Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Deep Dive (pt. 3b): Marshall McLuhan & the Medium-as-Message

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

This is the second half of our third installment of the Dialectics Deep Dive subseries. In this episode, Matthew Furlong joins Breht to discuss the work of Marshall McLuhan and media analysis more broadly; all through the lens of dialectical materialism. As always, there are tons of (hopefully interesting) detours that our conversations tend to take, so enjoy! Check out the first half of this episode here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/deep-dive-3a ------ Check out our first installment of "Dialectics Deep Dive" here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/dialectics Check out our second installment here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/spinoza Outro Music: "Resonant Body" by Maggie Rogers ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome to Rev Left Radio. This is the introduction to part 3B of our dialectics deep dive. I'm releasing this on the same day as I'm going to release Part 3A, which is on Spinoza and his ethics with regards to bodies and mind, etc. And this is going to be a continuation of that conversation. But in the second half, we discuss Marshall McLuhan and just get into a bunch of really fascinating deep philosophical territory. And as I say at the end of this episode, I've been talking a lot in recent episodes,

particularly around optimism related to climate change and whatnot, about this arising new consciousness, this new way of understanding the world and relating to ourselves, to others, and to the natural world that is part and parcel with the political, social, and economic transformations that we're trying to make happen politically through organization and agitation etc and this really is this whole series dialectics deep dive is the philosophical exploration of that new consciousness and it's not really new as i say in this episode it goes it was present in spiritual communities 2500 years ago it's been present in the mythologies and the understandings of indigenous cultures for millennia

It's always been present even in Western philosophy, quote unquote, even though it's been sort of hard to pull out and has been submerged by bourgeois metaphysics, which we talk about as well. But it's always present. But adopting it on a global level through these new forms of transformation in the era of climate crisis and our species' desperate need to evolve to the next stage of intelligent life, seeing it go global is what I mean by the new part of this new consciousness. that seems to be blossoming, but it is just a dialectical understanding of ourselves and our cosmos

and our natural world. It is this hyper-connective, relational understanding the individual by reference to the totality element of human life and existence. And I hope that becomes clear throughout this series, that this is the philosophical exploration of that particular point. And we do spiritual and political explorations of that point on different episodes of Rev.F as well. But this is part two of this bigger part three of our sub-series, and we'll be talking about a lot of fascinating stuff. So without further ado, without me continue rambling, here is part B of Mike discussion with Matthew Furlong, and this time we focus on the work of Marshall McLuhan. Enjoy.

Okay, so we covered a lot of Spinoza, and now we're going to move into the second half of this episode, which is going to be focused on Marshall McLuhan. So just for everybody who, I think a lot of people know the name maybe, or they know the phrase, the medium is the message, for example. for those who might not know more than that or even that in and of itself, can you just say a little bit about who McLuhan was, what the context of his thinking and practice was, and sort of how he fits into the context of our discussion more broadly, specifically in relation to a dialectical materialism? Okay, well, the first thing I want to say up front is that McLuhan is not a Marxist.

He makes some commentaries on Marx and Engels and sort of comments on how some of the of their depictions of the dialectic are limited in a way by mechanical industrial technology and a similar way to Spinoza being limited by the language of the mechanical philosophy. And so if you want to, the quickest way to find your way from McLuhan to Marxist discourse is through Volta Benjamin, who you mentioned to me you hope to have an episode about soon, which would be great. And his essay from 1936, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, another way that this title is translated is the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility. And where McLuhan and Benjamine conceptually have a basic rapprochement or sort of commonality is you can find it in this one sentence in Section 3 of the work of art and the age of mechanical reproduction,

where Benjamin says, during long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. And this is sort of the foundation of McLuhan's thinking. So McLuhan is a dialectician, very much so. He's very influenced by Aristotle, very influenced by Thomas Aquinas, who many people may probably don't know because of the way he's curated in Western culture is very, a very excellent dialectician, and also not a proponent of the idea of a sky god or another world or anything like that. It's too bad that that has been lost. And he's also influenced by

James Joyce in the way that he uses prose. He kind of electrifies prose by smashing words together to create new terms and stuff like that. And he's also influenced by a French mystic named Teilhard de Chardin, who sees technologies as extensions of the human body in a material way. And there's one other thinker that really influenced him named Harold Innes, who is much more of, he's not even really a liberal. He's more like a conservative in the sense of Edmund Burke, which is unfortunate because that stuff's just a non-starter. and he it's he in his work focuses on analyzing how different like ancient empires used different media different technological forms to communicate like documents and edicts and stuff like that so he looks at empires that use like stone tablets and and you know thick like big

you know big gigantic walls with messages carved into them and the sort of spatio temporal consequences that that has in terms of their exercise of power versus empires that use like papyrus or eventually paper or something like that, and what kind of spatio-temporal material capacities that gives them. So just about McLuhan, who he was, he was born at Edmonton, Alberta in July 21st, 1911. And I think his family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba early in his life. His father was an insurance salesman. I think his mother was. was an actress or a singer or a general sort of theater type person. He went to university and studied literature.

He was really into James Joyce and sort of brought and very into the dialects of Aquinas and Aristotle, and very interested in the concept of the formal cause and uses all these concepts to analyze our relationship to technology, but more importantly, our alienation. from technology. And his basic contention is that, first of all, we fundamentally misrecognize technologies, or what we would today call technologies, as other than ourselves.

When, in fact, they are direct material, corporeal, spatial, temporal directions of ourselves. And there are ways of getting around in the world, of communicating with each other, and like triangulating human existence. However, he sees within this sort of general scheme, he sees a problem which is coming to plague and which is now deeply plaguing societies like ours, which is that through a series of developments in the form of, first of all, alphabetic writing emerging out of ideogrammatic writing

like hybrid glyphs. Then following on that, the emergence of movable type in the form of the Gutenberg Press, which then becomes the sort of template for the basic logic of industrial technological production. He sees these effects like compounding each other and creating greater and greater separation. So this was his basic argumentation and what he brought to the public largely in the, really in the 1960s. That's when he really sort of blew up. Unfortunately, his message wasn't really heard, and he was almost sort of just only paradise and never really understood. And the first encounter I had with him was when I was a kid, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is sort of the ideological, super structural engine of Canadian identity at the behest of the Canadian Settler State,

had these little, you know, two-minute vignettes of different events or figures that are important for Canada. So they had one where it's like, oh, the invention of the name Canada for this country. And it's just sort of this relatively friendly interaction between the settlers and the indigenous where they just, you know, how funny that we just misinterpreted their word for village, which is Canada, and we think they mean the whole land. And aren't we just a bunch of silly bumblers and ha, ha, ha, ha. McLuhan gets one of those and he is celebrated for coining the expression, the medium as the message. I've got his Wikipedia expression, or his Wikipedia page open here, and it says, but Kluen coined the expression, the medium is the message, which is not really true. And the vignette actually has him coming up with this on the fly in the context of the classroom discussion.

Like all of a sudden a light bulb goes on and he's like, of course, Eureka. When in fact, no, he developed this notion out of the work of Haroldiness and other people over a long period of time. But the medium is the message is the sort of central point of his whole thing. philosophy. And what he's really saying by that is that whenever we develop a new technology, we fail to recognize that it necessarily imposes its own demands on us. And we, whether we recognize it or not, and we primarily don't recognize it because we end up with this weird illusion where we think that these things just existed in and of themselves and we happen discover them instead of them growing out of us, we don't see that they're doing things to us.

So just like take for example, you know, a pretty narrow sort of example. Like I think this was on your episode with Faith in Capital maybe where you talked about how nauseating the interaction is between people on Twitter. Yeah. For example. But what the hell can we expect? Because Twitter is sort of a reformulation of the telegraph. And the telegraph is only good for delivering.

the most clipped messages and just meant to deliver information in a very cursory way. And initially, when Twitter came out, that really seemed like that that was the purpose they were trying to put it to, like sharing articles, spreading information as fast as possible, and all that sort of stuff. But over the years, what's happened? People have tried to turn it into a medium for having complex discussions about very difficult things. But what ends up happening?

People take these hard sides, you know, very complex positions and events and realities get reduced to just like catchphrases, people calling each other trots and tankies and like, this is totally incoherent, totally useless and worse than useless, destructive way of interaction. But it's not happening because people are jerks, although there are certainly jerks on Twitter. It's happening because the medium is the message. And then in the context of that medium, McLuhan will say the audience is the content, right? And we are not, we are not just the users of these things.

They are expressing their characteristics through us. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And we don't see it. He says at first, when a new technology arises, it may be irritating to us, but eventually, like, the brain just sort of shuts off the nerve endings or whatever that are receiving. They just start to ignore it.

And so consequently, we get all of these effects compounding on us through these extensions of ourselves that we experience as really alien to ourselves when they're really not. And like this creates a whole new layer of problems for freedom and for social solidarity and for the psyche and for all of these things. And so I'd just like to read a little bit from some of his famous work, his most famous work, Understanding Media. He wrote a number of works, so he wrote the mechanical bride in 1951, where he's really, he's very angrily railing against the outcomes of industrial civilization, the Gutenberg Galaxy from 1962, Understanding Media from 1964, the medium is the massage, she loves puns from 1967, war and peace in the global village from 1968, from cliche to archetype, 1970, and the global village from 1989, and then there are other collections that that, that have come out. There's one that he co-authored with his son and some other people called media and formal cause, which is really fascinating. And he analyzes long passages from like Engels as dialectics of nature and stuff like that and sort of points out where he angles and Marx as well and some of Marx's ratings are sort of inadvertently falling prey to

sort of like mechanistic tropes for explaining phenomena that are better explained maybe through other logics and stuff like that. So we'll just start with just reading a bit from the introduction. He says, this is the introduction to understanding media. After 3,000 years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages, we had extended our body in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology,

and he doesn't mean electronic, he means electric. He's very interested in electric instantanity and simultaneity at the speed of that. After more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we've approached the final phase of the extensions of man, the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. So he's talking about, I mean, he sort of anticipates the modern Internet in a way, which, you know, unfortunately, because he's not really a Marxist analyst, he didn't see how capital is going to distort and make that into a grotesque thing

instead of something that's beautiful and that brings humanity together. But nonetheless, he's saying that we, Western civilization has gotten itself into this position of exploding, expanding, separating, undermining the unity that we naturally enjoy with nature, which is alienating us from other kinds of civilizations on the earth. And we are going to run into some serious problems. And in fact, he says, as in 1964, we are already in serious trouble. And we need to come to an awareness of this. We need to become conscious of these phenomena, these extensions of ourselves,

as extensions of ourselves, and not just other things that either showed up or that we invented out of nowhere. really their extensions of our body. He says, in the first chapter, the medium is the message. He says, in a culture like ours long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things of a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium, that is, of any extension of ourselves, results from the new scale.

that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology. So, for instance, I thought about this passage a lot when I was watching, like, live streams of the Tarrier Square uprisings in Egypt in 2011 or whenever that was. And being like, in a very real way, my eyes are materially on the scene for this, even taking into account the delays and transmitting it and all that kind of stuff. Thus, with automation, for example, he continues, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs. It is true.

That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that are preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. And again, you know, a little bit optimistic about how capital is involved in all this. He said many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine but what one did with the machine that was its meaning or its message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves,

it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralized in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist and superficial in its patterning of human relationship. So, for example, you look at like a modern assembly line for automobiles, these kind of robots show up and sort of put it all together at once, intervening from all sides, whereas the classical

idea of an assembly line is sort of one, and again, I refer to Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times, which is hilariously includes the whole scene with an assembly line. It says this moment and then this moment and then this moment and this, and just, add and add and add and add in a sequence, and then the thing is done. What are you saying is that in the age of electricity, when you can start to automate things, you start to see commodities products being produced as though it's almost like this simultaneous generation. And that is going to, that kind of simultaneity, that velocity, that instantaneous presence

is going to change the consciousness of human beings wherever it goes. So you're with me so far on that? Is there any questions about that? No, I'm good. Okay. Interesting. So he says basically, and this is very close to what Engels is talking about and what Mao is talking about, these technologies, which are actually, you know,

they start off much earlier than modern mechanistic or the mechanical philosophy or industrial technology. And he locates the beginning of all this with the development of alphabetic writing. They have created a world in which everything depends on separating. a private point of view, non-connectedness to other things, other people, the world. And he says this has had its benefits in the sense that, well, we're able to produce things industrially, and that has its bad outcomes, but it has its good outcomes as well. But also it's enabled us to think about things analytically from a standpoint of a certain

degree of separation, which can actually help to be able to stand back and analyze things and take things apart. And there are good things about that. But we've also ended up, it's become so totalizing that now that this new electric speed in simultaneous and instantanity is emerging, the people that are raised, according to both these different modes, for one thing, they're going to clash with each other. And so I think, for example, of, you know, the last, since Occupy happened or whatever, you see these protests, and they're very diversified. in the sort of demands that they're making, the causes that they're representing and all this kind of stuff. And then you get like bourgeois liberal parliamentarians. They're like, oh, no, you really need to boil that down to like one or two points. So we can run that in an efficacious

manner through the machinery of parliament and the committees and all that. This sort of unified diversity of political messages and demands, that's just too inconvenient. It's too messy. It doesn't make any sense. It's not coherent. This is where McLuhan would say, he would jump in and he would say, well, this is because you still inhabit the mechanical world. But these protesters who understand the interconnectedness of all these problems, the unity of all these problems, the simultaneity of all these problems, and the necessity of solving them all at once, they're electric. And in a material way, you're blocked from seeing what they see. And that is, in addition to class interests, political attitudes and all that, that's another division that we need to recognize and understand so that we can overcome it. So he says, this is the problem that we found ourselves in.

He says, such economists as Robert Theobald, W. W. Rostow and John Kenneth Galbrae's have been explaining for years how it is that classical economics cannot explain change or growth. And the paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization. So let's think back to the mechanical philosophy and what makes it work. The principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series.

Yet, as David Hume showed in the 18th century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows from another thing accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity that ended sequence by making things instant. With instant speed, the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg's idea for getting more eggs. Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound, just as sound ends, is an apt instance of that great pattern of being

that reveals new and opposite forms, just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. Mechanization was never so vividly fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies, the moment that translated us beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation. The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from linear connections to configurations. And here I think mostly, largely of Soviet cinema, particularly montage and particularly the technique of montage, above all in the work of Ziga Vertov.

It is the transition that produced the now quite correct observation. If it works, it's obsolete. When electric speed further takes over from mechanical movie sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media become loud and clear. We return to the inclusive form of the icon. And so he's saying that's really where we're going back. And until we become aware of this sort of this transformation that's happening in our bodies and in our consciousness, we're going to be taken over by it, taken surprise by it, and all forms of social and individual violence can potentially grow out of that as though, you know, that aspect of us or of society

that still wants things to be mechanical, reducible to just very simple things, comes into conflict with those of us, those aspects of society that understand the interconnectedness of things. And he says, in fact, what we're going to see in the 20th or the rest of the 20th and the 21st centuries is that after centuries of denigrating indigenous cultures, the cultures of Africa, black culture in America is primitive and backwards. white America, white settler culture is going to find out that it's the backwards one

and that it's the odd man out and that those who understand the interconnectedness of the whole, they're the ones who are not backwards. Wow. Amazing. I mean, that foresight is beyond impressive specifically given the time. He wasn't talking in like post-20 first century. He was talking in the middle and later parts of the 20th century and this is just becoming more and more true as time marches on. And so he divides between literate,

and tribal cultures, this is the terminology he uses, but he's like, I'm saying tribal is good and that literate is now turning out to be toxic. And if we need to, if we're going to save ourselves, we need to retribalize, not in the sense of like, you know, in mainstream political discourse, like people talk about tribalism. What he's saying is that we need to return to the archaic. We need to rediscover that stuff and relax the use of our eyes. And, you know, as Aristotle says the sense of sight is the sense of distinction that is the sense of separateness in a way, whereas touch and smell and taste and hearing are not based in separateness like that.

Sight is almost like the odd man out in the terms of senses. And mechanical, industrial, boreswa, metaphysical society emphasizes sight and separateness above all else. And it separates us from being able to feel rhythms and vibes and understand social dynamics happening. As McLuhan says, you know, like, from this standpoint, you fail to remember that a lot of your sense of hearing actually comes through your skin all over your body. You, like the, or another way to put it is that he's trying to show us that in and of itself, the human being is inherently naturally synesthesia to some extent or other in each individual,

but the default mode that we should return to understanding is that of a certain kind of natural synesthesia. So interesting. So, yeah, anyway, that's basically who he is and what he's, where he's coming from, and the kinds of things that he's thinking about. And in understanding media, it's a very interesting way he divides the workup, which is that there's a first, a part one, and in part one, he lays out basic concepts that he's dealing with. So the medium is the message is chapter one, media hot and cold is chapter two, three, chapter three is reversal of the overheated medium, which is very important for us right now. Chapter 4 is called

The Gadget Lover, Narcissus as Narcosis. And that's where he's talking about that effect whereby we mistakenly perceive technological artifacts, technological apparatuses as something other than us. And in modern culture, we talk about narcissism as an extreme self-absorption. But in the actual Narcissus myth, Narcissus is mystified by his reflection because he doesn't recognize that it's him. He thinks it's like this weird magical, mysterious other down in the water. And that's how he ends up staying there until he dies. He's just transfixed by this, and he doesn't know it's just him.

And this is what McLuhan means by the narcissist effect. He's saying, we become as narcissists when we misrecognized technologies as something other than us, when we start to be like, oh, hey, because computers can do all the calculations that humans can do except way better, maybe humans are really just like computers. When, in fact, the term computer came from a job type of human beings that would individually and groups do computations to help with stuff like navigational charts or to do punch card systems to help mechanical loons. It was a human job, a human role. And then once we started to mechanize computation with like punch cards and the Charles, what is it, the difference engine and all that stuff. And then you get like touring machines and all that, the relationship reverses.

And because we failed to realize that we've offshored the human job of computation to these mechanisms that we've deter, these machines that we've determined to act in a certain way, and we fail to recognize that that's an offshoot of us, we then turn around and be like, you know, you get, you get forms of thinking that are like, we've discovered that human beings are really just computers. Exactly. And that's where McLuhan is like, dude, you're just narc out. Like, you're just, you've got to get off the opium and look around. maybe do a little meditation and actually think about this stuff and learn some history because that is not something that's just showed up like a mountain range. It's not like that one. Number five is hybrid energy.

Les liaisons dangerous liaison. So he's, I think, in that chapter, he's talking about how the electric, speeding up mechanical processes to electric speed in the form primarily of cinema creates this sort of explosive reaction where we now live in cultures of image, in cultures of spectacle, as Gita Borden, for example, talks about. And this is where he sort of comments on Marx and Engels, and he's like, man, if they had only known the deep effects of cinematic images and then eventually television images and television broadcasting on the human psyche

through the nervous system, through the skin, through the eyes, through our whole bodies, they would have seen how friggin' tough it's going to be to foment revolution in the industrialized countries, in the central countries, because we are so narked out. We are so jacked up and we are so just living inside this prism, this crystal of images, this of phantasms in a way. And Gutari comments on this, I can't remember what text, but I'll dig it up for next time. He talks about this too, and he's like, we are in. deep trouble. If we don't understand why revolution did not happen in the more advanced

like industrialized Western European countries after or around the same time as the Russian revolution like Lenin and everyone else was hoping for, it's because we still haven't figured out what we've done to ourselves. We haven't figured out that being able to beam images and sounds and sights in a coherent package of lifestyles of the rich and famous in a way that's curated to seem that you can empathize with it and hey they're just like us and you know you bombard people with that every goddamn day of their lives um if you don't see what that does like we'll never we're never going to get ourselves out of trouble and we're never going to be able to help ourselves or anybody or support anything we're going to be trapped um living in this world

of like Rambo movies and reality TV and network news, like possibly worst of all. And also a lot of stuff on YouTube and all that kind of stuff. We are surrounded by phantasms, these audio-visual tactile phantasms that become possible when mechanical technology in the form of film projectors and all that meets with electric speed and the possibility of reversing the separateness.

You know, you think about the old zoetrobes, right, where you spin it and you see like a, a horse. It's all these separate images of a horse when you speed up the zoetrope fast enough that appears to be running. He's like, this is how through mechanism, by combining it with electricity, we can overcome the mechanical illusion and return to the organic and the fluid and the interrelated and the growing and the changing. And that's sort of like, that's what he means by hybrid energy because it takes these two media paradigms, the mechanical and the electric and smashes them together. And then he has

a chapter called media as translators. And then chapter seven in part one is called challenge and collapse, the nemesis of creativity. And basically that's about all of the sort of crises we're going to run into through these weird hybrids, these reversals of media forms, the exhaustion of media forms, the emergence of new ones on what they do to our bodies in our minds. And then the second part is 25 chapters that are sort of like case studies of different kinds of media formation. So he has the spoken word. the written word, roads and paper routes, numbers, as statistics, clothing, housing, money, clocks, print, comics, the printed word, wheel, bicycle, and airplane, the photograph,

the press, like the news, news press, motor cars, ads, games, the telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the phonograph, movies, radio, television, weapons, and automation. And he goes through and just analyzes all of these things and has. how they've come out of us and what they've done to us. So he's like clothing is an extension of the skin, the bullet is an extension of the tooth, the wheel is an extension of the foot, and electric media in general are an extension of our nervous system.

And we need to start thinking about our bodies in this expanded way, whereby things that we would not normally include in the idea of our bodies to reverse back to Spinoza, we had to start doing that, or otherwise we'll be trapped forever, basically. Yeah, I would love to hear his updated thoughts on something like smartphones and how they become extensions of us and social media and the internet today because it's incredibly prescient and it's these things are the logical result of what somebody like McLuhan saw coming. Absolutely. And in an interview, he expressed regret that he's not going to live to see what's probably going to happen in the next 50, 60, 70 years after him because he says that on the one hand, this age that we're going into is going to be an age of extreme trauma, extreme pain, extreme disorientation as we come to grips with all this

in all of its different ramifications. But he says at the same time, I remain hopeful that we'll be able to come through this and come into a world of mutuality and reciprocity and equality and fairness. Yeah. Well, I share that hope. And yeah, it's horrifying that we are born and have to live through this incredible period of time. But there is that sliver of hope that this is a great transformation leading or possibly the trajectory of leading towards something better is open to us. And our actions now and in the coming decades are going to dictate which way the thing falls, you know, in what direction it heads in. But there is a very real possibility.

and I think about this sometimes in my more optimistic moments that although we're looking down the barrel of a very scary several decades, that what we're actually living through is the very beginning of the greatest transformation in human history since the agricultural revolution. And that's sort of stunning. And it's going to happen on timescales that those earlier revolutions, industrial, agricultural, etc., those happened over centuries. This is going to happen in a very condensed rate. And I think that is also going to add to the intensity through which. which we experience it. Yeah, and, you know, I was thinking about this last night as I was trying to fall asleep,

which is that it's, I think it's sort of taken to be kind of commonplace, common knowledge that as you age, time seems to move faster. And but McLuhan says, well, you know, there's that aspect of it too, but the media formations, technological formations also objectively concretely transformed space and time. So it's, and with electricity, and for us, like in the context of capitalism, which is the medium itself of acceleration, like there is no, there is no accelerationism other than capitalists, right? Like when I see these radlibs, these so-stems, these whatever, these liberals on the internet being like, well, you don't want to vote for Joe Biden, and that's accelerationism. Like, bro, it's like, like Martin Sheen says, an apocalypse now, like, you know, charging a guy with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. Yeah.

Right? To call someone an accelerationist for not wanting to support the Democrats, like the Democratic Party and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, to call that person an accelerationist, that is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. That's absolutely absurd. But back to the point. It's myopic. We're all accelerationists now, whether we want to be or not. We're in the acceleration. Capitalism is the ultimate medium of acceleration. It necessarily accelerates. That's the meaning of MCM prime. And that's why two episodes, so I recommend that if young people, people want to try to get into Das Kapital, just get to chapter four where he lays out the logic of MCM Prime, and then you're going to be like, oh, no, you're just going to be like this, it's necessarily a speed up. And so, but time and space, like time objectively is speeding up. You know, there's that famous Lenin quote, right? Like, there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. And the technological arrangement we're under now versus is what, you know, formed Lenin's frame of mind.

Like, it's going to guarantee that that's the case. And, but I, you know, and I think I share with you this optimism, not like Barack Obama's optimism. Yeah. The audacity of hope. Yeah, that's, I mean, the Council of Despair is what it should be called. Exactly. But sort of, well, I've always been for a long, I guess almost always, I've been a really big fan

of the poet Dante. the Italian poet Dante from the Middle Ages. And many people don't know that the divine comedy is in fact not an account of what's going to happen to you after you die. It's a philosophical psychology depicting three sort of mental or psychic states, one of chaos and cacophony, one of sort of a reduction to simplicity that goes along with rebuilding yourself after you've been through serious trauma of getting yourself back together. and then this psychic state of interconnectedness and harmony. And these are the subject matters of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy.

So Inferno, the Hell, purgatory, and Paradise. So, for example, in modern pop culture, the best sort of depiction of what the psychological state or process that Dante is talking about when he's talking about being in hell, that's exemplified in spades by Walter White and Breaking Bad because Walter is, I mean, he's a horrible piece of crap, but he's in a state of being completely alienated from himself in the sense that he's constantly telling himself this, I'm doing it for my family, I'm doing it from, I have no people that believe that, you know, but in reality he's doing it for himself, but he can't connect with himself about that so he exists in this chaotic existence where there's no unity, there's no coherence, it's just constant ducking and change, ducking in weaving and trying to avoid coming to the ultimate conclusion, which is that if you're being honest with yourself, you're doing this for yourself. Yeah, his own ego needs, his own narcissism.

Exactly. So, like, if you were actually to admit that you would be actually less evil than you are right now where you're in denial about it. But anyway, that's just a side note about Dante and Walter White. That's a great idea. Dante's conception of hope is the. unbreakable connection of our mind, our psyche to the good that we know. And that's an optimism that I can work with, which is that whatever happens,

I'm not willing to entertain like dumerism, nihilism, anything like that, because even if we've already lost, I can't break that connection to the good that I know. I see that good in the form of your children, you know, the children of my friends, I have students now from 10 years ago who have children. It's really all about the future. And regardless of whether we're defeated or we die before whatever happens, I don't think we have a right to give up on that kind of optimism. Now, if it's the kind of like, it'll be okay and we'll elect someone and they'll turn it around.

Like maybe once AOC gets in or next time Bernie will get elected and that's not optimism. That's hopelessness. That's denialism. That's absolute denialism. And I think, yeah, McLuhan holds that same optimism. And it's realistic. He's like, this is going to be horrible. But what other choice do we have?

We have no, if you're rational, like Spinoza would say, if you're rational, you're by definition in contact with necessity. And you will be guided by true necessity. And, you know, all the kind of dumerism, they're really like, just sort of like, let go and just, engage in this private enjoyment while it all goes down. I mean, that's not rational at all. It's absurd. Absolutely. All right. So let's go ahead and move the conversation of Ford a little bit. And you've referenced hot and cool and mechanical and electric, but I want to get into these

dualities. And if you want to up top sort of reframe or reiterate, rather, McLuhan's general concept of media just to make sure that everybody's got it, and then just go into these dualities specifically hot and cool and then that of mechanical and electric. Okay. Um, Well, in general, again, what he means by media or medium, when he's dealing with them individually, it's a medium. It's generally what we mean today by technology. That's important to note that, I mean, technology became a really intense subject to study. I mean, definitely it's there for Marx, but just getting into analyzing the concept of technology as such is a relatively recent thing, even after Marks. And what people now call technologies or a technology, before all that, it would be called like a technet or in the plural techni.

These are Greek words. And what tech name means is it can mean art, can mean craft, art in the sense of like how like metal working is an art or brewing as an art or something like that as opposed to like art that you go to look at like a painting. or that's like, in Greek, that's like poesis or something like that. And these are, these technae, tecna, these media, these extensions of ourselves, are constructions that we build up to extend various aspects of our bodies and our minds, using materials that we find, quote, unquote, outside ourselves that have developed historically, basically as like civilizations have developed historically. And so there's always, wherever there's a civilization or even,

civilization generally refers to like settled settled society or non-settled societies as well there are technological there are media apparatuses that they inhabit as well so like nomadic peoples they move around the territory that they travel through during the cycle of their year or whatever there are sort of technologies that they have that accompany that and again the key thing for media is that they come about out of us and we end up having this impression that they're not out of us

and they're not us, that they're just something else. And that explains like, you know, you get like Wired magazine, all these tech magazines, you know, in the last 15 years just talking tech, tech, tech, tech, and they sort of intensify the impression that these things are something other than us. Like the way that people are enticed, in sight, to fetishize smartphones and stuff like that. By seeing it, like seeing them at these alien artifacts that just sort of descended from on high and aren't they so amazing, that's what he's talking about.

It's a failure to recognize that this is not just an extension of various functions of our body. So like through the phone, what do you do? It's an extension of the voice. It is an extension of the air. All this kind of stuff. But it's also the production of all this kind of labor that, involves millions of people, and that gets covered up as well.

And that leads to all sorts of problems. I think one area really quickly, bouncing off that, one area that I see this heightened in is the artificial intelligence, the discussions around artificial intelligence. There's very much, I've come to sense like this fear and this anxiety bubbling up around the worries and the fears surrounding artificial intelligence is. sort of this slightly sublimated or off-kilter fear and anxiety of humanity itself, but it's not clearly seen it. It's so obvious that AI is seen by a lot of these people that obsess over it as something

fundamentally separate from us, but it hides like this more subconscious fear of like humanity itself by displacing it as if it's something separate. Does that make any sense at all? Absolutely. I mean, yeah. I mean, this is what the two. 2004 to 8 or whatever was Battlestar Galactica is all about. I don't know if you've ever seen that one.

I love it. But they, you know, the human characters, they build this race of serve all robots to serve their needs and make them artificially intelligent. And consequently, the robots called Sylons, they eventually have enough and they wage war against the humans. And then they disappear for 50 years. And then when they come back, spoilers,

they've managed to develop their own technologies so that they literally have bodies that at every level, like down to the chemical, down to the subatomic, well, that's necessarily the case, I guess. At the chemical level, at the metabolic level, like all the stuff they're basically indistinguishable from humans and the humans totally freak out.

And they're like, we have to deny that you're really conscious because if we accept that you're really conscious, then we may, We made you. So you have to be fake. And if we accept that you're real, then maybe we're fake. And it gets into all this anxiety and confusion. And, yeah, like you see this a lot.

And sometimes you see the other side of it where it's like, I hope this is true so I can give up being responsible for anything. I can just let go and just enjoy my mental representation, this illusory trip that I'm on and not think about my connection to anyone. else because, hey, it's just me in here because I'm not real because this artificially intelligent thing came along and that can't be real because we made it. Or someone like Spinoza would say, if it can do the things that you do and express the feelings that you have, you can have and share experiences with you, then what difference does it make? What's the

problem? Just treat them like human beings. There's no reason to be anxiety. We all come from the same place and we're all going to go to the same place. It doesn't matter that you were an intermediate step in their arrival of this. Exactly. Exactly. But you see all those anxieties. And like you see it with automation. Like it's like automation itself. This is just bourgeois ideology, this propaganda.

Automation itself is coming to assert itself and put us out of jobs. Yeah. Like there's no class conflict. It's not going to do with that. It's not about class war. It's about the march of the techney. Like it's just I, you know, I'm technology and I'm here and I deserve a play. It's just insane.

It's totally alienated. And it's highly super. It's like it's like projecting animal spirits like daycard or something. Animal spirits and these machines and it's just completely failing to understand how anything works. Yeah, automation is seen as a process that's sort of developing above and beyond our control or anything when it's actually very much, it's being weaponized as a tool of class society, but that's completely obscured by this envisioning of it as a separate sort of process

that's going to happen no matter what. And then it's used, you know, after that, to discipline labor and to fear monger. If you ask for a higher wage, you're going to be automated. And it's nothing we can really do about it. It's just the way things work, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, it just goes to show how the quote unquote enlightenment concept of quote unquote progress in quote unquote history, far from being this wonderful, glorious thing is really actually very insidious, right? Whereas if you point that out in liberal society or liberal circles are like, oh, what, you're anti-progress. you like things to go backwards, you don't want things to get better.

Like, you just hear all this nonsense because through bourgeois metaphysics and societies of separateness, they can only imagine like, okay, well, if you don't like this thing, you don't agree with this, you must agree with its absolute direct opposite. If you don't want to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, you must want to vote for Donald Trump. If you think that thing is bad, you must think this thing is good. Exactly. And, like, there's hardly a more automated process than that kind of thing. Exactly.

You know. Well said. So hot and cool, the division or the distinction between hot and cool basically is his sort of fundamental, very basic analytical grid for starting to investigate the effects that different media formations have on them, on us rather. So he says, the rise of the waltz, he always, he's very, he's got an interesting style. He just has all these references and throws them in. The rise of the waltz, explains Kurt Sachs in the world history of the dance, quote, was a result of that longing for truth, simplicity, closeness to nature, and primitivism,

which the last two-thirds of the 18th century fulfilled, end quote. In the century of jazz, we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles. So in other words, I guess what he's trying to say is that instead of these dance, forms these sort of cultural expressions that revolve around the politics of the court, the waltz revolves around a certain kind of like mathematicization of movement in music. So the one, two, three, one, two, three.

And you move in conjunction with that. And his argument is, or the sax's argument is, is that this was actually almost like a revolutionary, a revolution in, in choreography at the time, whereas we would probably, I grew up thinking, well, that's nothing more boring and lame than waltz. There is a basic principle, McLuhan says, that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. So it's too bad he's not around to comment on high definition television.

Or ultra high definition. Ultra high definition, words. Everything's like it looks fake now. It's weird. A photograph is visually high definition. A cartoon is low definition simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, one of low definition, because the air is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.

on the other hand hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience so think back again we were talking about rush limba on the radio earlier he's just there what's he doing he's blasting you just like blah blah blah blah blah and you're just there you're driving in your car and he's speaking to you and people through the medium of radio they feel like they develop this individual relationship with rush um and if it were the band maybe that wouldn't be so bad but but i mean like the the the the the connection of like that violence that he provokes it's through this um uh mcleum would say it's at least partly through the the nature of radio as hot which is to say you don't have to do any interpretive work it just bombards you with this messaging and you're just there listening to it and like the environment of talk radio in america and in Canada i mean it just people get enveloped in this stuff and spend their commutes in it um just being told what's going on and they're just like yeah okay because they're being it's so. overwhelming the medium itself, the way that it's delivered, that it's persuasive just at the sort of level

of your nerve endings, right? On the other hand, hot media are therefore low in participation and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone. A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammatic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, so when it was taken out of medieval illuminated manuscripts or letters were embroiled in the art itself, right?

And they become just sort of these black marks on a white page eventually. So the alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation

with its impersonal empire over many lives. The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the 16th century. The heavy and unwieldy media, such as stone, are time binders. Used for writing, they are very cool indeed and serve to unify the ages, whereas paper

a hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally, both in political and in entertainment empires. And so he goes on talking about how these things operate, and TV is a very interesting one. And you'd think that if he called cinema a hot medium, he would also call TV a hot medium. But it's really important to remember that at the time that he's writing about this, TV is in its infancy. And, you know, it's in its infancy. And, you know, If you think back, you know, like honeymooners or, you know, the NBC News from 1958 or whatever, those are pretty low definition images and your brain does have to do work. It has to participate in the construction of the image to make it recognizable to you as a representation of what is actually there.

Same thing with cartooning, right, and like really minimalist styles of cartooning. Your mind, your brain fills in the gaps and then, you know, like think about Charles Schulz's peanuts like Charlie Brown and that. I mean, you do have to do a little bit of work to be like, oh, yeah, that's a human figure or a snoopy. You got to do a little bit of work to be like, oh, yeah, that's a dog. And so he says that interestingly, even though cinema, and I think he's thinking primarily of before talkies came along, before Sam was introduced in the movies, cinema is primarily visual because in the silent movies, they had to put up flashcards between different scenes if they needed to indicate a piece of dialogue or something like that.

And it's, cinema is much more high, like film is much higher definition at the time, where it was much more high definition at the time than TV images were. So it's more explosive. And I think about the first film that was shown publicly, I think in Paris, which was, it was like 1899 or something, of a train station coming into a, sorry, a train coming into a train station. and the camera person set up their camera sort of in front and sort of kind of underneath, like looking up at the train from above.

And when this was screened in Paris, the whole audience freaked out and people were like throwing themselves under their stuff because they were afraid they were going to get run over. It was going to come through the screen and get them. And the thing is, it's like, yeah, I mean, that says something a lot about the sociality of the human brain, the historicality of the human brain.

These brains were presented with something, which in any other situation, move, you're going to get turned into a fruit roll-up, you know? And so, whereas the, the effect of media of television, he says, is totally different. And unlike movies, TV developed in the context of a capitalist, industrialist, advertising, and an environment of commerce. And it's, it goes constantly. It isn't something where you go with a group of people. I mean, today, now you have streaming services and, you know, you can go to a bar and watch your favorite show with all your friends every week or something like that, right? And it's become more cinematic in that sense.

But in the time of TV's birth, it was fully integrated into the industrial, you know, the political economic strategies of really like really high industrialist, capitalist political economy. And the low definition nature of the images, McLuhan says, makes TV more even of a tactile medium than a visual medium because your brain is trying to work to fill in all the textures, all the things that are really tactile even in sight. Like when you look at something and see its texture, you already have a sense of what it will feel like when you put your fingers on. on it, right? And he says, because of that TV is much more high involvement, and it's much more prone to making people get super knocked out and becoming just sort of like drooling zombies who don't move and they don't think and they get sucked into this world of fantasy. And, you know, even today with more high definition TV, like when you watch, like I rarely

ever watch TV, when I go visit my parents that will be on or whatever, and you, when you're not around it, you forget that it really. is a torrent of all these messages, all these messages that are sort of created by lies of omission and like all this kind of stuff. But just the sort of pace of it, the nature of it, the way that the producers of it all know how to configure it and curate it to get you to think what they want, it still has a lot of the same effects because, you know, you end up sitting there, you can be vaged out for like four hours with frigging MSNBC on the go. And that's just poisoning your mind. Yeah, exactly.

And it's making you feel certain ways because this is McLuhan's argument, because it's cool and your brain has to do more work to fill out the image that's being projected, you get necessarily more involved and you're more prone to feeling sympathetic to the points of view that are being presented. And so you're subject to a line of like intellectual attack that runs beneath the radar of like verbal argumentation. incredibly interesting particularly when you think that like a lot of TV especially like you know probably older folks I think there is a move away from classical cable television amongst younger people but there's like this sense of putting the TV on in the background and often you know putting it on to a 24 hour cable news network is very sort of sufficient for that being background noise but you're picking up these these chunks and these snippets and you are being affected emotionally even though oftentimes you're not conscious that that's happening Well, yeah, and a great example. I mean, it's not great. It's horrible. I remember right after September 11th happened. And for some reason, I happened to end up in a room in a space where CNN was playing.

And they had a panel on it. And this is going to sound like it's set up to a shitty joke. But they had a priest, a rabbi, and an imam. So a priest, the rabbi, and imam walking to a horrible corporate news network. And they were like, obviously the underlying point, point of this was to beat the war drum and get America and Canada, for that matter, get Western, you know, these imperialist countries ready to go to war. Not that we haven't already always been at war, but for this new project. And on the surface of it, at the level of

verbal argumentation of verbal content, it almost seems innocent. It's like, well, you know, we need to get your perspectives on this, right? And what do you think about this? And what are we going to do and what's the appropriate response, you know, and, you know, really needling the Imam especially, right? It really just, oh, really gross. And at the same time, on the background screens, they're playing low resolution image, video footage of people throwing themselves to their deaths out of the World Trade Center to avoid death by suffocation or fire or whatever. Just repeating, on repeat, on repeat, in the background without any sound, just repeating and repeating and repeating. And finally, the rabbi turned around and he said, can you please stop playing

those images? And the anchor was obviously playing innocent, not playing dumb. I mean, like, what do you mean? Like, don't you want the people to see the truth? As if this patchy, grainy footage of this poor person falling to their death is synonymous with the truth. And the rabbi said, I know what you're doing. You're trying to rile people up with this, you know, this horrible, this is horrible. We know it's horrible. But you're playing this image to undercut our discourse between me and my two colleagues here with what we want to say, which is that we shouldn't go to war. Right. And no matter what we say, what people are going to be left with is that image because it's so visceral and because of, you know, and McLuhan would hair jump in and

say, yes, and because it's so grainy and low definition, they're doing more work to figure out what they're seeing with that than they are paying attention to what is being said. god damn right that's so dark too it's super dark right and and like even the anchor you knew that she knew and she knew that the rabbi knew that she knew and the other two guys they they knew and it was just like propaganda doesn't have to be delivered through verbal content right like McLuhan talks about how the radio was used in propaganda and like Nazi Germany and stuff like when you're constantly being like just like bombarded with like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah with all this horrible stuff, like, you know, enraging you, making you anxious.

And this is kind of what he says. Like, it's really about, in many ways, ratcheting up and down people's anxiety levels so that when the moment of war actually breaks out, people feel a kind of relief and they're more prone to going for it because this condition of being kept in constant manipulation of your feelings at the level of like electrical bombardment on your senses is so unbearable that you'd almost rather just go start killing. people yeah there's like a and i mean to go back to spinoza's parallelism right to you see how there's this line of bodily of motions and transformations and effects going along with what you're

thinking and like how you're perceiving things and what you're willing to do and where you're willing to go and what decisions you're willing to make yeah in that hot and heavy time after after 9-11 we forget also the anthrax scare which we still have no idea who was really behind that or what happened but it was a especially for younger folks who might have been too young or not even born yet when it was happening, an incredibly heady time where America as a collective psychological unit went psychotic. It was incredible. I remember the days after, and it was absolutely, like, you know, for a while, you know,

I grew up really into punk rock and, you know, became acquainted with, like, propaganda Andy and American political hardcore bands like Born Against and, you know, just abolition records and earth crisis and all these bands that are sort of pointing at like something is seriously wrong with the United States of America. So you got that. I was like, okay, something's wrong about this. And I have a lot of American relatives and some of them are quite committed to the project and it's pretty weird.

But after, in the days after that happened, it was just like the mass came off entirely in like 24 hours. Yeah. It was murderous. It was so intense. Just people talking about we're going to turn the Middle East into glass. We're going to, you know, they don't care about, they don't care about us, quote unquote, so we don't care about them, quote, unquote, and just like absolute savagery of the most debased kind imaginable. And nowadays, being against the Iraq war is what the Republicans and the Democrats have to say, like, even Trump was like it was a terrible war. It was a mistake in those days saying even the slightest most mild moderate criticism of the iraq war or the surge or anything that could be possibly construed as even mild criticism of the american war machine

it was rabidly attacked by all sides people i mean would not even be allowed on on even liberal ostensibly liberal news channels if they had even a slight critique of the way that america was handling this. And it was truly, I think when we get further away from it, we sort of lose sight of that five to ten years of just peer pathology, which is the pathology of the American empire, of settler colonialism, and of the absolute general ignorance on behalf of Americans about the rest of the world and all the events that led up to 9-11, which broadly were American imperial ventures throughout the Middle East, and 9-11 was, in bin Laden's own words, a direct response to that imperialism.

And his hope was not that he was going to bring down America, but that America would classically overreach and destroy itself through an expenditure of blood and money, which he's only been proven correct on as time goes on. Yeah, I mean, he beat them. Yeah, he did. He won, you know. He won. And I mean, speaking of the, you know, the reactions people received, I mean, look at

what happened to Chris Hedge. And we could say a lot about Chris Hedges. There's a lot of critiques that stand to be made. Sure. You know, a lot of the stuff about Antifa and the use of violence. And I think, you know, in responding to that, it also should be recognized in fairness that he spent a lot of time in war zones. I've never been in a war zone. And he, by his own admission, is deeply traumatized.

And, you know, that has to be taken to account despite whatever criticisms we want to make. But he did speak out against the run-up to the, he spoke out against it. at a university graduation commencement, and he had to be physically escorted off stage because the entire crowd was gearing up to kill him. And you can see the footage of that. I think it's still up on YouTube. And they, you know, they,

I think at one point they started singing the national anthem to try to drown him out, and then people started bumrushing the stage, and he had to be taken off. Insanity. Insanity. Yeah. Anyway.

That's an interesting detour, but I think it speaks to a lot of the points that you're making and it shows how this stuff connects with their everyday life and how it shapes our political and social reality. Did you want to touch on the mechanical and the electric before we move towards the end? Yeah. Well, I mean, we've been talking about the mechanical and the electric a little bit, but just to sort of sum it up for McLuhan, the mechanical is generally this sort of complex of layered media formations beginning with alphabetic language. And there are all these little variations I'm leaving out, but these are

the big points, right? Alphabetic language, movable type in the printing press, industrial technology as such. Those are the broad outlines of the media formations that have shaped the psyche of Western bourgeois capitalist culture. Electric media, which it has emerged since, which had emerged since I guess the practical discovery of electricity, like the Greeks, for instance, and I'm sure if they did, the Egyptians and the Indians and all sorts of people did, recognized phenomena like static shock and all this sort of lightning obviously right but it wasn't really harnessed in a practical way until a few hundred years ago let's say and the thing about electric media that stands out is that where mechanical media breaks things down into sequence and

separateness in the before and the after and the this and the that electric media um is it's all about the all inclusive the all involved in the everything at once and so for example one example he gives of that is how an electric light bulb, even if you were to like set up an electric light bulb on a lamp stand out in your backyard or in a field somewhere with an extension cord, the electric light bulb instantaneously creates a room without walls. It creates a space in which it's possible to move comfortably around in and be with other people or be by yourself. And it does it all at once. The radio, the TV, cinema, but more so TV, especially in the world of like global networks and all that stuff. They bring your eyes and ears simultaneously, instantaneously to

anywhere potentially in the world, along with all sorts of other people at the same time. And now with the internet, you can all be talking about it together at the same time. And that's not really possible with just mechanical, industrial style technological formations. We needed to have the practical discovery of electricity for this and its practical implementation. And McLuhan, I think, again, a major, major hinge point is the development of cinema and all of the implications that follow from cinema for our bodily lives and our psychic lives. And so that's basically the fundamental duality that he's trying to deal with because through the electric media, he's saying, even though it's going to be painful, very painful for us

backwards-ass Western zombies, electric media stand to help bring us back and to, you unification with our past, and to open up for us connectedness to other kinds of societies that we've been hurting and that we need to stop hurting, and through that we can stop hurting ourselves. And he sees great possibility in the advent of electric media, but also sees, as I said, a lot of trauma, a lot of conflict, a lot of internal sort of psychic difficulty and challenges, as well as social psychic difficulty in challenges, but that's, that forms part of our duty today, especially for those of us who are following the political lines that we are. We have a responsibility to engage in media critique, not in this sort of idle way, but as a

critique of our own psyches and our own bodies in the, in the milieu of history as material, if I can put it that way. And that is really, really why I wanted to bring the clue in, even though from a Marxist standpoint, certainly from a Marxist Leninist standpoint, and actually maybe more so Marxist Leninist than Marxist-Maoist, he is not on really any political line that's really that coherent or recognizable to this. However, because unlike someone like Benjamin, who didn't have the opportunity to really develop his thinking about this much more than he did, McLuhan offers these analytical concepts that if used responsibly in a non-eclectic way, we can use to help ourselves.

And the other reason is that this is a good transition to De Lozen Guattari, because Deleuze and Guatari, especially Guatari, they're fundamentally informed by the rise of the study of media as symbol, as psychic vehicle, as psychic formation, as bodily formation. and in the study, which becomes very, very popular in the Soviet Union, as I've been talking to you about offline, the study of semiotics, which is, let's say, the system of signs and languages in this mode of study incorporated as a subset of systems of signs, and signs are something that humans do that are much broader than what we think of as everyday language. So McLuhan is sort of a good transition point to getting us ready for the Gertari aspect of DeLos and Guitari. Absolutely. Well laid out. And as you were saying,

the electric media, especially in its heightened modern forms, is doing what he said it would do both the good and the bad. It is traumatizing. It's splitting up narratives. It's driving conspiracy thinking and conflict, etc. It's doing all of those things. But it is also bringing people together. It is allowing us to see what before we could not see, whether that is with smartphones, the rise of everybody seeing the realities of police brutality, or specifically in the climate era, being able to see in real time as it's happening the effects of climate change around the world. I was just talking to somebody else about this recently, but imagine if we had to convince people that climate change was a problem without the smartphones and the internet and

the images that they avail us to show others. Like we know what's happening in Turkey, in Greece, and Europe and China with these historic climatic events. If we didn't have those images to immediately be like, this is what's happening here and this is how it's unfolding over here and here's the wildfires which is why your sky is hazy here people would have a much harder time realizing that it's a real issue particularly if you live somewhere like kind of where i live right in the northern plains of the of the united states where if you just had to go by what you see in your day-to-day life you would see maybe like over a period like the summers are a little hotter than they were when i was a kid and

the growing season starts a little earlier than it did as when i was a kid you really wouldn't notice anything that would make you feel like there's an urgent need to address a global climactic crisis. But it's precisely this electric hyperelectric media that allows us to understand the full effects and to come together as a global community insofar as we have, you know, there's this withdrawal into nationalisms. But increasingly, it's a reaction to this globalization of our understanding and attention. And that is a crucial sort of prerequisite to building the global.

cooperation that's needed to tackle the problem in the first place. Absolutely. And I'd just like to say, too, just in support of like Rev Left and other projects like it in anticipation of Guattari in his book or sort of kind of a collection called Molecular Revolution in Brazil, but in 1982, Guatari went to Brazil and was hanging out with Lula to Silva. And they spent a lot of time talking about the importance of radio for revolution and public or group access, public access, easy access to radio, and I would say as superior to forms of communication that involve visual images, I think. We could maybe in another episode, maybe in the next

episode talk about that a little bit more. It's reference to the Guitari's text. But I think, yeah, these texts, like this, I mean, obviously Reblef radio, I mean, we're not on an actual radio network, like on old school radio waves and stuff like that. but this medium and I think a black red guard mentioned this on the episode and when he talked about his sort of departure from YouTube and I think it could be wrong I hope I'm not quoting him but he said he found the sort of audio the radio format to be more effective as well it's worth exploring picking up on this discourse from from Lula and all that and also I think they talk about this is a topic of discussion in the Chilean context with Iende although it might be

even misremembering that. It'd be good to analyze, like, what is the really superior media formation for making the kinds of contact and networks that we're trying to make? Is it really Twitter? Is it really Facebook, Instagram, or do we need to radically reassess what we should be leading with? And I think the audio format is, for my money, not that I have any, is, is, I've got a $5 bill my wallet. In my opinion, the audio format, and we could explore why, I think it's the best one

other than being an actual person together with people. Couldn't agree more. And I'll just throw out an idea I just talked to on a recent, it's not out yet, but by the time people hear this, it will be, I think the title is going to be awakening to the dream of separateness or something along those lines. I talk with a spiritual practitioner from Germany. And we had this whole discussion about meditation his experiences with awakening etc at the end after we stopped recording he's he's mostly on on youtube and he was sort of talking about some of the limitations of youtube and his interest in maybe going to a podcast format and i mentioned like there is this sense of deeper intimacy that people feel uh with podcasts than they do with youtube movie television which is sort of

counterintuitive because more senses are engaged um with those visual formats right you're watching something on the screen. But I was just sort of mulling this over. I was like, I don't really know why there seems to be this increased intimacy with the podcast format compared to these other ones. And he had a great theory that just popped it into his mind, which is when you're watching something on screen, you're seeing people on screen. There is a sort of heightened passivity where you're clearly sitting back as an observer. You cannot be observed. And you're watching something out there. It's very much in, like we're talking earlier about how vision gives you this sense of separateness. With the audio,

format, especially in the context of meditation and inner dialogue and chatter, it almost replicates when you have your earbuds in, right? Almost replicates inner chatter. And nothing is more intimate than you talking to yourself in your head all day, although the voice is just different. But it mimics that inner dialogue in a way that a primarily visual format doesn't. And I thought, and that was just something he threw out there in an organic back and forth conversation. But I thought that at least is part of the puzzle of why this, this platform seems to be so much more intimate. I think that's a viable hypothesis. Yeah, exactly. Viable hypothesis. And I'm sure that, I'm sure that there's some study up, I need to go back

and reread McClun on radio and stuff like that. But again, this isn't really radio in the same way that modern streaming services are not quite TV in the sense that McLuhan means. This is audio. and you pay homage to the medium of the radio, the classic radio in the name. But this is something that's still a little bit, the podcasting thing is still a little bit different because it's not connected, we're not like connected to any kind of big capitalist networks

in an immediate, you don't have to advertise and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, it's, it's tough to analyze, but it needs to be analyzed, but I think that that's a totally viable hypothesis. And if you're, if you're listening to radio classically, whether in your home, like the 50s and 60s or in your car after that, there's the sense that perhaps the person is in the room with you or

in the car with you. There's that sort of subconscious sense. But with the podcasting specifically and the connection of it to smartphones, you have the added thing of putting the earbuds in your ear or the headphones over your ears, which decreases the distance. It's not the radio's over there, and so I could be talking to a person that's two feet away from me, but it gets into your head in a way that the radio classically hasn't been able to. So maybe that's also point in favor of that hypothesis. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I agree. All right, well, let's go ahead and one more question, and then we'll round it out with the question about Marx, which is always a great way to end such discussions. And the question I want to ask you now is, how can

Marshall McLuhan's media analysis help us with class analysis and the critique of ideology, especially in terms of our conversation about how Spinoza can help us with the same exact problems. I know we've touched on this, but maybe you could put a fine point on it. Hmm. Okay. Well, I think the real virtue of McLuhan's analysis here is, well, just let's go back to the example I gave of that, that horrible segment on CNN that I described earlier, which is that what McLuhan can help you see is that class conflict, class struggle, you know, class war is being applied to your senses at a level beneath that or other than that or whatever you want to call it, whatever, you know, spatial metaphor you want to use of verbal argumentation. And again, we live in a society where, again, like, with the, you know,

if there's no contractual agreement between Rush Limbaugh and the guy that he inspired to go shoot up a bunch of people, then there's no cause and effect relationship. McClun's announcement helps you move beyond that and helps you to see how class is being applied at every level of your body, how capital infuses every level of our bodily lives. And it's not, so ideology is a much more difficult and subtle problem than that of just agreeing with this or that proposition, agreeing with this or that line of argumentation or even just this or that concept. You're being, we are all being bombarded through our nervous systems at all times, with class war

and it informs our behavior our thoughts in ways that do not come in the form of words. So that's basically it and to bring it back with Spinoza by understanding how our bodies are affected, our minds

are transformed and clarified. And so there's a need to bring sort of like Marxist analysis and all of its power and whatever tools we can bring to it to our bodies and to our psyches

in a very immediate and intimate way. Whereas, you know, some approaches to Marx or, you know, sort of the liberal tolerances of Marx always just treat this as a purely external problem like it's just a policy problem or set of, you know, about the clash of ideas, but it's much more profound than that and much more complex than that

and much more difficult and urgent than that. Yeah, I think that's how for me, In the context of this discussion, I line sort of Spinoza Marx and McLuhan up. But again, to get the most out of McLuhan, I definitely would read Valta Benuemines, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Someone else that's definitely worth reading in this sense, although depending on how far you go, your mileage may vary is Alphazir's ideology and ideological state apparatuses.

And obviously Guateri is going to be in the thick of it. for bringing these questions together in a sort of unified way of like, you know, just not that it's, he doesn't necessarily use all these names all the time, but the Spinozist view, Marx's view, and the view that McLuhan and people like Benjamin offer. And then there are other people that were writing around the same time, like a French thinker named Jacques Allude wrote the Technological Society and that little Nazi little asshole, Martin Hediger, wrote the question concerning, technology, which, to his credit, is worth reading and has a lot of valuable insights.

And because I just said something nice about it, I'm going to give you guys another reason why he's an asshole, which is that when his first book Being in Time came out, he dedicated it to his teacher, Edmund Husserl, who was Jewish. And in his attempt to impress the Nazi party and get in with them, he removed the dedication and totally slated Husserl and betrayed him, which I think is extremely lame. But nonetheless, the essay question concerning technology, which is from like the 70s or something, that's part of that movement. And it's worth, it's worth looking at just keeping in mind what a little jerk he is. Yeah, fucking coward.

Yeah. No, I mean, that's the worst thing about him is that there's just in my view. And I'm sure there's scholarship that could object to what I'm saying. He just seems like an opportunistic, sniveling little coward. And there's that element to all fascists. Yeah. I think that, I think we underestimate how much coward. Howardist plays a role in the fascist mindset and behavior set.

So that comes as no surprise. Yeah. And, you know, it makes you even angry when you do see that there are things he wrote that were good and not fascist. And you're just like, you're even worse because you don't even believe in it. You're just, you're just a parasite. True opportunist, yeah. True opportunist in the truest sense, yeah.

And something I wanted to say earlier, I'm just going to mention in passing before the last question. Yeah. is, and I think most people who would listen to an episode like this totally get it, but you do sometimes see it on the left of this very much sort of, if it's not in the canon of my specific tendency, then it's not worth reading, or if it is worth reading, it's only to show why they were wrong and didn't have a full analysis.

But I think what you prove with your amazing ability to connect thinkers and what Rev.F tries to reflect in the stuff that we cover more broadly, it really behooves anybody who wants to really understand themselves and the world around them to be able to have that basis of critical understanding within the quote-unquote canons of left-wing or Marxist thought. But then to use that to go out and explore other thinkers who may not be Marxists even, but have something to offer that a Marxist could easily take in and intertwine with their other, their network of knowledge and understanding and bring out new dimensions and dynamics of it, which can be very helpful. And there are some thinkers which are more obvious that Marxists can

use and some that are less obvious. But I would always argue for a robust engagement with thought generally, coming from a critical perspective, understanding, you know, as much as you can, the flaws and weaknesses of a given individual's perspective, but always with the goal of continuously learning and always with the goal of seeing what is useful in a thinker's catalog of work. And even the most non-Marxist or even the most sort of despicable thinkers would have something in there that even if it's negative could be a sort of brick in the wall of your overall knowledge and can help deepen your understanding.

So I think it's always important not to fall into that dogmatic spiral of only reading things that you think fall within the canon and excluding or rejecting anything that falls outside of it. Yeah. And I mean, in my reading of like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, like anyone like that, they warn you against being dogma. I mean, Mao says this most explicitly, right, on contradiction, on practice, all these papers. To just simply ignore something or dismiss it from the standpoint of just this or that immediate opinion, that can lead you into one-sided and dogmatic thinking. And that can end up screwing you over in the end in ways that you don't realize. And I take, you know, I think it's quite clear that Lenin, for example, he would want you to read widely because he would want you to be able to trust in yourself that you know what's a good thing and what's a bad thing.

And I think in the Western left, a lot of that kind of dogmatism is in reality a kind of fear and insecurity generated by how impoverished our forms of quote-unquote education are. Bingo. We are, and McLuhan talks all the time about this, that we have forms of education that are just about specialization and sub-specialization and sub-specialization and dividing and splitting and siloing and segregating. And because of that, the best we're able to come up with a lot of the time in each of us is just one sort of little minute kind of specialization when, in fact,

And, you know, I've talked to you about offline about maybe having a conversation about Soviet approaches to the philosophy of education and actual public policy about it. If you look at what the Soviets were trying to do, they're trying to come up with a form of education that's integral, that brings all of these disparate aspects of human practices together. And in an ordered, rational, methodological way from childhood introduces you to a sort of holistic approach to being able to assess this or that feature of the world. And because we do the opposite of that, I think there are very good reasons, material reasons why people cling to this

or that tendency that they prefer in a dogmatic way. And I think a lot of it is legitimate. I'm not trying to talk down or criticize anyone, a legitimately generated fear and anxiety and insecurity because capital works to keep us that way and to its advantage. So for, you know, anyone is listening, who's prone to that, prone to dismissing anything that falls outside of your tendency, like just stop for a second and, you know, sit down and breathe for 20 minutes and ask yourself, is this me or is this capital? Which is it? And can I tell the difference? And how can I combine with my comrades, with my friends, with my loved ones to overcome this in a way that's humane? Right. It doesn't mean that when the time,

comes to fight down the road whenever that is. If that comes to your doorstep, you should be passive and not defend yourself and your community. It doesn't have to imply that at all. But what it does imply is that if I'm correct about how capitalist education makes us weak and reduces our capacities, we need to overcome that. And the only way we can overcome that is communal. Yeah. Insightful and well said. All right. Let's go ahead and end this. a wonderful, long conversation on Marx again. Now, earlier you talked about Marx's quote referring to the earth as the human beings' inorganic body, and we talked about trees and lungs and all of this stuff. And Marx talks about this stuff and as early of work as economic and

philosophic manuscripts and as late as the Grundis. So it's throughout his work that he has this conception. So to end this conversation, you want to spend a little time just sort of maybe saying a couple last things about that quote and that perspective and how what its implications are perhaps for thinking and practicing our politics today? Well, I think the most important thing is to take marks literally about that. That's not a metaphor. You know, we've quoted Alan Watts a couple of times now. Like you don't come into the world. You come out of the world. I watch this video or listen to this top by him the other night and he said, what do you suppose yourself to be? supposing this world to be a tree, are you a leaf that grew out of it or are you a bunch of

birds that just landed on a dead old tree from somewhere else? What do you think? What do you suppose? And I think Marx is supposing that he's a leaf and that you're a leaf and that I'm a leaf. And just as the apple tree apples, the planet Earth somehow seems to people. And that's, and we grew out of it. And this insight, or, you know, if you follow Marx in this, the illusion of separateness also starts to fall away. And a lot of, like, you know, Western, you know, left tendencies and, like, highly industrialized, you know, the quote-unquote advanced countries, still in a way often tend to betray this idea that communism, socialism, Marxist, Leninism, Maoism, whatever, really just reduces, to a policy platform for how to make use of that world that's separate from us and is there for us. And if we follow Marx down this line, we can't really reside in that reality anymore. Two books that explore this in a pretty interesting way are Marxist ecology, Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster,

came out in the year 2000. and Paul Burkett's book, which I think is from 1999, Marx and Nature, a red and green perspective. And they really follow from this. And in taking Marx literally, we need to remember that he's not just talking about, so if we interface with the Earth, if our metabolic relationship to the Earth is fundamentally interfacing with an inorganic life, and we are connected to other organic lives through this inorganic life, right?

Then we really can start to see or feel in a physical corporeal way our connectedness to all people all around the world and know that we are all a body. And at this stage, we are in a condition of extreme alienation between the north and the south, which is absolutely hideous and world destroying and just sold, just to hear, humanity destroying. And we can find in Marx's concrete, non-metaphorical statements and lines of argumentation to show that we are of one body with them. They are our brothers and sisters in the most intimate way possible, and we will all collapse back into that ocean. And I think that that's something that we need to take on very seriously in terms of decolonizing our minds,

in terms of decolonization generally. And we have to get over this idea of communism as an eventual future service economy of some sort. That's there just to deliver consumer goods to us. What Marx is talking about is much deeper than that. And I don't mean to sound new agey or flaky, but much more cosmic than that in the sense of we belong to a cosmos. The earth emerged out of the cosmos.

All of the celestial, the sun emerged, they all came together and things come out of them and we came out of one of those things. And here we are. That's Dialectics, baby. And that's the point of this series. That's the point of so much work that we're doing here. And over the last several episodes, especially when I'm focusing on climate change, and particularly those episodes where I'm trying to offer some notes of optimism for the fight against the climate crisis,

I keep coming back to this idea of a blossoming new consciousness. And I talk about it as, you know, as eco over ego and I talk about it as inherently dialectical but this is what it is and this series is doing a deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings of this way of viewing and experiencing yourself your own existence in the cosmos around you and these implications are i mean they're everything for the new world that we're trying to create this is the philosophical approach this this this new consciousness that is emerging and it's always been around right it's It's what connects indigenous cultures to Marxism, to Spinoza, to Buddhism, and everything in between.

It's not new, but it's new in the sense of coming to be a globally recognized way of apprehending our existence and our connectivity. And this is what we're talking about. And so in other realms, I'll focus on spirituality as a route into this way of being. On this sub-series, I'm using with Matthews's ability to connect thought and thinkers, from across space and time, how we can understand it philosophically. And in other shows, we talk about how we can express it politically. But these are all getting at the same underlying reality. And I couldn't ask for a better person to come on and do this series than Matthew.

Always astounded, Matthew, by your ability to connect and to bring these highfalutin ideas down to material reality and make them make sense for regular people. So thank you. Oh, thank you, Brett. This ongoing series is a joy for me, truly. I'm very grateful for it. Before I let you go, can you let people know what we're going to tackle next in the series, just quickly? Yeah, so next time we're going to look at the subsequent books to part, sorry, of the ethics.

So I'm going to see there's three more parts. So there's three, four, and five. And I've got to figure out if we can navigate through all of them in a manageable way or we'll see what happens. But basically three, four, and five have to do with how this mind-body parallelism, if you want to call it that, then gives rise to psychic, emotional life, psychic life, feelings of joy and sadness. And I talked about sad passions the last time, I think. And this is where the real ethical dimension comes in. So in this part, we've talked about the composability of bodies, of individual human bodies are composite. it and we can enter into greater composition.

So you and I in a way now are forming a body through the intermediation of all these bodies known as like the microphone and the internet and the internet connection and all the labor that goes into all that. And the people are listening and the idea of their body as their eardrums are impacted includes the idea of the bodies that have made the sounds happen, all this sort of stuff. But yeah, the next one, we're going to get to the real ethical dimension, which is about how we are affected psychically by this reality that we live. live in and how it can trap us and lead us into inactivity and separatedness and isolation

and alienation and pain and how we can turn that around and come into greater concert and harmony even a contradiction I mean there will always be contradictions contradictory harmony and creating true joy on earth as much as we can while we're here before we go back to the to the ocean um and spinov for spinoza we can never forget joy means an increasing capacity of to act and a feeling of that capacity to act increasing primarily in conjunction with other people and with other aspects of nature and that's where we're going to go and deluz and wittari um are very helpful here especially and i've worked more on deluz um but i want to foreground wittari because he's more um he was a clinician he

worked at a psychotherapy clinic with inpatients and used principles like, you know, the mechanisms of democratic centralism to organize the way the patients, the janitors, the clerical workers, and the doctors interacted with each other. And so he has a real active political and ethical life. And he's also very, very deeply involved in the study of semiotics and the systems of signs, which includes languages and how they affect our psyche in the ways that we organize ourselves as external bodies and as, you know, group bodies and how that plays into like revolutionary struggle. And that'll be where we're going. And also like just to offer clarifications or correctives to a lot of like Western Anglo takes on these guys, like they're

postmodernists or their post-structuralist, whatever that means, all of this lingo that's thrown around and clear that away so we can actually engage in really good, interesting criticisms of what they're thinking. So, for example, I was, you know, really diving deep into Guatari, and there are some ways in which she, like a lot of other French thinkers at this time, exhibit a kind of distressing susceptibility to certain representations made by, like, Leon Trotsky and Nikita Khrushchev. And that creates questions and difficulties and contradictions that we need to look at. But that's way better than... getting into this sort of Western liberal academia of like, well, this guy is that kind

of thing person, he sucks, forget it. Right. That's not responsible. That's not dialectical. It's not interesting. It's extremely boring. And it's not productive in any way. And it's not helpful in any way.

But finding out, clearing all that nonsense away so that we can actually look at how, you know, Gutari, for example, may have been interested by lines of political lines, into theoretical lines that we now have caused to question very deeply. I mean, that's worthwhile, that's useful, that's helpful, and it's substantial. Absolutely. Well, I'm looking forward to that, my friend. I'll talk to you soon. Okay.

Peace and love and solidarity to everybody listening. I'm a risen and party with knuckles and loves. Beat me with symbols. Play cords on my team. I'm a resonant body With elbows and toes Drum on my rip cage Release my disson and tones

My disson and tones My disson and tones My disson and tones I'm a resonant body Traced a long masket In the furcles and old scars And the lines I have hit In a resonant body

All the frequencies hold like Dirty feet on carpet Your breath in the cold Your breath in the cold Warm breath in the cold I'm sorry for our miscommunications and force for sympathy I'll rest in the garden with roots, so, and the reeds.

Stay from human frequencies. Oh, oh, oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I'm a resonant body with elbows and toes Drum on my rib cage Release my distant tones