<nettime> **The Technology as a Cause** (by Raymond Williams, 1974)

[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

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