accoustic space

The Senses and SocietyISSN: 1745-8927 (Print) 1745-8935 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfss20 “Acoustic Space” – Marshall McLuhan Defended Against Himself Veit Erlmann To cite this article: Veit Erlmann (2016) “Acoustic Space” – Marshall McLuhan Defended Against Himself, The Senses and Society, 11:1, 36-49, DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2016.1162946 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2016.1162946 Published online: 01 Jun 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfss20 Download by: [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] Date: 04 June 2016, At: 08:28 edu .1080/17458927. emplaced sound formance.2016. unconscious. assumptions regarding the givenness of a particular cation Award of the African Studies domain such as “hearing” or “sound” have become Association and the Mercator Prize of the German Research Founda- debatable. P. he is currently There he was. Modernity and the Global Imagination. In addition to being a co-editor of the journal Sound Studies. He has won ABSTRACT  After a spectacular rise over two dec- numerous prizes. A History of McLuhan. including African Stars. The Senses & Society VOLUME 11. Merriam award for the best Eng- lish monograph in ethnomusicology. including the Alan ades Sound Studies appears to be at a crossroads. the armrests.” 36 erlmann@utexas. Marshall McLuhan’s largely forgotten tion. reveling in working on a book on intellectual the glory of his comet-like rise to fame. “You have been quoted as saying. TRADING AS PUBLISHERS LICENSE ONLY TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP.1162946 ethnomusicologist and the Endowed Chair of Music History at the Univer- sity of Texas at Austin. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 “Acoustic Space” – Marshall McLuhan Defended Against Himself Veit Erlmann is an anthropologist/ Veit Erlmann The Senses & Society  DOI: 10. Many of its taken-for-granted epistemological the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publi. ISSUE 1 REPRINTS AVAILABLE PHOTOCOPYING © 2016 INFORMA UK PP 36–49 DIRECTLY FROM THE PERMITTED BY LIMITED. PRINTED IN THE UK Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. His most recent publication is KEYWORDS: sound. Marshall Reason and Resonance. Nightsong. South Africa and the West. acoustic space Modern Aurality (Zone Books. Studies in Black South African Per- to explore alternatives to sensed. He has published widely concept of “acoustic space” and its complex rela- on music and popular culture in tionship with the unconscious offers an opportunity South Africa. as the normative epistemological space of sound Power and Practice in South Africa. DFG. listening. 2010). studies. alone on a dark stage. Walter Benjamin. swiveling property law in the South African music industry that will be published in a chair with a microphone attached to one of by Duke University Press. and Music. Performance. Critiques of McLuhan’s work come in a variety of guises. she writes. high definition versus low definition. “Acoustic Space” . But most famously. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 course. of Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. repetitive. spinning to the left and to the right in his solitary chair. Constance Classen. as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suspects. Alterna- tively revered as a founding father.”1 Did he really have no point of view? The camera certainly had one. a strong one at that. he replies. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld. And lastly. I’m just moving around and picking up information from many directions. his work continues to radiate a powerful yet iridescent aura. “that you don’t necessarily agree with everything that you say.” cautions against following McLuhan’s theory to the letter (2005: 148). while acknowledging his visual/aural binary to be a “driving force in many cultures around the world.Marshall McLuhan the voice from off-stage asks. for instance. he was adamant that our entire per- ceptual world could be categorized into a set of neat opposites: hot versus cool. Among the most widespread is the tendency to include him in a lineage of “pioneers” of media studies whose Delphic predictions. everybody else said he had one. does the opposite. he has no problem invoking some of McLuhan’s signature terms to describe the perceptual model of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea as a “spatio-acoustic mosaic” of constantly “changing figure and ground” (2012: 265). More than three decades after Marshall McLuhan’s death. must periodically undergo a reality check: Can McLuhan’s ideas “help us make sense of our new digital age?” (Levinson 1999: 1) Much the same applies to sensory studies. primitivist. now. lurking behind all this is an altogether more sinister 37 agenda. and discontinuous as the “electric age” he prophesied. “I couldn’t possibly have a point of view.” No. towering intellectual figure and soothsayer with a tendency toward one-upmanship or reviled as a dyed-in-the-wool techno-determinist. gazing past the disbelieving audience in front of him toward dimly flickering lights at the back of the auditorium. And you can’t have a static. In celebrating . following from its invisible vantage point his carefully chore- ographed ballet complete with stage lighting and props. McLuhan’s work eludes a single vantage point much like he had evaded the point of view in the 1967 interview. and on just about every conceivable topic from medieval painting and the grid of American cities to ballet and cars – all delivered in prose as intuitive.” “No. he does not have a point of view. fixed position. “As for example. “to extrapolate a perceptual model from the dominant The Senses & Society mode of communication” (148). enigmatic media guru with a penchant for elliptical – “McLuhanesque” – statements. center against margin. It is not enough. meanwhile. And. While he rejects as essentialization McLuhan’s visual-auditory dichotomy along a West/non-Western divide (2005: 184). figure against ground.” he says. while captivating at first sight. a point of view means a static. fixed position in the electric age. and above all visual versus oral. space made by the thing itself. the dark of Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. but dynamic. A more benign reading might focus on acoustic space as an “umbrella term for a set of epistemological boundary experiments” (Stamps 1995: 133). Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 the mind.” (McLuhan 2011: n. those who don’t are in the wilderness. is not only scientifically improbable.3 But the myth-tinged proximity between sound-based “oral- ity” and “acoustic space” alone is insufficient to dismiss the latter concept outright. Those who hear the church bell are in the parish. horizonless. more effervescent than “orality. as hinted at typographically 38 above? Or might “acoustic space” be less an issue of acoustics . shrouding the voice. Veit Erlmann global telecommunication as a means to “go back to the possibility of precapitalist spiritual riches without their attendant discomforts. always in flux. It is not pictorial space. the world of emotion. Did they all miss it. rather than sound being a function of the sphere. and all the “visual” rest? And besides. it is indifferent to background. it is grounded in religion.” she claims.” how might it be repre- sented beyond its formless simultaneity. it is a cosmic. primordial intuition. the point about the impossible point of view? What about “acoustic space. as composer and soundscape pioneer Murray Schafer. The “sphere without boundaries” creates boundaries. and it does contain something: a “proprietor who maintains The Senses & Society authority by insistent high-profile sound” (Schafer 2004: 68–69). invisible architecture of the human dark. then. writing was the visualization of acoustic space. directionless. the notion of acoustic space as a sphere whose boundaries are a func- tion of sound. boxed in. It lit up the dark.” the term that originated in the early 1950s from the heady discussions at what would become known as the Toronto School of Communication and that McLuhan claimed as his own but few critics now seem to remember?2 “Until writing was invented. creating its own dimensions moment by moment. Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space. It has no fixed boundaries. not space con- taining the thing. Writing returned the spotlight on the high. It’s a sphere with- out fixed boundaries. Speak that I may see you. possibly McLuhan’s acoustically most informed critic noted. McLuhan “legitimizes postfordist postmodern capital- ism” (1999: 365). dim Sierras of speech. terror. If indeed there is a realm more primordial. direction. we lived in acoustic space.” (Carpenter and McLuhan 1960: 67) Speech as structure? Shrouding the voice? Had he not declared speech and voice – in other words. “orality”– to be the antithesis of structure. where the Eskimo now lives: boundless.p. Speech is a social chart of this dark bog.) “Auditory space has no point of favored focus. architecture. then. a sound that seems to have been heard somewhere in the darkness of a past life. Whereas it is commonplace that. just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. “Acoustic Space” . he raised doubts whether the “space informed by the unconscious” was in fact an optical one. Adorno.” (Benjamin 1999a: 511–512) Walter Benjamin would add an important qualifier to this famous passage from his1931 article "Little History of Photography" a year later. Is the term déjà vu – which enjoyed wide currency in the early decades of the twentieth century – “well chosen” to describe that space. It is . It is a word. In “A Berlin Chronicle. a tapping. or a rustling that is endowed with the magic power to transport us into the cool tomb of long ago. might we imagine the resonant “dark bog” to be a realm on the edge of the oral/visual dichotomy. can one salvage sound studies’ McLuhanite legacy by defending its author against himself? Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. the shock with which moments enter consciousness as if already The Senses & Society lived usually strikes us in the form of a sound. Photography.Marshall McLuhan than of epistemology? Instead of it being a space of original purity. reveals the secret. aesthetic. but as one that recognizes the excess of meaning that cannot be exhausted by either speech or writing? How might McLuhan’s term be helpful in reviewing some of sound studies’ taken-for-granted historical. we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms). Would it not be better to use a metaphor taken from the realm of acoustics to denote the strange phenomenon of recognizing the class divisions of his native Berlin by re-hearing the barrel organs and chorales of his childhood days? “One ought to speak of events that reach us like an echo awak- ened by a call. Accordingly.” a short text rich in references to sound and music. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious. and hence “acoustic space” as a term that does not reconcile the polar opposites by transcending them. for example. we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. if we are not mistaken. finally. and most notably epistemological assumptions “regarding the givenness of a particular domain” such as “sound” or “hearing” (Akiyama and Sterne 2011: 556) without lapsing back into mystic invocations of orality? In short. after extensive conversations with Theodor W. from the vault of which the present seems to return only as an echo. the “realm of acoustics” had been firmly integrated into his work on sound film. he wonders. In the famous essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” the “space informed 39 by the unconscious” is no longer one revealed by photography.” (Benjamin 1999b: 634) By 1938. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 “For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the uncon- scious. with its devices of slow motion and enlargement. Camera and recording devices operate in a dialectical fashion. The “visuality of the instant” (Krauss 1993: 214). Leaps into Utopia. etc. In the wake of Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of “Animal Locomotion” and Etienne-Jules Marey’s wheel-camera images the sense of time. disrupting and isolating. But by establishing the tenth-of-a-second as the minimal unit of perception.” Much like for Freud technology were “auxil- iary organs. stretching or compressing” of the much more nimble movie camera that brings to light “things which had previously floated unnoticed on the broad stream of perception. Benjamin goes one step beyond psychophysiology. slips of the tongue. that is. is transformed back into undivided continuity. in particular. early recording technologies such as the condenser microphone and the gramo- phone) were essentially prosthetic devices compensating for the inability of our nervous system to cope with the rapid flow of move- ments. disrupted the clas- sical dogma of the unity and temporal immediacy of perception and cognition. Veit Erlmann now the “swooping and rising. the blatant divisibility of the temporal present made possible by technology. Benjamin hoped that film would accomplish a “deepening of apperception throughout the entire spectrum of optical impressions” – and. unheard and.” “isolating. into the perceptual and ultimately also cognitive unity of the person in front of the screen.” Benjamin’s camera (and by extension. early twentieth-century psycho-physiology put paid to metaphysics’ preposterous claims of self-presence (Canales 2009). he argued. As such the fascination with the “augmenting” capability of such devices was part of a broader shift in everyday spatio-temporal experience.” and “stretching” such devices are capable of recombining the isolated incidents into a more conscious narrative. In cap- turing the unseen.” Much like Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life had made us aware of everyday slip-ups. especially of time. Yet this return to flow is also shot through with ambiguity and surprising leaps. unconscious split seconds and by subjecting them to conscious scrutiny through the analytical The Senses & Society toolkit of “disrupting.4 The Benjaminian camera is little more than an intermediary between consciousness and the unconscious. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 that operates entirely outside the unconscious/consciousness divide. he adds in a largely unnoticed parenthesis of just five words. An avalanche of “reaction time” tests in which the time interval between an optical or acoustic stim- ulus and an individual’s response served to determine the velocity of nervous transmission and the speed of thought. “now also the auditory” [und nun auch der akustischen] impressions (Benjamin 2003a: 265). As such Benjamin’s instrumentalist understanding of technol- ogy is much more indebted to an older brand of psychology asso- ciated with the physiology of perception. had undergone a radical transformation. an invisible machine Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. 40 . hence. than to Freud’s “talking cure. (Benjamin 2003b: 318) There is. But above all it was the “pulse. one sound.” the “being caught inside the illusion and this looking nonetheless from without. looking back. the space of his “now in the auditory” is not simply that of “sound. he quotes Freud’s famous dictum.” (Benjamin 1999a: 510) Some of that longing for the Utopian “spark” was present in Sur- realism. or forgotten – the “most recent popular tune” – (Benjamin 1977: 300) into what he called “energies of intoxication” or “revolutionary experience.” but if it were incorporated into consciousness. It was a “both-at-once. no matter how care- fully posed his subject.” Yet as Rosalind Krauss tells us. and legibility to all The Senses & Society this. then.” that resulted from the experience of a series of immobile birds merging into the sensation of a flying pigeon (Krauss 1993: 209). Or. more precisely. the shock would be sterilized. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 enthralled turn-of-the-century audiences who were gazing through the openings in the rotating drum of a zootrope at the wooden pigeons inside (lampooned by Ernst in his collage novel A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil) was something altogether more mundane and phantasmagoric at the same time. a sequence in which one thing. the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search the picture for the tiny spark of contingency. one word follows another going in one direction before it returns in the same order in the opposite direction.Marshall McLuhan “No matter how artful the photographer. and meaning. Max Ernst and André Breton. Benjamin clung to it tenaciously. language. “Acoustic Space” . Accordingly. the panorama. But con- sciousness can also have another function other than the neurologi- cal function of protecting against “shock. Baudelaire’s poetry is indeed the result of a carefully calculated “plan” that turns the exposure to “shock” into an aesthetic norm. Becoming conscious and leav- ing behind a memory-trace. a certain sense of logos.” If the shock is parried by consciousness. and the praxinoscope punctuating the viewer’s vision that not only threatened the desire for perceptual synthesis but the very modernist mythology of autonomous form.” but that of sound as structure.” of sounds being undone 41 . mundane. are incompatible processes within one and the same system. syntax. of the here and now. what Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. the incident that causes it would be considered as an isolated experience or “Erlebnis. as if a hidden principle organizes the two-way street of the rela- tionship between consciousness and the unconscious. Benjamin’s “realm of acoustics” does not consist of audible sounds per se as much as it encompasses successive stages of “soundness” and “unsoundness. may rediscover it.” It is a function that is more ambiguously positioned at the intersection of where consciousness emerges from a memory-trace and that Benjamin associates with what he calls the “poetic experience. had converted the destitute.” the quiver of the jerky zoot- rope. to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we. with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject [of the photo]. he argued. other-sen- sory (“cool”) space. From which it resurfaces in somewhat atten- uated. is not so much a record of what we have heard and then re-actualize in some con- scious act. It is close to what Lyotard calls the matrix. first. much like an echo retains the temporal structure of the original sound that it emanates from.” the audible negates itself. much like the unconscious itself. sound morsel after sound morsel. my emphasis) the acoustic unconscious for Benjamin shelters a secret code whose key has been lost and whose meaning must be retrieved through a form of redoubling. a déjà entendu. The interval that the order of perception requires so that the things in the external world can be distinguished from one another. There is. Thus. is not something that “fills” the unconscious in lieu of some other sensory element in the manner of an adjective lending specificity to an abstract category. As Jean-Francois Lyotard has argued in a brilliant reading of Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten. is not The Senses & Society another form of the unconscious or an anti-optical unconscious. but an unconscious-as-sound. [in order] to make predictions or extensions on the basis of accepted principles.” Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. Instead of an “acoustical” counterpart to Benjamin’s “optical unconscious. truncated form. invested with the same charge. From an initial state of being a “word. in a word. posited simultaneously with the same intensity. entering a silent. it is not necessary for it to be cleared in order to be reinvested. Just as Proust’s mémoire involontaire makes available “images that we have never seen before we remember them.” But 42 there is also a “mosaic” approach. it is not even a space. For Freud. decoding. Yet the lineal order of “events” remains intact throughout. but rather an “unheard” that has been repressed and is compulsively repeated. The acoustic-unconscious rather is an assemblage. a nexus that undercuts the coordinates of space and time.” the acoustic-unconscious cannot be grasped as part of an auditory field. and “reading. Here each problem is taken for . language or fixed oppositions – such as between visual and auditory. to keep them from blending into one another.” (Benjamin 1977: 1064.” a “tapping” or a “rustling. depth of field […] is abandoned here” (Lyotard 2011: 337). Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 Yet the acoustic-unconscious is more than an acoustic version of the déjà vu of a text. The acoustic. Georg von Békésy distinguished two kinds of approaches to the challenges posed by the “revolutionary development of techniques in acoustics” during the early decades of the twentieth century. Veit Erlmann and reassembling. […] If an area is invested. accordingly. a space that does not know any structure. In fact. even inscrutability. through painstaking deciphering. a “theoretical approach” according to which a problem is formulated in relation to what is already known. The acoustic-unconscious. then.” for Freud all “the formations of the uncon- scious are contemporaneous. writing about the “listening cap” or Hörkappe that sits astride Ego. the moment of remembrance is not one that is subject to individual volition but one of irresolvable ambi- guity. Nor is it about hearing. rejects “retinal sat- isfaction” and thus might be said to require much less a beholding than a holding of objects. 43 . No certainty. for instance. when represented in the mosaic form things do not occupy the space of empirical vision as clearly bounded figures or by virtue of their distance from the ground. The mosaic approach. In contrast to perspective.” all-at-once form: “discontinuous. and multi-leveled” (55). In short. No. What do you see? Faces or vase? What do you hear? The sound in front or the sound behind? One has to choose.” one the one hand. it all comes down to the unconscious. (Békésy 1960: 4) McLuhan quoted the Hungarian-born scholar whose research on the biophysics of the inner ear had won him a Nobel Prize in 1961 compulsively. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 does not reduce space to a “single. and the attempts from the Renaissance on to give unity and perspective and to represent the atmosphere of the scene depicted. even though it is possible for a subject to voluntarily shift the sound image from front to back and vice versa. of individual objects as if “spread out on a carpet. While the perception of distance of a sound is simply determined by its loud- ness. This. Mosaic form is “lossy. by listening to a sound behind the head) the perception of distance was indetermi- nate. as “sounds assembling.2. It is for this reason that modernist painting since Cézanne is best appreciated as a mosaic whose two-dimensionality is not subject to the dominance of the visual but opens up a space for “maximal interplay among all of the senses” (55). Békésy discusses “The Spatial Attributes of Sound. in which things take their place in geometric (Euclidean) space relative to an observer’s more or less arbitrary and stationary point of view. on the other hand. its claim to perceptual and informa- tional hegemony and the depreciation of the ground following in its wake. for instance. he argued for instance.Marshall McLuhan itself “with little reference to the field in which it lies and that seeks to discover relations and principles that hold within the circumscribed area.” Bekesy provided two examples of the difference between the two approaches: the depiction in Persian miniature painting. likewise.” Elsewhere in his Experiments in Hearing. It was the arro- gance of the “lossless” figure. or to quote the title of a painting and a poem by McLuhan’s near-contemporary and possible influence Bertram Brooker (1980). In fact. “Acoustic Space” . in front-back location (that is. there is no lasting ground. clearly. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.” arguing that directional hearing is sub- ject to a great deal of variation in the sensation of stimuli. modernist art can only be experi- enced as a merging of forces without vanishing point. Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. and connected char- acter” as does all post-Renaissance perspective painting (McLuhan 1988: 55). fitting him into his Procustean bed of dichotomies at every opportunity. that he railed against. abrupt. uniform. it suited McLuhan’s project of articulating auditory space and the mosaic. no synthesis. not only resembles the perception of reversible perspective figures such as in The Senses & Society Edgar Rubin’s famous faces-vase diagram (1960: 280–281). Oedipus’ fate. it does not tolerate a “withholding the syntactical connection” for the sake of producing a “single image of great inten- sity” (McLuhan 1951: 80). Unlike Cézanne. Psychoanalysis’ unconscious and acoustic space are not coterminous. numbing Narcissus to Echo’s attempts to seduce him with fragments of his own speech. The myth of Narcissus. “He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed sys- tem” (McLuhan 1994: 41). but the product of extrusion. McLuhan argued. as his name implies. psychoanalysis could but fixate on the figure and geometric three-dimensionality. Veit Erlmann The difficulty with psychoanalysis. Narcissus cut himself off from himself. it is rather the price he had to pay for the hubris of having solved the riddle of the Sphinx. As a result. is thus tantamount to narcosis. psychoanalysis favors introspec- Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. Picasso. for its part. As the ancient dramatists knew well. by falling in love with an image of himself as an Other. 44 Similarly. Perhaps he had in mind Freud’s analogy between the unconscious and the Piazza of the P ­ antheon in Rome (where buildings from different eras are juxtaposed) when he reproaches psychoanalysis for failing to pay attention to “the ground of psychic conditioning” (McLuhan 1987: 458). The Senses & Society Oedipus and Narcissus do not belong to the same order of the unconscious then. Freud’s interpretations of the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus. Oedipus might be said to have tried an acoustic approach . it is a tale of self-amputation. More than any- thing. his blindness. which in turn prevents self-recognition: a “massive psychic chias- mus” (McLuhan 1962: 277). is not about what Freud called “ego ideal” (and would later rename as “super-ego”). The extension of himself through the medium of the mirror. Oedipus’ penalty for having caused a break in the system by ingeniously crossing “break boundaries” over into another system was a sealing-off of “awareness to the total field” (McLuhan 1994: 39). McLuhan’s unconscious is not a site of interiority and of the repression of unwanted outside intrusion as it is with Freud’s Oedipus complex. By mistaking his own reflection in the pool of water for another person. The “outering” of the self through media is what creates the uncon- scious and prevents Narcissus from escaping visual space and from immersing himself in the totality and simultaneity of acoustic space. Faced with the impossibility of picturing the simultaneous and unable to resolve the paradox of having to represent the discon- tinuous work of the unconscious in a theory of continuous tempo- rality. likewise. and Duchamp who upheld the figure while fighting its tyranny. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 tion over two-dimensional or “mosaic” participatory simultaneity. is not the punish- ment for having acted out his repressed sexual desire in killing his father and marrying his mother. was its failure to grasp the ever-present now of the unconscious in terms that tran- scend those of geometric space or the figure. Self-extension leads to self-amputation. bespeak psychoanalysis’ obstinate fixation on visual space. he held. He called it Merkwelt or “perception world. Consciousness. Language is not a homog- enous system: it is divisive because it extends the sensed into an object of signification. he might have said. When an environment becomes an object of attention it assumes the character of an anti-environment or an art object. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 that is inherently unstable and vulnerable to disruption? In short. the media environments that we hardly ever notice and that film supposedly explodes with the dynamite of the tenth-of-a-second.” Lyotard writes. consequently. it cannot confine within itself the meaning of the media-unconscious. to “go to the other side of discourse.” (7) Yet figure and ground. For McLuhan media are not a priori means to blast open and make available for conscious inspection what Benjamin had called the “prison-world” of our “commonplace milieux” (2003a: 265). if the medium is the message. visual and acoustic space.” 45 . “An environment is naturally of low intensity or low definition. and language is a medium. it is merely a new milieu. Anything that raises the envi- ronment to high intensity. Media are the unconscious. one can get “to” the figure and be “in” the figure at one and the same time. If the unconscious is consciousness that is “outered” by media rather than being the internal residue of the excess of media input that has been repressed. Of course.” (McLuhan 1967: 44) Benjamin earlier had used an unusual term for the claustrophobic “commonplace milieux” of city streets. consciousness and the unconscious are not quite as diametrically opposed to each other as McLuhan often made them appear. furnished rooms. whether it be a storm in nature or a violent change resulting from a new technology. which is why it escapes observation. One get to the figure because there is no discourse without its counterpart “over there. turns the environment into The Senses & Society an object of attention. (Lyotard 2011: 7–8) Hence. and railroad stations – in other words. as phenomenology claims. Because language itself is a medium. is not the Other of this media-uncon- scious. how can one write about it? How might such a media-unconscious become available to concepts when it resists the geometric logic of the point-of-view in the first place? And how can we grasp through the closed system of language a space Downloaded by [University of Nebraska.Marshall McLuhan but was doomed to remain trapped in the sensory deprivation of visual space symbolized by blindness. but it is also divided because it interiorizes the figure in its completed signification.” and one can get in the figure “without leaving language behind because the figure is embedded in it. But the problem with the interpretation of the Oedipus myth as a master trope for psychoanalysis’ unconscious lies deeper. “Acoustic Space” . what can be said about the unconscious beyond the apparent oxymoron of it being formless form? There simply is no way. there are paral- lels between McLuhan’s self-extension/self-amputation and Freud’s discontent with “civilization’s” prosthetic organs and their narcissist implications. the Merkwelt was part of a “functional circle” in which the Merkwelt and “effect world” or Wirkwelt react back on each other as in a feedback loop. percep- tion and perceiver on ever-shifting terms. Rather than a stable entity the animal becomes an Uber-animal or. a “musical theory of life. The camera records the day-world. the “here and now” and. the projector evokes the night-world.” Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt. the future. because each niche contains only a limited set of “perceptual signs” whose “meaning” determines the action of the organism.” The space of the Uexküllian environment is not nature. dissect.” The projector reconstructs the dissected scene and “unrolls the daylight world of a magic carpet. While Uexküll’s Umwelt is an all-en- compassing field that incorporates both figure and ground. Veit Erlmann The term is key in the work of Benjamin’s acquaintance. the biolo- gist Jakob von Uexküll. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 isms in the order of biological knowledge from a concern with origin. is a theory of relations and indeterminacy. ultimately. In Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt. And in contrast to the mosaic flatness of Uexküll’s Merkwelt in which meaning exhausts itself in the moment of perception and the action following in its wake. it is an acoustic theory or. is not a question of their content but 46 an ecological question. Other environments are unreadable and thus out of reach.” (McLuhan 1954: 7) Once he had settled on the notion that the medium is the message.” either). For in shifting the place of organ- Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. thus constituting an organism’s Umwelt or environment (von Uexküll 2010). or physiological mechanism. and record motion The Senses & Society the movie camera “rolls up the carpet of existence. Media come in pairs. it could hardly be the figure that reveals the unconscious ground of the media environment it happens to be “in. With its analytic power to arrest. Much like in Uex- . what moves to the center of the scientist’s attention is no longer any fixed quality but the organism’s ever-changing place in a larger system of data flows and processes of adaptation. form. As closed as the tick’s or dog’s respective environments may appear. they are rather dynamic. Benjamin’s “perceptual world” resem- bles more a distant horizon of a potentially infinite yet stable space that consciousness does not (and cannot) fully exhaust.” But this temporal fluidity and event-like character of the organism is at odds with Benjamin’s interpretation of Uexküll’s term. an utterly per- spectival space in which the “nature” of things is determined from the position of the “visual.” The nature of media. it is not Murray Schafer’s secularized divine creation. of course. as he called it. dog or jackdaw functions within a specific ecological niche that is his and his alone. a dream-world. Benjamin tries to grasp the truth of our unconscious nature by extracting from the “com- monplace milieux” the figure. by comparison. in one of Uexküll’s audacious phrases. it needs technology to yield the meaning that only depth will provide. filtering and feedback. the “living outdoors. then. an “event (Geschehnis). Nature is a human construct. then (And. Atick. one which Jean-François Lyo- tard calls the “figural” and that works entirely outside the realm of either sound or non-sound. The figural refuses to confine art in per- spectival. hence. is thus not one of the order of the unconscious as an object of repression. com/watch?v=OMEC_HqWlBY. Marshall McLuhan: CBC Interview 1967. to adumbrate the aesthetic experience as a form of “understanding.   2. And yet he could not let go of difference.” and this is the order that the nineteenth-century theorists of “absolute music” and their late-blooming descendants such as Adorno spurned. Yet it survives in a far more paradoxi- cal form than McLuhan might ever have imagined. reality and daydream meld into each other. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 survives as a powerful trope through which modernism struggles to master the difficult ground–figure relationship that so haunts its claims to formal autonomy. anti-en- vironmental.” one might conclude. we might say with Krauss and substituting the auditory for the visual. Even in acoustic space. the art of “acoustic space” is an art of the figural. and effect world are interlinked in fluctuating constellations of function. it reminds us that there is an interworld that is less a store of readily available “sounds” than a store of past “hearings. While remaining well within the sensory. stronger because it transcends all divisions of visual space. impossible order of the figure.” But in turn it also resists as gratuitous the temptation to reduce the aesthetic experience to a mere mechanical reflex to or record of unconscious repression. The first is the order of empirical hearing and of the sound as “heard. commonplace of our media-unconscious is being unlocked only rarely disrupt the twilight of complete interdepend- ence. and Stamps 1995. An art of the “acoustic space. representational space for sure and. Levinson 1990. For the most part. “every form of discourse exhausts itself before exhausting it” (Lyotard 2011: 7). http://www. structure: audible but unheard (1993: 217) Yet there is also a third.” The Senses & Society In experiencing such art.youtube. The second order is that of “pure” hearing itself. Modernism. unity. 47 . despite the disa- vowal of the point-of-view. See however Cavell 2002.Marshall McLuhan küll’s theory perceiving organ. the modernist myth of cognitive authority Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. of what he would call “total awareness” or “consciousness of the unconscious” (McLu- han 1994: 47). This would be his ultimate master-narrative. Notes  1. perceptual world. Nor can it can it simply take the side of all-point-of-view. flashes of intuition and quasi-messianic moments in which the black box of the undifferentiated. “Acoustic Space” . in McLuhan’s environment/anti-environment scheme sharp differences. the level that modernism simul- taneously fears and wants to master as a principle of coordination. stronger than all the dyads taken together. To paraphrase Lyotard. imagined the figure to be of two orders. total consciousness. Steven. 544–560. Carpenter. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooker. 1980. 1927–1934. and Sterne.” In Gesammelte Schriften. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techno- logical Reproducibility: Third Version.3. Walter. Vol. 1977. Benjamin. “A Berlin Chronicle. “McLuhan in the Rainforest: The Sen- sory Worlds of Oral Cultures. edited by T. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. R. Vol. 1064–1065. 2002. 147–163. 1938–1940. References Akiyama. Explorations in Commu- nication. 1960. J. See Roff 2004. Georg von. 1999b. edited by D. Veit Erlmann   3. 1999a. 4. Oxford: Berg.” In Selected Writings.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. M. 2.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sen- The Senses & Society sual Culture Reader. Walter 2003b. 179–191. “Places Sensed. Walter. Poetics. “Aus einer kleinen Redeüber Proust. Benjamin. 1927–1934. Downloaded by [University of Nebraska. and Marshall McLuhan. Sounds Assembling: The Poetry of Bertram Brooker. Bijsterveld. 2011. Feld. Experiments in Hearing. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2. 595–637. 2003a. Lincoln] at 08:28 04 June 2016 Békésy. This critique does not prevent Schafer from positing his own. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press. Vol. 1938–1940. NC: Duke University Press. secular version of McLuhan’s allegedly mystic “acoustic space:” the “living outdoors” he calls it (2004: 70).   4. Howes. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. “The Recording that Never Wanted to be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification. Cavell. Feld. E. 313–355. 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