1.0 - 1.8
Proxemics and Prosthetics
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1.0
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Distance overcome by technological devices. The
same headline could cover the very different stories
Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin tell about media
effects. McLuhan tells the tale of an emerging
global village enmeshed in the participatory mystique
of acoustic space. Benjamin, however, is no
prophet of returning neotribalism. For him,
optical technologies bring objects closer to viewers
and thus undermine the embrace of auratic art (n1).
Attached to these narratives are meditations on the
power of tropes. McLuhan praises metaphor;
Benjamin attacks symbol. Out of his critique of
the symbol, Benjamin develops a typology of modes of
experience. The less phenomenologically astute
McLuhan opts for empirical reduction. For McLuhan,
technology is a play of hypertrophy and atrophy of
bodily extensions. The play is sealed in a cycle
when he reifies metaphor as the motor of
reversals. Benjamin would find this quite
undialectical. Whatever contrary political
positions they may take, both thinkers, however, depend
upon the cultural investments grafted onto a
dichotomous division of the senses, the same cultural
investments that celebrate or demonize a putatively
primitive past. Surprisingly or not, Jung will
prove to be the key to liquidating those investments in
both Benjamin and McLuhan (and to rewriting headlines).
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1.0
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1.1
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McLuhan himself catalogues the effects of his most
favoured tropes. In his frequent conflation of
communication media and attitudes towards them, two
tropes are employed. They are
hendiadys and
chiasmus. He devotes a section
of From Cliché to Archetype to
doublets yoked by conjunction (hendiadys). Eye
and ear, hot and cool, print and tribal, are some
examples of pairings invoked and explored by McLuhan.
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1.1
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1.2
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He opens the section by claiming that L.P. Smith's
Words and Idioms "draws attention to a
mysterious property of language, namely, the
ineradicable power of doublets" (Cliché 108).
Smith is documenting habit. Therein may lie the
secret of power. He certainly does not ascribe to
words themselves any mysterious properties or
ineradicable powers. Smith in lexicographical
spirit lists as so many odds and ends, habitual
doublets of the English language. He also
categorizes them according to emphatic usage by
repetition (again and again), by alliteration (humming
and hawing) or by rhyme (by hook or by crook).
His final lists consist of doublets formed by contrast
of two alternatives (heads or tails) and two
alternatives joined to make an inclusive phrase (the
long and the short of it) (Words
and Idioms 174-175).
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1.2
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1.3
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McLuhan stresses only disjunctive conjunction.
His eye and ear represents a now-and-then or a here-and-there. Never a here-and-now. Heterogeneity is kept at bay as the dichotomy
is mapped onto historical periods or onto geopolitical
divisions. Furthermore, the temporal and spatial
disjunction is necessary for the pairing to become set
in a chiasmic structure. McLuhan accords this
trope ontological status as a process of human history
(Gutenberg Galaxy
277).
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1.3
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1.4
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In McLuhan's use of chiasmus to explain exchanges in
sensory domination between eye and ear, the sequential
element is elided and temporality foreshortened:
one knows as one perceives. This allows tropes to
be used to explain history. Barrington Nevitt
exemplifies the expanded application of the rhetorical
term. He claims "[A]ny process pushed to the
extreme of its potential will break down or
metamorphose or reverse its original effects by
chiasmus" (Nevitt
157). One can read Nevitt as
providing three
options: breakdown, metamorphosis or
reversal. McLuhan insists on continuous
reversal. For him breakdown is always
breakthrough.
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1.4
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1.5
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Faith in tropes never meets failure of fiat.
Throughout the McLuhan corpus rhetoric is
reified. Doublets and chiasmus not only describe
reality; they are taken for real. Whether
operating from a realist or nominalist position
McLuhan, the rhetorician, would have perhaps benefitted
from the discipline targeted for diatribe in his
Laws of Media, that is dialectic or logic.
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1.5
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1.6
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A more serene appraisal of the contributions of
dialectic to human communication or its relation to
grammar and rhetoric, the other arts of the trivium,
might have led McLuhan to greater care in the creation
and manipulation of his categories (n2).
Informed by dialectic, his rhetorical analysis might
have turned more critically to the devices of his own
discourse. For example McLuhan might have
commented upon the tendency of his doublets to classify
sensory phenomena and communication media in a
dichotomous fashion. Hendiadys, doublets coupled
by conjunction, underscore the complementary nature of
the relation between two classes. Each is a unit
of a whole. The coordination of pairs through
conjunction hints at, without explicitly exposing it to
scrutiny, a complementarity. Thus McLuhan's
description fosters his explanations in terms of the
play of hot and cool media as well as his insistence on
switches in eye and ear domination.
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1.6
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1.7
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A connection between discourse and discovery need not
lead in every case to a conflation of explanation with
description. A drive to certitude does risk such
a collapse. McLuhan's emphatic and vatic style,
full of bold assertions, lacking in qualifications or
concern for nuance, displays such a drive. Yet it
is an insufficient condition. The tangle of
description and explanation results from more than the
unexamined lodging of symmetries in McLuhan's
exposition.
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1.7
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1.8
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For McLuhan certitude, an attitude towards knowledge,
is joined with a narrative construction, closure, which
for him is indispensable. It leads to completion
of a successful and pleasurable act of perception by
restoring an organism to equilibrium. What is
stated in a speculative fashion and without reference
to sensory extension in J.Z. Young, his source, McLuhan
restates in a universalizing affirmation:
The inevitable drive for "closure,"
"completion," or equilibrium occurs
both with the suppression and the extension
of human sense or function. (Gutenberg
Galaxy
4)
Any disturbance, suppression or extension, leads to
attempts to reinstall homeostasis. McLuhan's
rhetoric enshrines a physiological phenomenon as an
endorsement for a cyclical view of history. It is
recourse to chiasmus that endows such a descriptive
statement with explicative force.
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1.8
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