... 'The the living.' (Michel de Certeau [3])

Hauntology and Historical Materialism

"There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them" (Derrida, Specters xx). [1] With Spectres de Marx, Derrida attempted to create an exorcism of sorts regarding the global specters of public space as conveyed through the medium of telecommunication. (2) This is, of course, an extension of his unremitting critique of logocentrism, recognizing that the haunting of the political has moved beyond bounded text and geopolitical borders to the borderless spectra we can only call a "global village." (3) Derrida (Specters 50-1) writes:

And if this important frontier is being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely, the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, telecommunications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconic-ity, that which in general assumes and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent, it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life and death. It requires, then, what we call, to save time rather than just to make up a word, hauntology. (4)

For in the piece, besides addressing the problems concerned with Marxism in late, reflexive modern, neoliberal democracies, Derrida conjures a number of these specters, ghosts, spirits--hauntings--which he deals with through this logic of the ghost, hauntology. (5) The word itself is, of course, a Derridean invention which plays at once on the subject of the spectral and the essence of Being.

Medium theory, most often in the phrase "the medium is the message," has had a contentious history vis-a-vis media and cultural studies. This essay argues that, along with that of Karl Marx, the spirits of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Martin Heidegger haunt us on a regular basis in media and cultural studies. If they already exist in ghostly form, perhaps by exorcising them through the logic of the specter, we can allow them to comingle with the living via historical materialism, Marxism, and phenomenology, along with a Heideggerian "questing for technics."

Daniel Czitrom (147) once noted that "for the most radical and elaborate American media theory, one must look to the work of two Canadians, Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan." Innis's central claim regarding media and power as having been ossified in the political economy canon is surely without question, cemented into thousands of bibliographies as firmly as anyone else in Canadian historiography. Beyond the field of political economy, however, there has clearly been some renewed interest in Innis's place within the media studies canon in recent years. (6) In his introduction to the 1994 rerelease of Understanding Media, Lewis Lapham wrote that Marshall McLuhan makes sense now more than ever, and, though he made this proclamation over a decade ago, little has changed (Lapham ix-xxiii). That was just following Wired magazine's 1993 launch, whereby they labeled McLuhan their "Patron Saint" on the masthead. And beyond these examples, there is no denying the signs that abound, indicating the presence of McLuhan in contemporary discourse. For many, his pseudo-prophetic conjectures are now only beginning to show their clarity with regard to the "Internet Age." (7) This is to say that Innis and McLuhan are a presence; they haunt us, to be sure.

By placing medium theory in this historical context, it will be shown that its epochal history of communication demands to be dually understood in terms of Marxian materialism and phenomenology. The final section will discuss Martin Heidegger's "technological question" with relation to the Derridean deconstructive, hauntological apparatus, in order to juxtapose both the parallels and incongruities of these disparate philosophical tendencies.

Epochal Histories

To adapt Todd Gitlin's famous comment regarding the overzealous application of Gramscian hegemony theory, if medium theory explains everything, it explains nothing. And while this is a shortcoming of a field that is all too inclusive (cultural studies, I feel, suffers this same malady), the historical possibilities medium theory provides are still worth noting, for, as grand theories go, they don't get much grander. Medium theory, specifically in the historical work of Innis, McLuhan, and Ong, has such an impressive scope that it draws upon the entire history of humanity, complete with its "social upheavals" and its "growth of languages, techniques, inventions, arts, and sciences" (Finkelstein 8). Each lays out an epochal history with nuanced classification. For example, for Innis, all communication media were biased in terms of time and space, thus creating what he termed "monopolies of knowledge" for the dominant culture. Time-biased media are durable and difficult to transport, whereas spatially biased media are light and can be moved across space with relative ease, speed, and accuracy (Carey 274-75). Following Innis's lead, McLuhan divided human history into three distinct eras based on the dominant medium of communication that characterized the period. Thus, mankind may be seen as having three epochs: the oral tradition, which stretches from the moment man first acquired speech to the beginning of literacy roughly five thousand years ago, the literate era, which extends from the invention of writing to the creation of the electric telegraph, and, lastly, the era of electric communication, beginning at the first telegraph usage in 1844 through today. Walter 1. Ong, heavily influenced by McLuhan (who was Ong's teacher and master's thesis advisor), doesn't simply recapitulate the work of his forebear, however. Rather, he sees the history of man as divided into four stages of communication and culture--orality, chirography, typography, and electronic orality, or what he refers to later as "literate orality" and "secondary orality" to describe the complex and contradictory blend of old and "new" found within the media environment (see, for example, Ong, Orality; Rhetoric; The Presence). (8)

From within this paradigm, we can begin to see that media are not conduits, rather, they are active agents of cultural and psychological change. And while I have only provided a perfunctory gloss of the historical and theoretical uses of medium theory, a simple perusal of this theory's grand theorists clearly emphasizes the breadth and scope that becomes incorporated. It also becomes clear that this approach is historical materialist (not dialectical materialist) in nature. If we take the power that a particular medium might hold over its niche within the historical context, we might term its underlying biases as a kind of dominant ideology, though its "effects" might not be relationally understood without the benefit of hindsight. The dominant ideologies at work in the biases of these communicative forms would thus incorporate subordinate technologies and their uses, rendering them politically quiescent and overshadowing alternative modalities via the concealment of reactionary social realities. Thus, the mechanics of dominant communicative forms are inherently powerful enough to bypass social contradiction and reify its position within the social, political, and personal consciousness. Underlying this technological manifestation is, of course, a specter in itself: the classic thesis from The German Ideology (Marx and Engels).

Historical materialism is the theory of social change, developed by Marx and Engels, in which history is divided into a series of epochs (or modes of production), each characterized by a distinct economy and class structure. Historical change in this view is fueled by the progressive expansion of the productive capacity of the economy, as well as the development of technology and the forces of production. This becomes manifest in class conflicts and revolutions. One of the reasons the historical materialist approach works so well in both Marxism and medium theory is that it shows that ideas actually come from somewhere and gives an agency. Ideas and social change don't fall from the sky, and the appeal to this is clear in both schools of thought. (9)

Dialectical materialism, in Marxist terms, encompasses those aspects of its philosophy beyond its theory of history (such as metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology). The term wasn't used by either Marx or Engels, but later became the dogmatic philosophy of the Soviet Union, building on works such as Engels's Dialectics of Nature. Dialectical materialism, for our purposes here, might be characterized by its materialism and rejection of skepticism. The material world, in this view, is held to have a primacy over the mental, so that the material is a precondition of one's consciousness (which would seemingly make sense for someone like Innis, McLuhan, or Edmund Carpenter). The material world is then knowable through the realm of empirical studies. Beyond focusing solely on its materialism, the philosophy itself is dialectical, in that it sees reality in its ever-changing state of development, arguing not simply that change exists in the world, but rather that the reality of that world is characterized by varying properties and their emergence.

The "Bias" of Innis

Innis's research can clearly be classified as both idealist and materialist, with an evident emphasis on the latter. As William Westfall (39) notes, "Instead of recounting the gradual unfolding of an idea or series of ideas (such as political liberty, responsible government, or autonomy) ... it turned history toward the ongoing ramifications of a body of material factors in a geopolitical and economic setting."

For obvious reasons, this parallels Marx's notion of the economic base, supporting a historically derived superstructure. Innis, however, avoided Marxian theory and "he certainly did not truck with socialism" (Heyer 24). In a 1948 essay, he makes clear the limits of Marxism and its approach and claims to be utilizing "the Marxian interpretation to interpret Marx" (Innis, The Bias 190). While this would seem a worthy undertaking, Innis never really fulfills the promise in any of his published writings. It is worth pointing out, however, that he uses the term "Marxian," as opposed to "Marxist," which implies the source, rather than the tradition that sprang from it. Class-consciousness and any sort of concept of ideology, both of which are mainstays of Marxism, are glaringly absent in Innis's staple research (such as his work on fur or cod, etc.), which is why I am not linking him on that level. What is very present are the material conditions of production, and a sense of the cyclical nature of history (which Marx inherited from Hegel). Interestingly, Innis's later work, which valorized the oral tradition, is quite similar to Marx's notion of primitive communities.

The centrality of Innis's presence in critical communication and media studies is his focus on what he termed "bias." What began for Innis as a very specific problem (how does form influence power?) ended with what was almost an overarching theory of social and cultural analysis, the notions of spatial and temporal...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.