MCLUHANS GLOBAL VILLAGE TODAY: AN INTRODUCTION

Carmen Birkle, Angela Krewani and Martin Kuester

This collection of essays brings together Canadian and European views of Marshall McLuhan in a transatlantic perspective. They were gathered in the spirit of commemorating McLuhans one hundredth birthday, not in his Canadian birthplace or in the university where he taught for many years, but in the form of a conference organized by a European Canadian Studies centre which is part of the international network of centres meaningfully linked in a way that would have been almost unthinkable without McLuhans concept of the global village. Such a transatlantic enterprise is all the more meaningful since McLuhan, although generally seen as a typical representative of North American media culture, received important parts of his literary education on the European side of the Atlantic Ocean, at the University of Cambridge. Even though Cambridge may have been a shock to him, as the famous dictum quoted by Bernhard J. Dotzler in the title of his essay in this volume suggests, it was also a major influence on his reading and interpreting strategies. The transatlantic perspective has been shaping the discussion of the impact of technical media on collective cultures over the last decades. Furthering McLuhans concept of media as underlying organizers of knowledge, the German media scholar Friedrich Kittler widens his literary approach by incorporating writing as a technological adventure writing and literary contents thus become an effect of technical media. Radically through the eyes of McLuhan literature is written by technology and not the human instance. This line of argument places media in the spotlight: if media are formulating our discourses, we involuntarily have to look at their design and their history. And media an argument originally introduced by McLuhan transform the concept of being just agents of communication. Against the background of this tradition, the concept of media archaeology has been institutionalized in the wake of the works of Friedrich Kittler. Media archaeology is promoted by Wolfgang Ernst and Siegfried Zielinski, and both of them have published widely on the impact of media and on the history of media apparatuses, providing us with an insight into the history of technical media.

Copyright

McLuhans Global Village Today

Copyright

Media archaeology focuses on long-running continuities of media, deep time media, as Zielinski calls them. And these can be traced back into antiquity. As a result of the proliferation of digital media and digital communication such as diverse networks, the idea of being controlled by media is more explicitly discussed. Thus the concepts of media archaeology and media ecology once again travel the Atlantic into Anglo-American media theory. First, the Canadians Arthur and Marielouise Kroker developed a concept of the everydayness of digital media and the pervasiveness of these media in everyday life. Against this background the idea of media archaeology, reformulated by Jussi Parikka and Matthew Fuller, becomes the centre of attention. Basically the idea of domineering media remains the same the archaeological impact is turned into a dissection of overpowering contemporary digital media networks and the data processing of a society, which can be researched through an analysis of its artistic media, as Matthew Fuller states. This insight into the transatlantic dynamics of media theory documents the vivacity of McLuhans thinking as well as his impact on historic and contemporary media theory. As many of the essays gathered here show, the transatlantic perspective is far more than a negligible aspect of McLuhans life and theories. The first five essays in our collection address the topic of McLuhan and his influence on media theory. Richard Cavells In-Corporating the Global Village analyses McLuhans turn to the concept of the corporate in the 1960s and shows in what fascinating ways McLuhan then addressed the topics that occupy our minds today, whether it is in dealing with questions of the environment, the global village or bio-mediation. Obviously, McLuhan did not posit the same oppositions between environment and technology that have become commonly accepted today and, above all, he saw the individual as a natural part of a creative commons dominated by the media. In Metaphorical Effects: McLuhans Media, Jana Mangold analyses his use of the concept of metaphor in his own writing, paying attention to his own metaphorical use of the term in the context of electrical and media technology, for example when he compares metaphoric expression with the principle of the electronic tube, an object that has by now become almost obsolete itself. Here the transatlantic influence comes to the fore, as Mangold shows that McLuhan makes special use of I. A. Richardss model of the metaphor. In Hot/Cool vs Technological/Symbolic, Andreas Beinsteiner tackles one of the most disputed dichotomies in the field of McLuhan studies, namely that between hot and cool media. Showing that the distinction between hot and cool is not as straightforward as one might think at first, especially when ethical concerns are involved, he suggests complementing McLuhans dichotomy with that of the symbolic and technological media devised by Friedrich Kittler. Such an approach may well lead to questioning some of the apodictic statements McLuhan made about media, and it also shows another way in which European

McLuhans Global Village Today: An Introduction

and North American approaches to media can complement each other. Florian Sprenger, in Global Immediacy, criticizes McLuhans use of the concept of immediacy in the context of media. For him, the idea that electric media should provide immediate communication contains an aporia. Such an immediate communication would only be possible, one might argue, in the insights provided by McLuhans Catholicism. In his essay entitled The Complementary Aspects of Marshall McLuhan and Postmodernism in the Literary Study of the Internet: Exemplified in the Rhizome Theory of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Martin Speer focuses on parallels between McLuhans theories and the concept of the rhizome developed by the French philosophers, thus providing another example of transatlantic connections beyond the Anglo-Saxon realm. For Speer, the non-binary character of the rhizome provides an ideal counterpart for McLuhans concept of acoustic space and electric or electronic media also commented on by several other contributors to this volume. Mark A. McCutcheons contribution, Dubjection: A Node (Reflections on Web-Conferencing, McLuhan and Intellectual Property), offers a more practical take on contemporary media theory. It is very McLuhanesque for several reasons: first, it comments on McCutcheons contribution to our McLuhan conference via the internet, probably the most typical way of communicating in the global village of the twenty-first century. But in addition to insightful technological remarks, McCutcheon also comments on the development of media communication on the web and its legal and copyright repercussions. He creates the innovative term dubject in order to refer to the new situation of the subject in twenty-first-century communication networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and in internet teaching and web-conferencing set-ups. A second group of essays focuses on McLuhan in the context of literary studies and literary production. In Herbert Marshall McLuhan: Before The Mechanical Bride, David Staines provides a fascinating reading of Marshall McLuhans literary criticism which owes much to the transatlantic, i.e. British, tradition of the New Criticism that McLuhan had been exposed to in Cambridge. Focusing on McLuhan the critic, Staines offers quite a different view of McLuhan than the usual perception of him as the prophet of the internet. Here we see the rather conservative literary scholar who only later decides to add the new field of pop culture, media and advertising to his repertoire when he feels he can no longer connect to the world of his post-war American undergraduates. In Cambridge was a Shock: Comparing Media from a Literary Critics Point of View, Bernhard J. Dotzler complements Stainess essay on McLuhan as a literary scholar by highlighting the influence of Cambridge scholars such as I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis on McLuhans cultural studies approach to literature, which in its own turn provided the starting point for his media theories. Martin Kuester, in Master, Collaborator and Troll: Marshall McLuhan, Wilfred Watson and Brian Fawcett, looks at the collaboration of, as well as tensions between,

Copyright

McLuhans Global Village Today

Copyright

McLuhan and dramatist and English professor Wilfred Watson. He also studies the reflection of McLuhans theories and works in Watsons plays and the prose work of contemporary short-story writer and cultural critic, Brian Fawcett. Extending the discussion to a new literary genre, Anne Hoyers essay entitled Taking Action: What Comics Demand of their Recipients applies McLuhans theories of hot and cool media to her analysis of a traditional Scottish comic strip and thus shows in what way the transatlantic theories of McLuhan can be put to use in Old-World media. The final group of essays addresses the field of McLuhan and technical media. In her essay on Radio Voices: Reflections on McLuhans Tribal Drum, Kerstin Schmidt discusses McLuhans theories in connection with a medium that he did not write about so much himself but which corresponds very well with his ideas of acoustic space and tribal drums: radio. Schmidt insists that radio is in no way the dead medium that some scholars have claimed it to be. Rather, as she demonstrates with examples from radio shows starting, of course, with Orson Welles and the use of radio in literary texts by authors such as Garrison Keilor and John Cheever, radio has become a topic worthy of scholarly and theoretical discussion. In McLuhans Paradigms and Schafers Soundscape: Parallels, Influences, Envelopes, Shifts, Sabine Breitsameter approaches McLuhan by looking at his influence on and parallels with the Canadian composer and music theorist Murray Schafer and his theory of acoustic space, or soundscape. Although Schafer belongs to a younger generation of scholars than McLuhan, he has taken up many suggestions from the latters work on media and applied them to his innovative model of listening and of sound perception as part of an acoustic ecology. In Literary Modernists, Canadian Moviegoers and the New Yorker Lobby: Reframing McLuhan in Annie Hall, Paul Tiessen interprets McLuhans relationship to and appearance in the medium of film. Contributing centrally to the transatlantic approach taken in this collection, he shows the connections and parallels between British film pioneers and writers such as Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson and John Grierson and Canadian counterparts such as Malcolm Lowry, Gerald Noxon, Earle Birney, Sheila and Wilfred Watson (who are also touched upon in other contributions to this volume) and, especially, Marshall McLuhan. After insightful references to the British and Canadian cultural scene from the 1940s to the 1970s, Tiessen gives us an entertaining view of Woody Allens inclusion of McLuhan in the 1977 movie Annie Hall, which is alluded to in several of the contributions to this collection as well as in the title of the American edition of Douglas Couplands biography of McLuhan, You Know Nothing of My Work! Philipp Blum, in his essay The Animated Medium is the Animated Message (?): Reading Animated Moving Pictures with Marshall McLuhan, uses the famous McLuhan dictum that the medium is the message for his analysis of animated motion pictures. Animated pictures do not pretend to represent an extra-filmic referent in the real world, so they automatically become

McLuhans Global Village Today: An Introduction

auto-referential or, if we see them as telling a story, metafictional. In Marshall McLuhan and the Emergence of American Television Theory, Angela Krewani reads American television theory from a McLuhanian perspective. McLuhan shifts our interest from the level of contents to that of the medium and thus to the special conditions of television production. Krewani pays special attention to the bodily aspects of McLuhans insight that media are the extensions of man, and places television theory in the context of the development of artificial intelligence and computing technology. She also emphasizes the importance of McLuhans theories for the development of video culture and the rise of alternative television stations and channels. Finally, Raphael Peter, in The Medium in Your Pocket: A McLuhanian Approach to New Media, interprets the twenty-first-century smartphone in the light of McLuhans prophecies. Smartphones that nowadays combine the functions of cellphones, personal computers, web browsers, GPS appliances, etc. have, in a way, become the extensions of man which McLuhan had claimed media were or would become. Peter also draws the readers attention to the dangers that are inherent in the use of this new medium as it makes the user more and more traceable and transparent to those in control of the media. The editors would like to thank the contributors from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for the enthusiasm with which they responded to our call for papers, which shows that McLuhans ideas are as vibrant in the twenty-first century and at the time of his one hundredth birthday as they were in his lifetime. Typically for McLuhans global village, not all participants in the conference had to physically move across the Atlantic Ocean to give a live performance in the Marburg Rathaussaal. McLuhans concept of media as extensions of human beings has made this possible. Still, the traditional exchange of ideas over coffee in the Marburg town hall has also contributed to making the conference a success. Therefore our sincere thanks are due to all those who supported the Marburg conference that brought twentieth- and twenty-first-century media and technology to the historic, early sixteenth-century Marburg town hall: our organizing team and supporters (Annett Vmel, Sylvia Langwald, Marco Ulm, Susanne Motsch and Claudia Merl). Special thanks are due to Christian Pauls for making Mark McCutcheons virtual web appearance possible in the Rathaussaal. We would also like to thank the composer Mark Polscher for making his compositions that were inspired by McLuhan available to be listened to at a hearing station throughout the conference, and the Marburg Fast Forward Theatre for their entertaining MMCL: Marshall McLuhan Improv Project. Our project could not have been undertaken without the moral and financial support of the Government of Canada, especially the Embassy of Canada in Berlin, the Gesellschaft fr Kanada-Studien, the University of Marburg, its Kuhlmann-Fonds and the City of Marburg. We would of course also like to thank Ruth Ireland, Mark Pollard and the very helpful editorial staff at Pickering & Chatto for making it possible to turn the message of this conference into the medium of a book.

Copyright