Locating Media Theorists in the Aristotle-McLuhan Field

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Stories, Games, Databases and Film: The Aristotle-McLuhan Field

My previous musings on the opposition between McLuhan and Aristotle imply a two-dimensional continuum for locating various forms of media. If we let the term “narrative” cover what Butcher translates as “plot” in Aristotle, and we classify the four kinds of media discussed by Manovich, then he have the following structural table:

This table is an example of the classic structuralist device, made famous by Lévi-Strauss, where all possible variations of an opposition are laid out in a kind of truth table. A plus sign (+) means that the category is present in the item, while a minus sign (-) indicates its absence. These tables are useful for generating ideas about how elements in a given field — in this case, media forms — are related to each other, generating further questions. For example, it emerges that databases are the strong opposite of films, while stories and games are weak opposites.

The table above can also be expressed as a two-dimensional field, where the named column headers become the X and Y axes of a discrete Cartesian plane, and the values in the first column become values in the field. This is the sort of device made famous by Bourdieu (see Distinction). The advantage of this device is that it allows us locate media forms with more precision. Here’s what I have in mind:

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Aristotle and McLuhan (iii)

It came to me recently how completely and diametrically opposed Aristotle and McLuhan really are. By which I mean the ancient academic sensibility that still pervades academia and the (post)modern, new media one that wants to break free from the old forms associated with literacy.

In the Poetics Aristotle specifies two distinguishing features of tragic poetry: (1) the paramount importance of the plot, or sequencing of events in the play, and (2) the downgrading of the “spectacle” of the play — the scenery, special effects, etc. Here’s how he puts it (emphases mine):

The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

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, the plot is the soul of tragedy while spectacle is the least artistic part of it. Spectacle is so low in Aristotle’s reckoning that he even suggests that drama doesn’t need actors and stages! Apparently, the script by itself will do fine to achieve the sublime effects of the art. (Here it is clear that what Aristotle means by poetry is writing, and that he strongly values the stand-alone written work of art with this hierarchy. Although the form of the novel emerges much later, it is hard not to notice a genealogical connection here.)

Notice how opposite this is of the new media. On the one hand, as McLuhan states over and over, the medium is the message — i.e. that spectacle is the most important dimension of art and communication. And, regarding plot, consider Lev Manovich’s idea that the database is the symbolic form of our time: the sortable, selectable, random-access, paradigmatic, and non-linear form of the database, broadly defined, is the precise opposite of writing, although both involve text. For writing is, above all, the construction of a specific and unique sequence of sentences into a work that has, the more artistic it is, what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending. Writing, in the sense of literary or philosophical or historical representation, is distinguished by the presense of an argument, a narrative, an unfolding of events and ideas in time, where the progression itself is as important as the content. Not so with databases, where content is decomposed into elemental units (records and fields) and then subject to endless growth and manipulation.

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Aristotle and McLuhan (ii)

If electric media creates experiential drama for McLuhan, does Aristotle’s theory of tragedy — peripeteia, etc. — help us understand that drama? (Does it matter that I arrived at this idea in the form of an Aristotelian syllogism?) Can education be understood as a dramatic, or ritual, process? If so, Victor Turner’s theory of ritual process may be helpful — he discribes the liminality that McLuhan values, but he does so in Aristotelian terms.

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Aristotle and McLuhan

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.

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