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ABSTRACT
The late Marshall McLuhan’s substitution of the term “global theater” for the more celebrated but arguably less effective “global village,” with its relational/holistic underpinnings, signals a turn in his media philosophy: from an ontology of identity supporting an organicist theory of mediated interplay (world–self relations) to an ontology of difference, sense, and multiplicities prioritizing the existence of individual objects. The performative concept of “global theater” has been overlooked by media ecology commentators, who tend to interpret it as a colorful detail—a loose element in McLuhan’s overall system—often associating it with a shift from detached contemplation to involved production. This essay argues that a mere shift from theory to praxis is not enough to fully comprehend this enigmatic concept, which holds one of the keys for understanding the late McLuhan’s transition from an extended configuration, anchored in the constitutive subject, to a postfinite philosophy of difference, sense, and multiplicities akin to the “new realist” school of contemporary thought, particularly the “fields-of-sense” ontology of Markus Gabriel.
Notes
1 Lewis H. Lapham, Introduction to Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), xi.
2 Elena Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
3 Eduardo Vizer, Lo que McLuhan no Predijo (Buenos Aires: La Crujía Ediciones, 2014).
4 Paul Levinson, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium (London: Routledge, 1999); Robert K. Logan, Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
5 Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), 86.
6 Ibid., 3.
7 Marshall McLuhan, “The Future of the Future Is the Present,” Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection, http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/prophecies/1967-the-future-of-the-future-is-the-present/.
8 Laureano Ralón and Marcelo Vieta, “McLuhan and Phenomenology,” Explorations in Media Ecology 10, no. 3–4 (2012): 185–206; Marcelo Vieta and Laureano Ralón, “Being-in-the-Technologically-Mediated-World: The Existential Philosophy of Marshall McLuhan,” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 1, no. 1–2 (2013): 36–60.
9 This is a branch of continental philosophy that presents itself as an alternative to modern and postmodern thought. Among the philosophers associated with this movement are Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Markus Gabriel, Maurizio Ferraris, Levi R. Bryant, and Steven Shaviro, to name a few.
10 Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 140.
11 Paul Levinson, New New Media (New York: Pearson, 2012).
12 Laureano Ralón, “Interview with Maurizio Ferraris,” Figure/Ground, http://figureground.org/interview-with-maurizio-ferraris/ (accessed May 12, 2016).
13 Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Continuum, 2006), 8.
14 James Striegel, “McLuhan on Media” (Ph.D. diss., Union University, 1978).
15 David Stern, “Practices, Practical Holism and Background Practices,” in Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 2, ed. Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 55.
16 Laureano Ralón, “Interview with Günter Figal,” Figure/Ground, http://figureground.org/interview-with-gunter-figal/ (accessed August 18, 2015).
17 Ibid.
18 Gary Genosko, McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion (London: Routledge, 1999).
19 Mark Poster, “McLuhan and the Cultural Theory of Media,” MediaTropes 2, no. 2 (2010): 1–18.
20 Donald Theall, “McLuhan as Prepostmodernist and Forerunner of French Theory,” in Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2005), 379–92.
21 Striegel, “McLuhan on Media.”
22 Lawrence K. Schmidt, Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2000), 62.
23 Ian Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication: Communication, Consumerism, and Social Movements (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 101.
24 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 6.
25 Peter Zhang and Eric Jenkins, “Deleuze the Media Ecologist? Extensions of and Advances on McLuhan,” Explorations in Media Ecology 15, no. 1 (2016): 81–91.
26 Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking, 1970), 12.
27 Hans Achterhuis, De Maat van de Techniek/The Measure or Meter of Technics (Baarn, Netherlands: Ambo, 1992).
28 Graham Harman, “The McLuhans and Metaphysics,” in New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, and Søren Riis (London: Palgrave, 2009), 100–22.
29 Ibid., 101.
30 Ibid., 116.
31 Ibid., 119.
32 Ibid., 119–20.
33 Ibid., 120.
34 Ibid.
35 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2011).
36 Laureano Ralón, “Interview with Corey Anton,” Figure/Ground, http://figureground.org/interview-with-corey-anton/ (accessed June 10, 2010).
37 Laureano Ralón, “The Media Ecology–Philosophy of Technology Disconnect: A Matter of Perception?” Explorations in Media Ecology (forthcoming).
38 Laureano Ralón, “Beyond the Organicist Metaphor: Media Ecology through Assemblage Theory,” Razón y Palabra (forthcoming).
39 There are, of course, exceptions to this metaphysical tendency, most notably in the work of the late Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alphonso Lingis, and Calvin Schrag—all worked through similar concerns regarding postmodernism.
40 Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 74.
41 Ibid., 76.
42 Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 203.
43 Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist, 74.
44 Ibid., 66.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 208.
48 See Gabriel, Fields of Sense, chapter 9.
49 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46.
50 Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist, 211.
51 Ibid., 209.
52 Günter Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology: The Appearance of Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 3.
53 Degenerate Times, “Marshall McLuhan Speaking Freely with Edwin Newman—3 of 6,” YouTube.com, min 3:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMPA-Mpg4kc&list=PLQ3×9GxkJznXMCGlEZXkIxqrMy2ERp761&index=3.
54 Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist, 210.
55 Ibid., 213.
56 Ibid., 214–15.
57 Ibid., 215.
58 Ibid., 216.
59 Ibid., 217.
60 Ibid., 217–18.
61 Ibid., 218.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 219. Admittedly, the primacy of vision seen in Gabriel’s ontology seems to reintroduce a hierarchy into appearances. To be sure, this kind of vision does not organize the worldly spectacle of solicitations, as in the case of a sense-giving phenomenological spectator. Strictly speaking, this kind of television should be equated less with perception and more so with a rational kind of seeing: thinking itself detached from the human organism. Hence, tele-vision is only a sense that discerns the plurality of fields of sense but without restoring an anthropocentric asymmetry through the logic of constitution. Of course, some appearances are more “real” than others, particularly through the standpoint of affect; however, the discussion here is ontological. Ultimately, we are not arguing that all objects are equal, but that they are all equally objects inasmuch as, to exist, they must appear in a field of sense.
64 Ibid. A question may be raised about the reality of global monopolies, which seem to involve a “behind the scenes” pertaining to political economy. Here, I believe Gabriel (and McLuhan) would respond along the lines of the phenomenological tradition: if reality is an illusion, then the illusion is reality. In other words, there is a structure to our appearances that is ontologically as real as that which takes place behind the scenes; it cannot be reduced simply as an epiphenomenon. Strictly speaking, the powers that be, which arguably operate “behind the scenes,” must appear in a field of sense in order to exist. These fields are not necessarily inaccessible in a metaphysical sense. They may be more or less defined, more or less accessible, but always contingently so.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.