Dr. Lorenz Engell is a professor of media philosophy at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Since 2008 he has been the Co-Director of the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM, Weimar). Lorenz Engell is a leading figure in the first 'generation' of academic researchers who recognized media studies as an independent field within the humanities. His focus on film and television culture formed a major point of linkage German academia between McLuhan's work and Niklas Luhmann's systems theory.

29 May 2011: RETOUCHING McLUHAN - THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE Conference Lecture Abstract

Topic: McLuhan as Mouse: The Tactile and the Index

The paper re-examines McLuhans founding concept of tactility and develops it further: with the evolution of technology from the tv screen to the remote control to the computer mouse, the tactile has moved away from its all-wrapping, all-including, all-surfacing function, which is basically iconic, to one specific point: the finger tip. This condensing of tactility into one point has already been described by Michel Serres in his “The five senses”. It produces a shift from total participation to deixis, and hence selection, and indexicality. Moving from Serres back to McLuhan, what can we learn from him about tactile worldmaking not by iconic inclusion, as visioned in McLuhan’s “Global Village” and “Massage” metaphors, but by indexical selection?