[The Law of Media 2 is an internal expansion of The Law of Media 1. The two versions have been retained as indicating the current of thought exercised in this blog. Its flow-through. That current should be open to critique as much as any factual assertion in the blog’s posts. McLuhan named this current at play here in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ rumination: “There are endless popular phrases (…) that are really questions.”]

The epigraph to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949)¹ is taken from Primitive Culture (1871) by E. B. Tylor:

The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.² 

Earlier in the same decade as Lévi-Strauss’s original publication of  Elementary Structures, McLuhan, in his 1943 PhD thesis on The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time, expressed a slightly offset agreement with Tyler as follows:

Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings, so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials.³

Tyler in 1871 located the “conclusion” that “law is (…) everywhere” as following from a “tendency of modern inquiry”. On its surface, Tyler’s observation concerned an objective condition (the ubiquity of law) to which subjective inquiry found itself increasingly constrained. This was its “tendency“. But what was the nature of this constraint on the subjective side and just how grounded was its conclusion of the lawful condition of the objective side?

Like the concern in phenomenology with Wesensschau⁴ in the first decades of the twentieth century, McLuhan’s formulation, 70 years after Tyler, shifted the matter at stake towards the conditions of reliable “perception”. The assertion was that both sides of Tyler’s equation are subject to an “intuitive” — unconditional — consolidation. That is, the essential nature of the object is revealed as that without which it could not be that object; while for the subject, its “perception” is bound to that essence — focused on it — since only so could it be the “perception” of it.    

But just who was doing this looking? And exactly why should her “perception of [just these] essentials” be trusted?

“The medium is the message” marked McLuhan’s decided realization, 15 years after his Nashe thesis, that the first steps towards open collective investigation into these questions had yet to be taken — namely, agreed identification of those purported essentials.⁵ Such ‘agreement’ had to do not only with the question of the object to be investigated collectively, but also with the question of the ‘who’ doing the investigation. For once an agreed object were in place — the ‘medium’ — subjectivity would be constrained to findings about it and could no longer freely hypothecate (except in art and in the rare circumstance of scientific revolution).

Moreover, here the object to be investigated was just that of subjectivity itself. As a result, the subject would find itself doubly bound: on the one hand, within the new investigation, by its agreed parameters and findings (Kuhn’s ‘normal science’); on the other hand, outside that investigation, by feedback from it to human deportment everywhere. Where before actions and beliefs had been the effects of unknown causes or (as McLuhan preferred to say after he read Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964) figures on unknown grounds, now those causes and grounds, along with their effects and figures, would be exposed in and by the newly inaugurated field of interrogation. Within the field, just as in any other science, findings would continually lead to further findings through the working of scientific interrogation. Outside of the field, formerly subliminal actions and beliefs would now increasingly be exposed and illuminated.

This double binding of subjective action and belief would introduce a new sort of freedom to individual and collective behavior. But would humans be capable of exercising it? The old freedom had been grounded in the caprice of ignorance. It expressed itself in the ungrounded figures of that vast range of individual and collective action comprising the historical record.⁶ Now a new freedom was possible, comparable to the new ways of behavior both within and without such relatively new sciences as physics and chemistry⁷ — but now applicable to social and political behavior in ways they were not.

With “the medium is the message”, it had become clear to McLuhan that only agreed definition could at last initiate the open collective investigation into human experience  — through which survival might be yet be achieved.⁸ But he was also increasingly aware that the possibility of such agreement was subject to a strange and potentially ominous knot in time — a ‘knot’ that could eventuate (and indeed always had eventuated) in a ‘not’ of refusal. 

The problem was that the promised future feedback⁹ between figured thoughts and actions and their grounds had to be activated (or pre-activated, as might be said) in the present — in order for that future to be initiated. This knot in time meant that, at a minimum, investigators would have to expose themselves to the uncertainties of a rigorous investigation into the unknown grounds of their existing thoughts and behaviors.

McLuhan knew that few would understand this requirement, let alone submit themselves to it. Therefore, the prospect of such agreed collective identification of the ‘medium’ to be interrogated in the new field was uncertain in multiple respects: it was uncertain if investigators would submit themselves to the uncertainties entailed by the peculiar initiation required for such investigation. And, if McLuhan were right that the survival of civilization and perhaps of the species depended upon this achievement, it, too, was uncertain.

McLuhan reflected on these problems in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ essay:

Man is now in a somnambulant state because this offers him [what seems to him as] his only possibility of survival and sanity [whereas it is really exactly what threatens survival]. He couldn’t bear a fully conscious existence under the frenetic conditions that he is exposed to by his own technology. He could not register these terrible shocks directly and survive. He’d go mad. I think that all human technology and invention has occurred under this kind of anxious pressure. You don’t outer anything [original]¹⁰ (…) until you’re under some dire pressure and fear. But when you put the nervous system outside [with the innovations of electric technology], fear is no longer the problem. Anxiety is the problem. Fear is specific, anxiety is total. As in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread, a book that appeared in the year of the telegraph.¹¹ You don’t know now precisely what you’re dreading, rather it’s a pervasive state. The condition of man is what you dread. You no longer dread [things or possibilities in the environment like] that animal [or] that famine, and so on, but this [unprecedented] condition [of human being subject to “a fully conscious existence” in dread.] (…) Anxiety means utmost alertness, utmost watchfulness, involvement and therefore of course a very heightened kind of existence, a sort of nightmare (…) This [all] terrifies mechanical man because he does not know what to do about the transition that is taking place [within and without him].

In the 1950s McLuhan himself had gone through the “transition” he described here. Now he wondered about the prospect of anyone following him in the required complete trans-formation of turning oneself inside-out. The operative inside-out of the electric environment where “our nerves [are] outside ourselves” made both possible and impossible¹² a science which would treat the human insides, at last, in an outward conscious manner.