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<nettime> **The Technology as a Cause** (by Raymond Williams, 1974)


[Raymond Williams, *Television: Technology and cultural form*, Chapter 

3, "The Forms of Television," p. 129-132]

 

C. The Technology as a Cause

 

Sociological and psychological studies of the effects of television, 

which in their limited terms have usually been serious and careful, 

were significantly overtaken, during the 1960s, by a fully developed 

theory of the technology -- the medium -- as determining . . . The 

work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory 

which became, negatively, a social theory: a development and 

elaboration of formalism [by which he probably means a "search" for a 

long-abandoned "formal causality"] which can be seen in many fields, 

from literary criticism and linguistics to psychology and 

anthropology, but which acquired it most significant popular influence 

in an isolating theory of "the media."

 

Here, characteristically -- and as explicit ratification of particular 

uses [mistakenly imagining that McLuhan "endorsed" anything he wrote 

about] -- there is an apparent sophistication in just the critical 

area of cause and effect which we have been discussing.  It is an 

apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the 

significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a 

determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we 

have now [completely missing the fact that McLuhan's popularity was a 

result of a "counter-culture" that adopted him as its "guru"].  For if 

the medium -- whether print or television -- is the cause, all other 

causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to 

effects.  Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects [here implying 

"efficient causality"] and as such subject to social, cultural, 

psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by 

comparison with the direct physiological and therefore "psychic" 

effects of the media as such.  The initial formulation -- "the medium 

is the message" [title of Chapter 1 in "Understanding Media" (1964)] 

-- was a simple formulation.  The subsequent formulation -- "the 

medium is the massage" [title of the 1967 book, not actually written 

by McLuhan and from which his estate collects no royalites] -- is a 

direct and functioning ideology . . .

 

If specific media are essentially psychic adjustments, coming not from 

relations between ourselves but between a generalized human organism 

and its general physical environment [aka, a "proto-psychology"], then 

of course intention, in any general or particular case, is irrelevant, 

and with intention goes content, whether apparent or real.  All media 

operations are in effect desocialized; they are simply physical events 

in an abstracted sensorium, and are distinguishable only by their 

variable sense-ratios.  But it is then interesting that from this 

wholly unhistorical and asocial base McLuhan projects certain images 

of society: "retribalization" by the "electronic age"; the "global  

village."  As descriptions of any observable social state or tendency, 

in the period in which electronic media have been dominant, these are 

so ludicrous as to raise a further question.

 

The physical fact of instant transmission [beginning in the 19th 

century, with telegraph], as a technical possibility, has been 

uncritically raised to a social fact, without any pause to notice that 

virtually all such transmission is at once selected and controlled by 

existing social authorities.  McLuhan, of course, would apparently do 

away with all such controls; the only controls he envisages are a kind 

of allocation and rationing of particular media for particular psychic 

effects, which he believes would dissolve or control any social 

problem that arises [never something McLuhan ever seriously proposed] 

. . . The effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses 

it, and we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let 

the technology run itself . . . The particular rhetoric of McLuhan's 

theory of communications is unlikely to last long.  But it is 

significant mainly as an example of an ideological representation of 

technology as a cause, and in this sense it will have successors . . . 

What is to be seen, by contrast, is the radically different position 

in which technology, including communication technology, and 

specifically television, is at once an intention and an effect of a 

particular social order.

 

[Raymond Williams (1921-88) was a Welsh Marxist theorist and academic, 

who was an influential figure in the New Left (i.e. the version of the 

"left" developed in the 1960s, under the influence of television, as 

opposed to the "Old Left" which developed under earlier radio 

conditions.) He is often credited with "laying the foundations of 

'cultural studies'", as reflected in his 1958 "Culture and Society."  

In the late-1930s, he attended Trinity Hall college, Cambridge, where 

he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.  At little earlier, 

Marshall McLuhan, 10 years his senior, also attended Trinity Hall, 

from which he was awarded his "The Classical Trivium" PHD in 1943 -- 

in which "grammar" (or formal cause) is juxtaposed to "dialectics" (or 

efficient cause), beginning with the Pre-Socratics through Elizabethan 

England.]

 

https://www.amazon.com/Television-Technology-Cultural-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415314569

 

Mark Stahlman

Jersey City Heights

 

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

 

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