Flatline_Constructs 2.5 Jumping out of our Skin

"Today men's nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment," McLuhan writes at the beginning of his essay, "Notes on Burroughs". "The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to the first proposition, and Nova Express [...] to the second."[128]

McLuhan’s essay clearly has as much to do with McLuhan’s own theses as it has to do with Burroughs’ fictions, anticipating their splicing in cyberpunk and its vision of “mankind’s extended nervous system”, the “electronic consensus-hallucination”[129] of cyberspace. McLuhan reads Burroughs as registering the epidermal crisis that will erupt in the violent imagery of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Cronenberg’s Videodrome: the sense that, under pressure from enormous stimuli, the skin is no longer a secure marker of organic integrity. “Our language has many expressions that indicate [the] self-amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of ‘wanting to jump out of my skin’ or of ‘going out of my mind,’ ‘being driven batty’ or ‘flipping my lid.’” (UM 42) In the age of cybernetic hyperconnectivity, McLuhan suggests, we cannot contain ourselves.

“Notes on Burroughs” rehearses themes McLuhan had explored in the almost directly contemporaneous Understanding Media (both came out in 1964). “With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself,” McLuhan famously argued there. “To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. It could well be that the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and overstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure.” (UM 43)

A proto-cyberpunk work of theory-fiction, Understanding Media is also a sequel to the “speculative”[130] fictions of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Beyond the Pleasure Principle itself marked the resurfacing of Gothic Materialist themes that had haunted Freud since the “steampunk”[131] 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. This is the original case history: the story of how organic individuation emerges out of processes of binding, damming and filtering, which operations, the Project and Beyond the Pleasure Principle make clear, define the organism as an inherently cybernetic system. “Far from [organic bodies] being constituted by means of a reference to an absolute self-possession, an absolute propriety, they are constituted, as is any closed system, by the exclusions that define the (as near as possible) noiseless or determinant channels through which the only information that flows is that which reproduces the identity of the system as such. In other words, the borders, the ‘skin’ (to pursue the libidinal apparatus) is the product of the identitarian reproduction of the system, its re-presentation of its own constitution to itself.”[132] The organism, one might be tempted to say, is defined by the skin; yet, as we have already seen, the skin itself is not organic, but a “livedead” “inorganic shield”. It couldn’t be said, strictly speaking, that the ego is “inside” , since this topologization already assumes the distinction between outside and inside that only belongs to the ego. The ego, or consciousness, therefore, lives on the skin, as Freud says, not beneath or behind it. It is, in Freud’s characterization, a “border creature”, in the double sense that it constitutes borders by patrolling them.

Following the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle , who famously remarks that “[p]rotection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli” (PFL 11, 298) McLuhan conceives of the organism as an homeostatic system whose aim is to neutralize, or disintensify, stimuli . “The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the central nervous system, is to act as buffers against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment.” (UM 43) Media function ambiguously in this respect: as what McLuhan misleadingly characterises as “extensions of man” they form an artificial perceptual system fusing with the organism’s “ectoderm”[133] so as to present an extra protective layer against the “acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media”, whilst simultaneously contributing to capitalist hyper-stimulation, through their “amplification of a separate or isolated function” of the body’s perceptual apparatus. What McLuhan calls “auto-amputation” is a “numbness or blocking of perception” arising from an organic attempt to regain “equilibrium” in the face of unmanageable stimuli: “the autoamputative power is is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the source of irritation.” (UM 42) “Whatever threatens” the function of the central nervous system “must be contained, localized, or cut off , even to the total removal of the offending organ.” (UM 43) "We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed or we will die." (UM 47)

This numbness corresponds to what Freud describes as the development of an insensitive “crust” on the ectoderm, a “baking through” of the organism’s outer layer brought about by “the ceaseless impact of stimuli.” (PFL 11 297) Since this surface “can undergo no further permanent modification from the impact of excitation”, it “present[s] the most favourable conditions for the reception of stimuli.” (PFL 297) For McLuhan, as for Freud, the sense organs, and their inorganic prostheses, have a Kantian ambivalence: in “sampling” the external world, they also necessarily screen it out, formatting its “enormous energies” so as to make them compatible with organic interiority. As Freud puts it in the Project, “The sense organs operate not only as screens against quantity (Q) - like every nerve-ending - but as sieves [...]”[134]

McLuhan explicitly invokes Freud to explain the functioning of this mechanism. "The 'Freudian' censor is less of a moral function than an indispensable condition of learning. Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute. The 'censor' protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a good deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of physical rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology." (UM 24)

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^[128]McLuhan, "Notes on Burroughs", in Skerl, Jennie and Robin Lydenberg, William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, 69

^[130] Freud himself classifies Beyond the Pleasure Principle as “speculation, sometimes farfetched speculation.” Beyond the Pleasure Principle, PFL 11, 295

^[131]Cf Iain Hamilton Grant’s discussion of the Project in “Black Ice”, in Broadhurst Dixon and Cassidy eds., Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism, London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

^[132] Grant, Indifferentism and Dispersal..., 196

^[133]On the ectoderm, see Beyond the Pleasure Principle, PFL 11, 297. “[T]he surface turned outwards towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties.”

[134] Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology, in The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fleiss, Drafts and Notes: 1887-1902, eds., Marie Bonapart, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris, trans., Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey, London - Imago, 1954, 372