Abstract
Prophetic media theorist, playful analyst, technological optimist, ardent formalist, pop philosopher, amateur actor, interpreter of the world – much can be said about Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan, whose prolific work throughout the 1950s and 60s formed the cornerstones of media theory and communications studies. McLuhan is widely known across a range of academic and mainstream spheres for his eclectic, influential and prescient texts, but has often been reduced to the oft-cited mantras and hollowed-out phrases that disseminated his thought – ‘the medium is the message’, ‘the global village’, and so forth. This is the central argument made by Alex Kitnick in his comprehensive study Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde, which seeks to approach these expressions, as well as McLuhan’s contributions to various discourses, from a different perspective. Kitnick maintains that he was as much a theorist of art as he was a media theorist, and that, through McLuhan’s lens, both theoretical fields are integral and complementary to one another, offering important insights into the role of the artist as researcher who deploys art as a means of cultural exploration and environmental change. Parsing the relationship between McLuhan and the arts of his time, Kitnick positions him in a symbiotic feedback loop in which the critic/artist work in steadfast collaboration: borrowing and blending style and form from each other, yielding consistently revised, hybridized, cutting-edge creative results.
Distant Early Warning is a rich and absorbing book and Kitnick succeeds in recasting McLuhan as a key interlocutor within theories of art and creative practice. Through a nuanced and generous reading, expressed in meticulous yet accessible prose, he places McLuhan in a constellation of avant-garde artists, revealing the commitment McLuhan had to the arts and the seriousness in which he viewed the role of artists and their work in society. Although some sites receive more attention than others, leaving a few areas feeling underdeveloped or diluted, this is only by comparison and in the context of this project. Indeed, each energetic and complex relationship between McLuhan and the North American avant-garde arts community that Kitnick elucidates could very well be the subject of a book of its own. While packed with an abundance of historical context and intimate details about this time and place, what is most impressive are Kitnick’s own rich interpretations of McLuhan’s theories and conceptual frameworks, which allow us to profoundly reposition him across new theoretical lines, offering original perceptions that are perhaps not discernible at first, especially beneath the controversy that surrounds so much of McLuhan’s work, both at the time and to this day. As Kitnick notes, while often criticized for not being academic enough, too tepid, too cheeky, or leaning in too much to corporate interests, the possibilities that McLuhan speculates for artistic practice within an approximate 30-year period, before his untimely death in 1980, remain important as new technologies continue to emerge and saturate our daily lives. McLuhan’s expanded notion of art and practice as well as criticism is not just a form of judgement or aesthetic expression, but a new means of critical exploration of the present moment.
According to Kitnick, a central premise of McLuhan’s theory of art is its ability to raise awareness and ‘stand up against a numbing, habitual environment and show what was really going on’ (p. 7). This has less to do with training perception than it does with modulating the environment itself. McLuhan consistently emphasized the value of effecting change via perception, awareness, and, most importantly, control. Harnessing McLuhan’s theory, Kitnick exposes how the relationship between art and media is both revelatory and generative, a relationship that is often misunderstood or incorrectly ascribed as threatening or obliterating with each new technological development. But, as McLuhan argues, this process transforms older forms into art, thereby ‘making us aware of the world just past and its difference from the present: TV granted film art status, just as today, in the age of the Internet, television appears comfortably in the museum’ (p. 7). One of McLuhan’s most critical observations about art is that it casts a singular view of the present, illuminating environments that might otherwise remain invisible, providing insight into the future, signalling what was to come. As evident in the title of the book, McLuhan’s propensity for the future, which guides most of his theories of media, is arguably one of his most striking gifts, that is, the ability to balance historical context with keen orientation (and enthusiasm) for the future as well as the ability to think big and small at the same time, ‘to limn the connection between the macro and the micro’ which Kitnick identifies across McLuhan’s approach to art and criticism (p. 111). The importance of studying McLuhan is not only that it might help us rethink the relationship between art and media in the present, but in the ways his prolific and perceptive work extends to a reassessment of criticism more broadly – its status, function, and practice, which are undoubtably in crisis and thus relevant in contemporary times.
Kitnick traces McLuhan’s ‘rise to fame’ and critical acclaim in the academic world and public eye through a relatively chronological trajectory of notable events and activities. Distant Early Warning comprises seven chapters and, with a few exceptions, each focuses on a key word or phrase that straddles technological paradigm and social formation (for example, ‘Lights On’, ‘Electronic Opera’, and ‘Culture Was His Business’), which in a way resembles McLuhan’s own understanding and approach to language, media, and society. Many chapters explore one or several artistic practices and their dynamic relationship to McLuhan, some more explicitly in connection than others, alongside a close critical reading of his books and tangential experiments in publishing, allowing a broad mapping of concepts and questions across timelines, texts, and forms.
The first two chapters, ‘The Age of Mechanical Production’ and ‘What It Means to Be Avant-Garde’, take McLuhan’s first two books, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) and Counterblast (1969[1954]), as exemplary in demonstrating his innovative ideas about design and topography, proving McLuhan’s early relationship and commitment to visual arts, creative expression, and aesthetics. In these chapters, Kitnick establishes a rich cartography of lineages, excavating sites, scholars, and artists – such as IA Richards, FR Leavis, Sigfried Giedion, Marcel Duchamp, Siegfried Kracauer, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound – from whom McLuhan drew inspiration – scholars, and artists he criticized, and collaborated with, as a student, junior professor, and writer, together contributing to the cultivation of his own distinct brand of media criticism. Kitnick probes his publications with precision and sensitivity, rescuing them from one-dimensional or overly simplistic readings that underpin his contested legacy. Through this process, not only is McLuhan’s theory of art proven through the assemblage of numerous quotes that explicitly recount his devotion, but through evidence of how McLuhan’s approach to other, adjacent, forms of his own research outputs, namely writing, typography, design, and publishing, share propensities with the avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and Pop art. Referring to the Independent Group (IG), a collective of radical young artists and critics in London in the 1950s, Kitnick claims that ‘in retrospect, it is easy to see proto-Pop tendencies at work in The Mechanical Bride, such as the emphasis on appropriation and the ambivalence about mass culture’ (p. 30). Indeed, what Kitnick also lays bare are the shared proclivities towards change across this grouping – John Cage, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, General Idea, among others – and McLuhan himself, which allowed them to adapt and reshape themselves as the technologies they worked with and were surrounded by continued to develop and transform.
‘For McLuhan, survival was at stake’, Kitnick claims (p. 129). He wanted artists to take control because he believed only they could ameliorate the uneasy situation produced by new technologies, responding the soonest to these new challenges and pressures by showing us ways of living with new technology without destroying earlier forms and achievements (p. 126). While McLuhan once insisted that new media and its environments were too important to be left in the hands of ‘Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives’ and could only be entrusted to artists, in Culture Is Our Business (1970), he melds the two, citing the increased proximity between art and business – the kooky and the corporate – who both crave the next new thing (p. 49). By this point, McLuhan understood the ways in which capitalist markets affected art and as his own work evolved so did his conception of the relation between artists and executives, eventually constituting his appeal to artists and corporations alike. Kitnick states: just as Marx believed that capitalism paved the way for communism, McLuhan imagined that the market prepared the ground for art by creating new models of connection. The traditional disciplines of painting and sculpture were no longer capable of connecting art to the world. Corporate forms were needed. (p. 125)
It is within the examination of this later career phase that Kitnick critiques McLuhan, suggesting that his tools are perhaps not as efficacious as they once had been.
Lastly, the role that artists and the arts play in society is often overlooked, while the structures that support and enable creative practices are undoubtedly underfunded and poorly regulated, at the helm of neoliberal interests and systems. In situating what artists do as research, not just as makers of objects but experts in communications who fully grasp the implications of their actions, the role of art becomes essential for its embodied, multisensory and nondiscursive approach to the complexity of contemporary social and political issues as well as its capacity to reframe and reconstitute attention, perception, and knowledge about these concerns. McLuhan taught us that art has a singular ability to raise awareness to urgent issues – such as climate crisis, unreconciled colonial trauma, ongoing gendered and racialized oppression, and the violence of advanced capitalism – as well as to argue for change beyond the hegemonic frameworks ruling these discourses, where it is not simply or solely perceptual or critical but also a means of control within society which conceives of totally new relationships between art and life. Working at the fulcrum of various media and social worlds, artists have the power to impose different assumptions, interrupt dominant flows of information, help navigate technological change, and remake the world. This is not to say that art will ‘save us’ or provide pragmatic solutions to these complex, longstanding issues, but as media artworks attempt to express and engage more expansively and generatively with these contemporary multifaceted conditions, they provide arenas where novel experiences and more dynamic, relational modes can be explored, where new multi-sensory epistemologies can be cultivated.