Assuming that
there is no point in presenting either term as neutral, a positive or negative
value is assigned to each term within the Culture/Nature opposition. The table
tells us what we might look for in other advertisements.
 |
| Figure 5: The Permutation Table |
Let’s consider
another example.[2]
At the beginning of an advertisement for Wisk laundry detergent a man and a
woman are preparing a dinner party. In all cultures the sharing of food is a
primary social situation, and when food is scarce and hard to acquire, many
rituals and myths are devoted to the origins and continued availability of the
staples. In American society, where most people get enough to eat, much
attention is still paid to the quality and the quantity of the food we eat and
the people with whom we share it.
 |
| Figure 6: Applying the Permutation Table |
In this
advertisement the dinner party is disrupted before it begins by the discovery
that the husband has “ring around the collar.” Mary Douglas[3]
has defined dirt as “matter out of place,” (35) and it would seem that this
social occasion cannot take place if dirt is present. Notice that fast upon
this dreadful discovery we are told that “anyone can get ring around the
collar,” as if to emphasize that there is no personal guilt involved here; it
is a chance occurrence that can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. What
is the effect of this discovery? The dinner party vanishes, and the wife is
suddenly sent down to the laundry room to get the dirt ring out of the
collar. First she uses a spray, an
ineffectual cultural product. Success is finally achieved by use of Wisk. Compare
the woman’s initial and subsequent situations. In the first scene she is engaged
in a “positive” activity, preparing for a dinner party. Anything which disrupts
a cultural activity must be seen as an attribute of its opposite, a natural
situation. Typically, this advertisement does not portray a situation in which
nature is positive while culture is negative. It is thus possible to align the
narrative of this ad according to the table of permutations developed
previously.
The sudden
incursion of nature into the sphere of culture seems to be a preoccupation of
advertising. If the way advertising content is structured concerns an
opposition between culture and nature, then within the other “legs” of the Television
Triad there may be other hidden structures that a thorough structural analysis
will reveal.
After I completed
my talk, Dr. McLuhan observed that I had missed the point in focusing on the
triad, because, he noted, "things come in fours." In 1977 McLuhan was
working on his own methodology to explain the structure of television. His
"Laws of the Media" Tetrad described all technologies as metaphors
with their own biases and hidden assumptions. It is the metaphor of a
technology, not its content, which determines its true impact on society.
The nature of
these technology metaphors can be revealed by asking four questions:
·
What is enhanced?
·
What is made obsolete?
·
What is retrieved that
was previously lost?
·
What does it reverse into
when pushed to an extreme?
For example, the
impact posting on Twitter can be understood by the following effects.
Tweeting:
·
Enhances “many to many”
communication.
As
a medium, tweeting allows me to get my message out to many without the need of
access to television, radio, print or film production facilities. Tweeting also
allows me to receive messages from many sources.
·
Obsolesces “one to one” or “many to one” communications.
Telephone
chats and television binges are replaced by blogging connections.
·
Retrieves the habits of
18th letter correspondents or diarists.
At
the minimum blogging requires that we capture and express our thoughts via the
keyboard. some bloggers go much further than that. in the blogosphere, we all
become nascent Montaignes.
·
Reverses into total
narcissism.
When
pushed to an extreme, I write only to myself, for myself. I put myself into the
blogosphere, and seeing my own image, become entranced.
So while I was
thinking about the media in terms of Lévi-Straussian "threes",
McLuhan was thinking in terms of his Laws of the Media "fours." and
it is clear that he and I were operating at differing levels of abstraction.
McLuhan believed
that the four part structure of the Tetrad more accurately reflects the working
of the human mind. The Tetrad tells us something about the way the mind sorts
things into categories and makes sense of the world. “A four-part analogy is a
figure-ground structure. (in a metaphor there are two figures and two grounds
in ratio to one another)”[4]
(Laws of the Media, p.120) McLuhan admitted in a 1975 letter to the journal
“technology and culture” his debt to Claude Lévi-Strauss:
“How did I
arrive at these ‘Laws of the Media’? By
a structural approach.”[5] (74)
McLuhan
also stated that his Tetrad was not a logical technique:
“The whole point about my
Tetrads is that they are analogical. that is there are no connections between
any of them, but there are dynamic ratios.”(78)
If the elements of
McLuhan’s Tetrad are in a ratio to one another, then we can see that the Tetrad
brings to the foreground the underlying narrative of that technology’s impact
on society.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
also believed that things come in fours, especially with regard to the
structure of myths. Lévi-Strauss
demonstrated that the there is a logic of myths that can be discovered if we think
of them as a kind of musical score. When
we listen to a single mythic tale it is as if we are hearing only part of a
musical score. To get the “message” we
need to consider the entire body of myths of a culture.
For Lévi-Strauss,
the structure underlying a culture’s total body of mythology can be codified as
a series of ratios which has become known as his “Canonical Formula.”
A myth begins by
contrasting two elements. The function X
of element A is presented in the myth as the opposite of the function Y of
element B. The myth then considers the effect of applying the original
condition of “A” to “B” as the function X of B.
According to Lévi-Strauss, the contradiction of the original opposition
of pairs is resolved by comparing this new term to the first term as it is
transformed into a new condition where the positions of function and element
are reversed. The reversal resolves the
contradiction that was the original concern of the myth. While presented as a
logical formula rather than a series of questions, the Canonical Formula also
represents a four-fold approach to analyzing cultural artifacts. Just as the
enhancing impact of a new technology in McLuhan’s Tetrad flips into its
opposite when pushed to the extreme, Lévi-Strauss asserts that within the
structure of a myth, an initial contradictory relationship is mediated in such
a way as to transform the original condition into its opposite, thereby
mitigating the contradiction.
Any culture contains
inherent contradictions and inconsistencies.
According to Lévi-Strauss, myths are created to reconcile these
contradictions or to deny that they exist. In a similar fashion, McLuhan’s Tetrad
helps us to reconcile inconsistencies that occur when a new medium or
technology is introduced into a culture.
The Tetrad attempts to discern the technological metaphor within
enhancements of human capabilities and can itself be viewed itself as a type of
mythic narrative.
I would argue that
the approaches of McLuhan and Lévi-Strauss are complementary. Any new medium or technology contains its own
bias, a type of mythic narrative, which we introduce into our culture when we
adopt that medium or technology. By combining the two approaches, we can
develop a better methodology for
interpreting and understanding technology effects. It may well be that “things come in fours.”
because the Lévi-Strauss’s triad doesn’t permit a transformation from within
its terms, there is descriptive power, but no capacity for prediction or
reconciliation. The figure-ground structure of a four part approach, merging McLuhan's
Laws of the Media with the Lévi-Strauss’s Canonical Formula, allows us to focus
our analysis on the culture or social transformation encouraged by a technology,
not the technology itself. The hidden biases of a new technology can change our
assumptions about what is valuable and what is not, what is true and what is
false, and who are the winners and the losers in the new media ecology.
Ultimately, as Levi-Strauss suggested in his study of myths, we can go beyond
content analysis to understand how technological transformations operate in
men's minds without their being aware of the fact.
Notes:
Csapo, e. 2005.
theories of mythology. p.226 (blackwell publishing)
Lévi-Strauss,
c. The raw and the cooked: introduction to a science of mythology, vol. 1. new
york: harper & row, 1964, p. 11.
McLuhan, m. Letter
to the editor in technology and culture, vol. 17, no.2, p.263
McLuhan,
m. and McLuhan, e. Laws of the media: the new science. (toronto: university of toronto press, 1988),
p. 148
