Second Workshop #7

This week we endeavored to make a conversation between ourselves, Marshall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Robert Walser, and Raymond Williams. Walser was the most pleasant guest. His brief prose piece, “Parisian Newspapers,” was our keynote. In this short paragraph (written in 1925) he discusses the Parisian papers, “from which the scent of power emanates.” “The papers of conquerors,” he observes, “make the best society.”

Walser’s compelling synaesthesia and the beautiful English of translator Christopher Middleton enchanted us, and Stephanie Snyder wondered if he meant that the papers actually “make” the best society, by creating the social culture of power. Someone (was it Leslie Miller?) observed that one doesn’t glean information from newspapers so much as soak in them, bathe in them, acquire their perfume, so that one may walk out into the day properly groomed and acceptable for the society of others. While for Walser in 1925 this morning ritual meant “the Parisian newspapers,” for us, in Portland, 2007, it means The New York Times. The daily comedy, at Portland’s coffee shops, of scores of intelligent people grooming themselves behind fresh copies of that giant “Baby Huey” of a newspaper was observed and appreciated.

Walser’s “appreciation” of the Parisian papers was read by Erik Palmer, Abi Spring, and others as ironic, perhaps even sarcastic, and they felt he was mocking the newspapers’ self-importance. But Leslie Miller read him literally. With Leslie, we enjoyed the bracing vertigo of taking Walser’s indulgent submission to power on its face, as a real pleasure. We speculated that a commitment to read—and to conduct our own work—without irony might be a revolutionary position. By the end of the paragraph, Walser has “forgotten how to speak German,” and asks “I wonder if there is any harm in that?”

Marshall McLuhan entered the discussion with his distinction between “hot” and “cool” media. We speculated that Walser’s writing was itself “cool,” because he left room for such divergent readings (taking him literally or reading him as ironic or mocking). In McLuhan’s terms, this would be “cool” writing because Walser left the text “low definition” so it could be filled in and understood by the reader as he or she pleased. A “high definition” text might labor to fill in all nuance—or strip away ambiguity—so the reader is compelled toward one clear reading, as with newspaper writing. Also, Walser’s synaesthesia (he reads “the scent of power”) blurred the predominance of a single sense (visual reading) and thereby “cooled down” the otherwise hot medium of printed text.

Great hubbub and disgust was expressed about McLuhan’s text, on the one hand from Erik Palmer who felt that McLuhan has little or no place in contemporary media theory (because he lacks historical perspective or theoretical rigor) and on the other by Abi Spring, Leslie Miller, Melia Donovan, and Stephanie Snyder, who were put off by the declamatory tone of the text and McLuhan’s dated sexism. Scott Wayne Indiana professed to have little or no reaction to McLuhan. He found the distinction between “hot” and “cold” media clear and commonsensical, but he also doubted that it would ever be of much use to him.

Sergio Pastor, who has studied McLuhan in more depth than the rest of the group, reminded us that the terms “hot media” and “cool media” were what McLuhan called “probes”—images that he deliberately launched into the culture like fireworks, to both dazzle and illuminate. They were not intended to serve as reliable tools for theorists; rather, they clarify complexity the way a poetic image clarifies—which often means falsely—and thereby they set the stage for others to react by engaging and re-exposing the complex dynamics of media. Sergio also reminded us that McLuhan’s terms were neutral; McLuhan posed “hot” and “cool” as descriptions of media, not as desirable or undesirable qualities.

None of this dispelled the group’s general feeling of aggravation with McLuhan’s writing style, especially his fondness for such sweeping declarations as “the 'city slicker' is hot while the rustic is cool.” Erik Palmer agreed that this style of writing provoked strong reactions, and in this way was perhaps a useful strategy, but he regretted that McLuhan’s resulting celebrity also influenced the way academics function. McLuhan’s celebrity opened an era of pop scholarship that later gave us Camille Paglia, Rupert Sheldrake, and some would argue, Slavoj Žižek. As a PhD candidate himself, Erik feels that he faces career choices strongly shaped by McLuhan: should he court celebrity with provocative pop cultural pronouncements, or remain steadfastly working at the invisible, impersonal, cumulative labor of scholarship?

An interesting controversy erupted when the McLuhan probe of “cooling down” was brought to bear on the work of Melia Donovan, who herself had been so put off by McLuhan. I observed that McLuhan’s categories helped enrich my interaction with Melia’s PDX Window piece (discussed earlier) by letting me see that her transformation of a photograph into a sculptural analog of the photograph “cooled” this otherwise “hot medium” and gave the viewer radical agency and consciousness where usually (with a “real photo”) we hold little power. Stephanie Snyder pointed out that my use of McLuhan here had nothing to do with Melia’s intentions or hopes for the piece; I said that this was exactly what I liked about it.

In closing our discussion of McLuhan, I explained my reasons for assigning his text. First, as Sergio also pointed out, McLuhan’s interest (and sometimes horror) at the way electronics had altered the reach of human consciousness led him to speculations and analysis that are increasingly relevant as we shift more and more of our sensory interactions into the realm of digital media. His outré work is coming back into the conversation. Second, but more important, I like his writing. He’s an effective prose stylist. His texts are memorable and literary; that is to say he uses poetic imagery and ambivalent, unresolved meanings to provoke us to a kind of passionate engagement with his subject. His work leaves the reader in a sufficiently unresolved space that a great deal of thinking and further conversation results, as evidenced by his place in the popular imagination. In his own terms, he makes “cool” texts, ones that are low definition and so bestow agency on the reader. Ultimately, all media are political spaces—spaces of negotiated power—and it excites me to read a text that so democratically disperses power amongst all those who enter it.

McLuhan’s celebrity offered a further puzzle, in its contrast to the fate of Raymond Williams, the highly-respected British Marxist scholar whose own work on media, Communications, pre-dated McLuhan’s most famous text, Understanding Media, by two years. Why was McLuhan famous in popular culture and Williams not? We wondered if Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s analysis of mass culture, “The Culture Industry” (a chapter from their book The Dialectic of Enlightenment), could help us answer this conundrum.

Erik Palmer prefaced our exploration of this question by giving some background on Williams. He reminded us of Williams’s Marxism, and his hope that Marxist scholarship could be a useful instrument in the everyday lives of the working class (his own class). Erik said Williams was pursuing this hope in the 1950s and 1960s, when the horror of Stalin’s authoritarian regime had eroded the clarity and ideals of Marxism in Europe and North America. Williams broke with other British Marxists by suggesting that Marx's strict determinism (the “material base,” the infrastructure, generates the “superstructure,” that is the culture—thus the culture always expresses the values of the ruling class that controls the base) might in fact be less deterministic than Marx had described. Williams spoke of a “structure of feeling” within which different cultural expressions are possible, bounded but not strictly determined by the values of the ruling class. Within this structure of feeling there could be a revolutionary politics and, more crucially, there could be hope. Determinism, we concluded, was “a gentleman’s sport,” a game the truly disenfranchised cannot afford to play. They need hope.

Erik contrasted Williams to Adorno and Horkheimer and briefly located their work within the context of the Frankfurt School, and then, suddenly, it was 10:15. I officially apologize to the patient workshop members who have endured my failure to bring the class to a neat conclusion by 9:30, as intended. I pledge that our final three meetings will end well before 10 pm, at which point those who need to go elsewhere will be able to go.

I have saved the best for last. Leslie Miller brought us another beautifully produced zine, a graphic story and text called “A Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Like Melia’s PDX Window piece, it briefly became the unwitting victim of McLuhanesque analysis (cartoons are cool; text is hot) but survived this uninvited assault with all of its beauty, intelligence, and attention to craft intact. It is a lovely object, truly H-O-T and super cool. Thanks galore, also, to Melia Donavan for this week’s provision of exotic Japanese snacks, especially a pickled lotus root that she prepared specially, and the various leaf-capped rice balls imported from the far reaches of Beaverton, Japan. Scott’s Old Crow remains unopened, and will be on the table again when we meet next.

It’s Spring Break! The workshop will reconvene on April 4th, to continue our discussion of Adorno and Horkheimer, and to meet our next guest, film-maker Matt McCormick.