<nettime> McLuhan and Latour

[Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca>]

[This is a paper that I presented yesterday at the _Many Dimensions: The
Extensions of Marshall McLuhan_ conference here in Toronto. It explores
similarities between McLuhan and Latour. Attention: ACADEMIA ALERT.Felix]

>From Figure / Ground to Actor-Networks: McLuhan and Latour
-------------------------------------------------------

The figure / ground concept is a theme that runs through almost all of
McLuhan's books. This concept shapes McLuhan's ideas deeply and leads to
some of his most profound, enigmatic and long-lasting insights -- the
famous "the medium is the message" is but one. A great deal of McLuhan's
work has been devoted to shifting attention from figure to ground.
However, it is nowhere discussed in its own right, at least to my
knowledge. But without that, we cannot understand McLuhan nor find ways to
retain his key insights and avoid some of the problems that are connected
to them.=20

This paper presents a brief assessment of this concept and contrasts it
with an approach that has been developed without any reference to McLuhan
but shares a similar shift in perspective: Actor-Network theory (ANT) as
formulated by Bruno Latour.=20

The figure / ground idea was developed as one of the concepts of Gestalt
psychology, a approach to what was called "perceptual organization". The
question was: how do we perceive? This approach has had its heydays
between the two world wars in Europe, a time when McLuhan was in England
writing his Ph.D. thesis (completed in 1943). Gestalt, a German word
infrequently used in colloquial German, in this context means the form
that emerges out of the interaction of its part in the process of
perception. The continuous movement in film, emerging from the rapid
sequence of stills, for example.=20

The figure / ground relationship describes a way in which perception is
structured. The figure and the ground together constitute the totality of
what is perceivable. However, it is the figure on which perception is
focused. The figure is what appears structured, as the foreground and
whereas ground appears as unstructured and background. The boundary
between the two appears to belong to the figure, that is why the figure
has a shape whereas the ground appears to be shapeless. The figure is
specific, the ground is generic.=20

This distinction between that which is perceived and that which is blocked
out in order to focus perception is central for McLuhan. A great deal of
his work is the result of shifting attention from the area of attention,
the figure, to the area of inattention, the ground. McLuhan used different
sets of words to describe the figure / ground relationship, for figure he
used content, for ground he used environment, or more often, medium. The
study of media, then, is the study of ground, the study of the area of
inattention. This area of inattention, however, is where the pervasive
influence of media unfolds, rather independent in the figures that appear
easily visible. His _Understanding Media_, for example, is by and large
the exploration of different grounds as they are structured by media such
as Television, radio print, the car, clothing or money.=20

The ground, or environment, is not a passive container, but active
processes that influence the relationships between all of the elements in
it. Shifting attention to the ground, McLuhan found that the ground is not
all generic, as it has been though by the psychologist. The ground is full
of differences. Its elements are extremely heterogeneous -- basically
everything except what you look at . Most important is that they are
related across all categorical distinction. Their relationships ignore
preconceived categories that modern science was all about establishing.
However, these relationships are not random, but structured by the medium
itself. And the restructuring of ground is the most important thing that a
new media does. Hence, the medium itself is the message. To follow these
patterns, one has to jump across categories and neatly separated
distinctions. The speed with which McLuhan jumped in a seemingly random
fashion from observation to observation is legendary. The reason why he
did that, and why these jumps were natural to him, was because he
described ground. The reason why he ran at such as speed was that he had
to be fast enough to avoid turning what he described into figures, and,
quite literally, he had to cover lots of ground.=20

Now turning attention to the area of inattention is a tricky, paradoxical
thing. Given the intuitiveness with which McLuhan performed thus trick,
few at the time, and today, have been able to understand it and even fewer
to follow.=20

One of the reason for this is that McLuhan defined ground very poorly:
basically as that which is ignored. This is problematic. Consequently,
McLuhan ran into significant difficulties describing what ground is. In
_The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment_ he writes: "An
environment is naturally of low intensity and low definition. That is why
it escapes observation." That doesn't clarify too much, one of the few
methods to probe ground was the inventory, a list of related things
without being specific about their relationships. While this had the
advantage of not being trapped in inadequate categories, it wasn't overly
specific either.  Laws of Media is an attempt to become more specific. The
tetrad is a way of probing ground. But again, the tetrad is strong in
turning up surprising result but weak in arguing why these results matter.
In short, it's something for insiders.=20

As a side note: McLuhan wasn't the only one who struggled with the
difficulties in the paradox of focussing on ground -- the area of
inattention. Martin Heidegger's fundamental distinction between beings and
being, between Zuhandheit and Vorhandenheit, things that you can grasp and
things that are just there, is not much less opaque.=20

However, the shift away from the single entities, the figures, to the
surprising and strange combination of the diversity of things -- people,
cultures, things and artifacts is ground breaking, so to speak. It is a
necessary shift if we want to understand the ramifications of the new
facts and artifacts that we are creating. But how can we manage this shift
from the clearly defined, isolated entities to the hybrid configurations
that are related to those entities? In other words, how can we move beyond
taking of granted what needs to be explained?=20

One way of doing that is to forget about McLuhan, at least for a moment,
and bring Bruno Latour on stage. Actually, I'm glad he isn't here! I have
the impression he wouldn't feel overly comfortable in the neighbourhood of
McLuhan. He told me that he hasn't read McLuhan and when we met briefly
last May he wasn't particularly interested in exploring possible
connections. In his writing, he only refers twice to McLuhan, and once he
misspells the name!=20

In one case he refers to the "Toronto School of Communication". In
_Drawing Things Together_ he writes: "It is all too easy to throw a set of
clich=E9s together extending Eric Havelock's argument about the Greek
alphabet, or Walter Ong's rendering of the Ramist method, all the way to
computer culture, passing through the Chinese obsession with ideograms,
double-entry book keeping-and without forgetting the bible. Everyone
agrees that print, images and writing are present everywhere, but how much
explanatory burden can they carry? How many cognitive abilities may be,
not only facilitated, but thoroughly explained by them? When wading though
this literature, I have the sinking feeling that we are alternately on
firm new ground and bogged down in the old marsh".=20

Reading McLuhan, everyone knows this oscillation between excitement and
disappointment.=20

However, much of Latour's work can be read as an exploration of ground, or
more specifically until recently, as an exploration of the ground of
science, science in the making, as he called it a long time ago. And he
came, if we disregard the differences in vocabulary, to surprisingly
similar results. In Latour's vocabulary, the environment is the networks
and the content is the fact, or artifact that we are investigating.=20

The clean world of scientific facts, or manufactured artifacts, cannot be
understood with looking at the hybrid networks that sustain them. These
hybrid networks connect people to machinery, machinery to things, things
to funding committees, committees to articles in journals which are
written by people and so on. Each of the elements in this hybrid
arrangement is active, constantly involved in redefining all other
elements in the networks. "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape
us," as McLuhan used to say. Unfortunately, McLuhan saw this really as a
temporal sequence-thereafter-and he was most concerned with the latter
part of it: the impact of technology. While he acknowledged the
simultaneity of different effects, he his approach as an underdeveloped
notion of feedback or of "mutual constitution". This skewed focus
contributed to him being called a techno-determinist, a misunderstanding
which was prone to happen.=20

For Latour now, the shaping and being shaped of culture, technology,
nature and people, is an endlessly ongoing process, and this is important,
one without a clear temporal sequence or cause-effect relationship. In his
networks, each elements is an actor. Actor for Latour has particular
definition: "An 'actor' in ANT is a semiotic definition-an actant-, that
is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It
implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in
general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be
the source of an action (Latour 1997)." Much of the method of ANT consist
now of "following the actors" of investigating relationships of mutual
constitution between elements, whatever they are. Each of them has an
ability to act, that is, to make certain things easier and other things
harder, to change the overall constellation of the networks. The ability
of act is not inherent in the actor but a consequence of his, her or its
position in the network. Astronomy was seriously limited without a
telescope. But is it the telescope that caused, or gave rise to modern
astronomy?=20

ANT yields not the simple truism that everything is connected to
everything which, by the way, is not true at all! Nor does it end in
post-modern despair that everything is just a construction. Well yes,
everything is a construction, but not an arbitrary one. Since not only
texts are connected to one another but also people and things, a network
is at the same time subjective and objective, infinitely malleable and
rigid. And it often changes from one state to the other according to the
connections between its constitutive elements.=20

Facts and artifacts are constructed, but not out of thin air, but of
heterogeneous elements. They are social, cultural and natural at the same
time! There are no ultimate movers, as McLuhan saw them in media
structuring ground.=20

Latour spent a great deal of time detailing the sociological and
philosophical ramifications of the shift from the pure to the hybrid
(Latour 1993), or in McLuhan's terms, from the figure to the ground. He
and his circle also produced a number of case-studies in which the
theoretical ideas are tested for describing actual realities. One of my
favourite studies examines the actor-networks of a mechanical door-opener!=
=20

The shift from McLuhan to Latour allows us to retain some of the key ideas
of McLuhan, namely that the most interesting aspects of new technologies
are that they indicate much more extensive changes in the environment.
However, ANT might be able to describe these strange new connections in
ways that are less declarative but more argumentative, less intuitive but
more analytical.=20

References:

Latour, Bruno (1990). Drawing Things Together. in Lynch, Michael; Woolgar,
Steve (eds.) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres=
s
---- (1993). We Have Never Been Modern (translated by Catherine Porter).
New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf
---- (1997). On Actor-Network Theory: A few Clarifications.  to be
published in Soziale Welt, 1997 available at:
http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/stt/ant/latour.htm
McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New
York: McGraw-Hill
---- (1966). The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment.  University
of Windsor Review
----; McLuhan, Eric (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press


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Les faits sont faits.
http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/~stalder=20

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