Discarnate Man

The Rise and Fall of Nature

by Marshall McLuhan

“At the speed of light, minus his 
physical body, man is discarnate, and  
discarnate man is not related to ”Natural Law’,” 

A basic principle in all media observation concerns the effect of putting one medium inside another. Siegfried Giedion pointed out the origin of visual space as occurring when the arch is put inside a rectangle, cf. the Arc de Triomphe. 

When any medium becomes the content of another, that which is contained becomes an art form. When the movie became the content of TV, the movie was at once elevated to the status of an art form. Prior to that, the movie had been common, or popular entertainment. When Sputnik (1957) went around the planet, the planet became programmable content, and thus became an art form. Ecology was born, and Nature was obsolesced.
In the 5th century B.C the new phonetically literate Greek had invented Nature by classifying various phenomena and thus putting thorn inside the visual space of classification. It was this visually ordered “Nature” that was ended by the new environmental fact of Sputnik .The concept of planetary ecology came into play at once. “Spaceship Earth” was recognized as having no passengers, but only crew. Sputnik is an information environment. i.e. a software environment which transforms the old “external” Nature. In the same way, when man is “on the phone” or “on the air,” moving electrically at the speed of light, he has no physical body He is translated into information. or an image. When man lives in an electric environment his nature is transformed and his private identity is merged with the corporate whole. He becomes “Mass Man.” Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not a physical quantity. Mass man was first noticed, as a phenomenon in the age of radio, but he had come into existence, unnoticed, with the electric telegraph.

In this short introduction to his article, some very important notions are mentioned, if not introduced:

• Discarnate
• Natural Law
• The effect of putting one medium inside another
• Ecology
• Obsolescence of one concept by a new one
• Phonetical environment
• Visual space
• Information environment
• Electrict environment
• Loss of private indentity: Mass man

As Andrew C. Stout puts it at

Incarnation and Digitization: Marshall McLuhan and the Digital Humanities

And I sumarize:

While pre modern cultures were primarily auditory and multi sensory, print culture trains the eye intensely rather than the ear. However, electronic technology has radically changed the cultural landscape, ushering in a “post – literate age.” Through radio, television, and the telephone, global events become immediate realities.

New technologies have the paradoxical effect of both being products or extensions of our existing faculties and also of reshaping our environments in ways that can radically recalibrate the operation of those faculties and senses.
Technology is an extension or augmentation of human senses which has the power to shape and reshape our environments.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy  McLuhan traces how the Western consciousness had radically reoriented itself through print technology, and in Understanding Media  he explained how electronic media reshapes humanity into citizens of a “global village.”

Electronic media erases time and space. This prompts McLuhan to ask, “Must the Greco-Roman Church take a stand against the inner tribal and discarnate dynamics released by the electric information environment?” Instead of seeing electronic media as an extension of the body that demonstrates the radical potential and supernatural end of human nature, McLuhan here calls into question whether such technology is compatible with his own understanding of the Christian faith.
A medium like the telephone is an example of disembodied presence: “Electric man has no bodily being. He is literally dis-carnate.
While McLuhan focuses on the “discarnate” or “disembodied” nature of electronic media, others have highlighted the physical characteristics of virtual technology and digital media. Paul Lévy, writing in the relatively early days of the internet, builds on McLuhan’s insights about technology as extensions of human senses.  In contrast to McLuhan, he assumes a “noncatastrophic point of view”  when dealing with virtualization. While “virtual”  is often used as a synonym for “illusionary” Lévy insists that “The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate  physical presence.”

Virtual presence, whether by telephone, TV or computer screen, or virtual image, is in fact an extension of physical presence. It is nonetheless a real  presence which relies on a physical substrata. In this respect, virtuality is not “unreal” or “disembodied” but both physical and more than physical
As McLuhan observed in light of print and electronic media, so Hayles Observes of digital media –  human consciousness is thoroughly malleable.
A key distinction for Hayles is that between “materiality”  and “physicality.”  We can talk about the physical features of a computer screen, wires, circuitry, etc. –  but still fail to give an account of technological innovation: “What counts is rather the object’s materiality . Materiality Comes into existence, I argue, when attention fuses with physicality to identify and isolate some  particular attribute (or attributes) of interest
You cannot have materiality, in this sense,without the physical or the embodied, but materiality also transcends the physical. Materiality is indeterminate and plastic, unlike pure physicality. Materiality “cannot be specified in advance, as though it existed ontologically as a discrete entity. Requiring acts of human attentive focus on physical properties, materiality is a human-technical hybrid.” It is the material, not thereductively physical, that provides the conditions under which humans can coevolve along with their digital tools.