Monthly Archives: September 2020

The Law of Media 2

[The Law of Media 2 is an internal expansion of The Law of Media 1. The two versions have been retained as indicating the current of thought exercised in this blog. Its flow-through. That current should be open to critique as much as any factual assertion in the blog’s posts. McLuhan named this current at play here in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ rumination: “There are endless popular phrases (…) that are really questions.”]

The epigraph to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949)1 is taken from Primitive Culture (1871) by E. B. Tylor:

The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.2 

Earlier in the same decade as Lévi-Strauss’s original publication of  Elementary Structures, McLuhan, in his 1943 PhD thesis on The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time, expressed a slightly offset agreement with Tyler as follows:

Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings, so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials.3

Tyler in 1871 located the “conclusion” that “law is (…) everywhere” as following from a “tendency of modern inquiry”. On its surface, Tyler’s observation concerned an objective condition (the ubiquity of law) to which subjective inquiry found itself increasingly constrained. This was its “tendency“. But what was the nature of this constraint on the subjective side and just how grounded was its conclusion of the lawful condition of the objective side?

Like the concern in phenomenology with Wesensschau4 in the first decades of the twentieth century, McLuhan’s formulation, 70 years after Tyler, shifted the matter at stake towards the conditions of reliable “perception”. The assertion was that both sides of Tyler’s equation are subject to an “intuitive” — unconditional — consolidation. That is, the essential nature of the object is revealed as that without which it could not be that object; while for the subject, its “perception” is bound to that essence — focused on it — since only so could it be the “perception” of it.    

But just who was doing this looking? And exactly why should her “perception of [just these] essentials” be trusted?

“The medium is the message” marked McLuhan’s decided realization, 15 years after his Nashe thesis, that the first steps towards open collective investigation into these questions had yet to be taken — namely, agreed identification of those purported essentials.5 Such ‘agreement’ had to do not only with the question of the object to be investigated collectively, but also with the question of the ‘who’ doing the investigation. For once an agreed object were in place — the ‘medium’ — subjectivity would be constrained to findings about it and could no longer freely hypothecate (except in art and in the rare circumstance of scientific revolution).

Moreover, here the object to be investigated was just that of subjectivity itself. As a result, the subject would find itself doubly bound: on the one hand, within the new investigation, by its agreed parameters and findings (Kuhn’s ‘normal science’); on the other hand, outside that investigation, by feedback from it to human deportment everywhere. Where before actions and beliefs had been the effects of unknown causes or (as McLuhan preferred to say after he read Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964) figures on unknown grounds, now those causes and grounds, along with their effects and figures, would be exposed in and by the newly inaugurated field of interrogation. Within the field, just as in any other science, findings would continually lead to further findings through the working of scientific interrogation. Outside of the field, formerly subliminal actions and beliefs would now increasingly be exposed and illuminated.

This double binding of subjective action and belief would introduce a new sort of freedom to individual and collective behavior. But would humans be capable of exercising it? The old freedom had been grounded in the caprice of ignorance. It expressed itself in the ungrounded figures of that vast range of individual and collective action comprising the historical record.6 Now a new freedom was possible, comparable to the new ways of behavior both within and without such relatively new sciences as physics and chemistry7 — but now applicable to social and political behavior in ways they were not.

With “the medium is the message”, it had become clear to McLuhan that only agreed definition could at last initiate the open collective investigation into human experience  — through which survival might be yet be achieved.8 But he was also increasingly aware that the possibility of such agreement was subject to a strange and potentially ominous knot in time — a ‘knot’ that could eventuate (and indeed always had eventuated) in a ‘not’ of refusal. 

The problem was that the promised future feedback9 between figured thoughts and actions and their grounds had to be activated (or pre-activated, as might be said) in the present — in order for that future to be initiated. This knot in time meant that, at a minimum, investigators would have to expose themselves to the uncertainties of a rigorous investigation into the unknown grounds of their existing thoughts and behaviors.

McLuhan knew that few would understand this requirement, let alone submit themselves to it. Therefore, the prospect of such agreed collective identification of the ‘medium’ to be interrogated in the new field was uncertain in multiple respects: it was uncertain if investigators would submit themselves to the uncertainties entailed by the peculiar initiation required for such investigation. And, if McLuhan were right that the survival of civilization and perhaps of the species depended upon this achievement, it, too, was uncertain.

McLuhan reflected on these problems in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ essay:

Man is now in a somnambulant state because this offers him [what seems to him as] his only possibility of survival and sanity [whereas it is really exactly what threatens survival]. He couldn’t bear a fully conscious existence under the frenetic conditions that he is exposed to by his own technology. He could not register these terrible shocks directly and survive. He’d go mad. I think that all human technology and invention has occurred under this kind of anxious pressure. You don’t outer anything [original]10 (…) until you’re under some dire pressure and fear. But when you put the nervous system outside [with the innovations of electric technology], fear is no longer the problem. Anxiety is the problem. Fear is specific, anxiety is total. As in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread, a book that appeared in the year of the telegraph.11 You don’t know now precisely what you’re dreading, rather it’s a pervasive state. The condition of man is what you dread. You no longer dread [things or possibilities in the environment like] that animal [or] that famine, and so on, but this [unprecedented] condition [of human being subject to “a fully conscious existence” in dread.] (…) Anxiety means utmost alertness, utmost watchfulness, involvement and therefore of course a very heightened kind of existence, a sort of nightmare (…) This [all] terrifies mechanical man because he does not know what to do about the transition that is taking place [within and without him].

In the 1950s McLuhan himself had gone through the “transition” he described here. Now he wondered about the prospect of anyone following him in the required complete trans-formation of turning oneself inside-out. The operative inside-out of the electric environment where “our nerves [are] outside ourselves” made both possible and impossible12 a science which would treat the human insides, at last, in an outward conscious manner.

 

 

  

 

 

  1. English translation: The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969. ↩
  2. This is the concluding sentence of Lévi-Strauss’s quotation from Tyler. The preceding part of the citation reads: “Few who will give their minds to master the general principles of savage religion will ever again think it ridiculous, or the knowledge of it superfluous to the rest of mankind. Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish-heap of miscellaneous folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as even roughly classified, to display the principles of their formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance.” ↩
  3.  The Classical Trivium, 51. McLuhan’s enduring thought, explicitly from the time of his thesis onwards, but implicitly from the time of his work with Rupert Lodge at the University of Manitoba a decade before, concerned the identification of the basic structures of human experience and the investigation of how these structures interrelate to constitute the very complicated fabric of the historical record. See Take Today 22 for his formulation of this complex thirty years after his Nashe thesis. ↩
  4. The Nashe thesis phrase “perception of essentials” supplies a fitting translation of Wesensschau — if the phrase is taken as a dual genitive. That is, Wesensschau is both essential perception and the perception of essence. ↩
  5. The nature of such agreement at the start of a science requires close consideration. As set out in a previous post: If we are to survive what McLuhan approvingly cited from Sheila Watson, ‘the intrusion of the mechanical foot into the electric desert’, it will be only because we have learned to understand at last: (a) how everything we currently experience, from our own identity to world issues threatening nuclear war, are subliminal effects of as yet imprecisely known media structures — effects which are insuperable as unknown, but optional once dis-covered and investigated: ‘All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes.’ (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, ‘Recommendations’, 1960) (b) that we do not have to know definitively how to specify these media structures prior to initiating research into them. Rather, just what such media are and how they operate is exactly the central question of the proposed investigations. Therefore McLuhan’s emphatic remark in 1959 to Harry Skornia in the course of his NAEB project to research new media: ‘We can’t assume that we understand media already!‘ (Therefore as well his constant admonition that we need to organize our ignorance.) (c) that the imperative is therefore for researchers, in particular media researchers, to abandon their specialist perspectives in order to initiate open collective research into the nature of media and their effects as guided by a series of clues supplied for the first time by the electric environment: the digital (multilevel, figure/ground, eye/ear) structure of media (and, indeed, of all that is); the variable emphasis or weighting or valorization that may be made of all such structures (eg, more eye than ear or more ear than eye); the covariable nature of such variation (the more eye, the less ear and vice versa); the fundamental reversibility of all such structures at the extremes of emphasis (eye collapsing into ear or ear collapsing into eye); the plurality of time (diachronic/synchronic) in the horizontal/vertical unfolding of these structures in a myriad combinations. (d) that findings in the existing sciences should be used as indications of complications to be expected in media investigations — eg, that a given sample may be a compound or compounds rather than an element, or that it may be subject to some further as yet unknown science, not chemistry but organic chemistry or genetics, etc. (e) In sum: no science is more needed than the rigorous investigation of the internal landscape and more than enough clues and guidelines exist to initiate it. If it is asked what is preventing the initiation of such science(s), despite the great need and the existing clues, the chief answer seems to be that the will is lacking to subsume individual point of view to collective questioning. This will cannot be taught or otherwise urged into existence, however, since these would be grounded when the very point at stake is to question ground. The beginning of a science of the interior landscape can have no other origin than the abysmal unaccountable will to enter its maelstrom. See note 9 below. ↩
  6. Compare this to the fact that all physical reactions for millions, indeed billions, of years have always been grounded in the interactions of the elements. But this was unknown until chemistry exposed those grounds in the course of the nineteenth century. ↩
  7. Physics and chemistry, especially in their applications to transportation and commerce, revolutionized the world. Of course, these sciences were also revolutionized internally. But the latter changes, although they caused the former, were as nothing, taken quantitively, compared to the former. ↩
  8. McLuhan’s “survival strategy” lay in the question: how can we so exercise our “intuitive perception of essentials” in the study of human experience to realize in it the sorts of revolutionary dis-coveries achieved (only recently in human history) in sciences like physics, chemistry, biology and genetics? ↩
  9. McLuhan concluded his 1968 letter to I.A. Richards with this short paragraph: ” Your wonderful word, ‘feedforward’, suggests to me the principle of the probe, the technique of the ‘suspended judgement’ which has been called the greatest discovery of the 20th century.” (Letters, 355) ‘Feedforward’ captured both how the proposed science might operate and the great problem of initiating it. ‘Suspended judgement’ in this context entailed ‘suspended identity’ and ‘no one’ (strangely enough) was willing to wager this. ↩
  10. McLuhan’s suggestion here is very compact and requires teasing apart. The component premises are: (a) originality from the infant learning language to revolutionary insight in art or science represents a resetting of perception; (b) the resetting of perception requires a descent into the possibilities of human being; (c) descent into the possibilities of human being implicates a loss of previous identity and orientation; (d) the loss of previous identity and orientation occurs only under “dire pressure” (like fusion in physics); (e) dire pressure implicates “fear”. In sum, what is most human about human beings is a continual retreat into their essence which is a spectrum of possibilities. This essential descent is yet fearsome because of the threat it implies to identity and orientation and for the most part it is therefore cloaked and forgotten. Original insight pulls away the cloak and consciously experiences the turbulence within. The great question posed by McLuhan, and by all original thinkers, is whether human beings can learn to live consciously who (and where and when) they are. ↩
  11. McLuhan immediately qualified this statement a few sentences later in ‘Prospect’: “Kierkegaard came out with the concept of dread in 1844 which was when commercial telegraph began in America, about ten years after the development of the telegraph.” ↩
  12. Instead of the carapace of the “somnambulant state”, the required transition would feel “like living without a skin” (‘Prospect’). ↩

Frye’s References to McLuhan in Correspondence

The following is a post at the Northrop Frye blog, The Educated Imagination, which is archived here since that blog is now largely inactive.

*****

From Northrop Frye: The Selected Letters, 1934-1991, ed. Robert D. Denham (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2009)

Letter to Robert Heilman, 29 October 1951

. . . I am very deeply obliged to you for being responsible for my having a wonderful summer.  I have seldom enjoyed a summer so much.  We topped it off with ten days in San Francisco and two weeks in New York—one at the English institute, which turned out to be a very good one.  I got Marshall McLuhan down to give a paper [“The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry,” in Alan Downer, ed., English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 168–81; rpt. in The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, ed. Eugene McNamara (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 91–7].

Letter to Richard Schoeck, 24 November 1965

You may know that Marshall and Ernest have asked me to do a collection of comments on myth and criticism as one of the Gemini books.  I gather that their original idea was to collect contemporary essays on the subject, but I thought it might be more interesting and useful to go back into the history of the tendency.  Things like Raleigh’s History, the opening of Purchas, Camden, Reynolds’ Mythomystes, Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients, Sandys’ Ovid, from that period; some of the “Druid” stuff from around Blake’s time; some of the material used by Shelley and Keats, and so on down to Ruskin’s Queen of the Air, but without incorporating anything much later than The Golden Bough and the turn of the century.  An introductory essay would of course indicate the relevance of this to what came after Frazer.  I’ve spoken about this to Marshall and he suggested that I might consult the other editors.  [Frye wrote a preface for the proposed collection, but the project was for some reason aborted.  His preface was published forty years later in CW 25:326–8.]

Letter to John Garabedian, 12 September 1967 [In reply to an letter by Garabedian (1 September 1967), a feature writer for the New York Post, wanting Frye to expand on a comment quoted in an article in Time magazine that hippies were inheritors of the “outlawed and furtive social ideal known as the ‘Land of Cockaigne.’” The Time article also referred to Frye as a disciple of McLuhan.]

Thank you for your letter.  I am not sure that I can be of much help to you, as I did not have hippies in mind when I spoke of the Land of Cockaigne as one form of Utopia.  The association was due to the Time writer, and I doubt very much that the Land of Cockaigne is really what the hippies are talking about.  Neither was it correct to describe me as a disciple of McLuhan, although he is a colleague and a good personal friend.

Letter to Walter Miale, 18 February 1969

. . . Korzybsky was, because of his anti‑literary bias, a person I was bound to have reservations about, but there was still the possibility that he might be, like Marshall McLuhan today, probing and prodding in directions that might turn out to be useful.

Letter to Walter J. Ong, S.J., 28 March 1973

. . . I saw Marshall [McLuhan] the other day at a meeting on Canadian Studies, where we were discussing the question of how difficult it is for students in this bilingual country to acquire a second language when they don’t possess a first one.

Letter to William Harmon,  13 August 1974

Harmon had requested (8 July 1974) the source of Joyce’s referring to Eliot as “the Bishop of Hippo,” which Frye quotes in his book on T.S. Eliot (pp. 67–8).  Frye replied that he wasn’t certain as he was quoting “orally from someone who had been working in the Joyce papers at Buffalo.”  Harmon responded with a note of thanks, which prompted Frye to write again to say “Marshall McLuhan was present when this tag from Joyce was quoted, and his memory of it may be more accurate than mine.”

Letter to Richard Kostelanetz, 7 January 1976

. . . Please don’t make me an enemy of Marshall McLuhan: I am personally very fond of him, and think the campus would be a much duller place without him.  I don’t always agree with him, but he doesn’t always agree with himself.

The statement of Colombo’s on page 16 strikes me as curious, but it’s your article. [John Robert Colombo had said that “McLuhan and Frye are Canada’s Aristotle and Plato.  McLuhan is the scientist, and Frye the mystical theorist, with the eternal paradigms and everlasting forms” (qtd. by Kostelanetz, Three Canadian Geniuses, 131).]

Letter to Andrew Foley, 20 April 1976

. . . I think psychologists are now moving away from the Freudian metaphors about an unconsciousness buried below a conscious mind, and are thinking more in terms of the division in the brain between the hemisphere controlling a linear and verbal activity and the one that is more spatially oriented.  It seems to me that the most important aspect of McLuhan is his role in the development of this conception.

Letter to Fr. Walter Ong, December 1977

. . . I saw something of your student Patrick Hogan this year, but he left early.  I don’t know whether he was disappointed in what we did or didn’t do for him.  He was very keen, and one of his proposals was that he and Marshall and I should form a seminar to discuss Finnegans Wake, which hardly fitted my working schedule or, I should imagine, Marshall’s.

Letter to Barrington Nevitt, 20 September 1988

This is in connection with your letter about your proposed book on Marshall McLuhan.  I am sorry if I am unhelpful on this subject, but I doubt that I have anything very distinctive to say on the subject.  What I could say I said at the teacher’s awards meeting you referred to [Distinguished Teacher Awards, December 1987], but unfortunately I had no text for that talk.  I think I remember saying that Marshall was an extraordinary improviser in conversation, that he could take fire instantly from a chance remark, and that I have never known anyone to equal him on that score.  I also feel, whether I said it or not, that he was celebrated for the wrong reasons in the sixties, and then neglected for the wrong reasons later, so that a reassessment of his work and its value is badly needed.  I think what I chiefly learned from him, as an influence on me, was the role of discontinuity in communication, which he was one of the first people to understand the significance of.  Beyond that, I am afraid I am not much use.

McLuhan’s “flush-profile” review of Frye

As detailed in Dating McLuhan’s “flush-profile” review of Frye, this unpublished review of Anatomy of Criticism, probably written by McLuhan in the fall of 1958, has been discussed by Philip Marchand in his bio, in a post at the Frye blog, The Educated Imagination (in which Marchand’s treatment is cited at some length), and by Bruce Elder1 in an extended footnote to his comments on Barilli at New Explorations (since removed by the censors there). The first two agree that the paper amounts to a rather petty attack on Frye by a supposed UT English department rival. But the review is, in fact, an enthusiastic endorsement of Frye’s work by McLuhan, who had the hope that he and Frye together, through “a genuine chain reaction”, might inaugurate a new investigative approach, not only to literature and its criticism — but to all human experience.

If it is asked how such wildly mistaken readings could have arisen, the answer is that McLuhan’s review has been read in various settings of the rear-view mirror, the RVM, and it has been found there to be both largely unintelligible and regrettable. There is a certain tension between these findings, of course. But the Marchand and Frye post discussions (relying on the recollections of the then grad student Frederick Flahiff) leave the matter there: the review is an obscure attack that reflects badly on McLuhan.

Elder engages with the review more extensively. His determination to find a setting of the RVM fitted to the task is explicit:

McLuhan highlights (…) the importance for the era of holistic (group) consciousness of the rhetorical understanding of communication.

However, Elder also has

electric media, with their holistic nisus, might help restore their original power to rhetorical devices.

Which is figure and which is ground? McLuhan’s answer, in Elder’s reading at any rate, was that “rhetorical devices” are ground:

Holistic (cosmic consciousness) should be understood through rhetoric, McLuhan avers.

Elder doesn’t say so outright, but his notion here may be that McLuhan allowed his concerns from the 1940s to contaminate his investigation of “electromagnetism”. Instead of probing the former through the latter, he probed the latter through the former. The charge is familiar from Jonathan Miller and others.

In his explanation of McLuhan’s purported averral that “holistic (cosmic consciousness) should be understood through rhetoric”, Elder begins by taking another look in the RVM: “McLuhan’s interest in rhetoric dates back to his university days and his dissertation (The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, 1942)”.2 It may be that Elder’s misdating of the “flush-profile” review to 1947 has to do with the connection he supposes of McLuhan’s thesis with it.

In any case, Elder unrolls the following series of observations regarding that thesis:

[McLuhan] treats grammar and rhetoric as positive expressions of a mentalité,3 while the [the?] dialectic, logic, he sees as menacing: logic rejects the patterns that are sown into the fabric of the world.4 Thus, in his unpublished commentary on Anatomy of Criticism, McLuhan essentially recommends that Frye pay heed to this topic.

Deploying paradigmatically and paying heed are two different things, of course, and Elder seems to water down his suggestion from the first to the second as he goes along. But it is exactly paradigmatic or archetypal deployment that is at stake both in Anatomy itself and in McLuhan’s review. So when Elder corrects the threefold trivial grounds of McLuhan’s thesis to a singularity (by running its grammar and rhetoric together as “a mentalité” and then rejecting the remaining art of dialectic as supposedly “menacing”), it is clear how and why earlier in his post he has asserted that “there is no bifurcation of reality, no ontological gap”. In a word, Elder’s reality is not a plural three, per McLuhan,5 requiring abysmal “bifurcations”, but a singular One, per the RVM setting employed by Elder, for which this is a, arguably the, favorite metaphysical cum nihilist move of all time.

“Let us rejoin the One”, writes McLuhan in ‘Nihilism Exposed’6, specifying the central urge of the gnostic persuasion, where ‘rejoin’ must be read both as a merger with the One (in a submission of our subjectivity) and as putting the One back together (in an assertion of our subjectivity). “Holistic (cosmic consciousness)” seems close at hand. 

Elder continues:

Discerning the meaning of the transformation of rhetoric from pre-Classical7 times to the early renaissance is the kernel8 from which McLuhan’s histoire de mentalités9 developed. We might conjecture that McLuhan, even in 1947, had a sense of the importance that study [of rhetoric] would come to have and was hoping that his University of Toronto colleague might come to share his interest. After all Anatomy of Criticism gave evidence that Frye had at least glimpsed the significance of new media and new ideas about language.10

Despite the non-sense in the penultimate sentence regarding McLuhan’s supposed “sense” of rhetoric (see the detailed consideration below), Elder’s last sentence is on the verge of coming to a fitting understanding of McLuhan’s review. The reading of it that follows here shows how he might have, not ended with that observation, but started from it.

***

McLuhan begins the review by noting:

It is natural for the literary man [ie, Frye]11 to underestimate the relevance of Professor Frye’s archetypal approach to literature.

The rest of the review is at work to show how this “quarrel” within Frye himself, the literary Frye vs Professor Frye12 — a quarrel reflected in Anatomy of Criticism — might be investigated and potentially resolved. First, the Janus-face of the backward looking literary Frye is specified:

For four centuries we have been conditioned by the printed word as snap-shot of the postures of the individual mind. Segmental analysis of all motion, mental and industrial, has long been for us the norm of education and of civilized life.13

In fundamental contrast, the other Janus-face of Frye, Professor Frye, can see, or almost see, not only how this “norm” is changing, but that this trans-formation is of enormous consequence:

These profiles or nuclear models of collective postures are not literary bon-bons for passive savoring but rather scientific data suited to the austere producer-oriented mind, data necessary to the public relations engineer and the shaper and ruler of societies.

Part of Frye and all of Flahiff may think that literary work relates to library carrels and obscure journals, but for McLuhan a great deal more is at stake — as it was for Plato in his various attempts to educate “the shaper and ruler of societies”. How this is now possible (when it was not for Plato and for the two and a half millennia after him) McLuhan then sets out in the truly wonderful sentence:

Like Sputnik they [these “nuclear models of collective postures”] have a hook in outer space whence they relay signals to us, blip calling unto blip in the universe of the pictorialized word.

The visual sounding “pictorialized word” (referring especially to comics and advertisements, but tending towards the ratio of the ‘pictorial’ eye and the ‘word’ ear) was used by McLuhan in the 1950s to mark, rather confusedly, a difference of the eye at that time in the Marconi era, from the eye of the visual book world in the Gutenberg era.

The fundamental point at stake is that our models of minding in regard to the interior landscape can now be as universal as our ‘models’ in chemistry and physics in regard to the exterior landscape. Like satellites (enabled by those very ‘models’ in chemistry and physics), such ‘universals’ see the entire world. If we are to survive, it was McLuhan’s contention, we must investigate and otherwise subject ourselves to the “signals” which such models “relay to us” — as MRI images (say) signal information to us to which we gladly and profitably subject ourselves: “blip calling unto blip”.14

The universality of these models is, like chemistry or physics, applicable to any place or time:

It is natural15, therefore, that Professor Frye should have betaken himself to the anthropologist and to the folklorist for his profiles of literature16. (…) For the characteristic mode of learning and knowing since the telegraph offers a pattern of instantaneous inter-cultural x-ray, very different from the enclosed spaces of literature. (…)

The one Frye is

a literary man describing a people past or present [who] adopts a slant, a point of view. He selects. He structures his image with syntactical bonds of perspective in the style of Hume…

The other Frye, however, Professor Frye, is capable of “statement without syntax”:

Not the personal point of view, nor the partiality of perspective and self-expression, but the catalyst role of the non-personal  chemical medium…17

This “non-personal chemical medium” is

A bedouin’s rug of timeless patterns which include all possible arrangements of human experience…

And it “is indispensable equipment today” when our news and entertainment have assumed the role of being “the shaper and ruler of societies” and when humans guided by them have thrown their own survival into doubt.

The two Fryes with their Janus-faces looking in different directions are summed up in a single paragraph as follows:

Seen from the split-level18 picture-window House of Archetypes, the receding world of Western literature may look [to the Gutenbergian literary Frye] appallingly like a silent movie on a late TV show. But for those who recognize the importance of aligning all education with the dynamics of the new mass media, the deft and decent burial of literature provided by [the Marconian Frye in some aspects of] the Anatomy of Criticism will come as an exhilarating climax to the slower-paced preliminaries of the literary centuries.

It is at this point in the review when McLuhan enters into his concluding paragraph that Elder’s reading goes off the rails, leading him to mis-take the review and, in fact, to reveal his misunderstanding of McLuhan’s work as a whole.19 McLuhan begins the paragraph by stating that:

Professor Frye is not, perhaps, sufficiently cognizant of one major resource adjacent to his enterprise. The world of ancient and medieval rhetoric was vibrant with archetypes referred to as “the figures of rhetoric”.

As indeed noted by Elder, McLuhan immediately specifies:

These figures are, it is true, postures only of the individual mind which had become accessible to observation and control after phonetic writing. The written word arrested the mental and verbal flux of the fast-talking Mediterraneans and gave them the means of classifying hundreds of mental postures such as chiasmus, catachresis, and scatalogie.

But this remains an important technique in Anatomy! Or, better put, it is the technique of Anatomy as advanced by the literary or “humanistic” Frye. The Gutenbergian one. It is doubtless the “odor” of such “individual expression and eloquence”, the “pipe-line of natural gas from the farther shores of rhetoric”, that renders the book “uniquely opaque and almost unreadable”:

These figures or postures of the mind were like so many whales left immobilized amidst the shallows and sands of the written word. And in due time their odor began to be abroad in the land. Writing, however, as a means of capturing, or perhaps of fashioning, the postures of the individual mind [has missed the lesson of these reeking carcasses and therefore] has proved to be fatally committed to the fostering of individual expression and eloquence [just like them]. It is flawed by preference for the humanistic…

This obtuse Frye, says McLuhan, should go to school from “Professor Frye”:

a scientific [not “humanistic”] enterprise such as that of [the Marconian] Professor Frye (…) has secured a vehicle which by-passes all rhetorical expression of this personal type, and makes possible the deploying of the total resources of [all time from] pre-literate culture on to the Madison Avenue testing ground. This in turn will greatly hasten the mopping up of [the Gutenbergian Frye’s] remnants of private awareness and expression such as now give a confused and unsettled character to the literary and educational scene [as instanced both in Anatomy and in the grad student panel discussing it]. So that what has here begun as a momentary flush-profile of literary profiles [in one side of Anatomy of Criticism] will develop [better: flip or “blip”] into a genuine chain reaction [of its other scientific side, propagating to McLuhan’s work and then beyond the two into a whole new field of analysis], and the remnants of a decadent form of personal expression [in the obtuse Frye and the whole “mechanical” world he instances] can be dispatched down the drain.

The “major resource” of “the world of ancient and medieval rhetoric (…) vibrant with archetypes” could and should show both Fryes where his Gutenbergian Janus-face, “vibrant with [its] archetypes”, has gone fundamentally wrong.20 But getting down to fundamentals is a major achievement, regardless of Frye’s Janus-faced ambiguities, since through his work a way appears that “makes possible [at last] the deploying of [mankind’s] total resources of [all time from] pre-literate culture on to the Madison Avenue testing ground”. This would constitute “a bedouin’s rug of timeless patterns which include all possible arrangements of human experience”, hence a “non-personal chemical medium” in which the abysmal problems of the present would be subject to the sort of unforeseeable solutions as revealed themselves after those other media revolutions of literacy and of print. And — especially — after that revolutionary “pattern recognition” of the elementary structure of the “chemical medium” that took place leading up to Mendeleev’s table in 1869.

  1. For further on Elder, see Comments on Elder’s comments on Barilli. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s thesis did not have the title, The Classical Trivium, of course, and while it may have been largely composed in 1942, it was submitted in April 1943 and approved in December 1943. ↩
  3. Is this an objective genitive? So that the aforesaid mentalité is an expression of “grammar and rhetoric” together? Or is it a subjective genitive? So that “grammar and rhetoric” are “positive expressions” generated by that mentalité? The plural “positive expressions” would seem to indicate the latter. In this case, however, “rhetorical devices” would no longer be ground, but figures with a deeper ground in this mentalité. What, then, would be its ground? An endless regress seems to open up before us here… ↩
  4. This assertion could hardly be more mistaken. See Pre-Christian Logos for McLuhan’s life-long appreciative treatment of the different facets of the Logos. Contra Elder, for McLuhan and, indeed, for traditions as old as history itself, the word was — or is — “the fabric of the world”. ↩
  5. See Ignatov on Maritain on Bergson 1 for discussion of this point. ↩
  6. Renascence 8.2, 1955, 97-99. ↩
  7. Against the use of “pre-Classical” here, Elder himself correctly notes: “McLuhan acknowledges that the humanistic study of rhetorical figures developed only after written language and private modes of thinking had developed.” The specification of “pre-Classical times” is therefore mistaken both in regard to rhetoric and in regard to the development traced in the thesis. Only in The Gutenberg Galaxy, twenty years later, did McLuhan consider “pre-Classical times” and not in terms of their rhetoric. ↩
  8. Note the singular! ↩
  9. As suggested above in note 2, the question of the ground of mentalité (now mushroomed to mentalités) threatens an endless regress for which the number one cure has always been the conjuring of some or other unregressable One. “The kernel”! ↩
  10. Brackets have been removed from Elder’s comments to forestall any question of where editorial interjections have been made here. ↩
  11. Behind Frye, McLuhan intended the whole Gutenberg galaxy including Flahiff and his fellow grad student panelists, the University of Toronto and a world determined to end itself (in a subliminal quest for the One). Flahiff is included in the assemblage almost by name: “the run-of-the-mill graduate student”, one of the “keen spirits in the post-literate age of conformity and of global stereotypes” who “does not understand Professor Frye. (All) he (Flahiff) knows (is) that Frye is ‘with it’ and that group participation or togetherness in the aura of such leadership is far more satisfying than private interpretation” (thus exemplifying the point at stake even while mis-taking it at the same time). Note the required sequence: unconscious conformity > “private interpretation” > “the austere producer-oriented mind” that is no longer unconsciously conformist nor private. ↩
  12. Throughout the review, McLuhan uses “Professor Frye” to designate Frye’s forward looking Janus-face, the one expressing “not the personal point of view, nor the partiality of perspective and self-expression”. ↩
  13. Flahiff’s mind as “run-of-the-mill” here receives further specification as a “mental and industrial” setting. ↩
  14. See the post of this name forthcoming at New Sciences. One reading of the phrase “blip calling unto blip” is ‘bit by bit’ which is, of course, the very ground of the digital world, enabling things like satellites and the communications we have with and through them. ↩
  15. McLuhan also uses the word ‘natural’ in his review in the phrase “natural bias”. The great point is that assessment, while never without bias, yet has a “natural” inclination, or “bias”, to truth. The sciences would seem to demonstrate this point conclusively and obviously, but many, apparently including Elder, don’t get it: “McLuhan was convinced that perception, thought (conception), and language relied on a divine dispensation to humanity that ensured there is a relation of some sort between signs, ideas, and reality.” Not “divine dispensation”, that stupid idea of our grandparents and their grandparents going back forever, but, says Elder, it is “the holism of the theory of electromagnetism (that) guarantees thought and spatial reality will be related”. Really? Is this really what celebrated folks have come to cogitate and to teach our children? Have we come to this? Our theory is the guarantee of a “relation of some sort between signs, ideas, and reality”? ↩
  16. The whole point at stake for McLuhan in regard to Anatomy is the turn, or not, from “profiles of literature” as a subjective genitive to “profiles of literature” as an objective genitive! Not lit as the organizing centre (ultimately of nothing) but lit as an organized margin (amongst everything). ↩
  17. Elsewhere McLuhan retracts the secondary characterization of media as a “catalyst”. What he had in mind here is that while media do not determine us (exactly because they are plural), they are yet determinative once installed. This determinative but not determining function might well be described as “catalytic”. ↩
  18. As McLuhan discusses in Nihilism Exposed, it is the “dissociation of sensibility” as manifested in a manifold of different “split” conditions that eventuates in an “annihilation pattern” — an “annihilation pattern” that would remedy any given split by ‘taking sides’ with One of its sides. This all-too-real “annihilation pattern” is exactly an unquenchable — except in annihilation — thirst for the One. McLuhan: “in the new age of technology when all human arrangements from the cradle to the grave have taken on the hasty extravaganza aspect of a Hollywood set, the nihilist philosophies of neo-Platonism and gnosticism have come into their own. Existence is an empty machine, a cheap art work, they have always said. The soul is a shabby mechanism, the body a monstrous one. (…) And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: “I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. ‘Let us rejoin the One’.” ↩
  19. Elder: “McLuhan highlights, by way of contrast with the (the!) discursive or propositional conception of language, the importance for the era of holistic — group — consciousness of the (the!) rhetorical understanding of communication”. Yikes! ↩
  20. Not Elder’s — gone right! ↩

Comments on Elder’s comments on Barilli 2

For all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past. . . . If there be any suspicion, that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. (Hume’s 1748 Enquiry as cited by Elder in his comments on Barilli)

Strangely, Elder seems to have missed how the observation from Hume cited by him exactly captures the working of McLuhan’s RVM, the rear-view mirror. Recourse to it presupposes “as foundation, that the future will resemble the past”.

In one important respect, however, the future will really be like the past, namely, that the two will be entirely different after a media revolution like those of the institution of literacy in Athens or of print two millennia later in Europe. In such cases, our understanding of “the course of nature may change, and [we will find] that the past may be no rule for the future, [for] all [past] experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion” about anything at all in a new media environment (including about our own selves and everything we hold dear).

Elder nevertheless puts forward the hope that refinement of the RVM can reveal what McLuhan was up to. “A little more background will help us appreciate the richness of Barilli’s commentary on McLuhan’s notion of holism and its parallels with Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics.”

Against this it must be said that what McLuhan was trying to indicate cannot be seen!  By definition!  For through the sort of revolution he foresaw, as illustrated by past Gestalt-switch events like the advents of literacy and printing, “all experience [of the preceding type] becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion” about the new world now dis-closed.1 This was the great point detailed by Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato which McLuhan championed from the moment it appeared in 1963 (as acknowledged and much appreciated by Havelock). McLuhan did so exactly because it revealed the sort of change 2500 years ago that he saw as both possible and necessary today. His own Gutenberg Galaxy had the same impulse. The unrealized hope was that pointing out revolutionary Gestalt-switch in the past might help its recognition in the present. Mais au contraire!

What is at stake in McLuhan (namely, the medium that is the message) is necessarily unknown, partly because it cannot appear in the RVM at all (when the RVM is all we have absent originary insight!) and partly because, when it “paradoxically” is seen, at last, through and behind the RVM, its nature will then forever be subject to scientific investigation. Only consider the dis-covery of the chemical element by Lavoisier and Priestley. Their breakthrough into a whole new world was astonishing. But what did they know of it? What could they know of it? So it is with us in face of McLuhan’s not unrelated demand (above all to himself) that “the medium is the message”. It is both presently almost entirely unknown and forever subject to future revision (whatever it is).

What McLuhan was attempting to indicate is itself necessarily subject to what he called the “paradox” of sudden awareness — and all appreciable awareness is sudden! We always and only experience through Aristotle’s “opposite form”, aka the RVM: “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”.2 This is why, as McLuhan endlessly repeated, breakthrough absolutely depends upon breakdown. No breakdown, no breakthrough.

Now, as broached above, one of the aims of Elder’s comments on Barilli is to flesh out Barilli’s view that McLuhan’s achievement may be illuminated by the study of Kant as its background. So Elder would further illuminate Kant, in turn, by study of his background, particularly in Hume. But this is to revert to the RVM in two different ways. First, McLuhan is located against what we know or, at least, what we can and should know — as if his suggestions were intended as contributions to ‘normal science’. Second, this linear and progressive view with its focal objects like ‘Hume’ and ‘Kant’, even ‘Wolff’, is itself an instance of the Gutenberg galaxy whose idea of the ‘past’ in these senses has, according to McLuhan, ‘passed’ away.

Refinement of the RVM not only won’t work, it is counter-productive! (Hence McLuhan’s turn away from explanatory prose to something like comedy.)

If we are to approach McLuhan as a consequential thinker, indeed if we are to approach Hume and Kant as consequential thinkers, we need to do so subject to the proviso that they inform us, not we them. They can’t be put to use! Applying such a method won’t work for McLuhan — but it also won’t work for Hume and Kant! The entire procedure breaks down.3

Here, again, background is helpful only as something to be broken through, as forty or fifty years of McLuhan ‘scholarship’ amply reveals — negatively. He wanted to dis-cover a new mode of investigation into the entirety of human experience. In determined opposition, the McLuhan industry, supported by many $millions a year in Canada alone, will have anything but that — for it would require a break with the established (ie, ‘passed on’) past in which one’s reputation, identity and understanding are firmly anchored. 

In McLuhan’s view, there is no such thing as, say, ‘Kant’. This is the alchemical green dragon. Instead ‘Kant’ is like an immensely complicated chemical solution with (eg) propylene glycol (CH3CH(OH)CH2OH) suspended in it. It is impossible to get anywhere at all with such an identification until you understand C and H and O — and to do that, you have to understand the elements and how they work: “the medium is the message”.4 

If we are to survive what McLuhan approvingly cited from Sheila Watson, “the intrusion of the mechanical foot into the electric desert”,5 it will be only because we have learned to understand at last: (a) how everything we currently experience, from our own identity to world issues threatening nuclear war, are subliminal effects of as yet imprecisely known media structures — effects which are insuperable as unknown, but optional once dis-covered and investigated:

All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, ‘Recommendations’, 1960)

(b) that we do not have to know definitively how to specify these media structures prior to initiating research into them. Rather, just what such media are and how they operate is exactly the central question of the proposed investigations. Therefore McLuhan’s emphatic remark in 1959 to Harry Skornia in the course of his NAEB project to research new media: “We can’t assume that we understand media already!” And therefore as well his constant admonition: “Organize the ignorance!”

Did Priestley and Lavoisier understand chemical elements? Mostly not. But they understood enough to spark a change in our investigation of physical nature — the exterior landscape — through which the world has been utterly revolutionized. Between 1800 and 2020 the entire world has been through a kind of worm hole which has left almost nothing the same. And yet the chemistry through which much of this change has come about is just as applicable to materials from a million years ago as it is to materials today. Everything has changed and nothing has changed.

The “survival strategy” urged by McLuhan turns on the notion that the interior landscape is subject to a comparable revolutionary change in investigation, one that has already been deployed so to say objectively (especially in the development and use of mass media, ironically enough), but has not yet been deployed subjectively in investigations of the interior landscape. Civilization and perhaps the species as a whole will survive, in his view, only through a  revolution in our knowledge of human being (dual genitive!) where we finally apply what we already know to what we already experience — but have somehow failed so far to activate.

 

  1. It may be that McLuhan should be seen as giving the opposite answer to Hume as did Kant. Namely, that Hume was exactly right in an Enquiry passage cited by Elder in asserting that “the first imagination or invention of a particular effect, in all natural operations, is arbitrary, where we consult not experience”. What was needed to account for scientific law from here was only Kuhn’s distinction between revolutionary and normal science. The former is “arbitrary”, while it is exactly the role of the latter to weave such arbitrary insight back into our accepted experience. Nearly all existing readings of McLuhan, it may be noted, have silently assumed the second function, which amounts to taking him exclusively as he appears in this or that RVM. Understandably, the idea that he might have been an original thinker has not occurred to those who are not original thinkers themselves and have no idea that such thinkers even exist — nor, naturally, how they might be recognized if they did exist. ↩
  2. See Comments on Elder’s comments on Barilli for reference and discussion. ↩
  3. There is one aspect of a study of figures like Hume and Kant that is indeed helpful to an understanding of someone like McLuhan. Namely, experience in subjecting oneself to the originary insight of any thinker at all reveals, or can reveal, the subjection demanded in regard to any other. ‘Subjection’ is such a case is not sycophancy, but the putting in play one’s subjectivity or identity sufficiently to experience beyond one’s existing capability. ↩
  4. It is well to remember that such understanding of the physical world is less than two centuries old. Propylene glycol, for example, was first synthesized in 1859. ↩
  5. Given in the last paragraph of ‘My Friend Wyndham Lewis’, Atlantic Monthly, December 1969. ↩

Maritain on Phelan

In his Foreword to the 1958 reissue of his Degrees of Knowledge (orig 1932) Jacques Maritain wrote the following tribute to Gerald Phelan:

I am happy to extend my very special gratitude to the captain of the [translation] team, Dr. Gerald B. Phelan, who directed, supervised and revised the whole work. I deeply appreciate the great testimony he bore to our long and affectionate collaboration in spending thus so much of his time for my book’s sake, and allowing this new translation to profit not only by his mastery of the subject matter but also by his mastery of the French and English languages. I avail myself of the present opportunity to pay my tribute of loving gratitude to this incomparable friend. When I first came to this continent, some twenty-five years ago, it was because, in his capacity as President of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies, he had invited me to give a series of lectures. I was immediately captivated by the eminent qualities of his mind and the charity of his heart and by the way in which were united in him love for truth and philosophical wisdom, in all their objectivity, and evangelic love of one’s neighbour. This was the beginning of an intellectual fellowship which has been especially dear to me. And from that time on, I cannot count the proofs of steadfast support and generous cooperation I have received from him. The last, and not the least, is the present translation.

 

 

Comments on Elder’s comments on Barilli

Elder’s comments on Barilli (since censored out of existence) at New Explorations immediately raise noteworthy difficulties.

First and foremost, when gaps are to be removed or solved or declared absent from McLuhan’s thought, we are no longer dealing with McLuhan. “There is no bifurcation of reality, no ontological gap”, writes Elder. “The barrier, the gap, the hiatus that exists between the two poles [of subject and object or word and thing], denying any possibility of communication (…) was the main feature of all modern philosophical positions as they anxiously awaited an audacious solution that would be able to bypass the obstacle”, writes Barilli, thumbing his notice at Hegel, but presumably pointing to McLuhan’s great gap-obviating contribution.

But McLuhan insisted that “gaps are where the action is” (not least to the Ontario Dental Association), and it or its equivalents featured prominently in his work and were meant very seriously. And this for a series of reasons (quite aside from the fact that the man was a Catholic convert for whom the dead God on the cross symbolized, or was, the condition of a definitively gapped reality).

Creativity, beginning with the infant’s learning of language, does not take place through x number of steps of linear sequence to produce “matching” (by conquering the gap), but through a “paradox” resulting in “making” (on the basis of the gap):

The basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, 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”.1

Shortly put, no gap, no paradox. And if no paradox, no language and no creativity. (Hence McLuhan’s full agreement with Hume, as cited by Elder, in the supposed obstacle that “the first imagination or invention of a particular effect, in all natural operations, is arbitrary” — but not for that reason, for McLuhan at least, necessarily false or unaccountable!)

Furthermore, what gives for McLuhan the unique revelatory power of the electric form (which Barilli and Elder decidedly want to celebrate, if not apotheosize) is exactly its ineluctable gap between negative and positive poles in electricity and magnetism which, generalized, became the ineluctable gap between yes/no gates and 0/1 binary digits in computers and other computing machines.

But this did not mean previous thought was thereby overcome (as though McLuhan or anyone else could out-Kant Kant, or out-Plato Plato). Instead it meant that the same sort of value free analysis as chemistry can make of materials at any time anywhere could now be made (if McLuhan were right) of all experience anywhere anytime. As Elder himself cites McLuhan in his extended discussion in this same Barilli post of McLuhan’s unpublished review of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism:

A bedouin’s rug of timeless patterns which include all possible arrangements of human experience is indispensable equipment today.

Right or wrong was not the issue; the issue was how to approach “all possible arrangements of human experience” in a new medium such that collective investigation became possible — with, it was McLuhan’s great hope, the same sort of revolutionary insights and solutions as followed upon those other media revolutions — the instigation of literacy in Athens 2500 ago and again after printing 500 years ago. And — especially — after that revolutionary “pattern recognition” of the elementary structure of the “chemical medium” that took place leading up to Mendeleev’s table in 1869.

Moreover, the key to understanding space, time and media was exactly to understand their inherent plurality and, therefore, the “bifurcation” or “ontological gap” between (!) their instances. “Understanding media”, in particular, posed the problem of this plurality and of its gaping borders (since media cannot be separated and differentiated by media), for here the spectrum of medial gaps was itself gapped.

Finally, McLuhan recognized what might be termed existential gaps. Here he is in his Nina Sutton interview with Barbara Rowes sitting in:

BR: What is the fascination with identity ?
MM: Because it’s gone [under electric conditions]. You are always aware of the thing that’s disappeared. It’s a gap. It’s like a lost tooth, an aching void — you feel it all the time.

In a word, gaps, plural, are what are to be understood in understanding media. They are McLuhan’s topic. They are his one thought, as Heidegger might put it.

The other great difficulty posed by Elder and Barilli is what seems for all the world to be a far too one-sided evaluation of the electric form and electric environment,2

] despite the unique dangers they pose (of which McLuhan was well aware early on). It may be that enthusiastic assessment is where Prof de Kerckhove gets his notion of the saving power of digital ID. In any case, however the electric may have solved various problems, it has also created more of its own and more ominous ones to boot. Forgetting this means to overlook the up-down dynamic of Heraclitus’ way of which McLuhan’s tetrads are a modern iteration. For humans there is no up that does not implicate an ever-present down and this gapped-gaping-chaotic3 implication is — the medium that is the message.

  1. From Cliché to Archetype, 160. The passage from Aristotle used by Thomas is cited by McLuhan in Latin in ‘The Medieval Environment’ from 1974 and appears as well in letters to Maritain and others. For discussion see The “magical” essence of communication. ↩
  2. Berilli: “For where else do we find the force in which all the synthetic, holistic and structuralist principles of our age are based, if not in the electromagnetic field with all its features and laws? This is the unifying notion from which no one and nothing can be removed. In itself, holism might be considered a fallacious theoretical, quasi-mystical or religious concept. It might even provoke a degree of suspicion. Yet the notion of the electromagnetic field constitutes an indisputable, physical and material reality that immerses us all at every moment of our lives. This is the link, the ultimate warrant of our present unitary, structuralist condition”.  Elder: “Thinking is electric; spatial reality is electric. There is no bifurcation of reality, no ontological gap (…) The holism of the theory of electromagnetism guarantees thought and spatial reality will be related”. Further on Elder at McLuhan’s “flush-profile” review of Frye. ↩
  3. Cf, the shared etymology of gap-gape-chaos. ↩

Dating McLuhan’s “flush-profile” review of Frye

In his Comments on Renato Barilli (now censored out of existence) post at New Explorations, Bruce Elder has a long footnote (ditto) on McLuhan’s unpublished “flush-profile” review of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. In what is either a simple typo or a confusion of McLuhan’s published review of Frye’s Blake in 1947 with his unpublished review of Frye’s Anatomy a decade or more later, Elder gives 1947 as the date of the latter paper. Since Anatomy was published only in 1957, and since McLuhan mentions Sputnik (which launched in October 1957), the earliest possible date for the “flush-profile” review would be the last couple months of 1957.

As indicated by Elder, McLuhan’s review is reproduced along with a discussion of it in a post, Frye-McLuhan Rivalry?, at the Northrop Frye blog, The Educated Imagination. Philip Marchand is cited there from his McLuhan bio as dating the UT panel discussion on Anatomy, for which the paper is said to have been written, to “shortly after its publication”. Here again, then, the review would date to the last months of 1957 or, perhaps, to early in 1958. But Marchand gives no source for this dating and he goes on to cite Fred Flahiff concerning McLuhan’s paper as saying that Flahiff and McLuhan “went out and walked around and around Queen’s Park” discussing it. While this is not impossible in winter in Toronto, it is unlikely.

Absent other evidence, dating the paper must rely on its vocabulary and style. Tellingly, McLuhan notes in it that “Professor Frye has devised a kind of nomadic bookcase for the cosmic man of today who is inevitably a mental D.P.” The same image of “a mental D.P.” appears in a passage in McLuhan’s address to the NAEB Annual Convention in Omaha in October, 1958, ‘Culture Is Our Business: The meaning of the new electronic media’.1 In his address McLuhan observed:

One of the great problems in pedagogy, I think, is a kind of process of translation from one culture to another culture that we are undergoing; and an extensive medium revolution, such as the electronic one, turns us all into mental DP’s. We are all displaced persons today, whether we like it or not; and we are all confronted with huge undeveloped countries of the mind where we hardly know what to do first.

Since the image of our being displaced persons is very rare2 in McLuhan’s work,3 this would provisionally date his “flush-profile” review to 1958, probably in the early fall when the university was just back in session, at the same time as McLuhan was drafting notes for his NAEB convention address in October.4

  1. Published in the NAEB Journal, Volume 18:3, December 1958, 3-5 and 30-4. ↩
  2. The topic of displacement, on the other hand, could be said to be all that McLuhan ever talked about. The Gutenberg Galaxy gives its history, Understanding Media and Take Today its present objective and subjective applications. ↩
  3. It appears also in Take Today, 276: “The rich man becomes the displaced person” — written more than a decade after his NAEB convention address, at a time, admittedly, when the tone of the “flush-profile” review was more common than it was earlier. ↩
  4. Flahiff’s dates in Toronto supply some confirmation to this supposition. From his obituary, it appears that he was a grad student at UT in the late 1950s before beginning his teaching career in Saskatoon in 1960. In Marchand’s recounting of the incident, “a panel of graduate English students was organized by the Graduate English Association at the University of Toronto to discuss Frye’s book shortly after its publication.  One of the panellists (was) Frederick Flahiff”. It seems certain, then, that the review was written at the end of the 1950s, following publication of Frye’s book in 1957 and before Flahiff graduated to begin teaching in 1960. The strange behavior of McLuhan reported by Flahiff, it should be noted, was that observed by a grad student who was bolted to his RVM and determined to report of Frye — and McLuhan — only what he saw in it. That McLuhan might have been trying to spark revolutionary insight in his bean, and through it perhaps also in the beans of the other panelists and their audience, never occurred to Flahiff then or later. This is the McLuhan we have ever since: an odd guy ‘researched’ by folks who know better. ↩

McLuhan at the crossroads

In 1953 McLuhan, now in his 40s, was turning from the literary views that had defined his way for the previous two decades to a new way that would remain indistinct and tentative for most of the remainder of the decade.1 Here he is in letters that year to Wyndham Lewis:

For Shenandoah magazine Lewis number I’ve attempted to present your Theory of Art and Communication. Mainly in your own words. Only in the past year have I become fully aware of the reality of the secret societies in the arts, philosophy and politics. Your own work has consequently taken on a much different significance for me. (April 15, 1953, Letters 236)

Re-reading Snooty [Baronet] (1922) recently I realized my own situation is not unlike his (…) The range and character of the “cultic twalette” has just dawned on me in the past year. Like Snooty I’m trying to get my bearings. (July 14, 1953, Letters 239)

As for my book. It owes much to you of course. But it was so long in the publishing (6 years) that I had lost interest in its approach before it appeared. Now I see that I was trying to prop up the standards of book culture when we have passed out of the Gutenberg era. (December 9, 1953, Letters 241)

As an indicator of that new way, first of all to himself — “trying to get my bearings” — he twice over in 1953 cited the same passage, word for word, from G. Rachel Levy’s Gate of Horn, once in ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’ and again in ‘Maritain on Art‘:

Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis. The relation of created things to the “‘pattern laid up in heaven” is, as we saw, that methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis, the “imitation” by which the living world was built upon the Pythagorean numbers. Thus the relationship created by earliest man, and the means of his growth as already described; the vehicle of the first-known religion is now made articulate. The wheel has come full-circle.2

McLuhan’s work for the whole remainder of his career is captured here in nuce.  But it would take McLuhan himself years and sometimes decades to realize these implications.

To “Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis” compare McLuhan almost 10 years later at the end of his 1961 ‘Humanities in the Electronic Age’:

The ideal Marriage of Mercury and Philology, of spiritual values and perfected method, will be consummated, if ever, in the electronic age.

What Plato’s “gigantic effort” had been unable to accomplish — even with Aristotle’s further specification of the dynamic “methexis or participation” of the forms (the “pattern laid up in heaven”) in constituting “the living world”  — might now “in the electronic age”, at last, be realized or “consummated”.

The notion at stake is just that of chemistry or genetics where a “pattern laid up in heaven” (the elements in the first, the DNA structure of genes in the second) expresses itself dynamically in and as “the living world”. There is, of course, a fundamental difference between such structures and the physical materials they constitute (even when they are of utmost purity), but the two levels, while maintaining their distinction, are one in any given sample. The answer to the question, ‘what is this?’, must always be given in terms of those elementary structures, but is always also some particular expression of them. Theory and instance are never simply identical, but each mirrors the other in a re-flection that is essential. First starting in 1958, McLuhan would term the necessity of this sort of specification, “the medium is the message”.3

Inherent to this idea even in Plato and Aristotle was a “multilevel” approach. Only so could focus be directed to “methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis“. These are all terms or actions which seek to explicate how differences like form and matter or experience and world are dynamically inter-related and so mediated. No such multilevel approach, no possibility of insight into the medium as focal message. In fact, McLuhan seems to have come to the former multilevel approach before the latter medium as message insight and arguably to the latter only by way of the former. Here he is some years before his insistence, beginning in 1958, that “the medium is the message”:

anybody can test for himself the fact that sixteenth-century prose [like that of Nashe, McLuhan’s PhD thesis subject from 12 years before] still retains many of the rapidly shifting perspectives of multiple levels of tone and meaning which characterize group speech. It took two centuries of print to create prose on the page which maintained the tone and perspective of a single speaker. (Historical Approach to the Media, 1955)

Oral disputation and multi-level comment on texts were the natural result of oral teaching. Multi-level awareness of linguistic phenomena and of audience structure held up during print’s first century [eg, with Nashe], but swiftly declined thereafter, since the speedy linear flow of printed language encouraged single perspective in word use and word study. (The Effect of the Printed Book on Language, Explorations 7, 1957)

McLuhan would incessantly insist on “multi-level awareness” in his writings after 1960, particularly (after reading Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964)4 in terms of figure and ground. But he became aware of the fundamental importance of this awareness5 only when he began to explore the differences between orality and literacy in the 1950s. 

Another implication of the Levy citation, one that McLuhan would broach in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ piece for Canadian Art Magazine, and then endlessly repeat, was the return to the paleolithic, to Levy’s “wheel [that] has come full-circle” back to “earliest man, and (…) the first-known religion”:

When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomad state. We have become like the most primitive paleolithic man, once more a global information-gatherer instead of a food-gatherer. The source of man’s food, and wealth, and daily life from now on, is just information.6

Finally, the most important implication of Levy’s passage, one that McLuhan himself did not see clearly until the 1970s, was the plurality of time. Levy indicates at least three different workings of time: 1) the linear “effort to establish” intellectual clarification on some newly specified “basis” — “the means of (…) growth”; 2) the synchronic or simultaneous working of that ‘new’ basis via “methexis, or participation” “by which the living world [is] built”; 3) the revolutionary time-flip or “paradox” through which (1) culminates in recognition both of itself and of the oldest of the old as constituted by way of (2) — “the relationship created by earliest man, and the means of his growth [up to the present insight] (…) is now7 made articulate. The wheel has come full-circle.” The linear finds itself in the synchonic:

And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, v)8  

 

  1. McLuhan’s way can therefore roughly be put as 20 years spent as a literary theorist (1930 to 1950, age 20 to 40), 10 years spent in transition from literary theory in search of a new ground and discipline (1950 to 1960, age 40 to 50), and 20 years again as an investigator of — dual genitive — the electric, 1960 to 1980, age 50 to 70. ↩
  2. Parts of this passage from Levy were actually cited twice in McLuhan’s 1953 Lewis essay — for a total of three times that year. In doing so, he was saying to himself something like: “get this into your head and figure it out not for Plato’s 400 BC, but for now!” ↩
  3. Although it would be absurd to insist that color or smell must be considered along with the elements in specifying physical materials, champions and foes of McLuhan have never ceased insisting that the message must be considered along with the medium in some way. One of the chief things the intelligibility sought by McLuhan had to explain as a “survival strategy” was this universal obtuseness. ↩
  4. See McLuhan’s letter to Bascom St John, July 10, 1964, Letters 306. He had earlier reported reading Köhler to Harry Skornia in an unpublished letter. ↩
  5. As opposed to practising it, which he had done forever. ↩
  6. McLuhan continues ‘Prospect’ as follows: “The transforming of this information into usable products is now an automation problem, a thing no longer calling for the utmost division of human labour and skill. Automation no longer calls for personnel. This terrifies mechanical man because he does not know what to do about the transition that is taking place.” This was a “transition” McLuhan himself had made in the preceding decade, presumably not without its accompanying ‘terrors’. Here was a reason, namely a lack of courage and perseverance in the face of such “terrors”, along with constitutional intellectual limitations, practical concerns with one’s position in every sense and the workings of Kuhn’s ‘normal science’, that might account for the universal obtuseness noted above. ↩
  7. When is this ‘now’? It is the moment when linear insight ‘paradoxically’ finds simultaneous “basis”. ‘At the same time’, however, this is no satori flash of supreme illumination. Instead it is the initiation of investigation on a ‘timeless’ basis that will not only exercise that basis but also subject it to question. As Kuhn has detailed, the working of ‘normal science’ culminates in a revolution through which its previous ‘basis’ is overthrown — the timeless becomes subject to time. ↩
  8. Eliot, and particularly Four Quartets, was one of the central texts giving orientation to McLuhan’s way. Hugh Kenner has reported McLuhan’s fascination with it in the late 1940s and some of McLuhan’s last published work focused on it thirty years later. In McLuhan’s unpublished work, there seems to be more writing on Eliot than on anybody else. A constant background topic for him after 1950 or so was: what is the central difference between Eliot and Joyce and what does this difference implicate? ↩

The Art of Being Ruled (de Kerckhove 3)

Lewis conducts an elaborate survey of the art, entertainment, science, and philosophy of the contemporary Western world to determine what is going on. (193)1 

***

McLuhan’s appeal to the work of Wyndham Lewis was founded on Lewis’ critique of modernity, not on Lewis’ attempts to answer that critique. Ultimately, indeed, McLuhan saw Lewis as falling prey to the very trends Lewis specified so well.2 But the farsightedness and accuracy of Lewis’ critique from the 1920s, and arguably from a decade and more before in his Blast writings, together with McLuhan’s appreciation of that critique from the early 1940s, should not be gainsaid. They saw, defined and criticized matters then which de Kerckhove describes as the latest news now.

Consider, for example, de Kerckhove’s thoughts on the “digital twin” as compared to McLuhan in his 1944 essay from 75 years ago — citing Lewis from his 1926 pamphlet written 20 years before that:

The intensity of mass-control and exploitation is increased by the multiplication of superficial differences: “Thus, if a man can be made to feel himself acutely (a) an American; (b) a young American; (c) a middle-west young American; (d) a “radical and enlightened” middle-west young American; (e) a “college-educated” etc etc; (f) a “college-educated” dentist who is an etc etc; (g) college-educated’ dentist of such-and-such a school of dentistry, etc, etc, — the more inflexible each of these links is, the more powerful, naturally, is the chain. Or he can be locked into any of these compartments as though by magic by anyone understanding the wires.”3 (The Art of Being Ruled)

The stupendous value of the FAANG stocks records nothing else, of course, than their “understanding the wires”.

It goes without saying that spying has always gone on, as has the appreciation of customer taste by men and women, in the most ancient professions, and even by singers of tales. What was new in modern times was partly the efficiency of the means of gathering such information, but above all it was the specification of human life as having its meaning and worth in the terms of that information. For Lewis this meant that “the human being is no longer the unit”4 — a condition which McLuhan attributed to Lewis’ “dehumanizing forces of the Magnetic City”.5 The central concern of Lewis, and McLuhan in turn, was first of all to illuminate that and how this had happened — and then to investigate if the sleepers might wake.

Before computers, before the internet, before cookies, before AI, the twin through whom economic and political control could and would be exercised was already precisely identified. That we have nevertheless marched in lockstep into our present dystopia tells us everything we need to know about the “ideologic machine” as “teaching machine”: it tells us — who we are and what we are for.

***

Looking back from the late 1960s, entering his last decade of life, McLuhan described what he had received from Lewis:

In The Art of Being Ruled [Lewis] revealed the vast new Lumpenproletariat of the affluent who have since become so painfully obvious as the successors to the Marxist proletariat. In The Doom of Youth he explained the idiocy of the child cult long before Dr. Spock undertook to sponsor permissiveness. [In The Human Age, his last work, he presents the dehumanizing forces of the Magnetic City. He starts with the telegraph press and its power to generate cosmic political disturbances as a means of selling advertising copy. He concludes with TV and its power to alter the images of self-identity on a world-wide scale.]6 (…) Is it any wonder that his analysis of the political, domestic, and social effects of the new technological environments had a great deal to do with directing my attention to these events? (McLuhan, ‘My Friend Wyndham Lewis’, Atlantic Monthly, December 1969)

Two years earlier, McLuhan can be heard crediting Lewis with his interest in “the new technological environments” on a flexidisc recording included with the November 1967 issue of artscanada.7 Asked what influence Lewis had had on him, McLuhan answered:

Good Heavens — that’s where I got it! It was Lewis who put me on to all this study of the environment as an educational — as a teaching machine. To use our more recent terminology, Lewis was the person who showed me that the manmade environment was a teaching machine — a programmed teaching machine. Earlier, you see, the Symbolists had discovered that the work of art is a programmed teaching machine. It’s a mechanism for shaping sensibility. Well, Lewis simply extended this private art activity into the corporate activity of the whole society in making environments that basically were artifacts or works of art and that acted as teaching machines upon the whole population.8

***

In fact, even as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba, a full 35 years before the artscanada recording, years before he had ever read a line of Lewis, and before he was soon to encounter Leavis and Thompson’s Culture and Environment at Cambridge,9 McLuhan already perceived the larger social world as a “classroom without walls”. Here he is as an undergraduate in the UM student newspaper, The Manitoban:

It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day. (‘Public School Education’, October 17, 1933)

we lift up our eyes to the signboards whence cometh our help (‘Morticians and Cosmeticians’, March 2, 1934)

[Interviewer:] These men have enabled us to control nature. [Johnson:] Yes, sir, and it controls you. When men pride themselves on the mastery of a thing, they are the slaves of that thing. (‘An Interview with Dr Johnson’, March 16, 1934)

While McLuhan was greatly taken by the attempts in the Cambridge English school to investigate the structures of language as the key to understanding social life in general (hence his PhD thesis on the trivium as the backbone of western history from 400 BC to 1600 AD), his long-standing interest in the economic and political implications of the “classroom without walls” led him in the 1940s to the writings of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in which they addressed the whole social environment.

In 1944 McLuhan published an essay on Lewis, ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’, which he apparently wrote in some kind of consultation or even collaboration with Lewis.10 Here appeal to The Art of Being Ruled is made repeatedly:

men (…) no longer understand the world they have made and which, as robots, they operate day by day. Such is the situation into which Lewis shot his pamphlet breezily entitled The Art of Being Ruled.11 

The Art of Being Ruled is a study of the major dichotomy of modern life. There is the romanticized machine on one hand [with its] the vulgarized spawn of speculative science committed to perennial and ever-accelerated revolution.12 On the other hand are the traditional human and political values. (…) Against the pseudo-impersonality and supposed [ever-better] “drift of events”, Lewis asserts the prerogatives of human intelligence and control. He unmasks the long-preserved anonymity of supposedly unwilled and irresistible forces in modern life. The atomization of consciousness, the attack on the continuity of personal experience, whether by the medicine man of the laboratory or the dionysiac ecstasies of advertisement and high-finance, are alike shown to be the products of deliberate [contrivance].13 The worship of the dialectic of history or of the “dynamic aspect of reality” in Hegel, Marx, and Bergson has its natural corollary on the “practical” plane: “Dynamical, as the most ‘hurried’ of men is aware, means the bustle and rush of action — of Big Business, Armaments, Atlantic ‘hops’, Wall Street and Mussolini. A ‘dynamic personality’ means, in journalism, an iron-jawed oil-king in an eight-cylinder car, ripping along a new motor-road, with a hundred-million-dollar deal in a new line of poison-gas bombs blazing in his super-brain, his eye aflame with the lust of battle — of those battles in which others fight and die.”14

“Science is often described as the religion of industrialism. It is said to have provided man with ‘a new world-soul’. Its (…) function is actually (…) to conceal the human mind that manipulates it, or that manipulates through it (…) For in its impersonality and its ‘scientific detachment’15 it is an ideal cloak for the personal human will. Through it that will can operate with a godlike inscrutability that no other expedient can give. It enables man to operate as though he were nature on other men. In the name of science people can be almost without limit bamboozled and managed.”16 (The Art of Being Ruled) 

the modern state is necessarily an educationalist state owing to the huge impassivity of the urban masses on the one hand and to the closely centralized control of all agencies of  communication on the other…17 

Consider again how the press of the world imitates and promotes “scientific detachment” in its methods of “impersonal” news coverage. Yet nothing is more hysterically personal than “news” in its reflection of the human will. Time, Life and Fortune put up an enormous front of “detachment” which upon slight examination proves to be violently emotional and interested. (…) It is therefore, politically and humanly speaking, a matter of the utmost concern for us to know from what sources and by what means the rulers of the modern world determine what they will do next.  How do they determine the ends for which, as means, they employ the vast machines of government, education, and amusement?18 

[Lewis emphasizes] the pathological blindness of the modern world to anything but itself: “It is naturally, for itself, the best that has ever been — it is for it that the earth has laboured for so long”19 (The Art of Being Ruled)

“The Heir of all the Ages20…stands by the death-bed — penniless.”21 (The Art of Being Ruled)

“Finally, under the circumstances, it is able to do what no former society has been able to do. It is able to dispense with (…) art…”22 (The Art of Being Ruled)

Paradoxically, the machine has not stiffened but melted life. Mechanism has imposed universal fashions of primitivism. It has rendered all the conditions of experience so fluid and frothy that men now are swimming in another Flood: “It is because our lives are so attached to and involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in revolutionary terms”23 (…) “it is the first genuine philosophy of slaves that has ever been formulated … it consists in an exploitation of the joys of slavery and submission.”24 (The Art of Being Ruled)

“Science makes us strangers to ourselves. (…) It instills a principle of impersonality in the heart of life that is anti-vital. In its present vulgarized condition science represents simply the principle of destruction: it is more deadly than a thousand plagues, and every day we perfect it, or our popular industrially applied version of it.” (The Art of Being Ruled)25 

Modern man, philosophically committed and conditioned to sensation and its twin, action, is automatically manifesting the fruits of that philosophy [of slaves] in a multitude of ways. (…) The [supposed or imposed] constitution of created being guarantees modern man that in seeking sensation and thrills, all his acts will uniformly possess a character of accelerated imbecility: “(…) the religion of merging, or mesmeric engulfing”. 26

The answer then to the question of ‘cui bono‘ is ultimately this. Everybody loses. Society has been made into a machine (…) There are no beneficiaries. The Dagwoods and the billionaire power-gluttons are equally rushing to the suicide of total immersion in the chaos of matter.27  However, they are not equally responsible. There is moral accountability in the profound cynicism of the Hollywood tycoons and of the Hearsts and Henry Luces who toboggan us down to the lowest levels (and biggest profits) of What the Public Wants. But, as the “public” becomes more deeply bored with “what it wants” it turns not in wrath but with envy towards its tormentors. (…)28 Corruptio optimi pessima.29 “But with all the resources of his fabulous wealth, the democratic magnate is able to drag the poor into depths of spiritual poverty undreamed of by any former proletariat or former ruling class. The rich have achieved this awful brotherhood with the poor by bleeding them of all character, spirituality, and mental independence. That accomplished, they join them spiritually or unspiritually in the servant’s hall.” (The Art of Being Ruled) The exploited and the exploiter coalesce. Thus it comes about that the attack on the family, for example, which develops first (in the eighteenth century) as an attack on reason and the concept of authority, is conducted very thoroughly on the economic front as well. (…) The destruction of family life, in theory and in practice, the flight from adulthood, the obliteration of masculine and feminine has all gone ahead — by means of a glorification of those things. Never was sex so much glorified, children and motherhood so idolized and advertised in theory as at this present hour when the arrangements for their internment have been completed. 30  

Again, no plan or plot or super-brain is needed for the full inter-meshing and exfoliation of all these things to proceed through innumerable changes, and ever-increasing violence and intensity, to their natural term — the “dialectic” of matter31 itself guides the brutalized mind into the labyrinth.32 

What Lewis gave McLuhan were not answers but questions: if modern human beings were losing their social and individual lives, and were actually complicit in casting these away, how was this death process to be stopped and these irreplaceable treasures regained? Since these machinations were the effects of education — of the “classroom without walls” of “art, entertainment, science, and philosophy” — they could hardly be countered by these same means, at least as presently conceived and configured. What lever was there, then, that might be applied against the mad rush to war and more war and to potential oblivion?

  1. ‘Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput’, 1944, reprinted in The Medium and the Light, 178-197. All page references not otherwise identified are to this M&L version of McLuhan’s essay. ↩
  2. See especially ‘Nihilism Exposed‘, Renascence 8:2, 1955, 97-99. ↩
  3. 196. ↩
  4. Cited in ‘Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput’, 185, from Time and Western Man. ↩
  5. McLuhan’s June 1, 1969 letter to Robert Manning, Letters 374. ↩
  6. The bracketed sentences here appeared in the original version of this paragraph in McLuhan’s June 1, 1969 letter to Robert Manning, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, in which he proposed his essay on Lewis for the magazine. Letters 374. But in the published version of this same paragraph these sentences were omitted. ↩
  7. A special issue on Lewis edited by Sheila Watson. ↩
  8. Transcription and recording link from http://answick.blogspot.com/2010/05/marshall-mcluhan-on-wyndham-lewis.html. See also Andrew McLuhan’s post: https://inscriptorium.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/mechanisms-for-shaping-sensibility/ ↩
  9. In his interview with Nina Sutton, McLuhan specifically credited Culture and Environment as an important milestone on his way. It combined all his interests: literary analysis, concern for tradition, environmental education and the manufacture of culture through business and entertainment. ↩
  10. McLuhan to Robert Manning, June 1, 1969, Letters 374: “I enclose a wee essay (‘Lemuel in Lilliput’) I wrote on Lewis years ago when he was visiting us in St . Louis.” ↩
  11. 182. ↩
  12. ‘Revolution’, ‘managerial revolution’, ‘revolutionary terms’, etc, are used in McLuhan’s essay to designate change as desirable in itself, change as both necessary and as necessarily good. ↩
  13. McLuhan: “of deliberate will”. ↩
  14. 184-185 citing Time and Western Man. ↩
  15. The typo “scientific attachment” here was already present in the 1944 printing of McLuhan’s essay and was not corrected for the Medium and the Light version. ↩
  16. 187. ↩
  17. 187n20. ↩
  18. 188. ↩
  19. 191-192n26. ↩
  20. Lewis facetiously cites Tennyson’s Locksley Hall (1835) here: “The heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time”. ↩
  21. 186. ↩
  22. 192n26. ↩
  23. See note 12 above. ↩
  24. 192. ↩
  25. 192-193. ↩
  26. 194 citing Time and Western Man. ↩
  27. By “the chaos of matter” McLuhan does not mean material stuff, but that which is unformed or at least unformulated. It is mind death. ↩
  28. Part of the omission here is the sentence: “This is not a question of either-or, but of both-and.” (195n31) With it McLuhan characterized our tycoons both as villains and as fools. But the phrase should be noted as a directive (to McLuhan himself) concerning the structural difference between the Gutenberg and Marconi eras. ↩
  29. Corruption of the best is the worst. ↩
  30. 194-195. ↩
  31. See note 27 above. ↩
  32. 196. In regard to this labyrinth, a couple years after this Lewis essay McLuhan would begin consideration of Poe’s maelstrom that he would then maintain for the rest of his life. ↩