February 13th, 2014 Are really artists our salvation or is Culture our Business? Response to Marshall McLuhan’s text
Marshall McLuhan (1911 -‐ 1980), wrote Counter tzald in 1969 and Culture is
our business in 1970. Both texts explore new medias and the effects on society. In this assignment, two chapters will be discussed: “Culture is our Business” and “Political Gap”. I have decided to think about McLuhan's opinion that new media is nature and that we have become technological idiots; having as only salvation either knowledge or artists.
McLuhan states with conviction that:“[…] [T]he Age of Writing has passed.
We must […] restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.” (McLuhan.15) By saying that new media is nature, I consider it implies new media becomes part of our own structure of experiencing reality, part of our bodies. Furthermore, we are engaged in nature, whether we are aware of it or not. In the same way we are immersed in effects of new media as we are in the air. We live everyday experiencing our senses through the filter of technology without noticing it. As McLuhan mentions, we are in a state of hypnosis because we are not able to perceive what new medias provoke in our culture. And, it is not something particular to the 20th or the 21st century. It has been like that in the past. When the written language and print was invented by Johannes Gutenberg, in 1439, society using that innovation could not notice what was changing in their perception of reality. They could not do it even in retrospective, in McLuhan’s opinion. Then how did McLuhan find out what sortilege
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was been sent on us? Was he a sort of guru who discovered what was really happening to all of us as humanity? Could we compare him to Sigmund Freud, who changed knowledge about our intimate self, our shadow and subconscious? I leave the question in the air. Going back to the previous quote, new media are not bridges, they are not connecting us to other by external ways, they are more like electrons, always around us, getting closer one electron to another through electromagnetic interactions without our willpower.
Facing new medias, we must restructure our thoughts and feelings. Maybe it
happens without our consent. By understanding how our perceptions change we might be able to take decisions regarding technology without simply experiencing the consequences. For example, we can in a very determinate resist to the huge flow of high-‐tech media. Some of us avoid having television, cell phone or internet; or some might use them with certain limitations, not accepting to invade their life with those artifacts. McLuhan does not give details (in that chapter) about how actually our thoughts change with the use of new media. I think that by using extensively any technology we start to think in a similar way as technology works. We limit our imagination and free association by being subordinated to a binary vocabulary for such long periods of time.
The dynamics of Western civilization have been abolished by the
omnipresence of the eye and the ear, announces McLuhan (op.cit.17), and they have been replaced with tribes of hunters and technological idiots. George Orwell, in 1949, imagined a society with a Big Eye watching everyone and controlling them. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, people are victims of that condition, they suffer from that
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political system, they have no option. We passed the year 1984 in a different way than Orwell imagined. In 2014, we are not watched by a big eye but we have chosen, with free will to live with an omnipresent eye controlling us. What else could be that delirious of making every meal, feeling, night of sex and drugs public in the social medias? We want to be observed permanently, but only in a superficial way, perhaps because we are afraid of our true self. I should apologize, I am not trying to accuse anybody, and I do not have rational proofs about a need of being far from our self and being a kind of human idealized Ad for the world.
Ads are all around us, they have become part of our nature. McLuhan
confirms: "Media effects are imperceptible, they cause hypnosis because they dilate the senses. Since we cannot perceive how our perception change we are “technological idiots. [...] The electric information environment returns all men to the condition of the hunter.” (42) We are looking for a goal, always ready to catch the beast. What beast would it be? That of information, reward, recognition and fame. Through the use of internet we are not living in the present but in the platonic intelligible world of pure ideas and forms, unaffected by reality. Internet has become that perfect space, ephemeral and pure, faultless, tidy and tasteless. Then we have learned to feel safe in that net and we are loosing abilities to live in the earthy world of shadows and imperfections. Nevertheless we are still in the cave.
McLuhan has some hope in artists’ contributions to society. He sees them (or
us, I hope) as awake, ready to witness, explore, and understand society. It seems to me he imagines them eyes and heart wide-‐open, eventually able to guide the sleepy society. He is convinced of artists opening doors of perception. I imagine some that
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match with that profile, or they seem to, as: Pablo Picasso with all his quest for a visual vocabulary, breaking conventions all the way through; Marcel Duchamp with his bride glass reflecting on the industrial society, the gaze and passivity; David Hockney in a constant research for clues and ways of creating, exploring the camera oscura and camera Lucida, discussing on the old masters' secret techniques. I see all these artists as luminous and unambiguous individuals, with a critical point of view about their contemporary society. But, other artists -‐in McLuhan perspective-‐ do not give me any hope, I see them comfortably placed in the inertia of capitalist society, having found selling products which fit standards. I doubt they could guide us in our postmodern tribal society. I wonder what would McLuhan think of Jeff Koons, Demian Hirst and David Lachapelle. I will finish my text with McLuhan's promising words: “Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feed forward. They have no identities.[...] Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away. […[ The artist smashes open the doors of perception.” (op.cit.44) I consider in this society artists are in a position with responsibility and power, although in an unconventional sense. They do not detain force for violence and imposition but power of knowledge and sensitivity. I rather be an artist than a politician, a priest or a scientific.
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Bibliography
McLuhan, Marshall . Counter tzald. The Canadian Publishers, Toronto, 1969. McLuhan, Marshall. Culture is our business. McGraw-‐Hill Book Company, New York, 1970.
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