Monthly Archives: March 2017

Preface to Eric Havelock and the Toronto School

Harold Innis and Eric Havelock taught at the University of Toronto together for almost twenty years. Innis came to Toronto in 1920 and remained until his death in 1952.  Havelock joined the faculty in 1929 and left for Harvard in 1947.

Marshall McLuhan taught at Toronto from 1946 until 1979.  Innis and he were colleagues for six years, bound together by Tom Easterbrook who was a longtime crony of McLuhan from Winnipeg (they toured England with one another as university students in 1932) and who was a close associate, almost an assistant, to Innis in the UT Political Economy department.

Innis and Havelock knew each other personally from 1930 at the latest and influenced each other profoundly over the following decades. McLuhan met Innis through Easterbrook in 1948 (if not already in 1947).  It is unclear when he first met Havelock, but presumably sometime in the 1950s. McLuhan, in turn, was profoundly influenced by both Innis and Havelock. The three together are rightly considered as forming a ‘Toronto school of communications’.

The chapters which follow are posts from the blog: McLuhan’s New Sciences (http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/).  Each considers some aspect or aspects of the relations between Innis, Havelock and McLuhan.  Often the instigation is taken from research claims which have all too often ignored the plain facts of the matter. In particular, researchers have unaccountably failed to look into Havelock’s early writings1 from Toronto and have therefore not seen when and how he contributed, mightily, to the ‘Toronto school’.

The research of all three turned on deep questions of epistemology and ontology. Now that all three are coming back into fashion as communication theorists, particularly Innis and McLuhan, perhaps to be joined soon by the early Havelock, it is time to consider just how they related to each other and what their objects were in doing so.  

Eric Havelock and the Toronto School is the first volume to be published by NorthWest Passage Press. The press will concentrate on Canadian intellectual history and will include volumes of original texts, some now out of print, some never published at all.  Its motivation, taken from Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, is that the margin generates insights which the centre does not — but which, for its own stability, it needs to acknowledge. By according with such marginal insights and reorienting itself through them, the centre is able to regain its balance and prevent an uncontrollable destabilization that is otherwise inevitable.

 

Santa Ana, April 6, 2017

  1. Most of Havelock’s early writings from his time in Canada are now difficult to access or even to find at all. NorthWest Passage Press will issue a volume of them later in 2017. ↩

Innis, McLuhan and “the “power of metamorphosis”

There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing with this subject. For it does not at all admit of theoretical expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion about it, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself. (Plato, Seventh Letter, 341c-d)1 

The words spoken by the muzhik had the effect of an electric spark in his soul, suddenly transforming and uniting into one the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts which had never ceased to occupy him. (…) He felt something new in his soul and delightedly probed this new thing, not yet knowing what it was (…) “And suddenly (…) I understand him from a hint!” (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

My aversion to publishing anything has not been due to want of interest in others but to the thought that after all a philosophy can only be passed from mouth to mouth, where there is opportunity to object & cross-question & that printing is not publishing unless the matter be pretty frivolous.” (C.S. Peirce to Lady Welby, letter of December 2, 1904)

The soul (…) has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

The printing press and the radio address the world instead of the individual. Their dialectic is overwhelmingly significant to subjects whose subject matter is human action and feeling and is important in the discovery of new truth, but is of very little value in disseminating it. (Innis, A Critical Review)2

By the middle 1930’s, if not earlier, Harold Innis had become highly suspicious of information packaging in modern media like newspapers and radio, but just as much in academic research — including his own.3 He was clear that all information processing inevitably had an element of self-interest and/or of purchased interest and could sense that this inevitable “bias” would precipitate a crisis of civilization.

Starting sometime later, but by the early 1940s at the latest, he began to look into Eric Havelock’s research on “the use of epic poetry as a technique for inter-generational communication of the ‘cultural baggage’ of a non-literate people”.4 Communication as information packaging in modern society and in pre-classical Greece gave him two historical data points 2500 years apart. It must have occurred to him that further data points could be defined by correlating other communication media with their historical and cultural contexts. In fact, the chapters of Empire and Communications (1950) constitute just such a series of civilization/media data points:

Egypt [and “the shift from dependence on stone to dependence on papyrus”]
Babylonia [and questions of clay, scripts and languages]
The Oral Tradition And Greek Civilization
The Written Tradition And The Roman Empire
Parchment And Paper
Paper And The Printing Press

McLuhan was not alone in pointing out that Innis’ economics research into the pervasive and often surprising effects of staple products on the societies processing and transporting them, and on ‘The Penetrative Powers of the Price System’ (1938), provided models for the investigation of the complex relationships between communications media and their social-cultural-political correlates.

But the extension of his data points over a 5000-year history was intended by Innis to be more than a series of snapshots of communication revolutions. The first two sentences of Empire and Communications read: 

The twentieth century has been notable in the concern with studies of civilizations. Spengler, Toynbee, Kroeber, Sorokin, and others have produced works, designed to throw light on the causes of the rise and decline of civilizations, which have reflected an intense interest in the possible future of our own civilization.

Innis’ object, too, was to address “the possible future of our own civilization”. And his central concern was to investigate whether social science could surmount what he called “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”5 and thereby become a sort of gyroscope for use in navigating that future. In investigating the space-time implications of the communication capabilities of civilizations since the beginning of recorded history, the hope was to uncover an indirect way around the problem of “fundamental solipsism” through a kind of social science relativity theory. As Innis wrote as early as 1942! in ‘The Newspaper in Economic Development’:

The concepts of time and space must be made relative and elastic and the attention given by the social scientists to problems of space should be paralleled by attention to problems of time.6

This intention of Innis’ work was noted by McLuhan in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1964 reissue of The Bias of Communication:

Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures. Many scholars had made us aware of the “difficulty of assessing the quality of a culture of which we are a part — or of assessing the quality of a culture of which we are not a part.” (1327) Innis was perhaps the first to make of this vulnerable fact of all scholarly outlook the prime opportunity for research and discovery.

Also by  Graeme Patterson’ in History and Communications (1990):

Beginning with the late work, however, [Innis] began to write about the relativity , or “bias” of media both in relation to each other and to space and time. In this instance his pattern of thought resembles relativity theory, which he probably took as a model to escape the “mechanical” theory he so disliked and mistrusted. It offered him an escape from determinism. (79)

And by John Watson in his 2007 ‘Introduction’ to Empire and Communications:

What Innis was attempting to do in the social sciences was to develop a grand synthesis akin to the quest to develop a “unified field theory” in post-relativity science. He was attempting to develop and merge a theory of politics or imperialism (drawing largely on the work of classics scholars) with a theory of consciousness (drawing on scholars researching the concept of time and space) and a theory of technology (based on an understanding of the biases of media of communications). In so doing, he hoped to overcome the persistent problem of objectivity in the social sciences and provide a means of escape from the limitations of contemporary worldviews [like those of “Spengler, Toynbee, Kroeber, Sorokin and others”]. Although Innis did not successfully complete this grand synthesis, his work in my opinion does not represent a dead end but a rich scholarly vein that has been abandoned long before it is exhausted. Innis offers an immensely suggestive way forward in a world dominated by “spin”, punditry, and commercialism.

However, Watson was deeply mistaken in suggesting that the need for Innis, or for us after him, was to “successfully complete this grand synthesis” by going all the “way forward” to some supposed end of the lateral “vein” exposed by him.

Innis did not live long enough to come to grips with two suggestions made in this connection by McLuhan in the programmatic letter he wrote to Innis on March 14, 1951 (Letters 220-224).

The first of these was the strange notion that the only “way forward” was a labyrinthine way backward:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (…) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction.8

Again:

But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, [Wyndham] Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines.

In his letter to Innis, McLuhan described this retrograde movement of any medium, by which it establishes the prior social environment required by it in order to begin, as “magical”.9 In a later letter to Wyndham Lewis he characterized this strange action as the “power of metamorphosis” (McLuhan to Wyndham Lewis, December 18, 1954, Letters 245), where the phrase should be read in the first place as a subjective genitive: this is an irrepressible power belonging to metamorphosis.

The second suggestion was that this “magical” backwards step, or “flip”, has in fact already been activated whenever any communication medium is deployed, beginning with “language itself“. And since language defines human beings, differentiating them from all other sorts of beings, this knot in time is always already in operation wherever and whenever humans are at all. Indeed, so essential is it to humans that even their perception (“sensation itself”, “the first stage of apprehension”) cannot occur without it. McLuhan made this point in correspondence with Ezra Pound later in the same year as his letter to Innis:

From Joyce’s Stephen Hero, I gather that he had with the combined aid of Aristotle, Dante and Rimbaud decided that the poetic process was nothing else than the process of cognition. That sensation itself was imitation since the forms of things in our sensations are already in a new matter. Namely a human organ. So that the first stage of apprehension is already poetic. (July 24, 1951, Letters 228-229)

Similarly in another letter to Pound from February 28, 1953:

Art is imitation of the process of apprehension.10

And in his important 1954 lecture, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, McLuhan described this “scandal of human cognition” as follows:

As language itself is an infinitely greater work of art than the Iliad or the Aeneid, so is the creative act of ordinary human perception a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so.11 

In sum, “the first stage of apprehension is already poetic” and “the poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition”. It followed that there is no human experience of any sort that does not already enact the backwards flip of media-tion. In the investigation of communication media, therefore, the need was first of all to follow, via “the technique of reconstruction”, what is always already happening on its own in all human experience.

In his letter to Innis McLuhan put this point in the middle of reflections on the cybernetics work at MIT which he saw as being “a dialectical approach born of technology” — that is, a linear method taking only the “way forward“: 

The fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener approach is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts [ie, “the poetic process [a]s a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition”] as the essential type of all human communication. It is instead a dialectical approach born of technology and quite unable of itself to see beyond or around technology. The Medieval schoolmen ultimately ended up on the same dialectical reef.

Between the lines, McLuhan was suggesting to Innis that his own studies of “the (…) type[s] of human communication”, like those of Karl Deutsch and Norbert Wiener at MIT, might have missed its essence. Innis’ approach, despite its great many virtues, had itself fallen prey at its core, perhaps, to the very “technology” he intended to critique. His research would therefore be subject to the same “dialectical” limitations as those of “the Medieval schoolmen” which culminated in “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”. (The irony here, of course, was that Innis had famously been critical of McLuhan’s Catholicism in one of their first encounters and now McLuhan was implying that ‘bad Catholicism’ was actually central to Innis’ own work.)

The point at stake, or knot, might be put in terms of Innis’s ‘Plea for Time’ which was correct, in McLuhan’s estimation, in associating time — or times — with “the human dialogue” and with the correlative need for space-time and eye-ear balance. But Innis missed the essential factor that one of the times implicated in “the human dialogue” was backwards (in the continual readjustments of interlocutors to each other in dialogue, a readjustment that was also operative in the “magic” of communications media) such that the fundamental plurality of time did not lie only in the undoubted complications of “forward” linearity.

But precisely since the plurality of time implicated questions of its “magical” reversal, it also forced the further question of that plurality’s synchronicity or “allatonceness”.12 For otherwise differences in time, regardless of their forward or backward direction, would be ‘one at a time’ and ‘one at a time’ is just what ‘time singular’ is!  If time were fundamentally plural, it followed that it must be plural at once — that is, all at the same time!  In this case, not only did time have different forward and backward horizontal directions, but also different vertical ones (‘odos ano kato) such that plural times could unfold simultaneously as well as progressively and retrogressively.  Time itself, like language for Saussure, was both diachronic AND synchronic. It was, as McLuhan put the point in Through the Vanishing Point  (1968), “multileveled“.13

Investigation of this space-time and media complex, while initiated by Innis, needed to be reoriented, in McLuhan’s judgement, if it were to specify the only way out of the problem that was plaguing that investigation, namely “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”. And the key to this reorientation was that it learn how to take up itself the “magical” resetting of space-time(s) which was already fundamental to the operation of media throughout the register of human sentience from perception to cognition. Understanding plural space-times could therefore be restated as “understanding media”, as Innis had shown, not only because each medium was inherently structured by some space-time configuration, but also, as McLuhan added, because media operate precisely and only on the basis of a “magical” resetting of these configurations.

The essence of communication according to McLuhan was the step back14 into its own possibility. So, when a child (or the human species for that matter) first begins to speak, the requirement is that it unexpectedly first find itself in a communicative environment. In his letter to Innis McLuhan called this “participation in a process”. Only so, only with some sudden feel for an already existing social medium (however unconscious this must be in the beginning), could a message ever be sent or received. Even, or especially, the initial message, ontogenetic or phylogenetic, requires the activation of a prior medium through which such a message could first be a message at all. 

A reworked ‘Plea for Time’ would therefore have to consider how an environment could already be in place before the first message and how it was possible to understand this — then and now. In McLuhan’s 1964 ‘Introduction’ to The Bias of Communication he observed:

One can say of Innis what Bertrand Russell said of Einstein on the first page of his ABC of Relativity (1925): “Many of the new ideas can be expressed in non-mathematical language, but they are none the less difficult on that account. What is demanded is a change in our imaginative picture of the world.”15

The great question is when and where this “change in our imaginative picture of the world” takes place. After the ‘I’ is in place in its accustomed environment?  Or before?  Produced by and through the experiencing subject?  Or productive of the experiencing subject?16

If a child (or the species) in linear fashion simply continued its existing inability to understand language, no message would, of course, ever be sent or received. But this was just the cul-de-sac in which Innis was trapped.  As he baldly put the point in ‘A Plea for Time’: “It is impossible for [the economic historian] to avoid the bias of the period in which he writes”. That is, temporal conditions are both determinative and unbreakable — unbreakable on account of time’s (singular) arrow forward. “The fundamental solipsism of Western civilization” necessarily followed from the suppositions that time is singular and that singular time takes only the “way forward” and that there is no remove from this moving staircase.

Instead, according to McLuhan, a “magical” resetting of identity is always occurring to humans through a flip back in time and space into a new sensed environment — a flip he called “the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties” — and that he saw as already characterizing perception itself. So where Innis was prescient that “a stable society is dependent on an appreciation of a proper balance between the concepts of space and time” (‘A Plea for Time’), between the eye and the ear, he did not consider that this balance as a dynamic sensus communis might be more fundamental than linear time and the familiar environment in space — and than the identity correlate with these. He therefore did not see that it is entirely possible “to avoid the bias17 of the period in which [one] writes” and thereby to avoid “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”. 

In his letter to Innis, McLuhan indicated that this “learning process”, particularly in the case of language but in fact with any medium at all, “provided the key to all arts and sciences” and even to contemporary commerce and politics in what he called “the age of advertising”: 

Working concepts of “collective consciousness” in advertising agencies have in turn given salience and practical effectiveness to these “magical” notions of language.

But the modern world was caught in the strange fate that although it everywhere put this “magic” to use, it remained unconscious of it (like fish of water) and therefore remained trapped in it —  trapped in what could and should be its way out. As McLuhan put it to Innis:   

The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertising, or in the high arts is toward participation in [such] a [magical] process (…) And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt.

Technology itself had gone from Gutenbergian linearity to electric “allatonceness”. And now McLuhan was proposing to Innis that study of “this major revolution” be initiated on “Bloor St”, meaning in the old McMaster Building where Innis had been a student 40 years before and that now (following the McMaster move to Hamilton) housed the UT department of political economy that Innis headed.

McLuhan’s letter ends with a description of how this study might operate: 

A simultaneous focus of current and historic forms. Relevance to be given to selection of areas of study by dominant artistic and scientific modes of the particular period. Arts here used as providing criteria, techniques of observation, and bodies of recorded, achieved, experience. Points of departure but also return.

His estimation here of the potential of the “arts” echoed claims made earlier the letter:

But it was most of all the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) which have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years.

an experiment in communication which is to follow the lines of this letter in suggesting [a] means of linking a variety of specialized fields by what may be called a method of esthetic analysis of their common features.

What was at stake in these “esthetic discoveries” and in an “esthetic analysis” derived from them was the “method” of a flip back into changed presuppositions (or media)18

From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience.

Experience conceived on the model of language learning — “awareness of the potencies of language” — was the continually renovating exercise of perception based on the flip back into a changed medium. Study of this “process” as implemented on the basis of different dominants would allow “a simultaneous focus of current and historic forms” AND the testing of each of these forms through “direct participation in an experience” for the intelligibility it was able to give (or not) to the great questions implicated in communication (especially that of its unavoidable “bias”).  Once “achieved”, such intelligibility would itself already represent an overcoming of “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization” and so be a new “departure but also [a] return”.19

Communications study on this model would be a search for its own beginning and itself be knotted in time. For it would actually begin only after the sort of testing for intelligibility it was already doing came into sudden focus for a community of speakers of what would constitute a new language. It would genuinely begin only when the pieces suddenly fell into place as described by Plato in his Seventh Letter as cited above — but now, not for isolated individuals who have “found [it] and [and then have it be] lost again and again”, but for an ongoing community of researchers.

Plato’s descriptions of the necessarily dialectical process of communication in philosophy have been reported with some frequency. Here is Tolstoy:   

It was something like that which might happen to a man who, after vainly attempting, by a false plan, to build up a statue out of a confused heap of small pieces of marble, suddenly guesses at the figure they are intended to form by the shape of the largest piece; and then, on beginning to set up the statue, finds his guess confirmed by the harmonious joining in of the various pieces. (What I Believe, 1884)

And Thomas Kuhn:

Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I’d never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he’d said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience — the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way — is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before. (The Road Since Structure, 2000, 16-17)

And here is McLuhan on Innis in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1964 reissue of The Bias of Communication discussing “the basic difference between classified knowledge and pattern recognition”:

It is a helpful distinction to keep in mind when reading Innis since he is above all a recognizer of patterns. Dr. Kenneth Sayre explains the matter as follows (…): Classification is a process, something which takes up one’s time, which one might do reluctantly, unwillingly, or enthusiastically, which can be done with more or less success, done very well or very poorly. Recognition, in sharp contrast, is not time-consuming. A person may spend a long while looking before recognition occurs, but when it occurs it is “instantaneous”. When recognition occurs, it is not an act which would be said to be performed either reluctantly or enthusiastically, compliantly or under protest. Moreover, the notion of recognition being unsuccessful, or having been done very poorly, seems to make no sense at all.20

Along the way of trying out “participation” in the different ‘space-time resetting’ processes of multiple media21, communications study might at some happy and necessarily sudden moment join physics, chemistry, genetics and other sciences which have been born from the same experimental procedure and which have the same basis in the social resetting “magic” of new language learning. As McLuhan suggested in his letter to Innis:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences…

  1. Heidegger used this text in his 1929 laudatio for Husserl to describe Husserl’s ability to spark die Sache des Denkens in his students. ↩
  2. Instead of “their dialectic” in this passage Innis has “the oral dialectic”. He meant something like: ‘Having significance which ultimately derives from oral dialectic, their subject matter is human action and feeling and is important in the discovery of new truth…’. ↩
  3. See Innis and McLuhan in 1936. Innis’ experience in WW1 and his graduate work in Chicago just after the war with the then 34 year old Frank Knight had inclined him in this direction. Then, in 1935, articles in the maiden issue of The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science by Knight and by Innis’s mentor at UT, E.J. Urwick, prompted Innis to specify his suspicions. ↩
  4. See Sirluck on Innis, Owen and Havelock and Innis and Havelock – 1930 and Beyond. Much ink has been spilled on the question of how Innis came to have an interest in communications.  The suggestion here is that he had it at least since his graduate studies in Chicago in the inchoate field of “political economy”. Havelock’s work (which was abroad at UT and particularly, of course, in the classics department where Innis had close friends) then suggested the need for a similar — but interestingly different — concern in relation to the development of Greek society leading up to Plato. As McLuhan noted, the suggestion was then close of “a shift in attention from the trade-routes of the external world to the trade routes of the mind” (‘The Later Innis’, 1953). ↩
  5. Empire and Communications, 1950 edition, 67; 1972 edition, 56. ↩
  6. Originally in the Journal of Economic History, December 1942, reprinted in Political Economy in the Modern State, 1946, p 34. ↩
  7. McLuhan is citing Innis here from an essay included in The Bias of Communication, ‘Industrialism and Cultural Values’. ↩
  8. In his first published paper in 1936 on Chesterton, McLuhan, age 25, had already noted that “history is a road that must often be reconsidered and even retraced”. ↩
  9. See ‘the “magical” essence of communication‘ for further discussion. ↩
  10. Letters 235.  With “imitation” here, McLuhan has Greek ‘mimesis‘ in mind.  Such “imitation” is anything but a “matching”. ↩
  11. The Medium and the Light, 157 ↩
  12. See Through the Vanishing Point, p 103: “The Shakespearean moment (“that time of year”) includes several times at once…”. ↩
  13. Through the Vanishing Point, 55: “If the three-dimensional illusion of depth (in Western European art) has proved to be a cul-de-sac of one time and one space, the two-dimensional (in Eastern art) features many spaces in multileveled time.” Cf, The Gutenberg Galaxy citing Georges Poulet: “For the man of the Middle Ages, then, there was not one duration only. There were durations, ranked one above another, and not only in the universality of the exterior world but within himself, in his own nature, in his own human existence” (14; also Through the Vanishing Point, 9). And Understanding Media: “plurality-of-times succeeds uniformity-of-time” (152). ↩
  14. The ‘horizontal’ step back is just as much, according to McLuhan, a ‘vertical’ step down. Hence the importance to him of Poe’s Maelstrom and the underworlds of Odysseus, Orpheus. Aeneas and Alice. The notion of such a ‘step back’ appears as ‘der Schritt zurück’ at least as early as Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1794). ↩
  15. Similarly in his later (1972) ‘Foreword’ to Empire and Communications citing Schrödinger instead of Russell: “What Erwin Schrödinger tells us about the change of outlook from Newtonian to quantum physics concerns the student of Harold Innis: This intrusion (of quantum physics) has, in a way, overthrown what had been built on the foundations laid in the seventeenth century, mainly by Galileo, Huygens and Newton. The very foundations were shaken.” ↩
  16. It is hard to see how any sorts of discoveries (especially “scientific revolutions”) can be made without a resetting of perception and identity. But how to delineate the ‘resetting of perception and identity’ is a fateful question which has been posed without answer for at least 2500 years and probably for many millennia more than that. A great part of the problem, of course, lies in the questions of where and when this ‘takes place’, if a resetting of time and space is of its essence, and who ‘does’ it, if the experiencing subject is its result. ↩
  17. There is no such thing for McLuhan as “the bias”. For not only are psychological and sociological contexts as complicated as chemical and genetic ones, implicating an array of different biases, but any bias is itself always situated in an ontological context which supplies a kind of counter-current to it. This underlying counter-current to bias is “the main question“. ↩
  18. Media for McLuhan are not ‘mechanical things’. They are psychological and sociological and even ontological dominants. In his ‘Introduction’ to The Bias of Communication (1964) he wrote of “the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology entailing new perception and new experience“. ↩
  19. The great mystery to communications research is that such intelligibility has long been “achieved”, but its achievement resists communication:
    And what there is to conquer
    By strength and submission, has already been discovered
    Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
    To emulate — but there is no competition —
    There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
    And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
    That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
    For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.  (‘East Coker’, v) ↩
  20. McLuhan cites Sayre from The Modeling of Mind (1963), 17-18. ↩
  21. In his ‘Introduction’ to The Bias of Communication McLuhan described Innis’ method as the “use of history as a scientific laboratory, as a set of controlled conditions within which to study the life and nature of forms”. ↩

The “magical” essence of communication

As theme (…) I have taken (…) the new media of communication and their power of metamorphosis. (McLuhan to Wyndham Lewis, December 18, 1954, Letters 245)

We paced along the lonely plain, as one who returning to his lost road, and, till he reached it, seems to go in vain. (Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 1, cited by McLuhan in ‘Space, Time, and Poetry’, 1955)

The world of electric circuitry feeds us back into ourselves. The whole point about feedback is that it feeds back into you, and involves you in the process. That is what is called communication. (Education in the Electronic Age, 1959)

In his letter to Harold Innis from early in 1951 (if not at the end of 19501), McLuhan observed that modern art, social science and commerce all echoed an ancient complex (recalling his 1946 essay ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’2):

Many of the ancient language theories of the Logos type which you cite [in Empire and Communications] for their bearings on government and society have recurred and amalgamated themselves today under the auspices of anthropology and social psychology. Working concepts of “collective consciousness” in advertising agencies have in turn given salience and practical effectiveness to these “magical” notions of language. (…) Mallarmé (…) saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious far beyond any informative purpose.

By “informative purpose” here McLuhan meant what he would later call “the message” and “its very technological form” was “the medium”.  So he was clear already in late 1950 or early 1951 that “the medium is the message”.3 That is, something else and something more is going on in communication than information exchange. This something else and something more is, in the first place, the trans-formative effect of communication on its users to produce by a kind of backwards flip the social understanding that is required to be already in place in order to begin to issue or to receive a message as a message. Required, that is, for communication to be initiated at all.

It is this trans-formative power of a medium to effect integration into the social environment required by it that McLuhan called “magical”. A sort of backwards somersault is effected so that the capacity that must already be in place in order to have the capability to send or receive a message has somehow suddenly been activated beforehand. 

Following Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, McLuhan saw that a sudden knot in time was the key structural feature of such “magic”:

We have to repeat what we were about to say (‘The Be-Spoke Tailor’, Explorations 8, 1957, #4)

The basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle [235b-241b], to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica I.II.q 113.a.7, ad quintum. The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs instantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics — “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form.” (From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, 160)4

In a postscript to his May 6, 1969 letter to Jacques Maritain (Letters, 371), McLuhan cited all of this same text, in Latin, and included its continuation:

et in ultimo instanti illius temporis, quod est primum instans… (and in the last instant of that [preceding] time, which is the [succeeding time’s] first instant …)

The initial (initiating) understanding of language, whether in an individual child or in the whole species, cannot be the result of gradual steps. For this would presuppose something like ‘pre-linguistic thinking’ and would decisively submit the supposed process to Zeno’s paradox (that a gradual course cannot be brought to an end because always reaching only some fraction of the way to that end).5 In fact, language learning implicates Zeno’s paradox in a particularly heightened way since the process at stake is not only one of crossing a certain distance in time or space, but of crossing from ignorance to insight. As with McLuhan’s example from Aquinas of “justification by faith”, understanding language can hardly be thought to depend on a process “under the opposite form” — ie, based on the ignorance and absence of what is to be achieved. 

When a child first hears the sounds of language it can have no idea yet of their “informative purpose”. At some point, however, it will suddenly grasp the meaning of one or two of these sounds as its first steps toward full language capability. From this “magical” moment on, it will understand both the meaning of a growing number of sounds and be more and more integrated (or in-formed) into its social environment exactly through this understanding. These steps will be possible only because the child has “magically” been introduced into the “very technological form” of these sounds — that is, into the medium of language as the technique of using sounds to communicate. The time sequence here is all important. The child cannot understand a message like ‘mama’ without first understanding (however unconsciously) the medium of language: it must already have come to understand in some sense that sounds can mean in order then to grasp the meaning and use of some particular sound. Strangely, however, the medium (that sounds can mean) is somehow learned (ie, found to be in effect) through the sounds repeatedly made to the child. The that medium, which must come first, is somehow effected via the what messages, which can come only second.6 In the event, the medium is imparted unconsciously and by “magic”. It is a matter, as McLuhan says, of a “collective consciousness” that is somehow able suddenly to bootstrap itself in the child as the peculiar sort of creative receptivity needed to understand the meaning of sounds. This can occur only after it has first of all mysteriously found itself in a communicative environment.

Something of the sort occurred when language first began to be used by humans (regardless of whether this happened once or multiple times). Before this sudden event, or events, there was, of course no acclimatization to language because there was no language. Nor did one or more proto-humans think up language in some sort of non-verbal thinking leading to a light-bulb moment.  For whatever ‘non-verbal thinking’ might be, it would of course be non-verbal and the great phylogenetic (species related) question, as much as the ontogenetic (individual related) one, is exactly how a non-verbal being suddenly becomes a verbal being. How is this gap crossed? How is this gap crossed into a new sort of environment that is suddenly accomplished in a moment’s time and not by one individual alone but by at least two together and at once — for communication (“the human dialogue itself”) is inherently social.

McLuhan emphasized the importance of this point for an understanding of the present and future of the electric age in a letter to John Snyder, Aug 4 1963:

we are already moving in depth into a situation in which learning becomes a total process (…) from infancy to old-age. The pattern by which one learns one’s mother tongue is now being extended to all learning whatsoever. The human dialogue itself becomes not only the economic, but the political and social, fact.  (Letters 291)

Media, and especially language as the archetypal medium, somehow effect a resetting of time and space — and of the individual and social identity that is correlate with these. This is “magical” exactly because of this unaccountable translation of space, time and identity. Always and everywhere humans are submitted to this “magic” with incalculable effect. But they do not perceive this submission, nor its trans-formative effect, nor their calling to an understanding of these. Nor, of course, do they intuit their utmost need to do so.

His [Midas’] power of translating all he touched into gold,7 is in some degree the character of any medium, including language. This myth draws attention to a magic aspect of all extensions of human sense and body; that is, to all technology whatever. All technology has the Midas touch.8 (UM, 139)

This “Midas touch” possessed by “any medium, including language”, is the vast but invisible “power of translating” into a new space-time dimension and its correlate identity: the fundamental power of meta-phor.9

  1.  McLuhan’s letter to Innis of March 14, 1951 (Letters, 220-223) is described as a “rewrite”.  Innis’ answer to the original was written in February and apologizes for the belated reply. ↩
  2. ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ was originally a talk delivered in 1944. The talk, in turn, was based on his 1943 PhD thesis, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, a thesis which might well have been titled ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Elizabethan England’. ↩
  3. In a letter to Pound (July 16, 1952, Letters 231): “Once a man has got onto technique as the key in communication it’s different. But somehow the bugbear of content forbids that anybody be interested in technique as content.” ↩
  4. The passage from Aristotle discussed by Thomas here is cited again by McLuhan, but in Latin, in ‘The Medieval Environment’ from 1974. ↩
  5.  Aristotle specifically discusses Zeno in this same book of the Physics. ↩
  6. The sounds conveying the what message vary greatly, of course, from culture to culture.  But the that medium is universal. ↩
  7. McLuhan was well aware that Midas touched his own daughter, Zoe (‘life’) into gold (death). The unanswered question hanging over modernity is whether the magical world-transformative powers gigantically developed in it lead to life or death. ↩
  8. The centrality of the “magical” essence of communication to McLuhan’s whole enterprise may be seen from the ‘declaration’ he made on the sacred island of Delos in 1972 on his second ‘ekistics’ tour of the Aegean with C.A. Doxiadis: The mystery of creativity is the paradox of how beauty is created from ruin. After a long career of stylistic invention and triumph, W.B. Yeats deliberately scrapped his entire enterprise in order to begin again: “Now (that) my ladder’s gone, I must lie down (where all the ladders start) in the (foul) rag and bone shop of the heart.” (The Circus Animals’ Desertion) It is the mystery of how life succeeds in that it seems to fail, the paradox of how beauty is born out of despair, art out of the garbage and sweepings of the street. The merely mechanical world of the computer has coined the phrase: “Garbage in, garbage out”. It is the glory of the human spirit (…) that “garbage in” is wonderfully transformed into “treasure out”. (‘Epilogue to the Declaration of Delos Ten’, Ekistics v203, 291, October 1972.) Because no human medium can ever do more than enable the making of meaning (“garbage in”), never the matching of it, the success of communication (“treasure out”) depends entirely upon its prior situation in an ontological environment that prompts and sustains this multiple transformation. ↩
  9. Compare Samuel Beckett speaking in his excellent German to gymnasium students in Germany in February 1961: “Für mich ist das Theater keine moralische Anstalt im Schillerschen Sinne. Ich will weder belehren noch verbessern noch den Leuten die Langeweile vertreiben. Ich will Poesie in das Drama bringen, eine Poesie, die das Nichts durchschritten hat und in einem neuen Raum einen neuen Anfang findet. Ich denke in neuen Dimensionen, und im Grunde kümmert es mich wenig, wer mir dabei folgen kann. Ich konnte nicht die Antworten geben, die man erhofft hatte. Es gibt keine Patentlösungen.” (Spectaculum 6, 1963, 319, emphasis added.) The translation given in Knowlson’s biography of Beckett (427) is frequently cited in English language Beckett criticism, but stupidly gives “space-room” for Beckett’s “Raum”: “For me, the theatre is not a moral institution in Schiller’s sense. I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void (das Nichts durchschritten hat) and makes a new start in a new room-space (SB: ‘in a new space’). I think in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed. I couldn’t give the answers,which were hoped for. There are no easy solutions.” ↩