McLuhan Invokes a Shamanic Analogue
Prevailing Western cultural myths surrounding technological
advancement plot a trajectory of cumulative “innovations” that propel
civilization – and by extension the individual – in a progressively more
rational, mechanized, automated and abiological direction: away from the
natural world and the animal body. It is generally accepted that technology
represents a triumph over nature via a body of progressive improvements on
tools and other media, and while that can be demonstrated to be categorically
true, any analysis of the underlying side effects of individuals submerged in
the techno-industrial milieu, especially negative observations, are met with
skepticism, confusion or derision and occur late if at all. In the mid-20th
century, Marshall McLuhan presented an alternative interpretation that reversed
the trajectory of the previous Weltanschauung; specialized, machine-like
Cartesian man was a biproduct of print technology, print itself was a detour
and the new electric technology promised to paradoxically deliver humanity back
to an audile-tactile, whole field perception illuminated by the image of an
instantaneously connected global tribe. It is the purpose of this paper to
describe McLuhan's pioneering and prescient analyses that continue to run
contrary to the generally accepted view of the techno-human condition (a
mindset itself, according to McLuhan, that is a relic of long obviated
print-oriented sense ratios[1])
in relation to individuals working in the arts and their role in the potential
elucidation of the hidden yet profoundly transformative effects of the
ubiquitous experience of media.
“It is in its power to extend
patterns of visual uniformity and continuity that the “message” of the alphabet
is felt by cultures.” -Marshall McLuhan (1964)
The distinction between the print-conditioned perception and
preceding arrangements of senses and cognitive biases is the sine qua non
of McLuhan's oeuvre. Without an understanding that the homogenizing power of
the phonetic alphabet and its repeatability through uniform type technology
disseminated en masse a profound shift in human civilization down to the level
of each individual's inner processes, it is impossible to understand and
extrapolate from the “zero point” of the Gutenberg revolution the precipitation
of Renaissance perspective, linear sequential bias, primacy of the visual
(ocularcentrism) and ultimately the present Western rationalism inherited from
the legacy of René Descartes' mind-body dualism. New patterns of behavior and
self-extension result in new modes of functioning, it is McLuhan's assertion
that at the expense of previous forms of awareness, we adapt to our technology
and it internalizes us (“Extension of the self involves a state of
numbness...He had adapted to his extension of himself and become a closed
system.”[2]).
The fragmenting, specialist, isolating mode of literate man
is originated in “the same separation of sight and sound and meaning that is peculiar
to the phonetic alphabet also extends to its social and physiological effects.
Literate man undergoes much separation of his imaginative, emotional, and sense
life.”[3]
Completely receptive to the ordering and pattern-defining operational framework
of adaptation to print, it follows that literate man falls victim to the
temptation to apply the rational ordering approach to everything that falls
within his experience, which proved a remarkable success primarily in the
science of physics[4],
but also in establishing means of mechanized mass production such as the
assembly line (cf. Fordism). However, what may apply agreeably to laws
describing the behavior of physical matter does not necessarily have the same
implications at cultural levels, as McLuhan interjects, “Consciousness is
regarded as the mark of a rational being, yet there is nothing lineal or
sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of
consciousness. Consciousness is not a verbal process.”[5]
The bias extended to the lineally sequential and the rational, repeatable
conclusion by adaptation to print heavily informed the Western mind for several
hundred years, however, according to McLuhan, the sense ratios demanded by a
print culture have already been supplanted by the immersion in the electric age.
Already transformed and retribalizing at a rapid rate, humanity is simply not
aware of the new environment shaping perception—we continue to navigate into
the future as though building linearly on the advancements of the past: “We
look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the
future.”[6]
Early in Understanding Media, McLuhan states “The
serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity,
just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”[7] The “serious artist” is described as
fulfilling a special kind of social role; someone who in a sense exists outside
or detached from the everyday, operationally conditioned level of culture or at
least someone who has cultivated a faculty of perception, that is to say the
ability to see and analyse the systems and cultural machinery in which they are
immersed. A favorite metaphor often employed by McLuhan to evoke the
obliviousness of human-in-media was that of a fish, completely unaware of its
total immersion in the medium of water ,“since they have no anti-environment
which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”[8]
It is the base principle of McLuhan's work that humans experience a total
immersion of which they demonstrate very little awareness until an
“anti-environment” is eventually presented; that the changes which are accepted
as technological triumphs are in fact transformative down to the very subtle,
animal body levels of sense perception, cognition and psychological modus
operandi, ultimately how we are capable of perceiving the world and ourselves.
In many traditional human societies, a higher perceptual
role belonged to the shaman figure[9]–
one who parses the invisible landscape, an extra-environmental individual who has
a vantage point that permits the awareness of underlying mechanisms. McLuhan
positioned himself in alliance with the shamanic tradition through his
intentional focus on the ability to probe and analyse generally unquestioned
social conventions and effects the majority of the population pass through in
minimal awareness, unless their attention is specifically commanded here or
there. As well as typical “witch doctor” practices such as healing, weather
prediction and various forms of divination, the shaman is a wise woman/man to
whom the society turns for guidance in the face of change–the shaman serves as
a kind of cultural mediator, delivering myths that shape the culture,
disseminating symbols and experiences designed to maintain a balance and sense
of wholeness at tribal and individual levels, “the shaman helps patients
transcend their normal, ordinary definition of reality” (Harner, 1980).
At the time of writing, from within the cultural perspective
of the writer (which could be described as “Western techno-industrial consumer
capitalism”), there is no accepted or acknowledged place for something like the
shamanic tradition, no dedicated and refined practice that deals in mediating
cultural ethos and reconciling the tribe's perceptual balance in a world that
has presented rapid fragmentary change on all levels[10].
The closest analogue we afford is the idea of the “visionary thinker”, usually
a role reserved for McLuhan's serious artists and to those in fields like
psychoanalysis, philosophy or cultural theory writing, though the latter
produce work which is not engaged with by the broader society on the level of
art. It should be noted that while writers like Debord, Baudrillard, Deleuze,
Zizek, etc., have been entertained as valuable “pop” figures within the
culture, it may be conjectured that celebrity status overshadows the actual
work, as discussion shifts immediately away from analysis of content to the
spectacle of the personalities themselves, the medium of the Icon is the more
effectual, more viral message, true to McLuhan's paradigm, and the culture has
no problem accepting such thinkers as “important” without having to actually
read any of them more deeply than a Wikipedia summary at best, and probably not
at all on average. McLuhan's popularity was of course exemplary of this
cultural dynamic; though he achieved a massive presence and audience and his
work resonated deeply with some, “McLuhan the TV Guru” became the message in
spite of content; volumes of heavily involved and demanding cultural exegesis
were reduced to catchphrases and TV talk show audience members were invited to
suppose whether or not they really “meant anything” in one of the most ironic
provings-right of possibly all recorded history.
Seemingly it has fallen upon the shoulders of artists (a
contentious role itself in contemporary society) to reach the general
population with “outsider” information facilitating potential shifts in
perception that do not come from within the established continuing inertia of
the cultural machinery. If they feel they have some insight, it is the province
of innovative individuals to attempt to present or mirror the culture and its
effects. By 1969, McLuhan tasked artists more urgently than ever with “the need
for a counter-environment as a means of perceiving the dominant and unnoticed
environment.”[11]
He may have felt quite alone in his struggle[12]
and that artists who could sense the true, hidden implications of the
unquestioning acceptance of the new electric technology should be tasked with
devising creative and appealing methods of conveying these realizations and
thereby influencing the awareness of mass culture: “To this end, the artist must ever
play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the
majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual
attitudes.”[13]
Attempting to create a counter-environment often involves
hijacking the tools and media of the dominant, unnoticed environment and
repurposing or subverting them in some way, this is especially true of video
and installation art. Margaret Morse describes interactive installation art in
terms of “setting this mediated/built environment into play for purposes of
reflection.”[14]
The media and technology we are exposed to everyday in a broader cultural
context are potentially reversed through interactivity dynamics and turned into
mirrors of the relationship between interactor and interface, “what is returned
is ourselves, transformed and processed”.[15]
Nam June Paik arrived in New York in the 1960s after being inspired to pursue
electronic art while studying musical composition in Germany, and is considered
the first video artist. Paik's experimental video piece Global Groove (1973)
involves viewers in a cross-cultural intersection predicated on mass global
satellite transmission, he supposed “If we could compile a weekly TV festival
made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge
round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a
phenomenal effect on education and entertainment”[16].
The non-linear production style and often jarring effects of
Global Groove made full use of television's unique demands on the
senses. In contrast with print, which allows the reader a fixed perspective of
analysis, television must be watched and “kept up with”. According to McLuhan,
“TV promotes depth structures in art and entertainment alike, and creates
audience involvement in depth as well.”[17]
The linear, fixed perspective is obviated by speed, involving a viewer in
keeping up with a flow of imagery that often would not make coherent sense as a
still frame but must be absorbed instantaneously as a dynamic whole,
participatory involvement in a “nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms”[18].
Paik exploited the medium through video manipulations that accentuate the
dynamic, high speed involvement of television that draws the viewer into its
pace (and its space), attempting to keep up with the “New York style” dancing
figures on the screen, feeling the resonance of the beating of the traditional
Korean drum synchronized with the movements of the drummer and modulated in and
out of abstraction by the wild, distorting video effects of the Paik-Abe video
synthesizer. The tone of Global Groove is something which is felt or
sensed rather than made explicit through visual text or speech; involvement in
the video demands a “unified sensorium”[19],
a viewer may get the feeling of involvement in many places and cultures at
once, there is a focus on expression of the body through rhythm – the sensibility
of the tribal dance of the global village facilitated by the electric age.
Bill Viola's Sleep of Reason (1988) incorporates the
television as an object itself as part of a built environment. Since Global
Groove, the moving image has escaped all confines and appears to us on
walls, floors, external structures, hanging in air or extending into virtual
spaces. In Sleep of Reason, the
unexpected visitation of the moving image on all the surrounding walls evokes a
sense of the supernatural; owls fly in and out of space, dogs bark menacing,
and in an instant the lights return and the walls again solid as if nothing had
happened at all. The eeriness and ethereal, dream-like or subconsciousness
theme runs throughout much of Viola's work, often alluding to religious
apparition or a communion with the world of the dead (as in the shamanic
tradition). “Sleep of Reason” refers to Goya's work of a similar name, which in
the context of its time suggested rational, Enlightment reason as an antidote
to the “monsters” that plague the superstitious, religious mind. By
recontextualizing this sensibility into the electric age, Viola seems to
suggest that we are still pursued by monsters, even producing our own monsters
and that reason fragmented our focus rather than delivered us to a truly utopic
state. In dreams, as on TV, we are haunted by the contents and projections of
the unconscious mind, despite their apparent dismissal in the face of reason.
Paradoxically, it seems, we may need to put Enlightenment reason itself to
sleep if we are to cast off the curse of Cartesian dualism and navigate the new
demands and frontiers of the electric age, which is more like the inner space
of the mind than the structural space of the printed page.
Awareness of the body in relation to technology and
virtuality is an issue bordering on the pathological in contemporary society.
William Gibson fanboys proudly denounce “meatspace” and defiantly live much of
their lives, alongside millions of dedicated or addicted TV watchers and
Internet users, as though they have no body to burden the ascent into media.
The Cartesian legacy gives them confidence that the body is simply outdated
technology, like an old car, and an updated model will be dispensed according
to the laws of supply and demand. Simon Penny tells us there is no such thing
as a virtual body[20],
that computer-based technology can only give us visual representation or
unconvincing feedback. McLuhan asserts that the central nervous system is
extended entirely outside itself[21]
through our love – “this continuous embrace” of – technology, and that we
respond autonomously with numbness in “the Narcissus role of subliminal
awareness”[22].
The extent to which we identify with reflections of
ourselves extended into media is investigated by Paul Sermon's telematic works,
especially the intimate and boundary dissolving Telematic Dreaming
(1992), named for a phrase from a Baudrillard essay. Distant participants
project simultaneously in realtime, transposed virtually in each others spaces
like lovers made of light in a dreamlike precessionof simulacrum of seduction, as per “enchanted simulation: the trompe-l’oeil, more
false than false, and the secret of appearances.”[23]
Is the trick of the eye enough to simulate the intimacy of laying next to
another body or are we simply entranced by the simulation itself? McLuhan would
have heavily applied his Narcissus analogy to Telematic Dreaming; more
an encounter with a disembodied Other than another human, the ability to feel
intimacy toward a represented body of light could constitute adaptation to “a
closed system” induced through the interplay of mutually auto-amputated
participants[24].
This work is easy to romanticize yet a very ominous undertone stresses the
disconnection between interface and the body on the other side must not be
confused. Already we can imagine the unspoken anxiety that follows users of
online dating sites in the realization that they are much more adapted to
communicating with each other virtually than “irl”, more comfortable seeing
each other on a screen than in three dimensions. Though he suggests the body is
wherever it can affect, Sermon presents the piece not as the technology for
long distance lovers it may seem possible to market it as today, but as a situation
for reflection .
The message McLuhan was so at pains to deliver to the masses
is one of awareness; a cautionary approach to adopting media is necessary if we
are aware of the potential effects on all scales. If we are to become aware of
what we are doing and what is happening to us before it has already happened,
we must deploy counter-environments and analytical tools and the possibility
for real reflection as a human organism, not mediated reflection that “forbids
self-recognition”[25].
Despite Simon Penny's lamentations that virtual reality is absolutely
inadequate, especially when it ignores the body, millions of people will
continue to immerse themselves in virtual simulation via media like videogames,
online environments and interfaces, etc. As Lynn Hershman Leeson observed,
“When “real” objects are artificially inserted into environments, they
simultaneously become simulated symbols that function as virtual reality[26]”
and therefore the first virtual realities began in places like Ur and Çatal
Höyük when nomadic humans first extended themselves into structures and “sacred
space”[27].
Technology is not separate from the psyche is not separate from the body. If we
can understand what media truly is, we may be able to step outside, at least
for a shift in perspective.
McLuhan and the artists whose work presents these dilemmas
and restructurings to us implore us to accept that our sense ratios,
perceptions and even cultural systems are virtual, provisional and malleable
constructs inextricably bound to the way we engage our bodies with tools in
internal and external space. The retribalization of global culture is an
invitation for a shaman class capable of whole field of consciousness
perception to take the reigns from the crumbling artifice of Cartesian tunnel
vision with its nature and body-rejecting materialism that, staring fixedly
into the rear-view mirror, cannot see what has already hit it head-on.
Bibliography
Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. War and Peace in the
Global Village. (New York: Bantam, 1968).
Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. (New York: Signet Books, 1962).
Marshall McLuhan. Counterblast. (1969)
Michael Harner. The Way of the Shaman. (New York:
Harper & Row, 1982).
Margaret Morse. “Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image
and the Space-in-Between.” In Illuminating Video: An Essential guide to
Video Art. Edited by Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer. (New York: Aperture
& Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990) 153-167.
David Rokeby. “Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and
Control in Interactive Media.” In Critical Issues in Electronic Media.
Edited by Simon Penny. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995) 133-158.
Simon Penny. “Virtual Reality as the Completin of the
Enlightenment Project.” Culture on the Brink. Edited by G. Bender & T.
Druckrey. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994) 231-248.
Jean Baudrillard. On Seduction. (1980)
Lynn Hershman Leeson. “Reflections and Preliminary Notes”. Paranoid
Mirror. Exhibition Catalogue. (Seattle Art Museum, c. 1995), 11-24.
Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of
Religion. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959)
[1] “Print
is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes
man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to
highest intensity of definition.” McLuhan (1962), 158.
[2] McLuhan. (1964), 51.
[3] McLuhan. (1964), 90.
[4] “Print brought in the taste for exact
measurement and repeatability that we now associate with science and
mathematics.” McLuhan (1964), 276.
[5] McLuhan. Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. (1964), 87.
[6] McLuhanism.
[7] McLuhan. Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. (1964), 18.
[9] Harner. The Way of the Shaman. (1980)
[10] “Blake sees man as fragmented by his
technologies.” McLuhan (1964), 55.
[11] McLuhan. Counterblast. 1969.
[12] “I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling
doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognised
by them.” McLuhan (1964), 18.
[13] McLuhan (1964), 224.
[14] Margaret Morse. Video Installation Art: The
Body, the Image and the Space-in-Between. (1990).
[15] David Rokeby. Transforming Mirrors:
Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media. (1995).
[16] Nam June Paik. 1973.
[17] McLuhan (1964), 272.
[18] McLuhan (1964), 272.
[19] McLuhan (1964), 269.
[20] Simon Penny. Virtual Reality as the
Completion of the Enlightenment Project. (1994)
[21] “...in the age that had extended its nervous
system outside itself...” McLuhan (1964), 222.
[22] McLuhan (1964), 55.
[23] Jean Baudrillard. On Seduction. (1980),
157.
[24] McLuhan (1964), 51.
[25] McLuhan (1964), 52.
[26] Lynn Hershman Leeson. Preliminary Notes.
(1968)
[27] Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane:
The Nature of Religion. (1959).
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