Page 112 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 97
remaining faculties to their highest power, the auto-amputated social
body results in the proliferation of specializations, collectively and
individually we respond to the loss of various channels, by a
hypertrophy of those that remain. We can see here that implicit in
McLuhan’s theory is a critical rereading of Kracauer’s notion of the
potentially empowering aspect of the media (see Kracauer’s use of
the myth of Medusa’s shield in the Conclusion) and an intimation of
Baudrillard’s later sustained account of that which is hypertrophied
in the contemporary mediascape: the etiolated hyperreality of a
society in which aura has all too effectively been eradicated. We shall
see in subsequent chapters that McLuhan’s theory allied to that of
Benjamin, Debord, Boorstin and Baudrillard provides us with a
critical basis from which to understand the cultural effects of the
disproportionate role of images whether manifested in affect-driven
news reporting or television formats and their obsessive attention to
increasingly inflated and conflated voyeuristic formats (see Chap-
ters 7 and 8 in particular).
Another aspect of McLuhan’s work that tends to be given scant
attention by media-optimists is the way in which he needs to
compensate for the implicitly critical aspects of his presentation of
the relationship between man and prosthesis with his various appeals
to a quasi-Catholic belief in an ultimate communion, that is, at both
a restoration of humanity to a pre-lapsarian state, before the fall into
language and separation, and the ultimate rapture:

Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of
consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbali-
zation whatever. Such a state of collective awareness may have
been the preverbal condition of men … Today computers hold
out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code
or language into any other code or language. The computer, in
short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of uni-
versal understanding and unity.
(McLuhan [1964] 1995: 83)

We can perhaps get a better sense of the critical implications of
McLuhan’s theory in relation to the work of various artists such as
J.G. Ballard, Cronenberg and Burroughs. McLuhan’s comments on
the latter are particularly informative. He finds in Burroughs’s
visceral satires, an allegory of the function of media as translators
and consumers of previous environments. In Burroughs’s work the
relationship between body and media is vividly confronted; if media
consume their forbears’ form as content, and if media are sensory
extensions or reproductions, then can it be said that media are in
the process of consuming the form of the human body? Is the
human organism in the process of being digested by its technical

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