2023

The United States as a nation is doomed … to break up into a series of regional and racial ministates; … a civil war would merely accelerate that process.

McLuhan, interview with Eric Norden, Playboy (March 1969) 68

 

World War III is a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

McLuhan, Culture is Our Business (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1970) 66

 

Jarrett Earnest, “Art is a Drug,” New York Review (11 May 2023)

 

“[T]he three members of General Idea … continued elaborating [their story] for decades, shifting details and emphasis with each iteration, until the fable was as hard and glittering as a diamond. Assuming the role of artists as critics, they injected themselves into a variety of cultural situations, testing what could be communicated through varying formats. In 1972 they created FILE Megazine as their artistic and conceptual mouthpiece, and in 1974 founded Art Metropole, a hub for exchanging and selling artists’ books and multiples—editions of inexpensive art objects. These two projects connected artists and writers across North America and around the world, cross-pollinating an alternative culture.

The megazine’s interior was designed as elaborate image-text collages recalling the techno-positivist communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s picture book [sic] with Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (1968), as well as the countercultural prophets William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin with their cut-up techniques. General Idea adapted many ideas and phrases from Burroughs, including his dictum ‘Language is a virus,’ a mechanism of social control that perpetuates itself within its host through speech, broadcasts, and publications. ‘Image is virus’ became its catchphrase. Over the better part of twenty years General Idea created an oracular ‘voice’ in FILE, blending the positive and negative perspectives of McLuhan and Burroughs into a complex engine of theorization, cultural analysis, and literary fiction. Importantly, and above all else, they insisted that FILE was a ‘frame’ in which to resituate found materials, sharing the ideas and activities of wide swaths of artists and integrating many different kinds of work into their own.”

John Lechte, Philosophy of the Medium: The Age of McLuhan in Question (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)

Taking the principle of the ‘disappearance of the medium’ into new territory, this book questions the pervasive influence of the principle that the ‘medium is the message’. Bold and expansive, this book argues that we have for too long focused on the technical specificities of media, when we should have been focusing on what it is that mediums do, that is, on their ‘content’ rather than their formal and technical qualities. With a re-reading of McLuhan, this volume offers a study of the conflicting views of technics as a medium in Bernard Stiegler’s work as well as an investigation into the extent to which Michel Serres’ work on communication sheds light on the nature of medium. Engaging also with the concept of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and the notion of probabilistic objects in quantum physics and climate change, he explores the way in which measurement is perceived to ‘create’ reality. Concluding with a fascinating study of the implications of consciousness as a medium, this book ultimately reconsiders and offers a deeper understanding of what we mean by the term ‘media’: it is that which comes ‘between’ and which facilitates the transmission of content, essentially a creator of possibilities, yet never present as such in the light of its success as a vehicle for meaning.

 

 

 

The End of the McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology (1968 – 2023) 

06feb23

By Alexander Kuskis, PhD
University of Toronto

In 2016, CHI was renamed once again in McLuhan’s honour as the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. The Estate agreed to this with the tacit understanding that finally, a centre for McLuhan Studies would be established at the University. This was not to be. The programming since the renaming in 2016, has not been McLuhan-centred.

Realizing that the Faculty of Information had no intention of nurturing a centre for McLuhan Studies, the Estate and heirs decided to rescind permission for the use of the McLuhan name. The process, begun in May 2022, will be completed this month according to the current Dean, Wendy Duff.

The McLuhan Galaxy: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2023/02/06/

Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.