August 18, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall
Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
Everywhere At Once And Nowhere At All - Discarnate Man Is a Nobody Because He Has No Body.
A Graduate Student of Technology asks:
Professor McLuhan said that at the speed of light, minus his physical body, man is discarnate, and that discarnate man is not related to Natural Law. If electric communication makes us bodyless in the electric environment, what happens to our identity when we become images without bodies?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Once electric communication makes us discarnate, we become bodyless in the electric environment. At the speed of light we are translated into information, images without bodies. Our physical bodies remain behind while our electronic images travel at the speed of light. No body becomes a nobody. And here McLuhan's reference to Natural Law becomes crucial. Natural Law belongs to embodied man, man situated in Nature, possessing physical boundaries, occupying a particular place and confronting other embodied human beings. The electric environment has no natural ground to remove. Without that ground, the old coordinates of identity disappear. Discarnation therefore produces more than bodylessness. It produces identitylessness. A nobody begins an urgent quest to become a somebody again, and that quest produces anger and can erupt into physical and non-physical violence. We live in an angry age asking: Who are we? What are we? Where do we belong? And they haven't discovered anything so far.
The artist began revealing these effects long before the culture understood what it was seeing. As early as 1976, Taxi Driver gave American culture the angry identity probe, "You talkin' to me?" Later came "Talk to the hand, 'cos the face ain't listening." These are cultural signposts of a nobody demanding recognition while rejecting the existence of the other. And when reality can no longer provide the identity the discarnate person has lost in the electric environment, fantasy becomes a substitute for identity. Electric man fabricates identities, inhabits images and joins electronic tribes in an effort to become a somebody again. At the speed of light we become discarnate. Discarnate means bodyless in the electric environment. Bodyless means no body there. No body becomes a nobody. And the nobody's great struggle is to discover who he is. And they haven't discovered anything so far because they haven't, in the Western world, been formally educated in understanding the grammars of electric culture and propaganda science.
Source: Nelson S. Thall, Visions of the Electric Effect: Outlining the Human Sensorium of Perception and the Science of Human Communications by Employing Marshall McLuhan's Laws of Media, 2019, especially slides 14–20 and 43–45.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com