me | probes | managers | virtual | space
The Book of Probes.
NY: Ginko Press, 2003. Marshall McLuhan and David Carson. Eds. Eric McLuhan
and William Kuhns. Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 2003. The Book of Probes (2003) by Marhsall
McLuhan and David Carson, edited by Eric Mcluhan and William Kuhns, treats
McLuhan's writing as found poetry, and in the hands of Carson, the most
celebrated graphic designer of the last 20 years, pushes the visual/verbal
style of McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage to its limits. This
book exemplifies what McLuhan would call the "cool"
style – it explores rather than explains, it requires participation
and engagement, and it will only frustrate or annoy those who approach it
as detached observers wanting evidence and facts to support the many claims.
The McLuhan-Carson probes on "war" are worth considering as one small set of
examples from this book, particularly relevant to our current geopolitical environment.
The McLuhan text reads: "The unformulated message of an assembly of news items
from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. ALL WAR
IS CIVIL WAR." "ALL WAR IS CIVIL WAR" is presented as white text on
a predominantly black background, although there are blurry white lines –
light lines – running vertically across the page. Unpacking this probe,
unstuffing the compressed file, I see a variation on "the medium is the message"
– the unformulated message of an assembly of news items. Regardless of
what the news is saying, the effect is that all who follow the news are involved
in all the global conflict; they are all brought into our homes, and become
local. "All war is civil war" also cuts a different direction. If we think within
a national framework, the many assembled news items present various perspectives
on US military intervention and foreign policy. A unified point of view –
a national consensus – while not easily achieved before television and
global news coverage, is unlikely to be achieved when so many perspectives are
so readily available in our contemporary media environment. You are either with
us, or against us.
The Book of Probes consists of
almost 400 pages of word-image probes, the words having been selected by
the editors, the images having been designed or selected by Carson. The
probes are grouped into themes – it would be wrong to call them chapters
– "From Cosmic to Existential Man, "The Extensions of Man," "Media
Ecology," "Advertising," "Sense," and "The Laws of Media." The editors have
chosen to keep the sexist language of McLuhan's writing– a point I
will return to below. These probes are followed by short essays. "Poetics
on the Warpath" by Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns puts the McLuhan method
in context, "The Book of Probes," by W. Terrence Gordon (a McLuhan biographer)
functions like an "Afterword," reflecting on the interaction of words and
images, and "McLuhan and Saussure," also by Gordon, is a short comparative
essay that draws out an intellectual connection un-developed in the scholarly
books under review here. The Book of Probes ends with another collection
of McLuhan "percepts," this time presented black type on white paper rather
than enframed by Carson's images.
These kinds of books produced by scholars
in collaboration with designers are frequently criticized for being academic
sound bytes, pfluff, and/or incomprehensible. But if readers play a believing
game with this book, and accept its method and goals, it can provide a rich
springboard for thought and exploration. Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns
explain:Like myth or aphorism, each probe is an essay compressed into a few words. Decompression – in the form of sudden insight – calls for wit and agility and the patience to mull something over for hours, or days, or longer. A good probe is hard to exhaust. It does not surrender everything at first encounter any more than a line of poetry does. The best poets have the same hard-won gift for comprehension. Each of McLuhan's probes invites similar prolonged meditation and exploration. (413)
Another war probe (and there are about half
a dozen in the book) sets McLuhan's text – a modest font size, with much
less stark figure-ground separation – overtop a particularly blurry image
of a breakfast, originally published in Carson's Fotografiks. The text
says "The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage [...] there'd be no
war. Yes, the newsmen and the media men around the world are actually the fighters,
not the soldiers any more" (342-43). Such a claim is easy to dismiss, even offensive
in the context of the number of soldiers and civilians dying in conflicts around
the globe. Jean Beaudrillard has been sharply criticized for similar statements,
but McLuhan and Baudrillard seem to be trying to get us to understand the totality
of the war enterprise, the extent to which it is tied up in technological development,
educational enterprises, and of course media coverage. Such probes can be dismissed,
but they strike me as challenging us in rhetoric and composition to not only
think through the implications of what McLuhan has said, but also think through
the possibilities and complexities for a rhetoric of one-liners. As we engage
in public discourse, and encourage similar engagement for our students, should
we be writing and teaching slogans, the rhetoric of bumper stickers, and the
poetic/parodic insight alongside (or instead of!) the commentary essay or the
proposal argument? These are the questions McLuhan raises for me, and perhpas
others in rhetoric and composition.
The two Carson-supplied images I have mentioned
both rely on the "out-of-focus" style he is frequently associated with, and
being "out-of-focus" is an apt complement for probes that need tuning, adjusting,
contemplation, closure. The book as a whole frequently employs a sequence of
related images, sometimes photographs out of focus or subjects examined from
obscure angles, sometimes computer-generated images emphasizing line, shape,
contrast, sometimes collage: photos, clip art, computer generated images. The
typography varies widely in size, color, and font. Occasionally the images will
re-enforce the text in fairly conventional ways, but much more frequently Carson
employs the McLuhan percept that when "information is brushed against information,
the results are startling and effective" (Medium is the Massage 76-78).
The sexist language retained in this text
and in all of McLuhan's work remains jarring. If readers cannot read past, through,
or around it, the barrier is consistent with McLuhan's notion that language
is an organ of perception. If key formulations like "media as extensions of
man" exclude readers, if they cannot see themselves in that formulation, perhaps,
if willing, they can in McLuhanesque terms, sharpen the phallocentric cliché,
perhaps reverse the formulation, or as McLuhan himself would suggest –
amputate the obsolete extension. Re-working sexist languae is not, of course,
a simple game, and requires social, cultural, political and economic work to
shift our stratified environments towards more inclusive environments. The sexist
language reminds us that McLuhan was not speaking to 21st century scholars,
and his work needs re-working and extending if it is going to be of substantial
use to scholars in the near and distant future.
