Marshall Mcluhan and the Arts MOHAMMAD SALEMY
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REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES IMAGINATIONS JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES | REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE CONTRIBUTORS ADAM LAUDER AND JAQUELINE MCLEOD ROGERS Publication details, including open access policy ELENA LAMBERTI and instructions for contributors: ALEXANDER KUSKIS ADINA BALINT http://imaginations.csj.ualberta.ca JESSICA JACOBSON-KONEFALL MAY CHEW DAINA WARREN TOM MCGLYNN HENRY ADAM SVEC ISSUE 8-3 KENNETH R. ALLAN Marshall McLuhan and the Arts MOHAMMAD SALEMY JODY BERLAND MARSHALL AND THE MCLUHAN Editorial Team: Brent Ryan Bellamy, Dominique Laurent, Andriko GARY GENOSKO Lozowy, Tara Milbrandt, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Sheena Wilson December 6, 2017 REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES MARSHALL MCLUHAN ARTS AND THE ARTS ISSUE 8-3, 2017 To cite this article: Lauder, Adam and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers. “McLuhan and the Arts after the Speculative Turn.” Imaginations 8:3 (2017): Web (date accessed) 5-24. DOI: 10.17742/IMAGE.MA.8.3.1 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.MA.8.3.1 The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author’s original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions. MCLUHAN AND THE ARTS AFTER THE SPECULATIVE TURN ADAM LAUDER AND JAQUELINE MCLEOD ROGERS cLuhan and the arts is a well-trod- signifcant advance in our still evolving con- den theme yet surprisingly still fer- ception of McLuhan as a thinker and practi- tile ground for original scholarship tioner of aesthetics. Mand research-creation. Milestones include ex- cavations by Richard Cavell and Elena Lamber- A notable acceleration in the uptake of McLu- ti of the aesthetic sources of McLuhan’s media han’s thought in recent years points to some- analyses in the literature and visual arts of his thing of a mutation in the trajectory of recovery, time as well as his infuence on a range of con- restoration, and revision initiated by the publi- temporary artistic projects, from happenings cation of his Letters in 1987. It has become com- to installation art. Janine Marchessault and monplace to attribute McLuhan’s post-contem- Donald Teall have also presented compelling porary revival to the forces of retrospection portraits of the media thinker as himself an and reassessment focused by centennial cele- artist or “poet-artist manqué” (Teall, Te Me- brations of his birth in 2011. Yet there is more dium 6).1 More recently, case studies of specifc than chronology driving this renaissance. artists and movements inspired by McLuhan— notably Kenneth R. Allan’s exploration of Mc- Richard Cavell has recently drawn parallels Luhan’s notion of the “counterenvironment” as between McLuhan’s thought and contempo- a mode of immanent critique practiced by con- rary afect theory and new materialisms. It is ceptualists ranging from Dan Graham to the also not coincidental that McLuhan’s thought Vancouver-based N.E. Ting Co. Ltd.—have experiments have been the object of renewed lent additional defnition and texture to exist- attention amidst the intellectual sea-change ing accounts of the longue durée of McLuhan’s spelled by the speculative turn. While it would infuential percepts. Yet no authoritative sur- be dubious and unfruitful to retrospectively vey of McLuhan’s global impact on contempo- claim McLuhan as a new realist avant la lettre, rary art has emerged to-date. Tis special issue compelling resonances between his trans- of Imaginations does not, and for reasons of gression of disciplinary boundaries and pres- space alone cannot, fll this gap. Nonetheless, ent-day intellectual currents illuminate some the articles and artists’ responses gathered here, of the leading concerns propelling the pres- both collectively and individually, constitute a ent special issue of Imaginations. If the 1990s ISSUE 8-3, 2017 · 5 MCLUHAN AND THE ARTS AFTER THE SPECULATIVE TURN gave us a “virtual” McLuhan who was simulta- “non-philosophy” elaborated by Laruelle that neously a philosopher of diference and a fore- comes closest to McLuhan’s non-standard hu- runner of the spatial turn, today the media an- manism and best illuminates the experimental alyst is ripe for reevaluation as the generatively currents propelling this special issue. unclassifable thinker that he is. Laruelle (b. 1937) is Professor Emeritus at the In common with the proponents of various University of Paris X (Nanterre). Of his more Speculative Realisms, McLuhan’s writings are than 20 monographs, some dating back to the characterized by a profound wariness of the 1970s, English translations have only begun to “Subject” produced by Enlightenment epis- appear since 2010, although they are now be- temologies and conserved, if profoundly re- ing published at a rapid rate by the most distin- confgured, by the linguistic turn which coin- guished academic presses. Laruelle began his cided with the waning of his own reputation career by extending but also hybridizing the afer 1968.2 “Man” may be the unapologetic seemingly incompatible post-structuralist the- subject of McLuhan’s media explorations, yet ories of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. By it is no liberal-humanist individual—no Vit- the early 1980s, however, he was beginning to ruvian Man—that emerges from his collagiste push against these “Philosophies of Diference” prose. Rather, McLuhan presents us with an to formulate his own non-philosophical alter- oddly prosthetic and generic humanity that native (discussed in detail below): a rethink- anticipates the contemporary French think- ing of the central assumptions of continen- er François Laruelle’s provocative contention tal philosophy that nonetheless makes new, if that “there are no longer subjects” (“Is Tink- sometimes unrecognizable and perverse, uses ing Democratic?” 233). Likewise anticipatory of its now-familiar concepts and vocabulary. of Speculative Realism, McLuhan drew upon Some commentators group Laruelle with An- a range of scientifc discourses to expand the glo-American thinkers associated with Specu- scope of humanistic study beyond the con- lative Realism—an afliation that the non-phi- fnes of Greek metaphysics and Judeo-Chris- losopher would likely reject. Nonetheless, tian theology. In particular, McLuhan emerges Laruelle’s project shares with SR an ambition to as a prescient critic of linguistics as the master think beyond such hallmarks of French Teory signifer of the human. For the Toronto School as the linguistic metaphor and the centrality of thinker, as for contemporary realists, “ontology the Subject utilizing techniques and terminol- is politics” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 16)— ogy derived from science. an orientation made plain by his prefatory pro- fession of faith in “the ultimate harmony of all Like Laruelle, McLuhan is a gnomic thinker being” in Understanding Media (5). who defes standard disciplinary taxonomies and norms. Indeed, McLuhan’s currently ac- Yet McLuhan’s non-Kantianism—derived from cepted designation as a media theorist or me- Henri Bergson, as traced by Stephen Crock- dia philosopher is questionable, not only on er—thwarts any meaningful alignment with the basis of his own of-noted resistance to contemporary neo-Kantians such as Gra- systemization; the Toronto School thinker pre- ham Harman or his noumenal world of “ob- ferred, like Laruelle, an aesthetic and experi- jects.” It is, rather, the eccentric project of mental methodology substituting non-rational REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES ISSUE 8-3, 2017 · 6 ADAM LAUDER AND JAQUELINE MCLEOD ROGERS “percepts” for the concepts of conventional culture and perspectival optics alike (Counter- epistemology. Even the default subsumption of blast n.p.). Paralleling the originary “blackness” McLuhan’s protean speculations under the ru- that Laruelle attributes to the Real (thereby re- bric of media studies is debatable, if only giv- jecting standard metaphysical metaphors of il- en his noted lack of training in communica- lumination and enlightenment), McLuhan de- tions and resolutely literary methodology. Like scribed this acoustic space as “the dark of the Laruelle, McLuhan’s project is more accurate- mind” (Counterblast).4 ly characterized as an irreverent bricolage of seemingly irreconcilable methodologies that Moreover, McLuhan’s acoustic space as well as efects a mutation of the central forms of clas- the “mosaic” form that he developed to com- sical Western epistemology and its contempo- municate its heteronomous essence (Gutenberg rary ofspring. Galaxy 265) can both be likened to Laruelle’s insistence upon the foreclosure of the Real to Te formal orientation of McLuhan’s analyses epistemological capture: a “One” that unilater- was long dismissed as a methodological short- ally equalizes all attempts at its representation coming, a holdover from the naïve formalism as necessarily incomplete. Laruelle’s universe practiced by an earlier generation of human- establishes an irreversible vector from the Re- ists. Jessica Pressman has persuasively argued al-One