Meta Four Play Part 4 - McLuhan's Tetrad and Lévi-Strauss' Canonical Formula: Down the Rabbit Hole

My previous posts on this topic, which can be found here, here and here attempted to link the process of mythic analysis proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Canonical Formula with Marshall McLuhan’s approach to the study of technology which he termed his “Laws of the Media.” McLuhan demonstrated his laws using his Tetradic division of that impact into enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal. This linkage is possible because visual media operate on a mythic basis. The difference between the myths of our era of secondary orality and those of primary orality is that there is now a stronger dependence on visual imagery to tell the story. McLuhan noted that

“…when the entire economy is on an artistic or magical basis, sparked by the magical appeals and promises of the ads (visual ads are in themselves magical in their habit of transforming ordinary objects and situations) is it not repugnant to the total pattern and promise of the new life to accept ‘natural’ effects even at the level of physical taste? The power of the machine to transform the character of work and living strongly invites us to transform every level of existence by art.

Gilbert Seldes mentions how in the early days of TV crowds would stand by the hour watching a TV screen in a shop window when the only picture on the screen was of the traffic in the street in which they stood. Such is likewise the magical power of the press. Reportage takes up the ordinary events, the weather and the municipal events in which we all participate, and changes them simply by virtue of the medium of print and photography. Any communication link or channel necessarily possesses this myth dimension. Much more are the ineluctable modalities of sight and sound charge with powers of metamorphosis which have been magnified by technology into the size and posture of mighty djinns.”(1)

Our current system of myths is not only presented verbally, but also via images, in print, and even in interplay of biases amongst all of our competing media. Since we may be relearning this manner of thinking as we move deeper into secondary orality, McLuhan and Lévi-Strauss each provide us with maps of where we may be headed. What hasn’t been apparent before is how their particular approaches are complementary and when used together, provide a stronger methodology to interpreting and understanding media effects.

Every television commercial is a lesson in the ways of thought under secondary orality and, as advertising icons spread out to other venues, they act as constant reminders of the secondary orality way to process experience.

Theatrical television is based on literary conventions. Film school students can tell you how every movie is divided into three acts--just like a stage play. One hour theatrical tv programs extend the dramatic arc to four acts, each about 11 minutes long. The drama progresses via thought processes that are linear, based on literacy-based cause and effect logic. TV Ads teach us to think like pre-literate peoples, using the type of non-linear thought processes that Claude Lévi-Strauss divided into "empirical" and "transcendental" deduction.

"Empirical deduction occurs whenever a myth attributes a function value or symbolic meaning to a natural being because of an empirical judgment durably associating the being with the attribution. From a formal point of view the correctness of the empirical judgment is irrelevant." (2)

Empirical deduction begins with some observation of reality. It then treats that observation as if it were an abstract concept. This type of mental process can occur using two different types of association. First, through the use of a metonymic association, some observed characteristic or habit of an animal is treated as if it stood for the entire animal. If this characteristic is found elsewhere in the environment, it too is associated with that animal. The metonymic association then becomes a metaphoric assertion. Lévi-Strauss’s term for such uses of metaphor is “imaginary association.”

"An imaginary association…results in the attribution of curative powers against snake bite and tooth decay to seeds shaped like fangs." (3)

The metonymic association (fangs of a snake) is used to make a metaphoric assertion (fang-shaped seeds cure snake bite). In classic television advertising we see this type of reasoning regularly. The air bubbles in Baggies sandwich bags make the bag look like an alligator’s skin, so an alligator is used as the product mascot. The Volkswagon “bug,” the Turtlewax turtle, and the old Exxon tiger are further examples of this type of association.

In current advertising, the associations are more subtle. For example, many ads feature automobiles that will never in real life leave a paved road "roughing" it through forests or deserts, avoiding natural obstacles and endowing the driver with the "freedom of the wilderness." The irony of these images is that the car or SUV, which often is given an animal name, is actually the embodiment of culture that provides the driver with protection against the storm. This is why Marshall McLuhan could refer to the automobile and driver as a knight in shining armor:

"The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile." (4)

"Transcendental" deduction operates at another step removed from reality. The characteristic attributed to an animal or an object is removed from any grounding in empirical observation, and is determined by its relative position in the culture's symbolic structure as a whole. Lévi-Strauss states that:

"It does not necessarily rest on a true or false, a direct or indirect empirical base; rather, it stems from the awareness of a certain logical necessity, that of attributing certain properties to a given being because empirical deduction has previously connected this being with others on the basis of a set of correlative properties." (5)

Lévi-Strauss has borrowed the notion of redundancy from communication theory to explain the rationale behind this procedure. Imagine that you are the story teller of a culture that relies on oral communication for the transmission of its body of knowledge. Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are fully aware of the hidden structural associations that your stories are portraying. How would you insure that the information contained in those tales would survive the erosion of time and the individual idiosyncrasies of future story tellers? One way would be to take the basic message or messages and repeat them over and over again using different formats and imagery. Though the stories would seem to be about different heroes, animals, events, and so on, the underlying struc­ture would be more or less the same throughout. Furthermore, future story tellers would internalize these structures so that they would tend to reject any alterations which went against the general pattern.

That's why, in our secondary orality culture, ads want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives: Not just as an accepted part of television and radio and magazines but also in movies and broadway theaters, in our schools and workplaces. Can our places of worship be far behind?

The type of thought manifest in television advertising represents the symbolic realization of the lesson of the medium itself. A medium of images and sounds, TV's biases toward the non-discursive are represented and reinforced in the narratives of advertising.

(1)McLuhan, M. (2005). "Notes on the Media as Art Forms" in Marshall McLuhan - Unbound, E. McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon, eds. (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press), pp 8-9.

(2) Levi-Strauss, C. (1971). “The Deduction of the Crane,” in Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, Maranda, P. and Maranda E.K., Eds. (p. 3). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

(3) Ibid. (p. 3)

(4) McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (p. 17). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

(5) Levi-Strauss, C. Op. Cit, (p. 3)

Culture vs. Nature: Women and Advertising in the New Media

As the new media liberate traditional advertising, women may want to reevaluate their roles.

It may seem that economic factors and competition from new media are forcing advertisers to reevaluate how to get their messages across; to engage in product placement and other tricks to penetrate the clutter. In fact this is just the tail wagging the dog. It has always been inevitable that the "content" what we call "ads" would move from the confines of the 15 or 30 seconds spaces between the old content presented by traditional electronic media or the column inches of traditional print media to become involved in every aspect of our lives. Advertising in general wrestles with the same types of concerns that structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of "primitive" South American Indians. That is, in a context relevant to our modern sensibilities, ads are really dealing with an opposition between nature and culture. In doing so, they provide structure to our lives, disseminate guidelines for how to look and feel, and mandate what rituals to perform to be fully human.

Think about how the average person in Homeric Greece related to The Iliad or The Odyssey. These performance/poems weren't just the "literature" of Greek culture, separate from the general experience. As Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out, The Iliad and The Odyssey constituted cultural how-to manuals, presenting the proper ways for Greek men and women to conduct ceremonies, the proper relationship of Greeks toward their gods and the proper things to believe about just about everything in their world. Claude Lévi-Strauss added that such cultural encyclopedias reconcile or deny the inevitable contradictions within a culture. By doing so, they promote well-being and peace of mind of the members of the culture.

We still can't see that modern advertising, in all its manifestations, performs the same functions in our modern culture that The Iliad and The Odyssey performed in ancient Greece, or that the tales about frogs and honey bees and jaguars performed for native South Americans. In doing so, advertising explains and reconciles the contradictions that must inevitably exist in the lexicon of a complex culture, or deny that those contradictions exist. To help better grasp this concept, I’d like to ask the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup?

One response is that our culture still distinguishes men from women along a culture/nature opposition. The religious and scientific stories of our culture tell us that as human beings we are outside or above the constraints of the natural world. At the same time we come into this world through childbirth, we get sick, we age and die, we suffer from various bodily afflictions. How do we reconcile this contradiction?

Lévi-Strauss cites an instance where an anthropological field investigator asks his native informant why his people apply so many tattoos to their bodies. "Because we are not animals" is the reply. They complete the transition from nature to culture, they make themselves cultural beings rather than natural ones, via tattoos and the fact that they are not within nature makes them want to do so. The implication is that they distinguish themselves from the natural order by decorating their skin.

What I am suggesting is that when women apply makeup they are doing the same thing. They are making themselves into cultural beings. By applying a corporate (meaning collective) mask, women tap into a source of collective power. Men don't need to wear makeup because they are, by definition, already cultural. Of course, much advertising operates along this borderline, and because both men and women buy their products, advertisers pitch to both sexes. Ads say “If you have a problem with a bodily function (i.e. nature) we have a cultural product that can help.”

This also applies to sexual attraction. In order to attract a mate both men and women have to look sharp by applying proper grooming aids, and smell sharp by applying proper perfumes, but women must go much further. They must color and condition their hair. They must paint their eyes, their lips and their faces. They must remove hair from inappropriate places on their bodies. Ads never discuss (beyond the obvious sexual claims) why they must do this, only how.

What is an advertisement in a new media web site? Is it presenting a narrative, like television advertising, or is it evoking a response through a still image, like print advertising? The answer is probably both and neither. Banner ads on a web site try to be TV commercials or they try to be print ads and yet they aren’t really either. This is a prime illustration of Marshall McLuhan's assertion that we are numb to the true impact of our media. By shifting the communication paradigm, the new media allow advertising myths to burst out of the confines of the traditional media. While the new media sorts itself out, the advertising of the old media breaks out and becomes the content of our everyday lives. As the mythic avatars of our culture, advertising icons want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, and we subconsciously want them to do so.

Our collective body of advertising defines what is cultural and what is natural, and offers concise advice on how we can best exist in culture rather than nature. This collective resource, acting as a sort of cultural encyclopedia, performs the same function in our age that the Homeric epics performed in classical Greece. The new media are taking our existing cultural encyclopedia and transforming it into a wikipedia. How this transformation affects our social institutions, our belief structures and our notions concerning gender remains to be seen.

YouTube! YouTube! A Pirate's Life for Me!

I'm all for intellectual property (and I hope some day to have some,) but it seems to me that movie studios, like the music business before them, are responding in the worst possible way to the current threats to existing modes of media distribution posed by the Internet and digital recording technology. Computer wizards will always find ways around DVD watermarking or anti-piracy technology, just as our usual criminal elements will continue to traffic in any money-making opportunities they can create.

My suggestion, (and I'm available to consult or provide, for a price, written commentary on this) is that movie studios immediately embrace this new method of distribution. After all, what are the studios really selling? Is it an oft-told tale? A particular fashion or style? A group of consumer products portrayed in the film? A pretty face within the star system?

Just as Marshall McLuhan in the 1960's informed GE that they were in the "information" not the "light bulb" business; I would tell the movie studios that they aren't really selling a particular movie. They are primarily selling a way of seeing the world and being in the world, and coincidentally, a group of products that represent that viewpoint and that lifestyle.

The movie studios are too hung up on the story content, which, if surviving manuscripts are any guide, hasn't changed all that much since prehistoric times. They are also blinded by the incredible rewards of the existing distribution system, where they are the few gatekeepers to an entire medium. The digital age has done away with this celluloid oligopoly.

How do the movie studios embrace the new digital distribution environment? They may have to abandon the blockbuster mentality as a means for supporting their other creative misjudgments. Smaller returns for smaller projects mean smaller risk, but also smaller incentives to pirates and hackers.

Just as cable has created niche television, movie studios should explore the profit potential of niche cinema distributed digitally. YouTube anyone? Big budget movies won't disappear overnight, but the lesson of the recent history of the music industry is that consumers want to be producers, that there is a huge pent-up demand that cheap recording and editing technology is addressing, and that the coming change cannot be contained by stronger constraints, whether technological or legal.

The Internet is now determining our media biases. Intellectual property, copyright legalisms and print-based exclusivity will soon be a fond relict of the past. Movie studios can embrace this new digital paradigm or they can continue to resist it, at their peril.

Why Advertising Is Becoming Ubiquitous

(Updated below)


The trend in advertising toward a ubiquitous presence in our lives, as documented in this New York Times article, is a natural outgrowth of the mythologic function of advertising. As advertising becomes truly ubiquitous, and therefore environmental, and before it becomes completely invisible to the average eye, it is a fitting focus for Media Ecology. The question one might asked is why the total penetration of advertising into all venues is considered an imposition. If advertising is our culture's mythology, as I have claimed, why is it perceived as an annoyance?


Reason #1: Due to a misunderstanding of its true nature and impact, to date advertising has been segregated in minutes between programming or spaces in magazines and newspapers. We find advertising annoying because it interrupts our stories, sporting events and news reports. That will change with product placement supplementing and then replacing separate commercial breaks (Think "The Truman Show").


Reason #2: The structure of current advertising is (sometimes) warped by a corporate agenda. Sometimes the conscious attempts by corporate advertisers to bend the message to fit their agenda works against the underlying mythology. This gets our attention, but is also disquieting. Some things just won't work in our current culture. Imagine an ad that tries to convince men to start wearing makeup. What aspects of our current conception of sexual roles would need to change for this to become a reality? Would Avon or Maybelline be willing to take this on to increase profits? What other factors would work against this? The point is that corporation advertising must operate within certain pre-determined structural boundaries to be successful. Sometimes corporations try to push that envelope and it doesn't work.


Reason #3: We haven't yet become numb to its influence. As advertising changes our culture, we adopt new "corporate" identities. We already proudly display corporate logos on our clothing and artifacts. We gain parts of our personal self-image and identity by assimilating corporate images and icons. (In Supersize Me there is a scene where children more readily identify Ronald McDonald than George Washington or Jesus Christ.) Identity change is an uncomfortable process, and as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, can lead to things like social uprisings and war.


UPDATE

Anonymous asks:

Would it be fair to say that the ubiquity of advertising suggests that we are living in the Age of Advertising?

Would it be fair to say that the Age of Advertising does not vaunt reason (logos) alone as though it were everything?

Would it be fair to say that in this respect the Age of Advertising is seriously at odds with the Age of Reason?

Would it be fair to say that the Age of Advertising reminds us of the non-rational factors in life that Plato (thumos and eros) and Aristotle (ethos and pathos) mentioned?

In my paper “The Heart of the Matter” which will soon be published under “Proceedings of the 2005 Media Ecology Conference,” I examine the implications of the Greek concept of

which is transliterated as either “thumos” or “thymos” and translated as “mind,” encompassing memory and consciousness.

Classical Greeks believed that consciousness resided in the lungs and was expressed in speech, the dominant communication medium of the age. Thoughts were breaths that originated from a divine source, hence the origin of the word “inspiration.”

In Plato’s time, writing was beginning to supplant speech as the dominant mode of communication and the popular concept of the seat of consciousness and memory began to move from the lungs to the heart. We still speak of ‘learning by heart’ when we want to memorize something. “Reason”, as Plato defined it, was an indication of this shift from speech to writing. He could split reason (“logos”) from feeling (“thumos)” and sexuality (“eros”) as a result of this shift. This differentiation was something that wouldn’t occur to Homeric Greeks.

In our age we see the beginnings of an era of secondary orality. The exact parameters of are still working themselves out, but considering the celebrity and authority granted to our entertainers (that is our singers and actors) it may be that we will see a decline in logos considered as an aspect of consciousness.

The connotation of the term “Age of Advertising” is that we are somehow controlled and defined by beliefs and values dictated by corporations.

My claim is that the advertising of our age is a manifestation of the universal human tendency to apply categories to the elements of our environment and then reconcile the inevitable contradictions that arise. In other words, advertising operates in our culture the way mythology operates in primary orality cultures. I might also add that, compared to the subtlety and complexity of these early mythic systems, our advertising is truly primitive.

This may not involve the type of reason espoused by Plato and Aristotle, but may be a result of a type of intellectual activity of primary orality cultures which Claude Lévi-Strauss called a “science of the concrete.”

The Rise of Product Placement

Why has product placement become an attractive alternative to the standard commercial messages which interrupted televised narrations but did not enter the narrations themselves? It has been argued that economic factors and competition from new media are forcing advertisers to reevaluate how to get their messages across. In fact this is just the tail wagging the dog. It has always been inevitable that the "content" what we call "ads" would move from the confines of the 15 or 30 seconds spaces between the old content presented by our traditional media to become involved in all forms of entertainment, from movies to television, to the theater, to news reports, to our literature.

As the mythic avatars of our culture, advertising icons want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, and we subconsciously want them to do so. As Nicholas Johnson noted, television programs are not the "products" of American television. We, the viewers, are the product and we are sold to advertisers at a cost per thousand by the television and cable networks. Advertisers spend a great deal of money testing and researching which symbols or narratives will strike what Tony Schwartz calls a "responsive chord" with the public. Through their psychological research, advertisers have become very sophisticated in their understanding of what motivates our purchasing behavior.

Think about how the average person in Homeric Greece related to the Iliad or the Odyssey. These performance/poems weren't just the "literature" of Greek culture, separate from their general experience. Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out that the Iliad and Odyssey constituted cultural "how-to manuals" or "mythic encyclopedias," preserving for a culture without writing the proper ways to conduct ceremonies, the proper relationship of Greeks toward their gods and the proper things to believe about just about everything in their world.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that such mythic encyclopedias reconcile or deny the inevitable contradictions within a culture's system of beliefs. My research on television advertising suggests that many television ads deal with nature/culture issues, wrestling with the same types of concerns that Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of South American cultures. Ads are part of a system that explains the contradictions of our culture, or denies that those contradictions exist. The iconic imagery presented by ads is not "art", out there to be appreciated only by an educated few. They are part of all our daily lives and as such they constitute our culture's mythic encyclopedia. By doing so, they promote well-being and peace of mind of members of the culture.

Commercials portray people suffering from the assaults of dirt and disease, using the sponsor's product to mediate and restore order. Foods of all types, raw and cooked, fresh and "aged' or "cultured" are touted, not just as basic nutrition, but as enablers for social occasions. Personal care products promise to help overcome individual shortcomings and enhance sexual attractiveness.

To help them better grasp this concept, I like to ask students in my classes the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup? The acceptance of this cultural norm is so deep that this question is seldom asked. We see all sorts of ads in all our media showing women wearing the public mask that the use of makeup represents. A woman's need to wear makeup is constantly promoted and reinforced by all of our media, but seldom are the particulars of purchasing, applying and wearing makeup examined in such minute detail as they are in our advertisements. Why do women need to do this? Why, before going out in public do they engage in rituals associated with eyes, skin and mouth? Perhaps, it is argued, that applying makeup minimizes individual variances from the beauty norm and thereby enhances one’s sexual attractiveness. Then why don't men need to wear makeup? What allows them to forgo the rituals? Certainly in other times and other cultures the use of makeup by men was perfectly acceptable.

I would argue that there is a structural opposition within our culture that, in opposing men and women, dictates that one needs makeup while the other doesn't. In her opus, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia explores at length some of the root causes of this opposition. Paglia discusses in great detail how the great works of art of our culture have reflected these oppositions and in other writings she traces how modern advertising pays homage to these artistic precedents. I would add that one of the ways the characteristics of this structure is disseminated and maintained is through the structure of the entire body of advertising in our media. Not just the images, but the narratives of advertising perpetuate this male/female opposition.

We still can't see that modern advertising, in all its manifestations, performs the same functions in our culture that the Iliad and the Odyssey performed in ancient Greece, or that tales about frogs and honey bees and jaguars perform for native South Americans. To me, this is a prime example of McLuhan's assertion that we are numb to our technology's impact.