The Renaissance Legacy
The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement,
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!
The view of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A pizza for everything and everything in its piazza.
The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.
(p.53)
Francesca Woodhouse, Nude Self Portrait with Mirror, 1974
This passage from The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan drew my attention because it speaks to the breaking down of barriers between the perceiver and the material that is being perceived and encourages our own critical engagement with the mediums through which our information and experiences are perceived and expressed. McLuhan addresses the myth that there is a detachment or lack of involvement between viewer and material and asserts that the division between the individual and media does not exist in the same way as it has in the past.
Me, No Involvement! 2015
The next page in McLuhan’s book includes a quote by John Dewey. This passage is written backwards and can only be read with the use of reflective surface such as a mirror (or, in my case, a laptop). This section demands involvement from the reader and so places our critical engagement at the forefront of our experience with the material. In reading this passage we are also likely confronted with the reflection of our physical selves. At the time this book was published reader’s would have probably used a mirror to interpret the passage as mirrors were at the time the most prolific tool of engagement with and physical awareness of the self. In the most literal way we as readers cannot separate ourselves from the medium or the process in which we interpret the passage. This encourages readers to think more critically about the ways in which we interact with media, and examine ourselves as producers and products of the media we consume. This also means that we need to be acutely aware of the mediums through which we express ourselves and we have a physical, active engagement with the book. Along with the actual quote, the action that this passage requires from its readers is what illustrates MacLuhan’s point from the previous page.
Lora Mathis, 2015
As social media websites and apps become the dominant means of personal expression we have unprecedented control over how we mediate our image and what tools we use to communicate our ideas. The boundaries between our intellectual and bodily selves and our online projections become very blurred as time passes. We now use social media to strengthen our “personal brand” as much as we used it for pure communication. I feel like the actions we perform through these platforms are beginning to become so natural to us that we can’t really differentiate our bodily selves from our online selves with such strict divisions as we once thought. We are more obviously present in the transfer of information and our past conceptualization of the frame dissolves leaving us to question where the boundaries are between ourselves, what we produce and the means through which we choose to communicate.
Shannon,
This post is a pleasure to read. Your analysis of Dewey and the mirror are particularly insightful. You provide a very sturdy platform from which to consider how our bodies and self images are wrapped up in the production of media. I do wonder about your title though. Is it possible to dissolve the frame? If so, what are the political implications?
I love your commentary on how the mirrored passage forces us to be ‘confronted with the reflection of our physical selves’. Having spent hours as a kid teaching myself to read mirror imaged text (apparently Leonardo DaVinci was very good at it so I thought I should be too), I read the mirrored text largely the same as I read the rest of the book; I wasn’t confronted with any reflection of myself. But now I wish I had, because I think it builds a very important point. I agree with your thinking that it forces us to remember our own integral role in the medium, as both ‘producers and products of the media we consume’.
For the brief moment that you read this passage, the text and your own face is on the other side of a glass wall and you are pushed outside yourself. There is a moment otherness. This moment further solidifies the role of identity and perception in the medium; how do the self and the other shape our perceptions? You already point out that our own identity and perceptions shape the medium. But how do our perceptions of others shape it? And our perceptions of how they perceive us? What is the person on the other side of the glass thinking about me? And how does all of this affect the medium? I don’t really know, but it has dropped me down a rabbit hole of McLuhan-esque thinking!
Hey there,
Interesting blog read, thanks!! One thing that was really neat was when you identified that when you read McLuhan’s backwards page and look in the mirror, you cannot ignore your involvement in the piece because you see your own image reflected back in the same image as the page: the frame of the mirror incorporates both you and the book. I hadn’t really understood what he was going for there, and that really makes sense. And then really interesting how you mapped the shift from mirrors as being the main means through which humans understand their physical selves to social media playing that same role. This made me consider how, since these “boundaries between our intellectual and bodily selves and our online projections” are so “blurred”, we even look to how we portray ourselves in social media to understand not only our physical self but our intellectual self as well.