Marshall McLuhan Research Articles

Reading McLuhan Reading Ulysses

Background Marshall McLuhan was not only a prolific reader but also an expert annotator of his own books. Taking as a case study McLuhan’s copies of James Joyce’s Ulyssesin the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, this article asks what we can learn about McLuhan’s reading from close analysis of his own books.Analysis The article begins with a discussion of McLuhan’s media theory as “applied Joyce,” with particular reference to Ulysses, and then turns to an overview of the annotation techniques and strategies visible in McLuhan’s copies of the novel.Conclusion and implications The conclusion considers McLuhan’s own books as hybrid artifacts that challenge us to rethink rigid distinctions between print and manuscript cultures.

Reading the grand palimpsest of mixed reality

By applying Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad, this article proposes and responds to the question, ‘[h]ow does mixed reality change and create social environments?’. Historical examples of media as tools and modes of experience are described and assessed in order to reveal traces of the old and the ancient found in mixed reality. These examples include the Palais de l’electricité of 1900 and the medieval palimpsest. The article concludes with the argument that mixed reality foretells a new age of consumption.

Flash, Spirit, Plex, Stretch: A Trans-Disciplinary View of the Media Sensorium

Background This article takes a transdisciplinary view of the media sensorium by applying humanities, social science, and engineering perspectives to the relationships among sensory perception, cognition, and how people come to understand their worlds through the senses. Analysis The goal of this article is to engage with the provocation that the sensorium, a concept that Marshall McLuhan brought to media studies in the 1960s, provides the lens through which we observe that communication is the expression of cognition via the combined potentiality of physiology and technology. “Sensory technologies” are used as analytical vehicles in a technological journey from the Walkman to 21st-century telecommunications. Conclusion and implications The reader is given a call to action to use the full spectrum of the sensorium to locate and act on transformative contemporary processes underway.

The Medium Is the Message Is the Metaphor: Cool Reason and the Young Intellectual Public of Marshall McLuhan

Background Following recent reappraisals of the work of media and communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, this article argues that an overlooked aspect of his appeal and celebrity is not only his famous use of metaphor, but also a countercultural stance suggested by this use of metaphor. Analysis Applying Michael Warner’s arguments about publics to McLuhan’s rhetorical style, the article focuses partly on 1) the 1967 film This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage and how it might have addressed an audience of countercultural youth; and 2) related texts that helped to construct McLuhan’s celebrity. Conclusions and implications Ultimately, the article historicizes McLuhan’s celebrity to explain both its relatively short heyday in the 1960s and the comeback that can be attributed to the development of his young audience into teachers and reappraisers.

The message is the medium: immaterialism and McLuhan’s Poetic Excess

ABSTRACTAgainst interpretations of Marshall McLuhan as philosophical materialist, I argue that Understanding Media and its tagline, the medium is the message, show McLuhan to be an immaterialist: a poetic, intuitive thinker, at least as interested in immaterial as in material aspects of the world. From a pragmatic perspective, or one requiring attention to both poetic and technical modes of understanding, McLuhan’s approach—offering a torrent of flashing insights and neglecting the process of empirically assessing these insights—is described as poetic excess. This is a double-edged sword, alienating many readers even as it inspires others. McLuhan’s poetic excess is a rhetorical reminder of the value and power of poetic thinking, and simultaneously of its insufficiency for the fullest understanding. Pleading that his poetic texts should be read rhetorically rather than literally, I argue we should forgive McLuhan’s worst affronts to technical, materialist rationality. McLuhan’s immaterialist epistemology, inseparable from the content of his insights, is a valuable part of his distinctive and foundational contribution to media studies.

Online "Versus" Print: No More an Either/Or.

One of the roles of the co–editors-in-chief is to dialogue with clinicians about the publishing process as well as topics and trends of interest for our specialty. We have realized that some readers may not be familiar with our “published ahead-of-print” and “online-only” modalities. With this prompt, our editorial was born. When the journal was first published in 1988, each subscriber received a printed copy of the journal four times a year. There was no online presence for the journal; clinicians eagerly awaited their “hard copy.” Content was static and unchangeable after press time, barring a retraction or correction in a future issue.1 Nowadays, online publication has enabled us to be much more agile and deliver content in multiple timely ways. As Marshall McLuhan,2 a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual stated, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan2 believes that each new medium is a potential extension of ourselves (eg, speech leads to writing, and writing leads to the printed word) that adds a new scale into our affairs (eg, the introduction of online publishing increases agility). Advances in Skin and Wound Care is dedicated to taking full advantage of new opportunities to inform our readers, beyond simply publishing online versions of content alongside print. In 2019, skin and wound health professionals still eagerly await each new issue, but they do not want to wait; they want the latest research as quickly as possible. The advent of the internet and our journal’s website provides a platform to electronically publish selected manuscripts so that our subscribers can read an article before it appears in the printed journal. Called “published ahead-of-print,” this category comprises articles that will appear in an upcoming printed issue. They can be found on www.woundcarejournal.com. (Under the Issues tab, in the dropdown menu, click “Published Ahead-of-Print.” You can also subscribe to the journal’s Published Ahead-of-Print Alerts.) This gives our readers the opportunity to access cutting-edge material prior to the hard copy of the journal reaching them in the mail. For example, a commentary by Dr Jeffrey Levine entitled Historical Perspective on Pressure Injury Classification: The Legacy of J. Darrel Shea will be published ahead-of-print before the end of the month. It will also appear in print as part of the special focus on pressure injuries in the March issue. Be assured that these papers have undergone the same rigorous peer-review process as all of our manuscripts and have been formally accepted for publication in Advances. Each of these articles, available in PDF, has its own unique DOI (digital object identifier) number that carries over into print publication and can be cited using the date of access. However, it is important to note that there may still be edits and changes made to the final printed version of the journal manuscript as well as the final electronic version. Articles published ahead-of-print are not the same as the Online Exclusives that we wrote about in our December editorial.3 Given the number of quality manuscripts we receive every year and the printed page constraints with which we contend, publishing important research online is another valuable solution we implement to ensure clinicians and researchers have access to the very latest information. Once again, all of these online-only manuscripts are peer reviewed, accepted for publication, edited, formatted, and indexed in PubMed and other databases. The difference is that they are only published electronically on the Advances website. The next time you are exploring our website, you may notice another tab called “Collections.” Here you will find key articles published in the journal organized by topic. These include a Best of 2018 collection and other content on burn wounds, deep tissue injury, diabetic foot ulcers, palliative care, scars, skin integrity, skin imaging, venous leg ulcers, wound infection, wound pain, and more. Clinicians are welcome to request a collection or search our archives (dating back to our very first issue) for a specific topic. All of these resources are approaches to facilitating access to the latest evidence and information. Take a moment to reflect on your current professional development and how you can use these new modalities to enhance patient care outcomes.FigureElizabeth A. Ayello, PhD, RN, CWON, ETN, MAPWCA, FAANFigureR. Gary Sibbald, MD, DSc (Hons), MEd, BSc, FRCPC (Med Derm), FAAD, MAPWCA, JM

The Medium is the Message: Cell Phones and Mediaturgy in Épica de la inmediatez

While the smartphone and social media are widely used to connect users and to provide information, our utter addiction to digital platforms comes with a price, which is open access to our private lives. Focusing on just one of the thousands of women who have disappeared in Mexico, the play Épica de la inmediatez (2017) forces us to consider the dangers of social media and our slavish addiction to smartphones. Technology and social media are integrated to such an extent in this work that, as Marshall McLuhan proposed, the medium itself becomes the message, which is that social media has come to dictate our perception of what we can only hesitatingly call “reality.” Through the clever use of interactive phone apps, dramatist/director Hugo Wirth shows us just how vulnerable we are to the violence that both shapes and feeds our media-driven world. Ironically, he does this by asking us to turn on our cell phones and become complicitous voyeurs as well as amateur detectives in the dark and devious world of the play.

Has Marshall Mcluhan’s media theory influenced the formation of the Catholic Church’s approach to public communication?

The article analyses the question of whether the media conception of one of the most prominent media theorists, Marshall McLuhan, has influenced the formation of the Catholic Church’s concept of communication tools. The conclusion of the study is negative: the position of the Church has developed independently from the theoretical discoveries of the Canadian professor.

New Literary History at 50: Reflections and Futures

New Literary History at 50Reflections and Futures Bruce Holsinger When rita felski assumed the editorship of New Literary History just over ten years ago, she invoked John of Salisbury's twelfth-century Metalogicon and the famous image (attributed to Bernard of Chartres) of dwarves seated on the shoulders of giants: a notion well suited to her thoughts on the daunting prospect of succeeding the journal's founding editor, Ralph Cohen. On succeeding Rita Felski in turn, I am put in mind of the opening sentence of the Policraticus, John of Salisbury's more rambunctious work of humanistic observation: "Although pleasurable in many ways, the pursuit of letters is especially fruitful because it excludes all annoyances stemming from differences of time and place, it draws friends into each other's presence, and it abolishes the situation in which things worth knowing are not experienced."1 This caustically optimistic view of a transhistorical republic of letters rings true to a new editor's ears, tuned as they are to the simultaneous joys and challenges of leading this storied journal and its particular pursuit of letters into the immediate future. Rita Felski's own will to transcend time and place in the pages of New Literary History is reflected in the variety of historical and theoretical topics her special issues have explored, as well as the colloquial spirit she brought to the editorship through the many intimate gatherings and major conferences arranged over the last decade, all of them organized around things worth knowing and knowing anew, to borrow from John of Salisbury again. One measure of the excitement she brought to NLH can be discerned in the large percentage of the essays coming across our transom that rely fundamentally on her work, which remains at the center of current discussions around modes of reading after the so-called postcritical turn. It is humbling to follow in her footsteps and take on the formidable task ahead. I am deeply grateful to her for the wisdom and counsel she has provided over the last eighteen months, and (like everyone else who reads this journal) in awe of where she has taken NLH over the last ten years. [End Page v] New Literary History began as the 1960s closed, publishing its first issue in October of 1969 and inaugurating a fifty-year run that has helped shape the contours of literary study over several generations. It would be difficult to name a prominent figure in theory and criticism who has not published work at one point or another in its pages. Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, Fredric Jameson, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wolfgang Iser, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stanley Fish, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, and more recently Bruno Latour, Sara Ahmed, Graham Harman, and Wai Chee Dimock—the illustrious lists go on, and on, and on, drawn from every school of criticism and every theoretical disposition, from French feminism and poststructuralism to new materialism and object-oriented ontology, from Marxism and cultural materialism to ecocriticism, critical race theory, and new historicism. As Cixous herself remarked in these pages some years ago, the longevity of NLH itself represents "a coherence in the world of letters … a proof of, and a metaphor for, the world-wide need to think and save literature."2 Nor has the journal, despite its title, limited itself to the literary. Perspectives from other fields and paradigms have long enriched its intellectual mission to plumb the depths of literary history, politics, genre, and form from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, often seemingly far afield. Past issues have featured essays by Stephen Jay Gould on the science of form, Marshall McLuhan on performance, and the composer and conceptual writer John Cage, who published one of the original fragments of his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) in a special issue on "Modernism and Postmodernism" in 1971.3 Historians of art, theater, and music, as well as philosophers, classicists, and historians, have figured prominently among its hundreds of contributors over the years. One of the editorial delights of this coming anniversary year has been the excuse it has afforded to browse...

The Mold Is the Message

Expecting that media and/or digital technologies “do” things (Verbeek), we are called upon to take a stance on them, theoretically as well as practically. Media literacy represents one such stance—we are prodded to be literate about media—but there are others. To this extent media literacy is a lens through which we look at issues and that shapes what we see. This becomes particularly clear when we consider another lens, namely, that of media health. While media literacy suggests a rather pragmatic way of doing, making do with what is on offer, the image of media health dramatically alters the starting point: media are seen here as affecting us, even to the extent that we become sick and need to be cured. This image or model of media as somehow related to disease and health is developed in varying degrees of explicitness in the work of Bernard Stiegler and Marshall McLuhan among others. In this paper, we investigate the differences between the media literacy and media health models from a meta vantage point and ask how the lens determines how we view and understand certain problems in relation to media/technologies. We do this by deploying a metaphor ourselves, namely that of mold. Our models are molds. They are understood as a “frame or model around or on which something is formed or shaped,” but the connotations of fungal growth helping organic decay and of soil and earth are also at stake. Depending on which meaning we prefer, it might turn out that we do not need to choose between our molds/models: they are interconnected, like mold. On a more theoretical level, we link up the media literacy and media health approaches to two major strands in philosophy of technology, namely to the pragmatist/postphenomenological and transcendentalist/critical streams respectively.

Media Theory in Japan ed. by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten

Reviewed by: Media Theory in Japan ed. by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten Hoyt Long (bio) Media Theory in Japan. Edited by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2017. xvi, 423 pages. $114.95, cloth; $30.95, paper; $28.95, E-book. When future cultural historians look back at this moment in humanistic inquiry, they will almost certainly point out its decisive "media turn." The genealogies of this turn will be traced to still earlier moments, whether the rise of postwar communication studies and catalyzing figures such as Marshall McLuhan; the deeply materialist strain of Freidrich Kittler's media archaeology; or the collapse of all media into "new media" through the common denominator of the digital screen, à la Lev Manovich. Wherever its origins are located, our current media turn will stand out as the moment when various past strains of media studies achieved critical mass in the North American academy, combining to form a common language legible across diverse fields and areas of study. As W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen declared in 2010, "We are, it seems, all practitioners of media studies, whether we recognize it or not."1 Media Theory in Japan, a set of essays originating in a film theory conference in 2012, reminds us that this is only more true today, highlighting in particular how far media studies as a new academic lingua franca has penetrated area studies. It also reminds us of all the ways this language remains a tower of babel. As it has risen in prominence, a fundamental concern of media studies has been how to delimit the study of media when all aspects of social and cultural interaction come to look mediated. Does one focus on media as an empirical and technological form? Does one look to the representational worlds that different media create? Or are media best viewed ontologically through the social relations they knit together and the knowledge formations they make possible? While not entirely independent, an emphasis on any one approach yields different insights and requires different methodologies to demarcate the horizons of interpretive possibility. This task of demarcation [End Page 490] is the first challenge that editors Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten confront in their introduction. For them, the potentially infinite array of objects that media studies addresses is reframed as the twin problems of how media have been thought about over time (i.e., media theory) and how this knowledge is mediated by space, specifically the "technological, historical, institutional, and cultural practices that form the ground" (p. 3) of the space called Japan. Of primary concern are not media objects as they coconstitute the human condition but the thinking of media as itself an effect of shifting "medial conditions of production" (p. 7). That this volume will strictly be a meta-history of media is reinforced by the editors' warning that the essays "do not treat individual media as a set of channels or technologies to be covered each in turn. The reader will not find a procession of media commodities or institutions, from woodblock prints to newspaper to film to radio to film to video, and so on, each afforded a distinct chapter" (p. 25). Every book must choose a frame, and media theory certainly demands our attention as much as the study of media objects. The implication that the two frames do not belong together, however, is a curious one. The same media turn of which Media Theory in Japan is a part has also generated important new histories of channels and technologies, commodities and institutions, by Japan studies scholars, including monographs by Michael Bourdaghs (music), Seth Jacobowitz (stenography and writing), Thomas Lamarre (television), Paul Roquet (music and sound), Atsuko Sakaki (photography), and Kerim Yasar (sound). This is an equally lively, and equally theoretical, wing of the current media studies tower of babel. So why provisionally cordon it off? Or rather, what definition of "media theory" is proposed by this act of division, and what are its implications for the future study of media in Japan? While Steinberg and Zahlten frame the volume as a collective engagement with media as epistemology (albeit a materially conditioned one), the contributors address this...

Exploring the Digital Attitude

In the early days of the Internet, philosophers, consumers, engineers, and futurists wondered what Web 1.0, the initial stage of the world wide web, might look like. At the time, there was not even a space called the world wide web, let alone the moniker “Web 1.0.” As the Internet flourished, consumers were spun into its sticky, silky residue. More connections and devices heralded in Web 2.0, including changes in both the form and the content of digital media. Now, with Web 3.0 right around the corner as we head into the thirtieth year of widespread web use, we explore the digital attitude adopted towards digital media in contemporary society. The idea of an attitude suggests the typical way we are feeling about a certain thing at the time. How do users and consumers and human beings in general assess their digital media use and understanding? Lines blur between where contents and forms begin and end. The digital media “content” needs a device and the “device” needs content to engage the consumer/user. Form comes through technological, electronic, digital, and device driven ways. Content proliferates through media through a variety of user generated programming, visuals, sound, apps, games, TV shows, billboards, and software. The combination of these elements provides digital media with its spreadable and participatory nature. This reflection considers the digital attitude as it relates to the human-technology experience approaching the Web 3.0 era. Does the web+digital+media’s ubiquity highlight or in some way name a new or different kind of in-between and taken-for granted attitude? Ideas from of Don Ihde, Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckman, Marshall McLuhan, and Peter-Paul Verbeek are considered.

Komix Kountermedia (1969)

Komix Kountermedia (1969) Paul Buhle (bio) The left's mixed reception of komix is an interesting indication of the schism in attitudes toward "cultural" subjects. On the one hand, people (including myself) who believe that the New Left is only part of a much larger but more amorphous New Culture movement are excited to see an intrusion of radical attitudes into "classic" areas of modern cultural mediations, comic strips and comic books. For us it seems to promise another step toward an organic New Left, striking root in society deeper than the level of "politics" (elections, parties, organizers, etc.). On the other hand, plenty of fine, even good-humored radicals are plainly distressed to see the excitement over komix. One extreme tendency is indicated by a dealer in an old, CP1-oriented bookshop who wrote me that all "underground culture" was a new attempt by the ruling class to pervert the revolutionary threat. Another attitude, common among people sympathetic to New Left culturalists, is that komix are interesting but not to be taken seriously in political terms. A considerable amount of the confusion about komix and the Left is their newness, with their power to irritate or excite. Not that comic strips have been unknown to the Left: […] strips have often been offered in radical newspapers. But komix, as drawn by such creative figures as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and S. Clay Wilson, are more than simply instruments of the political New Left; they are subversive thrusts at capitalism coming right out of a popular cultural tradition. More fundamentally the confusion about komix is symptomatic of important misunderstandings about the meanings of culture and art. Bourgeois aesthetics has taught us that these are leisure customs associated with the elites, rather than organic aspects of popular life. But if we accept the anthropological definition of culture as the style and organization of day-to-day life and of art as a more self-conscious aspect of "culture," then content, how popular "culture" and "art" relate to the values of society's rulers, becomes an important political question. As yet, the New Left does not possess the theoretical tools for a full analysis of modern (hence popular) culture and its art forms (certainly less for comic strips than for America's other two distinctive contributions to twentieth[-]century culture, cinema and jazz) under capitalism in the mass market epoch. Certain critics, like Marshall McLuhan, attempt to deal with the meaning of various communications media in contemporary society; but for me the most heuristic insights were offered by Walter Benjamin over thirty years ago, in his brilliant essay, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." [End Page 199] Art, as Benjamin understood, could not remain unchanged in the new era of mass production and consumption: its traditional "aura," its quality of craft refinement, of rarity, could not survive immersion in the "commonness" of the masses and their daily life. Indeed, to have any élan or vitality of its own art had to associate with and give expression to the existence of the people it now reached. Even poor Mona Lisa, reproduced on a half million postcards, simply wasn't enough. But Benjamin also perceived that the possibilities for new, popular arts were emerging at the very time when bourgeois cultural vitality had long passed even though their nascent forms were subject to the influences of the decay of bourgeois culture. On the other hand, he believed that the threads of art's resurrection nevertheless lay within popular culture, in the essence of their content that commercial forms so thoroughly violated. In one sense, the forms of the future were stretching their fingers into a repression-ridden present; in another, mass art, like politically revolutionary forces, was maturing, as it had to, within the womb of the culture of the old social system. Drawing on Benjamin's notion of a cultural dialectic, I have noted three rough stages for the emerging modern art form which also describe the growth of twentieth[-]century comic strips: (1) an early, highly experimental period, where the very newness of the form permits the "eccentric" visionaries to practice before internal and external discipline are fully introduced; (2...

From Passengers to Crew: Introductory Reflections

It is only very recently that we humans have come to recognize our place on this Earth. As Marshall McLuhan once put it: “On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew” (McLuhan, 1974, p. 50). While we have never been simply passengers, our status as crew has mattered little for almost all of human history; to paraphrase Harari (2014) we have been decidedly “insignificant” crew members. This changed drastically with our capture of fossil fuels, or “ancient sunlight” as Hartmann (1999) calls it, to drive the machine of successive industrial revolutions (Marks, 2006). Thanks to these developments, the Earth has transitioned out of the Holocene and into what is now being termed the Anthropocene, an age in which our status as crew members is hugely significant. We have become “geological actors” (Chakrabarty, 2009) whose actions have shaped, and are reshaping, the systems that have kept Spaceship Earth on its course for some 10,000 years. The consequences of this new era are both profoundly global and acutely local: with the pushing of our planetary boundaries, safe spaces for humans and other species are shrinking, giving way to less favourable and less stable planetary conditions for the lifeforms evolved in the previous Holocene era.

Dei, Ideologie, Media. Per una mediologia del politico

Marshall McLuhan’s insights on the potential of the media in deeply transforming every area of daily life, are the reference point of the reflection on the new forms taken by the politician in the digital age. Media in the paper are considered as new dispositive useful for building individual and social reality. The emptiness between expressive contents and action, which in the past has been filled by deistic, mythological, religious and ideological figures, is now filled by the media in all their expressions and, in particular, by the imaginaries that come from the interweaving of new and old symbols transfigured by the powerful filter that new technologies constitute.

Let’s Talk: Communication in the Nursing Home

Let’s Talk: Communication in the Nursing Home

Reading, Writing, and Realism in 19th-Century Russia

Reading, Writing, and Realism in 19th-Century Russia Lynn Ellen Patyk Molly Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890. 264 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0875807386. $59.00. Irina Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks. 256 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0299308308. $65.00. Tat´iana Venediktova, Literatura kak opyt: “Burzhuaznyi chitatel´” kak kul´turnyi geroi (Literature as Experience: The “Bourgeois Reader” as Cultural Hero). 360 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018. ISBN-13 978-5444806883. For perceptive observers of modernity, from Sigmund Freud to Marshall McLuhan, communications technology and media have served as “marvelous extensions of man,” enabling the acquisition of knowledge, capacities, and experiences by ordinary individuals transformed, in Freud’s unforget-table words, into a “kind of prosthetic God.”1 Even as we have not yet fully processed the implications of the industrial revolution in print and electronic media (radio, cinema, television), we are overwhelmed by a tsunami of digital media that is fundamentally inundating every facet of our experience, from community to cognition. In light of the current upheaval, the media landscape of the past seems delightfully quaint, despite the fact that the explosion [End Page 377] of the printed word and the media infrastructure of the 19th century was comparable in the magnitude of its revolutionary effects. While none of the three scholarly studies under review explicitly conceives of itself as media studies, which is still nascent in Russian studies, this is where they intersect: in their approach to literature and the visual arts as media that extend our perceptions and experience of life, or alternatively, that offer deceptive copies that are accepted as real, emblematizing Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal.2 ________ Tat´iana Venediktova’s Literatura kak opyt: “Burzhuaznyi chitatel´” kak kul´turnyi geroi constructs an elegant and compelling model of “bourgeois” writing and reading that can be fruitfully drawn into dialogue with Irina Reyfman’s How Russia Learned to Read and Molly Brunson’s Russian Realisms: Painting and Literature, 1830–1890. Venediktova’s study stands apart because it is concerned with the Western (Anglophone and Francophone) “bourgeois reader” and hence has little to say directly about the Russian reader, bourgeois or otherwise, except for an extensive footnote, which I will address shortly. The first 90 pages of Venediktova’s study is a tour de force that draws extensively on Western literary and cultural criticism and is perhaps most discernibly influenced by Franco Moretti’s seminal works on the novel and the bourgeoisie in literature and history.3 She impressively synthesizes cultural studies, reception theory, the sociology of literature, and pragmatics to model the image of the bourgeois reader and even more ambitiously, to model the relationship between the bourgeois reader and writer as one of collaborative co-creation.4 [End Page 378] For Venediktova, as for Moretti, “bourgeois” as a designation encompasses widely divergent qualities, both positive and negative, and corresponds more to a structure of feeling or type of subjectivity that made the “bourgeois reader” the ideal reader/collaborator for an author who was also very likely bourgeois. Venediktova’s key concept in the context of capitalist modernity is “exchange,” both economic and emotional, material and immaterial. Market relations determined the role of professional writers as producers and the reading public as users/consumers, while publishers and booksellers acted as intermediaries who played an ambivalent but critical role in influencing the commercial and critical fate of a given work. In the case of literary production, the medium of exchange is without question material (currency, books, words) but ultimately immaterial—symbols, experience.5 For Venediktova, Adam Smith’s theory of economic exchange (the “invisible hand” of the free market) and of sympathy as the moral/emotional foundation of social relations provides a one-stop shop in conceptualizing the mechanism of literary exchange under the conditions of print capitalism: “Sympathy is the mechanism by which the subject makes others’ experience one’s own and relates to one’s own experience through another perspective” (40).6 With the erosion of traditional social structures and belief systems and the rise of unprecedented opportunities, there was a...

The Coldness of Forgetting: OOO in Philosophy, Archaeology, and History

Abstract This article begins by addressing a critique of my book Immaterialism by the archaeologists Þóra Pétursdóttirr and Bjørnar Olsen in their 2018 article “Theory Adrift.” As they see it, I restrict myself in Immaterialism to available historical documentation on the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and they wonder how my account might have changed if I had discussed more typical archaeological examples instead: wrecked and sunken ships, released ballast, deserted harbors, distributed goods, and derelict fortresses. In response, I argue that my account was not therefore non-archaeological, since ruins are the topic of archaeology only by accident: the real subject of the discipline is what Marshall McLuhan describes as “cold media,” in the sense that they are low in information. McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media is shown to be surprisingly analogous to Aristotle’s difference between continua and discrete substances, and some consequences are drawn from this analogy.

Talking About North American Intellectual Tradition, Free Speech and Education with Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984. She received her B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1968 and her M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1971 and 1974 respectively. Her prior books are: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990); Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992); Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (1994); The Birds , a study of Alfred Hitchcock published in 1998 by the British Film Institute in its Film Classics Series; Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems (2005), Glittering Images: A Journey through Art from Egypt to Star Wars (2012), and Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (2017). Her eighth book, Provocations: Collected Essays, was released by Pantheon in October 2018. Prof. Paglia was a co-founding contributor and columnist for Salon.com, beginning with its debut issue in 1995. She has written numerous articles on art, literature, popular culture, feminism, education, religion, and politics for publications around the world. In this interview, conducted by e-mail between December 14 and 22, 2018, Camille Paglia talks to Gunter Axt about North American intellectual tradition and some of her main theoretical references, such as media theorist Marshall McLuhan. the American literary critics Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown, as well as Northrop Frye, Erving Goffman and Erich Neumann. She also discusses Marxism, Post-structuralism, Simone de Beauvoir’s and Arnold Hauser’s legacy. The interview also addresses the so-called Queer Theory, the political correctness, and the movement of Free Speach in universities. She comment about her meeting with Jordan Peterson and her impressions of his ideas. Finally, Camille talks about her impressions of the recent academic scandal involving scholars Judith Butler and Avital Ronnel, in the United States.

Body Conjunction = Wavering Between Actual and Virtual Spaces

In the present digital age, the body tends to extend beyond it being flesh, it can be extended, it is a body without organs, and it might belong to more than your own-self. The “Body” as a living entity with its embedded sensory system, not only embodies who we are but also lets us understand and explore the sensitive, unpredictable but fascinating world. The body is an information receiver as well as information reactor. Through years of medical experiments and research on the body, medical devices and instruments are able to allow us to look into the deepest and the most mysterious spots in the human body. For instance, if seen through an HD monitor, while being probed by an endoscope, the body appears as an immersive and infinite landscape. By observing the smoothness and the folds of the surfaces encountered within the body, it is quite simple to project your individual self into this body-scape for a while to imagine and experience this immersive organic space. Various potential ideas of designing a body-like space have become the subject of design fantasies of a number of architects. The “Vitruvian Man”, which, Vitruvius described in the third book of De Architectura, and was later interpreted and illustrated by Leonardo DaVinci, has served as the human figure/body representation to be used as a measuring unit rather than being considered as a sensitive object. Unsurprisingly, it was a relatively long journey for architects to abandon this dogma. After the industrial revolution (during the modernist era), the concrete evidence of considering body proportions as potential measurements could still be seen in the projects of Le Corbusier, which accompanied his famous school of thought: “A house is a machine for living”. He developed the “Modular” in a mathematical proportion of space based on figures and intended to replace the old Vitruvian man with it as a new generation’s typical model. However, with the rapid development of electronic technology, the trend of realizing sensory environments akin to living bodies has no longer remained a thought but can be seen as an initial action to refuse to see the human body merely as a measuring unit. The turning point came about the time while the medium of news media, television, and social media became relatively mature, and thus started making people conduct critical reflections. Marshall McLuhan, a well-known pioneering media theorist, stated in his well-known publication, “Understanding Media: The Extension of Man” (McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). This explicit shot made the researcher foresee the potential and intimate relationships between the body, technology, and space, and somehow have a rational explanation to extend the physical body to endless space, which is crucial in this chapter.