This post is about Marshall McLuhan. In a deeply ironic turn, McLuhan, a once widely influential media theorist, is now primarily known, arguably, for appearing as a visual punch line in a wish-fulfillment gag in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall. In this way, McLuhans's reputation came to be the best evidence of much of what he had argued in his works, even though his works are no longer read because this stunt had discredited him to a degree. The equilibrium point of his fame, reputation, credibility and historicity has settled in a paradoxical point where the theoretical significance of his work is grasped mainly as intuition. The recursive commentary he provides on the very phenomenon he came to embody creates a short-circuiting loop impenetrable to standard modes of logical analysis. A self-canceling intellectual apparatus.
Carles wrestles with McLuhan's memory when confronted with a sign that attempts to deny the significance of Carles's chosen medium. By publicizing the sign, Carles inverts the discursive logic of signs, prompting a chase along a daisy chain of signifiers and signifieds in an infinite loop. "This sign seems like it is trying to ‘get the attention’ of the internet through the collective blogospherian voice," Carles explains, thereby negating the signficance of the negation, presenting a radical critique of his own praxis in his own medium by adopting through a proxy the medium of an earlier age. How does one critique media through the media? What does it mean to speak when you deny the objectivity of your own voice? The writers of this sign were not entirely prepared for a skilled semoitician like Carles to note its existence, or rather one should argue that it seems far more likely that Carles wrote the sign himself in an effort to end the empire of signs, to borrow a Barthesean turn of phrase.
At the same time, Carles detaches a diachronic critique of time via a space of signs -- at a moment at which certain cultural commentators were forbidden from entering into the social factory, as it were, where elites were attempting to forge significance as a reified commodity through their collective biopolitical power, amplified at such a feted occasion by the intense traditional media scrutiny -- and resituates it as a synchronic critique of space throughout time. By this double move, time and space are both decentered, one category collapses into the other. Reality itself is called into question. "Are bloggers real writers?" Carles asks, in the very instantiation of the gesture that nullifies the inquiry's very basis. Does this text exist? Is it time? Space? Time-space? Space-time? A hitherto unnamed a priori dimension?
In Carles's gesture we sense the movement of the trace, which is the pulse of culture itself, as the festival where the sign was spotted pretends to be. Carles's point is precisely this, that a negative dialectic conducted at the level of a formal critique, that is a critique of forms, still serves to advance and extend and elaborate the kingdom of signs. "Should I stop blogging and start writing on poster boards?" Carles asks, pointing to the dialectical exchange of mediums, which inherently evinces an exchange of messages, which have become reducible to foregrounded formal qualities. As McLuhan had noted in his landmark work Understanding Media "One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies.)" What will Carles's strange concatenation of blog and sandwich board yield? Will the hybridization of media forever neutralize the potential of critique? In other words, how can this question be answered: "Is SXSW full of ‘fucking ass holes’ from every pseudo-industry in the Western World?"
A real critique of a pseudo-industry, Carles warns us by this ornate example, only legitimates erstwhile harmless pretensions. Even if, like Woody Allen, he could bring McLuhan himself out to refute the rampant posturings of the self-appointed cultural apparatchiks at the industry-sponsored bacchanalia, the critique would backfire, turning critique itself into a bad joke, the very sort of failed entertainment that SXSW tries to foist on the public at large. It is our duty not to listen to the siren's call. "What do u do when u can’t get into venues?" Carles asks -- and his answer is strongly implied. You thank the gods for their mercy.
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