![Checking out “McLuhan’s Unconscious” [http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/49671/1/02whole.pdf]
which maybe charting a kind of Lacanian McLuhanism. Not sure yet.
So far it’s very good. Drawing out McLuhan’s theoretical predecessors, from Aquinas to Barthes, they drew upon some great connections between McLuhan and Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jung, Symbolists, Said, and more. A section I’m reading now is really highlighting some of McLuhan’s views on sex. The trauma of an ad-saturated environment combined with the incredible potency of technological innovation, has caused an psychic identification with the machine (in place of what was once a human-animal hybrid in the totem animal). Haraway comes to mind here. This identification creates the hygiene obsessed culture, with post facto reasoning for the need to maintain such cleanliness. There is a contrast between technology (power) and sex (comfort) that is resolved, but only in a sense. Sensitivity is weakened due to the sensory overload of consumer-tech. culture. Sex is something one produces as if on the assembly line, perhaps even specialized. The hands we use to operate the machines are made more and more uniform even when difference of consumption is encouraged. There is also an increased interchangeability of parts. Sex becomes an issue of mechanics and hygiene.
I wonder to what extent our politics of liberation have become a strive for further interchangeability of parts and sensory thrill-seeking.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1oka5qVce1qeyut3o1_1280.jpg)
Checking out “McLuhan’s Unconscious” [http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/49671/1/02whole.pdf]
which maybe charting a kind of Lacanian McLuhanism.
Not sure yet.
So far it’s very good. Drawing out McLuhan’s theoretical predecessors, from Aquinas to Barthes, they drew upon some great connections between McLuhan and Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jung, Symbolists, Said, and more.
A section I’m reading now is really highlighting some of McLuhan’s views on sex. The trauma of an ad-saturated environment combined with the incredible potency of technological innovation, has caused an psychic identification with the machine (in place of what was once a human-animal hybrid in the totem animal). Haraway comes to mind here. This identification creates the hygiene obsessed culture, with post facto reasoning for the need to maintain such cleanliness. There is a contrast between technology (power) and sex (comfort) that is resolved, but only in a sense. Sensitivity is weakened due to the sensory overload of consumer-tech. culture. Sex is something one produces as if on the assembly line, perhaps even specialized. The hands we use to operate the machines are made more and more uniform even when difference of consumption is encouraged. There is also an increased interchangeability of parts. Sex becomes an issue of mechanics and hygiene.
I wonder to what extent our politics of liberation have become a strive for further interchangeability of parts and sensory thrill-seeking.
