McLuhan
An easy reading of McLuhan’s the medium is the massage might lead to a dismissal of the classroom essay as a model of inefficacy. It is, after all, driven by the sentence, an almost a Romantic bastion to linear, singular and, in the disconnect between its composition and introduction to the reader, expiring thought/meaning. And a similar [easy] argument could be made in opposition to the still image, a bounded information form that doesn’t reflect the current mode of information dissemination. Such readings, such calls for radical or wholesale change in the classroom, however, would do little justice to how McLuhan puts the sentence and the image to work. In reading, there was a way in which the text resonated with elements of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” particularly in its division of old/new methods and needs. If its guiding concern was how new methods were being put to old uses, then I think one has to take into consideration an underlying idea regarding the possible benefit of the inverse to this statement: putting old methods to new uses. And in this way, it very much does concern itself with Eliot in its belief that the familiar, placed within a new context, has the potential to shift (even if slightly) an entire discourse.
There’s a way, however, to be more specific in discussing this, and I think it comes down to the central place that juxtaposition holds within the text. It is, in a number of ways, the form that is implied when McLuhan discusses the manner in which we receive information. It is no longer a private, linear process in which sentences combine to form (and, more specifically, dictate) a privileged meaning. Instead, we receive and process information through a concurrent exposure to multiple discourses or ideas (singular meaning becomes, in a sense, impossible because of the rapid and constant introduction of new discourses which must be integrated into our understanding of the whole). Thought and writing, then, take on the form not of linearity but of multi-directional negotiation. The still sentence is replaced by an ever-expanding circuit or, perhaps more accurately, a constellation whose shape shifts with the inclusion of new stars. (In this sense, I also read McLuhan as an interesting and maybe even pre-emptive defense of cultural studies’ demand that we account for the volume of information that shapes and re-forms not only the individual’s identity but his/her perception of identities outside of his/her own). As such, for the written form (or the essay in any media for that matter) to be not only successful but relevant, it has to more closely emulate the circuitousness of modern thought; it has to be draw upon something akin to that primary effective quality which Marjorie Perloff located in cubist collage: meaning cannot “happen” prior to or outside of the essay, but must be established in the process of reading. And this, I think, is where juxtaposition comes into play (and does so in a way that simultaneously allows the author to establish and call into question a “unique stance”). The act of juxtaposition, whether written or visual, does not dictate but rather suggests meanings–meanings that are arrived at, variously, in the viewers’ process of negotiating multiple ideas at once. It is an author’s statement of a unique but un-fixed stance and, even more importantly, it is an admission that such a stance could (and likely will) shift with the passage of time, as new ideas come to inform how we treat/experience the individual components within the juxtapositional frame. It is also, as McLuhan’s critique of the classroom would demand, a form that actively invites a certain interdisciplinary- ness. There are no boundaries dictating what can or cannot included in the form. Consistent with the flood of available information in an electronic society, it is more a statement of “I learned this by way of this,” an expression of identity whose source material is anything but static. The message, then, is one of immediate and future variability and potential expansion; it is dictated by the form/media in which the ideas are presented rather than the precise achievement of the singular idea. It’s not that it simply includes multiple media but that it forces thinking into a context of activity rather than framing it as a passive act of receiving. It can be metaphorized, perhaps, in the nightly news which is treated, at points in the book, as evidence of new media (television) serving old forms (narrative). However, I would argue that the juxtaposition of abbreviated narratives that occur during a news broadcast removes a certain privilege from the single narrative and instead treats its juxtaposition with other stories as central to its message. We must negotiate how local/world/athletic/entertainment news all shape a worldview, and, more importantly, how the introduction of each subsequent story within the thirty minute block shifts this worldview (which shifts again, as soon as the television is turned off). There is an inherent kinesis in juxtaposition, what Pound might call energies flowing through multiple form, and it is this kinesis that allows multiple media to emulate thought in such a way to make them reliable and relevant in a space of mutating/evolving sensibilities and thought patterns.