Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. Mechanization was never so vividly fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies, the moment that translated us beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation. The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations. It is the transition that produced the now quite correct observation: “If it works, it’s obsolete.” When electric speed further takes over from mechanical movie sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media become loud and clear. We return to the inclusive form of the icon. -p12

The phenomenon of “peak performance” preceding “new and opposite forms” is similar to Engels idea of the Law of transformation of quantity into quality which roughly states that systems reach a point in quantity that abruptly changes their quality. A simple example is the change of water to steam by the quantity of heat applied. MM’s sound barrier phenomenon works similarly which he uses to talk about how the mechanical process of movie projection and filming creates an illusion of movement by applying a mechanical speed beyond simple comprehension. He anticipates that further advances in electronics (which could be seen as the proliferation of video that came soon after)will take film images further as shared cultural features.

While he doesn’t often cop to it, McLuhan’s theories often seem a lot like Marx and Engels’. The social determinism which M and E suss out the class mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution, are similar to the media determinism by which MM susses out the dynamics of the Information Age. I’ve gone into this is greater detail here.

Only now am I seeing that the Industrial and Information age, and indeed the works of M and E and MM could themselves represent this same quantity/quality law. That is, the dawn of the information age represents the point at which industrial speed becomes qualitatively different, moving decidedly from the precise and rapid movement of gears to the even more precise and more rapid movement of electrical pulses in a circuit. I’m somehow surprised that MM doesn’t just give us some jazzy line here like “breaking the information barrier.”

Its worth noting that in the mechanical process of editing and projecting film, the technicians of this must make a further leap toward accepting the illusion of the medium. On the other hand, contemporary producers of video can glide easily through the editing process with little knowledge or thought to the electronic processes that underpin their editing suites.