Does McLuhan get us beyond Aristotle?

Just the other day I was re-reading my copy of Aristotle’s Poetics (tr. Butcher), and it struck me how interesting it might be to juxtapose Aristotle to McLuhan. They intersect at a lot of points. They are both media theorists-in fact, with the Poetics, Aristotle invents the field-but Aristotle is McLuhan’s opposite in that he is the first to theorize (and embrace) writing as a medium. But Aristotle also provides a supplement to McLuhan, since he unpacks the concept of drama that McLuhan draws on so heavily in his characterization of the new media. (For McLuhan, new media create an electric environment which serves as a global mise en scène for a postmodern drama of social life.) In addition, Aristotle sets a bar for McLuhan — for until the latter, or rather new media theorists who follow him, can provide an alternative to the concept of mimesis — with something more useful than Sonntag’s “erotics of art” (which admittedly sounds pretty fun) — then we will remain Aristotelians, for better or for worse. It is not enough to view mimesis as an artifact of writing, for that is a statement of faith and begs the question. A truly radical media theory would find the means to displace this concept, or else embrace it with abandon.

The art “without a name”

If there is any doubt that Aristotle is the first to embrace writing as a medium, and to dismiss Socrates’ concerns about it in the Phaedrus, check out this passage, which occurs at the end of Section I:

There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse—which verse, again, may either combine different meters or consist of but one kind—but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar meter. People do, indeed, add the word ‘maker’ or ‘poet’ to the name of the meter, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all meters, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of meters of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet [emphases mine].

Here Aristotle carves out a space for this new craft, writing, “under the general term poet.” The Poetics is about this new form of mimetic practice, this new medium, with particular emphasis not on the spectacle - McLuhan’s focus — but on the action, the arrangement of scenes … the screenplay.

The Spectacle of McLuhan

Here is what Aristotle has to say about the spectacle (the massage) of drama, one of the distinctive features he discerns in the art:

The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.

So we have a very thick line drawn in the sand. It’s not Gutenberg that created the old world that McLuhan wants to transform, it is Aristotle.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 11:25 am and is filed under Edupunk Reading Group, classics, theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.