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Media as Extension and Environment
Michael Darroch & Janine MarchessaultIn late 1961 or early 1962, Marshall McLuhan wrote his closest collaborator,
Edmund Carpenter, in one of their many reflections to carry forward
their effort to establish interdisciplinary media studies in the journal
Explorations:
'Karl Popper in the Open Society discusses more idea of production and consumption
as externalization of organic process. Seems this is about the extent of Marx idea of
technology change as affecting our lives. Not a clue to technology altering our cognition
or perception. You check me out on this Ted? Page 79 of Ed Hall’s Silent Language talks
of technologies as externaliz. of teeth, hands, back feet etc, but not of the organs of
perception, such as happens with media. You know of any study of media as extensions
of five senses? If we can get this fact into circulation we can expect some improvement
in general awareness and responsibility of media use.'
McLuhan’s work and indeed the work published in the interdisciplinary
experimental journal Explorations did indeed focus on the phenomenology
of media broadly defined through perception. McLuhan and his collaborators
were unique in emphasizing the body as a sensory platform, a
mediator of experiences and thus as the locus of knowledge. This is why
the experimental methodologies of artists from Cézanne to James Joyce
to the Symbolists and Vorticists to the Bauhaus and to Eisenstein (to
name only a few) were central to the ‘exploration.’ It was this spirit of
experimentation with forms and ideas that emerged from the back and
forth and the interplay of words that gave the exploration its unique and
exciting character of discovery. Perceptions communicated through language
were not static entities but dynamic nodes of deciphering through
the dialogic interchange always tied to the diversity of the human sensorium
across the cultures of the world – thus radical anthropology was
central to the exploration.
An experimental interdisciplinary publication led by faculty and graduate
students at the University of Toronto from 1953-1959 served as a
container for this post-war experiment in thinking through media in the
electric age – such a publication would provide the intellectual fuel for
McLuhan’s future publications such as Understanding Media (1964). The
journal served to disseminate some of the insights and experiments of
the Culture and Communications graduate seminar (1953-55), an innovative
media think-tank of the 1950s. Alongside McLuhan and Carpenter, town
planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, political economist Tom Easterbrook, and
psychologist D. Carl ton Williams brought insights and experience to
their discussions.
The Explorations research group aimed to develop a ‘field approach’
inspired by aesthetics to the study of new media and communication.
While enthused by a postwar, modernist discourse of universality, no
single mode of research was dominant. By their own account, the team
sought ‘an area of mutually supporting insights in a critique of the methods
of study in Economics, Psychology, English, Anthropology, and Town
Planning.’ 1 In developing their methodologies, and with cinema and TV
on their minds, seminar faculty and graduate students undertook a number
of critical media experiments on changing patterns of perception
resulting from new media. They set about testing new and old media by
acquiring ‘the antidote of related media like print,’ as McLuhan would
later write about the typewriter.2 To copy excerpts and take minutes, they
purchased a Remington Rand typewriter and, anticipating Kittler, would
debate the psychological effect of the shift from handwriting to print. The
Canadian Broadcasting System and the then Ryerson Institute later placed
studio space and media equipment at their disposal. Their experiment
tested their central hypothesis that different media (speech, print, radio,
television) lend themselves to different kinds of pedagogical experiences.3
It is surprising that such findings have never been fully taken up by educational
media researchers. Hopefully, the republication of these early
studies will renew interest in the cognitive studies of media which have
focussed too narrowly, according to Carpenter and McLuhan, on attention
and inputs and not enough on the creative and critical aspects of
perception.
One of McLuhan’s best known aphorisms translated the work of the
Explorations Group into the notion that the ‘medium is the massage’:
All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their
personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical,
and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected,
unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of
social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way
media work as environments.4
McLuhan’s interest in media as an environment drew upon Hans Selye’s
stress theory of disease to theorize the impact of the media on bodies in
terms of a metamorphosis akin to disease and addiction. Carpenter and
McLuhan published Selye’s research on stress in the first issue of Explorations.
5 Selye (1907 — 1982) was a Hungarian endocrinologist, who was
the first to give a scientific explanation for biological stress.6 He founded
the ‘Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery’ at the University of
Montreal in 1945, and devoted his life to studying its effects of stress on
biology. McLuhan and Selye corresponded regularly in the 1960s and
1970s, and Selye invited McLuhan to join the board of his Institute.7 The
first symptom of this new electric environment, which is the result of the
extension of the human nervous system, is ‘numbness’ and ‘narcosis’.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan relates the effects of the media amplification
of our senses to a ‘collective surgery’ upon the whole social body. He
writes: ‘For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the
incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is
numb. It is the entire system that is changed. The effect of radio is visual,
the effect of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios among
all the senses.’ 8 McLuhan sees the electric environment as a homeostatic
system. According to Selye’s theory of adaptation and disease, any physical
extension will need to maintain equilibrium, and as such he regards
any technological extension as an ‘autoamputation.’ In the midst of the
electric environment, we ‘numb’ our (extended) central nervous system
‘or we will die.’ The new media support an awareness of others and of
social responsibility, yet they also produce anxiety and indifference; that
is the only way to live with the reality that in ‘the electric age we wear all
mankind as our skin.’ 9
Philosopher Catherine Malabou sees McLuhan’s 1960s work on media
as potentially useful for theorizing media in the context of climate change.10
McLuhan is concerned with the new sensory experiences and collective
sensibilities produced by the narcotic cultures of media. This notion of
addiction is especially useful Malabou points out, for understanding the
way in which media (smart phones, games, television serials, social media
connectivity) are fundamentally addictive. Media as extensions of the
human senses, become so implicated in our quotidian life that we cannot
be without them; they are part of our physical nature. Media as extensions
and environments (that is, as complex interconnected ecologies)
may constitute a starting point for exploring ways of living and sensing
in a damaged world.
1 Herbert Marshall McLuhan Fonds, held in Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
in Ottawa. Further references to the McLuhan Fonds will be identified as LAC
followed by the call number MG 31, D 156, the volume number, and the folder
number (here: LAC MG 31, D 156, 145, 35).
2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964: 287.
3 Edmund Carpenter, 1954, ‘Certain Media Biases,’ Explorations 3: 65-74;
Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, 1956, ‘The New Languages,’ Chicago
Review 10 (1): 46–52; Edmund Carpenter, 1957, ‘The New Languages,’ Explorations
7: 4-21. ‘Stress syndrome’ (Nature, 1936; Lancet, 1943).
4 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, (New York and London: Penguin Books 1967, 26.
5 Selye, Hans. 1953. ‘Stress,’ Explorations 1: 57-75.
6 ‘Stress syndrome’ (Nature, 1936; Lancet, 1943).
7 See Hans Selye, The Stress of Life, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
8 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 64.
9 Ibid., 48.
10 Catherine Malabou, ‘The Anthropocene: A New History’ (lecture,
Durham Castle Lecture Series, Durham University, England, January 27, 2016)
‘Explorations as a container for a post-war experiment in thinking through media in the electric age’
References:
– Carpenter, Edmund S., Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, H. M. McLuhan, W.T. Easterbrook,
and D. C. Williams. 1953. ‘University of Toronto: Changing Patterns of Language
and Behavior and the New Media of Communication.’ Ford Foundation Archives.
Grant File PA 53–70, Section 1, 1–11. Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.
– Carpenter, Edmund. 1954. ‘Certain Media Biases.’ Explorations 3: 65-74.
– Carpenter, Edmund. 1957. ‘The New Languages.’ Explorations 7: 4-21.
– Carpenter, Edmund. 2001. ‘That not-so-silent sea.’ In: Theall, Donald F. (ed.):
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press: 236-261.
– Carpenter, Edmund, and Marshall McLuhan. 1956. ‘The New Languages.’
Chicago Review 10 (1): 46–52.
– Ford Foundation. 1953. Ford Foundation Annual Report 1953. New York: Ford Foundation.
– Catherine Malabou, ‘The Anthropocene: A New History,’ lecture, Durham
– Castle Lecture Series, Durham University, England, September 10, 2017,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkTGZ7l7jcM.
– McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.
– McLuhan, Marshall. 1967 The Medium is the Massage. New York and London: Penguin Books.
– Ruesch, Jurgen and Gregory Bateson. 1951. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
– Selye, Hans. 1953. ‘Stress,’ Explorations 1: 57-75.
This publication appears on the occasion of the project:
feedback #1: marshall mcluhan and the arts
Marshall McLuhan, Peter Blegvad, Disnovation, Harun Farocki, Darsha Hewitt, Mogens Jacobsen,
Willy Lemaitre, !mediengruppe Bitnik, MRZB, Christof Migone, Reynold Reynolds, Thomas Bégin,
Wolfgang Spahn, Hito Steyerl, Stephanie Syjuco & Angela Washko
22.09.2017 — 19.11.2017
Location: West in Huis Huguetan, Lange Voorhout 34 and West, Groenewegje 136 Den Haag
Text: Michael Darroch & Janine Marchessault
Michael Darroch is Associate Professor of Media Art Histories and Visual Culture, School of
Creative Arts, University of Windsor. He was Founding Director (2010–2016) and is now Co-
Director of the IN/TERMINUS Creative Research Collective. He has held a Visiting Fellowship at
the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (University of London, 2015), a Humanities Research
Group Fellowship (University of Windsor, 2016–2017), and a McLuhan Centenary Fellowship
(iSchool, University of Toronto, 2016–2018). Recent SSHRC-funded projects have investigated
the interdisciplinary history of Canadian media studies. He co-edited Cartographies of Place:
Navigating the Urban (MQUP 2014), an interdisciplinary collection that situates different historical
and methodological currents in urban media studies. His publications engage with issues in
urban media cultures, history of media and media studies, borderlands studies, performance,
language, sound, and translation.
Janine Marchessault is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University and Canada
Research Chair in Art and Globalization (2003–2013). Her most recent publications include Ecstatic
Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (MIT Press, 2017), Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (MQUP 2014)
and Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (MQUP 2014). A public art curator of numerous site
specific exhibitions in Toronto, she is a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada,
She is also the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Building on her book
McLuhan, Cosmic Media (Sage 2005), her current projects concern the afterlife of media.
Translator: Tiny Mulder
Typesetting: Jelle Koper
Printer: Oranje van Loon, Den Haag
Thanks: Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and Gemeente Den Haag
Publication: West
Edition: 1.000
isbn: 978-90-79917-70-9
West Groenewegje 136
2515 LR Den Haag
the Netherlands
+31 (0)70 392 53 59
www.westdenhaag.nl
info@westdenhaag.nl
