McLuhan and Continental Philosophy: how Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception helps support and continue McLuhans directions

Sergio Roclaw Basbaum1

1

Pontifcia Universidade Catlica de So Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil.

Abstract. This paper addresses the relations among McLuhans work and authors in the European tradition of thought. After a brief intro, a section offers general observations; next part is dedicated to comparing some of Walter Benjamins findings, almost 30 years prior, to McLuhans work; another section is dedicated to mcluhanic aspects in Vilm Flussers work, written in the 1980s; then we present a synthesis of Merleau-Pontys work on perception, suggested to offer important contributions for filling gaps in McLuhans work in which perception plays a key role; finally, a last part pursues some of the consequences of melting McLuhan and Merleau-Ponty for further studies on the social impact of technological media. Keywords: philosophy, perception, phenomenology, sense, technology.

1 Introduction
Marshall McLuhans impact on the world of thought in the incredible decade of 1960 is well known. One can imagine the shock experienced by the European intellectual milieu, which was just coming from a brilliant generation of structuralists, with the impact of the works from Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes (all of them still alive and producing at the time), to get into an also brilliant generation of poststructuralists, in which one can count names like Jacques Derrida or Gilles Deleuze, when McLuhan emerged on the scene with his very unusual style and a whole package of quite new concepts about books, television and technologies of mediation. Today, with the advent of Digital Culture, the main McLuhans ideas seem so clear that one hardly understands why he may have been so controversial at first. Nonetheless, in the sixties, McLuhans seemingly lack of respect for Continental philosophical tradition although he had a PhD in English Literature, and an amazing knowledge of English poetry was very unexpected. It striked Jean Baudrillard (Kellner 1990, p. 5), for example, that McLuhan did not show much respect for a giant like Karl Marx, who was, for the Canadian, just a by-product of the book and the mechanicist environment of the XIX century. Although certainly a brilliant and inspiring media theorist, McLuhan was not a philosopher in European terms he didnt have exhaustive domain over French and German Philosophy, although his Galaxy of Gutenberg thesis did put all those authors under a new, unexpected light. In the following paragraphs, I expect to suggest some

McLuhan Galaxy: Understanding Media Today Conference Proceedings. Edited by Matteo Ciastellardi, Cristina Miranda de Almeida, Carlos A. Scolari. Barcelona: Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, 2011. pp 552-61

relations among Continental Philosophy and McLuhans ideas, in order to open directions which deserve further exploration and seem to offer tools for new McLuhan styled probes into contemporary technological culture.

2 Opening Remarks: European Philosophers and McLuhans Work

There are many ways by which one can establish relations and bridges among McLuhans theoretical propositions and European Philosophy. Micheal Heim (1993:54-71), for example, has suggested that McLuhans legacy should be compared to Martin Heideggers philosophy of technology, and that such comparison would bring more similarities than one would expect those two thinkers agree not only that technology cannot and should not be regarded as neutral, but also locate the origins of Western technology in the changes in thinking which took place in Classical Greek Antiquity. Among French philosophers, one quite often reads about the connections between Jean Baudrillards thinking and McLuhans media theory (for example, Howes, 2003:237n4; Kellner, 1990), and also Paul Virilios ideas on the power of technology and dromocracy the idea that the domain over velocity and time through communication means implies most of all in political power bring a strong kinship with the Canadian media theorists ideas (Virilio, 1999). Interestingly, while Virilios readers consider his work to be in the opposite site as to McLuhans media-theory, it should be noted that not only both share a technocentric view of Modernity, but also both were committed to Christianity (see, for example, Armitage 2000). One can even find authors who point to mcluhanic aspects in Gilles Deleuzes work, and the passages in A thousand Plateaus addressing cultural, body and behavioural changes which take place as result of new technologies and technological devices are, for sure, not anti-McLuhan. In an amazing article about the new artificial sensibility, written in 2000, the Portuguese author Maria Thereza Cruz (2000: 8) states that as Deleuze suggests, it is our body, first of all, which loses the certainty and the need of its functions. And in this point, at least, Deleuze is a Mclhuanian. Of course, with some intellectual effort any relation is possible, especially when were definitely living in a time when it became almost impossible to over-estimate the role of technology in our lives. Thus, the way by which connections and modes of dialogue are proposed is probably more productive than straight connections. From his side, Marshall McLuhan himself has made some effort to place his own work in relation to both European thinking and positive Science, especially in his last work, Laws of Media, in which he intended to give scientific status to his theory. In a letter to Marshall Fischwick, in 1974 (McLuhan 1987, p. 506), he writes that The reason that Im admired in Paris and in some Latin Countries is that my approach is rightly regarded as structuralist. One can notice his interest and respect for the reception of his writings in Europe, and his amusement for this comparison, even much after the peak of Structuralism. Of course, the comparison it is not senseless: the privilege McLuhans work has given to support over content, to looking at ground as what gives meaning to and allows the bringing forth of figures, is certainly something which is in line, or can be understood as an emphasis in structure, thus

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placing his ideas although in a very unexpected way in line with the developments in French Philosophy through the 1950s and early 1960s, when McLuhans thinking matured. Certainly, the fact that Gutemberg Galaxy, it can be said, told European intellectuals that it was not that them had written all those fantastic books, but rather it was the books that had written them, was not an easy idea to digest. Still today one can notice that intellectuals whose thinking is still deeply rooted in the mind structure of the book, such as Umberto Eco, hesitate (to say the least) in recognizing the meaning of the medium is the message. While trying to provide an original understanding of Modern European thinking through the lens of his own Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media and Laws of Media approach to quote some of his most important works McLuhan also felt pressed to come to terms with Continental heritage, as if he was concerned that his work could stand on its own feet before the tradition. In spite of feeling himself closer to Vico and pre-scientific thinking, in Laws of Media he explicitly addresses Kant, Heidegger and the most influential modern authors in Continental Tradition. One notices that, as frequently suggested by his critics, McLuhans understanding of European philosophers is a bit confuse: in the same letter quoted above, he says that Nobody except myself in the media field has ventured to use the structuralist or existential approach, betraying a misunderstanding of the precise meaning of both definitions which he seemed to think of as one and the same. As Jack Lemmon once said, nobodys perfect. However, wed like to call attention to the connections between McLuhans work and ideas presented by three authors he doesnt seem to have been interested in or even aware of. The first is the German essayist Walter Benjamin, with his writings on photography and cinema; the second is the Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilm Flusser, with his ideas about technology and the metaphor of the black-box; and the third one, maybe the least expected, the French Phenomenologist Maurice MerleauPonty.

3 Walter Benjamin: Visionary Pioneer

Starting with Benjamin, one notices striking similarities between insights offered in his much quoted essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction written in the midst of the Nazi catastrophe in the 1930s and McLuhans ideas. If Benjamin certainly was not the only one intrigued with photographic and cinematic pictures in the first half of XX century, he was first to call attention to the effects of such technological novelties in European culture as related to the kind of experience such apparatuses impose. According to Benjamins account, understanding the impact of photography and film on cultural experience demands recognizing the destruction of previous modes of urban experience:
[B]y making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately

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connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the lm. Its social signicance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. (Benjamin 2010, p. 14)

By noticing, in the lines that follow the quote above, that a Shakespeare play, when seen in a movie theatre is an entirely new kind of experience, which cannot be understood as a mere translation of the original play to the new medium of cinema, Benjamin is, in other words, stating that the medium is the message, that is, it produces a kind of experience of its own. Benjamin goes on, to notice that such a destruction of traditional value implies the offspring of a new social order in which values that were supportive of previous power relations in European society tend to be superseded, while nobody notices:
[E]arlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art was not raised (Benjamin 2010, p. 25)

So, according to Benjamin, the primary question to be asked was not related to content, but to the changes new media introduces in society, capable of engendering an entire new aesthetic understanding thus impacting, essentially, in perception. This is far ahead from what other theorists from the Frankfurt School, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, were able to envision at the time. These two, typically, were worried about the destruction of traditional art values they ascribed to high-culture, as opposed to mass low-culture they highly criticized. While trying to unveil the elements which allowed the camera to provoke such cultural tornado, Benjamin also talks explicitly about what will later emerge as a key McLuhans topic, the changes in perception itself. He notices that, by transforming the possibilities of the eye, with close-ups, enormous screens and changes of film speed (by fast-motion or slow-motion), images that have always remained unconscious suddenly surface to conscious. Also, as a result of the intense presence of photography in press, the uniqueness of an instant which just happens once is turned into a mass reproduced phenomena, which is
(...) [i]s the mark of a perception whose sense of the universal equality of things has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus it is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception. (Benjamin 2010, p. 18)

One must agree that such unusual relations, which link cultural facts, urban experience, technology and perception in a single unexpected articulation could be written by a certain Canadian author, decades later. This is typical McLuhan style of starting from the simplest facts to find meaningful correspondences able to unveil the logic of a whole age.

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4 Vilem Flusser: Bodenloss Thinker

Another passage in Benjamins article allows a triptych connection between himself, McLuhans work and another Philosophy outsider, the born-Czech thinker Vilm Flusser, who lived in Brazil for 30 years and has written several of his works in Portuguese, before returning to Europe in the 1970s. While discussing the experience of the photographer, Benjamin writes (idem 35-6) that a cameraman is to a painter what a surgeon is to a magician: that is, the camera incorporates and imposes to its users the relation of a subject to his object. By underlying the fact that the camera has embedded in its mode of operation the epistemology of classical science, Benjamin also anticipates Flussers concept of black-box (when one knows what a machine gets as inputs and what it throws as outputs, but nothing about what goes inside), as a materialization of a conceptual framework classical science , as presented in his book about photography and technical images (Flusser 1998). More interesting, for the purposes of this article than to offer a detailed reading of Flussers growing influential work, is to illuminate the way by which he can be read as one of the Continental versions of McLuhan. Well versed in classical Philosophy, and a very deep reader of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Flusser was certainly touched by McLuhan insights in the 60s. One can easily notice the resemblances among the way Flusser describes the impact of writing and printing in European thinking (the notion of a world which lives historically because of reading as opposed to those who live magically because of orality and the magic power of images) and McLuhans account of the Guttenberg Galaxy. The whole Flusserian account of Modernity as shaped by an inflation of texts sounds as an elegantly written and concise version of McLuhans work. And the power assigned to the apparatus (the camera), which dominates the photographer by imposing its program over him an image Flusser uses as a metaphor to the whole technological age, in which we are not more than servants to machines is already noticed as a radical version of McLuhans ideas in Brazilian author Arlindo Machados presentation of the Portuguese edition of Flussers small masterpiece (Flusser 1998, p. 9-18). That Flusser could have possibly known McLuhans work should not be a surprise. Not only McLuhan was widely discussed in the 1960s, celebrated as media-guru, and prophet of communications age whose name would hardly pass unnoticed but also Flusser was a really heavy reader, of whom it is said that read obsessively; one can suspect, by his works in English, German, French, Portuguese, and by his Jewish Czech origin, that he had domain over around ten different languages! How could he have not at least had a look in McLuhans work? Also, Flusser was certainly an intelectual outsider: not being in Europe, he could not be pressed to reject McLuhans work; and although writing regularly in influential newspapers in Brazil, he was never entirely accepted by the Philosophy club in the country, thus when the military dictatorship has taken power in 1964, he was though never a supporter of the government always suspicious of leftist discourses, aware of the results of Communist dictatorships in Czechoslovakia and Western Europe. Thus, if for the main Brazilian intellectual milieu, most engaged in political resistance to the dictatorship, McLuhan was regarded as a thinker of the system, who would never address his topics through the lens of a Critical Marxist matrix, as the favoured Frankfurt School authors, Flusser was not leftist enough, and also certainly

McLuhan Galaxy: Understanding Media Today Conference Proceedings. Edited by Matteo Ciastellardi, Cristina Miranda de Almeida, Carlos A. Scolari. Barcelona: Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, 2011. pp 552-61

intellectually curious enough, to check by himself the surprising ideas of the Canadian media-theory pop-star, who was then stealing the intellectual stage. One should not be surprised, then, to find in Bodenloss [Soil Loss], Flussers unfinished self-biography, at least once the expression Guttenberg Galaxy (Flusser 2009, p. 147). Could it come from anyplace else? Thus, if Benjamin anticipated many threads McLuhan would develop later, it also can be said that Flusser offered a brilliant and with an amazing domain of Continental Philosophic tradition version of McLuhans ideas, in a concise and original style which complements the Canadian thinkers well known mosaic-like style.

5 Merleau-Ponty: Senses and Sense

However, a question remains: if Flusser is more concerned with the history of ideas themselves and cultural changes carried by technological apparatuses, both Benjamin and McLuhan put enormous emphasis in the shifts imposed on perception by technological mediation. Changes of perceptual bias, as widely known, are at the core of McLuhans thinking. It turns out that, by mapping cultural effects related to perceptual and cognitive changes accredited to technological mediation, neither Benjamin nor Flusser, and McLuhan especially, have been able to offer a theoretical support for their ideas in any comprehensive theory of perception and cognition. Although raised on observation of a well recognized inventory of effects of technological mediation, it can be argued that McLuhans theory, and the discussion on sensory biases for example, the famous an eye for an ear aphorism, the synesthetic bias of oral cultures, and the hypertrophy of vision in Western culture reclaim the support of a perceptual theory able to adequately bond perception, sense and knowledge. I suggest that the answer for such gap, interestingly, can be found in one of the authors about whom McLuhan seems to have never written a single line about, and who has written the most important philosophical work on the topic of perception in the XX century, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty as I shall suggest, such a contribution opens interesting directions for McLuhan influenced studies of contemporary digital societies. While never showing much care about technology, as if it was not a question for himself, Merleau-Ponty has written the most comprehensive, up to present day, and still highly influential work about perception, anticipating and being decisive to more recent efforts in the topic by authors such as Francisco Varela, Alva Ne or Evan Thompson. Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of perception (1945) continued directions opened by Husserl, concerning a critique of the natural attitude towards the experienced world, and, and by dipping on the findings of German Gestalt psychologists (from whom come the concepts of figure and ground as widely explored by McLuhan), Merleau-Ponty gives a radical emphasis to the role of perception in our living experience, disclosing the way by which we are tied to the world by perceptual bonds, and this unique familiarity between body and world on which all possible knowledge is grounded.

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Fig. 1: Zollners illusion, a classic Gestalt example of how perception has as syntax of its own, independently of what one rationally knows about the world.

Classical Gestalt examples such as the Zolner Illusion (fig. 1) serve MerleauPonty as points of departure to show how perception gives us a world which is previous to right or wrong and to any rational action and decision, on which any rationality and decision must rely. The key point on Merleau-Pontys account is that perception is for the first time described as an active process of creating a world through the presence of a body in a circumstance something that would appear much later in Maturana and Varelas work, in the 1970s (Maturana, Varela 1995):
[W]e grasp external space through our bodily situation. A corporeal or postural schema gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, of our hold on them. A system of possible movements, or motor projects, radiates from us to the environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 5)

Contingent to this active presence of the body, the field of perception and action (pg. 16), emerges the perceived world, a perspective which blossoms from the individuals meeting with a dynamic system of things in which she or he is immersed, and which is always unfinished, and perpetually being made; what we perceive is never a sum of parts, but a whole from which parts (objects) are eventually detached, but are defined according to their belonging to such set. Any theory of perception which relies on the idea of perceiving an objective world as organizing sensations derived from a circumstance of defined objects misses the very operation by which perception constitutes a world in which we exist:
[W]e observe at once that it is impossible, as has often been said, to decompose a perception, to make it into a collection of sensations because in it the whole is prior to the parts and this whole is not an ideal whole. (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 15)

And, following this,

(...) [W]hat prohibits me from treating my perception as an intelectual act is that an intelectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary. But in perception it is real; it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none is it given exhaustively. It is not accidental for the object to be given to me in a

McLuhan Galaxy: Understanding Media Today Conference Proceedings. Edited by Matteo Ciastellardi, Cristina Miranda de Almeida, Carlos A. Scolari. Barcelona: Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, 2011. pp 552-61

deformed way, from the point of view [place] which I occupy. That is the price of its being real. (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 16)

Thus, Merleau-Ponty gives us a rigorous account in which perception can be understood as the way by which I dispose a set, a horizon in which my body, prior to the operations of reason, acts as to get the best grasp, a satisfying and transitory gestalt of the circumstance, enough for one to perform ones existence successfully. And since we are this situated body, even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception (MerleauPonty 1964, p. 5), in a way that theres never such a thing as a neutral set: we always perceive a meaningful world, as a result of the intention with which one addresses the moment. Perception emerges as the baby-cradle of meaning, substituting, for a classical abstraction of passively perceiving a neutral world, an awareness of context which cannot in anyway be severed from sense: the senses give us a world invested with sense. Of course, as a result of world created by each of us according to individual perspective, Merleau-Pontys philosophy faces the challenge of the alter, of the others world being divergent of mine and reality emerges as an intersubjective agreement or distinct perspectives. Since reality, as we experience, is thus, up to a certain level, shared by a community, this raises the problem of culture. Although Merleau-Ponty has, during his short life-time casted the question of perception in culture as something which deserved further work (see, for example, Ferraz 2009), it took some decades for a group of anthropologists, most notably David Howes and Constance Classen, to unveil such culturally determined structures of perception. Since the late 1980s, Classen and Howes have written and/or edited several works, addressing different cultural perceptual models, different collective arrangements of the body sensorium, as leading to distinct ways of making sense and dealing with reality. Although Howes (2003, p. 54) himself affirms that No Western theory of the senses (...) can substitute for or comprehend such culturally specific indigenous epistemologies, their work is the best demonstration of Merleau-Pontys thesis that the experienced world gives me not the precise objects of science, but things which are endless source of meaning (Basbaum, 2006:186) meaning as born in the perceptual act and normalized between individuals, in collective experience.

6 Final Remarks: Bringing Theories Together

That Merleau-Pontys theory couldnt fulfil every consequence of the directions opened by his pioneer placing of perception as the ground of meaning and knowledge shouldnt surprise, not only because of his early death, but also because no thinker can give account of everything, no matter whom. More important is to notice that Classen and Howes works which, as I suggested, brought enormous contribution for a broader understanding of perception, reinforcing the core of Merleau-Pontys work derive almost directly from ideas developed by Marshall McLuhan concerning the opposition of oral and literate societies. Mcluhanists are usually aware of such problems as the synesthesia of oral cultures, and the growing dominance of visuality in Western culture throughout Modernity something that is brilliantly described by

McLuhan Galaxy: Understanding Media Today Conference Proceedings. Edited by Matteo Ciastellardi, Cristina Miranda de Almeida, Carlos A. Scolari. Barcelona: Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, 2011. pp 552-61

Classen (1993, p. 15-36), through observing the changes in flower contests in London, which favoured smells in the XVI century, and in the XIX century were prizing just the perfect visual form. No account could be more persuasive, given that flower contests inhabit a territory in culture quite distinct from those of books and philosophers. Classens example proves the triumph of visual bias during the Gutenberg Galaxy as does Gestaltists and psychologists enormous emphasis in visual research, in prejudice of all the other senses. Based in Toronto, the anthropology of the sense was directly influenced by McLuhans and Walter Ongs insights (Howes 2003, p. xviii-xx). But, given that many of McLuhans findings and insights acquired dramatically renewed meaning with the global consummation of digital culture, there are some consequences of bringing Merleau-Pontys work in the menu of tools for understanding contemporary world. In terms of McLuhans perceptual bias theory, one of the keys to a comprehension of our times would be to be able to unveil the decisive aspects of the kind of perception determined by the omnipresence of digital apparatuses the key for the doors of digital perception! To start with, if McLuhan has taught us as how to be aware of in interpret any cultural and behavioural changes as symptom of the impact of technological mediation, it was Merleau-Ponty who has best shown how to interpret data collected by psychologists and extract from this data radical understanding of the meaning of human experience. By bringing a repertoire of metaphors which surpassed the lack of imagination of cognitivists who compare everything to computers and informational flow, thus impoverishing the scope of meaning and human experience, in an epoch in which we need richness of both (which, are, as weve seen, tied one to the other) Merleau-Pontys writing teach us how to bring them with us in this world to be. But more interesting consequences can be derived. Following his typical mcluhanic-continental style, Vilem Flusser comments, in one of his last writings, on the cultural values developed under the influence of the book and the on-going cultural changes:
[T]emporal experience, which is understood along with the categories of History, that is, as irreversible, progressive and dramatic ceases to exist for the crowds, for people, to whom the codes of surfaces prevail, for whom images take the place of alphabetical texts. Such encoded world does not anymore mean processes (...) The very fact that it does not mean it anymore is called crisis of values. (Flusser 2007, p. 135)

In a way that could be McLuhans, Flusser assigns to the book all the fundamental values and principles whose profound changes today we testify in contemporary society. One of the most basic of such values which could be assigned is ethics. Should we suppose that we could undergo radical ethical changes, given changes in perception determined by digital mediation? This is precisely what, according to Merleau-Ponty we should expect:
[J]ust as the perception of a thing opens me up to being, by realizing an infinity of perceptual aspects, in the same way the perception of the other founds morality by realizing the paradox of an alter ego, of a common situation, by placing my perspectives and my incommunicable solitude in the visual field of another and of all the others. (...) If we admit that sensibility is enclosed within itself, and if we do not seek communication with truth and with the others

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except on the level of a disembodied reason, then there's not much to hope for. (...) If, on the contrary, as the primacy of perception requires, we call what we perceive the world and what we love the person, than there's a type of doubt concerning man, and a type of spite, which becomes impossible (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 26-7)

For the French Phenomenologist, it is the perceptual experience, and specially the perception of otherness, the very ground of morality, certainly casted in Flussers package of values. Should we expect strong changes in such basic topics as morality due to changes in cultural perceptual bias derived from digital mediation? In fact, in a recent lecture, Ive been in a debate with an important entrepreneur in Brazil, who asked me, in a certain slushy tone as to impress an audience of young students, if the answer for all these changes was not just love. To this, given that my speech was about technology and cognition, I could not but paraphrase Walter Benjamin: what matters is not if were still going to think of love the very question is whether the very invention of computers is not transforming the entire nature of love. And we are all still young enough to testify the new forms of love emerging in Digital Culture, as well probably testify new forms of ethics once all laws we know have not been conceived aware of networks and digital environments. Weve run full circle: weve seen how the changes brought by photography and cinema have lead to Benjamins pioneer insights on the relations among technology, perception and culture; weve also seen how Flusser very Continental styled philosophy embraced the Gutenberg Galaxy thesis and derived radical insights. Then weve seen how Merleau-Pontys phenomenology provides strong theorethical support to McLuhans (and Benjamins) assumptions about perception, culture and meaning, and also how a McLuhan inspired Anthropology of the Senses gives cultural scope to the French Phenomenologists theory of perception. From this, McLuhans media theory emerges as a kind of phenomenological anthropology of the technological man. So Paulo, February-April/2011

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