Page 116 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 101
process, and the various technologies that are seen as its precursors,
are read in terms of their anticipation of, and divergence from, this
ideal.

Photography and McLuhan’s criticality
The technologies of the eye (for our purposes primarily film and
television) have their inception in the photograph. McLuhan regards
the camera as a technology of objectification, arresting the vital
continuity of its subject and reducing it to a static tableau. As we
have seen in Chapters 1 and 2, objectification is a consequence of
commodification, and the photograph both as an object and as an
objectification is the result of technology commensurate with the
emergence of capitalism. McLuhan’s definition of photography as a
brothel without walls ([1964] 1995: 169) is in keeping with this
perspective, and his imagery recalls Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire
as the poet of high capitalism (Benjamin 1985a), in which the figure
of the prostitute is used to symbolize the interplay between com-
modification, urbanism and capitalism. However, McLuhan, lacking
the syncretic resources of Freudo-Marxist theory, does not make this
connection.
What McLuhan does do is charge the camera with introducing a
hitherto undreamt of degree of exactitude into culture. This has
several aspects: first, a temporal exactitude. By capturing the evanes-
cence of the external world, the photographic image institutes a new
relation to time, and this relation has a vital role in ‘creating a world
of accelerated transience’. In an observation that recalls Kracauer’s
meditation on the temporality of the photographic image, McLuhan
states that:
If we open a 1938 copy of Life, the pictures or postures then
seen as normal now give a sharper sense of remote time than
do objects of real antiquity. Small children now attach the
olden days to yesterday’s hats and overshoes, so keenly attuned
are they to the abrupt seasonal changes of visual posture in the
world of fashion.
([1964] 1995: 176)
This exactitude has the paradoxical effect of transubstantiating the
‘real’ that it preserves, so that it increasingly takes on dream-like
malleability. Photography’s recording of reality, soon becomes a
writing of reality. Photography not only confers the power to
translate all it beholds into an object, but initiates a change in the
nature of the object itself. This process affects both the psychology
and physiology of the individual and the external environment –
indeed it serves to problematize any clear demarcation between
these realms.

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