« Handmaids' Tales | Main | Precursors »
smoking or drinking together
My friend Richard Cavell is something of an evangelist for Marshall McLuhan. Whom, hitherto, I had thought to be little more than a one-note sixties media theorist with a gift for the soundbite. Now deservedly forgotten. I suspect that my assumptions are shared by others. But encouraged by Richard's enthusiasm, albeit in some shame that I am not going straight to the horse's mouth, I have started reading his book McLuhan in Space. Is it not worth trying to learn from that decade's counter-culture heroes?
I'm yet to be convinced, though it's still early days. And I do like the following quotation:
Communication, in the conventional sense, is difficult under any conditions. People prefer rapport through smoking or drinking together. There is more communication there than there ever is by verbal means. We can share environments, we can share weather, we can share all sorts of cultural factors together but communication takes place only inadequately and is very seldom understood. . . . There is a kind of illusion in the world we live in that communication is something that happens all the time, that it's normal . . . Actually, communication is an exceedingly difficult activity. In the sense of a mere point-to-point correspondence between what is said, done, and thought and felt between people--this is the rarest thing in the world. (qtd. 5)
Cavell emphasizes how much this approach to (non)communication differs from the standard "sender/receiver" model that has marked Communication Studies and Information Theory since Shannon and Weaver.
But more generally it's also a corrective to "encoding/decoding" versions of media effects, or the notion of a saturated symbolic from which we must struggle (vainly) to escape. And to the continual stress on the ideological (let alone the rational) in political analysis and strategizing. McLuhan here brings together affect, performance, and contact rather than contract as fundamental to the constitution of community.
Moreover, the concept of "rapport," which I like, connects to the notion of "conviviality" as found either in another sixties theorist whose star has since waned, Ivan Illich, or in the more fashionable, recent work of Paul Gilroy.
Plus we can be sure that McLuhan's is not some nostalgic appeal to premodern face-to-face sociability; after all, in the words of one of those famous soundbites, the village is now global.
Meanwhile, if it's smoking (actually, probably not) or drinking together you want... Toronto residents can hurry along to join faithful McLuhanites this afternoon, at 5:30pm. Though you have already missed out on the opportunity to "share weather" by way of a twenty-fifth anniversay pilgrimage around the city's snowy streets and up to the Park Plaza roof garden.
By Jon | January 30, 2006 in Politics, Readings, Social Theory | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/361357/4152369
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference smoking or drinking together:
» tomorrow is our permanent address .. from >> mind the __ GAP* ?
McLuhan claimed some decades ago but nowadays we are simply already immersed and embedded
Arthur C. Kroker (editor of ctheory) states that we live in the electronic culture that he (McLuhan) prophesied. And since he wrote about it, tech... [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 2, 2006 7:12:37 PM
» counter-culture from pas au-dela
Lenny Bruce is no doubt one of many "counter"-culture "heros" from whom we may still learn. Of course he was treated to the ugly contempt of scare quote bullying back then as well, and by those who didn't get it. [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 4, 2006 2:11:07 PM
Comments
As someone who is also somewhat of an evangelist for McLuhan, a trait that often induces a raised eyebrow, I am often dismayed at how easily McLuhan is dismissed. I don't agree with everything he says, but he does take variations in media forms seriously, and he does an excellent job demonstrating how it is that different media environments might produce different ways of inventing/consuming, something that one sees backed up in other work as well (Havelock, Ong, Goody, Kittler, etc.). That he does this without a sad, pathos-ridden nostalgia only makes the work more appealing.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jan 30, 2006 7:29:09 AM
I've mentioned previously elsewhere McLuhan's PhD thesis, "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time" (undeservedly forgotten, but coming soon) as perhaps of more interest than his later writings.
Posted by: nnyhav | Jan 30, 2006 5:16:54 PM
Yes, an interesting idea. One of the films we have had our students watch here in Italy is a 1972 vehicle for Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills about culture shock in Italy, called "Avanti." As part of the iconography of that film, the viewer is treated to a showing of "Future Shock" by Alvin Toeffler.
But sticking with media for a second, one question would be: how much of what McLuhan says is already said by someone like Lippmann and "Public Opinion"? I ask that not in a polemical way. Also, what's the link between McLuhan and the Network movie? Where the guy says, we're fed up and we're not going to take it any more?
Posted by: John S. Ransom | Jan 30, 2006 5:31:09 PM
Kenneth, nnyhav, thanks for your further thoughts. For what it's worth, Cavell's book suggests that McLuhan really starts to get interesting once he comes across and develops the idea of "acoustic space" (which I'd be happier calling haptic, fitting also with this interest in contact over contract) and so breaks from Innis's dichotomization of space and time. But John, I'm a neophyte really, so can't help you with your question.
Posted by: Jon | Jan 30, 2006 7:33:19 PM
Lippmann/McLuhan overlap? About 1%
Connection to Peter Finch in Network? Not much, but McLuhan did have a cute cameo in Annie Hall.
His project may be ultimately theological: the conditions of possibility for the reconstruction of a lost, adamic knowledge. This would bring back together the logical with the analogical; which overlaps in interesting ways with the visual (and writerly) versus the aural (and oral).
His books are of uneven quality but all interesting. The Nashe thesis, which few people have seen, is something of a holy grail of mcluhanania, but i doubt there's much in it that can't be anticipated from the rest of his work.
To understand where he came from, its helpful to know a bit about Cambridge English, particularly I A Richards. And that he was a Catholic convert.
He is a major, often unstated, influence on Paul Virilio, and more openly on Friedrich Kittler. Profitably read alongside the other great Canadian maverick, Harold Innis.
Posted by: McKenzie Wark | Jan 30, 2006 10:30:49 PM
And an influence on Baudrillard, of course.
And McKenzie, (hello!) you and I are of one mind about the spiritual component. McLuhan was pretty intense in thinking about Catholicism and implies just about every chance he can that a) there's a core essence prior to the media act of extension, and b) that the ultimate consequence of electronic extension will be something like Teilhard du Chardin's noosphere.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jan 31, 2006 7:16:30 AM
...that the ultimate consequence of electronic extension will be something like Teilhard du Chardin's noosphere.
Or not. As i read him, McLuhan is quite ambivalent about whether the 'electric' media can restore the balance of the faculties, or obliterate it.
McLuhan's odd Catholicism exempts him from the usual liberal platitudes about media, and unlike the critical theorists he did not reduce the question of the materiality of communication to the commodity form. He is very interested in the specificity of media.
Or, in short, he can usefully be read without buying in to his governing worldview. He is always a welcome relief after the relentless reduction of communication to text, sign, discourse, and other convenient ways of pretending that we don't really need to know anything about media qua media.
Posted by: McKenzie Wark | Jan 31, 2006 11:22:11 AM
For what it's worth, his particular spiritual spin on electric extension operated rather independently of his question of sense-ratios, since it stemmed from his belief in an originary essence related closely to consciousness. As he explained in a 1970 interview:
I think we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sens we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression reconstitutes the mythic type of consciousness, of once-upon-a-time-ness, which means all-time, out of time.It is possible that our new technologies can bypass verbalizing. There is nothing impossible about the computer's extending consciousness itself, as a universal environment. In a sense, the surround of information that we now experience electrically is an extension of consciousness itself.
That being said, I agree that he's largely exempt from some of liberalism's critical vices, and it is McLuhan's great credit that he was able to think the specificity of media without a reduction to content. The content of one medium, as he often noted, is just another medium.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jan 31, 2006 4:45:04 PM
Besides, McLuhan's blathering about exteriorizing our consciousnesses into the computer, it sounds remarkably like ever-present cybernetic discourse, no?
It's not for nothing that Wired called McLuhan their patron saint. Prophet might have been more accurate.
One can raise their eyebrow at his Catholicism, sure, but I prefer that raised eyebrow to the perma-raised eyebrow when confronting the work of those who dismissed and dismiss McLuhan.
Posted by: RIPope | Feb 10, 2006 10:21:12 AM
Post a comment
Please note: comments are published at the discretion of the post's author and will not appear immediately. Do not submit comments more than once.
