurat's artistic representation of the spatial
reversal at work in the electronic age, a reversal which plunges us
into active participation in the "field" of technological
experience, was one such early warning system. It was, in fact, to
counteract our "numbing" within the age of the anxious object that
McLuhan's literary and artistic imagination, indeed his whole
textual strategy, ran to the baroque. As an intellectual strategy,
McLuhan favoured the baroque for at least two reasons: it privileged
"double perspective and contrapuntal theming;" and it sought to
"capture the moment of change in order to release energy
dramatically."33 There is, of course, a clear and decisive
connection between McLuhan's attraction to Seurat as an artist who
understood the spatial grammar of the electronic age and his
fascination with the baroque as a method of literary imagination.
If, indeed, we are now "looking out" from inside the technological
sensorium; and if, in fact, in the merger of biology and technology
which is the locus of the electronic age, "we" have become the
vanishing points of technique, then a way had to be discovered for
breaching the "invisible environment"34 within which we are now
enclosed. For McLuhan, the use of the baroque in each of his
writings, this constant resort to paradox, double perspective, to a
carnival of the literary imagination in which the pages of the texts
are forced to reveal their existence also as a "medium", was also a
specific strategy aimed at "recreating the experience" of technology
as massage. Between Seurat (a radar for "space as process") and
baroque (a "counter-gradient"): that's the artistic strategy at work
in McLuhan's imagination as he confronted the subliminal, processed
world of electronic technologies.
There is a deep, thematic unity in all of McLuhan's writings,
extending from his later studies of technology in Understanding
Media, The Medium is the Massage, The Gutenberg Galaxy and
Counter Blast to his earlier, more classical, writings in The
Interior Landscape, The Vanishing Point and also including his
various essays in reviews ranging from the Sewanee Review to the
Teacher's College Record. McLuhan's discourse was culturally
expansive, universalist, and spatially oriented precisely because
his thought expresses the Catholic side of the Canadian, and by
implication, modern mind. McLuhan's Catholicism, in fact, provided
him with an epistemological strategy that both gave him a privileged
vantage-point on the processed world of technology and, in any
event, drove him beyond literary studies to an historical
exploration of technological media as the "dynamic" of modern
culture. The essential aspect of McLuhan's technological humanism is
that he always remained a Catholic humanist in the Thomistic
tradition: one who brought to the study of technology and culture
the more ancient Catholic hope that even in a world of despair (in
our "descent into the maelstrom"35 with Poe's drowning sailor)
that a way out of the labyrinth could be found by bringing to
fruition the "reason" or "epiphany" of technological society.
McLuhan's thought often recurred to the sense that there is an
immanent moment of "reason" and a possible new human order in
technological society which could be captured on behalf of the
preservation of "civilization."
Thus, McLuhan was a technological humanist in a special sense. He
often described the modern century as the "age of anxiety"36
because of our sudden exposure, without adequate means of
understanding, to the imploded, instantaneous world of the new
information order. Indeed, in The Medium is the Massage, he spoke
of technology in highly ambivalent terms as, simultaneously,
containing possibilities for emancipation and domination. For
McLuhan, a critical humanism, one which dealt with the "central
cultural tendencies."37 of the twentieth-century, had to confront
the technological experience in its role as environment,
evolutionary principle, and as second nature itself.
Environments are not passive wrappings, but active processes
which work us over completely, massaging the ratio of the
senses and imposing their silent assumptions. But environments
are invisible. Their ground-rules, pervasive structure, and
overall patterns elude easy perception.38
McLuhan's technological humanism was at the forward edge of a
fundamental "paradigm shift" in human consciousness. When McLuhan
spoke of electronic technology as an extension, or outering, of the
central nervous system, he also meant that modern society had done a
"flip". In order to perceive the "invisible ground rules" of the
technological media, we have to learn to think in reverse image: to
perceive the subliminal grammar of technology as metaphor, as a
simulacrum or sign-system, silently and pervasively processing human
existence. After all, McLuhan was serious when he described the
electric light bulb (all information, no content) as a perfect
model, almost a precursor, of the highly mediated world of the
"information society." McLuhan's thought was structural, analogical,
and metaphorical because he sought to disclose the "semiological
reduction"39 at work in the media of communication. But unlike,
for example, the contemporary French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, who,
influenced deeply by McLuhan, has teased out the Nietzschean side of
the processed world of television, computers, and binary
architecture but whose inquiry has now dissolved into fatalism,
McLuhan was always more optimistic. Because McLuhan, even as he
studied the "maelstrom" of high technology, never deviated from the
classical Catholic project of seeking to recover the basis for a
"new universal community"40 in the culture of technology. Unlike
Grant or Innis, McLuhan could never be a nationalist because his
Catholicism, with its tradition of civil humanism and its faith in
the immanence of "reason", committed him to the possibility of the
coming of a universal world culture. In the best of the Catholic
tradition, followed out by Etienne Gilson in philosophy as much as
by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in politics, McLuhan sought a new
"incarnation," an "epiphany," by releasing the reason in
technological experience.
Indeed, in a formative essay, "Catholic Humanism," McLuhan averred
that he followed Gilson in viewing Catholicism as being directly
involved in the "central cultural discoveries" of the modern age.
"Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition
shows the way to earthly paradise, or complete madness: the abyss or
the top of mount purgatory."41 Now McLuhan's Catholicism was not a
matter of traditional faith (he was a convert), but of a calculated
assessment of the importance of the Catholic conception of "reason"
for interpreting, and then civilizing, technological experience.
Over and again in his writings, McLuhan returned to the theme that
only a sharpening and refocusing of human perception could provide a
way out of the labyrinth of the technostructure. His ideal value was
that of the "creative process in art;"42 so much so in fact that
McLuhan insisted that if the master struggle of the twentieth
century was between reason and irrationality, then this struggle
could only be won if individuals learned anew how to make of the
simple act of "ordinary human perception" an opportunity for
recovering the creative energies in human experience. McLuhan was a
technological humanist of the blood: his conviction, repeated time
and again, was that if we are to recover a new human possibility it
will not be "outside" the technological experience, but must, of
necessity, be "inside" the field of technology. What is really
wagered in the struggle between the opposing tendencies towards
domination and freedom in technology is that which is most personal,
and intimate, to each individual: the blinding or revivification of
ordinary human perception. Or, as McLuhan said in "Catholic
Humanism": "...the drama of ordinary human perception seen as the
poetic process is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on
the secrets of created being."43 And, of course, for McLuhan the
"poetic process" - this recovery of the method of "sympathetic
reconstruction," this "recreation" of the technological experience
as a "total communication," this recovery of the "rational notes of
beauty, integrity, consonance, and claritas" as the actual stages of
human apprehension - was the key to redeeming the technological
order.44 If only the mass media could be harmonized with the
"poetic process;" if only the media of communication could be made
supportive of the "creative process" in ordinary human perception:
then technological society would, finally, be transformed into a
wonderful opportunity for the "incarnation" of human experience.
But, of course, this meant that, fully faithful to the Catholic
interpretation of human experience as a working out of the
(immanent) principle of natural, and then divine, reason, McLuhan
viewed technological society as an incarnation in the making.
Unlike the secular discourse of the modern century, McLuhan saw no
artificial divisions between "ordinary human perception" and the
technical apparatus of the mass media or, for that matter, between
biology and technology. In this discourse, the supervening value is
reason; and this to such an extent that the creative process of
human perception as well as the technologies of comic books, mass
media, photography, music, and movies are viewed as relative
phases in the working out of a single process of apprehension.
"...The more extensive the mass medium the closer it must
approximate to the character of our cognitive faculties."45 Or, on
a different note:
As we trace the rise of successive communication channels or
links, from writing to movies and TV it is borne in on us that
for their exterior artifice to be effective it must partake of
the character of that interior artifice by which in ordinary
perception we incarnate the exterior world. because human
perception is literally incarnation. So that each of us must
poet the world or fashion it within us as our primary and
constant mode of awareness.46
McLuhan's political value may have been the creation of a universal
community of humanity founded on reason, his axiology may have
privileged the process of communication, and his moral dynamic may
have been the "defence of civilization" from the dance of the
irrational; but his ontology, the locus of his world vision, was the
recovery of the "poetic process" as both a method of historical
reconstruction of the mass media and a "miracle" by which
technological society is to be illuminated, once again, with
meaning.
In ordinary human perception, men perform the miracle of
recreating within themselves - in their interior faculties -
the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous
poietikos or of the agent intellect - that is the poetic or
creative process. The exterior world in every instant of
perception is interiorized and recreated in a new manner.
Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and
cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within
our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of
Being.47
The significance of the "poetic process" as the master concept of
McLuhan's technological humanism is clear. It is only by creatively
interiorizing (realistically perceiving) the "external" world of
technology, by reabsorbing into the dance of the intellect mass
media as extensions of the cognitive faculties of the human species,
that we can recover "ourselves" anew. It is also individual
freedom which is wagered in McLuhan's recovery of the "miracle" of
ordinary human perception. McLuhan's intellectual strategy was not,
of course, a matter of quietism. Quite the contrary, the teasing out
of the "epiphany" in external experience meant intense and direct
participation in the "objects" composing the technostructure.
McLuhan wanted to see from the inside the topography of the
technological media which horizon human experience. His Catholicism,
with its central discovery of a "new method of study", a new way of
seeing technology, fated him to be a superb student of popular
culture. Indeed, McLuhan's thought could dwell on all aspects of
popular culture - games, advertisements, radio, television, and
detective stories - because he viewed each of these instances of
technological society as somehow "magical";48 providing new clues
concerning how the technological massage alters the "ratios of the
senses" and novel opportunities for improved human perception. In
much the same way, but with a different purpose, McLuhan was a
practitioner of Northrop Frye's "improved binoculars." Like his
favourite symbolist poets, Poe, Joyce, Eliot, and Baudelaire,
McLuhan always worked backwards from effects to cause. Much like the
models of the detective and the artist, he wished to perfect in the
method of the "suspended judgement,"49 in the technique of
discovery itself, a new angle of vision on technological
experience.
McLuhan was, in fact, a dynamic ecologist. He sought a new, internal
balance among technique, imagination and nature. But his ecological
sense was based on a grim sense of realism. In his view, the
"electric age" is the historical period in which we are doomed to
become simultaneously, the "sex of the lifeless machine world"50
or creative participants in a great cycle which turns society back
to a new "Finn cycle."51
McLuhan always privileged the connection between the immediacy and
simultaneity of electric circuitry and "blind, all-hearing Homer."
52 This was a "humanism" which wagered itself on a desperate
encounter with the "objects" of the technological order. In
Understanding Media, Counter Blast, and The Medium is the
Massage, there emerges an almost cruel description of the
technological sensorium as a sign-system to which the human mind is
exteriorized. Electric technology, this latest sensation of the
"genus sensation", implies that we are now "outered" or "ablated"
into a machine-processed world of information.53 It is the human
destiny in the modern age to be programmed by an information order
which operates on the basis of algorithmic and digital logic, and
which, far from conscious human intervention, continues to move
through the whirring of its own servomechanisms. Thus, in
Understanding Media, McLuhan noted:
By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous
systems by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by
which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of
hands and feet and teeth and bodily controls - all such
extensions of our bodies, including cities - will be translated
into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires
utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as now
befits an organism that wears its brains outside its hide and
its nerves outside its skin.54
And of this "semiological wash" through the technostructure, McLuhan
said simply but starkly,
In McLuhan's effort to humanize technology through "in-depth
participation" there is reopened a more ancient debate in the
western mind between the tragic imagination and the calculated
optimism of the rhetoricians. In his essay, "An Ancient Quarrel in
Modern America", McLuhan described himself as a "Ciceronian
humanist"56 (better, I suppose, than the early Scottish
common-sense realists in Canada who labeled themselves "Caesars of
the wilderness"). McLuhan was a "Ciceronian humanist" to this
extent: he was, by intellectual habit, an historian of civilization
and a rhetorician. McLuhan's rhetoric stands, for example, to
Grant's tragic lament or to Innis' "marginal man" in much the same
way as that earlier debate between Lucretius and Virgil. Between the
rhetorician and the tragic sensibility, there is always a contest
between the attitude of intellectual futility, tinged by despair,
and a pragmatic will to knowledge, between resigned melancholy and
melancholy resignation.
But if McLuhan brings to bear on technology the skills of a
rhetorician's imagination, then he does so as a Catholic, and not
Ciceronian, humanist. McLuhan's mind represents one of the best
syntheses yet achieved of the Catholic legacy as this was developed
in Aquinas, Joyce, and Eliot. In a largely unremarked, but decisive,
article - "Joyce, Aquinas and the Poetic Process" - McLuhan was
explicit that his epistemological strategy for the study of
technology was modeled on Aquinas' method of the "respondeo
dicendum"; the tracing and retracing of thought through the "cubist
landscape" of the Thomistic article.57 McLuhan said of Aquinas
that in his "method of thought" we see the fully modern mind at
work. In Aquinas, as later in Joyce, there is the constant use of
the "labyrinth figure" as the archetype of human cognition. "Whereas
the total shape of each article, with its trinal divisions into
objections, respondeo, and answers to objections, is an 'S'
labyrinth, this figure is really traced and retraced by the mind
many times in the course of a single article."58 Aquinas' central
contribution to modern discourse was this: his "method" of study
gave a new brilliance of expression to the "technique of discovery"
as the locus of the modern mind.
His 'articles' can be regarded as vivisections of the mind in
act. The skill and wit with which he selects his objections
constitute a cubist landscape, an ideal landscape of great
intellectual extent seen from an airplane. The ideas or objects
in this landscape are by their very contiguity set in a
dramatic state of tension; and this dramatic tension is
provided with a dramatic peripetieia in the respondeo, and with
a resolution in the answers to the objections.59
Now, the significance of McLuhan's recovery of Aquinas' method of
the "respondeo dicendum" is that this method is almost perfectly
autobiographical of McLuhan's own strategy for the study of
technological experience. Long before McLuhan in, for example, The
Medium is the Massage, discussed the creation of a "cubist
landscape" as a counter-gradient for understanding technological
media or in The Mechanical Bride appealed for the need to sharpen
"perception", he had already adopted the "Catholic method", and
Joyce's adaptation of Aquinas' "article" as his main epistemological
tool for "understanding media." Indeed, it was McLuhan's
achievement, fully faithful to the spirit of Joyce's writings in
Ulysses, Dubliners, and The Portrait, to translate the
Thomistic analysis of cognition, "namely the fact of the creative
process as the natural process of apprehension, arrested and
retraced,"60 into a powerful intellectual procedure for grasping
the inner movement in even the most prosaic objects of popular
culture. "Ordinary experience is a riot of imprecision, of
impressions enmeshed in preconceptions, cliches, profanities, and
impercipience. But for the true artist every experience is capable
of an epiphany."61 McLuhan may have lived with the grimly
pessimistic knowledge that we had become the "sex organs of the
machine world", but his intellectual spirit was optimistic, and
indeed, combative. In the following passage, McLuhan is speaking of
Joyce in relationship to Aquinas, but he might well have been
writing his intellectual notice. Like Joyce, and for the same
reason, he always preferred "comic to tragic art;"62 his
conclusions may have been downbeat, but his "method" was distinctly
upbeat. McLuhan's very psychology was like a counter-gradient
flailing against the technostructure; this in full awareness that
the "technological massage" worked us over, not from outside, but
from within. The "minotaurs" to be overcome in "understanding media"
were also fully interiorized within the human mind and body.
Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a
"minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything
which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride,
imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty.
So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between
the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the
first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the
key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he
was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of
the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of
perception.63
McLuhan shared with Grant, and Nietzsche, a deep understanding of
"technique as ourselves", of our envelopment in the historical
dynamic of technological media. But he differed from them, and
consequently from the 'lament' of the Protestant mind, both by
subscribing to the value of "creative freedom", and by providing a
precise intellectual itinerary through which the "creative process"
might be generalized in human experience.
In McLuhan's terms, everything now depends on the creation of an
inner harmony, a concordance of the beauty of reason, between the
"imprecision of ordinary experience" and the "cognitive power in
act." This is just to note, though, exactly how central McLuhan's
religious sensibility (his Catholic roots) was to his interpretation
of technology. It was, in the end, from Joyce and Aquinas that he
took an intellectual strategy for the exploration of technological
experience: the method of "suspended judgment;" the privileging of
the perception of the true artist in battle with the minotaurs which
block the possible epiphany in every experience, the technique of
reconstruction as discovery; a singular preference for the comic
over the tragic; the abandonment of narrative in favour of the
"analogical juxtaposition of character, scene, and situation." Like
other advocates of Catholic humanism in the twentieth-century,
McLuhan was neither an impressionist nor an expressionist, but one
who stood by the "method of the profoundly analogical drama of
existence as it is mirrored in the cognitive power in act."65 For
McLuhan, the recovery of reason in technological experience was
always part of a broader religious drama: what was also at stake in
the contest with the minotaurs in the labyrinth of technology was
individual redemption.
McLuhan often recurred in his writings to Poe's figure of the
"drowning sailor" who, trapped in the whirlpool without a visible
means of escape, studied his situation with "calm detachment" in
order to discover some thread which might lead out of the
labyrinth.66 While the Catholic touch in McLuhan's thought
provided him with the necessary sense of critical detachment and,
moreover, with the transcendent value of creative freedom; it was
the particular genius of his discourse that he managed to combine an
intellectual sensibility which was essentially Thomistic with the
more ancient practice of exploring the crisis of technological
society within the terms of experimental medicine. In McLuhan's
inquiry, there is rehearsed time and again a classically medical
approach to understanding technology: an approach which, while it
may be traced directly to Hippocrates' Ancient Medicine, also has
its origins in Thucydides' method of historical writing. Very much
in the tradition of Hippocrates, and then Thucydides, McLuhan's
historical study of the media of communication was structured by the
three moments of semiology (classification of symptoms), diagnosis
and therapeutics.67 Indeed, it might even be said that McLuhan's
adoption of the three stages of the Thomistic "article" -
objections, respondeo, and answers to objections - was only a modern
variation of the more classical method of experimental medicine. In
both instances, the historical experience under interrogation is
"recreated in depth", with special emphasis placed on the historian
(the cultural historian as doctor to a sick society) as a
"vivisectionist" of the whole field of experience.68 When McLuhan
recommended repeatedly that the cultural historian "trace and
retrace" the field of technological experience, both as a means of
understanding the "closure" effected upon human perspective and as a
way of discovering an escape-hatch, he was only restating, in
distinctly modern language, the experimental method of ancient
medicine. McLuhan's imagination always played at the interface of
biology and technology. His discourse took as its working premise
that the most insidious effect of technology lay in its deep
colonization of biology, of the body itself; and, moreover, in its
implicit claim, that technology is the new locus of the evolutionary
principle. For McLuhan the technological "sensorium" was precisely
that: an artificial amplification, and transferal, of human
consciousness and sensory organs to the technical apparatus, which
now, having achieved the electronic phase of "simultaneity" and
"instantaneous scope", returns to take its due on the human
body.69 The "sensorium" presents itself to a humanity which has
already passed over into "deep shock" over the inexplicable
consequences of electronics as a practical simulation of
evolution, of the biological process itself. This circling back of
the technological sensorium, this silent merger of technology and
biology, is the cataclysmic change in human history that so
disturbed McLuhan. His discourse on technology begins and ends with
an exploration of the "possession" of biology by the technological
imperative. Indeed, in McLuhan's estimation, technology works its
effects upon biology much like a disease. It is also the tools of a
doctor which are needed both for an accurate diagnosis of the causes
of the disease, and for a prognosis of some cure which might be
recuperative of the human sensibility in technological society.
One pervasive theme running through McLuhan's writings has to do with
the double-effect of the technological experience in "wounding" the
human persona by effecting a "closure" of human perception, and in
"numbing" and thus "neutralizing" the area under stress.70 It was
McLuhan's melancholic observation that when confronted with new
technologies, the population passes through, and this repeatedly,
the normal cycle of shock: "alarm" at the disturbances occasioned by
the introduction, often on a massive scale, of new extensions of the
sensory organs; "resistance" which is typifically directed at the
"content" of new technological innovations (McLuhan's point was, of
course, that the content of a new technology is only the already
passe history of a superseded technology); and "exhaustion" in the
face of our inability to understand the subliminal (formal)
consequences of fundamental changes in the technostructure.71 It
was his dour conclusion that, when confronted with the
"paradigm-shift" typified by the transformation of technology from a
mechanical, industrial model to an electronic one, the population
rapidly enters into a permanent state of exhaustion and
bewilderment. In McLuhan's terms, the present century is
characterized by an almost total unconsciousness of the real effects
of the technological media. "The new media are blowing a lot of baby
powder around the pendant cradle of the NEW MAN today. The dust gets
in our eyes."72
It was a source of great anxiety to McLuhan that electronic
technologies, with their abrupt reversal of the structural laws of
social and non-social evolution, had (without human consent or even
social awareness) precipitated a new, almost autonomous, technical
imperative in human experience.73 In Counter Blast, McLuhan had
this to say of the new technological imperative:
Throughout previous evolution, we have protected the central
nervous system by outering this or that physical organ in
tools, housing, clothing, cities. But each outering of
individual organs was also an acceleration and intensification
of the general environment until the central nervous system did
a flip. We turned turtle. The shell went inside, the organs
outside. Turtles with soft shells become vicious. That's our
present state.74
A society of "vicious turtles" is also one in which technology works
its "biological effects" in the language of stress. For McLuhan, the
advent of electronic technology creates a collective sense of deep
distress, precisely because this "outering" of the central nervous
system induces an unprecedented level of stress on the individual
organism. The "technological massage" reworks human biology and the
social psyche at a deep, subliminal level. Having grasped the
essential connection between technology and stress, it was not
surprising that so much of McLuhan's discourse on technology was
influenced by Hans Selye's pioneering work in the field of stress.
Indeed, McLuhan adopted directly from Selye's research a medical
understanding of the relationship between stress and numbness. A
central theme in McLuhan's reflection on bio-technology was Selye's
original theorisation that under conditions of deep stress, the
organism anesthetizes the area effected, making the shock felt in
peripheral regions. And McLuhan always insisted that the age of
electric circuity is a time of HIGH STRESS.
When an organ goes out (ablation) it goes numb. The central
nervous system has gone numb (for survival). We enter the age
of the unconscious with electronics, and consciousness shifts
to the physical organs, even in the body politic. There is a
great stepping up of physical awareness and a big drop in
mental awareness when the central nervous system goes
outward.75
Or again, and this in Counter Blast, although the same theme is
also at the very beginning of Understanding Media:
The one area which is numb and unconscious is the area which
receives the impact. Thus there is an exact parallel with
ablation in experimental medicine but in medical ablation,
observation is properly directed not to the numb area, but to
all the other organs as they are affected by the numbing or
ablation of the single organ.76
It was McLuhan's overall project (his semiology) to probe the
numbing of human perception by the technological innovations of the
electronic age. In much the same way that McLuhan said of the
movement from speech to writing that it illuminated the "high, dim
Sierras of speech", McLuhan's "medical" understanding of technology
lit up the darkness surrounding the invisible environment of the
forms (rhetoric) of technology. All of McLuhan's writings are, in
fact a highly original effort at casting iron filings across the
invisible "field" of electronic technologies in an effort to
highlight their tacit assumptions. McLuhan's intention was to break
the seduction effect of technology, to disturb the hypnotic spell
cast by the dynamism of the technological imperative. And thus,
while he was in the habit of saying, about the "inclusive" circuitry
of the electronic age, that it was composed of "code, language,
mechanical medium - all (having) magical properties which transform,
transfigure,"77 he was also accustomed to note that, on the
down-side of the "new age", its participants were daily "x-rayed by
television images."78
McLuhan could be so ambivalent on the legacy of the technological
experience because, following Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas, he
viewed technological media as simultaneously extensions and
auto-amputations of the sensory organs. The paradoxical character of
technological media as both amplifications and cancellations was, of
course, one basic theme of Understanding Media.
While it was no part of the intention of Jonas and Selye to
provide an explanation of human invention and technology, they
have given us a theory of disease (discomfort) that goes far to
explain why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body
by a kind of autoamputation.79
It was McLuhan's special insight though, to recognize the deep
relationship between the history of technological innovation and the
theory of disease. McLuhan's historical account of the evolution of
technological media was structured around a (medical) account of
technological innovation as "counter-irritants" to the "stress of
acceleration of pace and increase of load."80 Just as the body (in
Hans Selye's terms) resorts to an auto-amputative strategy when "the
perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation," so
too (in McLuhan's terms) in the stress of super-stimulation, "the
central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of
amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or
function."81 Technology is a "counter-irritant" which aids in the
"equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central
nervous system."82 Thus, the wheel (as an extension of the foot)
is a counterirritant against the sudden pressure of "new burdens
resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary
media;" "movies and TV complete the cycle of mechanization of the
human sensorium;" and computers are ablations or outerings of the
human brain itself.83 Now, it was McLuhan's thesis that the
motive-force for technological innovation was always defensive and
biological: the protection of the central nervous system against
sudden changes in the "stimulus" of the external environment.
Indeed, McLuhan often noted that "the function of the body" was the
maintenance of an equilibrium among the media of our sensory organs.
And consequently, the electronic age is all the more dangerous, and,
in fact, suicidal when "in a desperate... autoamputation, as if the
central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs
to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous
mechanism,"84 the central nervous system itself is outered in the
form of electric circuitry. McLuhan inquires, again and again, what
is to be the human fate now that with the "extension of
consciousness" we have put "one's nerves outside, and one's physical
organs inside the nervous system, or brain."85 For McLuhan, the
modern century is typified by an information order which plays our
nerves in public: a situation, in his estimation, of "dread".
It was in an equally desperate gamble at increasing popular
awareness of the "flip" done to us by the age of electric circuitry
that McLuhan undertook an essentially medical survey of
technological society. McLuhan's "classification of symptoms" took
the form of an elaborate and historical description of the evolution
of technology from the "mechanical" extensions of man (wheels,
tools, printing) to the mythic, inclusive technologies of the
electric age (television, movies, computers, telephone, phonograph).
His "diagnosis" was that the crisis induced by technological society
had much to do with the "closures" (numbing) effected among the
sense ratios by new technical inventions. McLuhan was explicit about
the technological origins of the modern stress syndrome: "the
outering or extension of our bodies and senses in a new invention
compels the whole of our bodies and senses to shift into new
positions in order to maintain equilibrium."86 A new "closure" is
occasioned in our sensory organs and faculties, both private and
public, by new technical extension of man. And McLuhan's
"therapeutic": the deployment of the "creative imagination" as a new
way of seeing technology, and of responding, mythically and in
depth, to the challenges of the age of electric circuitry. For
McLuhan, the stress syndrome associated with the coming-to-be of the
technostructure could only be met with the assistance of educated
perspective. If it is the human fate to live within its (own)
central nervous system in the form of the electronic simulation of
consciousness, then it is also the human challenge to respond
creatively to the "dread" and "anxiety" of the modern age. We may be
the servomechanisms, the body bits, of a technical apparatus which
substitutes a language of codes, of processed information, for
"natural" experience, but this is a human experience which is
double-edged. Without the education of perspective or, for that
matter, in the absence of a "multidimensional perspective"87 on
technique, it will surely be the human destiny to be imprinted by
the structural imperatives, the silent grammar, of the new world
information order. But it was also McLuhan's hope, occasioned by his
faith in the universality of reason that the electronic age could be
transformed in the direction of creative freedom. After all, it was
his over-arching thesis that the era of electric circuitry
represented a great break-point in human experience: the end of
"visual, uniform culture"88 based on mechanical technologies, and
the ushering in of a popular culture of the "new man". which would
be fully tribal and organic. In all his texts, but particularly in
The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan insisted on teasing out the
emancipatory tendencies in new technologies. Against the
blandishments of an "official culture" to impose old meanings on
novel technologies, McLuhan sympathized with "anti-social
perspectives": the creative perspectives of the artist, the poet,
and even the young, who respond with "untaught delight to the
poetry, and the beauty of the new technological environment."89 In
his intellectual commitment to the development of a new perspective
on technology, McLuhan was, of course, only following Joyce in his
willingness to respond to the technological environment with a sense
of its "creative process." "He (Joyce) saw that the wake of human
progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory
man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the
electric age, but if again, then let's make it awake or awake or
both."90 Anyway in McLuhan's world, in a society which has sound
as its environment, we have no choice. "We simply are not equipped
with earlids."91
McLuhan was the last and best exponent of the liberal imagination in
Canadian letters. His thought brings to a new threshold of
intellectual expression the fascination with the question of
technology which has always, both in political and private practice,
so intrigued liberal discourse in Canada. McLuhan's thought provides
a new eloquence, and indeed, nobility of meaning to "creative
freedom" as a worthwhile public value; and this as much as it
reasserts the importance of a renewed sense of "individualism", both
as the locus of a revived political community and as a creative site
(the "agent intellect") for releasing, again and again, the possible
"epiphanies" in technological experience. In McLuhan's writings, the
traditional liberal faith in the reason of technological experience,
a reason which could be the basis of a rational and universal
political community, was all the more ennobled to the extent that
the search for the "reason" in technology was combined with the
Catholic quest for a new "incarnation." McLuhan's communication
theory was a direct outgrowth of his Catholicism; and his religious
sensibility fused perfectly with a classically liberal perspective
on the question of technology and civilization. In the present
orthodoxy of intellectual discourse, it is not customary to find a
thinker whose inquiry is both infused by a transcendent religious
sensibility and whose intellectual scholarship is motivated, not
only by a desperate sense of the eclipse of reason in modern
society, but by the disappearance of "civilization" itself through
its own vanishing-point. As quixotic as it might be, McLuhan's
intellectual project was of such an inclusive and all-embracing
nature. His thought could be liberal, Catholic, and structuralist
(before his time) precisely because the gravitation-point of
McLuhan's thought was the preservation of the fullest degree
possible of creative freedom in a modern century, which, due to the
stress induced by its technology, was under a constant state of
emergency. In McLuhan's discourse, individual freedom as well as
civil culture itself were wagered in the contest with technology.
The technologica Attachment: Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan
Processed World
Tracking Technology I: The Catholic Legacy
Man becomes as it were the sex organ of the machine world, as
the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to
evolve ever new forms. The machine-world reciprocates man's
love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely by providing
him with wealth.55
Tracking Technology II: Experimental Medicine
McLuhan's Blindspots
