Sense: orientations, meanings,
apparatus

1.9 - 1.19


Proxemics and Prosthetics


1.9


Chiasmus will dramatize the descriptive doublets so that a medium is always paired with another in an agonistic relation and any redistribution of sensory ratio is a reversal.  However, narratives of domination are not necessarily entailed by chiasmus.  Chiasmus equally serves narratives of sensory coordination and collaboration.  For McLuhan the trope yields only one story. Perfect predictability ensues;  McLuhan's model is overdetermined and foreclosed.

1.9

1.10


Favoured tropes may not always be the preconditions for original experiential insights.  For McLuhan they are.  As he states without chiasmus, without hendiadys, "rhetoric, the open hand; dialectic, the closed fist" (Cliché 160).  In Erasmian fashion, the sceptic responds that the open hand can slap and the closed fist hold a seed.  And if the avowal that discursive habits shape and are shaped by conceptual commitments be framed in an interrogative mood, it provides the space for other dialectics.

1.10

1.11


What do McLuhan's charged remarks concerning dialectic signal?  Turning from the dialectic of the trivium against which McLuhan rails to that of German idealism about which he, in his writings on communication, is silent and which "extended the notion of contradiction in the course of discussion or dispute to a notion of contradictions in reality" (n3).  One notes, a pattern structurally akin to McLuhan's "chiasmus".  In McLuhan there is found the three elements of a classic idealist dialectic.  All three are connected to his notion of extension.  There is the transformation of quantity into quality in that the pivotal notion of extension starts as the repeated use of certain technologies and ends as a predisposition of the human sensorium.  There is an identification of opposites as extension becomes amputation (Understanding Media 45).  The claim that the content of a new medium is the previous medium expresses the negation of negation, the third element of the dialectic.  This negation of negation is generalized after the collapse of media and message in the turn to language as the ultimate human extension.

1.11

1.12


From this comparison McLuhan emerges as a crypto-Hegelian substituting "technology" for the Spirit of History (n4).  If one is not oneself to replace Spirit by "return of the repressed," one must turn to the moment when extension is not conveyed by chiasmus, not yet captured by dichotomies and not yet applied universally.  The moment is pre-McLuhan.  It is in his sources.  It is also post-McLuhan:  in a reading of his reading of his sources.

1.12

1.13


The further probing and questioning of McLuhan's reading habits retraces three elaborations of his extension hypothesis.  The first formulation of the notion occurs in The Gutenberg Galaxy.  Given his appeal to authorities in this initial elaboration, McLuhan's handling of his sources warrants scrutiny.  Later, in From Cliché to Archetype, extension is largely applied to language.  In this subsequent elaboration McLuhan further advances his concept of acoustic space.  Finally in Laws of Media extension is expressed in the form of the tetrad:  enhancement, reversal, retrieval and obsolescence.  It is here that McLuhan's commitment to a historical frame of eternal return becomes clear.

1.13

1.14


The striking feature of acoustic space as he formulates it, its simultaneity, allows a transcendental moment to occur, the eternal return to be tamed.  However, the simultaneous aspect of acoustic space operates so successfully in McLuhan's discursive universe only because the distinction between the instantaneous and the immediate is not taken into account, a distinction that threatens to undo the famous conflation of message and medium.

1.14

1.15


It is the notion of extension that permits the medium-message conflation.  Donald Theall critiques McLuhan's lack of distinction between primary extensions such as housing and secondary or tertiary extensions such as print media (Rear View Mirror 82-84).  Theall also exposes an absence of articulation between closure and extension, one being a brain activity, the other, a motor activity.  Finally, Theall's reading draws attention to the addition of a third authority, Leslie A. White.  A citation from White's The Science of Culture is meant to underwrite McLuhan's adoption of a definition of language as tool.  The combination of elements from Hall, Young and White allows McLuhan "to treat print and phonetic writing as extensions affecting sensory balance" (Rear View Mirror 84).

1.15

1.16


Theall's objections are here directed at the syntagmatic aspects of McLuhan's discourse, at how he threads together his authorities.  Simply, there are too many missing links in the citational collage.  Furthermore, beyond these objections, the connection between citation and McLuhan paraphrase is tenuously forged.  Only highly altered sources fit the McLuhan mosaic.

1.16

1.17


Prior to being strung, the citations are produced by a series of choices.  For example, three passages in Edward T. Hall's The Silent Language refer to extension.  McLuhan in the prologue of The Gutenberg Galaxy cites one, the one least likely to challenge the consonance of his own formulation.  The first mention of extension occurs in passing.  It is a passage where Hall enumerates the contents of the book:

The next chapters (Five through Eight) specify and deal with the communication spectrum.  Little is said about mass- communication media such as the press, radio, and television, which are the instruments used to extend man's senses.  Rather these chapters are focused on one main aspect of communication, the ways in which man reads meaning into what other men do. (Hall 51)

There is no matching of a specific sense with a particular medium.  Media are instruments for achieving extension not extensions in themselves.  A simple assertion by Hall cannot persuasively underwrite a more complex assertion by McLuhan.

1.17

1.18


In an other passage Hall refers to skis as an extension of the foot.  He is illustrating different learning environments.  He uses an observer- dependent simile: "When one watched these people move about it was as though the skis were an actual extension of the foot, a highly adapted organ for locomotion" (Hall 87).  From this observation, extension cannot be taken as a universal nor as an automatic process.  Furthermore the link in Hall between extension and skill which implies cognitive awareness would cripple McLuhan's assertion that changes in the human sensorium caused by technological extension happen unbeknownst to the human participants of the process.

1.18

1.19


The passage McLuhan does cite on page four of The Gutenberg Galaxy reads:

Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body.  The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb.  Clothes and houses are extensions of man's biological temperature- control mechanisms.  Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground.  Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions.  Money is a way of extending and storing labor.  Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs.  In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body. (Hall 79)

In a preceding paragraph McLuhan prepares his particular reading of Hall with the statement that:

Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties. (Gutenberg Galaxy 4)

Before McLuhan turns to cite Hall, disturbance is grafted onto the notion of extension.  As well extension becomes centred on sense organs.  The other faculties recede.  McLuhan's total attention is on parts.

1.19


wake bridge prow



orientations, meanings, apparatus -- sense

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