Explorations 8 was published in October 1957 and then republished in 1967 as Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations. More than half of the volume (76 pages) is comprised of notes, apparently written by McLuhan, under 24 separate titles (and so averaging around 3 pages each). It may be that Explorations 8 was mostly given over to McLuhan (who had an additional separate essay in it, ‘Third Program in the Human Age’) since Explorations 9 was to be given over entirely to Ted Carpenter for his Eskimo.
McLuhan’s notes provide an overview of the ‘chemical’ theory of communication he was developing at the time and would announce at length a couple years later in his Project 69. In a note titled ‘Stress’, McLuhan has:
The [Hans] Selye theory becomes at once intelligible and acceptable in our twentieth century of oral awareness. That “all vital phenomena depend merely upon quantitative variations in the activation of preexistent elementary targets” is not a superficial view in terms of auditory space.1, 2 In the old lineal terms, quantitative relations mean the exclusion of most meaning and of all spiritual complexity. A mere sequence of such effects can contain no vital or analogical drama of proportions. But analogy is itself field theory (…) [and] the analogical drama of being and perception needs no more than the quantitative terms postulated by Selye. With these the living word constitutes and manifests itself in all mental and spiritual complexity.
The quotation in this passage (“all vital phenomena depend…”) was identified earlier in McLuhan’s note as coming from a Hans Selye article that appeared 4 years earlier in the first issue Explorations. Selye’s piece was titled, like McLuhan’s note, ‘Stress’. The full passage there, given emphasis by its placement at the conclusion of Selye’s contribution, read:
As I see it, the basic task is now to find objective means to test the validity of the principal deduction, namely, that all vital phenomena depend merely upon quantitative variations in the activation of preexistent elementary targets.
When McLuhan claimed here that “the analogical drama of being and perception needs no more than the quantitative terms postulated by Selye”, he was nodding at the same time to cybernetics. For all three (Selye, cybernetics and McLuhan) the exclusive opposition of the quantitative and the qualitative was a remnant of a failed metaphysics and the revised formulation of the two in an inclusive relation was essential to an overcoming of that failed system.
- McLuhan’s model of experience can be seen as the playing of an organ (“the activation of preexistent elementary targets”) where its keyboards are the range of the elementary possibilities of experience and their complex derivatives. The moment to moment result is the constitution of self and world. But because self and world are effects of this “activation”, not their causes, they are tunes played by a “nobody” in an “instantaneous” time ‘before’ self and world (see note 2 below). Comparisons with the physical world and its sciences can be helpful. For example, where atomic fission and fusion are rare on earth because requiring enormous pressure and temperature, but are constitutive in the stars (from which the earth derives), so transformation is rare in our phenomenal selves but is constitutive at the generative level (from which our selves derive). Furthermore, just as the physical sciences have many levels of law-governing focus, like compounds, organic molecules, cells and so on up to weather systems, ocean currents and continental drift, so the generation of self and world may be grounded more in the activation of polyphonic ‘chords’ than in elementary notes from single ‘keys’. And just as the isolation of the chemical elements starting around 1800 led on to new sciences like organic chemistry and genetics and revolutionized the entire globe (so that the world of 1800 was more like that of 1000 BC than it was to the world of 1900 (to say nothing of 2000), so may the isolation of the “preexistent elementary targets” of experience have comparable results, one of which, according to McLuhan, could and should be a greatly increased chance of ‘survival’ (where the ‘survival’ he had in mind could be that of civilization or the human species or the biosphere itself). ↩
- If there is a “keyboard” of existence, who plays it? In Un Coup de Dés, Mallarmé writes of a “childlike shade”, of an “immemorial ulterior demon”, and of a “corpse”, exposed to “the virgin index” of possibilities — “in sight of all non-existent human outcomes”. McLuhan’s detailed study of Mallarmé with Mariana Thompson (later married name: Mariana Ryan) in the late 1940’s was critical for his transformation then when he “ceased being a moralist and became a student” (Playboy Interview). McLuhan to Archie Malloch in an undated 1949 letter: “Just had a long report on thesis project (on the Symbolists) from Mariana Thompson. (…) Much of my summer has gone into the French. Mallarmé has paid off a million bucks, as Mariana can tell you.” Marchand notes: “McLuhan’s conversational agenda was based on the themes that obsessed him. In 1948-49 Mallarmé and the Symbolists were such a theme.” (Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger, 1989, Random House edition, 102) ↩