If I had to invoke one cause above all others for the mess we are in now, I'd go back to this classic: Marshall McLuhan's first book:
Few people know that Marshall McLuhan's first book, published in 1951, is completely devoted to the phenomenon of advertising. Although popular in the 1960s, The Mechanical Bride is difficult to obtain nowadays
Marshall McLuhan was a folk hero to many in the 1960s but his fame was well earned. This book from 1951 was an eye opener even if it failed to change the course of what it sought to warn us about He was a modern prophet and his legacy of ideas needs to be read and reread right now. Look below the break and I'll make my case.
So who was this guy?
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, C.C. (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar — a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and the "global village".
If you have been reading my diaries you know that I am into systems. Systems are things where the whole is more than and often different from the sum of their parts. There is a philosophy behind the idea of "systemhood" that is at the core of a bifurcation in modern scientific (and sociolo-political) theory. You see, if it is true (and I firmly believe it is) that there is something real that is lost or destroyed when a complex system is broken down (reduced) to its constituent parts, then there is a profound philosophical truth involved here. That which is lost has an ontological reality, in other words it exists just like the more obvious and tangible parts do. In science this scares some people because it means there are things in complex systems besides a collection of atoms and molecules. The anti-religious wing of science gets espeecially uptight here. Have no fear we are not going there! No, the thing I am leading us to is the identification of McLuhan's ideas with modern complex systems theory because that is where he was at:
In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous slogan, "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media. The slogan, "the medium is the message", is best understood in light of Bernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.
When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. McLuhan's inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the effect of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others.
Were we able to question McLuhan about this now we would learn that the aspects of systemhood I briefly outline above are exactly what he was talking about.
The closest thing we have to this idea now is in the many books and other writings of George Lakoff. Having read most of his writings I must say that he left a gap between McLuhan's work and his own. The concept of framing is very much a McLuhanesque concept. In my own writings I have focused on the individual's "world view". The essence of all this can be stated fairly simply. The number of hours and individual is exposed to media has to affect his view of the world. The conscious, rational experience is but one level of the effect. The subconscious level is where the "programing" gets done. Does it work the same in everyone? Of course not. Does it happen to some extent in everyone? Absolutely!
McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp.
In 1960 there were few authors who captured the fancy of the Western World as well as Marshall McLuhan did. Like his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride is sui generis and composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order – what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.
Examples of advertisements
A nose for news and a stomach for whiskey: McLuhan analyzes an ad for Time Magazine in which he likens a reporter depicted as a romantic character from a Hemingway novel and asks "Why is it [his] plangent duty to achieve cirrhosis of the liver?"
Freedom to Listen - Freedom to Look: An ad for the Radio Corporation of America depicts a rural family doing their business with the radio on. Earlier in the Bride McLuhan notes "We still have our freedom to listen?" and here "Come on kiddies. Buy a radio and feel free - to listen."
For Men of Distinction - Lord Calvert: An ad for Lord Calvert whiskey depicts nine gentlemen holding a glass of their whiskey, while McLuhan notes the lack of non-artists amongst them; "Why pick on the arts? Hasn't anyone in science or industry ever distinguished himself by drinking whiskey?"
The Famous DuBarry Success Course: An ad for beauty creams complete with female model in a swimsuit hawks itself as a "success course" complete with "tuition", to which McLuhan asks, "Why laugh and grow fat when you can experience anguish and success in a strait jacket?"[
Here is an ironic commentary on the timing of the book that seems to miss the point entirely:
McLuhan's biographer Philip Marchand dismisses The Mechanical Bride as a failure since it appeared just as television was making all its major points irrelevant. During precisely the period when he was finishing his book, McLuhan began working with Harold Innis. That same year, 1951, saw the publication of Innis' book The Bias of Communication, which would set McLuhan on the track of technology and media as extensions of man. McLuhan then made his breakthrough with the article 'Culture Without Literacy', published in 1953 in Exploration I. The text of The Mechanical Bride
is admittedly less pithy or enigmatic than Counterblast or Through the Vanishing Point. The fact that the book comes out of the era of radio, film and newspaper, however, detracts not at all from its value. The theory presented here is miles ahead of anything else taking place in 1950 around McLuhan. The dynamics of modernity can perhaps be better explored in a period of apparent stagnation. In the Mondo 2000 User's Guide, Robert Anton Wilson says the most important idea McLuhan ever uttered can be found in the first chapter of The Mechanical Bride. The chapter in question is devoted to the collage
aspect of the front page of the New York Times, which McLuhan calls a collective work of art. The paper is a daily 'book' of industrial man, an Arabian Night's entertainment. McLuhan defends discontinuity as a fundamental concept against the critics of the day who saw it as irrationalism. To the alerted eye, the front page of a newspaper is a superficial chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies of a very high order. Picasso and Joyce were sharp stylists of such coherence. But people are unaware of the rich symbolism of the newspaper page. Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that is quite blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on its back. Only several decennia into the future, when the historic gaze
has gained depth of field, will we be able to see the beauty of advertisements, book covers, Wurlitzer phonographs, the Buick Roadmaster for '49 with Dynaflow Drive, the cartoons in Crime Does Not Pay (More than 6,000,000 readers monthly!), those unworried yet helpless Men of Distinction with their rare, smooth, mellow, blended Lord Calvert Whiskey in hand, or the August 1947 Reader's Digesttable of contents ('Marriage Control: A New Answer to Divorce', 'What Price Socialism?', 'Laughter, the Best Medicine').
The Mechanical Bride is a cross between Blondie, Superman, Coca-Cola (A kind of rabbit's foot), Emily Post, Tarzan (an amalgam of the noble savage and the aristocratic sleuth) and a horse opera with John Wayne on one side and Margaret Mead, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Toynbee and Kinsey on the other. This would be brilliant in itself, but we also get a taste of the later, real McLuhan. Not in the main text, but in the theory slogans that he puts in the margins. McLuhan is the philosopher of the one-liner. That ultimately worked to his disadvantage since masses of people never got much beyond stammering the slogan, the medium is the message. Have you had your literary hypodermic today? Mostly, there are questions: How much behaviorism is needed to make a big mental proletariat behave? In the section How to iron shirts without hating your husband he wonders if there is any known gadget for controlling a rampant know-how. In the beginning was montage. How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? Superman or subman? You little culture vulture, you! And finally, in the sectionUnderstanding America, he remarks, Don't run but look again, reader. Find the Mechanical Bride.
But what is the mechanical bride? According to McLuhan, it is the dominant pattern of visual coverage in the popular press, comprising a fusion of sex and technology: Explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique and possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. Long, slender ladies' legs are an expression of our 'replaceable parts' cultural dynamics. The industrial mode of production mechanized sex too. In ads the human body is depicted behavioristically as a sort of love machine capable merely of specific thrill, a view which reduces sex experience to a problem in mechanics and hygiene. Conservative Catholic McLuhan is floored by the division which has been made between physical pleasure and reproduction. He refuses in any case to be seduced into analysing the body as a sexual bulwark (Reich). McLuhan's concern is the ever intenser thrills made possible by technology. His later conclusion that advertisement is a modern form of rhetoric and an expression of tribal modernism is already implicitly present here. For McLuhan the headline was the modern equivalent of the aphorism. But who is going to collect contemporary media poetry and, like Barthes, write a worthy successor to The Mechanical Bride?
Was he a prophet? Did Television change things or did it really make the process far more effective? The world one lives in is generally quite small relative to the world one views in one's living room.
We write political arguments here like they were the ultimate tool for shaping people's thinking and changing their minds. After the 2000 and 2004 elections we were in a position to learn a great deal about the media as the massage. Somehow our clear convincing message did not get across as well as we anticipated. Somehow liars and propagandists like the Swiftboaters were more successful than I ever thought they could be. The answer lies in a system that gets created and reenforced every day. Now we have the internet to add to our attempt to understand the system.
Like all situations where we want to undestand something we are an intimate part of, we have to be very careful. Like all situations where we grab a snapshot of a complex reality, we have to realize that the quickest way to change what we want to understand is to begin to understand it. That's why systems ideas and complexity theory are so controverial. They are an agent for change. I suggest that a careful review of McLuan's writings can help us shape the worldviews of the voters we hope to convince. Beware, that means you will be changed as well. But isn't that what learning and growth are all about?
Today Al Gore (finally) took a stand. He will work with us to elect Obama. I'd like to have a discussion with Al about what he can do to help. Can he explain why the ideas that are so very true about Global Warming and Climate Change took so long to get across? Why there is still difficulty? If he can answer those questions he can be an enormous help. Unfortunately, I think he can not. I think the answers are burried in this poorly written diary somewhere. Welcome aboard anyway Al. We need you.