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Situationist International - Faces of Recuperation (S.I. - #1. - June 1969)

medienkompetenz, nr. 82

(via lf)

A common yet curious point regarding the reception of Marshall McLuhan’s work is despite its resemblance to admired thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard and Vilém Flusser, McLuhan is often discounted even derided by critics on the left.  He is often accused of a reactionary naiveté and complicity with existing power when in reality his writings consistently analyze the structures of media power and suggest methods for uncovering the functioning of that power in order to change it.  It would seem this situation requires an investigation and even a subsequent rehabilitation of McLuhan’s work.  The Gutenberg Galaxy provides the opportunity to observe McLuhan’s method in probing the structures and influence of media specifically the transformations involved in moving from oral to alphabetic to print cultures.  What is often overlooked with McLuhan’s work is that it theorizes the manner in which new technologies undermine and destabilize established institutional, cultural, epistemological and psychic forms. 

For example The Gutenberg Galaxy is an example of Walter Benjamin’s vision for a book comprised of quotations.  McLuhan’s “mosaic or field approach” of numerous quotations from varied scholars brings in multiple viewpoints to the point that McLuhan seems to go beyond compiling evidence for his claims and intends more to diminish his own presence.  Furthermore McLuhan attempts — surely part of Benjamin’s goal – to reduce not only the authorial presence, but to break up the unitary viewpoint McLuhan associates with print

If you go to the link above the Situationists do a hatchet job on McLuhan; unfortunately their critique is full of misunderstandings and shallow readings.  In the same essay they trash Herbert Marcuse.  I would suggest that as an exercise in reading, pick up Understanding Media and One-Dimensional Man and read them together.  They were both published in 1964 and both deal with the same issues but from different sensibilities.

What often confuses McLuhan’s critics is his oscillation between hard media determinism (which we should be wary of) and soft media determinism in relation to media’s impact on culture.  McLuhan’s hard determinism seems to operate beyond any influence of social relationships, economic structures or cultural values.  This hard determinism however usually occurs alongside his pronouncements of our collective somnambulism regarding technology; our habitual immersion in these technologies produces unawareness in its users.  McLuhan may take the “servomechanism” aspect of this too far but there is a point to be made here; our unreflective habitual use of media, their insertion into our everyday lives where there is little time or space to disengage from them, increases their power over us.