Toward a Black media philosophy

ABSTRACT

Marshall McLuhan is often considered a media philosopher, not a race theorist. Yet, his work is full of racial implications that often go unexamined. For McLuhan, media were ‘any extensions of man’, which is to say that the men of McLuhan’s ‘tribal’, ‘detribal’, and ‘retribal’ cultures were differentiated based on their use of different media. For McLuhan, the phonetic alphabet was an important extension of detribal man, it moved him out of a presumed tribal past. Interestingly, Frantz Fanon made a similar argument: the Black body was a vehicle toward the materialization of Western man. Rather than coming into being through recognition of others, Fanon noted that Western man perceived himself as ‘civilized’ based on his enactment of violence against Black bodies. Bringing together McLuhan and Fanon, I argue that Black bodies function as media: they are extensions of man into his raced self-conceptions of the world. And despite such a media relation, Black people have consistently fought against the reduction of our bodies to extensions of Western man.

KEYWORDS:

• Media philosophy
• McLuhan
• Fanon
• man
• extensions
• blackness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Armond R. Towns is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Richmond. His areas of study include, but are not limited to, Black radicalism, cultural studies, media and communication philosophy, post- and decolonial studies, the philosophy and science of race, feminist and queer geography, and political economy.

Notes

1 Mills has also been critiqued. Curry argues that Mills holds an optimism not conversant with reality, or ‘a hopefulness in white sympathies with the oppressed’ (Curry 2007, p. 142). More specifically, Curry argues that despite arguments that the racial contract is part of a ‘global white supremacy’, ‘Mills still pretends that there is a justifiable reason to appeal to the ethical sensibility of whites to remedy their own supremacy’ (Curry 2007, p. 142). Mills argues that the original racial contract did not place humanity as something attainable by Black people; yet, the later iterations of the racial contract hold claims for Black humanity. However, there is nothing to suggest that the original racial contract disappeared for Curry.

2 I put ‘Africa’ in quotes, here, to match Carothers’s own use of the term, which does not take into consideration the vast differences between people on the entire continent, but reduces the continent to a racialized construct, in spite of differences.

3 It is important to note that, for McLuhan especially, Western phonetic writing versus non-Western orality does not assume that oral cultures do not have a system of writing. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a complex system of hieroglyphic writing that was not phonetics. Thus, the distinction between oral and writing made, here, assumes that phonetic writing differs from other forms of non-phonetic writing. It is this distinction, for McLuhan, that civilizes man.