When sunny gets blue, McLuhan turns into a psychedelic Kenna
CONTRABANDA
In a vacuum
In 1967, Marshall McLuhan highlighted the historic change brought about by radio and television, noting how electricity had “
extended our very central nervous system in a global embrace that (…)
abolishes both time and space.” Shortly thereafter, Terence McKenna, the theoretician of the entheogenic experience, expanded on the concept in his impertinent but unmissable booklet (you can download the
free pdf online) “Food of the Gods.” The 13th chapter of which, is appropriately titled “Synthetic Drugs: Heroin, Cocaine, Television,” reads:
“
television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter a pleasurable, passive state of mind. (…) TV addiction distorts the sense of time. It makes other experiences vague and curiously unreal while it takes on a growing reality of its own.”
I am writing this article with alternating glimpses from the screen of the Soccer World Cup in Qatar. Jolly good opportunity to test McLuhan and McKenna’s observations in our current, real New Twenties.
For Western societies the Soccer World Cup is one of the few occasions (the others being the Olympics and some celebrations with military acrobatic jet-planes) to show a visually alive concept of nation, although - per se - that concept had been made extint at the end of last Century, with global finance and its related global ideological and economic space.
Paradoxically, the first thing that catches the eye in the world of FIFA televised football matches is how these shows... are an aural experience more than a visual spectacle. Something that is soon demonstrated in Italy by the absence of soccer matches televised without commentary. And by the presence (almost a sacred ritual) of radio-broadcasted matches on national AM/FM channel.
Once upon a time, feeling the action just meant to hear the sounds of the footballers' fight. And the roar and chants of the crowd, the roll of the drums, the screaming trumpets and bugles.
And, to complete the experience of this socio-musical circus, there came the oral testimony - provided with a pressing recitative - by voices that later became legendary, like that of Nicolò Carosio, son of a Palermo customs officer and an English pianist.
The adding to the mix of real live images - today, of astonishing definition - has turbocharged this John Cage-circus show, where casual patterns drawn by a ball on the field become content abstracted from the context such as electric representations, often truer than reality. It is precisely a reproduction on the screen (the feared VAR) that guides the referees to truly understand whether there was a penalty or not...
The television show is projected even in the very same stadium, as if it were a game of Russian matrioskas, and with its strong colors and close-ups interferes with the experience of the actual show.
When the broadcast producer plays it dirty, the screen provides the opportunity to receive parallactic glimpses from the game. It zooms in on Hitchcockian details, offering close-ups of the actors. Fans are actors as much as the players, here the audience plays the most important role - the game is an accessory. The crowd is often busy playing improvised bass drums, while jumping up and down with funny costumes, and displays of variations around the national flag.
Yet all and EVERYONE of them, seem struck by a metaphorical lightning everytime they see their own image reflected in the enormous screen. As if the fan felt felt sucked into an alien electric vortex that would ultimatrely splatter him across the world almost in real-time: here you become whhat Bowie prophesised: be a "hero just for one day."
The World Cup is a "festival" (the word used by FIFA in Qatar) with great commonalities with the electric festival par excellence, the rock one: oceanic crowds, states of consciousness excited beyond the threshold of decency, rituals practiced both in the audience and on the stage/field, psychoactivated numbness, spiritual tension.
In its electric reproduction, on TV - the editing with the help of machines distorts time by forcing it into a slow action, or by multiplying the points of view perhaps by abstracting from the football field and adding lines, superimposed game patterns and perhaps a digitally modified ball that leaves a white trail behind it. We're in a fantasy world.
Beyond the reporter and the chants of fans and the trumpets, the semantic dimension is lost in a liminal embrace of the senses, when - between the crowd and the sound and the overarching tiny white football zigzaging its way, our eyes cannot fail to read the short messages adorning the perimeter of the soccer field. Signposts with concise advertising lines. A show within a show. “Learn to code” orders a peremptory sign; “We do” reassures us another. And if one tells us to be “the best” someone else promises “everywhere”.
But among all the slogans, three stand out:
“Nothing is impossible”,
“The break is power” and
“Believing is magic”.
They are apodictic imperatives, imposed on our peripheral attention for only a few seconds at a time, but with a certain frequency.
Do you think “
Nothing is impossible” sounds a bit of Orwellian newspeak? Never mind! While you wait, I'll ask a couple of unemployed people how ever… a “[work]
break is power.” But the concept of “
believing is magic” is explained by
the advertising film of the Coke campaign bearing the same name.
The story goes like... young girl drinks the advertised drink, enters into a sensorial hallucination, catches a sort of manna falling from the sky and really experiences the World Cup - just in her head.
McKenna wrote:
“Television is, by its very nature, the drug par excellence of the dominator (…)
[It] induces in the viewer a state of trance which is a necessary precondition for brainwashing.”
So what? Even if that were the case, the first experiments in trans-humanism added an important piece of information: it is impossible for us to perceive whether our brain is hetero-directed or we direct it. It enjoys it both ways,
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