“Serenity” is one of my favorite movies, for some reason, a noble testament to a series that ended far too soon. In it, a new character, “Mr. Universe,” has a really memorable statement that’s stuck with me ever since I first saw it, and has continued to stick with me all fourteen or so times I’ve seen the movie.

“You can’t stop the signal.”

Philosopher Marshall McLuhan had an expression, “the medium is the message,” in “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” (He apparently also came up with “global village” and predicted the World Wide Web a long time before it came into being: the things you learn doing basic research!) Anyway, “the medium is the message” refers to how the channel of communication shapes human experience more than whatever content travels through it. Television rewires us whether we watch the news or a dead channel. The form is the thing.

But McLuhan was talking about macro-structures: print versus broadcast, hot media versus cold. Tiktok or Instagram against Reddit, maybe. The way a message was communicated affected the message: to see the same thing expressed over television and in text was to see two different messages even if the content was the same.

But, reader who may not realize what I’ve just done because you haven’t read further yet: I think there’s a related and distinct message as well, at the level of the utterance itself. It’s all doors, if you want to open them. The reading - the inhalation - is its own communiqué, a word I learned for a spelling bee and never used in competition, even though it became one of my favorite words because I am ridiculous.

The Medium is Its Own Message

Pardon my own self-observation, here, I’m clearly unbiased about myself, but: I have been known to encode multiple layers of meaning in most of my content. I have a message - the intent of what I say or write or, well, whatever - but I also layer meaning in how I communicate that message. I think I do this to keep myself interested and engaged, or to unconsciously flex, or maybe because I’ve forgotten how to be any other way, how to be simple anymore.

I can say “I like dogs” in a way that’s very simple - I do like dogs - but the way I say it says something about me, my mood, my audience, the form in which it’s communicated. The level of effort I put into saying it means something, my specific phrasing adds layers that go beyond the simple statement. The statement is a message. The medium in which that statement exists is also a message, often but not always related, possibly isolated for those who wish to see it.

It makes communicating both fun and terribly difficult, often obscure and confusing, and very occasionally highly enlightening for both me and my interlocutors.

For example, should I say something like, “I am speaking very seriously now, for real,” that phrase is doing multiple things simultaneously:

  1. It signals a mode shift - it tells you what’s coming
  2. It is a thing, with texture, weight, and relationship to everything around it
  3. It implies something about when I have not said it, that I might be being more wry than the surface implies: “now you should take me seriously…” but even this might be affected by other statements. Like this blog entry, actually.

Most people seem to treat the first function as primary. The signal is scaffolding; you look past it to reach the content. The phrase disappears once it’s done its job. McLuhan might say the medium affects how you integrate it, and how it might change you, but the medium is part of the message. I say they’re distinct but related.

The scaffolding that helps create the building is itself architecture. The frame is part of the painting, and changing the frame changes the painting.

Synergy, Not Hierarchy

The conventional model for communication treats form as a vehicle for content. You have something to say; you find words to carry it; you find a medium to place it within. The words are successful as much as they become invisible and let the meaning through. The words are, for the most part, the payload: the way it’s said, who said it, their tone, their specific phrasing, their caveats… all subservient to the words, and meaning is all.

I think … differently. I use words as art, precisely, as cudgels and scalpels, as veneer and bone, innately; it’s a defense mechanism from being embedded in a subtly hostile culture that sought to mutate who I was and am, even for my benefit. I built armor using thought and deed and phrasing, to allow me to be myself around those who wanted me to be a constant and a target and an audience, because iron was too honest and silence too naked, too inert. I could not be in a world where I was either a threat or a victim. I long to be neither. I refuse to be either.

And when I say I use words as art, I use art as words, too: when I write music, I choose pieces and parts and modes and rhythms to create the same kind of modus, where the music serves the point of the music, and the point of the music creates its own words, even if it’s not apparent on the surface.

I learned to layer meaning because simple things can be possessed, can be taken away, punished, misunderstood on purpose. I say things where misunderstanding becomes its own message, where possession is not possible because there’s nothing constant to hold. It all spirals, looping back on itself, being. All of it. Like water, or music, or prayers, or stories, or me, as I am a part in my own play.

I think Shakespeare had it right and wrong: “All the world’s indeed a stage, and we are merely players, each another’s audience inside the gilded cage,” as misquoted by Rush in “Limelight” - and yes, we are. But we are also our own audience, and that matters.

Thus, form and content work together, they’re synergistic - and not in the buzzword bingo sense. The word means something, after all! But the medium, the signal is itself, and what it carries is also itself, and the two amplify each other. Neither is ancillary. Neither is primary. They’re only hierarchical as much as the receiver needs them to be.

I like making jokes for myself - I’ll follow discussions about semiotics and meta-epistemology with phrases like “I like big words!” It’s not just self-deprecation wrapped around humility. (Although it is self-deprecation wrapped around humility, something I’m rather proud of.) But it’s a thing said, with its own weight, doing work alongside and with the humility it might seem to merely contain or reference, even as it demeans that humility in the process of expressing it.

What All This Stuff Might Mean, Sort Of

First off, it might mean that I could be horribly exhausting to try to keep up with, as a reader. I really do try to write in ways that can be understood clearly on multiple levels, for the surface readers and the readers who might be going “Hey, wait, what does that really mean,” for the second level of perception, and then those readers who look at the second level and think “Hey, now, there’s another level here, what the heck,” and so forth and so on, until I’m going “What did I mean by that? I better ask an AI. They’ll get it wrong, but it’ll be funny.”

Second, though, is this: If the medium used for a message is as much art as the message itself, then:

  • A misspelling can do work (not just fail to do work) - did I say “gilded cage” on purpose, or did I mean to say “guilded cage” to add some extra layer? (This is from the draft of this very entry, by the way, and it’s because I hit the tab key to accept an autocorrection by accident. I done fixed it.)
  • A tense shift can be content (not just error) - is the tense shift communicating something intentional to a reader?
  • The announcement of seriousness participates in the seriousness - or might imply sarcasm.
  • Playing with form isn’t decoration; it’s meaning-making, and possibly contains more meaning than what’s ensconced in the form.

McLuhan gave us permission to see the channel as significant, even if we were unaware of anything he’d said. The extension for me is seeing the utterance itself - each one, individually - as significant in the same way. Not a pointer to meaning, but meaning. Not a vehicle, but also a destination, often intertwined with the message itself, but not always. I can say more than one thing in a given statement, given opportunity and intent, and I often do, even if I’m the only one who might understand myself in that moment.

That’s okay, because I, too, am the audience, and I speak to myself and instruct myself as I speak and interact with any other reader.

The Endless Deep

Of course, explaining this is itself an utterance. This essay is a signal carrying content about signals carrying content. The form of the explanation participates in what’s being explained. It’s turtles all the way down - an endless, infinitely deep fractal that refers to itself in both the first and the third person. As if it had a personality of its own and no supervising editor, that is.

Which means it can’t just describe the thing. It has to be the thing, or it’s lying by omission. This whole essay has been an experiment in self-reference, a way of expressing something in such a way that the expression says what itself is, and it’s as demonstrative as I can make it.

Whether it succeeds is a question the reader answers by how they read it - whether they look through these words or at them, whether the scaffolding disappears or stays visible as architecture. If you see the framework, well, you win - and if you don’t, well, you still win, and that’s okay. I see it, so there’s a victory, no matter what happens. This is how I survive myself, both in daily endurance and beyond this mortal coil.

You can’t stop the signal.