From tactile to magic: McLuhan, changing sensorium and contemporary culture
3. Touch and the new magic: the dangers of tactility
The first German edition of Understanding Media, in 1968, was fittingly titled Die Magiche Kanale, emphasizing the nature of media as techniques (which is also the nature of magic) rather than
‘instruments’ (an aspect instead privileged in the title of the Italian edition, Gli strumenti del co-municare, or ‘The Tools of Communication’).
‘Magic’ comes from Greek ‘μαγεία’ meaning ‘voice’, insofar it provides techniques for evok-ing and callevok-ing up spirits. The post-literate, neo-oral era is also an era where magic seems to
Chiara Giaccardi
come back, and, again, McLuhan foresaw the development: ‘We might return to the state of tribal man, for whom magic rituals are his means of ‘applied knowledge’ (McLuhan, 1996: 59), where ‘applied means translated or carried across from one kind of material form into another’
(McLuhan, 1996: 58)
‘Our very word ‘grasp’ or ‘apprehension’ points to the process of getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time’
(McLuhan, 1996: 60) And also:
Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcend conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chambre where magic will live again’ (McLu-han, 1969).
There are several reasons to believe that in the tactile, digital re-mediation of the televisual global village, magic could become an individualistic technique for getting things done, alternative to participation. First, the context: today’s global world is based on contiguity and interdepend-ence, as everything is (or appears) connected to everything else (McLuhan’s ‘total field’). Magi-cal thinking assumes the world as a whole where anything is linked to anything else. Several anthropologists (including Mauss and Frazer) remarked how the laws of magic are all based on this originary ‘contact’. For example the ‘law of sympathy’: ‘things in contact are and remain the same – like produces like, opposites work on opposites’ (Mauss, 2001:79). Being in contact is the condition for magic to work: waving a magic wand to cast the spell is using an extension of the arm enhancing the effect of touch. This is in fact the condition of magic effectiveness, which is mainly based on the law of ‘sympathy’ and the correlated principles (continuity, similarity and opposition). As everything is in contact with everything else, the whole can be affected by acting on any of its parts: ‘This whole, which is contained in everything, is the world (…). Everything has something in common with everything else and everything is connected with everything else’ (Mauss, 2001: 91).
Second, the promise: just like contemporary technology, magic promises to eschew space (‘The shaman open the doors of distance’-De Martino, ibid: 15) and time by reducing ‘the inter-val between desire and its realization’: ‘Between a wish and its fulfilment there is, in magic, no gap’ (Mauss, 2001: 78).
Moreover, the contemporary neo-oral, neo-visual, deeply secularized era appears to be a fa-vourable time for neo-magic. In a complex world and in the ‘age of risk’, magic becomes a technique of ‘ritualizing optimism’, by fostering the hope of effective action, as well as being an antidote to the ‘crisis of presence’. The latter is a concept elaborated by Italian anthropologist, Ernesto De Martino, who analysed traditional and religious rituals of (especially southern) Italy, and indicates an existential awareness of the fragility of being, an anxiety about the solidity of things as they are and the risk of nothingness; a dilemma evidenced in a disturbed sense of self and often expressed as illness, emotional distress, or ‘alienation’.
Magic allows for a sort of ‘redemption of presence’: in Mauss’ words, ‘Magic’s exclusive aim, apparently, is to produce results’ (Mauss, 2001: 78), as magic is in sense ‘the easiest technique’
for reaching goals.
De Martino refers to ‘the magic drama’ as a drama in two acts: ‘the struggle of being, when is under threat and its relative redemption, taking place in particular moments of one’s existence when presence is required more strongly than usual’ (De Martino, 2007: 81)
121
In fact,
when a certain sensorial horizon faces a crisis, the risk becomes real for any limit to col- lapse; anything can become anything, which is like saying that nothingness is moving forward. But magic, being on the one side an indicator of risk, on the other side is at hand for containing chaos and redeeming it by order. Under this respect, magic is restorer of horizons under siege. And with its demiurgical role, it can restore for all the otherwise vanishing world (De Martino, 2007: 123).
In the global village of television, perceptual and emotional contact were condition of the aware-ness of the world as a whole; but the large amount of ‘bad news’ was heavily responsible for a sense of ‘crisis of presence’, nurturing what Bauman (2001) calls a generalized sense of uncer-tainty/unsafety/unsecurity.
By ritualizing optimism, magic can also fulfil the need for effective action in a world where the feeling of irrelevance and the sense of powerlessness are widely shared. Being a ‘tecnique for making things happen’, magic can become the new ‘art of changing’.
This ‘magical turn’ could foster problematic outcomes if we consider, for instance, the po-tential role of media as stages for contemporary ‘shamans of presence’, using neo-magic devices for injecting reality and trust in a chaotic and uncertain world, with heavy effects on political language and practices. McLuhan in a sense did forecast the revolution:
TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western world. For one thing, it’s creat-ing a totally new type of national leader, a man who is much more of a tribal chieftain than a politician. […] The new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively put on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate tribal image – like Mussolini, Hitler and F. D. R. in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era.
All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media. (McLuhan, 1969).
Thanks to the digital overheating of the ‘cold’ global village, ‘participation’ risks to devolve into ‘delegation’, and the ‘showman chieftain’ could rise to the rank of ‘shaman of presence’.
This ‘neo-shaman’ has several distinctive qualities: he can use ‘special methods’ to increase its capacity and its perceptual representational thinking, and also to enhance the in- tuition. While these methods can theoretically also be employed by ordinary members of the community, they are necessary condition of shamanism (De Martino, 2000: 12). Moreover, the shaman does not merely ‘see’ things, but is able to influence the ‘seen’ and his vision aims to be an active deter-mination of the real (68).
Within the ‘existential drama’, Shamans become ‘masters of the limit, explorers of the be-yond, heroes of the presence’ (104).
But as ‘magic has no churches’ and can perfectly fit the needs of an individualistic society, the risk for the digital village to reverse into a crowd of separated unities, leaded by a neo- sha-man, is not so irrealistic, as the political situation of many countries seems to suggest.
As a conclusion, we can certainly recognize that more than forty years after Understand-ing Media, McLuhan’s ‘explorations’ appear to retain a greatly usefulness for tastUnderstand-ing and under- standing the ‘unique cultural flavour of our society’ (McLuhan, 1996: 13).
Chiara Giaccardi
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