The epigraph to Claude Lévi
The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.2
McLuhan’s question, explicitly from the time of his Nashe thesis onwards (but implicitly from the time of his work with Rupert Lodge at the University of Manitoba a decade before), was: what are the basic structures of human experience and how do they interrelate?3 “The medium is the message” marked his realization, 15 years after his thesis, that the first step towards an answer to this question had to lie in the specification of those basic structures.4 Only so could the open collective investigation into human experience at last be initiated –- through which survival might be yet be achieved.
- English translation, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969. ↩
- McLuhan often expressed his confidence that human ingenuity could successfully grapple with any difficulty on which it set its sights: “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.” (The Classical Trivium, 51). His “survival strategy” lay in the question: how can we so exercise our “intuitive perception of essentials” in the study of human experience itself to realize in it the sorts of revolutionary dis-coveries achieved (only recently in human history) in sciences like physics, chemistry, biology and genetics? ↩
- For example, if human experience may be taken to fall into the types represented by the three trivial arts, how do these mutually combine, or dissociate, to form the complicated fabric of the tradition? ↩
- For example, if human experience may be taken to fall into the types represented by the three trivial arts, how are these to be recognized such that collective investigation of ‘them’ first becomes possible? ↩