McLuhan’s war: Cartoons and decapitations

1 Utopia and/or dystopia

Throughout his writings of the sixties, from the Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) to War and Peace in the Global Village (1967) to the famous Playboy interview (1969), McLuhan seems to have wavered between a dystopic view of the new media’s effects and a utopic one, although he never really turned them into a binary opposition. When asked, at the end of that interview if he was “essentially optimistic about the future,” he replied:

There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man’s consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ – Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born… Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos.

(McLuhan 1969: 22–23)

This lyrical and hyper-optimistic view of things to come was expressed in 1969, at the height of hippiedom and McLuhan seems to have been carried away by his early fan base, the flower children of the Age of Aquarius. Before that, from The Gutenberg Galaxy to War and Peace in the Global Village, he had been much more dystopically inclined and appeared to view the potential realization of the Anti-Christ as a more likely outcome. And so it seems to be turning out when, in today’s sense of the words, we turn on by pressing the remote control and tune in by selecting a listed channel.

2 The screen and the couch potato

I would argue, however, that if the return of oral culture through new electronic media has caused the present day catastrophes, our perception and awareness of them can only massage us more as we watch them unfold on our various types of screens. That is where and how we perceive local and distant shooting sprees, lone or multiple gunmen on a rampage, executions of hostages, the spread of the Ebola epidemic, etc. If an event or situation is not on a screen, it simply did not happen or is no longer current. To witness, a cartoon from the November 12, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. [This cartoon reminded me of my old, now vanished, “video rental” store where a wall poster simply asserted that “If it is not on video tape, it didn’t happen.”] (Figure 1)

Figure 1:

November 12, 2014.

Now, the standard model of communication, for literary and linguistic structuralism, is the one that Roman Jakobson first presented in diagrammatical form at a seminal 1958 conference on “Style in Language” (Sebeok 1960: 353). For communication to occur, said Jakobson, six “factors” must be at play: an addresser, a message, an addressee, a context (or reference), a contact (or medium) and a code (or common language; see Figure 2).

Figure 2:

Roman Jakobson’s six factors in communication (1958).

For each factor, there is a more or less, corresponding dominant, but not exclusive, “function”: the referential, emotive, poetic, phatic, conative, and metalingual are associated with each of these “factors.” The associations and labels have been put into question by many scholars, but I shall not deal with them here. ^[2]

Although Jakobson’s diagram may have been sufficient to explain oral and written communication at a time when print and speech were still the main means of cultural contact, it is clearly inadequate for our current electronic environment. When we sit in front of our computer, tablet or smartphone screens, we are, narcissistically, our own addressors and addressees. Consequently, the “context factor” and the “referential function” are quite different from direct oral and written communication. We gather information through sites and hyperlinks; we paraphrase or plagiarize it, and then disseminate it. The plagiarism aspect is the most frowned upon and yet, without it, we would have no encyclopedias (Wikipedia being an obvious example) and no progress in the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. I have occasionally recognized my own sentences and paragraphs in articles on subjects that I had also treated. I find that acceptable because there is no addressor, no one “author.” It is tribalism at its best, like an epic poem, the encyclopedic form brings together a multitude of individual voices into one or many “Cantos.” This recovery of an old genre, is a direct consequence of the return of oral culture through electronic media like cell phones, networks, etc. (McLuhan and Fiore 1967). I have, consequently, tried to adapt the Jakobsonian diagram to the present-day multi-media situation. Figure 3 shows my new model, inverting the Medium (Contact)/Message relationship as, I think, McLuhan would have drawn it.

Figure 3:

McLuhan’s possible version of Jakobson’s model.

While our media may have evolved, the access to the actual events is, of necessity, still mediated, even in the case of “live” transmissions. The screen gives us a window on the world. But what we see is only the broken pane and its scattered pieces falling both in and out of the room. These are the “pixels” (before that word became common currency), as in the René Magritte 1938 painting called La Clé des Champs (literally ‘the key to the fields’ and figuratively, as a colloquial expression meaning ‘to head for the hills, to flee,’ for the French idiom “prendre la clé des champs”).

3 “Every new technology necessitates a new war”

Thus spoke McLuhan and Fiore (1967: 98) at the height of the Vietnam War when television, the “cool” low-definition medium of the last decades of the twentieth century was the new technology. Now, television has itself become just another content of our ultra-high definition (HD) video screens. McLuhan’s own concept of “cool” versus “hot” media was one of his more controversial ideas, mainly because it is counterintuitive. These labels were borrowed from jazz music styles: hot jazz (dating back to the early days of radio) allowed the listener to just listen while cool jazz became the dominant genre during the early days of television and it forced the listener to participate in the production of the music. Here is one of McLuhan’s explanations for this generic classification, one that is eerily appropriate for the Charlie Hebdo cartoon massacres: “A photograph, for example, is high definition or hot; whereas a cartoon is low definition or cool, because the rough outline drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill in or complete the image himself” (1969: 11). (Figure 4)

Figure 4:

René Magritte, La clé des champs, 1938.

The question for us, today, is this: does watching stories and events as they unfold on our screens require less participation on the part of the CP (couch potato)? Are we now watching a “hot” medium, one that requires considerably less involvement on the part of the viewers? It might be that our current media are neither “hot” nor “cool” but “warm” or “lukewarm.” ^[3] These are not rhetorical questions: the media, both hot and cool, have now reached just about the same temperature (lukewarm) or, to put it differently, if TV is still “cool,” then “video games are “ice-cold” because they require the involvement of the players’ bodies as well as minds.

Today’s screen images have effectively blurred the lines between the fictional and the factual. To witness, the pre-decapitation videos of the ISIS hostages and their executioners, and the tragic events in France, in January 2015, surrounding the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. That particular event ended when the two perpetrators who had attacked the editorial board of the magazine, came storming out of their last refuge, a print shop (a curious McLuhanesque coincidence) in a Parisian suburb, guns blazing in a final shootout with “les forces de l’ordre,” as the French revealingly call their peacekeepers and police units. At that point, the “news hour” turned into a “video game.” Add to this the manhunt, after the initial massacre at the paper’s Paris offices, the story of the son of the print shop’s owner who was hiding inside the premises, in a nook behind some cartons, and kept the police informed by means of text messages. At the same time, the two fugitives in the shop remained in constant contact, by cell phone, with both the gendarmes and the hostage taker in the supermarket at the other end of town, in northeast Paris, and we are witnessing a process of infinite regression, of media representing other media. Is what we see through these windows on the real world any different from the fictional worlds of every day programming? It is practically impossible to find one of the currently running police or detective shows (NCIS, SIU, Chicago Fire, etc.) whose story is not held together by electronic gadgets. Take the cell phones out of any of their narratives and the plots completely unravel.

4 “Off with their heads”

As for the ISIS decapitations, they are, mercifully, not shown on our traditional Canadian and US news channels, probably because the average CP would be horrified or nauseated, even though s/he might relish it when it happens in so-called “historical fiction,” in a serial dramatic representation like Marco Polo. We know that the ISIS beheadings are chronologically close to us and we assume that they are referentially true (the expert analysts in Ottawa and Washington tell us so) whereas the ones in Marco Polo are historical and culturally distant, defamiliarizing (in the Freudian, Brechtian, and Russian Formalist senses of the word, i. e., “making strange” or “uncanny”). But the medium, our HD screens as extensions of our tactility, to use McLuhan’s terms, is still the same. In other words, as CPs, we are not only the screen but we also, more or less actively, screen out or do not screen out what is happening, figuring out the ground, and grounding in the Figure 5.

Figure 5:

René Magritte, La condition humaine, 1933.

It could be argued that our revulsion is due to the fact that the projection gives us both light on and light through its images, images being by definition representations of events, not the events themselves. In the case of fictional or historic events, we are conscious of the fact that the screen image is frequently, simply the representation of a representation, or an example of what ancient rhetoric and modern “theory speak” call ekphrasis, such as a literary description of a painting or sculpture (Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Wilde’s “Portrait of Dorian Gray,” etc.). A good illustration of this is another Magritte work, this one fittingly named La Condition humaine (1933), a painting representing a painting of itself as such and as scenery.

Similarly, artworks representing scenes from mythology or from sacred scriptures (Madonna and Child, for example): Max Ernst’s Pietà or the Revolution by night (1923) which is, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out “an Oedipal inversion of Michelangelo’s sculpture: a petrified father holds a living son in his arms, replacing the living mother and her dead son, Christ” (1985: 6). ^[4] (Figures 6 and 7)

Figure 6:

Max Ernst, Pietà or the Revolution by night, 1923.

Figure 7:

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498–1499.

More than an inversion, the Ernst painting contains, as a mirror image, Michelangelo’s sculpture. In literary theory, this device is called a mise en abyme, a term first borrowed by André Gide, from heraldry, where a coat of arms represents recurring images of itself in chiasmatic relationships, just like the one between the PC and the CP. ^[5]

Or, for instance, the representation of well-known historical events and periods, such as the 10 months of the Terreur (1793–1794) that followed the French Revolution of 1789, a time when witnessing decapitations became a spectator sport. Some people did and still do get satisfaction from seeing death sentences being carried out, in person or on video. They like to see justice being done or as a proper punishment for whatever crime(s) had been committed.

We know that there is a long tradition of executions (especially decapitations) as public spectacles. Think of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities and of the famous Tricoteuses, the women who sat there knitting while the heads of aristocrats and other ennemis du peuple were being chopped off and collected in baskets. Figure 8 shows this in a drawing of the period (Godineau 1988) and Figure 9 shows it as represented in the 1934 film version of Baroness Emma Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Figure 8:

Les Tricoteuses. Eighteenth century drawing (Godineau 1988).

Figure 9:

Les Tricoteuses in the 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Were such spectacles “hot” or “cool”? Or to use another one of McLuhan’s examples, were they more like formal lectures (hot, because of low audience involvement) or like seminars (cool, because of student participation)? The Tricoteuses (who may have been paid a per diem for being there and doing this) did every so often take time out from their knitting to heckle and curse the people on their way to the guillotine. In the Charlie Hebdo affair, the temperature labeling is more obvious. We have the provocative, blasphemous cartoons, a very cool medium exploding in the very heated up environment of religious fundamentalism. The killers, as they came out the building, shouted that they had avenged the Prophet for the paper’s previously published satiric and sacrilegious drawings of Mohamed. But more interesting, from a media analysis point of view, is the fact that the cover of the issue of Hebdo that the editors were discussing, was a cartoon drawing of Michel Houellebecq, promoting his latest novel, Soumission, (Submission) a fictional account of the election, in the near future, of a Muslim President of France who soon establishes Sharia law for the country and its institutions. The French population submits rather willingly to the new régime (just like it did during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War). Figure 10 shows a screen shot of that cover, another example of ekphrasis.

Figure 10:

Cartoon of Michel Houellebecq on the cover of Charlie-Hebdo, January 2015.

The caricature is of Houellebecq but there is nonetheless the palimpsestuous presence of the Prophet. The headline says “The prediction of the Magus Houellebecq” [magus is a downgrade from Prophet] and, in the balloons, the prophecies “in 2015, I will lose my teeth” and “in 2022, I will observe Ramadan.” After the massacre of the editors and the appearance of the newspaper, his book, not surprisingly, became a blockbuster and Houellebecq wisely went into a kind of self-imposed exile, but he does give interviews in France and abroad. In one such interview, he complained that “people no longer understand that a fiction is a fiction. This is a simple idea that people still understood not so long ago.” I would add that this is so because our HD screens have all reached the same neither hot nor cool temperature, a massacre that happened in Paris today or yesterday, is just part of another video game (almost).

Personally, I have never been a fan of Charlie Hebdo. It is crude and vulgar. But I am an admirer of Houellebecq‘s writings. I have read some of his earlier books like Les Particules élémentaires and Plateforme and I found Soumission to be a very good read. I like Houellebecq for the same reason I like McLuhan: their style and attitude. They are cool and they have mastered the fine art of tossing verbal hand grenades, mostly by making outrageous statements in an understated manner. Of course, their intellectual impact and importance are not comparable but they are navigating in the same far-away or near-by Galaxy. I do consider Houellebecq to be one of the artists (like Godard in his early films) who, according to McLuhan, are “under the radar,” that is in tune with what is happening Now.

5 And then …

McLuhan studies tend to fall into two categories: the first, and until recently, the dominant one, deals with the man and his ideas, their genealogy, their pertinence as far as new media are concerned and their archeology (by which I mean the foundations of his work, figures like Vico or Bacon). The man and his style were indeed one and the same (“le style, c’est l’homme” as the eighteenth century naturalist Buffon famously said) but his style also proved exceptionally well-suited for his speculations since his aphoristic pronouncements made him an oracle and he became his very own medium (in every sense of the word). Aphorisms, as I have tried to show elsewhere, are always true, that is why they are reversible, especially when it comes to clichés and commonplaces: McLuhan’s assertion that “Inventions are the mother of necessity” is just as valid as the commonplace “Necessity is the mother of invention,” or that “Credit cards are the poor man’s cash” today, as McLuhan’s “Cash is the poor man’s credit card” was when he published Understanding Media in the 1960s. This was his way of rigging the game because ideas expressed in aphoristic form are not subject to “true or false” criteria. He did explain his own use of them by retrieving Francis Bacon’s distinction between “Methods” and “Aphorism.” For Bacon, says McLuhan “‘writing in aphorisms’ rather than in ‘methods’ was the difference between keen analysis and mere public persuasion” (1962: 102). An aphorism is the outcome of a long line of reasoning, the tip of the iceberg or the cream that has risen to the top. As Derrida puts it: “Despite appearances, an aphorism never arrives by itself, it doesn’t come all alone. It is part of a serial logic” (1992: 416). Aphorisms are “cool” media because the listener or reader must figure out the long line of reasoning that led to the formulation of the idea. It is like the screen image we interpret according to our own habits and experience. That is, it seems to me, how we move from the referential content of the daily news broadcast to where the action really is, i. e., between the screen (the personal computer [PC] as a generic processing device) and the CP, the chiasmatic mirror image of the PC streaming videos to our various screens or, to use McLuhan’s automotive metaphor “between the wheel and the axle.”

That is why an alternative or supplemental approach, of a more pragmatic nature, is called for; one that puts the theories into practice. It is what we might call “applied McLuhan,” just as Derrida’s theories, first presented in De la grammatologie in 1967 led to Gregory Ulmer’s 1985 Applied Grammatology (“grammatology” is the study of “writing” as opposed to “phonology,” the study of the “sound system” of languages). For a long time phonology dominated linguistics, leaving “writing” and the “written” (in French, the word écriture covers both meanings) as a “secondary” system whose role is simply to represent speech and the spoken. This is very similar to McLuhan’s medium/content fusion: the medium is not just bringing us content, it is the content.

A good example of “applied McLuhan” is Rira Leistner’s recently published Looking for Marshal McLuhan in Afghanistan (2014) (Figure 11).

Figure 11:

Rita Leistner, cover of Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan (2014).

This is a remarkable work of “iProbing,” a portmanteau word that combines McLuhan’s “probes” with “iPhones” and, in this case, “Hipstamatic photographs.” Leistner is one of Canada’s first-rate photojournalists. The case in point in Leistner’s book is war-torn Afghanistan. Although her template remains McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s Vietnam era book on War and Peace in the Global Village (1967), with its typographical playfulness, marginal comments, black and white photographs and drawings, the format is no longer an inexpensive paperback but a very beautiful art book with Hipstamatic colored photos. It is also a more sophisticated work, applying some of McLuhan’s later concepts like the “tetrads” (1988), to the photos and events, and bringing us new insights from other disciplines like linguistics and semiotics.

The problem with Leistner’s type of work, however, is that it requires not just professional and theoretical competence, but that it also demands enough actual courage, even temerity, to put one’s own life in harm’s way, to don a flak jacket and to head for the danger zone. I doubt that most academic researchers, me included, would be willing to go that far. But what we can do, thanks to McLuhan’s insights, is to read what is happening differently, to understand (or misunderstand) the events on our TVs and various gadgets by the effects of their medium, even if that medium’s content is another medium. Leistner, being there, may be recording what she sees with her Hipstamatic photographs but we, her readers, only have access to it via an art book and its printed pages. This confirms, paradoxically, Mallarmé’s famous declaration that the world was created in order to end up as a beautiful book, “Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.”

6 The fatal 1 %

McLuhan used to quip that, like all prophets, he had a 99 % chance of being wrong. Unfortunately one of his prophecies seems to be in the process of coming true, He had foreseen that the return of oral culture through new communications media would retribalize ethnic and religious groupings and that this would have disastrous consequences for the world. Judging by the events of the last few decades, he was right on. From the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia in the 1970s, to the re-Balkanization of the Balkans after the breakup of the “former Yugoslavia” and the tribal genocide in Rwanda and in other parts of Africa in the 1990s, to the current Middle East sectarian conflicts, including the global rise and spread of ISIS, the recent massacres in France, the often disastrous mass migrations in and out of geographic areas, these all amounts to, I would suggest, a huge 1 %.