Marxism and McLuhan - pt 4 challenge and collapse

Marshall McLuhan is an interesting intellectual figure. He is best remembered for his connections to the 60s counter-culture. He is considered to have coined the slogan Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. His legacy, if it is anything, is a techno-evangelism, in part an offshoot of the counter-culture (McLuhan was also the first person to use the word “surf” in its modern sense); computing will save the day the internet will broaden our minds, liberate information and the geeks shall inherit the Earth.

One very modern off-shoot of this philosophy is the argument (distraction in my opinion) over the role of social media in popular rebellion. Does the application of Twitter to 21st century society result in occupations, riots and strikes? It's certainly a more comforting conclusion than admitting people over the world are tired, poor and fed up with living under their rulers.

But McLuhan was not a member of the counter-culture. He was a professor of English Literature, a public intellectual who appeared an adverts and movies. He was a practising Catholic. He may have been friends with Timothy Leary, but he was also on close terms with people like Wyndham Lewis.

But he was an educator, an educator with a very keen sense of the crisis in education, which arose out of post-war society, its contradictions, and came to be known as the Generation Gap.

Capitalism needed an educated, skilled workforce more than ever. Educational opportunities grew. Millions of young people growing up in the core capitalist countries for the first time had the chance to go into Higher Education and so reap the rewards of a better life. At the same time the rigorous application of capitalist norms to a formerly artisan-like HE system generated conflict, conflict between the new mode of intellectual production and the relations of production. The lecturer was slowly proletarianised. The student, promised intellectual liberation, was subjected to fusty, paternal supervision and backward rules. For example: the student struggle in France 1968, which set off the great strike in May, began as a struggle over the right of male students to visit female dorms overnight.

McLuhan was a lecturer during this period of change. He experienced the shift when he began teaching. Though only a few years older than his students, he felt an insurmountable gap between him and them. The difference, he thought, was in the mode of understanding. He was steeped in the literate, sequential and disinterested mode of thought. His students were saturated by modern media and its effects. Their understanding was post-literate, non-linear and deeply involved.

He saw this as the root of the conflict, the crisis of education (and of society at large). It was this he studied. His solutions were humane, intellectual and appropriately utopian – more designed to provoke debate rather than resolve it. His answer was critical reflection, we had to understand the changes we were going through as a society in order to cope with them. Cutting edge thought, and in particular art were to lead the way.

The Marxist response is clear. Firstly, culture is ambiguous. For human history so far every document of civilisation has also been a document of barbarism. In order to have Socrates you also had to have slaves. The prevailing culture of any class society is determined by that society's ruling class, their prerogatives, their preoccupations. An obsolete way of thinking does not simply give way to critical reflection, which brings us onto the second point, Consciousness has its basis in material reality. As Marx pointed out in his Theses on Feuerbach, criticism of heaven takes place on earth.

I want to conclude with two quotes, from Challenge and Collapse, the final chapter of the opening section of Understanding Media, one which Marxists should find intriguing:

Perhaps the most obvious “closure”... of any new technology is just the demand for it. Nobody wants a motorcar until there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programmes.

This is a close relation to the Marxist observation that a society does not create problems for which it does not already have solutions. There is no solution to bad weather therefore it is not a problem. There is a solution to poor harvests, to food speculation and starvation. These things are problems. While McLuhan's solutions may be technocratic, we can accept what he is saying here. But, McLuhan continues:

The power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses. When we are deprived of our sense of sight, the other senses take up the role of sight in some degree. But the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as breathing - a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep radio and TV going more or less continuously. The urge to continuous use is quite independent of the “content”of public programmes... It is ridiculous to talk of “what the public wants” played over its own nerves... Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we really don't have any rights left.

This is a vital point, that we can all agree with. However you define 'the media', broadly or narrowly, they are our mode of existence, alienated from us and used against us. We take them back under our control in order to emancipate ourselves.

There you go peasants...

You've had your class struggle, now get back to the field. The truly distressing thing is there are no substantial concessions. You will work longer, harder and get less for your trouble; maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but someday soon, and for the rest of your life. Does anyone honestly think the Tories will stop at this? Certain union leaders I suppose... but you wouldn't be unreasonable if you felt like the light at the end of the tunnel was a train headed your way.

Well done PCS for standing up to this. The union must stand alone, yet again, and that is for shame on the other union leaders. Give the civil servants, and anyone else who wants to stand up to the Tories properly, your support.

Marxism and McLuhan - pt 3 from narcosis to awakening

McLuhan’s best known writing is more about aphorism and argument than precisely laid out research. This is particularly the case with the opening chapters of Understanding Media. There are two chapters, which run together smoothly, The Gadget Lover and Hybrid Energy. McLuhan begins his argument by retelling the myth of Narcissus.

The myth is generally understood as a warning against self-love, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. According to McLuhan this is not quite the intention of the story. Narcissus was transfixed by his reflected image and so became numb to all other stimuli, a closed circuit.

All media are extensions of particular human aspects; the wheel is an extension of the foot, the lever an extension of the arm, clothing an extension of the skin, and so forth. Human invention is a response to need generated by discomfort; the wheel relieves the burden of moving objects, the lever the burden of lifting them, clothes keep us from being cold (or sunburned).

Any new invention is a greater or lesser shock to human relations. A neat illustration, from Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital:

In districts where natural economy formerly prevailed, the introduction of means of transport – railways, navigation, canals – is vital for the spreading of commodity economy… The triumphant march of commodity economy thus begins in most cases with magnificent constructions of modern transport, such as railway lines which cross primeval forests and tunnel through the mountains, telegraph wires which bridge the deserts, and ocean liners which call at the most outlying ports.

The latter chapters of the Accumulation of Capital are a meditation on the various media used to establish a commodity economy in various colonies, including the medium of ballistic weaponry. Colonialism is a rather sharp example but the point stands, changes in the medium of human existence require changes in the way people relate to each other.

On an individual level the shock of change leads to numbness, what might have been disturbing to your ancestors you have to take in your stride. Imagine, for example, your journey to work. You would never get there if you had to regard every single advert trying to catch your attention. This shutting down of the senses blinds us to the effect of various media. Back to the original example, ideology; we do not recognise mainstream ideology as such. Even so the supposedly non-ideological person is in fact the most ideological.

We only recognise a medium for what it is when it is either hybridised or superseded. An example from art is the journey from painted portrait to lithograph to photograph, to moving image, to synchronised sound, to Technicolor. Each invention cried out for the following one. As each medium was superseded it was transformed, the obvious example being after the rise of photography artists began painting concepts and feelings, rather than literal objects.

Another example: we now know that novels are in fact movie scripts. Every successful novel is touted to movie producers as a sure-fire hit (that or it’s cherished as an unfilmable novel). Movies are not novels, however. They almost never make the journey backwards. If anything movies are becoming role-playing computer games, judging by the number of spin-offs that have been made.

Relating this back to the point about ideology; we overcome our numbness to bourgeois ideology, see it for what it is, through its supersession (or, perhaps, hybridisation if we take reformism into account). This of course happens through practical action, class struggle, combined with the critical renovation of consciousness; the interaction, I would argue, between movement and party.

The Top Gear Defence

It's an almost unbeatable strategy, with practically limitless applications: why're you getting upset? It's all just a joke, like on Top Gear. Let's test it out:

Tory youth sing songs about the holocaust, but it's all just a joke... like on Top Gear.

Victims of Domestic Violence are to be charged commission on Child Maintenance payments, but it's all just a joke... like on Top Gear.

Cancer patients are to be subjected to welfare tests to see if they're sick enough, but it's all just a joke... like on Top Gear.

Public sector workers to face 16% pay cut to pay for bankers in need, but it's all just a joke... like on Top Gear.

Gumbies on cocaine

Tory MP Aidan Burley wants to get rid of trade union facility time. Facility time is an agreement between unions and employers whereby some members of staff can devote some or all of their time on union activity. It cannot be emphasised enough these are negotiated agreements, an essential part of collective bargaining, without which union organisation, the only strand of democracy in the workplace, is made just that bit more impossible.

Tory MP Aidan Burley goes to parties where people dress up as SS Officers, toast the third reich and belting oh-so humorous chants about the holocaust. A Tory MP toasts the Third Reich but (presumably) will keep his job... He'll probably use the Top Gear Defence. In fact, why didn't Hitler think of that when he killed those millions of people? It's all just a joke, like on Top Gear.

We might as well be ruled by Gumbies on cocaine.

Tony M Nyphot's Flying Riscu

Marxism and McLuhan - pt 2 Hot and Cold Media

Hot and cold media are important concepts for McLuhan. ‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ are slightly misleading names. The basic opposition is between high definition/low participation and low definition/high participation media. It is, say, the difference between a live action film and a drawn animation. With live action the visual detail is fairly rich, leaving little room for the viewer to fill in/interpret. With a drawn cartoon (a good example being Matt Groening cartoons) there is minimal visual information, few lines, few surfaces, and wide room for viewer inference.

Why should hot and cold media bother us? I think, firstly, because it is a useful way to track cultural development. Ruling classes attempt to develop culture appropriate to its rule. This means that culture is a site of conflict in class society. In Understanding Media, McLuhan cites the example of the waltz (a ‘hot’ dance) versus the twist (a ‘cool’ dance).

Dance is an expression of sexuality. The waltz, a formal dance, where the information is largely filled in beforehand, was consistent with early capitalism and its attempt to mould sexuality to the nuclear family and capital accumulation. The twist is an informal dance, with room to improvise and, most dangerously of all, does not require two closely locked partners. The twist and related forms of dance were consistent with a period of affluence and immanent sexual liberation. They were consequently terrifying to authorities committed to the capitalism and sexual propriety. Let’s not forget the added bourgeois horror of mixed race social dancing. It may seem unbearably backward and strange now but American cops used to attack Ray Charles concerts for precisely this reason (brilliantly evoked in Mike Davis’s writings on post-war youth riots).

But there’s a second point of interest. In McLuhan’s scheme new media cause a shock to our system. In order to overcome this shock, so we aren’t sent reeling every time we walk down the street or glance at a TV, we numb ourselves to the medium’s effects. One way of doing this is by cooling down the medium.

The printed word is visually hot. Spoken word on the radio is aurally hot. They each take particular senses and fill them out. One thing you will not have missed is the rise of right-wing demagogy in the internet and talk radio. These are cooling media that allow for greater participation; but this participation is as a kind of reflective surface in an echo chamber. Slanders become rumours and rumours become facts, as host and audience goad each other.

This can create false notions that are very difficult to dispel. An example: after the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes the Metropolitan Police put out a number of statements that simply weren’t true: he jumped the barrier, he was wearing a suspicious device, he challenged the police, he looked like Hussein Osman, etc. These claims were recycled through public forums and consequently longer in people’s minds even after they were disproved.

What is ideology, the medium itself; hot or cool? As far as the question is relevant I would suggest it is a cool medium, participatory. For example: The Conservative is a key outlet for bourgeois ideology. But the party cannot win general elections on the vote of its social base, the bourgeoisie, alone. There is a Conservative Party for big capitalists, but there is also one for small business people, there is even a party for a minority of conservative workers. This can only be achieved by incorportating the concerns, the points of view of other groups into the broader bourgeois perspective of the Tories.

The point here is not to suggest hot, cold or cooling media are better, worse, beneficial or pernicious, but to understand them so we are not taken by surprise by their effects.

A world without escape

Developments in the American Occupy movement:

Activists at Occupy Wall Street have issued a call to thousands of protesters across the US to reoccupy outdoor public spaces to mark the movement's three-month anniversary.

The Occupy movement has stalled in recent weeks after a wave of evictions swept away a raft of encampments, including the largest in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York. On Wednesday, it suffered a fresh blow as police in riot gear cleared Occupy San Francisco camp on the orders of the mayor, who had been sympathetic to protesters, while Occupy Boston lost legal protection against eviction.

This is of concern as there's no such thing as an insurgency on the defensive. Various municipal governments have collaborated to remove the occupations. If the theory of struggle for autonomous space free from capitalism is followed through to its logical endpoint we should see the emergence of a military wing of the movement, an autonomous red army... good luck with that. It could also be observed that the ruling class (especially in a vast country like the United States) does not worry unduly about occupied space. In America vast urban tracts are written off, bypassed by capital, used as silos to store (from their point of view) human waste. Interrupted capital accumuation on the other hand is another thing. The Occupy movement is strongest when linked to organised labour. The ruling class does not like having downtown areas in major towns and cities occupied, but it's merely a matter of isolating the occupation and biding time to hit back.

One last thought, though we should be prepared for this, we should also take some time out to be amazed at the bone-headedness of our ruling class. Voting isn't good enough, lobbying isn't good enough either, demonstrations don't cut it, occupations are merely a health-hazard. These people have no answer for the pain and suffering they are causing. They are creating a world without escape. They are begging to be overthrown.

Marxism and McLuhan - pt 1 The Medium is the Message

Start with a quote:

It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

It is not exactly an aphorism, but it is a neat segment of Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy with an important implication. Ideology is reasonably defined as a collection of ideas based around a distinct point of view. The argument here suggests ideology is the medium of class consciousness.

In the clash between forces and relations of production, the basis of class struggle, people can achieve things which are contrary to the ideas they hold. This was something Antonio Gramsci dwelt upon in his Prison Notebooks repeatedly. The achievements of the Biennio Rosso were not capitalised upon because there was not sufficient critical renovation of ideas; long story short, the workers rebellion was not translated into a workers state.

Ideology is the medium of class consciousness and, as we know, the medium is the message. The key benefit of Marshall McLuhan’s media studies was the spotlight he shone on the media themselves, media as physical objects, and the effects they have. For example, (in this case David Sarnoff, pioneer American broadcaster) people often advise that the “products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value”.

Suppose we were to say, “Apple Pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way that it is used that determines its value”. Or “the Smallpox Virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way that it is used that determines its value”. Again, “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value”.

A useful point for consideration, the ideology of Protestantism helped found capitalism. Not because of some supposed work-ethic, plenty of harsh toil had been carried before anyone pondered the nature of a personal god, but because its dispute with Catholicism over humanity’s relationship to the divine was in effect an argument over the individual’s relationship to authority. “No King But Jesus” is a roundabout call for a republic.

But why does this matter? One of the crucial points about ideology, specific ideologies, is why do they arise when they do. As Frederick Engels pointed out, early socialism was utopian because:

What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

So, Protestantism didn’t just happen to rise up during the feudal era to attack it, it arose out of the feudal era, part of it but against it (and eventually to be supplanted by more advanced articulations of bourgeois ideology). There is no debate about a personal versus an impersonal god without print technology and the beginnings of mass literacy. There are no ideas apart from the means of articulating them.

We exist in a state of media saturation, to the point where we do not regard the effects such media have upon us. We live in the medium of Earth’s atmosphere. We do not notice it because our bodies are evolved to live at around sea-level pressure; we live at the very bottom of an ocean of air. You can only get a handle on this when you climb a large mountain, get into a submarine or a spacecraft.

We tend not to notice the dominant ideology, the collection of ideas based around the point of view of the dominant class in our society. It is only when we are outside that medium that we see it for what it is. The recent public sector general strike in Britain, baby step thought it might have been, was amongst other things an important blow struck against the prevailing ideology, a temporary exodus transporting millions of people (not just the strikers) out of neo-liberalism, austerity and atomisation.

McLuhan’s strength is that he looks at the effect of technology on consciousness. It is easy to accept that electronic media creates almost instant global communication, and thereby bridges the gap between cause and effect, core and perhipery in the public mind. You can extrapolate from this. We have lived through a period of growing gated bourgeois communities, increasingly militarised policing, the enclosure of more and more public space, and so forth. The mass media batters away, the poor are dangerous, deracinated and, look, they're living among us. It’s all very logical.

But there is one clear problem with techno-determinism. Take something like the Canary Wharf Complex in East London. To the bourgeois Londoner it is a sleek monument to their power. The working class Londoner would be forgiven if they found it a cold, bewildering and unwelcome place (built upon the ruins of a former trade union stronghold let’s not forget). Technology, mass media live inside the greater medium of class society; that is the message they carry to us, everywhere, all the time.

The end of democracy

There are technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, formed to enforce austerity. They may cry tears at what they have to do, the sacrifices you have to make, but you still have to make them.

The democratic impulse is an obstacle to austerity. People don't vote to be fleeced, not generally (hence, also, the general trend of declining election participation in supposedly advanced democracies). There is active vote rigging, suppression and violence going on in Russia right now. Russia has been ruled by a former KGB agent for rather too long. According to the NAACP the American political establishment is preparing something similar:

In its report, Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP explores the voter suppression measures taking place particularly in southern and western states.

Fourteen states have passed a total of 25 measures that will unfairly restrict the right to vote, among black and Hispanic voters in particular.

The new measures are focused – not coincidentally, the association insists – in states with the fastest growing black populations (Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina) and Latino populations (South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee). The NAACP sees this as a cynical backlash to a surge in ethnic minority voting evident in 2008.

Barack Obama is part of that establishment. His election in 2008 chipped a small crack in the American political monolith, also known as the Southern Strategy, in short the means by which whatever way the people vote they get a solidly conservative government. However flaky his programme might have been, Obama inspired the Black and Hispanic working class to become politically active, and that is dangerous.

Space news

Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL), has produced an online list of potentially habitable exoplanets. That habitability will then be means tested. The most habitable planets will be turned into Private Finance Planets. Any creatures living on planets exceeding the habitability limit will be forced to move to Croydon or Romford.

In other news

Francis Maude's publicly funded pension is £43,825 a year with a pot of £731,883
David Cameron's publicly funded pension is £32,978 a year with a pot of £550,725
George Osborne's publicly funded pension is £32,978 a year with a pot of £550,725
Nick Cleggs's publicly funded pension is £28,404 a year with a pot of £440,000
Eric Pickles' publicly funded pension is £43,825 a year with a pot of £731,883
Vince Cable's publicly funded pension is £39,551 a year with a pot of £660,507
Andrew Lansley's publicly funded pension is £39,551 a year with a pot of £660,507
Danny Alexander's publicly funded pension is £26,404 a year with pot of £440,942

With antimonies like these...!

Who needs, um... ontology? And that's as far as I got with Historical Materialism. But seriously, a note on the contradictions of class baiting: In order to get their buddy Clarkson off the hook rightwing commentators have had to insist it was all said in jest (c'mon, any fool knows Clarkson does want to see us all shot, he just doesn't think it's practical right now). The trouble is the strike wasn't in jest, hence the 'joke' fell flat. Days ago the right was screaming blue murder about the cost to the economy, now they have to about face and dismiss the strikers as having non-jobs.

Similarly Cameron has claimed Wednesday's strike was a damp squib and, 24 hours later, obviously big.

Which is it, we're left wondering? For rightwingers it's both and everything.

Never forget

You pay his wages - he advocates your murder.

And in the topsy-turvy Land of Chocolate most right-wingers inhabit that's fair exchange no robbery. If Top Gear is Britain's cultural expression of fascism I suppose we have to comfort ourselves it's ironic fascism (it's all just a joke you see, can't you take murder fantasies with a pinch of salt?). If Clarkson and co get the upper hand we'll have ironic jackboots, kitsch swastikas and self-reflexive zyklon B.

[Extra note] The point about Jeremy Clarkson's statement is not that it shows him to be a violent minded idiot, there are plenty of those in the world. Clarkson and his Top Gear cohort consistently push aggressive, bigoted language from a public platform into everyday life, acclimatising people to violence. Where does it all end? One example is Anders Breivik, the Utoya mass murderer, who was inspired and encouraged to do what he did by over a decade of bigoted mainstream language and attitude directed against multiculuralism and immigration in general, muslims in particular. Amongst other things Breivik was a Clarkson fan.


It's a small thing in the long run but you can make your complaint here.