Monthly Archives: February 2021

Medium in America and Cosmic Man

In his programmatic letter to Ezra Pound from June 22, 1951,1  McLuhan recorded his reaction to Wyndham Lewis’ America and Cosmic Man:

In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society. Lewis saw that years ago. His America and Cosmic Man2 was an H-bomb let off in the desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much more fun. Lewis clears the air of fug. We want to get rid of people entirely. And it is necessary to admire the skill and thoroughness with which we have made our preparations to do this.  I am not of the ‘we’ party.  I should prefer to defuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the sidelines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists.3

It may be that Lewis’ pointers to “the medium” in Cosmic Man acted as a spur to McLuhan’s eventual appeal to the notion ten years later — and for the rest of his career thereafter. The most important of Lewis’ observations in this book concerning “the medium”, at least for McLuhan’s purposes, were these:

Until you know something of the medium — the political and social atmosphere — in which these great figures live and have their being, it would be useless to attempt to delineate them for you4… (34)

Water is a very different medium from air: and if you had never seen water in any but minute quantities, it would not be easy to explain to you about the life of a fish.5 (35)

Human societies are engaged in a perpetual struggle to disengage themselves from a chaos of superannuated laws. The accelerated tempo of mechanical evolution makes things much worse. (…) A bundle of old statutes, or the medium of exchange hallowed by long use, has us bewitched. A superstitious fixation makes of our political and economic life one vast “bottleneck”.6 (154-155)

Lewis was discussing “political and economic life” life here, but McLuhan would have seen an excellent description of our social, cultural, familial and individual predicaments as well. The Gutenberg Galaxy, begun not long after McLuhan’s letter to Pound, but completed only a decade later, could well be described in the terms set out here by Lewis: “Human societies [and all individual human beings] are engaged in a perpetual struggle7 to disengage themselves from a chaos of superannuated laws. The accelerated tempo of mechanical evolution makes things much worse. (…) A bundle of old statutes [governing first of all our perceptual patterns], or the medium of exchange hallowed by long use, has us bewitched. A superstitious fixation makes of our political and economic life (and our social and individual lives) one vast “bottleneck”.

And now today, more than 70 years after Lewis’ Cosmic Man, the planet remains fixated before this “vast bottleneck” — while it juggles nuclear bombs at an ever-increasing number of ‘flashpoints’….

  1. Letters 218. ↩
  2. London 1946, NY 1949. ↩
  3. It might be said that Lewis and Pound defined the cultural-social-political problem that McLuhan felt called upon to solve and that Sigfried Giedion gave him the potential solution to it: “to defuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue”. See Sigfried Giedion — A Faculty of Interrelations. In the 1940s with his Proposal to Robert Hutchins and still in the 1950s with the Culture and Communication seminar, McLuhan took “starting a dialogue” to be the practical problem of bringing together people with expertise and good will in a way that would fuse their individual and professional  perspectives into an ongoing collective program. This thought was also at the heart of McLuhan’s ideas for educational reform even in primary school where (for example) multiple teachers might teach dialogue to students by embodying it between themselves. However, bitter experience taught McLuhan that practical arrangements promoting interdisciplinary work (even in the rare circumstance when they could be financed and organized) did not achieve the desired result — any more than did his own teaching even to graduate students or, worst of all, in his own family life (where he was unable to pass on his religious convictions to his children). Having hammered away at this problem for a quarter century, McLuhan experienced a ‘breakthrough’ at the end of the 1950s that he would attempt to define and communicate in the remaining two decades of his life. That breakthrough was the idea that human beings in all their social, political, economic, educational and cultural activities could achieve a comparable sort of collective investigation as that in the physical sciences by defining the elementary structure of human experience: “the medium is the message”. Here, he intuited, could be the solution to the “impact nil” problem. ↩
  4. The medium as “the political and social atmosphere” would have recalled Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World for McLuhan. (See McLuhan on Whitehead.) Whitehead uses hundreds of phrases like “the political and social atmosphere” in his book without defining what such a thing as a “political and social atmosphere” is or how such a thing might be recognized. Using Lewis’ terminology, the resulting question could be put: what is such a “medium”? Or, formulated in the imperative, “the medium is the message!” ↩
  5. Following his friend John Culkin (in turn following Einstein and others), McLuhan often explained the difficulty of communicating his ideas on “the medium” by appeal to the difficulty a fish might have in recognizing water. ↩
  6. Bottlenecks are one of Lewis’ chief interests in Cosmic Man. For example: “America stands out as the one great community in which race has been thrown out, and the priests of many cults have been brought together, in relative harmony — in a world in which obstinate  bottlenecks of racial and religious passion, whether in Europe, Asia, or Africa, are in process of being overcome, or at least have reached the showdown stage. The United States is for Europe as well as for India, for instance, not to mention Palestine, an object lesson in how to make the lion lie down with the lamb.” (31) Here may be seen why Lewis remained unimpressed with McLuhan’s religious ideas, despite McLuhan’s attempts to interest him in them. Unlike McLuhan who had grown up with it and knew its eviscerating effects in his bones, Lewis conceived American rootlessness as a potentially good thing. ↩
  7. McLuhan had been writing repeatedly about an “ancient quarrel” since 1942 — the year before he met Lewis. ↩

Taking flight

An aerial view of a territory to be occupied by subsequent toil. (McLuhan to Felix Giovanelli, Aug 1948)

His [Aquinas’] “articles” can be regarded as vivisections of the mind in act. The skill and wit with which he selects his objections constitute a cubist landscape, an ideal landscape of great intellectual extent seen from an airplane. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

In his 1951 ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ essay,1  McLuhan set out the subject matter of his investigations for the following decade. They would focus on the specification of the technique of flight:

If anybody ever consciously cultivated2 a move camera eye it was Tennyson. But if one asks what it was of landscape art that the Romantics and the Victorians did not achieve, it must be replied, [it was] le paysage intérieur which had to wait for Baudelaire, Laforgue and Rimbaud. It was this discovery that gave the later poets and painters alike, the power to be much more subjective and also more objective than the Romantics. For all their skill in discovering and manipulating external-nature situations by which to render states of mind, the Romantics remained tied to the object3 (…) So they repeatedly bog down (…)4 just at the moment when they are ready to soar. They could not discover the technique of flight. It would be interesting to inquire how far the cessation of the poetic activity of Wordsworth and Coleridge was connected with this technical frustration. By means of the interior landscape, however, Baudelaire could not only range across the entire spectrum of the inner life, he could transform the sordidness and evil of an industrial metropolis into a flower. With this technique he was able to accept the city as his central myth, and see it as the enlarged shape of a man, just as Flaubert did in The Sentimental Education, Joyce in Ulysses and Eliot in The Waste Land.5 Moreover, the technique of inner landscape not only permits the use of any and every kind of experience and object, it insures a much higher degree of control over the effect  (…) The picturesque artists [= the Romantics]6 saw the wider range of experience that could be managed by discontinuity and planned irregularity, but they kept to the picture-like single perspective.7 The interior landscape, however, moves naturally towards the principle of multiple perspectives as in the first two lines of The Waste Land where the Christian Chaucer, Sir James Frazer and Jessie Weston are simultaneously present. This is ‘cubist perspective’ which renders, at once, a diversity of views with the spectator [including  the author or artist]8 always in the centre of the picture.9

The great question was how to domesticate this “technique of flight”? How could it be specified and thereby applied to crises not only (only!) in the humanities, but in education, economics, politics and war and peace?10

Ten years later, in 1961, McLuhan set out his progress in this quest in ‘The Humanities in the Electronic Age’:

Bertrand Russell pointed to the great achievement of the twentieth century as the technique of suspended judgement. That is, [it made] the discovery of the process of insight itself, the technique of avoiding the automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitudes that so easily results from any given [individual or] cultural situation – [the discovery of] the technique of open field perception. (…) The technique of insight itself is a natural phase to succeed the nineteenth-century discovery of the technique of invention, because it is the means of abstracting oneself from the bias and consequence of one’s own [individual and social] culture. (…) Innis’ concern in the Bias of Communication11 is with the technique of the suspended judgement. That means, not the willingness to admit other points of view, but the technique of how not to have a point of view. This is identical with the problem facing physicists in correcting the bias of the instruments of research, and it draws attention to the fact that the historian, the poet, the critic, and the philosopher, now as always, face exactly the same situations as the scientist.12

  1. First published in Essays in Criticism 1:3 in 1951. Reprinted in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham, 1960, and in The Interior Landscape in 1969. ↩
  2. McLuhan: “ever had and consciously cultivated”. ↩
  3. See the 1961 citation in this post for “the automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitudes”. Also note ‘Eliot’s Historical Decorum’ (1949): “Symbol means to throw together, to juxtapose without copula. And it is a work that cannot be undertaken nor understood by the univocalizing, single plane, rationalist mind. (…) Analogy institutes tension, polarity, a flow of intellectual perception set up among two sets of particulars. To merge those two sets by an attempt to reduce a metaphor situation to some single view or proposition is the rationalist short circuit”. In his 1974 interview with Louis Forsdale, ‘Technology and the Human Dimension’, McLuhan describes this “short circuit” as applied to identity in the electric age: “The ordinary man can feel so pitiably weak that, like a skyjacker, he’ll reach for a superhuman dimension of world coverage in a wild desperate effort for fulfillment”. Here again: the attempt “to merge (…) two sets” — the “pitiably weak” and the “superhuman” — into “some single view or proposition” of “world coverage”. The comical absurdity of this merger (which yet cannot not be made) entails that it can be achieved and maintained only by force. And it is this centripetal implosion into merger which is expressed in centrifugal explosion whenever that merger is threated: “violence is engendered by the need to recover identity” (as McLuhan says to Forsdale in the same interview). ↩
  4. McLuhan has “bog down in reflection”, which is strange since the spur for “closure” might well be said to be the felt need to put an end to “reflection”. But it may be that McLuhan was thinking of “reflection” in a technical sense here as narcissism in which fixation on the ‘one’ is the structural form even of its mirrored “reflection”. ↩
  5. McLuhan has a bracketed note here: “It is noteworthy that the English novel also preceded English poetry in the management of the city as ‘myth’. Dickens was the first to make London a character or a person. And James and Conrad in their different modes preceded Joyce and Eliot in assimilating the urban to the stuff of poesy.” ↩
  6. In ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ (1951) McLuhan uses the phrase “romantic or picturesque poetry”. ↩
  7. For example, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) decisively introduces a discontinuity between the wanderer and the rest of mankind. His whole being might be said to be a “planned irregularity”. But as McLuhan observes about the Romantics, the discontinuity and irregularity here with Friedrich’s Wanderer are captured (in multiple senses) in a single frame (in multiple senses). In remarkable contrast, Juan Gris’ Portrait of Jossette (1916), a century later, demonstrates how discontinuity and irregularity can destabilize both the subject of the painting and the artistic vision itself. Now romanticism might be said in one respect to be the forcible attempt to ward off these multiple instabilities (although of course it had great virtues in other respects). But for McLuhan and for any genuine thinking, these discontinuities must be assumed (in multiple senses) as the very presupposition and gateway to discovery. ↩
  8. Since “the technique of flight” self-consciously takes off from “the entire spectrum of the inner life” of human being, all possible perspectives of the author and of her audience are of course inclusive to her “analogical awareness”. This is “the technique of how not to have a point of view”, as McLuhan would put it a decade later (full passage given above). ↩
  9. With “the spectator always in the centre of the picture” McLuhan means exactly not the romantic spectator with a defined perspective in which everything can be ‘in place’. Instead, “the spectator always in the centre of the picture” puts the spectator in question. The spectator is not outside the picture observing it, but is inside the picture being observed by it! ↩
  10. An indication of how McLuhan would integrate the “technique of flight” into his media investigations is given in a 1959 letter to Edward S Morgan, a Maclean-Hunter executive, that recapitulated a speech given at the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club on May 11, 1959, ‘New Business Rules In Our Electronic Age’: “My theme was simply that the Electronic Age is one in which information comes to everybody in any job, in any social or personal activity, information comes from all directions at the same time. This creates a very peculiar field, as it were, ‘field’ in the sense that the physicists use the word, or the psychologists. A field of instantaneous interrelationships — which causes decision makers to play it by ear, as we say. In the Jet Age, for example, an airplane pilot can no longer navigate by the old method of intersecting bearings or lines because the speed of the plane takes him past the point so established too fast. In the same way, he has to rely on a continuously picked-up electronic beam on which to fly. He has to have a continuous and instantaneous flow of information in order to navigate.” (Letters 252) Ten years later still, McLuhan would begin to use the hi-jacking of airplanes as the master narrative of modern business, politics and entertainment. All represented a reversion to the Romantic “fixing of attitudes” — or altitudes. ↩
  11. McLuhan has “the Bias of Communication and later” here. But, sadly, there was very little “later” then for Innis. McLuhan must have been thinking of his own celebration of Innis in 1953, ‘The Later Innis’, which appeared shortly after Innis’ death in November 1952. ↩
  12. This essay appeared in the Humanities Association Bulletin for 1961. It was one of McLuhan’s self-consciously ‘Canadian’ pieces where he set out to identify something essential to his countrymen. To compare, it was two years before this, in 1959, that he introduced the notion of the “global village” in a speech to businessmen in his hometown of Winnipeg: ‘New Business Rules In Our Electronic Age’ (Letters 252-255; see note 9 above and the report in the Winnipeg Free Press from May 12, 1959). McLuhan made a whole series of such ‘Canadian’ pronouncements which require particular attention as signposts he emphasized along his way. Another instance: his introduction in May 1958 of the phrase ‘the medium is the message‘ at UBC in Vancouver. ↩

Jung on praeceptores mundi

For Gerry Fialka and Clinton Ignatov, and with a tip of the hat to Søren Kierkegaard1….

The archetype is extremely cohesive, the residues of other archetypes adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we unconsciously retrieve others, and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. In fact, whenever we ‘quote’ one [archetype of] consciousness [objective genitive]2, we also ‘quote’ [all] the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes has been called by Jung (…) ‘the archetypal unconscious’. (From Cliché to Archetype, 21-22)

[Freud’s] conception of man, considered historically, is a reaction against the Victorian tendency to see everything in a rosy light and yet to describe everything sub rosa. It was an age of mental “pussyfooting” that finally gave birth to Nietzsche, who was driven to philosophize with a hammer. So it is only logical that ethical motives as determining factors in human life do not figure in Freud’s teaching. He sees them in terms of conventional morality, which he justifiably supposes would not have existed in this form, or not have existed at all, if one or two bad-tempered patriarchs had not invented such precepts to protect themselves from the distressing consequences of their impotence. Since then these precepts have unfortunately gone on existing in the super-ego of every individual. This grotesquely depreciative view is a just punishment for the historical fact that the ethics of the Victorian age were nothing but conventional morality, the creation of curmudgeonly praeceptores mundi. (Jung on Freud)3

In ‘Sigmund Freud in His Historical Setting’, Jung considered how something like a ‘galaxy’ of experience operates:

even the most original and isolated idea does not drop down from heaven, but grows out of an objective network of thought which binds all contemporaries together whether they recognize it or not.

Such an “objective network” is manifested both individually (in a person like Freud for the purposes of Jung’s essay) and collectively (“which binds all contemporaries together”). But “all contemporaries” here should not be understood to mean ‘everybody alive at the same time’ and especially not to mean ‘everybody alive at the same time who all experience the world in the same way’. The human community (or comedy) is far more various than that.4 Some singular form of experience certainly did not dominate individuals like Freud all the time (let alone whole groups of individuals all the time) and it did not dominate in any way at all many other individuals who were alive at the same time as Freud and in that sense were ‘contemporary’ with him.5

It would seem that human experience, individual or collective, must be understood more finely — that is, with greater attention to its phenomenology, to its breaks and variations and assumptions (on the sides both of the observed and observer!). Descriptions in terms of persons (Freud) or groups of persons (Freud’s ‘contemporaries’) or ages (the nineteenth century!) will not do. These are air balloons. But while they fail in categorizing experience in a rigorous way, they do show that categorizing experience is always going on in one way or another. We can’t do without it! These air balloons therefore demonstrate both a need and attempts to answer that need. Determined investigation is called for to retrieve what is at once signaled by them and obscured by them.

Instead of such easy and misleading understandings, “contemporaries” may be taken to name, as the word itself indicates, a group whose shared experience has its root in a certain acceptance of time (dual genitive)6: con-temporaries. In the case of the Gutenberg galaxy (the phenomenon, not the book), the acceptance was (and is) of time as singular and linear. But since this particular acceptance of time is anything but unanimous across the extended record of human cultures, it must be asked where and when and by whom such a determination is reached.  Apparently there is another space and time (McLuhan termed it the ‘interior landscape’), in which the specification of such acceptances is incessantly at stake (McLuhan termed it ‘the drama of cognition’) involving some sort of ghostly actor (McLuhan termed it the ‘nobody’7 behind the dramatic masks).

The resulting implication is that time and space are fundamentally plural, not singular, and, at least in the first instance, vertical, not linear. ‘Con-temporaries’ thus takes on a further meaning as the fundamental task of human individuals and societies in determining, moment by moment, space, time and identity. This is a task that is going on ceaselessly, yet with no notice at all, behind our own backs. Penelope unweaving by night what she wove by day is an image of this definitive activity of humans — an essential activity like breathing that is yet, remarkably enough, unknown and uninvestigated.8   

McLuhan would initiate investigation of this activity as the path to potential survival in an age in which the ‘advance’ of human activity has come to threaten its own destruction: the Tower of Babel revisited. But just as with the ‘exterior landscape’, preliminary “pattern recognition” must first be achieved9 in order to initiate collective investigation of this “landscape” based on common focus. This is what happened with chemistry in the exterior landscape and what must now also happen in the interior one — if its investigation is finally to take off.10

A ‘galaxy’ of experience covers a loosely defined group in the same way that ‘organic’ names an enormous variety of carbon-based compounds. A timeless structure like carbon is at the base of such a group, but that structure has “innumerable variants”11 and is in any case only one elementary possibility amongst a whole ‘table’ of others.12 Exactly therefore, “when we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we unconsciously retrieve [all the] others” — that is, we cannot understand the particular structure of one of them without understanding the general structure of all of them.

To take an example, electric media expose old media, like the book or the car, as obsolete. Unconsciously (in the vast majority of cases) or consciously (at least potentially), this exposure implicates the medium as such. We are able to judge old media on the basis of new media only because we have some implicit notion of the medium and of the range of its expression — as plural media.

McLuhan’s quest was to bring these implicit understandings to explicit collective investigation — hence his constant appeal to “the grammars of the media“. For just as we follow the rules of language without knowing that we are doing so, so (in McLuhan’s view) we follow the ‘laws of media’ — but unconsciously.13 And this quest would be no mere conceptual exercise. It would eventuate in the study of dynamic media structures both in themselves and in their phenomenal expression — just as chemistry studies the elements both in themselves and in their phenomenal expression.

The phenomenon of the Gutenberg galaxy was a multifarious collection of individuals and groups.  When it was in operation, this form issued from a principle that was be-fore in time14 (but not clock-time, of course) in such a way as to “fore-ordain” experience — regardless of “whether they [those dominated by it] recognize it or not”:  

the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines

he is under compulsion from the Zeitgeist 

“Zeitgeist“15, like “contemporary”, is ambiguous. It can refer to a rather vague epoch in chronological time or to the underlying possibility out of which such temporal phenomena are issued — like the outburst of a geyser16 into diachronic time (Zeit #2) from out of its “ancient”, perennial or synchronic time (Zeit #1). Jung makes the point nicely:

The human psyche, however, is not simply a product of the Zeitgeist [narrowly construed as an historical epoch], but is a thing of far greater constancy and immutability. The nineteenth century is a merely local and passing phenomenon, which has deposited but a thin layer of dust on the age-old psyche of mankind.17 Once this layer is wiped off and our professional eye-glasses are cleaned, what shall we see? 

Jung therefore comments as regards Freud that:

A general psychological theory that claims to be scientific should not be based on the malformations of the nineteenth century, and a theory of neurosis must also be capable of explaining hysteria among the Maori.18

In the same way, media may not be understood literally as modern communication devices or even as all such devices, modern and historical. Instead, media as the abysmal patterns of the weaving and unweaving of experience19 are ‘contemporaneous’ with human being: it cannot be understood aside from them and they cannot be understood aside from it.20 In fact, neither can be at all without the other. Hence the very great difficulties involved in the investigation of media by human beings.

A check on any discussion of McLuhan and media may therefore be made simply by asking if it has overlooked, or not, what it means (and what it always has meant) to be human.21

Universal abdication of human motive is now plain. (McLuhan to Pound, July 30, 1948, Letters 198)

 

 

  1. Kierkegaard’s great virtue lies in reminding us over and over again how strange it is, indeed how ridiculously comical it is, for us to overlook human being in our investigations of individual and collective human phenomena. ↩
  2. See note 6. ↩
  3. Jung, ‘Sigmund Freud als kulturhistorische Erscheinung’ (1932). The first English translation appeared in the same year as the German original. The official translation of the essay is now included in CW15 and it is this translation which is cited in the quotations below that are not otherwise identified. The praeceptores mundi are the preceptors of world, which is one way of describing the archetypes. ↩
  4. Does a person at breakfast experience the world in the same way and as she will paying her bills that afternoon? ↩
  5. ‘Contemporary’ is used here in its usual sense of ‘at the same time’ — but only by way of posing the question: just what does ‘at the same time’ mean? As developed in this post, it would seem that it is no more straightforward in regard to human existence than it is to quantum particles. ↩
  6. A subjective genitive denotes possession: the ball of the boy; an objective genitive denotes some quality of an object: a recommendation of the boy; a dual genitive is to be understood in both ways: ‘acceptance of time‘, where the genitive is ambiguous between time as the determined object and time as the determining subject. ↩
  7. Compare Jung on the “ineffable something”: “This something is the desired ‘mid-point’ of the personality, that ineffable something betwixt the opposites (…) the product of energic tension” (CW7: Two Essays in Analytic Psychology). ↩
  8. Neither the exterior landscape nor the interior landscape is, of course, some molar singularity. Both are vast multifarious realms. But while the multifariousness of the exterior one has been subject to increasingly rigorous investigation for centuries now in a whole series of sciences, the interior one, when acknowledged at all, remains subject to guesses and pretenses. Its basic patterns — whose recognition would work to spark collective investigation in parallel fashion to the sciences of the exterior landscape — remain unknown. The extreme peril of the world is the result of this imbalance between exterior ‘success’ and interior ignorance. Hence the imperative of McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’! ↩
  9. Before being achieved in confirmed recognition, patterns must of course first be sought, by weaving and unweaving across all possibilities. This is what McLuhan was doing from, roughly, 1930 to 1960. Working his way through this labyrinth, or these labyrinths, he finally came to recognize the pattern in his attempts at pattern recognition: the medium that is the message! ↩
  10. See The technique of flight. ↩
  11. See Take Today 22: “There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or ‘parti-colored’ forms.” In the same place McLuhan specifies the “two basic extreme forms” as “eye and ear”. The distinct parallel with carbon (one type of the “two basic extreme forms” of the electron and proton) lies in the fact that carbon’s manifestations include not only molecules like graphite and diamond, but also “innumerable” compounds with other elements. It can hardly be the case that the exterior landscape is composed of such enormously complex structures and the interior landscape only of simple monolithic ones like ‘Freud’ or ‘the western tradition’. ↩
  12. Elementary structures like carbon are, of course, not ‘timeless’ as regards our understanding of them nor as regards their own dynamics (their impetus to expression). They are ‘timeless’ only in not being single level diachronic phenomena. The achievement of chemistry lay in  differentiating the elementary from the phenomenal levels of the material universe while also relating the two by way of demonstrable ‘properties’. ↩
  13. This is the condition according to McLuhan of our having mass media at all: “the mechanical or mass media of communication must at least parrot the world (as we know it in our ordinary experience) in order to hold our attention” (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, 1954). The bracketed clarification has been added. ↩
  14.  The root of the particular Gutenberg galaxy form of experience thus contradicts that experience itself. Where it would be single-leveled and linear (diachronic), its archetypal form, like all archetypal forms, is multi-leveled and all-at-once (synchronic). ↩
  15. Zeitgeist = Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit), so ‘the spirit of a time’. Like ‘contemporary’, Zeitgeist poses the question of how human being and time belong together. What is a time anyway? And what is spirit? And how do they operate in some kind of concert? And how does this concert break down? ↩
  16. ‘Geist‘ and ‘geyser‘ seem not to be cognates, but the association is interesting to contemplate, especially where the dynamic action of Geist is considered as  synchronic and not (at least not in the first instance) as diachronic. ↩
  17. Compare McLuhan on ‘allatonceness’ and on the “ageless mysteries in the relations of men” in note 20 below. ↩
  18. Compare McLuhan in From Cliché to Archetype: “For the literary archetypalist there is always a problem of whether Oedipus Rex or Tom Jones would have the same effect on an audience in the South Sea Islands as in Toronto.” The Maori of Jung are, of course, a South Sea Island people. Examples like this suggest to me that Jung was a slow and deep-seeded influence on McLuhan, but not one that he developed to any extent — perhaps on account of Frye’s use of Jung. ↩
  19. In the citation from The Grammars of the Media in the next note, ‘the weaving and unweaving of experience’ is called our “habits of perception and judgement”. ↩
  20. Media are “ancient” and “quarrel” among themselves exactly because they are both original (always already there) and plural. Their primordial combination provides what McLuhan terms “a complex view of the world” (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’). Put historically, there was never a time when humans were not already shaped by contesting multiple media like language, gesture, material culture, mythology, etc. What has happened in the electric age is that this multiplicity of media has become explicit as never before and so has emerged as a potential new field of study: “Educators have used these (new media) as audio-visual aids in varying degrees but without specific attention to their effects on the habits of perception and judgement. Today, however, we cannot afford this easy-going unconcern because the peculiar powers of print, telegraph, photo, TV, movie, typewriter, gramophone, and tape are in strong and jarring conflict. Their constant co-presence has created a situation unknown before, a situation far richer educationally than ever before, yet so confused that the danger is that we smother all the media by their unstudied and uncoordinated expressions.” (The Grammars of the Media) ↩
  21. McLuhan in his 1951 Dos Passos essay: “Joyce manipulates a continuous parallel at each moment between naturalism and symbolism to render a total spectrum of outer and inner worlds. The past is present not in order to debunk Dublin but to make Dublin representative of the human condition. The sharply-focussed moment of natural perception in Joyce floods the situation with analogical awareness of the actual dimensions of human hope and despair. In Ulysses a brief glimpse of a lapidary at work serves to open up ageless mysteries in the relations of men and in the mysterious qualities of voiceless objects. The most ordinary gesture linked to some immemorial (…) situation sets reverberating the whole world of the book and flashes intelligibility into long opaque areas of our own experience.” ↩