A Natural History of Media—McLuhan’s Method

1. Introduction: Literary Style or Research Method?

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1982) was the most influential and at the same time the most controversial media thinker of the twentieth century. As a pioneer or founding figure of the media ecology school, his reputation rose and fell dramatically: he was once elevated to the altar, and then quickly neglected and forgotten. With the dawn of the network age, he came once again to be widely known in academic circles and indeed throughout the cultural world as a “prophet-sage,” yet some still regard him as a mountebank who merely uses gibberish to hoodwink the public.

These two images are not really contradictory. So-called prophets and seers are often, in the eyes of skeptics, nothing more than raving lunatics. McLuhan’s wildly imaginative prose style and his ready-made aphorisms also made it difficult for serious scholars to take his writings seriously. Whether one agreed with him or not, people tended to regard McLuhan more as such a “wizard”; many admitted that those magical aphorisms were inspiring, but did not treat them as practical scholarly inquiry.

This resembles, in some ways, the fate of phenomenology in Anglo-American academia: people may acknowledge that these writings contain flashes of wisdom and enlightening turns of phrase, yet refuse to admit that they constitute serious “scientific” inquiry, regarding them at most as literary and rhetorical tricks.

McLuhan came out of English literary studies, so it was only natural that he should encounter such a reading. But what was the reality? Just like the phenomenologists, what those strikingly different styles of writing reflect is not a simple opposition between literature and philosophy, but rather two diverging understandings of the meaning and method of philosophy. Phenomenologists, too, were exploring serious scholarly questions, even pursuing the “strictest” scientific method; it was simply that this method of inquiry was mistaken by outsiders for literary technique.

What if McLuhan’s apparently loose, airy style was not merely a literary device, still less the result of an ineradicable literary background, but instead a consciously pursued theoretical exploration? Then we must reposition McLuhan’s thought anew.

In fact, when McLuhan was studying English literature and philosophy in his youth, his dissertations were nowhere near as “literary” as his later writings. For example, his master’s thesis on the nineteenth-century English poet George Meredith (1828–1909) was “finely worked out, beautifully written, and, compared with his later baffling style, can be said to be a gem”[1]

Melovitz remarks: “McLuhan, having come from literary studies, naturally saw himself as a product of print culture; in private correspondence and scholarly conversation he made no secret of the fact that print-based modes of thought and experience are superior to those based on electronic media. Yet if one puts aside McLuhan’s infatuation with print culture and looks only at his formally published works, it is not hard to see that he was in fact always trying to break free from the confines of the standard pattern of print texts. And to a large extent, he succeeded.”[2]

Seen this way, McLuhan’s stylistic turn was less a matter of his being unable to sever himself from old methods brought over from literature than of his groping toward new methods in order to open up a new field. Setting aside for the moment the merits and shortcomings of this method, we should first seriously reconsider this fact: McLuhan was consciously conducting serious scholarly exploration in a distinctive way, rather than simply evading the issue by resorting to style labels such as “literary” or “essayistic.”

Of course, some of McLuhan’s supporters and successors also tried to extract certain “methodologies” from his fragmented texts. For example, Robert K. Logan, one of the representative figures of the second generation of the media ecology school, summed up McLuhan’s methodology in 38 points[3]—such as “media and technology are equivalent terms,” “technology is the extension of the human body, media are the extension of the mind,” “hybrid systems,” “three ages of communication,” “the global village,” and so on. Leaving aside whether these summaries are accurate, the problem is that most of them are merely specific views, insights, and concepts unfolded by McLuhan’s theory, and cannot really be called a “methodology.” What is more, simply listing more than thirty items in a loose and unstructured way can hardly help us understand McLuhan’s method of inquiry; it may even add confusion.

To properly understand McLuhan’s method, we must first grasp his scholarly positioning: where exactly did his theoretical concerns and research interests lie?

I position the scholarly field of the entire media ecology school as “media history.” All media ecologists are, first and foremost, historians, and McLuhan is of course no exception. Within history there are many modes, formulas, tendencies, and viewpoints; these are what distinguish the various media ecologists, such as Mumford’s history of civilization and Innis’s economic history. So what kind of history was McLuhan doing? Here I will position McLuhan’s exploration of media history as a kind of “natural history”—a history that, at first glance, looks least like history, yet on the level of methodology is precisely the elementary form of history.

 

2. The Fourfold Meaning of “Natural—History”

By “natural history,” I mean precisely the English term “Natural History,” usually translated into Chinese as “博物学,” though I myself prefer the translation “natural history.”[4] But here we need not dwell too much on the merits of the translation; broadly speaking, we can take “natural history” as synonymous with “博物学.”

In ordinary usage, natural history includes the study of the characteristics and classificatory systems of plants, animals, and other natural things. In a broader sense, it also includes erudite notes on artificial objects, customs, and human affairs. It is easy to see that McLuhan’s research resembles natural history work in this broader sense: in Understanding Media, he describes one by one the features of more than twenty technical objects—paper, roads, clothing, money, clocks, print, automobiles, and so on—and classifies and groups them: cool media/hot media, light-reflecting/light-transmitting, auditory/visual, and so forth. Like a natural historian, McLuhan drew on a vast range of materials and explained each exhibit he displayed as if reciting the contents of a treasured collection.

But McLuhan’s relation to “natural history” is not merely one of outward resemblance; it has a deep affinity at the levels of method and orientation. To understand this, we must first go beyond the simple notion of “a learning that surveys all things” and talk about what layers of meaning “natural history” actually contains.

The word “nature” contains two meanings. One is “the natural world,” as opposed to artificial objects; the other is its original meaning: essence, what is so of itself, the inner ground of a thing.

And the word “history” also contains two meanings. One is the process of human “the past”; the other is its original meaning: an empirical “inquiry, investigation.”

These two aspects overlap, and the concept of “natural history” therefore contains at least four layers of meaning.

First, it is the course of the natural world; especially after Darwin, natural history in this sense is roughly equivalent to “the history of evolution.”

Second, it is an empirical inquiry into the natural world, which is roughly what “natural history” means in the narrow sense, including classification and description of animals, plants, minerals, and so on.

Third, it is the “history of what is natural,” that is, treating historical development as a natural process driven by some inner force arising from within itself, rather than making the accidental, externally imposed actions of heroes and great men the main focus of inquiry.

Fourth, it is the “inquiry into what is natural”: an empirical and practical, description-oriented mode of inquiry that “returns to the things themselves.” This is the spiritual core of what is called the natural history method or the method of natural history, and in a certain sense it is also precisely the method of phenomenology—this method aims “to gain as detailed an understanding as possible of phenomena themselves; such understanding does not focus on the universality of principles, but on the individuality, uniqueness, and irreducibility of phenomena and facts, taking direct experience and empirical experience as the most original and fundamental basis. In this regard, the phenomenological philosophical tradition initiated by Husserl has a natural-historical spirit.”[5]

Correspondingly, McLuhan’s “natural history” also combines the above layers of meaning.

First, McLuhan emphasizes the developmental history of technical objects. Although technical objects are, in the ordinary sense, the very opposite of the natural world, compared with traditional historians who focus on recording human thoughts and actions, the media technologies in McLuhan’s writings appear closer to the “natural world,” that is, the “environment” of human existence. McLuhan does not care who exactly invented or promoted these technologies, nor by what actions they were made or improved; he is not concerned with how people manufacture and refine media technologies, but with the “environment” created by media technologies and their shaping of human life.

Second, as noted above, McLuhan’s work resembles that of a natural historian: he is good at gathering a broad range of material, values description and classification, and gives more weight to personal empirical and sensory observation. The results of his inquiry are often presented in a mode of “display” and “juxtaposition.”

Third, McLuhan regards media technology as the inner driving force of human history, or, to put it another way, the “causal mechanism” that drives historical change. Of course, whether this causality amounts to mechanical determinism is something we will discuss later. In any case, McLuhan is concerned with the internal thread of history.

Fourth, McLuhan follows a certain “phenomenological-ontological” line of inquiry, ultimately elevating observation and reflection on media into philosophical insight at the level of ontology.

Let me now explain, one by one, the various implications of McLuhan’s natural-historical inquiry.

 

2.1 Media as Environment

“Media is the message” is McLuhan’s most widely circulated aphorism, and also one of the core propositions of his media theory. But this phrase is easy to misunderstand, and McLuhan himself later came to dislike this formulation; jokingly, he turned it into “media is massage”—“the medium is really massage, not message. It is the heavy blow, the jolting massage of the senses… It massages us all in the savage manner.”[6]

To say “media is massage” is of course a playful remark. The formulation McLuhan preferred was that media create “environment”——“‘The medium is the message’ means that a totally new environment has been created.”[7] “Saying that technologies or extensions create new environments is better than saying that the medium is the message.”[8]

Of course, “media is massage” is not just a flippant joke. What McLuhan wants to emphasize is that the environment created by media is a process that exerts powerful influence on human beings: “A medium makes an environment. Environment is a process and not a wrapper. The medium is action and it acts on the nervous system and our sensory life, totally changing our sensory life.”[9]

Whether we say media are message, massage, or environment, the most basic starting point is a rejection of a certain vulgar view—namely, the idea that “the medium of information transmission is neutral”[10]. This view treats media as channels for transmitting information, and media theory built on this premise is only concerned with how to keep these channels clear so that information can be transmitted more efficiently. McLuhan says: “The theory of transportation-type communication is concerned with removing noise, clearing interference on the tracks, and keeping transport smooth. … I have little interest in that kind of theory. My theory, or rather my concern, is: what effects do these media have on users?”[11]

If the medium itself is the message, then what is the content that people convey through media? Of course, the “content” of media is also a message, but at the same time it is still a “medium”——“The content of a new environment is always the old environment”[12], McLuhan says: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the content of print is writing, and the content of telegraph is print. If one asks, ‘What is the content of speech?’ one must reply: actual thought-processes…”[13]

“The new environment is always ‘invisible’”[14], but the new environment brings the old environment to expression: “In other words, the old environment becomes visible only when it is superseded by a new one.”[15] McLuhan regarded “electric light” as “the clearest example” of this proposition—“People are often skeptical that wheels, print, or airplanes can change our habits of perception. Even so, once they encounter electric lighting, their doubts are completely dispelled. In this area, the medium is the message. Once the light bulb is lit, a perceptual world appears. Once the light bulb goes out, that perceptual world vanishes without a trace.”[16]

The light itself, as background, is invisible; what people see are the things illuminated by the light. These things may once have been background within the earlier perceptual world (perhaps a world of sound and touch), but in the new perceptual world (perhaps a visual world) they become clear objective things or eye-catching works of art. “When writing was first invented, Plato transformed the previously oral dialogue into an artificial art form. When print was born, the Middle Ages became an artificial art form…”[17] Thus, in McLuhan’s view, artists provide a certain “rearview mirror” perspective: they sensitively capture the currents of the age and express environmental transformation. McLuhan points out that what is seen in the “rearview mirror” is precisely “the foreseeable future. Not what has already gone by, but what is approaching you.”[18] Artistic works are therefore both a nostalgia for the past and a grasp of the future.

Yet ordinary people are not as sensitive as artists. “New technologies numb us”[19]; people’s ways of thinking often remain stuck in a bygone era, understanding the meaning of new technologies through old patterns—for example, “the printed book on paper was long regarded as a cheap and vulgar form of manuscript,”[20] automobiles were seen as carriages without horses, “radio looked like telegraphy without wires,” “automation is a terrifying extreme of mechanization”[21], and so on. These are just like “using an X-ray machine as a space heater”[22]—a profound misunderstanding.

The media environment in McLuhan’s writings is not merely a concept that happens to share a word with what we ordinarily call the “natural environment”; it is an internally related concept. McLuhan even says that media “are not bridges between man and nature, they are nature.”[23] The media environment functions for human beings just as the natural environment does.

The course of nature is an evolutionary history of some kind of “natural selection”; in the face of “environment,” human beings are tiny and passive. Although humans constantly make technologies and change environments, these actions seem only to be things they are forced to do under the pressure of “adaptation.” McLuhan says: “Technology keeps changing man, stimulating man to keep seeking ways to improve technology. Thus man becomes the sexual organ of the machine world, just as bees are the sexual organs of the plant world, enabling the plant world to reproduce and evolve into more advanced species. The machine world repays man with commodities, services, and rewards. Therefore, the relation between man and machine is an inherent symbiotic relation. This has been true from ancient times to the present; only in the age of electricity did people get the chance to recognize their symbiotic relation with machines.”[24]

Thus, similar to the picture offered by evolution theory, McLuhan’s history presents a certain fatalistic scene, as if human agency and creativity were not worth mentioning, and the fate of humankind and the direction of history were determined solely by “environment.”

Indeed, this is so. McLuhan does not offer a picture of energetic, forward-moving progress; instead, he paints a kind of fatalistic scene. All manner of schemes devised to rescue McLuhan from “media determinism” are hard to find convincing. McLuhan’s “fatalism” may perhaps have been influenced by his Catholic background, but it also stems more fundamentally from his profound insight into media and history.

Recognizing human smallness is a form of honesty, not some simple pessimistic complex. The key question is: why do we always feel that human beings ought to control fate and dominate their environment? Why must we think that an active, aggressive stance before nature is better than passive compliance? McLuhan clearly understood that this desire to conquer the environment is itself determined by the environment: “From the ancient Greeks to modern man, users of phonetic script have always adopted an aggressive stance in relation to their environment. They need to translate the environment into vocal, written forms. This turns them into conquerors, into bulldozers and road graders.”[25] By contrast, in primitive cultures where oral media are dominant, people would never regard submission to nature and composure before fate as anything bad.

Of course, “following nature” does not mean that people do not need to think and act proactively—though human beings may be powerless to control the whirlpool of fate, to ride the tide still requires decision and courage. Even choosing to stand by with a cool eye does not mean being incapable of judging abundance and barrenness, or indifferent to calamity and suffering.

McLuhan’s move from literary studies into the field of media was, from the very beginning, accompanied by anxieties about modernity. When writing that transitional work, The Mechanical Bride (first published in 1951), which marked his shift from literature to media, the manuscript McLuhan initially prepared was titled A Guide to Chaos, and later renamed The Typhon Monster of America. Borrowing the many-headed monster from Greek myth, he used it to signify the confusion and danger modern people face before the onrushing flood of messages; only later did he settle on the title The Mechanical Bride[26].

Although he is often regarded as a celebrant of the electronic-media age, we should not simply conclude that McLuhan believed the rise of electronic media could once and for all solve the crises of print culture or the industrial era. According to the recollections of colleagues around him, McLuhan himself by no means trusted electronic media unconditionally. “Once, while watching television with Tom Logan, a colleague at the University of Toronto, he said: ‘Do you really want to know what I think of this thing? If you want me to preserve even the tiniest remnant of Judeo-Greek-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you’d better take an axe and smash every television set to pieces.’ … He also gave his son similar advice.”[27]

To be privately wary of television, yet in scholarly writing to comment on television and other new media in a positive, cheerful tone—does that not amount to hypocrisy? Not at all. McLuhan adopted this attitude quite consciously.

In the preface to The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan cites Poe’s “The Maelstrom” to metaphorize the state of “helplessness” people feel before the avalanche of advertising and entertainment-inflected information. He says that in the process of searching for a way to reverse this helpless condition, “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ kept recurring to me. Poe’s sailor escaped by studying the action of the whirlpool and following its lead; similarly, this book does not propose to attack the giant currents and pressures manufactured around us by newspapers, radio, movies, and the substitutes for advertising machines. However, this book does propose to place the reader at the center of the maelstrom and let him enter it in order to observe its workings. To observe the situation in evolution, with everyone involved. We hope that, in the process of analyzing this dramatic situation, many specific strategies will naturally emerge.”[28]

That is to say, McLuhan believed that before environment or fate, the way out is not to insist on resistance, but to ride the tide—and the prerequisite for riding the tide is to grasp the situation, which in turn requires close observation. Therefore researchers need not rack their brains trying to construct a scheme or blueprint out of thin air, but should use a kind of compliant, involved, firsthand observational activity—much like the explorations of a natural historian venturing deep into the natural world—to gain purchase on the situation, ultimately allowing concrete strategies to emerge naturally.

But then McLuhan abruptly shifts direction and says: “However, this book seldom considers such strategies.”

 

“Poe’s sailor, locked into the whirlpool and turning within it together with the things swept in, says this: ‘I must have gone mad, for seeing these floating objects, I actually inferred their different rates of sinking and took pleasure in it.’

He observes his own predicament with the attitude of a bystander. Such rational distance gave him pleasure; pleasure then gave him clues, enabling him to escape this labyrinthine maelstrom. In the same spirit, this book offers readers diversion. Many people accustomed to moral indignation may regard the search for diversion as moral numbness…”[29]

 

This cynical, game-like mindset cannot be simply reduced to “optimism.” This attitude—deeply involved yet maintaining distance, directly experiencing yet pretending to be objective, alert to danger yet enjoying oneself—looks full of contradictions, but in fact is not hard to understand. In reality, it is rather like a natural historian exploring the wilderness: although explorers know better than anyone the perils of the desert and jungle, they may still delight in the experience. Whether the plants they observe are useful or poisonous, whether the animals are docile or fierce, simply appreciating this diversity and gaining rich experience and knowledge is itself an exhilarating thing.

McLuhan’s “optimism” is not based on some blind worship of new technology, but on the joy of knowledge in the course of exploration. When he discovered the unprecedented possibilities opened up by new media, it was as if an explorer had stepped into a wholly unfamiliar new world, discovered strange and colorful new species, and foreseen the possibility of a new living environment; at such a moment, of course, one would be overjoyed.

Of course, McLuhan only says that “this book” seldom considers such “strategies”; he is not saying that he never considers them, still less that he opposes others considering the issue of “strategies.” But McLuhan never presumptuously stood on the standpoint of all humankind to think through a strategy for all humanity in response to the entire technical environment. What he considered more often were the strategies that concrete individuals might adopt in concrete technical environments—that is, how to understand the characteristics of media, recognize the direction of things, and act in accordance with their tendency. And that requires entering historical inquiry—“If we want to orient ourselves in our own culture, it is necessary to keep a distance from the bias and pressure generated by a certain technical form. To do this, it is enough simply to look at a society in which this technology does not yet exist, or a historical period in which it was still unknown.”[30]

Thus historical inquiry can ultimately help us understand our present situation, and the key lies in this method of comparison that reveals contrast.

 

2.2 The Method of the Interface

Because it aims to explore diversity and present contrast, McLuhan’s historiography pays more attention to difference and discontinuity than to telling a grand heroic epic.

Although his wild, freewheeling style, his broad range of interests, and his disregard for detailed argument make McLuhan’s historical writing look rather “grand” as well, this “grandness” is more like laying out a vast panorama or a huge exhibition hall than like unfurling a scroll step by step.

McLuhan consciously adopted this side-by-side, “museum-like” mode of presentation. He remarked:

 

“The way Toynbee writes history is to place all civilizations at the same position as our own time. History then becomes immediately relevant and a feasible model for political experimentation. Mead’s Male and Female displays the same method. She suddenly superimposes the cultural patterns of several societies—patterns having little to do with one another and still less with the pattern of our own time—stacking them together like Cubism, that is, in the style of Picasso. This greatly enriches the various potentials of humankind. By means of this method, we can create the greatest possible distance from current problems. Only by observing from a distance can we hear the voice of reason.”[31]

 

McLuhan’s strategy is to “stack” different historical scenes, cultural patterns, or rather media environments, on top of one another, so that diversity or difference naturally appears. McLuhan once declared, “I don’t explain; I only explore,” or perhaps, “I only adventure,” and this was his reply to an objection raised against Robert Merton at a seminar[32]: Merton accused McLuhan of talking nonsense and lacking argument, and McLuhan deflected the charge with this single sentence.

McLuhan was certainly not someone who never “explained” anything, but more often than not he seemed merely to stroll leisurely among his exhibits, jumping from one to another and pointing things out, commenting on the various topics he had assembled, while lacking a systematic, coherent chain of argument. McLuhan’s way of explaining a thing was precisely not to “lock” it down with a tight chain, but to try to “open” it, allowing all its aspects to open simultaneously to multiple perspectives. “His exploration is not a linear or syllogistic explanation, but a multilateral one, similar to the style of Cubist painting that simultaneously presents many sides of an object.” [33]

What Merton criticized was McLuhan’s report on The Mechanical Bride, which was roughly a scrapbook containing 59 newspaper advertisements (less than 1% of his scrapbook manuscript[34]) and McLuhan’s comments on them. This “clipping plus commentary” method continued into his later famous works The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, except that the objects selected were no longer newspaper advertisements but historical events or media technologies.

From The Mechanical Bride onward, McLuhan consciously used this mosaic-like scrapbook style in his writing, which is precisely the style of the “newspaper” itself, and McLuhan believed that the “discontinuous” character manifested in the newspaper as a text is common to the “discontinuity” manifested in modern science (quantum theory), modern art (Picasso), modern literature (Joyce), modern historiography (Toynbee), and so forth:

 

“Discontinuity in its various forms is the basic idea in quantum and relativity physics. It is the way Toynbee sees civilizations and the way Mead sees human cultures; it is also the visual technique of Picasso and the literary technique of Joyce.”[35]

 

In his famous work The Gutenberg Galaxy (first published in 1962), McLuhan attempted to apply the “way Toynbee writes history” that he had discovered. Clearly, in this style McLuhan was much more radical than Toynbee: “The Gutenberg Galaxy is developed as a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic of data and citation yields the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history.”

Later, when McLuhan evaluated Innis’s work, he pointed out that when Innis shifted from his earlier studies in economic history to his later studies in media history, he changed his “method”: “His method changed from a ‘point of view’ to an ‘interface’ method in order to create insight. In art and poetry this is the technique of ‘symbolism’ (Greek means ‘to throw together’), the use of troping to juxtapose different things without any connecting terms. This is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than written discourse.”[36]

In fact, neither Toynbee nor Innis was as self-consciously and vividly committed to this “throwing together” technique of writing as McLuhan was. So rather than attributing this method to Toynbee or Innis, it would be better to say that it is precisely McLuhan’s own historiographical method.

These disparate materials piled together are not, of course, completely unrelated; on the contrary, through McLuhan’s mathematics, classification, and guidance, readers will discover the connections among these seemingly different things. And this connection takes the form of a network-like plane, not a chain-like linear structure.

McLuhan’s so-called “revealing the causal operations in history” must by no means be understood in the Newtonian way, as some linear, one-way mechanical transmission; rather, it refers to a mechanism of relations in which things mutually affect and mutually impel one another. Classical mechanics, precisely, looks at each matter from an isolated perspective: it can only see fixed relations within an isolated system whose boundaries are strictly controlled, while ignoring the broader interconnections among things. McLuhan pointed out: “Thus far, cultural historians have tended to isolate the technological event, much as classical physics handles physical events…. Cartesian and Newtonian procedures are close to the historians’ use of personal ‘points of view.’”[37]

McLuhan moves from “point of view” to “interface”; on the “interface,” the elements of cause and effect are linked together in a more diffuse, looser manner.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, the so-called “Galaxy” can also be replaced by the word “environment”: “Any technology tends to create a new human environment…. Print technology created the new environment of ‘public’.”[38]

Although the word “galaxy” is somewhat too baffling, and McLuhan himself later abandoned it in favor of stressing “environment,” the word “galaxy” does have certain advantages: it better describes a fragmented, plural, heterogeneous panorama. This panorama is no longer based on a fixed “point of view,” but is composed of innumerable seeming isolated points that are nevertheless mutually implicated.

What opened up the entire “galaxy” was Gutenberg’s printing press. Under the influence of print media, new phenomena emerged in people’s thinking, culture, politics, everyday life, science, religion, and art; McLuhan’s task was to gather and describe these things and arrange them into a mosaic pattern—up close, they are mutually isolated, multicolored fragments, but from a distance one can discern the existence of order and structure. The mosaic method does not demand exacting rigor in the presentation of detail, so if one scrutinizes McLuhan’s argumentative details with a magnifying glass, one will find many ambiguous and tangled places, but this does not diminish the impact of the overall picture he reveals.

An “interface” is in fact also a kind of “cross-section”: a slice is taken in some way from the infinite historical material. The more familiar historiographical method to modern people, however, is merely to extract a single thread, with various historical events and materials usually linked together along chronological order by that “thread.” On an “interface” it is hard to find this thread running through front and back, so readers unfamiliar with this historiographical technique often fall into confusion.

Still, does the understanding obtained from such a cross-sectional view remain applicable when one sorts out the thread of historical development? McLuhan answers yes. He notes: “The structuralists divide their approaches to the problem into two classes: diachronic and synchronic…. The synchronic method assumes that all aspects of all forms of any cultural event are presented simultaneously. Although I have derived these ‘laws of media’ through the synchronic method, they may also be assimilated by the diachronic method if we place them in their historical background and detail,”[39]

In fact, McLuhan does indeed, starting from these scattered, mixed observations and analyses, point to the line of development and transformation in (Western) history from antiquity to the present: the age of oral media—the age of written media—the age of electronic media. The transformation of media of communication serves as a clue for understanding history, and the emergence of new media is seen as the driving force of historical change.

 

2.3 The Driving Force of History

Like Innis, McLuhan also attributes historical change or cultural difference to media. The turning point from oral to written media is basically recognized by all environmental theorists of media as the most important historical turning point. However, regarding the details of the written age, Innis paid more attention to the differing tendencies of writing substrates such as clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper, whereas McLuhan emphasized more strongly the difference between ideographic and alphabetic writing.

But the most crucial difference between McLuhan and Innis lies in how they understand the influence of media bias on historical development. Starting from institutionalist economic history, Innis focused on the social application of media technologies: because different media are more suitable for different forms of social organization, different historical tendencies would form. McLuhan, by contrast, focused on individual use of media: different media extend and suppress different senses, and therefore produce different tendencies in individual perception and behavior.

As James Carey summarized: “McLuhan and Innis both regarded communication technology as central, but differed in the manner in which this technology primarily operates. Innis thought communication technology primarily affects social organization and culture, whereas McLuhan thought it affects sensory organization and thought. McLuhan talks more about perception and thought and less about institutions; Innis, conversely, does the opposite.”[40]

In fact, epistemology and economics, individual perception and group interaction, the individual’s lifeworld and the organizational structure of society—these two aspects of the “inner” and the “outer” are always influencing one another. Thus McLuhan also acknowledged that the media environment affects social organization, while Innis likewise agreed that the media environment affects individual sensation and ideas; but the two of them started from exactly opposite points.

The mechanism of historical change as McLuhan understood it is roughly this: different media are extensions of different human faculties, and therefore tend to strengthen some faculties while suppressing others; and different “sense ratios” lead people to perceive different worlds. In different perceived worlds, people have different behavioral tendencies and modes of communication, which ultimately influence the different developmental trends of human culture.

At this point, it is necessary for us to discuss further this key concept of “sense ratio.”

McLuhan believed that “media” or “technology” are “extensions of man.” In simple terms, this means that technology is always the extension, enlargement, or intensification of some or certain human faculties. For example, eyeglasses are an extension of the eyes, wheels are an extension of the feet, clothes are an extension of the skin, and cities and society are also extensions of the human body’s mechanisms of defense and balance, and so on. In McLuhan’s view, “all human artifacts, including language, law, ideas, hypotheses, tools, clothing, computers, etc., are extensions of man.”[41]

On the one hand, this concept of “human extension” reveals the infinite openness of human capacity: any animal, in terms of the functions of its bodily organs, is often much stronger or more agile than human beings, but an animal’s capacities can only be limited by the functions of its own body. Human beings, however, can extend themselves with all kinds of technologies.

But on the other hand, human beings are after all finite beings. In particular, each person can always start only from his or her own finite situation, perceiving everything from a particular perspective. When some of my faculties are extended by technology, my personal perceptual world does not increase out of thin air, because when I focus on certain senses or abilities, the others will correspondingly be suppressed.

McLuhan compared “sensation” to color[42]: a color is a blending of the primary colors such as red, green, and blue, but its total amount is always 100%. For instance, orange is 50% red plus 50% green, but adding more red to orange will not turn it into some state of 70% red plus 50% green. When the proportion of red increases, green will be suppressed, and may even be diluted or obscured. Sensation is similar: when one kind of sensation becomes especially intense, other backgrounds become blurred, dulled, even numb or shut off. For example, “pain-blocking headphones”[43] may cover up pain through excessive noise.

“As extensions of our perception, media are bound to create new ratios. Not only do the various senses form new ratios, but their interaction with one another also forms new ratios.”[44] The introduction of every new technology will change the mutual relations among the various human senses. Technologies that extend vision may weaken the status of hearing and touch; some technologies tend to strengthen the channels of communication among certain senses, while others tend to separate them from one another.

On the basis of this method, McLuhan carried out “sense” analyses of all kinds of media technologies. The most representative of these is his discussion of the three eras of “oral speech,” “writing,” and “electronic media.” McLuhan believed that the various cultural characteristics of different historical eras all originate in people having different sense ratios: oral language extends and strengthens hearing, so people in oral cultures perceive a certain acoustic space, which in turn shapes all kinds of characteristics in the thinking, cognition, and ways of life of people in oral cultures. Correspondingly, writing, especially alphabetic writing and printing, shapes a visual world. In the era of electronic media, hearing-touch once again becomes dominant. Below, I will take the evaluation of oral culture and written culture as an example to illustrate McLuhan’s research.

“Language” is perhaps the most basic and important extension of human beings. It is by means of language that human beings are able to grasp the structure of the world. To form knowledge of the world, one must first be able, to a certain extent, to separate oneself from the world, and thereby come face to face with it. Animals are completely fused with their world, and therefore cannot produce objectified knowledge. McLuhan quotes Bergson: “If there were no language, human intelligence would be entirely absorbed in the object to which it is attending. Language is to intelligence what the wheel is to the foot and to the body. The wheel makes the limbs move more lightly and quickly among things, and absorption is increasingly reduced.”[45]

From oral speech to writing and then to printing, the history of language seems precisely to be a history of human beings growing increasingly estranged from the world. The significance of writing is by no means merely that it allows original speech to be recorded for wider dissemination; rather, it fundamentally changes the nature of “language.” If one has not experienced an oral culture without writing, it is very difficult for us literate people to understand what unwritten oral language is like.

Even so, we can still glimpse the various differences between oral culture and written culture. One way is to examine past and present unwritten cultures; another way is to explore the characteristics of oral and written technologies themselves. In the end we will discover that the differences between unwritten and written cultures correspond precisely to the differences between oral technology and writing technology.

McLuhan cited Professor Wilson of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on a report concerning the use of film among Africans[46], and, by juxtaposing unwritten Africans with ordinary Western modern people, drew insight into historical development. He pointed out that we people who are oriented toward written culture are accustomed to “looking at the world with a three-dimensional or perspective eye,” and therefore “can understand photographs or movies without training,” but unwritten Africans cannot understand movies without training.

To say that they cannot understand movies does not merely mean that they cannot understand the “content” of the movie, but that they cannot understand the medium of “movie” itself. If a film shows scenes from the stock exchange on Wall Street, then it is easy to understand why those African tribespeople would not get it. However, the film Wilson showed depicted “how ordinary people in a primitive African village eliminate a stagnant pool,” and “the image was of picking up empty cans and moving them elsewhere, and so on”[47]. There was nothing in this “content” that went beyond the daily experience of Africans. Yet when the researchers asked the Africans what they had “seen,” the answer was “a chicken”—the researchers had no idea there was a chicken in it! So they “carefully searched for this chicken, frame by frame. Sure enough, there was a chicken, flashing by for one second, frightened and fleeing. In the lower right corner of the image. … Everything else was slow motion.”[48] Only when the researchers pressed further did they answer that they had seen a person; but from beginning to end, “they had not seen a complete story”[49]. Wilson then said: “They had not seen the whole frame—they were searching for details within this frame. Later, we consulted an artist and an ophthalmology expert, and only then did we learn that experienced viewers, viewers accustomed to watching movies, always focus their gaze slightly in front of the screen so as to take in the whole frame of the picture at a glance. In this sense, we can also say that a picture is a conventional habit: you must first take in the whole picture. These Africans did not do that because they were not accustomed to movies.”[50]

To this, McLuhan explained: “They had no viewpoint that set them apart from the object; they were completely fused with the object. They were strongly immersed in it. The eye was used too, but not for perspective, but as if for touch. Euclidean space depends to a great extent on the separation of vision, touch, and hearing; they had no lived experience of Euclidean space.”[51]

In simple terms, people in unwritten cultures lack a certain ability that separates the senses from the body. They are intensely merged into the world they feel, and are not adept at playing the role of a “spectator” who keeps a distance from it. Wilson also reported that with the opening sequence of a film—“a panoramic view of the city, shrinking to a street, then to a house, then the camera moving in through the window, and so on—they, when watching these shots, insisted on seeing the camera as if they themselves were constantly walking forward and doing those actions, until someone pulled them into the window”[52]. Yet when we modern people watch such shots, we seem quite naturally to separate our “vision” from our bodies; we can experience the movement of such a visual space, but our bodies are not moved in the slightest. This habit of stepping back and coolly observing is precisely the basic mode of writing and reading. Speaking and listening in oral language both demand strong participation and are situational, whereas writing and reading cultivate an attitude of distance and detachment. McLuhan said: “When we speak, we tend to react to every situation, and even to the act of speaking itself, with tone and gesture. Writing, however, tends toward a detached and specialized act; we have few opportunities to react to the act of writing, and there is no need to react to it. Literate people and societies all cultivate a capacity for carrying out any task with a fairly detached and disinterested attitude. Non-literate people or societies, by contrast, are emotionally or affectively involved in everything they do.”[53]

Thus it becomes easy to understand why people raised in written culture can easily play a passive role when faced with books or films: “But the African audience had no such training, to follow quietly a narrative process.”[54] So much so that those showing them films had to be constantly attentive to how to guide their interaction with the film: “The person showing the film has to comment while showing it… if someone in the film is singing, then the narrator must also sing, and must invite the audience to sing along…”[55]

Not only is the experience of reading and writing indifferent and detached; writing itself, especially abstract and neutral alphabetic-print writing, is even more indifferent and estranging, tending to sever the bonds between people and the world and between people and others. McLuhan gives a vivid example: “Suppose we were not to display the Stars and Stripes, but instead exhibited a cloth on which the words ‘American flag’ were written. Although the meanings conveyed by these two signs are the same, their effects are quite different. Converting the rich visual pattern of the Stars and Stripes into words causes the flag to lose most of its group-image character and experiential character, while the constraints of abstract writing remain unchanged. Perhaps this example helps explain the changes experienced by tribal people when they learn to read and write: in their relationship with the community, almost all emotional and group-family feelings are stripped away. They free themselves from emotional bonds, and can separate themselves from the tribe and become civilized individuals; become people organized by vision…”[56]

In oral culture, words are “magical”; flags, ideographic symbols, and other visually rich patterns are also “magical,” able to mobilize people’s senses in many directions and evoke rich emotional associations. But alphabetic letters are completely empty: “The unique power of the alphabet is to separate sound, form, and meaning. Our alphabet is semantically neutral”[57]. McLuhan points out: “Only the alphabetic script splits human experience into such sharply distinct parts, enabling the user to replace the ear with the eye and liberating him from the tribal state of enchantment by resonant speech and kinship networks.”[58]

In short, the various differences between oral people and literate people are precisely the differences McLuhan called “acoustic space” and “visual space.”

Oral speech extends hearing, whereas writing places greater emphasis on vision. Moreover, unlike pictographic and ideographic scripts, alphabetic writing not only extends vision, but also makes vision tend toward independence and differentiation. In McLuhan’s words, alphabetic script culture produced Western “schizophrenia”—“Apart from alphabetic writing, no other writing has ever freed man from the coercive world of mutual interdependence and interrelation. The world of interdependence and interrelation is the world of the auditory network.”[59]

McLuhan often links hearing and touch together, because a world of touch or a world of hearing is one in which multiple senses are linked in action: “‘Grasp’ and ‘apprehension’ point to the process of using one thing to gain another, that is, the process of perceiving many aspects by using multiple senses. Obviously, ‘contact’ is not just a sensation of the skin, but the interaction of several senses;”[60]

By contrast, the visual world specifically refers to the condition in which vision is separated from the other senses. McLuhan reminds us: “It is only vision that makes us detached; the other senses involve us.”[61] Although people can also close their eyes and listen only with their ears, when listening to another person’s speech, closing the eyes does not enhance concentration. In verbal communication, all of a person’s senses are interconnected: you are always listening while also staring at the speaker, and at the same time as speaking there will be intentional or unintentional bodily movements. When engaging in verbal communication, not only are relations between people close, but the relations among the senses are interconnected as well. When using touch to operate, it is also best for the eyes and ears to be involved at the same time. Only in the case of writing and reading with written language is the situation completely different: not only are people and people, senses and senses not closely linked, they must in fact be separated. When reading, it is best to plug one’s ears; when writing, it is by no means appropriate to wave one’s arms and legs about. In the medium of writing, author and reader are also separated. When we speak publicly, we always hope to be noticed, and are willing to let the audience intervene at any moment, at least through nodding, applause, or smiling; but we are not used to writing while being stared at, and even if the people beside us are future readers, we still do not want them pointing things out to us while we are writing. Writing and reading require a person—more precisely, require a person’s vision—to withdraw from a world full of connections and rich color into a closed, monotonous, independent, empty, silent space. From then on, ideas such as “individual,” “private,” “objective,” and “abstract” gradually come into being.

McLuhan said: “In tribal societies, for very practical reasons, touch, taste, hearing, and smell are all highly developed—much more so than vision in the strict sense. Suddenly, alphabetic writing dropped into tribal society like a bomb, placing vision at the highest level in the sensory system. Literacy pushes man out of tribal society, replacing ear with eye, and replacing holistic, profound, public interaction with linear visual values and a divided consciousness. Alphabetic writing is an intensification and enlargement of visual function; it weakens the role of hearing, touch, taste, and smell,”[62]

It is precisely this visual centralism that laid the foundation for Western concepts of space and time. McLuhan points out that because of the alphabet[63], “the Greeks created Euclidean space and simultaneously discovered perspective and chronicle narrative.”[64]

Of course there is also “history” in oral culture, but that history exists in the form of epic poetry, telling the images of heroic figures rather than the image of “history” itself. Epics are organized around specific characters, not according to chronological order. Oral people would not have the concept of an objective and linear “history” that transcends specific individuals and actual life.

McLuhan cites Mumford’s views on the significance of the clock for modern civilization, and comments: “Mumford believes that, in terms of influence on the mechanization of society, the clock should rank ahead of the printing press. But he failed to notice the influence of the alphabet; it was the alphabet that made possible the visual segmentation and uniform segmentation of time. In fact, he did not realize that the alphabet was the source of Western mechanization, just as he did not know that mechanization was the process by which society shifted from an auditory-tactile type to a visual-value type.”[65] McLuhan believed that “it is not the clock, but written culture reinforced by the clock, that produced abstract time, leading people to eat not because they are hungry, but at the ‘time for dinner’”[66]

The crux of the so-called “time to eat” lies in the fact that it is some abstract, symbolized, visual impression, such as “12:00,” rather than some auditory impression. The moment as a written sign and the moment as a “bell toll” are utterly different things. If “time to eat” merely means “the moment the bell is rung,” then whether the bell is rung at a fixed hour by a person or by a mechanical device, no abstract conception of time has been formed. But once “time to eat” is a certain visualized moment, then time is severed from concrete life situations, while at the same time acquiring an image of continuity, objectivity, and disenchantment. The mechanization of “time” does not come only from the mechanization of the “clock”; crucially, it also comes from the clock’s shift from the auditory to the visual. It is the transition from “bell sound” to “hour” that shapes modern people’s view of time.

Before the mechanical age, and in the rural world after the mechanical age, the so-called “clock” undoubtedly referred to the auditory clock. It was an instrument, a ritual implement, and of course also a device for telling time. Like the mechanical clock, bell ringing could also establish a unified rhythm of life, but this unity was precisely a reflection of the connectedness of village collective life; the bell sound was the core that sustained the group. The visual clock, by contrast, provided the opposite tendency, namely to draw people away from collective life and abstract “time” out of the earth and the countryside. This phenomenon has nothing to do with whether the clock is operated by a bell-ringer or by a mechanical transmission device; it has to do with whether the moment is auditory or visual.

On the decline of bell-ringing culture, the work of the French historian Alain Corbin, The Sound of the Earth: The Acoustical Environment and Sensory Culture of the French Countryside in the Nineteenth Century, offers an interesting account—“The bell sound of the nineteenth-century countryside turned into noise in another era. People once listened to and enjoyed it with a system of emotions that has now disappeared. This bell sound indicated another relation between human beings and the world, and between human beings and the sacred; it indicated another way in which human beings existed in time-space and felt time-space. Interpreting the surrounding soundscape also entered into the process of constructing personal and collective identity. The bell sound constituted a language, establishing a system of communication that was slowly disintegrating……”[67]

Corbin narrates how that sacred and meaningful bell sound ultimately became noise that disturbed “private life,” how the dismantling of bells was deeply entangled with the political and social environment of the time, how banning bells aroused public outrage, and so on; I will not quote him in further detail here. We need only note this: the history of the clock is deeply intertwined with changes in people’s sensory culture and social relations, and the emergence of “private space” and the disenchantment of time-space are likewise connected with the retreat of the auditory.

The relation between alphabetic writing and “Euclidean space” is even more frequently mentioned by McLuhan. He says: “Today, the role of alphabetic culture in creating the technique of propositional statement (formal logic) is well known. But people still assume that Euclidean space and three-dimensional visual perception are arguments for human universals, and even anthropologists hold such a view. There is no three-dimensional space in indigenous art. Such scholars think that this is due to a lack of artistic skill.”[68] McLuhan, however, believes that “the Greeks’ entry into image space and Euclidean space was by no means a natural result. In both ancient and modern times, the world schema of pre-literate natural people is the schema we see in children’s drawings and primitive art. Such art does not follow the eye-dominant tendency. In cave paintings, multilayered, multiform auditory and tactile forms occupy the privileged position.”[69]

Space, in the broad sense, is the entire world of sensation; in the narrow sense, it may be said to be the background from which we perceive properties such as size, distance, direction, and so forth. Yet these spatial perceptions are by no means the exclusive preserve of sight; hearing and touch also provide perceptions of distance and direction. But space as presented through different senses is utterly different. McLuhan points out: “Every sense produces a unique space”[70]

So-called auditory space, or acoustic space, “refers to a space with no center and no edges. It is unlike visual space in the strict sense, for visual space is an extension and intensification of the gaze. Auditory space is organic and indivisible; it is a space felt through the synchronous interaction of all the senses. By contrast, ‘rational’ or graphic space is uniform, sequential, continuous; it produces a closed world, with no resonance from the tribal world of echoes at any point. Our Western notions of time and space are derived from the environment produced by alphabetic writing. The entire conceptual world of Western civilization is also derived from the invention of alphabetic writing. Tribal people live a complex, kaleidoscopic life because, unlike the eye, the ear cannot focus; it can only be synesthetic, not analytical or linear. Speech is meant to be voiced; more precisely, it is the simultaneous outward expression of all our senses. The auditory field is synchronous, whereas the visual field is continuous.”[71]

When we imagine the unfolding of the “world (the visual field)” with vision at the center, what we see is a “horizon”; our sight quickly detaches from our body and travels toward an infinitely distant boundary. In this world we are not at the center; indeed, one might say that, apart from vision, which has already been peeled off, our whole body is not even in this “visual field.” But if we imagine a world with hearing at the center, what comes to mind is the exact opposite. As Walter Ong, quoting Merleau-Ponty, says, “Sound comes to me simultaneously from all directions: I am at the center of this auditory world, which envelops me and makes me the core of perception and existence.” [72]

Here we cannot help recalling Heidegger’s “the age of the world picture,” when he says: “The world picture does not evolve from a former medieval world picture into a modern world picture; rather, the fact that the world becomes picture at all marks the essence of modernity.”[73] To say that the world becomes picture is also to say that the world is taken over by vision. For Heidegger, the picturing of the world means that human beings step out of the world and objectify it. And this is precisely the characteristic of vision. Neither hearing nor touch causes one to step out, nor does either separate human beings from the world.

Beyond causing human beings to withdraw, visual space itself is structured very differently from auditory space. Visual space is flat, continuous, and can be cut and frozen; auditory space is uneven (spherical), discontinuous, holistic, and dynamic.

When we imagine visual space, what appears in our minds is either a horizon, or three orthogonal straight lines at a room’s corner. But in the world of hearing and touch, there is fundamentally nothing like “straight lines,” much less geometric concepts such as “translation” or “congruence.” McLuhan, citing Little Evans, points out that without vision, and relying only on hearing and touch, “with empty hands and no tools, one cannot discover whether three or four objects are on the same line.” Euclidean geometry was the result of a greatly intensified visual experience, but Little Evans continues: “The Greeks had tactile minds… whenever they had a choice between touch and sight, they instinctively chose touch.”[74] Little Evans believed that the residual presence of touch was the reason Greek geometry did not advance further.

In the visual world, people can carry out calm analysis; the visual world is chilly and stable, whereas the auditory world pushes people “toward a state of universal panic”[75]. McLuhan quotes Alex Leighton: “‘For the blind, everything is sudden.’ Without vision, there is no sense of continuity, consistency, or connectedness in ordinary data experience.”[76]

Visual space can be segmented and thus “analyzed,” whereas the world of hearing is always whole and ever-changing. In fact, the evolution of human dwelling forms also reflects the evolution from an auditory world to a visual world. McLuhan notes: “People lived in round dwellings until they ceased to wander, until they moved toward specialized division of labor in the organization of work. Anthropologists often notice the process of change from round houses to square houses, but they do not know why. Media analysts can help anthropologists on this point.”[77] McLuhan explains: “A tent or hut is not an enclosed space sharply demarcated, or a visual space. Nor is a cave or subterranean dwelling. … The language a square house speaks to us is the language of the settled person with professional division of labor, whereas what a round hut or cone-shaped tent speaks to us is the integrated, migratory way of life of primitive societies living by gathering.”[78] Wu Guosheng also mentions that “modern architecture consists of geometric lines, straight, angular; primitive architecture is not highly geometrized, and is not angular. The perceptual system of primitive people is not constructed in a geometrized way… its boundaries are not very clear. So if you look at a place and judge whether its geometry is regular, you can tell whether its civilization is modern.”[79] This non-geometrized primitive perceptual system is, in McLuhan’s words, precisely the spatial structure of the auditory-tactile.

Finally, visual space can be “frozen,” whereas auditory space is always in a state of motion and transformation—“It is fundamentally impossible to stop sound and preserve it. I can stop the projector and fix one frame on the screen. But if I intercept the movement of sound, I no longer have anything. … None of the other senses outside of sound excludes in this way the movement that a single frame tries to grasp, nor excludes a stable state.”.

Abstract, linear, objective, disenchanted, isolated, analytical, static, and so on—all the elements of modern thought can be said to be the result of visual space replacing auditory space, and this is at the same time the result of the gradual rise of the written medium.

McLuhan thus establishes causal connections among media technology, sensory ratio, lifeworld, and ideas. Of course, this connection is not one-way; for example, a culture with a stronger visual orientation tends to build square houses, and the segmentation of living space produced by square houses in turn reinforces vision. In actual history, cause and effect are always intertwined and impossible to order clearly. But at the level of historical research, media and its sensory bias can indeed be a very good point of entry or focal point.

In his later years, McLuhan collaborated with his son Eric McLuhan to propose The Laws of Media[80], explaining the mechanism by which media exert influence in four aspects: “enhancement–obsolescence–retrieval–reversal.” Each new medium enhances certain things, renders others obsolete, brings back some things that had once become obsolete, and ultimately reverses into the opposite effect when its tendency is carried to the extreme. For example, Xerox (the photocopier) enhanced the speed of printing, made the book assembly line obsolete, retrieved oral tradition, and reversed into “everyone a publisher”[81]. The McLuhans pay tribute to Vico and try to establish “a new science” through this “law of media.” But I feel that this “law,” as a theoretical model, is too crude and rigid, while in practical use it is too arbitrary. Still, it is worth noting that McLuhan’s “laws” do not refer to some thing-in-itself beyond human knowledge, but rather to a “method” of cognition, understanding, or inquiry, by means of which people will find it easier to grasp the tangled historical threads. History certainly has its “natural” tendencies beyond human control, or, in the Platonic sense, its “necessity,” but human beings are still legislators of the “natural.”

 

2.4 Ontological Reflection

Although he takes the media environment as his object of study, “human beings” remain McLuhan’s point of departure and footing. “Know thyself” is an eternal theme in intellectual history; philosophy, history, and even the natural sciences are, at bottom, acts of recollection concerning humanity’s own situation. Through McLuhan’s phenomenological exploration of media issues, what we ultimately confront is still the question of the human.

Another implication of media as “an extension of man” is that reflection on media is at the same time self-reflection on human beings.

Earlier philosophy of technology thinkers had already proposed similar claims. For example, Marx called nature man’s inorganic body, which in fact already contains the idea that human beings extend their bodies through technological practice; moreover, Kapp, who first proposed the phrase “philosophy of technology,” is also famous for the doctrine of “organ projection.” However, we should also note that there are subtle yet important differences between the media-ontological notion of “the extension of man” and such formulations as “inorganic body” or “organ projection.” The so-called “inorganic body” is obviously opposed to the “organic body,” while the concept of “projection” also implies two clearly separated categories, on the one side the human body and on the other technology. This dichotomous perspective suggests a certain ready-made view of human nature, pre-accepting a fixed boundary between human and nonhuman, and what seems necessary to discuss is merely how the two ends of this boundary relate to and correspond with each other. But the proposition that “media are extensions of man” does not imply this ready-made division, at least not a static one.

Earlier understandings defaulted to a rigid division, defining “human beings” within the bounds of the “human body” and understanding “technology” as something outside the human body. Yet if we understand “technology” in a broader and more comprehensive way, including “body techniques,” then it is no longer easy to say that “man” is precisely that lump wrapped in skin. Here, replacing “technology” with the concept of “media” is beneficial: we can understand “man accomplishes … through …” as extending his own possibilities through some medium. But here “extension” no longer has a fixed starting point.

When I say, “I look at the moon with a telescope,” the “telescope” is the medium through which I accomplish my purpose; it extends my eyes. But I can also say, “I look at the moon with my eyes”; at that point, my eyes become the medium through which something is accomplished, and they extend my capacity for perception. I can also say, “I look at my eyes through a mirror,” “I look at my mirror through my eyes”… In these structures, the corresponding medium indeed reveals a bifurcated boundary, with the subject on one side and the object on the other; yet the dividing line within them is mobile and unstable.

However, to say that the dividing line is mobile and unstable also implies a commitment to some fixed and unchanging subject or determinate object. In traditional philosophy, people always try to fix one “endpoint” in place, either by setting up an absolute subject, such as “spirit,” or by setting up an absolute object, such as “matter,” and then trying to use this as the basis for understanding the nature of human beings or the world. Thus, when people notice the shifting boundary between subject and object, how subject and object can possibly communicate with each other becomes a major problem. But in fact, precisely because people insist on shackling themselves to some fixed endpoint, the “medium” of communication appears elusive and hard to grasp. The phenomenological-ontological philosophy of media no longer tries to begin from “endpoints”; it no longer presupposes some fixed subject or object and then seeks by every means to establish “communication” between them. McLuhan reveals to us that “communication” itself is precisely prior to this; “communication” gives rise to subject and object.

To interpret McLuhan’s “natural history” as a kind of “inquiry back to the things themselves,” or, to put it another way, as a phenomenological-ontological method, is not some fancy notion of mine. In fact, many scholars in China and abroad have already noticed the connection between McLuhan and phenomenology[82]. However, Fan Long, Mei Qionglin, and others mainly use concepts such as Husserl’s “eidetic intuition” to interpret McLuhan. In my view, compared with Husserl, McLuhan’s line of thought is actually closer to later existential phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty; rather than saying that McLuhan’s method is “eidetic intuition,” it is more fitting to say that it is “ontology.”

In fact, McLuhan himself acknowledged this position. He clearly stated: “My method is properly termed ‘structuralist.’ … In the field of media, only I have ventured to use a structuralist or ‘existential’ method. It is a noble method.”[83]

McLuhan himself was clearly engaged in extensive and sustained reading of the works of European philosophers. As early as McLuhan’s breakthrough book *The Gutenberg Galaxy*, one section bears the title “Heidegger, Riding the Electronic Wave, Is as Brisk as Descartes, Who Rode the Mechanical Wave” [84]—by which he meant that, just as Descartes’ philosophy reflects the mode of thought of the mechanical world, Heidegger’s philosophy is an outstanding representative of this brand-new electronic world. Of course, McLuhan goes on to say that Heidegger himself was not conscious of the environment of electronic media technology in which his thought was rooted, whereas McLuhan himself was more self-consciously employing the thought-form of this new world. That is to say, in McLuhan’s view, his own thought, like Heidegger’s, is an embodiment of the world of electronic media.

McLuhan also says: “The structuralism of European phenomenologists is an auditory-tactile world; I am very familiar with this because I am using it.” [85]

What is called “existentialism,” according to Sartre’s classic formulation, has as its basic slogan “existence precedes essence”; that is to say, “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterward. If man, as the existentialist sees him, is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.” [86]

In other words, human beings have no essence, or rather, human essence is possibility rather than any fixed determination. However, this does not mean that human beings can define and shape themselves without any limits; there are two key points here, first “in the world,” and second “make.” What is “the world”? How does one “make”?—this inevitably brings us to “technology,” or rather “media.” What is called “media ontology” is not ontology cited within the field of media; it is itself an interpretation of ontology.

Regarding “being-in-the-world,” Wu Guosheng says: “‘Being-in-the-world’ is not what we ordinarily imagine, namely that the world is like a basket, and we are like vegetables thrown into this basket-world. That is not the case. Put simply, it is better to write the ‘world’ in ‘being-in-the-world’ with the character for ‘vision’ as in ‘visual.’ This world is a field, a ‘horizon,’ a horizon line. … Then how is ‘this world’ unfolded, and through what is it unfolded? … In my view, technology is the way the world is unfolded, the concretization of the world’s unfolding.” [87]

The “media” McLuhan speaks of is roughly what is meant here by “technology,” namely “the way the world is unfolded.” In McLuhan’s view, media technology not only affects human thought; rather, media constitute “the world” or “nature” itself—“the effects of new media on our sensory life … do not alter our minds or our world but change the structure of our world.” [88]

Wu Guosheng writes “world” as “horizon,” pointing out that the world is like an extended field of vision. Yet such a metaphor, according to McLuhan, is precisely the mode of unfolding of the so-called “visual world” or “visual space,” and this “horizon” is a product of Western alphabetic-print culture; the world of oral culture and the electronic age does not unfold in such a visually dominated way. In the so-called “auditory world,” there is no existence of a distant “edge” like a “horizon”; people do not imagine the unfolding of the “world” through this picture of gazing into the distance. The “world” is always tightly wrapped around human beings.

Of course, both existentialism and McLuhan’s media ontology are anti-essentialist: the world that human beings unfold is not some “subjective world” opposed to the “objective world”; it is not that there are two worlds, nature and mind, and that media, as the intermediary between them, transmit the things of the objective world into human perception—media “are not bridges between man and nature, they are nature.” [89] What people can “talk about” is already the structure delimited by the medium technology of “language”; a world in itself beyond any medium is not speakable. The significance of media is not to transmit to human beings the determinacy of things that happen to possess such-and-such determinations, but to say that it is precisely media that make things acquire such-and-such determinations. McLuhan says: “Media (that is, human extensions) are the ‘why’ of things, not the ‘how’.” [90]

On the other hand, if the person in the world is to “define himself,” then by what are we to define humanity? And where are we to understand human nature? The answer given by media ontology is: “technology and human beings mutually define each other”—“the kind of person you are depends on the kind of technology you use; the way you understand human beings is the way you understand technology.” [91] This is also McLuhan’s view—“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” [92]

That is to say, human extensions do not merely extend human capacities; they are also an externalized “expression” of human nature. “Human technology is the most human thing about human beings.” [93] McLuhan says, “…whether this extension is shoes, canes, zippers, or bulldozers, all forms of extension are linguistic in structure, and are externalizations or outward expressions of human being. Like all forms of language, they have their own syntax and grammar.” [94]

Thus technology, as human extension, becomes a certain externalized, or rather objectified and structured, humanity; to understand technology is also to understand human beings themselves. But people often fail to realize that the qualities we see in those artifacts are in fact the “reappearance” of human nature, an image of ourselves. On this point, McLuhan invokes the story of Narcissus, the Greek myth about Narcissus becoming so enamored of his reflection in the water that he fell into an irredeemable frenzy. McLuhan points out that Narcissus is not what people usually call a “narcissist,” but rather someone lacking in self-love. He did not realize that the reflection in the water was precisely his own image: “If he knew that the reflection was an extension or repeat of himself, his feelings would have been quite different.” [95] He would then reinterpret the meaning of the reflection, and his understanding of himself would also be renewed. McLuhan uses this myth to symbolize the relationship between modern people and technology: people become so fascinated by artifacts that they cannot extricate themselves, yet they are so numb and dull that they fail to recognize their own image, and forget or repudiate themselves. In response to the predicament caused by the obsession or mania of modern technicism, McLuhan does not offer any solution, but he believes that once people are able to discern their own image in technology, they will gain an entirely new attitude. Understanding oneself through reflection on media technology—this is precisely McLuhan’s most basic theoretical concern.

 

3. The “Natural History” after McLuhan

We have used “natural history” to reposition McLuhan’s research method, which enables us to appreciate the unruly style and structural looseness of McLuhan. But I am not saying that we should be satisfied with this alone. Even within natural history research, there are different levels and styles: the thrilling first-hand reports brought back by explorers who venture deep into nature belong to the realm of natural history, and so do the dull but painstaking textual collation and anatomical analysis carried out in specimen rooms and laboratories. McLuhan’s work leans toward the former, that is, toward the explorer. He called his work “probe” (探查, probe), meaning that he would penetrate into a certain medium to “spy out” information, feed back intelligence, and then quickly pull back and turn to the next topic.

And based on the maps drawn by this explorer and the intelligence he brought back, later scholars can continue to broaden the exploration at its edges, or delve further into certain fields, and can also return to the study to carry out more rigorous summarization and analysis.

For example, Paul Levinson and Robert Logan [96], among others, imitated McLuhan’s form and assembled the various emerging media that arose after McLuhan’s death, such as the Internet; Levinson’s *The Soft Edge* [97] even takes “A Natural History of the Information Revolution” as its subtitle. Walter Ong, Eisenstein, and others, by contrast, tried to advance the study of written media or print media in a more rigorous form. Meyrowitz replaced McLuhan’s sense ratios with a sociological model and conducted an in-depth dissection of the specific mechanisms by which media exert influence. These works vary in style, but they are all in some sense extensions of McLuhan’s natural-historical method.

 

 

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.

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