Page 104 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 89
activities such as hunting, cooking, and so on, at once apply and
preserve the knowledge of the collective. In this manner, the
knowledge of preliterate cultures is truly encyclopaedic, that is to say
a totally integrated system in which each element reflects the other
so as to make up a cohesive whole. Resonant with Kracauer’s
previously cited discussion of the grounded nature of symbolic
culture and of Baudrillard’s later critique of the contemporary
mediascapes groundless, infinitely circulating signs, McLuhan
describes how knowledge in non-technological society is not tran-
scendent but immanent – embodied in the practices of everyday life:
Coercing reality to do one’s bidding by manipulating it in the
prescribed manner is, for the non-literate, a part of reality … It
is necessary to understand that non-literate people identify
themselves very much more closely with the world in which
they live than do the literate peoples of the world. The more
‘literate’ people become, the more they tend to become
detached from the world in which they live.
(Montagu, cited in McLuhan 1962: 76)
From this perspective the various prohibitions, superstitions and
taboos that characterize oral cultures, and that often appear to the
literate as folly, can be understood as strategies of data storage, as a
means of preserving ‘signal’ from noise or degradation. Of course,
this tactic of ‘rite words in rote order’ (Joyce, cited in McLuhan
1962: 19) inevitably results in an inflexibility, since there is no
distinction between (what the literate would regard as) genuine
causes and mere superstition, and there is little inducement to
experimentation or improvement. Thus the oral society dwells in an
eternal repetition of a static body of knowledge; if evolution occurs
at all, it is at the pace of genetic drift: ‘the culture controls
behaviour minutely … Little energy is directed toward finding new
solutions to age-old problems’ (Riesman, cited in McLuhan 1962:
29).

McLuhan now

McLuhan’s account of acoustic pre-technological culture offers
important insights into social conditions within the contemporary
mediascape – the latter represents a technologically mediated return
to the former. For example, subsequent chapters demonstrate how
the phenomenon of ‘rite words in rote order’ reappears in the
apparently flexible, but ultimately deeply enframing, cultural forms
of Reality TV. On the one hand, McLuhan’s account of modern
media technologies and the associations to be made with pre-literate

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