[Raymond Williams, *Television: Technology and cultural form*, Chapter 3, "The Forms of Television," p. 129-132]
C. The Technology as a Cause Sociological and psychological studies of the effects of television, which in their limited terms have usually been serious and careful, were significantly overtaken, during the 1960s, by a fully developed theory of the technology -- the medium -- as determining . . . The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory: a development and elaboration of formalism [by which he probably means a "search" for a long-abandoned "formal causality"] which can be seen in many fields, from literary criticism and linguistics to psychology and anthropology, but which acquired it most significant popular influence in an isolating theory of "the media." Here, characteristically -- and as explicit ratification of particular uses [mistakenly imagining that McLuhan "endorsed" anything he wrote about] -- there is an apparent sophistication in just the critical area of cause and effect which we have been discussing. It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we have now [completely missing the fact that McLuhan's popularity was a result of a "counter-culture" that adopted him as its "guru"]. For if the medium -- whether print or television -- is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects [here implying "efficient causality"] and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore "psychic" effects of the media as such. The initial formulation -- "the medium is the message" [title of Chapter 1 in "Understanding Media" (1964)] -- was a simple formulation. The subsequent formulation -- "the medium is the massage" [title of the 1967 book, not actually written by McLuhan and from which his estate collects no royalites] -- is a direct and functioning ideology . . . If specific media are essentially psychic adjustments, coming not from relations between ourselves but between a generalized human organism and its general physical environment [aka, a "proto-psychology"], then of course intention, in any general or particular case, is irrelevant, and with intention goes content, whether apparent or real. All media operations are in effect desocialized; they are simply physical events in an abstracted sensorium, and are distinguishable only by their variable sense-ratios. But it is then interesting that from this wholly unhistorical and asocial base McLuhan projects certain images of society: "retribalization" by the "electronic age"; the "global village." As descriptions of any observable social state or tendency, in the period in which electronic media have been dominant, these are so ludicrous as to raise a further question. The physical fact of instant transmission [beginning in the 19th century, with telegraph], as a technical possibility, has been uncritically raised to a social fact, without any pause to notice that virtually all such transmission is at once selected and controlled by existing social authorities. McLuhan, of course, would apparently do away with all such controls; the only controls he envisages are a kind of allocation and rationing of particular media for particular psychic effects, which he believes would dissolve or control any social problem that arises [never something McLuhan ever seriously proposed] . . . The effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself . . . The particular rhetoric of McLuhan's theory of communications is unlikely to last long. But it is significant mainly as an example of an ideological representation of technology as a cause, and in this sense it will have successors . . . What is to be seen, by contrast, is the radically different position in which technology, including communication technology, and specifically television, is at once an intention and an effect of a particular social order. [Raymond Williams (1921-88) was a Welsh Marxist theorist and academic, who was an influential figure in the New Left (i.e. the version of the "left" developed in the 1960s, under the influence of television, as opposed to the "Old Left" which developed under earlier radio conditions.) He is often credited with "laying the foundations of 'cultural studies'", as reflected in his 1958 "Culture and Society." In the late-1930s, he attended Trinity Hall college, Cambridge, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. At little earlier, Marshall McLuhan, 10 years his senior, also attended Trinity Hall, from which he was awarded his "The Classical Trivium" PHD in 1943 -- in which "grammar" (or formal cause) is juxtaposed to "dialectics" (or efficient cause), beginning with the Pre-Socratics through Elizabethan England.] https://www.amazon.com/Television-Technology-Cultural-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415314569 Mark Stahlman Jersey City Heights Sent from Mail for Windows 10
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