Page 111 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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96 Then
(over and above the usual, perennial differences of outlook between
generations). McLuhan saw this as a result of the new media: the
youth of the 1960s the television generation. As such they were
configured differently, equipped for a bright electronic future, while
their parents gazed backwards to the nostalgic comfort of the
certainties of the age of print. However, McLuhan’s account of the
relationship between the body and its extensions is marked by a
distinct ambivalence that is frequently passed over by those commen-
tators keen to emphasize the optimism of his reading of media
developments. Exploring such ambivalence further provides strong
evidence that McLuhan’s media theory has a strongly critical ele-
ment. This is perhaps best captured in his presentation of the myth
of Narcissus as an allegory of media effects. Drawing on the
etymological relation between narcissus and narcosis, McLuhan argues
that Narcissus rather than falling in love with his reflected beauty,
was narcotized by his own ‘extension’. Narcissus became the ‘servo-
mechanism’ of a cybernetic media circuit, and in this process
became terminally absorbed in his own extension. This terminal
absorption in terminals recalls the twenty-first century narcissists who
sit enraptured in the electric glow of their own extensions. For
McLuhan the crucial factor is that these extensions induce a
narcosis, a numbness, which means that those who use them are
singularly unable to comprehend the true nature of their condition.
Given the centrality of the body, and his suspicion of conventional
boundaries and distinctions, McLuhan’s description of this as a
process of auto-amputation is not simply figurative. He argues that
sensory channels and organs are tuned out if their input becomes
overwhelming; in order to preserve the psychic and physical integrity
of the overall organism, individual components are disowned. Thus
Narcissus becomes numb to his own (extended) organism, just as a
narcotic releases one from the pressures of the immediate environ-
ment. The status of media technologies as prosthetic sense organs,
results in an unbearable level of stimulation. Therefore we collec-
tively perform various acts of ‘auto-amputation’; we not only ‘outer’
but other our senses, and so regard them as external. It is this
narcosis that conventional debate about the media’s content consist-
ently passes over. Thus to focus on content or to argue that media
are neutral and simply reproduce the intention of their owner’s is to
succumb to a narcissistic narcosis. To truly apprehend media as
extensions of ourselves is a painful, overwhelming experience that,
McLuhan argues, we instinctively avoid.
Narcosis aids our functioning at the cost of inhibiting our
recognition of the nature of the situation. It both extends and
diminishes us: thus McLuhan notes that like those deprived of the
use of organs or sense, who compensate by developing their

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