Page 110 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 95
term in all that ‘passes through’ them. Although McLuhan was
openly critical of Boorstin’s work, believing it subject to fallacy of
content analysis (because the true import of media effects relates to
the medium and not the message), Boorstin’s concept does help to
develop one consequence of McLuhan’s argument – the medium
dominates the message.

‘Outering’ the body: media as extensions

One significant element introduced in Understanding Media is the
central role McLuhan ascribes to the human body. Subtitling his
book The Extensions of Man, he argues that it serves as the reservoir
from which disparate media are extricated and externalized, and as
the locus of their operation (as we shall see this position implies a
certain vision of what constitutes the human subject). Let us explore
these propositions in turn. McLuhan argues that media technology is
an externalization, an ‘outering’ of the various structures of the
human body and thus the manner by which the human body
extends its influence. While McLuhan was not the first thinker to
approach technology in terms of an extension of the human body
(see, for instance, Samuel Butler, Ernst Kapp, Marx and Alfred
Espinas), he was the first to systematically apply this proposition to
media technology and take his conclusions to a wide audience.
McLuhan’s ‘presupposition of corporeality’ (Wellbury, in Kittler
1990: xiv) was timely. It serendipitously coincided with a growing
awareness of the body and its role in culture. During the same
period artists and activists began to turn their attention to the body
as a terrain to be explored and fought over. This concern with
corporeality is inextricably bound to another dimension of McLu-
han’s media theory, namely, a suspicion of the human subject. As we
have already seen in his analysis of tribal and literate cultures,
McLuhan argues that different communication technologies gener-
ate different forms of subjectivity. Thus aural culture induced a
collective form of identity in which the boundaries between the self
and the social were indistinct. In contrast, print culture created the
interiority of the private subject. Implicit in this is his assumption
that the subject ‘man’ is a reconfigurable assemblage made up of his
technologies of communication, and the manner in which they
distributed his sensory functions. Media alter the sensory ratios of
the human organism, and when these ratio’s change then ‘man’
changes, as Blake’s lines, cited approvingly by McLuhan, have it: ‘If
Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary’ (McLu-
han [1964] 1995: 55).
The 1960s witnessed much talk of a ‘generation gap’, as youth
embraced a lifestyle increasingly incomprehensible to their elders

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