Monthly Archives: March 2022

Connubium of Being 3

Keys

to

Given 

These are the last words of Take Today which are taken from the near last words of Finnegans Wake — just before its gapped last/first sentence.

[Note: Aside from the Burroughs essay in 1964, and Take Today in 1972, McLuhan discussed Joyce’s The keys to. Given! also in the 1974 ‘Medium Meaning Message’ (coauthored by Barrington Nevitt) — treatment forthcoming in Connubium 4. Cunnubium 2 discusses the Burroughs essay in aspects which are not repeated here: reference should be made to its footnote #2. Connubium 5 will discuss the Burroughs essay in yet another respect. (The footnote app broke in this post. So notes that would have been footnotes are included in the text in square brackets with double indentation — like this note).]  

In his 1964 ‘Notes on Burroughs’, which amounts to a kind of prospect of his ‘connubium’ texts later in the decade, as well as of the retrospect of these same texts in Take Today, McLuhan discussed this donative — given! — gesture of the universe (dual genitive!!) as follows:

Finnnegans Wake provides the closest literary precedent to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end it [FW] is occupied with the theme of ‘the extensions’ of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension of man, and concludes with the resounding boast: The keys to. Given! Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian.

[Note: What McLuhan means here by ‘Egyptian’ may stem from Sigfried Giedion’s ‘space conception’ presentation to the Explorations seminar: “Egyptian art, in which several different aspects of the same object are depicted upon horizontal and vertical planes.” Published in Explorations 6. Also see McLuhan’s letter to Wilfred Watson in October 1964 (discussion in Connubium 5): “Lewis (…) wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness.  Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs.”]

It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the ‘extension’ division of the university.

[Note: Pun very much intended with ‘extension’ division. McLuhan’s complex suggestion here is not just that the term ‘extension division’ captures the university’s ‘extension’ to all the other areas of modern life, like commerce and the military, but also and more, that all these activities are constituted by, and as, ‘extensions’ of human faculties. It is the latter which enables the former.]

The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision (…) he is trying to point to the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process.

[Note: McLuhan’s text has ‘shut-on’, not ‘shut-off’ or ‘shut-down’. As always with his writing, it is impossible to say if this was intended to provoke thought or was a typo. And if it was a typo, was it seen and approved by McLuhan, like ‘the medium is the massage’, or was it unseen and so comes to us, not from McLuhan, or not directly from McLuhan, but via McLuhan indirectly as a channeled message/massage from the unconscious beyond? This question suggests an important reason McLuhan was so enamored of talk.]

One way to perceive the extent of what was at stake here for McLuhan’s consideration (see next note for the reach of the term ‘con-sideration’) of “the environment itself” is to look at a presentation given by Sigfried Giedion to the Explorations seminar in 1955 in which he discussed “universal space” or “sidereal space” in terms of prehistoric and contemporary art:

[Note: The word ‘sidereal’ stems from Latin, sidus/sideris = star. Interestingly, this is also the root of the word ‘con-sider‘, which is to ponder, beyond the parameters of the solar system and the local galaxy, to the ‘star’ systems of the All. Giedion in ‘space conception’: “It is possible to give physical limits to space, but by its nature space is limitless and intangible. Space dissolves in darkness and evaporates in infinity.” This throws an interesting new light on the title The Gutenberg Galaxy which may be read as the Gutenberg ‘local ontology’! This explains the great success of that ontology in solving scientific and industrial problems. Forget the larger picture, concentrate on the smaller! The method of calculus! Forget the circle and concentrate instead on manageable straight-line segments! The death of God!] 

Prehistoric Space Conception and Contemporary Art

[Note: This is the title of the concluding section of Giedion’s paper. Its overall title was ‘Space Conception in Prehistoric Art’. In the remaining 25 years of McLuhan’s life, he never tired of referring to Giedion’s ‘space conception’ (often in the context of ‘acoustic space’). These references to Giedion by McLuhan should be read as implicating univers-all or ontological ‘space’. Importantly, Giedion’s exploration of relative spaces was already central to the Explorations seminar in 1954 in the very session where ‘acoustic space’ emerged.]

Abstraction, transparency, and symbolization are constituent elements of prehistoric and of contemporary art. The space in which they evolve has many things in common. Differences exist, but (…) at the moment only their inner relationship is what interests us. Their space is a space without background, a universal space. We are indebted to artists like Kandinsky and Klee for slowly being able to grasp the space conception of primeval art. They have opened our eyes to the pictorial [Giedion has pictured’ here.] organization, which is not exclusively dependent on the [fixed] vertical. In Kandinsky ‘s early work — e.g., The White Edge (1913) — we find a passion to exploit the newly gained freedom of lines and color set in sidereal space.

[Note: Kandinsky’s astonishing work formulates the exfoliation of ontology into and as the ontic via the color white (especially in the central thrusting — edge mirroring — burst) and the mass of colors which is white “pregnant with possibilities” (in Kandinsky’s words). Ontology does not lose itself in the ontic, but presents itself in it. Kandinsky re-presents that presentation (just as the red wavy lines in his painting re-present the white ones).] 

Paul Klee followed the same path, but in his own way. In one of his popular and most frequently reproduced paintings — The Landscape with Yellow Birds (1923) — the birds are sitting on fantastic plants, which defy botanical definition. On the upper rim of the picture one of the yellow birds is represented upside-down, indicating the spatial fluidity. One is reminded of underwater landscapes, where the body may move in all directions, unhindered by gravity.

Developed even further is the cosmic atmosphere in the far less known Ad Marginem (1930).

A planet hovers in the middle of a greenish undetermined background. Fantastic figurations grow along the margin. Plants, animals, eyes are forms in statu nascendi, polyvalent in their significance. Like primeval hybrid figures, they too cannot be confined to a definite zoological species. Here and there a calligraphically precise letter is inscribed in one of these forms, suddenly losing its everyday aspect and being re-transformed into a magic symbol from which it originated. From the upper rim, the naked stem of a plant is thrust down, and a bird with a long beak marches upside-down in a space without gravity. The forms reveal not even the remotest similarity with prehistoric motifs. Only the problem of constancy — as we understand it — comes to the fore, not in the sense of a rational, direct continuation [as in the Gutenberg galaxy], but rather as that property of the human mind which has been submerged for years in fathomless depths, suddenly reappearing on the surface. This happened in our time. (Explorations 6, 1955)

[Note: Giedion defined “the problem of constancy” or “question of the continuity” at the very start of his presentation: “The problem of space conception is everywhere under discussion. Scholars ask themselves, for example, What things have changed and what have remained unchanged in human nature throughout the course of human history? What is it that separates us from other periods? What is it that, after having been suppressed and driven into the unconscious for long periods of time, is now reappearing in the imagination of contemporary artists?” Giedion’s suggestion here is that human history is a matter of identity (what remains unchanged in it) and difference (what changes in it). Now when Giedion and McLuhan met in St Louis in 1943, McLuhan had just finished writing his PhD thesis on Nashe. Its central concern was with what remains unchanged in history — the trivium — and what changes in it — emphasis on one or other of the trivial arts. The immediate attraction between the two men may have turned on just this fulcrum.]

More than a decade before McLuhan’s discussions of the “macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature” in the late 1960s (for texts and discussion see Connubium of Being 1), he and the Explorations seminar were already engaged with the question of making sense in a ‘macrocosmic’ or univers-all context. His ever-repeated attempts to specify a ‘strategy for survival’ by locating “the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process” must be seen as circling around the question of how to reinstate a sense for a grounding ontology in a world given over to an exclusive, purely ontic ‘reality’ — a ‘realty’ or ‘local ontology’ which, as Nietzsche specified, crumbles into nothing as soon as it is deeply ‘considered’:

The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no!! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.

[Note:  How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error’, The Twilight of the Idols (1888). For the original text and various discussions of it see the Nietzsche posts.]

Connubium of Being 2

Increasingly, I feel that Catholics must master C.G. Jung. (…) Modern anthropology and psychology are more important for the Church than St. Thomas to-day. (1944)1

*****

KEYS to GIVEN (1939 Joyce; 1964, 1972, 1974 McLuhan)2  

*****

trying to point to the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process (1964)3

*****

The conclusion of War and Peace in the Global Village (discussed in Connubium of Being 1) was revisited by McLuhan in Take Today.4

Compare the two:

War and Peace in the Global Village, 190
Biologists use two (…) categories that are helpful for perceiving the relation between the end of nature today and the problem of understanding the future of media and technology. They speak of ‘outbreeding’ and ‘inbreeding’. As Mayr puts it: “Most animals are essentially outbreeders, most microorganisms inbreeders.”5
With electricity, all this has changed totally. At present the entire mammalian world has become the microorganismic. It is the total individual cultures of the world, linguistically and politically, that have become the mammals, according to the old classifications of evolutionary hypothesis. It is the cultural habitat in which we have long been accustomed to think that people were contained that has now become the mammal itself, now contained in a new macrocosm or ‘connubium’ of a super-terrestrial kind. Our technologies, or self-amputations, and the environments or habitats which they create must now become [informed by] that matrix of that macrocosmic connubial bliss derided by the evolutionist. 

Take Today, 294
RETUNING THE SKY
The moment of Sputnik extended the planet. Something happened to the stellar system at that moment. The possibility of “retuning the sky” was born. Previously, the “extensions of man” related to his body, anything from his skin (clothing) to his central nervous system (electric circuitry). Each and all of these extensions affected the transactions between men and their previous environment. The extension of the planet itself meant that the technology was not transported [anymore] by individual or collective man but by his previous environment — the Earth. It became a totally new game with new ground rules. Our ground now was literally in the sky. (…) Whereas previous extensions had altered the speed of human motions in a great variety of ways, freely hybridizing with one another, the new extension of the planet seemed to call despotically for a new harmonizing of the spheres of action, influence, and knowledge. 

The problem posed here, and indeed by the whole history of humans on this earth, is how to understand our place in the “generalized environment” (Mayr)6, that is, in the “super-terrestrial” environment, that is, in the “macrocosm” of the entire universe. 

For hundreds of thousands of years before Sputnik,7 answers to this question were formulated within all the different “individual cultures of the world” — “the cultural habitat[s] in which we have long been accustomed to think”. All the cosmic interpretations of humans were “transported” between contemporaries in space and between generations in time via their ‘collective representations‘ of (dual genitive!) the spacetimes of the Earth. Of course all these representations were technologically modulated. But now, “with electricity all this has changed totally”. Now, with “the moment of Sputnik”, we exist within “a totally new game with new ground rules. Our [new] ground [no longer the Earth] now is literally (…) the Sky.”

But just how would this trans-formation work?8 By practicing outbreeding in Mayr’s sense of the “maximum of ecological plasticity and  evolutionary flexibility”,9 humans might (indeed can) learn to theorize their total “cultural habitat” (consisting of all their myriad of actual and potential habitats “freely hybridizing with one another”) by isolating its dominants.

Such, indeed, is the only way a domain may be brought into focus and investigated: through discrimination of its dominants.10 The medium is the message.

Humans have learned to theorize all sorts of other domains in this way, so the general ability is not in question — only (only!) its application to ourselves! To the interior landscape!

In the Take Today passage, McLuhan suggests that “the new extension of the planet seemed to call despotically”. This is a very com-plicated matter, a very knotted matter. For McLuhan does not say that the extension into outer space called “despotically”; rather he says that it “seemed to call despotically”. That is, looked at from the Earth, this was the impression. But how on earth can a call be “despotic” absent “despotic” formation? Absent “despotic” in-formation?

No, as McLuhan states baldly, the new impetus came not from the Earth at all, but from the Sky: “Our ground now was literally in the Sky.” Hence, “the new extension of the planet [was able] to call despotically for a new harmonizing” only as a re-call of such a “despotic” possibility. This was to be a celestial dominant exposed as such for the first time by “the new extension of the planet” into outer space.  Then, as a re-turn from the Sky to the Earth, this would expose, also here, how “the spheres of action, influence, and knowledge” might be harmonized via the study and application of the new domain.11

It’s not a question of planning but of receiving inspiration and allowing it to gradually invade your own being. You’re not thinking about inspiration, inspiration is thinking about you. (Federico Fellini)12

The goal is to learn how to come from the archetypal dominants or despots — in the Sky as this may be characterized — back to their expression on the Earth.13  

McLuhan’s career may be seen as the struggle to bring Jung’s archetypes into demonstrable focus — which in Jung’s work constitute a vast phantasmagoria14 of gods and forces. Just as human experience in all its different manifestations can be interrogated as to its dominants, so can the archetypal realm of dominants be interrogated for its dominants. The medium is the message.

As McLuhan specified in his ‘Notes on Burroughs’:

why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself?

But to enter into this questionable realm, this question of the real, this real(m) of the question (dual genitive!), is to descend chaotically into the maelstrom with Poe’s mariner. How to ascend again to the surface — a surface we are — is the riddle hanging over history like the sword of Damocles. 

As with Jung, archetypes are for McLuhan literally dominants or lords (dominus = ‘lord’). We are the expression of these dominants and just as they maintain themselves in and through their extension into us, so our extension is able to maintain itself, and in fact to first find itself, in the mirroring action of our reaching out to them and retracting back from them: ὁδὸς άνω κάτω.

Such a ‘play’ of dominants and dominated, which is first of all simultaneous and only (only!) secondarily sequential,15 is McLuhan’s “global theatre”:

An everyday roundabout with intrusions from above and below.16

 

  1. McLuhan to Walter Ong and Clement McNaspy, December 23, 1944, Letters 166. ↩
  2. These are the last words of Take Today which are taken from the near last words of Finnegans Wake — just before its gapped last/first sentence. In his 1964 ‘Notes on Burroughs’, McLuhan discussed this gesture of the universe (dual genitive!) as follows: “Finnnegans Wake provides the closest literary precedent to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end FW is occupied with the theme of ‘the extensions’ of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension of man, and concludes with the resounding boast: The keys to. Given! Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university. The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision (…) he is trying to point to the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process.” (McLuhan’s text has ‘shut-on’, not ‘shut-off’. As always with his writing, it is impossible to say if this was intended to provoke thought or was a typo. And if it was a typo, was it seen and approved by McLuhan, like ‘the medium is the massage’, or was it unseen and so comes to us, not from McLuhan, or not directly from McLuhan, but via McLuhan indirectly as a channeled message/massage from the unconscious beyond?) Aside from the Burroughs essay in 1964, and Take Today in 1972, McLuhan discussed Joyce’s The keys to. Given! also in the 1974 ‘Medium Meaning Message’ coauthored with Barrington Nevitt.  ↩
  3. See the passage in the previous note from ‘Notes on Burroughs’. ↩
  4. Bob Dobbs has drawn attention to this replay by citing the two passages in his Trump pamphlet. The War and Peace passage is given on his page 81-82 and the Take Today passage on his page 88-89. The close parallels between the passages may be set out as follows, where small changes in aid of clarity have been made to McLuhan’s phrasing (but the original texts are given in the main post above). (1) War and Peace: “the totality of the individual cultures of the world (…) is the (collective) cultural habitat in which we have long been accustomed to think that people are contained”; Take Today: “Previously, the ‘extensions of man’ related to his body, anything from his skin (clothing) to his central nervous system (electric circuitry). Each and all of these extensions affected the transactions between men and their previous (psychological and social) environments (on) the Earth.” (2) War and Peace: “the cultural habitat (…) has now become (…) contained in a new macrocosm or ‘connubium’ of a super-terrestrial kind”; Take Today: “The extension of the planet itself (beyond the Earth) meant (…) a totally new game with new ground rules. Our ground now was literally in the Sky”. (3) War and Peace: our “environments or habitats (…) must now become informed by that (…) macrocosmic connubial bliss derided by the evolutionist”; Take Today: “the new extension of the planet calls (…) for a new harmonizing of the spheres of action, influence, and knowledge”. In sum, “a new harmonizing” is needed whose possibility in the widest scheme of things — the universe itself — is its provision of “connubial bliss” (dual genitive!) as ground. The possibility here would not follow from the need, however, but rather the need from the possibility. As Heidegger has it in SZ: “Higher than actuality stands possibility” (Höher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Möglichkeit). ↩
  5. Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution (1963): “Outbreeders and inbreeders differ from each other in numerous ways. The entire breeding system of outbreeders is so organized as to accumulate and preserve genetic variation in order to have a maximum of ecological plasticity and  evolutionary flexibility, but at a price — the production of many inferior recombinants. (…) At the other end is the extreme inbreeder which has found a lucky genotypic combination that permits it to flourish in a specialized environmental situation, but again at a price — inability to cope with a sudden change of the environment. A species thus has the choice between (1) optimal contemporary fitness combined with considerable evolutionary vulnerability and (2) maximal evolutionary flexibility combined with the wasteful production of inferior genotypes. No species can combine the two advantages into a single system. Every species makes its own particular compromise between the two extremes and every species has its own set of devices for achieving this compromise. (…) Outbreeding, that is, genetic flexibility (…) is favored by large, structurally complex, slow-growing organisms that have low numbers of offspring and live in a generalized environment. Inbreeding, that is, genetic fixity, is favored by small, structurally simple, fast-growing organisms that have large numbers of offspring and are more or less adapted to special situations. Most animals are essentially outbreeders, most microorganisms essentially inbreeders.” (421) ↩
  6. See the previous note for Mayr’s use of this phrase. ↩
  7. For McLuhan, Sputnik made manifest what was already implied by industrialization, electrification, mass media and anthropology: namely, the “global village” in which all human cultures of all times and places formed a collective (not to say a unity). In his War and Peace text McLuhan called this collective a new “mammal”, in fact “the mammal itself”, which would have to practice a new type of ‘outbreeding’ in order to establish Mayr’s “maximum of ecological plasticity and  evolutionary flexibility”. The admonition was that it is this sort of exploration, and this sort of exploration alone, which can sustain human survival. ↩
  8. This transformation amounts to nothing less than the one way to exit the cul-de-sac in which modern humans have become trapped! ↩
  9. Such “plasticity and  (…) flexibility” amounts to the exploration of ignorance through the process of flipping between candidates for archetypal dominance. The practice amounts to jumping off a crumbing cliff (the old environments which will not hold) to see if one can land on one which does hold. Of course this is a risky business. But so is any birth! ↩
  10. Discrimination of dominants: in geometry: points, lines, circles, squares, triangles; in physics: mass, time, space; in chemistry: elements, atomic weight, valence. Domains are assemblies of dominants together with the properties of those dominants. ↩
  11. It is the harmonious “connubium of a supraterrestrial nature” (Playboy Interview) that first provides the possibility of harmonies here on Earth! ↩
  12. Fellini Racconta: Passeggiate nella memoria, 2000, 24:24ff. ↩
  13. For McLuhan, responding to in-coming in-formation is attending to ‘light through‘ and is akin to listening; while imposing information from some point of view amounts to ‘light on’ and is akin to seeing. Now humans always stand at some intersection of these lights — light through and light on — and the great need is to obtain insight with a sufficient lack of imposition that reception of it truly occurs, while at the same time there is a sufficient presence of imposition that exposition of it in knowledge and communication may be achieved. The dialectic between reception and exposition is just what science is. ↩
  14. Phantasmagoria as the meeting place (ἀγορά) of the phantasms (φάντασμα) may be considered as the connubium of Being. ↩
  15. The Global Village (1989): “time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground”. ↩
  16. McLuhan frequently paraphrased Frank Budgen in this way from Budgen’s ‘Joyce’s Chapters on Going Forth by Day’, Horizon, September 1941. ↩