"semantic wedges"

A recent article on the critical reception of Marshall McLuhan's work summarily dismissed his 1967 The Medium is the Massage and 1968 War and Peace in the Global Village as "crude publicity tracts." Yet from a design perspective, these boks are landmarks in the integration of text, image, and layout. In the values of the publishing industry, a divide persists between words and pictures, high academia and low mass media, authors and designers. Massage and War and Peace are remarkable for blurring the professional, commercial, and formal distinctions that constitute the hierarchies of publishing... To succeed, Fiore felt the book "had to convey the spirit, the populist outcry of the time, in an appropriate form. The 'linearity' of the average book wouldn't work. The medium, after all, was the message!"

The success of the project was all the more surprising considering the conditions under which it was produced: Fiore was given a tight budget and a three-week deadline for design and production. Composed of commissioned photographs as well as stock images of news events and personalities, the publication is a hybrid: part book, part magazine, part storyboard. It combines short prose passages with caption-length texts, some tied directly to images, others demanding to be read more obliquely &emdash; Fiore's visual punning is as persistent as McLuhan's wordplay.

While the typpography suggests a cool Swiss-Modern sensibility, the photography bears traces of a more diverse heritage, stretching from Moholy-Nagy's Painting, Photography, Film and the Dada collages of Heartfield and hausmann to the underground publications of the 1960s. Fiore cites such influences as Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, concrete poetry, Apollinaire's calligrammes, Fluxus, rebuses, and the "mouse's tail" of type in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Common to all of Fiore's boks is the deliberate repetition of images and text. This technique seems partly inspired by the serial forms of Pop Art; more fundamentally, repetition is an effext of the mass media which McLuhan sought to explain. Throughout his career, McLuhan described his work as a series of "probes." Bruce Powers, one of McLuhan's collaborators, has explained how these "probes" were conducted not through argument, but with "semantic wedges." Phrases like "the medium is the message" allowed McLuhan to shift attention from content to form. Fiore complemented these "semantic wedges" with a design strategy centered on repetition, reinforcing McLuhan's larger premise that America is a culture of reproduction.

Jean Baudrillard has noted the relationship between McLuhan's "medium message" and Walter Benjamin's landmark 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." As Baudrillard writes, "Benjamin (and later McLuhan) grasped technique not as productive force (where Marxist analysis remains trapped) but as medium, as the form and principle of a whole new generation of meaning." Benjamin and McLuhan both drew attention to reproduction, confronting it as a definitive aspect of modern culture. The ability to create meaning by recycling, repeating, and reframing images and texts constitutes Fiore's graphic response to McLuhan's assessments of the cultural impact of communication and technology.

Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, "McLuhan/Fiore: Massaging the Message"
Design Writing Research (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996)