McLuhan presented a number of interesting ideas in part one of Understanding Media including the idea of technology aiding in a societal implosion and the concept of being enslaved
to the machine. There were a number of ideas, however, I had difficulty digesting including McLuhan's sense of time, presence, and symbols. McLuhan states the following:
The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actionsIn addition McLuhan also states this:
and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
Mere existence side by side of any two forms of organization generates a great deal of tension.Obviously there is a great deal to unpack here considering gender and certain assumptions about culture, but I think what would be worth applying here first would Jacques Derrida's ideas of differance.
Such indeed has been the principle of symbolist artistic structures in the past century . . .
When two societies exist side by side, the psychic challenge of the more complex one acts as an
explosive release of energy in the simpler one.
Derrida believed that there was no such thing as presence and there was a thing called the trace
that is part of all of our contextual identities. In short, he thought that we could partially identify things by what they were not. Cold was what hot was not and hot was what cold was not.
If we apply this to McLuhan (who, understandably would not yet have been exposed to Derrida when he was writing) we see a different way to view time and cultural mixings. Derrida would say that it is wrong to think that the artist necessarily grasps time as something that is linear and can reach forward or back but rather only identifies and assigns meanings to symbols that become part of his trace and the trace of his time period.
The same can be applied to this idea that one society of power may dominate the other on the basis of complexity
. Instead, perhaps what is happening is that both cultures mix with each other and become part of each other's traces. So one culture doesn't overthrow another culture but rather they almost swirl into one another be contextually defining each other.
I know in some ways it's not fair to impose Derrida on McLuhan when Derrida wasn't yet known in North America at the time, but certainly it's worth examining how the ideas of differance and the trace
can radically change the meaning of what McLuhan is suggesting.