Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

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Even though both authors are not known for taking psychedelics, both authors seem to have an intrinsic understanding about what psychedelics concern.

Terrence McKenna put out a 1995 tape by Mystic Fire Audio, and it is worth seeking out for those who may be unfamiliar with either Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Marshall McLuhan. Since the tape has come out many of McLuhan's work including The Mechanical Bride have been republished.

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McLuhan's Messages, Echoing in Iraq Coverage

April 3, 2003
By SARAH BOXER

It was a cold night in the global village. The war in Iraq
was about to begin. Across the street from the Empire State
Building, in an auditorium at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, a celebration of Marshall
McLuhan, the media prophet of the 1960's, was also
beginning. The auditorium was nearly full.

McLuhan, of course, is the man who coined the term "global
village," came up with phrase "the medium is the message"
and drew the strange distinction between a "hot," or sharp,
medium - "one that extends one single sense in `high
definition' " - and a "cool," or fuzzy, medium. Hot media
(like radio and lectures) are packed with data, leaving
little room for individual interpretation or participation.
Cool media (like the telephone and seminars) leave a lot of
room.

The McLuhan program included a hot medium, a film about
McLuhan by Kevin McMahon titled "McLuhan's Wake," followed
up with a cool one, a panel discussion. Then everyone was
cast out into the cold night to return to their cool media
sets (their televisions) to watch the war begin.

Why McLuhan now? This is not an anniversary year for him.
He was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1911 and died in
Toronto in 1980. His two best-known books, "The Gutenberg
Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man" and "Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man," were published in 1962 and
1964, respectively.

And anyway, before he died he had become something of a
laughingstock. He railed against bureaucrats by citing the
failure of the king's men to put Humpty Dumpty together
again and enthused over a juice commercial: " `Glug, glug,
glug' - that's great television!"

But the war in Iraq - particularly the television coverage
of the war - brings out something fresh and bright in
McLuhan. One of the last chapters of "Understanding Media"
is about weaponry. And it happens to come right after the
chapter on television.

McLuhan's stroke of genius was to anchor his theory of
history in the realm of the senses, as Anne Middleton
Wagner, an art historian at the University of California at
Berkeley, suggested last month at a Boston symposium,
"Mediators: Medium and Its Messages." Because McLuhan saw
the media as extensions of the human body - printed books
as extensions of eyes, radios as extensions of ears - he
believed that each new technological advance would reshape
humanity and traumatize it, too. "We shape our tools and
our tools shape us."

Once upon a time, the city served as "a collective shield
or plate armor," an extension of our skins, McLuhan wrote
in 1964. But with the coming of the electronic age, McLuhan
said, "we put our whole nervous system outside ourselves."
We live in a highly sensitized global village. The world,
as Laurie Anderson said in the McLuhan movie, is like "a
buzzing forest, stirring all around you."

This was a strange image to take home as the war in Iraq
began on television. Suddenly the world and the war took on
a McLuhanesque cast.

The tanks rolling into Iraq from the south were not just
tanks but extensions of marching legs and protective skin.
The night vision goggles were extensions of eyes. And what
about those television cameras attached to the tanks? They
were harder to classify.

McLuhan declared television a cool medium. He said that
television, unlike film, radio or print, presents a fuzzy,
low-definition, mosaiclike image, which leaves a lot of
details to be filled in by those who watch it. It is a
"participant medium," sucking people into its vortex and
demanding "maximal interplay of all the senses." Of course,
McLuhan did not live to see high-definition television. But
the grainy, jumpy videophone images being beamed back from
Iraq would have been familiar to him. Indeed, they give him
a second wind as a theorist of television.

So what happens when a cool medium like television is
attached to a hot weapon like a tank or a Bradley fighting
vehicle?

It exerts a powerful effect on the audience. Suddenly
everyone watching television is dragged into war. When
there is a sandstorm, you, the audience, can't see ahead
any better than the troops. When the fight's going
smoothly, you feel that maybe the war will be quick and
easy. When the camera is attached to a smart bomb, you
might feel that you have become the bomb.

McLuhan understood this kind of tactile television
experience. "In closed-circuit instruction in surgery,
medical students from the first reported a strange effect -
that they seemed not to be watching an operation, but
performing it," he wrote. "They felt that they were holding
the scalpel." Television, he continued, "in fostering a
passion for depth involvement in every aspect of
experience, creates an obsession with bodily welfare."

With the war rolling ahead on television, you the viewer
are made a part of the invading army. Even the local
meteorologists participate in the illusion. They give two
weather reports: sunshine in New York, sandstorms in Basra.

Meanwhile, just as the audience feels a part of the army,
the army becomes part of the audience. American troops on
an aircraft carrier watch CNN to see how the war is playing
and progressing. Soldiers are watching other soldiers on
television.

That is, there is general confusion as to who is acting and
who is watching. And at the crux of the confusion are the
traditional eyewitnesses to war, the journalists,
"embedded" with the troops. Are the television cameras the
witnesses to war, or are they part of the weaponry? Or
both?

In this war, the perception of winning is almost the same
as winning. If Saddam Hussein can appear to be in power on
television, he is in power. If the United States military
can show the world that it is winning, then it is winning.

This, in turn, puts the Iraqi people in a bind. They have
to appear loyal to anyone who might be in power. Early in
the war, when it looked as if the United States and Britain
were going to have an easy victory, an American soldier
starting tearing down the image of Saddam Hussein, and an
Iraqi man took his shoe off and pounded on the picture,
then turned and smiled for the camera. This is what I want
you to know about me, he seemed to say.

When space is filled with satellites, all the world becomes
a proscenium arch, the narrator of the McLuhan movie
suggested. The phrase "theater of war" becomes literal.

Almost four decades ago, McLuhan noted that war had become
less "hot," less a matter of tanks and soldiers, and more
"cool," a participatory event. "The French phrase `guerre
de nerfs' " - war of nerves - "of 25 years ago has since
come to be referred to as `the cold war,' " he wrote,
linking his own lingo of cool and hot with the language of
international politics. He understood the cold war as "an
electric battle of information and of images."

Maybe it is no accident that in "Understanding Media,"
McLuhan's brief chapter on weapons, follows his long
chapter on television. He proposed that "all technology can
plausibly be regarded as weapons." And now, in his own
muddled way, he seems to be right on target. Television
cameras are weapons. The battle in Iraq is being fought
with cool weapons mounted onto hot ones. It's a warm war in
the global village.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/arts/television/03MCLU.html?ex=1050387278&ei=1&en=aa72c8ef4b023553

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I would be very careful when dealing with McLuhan. My favourite teacher was a student of his, and he did deal with intersting issues that others in North America. However there were other theorists of mass culture who are much more interesting, Roland Barthes, the English New Left, especially Raymond Williams, or the Frankfurt School.

McLuhan was a right wing antiSemitic Catholic who thought TV would bring the world together. His temperature analogies regarding media are amongst the vaguest concepts in modern Western thought. Be careful!

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"…McLuhan was a right wing antiSemitic Catholic who thought TV would bring the world together. His temperature analogies regarding media are amongst the vaguest concepts in modern Western thought. Be careful!"

Reducing a persons work to a two sentence denouncement is worthy of the warning: "Be careful!"