Monthly Archives: December 2020

Citadel of inclusive awareness

we live in a global village and the job is to create a global city (McLuhan to Tyrwhitt, 1960)1

Bob Dobbs has emphasized the importance in McLuhan’s work on “the citadel of individual consciousness”.2 Indeed, McLuhan himself marked this importance by repeating in the 1969 Counterblast this same phrase from 13 years earlier in the 1956 ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’.

What may be the deepest questions probed by McLuhan are: who, when and where is this citadel? what does it do? how does it go wrong? how might its function as a kind of gyroscope be put right?

‘Citadel’ derives from Latin ‘civis’, city, and McLuhan explicitly drew on this etymology in the passages below culminating in the idea of the citadel/city as “the central nervous system” (aka, as we might say today, the operating system). In a letter to Jackie Tyrwhitt in 1960 he set out a notion of the city as the social sensus communis against which his ‘citadel’ texts should be read:

Now that by electricity we have externalized all of our senses [in technologies like tele-phone and tele-vision], we are in the desperate position of not having any sensus communis. Prior to electricity, the city was the sensus communis for such specialized and externalized senses as technology had developed. From Aristotle onward, the traditional function of the sensus communis is to translate each sense into the other senses, so that a unified, integral image is offered at all times to the mind. The city performs that function for the scattered and distracted senses, and spaces and times, of agrarian cultures. Today with electronics we have discovered that we live in a global village and the job is to create a global city, as center for the village margins. The parameters of this task are by no means positional [= geographical]. With electronics, any marginal area can become centre, and marginal experiences can be had at any center. (…) The problem of [Tyrwhitt’s area of] urban planning today (in the field of nuclei that is the global village) is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times comprise all the senses, but in evershifting ratios which permit ever new light to come through them. Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space — not fixed but ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness? Thus the human community would assume the same integral freedom and awareness as the private person?3

Here are McLuhan’s ‘citadel’ passages in chronological order:

Ever since Burckhardt saw that the meaning of Machiavelli’s method was to turn the state into a work of art by the rational manipulation of power, it has been an open possibility to apply the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society. That is attempted here [in The Mechanical Bride]. The Western world, dedicated since the sixteenth century to the increase and consolidation of the power of the state, has developed an artistic unity of effect which makes artistic criticism of that effect quite feasible. Art criticism is free to point to the various means employed to get the effect, as well as to decide whether the effect was worth attempting. As such, with regard to the modern state, it [art criticism] can be a citadel of inclusive awareness amid the dim dreams of collective consciousness. (‘Preface’ to The Mechanical Bride, 1951)

No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspectives, either artistic or national. Everything [possible] is present in the foreground [of our consciousness]. That fact is stressed equally in current physics, jazz, newspapers, and psychoanalysis. And it is not a question of preference or taste. This flood has already immersed us. And whether it is to be a benign flood, cleansing the Augean stable of speech and experience, as envisaged in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or a merely destructive element, may to some extent depend on the degree of exertion and direction which we elicit in ourselves. (The Mechanical Bride, 1951, 87)

What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. Modern technology presumes to attempt a total transformation of man and his environment. This calls in turn for an inspection and defense of all human values. And so far as merely human aid goes, the citadel of this defense must be located in analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition. For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves in their manipulation of the new media. (Closing lines of ‘Sight, Sound, and the Fury’, 1954)

we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do so only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. But4 no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen, nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media. (Closing lines of ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’, 1956, that were repeated in the 1969 Counterblast.)

The literate man is one who is accustomed to the inner translation of sight into sound and of sound into sight, a complex activity for which he pays by psychic withdrawal, a weakening of sensuous life and a considerable lessening of the power of recall. But in return he obtains analytic mastery of specific areas of knowledge, and especially the power of applied science for social purposes. The increase of inner self-awareness resulting from the incessant translation of sound into sight and sight into sound also enhances his sense of individual identity and fosters that inner dialogue or conscience within, which we rightly associate with the very citadel [< civis] of civilized [< civis] awareness. (Printing and Social Change, 1959)

Historians see the forms of the great cities in the ancient world as manifesting all facets of human personality. Institutions, architectural and administrative, as extensions of our physical beings necessarily tend toward world-wide similarities. The central nervous system of the city [< civis] was the citadel [< civis]… (Understanding Media, 1964)

The 1959 passage from ‘Printing and Social Change’ continued:

In the new time which must be one of co-existence and pluralism there will be a basis for the simultaneous use of print and of all other media as well. To discover that basis now before we exhaust ourselves in moral denunciation and pointless clashes is urgently indicated. (Printing and Social Change, 1959)

The 1960 letter to Jackie Tyrwhitt cited above augmented these thoughts on “basis” from the previous year as follows:

By electricity, Jackie, we have not been driven out of our senses so much that our senses have been driven out of us. Before we can return to one another, a good deal of clarification is needed for the purposes of reconciliation. (…) Noise [in a communication system] is of course just any kind of irrelevance, and yet irrelevance is a needed margin for any kind of attention or center. In the field of attention, a center without a margin is the formula for hypnosis, stasis and paralysis. Again, when our senses are external to us, it becomes natural to regard a perpetual flow of programs5 through all media as indispensable to the community,6 just as much as the private individual considers that all of his senses should be receiving impressions all the time, even in sleep. 

In McLuhan’s view, “reconciliation” required the reconstruction of the “citadel of individual consciousness”, and of the analogous social “central nervous system of the city”, as a dynamic yet ordered site of “evershifting ratios”. The need was for ‘pattern recognition’ of the spectrum of figure/ground relations through and as which that citadel both received and managed its formations. The great riddle was and is how to under-stand ‘management’ as something received:7

The problem (…) is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times implicate8 all the senses, but in evershifting ratios which permit ever new light to come through them. Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space — not fixed but ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness?9

“Of conscious” — an objective genitive!10

  1. McLuhan’s 1960 letter to Tyrwhitt is cited at length in this post. ↩
  2. In McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia: The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome, Dobbs has the following fine insight — or insights: “humanity’s technological evolution had ended with television as all “hardware” had flipped and fused into “software” and what remained was a complex collective ESP, the patterns of which would be invoked by constant audience research, polling and surveillance. These new “weather” patterns, since they were multi-sensuous and abstract, McLuhan called “pollstergeists“. These are what plagued the human citadel of consciousness as it stared from its cave at the newly-retrieved quantum fluctuations of a still-born “astoneaged” society. The content of this situation, the human users and “media” themselves, imploded into a rapid, Sisyphean, and tetradic oscillation through the states of metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and irony which registered emotionally as states of paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, panic, and ecstasy. This is the condition I have designated as quadrophrenia in which the living metaphoric coherence of the collective consciousness appears to be usurped.” ↩
  3. McLuhan to Jackie Tyrwhitt, December 23, 1960, Letters 277-278. ↩
  4. McLuhan has ‘And’ here. ↩
  5. ‘Programs’ should not be understood here in the sense of ‘computer programs’. McLuhan must have been thinking of something like radio or television ‘programs’. That he equates ‘programs’ with ‘impressions’ should be be noted. The idea is that impressions are already a complicated story as exemplified in our dreams. ↩
  6. Cf, McLuhan to Harry Skornia, November 18 1958: “Big break-through in insight into TV came in NYC via Andre Girrard (sic, Girard) the painter who works for CBS and NBC. In a word, key fact about TV is that image is defined not by light on but by light through, exactly as stained glass principle of art form.  Makes me tingle all over just to see those words because very big matters hinge on this fact.  Opens up understanding fast.” ↩
  7. Take Today may be read as an inquiry into this riddle. ↩
  8. McLuhan has ‘comprise’ here instead of ‘implicate’. ↩
  9. McLuhan to Tyrwhitt, December 23, 1960, full passage cited above. ↩
  10. Consciousness is the always already having been achieved dynamic — as the always being achieved dynamic — of these “evershifting ratios”. The German word Gewesenheit captures the dynamic of this plurality (Ge-Wesen) as past (gewesen) and present (Gewesenheit). ↩

Dating key terms

To understand the trajectory of McLuhan’s work, it is necessary to understand when key terms appeared in it. Only with such a skeletal map in hand can questions properly be asked about the overall shape of that work or of its status at any moment in its course.

Naturally, some of these terms appeared in McLuhan’s writings before he realized how they might be used in a more technical way. For example, as early as 1951, in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’, he cited a passage from Ruskin in Modern Painters: 

A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character.1

There is so much here anticipating his later work — regarding time and times, the consumer as producer, the do-it-yourself ethic and the transitive gap — that the passage might well be read as Ruskin addressing McLuhan with the demand: Think about all this! This is the way to go! Or, since it was McLuhan who was citing Ruskin, it might just as well be read as some part of McLuhan, his second sight perhaps, addressing himself with this admonition: Here is what you need!

The aim below is to identify not when bare terms or phrases were first mentioned by McLuhan, but when he realized their systematic importance for his project. But no pretense is made to finality. Further key terms will doubtless have to be introduced from time to time and dates will have to be adjusted as new findings come to light.

*************

epyllion: 1951 ‘A Survey of Joyce Criticism’2

eye and ear: 1951 in ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’3

acoustic space: late 1954 in the Culture and Technology seminar4

classroom without walls: 1956 in ‘Media Fit the Battle of Jericho’ and ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’5.

medium is the message: May 1958 in ‘Radio in the Future of Canada’6

consumers as producers: 1958 in ‘Myth and Mass Media’7

structure: 1958 in ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’8

light through vs light on: 1958 in a letter to Harry Skornia9 

all-at-once: May 11, 1959 in a speech to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club10

global village: May 11, 1959 in a speech to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club11

formal cause: 1959 in ‘Communications and the Word of God’12

input/output difference: 1960 in a letter to Harry Skornia13

multilevel: 1960 in ‘Technology, the Media, and Culture’14

tactility: 1960 in ‘From Visual To Tactile Experience’15

the unconscious: 1962 in ‘Prospect’16

figure/ground: 1964 in letters from July 10 to Harry Skornia and to Bascom St John.17

interval: 1964 in ‘Notes on Burroughs’18 

gap: 1964 in ‘Cybernetics and Human Culture’:19

environment (as medium): October 1964 in a letter to Harry Skornia20

satellite surround: October 1964 in a letter to Harry Skornia21 

concept vs percept: 1969 in ‘Hardware/Software Mergers’22

nobody: 1969 in ‘Hardware/Software Mergers’23

media ecology: 1976 in ‘Violence of the Media’24

  1. Modern Painters, vol 3, 1856. After his 1951 citation of this passage from Ruskin, McLuhan quoted it again repeatedly in, eg, ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ (1954), ‘Media Log II’ (1959), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), and ‘Notes on Burroughs’ (1964). The insistent question to himself, apparently, was: did you get this yet? ↩
  2. ‘A Survey of Joyce Criticism’: “The Waste Land is epyllion to the epic Ulysses“. In his 1955 ‘Introduction’ to Tennyson: Selected Poetry (apparently written some years earlier) McLuhan specified his use of the epyllion term: “The so-called art of the little epic (the idyll and epyllion) was a late Greek form associated with magical rituals. It was especially cultivated by Theocritus, who was Tennyson’s favorite poet. Theocritus and the Alexandrian school were directly responsible for “the new poetry” of Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil. The work of Theocritus, Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil, masters of the epyllion, needs to be known for any deep understanding of Tennyson’s technique in narrative poetry. But the discontinuous technique of the epyllion is equally the clue to the art form of Dubliners, of The Waste Land, and of The Cantos. (…) In practice the epyllion was closely linked to the Alexandrian art of the idyll or little picture, the little epic being frequently a series of such pictures with narrative links. When these links are suppressed, the mere juxtaposition or parataxis of scenes tends (as in The Waste Land) to establish a dramatic mode for the poem. (…) ln antiquity the cyclic epic of Homer and Hesiod moved away from primitive magic toward a rational and limited social function. (…) The little epic, on the other hand, was a deliberate return to religious ritual and magic. Virgil was the first to fuse the solar or cyclic epic with the magical form of the little epic. In this fusion Virgil was followed by Dante, Milton, and Tennyson. In Four Quartets T.S. Eliot has effected a new kind of fusion of cyclic and little epic, as have Joyce and Pound in even more complex ways. Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the little epic as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is ‘the tale of the tribe’. That is to say, it is not so much a story of the individual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man. (…) Ritualistic form, great erudition, and artistic sophistication often disguised by a folk theme or casual irony, obscurity, and concentration of allusion and expression — these are some of the most obvious features of the idyll and epyllion as practiced in antiquity and as followed by Tennyson, Joyce, and Eliot. Inseparable from these features are the omnipresent devices of discontinuity, flashback, digressions, and subplots. Dramatic parallelism, multileveled implication, and symbolic analogy, rather than linear perspective or narrative, characterize the little epic at all times.” ↩
  3. ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’: “Traditionally there are two kinds of labyrinth, stone and sea, eye and ear. Joyce uses both constantly.”. In ‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’ (1954): “Many people have noted how ours is an ‘eye-minded’ culture. But we do not have educated eyes. Similarly our ears are assailed by messages as no ears have ever been assailed, but we do not have educated ears.” ↩
  4. See Autobiography 1954: McLuhan & Williams on discovering ‘auditory space’ and Ted Carpenter on discovering ‘auditory space’. ↩
  5. ‘Media Fit the Battle of Jericho’: “Let’s now take a quick tour of the walls knocked over by media change. Writing was the break-through from sound to sight. But with the end of the acoustic wall came chronology, tick-tock time, architecture. (…) With writing on paper came the road. The road and paper meant organization at a distance: armies, empires, and the end of city walls. (…) Print knocked down the monastic walls of social and corporate study. The (Gutenberg) Bible: religion without walls. (…) Print evoked the walls of the classroom. (…) It fostered the vernaculars and enlarged the walls between nations. It speeded up language, thereby setting new walls between speech and song, and song and instrumentation. (…) In America print and book-culture became the dominant form from the beginning, setting walls between literature and art, and art and life (…) In America print was a technological matrix of all subsequent invention. Its assembly-lines finally reached expression in Detroit and the motor-car: the home without walls. (…) With telegraph only vernacular walls remain. All other cultural walls collapse under the impact of its instantaneous flash. With the wire-photo the vernacular walls are undermined. (…) The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The movie and TV: classroom without walls.” ↩
  6. ‘Radio in the Future of Canada’: “Print, by permitting people to read at high speed and, above all, to read alone and silently, developed a totally new set of mental operations. What I mentioned earlier (although not in these same words) becomes very relevant here: the medium is the message. The medium of print is the message, more than any individual writer could say.” But in 1956 in ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’ he already declared: “we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects“. In fact, the whole passage concluding this ‘Educational Effects’ essay is eminently noteworthy: “Yes, we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do so only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. But no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.” (McLuhan has ‘and’ instead of ‘but’ at the start of the penultimate sentence here.) ↩
  7. ‘Myth and Mass Media’: “The mythmaking power of a medium (…) appears now in the post-literate age as the rejection of the consumer in favor of the producer. The movie now can be seen as the peak of the consumer-oriented society, being in its form the natural means both of providing and of glorifying consumer goods and attitudes. But in the arts of the past century the swing has been away from packaging for the consumer to providing do-it-yourself kits. The spectator or reader must now be co-creator. (…) The ‘form’ and ‘content’ dichotomy is as native to the abstract, written, and printed forms of codification as is the ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ dichotomy. (…) Edgar Allen Poe, both in his symbolist poems and in his detective stories, had anticipated this new mythic dimension of producer orientation by taking the audience into the creative process itself.” ‘Myth and Mass Media’ was published in 1959, but was given as a lecture at Harvard in the spring of 1958. ↩
  8. ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’: “Kenneth Boulding’s The Image is an important event in advancing our knowledge of alchemical change in all types of structure. And we achieve this advance by seeing every kind of structure, from the botanical to the animal and human, as a knowledge structure subject to information in-put.” (For “information in-put” see light through.) Later in 1963 in ‘We need a new picture of knowledge’: “It was about 1870 that Claude Bernard instituted the structural approach in experimental medicine, showing that the knowledge of separate organs could be advanced by their ablation or suppression. Then by observing the overall effect of this ablation on the changed relations by among all the other organs, the properties of the suppressed organ became automatically manifest. This total or structural approach to the interplay of functions and properties is called ‘closure’ or ‘completion’ in current psychology. ‘Closure’, in fact, is new balance or recovery after the shock of ablation or suppression of some organ or function.” ↩
  9. November 18 1958 to Harry Skornia: “Big break-through in insight into TV came in NYC via Andre Girrard (sic, Girard) the painter who works for CBS and NBC. In a word, key fact about TV is that image is defined not by light on but by light through, exactly as stained glass principle of art form.  Makes me tingle all over just to see those words because very big matters hinge on this fact.  Opens up understanding fast.” Light through brought McLuhan to what he would call “iconic mode”: percepts, media, rhetorical figures, the arts of the trivium and quadrivium, myths, formal causes — all were now conceived as incoming. As he would have it the next year in ‘Communications and the Word of God’: “the world of forms in which we live impresses us steadily and constantly without intermission, without benefit of words or thoughts. They are total in their action upon us. It doesn’t matter what theory we may have about them: their effect upon us is quite independent of any thought we may have about them.” See formal cause. The plurality of these incoming forms was critical since it implicated a transitive gap or interval which was necessary to preserve their plurality and which then could account for the possibility of revolution between outgoing Gutenbergian perspective and incoming Marconian mosaic. ↩
  10. Recorded in a May 14 1959 letter to Edward S Morgan: “It is important to understand that the Global Village pattern is caused by the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time. (…) We are retribalizing, after centuries of detribalizing; and (…) whereas we accomplished detribalization by literacy and segmental analysis of all thought, action, and production, we are accomplishing our retribalization by the simultaneous, by the electronic, which tends to put us in a kind of auditory world, or field, of simultaneous sound in which the Intuitive Man takes precedence over the Analytic Man.” (Letters 254, 255) ↩
  11. Recorded in a May 14 1959 letter to  Edward S Morgan: “The tribe is a unit, which, extending the bounds of the family to include the whole society, becomes the only way of organizing society when it exists in a kind of Global Village pattern. It is important to understand that the Global Village pattern is caused by the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.” (Letters 254) A few months later in ‘Communications and the Word of God’: “Let us start directly with a mention of what I consider to be an experience which we all share, all the time — the global-village atmosphere of the twentieth century.” Ten years before McLuhan had read Lewis’ America and Cosmic Man: “the earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport (…) there is no disunion any more on earth (…) the air-age has closed up the ocean gaps (…) America (…) is not any longer  across the seas. Instead, it is a time, not a place: namely, the cosmic era”. (Cosmic Man 21, 188, 189) McLuhan in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters in 1954: “But today with instantaneous global communications the entire planet, is, for purposes of inter-communication, a village rather than a vast imperial network.” ↩
  12. ‘Communications and the Word of God’: “Artists took up the cause of formal causality about 1800 after the philosophers had abandoned it (…) Formal causality disappeared (…) about Descartes’ time as an object of serious interest. (…) Artists, with the romantics, in a most earnest manner took up the cause of formal causality. Only, they talked about formal causality as if it were art in which the forms of things began to be insisted upon as having something to say to man and, above all, that they had the power to train human sensibility. Not the power to impose systems of thought but to train human sensibility. (…) a formal cause exerts its pressure non-verbally and non-conservatively. Any substantial form impresses itself upon you without benefit of awareness or conscious attention on your part. You can be conscious about it if you like, but (…) the world of forms in which we live impresses us steadily and constantly without intermission, without benefit of words or thoughts. They are total in their action upon us. It doesn’t matter what theory we may have about them: their effect upon is quite independent of any thought we may have about them. (…) In terms of formal causality, the dialogue is a necessity of education today. The old idea of presenting packaged information one-thing-at-a-time, visually-ordered, is completely at variance with our electronic media. I’m talking about their formal structure.” Later that year in a letter to Peter Drucker, December 15, 1959: “my media studies have gravitated toward the centre of formal causality, forcing me to re-invent it.” (Letters 259) ↩
  13. January 25 letter to Harry Skornia: “The last few days have seen a major breakthrough in media study. Working with the fact that each medium embodies one or more of the human senses, it struck me that we are impelled in perceiving each medium to complete the scale or spectrum of our sensorium. So that, radio impels us to provide a visual world moment by moment, and photography, which is so adequate in visual terms, compels us to complete the tactual and kinesthetic part of the sensorium. Thus the degree of sensuous completion is one way in which the lines of force in any medium are structured.” In his NAEB project report later that year, McLuhan would describe thus insight as follows: “Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained. Radio, for example, has an intense visual effect on listeners. But then there is the telephone which also proffers an auditory impression, but has no visual effect. In the same way television is watched but has a very different effect from movies. These observations led to a series of studies of the media, and to the discovery of basic laws concerning the sensory effects of various media. These will be found in this report.  In 1915 Heinrich Wölfflin published his Principles of Art History which has since then revolutionized the study of many matters besides art. His entire approach confirms what I discovered about media: “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts“. (Report on the Project in Understanding New Media) ↩
  14. ‘Technology, the Media, and Culture’: “Let us be quite clear that electric technology supplants and dissolves Euclidean rational space. As educators and responsible citizens, we have to inquire  whether we choose to pay the price for a technological change which not only substitutes multiple spaces and times for our long-held Euclidean world, but which also pulls the rug out from under all the legal, political, and educational procedures of the past three thousand years of the Western world. (…) As information levels rise, fixed point of view yields to inclusive multi-dimensional awareness. (…) It was only a generation ago that the literary world was startled by the rediscovery of multiple levels of statement in the simplest words and syntax. (…) What we today can see very easily is that the departure of the Greek world into pictorial and Euclidean space was anything but natural. Preliterate, natural man then and now lived in a world of scheme which we encounter in child and primitive art. Such art allows no dominance to the eye. The multiple levels and modes of sound and tactility are favored in cave art above the visual.” What McLuhan made explicit in this way in 1960 he had long known implicitly. Here he is in a 1934 letter to his family from Cambridge: “Of late I have been wayfaring among the work of T.S. Eliot. He is easily the greatest modern poet, and just how great he is remains to be seen, because he has not produced his best yet. However the poems I am reading (Poems 1909-1925) have the unmistakable character of greatness. They transform, and diffuse and recoalesce the commonest every day occurrences of 20th century city life till one begins to see double indeed — the extremely unthinkable character, the glory and the horror of the reality in life (…) is miraculously suggested.” (Letters 41) ↩
  15. Already in 1943 in ‘X’ McLuhan wrote of “tactual awareness”. But tactility did not become thematic in his work until 1960. ‘From Visual To Tactile Experience’: “But the TV image is the first technology by which man has outered his haptic, or tactile, powers. It affects, therefore, the balance or ratio among our senses. Since at all times consciousness involves a ratio resulting in the immediate “closure” or completion of pattern, such new “closure” or completion is, in fact, a new posture of mind charged with new preferences and desires, as well as with new patterns of perception. Tactility Means not Contact of Skin but Interplay of All Senses. The elementary and basic fact about the TV image is that it is a mosaic or a mesh, continuously in a state of formation by the “scanning finger”.  Such mosaic involves the viewer in a perpetual act of participation and completion.  The intensely dramatic character of this image is shared in no way by the photograph or by the movie image. The TV image is not a shot, nor a view of anything so much as an experience. Its primarily tactile, rather than visual, character is a quality familiar to art historians in connection with mosaic work and with abstract art. These also, like the TV image, foster an intense experience of structure and interrelation of form for which the visual experience of Western man since the Renaissance has prepared us not at all. For the tactile image involves not so much the touch of skin as the interplay or contact of sense with sense, of touch with sight, with sound, with movement.” Here is McLuhan to Walter Ong, Feb 27, 1962 (Letters 287): “Walter it’s about time that we did something for philosophy in regard to “touch”, that “interface” transforming moment when the sensus communis translates one mode into another. Our media now do this outside us and thus calls urgently for an outer consensus of media proportioned to the proportional ratios of consciousness.” ↩
  16. ‘Prospect’: “we live in the unconscious. This is the age of the unconscious because it is the age when the nervous system is totally exposed.” Later in ‘The Memory Theatre’ (1967): “The unconscious, the greatest of all possible memory theatres, goes outside into the external environment by means of electric technology.” And in ‘Environment As Programmed Happening’ (1968): “To say that we live mythically today while continuing to think conventionally may help to draw attention to the technological gap in our ordinary experience. Electric technology, simply because it is all at once, is also discontinuous. It tends therefore to create exterior situations that have all the structural characteristics of the human unconscious. To the rational observer who seeks to find connectedness and uniformity in the spaces of his world, the new situation presents an extreme form of the irrational.” ↩
  17. Both letters mention McLuhan reading Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology. In his conversations with Nine Sutton a decade later, McLuhan noted “I was not using figure-ground (…) when I wrote that book (Understanding Media) (…) Now I have switched completely to figure/ground. It was implied there but it was not explicit.” Indeed, the implication was already present 30 years before in a letter to his family discussing T S Eliot (cited in multilevel above). ↩
  18. ‘Notes on Burroughs’: “The art of the interval, rather than the art of the connection, is not only medieval but Oriental; above all, it is the art mode of instant electric culture.” But already in ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953) McLuhan’s second sight had already spotted the importance of the interval: “one of the most persistent and deeply embedded motifs in Ulysses is that of the ‘series of empty fifths’ which Stephen plays on Bella Cohen’s piano, expounding their ritual perfection ‘because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which (…) is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with the ultimate return. (…) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller (…) The longest way round is the shortest way home.’ The musical chord is a means of linking with the stages of human apprehension, the growth of the soul, the movement of the sun through the zodiacal signs, the Incarnation and Ascension, the mental labyrinth of art and the cloacal labyrinth of commerce. Nor are these diverse themes merely introduced casually in the Circe episode. They pervade this epic which unites the trivial and quadrivial arts by means of the same solar ritual which underlies Homeric and other epic structures.” See also gap and tactility. ↩
  19. ‘Cybernetics and Human Culture’: “Yet this strange gap between the specialist, visual world and the integral, auditory world needs to be understood today above all, for it contains the key to an understanding of what automation and cybernetics imply.” In that same year Understanding Media has a passage which pointed McLuhan to the idea of ‘the gap is where the action is’: “The discovery of calculation by positional numbers rather than by merely additive numbers led, also, to the discovery of zero. Mere positions for 3 and 2 on the board created ambiguities about whether the number was 32 or 302. The need was to have a sign for the gaps between numbers. It was not till the thirteenth century that sifr, the Arab word for “gap” or “empty,” was Latinized and added to our culture as “cipher” (ziphirum) and finally became the Italian zero. Zero really meant a positional gap. It did not acquire the indispensable quality of “infinity” until the rise of perspective and “vanishing point” in Renaissance painting. The new visual space of Renaissance painting affected number as much as lineal waiting had done centuries earlier.” The phrase, “the gap is where the action is”, seems to appear first in Take Today (60 and 81). Take Today begins: “The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things. All boundaries are areas of maximal abrasion and change. The interval or gap constitutes the resonant or musical bond in the material universe. This is where the action is. To naïve classifiers a gap is merely empty. They will look for connections instead of bonds. (…) But by directing perception on the interfaces of the processes in ECO-land, all gaps become prime sources of discovery.” ↩
  20. McLuhan to Skornia, October 3, 1964 (Letters 311): “Harry me boy, it works. Over and over I’ve talked to groups and individuals about new technology as new environment. Content of new environment is old environment. The new environment is always invisible. Only the content shows, and only the environment is really active as shaping force. As Drucker shows in his Management for Results in every situation 10% of the events cause 90% of the events. The 10% area is the sector of opportunity. The 90% area is the area of problems. The opportunity or environmental and innovational area is ignored. All sensible people deal first with problems, that is, the dead issues. To deal with the environmental directly is my strategy, Harry, to attack the new environment as if it were an artefact capable of being molded. Today Telstar is about to create a new environment. It’s content will be not only TV and computer but the planet itself. TV will become an art form just as movie has done  since TV.  But in order to have autonomy we must push the unconscious and environmental parameters right up into consciousness.  All that I’ve said about the medium is the message is sound.  But it becomes acceptable when put as ‘new technology is new environment’.  Everybody knows that environment is a force. The principle works in many ways. e.g. at what point does the supply of any item become environmental?  Answer:  ‘when it creates demand’.  It works also for all modes of perception.  Can now put the entire Gutenberg Galaxy on a single page.” Before 1964 McLuhan had certainly discussed what might be termed the global implications of media, but now his focus became explicitly on media as environments. ↩
  21. McLuhan to Skornia, October 3, 1964 (Letters 311). See environment (as medium) above: “Today Telstar is about to create a new environment. It’s content will be not only TV and computer but the planet itself.” A premonition of the satellite surround was already present in McLuhan’s 1956 ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’: “Yes, we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do so only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.” But Wyndham Lewis 15 years before in Cosmic Man, a book McLuhan knew and learned from, already foresaw: “The enormously increased velocity of the time-machine confounds the historian. His thinking is geared to time-tables which contemporary techniques have made suddenly obsolete. Even a revolutionary weapon like the rocket-bomb alters the conservative picture entirely. The atomic bomb just blasts it to pieces. The aerial platforms, two-hundred miles up, of tomorrow, which, it seems, the rocket-men were turning over in their minds, while engaged in the perfecting of their’doodlebugs’ will, in combination with the new nuclear principle, write an even more comprehensive finis to history as it up to now has been conceived.” ↩
  22. ‘Hardware/Software Mergers’: “From Concept To Percept — Havelock, describing the tribal encyclopedia of pre-Plato man, describes the world of percept. Today we are moving  rapidly out of the world of concepts, which came in with Plato, back into a world of perception.  Our school systems are not yet programmed for training perception, but only for concepts and classified data. Concepts end with electric circuitry and percepts take over. (…) After 2500 years of concepts: back to perception and discovery. We enter again the age of the hunter, the searcher, and the comprehensivist. It is a return to the age of the Cyclops, the data banker, the man who gathers data about his fellow man as a full time living.” ↩
  23. ‘Hardware/Software Mergers’: “He was on a frontier, and like anybody else on a frontier he was a nobody. When you are a nobody, you have to prove who you are. All frontiers are violent because nobody is anybody or everybody is a nobody.” McLuhan was close to this notion in ‘Television in a New Light’  in 1966: “a mass audience is an audience in which everyone experiences and participates with everybody and in which nobody has a private identity. So the psychiatrist’s couches today are groaning with the weight of people asking, ‘Who am I? Please tell me who I am.’ There is no identity left. At electric speeds nobody has a private identity. Don’t ask whether this is good or bad. It is an inevitable function of electric speeds (…) The electronic world rubs out all barriers, all partitions, all classifications. (See classroom without walls above.)That is why the existentialist discovers the difficulty of having a personality in the modern world. Electrically, you cannot have a private personality. It belongs to an older technology of data classification: for example, ‘I’m a Hungarian, I’m a dentist, I’m 35, I have three kids, that’s me.’ Under electric conditions that’s nobody!” ↩
  24. ‘Violence of the Media’: “Violence exerted by private individuals tends to have limited results, whereas the violence exerted by groups knows no bounds. Media are always and necessarily corporate or group activities, whether they are the mother tongues or the father images of big corporations. With the proliferation of multi-media in our time, there is a new consensus that some manner of  media ecology and control be put into action…” ↩