BEYOND MCLUHANS ARTIST Peter Blank Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University

1. INTRODUCTION
Make conscious, once more, the natural content of the artist drive Von Hildebrand, 1918, p. 115.

Society and social media today are intermeshed to the extent that they propel everyone to everywhere, creating spaces that express every kind of artistic eccentricity. Behind them hide the creators, the artists - but who are they? If art has now completely ceased to be a form of self-expression and can only be captured in unsatisfactory phrases like a necessary kind of research and probing1 or the construction of a passionate life"2, how can one still find release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them [media] on our senses (McLuhan, 1964, p. 55)? This paper addresses the need to specify artists and separate them from posers to tone down question marks emanating from McLuhans legacy, one that highlights the importance of artists for a society immersed in electronic technology. McLuhans legacy clearly addresses this issue, however from a position where one becomes aware of the neglect of media as messages themselves; of what media make obsolete by showing only form, not medium. However, once revealed the real effects would lead anew to forms to look at, not to media. What can be shown is the presence of an artist, in other words, not his absence. McLuhan used the tetrad to elaborate on this. If one can reveal the position from which he himself observed the effects of media, one might get a grip on McLuhans artist himself - and on todays real artists. 2. THE ARTIST IN MEDIA-IMMERSION Media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms (McLuhan, 1962, p. 64). In a world pervaded by media, however, this implies that one should let go of seeing media as influence machines, and start witnessing each other through them, in them" (Deuze, 2012, p. 391). The in 1 see http://lightthroughmcluhan.org/art.html 2 see Raoul Vaneigem (1957)

refers to a willingness to 'go ontological': complete immersion in media necessitates the shift from studying the apparent consequences of (new) media as objects we hold in our hands and activities we undertake - to studying the way society in general and, more specific, communications, thought, the use of the senses and plain living are newly arranged. The difficulty with complete immersion is that the environments we are in, themselves form antienvironments:
we have fashioned for ourselves a world of artefacts and images that are intended not to train perception or awareness but to insist that we merge with them as the primitive man merges with his environment. The world of modern advertising is a magical environment constructed to produce effects for the total economy but not designed to increase human awareness (McLuhan, 1966: 7-8).

For human awareness to increase one apparently requires a de-coupling from the artifacts and images (of media) that surround us. Media-immersion seems therefore to subside the material medium and replacing it with media as ideas, whose immateriality demands that external attributions (jobs, religions, upbringing) become marginal parts of computational configurations foreshadowing our every step. Indeed, our sense of identity, community, values, now arise from the phantasmal (Deleuze, 1990) - the imaginings or fantasies into which formerly only the poet or the neurotic so willingly withdrew - while our actual, computational identity is measured through the culmination of webanalytics. A computational viewpoint on self-identity alludes to both a radically interoceptive and introspective person-hood. It may, perhaps, form a new layer to a Heideggerian phenomenological Bestimmung des Seins des Seienden, of showing the self by itself: to locate the artist one requires his or her personal computational footprint, the kind of footprint that has gained primacy over ones culture as nation-based and communal. Such a viewpoint integrates unique qualities of modern technologies to know the self as acting completely external to both the life of the bodily organism and to any sensuous experience, that is, experience in a world about us for which we have habitual reactions" (Mead, 1956, p. 200). McLuhans release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed on our senses might then be traced in such a beyond of the body and sensuous experience. According to Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 132), the kinesthetic experience of the body is immediate. He assumes, however, that a structuring principle peculiar to that body could be sensed beneath, through, and despite physical conditioning - we are now faced with the question of whether the new selfreflective interoception can indeed glimpse" les autres possibles beyond cultural limits and within kinetic range. To Merleau-Ponty, the body should be self-reflected on in the midst of movement as a means of seizing ones own body as structuring' (structurant) as well as structured (Noland, 2009, p. 49). Another way to approach the peculiar structuring of the body, following Noland, is to ask what the status of the individual subject (and of its

interoceptive experience) [is] in a corpus dedicated to demonstrating the penetration of social categories into every layer of human being. What binds both approaches is the presumption of the existence of an unknown beyond, which appears to go up in a social setting by way of which its identity instantiates itself. Thus, a conception of the beyond might in addition be traced in an exteroptive sense, as in Latour's (1997) concept of the actant:
"something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action

Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) builds on the absence of a stable theory of an actor, and rather assumes the radical indeterminacy of the actor" (Callon, 1999, p. 181; italics in original). Thus, that which acts, for instance the artist, could be everywhere and in every person since the totality of performances. Following Latour, this totality is both self- and other-induced as it includes actants liking, (de)friending, uploading and tagging - all performed by both self and other - making it an entity exterior to our bodily perceptions and for which no one is supposed to take responsibility. It is simply there, and growing. The following highlights some insightful examples of and approaches to the beyond of the body and of the social setting, coming together in the beyond of McLuhans artist. 3. THE INTERO-/EXTEROCEPTIVE BEYOND A turn to the work of experimental psychologist Daniel Stern (1985, p. xviii) may provide starting point for outlining what the presence of a beyond may mean. In his description of Rodins Thinker, he surmises:
He sits immobile, posing his head on his hand and a elbow on his knee. True, he is not moving, but there is extraordinary tension in his posture, suggesting active, intense proprioceptive feedback from almost every muscle group. This feedback, along with the thinkers presumably heightened arousal, provides the background feeling against which his specific thoughts are etched.

For Stern it is the kinesthetic sensation rather than the emotional tone that builds the background, which Merleau-Ponty calls praktognosia, or kinesthetic background - a nonverbal understanding composed of signals the body receives all the time and from the beginning of the (subjects) time" (Noland, 2009, p. 76). Stern translates Merleau-Pontys notion of bodily kinetic presence as an as-yet-unspecified self" and the background music of an autonomous body that, under certain circumstances, can become louder and enter our awareness. Our movements, it follows, before we attach meanings to them, (...) are capable of providing us with a rich somatic awareness of executing them (Noland, p. 77).

In media-immersed society, such awareness might depend on Marcel Mauss (1973, p. 73) notion of the material body taking on the self-reflexive functions of consciousness - through the now widely practiced Indian philosophies and religions such as yoga-practice, which saturate the body through consciousness. The body, or kinesthetic awareness, could then become a kinesthetic consciousness, reflecting on itself and thus defining (...) what a distinct kinesthetic sensation might come to mean" (Noland, p. 36). Artistic activity could also been seen as the complete immersion, as an intuitive going up into the setting. Regardless of whether Generation Cupcake has much attention for this dynamic, the beyond may still be present, and perhaps more uncanny and unreal than before. In The Paradox of Acting (1883), Diderot famously describes the artistic form of acting out feelings - above and beyond the mere experiencing and expressing feelings. Diderot argues for an unreal psychological background pertaining to such acting:
But excuse me, someone will reply, these mournful sounds, full of sorrow and sadness which an actor produces from the depth of his being, which upset my heart and soul, are they not caused by genuine feeling, by genuine despair? Not at all. And here is the proof: they, these sounds, are measured, they are a component part of declamation. Were they one twentieth of a quarter of a tone higher or lower, they would be false. They obey the law of unity. They have been selected in a specific way and are distributed harmonically. They contribute to the solution of a specific problem. ... He knows with accomplished precision when to take out his handkerchief and when to shed tears. Expect this to happen when a specific word is said, when a specific syllable is pronounced, neither before, nor later.

This action of artistic form, following Diderot, releases despair and explains why the actor may not himself fully experience the feelings attributed to the character he represents. It is this possibility of a simultaneous beyond in Diderot that may be said to apply to everyone and everything in mediaimmersed society. Vygotskys (1925) notion of art as a catharsis might offer an example of such the unreal real. In Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard (1904), Vygotsky traces the theme of cultural futility: both the futility of the aristocracy to maintain its status and the futility of the bourgeoisie to find meaning in its newfound materialism. Similarly, in The Three Sisters, Chekhov has made Moscow the center of attraction for the sisters should somehow also motivate their urge to get there". Vygotsky writes that,
"[a]fter its first presentation, the critics wrote that the play is somewhat ridiculous because for four entire acts the sisters keep moaning, To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow, even though each of them could at any time simply buy a railway ticket and go to that Moscow which, apparently, none of them needs.

Both for protagonist Ranevskaia and the spectator the cherry orchard is an unmotivated element of the drama, as is Moscow for the three sisters. Thus, what the cherry orchard was to Ranevskaia, and what Moscow was to the sisters - an unreal motive - we accept as a psychological reality, which paints itself onto the canvas of real everyday life". He goes on to suggest that the struggle between the contradiction that these two irreconcilable motives (real" and unmotivated) foreground can be overcome in catharsis, and without which there is no art." 4. TETRAD AS METAPHORIC BEYOND To look for a similar unreal real in McLuhan, one could turn to the fundamentals of his own tetrad approach. To McLuhan, the tetrad is a metaphor for metaphor itself, since the pattern of four aspects of change - enhancing, obsolescing, retrieving, and reversing - happens to be the pattern of a metaphor itself. In Laws of Media (1992, p. 230), the McLuhans explain how Aristotle's anatomy of metaphor has nothing to do with metaphor itself: it is instead an anatomy of synecdoche. Aristotle is incapable of seeing how metaphor is itself first. Citing von Humboldt, they explain how Aristotle neglected the metaphor that language itself built: "Man lives with his objects (...) exclusively - as language presents them to him. By the same process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another" (McLuhan & McLuhan, p. 226). Simultaneously, and because of this, the tetrad is useful for its innovative effects, for the generation of new ideas. Paramount to McLuhans identification of the artist is his tetrad approach to figure-ground distinctions. With the tetrad the artist would have an easier time spitting out new ideas that reveal the yet unknown grammar and syntax of the language of media (McLuhan, 1988, p. 229). Science and philosophy typically approach each new medium by criticizing, documenting and disseminating their consequences. But in doing so, they use the language they already know and refuse to figure out how to speak the new language, refuse to be innovative. If they would figure that out the language, first they would make no sense at all - even to themselves. Gradually, they would get the picture. For this purpose, McLuhan conceived of the tetrad as a means to trace the consequences of new media as ideas (ibid., p. 99). More specifically, the tetrad functions as an insurgent metaphor (Santa Ana, 2002), as empowering phantasms to help us design reality with critically aware aims. McLuhan positioned himself indeed, following Levinson (1999, p. 26), on the generational stage of Donald Campbells evolutionary epistemology' (1974a, 1974b), where enhancement of human awareness occurs. Campbell had designated a theoretical threefold cycle for the generation of ideas, going from generation, to selection, to dissemination. The McLuhans (1988, p. 237) suggest that one has to use the tetrad, i.e. to

perform a "vivisection of each of these fundamental figures of speech [i.e. metaphor, irony, metonymy, synecdoche] to see how the next generation is derived". However, in Laws of Media, the McLuhans note how the grouping of metaphor and its companions of the rhetorical styles should not be seen as a tetrad itself. They claim that it [the tetrad] does not analyse some artefact of which synecdoche is the obsolescence phase, irony the reversal, and so on. Yet the ratios are present" (p. 232). Indeed, they are present because the tetrad is the left-brain or analytic version of the metaphor, designed to sensitize scientists to literary aesthetic. The generation of ideas that the tetrad aspires is than none other than the attempt to mirror sciences own pitfalls - to reverse the structure of structure. As such, one might assign McLuhan to the reversal, ironic dimension of the tetrad, from which enhancement, obsolescence, and retrieval (the content of his work) become apparent. The reversal then reveals itself through the medium of McLuhan himself: his stance vis-a-vis the scientific community, his celebrity status. Similarly, such a personified breach using mirroring techniques may in hindsight have been attempted by Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty and Diderot. And similar techniques might now be the inevitable standard to (personal) art for everything and everyone. 5. CONCLUSION Our times are a times of art as such, which can be experienced as a peculiar structure of the body (interoceptive) or as an unreal presence of social reality (exteroceptive). Both are used as a metaphor for the beyond of media that McLuhan was after using his tetrad. Although McLuhan is known for pointing out societys blindness towards media and the need for artists of integral awareness, McLuhan himself was someone who tried to reverse artifacts into their opposites by being ironic. That is, the content of his work blinds the medium that McLuhan as an artist himself established. The person who used artifacts, services and institutions to their maximum capacity until they broke, suggested a double metaphor in the form of tetrad, which as a metaphor for itself (mirror), turns out to have presented enhanced awareness as the beyond of established structures. This conjecture can form a starting point to reidentifying artists in our times, who are tied to computational mirrors reflecting self as others. REFERENCES Callon, M. (1999). Actor-network theory the market test. In: Law, J. & Hassard, J., Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deuze, M. (2012, forthcoming). Media Life. Polity Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). GA 20 Diderot, D. (1883). The Paradox of Acting, trans. Walter Herries Pollock,

London: Chatto Windus. Latour, B. (1997). On Actor-Network Theory: A few Clarifications. Soziale Welt, 4(47), 369-381. Levinson, P. (1999). Digital McLuhan. A Guide to the information millennium. London: Routledge. Mauss, M. (1973 [1935]). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2: 7088. McLuhan, Marshall (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McLuhan, M. (1984 [1964]). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. London: Ark. McLuhan, M. (2005 [1966]). The Relation of Environment to AntiEnvironment. University of Windsor Review, 11(1), 1-10. Reprinted in E. McLuhan and W. T. Gordon (Eds.), Marshall McLuhan Unbound (4). Corte Madera (California): Gingko Press. McLuhan, M. and McLuhan, E. (1992). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mead, G.H. (1956). George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology. Ed. Strauss, A., University of Chicago Press, 199-231. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962 [1945]). Phenomenology of Perception. Translation: Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Noland, C. (2009). Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Academic Press. Vygotsky, L. (1971 [1925]). The Psychology of Art. Psikologiia Iskusstva, Boston: MIT Press.