1.9 - 1.19
Proxemics and Prosthetics
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1.9
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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.
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1.9
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1.10
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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.
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1.10
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1.11
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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.
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1.11
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1.12
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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.
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1.12
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1.13
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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.
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1.13
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1.14
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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.
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1.14
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1.15
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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).
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1.15
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1.16
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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.
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1.16
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1.17
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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.
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1.17
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1.18
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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.
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1.18
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1.19
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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.
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1.19
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