Stagnation, Education, Incarceration: Classroom ~ Prison?

I want to focus on two sections of McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage: page 18 on education and page 61 on incarceration. There is already a figuration that connects the two institutions: the school-to-prison pipeline. But what happens when we imagine education of the masses and mass incarceration not as a means and an end, but as co-constitutive sites of necropolitical production?

McLuhan posits the educational establishment as a vestige of the nineteenth century “where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” (18). He contrasts this compartmentalization to the constant onslaught of uncensored and uncategorized information that the student experiences in hir extracurricular life. This false fragmentation engenders a lack of communication between disciplines and naturalizes the division of knowledge into binaries such as natural vs. social. In turn, scientific studies often enact and perpetuate oppressive social systems while humanities projects sometimes fail to engage recent technological innovations.

More insidious than the education system’s penchant for categorization is its ability to mold and instill hierarchies under the guise of ‘unbiased’ learning. The neoliberal school or college is, as McLuhan asserts, “much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines.” Instead of cars or computers, however, the factory called education produces docile human labor. Any units that subvert or rebel are corrected or expelled. Gender norms are (re)enforced and and naturalized as sex, racism is inculcated and rewarded, genocide and settler colonialism are justified as “manifest destiny”. Herstories are rewritten to legitimize a nationalist narrative.

Punishment in education is intimately tied to incarceration; ‘bad’ students are subjected to detention, suspension, or separation. Within our current social framework, isolation and immobility are the worst fates imaginable.

Mass incarceration has become the new racialized social control by which white settler colonial capitalists retain their power. The creation of ‘safe spaces’ relies on militarization, imprisonment, and murder. Once individuals are ruled guilty and isolated from society, they are then used for their labor to enrich the nation-state that relegates them to isolation and death.

Although McLuhan claims that “The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way,” (61) the prison and military industrial complexes are stronger and more far-reaching than ever.

McLuhan expressed the outdated and inadequate nature of ‘Western’ education and incarceration systems nearly 40 years ago. New media provides a platform with myriad potentials from integrated networks of social critique to information-inundated complacency.

Work Cited:

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. (1967) The Medium is the Massage. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.