Abstract
At first glance, nothing could be more obvious than for the journal of visual culture to devote an entire issue to ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man @ 50’. The interdisciplinary study of visual culture that the journal has fostered for more than a decade owes much to the study of media inaugurated by McLuhan’s slogan, made famous in Understanding Media (1994[1964]), that ‘the medium is the message’. Yet in the second decade of the 21st century there might be something anachronistic about commemorating Understanding Media in a journal devoted to ‘visual culture studies’, insofar as visual culture studies seems less a question of our present moment than of an earlier moment: the emergence of cyberculture and new digital media from the early 1980s through the end of the 20th century. I do not mean to argue that visual studies was a direct consequence of the ‘digital turn’ of the late 20th century, or that the project of the journal of visual culture is no longer relevant. Rather I want to highlight some of the divergences between a McLuhan-inspired new media studies and visual cultural studies, in part by emphasizing how visual culture studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field from the widespread focus of Anglo-American cultural studies on all forms of material culture and popular media, motivated by the Marxian belief that visual culture mediated the political ideology of capitalism.
This focus on the visual was intensified in the 80s and 90s by the explosion of visual images made possible by the proliferation of increasingly easy and affordable technical means of producing and remediating digital images. As Jay Bolter and I defined it (Bolter and Grusin, 1999), remediation operated at the end of the 20th century within a visual opposition between reality and mediation, following two predominant logics of visual mediation: transparent immediacy, in which signs of visual remediation were erased in favor of the presentation of ‘the real’; and hypermediacy, in which digital remediation served to multiply and make visible the processes of visual mediation. Like visual culture and visual studies, remediation and new media studies emerged at the end of the 20th century and have now become institutionally established at the beginning of the 21st. We gave Remediation the subtitle ‘Understanding New Media’ to acknowledge our debt to McLuhan’s transformative text, Understanding Media.
In the first decades of the 21st century, we find ourselves in the midst of a shift in our dominant cultural logic of mediation away from a predominantly visual, late 20th-century focus on remediation toward a more embodied affectivity of premediation generated by the mobile, socially networked media everyday of the 21st century. Where remediation spoke to the visually oriented model of mediation that prevailed in the 80s and 90s, premediation speaks to the embodied anticipatory mediation of the early 21st century. In developing the concept of premediation, I have not moved away from McLuhan, but pursued his influence on new media theory more fully than in Remediation, particularly his insistence that media operate affectively. In Understanding Media, McLuhan claimed that new media were ‘extensions of man’, which simultaneously extended and amputated our body’s senses. New electronic media like television, McLuhan argued, reconfigured the ratio of our senses, de-privileging vision and reemphasizing our haptic and auditory senses. What we have come to see in the half century since McLuhan wrote Understanding Media is that new forms and practices of media also change the ratios of power and knowledge. For premediation the political operates less through visual representation than through the surveillance and mobilization of people and things through social media networks that have been and continue to be premediated into the future.
More recently I have developed this understanding of mediation as massage in terms of the concept of mediashock, which comes directly from McLuhan. After 9/11, I argue, premediation has operated both to create and maintain low levels of mediashock among the public in order to keep them online in a state of medial anticipation, which keeps them engaged with their mobile, social media networks. In his 1967 experiment in typography, photomontage, and design, produced in collaboration with Quentin Fiore, McLuhan underscores the physicality of media and mediashock in the instigation of ‘social and cultural change’. ‘All media work us over completely’, McLuhan (2001[1967]: 26) writes: They are so pervasive 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.
To make sense of the broader anticipatory media formation of the 21st century requires more than visual studies, and McLuhan points the way. Following the precepts set forth in Understanding Media, McLuhan famously asserts in The Medium is the Massage that ‘Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.’ Visual culture studies must shift its focus to what media do rather than what they mean if it is to honor McLuhan’s insights: The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. (p. 8)
In thinking about Understanding Media 50 years after its publication, we can see that its greatest impact on visual culture studies is to turn our attention away from a primarily visual analysis of media and toward an understanding of how media operate as objects within the world, impacting both the human sensorium and the nonhuman environment alike.