McLuhan’s War: Cartoons and Decapitations

Peter W. Nesselroth

. Abstract

This essay analyzes certain recent news events like the “Charlie Hebdo” massacres

and the recurring decapitations of prisoners and hostages by ISIS and other groups. It

updates Jakobson’s standard model of communication to account for the different

“factors” at play in our present reality and it calls for an “applied McLuhan” approach to

processing the images that succeed each other on our various contemporary screen

types. One of McLuhan's prophecies was that the return of oral culture through new

communications media would have catastrophic consequences for humanity. Judging

by current events, he was right on.

2

“Today”, McLuhan wrote in 1965, at the very end of Understanding Media, “we appear

to be poised between two ages - one of detribalization and one of retribalization” (344).1

I would suggest that this is as true today, in 2015, as it was then, though perhaps

current events indicate that we are no longer just “poised between the two ages”, but

that retribalization, or the falling apart of previous national entities such as Iraq, Syria

and many other places, is really in process, while detribalization, or the geopolitical

drive to reassemble the fragmented ethnic groups in the same region under one banner,

e.g. the intention of the state of Israel to reunite the Hebrew tribes of Old as a national

unit or the Kurdistan nationhood project of the areas’ scattered Kurds, provides the

powder for the powder keg. The creation of the European Union is, in this sense, an

attempt at detribalization, even as some of its tribe-like members want to break away

again, that is “retribalize”. Greece and the Ukraine, for example, are seemingly caught

between the two tendencies. The European Parliament, a sort of council of tribes, in

Brussels, has currently many representatives from extreme right-wing nationalist parties

like the French Front National that are voices for retribalization. The United Kingdom,

while itself reluctant to detribalize and fully join the EU has to deal with its very own

forces for retribalization, i.e. the Scottish and Welsh separatist movements. Ironically,

1 A version of this essay was first presented at the invitation of Domenico Pietropaolo, the Principal of St Michael’s College, in Toronto, as the inaugural lecture for a new series of lectures on the legacy of Marshall McLuhan. The event took place on January 29th 2015, just after the Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris but before the November 13th mass shootings.

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but perhaps appropriately, Belgium, the center of the Union is now politically and

culturally, the most retribalized, with the Flemish and Walloon communities more at

odds than they had ever been.

1. Utopia and/or dystopia

Throughout his writings of the sixties, from the Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) to War and

Peace in the Global Village (1967) to the famous Playboy interview (1969), McLuhan

seems to have wavered between a dystopic view of the new media’s effects and a

utopic one, although he never really turned them into a binary opposition. When asked,

at the end of that interview if he was “essentially optimistic about the future”, he replied:

“There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man’s

consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium,

but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ—Yeats’ rough beast, its hour

come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born…” but, he went on,

“Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to

look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on

the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become

truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical

culture and enabled to roam the cosmos.” (22-23)

This lyrical and hyper-optimistic view of things to come was expressed in 1969, at the

height of hippiedom and McLuhan seems to have been carried away by his early fan

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base, the flower children of the Age of Aquarius. Before that, from The Gutenberg

Galaxy to War and Peace in the Global Village, he had been much more dystopically

inclined and appeared to view the potential realization of the Anti-Christ as a more likely

outcome. And so it seems to be turning out when, in today’s sense of the words, we turn

on by pressing the remote control and tune in by selecting a listed channel.

2. The Screen and the Couch Potato

I would argue, however, that if the return of oral culture through new electronic media

has caused the present day catastrophes, our perception and awareness of them can

only massage us more as we watch them unfold on our various types of screens. That

is where and how we perceive local and distant shooting sprees, lone or multiple

gunmen on a rampage, executions of hostages, the spread of the Ebola epidemic, etc.

If an event or situation is not on a

screen, it simply did not happen or is no

longer current. To witness, a cartoon

from the November 12, 2014 issue of

The New Yorker. [This cartoon reminded

me of my old, now vanished, “video

rental” store where a wall poster simply

asserted that “If it is not on video tape, it

didn’t happen”.]

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Now, the standard model of communication, for literary and linguistic structuralism, is

the one that Roman Jakobson first presented in diagrammatical form at a seminal 1958

conference on “Style in Language” (Sebeok 1960:353). For communication to occur,

said Jakobson, 6 “factors” must be at play: an addresser, a message, an addressee, a

context (or reference), a contact (or medium) and a code (or common language):

For each factor, there is a more or less, corresponding dominant, but not exclusive,

“function”: the referential, emotive, poetic, phatic, conative, and metalingual. are

associated with each of these “factors”. The associations and labels have been put into

question by many scholars, but I shall not deal with them here.2

2 For some recent discussions of this model, see (Danesi 2002; Genosko 2012, Nesselroth 2014)

CONTEXT

ADDRESSER………………………..MESSAGE………………………....ADDRESSEE

CONTACT

CODE

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Although Jakobson’s diagram may have been sufficient to explain oral and written

communication at a time when print and speech were still the main means of cultural

contact, it is clearly inadequate for our current electronic environment. When we sit in

front of our computer, tablet or smartphone screens, we are, narcissistically, our own

addressors and addressees. Consequently, the “context factor” and the “referential

function” are quite different from direct oral and written communication. We gather

information through sites and hyperlinks; we paraphrase or plagiarize it, and then

disseminate it. The plagiarism aspect is the most frowned upon and yet, without it, we

would have no encyclopedias (Wikipedia being an obvious example) and no progress in

the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. I have occasionally recognized my

own sentences and paragraphs in articles on subjects that I had also treated. I find that

acceptable because there is no addressor, no one “author.” It is tribalism at its best, like

an epic poem, the encyclopedic form brings together a multitude of individual voices into

one or many “Cantos”. This recovery of an old genre, is a direct consequence of the

return of oral culture through electronic media like cell phones, networks, etc (McLuhan

1967). I have, consequently, tried to adapt the Jakobsonian diagram to the present-day

multi-media situation. Here then is my new model, inverting the Medium (Contact)

/Message relationship as, I think, McLuhan would have drawn it:

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While our media may have evolved, the access to the actual events is, of necessity, still

mediated, even in the case of “live” transmissions. The screen gives us a window on the

world. But what we see is only the broken pane and its

scattered pieces falling both in and out of the room.

These are the “pixels” (before that word became common

currency), as in the René Magritte 1938 painting called

“La Clé des champs” (literally “the key to the fields” and

figuratively, as a colloquial expression meaning “to head

for the hills, to flee”, for the French idiom “prendre la clé

des champs”.

REFERENCE (Ebola epidemic)

PC Screen (generic) …………………. …. MEDIUM………………………CP (Couch Potato)

↓↑

MESSAGE

VIDEO, AUDIO, TITLES, SUBTITLES, ETC

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3. “Every new technology necessitates a new war”.

Thus spoke McLuhan (1967, 98) at the height of the Vietnam War when television, the

“cool” low definition medium of the last decades of the 20th C. was the new technology.

Now, television has itself become just another content of our ultra-high definition video

screens. McLuhan’s own concept of “cool” vs. “hot” media was one of his more

controversial ideas, mainly because it is counter-intuitive. These labels were borrowed

from jazz music styles: hot jazz (dating back to the early days of radio) allowed the

listener to just listen while cool jazz became the dominant genre during the early days of

television and it forced the listener to participate in the production of the music. Here is

one of McLuhan’s explanations for this generic classification, one that is eerily

appropriate for the Charlie Hebdo cartoon massacres: “A photograph, for example, is

high definition or hot; whereas a cartoon is low definition or cool, because the rough

outline drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill in or

complete the image himself.” (1969, 11)

The question for us, today, is this: does watching stories and events as they unfold on

our screens require less participation on the part of the CP (couch potato)? Are we now

watching a “hot” medium, one that requires considerably less involvement on the part of

the viewers? It might be that our current media are neither “hot” nor “cool” but “warm” or

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“lukewarm”.3 These are not rhetorical questions: the media, both hot and cool, have

now reached just about the same temperature (lukewarm) or, to put it differently, if TV is

still “cool”, then “video games are “ice-cold” because they require the involvement of the

players’ bodies as well as minds.

Today’s screen images have effectively blurred the lines between the fictional and the

factual. To witness, the pre-decapitation videos of the ISIS hostages and their

executioners, and the tragic events in France, in January 2015, surrounding the satirical

weekly “Charlie Hebdo”. That particular event ended when the two perpetrators who

had attacked the editorial board of the magazine, came storming out of their last refuge,

a print shop (a curious Mcluhanesque coincidence) in a Parisian suburb, guns blazing in

a final shoot-out with “les forces de l’ordre”, as the French revealingly call their

peacekeepers and police units. At that point, the “news hour” turned into a “video

game”. Add to this the manhunt, after the initial massacre at the paper’s Paris offices,

the story of the son of the print shop’s owner who was hiding inside the premises, in a

nook behind some cartons, and kept the police informed by means of text messages. At

the same time, the two fugitives in the shop remained in constant contact, by cell-

phone, with both the gendarmes and the hostage taker in the supermarket at the other

end of town, in North-East Paris, and we are witnessing a process of infinite regression,

3 See Robert Logan’s discussion of this in Understanding New Media (2010).

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of media representing other media. Is what we see through these windows on the real

world any different from the fictional worlds of every day programming? It is practically

impossible to find one of the currently running police or detective shows (NCIS, SIU,

Chicago Fire, etc) whose story is not held together by electronic gadgets. Take the cell-

phones out of any of their narratives and the plots completely unravel.

4. “Off with their heads”

As for the ISIS decapitations, they are, mercifully, not shown on our traditional

Canadian and US news channels, probably because the average CP would be horrified

or nauseated, even though s/he might relish it when it happens in so-called “historical

fiction”, in a serial dramatic representation like “Marco Polo”. We know that the ISIS

beheadings are chronologically close to us and we assume that they are referentially

true (the expert analysts in Ottawa and Washington tell us so) whereas the ones in

Marco Polo are historical and culturally distant, defamiliarizing (in the Freudian,

Brechtian and Russian Formalist senses of the word, i.e. “making strange” or

“uncanny”). But the medium, our HD screens as extensions of our tactility, to use

McLuhan’s terms, is still the same. In other words, as CPs, we are not only the screen

but we also, more or less actively, screen out or do not screen out what is happening,

figuring out the ground and grounding in the figure.

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It could be argued that our revulsion is due to the fact that the projection gives us both

light on and light through its images, images being by definition representations of

events, not the events themselves. In the case of fictional or historic events, we are

conscious of the fact that the screen image is frequently, simply the representation of a

representation, or an example of what ancient rhetoric

and modern “theory speak” call ekphrasis, such as a

literary description of a painting or sculpture (Keats’

“Ode to a Grecian Urn”, Browning’s “My Last

Duchess”, Wilde’s “Portrait of Dorian Gray”, etc). A

good illustration of this is another Magritte work, this

one fittingly named La Condition humaine (1933), a

painting representing a painting of itself as such and

as scenery.

Similarly, artworks representing scenes from mythology or from sacred scriptures

(Madonna and Child, for example): Max Ernst’s Pietà or the Revolution by night (1923)

which is, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out “an Oedipal inversion of Michelangelo’s

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sculpture: a petrified father holds a living son in his arms, replacing the living mother

and her dead son, Christ” (1985, 6)4

More than an inversion, the Ernst painting contains, as a mirror image, Michelangelo’s

sculpture. In literary theory, this device is called a mise en abyme, a term first borrowed

by André Gide, from heraldry, where a coat of arms represents recurring images of itself

in chiasmatic relationships, just like the one between the PC and the CP. 5

Or, for instance, the representation of well-known historical events and periods, such as

the 10 months of the Terreur (1793-94) that followed the French Revolution of 1789, a

4 The “source” of Ernst’s painting, its father/son configuration, may be autobiographical (Legge 1989: 59-68)

5 On mise en abyme, see Dällenbach (1989)

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time when witnessing decapitations became a spectator sport. Some people did and still

do get satisfaction from seeing death sentences being carried out, in person or on

video. They like to see justice being done or as a proper punishment for whatever

crime(s) had been committed.

We know that there is a long tradition of executions (especially decapitations) as public

spectacles. Think of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities and of the famous

Tricoteuses, the women who sat there knitting while the heads of aristocrats and other

“ennemis du peuple” were being chopped off and collected in baskets. Here they are, in

a drawing of the period (Godineau 1988) and as represented in the 1934 film version of

Baroness Emma Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel:

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Were such spectacles “hot” or “cool”? Or to use another one of McLuhan’s examples,

were they more like formal lectures (hot, because of low audience involvement) or like

seminars (cool, because of student participation)? The Tricoteuses (who may have

been paid a per diem for being there and doing this) did every so often take time out

from their knitting to heckle and curse the people on their way to the guillotine. In the

Charlie Hebdo affair, the temperature labeling is more obvious. We have the

provocative, blasphemous cartoons, a very cool medium exploding in the very heated

up environment of religious fundamentalism. The killers, as they came out the building,

shouted that they had avenged the Prophet for the paper’s previously published satiric

and sacrilegious drawings of Mohamed. But more interesting, from a media analysis

point of view, is the fact that the cover of the issue of Hebdo that the editors were

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discussing, was a cartoon drawing of Michel Houellebecq, promoting his latest novel,

Soumission, (Submission) a fictional account of the election, in the near future, of a

Muslim President of France who soon establishes Sharia law for the country and its

institutions. The French population submits rather willingly to the new régime (just like it

did during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War). Here is a screen shot of that

cover, another example of ekphrasis:

The caricature is of Houellebecq but there is nonetheless the palimpsestuous presence

of the Prophet. The headline says “The

prediction of the Magus Houellebecq”

[magus is a downgrade from Prophet] and,

in the balloons, the prophecies “in 2015, I

will lose my teeth” and “in 2022, I will

observe Ramadan”. After the massacre of

the editors and the appearance of the

newspaper, his book, not surprisingly,

became a block-buster and Houellebecq wisely went into a kind of self-imposed exile,

but he does give interviews in France and abroad. In one such interview, he complained

that “people no longer understand that a fiction is a fiction. This is a simple idea that

people still understood not so long ago”. I would add that this is so because our HD

screens have all reached the same neither hot nor cool temperature, a massacre that

happened in Paris today or yesterday, is just part of another video game (almost).

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Personally, I have never been a fan of Charlie Hebdo. It is crude and it is vulgar. But I

am an admirer of Houellebecq‘s writings. I have read some of his earlier books like Les

Particules élémentaires” and “Plateforme” and I found Soumission to be a very good

read. I like Houellebecq for the same reason I like McLuhan: their style and attitude.

They are cool and they have mastered the fine art of tossing verbal hand grenades,

mostly by making outrageous statements in an understated manner. Of course, their

intellectual impact and importance are not comparable but they are navigating in the

same far-away or near-by Galaxy. I do consider Houellebecq to be one of the artists

(like Godard in his early films) who, according to McLuhan, are “under the radar”, that is

in tune with what is happening Now.

5. And Then...

McLuhan studies tend to fall into two categories: the first, and until recently, the

dominant one, deals with the man and his ideas, their genealogy, their pertinence as far

as new media are concerned and their archeology (by which I mean the foundations of

his work, figures like Vico or Bacon). The man and his style were indeed one and the

same (“le style, c’est l’homme” as the 18th C. naturalist Buffon famously said) but his

style also proved exceptionally well-suited for his speculations since his aphoristic

pronouncements made him an oracle and he became his very own medium (in every

sense of the word). Aphorisms, as I have tried to show elsewhere, are always true, that

is why they are reversible, especially when it comes to clichés and commonplaces:

McLuhan’s assertion that “Inventions are the mother of necessity” is just as valid as the

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commonplace “Necessity is the mother of invention”, or that “Credit cards are the poor

man’s cash” today, as McLuhan’s “Cash is the poor man’s credit card” was when he

published Understanding Media in the sixties. This was his way of rigging the game

because ideas expressed in aphoristic form are not subject to “true or false” criteria. He

did explain his own use of them by retrieving Francis Bacon’s distinction between

“Methods” and “Aphorism”. For Bacon, says McLuhan “‘writing in aphorisms’ rather than

in ‘methods’ was the difference between keen analysis and mere public persuasion.” ((

(1962, 102) An aphorism is the outcome of a long line of reasoning, the tip of the

iceberg or the cream that has risen to the top. As Derrida puts it: “Despite appearances,

an aphorism never arrives by itself, it doesn’t come all alone. It is part of a serial logic.”

(1992, 416) Aphorisms are “cool” media because the listener or reader must figure out

the long line of reasoning that led to the formulation of the idea. It is like the screen

image we interpret according to our own habits and experience. That is, it seems to

me, how we move from the referential content of the daily news broadcast to where the

action really is, i.e. between the screen (the PC as a generic processing device) and the

CP, the chiasmatic mirror image of the PC streaming videos to our various screens or,

to use McLuhan’s automotive metaphor “between the wheel and the axle”.

That is why an alternative or supplemental approach, of a more pragmatic nature, is

called for; one that puts the theories into practice. It is what we might call “applied

McLuhan”, just as Derrida’s theories, first presented in “De la grammatologie” in 1967

led to Gregory Ulmer’s 1985 “Applied Grammatology” (“grammatology” is the study of

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“writing” as opposed to “phonology”, the study of the “sound system” of languages). For

a long time phonology dominated linguistics, leaving “writing” and the “written” (in

French, the word “écriture” covers both meanings) as a “secondary” system whose role

is simply to represent speech and the spoken. This is very similar to McLuhan’s

medium/content fusion: the medium is not just bringing us content, it is the content.

A good example of “applied McLuhan” is Rira Leistner’s recently published Looking for

Marshal McLuhan in Afghanistan (2014).

This is a remarkable work of “iProbing”, a porte-

manteau word that combines McLuhan’s “probes”

with “iPhones” and, in this case, “Hipstamatic

photographs”. Leistner is one of Canada’s first-rate

photojournalists. The case in point in Leistner’s

book is war-torn Afghanistan. Although her template

remains McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s Vietnam era

book on War and Peace in the Global Village (1967), with its typographical playfulness,

marginal comments, black and white photographs and drawings, the format is no longer

an inexpensive paperback but a very beautiful art book with Hipstamatic coloured

photos. It is also a more sophisticated work, applying some of McLuhan’s later concepts

like the “tetrads” (1988), to the photos and events, and bringing us new insights from

other disciplines like linguistics and semiotics.

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The problem with Leistner’s type of work, however, is that it requires not just

professional and theoretical competence, but that it also demands enough actual

courage, even temerity, to put one’s own life in harm’s way, to don a flak-jacket and to

head for the danger zone. I doubt that most academic researchers, me included, would

be willing to go that far. But what we can do, thanks to McLuhan’s insights, is to read

what is happening differently, to understand (or misunderstand) the events on our TVs

and various gadgets by the effects of their medium, even if that medium’s content is

another medium. Leistner, being there, may be recording what she sees with her

Hipstamatic photographs but we, her readers, only have access to it via an art book and

its printed pages. This confirms, paradoxically, Mallarmé’s famous declaration that the

world was created in order to end up as a beautiful book, “Le monde est fait pour

aboutir à un beau livre.’’

6. The fatal 1%

McLuhan used to quip that, like all prophets, he had a 99% chance of being wrong.

Unfortunately one of his prophecies seems to be in the process of coming true, He had

foreseen that the return of oral culture through new communications media would

retribalize ethnic and religious groupings and that this would have disastrous

consequences for the world. Judging by the events of the last few decades, he was right

on. From the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia in the seventies, to the

rebalcanization of the Balkans after the breakup of the “former Yugoslavia” and the

tribal genocide in Rwanda and in other parts of Africa in the nineties, to the current

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Middle East sectarian conflicts, including the global rise and spread of ISIS, the recent

massacres in France, the often disastrous mass migrations in and out of geographic

areas, these all amounts to, I would suggest, a huge 1%.

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Nesselroth, Peter W. 2014. “Reopening the ‘Closing Statement’: Jakobson’s factors and functions in our Google Galaxy. Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress, 25–36. Olomouc, CZ: Palacký University Press. Norden, Eric. 1969. The Playboy interview: Marshall McLuhan. Playboy Magazine. March. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1960. Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press Peter W. Nesselroth is Professor emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His research interests include Dada and surrealism, stylistics, literary semiotics and communications theory. He has published extensively on 19th and 20th C. writers (Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Poe, Eluard, Ponge, Derrida) in journals like Littérature, Semiotica and L’Infini. He is currently completing a book on Reading Problems: Making Sense of Difficult Texts.