Critical Media Theory in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

McLuhan's Global Village to Hegel's Phenomenology and Back Again

I discussed with David McKerracher and Ann Snelgrove of Theory Underground an upcoming course focused on “Digital Literacy and Critical Media Theory” inspired in part by Marshall McLuhan’s foundational work. The course starts June 11th and runs for 6 months, to sign up visit Theory Underground.

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Let’s keep it real, we need to think more critically about whatever the hell is going on in the age of “intelligent” machines, and specifically the phenomenology associated with ubiquitous virtual surfaces. When our current environment is situated in the context of our historical environment, whether we are talking 10,000 years ago, 1000 years ago, or even 100 years ago, there is really no precedent for what is happening.

The Singularity Really Does Seem Near.¹

That’s one reason why David McKerracher and Ann Snelgrove of Theory Underground are focused on running a “Digital Literacy and Critical Media Theory” course this year which focuses on our addictive personal relationship to virtual surfaces and the algorithmic “big Other.” Who cannot relate to headaches and strained eyes from hours of doom scrolling. Who cannot relate to that feeling that all human relationships and social life are being obliterated by the black hole at the center of our virtual surfaces?

For someone like David or I, technically “millennials,” the dominance of the social media mediated web has been a fundamental transformation that creates a gap between the world we knew as children and even young teens, and the world we inhabit now. We reflected recently on how, as kids, we could go call on friends by physically running door to door, to see if anyone would want to come out and play. Today, such behaviour may be perceived as a personal violation, if not outright criminal. Its remarkable the degree to which the transformations of our technological landscape and media ecology have transformed basic social norms in only a few decades. However, for someone like Ann, technically Generation Z, this has been the only world she has ever known. Consequently, the struggle with identity and social media is something that has more fundamentally penetrated experience to the point where there are no “before times.” And yet there is still a poor understanding of social etiquette in the age of virtual surfaces and artificial intelligence. It is almost as if a technological “atom bomb” has detonated through the fabric of planetary society and we need to rebuild the basic constraints that constitute a world.

Thus, one of the focuses of the “Digital Literacy and Critical Media Theory” course will be to engage debates and discussions on our personal relationship to this new environment. The course will not fall into the false binary of optimism or pessimism, but rather confront a pragmatic analysis of the way in which this landscape is programming us at a fundamental level. This course will also be complimented with theoretical investigations inspired by the foundational figures of media theory, which will hopefully give us a window into how to think and navigate our current environment while maintaining our sanity, or in some cases, reclaiming our sanity. After all, is not madness a proper response in, not only the aftermath, but the on-going waves of an “atomic” detonation, obliterating the structure of the world?

One of the theoretical figures that will be investigated is Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is a famous media theorist who became an overnight intellectual celebrity after the release of two classic texts: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). He proposed the hypothesis that media/mediums, irrespective of the messages they communicate, exert a compelling influence on human beings and society at large, dramatically transforming the relation between the immediacy of our senses and the larger environment.² Although McLuhan did not live long enough to witness the emergence of the internet or artificial intelligence, in many ways he can be understood as a prophet of our current technological landscape. His basic historical framing of the present involved thinking the way civilisation has been captured by “punctuated equilibrium-like” media revolutions. These revolutions involved the emergence of the phonetic alphabet (writing), the emergence of the printing press (“Gutenberg’s galaxy”), and in our time, the emergence of electronic media (here the modern internet and artificial intelligence could be understood as an extension, amplification, and intensification of the electronic media age).

For McLuhan, these media revolutions transform the way humans understand the content of their world. For example, the content of, let’s say, The Bible, would take on a totally other-alien meaning, depending on whether we are talking about it in the context of a universe of writing, a universe of printing, or a universe of electronics. As is common knowledge, we cannot really understand the Protestant Reformation and the split internal to the Catholic Church, without understanding this cultural phenomenon in the context of the emergence of the printing press, and the way it transformed the human relationship to Christianity’s fundamental text.

Now in evolutionary context, the revolutions of writing and printing, according to McLuhan, radically destabilised the human being in relation to its basic sense perception (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell). For McLuhan, the pre-historical/tribal man is perceived, even idealised, as a being more connected to the sense-body, and embedded by living oral traditions in a connected relational whole or social dynamic. In contrast, the Western civilised-literate man is perceived as fragmented, atomised, and individualistic, reduced to a specialised or reductionist form of cognition. For McLuhan, this led to a civilised detachment from the speech body, which was itself globalising:

You don’t have to go back 3000 or 4000 years to see this process at work; in Africa today, a single generation of alphabetic literacy is enough to wrench the individual from the tribal web. When tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu.

To be honest, this theory may be an interesting angle from which to view the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of a field like psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis certainly specialises in paying attention to the speech of the emotional body, or bodily speech as the truth of the subject of the unconscious, which precisely appears in this gap which “wrenches” the “individual” from the “tribal web” (i.e. Oedipal dramas with familial constellations).³

However, while psychoanalysis seeks to make space for the speech of the libidinal body by way of the clinic, in McLuhan’s work, the split subject must ultimately tarry with a strange third in the media revolution, specifically electronic media, or we could say now, the internet and artificial intelligence. No wonder the psychoanalytic philosopher Dr. Isabel Millar points towards this critical intersection today, in her remarkable doctoral thesis The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence.⁴ For McLuhan, electronic media is not like the writing and printing revolutions. Whereas those revolutions focused on the “dead letter,” electronic media brings the letter back to life. Consequently, McLuan hypothesised that this will bring back the tribe, reintegrate man with his senses, and reconcile the fall that occurred with written history. When I think about this relation between print media and electronic media, personally, I think about the ways in which, in my academic history, many professors of the previous generation found it shocking or even offensive, that I would consider expressing my academic work on a YouTube platform instead of an academic paper.

This may be one of the reasons why the early reaction by academics to McLuhan’s work was so hostile. With McLuhan, we start to see the emergence of a theory which puts the global-electronic medium back into dialogue with the global-retribalisation of man via the products of “speech, drum and ear” (of more oral traditions) as opposed to the visual-dominance of a society based on reading and writing:

After centuries of dissociated sensibilities, modern awareness is once more becoming integral and inclusive, as the entire human family is sealed to a single universal membrane. The compressional, implosive nature of the new electric technology is retrogressing Western man back from the open plateaus of literate values and into the heart of tribal darkness, into what Joseph Conrad termed “the Africa within.”

This tribal reintegrated and reconciled man (with, supposedly, “the Africa within”) would be the man of the “Global Village.” The historical fall into the “disassociated lonely nightmare” of fragmented individualism, mediated by writing and printing, would not be for nought, but would rather would be part of a process that would reassert the whole of tribal man, reconnected with his social nature. In some of McLuhan’s more inspired speculations, we even get a mystical vision that electronic media will open a type of global telepathy and ground the mystical body of Christ as the ultimate expression of our species-being destined to move into the galaxy as an internally integrated entity:

This is the real use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems but to speed the process of discovery and orchestrate terrestrial—and eventually galactic—environments and energies. Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

Cool. We are all destined to become psycho-communally-integrated-African-cybernetic-networked-dividuals which is maybe equal to the mystical body of Christ exploring the galaxy. McLuhan’s ideas seem to be pointing towards the coincidence between the third media revolution and the completion of humanity’s historical ontology (being qua being) via the transcendence of language itself. Consider the following statement:

“McLuhan: Electricity makes possible an amplification of human consciousness on a world scale, without any verbalisation at all.

Interviewer: Are you talking about global telepathy?

McLuhan: Precisely.”

Except, for me, there is a problem here. Let’s first reflect again on McLuhan’s basic thesis in its most concise form:

the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance.

What we see here is a very basic and common psychological structure, clearly and importantly, visible in both Christianity and Marxism, of a movement away from and back to perfect balance. In Christianity we see this structure in relation to the Fall from the Garden of Eden (sexual difference), and the Return to the Kingdom of God (Ultimate Ontological Unity) by way of the Cross (accepting our pain/suffering as finite-mortal individuals). In Marxism we see this structure in relation to the Fall from Primitive Communism (communal man), and the Return to World Communism (global-communal man) by way of Work (collectivist ownership of the means of production).

Both, seem, to be, or rather, have, a truth to them.⁵

In McLuhan, this narrative receives a new framing in relation to the loss and gain of sensory balance mediated by technological mediums, but the logic is essentially the same. Whether we are talking about this original (sexual) difference and communal (man), we are hypothesising some time in the past where the self-was-in-otherness which made the self-nothing and the substance-everything, as primal truth. Consequently, history is the fall from this otherness where the self is an everything that has lost true substance (and thus feels empty).⁶ For the unreflexive, or the unphilosophical consciousness, the only solution is to hypothesise some mechanism (whether reuniting with God, collective ownership of production, or restoration of sensory balance via telepathic technologies).

Strangely enough, when it comes to this feeling of an essential loss, one might be reminded here of Hegel’s opening remarks in the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit about the reflective cognitive disposition of modern man (7.):

“Spirit has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this loss, and of the finitude that is its own content. Turning away from the empty husks, and confessing that it lies in wickedness, it reviles itself for so doing, and now demands from philosophy, not so much knowledge of what it is, as the recovery through its agency of that lost sense of solid and substantial being.”

He goes on to add a curious proposition about the role philosophy is supposed to maintain in relation to this reflective cognitive disposition (7.):

“Philosophy is to meet this need by suppressing the differentiations of the Notion and restoring the feeling of essential being: in short, by providing edification rather than insight.”

In other words, and this is the basic motive and foundation for all of Hegel’s work: the modern man (the man of writing and printing), has not only been torn from his feeling of sensory wholeness, but has become reflexively aware of this, and is now demanding that philosophy (or some other agency) somehow restore this feeling of sensory wholeness, against the “tyranny” of modernist differentiation (or one could say also, individuation).⁷

But, it must be emphasised: Hegel’s project does not lead us in this direction. Hegel’s project does not posit an original perfect unity (as sexual unity, communal unity, sensory unity), and then articulate a narrative of a fall from and return to that unity at a higher level. For Hegel, in fact, whose project starts with a logical analysis of sense as such, sense breaks right at the beginning (i.e. sense is always already out of balance with itself, opening to a series of logical differentiations that comprise the Phenomenology of Spirit). Thus, Hegel’s project is rather understanding that very motion of a fall and a return, a cancelling and a lifting to a higher level, as the motion of the self itself, giving us a clue to the truth of differentiation into the unknown. Here from the final chapter of the Phenomenology (.804):

“That first reflection out of immediacy is the Subject’s differentiation of itself from its substance, or the Notion’s separation of itself from itself, the withdrawal into itself and the becoming of the pure ‘I’.”

Hegel is saying here that, at the ground of reflection itself, is a break from substantial immediacy (or balanced senses), and the opening which leads to the becoming of the pure ‘I’ (which is not on the level of sense, but on the level of suprasensation where we find freedom from the senses). This process involves, not a feeling of wholistic integration, but rather a feeling of deepening alienation (.805):

“The content, in accordance with the freedom of its being, is the self-alienating Self, or the immediate unity of self-knowledge. The pure movement of this alienation, considered in connection with the content, constitutes the necessity of the content; it is its own restless process of superseding itself, or negativity.”

In other words, and stated very simply, for Hegel, we should not think in terms of a fall from and a return to a One, but rather think about the One as its own process of self-division, where what One is falling from and returning to is only an unreflective narrative moment for the self. To be fair, the unreflective narrative does tell us something about unconscious substance (in Christianity’s case, perhaps, the struggles with sexuality in history; in Marxism’s case, perhaps, the struggles with work-processes in history; and in McLuhan’s case, perhaps, the connection between global media and the real body of all humanity, i.e. “global telepathy” and the “tribe within”). But ultimately, the increasing reflexivity of the self and its essence, leads us to the division as such, which is the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a true singularity (like a Jesus or a Marx or a McLuhan), which is certainly grounded in a reflexive determination cancelling and lifting its substantial immediacy.

This is basically what is at stake in the axiom “the absolute is substance, but also subject.”

Now, let’s return to McLuhan’s thesis. When he states that “the invention of the phonetic alphabet jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance” is this not missing a more primal division vis-a-vis the emergence of what we call the human being and sensory balance? In my doctoral thesis, Global Brain Singularity (2020),⁸ I propose a similar meta-structural theory of human evolution to McLuhan, except, instead of emphasising the triad of (1) phonetic alphabet, (2) printing press, (3) electronic media, I work with the quadruplicity of (1) the emergence of language itself, (2) writing, (3) printing press, and the (4) internet.⁹ I furthermore connect the emergence of each of these information mediums to the establishment of new energy and control regimes, which do not return us to an original balance, but rather introduce us to all new tensions which require the immanent emergence of philosophical consciousness.¹⁰ In other words, not the establishment of a Global Village unified by telepathic technologies, but a Global Brain constituted by networks opening a whole new world of problems for individuation processes.

Thus, whereas McLuhan proposes an electronic media which re-unifies us with our senses, I would rather frame the situation in light of the primacy of the self-division that opens with language as such, and which must be affirmed as such, internal to the dynamics of the Global Brain.¹¹ In other words, when people start thinking about how tribal-primitive communal man was integrated with his senses, and fallen historical man of writing and printing is the cause of fragmentation and so forth, what we are doing is obfuscating something very deep and related to the core of the human self as such: what leads to the emergence of a sensory imbalance or tension is language itself. Consequently, the only way to “rebalance” humanity, which is a signifying being, is to, as it were, remove language, and “become Animal” (indeed, it is likely that biological organisms have a deeper “balance” with their senses than does man).

However, as psychoanalytic philosopher Alenka Zupančič tells us in What Is Sex?, a book which takes us to ground-zero of the body and language, once language appears (which indeed distorts our sensory balance), we are dealing with a Real that is not possible to harmoniously reintegrate (p. 41):

“the signifier is responsible for the fact that the symbolic field, or the field of the Other, is never neutral, but conflictual, asymmetrical, “not-all,” ridden with a fundamental antagonism.”

Thus, while “in language” there is no possibility of a return to a fully ontologically constituted reality, there is rather the confrontation with what Slavoj Žižek calls the “incomplete ontological constitution of reality.” Here Zupančič reminds us that the speaking being, the being of language, represents a key feature of this Real (p. 93):

“The speaking being is neither part of (organic) nature, nor its exception, but its Real (the point of its own impossibility, impasse). The speaking being is the real existence of an ontological impasse.”

What does this mean for the electronic age and McLuhan’s thesis of the Global Village? I think it means that we should be very skeptical of any ideas that seek to homogenise us via processes of undifferentiation back into a psychically-integrated cybernetic collective. In other words, it is not that tribal man has been ripped from his original substance by writing and reading into individuation, and electronic media will reintegrate us all back to the tribe at a higher level. It is rather that tribal man was always-already ripped from his original substance by language, writing and reading intensified the process as its truth, and now electronic media is opening a whole new level of individuation which confronts us with the mystery of what to do with not only conscious reflexivity of the loss of original substance, but the loss of this loss.

Moreover, we should be aware of the ways in which narratives that posit the future necessity of a fully ontologically constituted reality (whether with God, or Communism, or a sensory-balanced telepathic Global Village), require a scapegoat to stabilise their narrative. Whereas Christians often scapegoat non-Christians (or even different denominations of Christians), and communists often scapegoat capitalists (or communists who are not communing right), McLuhan seems to scapegoat Western civilised-literate man as fragmented, individualistic and atomised. In Nietzschean terms, McLuhan is scapegoating Apollo and deifying Dionysus.

This is a mistake which even Nietzsche eventually realised went too far.

Moreover, this is clearly a move that is based on the aforementioned spirit which Hegel talks about at the beginning of the Phenomenology, i.e. the spirit that has not only lost its connection to substance (which is perhaps the condition of the human being), but also the spirit that has become consciously aware of this loss of substance (which is perhaps the condition of the modern man), and has no idea what to do about it. In other words, this move is based on the anxiety produced by the reflexive awareness of immanent alienation.¹²

When we think about the idea of the technological singularity, mediated by artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of virtual surfaces, we must be aware that what we are confronting cannot be confronted with a “rearview mirror view of the world,” as McLuhan would say. But we should also be aware that, there is always the unconscious temptation, even for future-oriented thinkers (like McLuhan), to project into the future an unconscious desire for reintegration with what is perceived to be lost (the original substantial harmony). In McLuhan’s own discourse, this seems to appear with the vision of psycho-communally-integrated-African-cybernetic-networked-dividuals as the Mystical Body of Christ. From a psychoanalytic perspective on our present, this cannot but appear like a “prophetic symptom,” a unique view into the desire for undifferentiation, to be relieved of the horrible reflexive burden of language, and the notional self-mediation qua differentiation, which is its truth.

In this truth, we should be aware of the ways in which our senses, which have of course become grossly distorted by artificial intelligence and virtual screens, can become hijacked for the purposes of facilitating this undifferentiation, and disempower us from the truth of self-differentiation. As anxiety-provoking as this truth may be, as mediated by alienation as this truth may be, there is the chance to perceive anxiety as a source of freedom,¹³ and alienation as the opportunity for overcoming man for the alien self-in-otherness.

And to close, perhaps that is why courses like “Digital Literacy and Critical Media Theory,” are more important than ever. Without spaces specifically designed to investigate practices of containment and constraint, vis-a-vis our new technological environment, we will fall into the virtual ocean of undifferentiation. However, with the right containment and constraint, mediated by both practices and theory, we can continue to engage that process of self-differentiation, all the while building networks that, while not “global” as in including the totality of tribal man, are “global” in the sense of expressing processes of individuation that truly transcend conventional boundaries of space and time. And that is a beautiful thing.

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REMINDER: I discussed with David McKerracher and Ann Snelgrove of Theory Underground an upcoming course focused on “Digital Literacy and Critical Media Theory” inspired in part by Marshall McLuhan’s foundational work. The course starts June 11th and runs for 6 months, to sign up visit Theory Underground.

1. I spent about six years (in a doctorate) working on the idea of “Global Brain Singularity,” which was first inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s landmark text The Singularity Is Near (2005), which basically argued that by 2029 we will live in an environment surrounded by machines that can mimic natural language, and by 2045 we will live in an environment surrounded by machines that can easily out-compute the entire human species collective intelligence. For Kurzweil, this will result in the emergence of a totally new era of evolutionary process, on par with the cosmic significance of the emergence of life or language itself.

2. This article largely draws on a Playboy interview with Marshall McLuhan from 1969 (see).

3. I will be teaching a course focused on Jacques Lacan’s Écrits starting July 16th. You can find out more here.

4. Millar, I. 2021. The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. The Palgrave Lacan Series. (Dr. Millar and I discussed her work, which you can see here).

5. At least as it relates to the psychological dimension of our relation to history and time.

6. We could call this the modern symptom often referred to as “nihilism.”

7. We should not forget, that at the opening of Kant’s What Is Enlightenment? he basically engages a plea with humanity to recognise their individuality and to use their own faculties of the understanding to make judgements. In short, man’s psyche at the beginning of the Enlightenment, was so embedded within identification with substantial community, that it could not lift itself to the true power of the understanding, which, as Hegel reminds us in the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, involves the (32.) “activity of dissolution” (in contrast to our common place assumptions of its role in fixing determinations of a whole.

8. Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: University History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer.

9. Its important to emphasise that Hegel’s logic is most basically, not a triad, but rather a quadruplicity, which involves not only the logic of A=B but also the logic of B=A.

10. The papers which most clearly deal with these dynamics can be found here: Last, C. 2015. Human Metasystem Transition (HMST) Theory. Journal of Evolution & Technology, 25(1): 1-16. (link) and: Last, C. 2015. Information-energy metasystem model. Kybernetes, 44(8/9), pp. 1298-1309. DOI: 10.1108/K-11-2014-0231. (link)

11. This line of thinking was developed here: Last, C. 2019. Symbolic Orders and Structure of Universal Internalisation. In: Evolution: Evolutionary Trends and Aspects. (Ed.). Grinin, L.E. & Korotayev, A.V. Volgograd: Publishing House ‘Uchitel’. p. 32-54. (link) and also: Last, C. 2018. A Reflective Note for Dialectical Thinkers. International Journal of Zizek Studies, 12(4): 1-48. ISSN: 1751-8229. (link)

12. This is why, Philosophy Portal’s first anthology, based on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, was titled Enter the Alien (see). What this title invokes is the positivity of alienation.

13. As Javier Rivera frames it (see).