Re: <nettime> Whatcha Doin', Marshall McLuhan?

[Brian Brotarlo <brofont@iloilo.net>]

McKenzie Wark wrote:

> I don't think electric media retribalise -- here we are deep in the
circular understanding of history that McLuhan shared with Vico and Joyce.
But they are a medium with a message of their own, creating new spaces
within which culture grows in different patterns. But then I have no faith
in the possibility of a return to an ideal balance between the senses.
There is no harmonious environment, the unstable and transformative nature
of media environments is a constitutive part of our experience. There was
no fall from Eden, from Adamic knowledge -- and no return to it.  >

Pessimism is a common feeling at the threshold of something not yet fully
discovered but inevitably to be experienced. I understand the adrenalined
anxiety, but what I don't get are the presumptions (you called it
telelogical without explaning why it has to be teleogically this way) that
anything has to move, without basic socio-cultural reasons (like simple
economic changes and overpopulation) and that somehow experience is more
about media environments than an existing accumulation we call
personality. 

> 
> Here, like McLuhan, I think we have a lot to learn from artists, who
perceive the media environment in ways scholars don't. McLuhan learned
form Eliot and Eisenstein and Joyce.20 I think we can continue to learn,
as his successor, from their successors. McLuhan showed the fecundity and
profundity of symbolist and modernist art for media studies. I think there
are good reasons to pay attention to their postmodern epigones. I've never
supported a cultural studies that looked only to popular culture. McLuhan
sought to see culture whole, and in the same spirit, if somewhat
perversely, I think we need to get Nietzsche and Nick Cave into the same
sentence.21 Both Nietzsche and Nick Cave, in different ways, made the same
discovery -- that God is dead. Both embrace in an untimely fashion the
unstable state of affairs that McLuhan and his modernist heroes lamented
and detested.  
>

Hasn't it always been unstable, as you said? In fact, the notion that God
is dead is as non-Adamic as the creation of Adam himself. I think those
two guys above had never been so comfortable, so like Adam, as when they
first pronounced that God is dead. 

>
> What I think we learn from the arts today is that while no return to a
unified Ciceronian knowledge and culture is possible, contemporary media
forms do make possible new networks of sense making, new configurations of
time and space. Now, in the postbroadcast age, some of the virtues of
previous eras of media form can be rediscovered and brought into new
creative syntheses. There's no way to undo the fall, but there is a way to
become conscious of the fact that culture is constantly in freefall,
tumbling out of balance with itself, inventing new assemblages of human
senses with their media extensions.  
>

It can be unified without being Ciceronian, can it? Whew! I thought we
were going to hit something when you say we're in freefall. All along, you
were saying that the world isn't flat and the earth is not the center of
the universe. That is, culture isn't really bound to the soil and religion
doesn't have anything to do with blood and virtual landscapes aren't that
far apart if you know the math, or is it the beat? And that if they're new
assemblages it doesn't mean that everyone has to line up and by one for
himself. 


Just checking if I can cope. 

Brian Brotarlo


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