Page 103 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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88 Then
the nature of media-induced cultural shifts with approaches and
perspectives that have been undermined and made outdated by
those same media. In the face of this situation, McLuhan turned his
attention to the history of such shifts in perspective. He investigated
the relationship between the cultural superstructure, and its techno-
medial infrastructure.

McLuhan then: acoustic/pre-literate cultures

McLuhan argued that the predominant medium or media defined
the nature of knowledge in any given epoch, and that these mediatically
determined cultures in turn dictated the form that ‘man’ would take
within them. Thus, according to McLuhan, preliterate tribal cultures
were characterized by an ‘acoustic’ space, within which the human
mouth and ear were the main organs of communication, serving as
transmitter and receiver respectively. This acoustic space is continu-
ous – in it, individual elements and their background are never truly
separate; they rise out of and return to a single aural dimension
from which they are only partially differentiated. Moreover, the
designation of this space of communication as aural/oral is largely
for convenience, in truth, mouth and ear are mere points within a
multi-sensory field of discourse in which gesture, intonation and
location constituted integral components in communication. The
preliterate word was ‘asignifying’ – a co-participant in a complex
‘speech’ act in which the body was as articulate as the voice. Its
tactility, immediate sensuousness, and omnipresence meant that
acoustic space was effectively coterminous with the collective space
of tribal life. The nature of the individual was in turn prescribed by
the primary medium of communication; indeed McLuhan argues
that acoustic space did not support the kind of individuated subject
that we now take for granted. In preliterate culture the individual
and collective are intertwined to such a degree as to be effectively
interchangeable. There is minimal distance between the responses of
the individual and those of the collective, and McLuhan depicts the
affective life of the oral society in terms that recall the fearful
tremulousness of a flock of birds and a herd of gazelles: ‘Terror is
the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects
everything all the time ’ (McLuhan 1962: 32).
2
Similarly, the production and preservation of knowledge is
enmeshed in the collective; thus McLuhan speaks of a ‘tribal
encyclopaedia’, an oral repository of the accumulated experience
and wisdom of the collective. The reproduction of this ‘encyclopae-
dia’ is co-extensive with the life of tribe. In the absence of any
external means of preserving information, rites of passage, various
rituals, celebrations and seasonal migrations, as well as material

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