Suzanne Bartels's List: McLuhanism

• 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
• 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
• 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."
• 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."
• "inside" the field of technology.
• When McLuhan noted in Counter Blast that "environment is process,
• When McLuhan noted in Counter Blast that "environment is process,   not    container,"      ¹⁵       he       meant     just  this:   the effect
• 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."
• That  McLuhan could find no moment of deviation between his civil humanism,    founded on the defence of "civilization", and his  absorption into the   intellectual appendages of empire, indicates,  starkly and dramatically,   precisely how inert and uncritical is the  supervening value of "civilization".

• Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan

   

  Arthur Kroker

• Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan

   

  Arthur Kroker
• "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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

• 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
• 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.
• But if McLuhan provides an important key to exploring the technological  media, then it must also be noted that there are, at least, two major  limitations in his thought which reduce his value, either as a guide to  understanding technology in the Canadian circumstance or, for that matter, to a  full inquiry into the meaning of the technological experience in the New World.  First, McLuhan had no systematic, or even eclectic, theory of the relationship  between economy and technology; and certainly no critical appreciation of the  appropriation, and thus privatisation, of technology by the lead institutions,  multinational corporations and the state, in advanced industrial societies.
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• It was not, of course, that McLuhan was unaware of the relationship of corporate  power and technology.
• But if McLuhan understood the full dangers of corporate control of  technological media, nowhere did he extend this insight into a reflection on the  relationship of capitalism and technology
• McLuhan urged the use of the historical imagination - an historical perspective  which was to be sympathetic, realistic, and reconstructive - as our only way of  understanding the great watershed in human experience precipitated by the  appearance of electronic society. His was, however, a curious and somewhat  constricted vision of the historical imagination: for it omitted any analysis of  the precise historical conditions surrounding the development of the  technological experience in North America. McLuhan was as insensitive, and  indifferent, to the problem of the political economy of technology as he was to  the relationship of technology and ideological hegemony in the creation of  liberal society, and the liberal state, in North America.
• Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and  separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men  sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a  means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or  language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition  of universal understanding and unity.
• Everything in McLuhan's thought strained towards the liberation of the  "Pentecostal condition" of technology: the privileging of space over time; the  fascination with the exteriorisation in electronic technology of an "inner  experience" which is electric, mythic, inclusive, and configurational; the  primacy of "field" over event; the vision of "processed information" as somehow  consonant with the perfectibility of the human faculties.
• And it was this utopian, and transcendent, strain in McLuhan's thought which  may, perhaps, have made it impossible for his inquiry to embrace the problematic  of capitalism and technology.

  • Explanation for McLuhan's failure to factor in the relationship between capitalism and technology.
• What was capitalism? It was the obsolescent content of the new era of the  electronic simulation of consciousness. For McLuhan, economy had also gone  electronic and thus even the corporate world, with its "magic" of advertisements  and its plenitude of computers, could be subsumed into the more general project  of surfacing the reason in technological society.
• If McLuhan was a deeply compromised thinker, then it was because his Catholic  humanism allowed him to subordinate, and forget the question of the private  appropriation of technology. And what was, in the final instance, tragic and not  comic about his intellectual fate was simply this: it was precisely the control  over the speed, dissemination, and implanting of new technologies by the  corporate command centres of North America which would subvert the very  possibility of an age of "creative freedom."
• a second limitation, or arrest, concerned McLuhan's contempt for the "national  question" in Canada. It would be unfair to criticize a thinker for not violating  the internal unity of his own viewpoint. McLuhan was always firm in his belief  that the dawn of the "global village", this new era of "universal understanding  and unity" required the by-passing of "national" political communities.
• McLuhan's polis was the world; and his, not inaccurate, understanding of that  world had it that the United States, by virtue of its leadership in electronic  technologies, was the "new world environment."⁹⁷
• It was, consequently, the fate of McLuhan to be welcomed into the  privileged circles of the corporate and intellectual elites of the United States
• And, of course, in prophesying the end of nationalist sensibility, or the more  regional sense of a "love of one's own", McLuhan was only following the flight  beyond "romanticism" of the liberal political leadership of Canada, and, in  particular, the "creative leadership" of Trudeau.
• The common trajectories traced by Trudeau's technocratic politics and by  McLuhan's sense of technological utopia reveals, powerfully so, the importance  of the Catholic touch in Canadian politics and letters; just as much as it  reflects, that for the empire at least, Catholicism is, indeed, intimate with  the "central cultural discoveries" of the modern age. Moreover, the very  existence of a "McLuhan" or a "Trudeau" as the locus of the Canadian discourse  discloses the indelible character of Canada, not just as a witness to empire,  but, perhaps, as a radical experiment in the working out of the intellectual and  political basis of the technological imagination in North America.
• McLuhan was such an "historical energizer." His utopian vision of technological  society provided the corporate leadership of the American empire with a sense of  historical destiny; and, at least, with the passing illusion that their  narrow-minded concentration on the "business" of technology might make of them  the "Atlas" of the new world of cosmic man.
• It was McLuhan's special ability, done, no doubt, sometimes tongue in cheek and  with a proper sense of intellectual cynicism, to transfigure the grubby  leadership (Grant's "creative leaders") of the American business world, and then  of a good part of the new class of technocrats in the West, into the dizzying  heights of a greater historical destiny, that made him such a favoured courtesan  of the technological empire.
• McLuhan's association of the values of reason and "universal unity" with the  expansive momentum of the technostructure was, of course, a highly fortuitous  compromise. It allowed him to serve a legitimation function for the  technological dynamo, while all the while maintaining his sang-froid as a  civil humanist who was above the fray, a Catholic intellectual among the  barbarians
• That McLuhan could find no moment of deviation between his civil humanism,  founded on the defence of "civilization", and his absorption into the  intellectual appendages of empire, indicates, starkly and dramatically,  precisely how inert and uncritical is the supervening value of "civilization".  McLuhan's lasting legacy is, perhaps, a historical one: the inherent  contradiction of his discourse in remaining committed to the very  technostructure which had destroyed the possibility of "civilization" indicates  the ultimate failure of civil humanism in modern politics. McLuhan's humanism,  and indeed his abiding Catholicism, could provide an inspiring vision of a more  utopian human future; but in remaining tied to the "primacy of reason", a  reason which was fully abstracted from history and ontology, McLuhan's  discourse could always be easily turned from within.
• To dismiss McLuhan as a technological determinist is to miss entirely the point  of his intellectual contribution. McLuhan's value as a theorist of culture and  technology began just when he went over the hill to the side of the alien and  surrealistic world of mass communications: the "real world" of technology where  the nervous system is exteriorised and everyone is videoated daily like sitting  screens for television. Just because McLuhan sought to see the real world  of technology, and even to celebrate technological reason as freedom, he could  provide such superb, first-hand accounts of the new society of electronic  technologies.
• Paradoxically, however, it was just when McLuhan became most cynical and most  deterministic, when he became fully aware of the nightmarish quality of the  "medium as massage", that his thought becomes most important as an entirely  creative account of the great paradigm-shift now going on in twentieth-century  experience.

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