After the publication of Understanding Media in 1964, Marshall McLuhan became for a while perhaps the most famous North American thinker. His fame was likely due to his use of memorable slogans which distilled his beliefs to what in the television industry is termed a ‘catch-phrase’. It is within these terms that McLuhan is best understood. While this paper intends to summarise rather than critique McLuhan’s thinking, I will suggest a few concerns which I will later examine in greater detail in the final term paper.
Perhaps the most egregious and obvious fault of the text is McLuhan’s continual use of broad generalizations when providing examples to support his arguments. This tendency is most notable, and perhaps the least excusable, when McLuhan describes human characteristics and subjective positions as contingent with national identity. One can piece together a list of national characteristics to which McLuhan alludes throughout his text, for example: “The African insistence on group participation and on chanting and shouting during films...” (287); “the Eskimo no more needs to look at a picture right side up...” (191), or the numerous references to “the American”, “the Russian”, and “the Chinese”. However, McLuhan’s naive essentialisms should not be dismissed out of hand by a reader schooled in contemporary identity politics. His Platonic appeal to the universal forms of being Chinese, African, or otherwise can be used if placed into their proper context. When speaking about the manner in which non-literate peoples come to understand and experience photography and motion images, for example, a critic may use McLuhan’s point about the non-linear reading strategies employed by the non-literate person without reference to a national or ethnic tradition. Perhaps more optimistically, McLuhan’s use of essentialised national characteristics can be forgiven as a rhetorical device consistent with a society enmeshed in what can perhaps be described as the essentializing zeitgeist of the Cold War. In any case, such criticisms will presently be glossed in favour of their more detailed return in a future paper.
Not simply a catalogue of the various extant media, McLuhan suggests that media should be understood as a multitude of extensions of the human body. Fundamentally, he positions media as the principle manner in which the production and consumption of knowledge occurs, as determined by its expression through a technological practise. Different subject positions in the human condition can as a consequence be understood as having been produced relative to the material availability of media.
It is here that we can begin to forgive McLuhan for his essentialised national categories. “The African...”, for example, is not rendered lesser than “the North American” due to any racial or cultural features inherent to the people of the nations of Africa. Rather, when seen within the context of the historical development of both film and colonial practices, it is perfectly understandable that McLuhan should want to describe what he felt was the most likely subjective position for a person born in a society lacking access to highly technological media as “the Eskimo” or “the African”. It is the job of the contemporary scholar working with McLuhan’s ideas to understand that the national identities used by the author are convenient historical constructions and, as a consequence, to determine a more precise and flexible body of examples of different subjectivities produced by differing literacy in relation to highly technological media.
McLuhan focuses his concern on the changes to human subjectivity which have resulted from the development of electric technologies. Electricity renders the transmission and experience of information instantaneous, and as such a new degree of politics has emerged: “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media. ... The mark of our time is its revulsions against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.” (5) McLuhan’s notion of media therefore disturbs the uniqueness of external reality relative to human subjectivity. What were once objects and events rationalised as exterior entities and processes capable of receiving human agency – indeed knowledge itself – have suddenly been interiorised as extensions of the human body itself. The capacity of a subject to understand and express their existence in the world is markedly different when that subject exists within a society mobilised by electricity. Indeed, the body itself is continually involved in a process of adaptation to such ‘mutation’: "Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body." (45)
Through an interrogation of the technologies of writing and print, McLuhan demonstrates that human existence is determined by technical processes of expression. Before electricity, existence was ordered along in the framework of print, a linear and sequential process which allowed a great and rapid dissemination of both books and a new world view contingent on alphanumeric literacy. McLuhan argues that this capacity for linear order shaped human use of other technologies: "Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization. The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike.” (85) Thus, he is able to rationalise the militarism which dominated the twentieth century: “our Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs have been so industrial. Both are shaped by the alphabet in their technique of transformation and control by making all situations uniform and continuous."
Electricity is a revolutionary technology due to the fact that its instantaneous nature disrupts continuity and centralised power (and by extension, discourse).
One can begin to critique McLuhan with his distinction between hot and cold media, characterised as either hot, which are constituted by what he refers to as information presented to one or a number of senses with a high degree of depth (definition), or cold, which present information in a less defined manner. While in both cases audiences participate in their own understanding of the message being conveyed, hot media invite a low amount of audience participation, while for cold media the reverse is true. Fundamentally, the categories which he uses are too essentialising: "A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in 'high definition' High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, 'high definition.' A cartoon is 'low definition' simply because very little visual information is provided." (22) While the conception of hot and cold may each be useful, media do not unify into a coherent entity as McLuhan suggests by "a photograph is" or "a cartoon is". Minimalist photographers such as Hiroshi Sugimoto allow for McLuhan's definition of low definition, while 'cartoon' artists such as Frank Miller, Gerhard and Dave Sim, Boris Vallejo, and many among the great number of Japanese artists who work in the Manga form attest to the potential for a high definition comic book. Furthermore, it is possible to suggest that given sufficient time to mature, audiences can be seen as increasingly active media participants.
Notes
1. See also The Medium is the Massage: “The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions – the patterns of mechanistic technologies – are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval” (12).
2. Nietzsche’s conception of will to power is perhaps a more accurate phrase to replace the term ‘existence’ in this context.
