Monthly Archives: November 2020

Burroughs on ‘Literary Techniques’

the environment itself becomes educator as it was for primitive man, the hunter (McLuhan, A Garbage Apocalypse)

In the TLS August 6 1964 issue with McLuhan’s Statement of Culture and Technology, William Burroughs contributed a piece on ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith‘. McLuhan’s ‘Notes on Burroughs‘ which appeared a few months later signaled that he had found Burroughs’ article highly interesting and suggestive. 

Since late 1958, closely contemporaneous with his admonition that ‘the medium is the message’, McLuhan had been emphasizing the difference between light through towards us in contrast to light on from us.1 Now he found that same distinction in Burroughs along with its corollaries of the organic nature of words and the imperative to perceive behind and below the surface level of things — especially of ourselves.

The great matter lay in Burroughs’ question: “Your words spelt out whose words?”

Our own words are light through towards us, not light on from us!2

In order to hear our own words we must, as Burroughs says over and over again, learn to listen. That is, we (whoever this ‘we’ is!) must first of all learn to re-cognize and inhabit an acoustic world, not (or not only) a visual one! Marconi, not only Gutenberg!3

In an acoustic world, all of our words are retrievals and replays: “muttering voices looking for a role”.

We are always in some role, always wearing some mask, always running some “errand”, always repeating some prior “muttering”; but roles and masks and errands and mutterings are not mine, are not me. As Burroughs directs twice over: “forget [your] me”!

The great matter at stake is just which role and which mask is fitting: “You only use the ones that fit you know.” A question of the put-on. At this “intersection point”, who am I? And who should I be?

…”muttering voices looking for a role”…

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The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith

I do not present the techniques I use in writing as a solemn new literary movement but rather as amusing exercises so introducing Lady Sutton-Smith who ‘haunted’ as she put it a villa in the Marshan (Tangier) overlooking the sea, Lady Sutton-Smith trailing spectral bouganvillia and thin stray cats: “I think of writing as something that is fun to do. Out here we have to make our own fun you know crippled with arthritis I hardly walk so I write my walks. I write my walks in columns.” Every day her servant went to the market to buy food and Lady Sutton- Smith wrote the walk before she sent her servant, wrote what he would see, who he would meet and what would be said. She plotted and timed his walk on her map of Tangier…”Now he is just here by the bouganvillia where the old junky doctor used to live”. When her servant returned from the market she questioned him to see how close she had come and entered the corrections in a separate column. Then she filled a third column with cross column readings and observations . . ledgers she kept stacked up in a dusty room each page divided neatly in three columns. Lady Sutton-Smith is here to answer your questions. Please remember she also has stray cats to feed, that she must organize benefit slave auctions for the SPCA and the Anti-Fluoride Society and teach a class in flower arranging at the leprosarium which is another of the civic things she did.

“Cut ups? but of course. I have been a cut up for years and why not? Words know where they belong better than you do. I think of words as being alive like animals. They don’t like to be kept in pages. Cut the pages and let the words out. Sometimes I take all my old Tuesday walks and fill a column on some future Tuesday with old Tuesday cut ups and see how close that comes when I get there. You would be surprised how I can write a future Tuesday from old Tuesday cut ups or any other day as well I use pictures too in my books…Oh not just any picture…The picture…”

Now back on a 1957 Sunday I wrote : “An old junky selling Christmas seals on North Clark St…’The Priest’ they called him”…And just here is a picture from Newsweek, May 18, 1964…plane wreck .. the priest there hand lifted: “Last rites for 44 airliner dead including Captain Clark (left).” Left an old junky on North Clark St dim jerky far away Lady Sutton-Smith Lady Sutton brings you an article I wrote once for the uplift magasines…My Advice to Young Writers: I had an old city editor once who used to tell his young reporters: “You will never get anywhere sitting on your dead tail. Go out and get that story. Go out and get that picture. Not just any story. Not just any picture. The story. The picture. And that goes double for young writers. Now look at your typewriter. Your words spelt out whose words?“…phantom tape playing over your typewriter, sad muttering voices looking for a role. Listen and record. Before you can write you must learn to listen. Now look beyond your typewriter. Pick up your soft typewriter and walk. Sit down in a cafe somewhere drink a coffee read the papers and listen don’t talk to yourself. (‘How do I look? What do they think of me?’) Forget me. Don’t talk. Listen and look out as you read (Any Private Eye knows how to look and listen as he rather ostentatiously reads The Times)…Note what you see and hear as you read what words and look at what picture. These are intersection points. Note these intersection points in the margin of your paper. Listen to what is being said around you and look at what is going on around you. Cast yourself as a secret agent in constant danger of assassination or enemy torture chambers all your senses on total alert sniffing quivering down streets of fear like an electric dog this is an amusing little literary exercise bringing to the writer what he needs namely: Action. Camera. You will find that a walk, a few errands, a short trip will provide pages of copy when you learn to look listen and read. Yes how many of you know how to read ? Look at Time or Newsweek. Hold a page up to the light and see what is on the other side. Just here in Newsweek, July 6, 1964 page 5 is a picture of a loaf of bread in some obscure way advertising Esso Petroleum Co. On the other side page 6 is devoted to Banking Service American Express. Now ‘bread’ in hip lingo used by old time ‘Yegg Men’ means money. How many of you saw that money behind the ‘bread’? When you read a novel look and listen out. I recently took The Quiet American by Mr. Graham Greene on a short trip from Tangier to Gibraltar so sitting in the saloon of the Mons Calpe cold mist outside fog horns blowing I read ‘Pyle looked dreamily at the milk bar across the street. Was that a grenade? he said’, No that was not a grenade. That was a fog horn . . cold mist through the milk bar. (Note in the margin). Now look around and see if you can find ‘Pyle’ in the saloon. Yes there he is . . bottle of beer . . quiet American eyes. So take any book on a trip and make a reading diary. Now arrange your reading diary in one column. In another column the so called events: arrivals and departures . . hotels . . (‘I wondered peevishly if I might not find every hotel on the Rock full of Swedes’)… incidents …(waiter there with the wrong wine). In a third column enter all the thoughts and memories stirred by the trip…Tangier Gibraltar… Gibraltar Tangier…’Captain Clark welcomes you aboard…Set your clocks forward an hour…Set your clocks back an hour…’ Now read cross column and see what an interesting trip you have made and how much there is to write about really because any intersection point in present time contains all your past times and maybe your future time as well…What’s that? I’m a little hard of hearing…Oh no of course you don’t use all your cross column readings any more than you use all your cut ups or fold ins. You only use the ones that fit you know. Yes it is a lot of work picking them out and putting them just here in the right place. I have often thought much of the opposition to cut ups was perhaps a premonition of the amount of work and precision required to use them properly. So look at a page you have written and move the lines around why not? Read from line one down to line anything: ‘I do not present just any picture…All your senses on Milk Bar Alert’…you can write on North Clark St intersection points…The ‘Priest’ there, quiet hand lifted brings you my advice to young writers…Forget me from old Tuesday intersection points…I on the other side…sad muttering voices…a few errands…An old junky writes in the margin dim jerky far away — Get that picture? You know how to read behind a novel? Future fog across arrivals and departures? Smell of ashes rising from the typewriter? Fear like this is an amusing literary exercise put away in some remote file…The Nova Police Gazette. Yes I keep all my papers in files and the title of the file tells me what is there already and what belongs there. Inspector J. Lee of The Nova Police like everyone who does a job works to make himself obsolete. I keep files on all my characters with identikit pictures. When I see a picture in a newspaper or magasine that seems to have something of Doctor Benway, AJ or Inspector J. Lee I cut it out and return it to the appropriate file with all the intersection readings from novels newspapers and magasines its all here in the files stacked up in a dusty room and that’s about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks. Always tell my young reporters…”Get the name and address.” Lady Sutton- Smith returned to a cool Sunday file. Fresh southerly winds stir papers on the city desk.

Note: The first cut ups were made by Mr. Brion Gysin Summer of i960 and appeared in Minutes To Go September i960. There are many ways to do cut ups: 1. Take a page of text and draw a line down the middle and cross the middle. You now have four blocks of text 1234. Now cut along the lines and put block 1 with block 4 and block 2 with block 3. Read the rearranged page. 2. Fold a page of text down the middle lengthwise and lay it on another page of text. Now read across half one text and half the other. 3. Arrange your texts in three or more columns and read cross column. 4. Take any page of text and number the lines. Now shift permutate order of lines 1 3 6 9 12 etcetera. There are of course many other possibilities. A throw of the words gives you new combos. Selection and use is up to the writer.

  1. See From world to worlds and Charge of the light brigade. ↩
  2. McLuhan had been thinking of this matter since reading Jung in the early 1940s around the same time that he was finishing up his Nashe thesis. If the trivial arts think us, not we them, how does this all work? See Jung and Dagwood and the ineradicable roots of our being. ↩
  3.  So: Marconi and Gutenberg! ↩

McLuhan reads Burroughs

For Andrew…

The same TLS issue1 of August 6, 1964 with McLuhan’s ‘Statement on Culture and Technology’ featured a piece by William Burroughs: ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith‘. There is good evidence that McLuhan read Burroughs’ piece and was impressed by it. 

In the first place, McLuhan wrote an article on Burroughs in The Nation2 that appeared only a few months after their joint appearance in the TLS. Presumably McLuhan was prompted to write his ‘Notes on Burroughs‘ for The Nation after reading Burroughs’ TLS note on ‘Literary Techniques’. 

In the second place, there are passages in Burroughs’ piece which would have impressed McLuhan as giving off a whiff of central aspects of his own thoughts — or, indeed, as something he needed to consider further thanks to Burroughs:

  • Words know where they belong better than you do. I think of words as being alive like animals. They don’t like to be kept in pages.3
  • Your words spelt out whose words?
  • muttering voices looking for a role…4
  • Before you can write you must learn to listen (…) don’t talk to yourself  (…) forget [the] me
  • I’m a little hard of hearing 
  • Any intersection point in present time contains all your past times and maybe your future time as well.

In the third place, the cut-up method that Burroughs’ TLS piece both describes and illustrates was a way (Gk οδός, hence meth-od) of deploying the com/plexity of language — its exfoliations and infoldings —  and the gaps which are required for such com/plexity.

Forget me from old Tuesday intersection points…I on the other side…sad muttering voices…a few errands…An old junky writes in the margin dim jerky far away…Get that picture? You know how to read behind a novel? Future fog across arrivals and departures? Smell of ashes rising from the typewriter? 

The cut-up method is a practical application of “the gap is where the action is”:

Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method” (…) To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed. (McLuhan, Notes on Burroughs)

In the fourth place, it must have been a very rare (and presumably much appreciated) event in McLuhan’s life to encounter a word he didn’t know. In earlier times he had delighted in using words which no one had ever heard of. Now Burroughs offered him one: “Yegg Men”.5 Burroughs had gone to Chicago to hear a course of Korsbinski lectures in 1939 and then lived there on the near north side in 1942-1943.6 He must have had these years in Chicago on his mind when he wrote the TLS piece since he mentions North Clark St three times in the course of its few pages. And ‘Yegg Man’ was Chicago slang for “hobo burglar, safe-breaker, criminal beggar”.

McLuhan would have been the all more delighted with this new word since he could identify with it: he himself was a self-professed “safe-breaker”:

Most of my work in the media is like that of a safe-cracker. In the beginning I don’t know what’s inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work. I grope, I probe, I listen, I test — until the tumblers fall and I’m in. That’s the way I work with all these media. (Stearn interview, 1967)

I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open. (Playboy interview, 1969)

Hence it was, when Eric McLuhan came to describe ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication‘ — this was in 2008, almost thirty years after his father’s death and 44 years after the Burroughs and McLuhan TLS pieces — that he called his essay ‘The Yegg’. And the definition he offered there for the word was “an itinerant professional safe-cracker”.

 

  1. Reprinted with the McLuhan and Burroughs articles in Astronauts of Inner-Space in 1966. ↩
  2. ‘Notes on Burroughs‘, The Nation, 199:21, December 1964, pp. 517-519. ↩
  3. Compare McLuhan from over a decade before: “words can be regarded not as signs but as existent things, alive with a physical and mental life which is both individual and collective” (‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’, 1953).  In that same essay McLuhan commented on puns like Burroughs’ on cages/pages — “puns in the Wake are a technique for revealing the submerged drama of language, and Joyce relied on the quirks, ‘slips’, and freaks of ordinary discourse to evoke the fullness of existence in speech. All his life he played the sleuth with words, shadowing them and waiting confidently for some unexpected situation to reveal their hidden signatures and powers. For his view of the poet was that he should read, not forge, the signatures of things.” ↩
  4. Burroughs “muttering voices” would have put McLuhan in mind of FW, of course. In Through the Vanishing Point, he writes of “the auditory mumble” (63). That all human being might be considered as “put-on”, masks and roles was a central feature of McLuhan’s lifetime method. ↩
  5. Eric McLuhan was back from his stint on the US Air Force at this time and would certainly have shared in his father’s discovery. ↩
  6. Burroughs chronology  ↩

Statement on Culture and Technology

The Aug 6, 1964 issue of the TLS was dedicated to the question of the avant garde. McLuhan appeared in it as did such figures such as William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg. McLuhan’s ‘Statement on Culture and Technology’ is available on YouTube read by Andrew McLuhan. Along with other contributions to the TLS issue, it was reprinted in Astronauts of Inner-Space (1966). 

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Statement on Culture and Technology
TLS, Aug 6, 1964 

The work of Adolf von Hildebrand (Problem of Form 1893) and of Remy de Gourmont was typical of a great deal of new awareness concerning the nature of materials and their relation to the modalities of human perception and creativity. The new art and architecture and poetry of the 20th century had their roots in a new kind of perceptual discipline that centers in the awareness of style. In 1922 Middleton Murray’s The Problem of Style made quite explicit the relationship between style and perception as well as the relation between art and the active training of sensibility. Recognition of technique became a program of discovery.

In 1920 T.S. Eliot’s essay on [Philip] Massinger brought new stress to bear upon the language of a period in order to make it a means of perceiving the entire structure and values of a civilization: 

These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled. 

This is the kind of approach to language as the material of poetry that launched many of the artistic experiments of the 1920s as well as the critical programs of the Calendar of Modern Letters and of Scrutiny. It is not only an attitude but a method and a technique of grappling with all the materials and technologies of any human environment so that if politics is the art of the possible, its scope must now in the electric age include the shaping and programming of the entire sensory environment as a luminous work of art. 

From the neolithic age men had been engaged in creating technological extensions of their bodies in various fragmented and specialist forms whether of script or wheel or housing or money. These extensions serve to amplify but also to fragment human powers in faculties in order to store and to expedite knowledge and materials and processes. Naturally such amplifications of human powers greatly enlarge the means and incentives to violence and foster the enlargement of bureaucracy and enterprise alike. The break with the neolithic age comes with electromagnetism and its derivative technologies. The electronic age is distinct from any other age. The numerous extensions of hands and feet in the various forms of spindles and wheels and roads now begin to yield to the circuit in the loop “where the hand of man never set foot”. The immediate extensions of our nervous system by telegraph and telephone and radio and television not only usher us into a period when the codifying and movement of information supersede all other tasks in scope and in the creation of wealth, but they involve us totally in one another’s lives. The extensions of our nerves and senses as they constitute a new man-made environment also require a wholly new kind of understanding of the sensory materials of this new environment and of the learning processes to which they are so deeply related. 

One of the discoveries of Baudelaire and his followers concerned the means of relating the creative process in poetry to the stages of apprehension of human knowledge. Since  Baudelaire art has become co-extensive with discovery and knowledge in every sphere of action and at every possible range of human development. The gap between art and technology has now ceased to exist as we come as we become cognizant of our art and technology as immediate extensions of ourselves. We have also acquired the responsibility of heeding the psychic and social consequences of such extensions. It is now many years since Mr Eliot pointed to the effects of the internal combustion engine on poetic rhythms. Many forms of technology far more potent than the internal combustion engine have been assimilated to the rhythms of art and poetry and social life since that time.

With the extension of the nervous system in electric technology, information not only moves in much greater quantity than ever before but at very much greater speed than ever before. Paradoxically the acceleration of information movement restores us to the habit of mythical and inclusive perception. Whereas data were previously fragmented by earlier forms of codifying information the electric circuit has restored us to the world of pattern recognition and to an understanding of the life of forms which had been denied to all but the artists of the now receding mechanical age. Our main concern today is with the patterns of the learning process itself — patterns which we can now see to be correlative with the processes of creativity in the world of the organization of work. The electric revolution means the end of jobs.

That is, electric circuitry eliminates the fragmentation and specialization of the work process which created the job type of work in the renaissance and after. The elimination of the job in the work process means a return to the depth involvement in role-playing formerly associated only with arts and crafts. But now in the age of information the work process and the learning process become interfused. Automation is learning a living. Precisely the same kind of a revolution is taking place in the world of learning as in the world of work. Numerous centers such as the center for culture and technology at the University of Toronto have recently come into existence. They are the response not so much to a theory as to a need and even to a pressure.

It has long been known that in graduate studies a research student crosses departmental boundaries as a matter of course. As access to all kinds of information becomes swifter, so does involvement in the pattern of every type of information. As an example the center for culture and technology which exists by cross appointments within the University of Toronto is concerned to establish ways of quantifying the psychic and social consequences of every type of technology. It is natural that the extensions of our senses technologically should have a direct effect upon the sensory usage and preference of any community. Many of these effects are quite incompatible with the continuance of older values. Once a sensory typology has been established for a given population therefore it is possible to predict the effect on that sensory typology of any given new artifact such as the motor car or television. That is to say it becomes possible to control or to avoid kinds of innovation that are destructive of such established values as we prefer to retain. However a large measure of personal and social autonomy thus becomes possible across the entire spectrum of culture and technology, much in the way that we now have the means of thermostatic control of the thermal environment.

A full understanding of the sensory typology of cultures on one hand and sensory order and impact of art and technology on the other affords the possibility of a human environment centrally programmed for the maximal use of the human powers of learning.

 

 

Garbage Apocalypse

McLuhan’s talk, ‘A Garbage Apocalypse’, given at a 1970 conference on art criticism in Ottawa is available online in the Critique d’Art archives.1 Here it is in text and with added emphasis: 

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A Garbage Apocalypse

We live in an age of innovation when we are surrounded by so many scrapped cultures that ruins, junk, and garbage have become a new kind of environment. Every innovation scraps the preceding environments created by preceding innovations and this prepares the ground for new cultural figures to emerge. The Greeks abstracted phusis2 as a visual figure from the ground of the surrounding barbaric cultures, sunk in their non-visual existential modes.

Thanks to the new art of phonetic writing, the Greeks were able to establish a new order of classified and conceptualized art structures which gradually became consolidated as Nature.

To the Greeks, phusis or “Nature” was abstracted from the huge existential mass of oral culture and magical practises by which the pre-Socratic world had established its relations with the ground of existence. The pre-platonic world was auditory, tactile, and kinetic, anything but visual in its patterns of order. The entelechies of man and society in the pre-Socratic world were resonant and auditory rather than visually classified. With the new phonetic writing, with its drastic separation of sign and semantics, the Greeks were able to make a complete divorce between the old pre-literate cultures and their own Euclidean order. Euclid himself had consolidated the new abstract, visual space, retaining as little as possible of the old kinetic aspects of land measurement in the organization of his formal structures. It was not, however, until printing that geometers were able to reduce the kinetic character of geometry to an absolute visual minimum. (See Art and Geometry by Wm. Ivins Jr.)

To the Greek of this early time it seemed plain enough that he was creating an order of phusis, or physics, or “Nature” from the huge midden-heap of confused barbaric cultures. What eventually emerged from this “garbage” of destroyed cultures was a highly selective abstraction of classified conformities and patterns which the Greeks called phusis, or physics, and which gradually became familiarized in the Western world as “Nature.”

In the age of non-Euclidean geometries (later 19th century and since), it is quite easy to see that the Greeks had separated out visual space from the many other kinds of space in setting up geometry. Visual space has the unique properties of uniformity, continuity and connectedness. These properties do not belong to the kinetic or auditory or tactile spaces. Only phonetically literate man has ever sufficiently separated out the visual sense from the perplex of all the other senses in order to create a merely visual order in art and knowledge. Pre-literate man lives primarily in the audile-tactile world of the resonant interval which is now familiar to us from the new quantum mechanics. (See The Nature of the Chemical Bond by Linus Pauling.)  

The world of play, celebrated in the study Homo Ludens by J Huizinga, is a world of the resonating interval such as we experience in the relation between wheel and axle. It is play rather than connection or logic that makes possible both wheel and axle. Logic is known only to the visual man who looks for connections rather than for play and metamorphosis. The artist, however, must always prefer the world of play and metamorphosis to the world of visual continuity and logical connection.

The Greeks, having created phusis from the huge midden-heap of surrounding barbaric cultures, proceeded to study the entelechies of their newly invented “Nature.” The processes within the structure of classified data and which they had included in their rigorous selections from the existential world outside themselves, they studied as vortices of power which they called energeia, or entelechy. Somewhat strangely, they excluded from this entelechizing process of observation and formulation all those forms of energy generated by the extension of man’s own being. Even language, itself the divine Logos as resonant in human speech, was given scant attention as a form of magical energy. The pre-Socratics seem to have been much more aware of the entelechies of language than the literate Greeks. It was surely writing itself that dictated this preference for the visual rather than the auditory manifestations of the word. Civilization has been reared upon techniques that suppressed the resonant and the magical forms of language and other technologies.

May it not have been their Greek satisfaction with the massive artefact of their phusis that made them feel exempt from the task of discerning the entelechies of human technologies? How else is it possible to account for this huge hiatus in Western philosophy and science? 3 Oriental, and also pre-literate societies around the world have always felt awe in the presence of the entelechies swarming from and around human artefacts. Only visual man has stood aloof and scornful of all the magical powers exerted upon us by our own ingeneous innovations, whether weapons, clothing, utensils, or vehicles.

Today in the age of Sputnik when the planet itself has been enclosed in a human artefact, Nature, whether the nature of Euclid, Plato and the Greeks, or that of Newton and Adam Smith and Marx, has been scrapped. The planet, enclosed in a human artefact, has become itself a vast garbage apocalypse. The instant environment of electric information made possible by the “wired” planet, has restored the pre-literate ecology of the pre-Socratics to the Western world. The Orient never did abandon the non-visual modes of magic and ecology. It is only visual, logical, and abstract Western man who has preferred to have “a place for everything”, and everything in it’s place”, and “one thing at a time.” Such an order, and the processes that are compatible with such an order, can scarcely co-exist with the electric all-at-once patterns of awareness.

It was in the mid nineteenth century that poets and artists began to explore the entelechies of human arts and technologies. Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire and Mallarmé were foremost among those who began a new approach to the arts and artefacts of man. They proposed the strategy of studying not causes, but effects. With Poe this meant the study of every kind of process, but especially the artistic and cognitive processes. In the art of poetic making, Poe recognized that order was related to effect and considered it necessary to start with effects rather than causes, with perceptions rather than concepts. This had been the hiatus of the preceding centuries since the Greeks. Concepts and classifications had been the supreme mode of studying Nature. Systems of thought and philosophy stood out as figures against the ground of “Nature.” Today when “Nature” has simply been scrapped by electric technology, it is obvious that we have returned from the ground of Nature to the ground of existence itself. Existence is enormously greater than anything included in any philosophical system, since a system, as such, must be exclusive rather than inclusive.

For most people the return from the Greco-Roman visual order of Nature to the audile-tactile resonance of existence, is nothing less than a garbage apocalypse.

Question from Laurent Lamy: You said something about American Telephone and Telegraph. I wonder if we let the AT&T people do the news, and listen to the telephone and telegraph all the time, that might be more fun.

McLuhan: I am not sure what is involved there, in your mind. I am not sure what you mean by AT&T doing the news. They do it now. What do you want them to do? It is their technology that does it now. They are the ones who have wired the planet.

Incidentally, when you have wired the planet for this type of service it becomes mandatory to make sure that your wire installations remain unviolated by other political forces so that the wires have to remain clear. You could say that the United States, or whatever powers have undertaken this wiring, feel obliged to keep other people out of the way of their wiring system. This, I think, may help to account for the strange contradictory policies, so that what is really a technological precaution for protecting a huge wiring system, seems utterly inconsistent with the old hardware, weaponry, goals, territorial and other objectives from a previous age. I think the United States is probably caught completely between these technologies, and has not a clue what to do with the new in terms of the old anymore than our postal department knows what to do with the old hardware technology in relation to the new software.

What would happen, for example, if video phones were to come in. You would scrap the old telephone. If you brought in video phone you would scrap the person-to-person character of the telephone, and you would bring in everybody. The video phone would not permit a person-to-person call but everybody would be there. Here comes everybody instead of just the person you want to speak to. The telephone is famous for this person-to-person character. It enabled people to speak person-to-person for the first time in the world. You were there, they are here, whereas the old letter, which you would send to correspondents, did not permit you or they to transfer your position. You stayed in your corner and the sender stayed in his. The telephone enables you to be there and the person to whom you are speaking to be with you. Now with video phone. the person to-person character of telephone would disappear instantly. The whole environment would be there, the whole surrounding in which you were speaking would be there, and all the people in the room with you would be there, and the person at the other end would be with you. You can imagine the chaos that the telephone system would undergo with video phone. The telephone people are terrified of the video phone possibility, just as the educational establishment is paralyzed by cassette ideas.

It is too much to make this transition from classrooms in which people stay in one position to a world in which everybody can be everywhere, instantly and simultaneously. Nobody has ever tried to devise a curriculum where everybody can be everywhere.  The answer, by the way, to those types of problems is that the answer is already here. In fact, the curriculum that takes over at that point is that the environment itself becomes educator as it was for primitive man, the hunter.

The primitive hunter used the environment itself as a trainer of4 perception, not concepts.

That is why under electric conditions concepts become useless. For example, the man who is up against the telephone problem or the mail strike problem, is up against a technological problem that has nothing to do with unions. Nothing to do with salaries. The educator who is up against an electric environment suddenly discovers that concepts are no use. He has to use percepts instead. The man who is trying to solve the video phone problem will find concepts, ideas, of just no use at all. He has to know what is happening and what is going to happen.

In the environment of the hunter of the new Paleolithic age in which we live, percepts are prior. Concepts are pushed into the background again, as nuisance. in the way of percepts. That is what I meant earlier when I said that we had moved into the age of the hunter again. The hunter is a man who cannot afford concepts, he has to use his senses. He has to perceive his world immediately and directly as a survival kit.

I do not think there are very many concepts that have the slightest relevance under these new instant conditions. The concepts that were built up laboriously over centuries of literacy, all the concepts turn out to be classifications. Filing Systems for information, and they are of no use in an age of instant retrieval and instant exposure to everybody.

I do not know whether this has any relevance to the question about AT&T, but AT&T has wired the world, they have already done the job referred to superbly and perhaps irresponsibly in the sense that they are not answerable to anybody. Nobody asked them to do it. People have not taken enough interest in what is going on to know what is involved and what was done. Those sounds which we just heard, I do not know whence they come, but they remind me of the primitive sort of animal cries. When you are at a loss for words you tend to resort to gestures, and grunts, and ‘like I mean, man’. Have you not noticed that language is disappearing very rapidly?5 In the new electric age the Marcel Marceaus have it all over us. We have returned to the age of mime, gesture, the verbal universe has been scrapped too.

It is part of the junk heap, witness Finnegans Wake. Finnegan is one of the great testimonies to the scrapping of the languages of the world, tossing them onto a junk heap as new resource material for poets. All of the languages of the world are now available simultaneously as poetic resource. We know more about languages than ever, but we have not decided what to make of them. Finnegan takes language as itself, material to be manipulated into art, possessing all the clues as to the inner structures of our own beings and also the inner history of our psyche. Finnegan is a new electronic use of language as gesture, language as resonant interval, pun. Joyce uses the pun to release the enormous stored perceptions of language. Every word ever introduced into any language represents millions of perceptions of millions of people, over long periods of time. Language as codified experience of many, many generations can be released only by puns. The pun is a kind of interface or interval which enables the stored perception of words to be released. Literary people who are accustomed to imposing semantic definitions on words are baffled by this use of the pun as a trigger for releasing experience in language. All language resonates with total perception of the race.6 The artist7 is a person who seeks to arrange it in forms which will release that power.

In our time advertising slogan-makers and label makers have spent more energy trying to release the magical powers of language than any other group in the community. They are, to our shame, the most active artists in the verbal field that we have. The rock bands do not make very many syntactical statements. They, too, are mainly concerned with rubbing words together to see what they are made of. They do not have much semantic or intellectual curiosity about them at all. Somatic rather than semantic, is the new thing, where it is at.

I am very interested in the phrase “where it is at”. It is a new dimension of perception in English because “it” does not refer to anybody or anything. It means everybody and everything, and “at” is a very strange word indeed. There is a kind of consensus and a consensuality, everybody and all our senses simultaneously concentrated in a single moment of awareness in that phrase. There is a new – it is not avant garde at all – there is a new feeling of need to know where it is at– and I would toss that one to Mr. Rosenberg.

I would suggest that ‘where it is at’ is a very much more complex and difficult approach to human awareness than anything that the artist had ever thought of in the avant garde period.

It certainly is not a task for a private artist to tackle, to discover where it is at.

Desvergnes: Vous avez dit un jour qu’un de vos amis, ingénieur du son newyorkais a rapporté cette remarque d’un policier de New York, qui lui disait, “Lorsque vous avez des problèmes, n’apellez pas à l’aide mais apellez au feu parce que l’aide est une chose froide qui ne donne pas envie de s’en mêler, alors que le feu est chaud, en donnant l’impression qu’on peut faire quelque chose très vite”. Je veux vous poser la question, dans cette idée de critique d’art et de ‘hunter’ et de ‘hunted’ la question de savoir si le critique d’art va être, tandis que vous vous êtes créé une situation prophète un peu dans le domaine, avec tous les alias que ça comporte, est-ce que vous croyez que le critique d’art va être du froid ou du feu, de l’aide ou du feu, “of the outer trip or the inner trip?”

McLuhan: A critic after all, like anybody else, thinks of himself as speaking to somebody. Montaigne, when the book was new, said there was nobody to speak to. It is very interesting to go back to the 1500s and see the strange efforts that people made in that period to find a public. Now, the medieval writers had tiny little publics, maybe a few dozen people at most, because the manuscript could not be read very quickly and it could not be read by very many people. But with print came the possibility at least of hundreds of readers and then thousands, and so on. There was nobody who knew how to write for the printing press for a long time. Montaigne thought of himself as putting messages in bottles and throwing them in the ocean. Montaigne thought of the book as a message in a bottle, he did not believe that it could actually reach anybody, except by chance.

Think of what your problem would be if in some African community you were the only person who could read and write and you had a great masterpiece in mind and you wrote it and got it published, in English or in your own African dialect. Who would it be for? Actually, you cannot even begin to write until you have in mind a public. The public is a producer, not a consumer. For the painter, too, and for the art critic, the public is a producer, not a consumer. Today we are in a very good position to realize that. We have scrapped all the publics and the consumers have all become producers by virtue of Gallup polls and various investigatory committees. The whole world audience is now being used as a resource for research and this is one function of the computer, to store data about everybody, and to make it available to anybody, for a small fee.

When you [are] asked about the art critic then, you have to say, who was the public for whom the painter worked, and then again, in a very subsidiary sense, who was the public for whom those art critics wrote about those painters? Mr. Rosenberg can answer those questions very well, having worked in that field for a long time. Notice that the New Yorker and Esquire, for which he wrote, were fun magazines, and that light-hearted magazines of that sort should be the vehicles of serious art criticism is itself rather strange. Where else would you print serious art criticism except in a comic magazine? This is one of the hang-ups of the art critic.

When you asked the question about the art critic, who is the art critic for the rock bands today, who are the people who do the evaluating and the standard making for the big bands?

This is worth looking into because what function these bands perform for their audiences, artistically, is certainly an important question. They do a profound amount of educating of the young. Their credentials as educators have never been examined except by — whom? I do not know. I am not sure that the art critic has a future in that kind of world. On the other hand, notice that you have a very high level of virtuosity, of discrimination and awareness among the consumers of rock music. The audiences are very critical. They are many of them participants. This is a new situation.

It is like the old Homeric rhapsodists who were the professional performers of the poems, the harpists, the bards, their audiences were participants too, and knew every trick in the game.

I think art criticism, in the sense of high standards of awareness of what is going on, probably is going to go up, up, up, in the pop art world but just what that might portend, I am not sure.

Mrs Weelen: Mr. McLuhan, earlier in your talk you said that the camera is an eye turned towards the world and that the television eye can be compared to the eye of the blind man turned in an inner quest. I wonder if you would mind elaborating on that because, of course, at first sight [at first sight!] it seems very contradictory since the journey made inwardly by the blind man would seem to be rather the opposite of what takes place with a spectator watching television. I would like to ask if you can elaborate on that.

McLuhan: It is not an easy matter.  I referred already to this book of Lusseyran. Jacques Lusseyran wrote a book called And There Was Light. It is in English and was published8 about 1964, I think. Having gone blind he became intensely conscious of the change in his sensory life and it is one of the best studies of the inner trip undergone by a blind man9 that I have ever read. In the ancient world, the seer, the one who knew, was portrayed as a blind person and he [ Lusseyran] explains that sort of thing very well in this book. He also explains the enormous stepping up of the senses of touch and hearing resulting from blindness. So, in a sense, in the television age of the inner trip, the other senses have become enormously more keen. The visual sense has gone down but the other senses have come up into a higher [relative intensity].

Weelen: You mean the watcher? The senses of the watcher of the television?

McLuhan: Yes. His touch and taste and smell and hearing have got much more sensitive than they had been before. The watcher of television, of course is mostly watching old movies but the fact is that they are translated into a television form of experience by the medium. That is, a movie put on television is not a movie anymore, it is television, and television goes into you. It is like a drug. It is an immediate injection into your system, your nervous system. That is not a figure of speech. It is literally an injection into your nervous system and the Krugman experiments revealed this.

Weelen: Yes. But surely all thought process is stopped there, whereas the blind man presumably…

McLuhan: Thought is again something subject to amazing varieties depending upon cultural set-ups. The idea that the body itself might be turned into a means of intellectual awareness is now an everyday fact under electric conditions. Now again, it is very difficult to evaluate these things but it is very different from the sort of thinking that went on in the age of concepts. I can only suggest that that might be one place at which to begin to study it, study the nature of preconceptual thought, you might go back to the pre-Socratics, or preliterate thinkers, and see how they encountered their world. But we are post-literate and more primitive than the pre-Socratics ever dreamed of being.

  1. PDF image pages 150-167. ↩
  2. It is evident from McLuhan’s references to phusis, entelechies and energeia, together with his later thoughts in the lecture on ‘language itself’ and on the pre-Socratics, that he was processing some recent acquaintance with Heidegger. Probably he had been reading translations with his friend and UT colleague, Tom Langan (author of The Meaning of Heidegger). As usual in McLuhan’s thoughts about Heidegger, the details are often wrong but the common central thrust is right. ↩
  3. This huge hiatus — of no hiatus! ↩
  4. ‘Trainer of perception’: a subjective genitive! ↩
  5. This is a good example of McLuhan’s second sight, since he himself would be “at a loss for words” at the end of the decade and would be reduced to “gestures, and grunts, and like I mean, man“. McLuhan would soon find his own “language (…) disappearing very rapidly”. Typical of second sight, McLuhan could see this looming fate, but he could not see the who, when, where, or how that would be implicated in it. ↩
  6. Hence Heidegger’s “die Sprache spricht”. We have to listen to language, not language to us (“Literary people (…) are accustomed to imposing semantic definitions on words”). ↩
  7. Strangely, McLuhan has “The literary artist” here. He must have meant something like: ‘the artist even in literary times’. ↩
  8. McLuhan: “is”. ↩
  9. “The inner trip undergone by a blind man”: compare to note 4 above on McLuhan’s second sight. ↩

Harry Skornia, peace activist

Television and Society has the necessary components to make it the classical study of television as a social institution. The natural authority with which Dr Skornia explores the complexities of the institutional character of TV was earned during the years of his unselfish devotion in proving the potential of TV in education and in social liberation. (McLuhan’s blurb for the back cover of Skornia’s 1965 Television and Society)

 Robert Rutherford Smith in Beyond the Wasteland: The Criticism of Broadcasting (1976) gives this capsule portrait of Skornia:

It has been charged that television and radio news, as the activity of corporations with vested interests in defense and other economic activities, is influenced by what is thought to be the corporate well-being. Anti-war activists were particularly enamored of this argument. Harry Skornia, author of Television and the News [1968] is perhaps the most eloquent advocate of this point of view. (65)

A note at the Veterans For Peace website memorializes “Dr Harry Skornia, the ardent peace activist who founded PBS, but is virtually unknown, even to those who work in public broadcasting.” Skornia died in 1991. And yet ‘World Storytelling Day‘ (“If I can hear your story, it’s harder for me to hate you.”), held around the world almost 30 years later on March 30, 2018, was dedicated to him in its Minneapolis iteration. Veterans For Peace was one of the sponsors of the event there.

Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough1 cited Skornia in remarks to the Senate from September 12, 1969:

Consider for a moment the rigors of qualifying as a third grade teacher. The applicant must have a college degree from a school of education. She must be qualified under standards established by the state for a teachers’ certificate. She must meet the standards of the local school board. She must have spent some time as a “practice teacher.” She may continue to take in-service training. She must meet these standards because she is going to spend time with a group of perhaps 25 children for a few hours a day for a few months out of the year. She will be giving them ideas, information, opinions, attitudes, and behavior patterns that must hold them in good stead throughout life. We don’t want to trust their minds to any but the most skillful and responsible of hands. Contrast these concerns and standards, if you will, with those we associate with broadcasters, with their access to millions of young minds for far more hours every year. As Harry Skornia has said, “Although broadcasting is one of the most powerful forces shaping social values and behavior, broadcast staffs and management in the United States generally have no specific professional standards to meet.” There are exceptions. But of the NAB Code Skornia says, “A document so vaguely worded, so defensive, and so flagrantly violated, can hardly be seriously considered a real code of either ethics or practices.” He believes that the mass media “should be entrusted only to professionals, who study their effects as carefully as new drug manufacturers are expected to test new drugs before putting them on the market.” News is, of course, a special concern: “It must be recognized that news, like medicine or education, is too important to be entrusted to people without proper qualifications.” Let me hasten to make clear that I do not urge that the FCC is the most appropriate agency to establish such professional standards, or to engage in licensing. But I do urge that the American people have the right to expect professional standards from those who instruct millions of young people Saturday morning that are at least as high as those it imposes upon the teachers who instruct a classroom of 25 on Monday morning. And I share Harry Skornia’s concern that: “In news and public affairs, particularly, the fact that there is no national academic standard prerequisite to practice, and that neither the names of the schools from which newsmen graduate, nor their diplomas or degrees, if indeed they are even considered necessary to employment, represent any definitive standard of intellectual accomplishment, morality, character qualification, or even technical skill, is disturbing if not shocking.” (25286) 

That same year Skornia was quoted extensively by Congressman William D Hathaway of Maine in his “extended remarks” from Monday, December 1, 1969 on “censorship of the broadcast media”.

Professor Harry Skornia has alleged: “In case after case it appears that the broadcast industry itself has firmly blocked release to the public of certain facts. Although this blockage sometimes has been on behalf of the political party in power, or the military, with which large corporations are closely allied, most of it seems related to the financial and profit interests of corporations controlling broadcasting, either as station or network operators, sponsors, or a part of the business community generally, as opposed to the over-all national interest.”
Here’s another comment from Mr. Skornia: “The press might render a great service if it let the public know how things stand between say, the copper companies and Central America. Or the oil companies and the Middle East. In the broadcast area, questions might be raised regarding the pressures exerted on the United States government by fruit, oil, sugar, tobacco, and other companies with investments in Cuba since Castro’s rise to power. Why are these enormous problems so little discussed in view of the overwhelming importance they have in making United States foreign policy?” (36300)

  1. From his Wiki bio: “Yarborough was known as “Smilin’ Ralph” and used the slogan “Let’s put the jam on the lower shelf so the little people can reach it” in his campaigns. He staunchly supported the “Great Society” legislation that encompassed Medicare and Medicaid, the War on Poverty, federal support for higher education and veterans, and other programs. He also co-wrote the Endangered Species Act and was the most powerful proponent of the Big Thicket National Preserve. Yarborough criticized the Vietnam War and supported Robert F. Kennedy in the 1968 presidential election until the latter’s assassination.” ↩

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1973-1974

Claude Bissell’s tenure as UT president ended in 1971. By 1973-1974 the new president, John Robert Evans, had decided that a new form was needed for the President’s Report, one with less print and many more pictures, McLuhan had foreseen the development twenty years before, of course.

The Report has no description from McLuhan of the activities of the Centre for Culture and Technology. But it does have an extensive list of publications stemming from it:

McLuhan, H.M. “El camino a seguir en la investigacion de las communica- ciones” (Dossier Mundo, no. 32, April 1974, pp. 6-8. Interviewer: Jose-Luis Gomez. Barcelona: Ediciones Meridiano, S.A.

“Changing Nature of Communications” (Detroit News, part of a series commemorating the 100th anniversary of the newspaper, Oct. 28, 1973, pp. IE and 2E) . 284

“Communication Crisis in Our Global Village” (from an interview by G.A. Vitiello in Pegasus, Jan. 1974, pp. 1-5).

“Communication needs human scale” (Nursing Management, published by Kendall Co. of Canada, vol. 1, 1971, pp. 1-2).

“Company we keep – Trudeau and Nixon in the TV Vortex” (Saturday Night, Dec. 1972, p. 17).

“Do Americans go to church to be alone?” (The Critic, vol. 3, Jan/Feb. 1973, pp. 14-23).

“End of the Work Ethic”; in The Empire Club Addresses 1972-73, pp. 105-25. Toronto: The Empire Club Foundation, 1973.

“English Literature as Control Tower in Communication Study” (The English Quarterly, vol. 7, spring 1974, pp. 3-7).

“Future of the Book”; chapter in Do Books Matter? published papers of seminar of The National Book League, 1972, pp. 31-41. London: Dunn & Wilson (Leeds) Ltd., 1973.

“International Motley and Religious Costume” (Christian Communications, newsletter published by St. Paul Society, Sherbrooke, Quebec, issue #39, Dec. 1972, pp. 1-2).

Interview with Professor McLuhan, by Derrick de Kerckhove (Vie des Arts, autumn 1973, pp. 19-23 (French) and 91-3 (English)).

Interview with Professor McLuhan, by Jean Pare (Forces, no. 22, 1973, published by Hydro Quebec, pp. 4-25).

Introduction to Empedocles, by Helle Lambridis. University of Alabama Press, 1974.

“Letter to the Editor” (The Listener, vol. 86, Aug. 26, 1971, pp. 272-3).

“Letter to the Editor” (ibid., vol. 86, Oct. 28, 1971, p. 273).

“Letter to the Editor” (ibid., vol. 89, Jan. 4, 1973, p. 19).

“Liturgy and Media” (The Critic, vol. 31, March/April 1973, pp. 69-70).

“McLuhan – McLuhan – McLuhan” (New York Times, May 10, 1974).

“The Medieval Environment: Yesterday or Today?” (Listening, vol. 9, winter/spring 1974, pp. 9-27).

“Mr. Eliot and the St. Louis Blues” (Antigonish Review, vol. 18, summer 1974, pp. 23-7).

“New Technology is changing human identity” (Toronto Star, Dec. 29, 1973, p. B-5).

“Patterns emerging in the new politics” (Globe and Mail, Oct. 20, 1972, p. 7).

Preface to Empire and Communications, by Harold Innis, pp. 7-10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. 3, 1971.

Preface to Subliminal Perception, by Wilson Bryan Key. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

“Private Individual vs. Global Village”; in Abortion and Social Justice, by Thomas Hilgers and Denni9 Horan, pp. 245-8. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1973.

“Understanding McLuhan – and fie on any who don’t” (Globe and Mail, Sept. 10, 1973, p. 7).

“Watergate as Theatre” (Performing Arts, vol. 10, winter 1973, pp, 14-15) .

“The Yestermorrow of the Book” (The UNESCO Courier, 25th year, Jan. 1972, pp. 16-21). McLuhan, H.M. (with Forsdale, L.)

“Making Contact with Marshall McLuhan” (an interview); in Electric Media, pp. 148-58. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1974.

McLuhan, H.M. and Nevitt, H.J.B. “Cybernetics and Management”; in Kybernetes, vol. 2, p. 1. London: Gordon & Breach, 1973.

“Everybody into Nobody” (New York Times, July 16, 1972, p. 3).

“Medium – Meaning – Message” (Communication, vol. 1, 1974, pp. 27-33).

Parker, H. “The Beholder’s Share and the Problem of Literacy”; in Media and Symbols: The Forms of Expression, Communication and Education, ed. David E. Olson, pp. 81-98. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1963

The 1963 report has no information on the new Centre for Culture and Technology other than an odd picture of McLuhan captioned as the Director of the Centre. McLuhan has one leg on a chair and is holding  a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy, which won the Governor General’s award that year for academic non-fiction:

The background is the original office of the Centre which Marchand describes as “an office in a seedy Victorian house on the St. Michael’s campus, with wooden floors that creaked and a door leading to the street”. McLuhan and his Centre would remain there until 1968.

There was, in fact, little to report of the Centre in 1963 — or in 1964, 1965 and 1966 — since it was only in 1967 that it received the right to offer an accredited course from the faculty of Graduate Studies and, with it, the right to designate itself as an official Centre at the University of Toronto.

 

 

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1964

The 1964 President’s Report alludes to the Centre for Culture and Technology but has no separate section for it. However, McLuhan did issue a Statement on Culture and Technology which seems to have originally been intended for internal University of Toronto use as a kind of self-portrait of the Centre concerning the need for it and its intended studies.  

The President’s Report does list some of McLuhan’s outside lectures during 1964:

Dr. H. M. McLuhan, on “Art Becomes Reality”; on “Changing Attitudes to Space in Poetry, Painting and Architecture Since Television” (co-author) ; on “Jobs to Roles in the Age of Automation”; on “The Europeanizing of the American Way of Life Since Television”; and on “The Strange Tendency of the Popular Arts to Go Iconic and Highbrow” at the Vancouver Festival in the Fine Arts Gallery; on “Changing Patterns of Decision-Making in the Electric Age” at the Executive Training Seminar of the Bell Telephone Company, Toronto.

 

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1965

McLuhan’s 1965 report for the Centre for Culture and Technology is especially interesting in providing information about its initial advisory committee. Just as had been the case a decade earlier with the Ford Foundation seminar, the bulk of the committee was composed by a Winnipeg mafia of Easterbrook, Williams and McLuhan. Malcolm Ross was an old friend whom McLuhan had known for decades (beginning when Ross taught at the University of Manitoba in the late 1940s) and was then the Dean of Arts at UT. Easterbrook and Porter were the heads of their respective departments. Williams was a close confederate of UT president, Claude Bissell, and J.H. Sword was Bissell’s Executive Assistant. So McLuhan had managed to assemble a crew which at once featured friendships going back even 40 years in Winnipeg and yet was also very well connected politically within the contemporary UT community. (The image of McLuhan as a Lone Ranger academic outsider may be both constructed and mostly untrue.)

The Centre for Culture and Technology was founded in 1963 to advance the study of the effects of technology on society and culture. During the first two years the concern of the Centre has been to establish means of observing and measuring the psychic and social consequences of technologies old and new. During the first year much work was done on experimental designs. During the second year research funds were obtained to carry out an experiment based on these designs.

At the present time a team of researchers, under the direction of Dr. Daniel Cappon, has begun to measure the sensory preferences of the Toronto population. Having determined the existing levels (and, if possible, the changes in these during the past thirty years), they expect to shift their attention to Athens in order to determine the sensory levels of that population just before the advent of television. At present the function of the Centre must continue to be experimental rather than instructional. The probing of hypotheses concerning culture and technology naturally lends itself to interdepartmental dialogue. In this respect the Centre has been richly nourished by the participation of: Professors J. W. Abrams, Department of Industrial Engineering; A. Bernholtz, Department of Architecture; B. Bernhollz, Department of Industrial Engineering; Dr. Daniel Cappon, Department of Psychiatry; Professor Brian Carpendale, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Professor A. J. Dakin, Town & Regional Planning Department; Professor W. T. Easterbrook, Department of Political Economy; Professor J. M. Ham, Department of Electrical Engineering; Principal R. S. Harris, Innis College; Dr. John A. Hrones, Provost, Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland; Professor R. A. Lucas, Department of Sociology; Professor Thomas McFeat, Department of Anthropology; Dr. Richard Meier, Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan; Professor N. M. Meltz, Department of Political Economy; Professor D. M. Nowlan, Department of Political Economy; Mr. Harley Parker, Display Chief, Royal Ontario Museum; Professor Arthur Porter, Department of Industrial Engineering; Dr. Alan Thomas, Canadian Association for Adult Education.

The Centre has been strongly encouraged by a large enrolment of able graduate students from many fields.

A considerable subsidy (non-academic) has been given to the Centre to advance research and to aid in its publication. This subsidy has made it possible to consider a programme of student term projects directed toward annual publication.

The organizing theme of study in the Centre this past year has been “The Recognition of Change.” It is a theme that made it possible to carry on a dialogue with many other areas within the University. This was actually carried out with the co-operation of several departments. The great success of these occasions suggests the advantage of choosing similar themes in the future.

The advisory committee of the Centre is Professor W. T. Easterbrook, chairman, Department of Political Economy; Professor Arthur Porter, head, department of Industrial Engineering; Professor Malcolm Ross, Department of English, Trinity College; Dr. D. C. Williams, Vice-President, Scarborough and Erindale Colleges; J. H. Sword, Executive Assistant to the President; and Professor Marshall McLuhan, Director. The Committee met twelve times during the year.

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1966

McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology report for 1966 was brief:

Last year the theme of the seminar for the Centre had been “The recognition of Change.” This year the theme was “Future Changes in the Man-Made Environments” of work, advertising, technical education, politics, science, money, language, the motion picture, the city, the school, consciousness and the unconscious.

Our sessions were graced by people from various fields of study and work, such as L. H. Freiser of the Electronics Information Services of the Board of Education, Graeme Cropley, Australian architect, and Barry Nevitt from the Ontario Department of Economics and Development.

The first phase of our sensory research project nears completion under the direction of Professor Daniel Cappon. This work has been made possible by a grant from I.B.M. of Canada. The second phase of the study concerns the production of a sensory profile of the Toronto population.

The 1966 President’s Report does not include listings of lectures by McLuhan (or others), but it does include a surprising observation about McLuhan from his friend, Claude Bissell, the UT president: 

The key to attracting staff is a reputation for scholarship. This University enjoys such a reputation, even more widely outside than inside the country. The constricting domesticity of Canadian comment frowns upon claims of excellence. Marshall McLuhan was a colleague with a few amusing and provocative ideas until the journals in New York and London began to put him in the company of the great social critics.

This could be interpreted in several ways and was probably intended by Bissell to be ambiguous. He was doubtless unhappy with McLuhan’s departure for Fordham and the possibility that McLuhan might continue there or take one of the many other offers he had from US institutions.

Patterns of Literary Criticism 

Patterns of Literary Criticism was a series of ten (?) publications edited by McLuhan along with his UT colleagues, R. J. Schoeck and Ernest Sirluck. The series was originally issued jointly by University of Toronto Press and University of Chicago Press, but was eventually continued by UC Press alone.

Beginning in 1965, titles appearing in the series included:

Aristotle’s Poetics and English Literature (1965)

Shakespeare: The Tragedies (1965)

Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction (1965)

American Drama and Its Critics (1965)

Images of the Negro in American Literature (1966)

The Seventeenth-Century Stage (1968)

Italian Poets and English Critics, 1755-1859 (1969)

Bibliography and Textual Criticism: English and American literature, 1700 to the present (1969)

Contexts of Canadian Criticism (1971)

English Literature and British Philosophy (1971)

 

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1967

In the 1967 UT President’s Report there is no separate report from McLuhan on the Centre for Culture and Technology, presumably because McLuhan was busy that spring getting ready to decamp for Fordham. However the Report, as usual, does record the lectures he gave during that school year outside of his courses:

The Marfleet Lectures [at UT] were given by Professor Marshall McLuhan, on “Canada, the Borderline Case” and “Towards an Inclusive Consciousness.”1

Professor H. M. McLuhan, on “Technology: Its Influence on the Character of World Trade and Investment” at the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, Md.; on “Film and Poem and the Interface of Landscapes” to the Modern Language Association meeting in New York City; the Purves Memorial Lecture at the American Institute of Architects’ convention in New York; on “The Museum as an Educational Institution” to the American Association of Museums meeting, Toronto.2

 

  1. These lectures were published in Understanding Me. ↩
  2.  archive.org/details/presidentsreport1967univ/page/46/mode/2up. ↩

Porter in UT President’s Report 1968

As acting director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, while McLuhan was at Fordham for the 1967-1968 school year, Arthur Porter contributed to the 1968 UT President’s Report as follows: 

During the current session, Professor Marshall McLuhan, Director of the Centre, has occupied the Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham University, New York. He will return to the University of Toronto in July 1968.

Following the pattern established in previous years, a major activity of the Centre during the current session has been the weekly interdisciplinary seminar. The theme during this session has been “The Communication of Values.” As in the past, the object has been to bring together a group of scholars and scientists to introduce topics associated with the theme and to lead subsequent discussions. The Centre has been encouraged by the consistently good attendance at the seminars — an average of 25 faculty members and students drawn from several disciplines have attended each Monday evening. The Centre is particularly grateful to the following scholars and scientists who presented seminars during 1967-68: Professor J. W. Abrams, Department of Industrial Engineering, and Department of History, U. of T. ; Mr. Ray Affleck, Architect (Montreal) ; Professor D. E. Berlyne, Department of Psychology, U. of T.; Mr. Milton Carman, Province of Ontario Council for the Arts; Professor W. T. Easterbrook, Department of Political Economy, U. of T.; Rev. A. G. Gibson, St. Michael’s College; Professor T. A. Goudge, Department of Philosophy, U. of T.; Professor Michael Gregory, Department of English, York University; Professor Ian J Jarvie, Department of Philosophy, York University; Dr. D. V. LePan, Principal of University College; Dr. Warren McCulloch, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mr. Wm. McElcheran, Artist; Professor T. F. S. McFeat, Department of Anthropology, U. of T.; Professor H. J. Olnick, Faculty of Music, U. of T.; Professor Brian Parker, Department of English, Trinity College; Mr. Ronald Ritchie, Director, Imperial Oil Limited; Professor Edward Safarian, Department of Political Economy, U. of T.; Dr. E. Llewellyn Thomas, Institute of Bio-Medical Electronics, U. of T.

Professor J. W. Abrams, Department of Industrial Engineering and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and Professor T. A. Goudge, Department of Philosophy, have been appointed members of the Advisory Committee of the Centre. 

 

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1969

McLuhan’s report:

The overall theme of the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1968-69 concerned the changing forms of cultural perception and organization now occurring East and West. The advent of the world-wide service environment of electric information is naturally attended by huge disservices of previously existing environments and organizations.

The programme of presentations began with the visit of Louis Van Gastern, Dutch film maker. He had just completed a film on Biafra which he screened for us. It was later shown on the CTV television network. There were other distinguished visitors during the year including Jane Jacobs, Dr. A. J. Kirshner, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, and Dr. Arthur Porter. Barrington Nevitt was also a frequent visitor. Such, however, was the richness of talent and enthusiasm among the twenty-five students that there was no need to seek for enrichment outside the group. As always, there was an irrepressible fringe of senior citizens from a diversity of fields who greatly enhanced the proceedings.

Following is a list of the graduate students who participated in the programme : Jo-Ann Baernstein (English), “Image by Icon”; Edward Bridge (English), “Theory of Oral Composition in Old English Poetry and Modern Culture”; W. Michael Brooke (Educational Theory), “Inventory Method of Cliché Procedures in Remedying All Kinds of Illiteracy”; Barry Cole (Music), “Clichés in Music Education”; D. de Kerckhove (French), “Decadence via Hertz Law”; Glen Eyford (English), “Changes in Radio since TV”; Donald Forgie (School of Library Science), “Obsolescence of Libraries as Hardware in the Age of Instant Retrieval”; Dr. John Godden (Psychiatry), “Editor as Probe”; Mary A. Griggs (Sociology), “Current Relationship Between Dress and Popular Culture Generally”; Chalmers Hardenberg (Astronomy), “Models of Perception used in Astronomy”; Polly Henninger (Educational Theory), “Clichés in Media in Education of Children”; Olivia Jacobs (Adult Education), “Changing Images of Self in Various Psychologies”; Louis LeGall (Special Student), “Advertising Clichés in English and French”; Richard Mackie (Educational Theory), “Clichés in Small Group Theory”; Raphael P. Martin (English), “Blake’s Way of Fighting Print”; John Morris (Industrial Engineering), “A Computer Garden”; Sister Noreen O’Neill (English), “Changing Religious Clichés”; Dallard Runge (Architecture), “Perception as a Clue to Knowledge of and Use of Functionalism” ; Ronald D. Schwartz (Sociology), “Changing Structure of the Rock and Roll Universe”; Joan Sherwood (Special Student), “Effect of technology in 16th Century Spain”; Fred Thompson (Architecture), “Japanese Concept of ma”; Arthur Van Diepen (Business), “Conglomerates”; Robert Wiele (Adult Education), “New Directions for Adult Education”; Arnold Wise (Urban and Regional Planning), “City Planning: Principles, Clichés and Roots.”

McLuhan talks: 

Professor H. M. McLuhan, on “War and Peace in the World Village,” the inaugural address, College of Communications, Ohio University; on “Modern Nationalism” at the Irish Studies seminar on theatre and nationalism in twentieth-century Ireland at St. Michael’s College; on “The Computer and the Mini-State” to the Systems and Procedures Association in Toronto; on “The Stunning Observations form the Astoneaged Muse” to the National Packaging conference in Toronto; on “One Touch of Nature makes the Whole World Tin” to the Young Men’s Ad and Sales Club in Toronto; on “Media and the Unstructured Society” to the Media Directors’ Council seminar in Toronto; on “The Executive as Drop-Out” to the International Council of Industrial Editors in Boston; the Commencement Address at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY; addresses to the Advertising Age Group and the American Booksellers Association in Washington, DC and the Institute of Canadian Advertising in Toronto; Liberal Party seminar with Prime Minister Trudeau and his Cabinet for the purpose of improving communication between government and people.

 

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1971

Perhaps the high points of the year were the seminars addressed by Dr. Claude Bissell, Professor Lynn White of the University of California at Los Angeles, Walter Starkie of Trinity College, Dublin, and Etienne Gilson. We were able to make video tape recordings of Gilson, Starkie, Fr. Stan Murphy, Dr. Bissell, and Madame Sarraute, the French novelist, interviewed by Mile. Riese.

The general level of dialogue during the year was enhanced by the regular attendance of Professor Eric Jorgensen, Professor Ross Hall (Chairman, Department of Biochemistry, McMaster University), Professor A.P. Bernhart, Department of Engineering, Professor J. Edwards, Centre of Criminology, and Mr. R.A.K. Richards of the University Planning Division. The theme of the 1970-71 seminars was “Obsolescence as the Matrix of Innovation“. This theme involves study of the effects of innovation as themselves rendering many earlier forms of organization merely part of the neutral ground. There was a general consensus that an inventory of effects relating to any innovation reveals a pattern that points to the new processes that supplant antecedent causality.

One of the principal efforts of the Director of the seminars was the completion of a book on Changing Patterns of Power: The Executive as Dropout. This volume (to be published by Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich next spring) was co-authored by McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt. Nevitt is an electrical engineer and management consultant who has been associated with the seminar for the past three years. He has addressed many international bodies on the work of the seminar. Being fluent in several languages, including Russian, he has been able to make available to our discussions experience gathered from working on four continents. The book he has written with McLuhan concerns the training of present perception in an environment of innovation.

The increasing rim-spin of the information environment insures not only the dissolution of the organization chart and the disappearance of all monopolies of knowledge, but also the decentralizing of all human organization. Under these conditions, obsolescence becomes the biggest product next to the abundance of ignorance generated by new knowledge. As Michael Polanyi says in The Tacit Dimension: It is a commonplace that all research must start from a problem. Research can be successful only if the problem is good; it can be original only if the problem is original. In view of the proliferation of exciting problems arising in a period of rapid change, the seminar looks forward to an even more fruitful year in 1971-2.1

Talks given by the McLuhan brothers in 1971:

Professor H.M. McLuhan, on “The switch from dress to costume in the twentieth century” at Webster College, St. Louis University; on “The concept of space in art” to the International Association of Art Critics at the National Gallery of Canada; on “The horse that’s known by touch alone” to the CNIB National Public Relations Conference; on “Television and its effect on the nation” at the University of San Francisco; on “The inner and outer reorganization of current society” to the Certified General Accountants’ Association of Ontario; on “Alternatives in communication media” at Syracuse University and at Auburn Community College; on “Discontinuity and communication in literature” to the colloquium on the Problems of Textual Analysis; on “The software revolution” to the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation; on “Relevant to our Electric Age” at the Christian Culture series at the University of Windsor; on “Patterns of teaching for the wired planet” at Queens College, City University of New York; on “The user as the content of technology” to the American Society of Medical Technologists.

The Reverend M. McLuhan, on “The New Education” to the Grimsby School Conference; on “Megalopolis begins with me” to the Toronto Principals’ Association; on “Humanism and the New Education” at the University of California, Riverside; on “The Medium is the Message” at Glendon College, York University; also to the Department of Political Economy, University of Toronto, and to the Data Processing Management; on “McLuhan Ideas” at Huronia College; on “A leap into the future” to the YMCA National Staff Conference.

Talk by Harley Parker (apparently a co-presentation with McLuhan):

H. Parker on “The horse that’s known by touch alone” to the CNIB National Public Relations Conference.2

 

 

  1.  McLuhan reporting as Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, President’s Report for the Year Ended June 1971, 118. ↩
  2. McLuhan and Parker reporting on “The horse that’s known by touch alone” to the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) might be compared to McLuhan presenting on “the gap where the action is” to the Ontario Dental Association. Presumably he asked himself in both instances where he might find people for whom his ideas would seem obvious. ↩

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1970

The overall theme of the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1969-70 concerned technology as creative action. All technology comes into a new configuration against an existing ground of institutions and social goals. The new technology, since Sputnik in 19571, has put a figure around the planet itself. This literally creates a monster, since the planet has been the ground of all previous human figures and operations. The planet is now a figure within a man-made ground of satellites and information. This is the formula for the monster, when figure merges into ground, or ground merges into figure. This is the formula used by Hieronymus Bosch in his paintings. It is also the formula of the surrealists – Dali and the fur-lined tea cup, and Mona Lisa’s moustache. The consequent loss of all human bearings and identity in this switch of traditional figure-ground, is accompanied by the familiar release of violent emotion and frustration. Violence, like the tragic agon, seeks new divisions, new patterns, and new equilibrium in a disrupted situation. Environmentalism becomes an obsession in a world in which Nature has “ended” and human programming of the space-ship earth becomes mandatory.

The seminar devoted a good portion of its time to ecological interests, as these were prompted by new technologies from Sputnik onwards. We studied the scrapping of the preceding technologies as well as the retrieval of ancient ones. In Viet Nam the elephant and tiger traps are ancient paleolithic devices now pitted against helicopter and radar warfare. Every new technology prompts a recall of a much older one. The young today are adept in the occult. The last two centuries of rationalism have been swept into the dustbin with much dispatch. These themes enabled full play for the wide diversity of interest represented in the seminar group.

A very large demand for speakers from the Centre2 has been met in part by the Centre Associate, Harley Parker, who is presently in South Africa consulting with government personnel on the effects of media on apartheid, and other matters. (A list of talks given by Mr. Parker during the past year is given elsewhere.)3

Centre studies on the effect of colour TV, for example, in upgrading the black image and downgrading the white image, have pointed to the great dangers latent in colour TV in many ethnic areas. In the same way, the effects of radio in intensifying tribal passions, especially in preliterate areas, has been the basis for considerable seminar discussion this year. Likewise, the effects of radio in creating the booze panic of the twenties, and the effects of television in creating the drug panic of the sixties have been canvassed in various seminar discussions during which psychologists and drug investigators were present.

The Rev. Maurice McLuhan, a new Research Associate of the Centre, has devoted much of his time to study of the nature and causes of student unrest. He attended a White House Conference in Washington on this subject a few months ago and has been in much request from various places since then. He has decided to concentrate on understanding student activism in relation to the new information environment.

The studies of Dr. Herbert E. Krugman, which were prompted by the McLuhan media hypothesis, constitute a welcome aid and enlargement to the studies at the Centre. Backed by a large staff of psychologists, and large funds for research, Dr. Krugman has begun a series of diversified tests. His initial report substantiated the proposition that the medium is indeed the message. He found that the content of media had little effect on the neurological responses of the subjects, although the various media had very pronounced effects, independent of their content. Dr. Krugman concludes his studies by saying:

In short, television man, the passive media audience, is an active but clumsy participant in life, while print man, the active media audience, is a selective, less active and more mature participant in life. Never mind now which is better. McLuhan was aware of the difference while none of our mass communication theory was relevant.
What then is the new theory of mass communication, not just for television but for video-phone, GE’s Video Projector and other and newer devices of the future? I suggest that communication theory is still a transportation theory, but with a difference. The old theory was concerned with the fact that the message was transported. The new theory must be concerned with the fact that the viewer is transported, taken on a trip, an instant trip — even to the moon and beyond.

Dr. Krugman’s study makes a very satisfactory extension to the Gappon-Banks experiments on media and changing sensory quotients done at the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1966-67 with a grant from IBM.4

 

  1. McLuhan (or at least the President’s Report) has ‘1956’ here. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s own talks away from UT are listed in the Report as follows: “The audience as actor and the priesthood of the laity” to the National Religious Broadcasters in Washington, DC; on “Agnew Agonistes” at the Congressional Breakfast, Washington, DC; on “Changing patterns of management and ad- ministration in the electric age” and on “The consumer as producer in the electric age,” the Gillette Lectures at the University of Western Ontario; on “The South by-passes the nineteenth century in entering the twentieth century” and on “A stroll down Sesame Street with the producers” to the South Carolina ETV Convention; on “Libraries: past, present and future” at Albright College, Reading, Pa.; on “Culture has become our business” to the Association of Industrial Advertisers, Montreal; on “The End of Sex” to the Comprehensive Medical Society, Chicago; on “Changeover from the age of hardware to the magnetic city” to the Society of Industrial Realtors, Toronto; on “Collective criminality and/or collective responsibility” to the Lawyers Club, Osgoode Hall, Toronto; on “Old and new media and student unrest” at Towson State College, Baltimore; on “The hardware/software mergers: Why haven’t they been successful?” to the Urban Research Corporation conference at the University of Chicago; on “General Booth enters Heaven minus his uniform” to the Salvation Army Association annual meeting in New York. (72) ↩
  3. See the President’s Report, 77: Mr. H.W. Parker, on “The new technological society and the retrieval of all primitive modes of human awareness” to the student body at Lakehead University; on “The role of tactility in the educational process” to Sheridan College of Applied Arts and Technology; on “The new satellite environment creates a totally new political and educational climate” to the Liberal Party annual national conference; on “The end of bricks and mortar in the new education: the student can now use the city as a classroom” to the Association of School Boards, Des Moines, Iowa; on “Roles vs. jobs, costumes vs. dress, in the new Age of Involvement” to the San Jose Students’ Association, University of California; on “Our unknown environments” to the College Union, Fresno State College, University of California; on “Some of the unrecognized factors in student unrest” to the Monterey Peninsula College; on “The artist as the antenna of the race: the artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he lives in the present” to the International Culture Center conference at Punta Ala, Italy; on “Art as a means of knowing ‘where it’s at.’ Art as a consensual probe for social invectors” to the Center for Continuing Education, University of Southern Florida; on “A world view of the impact of communications” at Loyola University, Montreal; on “The Global Theatre. The new problems facing the plain clothes priests and nuns in the global theatre” to the Seminar Seventy conference on Youth, the Church and the World at Buck Hill Falls, Pa.; on “Images of violence” to the student organization, University of Utah; on “Good taste is the first refuge of the witless: a refugee camp for frightened Philistines” to the Design Society of America; on “Technology as creative action” to the Conference on Communication in Action, University of Natal, South Africa.“ ↩
  4.  McLuhan reporting as Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, President’s Report for the Year Ended June 1970, 86-87. ↩

McLuhan in UT President’s Report 1972

The central theme of the seminars this year was “Critique of Satisfactions, Private and Corporate, Individual and Social.” Relating to our study of media and society and politics, there was a timely visit from Mr. Joseph Foyle of Dublin who has opened a Centre for Understanding Media in Dublin. He has asked for, and been granted, the right of association with the Centre for Culture and Technology here at the University of Toronto. (Similar association has been asked for by other groups, notably in Denver, Colorado, and in Paris, France.) Mr. Foyle, having studied the work of Harold Innis and the work of the Centre for Culture and Technology, had proceeded with some surveys of politics and media in Ireland, North and South. He is planning to expand this greatly and has already published some papers on the subject.

A major project which has been one of the underlying themes of Centre seminars for the past four years has finally been completed. This consists of the book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., N.Y.). This book was made possible by teamwork with Barrington Nevitt, engineering and management consultant for the Ontario Government. Mr. Nevitt is an electrical engineer whose contributions to the work of the Centre have been very great indeed. Many people come regularly to the seminars to hear him and to chat with him about many of the current problems in telecommunications. Since he has been a life-long specialist in precisely this field, he has added a great and important dimension to the activities of the Centre by his enthusiastic work with everybody associated with the Centre. A great linguist, with an extensive background in many countries of the world, he is also a humanist with an avid interest in contemporary art and poetry and literature. In a word, his encyclopedism constitutes a sort of ideal for any contemporary person.

A good deal of discussion during the year related to the problems encountered in the exercise of power and the dissatisfactions relating to the possession of great wealth. The Howard Hughes case came pat to the topic and the discussions on the problem of privacy and identity in a world in which mobility has destroyed community. Directly bearing on these problems came the Clifford Irving affair which brought into prominence the entire question of media coverage as constitutive rather than as reportorial. Clifford Irving brought out the fact that the media have more power to make than to report news. Coverage itself has become the new reality, and fact and fiction merge.

Phil Pendry, a CBC cameraman, visited the seminar and presented films to illustrate a strange development in political news coverage. In the North of Ireland the participants in violence carefully timed their public actions to synchronize with the TV and news cameras. They then adjourned indoors to watch themselves on TV and to hear themselves on radio. Until the cameras were in position, all was quiet in the streets.

The factor of massive public participation in on-going events presents a special problem with regard to public trials, whether in the Eichmann affair, or the Lieutenant Calley affair, or Angela Davis, or the Manson-Tate affair. As the defendants’ lives and motives are deployed, the public identifies more and more with the defendants simply by virtue of the coverage. There always seems to be the point at which the public suddenly feels that it has become the defendant itself, and at this moment the initial defendants flip into the role of public heroes, with the public saying: “I would have done the same thing myself under these conditions.” We studied violence as both the loss of identity and the means of regaining identity, whether private or corporate. This process raises that aspect of the social organism whereby its need for pervasive encounters in order to maintain identity and momentum is now fed by its consumption of its own image in the mirror of the mass media.

The decision to limit the graduate enrolment to fifteen students has worked out very well. It had become impossible to direct or to follow the projects of thirty or more students. Monday evening sessions from 8:00 to 10:00 were also held all year. Unexpectedly, this proved an ideal way of providing a platform for the fifteen graduate students on which to meet a wide range of faculty and community representatives. These representatives were always eager to initiate dialogue on many issues relating to the entire community. So natural and pervasive did the ensuing dialogue become that it was merely enriched by unexpected visitors, of whom there were many. This, in turn, prompted the idea of an “Airport University” to be conducted as an on-going seminar at major airports. This seminar could be a sponsored show on network or cable TV. Any major airport contains numerous key figures from almost all fields of social action and administration. These people sit for varying periods awaiting transport to their ultimate destinations. Many of them would welcome the opportunity to gather around a table to share food and drink and dialogue with their fellows.

Perhaps the highlight of the Monday evening seminars was one in the spring when Dean Safarian, Dr. Doug Wright and Father John Kelly, President of St. Michael’s College, shared their interests and problems with the other participants of the seminar. By its very nature, the Centre for Culture and Technology attracts a great many visitors from East and West throughout the entire year.1

 

  1. McLuhan reporting as Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, President’s Report for the Year Ended June 1972, 126-128. ↩