McLuhan’s charge that we are confronted once again with the mystery of the human heart takes on new significance when we consider what stands as his most striking image of the condition of man in the new decade. From the 1970s McLuhan turns to stress that technologically speaking, we now seem to have gone beyond T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men.”[1] When man has extended his central nervous system, McLuhan appears to have seen that he becomes a collection of organs without a body — endowed with super-angelic qualities. Not even the angels of Aquinas had this power to be everywhere at once:[2]
On the telephone, or on the air, man is in every sense discarnate, existing as an abstract image, a figure without a body. The Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland is a kind of parallel to our state. When discarnate, man has no identity, and is not subject to natural law. In fact he has no basis for morals of any sort. As electric information moved at the speed of light, man is a nobody. When deprived of his identity, man becomes violent in diverse ways. Violence is the quest for identity.[3]
Under late-electric conditions, as McLuhan notes in a letter to Father Shook, we entered the age of discarnate man:
My concern is with the fact that the psychic and social structure of the Western world has been profoundly shaped by its technologies of communication. It is the view of Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato, and of others, that the individual private psyche, the human “self” is itself an artefact. This private, separate self is as little known to the Hebrew as to the Hindu of yesterday, or the hippie of today. Electric man is discarnate man, sharing a consciousness or at least a sciousness, as fully as any native tribe. Information moved at electric speeds also sends the sender instantly. Not just the broadcaster but his public go to Peking and return, and everybody becomes totally involved in everybody.[4]
For McLuhan, the condition of discarnate man, where the ground for existence is disembodied and discarnate experience,[5] was one if not the “major sickness” of this last decade of his life, and he attributed it to the action of the “media” themselves.[6] In “Violence of the Media” McLuhan argues that it is the media themselves that inflict (rather than depict) violence by way of an instant invasion and deprivation of their users physical bodies as they are merged into a network of extensions of their nervous system. The elimination of the physical body of the user, he notes, deprives them (the user) of the means of relating the program experience to their private individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity:[7]
What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds — imagistic, sound, or tactile — from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once in the data bank. Discarnate man is as weightless as an astronaut but can move much faster. He loses his sense of private identity because electronic perceptions are not related to place. Caught up in the hybrid energy released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical “reality” that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive as any known drug. The mind, as figure, sinks back into ground and drifts somewhere between dream and fantasy. Dreams have some connection to the real world because they have a frame of actual time and place (usually in real time); fantasy has no such commitment.[8]
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