The Senses and Society

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“Acoustic Space” – Marshall McLuhan Defended

Against Himself

Veit Erlmann

To cite this article: Veit Erlmann (2016) “Acoustic Space” – Marshall McLuhan Defended Against
Himself, The Senses and Society, 11:1, 36-49, DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2016.1162946

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2016.1162946

Published online: 01 Jun 2016.

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“Acoustic Space” –
Marshall McLuhan
Defended Against
Himself
Veit Erlmann is an anthropologist/ Veit Erlmann
The Senses & Society  DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2016.1162946

ethnomusicologist and the Endowed

Chair of Music History at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin. He has won ABSTRACT  After a spectacular rise over two dec-
numerous prizes, including the Alan ades Sound Studies appears to be at a crossroads.
P. Merriam award for the best Eng-
lish monograph in ethnomusicology,
Many of its taken-for-granted epistemological
the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publi- assumptions regarding the givenness of a particular
cation Award of the African Studies domain such as “hearing” or “sound” have become
Association and the Mercator Prize
of the German Research Founda-
debatable. Marshall McLuhan’s largely forgotten
tion, DFG. He has published widely concept of “acoustic space” and its complex rela-
on music and popular culture in tionship with the unconscious offers an opportunity
South Africa, including African Stars.
Studies in Black South African Per-
to explore alternatives to sensed, emplaced sound
formance; Nightsong. Performance, as the normative epistemological space of sound
Power and Practice in South Africa; studies.
and Music, Modernity and the Global
Imagination. South Africa and the
West. His most recent publication is KEYWORDS: sound, listening, unconscious, Marshall
Reason and Resonance. A History of McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, acoustic space
Modern Aurality (Zone Books, 2010).
In addition to being a co-editor of the
journal Sound Studies, he is currently There he was, alone on a dark stage, reveling in
working on a book on intellectual the glory of his comet-like rise to fame, swiveling
property law in the South African
music industry that will be published
in a chair with a microphone attached to one of
by Duke University Press. the armrests. “You have been quoted as saying,”
36

erlmann@utexas.edu
 “Acoustic Space” - Marshall McLuhan

the voice from off-stage asks, “that you don’t necessarily agree
with everything that you say.” No, he does not have a point of
view, he replies, gazing past the disbelieving audience in front of
him toward dimly flickering lights at the back of the auditorium. “As
for example, now,” he says, spinning to the left and to the right in
his solitary chair. “I couldn’t possibly have a point of view. I’m just
moving around and picking up information from many directions.”
“No, a point of view means a static, fixed position. And you can’t
have a static, fixed position in the electric age.”1
Did he really have no point of view? The camera certainly had
one, following from its invisible vantage point his carefully chore-
ographed ballet complete with stage lighting and props. And, of
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course, everybody else said he had one, a strong one at that, and
on just about every conceivable topic from medieval painting and
the grid of American cities to ballet and cars – all delivered in prose
as intuitive, repetitive, and discontinuous as the “electric age” he
prophesied. But most famously, he was adamant that our entire per-
ceptual world could be categorized into a set of neat opposites:
hot versus cool, high definition versus low definition, figure against
ground, center against margin, and above all visual versus oral.
More than three decades after Marshall McLuhan’s death, his
work continues to radiate a powerful yet iridescent aura. Alterna-
tively revered as a founding father, towering intellectual figure and
soothsayer with a tendency toward one-upmanship or reviled as a
dyed-in-the-wool techno-determinist, primitivist, enigmatic media
guru with a penchant for elliptical – “McLuhanesque” – statements,
McLuhan’s work eludes a single vantage point much like he had
evaded the point of view in the 1967 interview.
Critiques of McLuhan’s work come in a variety of guises. Among
the most widespread is the tendency to include him in a lineage
of “pioneers” of media studies whose Delphic predictions, while
captivating at first sight, must periodically undergo a reality check:
Can McLuhan’s ideas “help us make sense of our new digital age?”
(Levinson 1999: 1)
Much the same applies to sensory studies. Constance Classen,
for instance, while acknowledging his visual/aural binary to be a
“driving force in many cultures around the world,” cautions against
following McLuhan’s theory to the letter (2005: 148). It is not enough,
she writes, “to extrapolate a perceptual model from the dominant
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mode of communication” (148). Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld,

meanwhile, does the opposite. While he rejects as essentialization
McLuhan’s visual-auditory dichotomy along a West/non-Western
divide (2005: 184), he has no problem invoking some of McLuhan’s
signature terms to describe the perceptual model of the Kaluli of
Papua New Guinea as a “spatio-acoustic mosaic” of constantly
“changing figure and ground” (2012: 265).
And lastly, lurking behind all this is an altogether more sinister
37

agenda, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suspects. In celebrating

 Veit Erlmann

global telecommunication as a means to “go back to the possibility

of precapitalist spiritual riches without their attendant discomforts,”
she claims, McLuhan “legitimizes postfordist postmodern capital-
ism” (1999: 365).
Did they all miss it, then, the point about the impossible point
of view? What about “acoustic space,” the term that originated in
the early 1950s from the heady discussions at what would become
known as the Toronto School of Communication and that McLuhan
claimed as his own but few critics now seem to remember?2

“Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the

Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of
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the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is

a social chart of this dark bog.
Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space,
shrouding the voice; it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the
human dark. Speak that I may see you.
Writing returned the spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech;
writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.”
(McLuhan 2011: n.p.)
“Auditory space has no point of favored focus. It’s a sphere with-
out fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space con-
taining the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic,
always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It
has no fixed boundaries; it is indifferent to background.” (Carpenter
and McLuhan 1960: 67)

Speech as structure? Shrouding the voice? Had he not declared

speech and voice – in other words, “orality”– to be the antithesis
of structure, architecture, direction, and all the “visual” rest? And
besides, as composer and soundscape pioneer Murray Schafer,
possibly McLuhan’s acoustically most informed critic noted, the
notion of acoustic space as a sphere whose boundaries are a func-
tion of sound, rather than sound being a function of the sphere, is
not only scientifically improbable, it is grounded in religion. Those
who hear the church bell are in the parish; those who don’t are in the
wilderness. The “sphere without boundaries” creates boundaries,
then, and it does contain something: a “proprietor who maintains
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authority by insistent high-profile sound” (Schafer 2004: 68–69).3

But the myth-tinged proximity between sound-based “oral-
ity” and “acoustic space” alone is insufficient to dismiss the latter
concept outright. A more benign reading might focus on acoustic
space as an “umbrella term for a set of epistemological boundary
experiments” (Stamps 1995: 133). If indeed there is a realm more
primordial, more effervescent than “orality,” how might it be repre-
sented beyond its formless simultaneity, as hinted at typographically
38

above? Or might “acoustic space” be less an issue of acoustics

 “Acoustic Space” - Marshall McLuhan

than of epistemology? Instead of it being a space of original purity,

might we imagine the resonant “dark bog” to be a realm on the edge
of the oral/visual dichotomy, and hence “acoustic space” as a term
that does not reconcile the polar opposites by transcending them,
but as one that recognizes the excess of meaning that cannot be
exhausted by either speech or writing? How might McLuhan’s term
be helpful in reviewing some of sound studies’ taken-for-granted
historical, aesthetic, and most notably epistemological assumptions
“regarding the givenness of a particular domain” such as “sound”
or “hearing” (Akiyama and Sterne 2011: 556) without lapsing back
into mystic invocations of orality? In short, can one salvage sound
studies’ McLuhanite legacy by defending its author against himself?
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“For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than

to the eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by
human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the uncon-
scious. Whereas it is commonplace that, for example, we have
some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general
terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of
a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with
its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It
is through photography that we first discover the existence of this
optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious
through psychoanalysis.” (Benjamin 1999a: 511–512)
Walter Benjamin would add an important qualifier to this famous
passage from his1931 article "Little History of Photography" a year
later. In “A Berlin Chronicle,” a short text rich in references to sound
and music, he raised doubts whether the “space informed by the
unconscious” was in fact an optical one. Is the term déjà vu – which
enjoyed wide currency in the early decades of the twentieth century –
“well chosen” to describe that space, he wonders. Would it not
be better to use a metaphor taken from the realm of acoustics to
denote the strange phenomenon of recognizing the class divisions
of his native Berlin by re-hearing the barrel organs and chorales of
his childhood days?
“One ought to speak of events that reach us like an echo awak-
ened by a call, a sound that seems to have been heard somewhere
in the darkness of a past life. Accordingly, if we are not mistaken,
the shock with which moments enter consciousness as if already
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lived usually strikes us in the form of a sound. It is a word, a tapping,

or a rustling that is endowed with the magic power to transport us
into the cool tomb of long ago, from the vault of which the present
seems to return only as an echo.” (Benjamin 1999b: 634)
By 1938, finally, after extensive conversations with Theodor W.
Adorno, the “realm of acoustics” had been firmly integrated into his
work on sound film. In the famous essay on “The Work of Art in
the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” the “space informed
39

by the unconscious” is no longer one revealed by photography. It is

 Veit Erlmann

now the “swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or

compressing” of the much more nimble movie camera that brings
to light “things which had previously floated unnoticed on the broad
stream of perception.” Much like Freud’s The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life had made us aware of everyday slip-ups, Benjamin
hoped that film would accomplish a “deepening of apperception
throughout the entire spectrum of optical impressions” – and, he
adds in a largely unnoticed parenthesis of just five words, “now also
the auditory” [und nun auch der akustischen] impressions (Benjamin
2003a: 265).4
The Benjaminian camera is little more than an intermediary
between consciousness and the unconscious; an invisible machine
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that operates entirely outside the unconscious/consciousness

divide. As such Benjamin’s instrumentalist understanding of technol-
ogy is much more indebted to an older brand of psychology asso-
ciated with the physiology of perception, especially of time, than to
Freud’s “talking cure.” Much like for Freud technology were “auxil-
iary organs,” Benjamin’s camera (and by extension, early recording
technologies such as the condenser microphone and the gramo-
phone) were essentially prosthetic devices compensating for the
inability of our nervous system to cope with the rapid flow of move-
ments, slips of the tongue, etc. As such the fascination with the
“augmenting” capability of such devices was part of a broader shift
in everyday spatio-temporal experience. In the wake of Eadweard
Muybridge’s studies of “Animal Locomotion” and Etienne-Jules
Marey’s wheel-camera images the sense of time, in particular, had
undergone a radical transformation. An avalanche of “reaction time”
tests in which the time interval between an optical or acoustic stim-
ulus and an individual’s response served to determine the velocity of
nervous transmission and the speed of thought, disrupted the clas-
sical dogma of the unity and temporal immediacy of perception and
cognition. But by establishing the tenth-of-a-second as the minimal
unit of perception, early twentieth-century psycho-physiology put
paid to metaphysics’ preposterous claims of self-presence (Canales
2009).
Benjamin goes one step beyond psychophysiology. Camera and
recording devices operate in a dialectical fashion, he argued. In cap-
turing the unseen, unheard and, hence, unconscious split seconds
and by subjecting them to conscious scrutiny through the analytical
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toolkit of “disrupting,” “isolating,” and “stretching” such devices are

capable of recombining the isolated incidents into a more conscious
narrative. The “visuality of the instant” (Krauss 1993: 214), the blatant
divisibility of the temporal present made possible by technology, is
transformed back into undivided continuity, into the perceptual and
ultimately also cognitive unity of the person in front of the screen. Yet
this return to flow is also shot through with ambiguity and surprising
leaps. Leaps into Utopia, that is.
40
 “Acoustic Space” - Marshall McLuhan

“No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how care-

fully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to
search the picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and
now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject [of the
photo], to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of
that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we,
looking back, may rediscover it.” (Benjamin 1999a: 510)
Some of that longing for the Utopian “spark” was present in Sur-
realism. Max Ernst and André Breton, he argued, had converted the
destitute, mundane, or forgotten – the “most recent popular tune” –
(Benjamin 1977: 300) into what he called “energies of intoxication”
or “revolutionary experience.” Yet as Rosalind Krauss tells us, what
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enthralled turn-of-the-century audiences who were gazing through

the openings in the rotating drum of a zootrope at the wooden
pigeons inside (lampooned by Ernst in his collage novel A Little Girl
Dreams of Taking the Veil) was something altogether more mundane
and phantasmagoric at the same time. It was a “both-at-once,” the
“being caught inside the illusion and this looking nonetheless from
without,” that resulted from the experience of a series of immobile
birds merging into the sensation of a flying pigeon (Krauss 1993:
209). But above all it was the “pulse,” the quiver of the jerky zoot-
rope, the panorama, and the praxinoscope punctuating the viewer’s
vision that not only threatened the desire for perceptual synthesis
but the very modernist mythology of autonomous form.
Benjamin clung to it tenaciously. Becoming conscious and leav-
ing behind a memory-trace, he quotes Freud’s famous dictum, are
incompatible processes within one and the same system. But con-
sciousness can also have another function other than the neurologi-
cal function of protecting against “shock.” It is a function that is more
ambiguously positioned at the intersection of where consciousness
emerges from a memory-trace and that Benjamin associates with
what he calls the “poetic experience.” If the shock is parried by
consciousness, the incident that causes it would be considered as
an isolated experience or “Erlebnis,” but if it were incorporated into
consciousness, the shock would be sterilized. Baudelaire’s poetry
is indeed the result of a carefully calculated “plan” that turns the
exposure to “shock” into an aesthetic norm. (Benjamin 2003b: 318)
There is, then, a certain sense of logos, syntax, and legibility to all
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this, as if a hidden principle organizes the two-way street of the rela-

tionship between consciousness and the unconscious; a sequence
in which one thing, one sound, one word follows another going in one
direction before it returns in the same order in the opposite direction.
Accordingly, the space of his “now in the auditory” is not simply that
of “sound,” but that of sound as structure, language, and meaning.
Or, more precisely, Benjamin’s “realm of acoustics” does not consist
of audible sounds per se as much as it encompasses successive
stages of “soundness” and “unsoundness,” of sounds being undone
41
 Veit Erlmann

and reassembling. From an initial state of being a “word,” a “tapping”

or a “rustling,” the audible negates itself, entering a silent, other-sen-
sory (“cool”) space. From which it resurfaces in somewhat atten-
uated, truncated form, sound morsel after sound morsel. Yet the
lineal order of “events” remains intact throughout, much like an echo
retains the temporal structure of the original sound that it emanates
from. Just as Proust’s mémoire involontaire makes available “images
that we have never seen before we remember them,” (Benjamin
1977: 1064; my emphasis) the acoustic unconscious for Benjamin
shelters a secret code whose key has been lost and whose meaning
must be retrieved through a form of redoubling, through painstaking
deciphering, decoding, and “reading.”
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Yet the acoustic-unconscious is more than an acoustic version

of the déjà vu of a text, a déjà entendu. For Freud, writing about the
“listening cap” or Hörkappe that sits astride Ego, is not so much a
record of what we have heard and then re-actualize in some con-
scious act, but rather an “unheard” that has been repressed and is
compulsively repeated. Thus, the moment of remembrance is not
one that is subject to individual volition but one of irresolvable ambi-
guity, even inscrutability. Instead of an “acoustical” counterpart to
Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” the acoustic-unconscious cannot
be grasped as part of an auditory field. Nor is it about hearing. In
fact, much like the unconscious itself, it is not even a space. As
Jean-Francois Lyotard has argued in a brilliant reading of Freud’s “A
Child is Being Beaten,” for Freud all “the formations of the uncon-
scious are contemporaneous, posited simultaneously with the same
intensity, invested with the same charge. […] If an area is invested,
it is not necessary for it to be cleared in order to be reinvested. The
interval that the order of perception requires so that the things in
the external world can be distinguished from one another, to keep
them from blending into one another, in a word, depth of field […]
is abandoned here” (Lyotard 2011: 337). The acoustic, accordingly,
is not something that “fills” the unconscious in lieu of some other
sensory element in the manner of an adjective lending specificity
to an abstract category. The acoustic-unconscious rather is an
assemblage, a nexus that undercuts the coordinates of space and
time. It is close to what Lyotard calls the matrix, a space that does
not know any structure, language or fixed oppositions – such as
between visual and auditory. The acoustic-unconscious, then, is not
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another form of the unconscious or an anti-optical unconscious, but

an unconscious-as-sound.
Georg von Békésy distinguished two kinds of approaches to the
challenges posed by the “revolutionary development of techniques
in acoustics” during the early decades of the twentieth century. There
is, first, a “theoretical approach” according to which a problem is
formulated in relation to what is already known, [in order] to make
predictions or extensions on the basis of accepted principles.” But
42

there is also a “mosaic” approach. Here each problem is taken for

 “Acoustic Space” - Marshall McLuhan

itself “with little reference to the field in which it lies and that seeks to
discover relations and principles that hold within the circumscribed
area.” Bekesy provided two examples of the difference between
the two approaches: the depiction in Persian miniature painting, for
instance, of individual objects as if “spread out on a carpet,” one
the one hand, and the attempts from the Renaissance on to give
unity and perspective and to represent the atmosphere of the scene
depicted, on the other hand. (Békésy 1960: 4)
McLuhan quoted the Hungarian-born scholar whose research on
the biophysics of the inner ear had won him a Nobel Prize in 1961
compulsively, fitting him into his Procustean bed of dichotomies at
every opportunity. The mosaic approach, he argued for instance,
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does not reduce space to a “single, uniform, and connected char-

acter” as does all post-Renaissance perspective painting (McLuhan
1988: 55). In contrast to perspective, in which things take their place
in geometric (Euclidean) space relative to an observer’s more or
less arbitrary and stationary point of view, when represented in the
mosaic form things do not occupy the space of empirical vision as
clearly bounded figures or by virtue of their distance from the ground.
Mosaic form is “lossy,” all-at-once form: “discontinuous, abrupt, and
multi-leveled” (55). It is for this reason that modernist painting since
Cézanne is best appreciated as a mosaic whose two-dimensionality
is not subject to the dominance of the visual but opens up a space
for “maximal interplay among all of the senses” (55). Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, likewise, rejects “retinal sat-
isfaction” and thus might be said to require much less a beholding
than a holding of objects. In short, modernist art can only be experi-
enced as a merging of forces without vanishing point, or to quote the
title of a painting and a poem by McLuhan’s near-contemporary and
possible influence Bertram Brooker (1980), as “sounds assembling.”
Elsewhere in his Experiments in Hearing, Békésy discusses “The
Spatial Attributes of Sound,” arguing that directional hearing is sub-
ject to a great deal of variation in the sensation of stimuli. While the
perception of distance of a sound is simply determined by its loud-
ness, for instance, in front-back location (that is, by listening to a
sound behind the head) the perception of distance was indetermi-
nate, even though it is possible for a subject to voluntarily shift the
sound image from front to back and vice versa. This, clearly, not only
resembles the perception of reversible perspective figures such as in
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Edgar Rubin’s famous faces-vase diagram (1960: 280–281), it suited

McLuhan’s project of articulating auditory space and the mosaic.
In fact, it all comes down to the unconscious. It was the arro-
gance of the “lossless” figure, its claim to perceptual and informa-
tional hegemony and the depreciation of the ground following in its
wake, that he railed against. What do you see? Faces or vase? What
do you hear? The sound in front or the sound behind? One has to
choose; there is no lasting ground. No certainty, no synthesis.
43
 Veit Erlmann

The difficulty with psychoanalysis, he held, was its failure to

grasp the ever-present now of the unconscious in terms that tran-
scend those of geometric space or the figure. Perhaps he had in
mind Freud’s analogy between the unconscious and the Piazza
of the P ­ antheon in Rome (where buildings from different eras are
juxtaposed) when he reproaches psychoanalysis for failing to pay
attention to “the ground of psychic conditioning” (McLuhan 1987:
458). Faced with the impossibility of picturing the simultaneous and
unable to resolve the paradox of having to represent the discon-
tinuous work of the unconscious in a theory of continuous tempo-
rality, psychoanalysis could but fixate on the figure and geometric
three-dimensionality. As a result, psychoanalysis favors introspec-
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tion over two-dimensional or “mosaic” participatory simultaneity.

Unlike Cézanne, Picasso, and Duchamp who upheld the figure while
fighting its tyranny, it does not tolerate a “withholding the syntactical
connection” for the sake of producing a “single image of great inten-
sity” (McLuhan 1951: 80).
Freud’s interpretations of the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus,
likewise, bespeak psychoanalysis’ obstinate fixation on visual space.
Oedipus’ fate, his blindness, McLuhan argued, is not the punish-
ment for having acted out his repressed sexual desire in killing his
father and marrying his mother. As the ancient dramatists knew well,
it is rather the price he had to pay for the hubris of having solved
the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus’ penalty for having caused a break
in the system by ingeniously crossing “break boundaries” over into
another system was a sealing-off of “awareness to the total field”
(McLuhan 1994: 39).
The myth of Narcissus, for its part, is not about what Freud called
“ego ideal” (and would later rename as “super-ego”). More than any-
thing, it is a tale of self-amputation. By mistaking his own reflection in
the pool of water for another person, by falling in love with an image
of himself as an Other, Narcissus cut himself off from himself. The
extension of himself through the medium of the mirror, as his name
implies, is thus tantamount to narcosis, numbing Narcissus to Echo’s
attempts to seduce him with fragments of his own speech. “He had
adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed sys-
tem” (McLuhan 1994: 41). Self-extension leads to self-amputation,
which in turn prevents self-recognition: a “massive psychic chias-
mus” (McLuhan 1962: 277).
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Oedipus and Narcissus do not belong to the same order of

the unconscious then. Psychoanalysis’ unconscious and acoustic
space are not coterminous. McLuhan’s unconscious is not a site
of interiority and of the repression of unwanted outside intrusion as
it is with Freud’s Oedipus complex, but the product of extrusion.
The “outering” of the self through media is what creates the uncon-
scious and prevents Narcissus from escaping visual space and from
immersing himself in the totality and simultaneity of acoustic space.
44

Similarly, Oedipus might be said to have tried an acoustic approach

 “Acoustic Space” - Marshall McLuhan

but was doomed to remain trapped in the sensory deprivation of

visual space symbolized by blindness. Of course, there are paral-
lels between McLuhan’s self-extension/self-amputation and Freud’s
discontent with “civilization’s” prosthetic organs and their narcissist
implications. But the problem with the interpretation of the Oedipus
myth as a master trope for psychoanalysis’ unconscious lies deeper.
If the unconscious is consciousness that is “outered” by media
rather than being the internal residue of the excess of media input
that has been repressed, how can one write about it? How might
such a media-unconscious become available to concepts when it
resists the geometric logic of the point-of-view in the first place? And
how can we grasp through the closed system of language a space
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that is inherently unstable and vulnerable to disruption? In short, if

the medium is the message, and language is a medium, what can
be said about the unconscious beyond the apparent oxymoron of it
being formless form?
There simply is no way, as phenomenology claims, to “go to the
other side of discourse,” Lyotard writes. Language is not a homog-
enous system: it is divisive because it extends the sensed into an
object of signification, but it is also divided because it interiorizes the
figure in its completed signification. (Lyotard 2011: 7–8) Hence, one
can get “to” the figure and be “in” the figure at one and the same
time. One get to the figure because there is no discourse without
its counterpart “over there,” and one can get in the figure “without
leaving language behind because the figure is embedded in it.” (7)
Yet figure and ground, visual and acoustic space, consciousness
and the unconscious are not quite as diametrically opposed to each
other as McLuhan often made them appear. Because language
itself is a medium, it cannot confine within itself the meaning of the
media-unconscious, he might have said. For McLuhan media are
not a priori means to blast open and make available for conscious
inspection what Benjamin had called the “prison-world” of our
“commonplace milieux” (2003a: 265). Media are the unconscious.
Consciousness, consequently, is not the Other of this media-uncon-
scious, it is merely a new milieu.
“An environment is naturally of low intensity or low definition,
which is why it escapes observation. Anything that raises the envi-
ronment to high intensity, whether it be a storm in nature or a violent
change resulting from a new technology, turns the environment into
The Senses & Society

an object of attention. When an environment becomes an object of

attention it assumes the character of an anti-environment or an art
object.” (McLuhan 1967: 44)
Benjamin earlier had used an unusual term for the claustrophobic
“commonplace milieux” of city streets, furnished rooms, and railroad
stations – in other words, the media environments that we hardly
ever notice and that film supposedly explodes with the dynamite of
the tenth-of-a-second. He called it Merkwelt or “perception world.”
45
 Veit Erlmann

The term is key in the work of Benjamin’s acquaintance, the biolo-

gist Jakob von Uexküll. In Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt, the Merkwelt
was part of a “functional circle” in which the Merkwelt and “effect
world” or Wirkwelt react back on each other as in a feedback loop,
thus constituting an organism’s Umwelt or environment (von Uexküll
2010). Atick, dog or jackdaw functions within a specific ecological
niche that is his and his alone, because each niche contains only a
limited set of “perceptual signs” whose “meaning” determines the
action of the organism. Other environments are unreadable and thus
out of reach.
As closed as the tick’s or dog’s respective environments may
appear, they are rather dynamic. For in shifting the place of organ-
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isms in the order of biological knowledge from a concern with origin,

form, or physiological mechanism, what moves to the center of the
scientist’s attention is no longer any fixed quality but the organism’s
ever-changing place in a larger system of data flows and processes
of adaptation, filtering and feedback. Rather than a stable entity the
animal becomes an Uber-animal or, in one of Uexküll’s audacious
phrases, an “event (Geschehnis).”
The space of the Uexküllian environment is not nature, then (And,
of course, it is not Murray Schafer’s secularized divine creation, the
“living outdoors,” either). Nature is a human construct, an utterly per-
spectival space in which the “nature” of things is determined from the
position of the “visual.” Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt, by comparison,
is a theory of relations and indeterminacy; it is an acoustic theory
or, as he called it, a “musical theory of life.” But this temporal fluidity
and event-like character of the organism is at odds with Benjamin’s
interpretation of Uexküll’s term. While Uexküll’s Umwelt is an all-en-
compassing field that incorporates both figure and ground, percep-
tion and perceiver on ever-shifting terms, Benjamin tries to grasp
the truth of our unconscious nature by extracting from the “com-
monplace milieux” the figure, the “here and now” and, ultimately, the
future. And in contrast to the mosaic flatness of Uexküll’s Merkwelt in
which meaning exhausts itself in the moment of perception and the
action following in its wake, Benjamin’s “perceptual world” resem-
bles more a distant horizon of a potentially infinite yet stable space
that consciousness does not (and cannot) fully exhaust; it needs
technology to yield the meaning that only depth will provide.
With its analytic power to arrest, dissect, and record motion
The Senses & Society

the movie camera “rolls up the carpet of existence.” The projector

reconstructs the dissected scene and “unrolls the daylight world of
a magic carpet, a dream-world. The camera records the day-world;
the projector evokes the night-world.” (McLuhan 1954: 7) Once he
had settled on the notion that the medium is the message, it could
hardly be the figure that reveals the unconscious ground of the
media environment it happens to be “in.”
The nature of media, then, is not a question of their content but
46

an ecological question. Media come in pairs. Much like in Uex-

 “Acoustic Space” - Marshall McLuhan

küll’s theory perceiving organ, perceptual world, and effect world

are interlinked in fluctuating constellations of function, in McLuhan’s
environment/anti-environment scheme sharp differences, flashes of
intuition and quasi-messianic moments in which the black box of the
undifferentiated, commonplace of our media-unconscious is being
unlocked only rarely disrupt the twilight of complete interdepend-
ence. For the most part, reality and daydream meld into each other.
And yet he could not let go of difference, of what he would call
“total awareness” or “consciousness of the unconscious” (McLu-
han 1994: 47). This would be his ultimate master-narrative, stronger
than all the dyads taken together, stronger because it transcends all
divisions of visual space. Even in acoustic space, despite the disa-
vowal of the point-of-view, the modernist myth of cognitive authority
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survives as a powerful trope through which modernism struggles

to master the difficult ground–figure relationship that so haunts its
claims to formal autonomy. Yet it survives in a far more paradoxi-
cal form than McLuhan might ever have imagined. Modernism, we
might say with Krauss and substituting the auditory for the visual,
imagined the figure to be of two orders. The first is the order of
empirical hearing and of the sound as “heard,” and this is the order
that the nineteenth-century theorists of “absolute music” and their
late-blooming descendants such as Adorno spurned. The second
order is that of “pure” hearing itself, the level that modernism simul-
taneously fears and wants to master as a principle of coordination,
unity, structure: audible but unheard (1993: 217) Yet there is also a
third, impossible order of the figure, one which Jean-François Lyo-
tard calls the “figural” and that works entirely outside the realm of
either sound or non-sound. The figural refuses to confine art in per-
spectival, representational space for sure and, hence, to adumbrate
the aesthetic experience as a form of “understanding.” But in turn
it also resists as gratuitous the temptation to reduce the aesthetic
experience to a mere mechanical reflex to or record of unconscious
repression.
An art of the “acoustic space,” one might conclude, is thus not
one of the order of the unconscious as an object of repression.
Nor can it can it simply take the side of all-point-of-view, anti-en-
vironmental, total consciousness. To paraphrase Lyotard, the art of
“acoustic space” is an art of the figural. While remaining well within
the sensory, it reminds us that there is an interworld that is less a
store of readily available “sounds” than a store of past “hearings.”
The Senses & Society

In experiencing such art, “every form of discourse exhausts itself

before exhausting it” (Lyotard 2011: 7).

Notes
 1. Marshall McLuhan: CBC Interview 1967, http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=OMEC_HqWlBY.
  2. See however Cavell 2002, Levinson 1990, and Stamps 1995.
47
 Veit Erlmann

  3. This critique does not prevent Schafer from positing his own,
secular version of McLuhan’s allegedly mystic “acoustic space:”
the “living outdoors” he calls it (2004: 70).
  4. Benjamin’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis was cursory and
eclectic. See Roff 2004.

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