Source: MediaTropes. Vol. 8 No. 1 (2022): McLuhan Meets Convergence Culture. License: Copyright (c) 2022 Suzanne de Castell, Milena Droumeva. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. (Authors retain the copyright in their submitted works. MediaTropes as a complete work is licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks) license.)
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McLuhan Meets Convergence Culture: Towards a New Multimodal Discourse
Suzanne de Castell and Milena Droumeva
This essay revisits contemporary media studies discourses about multimodality through a critical reflection on Marshall McLuhan’s contribution of a transitional theory capable of bridging between a tradition of textual authority—specifically, an engagement with poetics and literature—and an innovative and integrative way of engaging ideas about media through a multimodal discourse of cultural convergence, multisensoriality, and performativity. What we propose is significant about McLuhan’s transitional theories, and as such warrants attention from contemporary critical media studies, is precisely the possibility they hold for a reiteration and reconceptualization, under new technological conditions, of what multimodality is and does in academic discourse and, by extension, in the context and the study of new media cultures.
In the decades following McLuhan’s work, the fields of media studies and digital humanities have come, it seems, to an understanding and practice of multimodality as the quintessential transforming of traditional texts into videos, interactive web, or computational poetics; in this sense, multimodality is simply the possibility of combining image and sound with interaction. By contrast, interrogating multimodality thorough the frames McLuhan used for theorizing—techniques and adaptations from art and poetry—points to a distinctively different interpretation of multimodality as conceptual-perceptual expression: metaphor, provocation, collage, and performance. These tools of “rebellion” against the rigid structures of the familiar hearken to the importance McLuhan saw for artists as engineers of “anti-environments” determined to awaken sense and sensibility in the instantaneous, participatory world of electronic media (1964, 68).
Breaking ground: McLuhan’s cultivation of multimodal critical discourse
It was of course first in his written work that McLuhan began to disrupt and break up the monological authority of the literate text. While some examples, notably Understanding Media (1964) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), resembled nothing so much as a book of the most traditional kind, other works produced with more recognizably ‘artistic’ collaborators such as Wilfred Watson and Quentin Fiore enacted a new type of multimodal discursive paradigm in and of themselves. Pages printed sideways, marginalia, the use of colour, font shifting, pointed ‘misspellings,’ illustrations, photographs, drawings, designs—all reminiscent more of children’s books than academic ones—conspired to make ‘normal’ reading impossible, and demanded a physical, sensory engagement with the material form of the book, turning it this way and that, reading backwards then forwards, reading-between-the-lines, as well as, through creative spellings and typesetting, within them.
Even as McLuhan wrote about the “myopia” (1964, 195) induced by the entrenched textual preferences of hyperliterate scholarly and cultural tradition, he also sought through the depth and richness of these still text-based representations to illustrate, embody, instantiate, and to ‘put on paper’ the ideas he was more literally ‘putting into words.’(1) McLuhan saw content as an “illusion,” as neither data nor information but as the medium’s social impact, and he privileged an “epistemology of experience” over an “epistemology of knowledge” (McLuhan 1962). From the premise that the media we employ mold and shape the work we can do with and through them, how might contemporary studies of convergence culture engage more fruitfully and transformatively with McLuhan’s ideas—and why do so now? Most educational work—from theory to research to practice—remains relentlessly monomodal, and traditionally textual, which is particularly ironic given how long educational work has engaged with digital media within a networked technoculture (de Castell, Bryson and Jenson, 2002). Rather than working from the corpus of McLuhan’s texts, and then writing about them, we wanted to see what (and how) we could learn from using, chiefly, archived ‘live’ interviews, in order to better grasp the outlines of McLuhan’s conception of multimodality. His manner of delivery through aphorism, probe, and uncertainty, for example, and his framing of reflections through rich invocations of sensory metaphor, environmental and material semiotics, are some of the quintessential ways in which McLuhan’s discursive practice was multimodal. Axiomatic to McLuhan’s critical method for cultivating a multimodal discourse are (1) a “catalytic” mobilization of sensory metaphors that returns us to the multisensoriality of thinking; (2) the deft deployment of “probes” as an exploratory method to destabilize learned certainties, and (3) the knowing cultivation of style and charismatic self-staging to simultaneously enlist and provoke a following–possibly the counterpart to the now-familiar viral video effect. That reimagining of multimodality makes evident a critical difference in theoretical assumptions, and practical implications, between McLuhan’s original methods of theorizing, expression, and communication of ideas, and the way these lessons have been and are yet being deployed in contemporary media studies. For whereas McLuhan’s conception of multimodality is of a catalytic convergence of modes of experience and converging literacies, the uptake of that idea in contemporary media education tends to involve replication and multiplicity of content across media platforms.
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(1) Much of this paper’s analysis is based on video excerpts from a web-based video archive named McLuhan Speaks Special Collection. Each excerpt is cited and referenced individually.
Sensory metaphors that push
To understand media far beyond those paradigms of traditional literate text, McLuhan sought alternative, material-semiotic ways of investigating media effects, which he explored most notably through the metaphor of an ethereal “acoustic space” detached and broken free from linear, conventional text (1964, 111).
The simultaneity of information is acoustic because it comes from all directions at once. We hear from all directions at once, and so we are living in an acoustic world. It doesn’t matter whether we’re listening or not, the fact is we’re getting this acoustic pattern. (1970)
With this singular move, McLuhan advanced a conception of interdisciplinarity not only ahead of his time, but indeed more radical than his successors in striving for a convergence of perceptual, experiential, and discursive frameworks with which to understand and critique media culture. His preoccupation with the ‘sensorium’—a concept long retired from vogue in media studies—further exemplifies his seemingly naive embrace, and frequent invocation, of ‘pop science’ concepts mobilized to explain the effects of sensorial orientations. While the sensorium surely isn’t, as early scholars believed, a centralized “organ of the mind,” mounting evidence in the areas of cognitive science, neurobiology (Doidge 2007), and music cognition (Levitin 2007) suggest a profound interdependence of the senses on a neurological level, pointing, arguably, to the implication that synaesthesia might just be the norm, rather than the exception, in the way humans experience sensory environments. Such a notion would certainly bear on the concept of multimodality, both theoretically and methodologically; the implication being that cognition is always materially grounded, and is activated as much through physical and sensory modalities as through abstract thought.
Mixing sensory metaphors is undoubtedly one of the defining tools in McLuhan’s enactment of multimodal discourse. Alongside the idea of media ‘massaging’ the sensorium, that is, exerting almost tactile pressure on our sensory perceptions, McLuhan adopted a wide array of ‘audile-tactile’ conceptual metaphors to refer to media effects, thereby evoking and engaging a continuum of all other modalities besides the visual-textual field (McLuhan and Carson 2003). One of the most popular and best-known examples, his eccentric notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media (1968)—as often deservingly critiqued as they are—present one such illustration of McLuhan’s uses of material/sensorial formulations that are powerfully evocative of sensation, taste, and touch, bringing to media analysis other registers of experience, both pre- and post-literate. Aside from dwelling on critiques of their application, the very act of adopting sensory metaphor in addressing slippery concepts such as ‘media effects’ in imprecise ways, is emphatically neither just slang, nor poor scholarship—it is an important and potentially transformative communicative praxis, and an even more important analytical artifact epitomizing McLuhan’s methods of direct engagement with popular culture in order to disrupt traditional literate cultural hegemony. It is a transitional way of theorizing that flies directly in the face of certainty: “The permanence of writing, the attempt to be articulate, final, to get things right is oppressing the importance of being transitional, of creating something always in time” (1978).
Inspired by Parry (1930), Lord (1960), and later Goody’s (1977) work on preliterate societies, McLuhan was fascinated with the ‘phenomenology’ of sound (Ihde 1976) as a kind of epistemology of experience, seeing it as a radically different way of understanding the universe, of sharing ideas, of communicating. He frequently evoked the metaphor of a ‘tribal drum’ to describe at once a type of society, a type of phenomenology, a type of culture, and a sensorial impression (1964). Given his deep fascination with advances in the science of his time, McLuhan strung together metaphor and fact, association and impression, reaching beyond the limited toolbox of text and language, straining to enter an experiential, phenomenal realm of thought. An apt example comes from Picnic in Space, a short film in which McLuhan chats with Harvey Parker about life, the universe, and everything, springing forth analogies to sensory concepts related to technology, media, and society:
At the speed of light there is no sequence. Everything happens at the same instant. That’s acoustic, and everything happens at once … there’s no continuity, there’s no connection, there’s no follow through, it’s just all now … surprise, unexpectedness … and total involvement. (1967)
This example features several of McLuhan’s devices manifested in one phrase—the use of sensory metaphor to bring the notion of ‘acoustic space’ to light (more ingenuously than subtly, he happens to be holding a light bulb in hand at the time); brash suggestions related to aspects of popular culture woven together with pop science; a bricolage of disciplinary discourses aimed at enhancing the conceptual metaphor of proto ‘acoustic’ simultaneity. As McLuhan himself describes a “McLuhanism,” it is “a kind of bizarre, would be cynical and paradoxical sort of remark … a form of circuitry” (1967). Comparing his peculiar discursive practice to circuitry forges a relation between the circuit board—the staple of the electric age that McLuhan heralded with such affinity—and the ‘circuitry’ of the brain, the neural pathways that constitute habits of thinking being rewired to perceptually and cognitively comprehend new technologies, new perspectives, new practices.
The ‘probe’ as multimodal tool
Having, of necessity, developed his conceptualizations of media within a paradigm relentlessly and insistently textual, McLuhan devised ways of making and marking dramatic shifts in creation and expression of ideas primarily by evocative multimodal illustrations—moments of gesturing, echoing, hinting, and through forms of delivery that themselves instantiated new configurations of thought, research, and cultural engagement with media. Unpacking the multiple meanings and ways of understanding the probe offers a critical recollection of what this paradigm shift in engagement with media signifies. To use again McLuhan’s own fascination with acoustic space as a metaphor for media of the electric age, the probe can be understood not only in its medical permutation as a push—a pressure upon mute flesh in order to elicit new information, rendering the body a “laboratory for experiments” (1970, 180)—but also as feedback, as an echoing “call-and-response” directed at a static paradigm.
The probe offers thereby new provocations, and new intonings of meaning, pushing for a shift of perspective through an imaginative, speculative, exploratory, nonliterate, nonlinear semiotic. And interestingly, even McLuhan’s own characterization of the probe is laden with highly evocative physical sensorial analogies—nudging us towards seeing even plain language as pushing, squeezing, disturbing:
I tend to use phrases, I tend to use observations, that tease people, that squeeze them, that push at them, that disturb them, because I’m really exploring situations, I’m not trying to deliver some complete set of observations about anything. (1968)
McLuhan’s use of sensory metaphors, as discussed above, elicits a clash of phenomenal realities, evoking past sensory experience and juxtaposing it with others in order to disrupt the “total environment” (1964) of textual authority and linear logic. Probes, however, work by clashing conceptual entities and ideological perspectives. Concepts, whether or not related to sensorial experience, still work on planes of consciousness requiring different modes of thinking and engaging, mixing up historical, philosophical, technological and aesthetic paradigms. It is in this clash that the probe operates as a multimodal tool for reasoning, dialoguing, and participating in media culture. For instance, and since we’re in the business of education, let’s look at one of McLuhan’s probes about classrooms from the Book of Probes (2003):
The metropolis today is a classroom, the ads its teacher. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.
Notions and visions of metropolis, teachers, advertising, and feudal dungeons come together in this provocation literally forming a conceptual Dadaist collage of ideas and juxtapositions of meaning, while the ‘ultimate’ meaning evades perception.
Probes constitute a multimodal metaphor in the sense that—just like acoustic space—they are ephemeral, whimsical, imprecise, illogical, and yet materially and semiotically present, occupying space and taking up time, resonating in anticipation of an answer, provoking an uptake. As perlocutionary speech acts, the uptake itself is constitutive of a probe; it is what makes the probe what it is, since without resonance a probe fails in its intended action. In this sense, probes, while ostensibly delivered by a single voice, constitute a communion, an enlistment in dialogue. Interactivity is, on this view, intrinsic to the probe. Text, as McLuhan notes, is mute and, albeit a visual medium, fails to fully engage the eye because of its inability to activate all of the senses with which vision “co-engages” (1967). Conversely, probes are multimodal, because they not only evoke the resonant relationship of call-and-response, but purposefully mix metaphors, references, make juxtapositions and link seemingly unlinkable ideas together that are designed to confound the stagnant cognitive-perceptual apparatus in order to ‘clear the air’ for a new perspective and push towards new ways of understanding.
Charisma as a live performance
In our efforts to move this inquiry ‘beyond words’ we looked at McLuhan’s public enactments of critique to discern embodied practices of multimodality in look, feel, gesture, and aura of presentation. And what we found, at first sight anyway, was a profoundly disappointing series of similar performances by a tall, erudite, white, heterosexual man in a suit, either at the podium lecturing or seated more or less relaxed across from another white man in a suit, opining at length in response to a handful of mostly supportive questions. A few hand gestures, a bit of stretching, no remarkable speech patterns, and nothing at all that would engage a contemporary audience already over-supplied with fashionable talking heads and imposing bodies of authoritative white men of a certain age. If this medium is its message, this message is more than familiar, and more than clear, and it’s certainly not a message of disruption, innovation, or transformation.
McLuhan himself named the performance and its effect: speaking about charisma, he observed that it “means looking like a lot of other people, like Cronkite. If you reassure people by resembling a lot of other people they know and approve of, you have charisma” (1978). So, we can read McLuhan’s performances as both entirely ‘natural’ and authentic—cut as the conservative figure of a conservative man—as entirely strategic with respect to the cultivation of a charismatic public image, and for that purpose nothing could work better than looking pretty much like Walter Cronkite himself. And what, one might well ask, was so radically transformative about that kind of discursive performance?
What was transgressive was that behind an almost entirely conservative (bar a few odd tie choices in his later years) self-staging enacted in and through that familiar, well-accepted medium, was a kind of cross-dressing. Because what McLuhan was doing was using an image to stage a paradox: juxtaposing classical literary quotations with pop science and New Age psychology with Dadaist artistry and flair for the absurd; interweaving esotericisms of high culture with information-age jargon and terminology drawn from electrical engineering; forging links between drug-induced altered states and religious aspirations of a spiritual commonwealth, looking, paradoxically enough, not unlike the “group mind” he seemed to vacillate between deploring and extolling. In all this, McLuhan was a traitor to the academy that spawned and sustained him, refusing and refuting its traditions, its disciplinary constraints, its orthodoxies and its axioms, all the while using, in high style, the very accoutrements of that alma mater to fraternize with her political, economic, and cultural enemies.(2)
Another distinctly ‘English scholar legacy’ feature of McLuhan’s selfpresentation is his unbridled enthusiasm for his own subject matter, a deep and heartfelt affection for the very traditions whose imminent demise he simultaneously announced. McLuhan’s energetic proclamations of a new acoustics for the electric age culminated in what seemed like a love affair with television as he took media scholarship to the small screen. Between Playboy interviews and American talk shows, his devotion to the medium itself seems almost narcissistic. Yet seen in another way, what these oral performances offer is a refreshing antidote to the way critical theory, media studies, and communications discourse today engages with these “extensions of man” (1964). A removed, agnostic approach still dominates the field of media criticism enframed by a succession of foundational theorists. McLuhan himself is now wellinstalled among them as yet another set of pages to be cited and expounded upon, the vital, engaged, enthusiastic figure of the author gone missing.
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(2) “Speaking of the flips, there’s a story that exists somewhere between the story line and the oneliner—the Norman Mailer story at Berkeley. A few months ago he was addressing a Women’s Lib group and he said to them, ‘Everybody in this hall who regards me as a male chauvinist pig, hiss.’ When they all hissed very loudly, he turned to the chairman and said, ‘Obedient little bitches, aren’t they?’ [Laughter]” (Marshall McLuhan Speaks 1970).
McLuhan’s bold and at times arrogant and self-assured ‘authorship’, however conventional it may now appear to us, marks another potentially productive transition from textual to post-textual multimodal expression which has regressed, become undone, got lost somewhere in translation as contemporary media studies retreated to the familiar, faded, timeworn practices of textual re-citation and circulation detached from the circuitry with which McLuhan electrified media studies. A McLuhanesque approach to McLuhan himself might indeed be to regard his celebrity as an epiphenomenon, created by a certain set of privileged abilities and characteristics inserted within an emerging counterhegemonic media culture. What we might draw out and extend from McLuhan’s discursive practice is thus the ‘live’ multisensorial and multimodal public spectacle of heresy, of treachery, of disruption and transformation—a way of engaging directly with, rather than merely writing about, contemporary communications and technocultural media.
Multiplicity or convergence?
In order to extend our proposed conceptualization of multimodality with relevance to contemporary research and practice into ‘convergence’ media culture (Jenkins 2006), we return to an idea introduced at the beginning of this paper—the important, game-changing distinction between multiplicity and convergence. The imperative to understand media that was powerfully illuminated in the electric age of McLuhan followed along an electrical circuitry it soon exceeded. Head-turning technologies have proliferated at such breakneck speed that we are hard-pressed to distinguish modalities from applications, to tell apart human sensory capacities and technological capabilities. If we can create a presentation with digital photos, digitally captured and processed sound, animations, textual snippets, are we creating a multimodal presentation? When we can play a video game version of our favourite book or go see a blockbuster movie based on a video game, is this multimodality, multisensoriality? What is lost in such a formulation?
The lost element here pivots on this difference between multiplicity and convergence. We are suggesting that in epistemic terms, a vital aspect of McLuhan’s insights has been lost at worst and trivialized at best, because it hasn’t really been picked up, developed, and used even experimentally within the academy either for knowledge creation or for its dissemination. And it is not actually possible to follow the important trajectory of McLuhan’s work, which focuses on the ‘all-at-once-ness’ of the proto-acoustic, unless we are quite clear on this difference between multiplicity and convergence, between addition or amplification, and creative transformation.
We contend that, for the most part, in the context of the theory, research, and pedagogy that we are familiar with, multimodality refers to a quasi-additive process of alternation, addition, amplification, or multiplication of ‘content’ where the ‘same’ meaning in principle is cultivated and communicated with only trivial difference (as in the famously derided comment that “I didn’t find the film as good as the book”).(3) On that view, ‘modality’ has floated away from the sensorium and now refers not to forms of human sensibility, but to machine capabilities, that is, to applications and media formats. It’s easy to see how this has happened—the multiplication of content across media platforms is the gold standard for big business, particularly in the entertainment industry. The more movies, serials, playing cards, games, trinkets, amusement parks, fashion lines, music records, et cetera that can be produced from the same content, the better. This is economic—not multimodal, perceptual, or epistemic—convergence.
As a number of media theorists have alluded to already, we are nurturing, as educators and as a society, a powerful brand of ‘consumer citizenship’ (de Castell and Jenson, 2005; Banet-Wiser 2007; Ito et al. 2010)—or, in McLuhan’s words of warning, a kind of “total environment” in which we become fish in water, unaware, unable to comprehend or change the effects of our own inventions (McLuhan 1964). Convergence, on the other hand, as per the concept of multimodality we’ve been developing here, invokes a discursive and conceptual space where ideas, modes, and forms of presentation can co-occur, intersect, clash, inform, complement, or battle each other. Technologically, convergence would entail taking advantage of the full affordances of different media and modalities, creating the ‘environment’ that would allow us to envision life with our new inventions. Today, we see it more—as McLuhan saw it then—in art, rather than in education, and this is a critical problem.
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(3) A key distinction, and a parallel one, for McLuhan was between “transportation” theories and “transformation” theories: “My kind of study in communication is a study of transformation, whereas information theory and all the existing theories I know of are theories of transportation…. My concern is what these media do to the people who use them. What did writing do to the people who invented and used it? What do the other media of our time do to the people who use them? Mine is a transformational theory, how people are changed by the instruments they employ” (Marshall McLuhan Speaks 1970).
Why does that matter? Because there is a risky borderland between media conceived as extensions of our senses and our sensory capabilities conceived as extensions of media themselves. What is lost in the latter case is the intentional, purposeful application of and experimentation with media and with meanings demanding deep knowing and skilled engagement with media for creative purposes whose significance is extended by that media use, not merely ‘expressed’ by it. Do we build and disseminate knowledge and understanding in the ways we do because we are learning how—intentionally and responsibly—to utilize our various mediational toolsets to do that? Or are we building and disseminating knowledge and understanding in the ways we do because these are the ways our toolsets afford us? Both can surely be legitimate insofar as the former is judicious (or not) and the latter experimental. But discernment requires understanding media, and that, in turn, entails rhetorical responsibility.
Rhetorical responsibility would have us understand that epistemic discourse is bound up with toolsets, and we will not therefore find, not should we try to cultivate, the same ends in all forms.(4) Precisely that kind of epistemic reduction, however, is what our present knowledge economy, from universitybased knowledge creation to school-based knowledge transmission, is designed and structured to do. And that, in turn, is because the business of the academy is driven by assessment, assessment by measurement, and measurement by certainty. The problem, as McLuhan insisted, is that certainty is more often the enemy than the ally of intellectual exploration, and a barrier, rather than a boon, to understanding (McLuhan 1978).(5)
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(4) “The TV image uses the eye as an ear. It’s a way of drawing attention to the fact that the TV image has a very different effect on your psychic life than the movie image. Therefore, educationally speaking, TV has very strange consequences and could never be used as a mere transportation device” (Marshall McLuhan Speaks 1970).
(5) To unseat certainty, McLuhan proposed a program of “organized ignorance,” which he advanced as “a way of bypassing the problem of knowledge as confusion and as a block to discovery” (Marshall McLuhan Speaks 1970).
In conclusion
What is the responsibility of cultural and media studies today to acknowledge, in concrete terms, the fundamental importance of multimodality not only to the experience but to the epistemological framing of media forms and texts? Academic discourse, regrettably, remains textually bound, confined to an internally consistent structure of statements that lack the amorphous, spatial, proto-acoustic nature McLuhan envisioned and enacted, and it perpetuates precisely what McLuhan resisted: value judgments, linear argumentation, a pursuit of certainty, all the while escaping the recognition of the kinds of epistemic standpoints actively produced by the textual medium itself—of fragmentation, rigidity, disembodiment—leaving thought and experience as tightly stuck within its relentless textual preferences as the proverbial egg-bound chicken.
A release and resuscitation of McLuhan aimed at invoking, electronically speaking, capacitors and resistors, between and among different kinds of media clearly requires an approach to theorization that doesn’t simply reinstate the very constraints his work was seeking to break through and away from. The analysis of McLuhan’s richly multisensorial archive must take, as seriously as texts have traditionally been taken, a multimodal rendition of McLuhan’s oeuvre to make those aspects explicit as multimodal entities, in a context where they can evoke more than they could explain.(6) By this means, we may begin a mapping of the ‘tropics’ of a multimodal discourse both uniquely McLuhan’s and, as such, also invariably appropriative of past re-formations layered into a different order of academic ‘language’ for contending with, and challenging, the cultural practices whose multisensorial and convergent mediations McLuhan sought enactively to announce.
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(6) Gesturing, if awkwardly, at more than text may explain, and originally presented at the McLuhan100 Conference: http://prezi.com/giee65cp2bfp/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share.
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