Enzensberger, and Baudrillard. These thinkers, beyond their specific claims, have the merit of showing how little prepared we are to thinkthe problems of history and society. While it may appear tedious to rehearse some of these arguments, my hope is that readers will see this as a kind of affective practice, an attitude adjustment that might occur in relation to cultural analysis and what is known as thought.
The still-underappreciated McLuhan argued in 1964 that new media technologies alter the sense ratios and that the macroeffects of such alteration cannot be easily or quickly apprehended. Indeed, only with the rise of electronic media do we grasp the historical significance of the Gutenberg press. McLuhan drops blazing one-liners such as, "Print created individualism and nationalism in the 16th century," which, of course, implies that the fundamental categories for thinking about agency, history,and geopolitics in the standard historical accounts (i.e., the individual and the nation) miss the mark. Beginning with the famous, but perhaps not famous enough, example of the light bulb as a medium without content (without content, at least until neon lights—McLuhan's example—and perhaps the cinema screen—my example), McLuhan argues that “The medium is the message."15 In other words, the deep structuralandepistemic changes of history and society are media based and take place irrespective of particular content.
In 1970, Hans Magnus Enzensberger could have been writing about this, our current moment:
Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware or by a system of hardware however structured, isthe victim ofan obscure belief in progress. Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy transmitting and receiving is the dupe of a liberalism which, decked out in contemporary colors merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests.16
Cleaving to the belief that content, distribution, and access to the means of production matter, Enzensberger dismisses “the charlatan"McLuhan's formulation that the medium is the message:
The sentence... tells us that the bourgeoisie does indeed have all possible means at its disposal to communicate something to us, but that it has nothing more to say. It is ideologically sterile. Its intention is to hold on to the control of the means of production at any price while being incapable of making the socially necessary use of them is here expressed with complete frankness in the superstructure. It wants the media as such and to no purpose.17
Enzensberger also dismisses (as bourgeois):
the symbolical expression by an artistic avant-garde whose program logically admits only the alternative of negative signals and amorphous noise.
Digitality and the Media of Dispossession
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