McLuhan Revisited

The following is an edited version of one of my favorite passages from Arno Ruthofer's 1997 powerful paper Think for Yourself; Question Authority:

Most people in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s consider media philosopher Marshall McLuhan to be the grandfather of cyberpunk because as early as 1964 he was talking about a "global village" borne of communication technologies, a concept which evolved, over time, to his vision of the "[p]sychic communal integration of all humankind, made possible at last by the electronic media". Many cyber-philosophers (Leary, McKenna, Rushkoff, etc) were strongly influenced by McLuhan's work. [...] "McLuhan was never the technotopian that contemporary technophiles like to portray," writes Arthur Kroker. "To read McLuhan is to discover a thinker who had a decidedly ambivalent perspective on technoculture. Thus, while McLuhan might be the patron saint of technotopians, his imagination is also the memory that should haunt them."

This chapter, which is based on Kroker's essay "Digital Humanism: The processed world of Marshall McLuhan", offers a new way of understanding McLuhan and is, at the same time, a criticism of [cyberdelic] techno-utopianism. McLuhan's discourse on technology provides a brilliant understanding of the inner functioning of the technological media, which might help us "to break the seduction effect of technology, to disturb the hypnotic spell cast by the dynamism of the technological imperative".

According to McLuhan, the nature of technology is paradoxical: On the one hand, all technologies are extensions of the human being (e.g., the wheel is an extension of the foot); on the other hand, every extension by technology is simultaneously a "self-amputation" of the part of the body that is extended (by using the wheel/car we "self-amputate" our feet because we do not use them to walk any more). This means that we extend ourselves by self-amputation. According to McLuhan, the history of technological innovation can best be understood in terms of experimental medicine. In Understanding Media, he gives much attention to Hans Seleye's work in the field of stress, especially the biological phenomenon that under conditions of deep stress an organism "self-amputates" the organ effected by anesthetizing it in order to protect itself. (For example, when an organ of the body goes out it automatically goes numb. The organism automatically self-amputates it.) In Digital Delirium, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker explain McLuhan's medical approach to technology as follows:

McLuhan's historical account of the evolution of technological media was structured around a (medical) account of the evolution of technological innovation as "counter-irritants" to the "stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. Just as the body (in Hans Seleye's terms) resorts to an auto-amputative strategy when "the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation," so (in McLuhan's terms) in the stress of super-stimulation, "the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function." Technology is a "counter-irritant" which aids in the "equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central nervous system." Thus, the wheel (as an extension of the foot) is a counter-irritant against the pressure of "new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media;" "movies and TV complete the cycle of mechanization of the human sensorium;" and computers are ablations or outerings of the human brain itself.

According to the Krokers, it was McLuhan's thesis that the motive-force for technological innovation was always defensive and biological: The nervous system tries to protect itself against sudden changes in the "stimulus" of the external environment by using the physical organs (that is, the technologies which extend these organs as) "buffers." In times of high stress, humans always invent new technologies - that is, they extend, or "outer," individual organs - so the nervous system can protect itself against the stress of acceleration of pace. But each "outering" of individual organs is also an acceleration and intensification of the general environment. So it seems that humans are caught in some kind of vicious circle. (high stress > we invent new technologies to protect the nervous system > acceleration of the environment > high stress...). According to McLuhan, in the electronic age we reached the culmination of this process. The environment changed so fast that "in a desperate [...] autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs as buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism", the central nervous system itself was outered in the form of electric circuitry (computers, the Internet, etc). In other words, the nervous system has gone numb. According to McLuhan, this outering of the central nervous system induced an unprecedented level of stress on the individual organism. McLuhan argues that the electric age is an age of "anxiety and dread" because we are unable to cope with this new situation; we are unable to understand the subliminal consequences of the fundamental changes in technostructure.

McLuhan tried to make people aware that it is futile to deny that technology exists and that it is actually a part of us. The only way we could really understand technology is to experience it and try to become aware how it changes our perception of the world. If we are to recover a new human possibility it will not be "outside" the technological experience, but must be "inside" the field of technology. According to McLuhan, only a sharpening and refocusing of human perception could provide a way out of the "labyrinth of the technostructure". In Digital Delirium, Arthur Kroker writes that "[McLuhan's] ideal value was that of the 'creative process in art,' so much so in fact that McLuhan insisted that if the master struggle of the twentieth century was between reason and irrationality, then this struggle could be won if individuals learned anew how to make of the simple act of 'ordinary human perception' an opportunity for recovering the creative energies in human experience". According to McLuhan, we will never fully understand the subliminal effects of technology and be able to use technology to increase our intelligence, creativity, and freedom, if we do not first become aware of the "double-effect of the technological experience" - that all technologies are simultaneously extensions and self-amputations of some human mental or physical faculty.