Page 117 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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102 Then
This represents an interim theoretical position between Benjamin’s
work upon the notion of aura and Baudrillard’s later concept of the
hyperreal as more real than the real itself. McLuhan’s interpretation
underlines the profound changes to our experience of the world
represented by the advent of the camera. Photography provides a
concrete example of the interplay between technology and the body,
and the essential plastic nature of subjectivity within it. McLuhan
argues that photography initiates a physiological education, as the
body adapts itself to a new servo-mechanism. Gaze, deportment,
posture: all these are refashioned to fit the new environment. The
apparent naturalness of those who are ‘photogenic’ is the height of
artifice; in this manner photography’s immediate corporeal impact
corresponds to a shift in the status of the individual:
the complete transformation of human sense-awareness by
[photography] involves a development of self-consciousness that
alters facial expression and cosmetic make-up as immediately as
it does our bodily stance, in public or in private. This fact can
be gleaned from any magazine or movie of fifteen years back. It
is not too much to say, therefore, that if outer posture is
affected by the photograph, so with our inner postures and the
dialogue. The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of
the photograph …
(McLuhan [1964] 1995: 197)
The reformatting of subjectivity takes place within the context of an
increasingly complex relationship between the material world and its
representations/simulations. This intersection between subjectivity,
photography and psychoanalysis has already been noted by some of
the other, more ideologically orientated theorists of earlier chapters.
What sets McLuhan apart, is his particularly relentless commitment
to the centrality of the medium. A commitment that may make him
appear to avoid the kinds of engagement with political questions
that we have observed in other explicitly critical theories of mass
media, but which remain implicit in his work none the less.
For instance, there are a number of points of convergence
between McLuhan’s account of the impact of photography and
Debord’s thesis of the spectacle. For example, Debord’s account of
the increasing convergence of urban space with the spectacle finds
an echo in McLuhan’s observation that the city is designed and
redeveloped in response to its photographic representation. Simi-
larly, McLuhan’s observation that ‘One immense area of photo-
graphic influence that affects our lives is the world of packaging and
display, and … the organization of shops. The newspaper that could
advertise every sort of product on one page quickly gave rise to
department stores that provided every kind of product under one
roof’ ([1964] 1995: 179). In other words, the exaltation of the

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