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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McLuhan for Edupunks

[NOTE: This text has been refor­mat­ted to fit your screen … which is to say, I’ve made some changes to make it less an essay and more a blog entry. I’m still get­ting a feel for the genre.]

Quick note on what I’m try­ing to do by “read­ing McLuhan”

For me, a close read­ing is an exca­va­tion of a text, the retrieval of embed­ded sym­bols and mean­ings indi­cated by the cir­cuitry of tropes and fig­ures cho­sen and adapted by the author, pro­vided by tra­di­tion, and selected for by recep­tion. I try to dis­cover the recur­ring images, the sym­bolic struc­tures, deployed in a text that struc­ture and ground its argument.

Sym­bolic struc­tures are impor­tant, in my view, because they are gen­er­a­tive forms that pro­duce the com­plex dis­cur­sive forms that we call texts, just as genes gen­er­ate pro­teins. “The sym­bol gives rise to thought,” says Ricoeur—a close read­ing attempts to reverse engi­neer this process.

A close read­ing of McLuhan’s Mas­sage is inter­est­ing because the book is a kind of post-text, a self-consciously post-literate con­struct that adopts what were then the new media forms of adver­tis­ing (although even these date back to the pro­pa­ganda forms of the ear­lier 20th cen­tury). A dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of this kind of text is the use of real images (par­tic­u­larly Life mag­a­zine style pho­tos), which makes the task of exca­vat­ing imagery interesting—how is this exca­va­tion, when the arti­facts are just lying on the ground? But the task is the same—literal images in the text are not used to rep­re­sent so much as to pro­vide second-order significations—it is not the ref­er­ent of the photo that mat­ters, but the grainy, black-and-white form of the sig­ni­fier that counts, the inti­ma­tion of hard, photo-journalistic real­ism. The medium is the mes­sage in this sense too.

What is inter­est­ing about texts that deploy both prose and imagery is how rarely the two chan­nels merely par­al­lel each other. The images in Medieval illu­mi­nated man­u­scripts will often tell a dif­fer­ent, com­ple­men­tary tale than that con­tained in the writ­ing. This is not the cog­ni­tive style of Pow­er­Point, where the on-screen image is often a redun­dant rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the speaker’s words (or, all too often, vice versa). Sim­i­larly, McLuhan’s images do not rep­re­sent the embed­ded imagery in the writ­ten channel.

McLuhan’s deep images are actu­ally quite sim­ple, sta­ble, and pow­er­fully gen­er­a­tive. But they are not nec­es­sar­ily the ones we asso­ciate with his strongest memes — such as “media are exten­sions of man,” and, of course, “the medium is the mes­sage.” A close read­ing shows a rel­a­tively sim­ple clus­ter of images of which McLuhan’s memetic one-liners are indices. Their role is to entice you, by hyper­bole and para­dox, into grasp­ing his sym­bol­i­cally struc­tured con­cep­tual frame, his ontol­ogy. Here, then, is a small inven­tory of these images.

A. Elec­tric (not elec­tronic)

New media for McLuhan are pri­mar­ily elec­tric. His prose is lit­tered with the term. He writes of “an elec­tric infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment,” “an envi­ron­ment of instant elec­tric speeds.” Exam­ples of elec­tric media are film. tele­phones, tele­vi­sion, and the assem­blage of media asso­ci­ated with the music indus­try — records, “hi-fi” and stereo music sys­tems, radio, elec­tric gui­tars, rock con­cert sound and light equip­ment, etc.

Sig­nif­i­cantly, McLuhan does not often use the word “elec­tronic,” and when he does, his intent changes, as we shall see below. He was crit­i­cized for con­fus­ing the two terms, but I think his usage is accu­rate. For bet­ter or for worse, McLuhan does not the­o­rize the dig­i­tal qua dig­i­tal very well. He does not the­o­rize the effects of dis­crete representation—if he did he would find Guten­berg lurk­ing beneath the sur­face of the effects he describes in the form of the com­mand line (another rich image (not his) to be explored at another time). He is much bet­ter at describ­ing the social effects of the per­va­sive, puls­ing, and fast elec­tric world of in-your-face media that char­ac­ter­izes adver­tis­ing and rock-and-roll (which becomes another of advertising’s many vehicles):

The world pool of infor­ma­tion fathered by elec­tric media—movies, Tel­star, flight—far sur­passes any pos­si­ble influ­ence mom and dad can now bring to bear.

Elec­tric cir­cuitry has over­thrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and con­tin­u­ously the con­cerns of all other men …

B. Envi­ron­ments

Elec­tric media are so pow­er­ful for McLuhan that they form an environment—a con­structed, mate­r­ial space in which human action is sit­u­ated and bound. McLuhan links new media so closely to envi­ron­ment that it seems clear that he is more inter­ested in media as art and archi­tec­ture than as means of infor­ma­tion deliv­ery. As art and archi­tec­ture, new media com­prise the aes­thetic envi­ron­ment of the mass age, the human made forests of sym­bols that we call cities. (And this is con­sis­tent with the rel­a­tive absence of the words elec­tronic and dig­i­tal in his prose. The elec­tric is an inter­face as well as a vis­i­ble motor; whereas the dig­i­tal (at the time of his writ­ing) is the hid­den pre­serve of the numerati.)

It is easy to read in McLuhan a gen­eral the­ory of media that would asso­ciate all media with envi­ron­ments. But print media do not form an envi­ron­ment in the sense that elec­tric media do, except for “book worms” — a telling image that reserves envi­ron­men­tal immer­sion for the mar­ginal, extreme case. Print media enforce a detach­ment from the bazaar into the cathe­dral. But elec­tric media is a cheese that makes us all worms.

C. Bod­ies

Com­ple­ment­ing McLuhan’s con­stant explicit ref­er­ences to envi­ron­ments are his implicit ref­er­ences to bod­ies, and media as “exten­sions of our­selves.” If media form an envi­ron­ment, that envi­ron­ment is largely com­prised of the extended selves of others–in a lit­eral sense, the bod­ies of oth­ers. With elec­tric media, we are like giants on the world stage, bump­ing into each other, “work­ing over” each other, mas­sag­ing and seduc­ing each other under the guise of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and travel.

Two images in Mas­sage illus­trate this point, though implic­itly. The first is the image of the large woman that you can walk inside of. Depicted to make a point about the role of art, the lit­eral image illus­trates the implicit image in the text quite well. With the new media, we (or at least some of us) have the power to become big bod­ies that oth­ers can inhabit.

The sec­ond is the image of the con­cert. Again, it is not explicit, but evoked. Ref­er­ence to rock and roll con­jures up the Oz-like image of a band on a stage—the Bea­t­les at Shea stadium—larger than life, plugged into a sound appa­ra­tus that projects the gui­tar (itself an exten­sion). Think of Jag­ger in his Jumpin’ Jack Flash phase, and the huge inflat­able penis on stage.

D. Rit­ual and myth

The image of the con­cert con­nects to another of McLuhan’s deep image—ritual. The elec­tric envi­ron­ment of new media cre­ates forms of social par­tic­i­pa­tion that are con­stantly described in terms of rit­ual, drama, and mys­tic par­tic­i­pa­tion. McLuhan describes new media as “the total elec­tric drama” and fre­quently refers to images of tribal inter­ac­tion and myth: “Elec­tric cir­cuitry con­fers a mythic dimen­sion” he tells us, and “the Finn cycle of tribal insti­tu­tions can return in the elec­tric age.”

Per­haps the sin­gle most impor­tant asser­tion in McLuhan’s sym­bolic arma­ture is his depic­tion of the rit­ual qual­ity of the elec­tric envi­ron­ment as a lim­i­nal space, a place where bound­aries of space, time, and social class are obvi­ated and tran­scended. To draw out the sym­bol­ism a bit, as vir­tual, elec­tric bod­ies, we con­stantly run into each other, inter­sect and inter­pen­e­trate, not nec­es­sar­ily in any sen­sual way (although it is hard to avoid that image), but as imma­te­r­ial holo­graphic pro­jec­tions who have not yet learned how to behave on this vir­tual stage. For now, it is a free-for-all of elec­tric inter­ac­tion, like the streets of Chiba City in Gibson’s Neu­ro­mancer.

Accord­ing to the anthro­pol­o­gist Vic­tor Turner, lim­i­nal­ity is char­ac­ter­ized by com­mu­ni­tas—a short-lived state of fellow-feeling that many soci­eties inten­tion­ally cre­ate from time to time in order to regen­er­ate the social order (such Christ­mas or the Swazi rite of ncwala). McLuhan’s words are text­book descrip­tions of the lim­nal state (emphases mine):

Elec­tric tech­nol­ogy fos­ters and encour­ages uni­fi­ca­tion and involve­ment …

Elec­tric cir­cuitry pro­foundly involves men with one another …

In McLuhan’s time, com­mu­ni­tas was really achieved by events such as Wood­stock, and it seems clear that the actual rit­ual form that McLuhan is refer­ring to is the rock concert—a rel­a­tively new cul­tural form at the time—especially given his (sur­pris­ingly under­stated) ref­er­ences to Warhol, Dylan, and the Beatles.

E. Tribe, com­mu­nity, village

Con­stant ref­er­ence to images of tribal rit­ual indi­cates McLuhan’s endgame—that elec­tric media, in what must count as one of the most counter-intuitive unin­tended con­se­quences of the cen­tury, are not alien­at­ing and dis­em­pow­er­ing, as Orwell depicted in nov­els such as 1984 and Keep the Aspidis­tra Fly­ing, but gen­er­a­tive of authen­tic com­mu­nity in oppo­si­tion to alien­at­ing mass soci­ety. By mak­ing us giants on the world stage, the new media have cre­ated a global vil­lage, our best hope to achieve Tonnie’s gemein­schaft. The old cul­ture, asso­ci­ated with print and bureau­cracy, can only repro­duce gesellschaft, the oppres­sive square world of estab­lish­ment society.

So new media cre­ate a rit­u­al­is­tic elec­tric envi­ron­ment capa­ble of engen­der­ing a return to human com­mu­nity; it can be a cure to the prob­lem of “man against mass soci­ety.” So why does soci­ety con­tinue to be oppressive?

F. Infor­ma­tion

The global vil­lage is an ideal for McLuhan, not a real­ized sit­u­a­tion. Tyranny remains in the form of infor­ma­tion devices, or com­put­ers (emphases mine again):

Elec­tri­cal infor­ma­tion devices for uni­ver­sal, tyran­ni­cal womb-to-tomb sur­veil­lance are caus­ing a very seri­ous dilemma between our claim to pri­vacy and the community’s need to know.

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, by the elec­tri­cally com­put­er­ized dossier bank—that one big gos­sip col­umn that is unfor­giv­ing, unfor­get­ful and from which there is no redemp­tion, no era­sure of early “mistakes.”

Here we see why McLuhan implic­itly sep­a­rates the elec­tric from the elec­tronic: the lat­ter is asso­ci­ated with what can only be called a dark side of new media for McLuhan, the per­sis­tence of hier­ar­chi­cal, class-ridden soci­etas in the forms of data­bases and sur­veil­lance. And this is con­sis­tent with his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of print culture–information tech­nolo­gies are the inher­i­tors of print lit­er­acy, max­i­miz­ing the effects of the ditto device to unprece­dented degrees. I am not sure if McLuhan ever comes out an makes this oppo­si­tion clear (between elec­tric media and elec­tronic infor­ma­tion), but it seems clear enough from his ontol­ogy.

The impli­ca­tion of this oppo­si­tion is, I think, pro­found: it means that McLuhan is not opposed to the loss of pri­vacy. Note that it is not Big Brother who wants to know, it is “the com­mu­nity.” And his ref­er­ence to gossip–the quin­tes­sen­tial mech­a­nism of social con­trol in vil­lages and small towns–must be viewed in light of his com­mit­ments to a tribal, rit­u­al­ized social­ity. As any anthro­pol­o­gist who has done field­work in a small, remote, non-literate set­ting will tell you, pri­vacy does not exist in those worlds. McLuhan knows this, and he implies strongly that for our global vil­lage to emerge, we need to lose our old notions of pri­vacy, and become devoted to ser­vice and collaboration:

Under con­di­tions of elec­tric cir­cuitry, all the frag­mented job pat­terns tend to blend once more into involv­ing and demand­ing roles or forms of work that more and more resem­ble teach­ing, learn­ing, and “human” ser­vice, in the older sense of ded­i­cated loyalty.

G. Old and New

So, the media trans­gress social bound­aries of nation and prop­erty, threat­en­ing pri­vacy, sov­er­eignty, and class. This is the most pro­found mes­sage McLuhan has to offer — new media have returned us to a mythic, rit­ual con­scious­ness, or at least they have the power to do so. But accept­ing this means get­ting over pri­vacy con­cerns and other “hang-ups.”

Now, this is (finally) where McLuhan’s media deter­min­ism comes into play. The prob­lem that we should con­cern our­selves with is not our loss of pri­vacy, but our being caught between two worlds, two regimes of media. Our value of pri­vacy is just a carry over from the print world of class sep­a­ra­tions and hier­ar­chi­cal orga­ni­za­tions. Our prob­lem is that print cul­ture per­sists and con­tin­ues to hold back the emer­gence of community:

The inter­play between the old and the new envi­ron­ments cre­ates many prob­lems and confusions.

We impose the form of the old on the con­tent of the new. The mal­ady lingers on.

Some con­clu­sions and ques­tions

OK, then, these are some of the images that can be retrieved from McLuhan’s text, and I’ve tried to set them out in a kind of log­i­cal pro­gres­sion. Elec­tric media have cre­ated a world of extended bod­ies and trans­gres­sive envi­ron­ments that have the capac­ity to destroy social bound­aries and cre­ate a global vil­lage of rit­ual com­mu­ni­tas. How­ever, print cul­ture per­sists in the form of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy (e.g. data­bases) as well as the iner­tia of old forms try­ing to con­tain new con­tent. If we want to real­ize the vision of a global vil­lage, we need to embrace the col­lab­o­ra­tive and rit­u­al­is­tic affor­dances of the new media, and oppose the cen­tral­iz­ing, clas­si­fy­ing, and hier­ar­chi­cal influ­ence of the electronic.

Hav­ing writ­ten this, it strikes me as incom­plete (of course it should be!), but I think it works as an ontol­ogy, or world pic­ture, that per­sists to this day in, say, Michael Wesch, whose Space­ship Earth nar­ra­tive (from Buck­min­ster Fuller) is very close to McLuhan’s global vilage. For him the class­room is the agent of per­sis­tent print cul­ture, and new media pro­vide a means of engag­ing stu­dents in par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture. And I can even see view­ing Lyotard in this frame­work, his ago­nis­tic lan­guage games being one of the devices of play­ing with new media to oppose the effects of com­put­er­i­za­tion on knowl­edge and society.

If I were to sum­ma­rize the view, I’d call it the Tru­man Show model of social life. For it is hard to escape the impor­tance of lit­er­acy in the model, and the futil­ity of coun­ter­ing it with rit­ual and play. Lit­er­acy (in the form of code and the com­mand line, in addi­tion to books and ledgers) remains the dom­i­nant media form of the world’s elite strata, whereas new media con­tin­ues to play the role pro­pa­ganda tool. Behind the Sex Pis­tols is EMI. It’s for another post, but I think we should be con­cerned with appro­pri­at­ing the infor­ma­tional (in this ontology).

But what about YouTube and the bal­anc­ing of influ­ence between media elites and com­mon­ers afforded by Web 2.0 and pro­sump­tion? Aren’t the main­stream media declin­ing as more egal­i­tar­ian social net­works are emerg­ing? Didn’t blogs kill Dan Rather? I think this is the excep­tion that proves my read­ing: McLuhan does not pro­vide us with the tools to the­o­rize the effects of the new social media, since he sep­a­rates the elec­tric from the elec­tronic, media from infor­ma­tion. The cool thing about the new new media is the con­ver­gence of these. But I would sug­gest we start pay­ing atten­tion to the algo­rthms behind the ser­vices, to what I call the data­s­phere, and not take the out­ward pur­poses of Google and Face­book for granted. Face­book is pri­mar­ily an engine of cap­i­tal and a con­sumer research tool, not a com­mu­nity build­ing tool. It’s hard to image a global coomu­nity in McLuhan’s sense ever emerg­ing from it.

OK, nuff said for now.

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