The Lightbulb
by Laura Bluebird Greig
The lightbulb is a central theme in both Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) and Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (1964). Both books are about information — about what kind of information is shared in the world, and how. Both authors point to the lightbulb as what gives information life.
“Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.
That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. … I enjoy my life with the compliments of Monopolated Light & Power. Since you never recognize me even when in close contact with me, and since, no doubt, you’ll hardly believe that I exist, it won’t matter if you know that I tapped a power line leading into the building and ran it into my hole in the ground. Before that I lived in the darkness into which I was chased, but now I see. I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility — and vise versa.”
- Invisible Man, p.7
“The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the ‘content’ of any medium is always just another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. … Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. … Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. … The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no ‘content.’ And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For is is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the ‘content’ (or what is really another medium) that is noticed. The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth.”
- Understanding Media, p.9