Such theories of extension have a long history. It is idle to speculate on the origin of their formulation. Instead of simply asking for the sources of this often articulated idea it may be better, as Lance Strate supposed, to investigate the plausibilities regarding the economy of knowledge which they invoke again and again even without direct affiliation. But one thing is for
sure: «the extensions of man» is not McLuhans idea.
Considerations about functional body-extensions in form of tools date back to Aristotle, who believed that all human art is an imitation of nature. The idea of an extension of tools out of body parts can be found in the works of Lewis Mumford, on whom McLuhan regularly refers, as well as in the books of the architects Buckminster Fuller and Le Corbusier. Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and physiologist Georg von Békésy follow in line. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall, correspondent of McLuhan for most of his life, estimates the development of tools and weapons as a compensation of physical deficiencies. Also Henri Bergson, who is quoted by McLuhan repeatedly, endows the idea of
a globally extended organism. And even if McLuhan did not know Ernst Cassirer’s essay Form und Technik, which is based on Ernst Kapp, he knew the work of Susanne K. Langer, who was influenced by Cassirer, and for sure Sigmund Freud’s essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, in which the term Prothesengott is phrased. McLuhan was certainly familiar with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s canonical essay Works and Days from 1870. Emerson, who lived in Germany for some years and studied romantic philosophy, described the impact of new technologies on humanity with a critical gesture. „Our nineteenth century is the age of tools. They grow out of our structure. The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.”
The most prominent representative of the extension-thesis at least in German speaking countries is Ernst Kapp, whose Philosophie der Technik from 1877 has not been translated into English until today. For Kapp, all technology is an extension of man – he calls it Ausweitung, the german word for
extension. “The denture occurred within the field of speech organs, the claw-like extensions of the hand, which was probably also used as a foot, became the protective nail bed of the working finger[…].” He also has an idea of amputation and narcosis. Nonetheless, it is very unlikely that McLuhan was familiar with his theories, even though both have much in common. This unaffiliated correspondence gives an impression of the plausibilities extension offers for thinkers who want to establish their theory on anthropological and teleological grounds.
By referring to the notion of media or techniques as extensions of man, McLuhan and his contemporaries implicitly relate their ideas to discourses which emerged during the founding years of electromagnetic telegraphy. In the 1850s, telegraph lines were compared to nerves for the first time. Even if it has no name at that time, the extension thesis is related to the establishment of electric media in the second half of the 19th century. It is a spearhead in the development of new knowledge by crossfading different orders. It makes the separation of body and technology precarious and provides a new ontology to clarify their relation. This ontology has risen in physiology, a leading science of the 19th century, and in the sciences of electricity. With the electromagnetic telegraph, which is related to the subsequent history of galvanism and ‘animal’ electricity, analogies between humans and technology as well as juxtaposition of cables and nerves, electricity and physical agents reach a climax. With galvanism, an organic cause for electricity became plausible and the same force seemed to act in the human body and in the cable. The cable networks of 1877 are, in the words of Kapp, the “big triumph” of organ projection. With telegraphy and the following explanations of human bodies by new metaphors from the technical field (or vice versa) the dualism of body and technics is deranged. Afterwards, technology and not simply tools can be correlated to the body as an extension. Telegraphy is described, to name one example, as an elongation […] of our own nervous system“, as the London essayist Andrew Wynter said already in 1865.
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