FURTHER THOUGHTS ON ICONS



Since writing the earlier essay, my studies of the icon have developed 
considerably. As an audile- tactile form of resonant interface, it gets 
attention in Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting 
(Harper & Row, N.Y. 1968) by Harley Parker and Marshall McLuhan.


	The TV image is not so much pictorial as iconic because the TV 
tube projects figures rather than pictures. The TV camera has no shutter. 
Its "scanning finger" stresses outlines rather than light and shade. 
Especially since colour, the rear projection of the TV image has acquired 
much greater iconic force. That is one reason why non-white presences on 
TV are so much more effective than the white man's image. The white is 
weak on TV because of the light and shade or chiaroscuro effect which 
acts mainly on the periphery of the eye. Colour and bounding line or 
iconic contour, on the other hand, are received mainly on the periphery 
of the eye. Colour and bounding line or iconic contour, on the other 
hand, are received mainly by the macula or centre and cone area of the 
eye where the multitudinous interfaces of the cones create there the 
images of light and shade and movement which are apprehended by the outer 
areas of the eye.
	It cannot be too much stressed that rear-projection, or "light 
through" rather than "light on," has a very much greater power to involve 
the viewer. The TV image is iconic, not only in its bounding line 
character, but in its dominant fact of flatness or two-dimensionality. In 
contrast, the movie camera with its lineal sequence of stills and its 
convergent lenses which stress angle and point of view, light on rather 
than light through, is at the furthest extreme from the TV image. The 
movie camera favours the private point of view, the detached spectator 
and the star system of private images. TV, on the other hand, demands 
corporate images and is highly unfavourable to the star system stress. 
The TV audience tends to become actor and participant rather than star- 
gazer.
	The TV camera is a Cyclops, a one-eyed monster, which merges the 
gestalt of figure and ground and turns the viewer into a kind of hunter. 
Unlike the movie, TV does not favour escapism or dream life. It is an 
inner, existential trip. The TV viewer not only tends to suppress 
mentally the action of one of his eyes, but tends strongly to play the 
total field rather than to concentrate on any particular target. In this 
way, TV is not only consistent with the war on pollution, but one of the 
major contributing causes to our awareness of pollutants as environmental 
facts. I would also point out that just as the booze panic of the 20's 
came with the jazz age and the initial retribalizing of the West, so the 
drug panic of the 60's came with the inner trip that is the act of the TV 
viewer. In effect, the TV viewer is "stoned." He doesn't need chemical 
drugs in addition. In the same way, the radio fans of the 20's in the 
first onset of tribal togetherness had no need to booze to counteract the 
up-tight remoteness and inhibitions of the old Wasp culture.
	"The War of the Icons" has many new dimensions in politics and in 
advertising. The phrase "Love Thy Label As Thyself" is now for real, 
around the world. The icon may be ethnic, verbal, chemical, or personal. 
It has created totally a new figure-ground pattern of resonant intervals 
and metamorphosis in the West. Modern quantum mechanics insists that the 
chemical bond is resonance. There are no connections in the material 
world, only auditory intensities. In a word, science has gone iconic also 
since Heisenberg and Bohr. To understand the interplay of the icons today 
is to have the key to every level of action and change.2




Notes:

*	Copyright 1970 by Marshall McLuhan. All rights reserved.

1.	Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New 
York, McGraw Hill, 1964), p. 294.

2.	Apropos the different audience responses to front and rear 
projection, even with the movie alone, a properly conducted experiment 
was carried out at Fordham University in 1967 by Eric McLuhan. The 
results are reported in Monday Morning Magazine, May, published in 
Toronto, 1968.


                           

"War of the Icons" (Chapter 32 of Understanding Media plus two additional 
pages) in Icons of Popular Culture Marshall Fishwick and Ray Browne, 
eds., Bowling Green: Popular Culture Press, 1970.

From: Icons of Popular Culture Marshall Fishwick, Ray B. Browne, 1970.