Media ecological motifs in intellectual history.

McLuhan, Eric ; Zhang, Peter

Preamble

The authors started an extended but "desultory" (by no means a positive term according to our dictionaries which embody a "visual" bias) conversation on media ecological topics in 2011. This is one chunk of the conversation. The following mosaics are based on chance encounters and long-term ruminations. The authors offer them here in the spirit of probing.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)

PZ: In his lecture entitled "Descartes, Leibniz, and Vico," Ernst Cassirer (1979) offers a concise summary of the three different stages that Vico distinguishes in the evolution of mankind, along with the language and characteristic mode of thought corresponding to each. Vico calls the three stages the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Cassirer points out:

   ... the language of the first ages is described by Vico as a
   hieroglyphic one; the language of the second age was a symbolic and
   poetical one; the language of our own age is an abstract or
   rational one ... the primeval thought of mankind was a mythical or
   poetic thought.... (p. 106)

McLuhan would call the hieroglyphic and poetic modes of language cool, and the rational mode of language hot.

Cassirer suggests that in the epoch of Enlightenment, Vico's thought was anti-environmental. The following passage is worth dwelling on:

The first nations did not think by concepts; they thought in poetic images, they spoke in fables and wrote in hieroglyphics. In accordance with these forms of thought and language they did not possess a scientific but a poetic geography, a poetic cosmography and astronomy--and even a poetic morality, a morality based upon mythical conceptions. In this conception of history we feel the beginning of a new epoch; we feel the first dawnings of the spirit of Romanticism. (p. 107)

A couple things are notable here. First, in the age of Enlightenment, Romanticism was already present, and Vico can be seen as the figure of that emerging ground. Second, Romanticism is essentially the retrieval of mythical and poetic modes of thought when the time was ripe (when electric media came to the scene).

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

PZ: Social Darwinism is an ideological formation that has emerged in spite of Darwin. Kenneth Burke is among those who have gone back to Darwin to "retrieve" the cooperative side of his teaching that has been displaced into the (back)ground. Darwin (1872) himself doesn't just emphasize competition, but also "sympathy and the love of [one's] fellow-creatures," treating of these as among the "higher mental qualities" (p. 150).

The logic of survival of the fittest, or the root metaphor of society as a jungle, "naturally" evolves into social Darwinism, and radical individualism. When this has been taken to an extreme, a "flip" (a reversal) is in order. Such a flip could result in corporatism, a new tribal loyalty, an emphasis on teamwork, or, depending on the specific dynamics and social matrix, Nazism (which is a phenomenon of retribalization).

On a separate note, perhaps it is no mere coincidence that evolutionism was formulated in the nineteenth century--the century when print was the dominant medium. Burke (1966) points out that the nineteenth century "was par excellence the century of Darwin," when "the spontaneous thing to do always was to treat questions of essence, or logical priority, in terms of temporal priority," when "the historicist style of expression" was the order of the day (pp. 35-36).

Jakob von Uexkull (2010) makes an interesting point, too: "Was the much-lauded progress, which was to lead living beings from imperfect beginnings to evergreater perfection, really, after all, only a petty bourgeois speculation on the increasing utility of business?" (p. 195). To Uexkull (2010), "no imperfection was apparent even in the simplest animals"

(p. 195).

Paul Virilio (1995) suggests that Darwinism proper has "become old hat" in the age of technological prostheses, and that evolution is entering "a TECHNOSCIENTIFIC phase" (p. 117). I think he is restating a point made by Marshall McLuhan.

EM: As I recall, Darwin did not once use the term evolution in The Origin of Species. He was after other game. Darwin was interested in natural selection. His competition was Lamarck, wasn't he? Evolution is quite a separate matter.

It bears reiterating: with the first tools, including speech, evolution shifted from biology to technology.

PZ: Uexkull (1926) points out, "the word 'evolution' expresses just the opposite of what it is intended to mean" (p. 263). He further explains:

"Evolutio," or unfolding, clearly means that the forming of folds becomes less and less. But "evolution" is used to express the increase in complexity observed in the realm of living things, beginning with the simple amoeba and going up to the mammals. when Darwinism speaks of the evolution of the individual, it means quite rightly the decrease in the number of folds. In the Darwinistic sense, evolution means that within the germ the finished animal already lies concealed, just as the folded bud contains the perfect flower, and in addition to growing, has merely to unfold and evolve in order to produce it. Darwinism, here using the word in its right sense, sees in the genesis of the individual a decrease in the folding, and accordingly, a simplification. in the same breath, Darwinism uses one word in two opposite senses. When it speaks of the evolution of the individual, it means simplification; when it speaks of evolution in the animal kingdom, it means complication. (pp. 263-264)

In our cultural doxa, "evolution" suggests linear progression. But with technological extensions, we are now pausing on the threshold of physical atrophy, if not regression. Instead of natural selection, we are now faced with "a kind of artificial selection, the product of technoscientific progress whereby the physical body of pedestrian man (Kierkegaard) will gradually lose its usefulness and bow out as a truly metaphysical body capable of replacing it emerges" (p. 119), as Virilio (1995) indicates.

EM: As if to contradict myself, I must reply to this one as follows.

Have a look at--or buy: it's worth it!--a copy of Etienne Gilson's From Aristotle to Darwin and Back

Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution (Ignatius Press, 1984). It is very clear, from his discussion, that there is no reliable or accepted definition of the term, evolution: there are dozens of definitions and shades of meaning. Seemingly, everyone has his own.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

PZ: Burke (1967) points out, "Marx's concept of the 'classless' stage following a maximum intensification of class conflict is precisely in line with the Aristotelian recipe for the process of dramatic 'catharsis'" (p. 311). Technically, McLuhan would use the term "reversal" to capture the process Marx envisions. However, McLuhan totally disagrees with Marx here. The way he sees it, "The Marxists spent their lives trying to promote a theory after the reality had been achieved. What they called the class struggle was a spectre of the old feudalism in their rear-view mirror" (McLuhan, 1969, p. 140).

One thing McLuhan cannot deny, though, is that Marx is not media ecology-proof. In The German Ideology, Marx (1972) asks rhetorically:

Is the Iliad possible when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear? (p. 150)

John Dewey (1859-1952)

PZ: John Dewey (1980) has a line about Platonism in his Art as Experience:

Some philosophers have put forth the idea that esthetic effect or beauty is a kind of ethereal essence which, in accommodation to flesh, is compelled to use external sensuous material as a vehicle. The doctrine implies that were not the soul imprisoned in the body, pictures would exist without colors, music without sounds, and literature without words. (p. 199)

EM: Well, any kid on the telephone can disprove that statement. We are all discarnate these days, body set aside while soul/mind roaming the universe and interacting with other discarnate beings. Add in radio, TV, satellite, the Internet, and the rest ...

"Imprisoned" is the giveaway. Those who think that way regard soul or mind and body as participating in the cosmic spirit/matter dichotomy. Matter and spirit are antagonists; enlightenment comes as gradually spirit is liberated from matter. Wistful romanticism at its core. On the other hand, an intersection of soul and body is the very essence of humanity--not dichotomy but fruitful interaction. Individual identity is only possible when spirit and matter intersect. Only angels are created spirits without bodies; each angel is a separate species. Humans are a single species.

PZ: I read the Dewey line as a sardonic note on the Platonic notion of form ("the 'leaf' is the cause of the leaves"), as against the McLuhanesque one! So Dewey sides with "us" here.

Art as Experience can be read as Dewey's phenomenology. A very interesting book--more or less a precursor of the media ecological orientation. McLuhan has an interesting line about phenomenology: "Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode. a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground." (McLuhan & Carson, 2003, p. 332). He seems to be suggesting that phenomenology dangles half way between the acoustic and the visual sensibilities--a half-hearted McLuhanism, instead of a thoroughgoing one. In Laws of Media, he points out: "[phenomenologists] have tackled a right-hemisphere problem using left-hemisphere techniques and modes of cognition" (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 128).

Experience and Nature can be read as Dewey's metaphysics. Is it accurate to say that McLuhan is beyond metaphysics?

EM: Actually, McLuhan's (both of us's) approach to media is metaphysics. The usual approach, which works with the hardware ("channels"--TV, radio sets, etc.) is all efficient-cause-based. Ours concerns modifications of being, via our extensions and utterances and outerings, and via the discarnate effects of electric media. Only formal cause is of any use when trying to study environments: environments exert their pressures from every side at once--there is no sequence to hang on to.

Years ago Ken Johnstone wrote an article on Marshall McLuhan the "Metaphysician of Media." He was right on.

PZ: Excuse the digression, but, speaking of utterances and outerings, there is a Nietzsche quote from On the Genealogy of Morals that parallels this notion of McLuhan's:

This alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to isolated acts of any kind: we may not make isolated errors or hit upon isolated truths. Rather do our ideas, our values, our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts, grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit--related and each with an affinity to each, an evidence of one will, one health, one soil, one sun.

I have to say Hitler seems to have appropriated the tonality of the last phrase ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!"). The point here is that humans are the etymology of technology and philosophy alike.

The following line by Dewey (1980) calls to mind McLuhan's "Narcissus as Narcosis": "'Medium' in fine art denotes the fact that this specialization and individualization of a particular organ of experience is carried to the point wherein all its possibilities are exploited" (pp. 196-197).

EM: Notice that Dewey is thinking solely in terms of input. He betrays no sense of the closure by the other senses, which is where and how the effects are registered.

PZ: Despite its limitations, Dewey's Art as Experience is still a relevant source partly because McLuhan teaches us to treat media as art forms.

Dewey (1980) points out, "... the mad, the insane, thing to us is that which is torn from the common context and which stands alone and isolated ... The sense of an extensive and underlying whole is the context of every experience and it is the essence of sanity" (p. 194). What does this say about the written word--a figure abstracted out of a ground? There is something Jungian about this Dewey quote. McLuhan (1962), too, says, "Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy" (p. 26). An extreme case is found in the Nazis: "the Nazis had an extraordinary intelligence, of course. That's what evil is" (Virilio, 2002, p. 113).

Virilio (2009) suggests that the extensive whole Dewey talks about is being polluted by the acceleration of reality, by communication at the speed of light (p. 74). Hence the global villager's sense of claustrophobia. If the depletion of ground is the destiny of man, then so is nuttiness, to follow Dewey's logic above. There is already a syndrome called nature deficit disorder.

Dewey (1980) further points out, "About every explicit and focal object there is a recession into the implicit which is not intellectually grasped" (p. 194). I think Dewey is talking about figure vs. ground here. Intellect has everything to do with vision, and left-hemisphere dominance. Alan Watts (1957) uses the metaphors of central vision vs. peripheral vision to talk about a similar understanding (p. 8). The intellect and manifest discourse are the equivalents of central vision.

Dewey seems to associate ground orientation with intuition and mysticism. Here's the evidence:

... any experience the most ordinary, has an indefinite total setting. Things, objects, are only focal points of a here and now in a whole that stretches out indefinitely ... There is something mystical associated with the word intuition, and any experience becomes mystical in the degree in which the sense, the feeling, of the unlimited envelope becomes intense ... This sense of the including whole implicit in ordinary experiences is rendered intense within the frame of a painting or poem. (Dewey, 1980, pp. 193-194)

Perhaps it is not by coincidence that Aldous Huxley (1954) chooses to direct our attention to ground instead of figure in paintings:

In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many coloured variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these nonrepresentational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds in Piero's draperies. (p. 23)

It is worth pointing out that Dewey (1980) brings up the symbolists--those who abstract, who pull out the connections (according to McLuhan)--in the same context:

The symbolists have exploited this indefinite phase of art; Poe spoke of "a suggestive indefiniteness of vague and therefore spiritual effect," while Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect. (p. 194)

The following passage from McLuhan' s short essay, "The Role of New Media in Social Change," shows that Dewey and McLuhan are on the same page:

At the same time as Monet and Seurat and Rouault were dimming the visual parameters of art in order to achieve maximal audience participation, the symbolists were demonstrating the superiority of suggestion over statement in poetry. The same principle obtains on the telephone as compared with radio. (McLuhan, 1989, p. 39)

Max Weber (1864-1920)

PZ: I believe The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has a lot to do with the kind of sensibility that comes with print media.

EM: This was a McLuhan observation since the forties.

PZ: Good to know. Weber's taxonomy of authority can be explained in media ecological terms, or in terms of tetrads.

Traditional authority: corresponds with orality (obsolesced by print media).

Rational-legal authority: corresponds with literacy (enhanced by print media; obsolesced by electric electronic media; flips into charismatic authority). Michel de Certeau (1988) seems to share this understanding:

"Modernization, modernity itself, is writing," says Francois Furet. The generalization of writing has in fact brought about the replacement of custom law by abstract law, the substitution of the State for traditional authorities, and the disintegration of the group to the advantage of the individual. (p. 168)

Charismatic authority: corresponds with electricelectronic media, such as radio (Hitler is an example) and TV (Kennedy is an example).

Weber traces the paradigm shifts quite well.

"Authority" has to do with "author," and print technology. Traditional "authority" is folkloric. There is no author in a strict sense. When TV permeates social life, the image displaces the unchallenged reign of rational discourse (or logocentrism). Performance displaces disembodied discourse.

In the electric and electronic age, there is a retrieval of orality (Walter Ong calls it "secondary orality") and nonverbal communication. Interestingly, in Virilio's War and Cinema, there is an illustration that shows Hitler rehearsing sign-language for a public speech (1989, Illustration 17).

In the age of digital media and the Internet, the author is a diffused function. Anonymity (as was the case in manuscript culture) came back. Authority is diffused. When it comes to medicines, people trust the kind of knower-less knowledge available on the Internet as much as they trust their family doctors, if not more.

Maybe there is a media ecological reason behind Deleuze's predilection for collaborative writing, writing in the third person (not as you and me), and behind his notion of the author as being populated.

Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944)

PZ: The inconstancy of objects is a notable theme in Uexkull. He points out that objects "change their form as well as their meaning in every environment" (Uexkull, 2010, p. 197). The same flower stalk becomes four different objects in four different environments: an ornament in the environment of a flower-picking girl, a path in the environment of an ant, a spigot in the environment of a cicada larva, and a clump of food in the environment of a cow (Uexkull, 2010, p. 413). This idea foreshadows Deleuze's notion of the assemblage. To couch it in Deleuze's language, the meaning of an object is a matter of what social machine takes it up. Instead of saying "each object creates its own environment," we should say, "each environment creates its own objects out of the things at hand." There is a machinic sensibility here. The idea of the social machine applies to humans, too. That is to say, like objects, humans can be taken up by various social machines. To be taken up by what social machine that's an ethical question through and through. A different social machine means a different mode of being for one who's taken up by it. The Stoic, for example, is very choosy when it comes to what social machines to be taken up by. I think this is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) mean when they say "the becoming-tick of the Stoic" (p. 264). Deleuze and Guattari got their tick example directly from Uexkull.

EM: The bit you quote is basic figure/ground relation. Deleuze makes of it a machine (which is a key to his imagination), whereas figure and ground are artifacts of human perception. Nature does not use figure and ground anywhere or anyhow, that is, she does not separate figure out from ground: the whole thing is ground and stays that way. Figure is created by consciousness, and even more by unconsciousness-which is ground.

PZ: McLuhan (1964) talks about the social machine as well in his fascinating chapter on games in Understanding Media: "Do not our favorite games provide a release from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine?" (p. 238). Another line from the same chapter suggests that the release is simply another machine: "A game is a machine that can get into action only if the players consent to become puppets for a time" (p. 238).

For whatever it is worth, I feel the following passage from Uexkull (2010) touches upon both final cause and formal cause in a useful way:

When the spider builds its web, the different stages of web-formation, such as the frame built in the form of rays, can be referred to as both goal and motive for the formation of the frame. The web but never the fly--can be called the goal of forming the web. But the fly does indeed serve as the counterpoint as the motive for the formation of the web. (p. 193)

Here the web as the goal of forming the web is the final cause. The fly as the counterpoint as the motive for the formation of the web is the formal cause. Put simply, formal cause is relational. Uexkull extends the invitation for us to examine formal cause in Nature, not just in culture.

EM: A very useful object lesson, the spider, a propos causality.

Goal certainly seems to have final cause about it, and motive accords with the movement aspect of efficient cause (I mean that which moves the maker to set things in motion, that which propels one into action).

So with the next sentence we have the same web (final) presented as the goal of the efficient cause (formation process), which is a classic misreading of the relation between the two. Final cause is NOT, as the general consensus has it, the end point of a chain of efficient causes. That would make of it the effect of efficient cause, and final cause is, first of all, a cause and not an effect. Efficient cause works in time, sequentially; final cause and formal cause work outside time and are simultaneous--there is no sequentiality about them.

The problem with the web is that it is part of the spider, not an extension in our sense but something that the spider made from itself.

The fly as the motive is not formal cause but part of efficient cause, the mover.

Formal cause is not relational; he's wrong about that too. It is absolute. Final cause can also, at extreme, be absolute. (Cf. Plato's Ideas.)

I have tried dozens of times, but have never managed, to make anything natural "fit" the four causes. What, for example, is the formal, efficient, or final cause of a tornado? A volcano? A tree? A waterfall? The moon? Thunder? Gravity? Our galaxy? Wood? Etc. It simply won't work. But do try a few for yourself. Perhaps you'll have better luck than I have.

PZ: Your question sounds very Zen-minded: nature is fundamentally mystical. Alan Watts calls it "nature naturing." The moment we can talk about "nature natured," we are in the realm of final cause. That moment won't come, though.

EM: And then there's the little matter of fact that nature is a human invention, as much as is "second nature." There's a bit on this in Laws of Media. The Greeks were the first in the world to come up with the notion of nature: their word was physis. That they gave it a name tells us that it had recently emerged from ground into figure. "Nature" itself/herself is an artifact. Bestowing of names is a reliable sign of figure emerging from ground.

I take it that Nature natured (or vice-versa) is nature reemerging from the new ground and hence remade, reimagined. In a word, retrieval--an aspect of formal causality.

I knew Alan in the sixties, even edited a few issues of his newsletter (I worked for the publisher). He was riding the Aquarian Age wave, and very good at it.

PZ: By "retrieval--an aspect of formal causality," do you mean whenever an old form is recycled, it always takes on a new shape, so repetition is always accompanied by difference? If so, we get a clue about Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return. The world at once repeats itself and departs from itself--that's life. That's precisely what makes the world mystical. "Nature naturing" captures that live process, that ongoing eventing. In contrast, "nature natured" refers to a done deal. This is a General Semantics read, but either way, we arrive at the same understanding of the world. There's a similar conceptual pair in Richard Lanigan: "speech speaking" and "speech spoken." The one has an emergent quality whereas the other does not.

EM: Laws of Media, again, has a fair bit about retrieval. The old thing comes back, but in a new form, ready to play a new role. It is trans-form-ative.

E.g., the motorcar retrieves the knight in shining armour. Electric media retrieve preliteracy. Print retrieved the manuscripts of the ancient world. The etymology of any current form is its former, unretrieved state.

PZ: Do you see a media ecological sensibility in Alan Watts?

EM: Alan Watts for media ecology? I don't think so.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)

PZ: Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) looks relevant. Did you like the book? McLuhan mentions him as an acoustic thinker, I believe (Stearn, 1967, p. 269).

EM: The simple answer is no. I heard about Spengler a fair bit for a while, but never read a word of him. All my attention at that time was on Joyce and Finnegans Wake. I believe Wyndham Lewis had a fair bit to say about Spengler in Time and Western Man.

PZ: The title of the first volume is Form and Actuality. Having been preoccupied with Media and Formal Cause, I was simply stunned by the German title Gestalt und Wirklichkeit. Form = Gestalt! Do you recall the riddle "What makes a witch itch?" and the answer "Take away her 'w'"? We talked about it in "Formal Cause, Poiesis, Rhetoric" (E. McLuhan & Zhang, 2012, pp. 441-458).

Here, I'd like to mention a few more sources to map out an interesting research project. In a conversation with Marianne Brausch entitled "'It's the Invisible Space That Enables Us to See the Visible': 1950 or the Birth of the Thinker of the In-Between," Virilio (2011) says, ". the philosopher who most inspired me was Merleau-Ponty.. I found in him an echo of my German masters, who were the 'Gestaltists'. I discovered Gestaltheorie through (Paul) Guillaume's book, La psychologie de la forme." (p. 76). Merleau-Ponty and Guillaume are must-reads. Burke's "Psychology and Form" is another important source (1964, pp. 20-33). In the essay, Burke privileges the psychology of form over the psychology of information from a dramatistic perspective, and treats of scientism as a cultural syndrome--that is to say, as a pathological cultural ground.

Chapter 2 talks about "The Meaning of Numbers," which directly calls to mind Chapter 11 of Understanding Media--"Number: Profile of the Crowd."

Chapter 7 deals with "The Arts of Form"--one of the most enticing chapters in the book.

This book needs to be studied. Absent that, we cannot say we have studied McLuhan adequately.

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)

PZ: I like the following line by McLuhan (1987) a lot:

I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society. (p. 227)

EM: Dad got the "intellectual thug" idea from Wyndham Lewis, who styled himself "The Enemy" and actually used that title on one of his mags. Lewis was widely called "the scourge of Bloomsbury" because he relentlessly attacked their pretensions to be artistes and sophisticates, whereas they were for the most part simply hi-society snobs. Cf. his The Apes of God, which was aimed right at them. Isn't it ironic how Kevin Kelly's utopian HIVE fits so exactly into the same context? Even at the time Lewis wrote The Apes of God, many observed that "Apes" is punning on Latin for bees. Dad told me so as well, that Lewis intended the double-entendre. The hive is the antithesis of civilization.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

PZ: How do you like Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception? I think it's an important book for media ecologists and general semanticists. It's a Zen-minded book, too.

EM: You're right about those uses. When I read it, some 40 years ago or more (so my memory is real hazy), I didn't think much of it. Of course, that was the '60s, the age of acid and mushrooms and speed. Doors? Everybody was flying.

It would be interesting to use Huxley in the context of studying the '60s.

PZ: The book gets me to feel that psychedelics are a spiritual medium, and a philosophical medium, too. The other thing is: if language as a utilitarian map keeps us humans from seeing the territory, psychedelics can help some people to overcome this barrier. On the other hand, "What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin (sic), the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time" (Huxley, 1954, p. 25).

I especially like the way Huxley talks about draperies. This single line is hauntingly intriguing: "For the artist as for the mescalin (sic) taker, draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being" (Huxley, 1954, p. 25). It calls to mind at least two things: how the hexagrams were invented in ancient China, and the way Alan Watts talks about cracking and li (3). As Watts (1973) puts it:

Li originally meant the markings in jade, the grain in wood, and the fiber in muscle. It designates a type of order which is too multidimensional, too subtly interrelated, and too squirmingly vital to be represented in words or mechanical images. (p. 96)

I see a fruitful area of inquiry right there! This is the Zen side of Huxley.

Brave New World is another good source for media ecologists. Or, there is a lot to say about the book if we read it through the lens of media ecology.

EM: A quick riposte.

Psychedelics are not a spiritual medium, though many people imagine it to be something of the sort. Prayer, though, IS a spiritual medium, and it does not necessitate any distortion of perceptions. In fact distortions of perception interfere with prayer. One cannot pray properly when drunk or when stoned on LSD or mushrooms, et al.

What psychedelics do is alter perception and thereby cause the mundane to seem extraordinary. They give the illusion of heightened awareness, for example, when what they do is alter the awareness of the mundane and make it appear fresh or revelatory.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)

PZ: According to Bakhtin, the epic world is univocal. The audience hears only one voice--that of the bard. The heroes are men of action.

In Dostoevsky's novels, speech is the content of writing, although not the only content. Writing, or the authorial voice, orchestrates but does not subsume or erase heteroglossia (the different oral languages spoken by the characters). There is an ecology of oral languages in Dostoevsky's novels. Bakhtin's linguistic universe is full of linguistic interfaces, or contact zones. Dialogism is the rule, whereas monolingualism is the exception what Bakhtin calls the petrified narrow seriousness of official discourse.

Arguably, what makes Dostoevsky unique as a novelist is that he exercises deep listening. Bakhtin's literary theory can be read as political philosophy.

If literacy entails standardization, including the standardization of language, perhaps Bakhtin anticipates a postliterate sensibility, which retrieves what is preliterate.

EM: I made much use of Bakhtin in my work on Joyce, in particular Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and Rabelais and His World. Thanks for reminding me of them. I'll try to reread them this weekend.

PZ: Which book of yours are you referring to, please?

EM: The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake. University of Toronto Press, 1997. It began as my doctoral thesis, which I eventually made into two books: the Joyce book is one of them. The other, on satire, awaits a publisher.

Bakhtin's big contribution was the idea of polyphony, the polyphonic novel. Polyphony can be seen in various guises. I was working on polyphonic satire, called Menippean satire by some. This mode of satire allows the writer to swipe material from anyone else past or present and use it as his own. Without attribution. In the twenties, T. S. Eliot scandalized everybody with "The Waste Land": Not only was it "not poetry," it had footnotes giving sources! "Poems don't have footnotes!" Etc.

"The Waste Land" is a polyphonic poem, not least because it was the work of two poets, Eliot and his friend Ezra Pound, who played midwife. Many voices and many accents and many times pervade that poem.

The question of voice is not new; it is still being asked. Only the Lyric mode uses the private voice. Lyric is the expression of private emotion, private sentiments. The "I" speaks. That leaves the voices of the Epic and the Dramatic. The audience hears only one voice, that of the singer, quickly forgotten: The Epic voice is not a private voice; it is many voices at once, a corporate voice, the voice of an entire culture and a time. Nor is the Dramatic voice a private voice inasmuch as the writer puts on the voices of others. (Should the writer intervene, as himself (private voice), in a drama, it immediately flips the entire drama into the mode of satire.) The Dramatic voice range includes a voice that is indisputably that of a group: the Chorus. And yet any Drama can be considered as a whole, a single poem, spoken by the author who puts on various voices in the process. Even so, it is not a private voice that speaks the drama to us.

Eliot pointed out once that there were only four conversations possible: with self, with an other, with others, and with God. The first we call soliloquy; the second, dialogue and conversation; the third, a spectrum from forensic logic to lifestyle ads, but all within Drama. The last is prayer, wouldn't you agree?

Bakhtin doesn't anticipate a postliterate sensibility, he reports on it. He sees it everywhere because it is everywhere around him, environmental. His two great studies are by way of being status reports.

Incidentally, there is a delightful little work by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge called The Reader Over Your Shoulder. It contains a chapter on "Official English" which dissects the "narrow seriousness" of the

Official Style.

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995)

PZ: McLuhan's work is descriptive and ethically implicit, whereas Deleuze's work is ethically explicit and politically committed.

Print media cultivate visual, linear thinking or arboreal thinking. A salient symptom is obsession with the root or the origin. This thinking translates into a politics characterized by the governing and judgment of life by some transcendental principle.

Electric and electronic media cultivate acoustic or rhizomatic thinking. For the eye-minded, a rhizome is chaotic in the same way A Thousand Plateaus feels chaotic. If we approach the book with an acoustic sensibility, then everything will fall into place like magic. The book is coherent in an acoustic way. Rhizomatic thinking bespeaks a politics of immanence.

Electric and electronic media (the workings of which are based on electromagnetic waves) and the theory of relativity are all about discontinuity and quanta. Hence Deleuze's point about starting in the middle (the resonating interval), or diving into the maelstrom or vortex (to use McLuhan's language), where the action is. McLuhan's emphasis is on pattern recognition. Deleuze's emphasis is on vector, movement, and involution.

The McLuhanesque term "visual" has a technical tonality (one can derive an ethics out of it, though) whereas the Deleuzian term "striated" has an ethicopolitical tonality. Where power is concerned, Deleuze makes explicit what McLuhan only hints at.

The implication of digital media is control (what cybernetics is all about). Digital media constitute the technological infrastructure of the control society.

It is wrong to fit Deleuze in the Procrustean bed (if there is such a thing) of media ecology. Rather, media ecology needs to be politicized. Deleuze enacts a way of doing that.

There's something ambivalent about A Thousand Plateaus. This has to do with how people understand the often-neglected subtitle of the book (Anti-Oedipus has the same subtitle), "Capitalism and Schizophrenia." A cryptic line from Anti-Oedipus may offer some clue: "Capitalism is profoundly illiterate" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 240). Capitalism follows a non-linear, acoustic, "smart," disorganized, rhizomatic organizational principle.

The question is: Is Deleuze simply romanticizing the liberatory potential of the rhizome, or is he also describing the rhizome as a new form (proper to the control society) to update our sensibility, so we invent new weapons of resistance and no longer fight yesteryear's battle?

The notion of assemblage, if used positively, in a "virtuous" way (as Spinoza understands the term), leads to a non-organic, machinic, rhizomatic understanding of the self, an ego-less self. (Incidentally, Deleuzian posthumanism is all about slipping the trap known as Man.) Power and resistance are co-present only in retrospect. As a matter of fact, resistance (the "active" self-affirmation of elal vital, or the exercise of active power, i.e., power as a potential, as the capacity to affect and be affected) precedes Power ("reactive" CONTROL, as when Empire striates back).

Instead of psychoanalysis, Deleuze (along with his coauthor Guattari) promotes Schizoanalysis, which is essentially about inventing lines of flight (new weapons of resistance, new possibilities of life). This is at best a latent concern in McLuhan. How to effectively resist Power, and affirm life (develop an active, as against reactive, sense of power) in a control society--this is where politics and ethics fuse into one in Deleuze. The virtuous man, the free man, is one who inhabits a striated space in a smooth mode ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]).

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

PZ: Foucault makes a rich site of exploration all by himself. Here's an interesting topic: how the Panopticon as a disciplinary technology evolves into an abstract principle that permeates the entire social field. That is to say, how it becomes environmental (a "medium") so families, schools, hospitals, factories, and barracks all feel like prisons. I can imagine people resisting this dark vision as sheer nonsense, but Foucault more or less anticipated the kind of control society or society of telesurveillance (a key characteristic of which is knowledge about the people via information technology and digital media) we live in right now. The dispositif makes another worthy topic. Foucault's genealogical as against teleological understanding of history definitely has a media ecological overtone to it. The latter understanding betrays an unawareness of how print media as a hidden force shape our sense of history. There is a perfect correspondence between the historical shifts in consciousness Foucault talks about in The Order of Things and McLuhan's perception of the psychic and social consequences of literacy and postliteracy, respectively. If Foucault perceives and describes two historical shifts in consciousness, then McLuhan provides the mediumistic interpretation for these shifts. In between the two shifts was the Gutenberg Galaxy, or the Literate Interlude (my coinage).

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

PZ: Perceived as a medium, as an intellectual milieu, Derrida deserves a tetradic study.

Put in tetrad form, Derrida enhances playfulness and the exploration of the outside of language, obsolesces structuralism and gravity, retrieves Zhuangzi (the ancient Chinese Taoist), and, taken to an extreme, reverses into obscurantism and incomprehensibility.

The critique of logocentrism Derrida launches in Of Grammatology can be productively read as a critique of print technology, instead of language itself. To read Derrida this way is to do hermeneutic violence to him a healthy kind, though.

Another book by Derrida that might interest media ecologists is The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, partly because the postcard is a medium.

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Eric McLuhan, Peter Zhang *

* An internationally known lecturer on communication and media, Dr. McLuhan has over 30 years' teaching experience. He worked closely with Marshall McLuhan for fifteen years and has also done extensive communication research. He has published many books and articles on media, perception, literature and the arts. Most recently, The Human Equation (BPS Books, 2011), Media and Formal Cause (NeoPoiesis Press, 2011), and Theories of Communication (Peter Lang, 2011). Dr. Zhang is assistant professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University. His scholarship so far has unfolded in the interzones between media ecology, rhetoric, Spinozian ethics, French theory (Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, etc.), and affirmative criticism. He was interviewed by Figure/Ground Communication in August 2012.

Correspondence to:

Dr. Eric McLuhan

Email: mcluhane@sympatico.ca

Dr. Peter Zhang

School of Communications

Grand Valley State University

Allendale, MI 49301

Email: peter.zxg@gmail.com