Unifying these various phenomena in his formula, McLuhan no longer tells us anything useful. In fact, to discover that the advent of the typewriter, bringing women into business firms as secretaries, created a crisis for the manufacturers of spitoons, simply means repeating the obvious principle that every new technology imposes changes in the social body. But in the face of these changes it is highly useful to understand whether they occur because of a new channel, a new code, a new way of articulating the code, the things the message says in articulating the code, or the way a certain group is disposed to receive the message.
Here, then, is another proposition: The medium is not the message; the message becomes what the receiver makes of it, applying to it his own codes of reception, which are neither those of the sender nor those of the scholar of communications. The medium is not the message because, for the cannibal chief, the clock is not the determination to spatialize time, but a kinetic ornament to hang around the neck. If the medium is the message there is nothing to be done (the Apocalyptics know this): We are directed by the instruments we have built.
But the message depends on the reading given to it; in the universe of electricity there is still room for guerrilla warfare: The perspectives of reception are differentiated, the TV station is not attacked, the attack is against the first chair in front of every TV set. It may be that what McLuhan says (and the Apocalyptics with him) is true, but in this case it is a very harmful truth; and since culture has the possibility of shamelessly constructing other truths, it is worth proposing a more productive one. In conclusion, three questions about the appropriateness of reading McLuhan.
Is it possible to understand Understanding Media? Yes, because even though the author seems to assail us with an enormous welter of data (Alberto Arbasino has splendidly suggested that this book was written by Bouvard and Pécuchet), the central information it gives us is still one and indivisible: The medium is the message.
The book repeats this with exemplary stubbornness and with an absolute fidelity to the ideal of speech in the oral and tribal societies to which it invites us: As McLuhan says, the entire message is repeated frequently on the circles of a concentric spiral and with seeming redundance. Just one carp: The redundance is real, not apparent. As with the best products of mass entertainment, the confusion of collateral information serves only to make appetizing a central structure that is unrelentingly redundant, so that the reader will receive always and only what he has already known (or understood).
The signs that McLuhan reads all refer to something that is given us from the start. Having read authors like Sedlmayr, is it worth reading authors like McLuhan? Yes, actually. True, if you reverse the signs, both say the same thing (namely, the media do not transmit ideologies; they are themselves ideologies), but McLuhan’s visionary rhetoric is not lachrymose, it is stimulating, high-spirited, and crazy. There is some good in McLuhan, as there is in banana smokers and hippies. We must wait and see what they’ll be up to next.
Is it scientifically productive to read McLuhan? An embarrassing problem, because you have to take care not to liquidate in the name of academic common sense someone who writes the Canticle of Sister Electricity. How much fertility is concealed behind this perpetual intellectual erection?
McLuhan does not confine himself to saying to us “Ace of Spades equals death,” but he makes further affirmations that, though still kabbalistic, are of the type of “legs: eleven”: in which case we do not have a totally unmotivated relationship, as in the former statement, but a certain structural homology. And the search for homological structures frightens only narrow minds and alphabets incapable of seeing beyond their own primers. When Panofsky discovered a structural homology between the plan of Gothic cathedrals and the form of medieval theological treatises, he tried to compare two modus operandi that give life to relational systems that can be described by a single diagram, a single formal model.
And when McLuhan sees a relationship between the disappearance of the Gutenbergian mentality and certain ways of conceiving organizational structures in a linear and hierarchical way, he is undoubtedly working on the same plane of heuristic happiness. But when he adds that the same process had led to the disappearance of the lines of porters waiting the arrival of guests in a hotel then he begins to enter the realm of the unverifiable, and when he comes to the disappearance of the vertical lines in nylon stockings he is in the realm of the imponderable. When he then cynically plays with current opinions, knowing they are false, he arouses our suspicions. McLuhan knows that a computer performs many operations at instantaneous speed, in a single second, but he also knows that this fact does not authorize him to declare that the instantaneous synchronization of numerous operations had put an end to the old syntax of linear sequences.
In fact the programming of a computer consists precisely in the arranging of linear sequences of logical operations broken down into binary signals; if there is something not very tribal, enveloping, polycentric, hallucinatory, and nonGutenbergian, it is precisely the programmer’s job. It’s wrong to take advantage of the ingenuousness of the average humanist, who has learned all he knows about electronic brains from science fiction. Precisely because his discussion offers some valid intuitions, we ask McLuhan not to play the shell game with us.
But and this is a fairly melancholy conclusion the popular success of his thought is due, on the contrary, to this very technique of nondefinition of terms and to that cogitointerruptus logic that has given such cheap celebrity also to the Apocalyptics, popularized in one-size-fits-all dimensions in well-intentioned newspapers. In this sense McLuhan is right: Gutenbergian man is dead, and the reader seeks in the book a message at low definition, in which to find hallucinatory immersion. At this point isn’t it better to watch television?
That television is better than Sedlmayr is beyond any doubt. With McLuhan, things are different. Even when they are merchandised in a jumble, good and bad together, ideas summon other ideas, if only to be refuted. Read McLuhan; but then try to tell your friends what he says. Then you will be forced to choose a sequence, and you will emerge from the hallucination.
1967
Language, Power, Force
On January 17, 1977, Roland Barthes, before the kind of capacity audience attracted by great social and cultural occasions, delivered his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, where he had just been invited to occupy the chair of literary semiology. This lecture, which the newspapers reported at the time (Le Monde devoted an entire page to it), has now been published by the Editions du Seuil, under the humble and very proud tide Leçon* Just over forty pages, it is divided into three parts. The first deals with language, the second with the function of literature with regard to the power of language, the third with semiology and, in particular, literary semiology. I must immediately say that here I will not go into the third part (which, brief as it is, nevertheless would demand an extended discussion of method), and I will mention the second part only in passing. It is the first part that, I feel, raises a problem of fer broader scope, going beyond both literature and the techniques of enquiry into literature, to arrive at the question of Power—a question that informs also the other books referred to briefly in this article.
Barthes’s inaugural lecture is constructed with splendid rhetoric and begins with praise of the position he is about to occupy. As many perhaps know, the professors of the Collège de France confine themselves to speaking: They give no examinations and have no power to promote or fail the students, who listen to them solely out of love for what they say. Hence Barthes’s contentment (once both humble and very proud): I am entering a place beyond power. Hypocrisy, to be sure, because nothing confers more cultural power in France than teaching at the
Collège de France, producing knowledge. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In this lecture (which, as we shall see, focuses on play with language), Barthes, however innocently, is playing: He offers one definition of power and presupposes another.
In fact, Barthes is too subtle to ignore Foucault, whom he actually thanks for having been his patron at the Collège; therefore he knows that power is not “one” and that, as it infiltrates a place where it is not felt at first, it is “plural,” legion, like demons. “. . . Power is present in the most delicate mechanisms of social exchange: not only in the State, in classes, groups, but even in fashion, public opinion, entertainment, sports, news, information, family and private relations, and even in the liberating impulses which attempt to counteract it.”
Whence: “I
