McLuhan and Baudrillard by Genosko Gary

Author:Genosko, Gary. [GARY GENOSKO]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2011-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

(Kroker and Cook 1986: 298, n. 17)

Technological extensions of human faculties (psychic or physical) demand “new sense ratios,” among other extensions, as McLuhan argued in Understanding Media and The Medium Is the Massage. Media work over the body completely, massaging it as it were, by intensifying certain faculties, diminishing others, and establishing new proportions between them. The term “servomechanism” was used by McLuhan to describe how one relates to technologies, that is, how one narcissistically serves extensions of oneself.

McLuhan used the Narcissus myth to indicate that the beautiful youth Narcissus did not fall in love with himself, as the myth is commonly read. Rather, Narcissus fell in love with a technological extension of himself. While McLuhan recognized Narcissus’s narcotic autoeroticism in relation to the nymph Echo’s spurned love, he believed the youth’s loss of his ability to communicate sexually may be nonetheless reparable. The thin film of water which kept Narcissus apart from his double no longer interferes with the New Narcissus’s sexual relations with extensions of himself. As Donald Theall (1971: 124) has observed, the New Narcissus “fecundates his images, the technology that he has generated and that is changing him.” Despite this recognition of mechanical sexual relations, Theall notes that the massage is never fully mutual because McLuhan was more interested in how one is massaged by the media, each of which has specialties that produce internal and external changes in oneself.

Kellner, too, has linked Baudrillardian semiurgy to McLuhan’s focus on the form of the media, and he uses the concept of “media semiurgy” to describe the multiple collapses toward entropy of the means by which critical distinctions are made and maintained. The media demiurge fashions new social relations and experiences out of signs freed from their concepts and referents. Kellner decries any capitulation to the power of televisual semiurgy.

Understood semiurgically, massage is unilateral and the New Narcissus will at best have to simulate a countermassage. Kroker and Cook (1986: 198, n. 17) credit Fekete (1982) with a “superb account of the semiurgical process in McLuhan’s thought.” But Fekete’s generous explication is Baudrillardian; this is certainly a far cry from his earlier comprehensive Marxist critique of McLuhan as a counterrevolutionary – “the major bourgeois ideologue of the one-dimensional society” (1973: 121). Baudrillard’s claims concerning the media’s fabrication of non-communication and the prevention of response are used by Fekete (1982: 57–58) to demonstrate the analytic value of McLuhan’s polysemic sense of massage. Semiurgy and massage both designate powerful forces reshaping social experience. As mass processes, they are similar; but the effects of this processing of the masses are quite different.

Baudrillardian semiurgy is a disruptive force which traps, breaks, collapses, reduces and simulates experience and communication; it is alienating. Technological massage also can be numbing, exhausting and bewildering, and requires protective ablations. McLuhan believed that this numbing fades over time as sensitivity and awareness are regained. New shifts in sense ratios require certain perceptual displacements which are stressful, and a new sensory equilibrium results from these shifts. Understood physiologically, massage

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