Monthly Archives: January 2023

The vortex of the living community

McLuhan uses the thought-provoking phrase, “the vortex of the living community” in Take Today (p5), in a section of the book titled ‘VERTEX v VORTEX’.

If every “living community” has the vortex form, escape from it would be possible only to another vortex and not to some supposedly vortex-free condition.1 McLuhan suggests as much in The Gutenberg Galaxy (pp 30-31) where he cites Wilhelm von Humboldt via Ernst Cassirer:

By the same process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another.2

This image of the social vortex recalls the fundamental role attributed to it by Empedocles of Acragas (Agrigento) who lived in the fifth century BC, a generation or two before Socrates:

When Strife was fallen to the lowest depth of the vortex, and Love had reached to the centre of the whirl, in it do all things come together (…) and, as they mingled, strife began to pass out to the furthest limit (…) but in proportion as it kept rushing out, a soft, immortal stream of blameless Love kept running in, and straightway those things became mortal which had been immortal before, those things were mixed that had before been unmixed, each changing its path. (Diels fr 35-36)3

For Empedocles ‘the medium is the message’ since the message of ‘mortal’ versus ‘immortal’, or of ‘mixed’ versus ‘unmixed’, depends on the middle or medium between such pairs, namely on the relative strength of Strife and Love. Further, the ratio between these is one of inverse correlation: as the one goes down or out, the other comes up or in. McLuhan saw the dynamic relationship of the visual and the audile, the left and right hemispheres, dialectic and rhetoric, etc, in just this way. His tactility, one might say was equal to Love divided by Strife and Strife divided by Love.4 And, just as with McLuhan, the image Empedocles proffers for the world where this dynamic is writ large, and for the individual where it is writ small, is the vortex or maelstrom.  

McLuhan was not so much saying something new as he was attempting to communicate what has been seen forever, but has never been communicated in such a way as to ground a fitting prudence either in the polis at large or in the individual soul:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again….5

In his ‘Foreword’ to the reprinting of Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications that appeared in the same year as Take Today, 1972, McLuhan elaborated on the ‘VERTEX v VORTEX’ contrast:

Innis, in the spirit of the new age of information, sought for patterns in the very ground of history and existence. He saw media, old and new, not as mere vertices at which to direct his point of view, but as living vortices of power creating hidden environments that act abrasively and destructively on older forms of culture.6

A vertex is a point where a line or a surface turns. It derives from Latin vertere, ‘to turn’, as does ‘vortex’. In fact, vertex and vortex were once a doublet with both meaning a ‘whirl’ and especially a ‘whirlpool’. Vertex then became separated from vortex and today is used almost exclusively in mathematical and biological applications.7 McLuhan assimilated the vertex to the Gutenberg galaxy where both the subjective viewer and objective extreme are taken as vanishing points belonging to perspective. Hence the post-Gutenbergian journey ‘through the vanishing point’.

McLuhan saw that humans never have their being apart from “living vortices of power creating hidden environments”.8 The great question was: can we become conscious of these vortex environments in order to subject them to shared investigation?

technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art, so the new media have transformed the entire environment into an educational affair. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, 1954)

“Nature in the old sense” was some unquestioned environment which gave definition to the society within it. Today any such a ‘natural setting’ has disappeared:

the natural round of seasonal and biological cycles [has been] supplanted by vehement new intensities of man-made “rim spins” (Take Today, p150)

The result is confusion and disorder to such an extent that survival itself is threatened.

In War and Peace in the Global Village the principal theme is the quest for identity through violence in a world of rapidly shifting technologies. A sudden change of environment through major technical innovations blurs the identity image of generations old and new. They then begin a tragic agon of redefinition of their image of identity. (From Cliché to Archetype, p114)9

It was McLuhan’s proposal that the world as “an educational affair”, as a “classroom without walls”, could establish a new form of shared identity:  

The old separation of art and nature we now see to have been based on an ignorance of nature. So that art today we apply to cities and to whole regions. Art is no longer for the few nor for the studio. And the learning process and the creative process which we had once reserved for scholars and geniuses we now know to be a character of all human perception. (New Media in Arts Education, 1956)

the next extension of man will be the simulation of the process of consciousness itself. (…) It does not mean the end of private awareness, rather a huge heightening of same via involvement in corporate energies. Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive, Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously. That is the meaning of tactual involvement.10 (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, October 4, 1963)

When everything happens at once, when everybody becomes totally involved in everybody, how is one to establish identity? For the past century people have been working at that problem. Quest for identity is a central aspect of the electric age. Naturally, we’re looking for identity in the old rear-view mirror where it was before. Perhaps we should be looking for it in [the] corporate… (Toward an Inclusive Consciousness, 1967)

The central idea is that ‘second nature’, specifically including all the individual and collective ways of human being, is as intelligible as any other field — or even more so, as Vico argued:

the world of civil society has certainly been made by men [unlike the material things of ‘first nature’], and (…) its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature (…) and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since men made it, men could hope to know.” (New Science, §331)

Investigation of this ‘new’ corporate domain — one that is just as much ‘ancient’ as it is ‘new’ — could serve as a collectively recognized and approved rudder in the defining maelstroms of our human being. 

 

  1. Cf Heidegger in Was heißt Denken? — Was z.B. Schwimmen »heißt«, lernen wir nie durch eine Abhandlung über das Schwimmen kennen. Was Schwimmen heißt, sagt uns nur der Sprung in den Strom. Die Frage »Was heißt Denken«? läßt sich niemals dadurch beantworten, daß wir eine Begriffsbestimmung über das Denken, eine Definition, vorlegen…” ↩
  2. “Spins” and the “circle” suggest the vortex form, of course. The same passage from Wilhelm von Humboldt cited in The Gutenberg Galaxy also appears in Laws of Media, p226. ↩
  3. McLuhan, too, saw the medium that is the message as defined by an “ancient quarrel” of Strife and Love: ‘exclusive’ vs ‘inclusive’ consciousness bound together in an inverse ratio, the more of one, the less of the other, but never One alone. And a striking result of this perennial quarrel for McLuhan was that “every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly” into its opposite (Take Today, p6)  — just as Empedocles observed “each changing its path” as the ratio of Strife and Love varied. ↩
  4. See note 2 and McLuhan to Skornia in the post above: “Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive, Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously. That is the meaning of tactual involvement.” ↩
  5. Eliot, ‘East Coker‘, Four Quartets. ↩
  6. The fact that vertex/vortex appears in this way in two texts from 1972 may suggest that the construction of both took place as selections from McLuhan’s unpublished writing and/or dictations and/or recorded conversations. Perhaps a single consideration of vertex/vortex got pulled apart and its pieces then used in these different places. Certainly the posthumous  Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989) were assembled in this way from McLuhan’s leavings. In fact, it seems that this method of composition may have gone back at least to Understanding Media in 1964, for which Ted Carpenter claimed to have made much input. McLuhan’s subsequent books — The Medium is the Massage (1967) with ‎Quentin Fiore and ‎Jerome Agel, War And Peace In The Global Village (1968) again with Fiore and ‎Agel, Through the Vanishing Point (1968) with Harley Parker, Counterblast (1969) with George Thompson (although Thompson is not named as co-author), From Cliché to Archetype (1970) with Wilfred Watson, Take Today (1972) with Barry Nevitt and The City as Classroom (1977) with Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon (published as Media Messages and Language: The World As Your Classroom in the US in 1980) — were all products of this same method. McLuhan loved to talk and write, but lost patience with book and article composition and was happy when this could be handed over to others. Naturally this involved the danger that content sometimes appeared that was contrary to McLuhan’s own views and intentions. But he seems to have been unconcerned about this compared to the worry that disorderly work might never appear at all — and he was certainly not going to order it himself! Coauthors were the only answer. ↩
  7. Such as the vertex form in calculus which is used to specify the extreme turning point of the graphed parabola of an equation. ↩
  8. ‘Foreword’ to Innis’ Empire and Communications — another echo of this text with Take Today and especially with the passage cited above: “the vortex of the living community”. ↩
  9. There is no identity between identities. ↩
  10. For ‘tactual involvement’ see the discussion of Strife divided by Love in the post above marked by Note 3. ↩

A whole new genus of sciences

Just as with a child, which after a long still gestation draws its first breath, breaking off the continuity of only gradual growth -– a qualitative leap — and it is born, so too the spirit, in ripening itself slowly and quietly towards a new form, dissolves bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering condition is intimated only by isolated symptoms — the frivolity as much as the boredom which enter into the established order, the indeterminate presentiment of some unknown, all are harbingers of the coming of something new. This gradual process of dissolution, which does not alter the physiognomy of the whole, is suddenly undermined by a supervening insight that — a lightning bolt! — at once reveals the prospect of a new world. (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ‘Preface’, 1807)1

But it has never been understood that the second-rate character of the English and American nineteenth century as compared with the German and French was owing to the German and French having adopted psychological rather than the biological experience as the source of the guiding analogies for (…) social study and discussion. (McLuhan’s 1947 Proposal to Robert Hutchins)

to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world. (Playboy Interview, 1969)

*

The basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica I.II.q 113.a.7, ad quintum. The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs instantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics  — “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”. (McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype)2

McLuhan foresaw3 a whole new genus of sciences. Not another species of science within the existing genus,4 but a new genus of sciences entirely. 

This would not be “old science” which studies “first nature” excluding (as far as possible) the bias of human observation and its instrumentation,5 but “new science” which would study what McLuhan called “second nature” — a “second nature” specifically including the spectrum of biases which humans enact, at present nearly always utterly unconsciously, in all their different ways of being.6

The central problem is that the whole environment defined by “new science” was and is invisible: its workings take place unconsciously behind our own backs even as we enact them. But environments in general are invisible, McLuhan argued, until they are not — only consider that 200 years ago the material environment as defined by the chemical elements was invisible and unknown. This did not mean that it was not very much already there and already at work everywhere (including in our own bodies and brains, as much as in the furthest reaches of the universe). In fact, it had always been at work and always will be at work  — but 200 years ago it was as if it were not there at all.

All of the sciences and manufacturing processes that have consequently been established in that newly dis-covered environment, indeed on the basis of that new environment, from chemistry itself to medicine and our whole industrial society — all modern life! — could appear only after it had appeared.7 The medium is the message.

However, once a new environment has emerged, at first always only tentatively of course, and against the resistance of the whole old world for which it remains invisible, humans are attracted to investigate it in a process which never stops generating new knowledge and even whole new sciences. As McLuhan said of this new genus of sciences, and of his attempt to initiate it, in the Introduction to his 1964 Understanding Media:

It [UM] explores the contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that will bring them into orderly service, I have looked at them anew, accepting very little of the conventional wisdom concerning them. 

Two decades before this, already in his Cambridge PhD thesis from 1943, McLuhan had proffered how it is that humans as humans relate to “the principle of intelligibility” in things:

Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings [by situating/orienting us in a defined natural and social world], so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials.8 (The Classical Trivium, 1943, 51)

And then in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ in 1954:

In this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being.9

And in From Cliché to Archetype in 1970:

The Expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension, somewhat along the lines that relate Coleridge’s Primary and Secondary imagination. In the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the (…) unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness.10

*

Here is McLuhan writing to his former student at St Louis University, Walter Ong, in 1961:11

My theory is acceptable only to Thomists for whom consciousness as analogical proportion among the senses from moment to moment is quite easy to grasp. But print technology actually smashes that analogical awareness in society and the individual. (…) I can now explain these matters very much better than I did in Understanding Media.12 But no more evidence is needed of the hypnotic aspect of all media in human history than the absence of awareness among those who underwent [subjection to] them. Each is invested with a cloak of invisibility. I am naturally eager to attract many people to such study as this and see in it the hope of some rational consensus for our externalized senses. A sensus communis for external senses is what I’m trying to build.13

Similarly a few years later in Understanding Media:14

The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of “common sense” that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus.15 When we have achieved a world-wide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a world-wide integration. Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness.

McLuhan contrasted the “exterior landscape”16 and “first nature”, with the “interior landscape” and “second nature”. The difference between them was not that the former are outside and material while the latter are inside and mental. Instead, McLuhan’s “second nature” is “first nature” plus all the varieties of sensibility through which humans experience that “first nature” and relate to it in ways that alter both it and them:

  • Consciousness (…) may be thought of as a projection to the outside of an inner synesthesia (War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, p62)
  • Second nature consists entirely in our artefacts and extensions (Laws of Media, posthumous, p116)17
  • Technology — second nature — recapitulates first nature in new forms. (Laws of Media, p118)
  • Second nature is [first] nature made and remade by man (Laws of Media, p222)

In short, the “second nature” investigated by “new science” consists of “the entire material of the globe as well as the thoughts and feelings of its human inhabitants“. (Culture Without Literacy, 1953)

Sensibility is not something inside our skulls. Sensibilities are extensions that inherently express themselves in and as relations with the “exterior landscape” of “first nature”. McLuhan’s technical name for these extensions was ‘media’. The subtitle of Understanding Media is: “the extensions of man”. 

The task of the investigation of “second nature” is to investigate it not only as including the biases of the human ways of being, so to say objectively, but to understand it also subjectively on the basis of our inevitable biases:

[Harold] Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures. (Media and Cultural Change, 1964)18 

The bias of our culture is precisely to isolate the bias of all others in an effort at orchestration. (Counterblast, 1969, p64)

McLuhan’s claim was that we are currently in the same relation to “second nature” as we were to “first nature” before, say, 1800. Only as the chemical elements were specified in the century leading up to Mendeleev’s table in 1869 was it gradually recognized that there was such a thing as the “first nature” of chemical nature — and of all the further sciences and disciplines enabled by chemistry (biology, genetics, modern medicine, etc). 

We are currently blind to “second nature” for the same reason that “first nature” was once unknown: because environments are invisible until we find a way to investigate them through collectively recognized focus. And as the old scientific revolution showed, this in turn requires the identification of elements that serve to supply that focus.

the crucial study that remains is that of working out in precise detail the relations19 between second and first nature (Laws of Media, p117)20 

The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic [first nature] but the perceptual [second nature] code. (Laws of Media, p239).

“It is not the bamboo in the wind [ first nature] that we are representing but all the thought and emotion in the painter’s mind at a given instant [second nature] when he looked upon a bamboo spray and suddenly identified his life with it for a moment.” (Laws of Media, p82)21

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance [first nature] and the environments created by technological innovation [second nature]. (Laws of Media, p98)

Aristotle first noted that the Greeks’ invention of nature was made possible when they had left behind a savage or barbaric state (first nature) by putting on an individualized and civilized one (second nature).22 (Laws of Media, p116)

Second nature consists entirely in our artefacts and extensions and the grounds and narcoses they impose…23 (Laws of Media, p116)

Technology — second nature — recapitulates first nature in new forms; that is, it translates from one nature to another.24 (Laws of Media, p118)

Speech (…) and our technologies, as other [forms of] speech25(…) have enacted our two natures, effectively hoicking us out of servitude to [first] nature [via ‘old science’], but leaving us slaves to the vagaries of second nature [since we unnecessarily continue to lack a ‘new science’ of it]. (Laws of Media, p118)

Vico aimed to heal the rift (…) between the Ancients and the Moderns. (…) In the end, it eluded him for he was caught in a dilemma that had been building for centuries before him [but] that was then [invisible because] environmental. (…) Vico simply had not distinguished between first and second nature for separate study: nothing in his experience suggested such a distinction would be of any use. Second nature is nature made and remade by man as man remakes himself with his extensions. Separate them: the first is the province of traditional grammar [and of the ‘old science’ from physics and chemistry to biology and genetics]; the second, that of Bacon, Vico, and Laws of Media. (Laws of Media, p222)26

McLuhan’s new genus of sciences accorded with the views of Vico and Joyce:

There must, in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. (Vico, New Science, §161, cited verbatim by McLuhan in Laws of Media, p221.)

What we symbolize in black the Chinaman may symbolize in yellow; each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action. (James Joyce, Stephen Hero, cited verbatim by McLuhan in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’)

*

Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth. (Playboy Interview)

*

The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our predecessors lived with the figure-minus-ground. (The Global Village, p26)27

*

Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)28

 

 

  1. “Aber wie beim Kinde nach langer stiller Ernährung der erste Atemzug jene Allmählichkeit des nur vermehrenden Fortgangs abbricht – ein qualitativer Sprung – und das Kind geboren ist, so reift der sich bildende Geist langsam und stille der neuen Gestalt entgegen, löst ein Teilchen des Baues seiner vorgehenden Welt nach dem andern auf, ihr Wanken wird nur durch einzelne Symptome angedeutet; der Leichtsinn wie die Langeweile, die im Bestehenden einreißen, die unbestimmte Ahnung eines Unbekannten sind Vorboten, daß etwas anderes im Anzuge ist. Dies allmähliche Zerbröckeln, das die Physiognomie des Ganzen nicht veränderte, wird durch den Aufgang unterbrochen, der, ein Blitz, in einem Male das Gebilde der neuen Welt hinstellt.” Pinkard’s translation has been used with considerable changes. ↩
  2. From Cliché to Archetype, p160. ↩
  3. McLuhan wanted not only to foresee such science, of course, but actually to initiate it. His last 20 years, after the start of his blackouts in 1959 and his first serious stroke in 1960, must be seen as a repeated attempt to communicate his findings through writing, lecturing, teaching, media interviews and the cultivation of co-workers who might be his intellectual heirs. But none of this worked — at least not yet. ↩
  4. The Gutenberg Galaxy was McLuhan’s attempt to explicate the foundations of the existing genus of ‘old science’ as defined by a certain kind of subjectivity related to a certain kind of objectivity within a certain kind of space-time. ↩
  5. Like Hegel 200 years ago, McLuhan saw that the goal of conducting investigation somehow aside from the instruments supplying its data, and from the mentalities supplying its experimental design and conclusions, is ultimately senseless and self-defeating. McLuhan: “The old separation of art and nature we now see to have been based on an ignorance of nature.” (New Media in Arts Education, 1956). How so? Because art and nature belong to each other and can be separated only artificially (in a fruitless Gutenbergian attempt to install some One). ‘Nature’ is always ‘nature as experienced in some way’, ‘nature as mediated’. And ‘experience’ (aka ‘art’) is always the ‘experience of natural beings (subj gen!) living in a natural world’. (The equation of ordinary experience and art was the central object of McLuhan’s research for the 10 years or so after WW2. See note 24.) ↩
  6. Terms such as ‘old’ and ‘new’ science, and ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, must, of course, be specified. McLuhan repeatedly tried to do so. He recognized that “the crucial study that remains is that of working out in precise detail the relations between second and first nature” (Laws of Media, 117). ↩
  7. For many reasons McLuhan thought that “new science” could emerge ‘now’ — 70 years ago and counting! — from its previous invisibility. One was that we already apply much of this “new science” in cybernetics, advertising, entertainment, politics, in fact everywhere. These are all much more than chemical constructions! They all implicate a practical knowledge of the workings of human being (understood verbally). What was and is needed: to become conscious of what we already live! Nietzsche’s motto for Ecce Homo “How one becomes what one is” (Wie man wird, was man ist). ↩
  8. Without such “perception of essentials”, how could infants learn language in the first place? Language is just (just!) a filter of essential noise from inconsequential noise and without intuitive perception of this difference, it could not exist! Decades after his 1943 Nashe thesis, in 1970, McLuhan termed this “perpetually operative” faculty “pre-tribal awareness” (since becoming a member of a tribe entails that its language — including its languages of gesture, story-telling, taste, etc — be subject to intuitive assimilation): “Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows how the phonetic alphabet scrapped tribal man but retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal awareness.” (McLuhan to Joe Keogh, July 6,1970, Letters 413) Again: “The liquidating of the tribal encyclopaedia of the bards (…) was done by phonetic literacy, but there was retrieved something of great antiquity, namely pre-tribal metaphysical man.” (McLuhan to Lynn White, August 17, 1970). Literacy retrieves this perpetually operative faculty in that it requires the same pre-tribal awareness or intuitive perception of essentials as does language. For it, too, is a filter — in this case of essential marks from inconsequential ones. The implication is that humans cannot be at all absent a “faculty which (…) is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials”. This explains (a) how it is that humans are an ontological animal who cannot perceive or feel or do anything that is not preformed by some intuitive understanding of the essentials of being itself; and (b) how it is that humans invent technologies through the apprehension of the essentials at work in different areas. The life or death question posed to contemporary humans is whether an understanding of essentials (aka, media) can be achieved before the unconscious application of essential intuition kills us. ↩
  9. By ‘Being’ here McLuhan does not mean some kind of cloud of unknowing. He means that humans ‘incessantly’ interrogate their surroundings for the being of things. This has eventuated in our understanding of the being of the physical universe: nothing occurs in it aside from its situation in the chemical and physical laws we have learned to identity and further investigate.  This same power can also come to an understanding of ourselves in all our various ‘extensions’. In turn, the possibility of these understandings tells us about the central characteristic of Being itself. As Aristotle has it: ἀλλ᾽ οὔτε τὸ θεῖον φθονερὸν ἐνδέχεται εἶναι
    “it is impossible for the Deity to be jealous”. (Met. 1.983a).
    Being openly extends itself in multiple ways and one of these is the possibility of knowing it.     ↩
  10. From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, p200. In ‘Towards an Inclusive Consciousness’ from 1967 McLuhan speaks of “an inclusive consciousness that is at the same time private and tribal”. The “liaison between private and corporate awareness” consists in the fact that “an intuitive perception of essentials”, aka “pre-tribal awareness”, is required in order to learn language and so to become a member of a tribe. Every human is exposed to an enormous variety of sounds and gestures. A tribe is structured by which of these it considers meaningful or “essential” — just as a word is a meaningful sound, not a meaningless one. A tribe can therefore be described as “the formative process of consciousness” in action, whose basis lies in the “incessant” “repetition” of this “creative process” of identifying what is “essential” and what is not. Finally, that this process not only has happened, but is happening even now in “repetition”, implies, since we are not aware of what we are doing at this moment, that it remains in our “unconscious” (somewhat like our absence of awareness of the hormonal interactions in our bodies). McLuhan’s whole point is that this “incessant” action need not remain unconscious (just as the specification and study of hormones has not). “All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes.” (‘Recommendations’, Project in Understanding New Media, 1960) (“Non-verbal” = ‘essentially pre-verbal’, in one sense, and ‘accidentally not-yet-verbal’, in another sense.) ↩
  11. November 18, 1961, Letters, 280-281. ↩
  12. McLuhan is referring here to his NAEB report, Project in Understanding New Media from 1960, not to his later Understanding Media from 1964. ↩
  13. Such a sensus communis would be a ‘new science’ — in fact a whole new genus of sciences.  This science would not operate like our subjective sensus communis (at least, as we currently imagine it to operate), but conversely, with new science we would come to understand ourselves through it. Not it like us, then, but us like it. ↩
  14. Understanding Media, p108. ↩
  15. When did everybody, especially the French, start talking about the ‘haunting’ of our thought? Was it before this passage from McLuhan in 1964 — or after? ↩
  16. Coleridge as Artist’ (1957): “The (study of the) exterior landscape serves very well for (…) some areas of experience. But it is necessarily (…) ill-suited to the variety and compression of the modern city.” ↩
  17. This is ‘consists in‘, not ‘consists of‘! Since 1953, if not earlier, McLuhan had seen: “the fact that with modern technology the entire material of the globe as well as the thoughts and feelings of its human inhabitants have become the matter of art (…) means that (…) there is no more external nature.” (Culture Without Literacy, 1953) ↩
  18. ‘Media and Cultural Change’ was McLuhan’s introduction to the 1964 reprinting of Innis’ 1951 The Bias of Communication. ↩
  19. ‘Relations’ here has two important significations: (1) “second and first nature” must be perceived as complementary fields of investigation — they are fundamentally different, but also fundamentally related since everything known about “first nature” is also an object within “second nature” exactly as something known; (2) all of the phenomena studied in the field of “second nature” are relations between knowers and what they know. ↩
  20. McLuhan’s posthumous book, Laws of Media, was assembled by his son, Eric, out of materials (published and unpublished papers, drafts, dictations, fragmentary notes, sound recordings and video tapes) from the last 10 or so years of Marshall’s life,1970-1980. Eric knew how crucial and how difficult was the task he had been given by his father. After Marshall’s death he spent a decade of his life putting together Laws of Media and then the remaining three decades of his life after that, continuing his attempt to think through his father’s work and to communicate its importance. In the end he left all the materials he had used for Laws of Media to the University of Toronto for future investigators to work through for themselves. This act of donation and preservation for future research reflected the heart of Marshall’s enterprise which lay in the ever-repeated attempt to communicate about communication with the object of “working out in precise detail the relations between second and first nature” (Laws of Media, p117). The book amounts to Eric’s understanding of a kind of prolonged last will and testament whispered to his first born from a man who was often gravely ill in those years and who deeply suffered from the knowledge that he had not discovered how to communicate what he had discovered about communication — and this to a world in desperate need of his discovery and one that, he feared, might well not survive without it. ↩
  21. McLuhan’s Citation from Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye, 1964. ↩
  22. The specifications of ‘first nature’ and ‘second nature’ in round brackets here are from McLuhan. ↩
  23. See note #17 above: consists in, not consists of. ↩
  24. Compare ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954): “In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being.” ↩
  25. Laws of Media simply has ‘other speech’ here and notes in the same place: “technology, as extension/outering, is speech (…) we speak our selves”. ↩
  26. As detailed in McLuhan on Vico and Bacon and Vico, McLuhan thought Vico pointed to “the only method of escape” from our enormous intellectual and practical difficulties. He especially agreed with Vico that: “The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body (‘first nature’ and ‘old science’), and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection” (second nature’ and ‘new science’) (New Science, §236), further “that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men (unlike the things of ‘first nature’), and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature (…) and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since men made it, men could hope to know.” (New Science, §331). ↩
  27. Compare: “Electronics and automation make mandatory that everyone adjust to the vast global environment as if it were his little home town. (War and Peace in the Global Village, p11) ↩
  28. In The Medium and the Light, 160. ↩

McLuhan & Peterson: competing fundamental myths 2

As Bob Dobbs has nicely articulated, McLuhan was a literary figure who put on tribalism, while Peterson is a tribal figure who puts on literary values. These mixed media were/are1 an important aspect of the success of each of them. But the great question in both cases was and is: what is the medium of these mixtures?

As will be detailed in later posts, Peterson would put the answer to this question in terms of the ‘masculine’ hero who penetrates a ‘feminine’ chaos. In doing so, the hero becomes illuminated by new possibilities through which both individual and social regeneration may be prompted.

Now while McLuhan saw a roughly similar need to go “through the vanishing point”, he knew that the hero could not do so and remain the hero. The hero would necessarily become a “nobody” in the process — in extreme opposition to Peterson’s hero who “as a consequence of such activity (…) necessarily meets himself (…) broadened and extended“.2

For McLuhan, it was only as the hero was utterly dispossessed that the search for meaning could take on the sort of hopelessness through which alone a new sort of identity might be found for our individual and social lives.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate (Dante Inferno, iii:9)3

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (East Coker)4

A world of multiple individual and collective identities could not be organized through a heroically maintained focus without distortion and even violence.5 The need was therefore to learn “how not to have a point of view“6 and the requisite trial by fire was to go through the dissolution of the hero into the nobody. Only the nobody could come upon new ground that would not be heroically stipulated — and therefore not be only ‘figure absent ground’.7

Put differently, Peterson’s hero would need to undergo complete immersion in Nietzsche’s nihilism and Beckett’s solipsism8 in order to turn away from misleading pathways like brain materialism9 and the postulation of a “thing in itself”.10 Both of these typically Gutenbergian attempts at anchoring would uselessly attempt to provide “a rock-solid foundation”11 for the understanding of human experience via a physical (“neural underpinnings”) or conceptual (“the perceived object is thus a low-resolution image of the thing-in-itself”) reduction of an irreducibly ‘gapped’ plurality to a merely stipulated ‘basis’ in singularity.

 

  1. The past tense will often be used in this post to describe McLuhan and Peterson, although Peterson is very much with us. In such cases, the present should be understood as implicated in the past. ↩
  2. Peterson, ‘Religion, sovereignty, natural rights, and the constituent elements of experience’, 2006. ↩
  3. A few lines before this:
    Per me si va ne la città dolente,
    per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
    per me si va tra la perduta gente.
    “Lasciate ogne speranza” is a technical requirement to the understanding of the enormous range of human experience. Whereas Peterson sees in mythology and literature “    imaginative roadmaps to being” (‘Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity’, 2013), McLuhan was clear that we must find in them ‘roadmaps from being’! Between ‘to’ and ‘from’ is a gap — the appreciation of whose significance lies on the other side of all heroism. ↩
  4. Compare Little Gidding: “And what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning / From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled / If at all. Either you had no purpose / Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured / And is altered in fulfilment.” ↩
  5. The problem, of course, is that such heroic focus is part of the class it purports to organize. Whence its privilege? ↩
  6. Often called by McLuhan ‘the technique of the suspended judgement’. ↩
  7. For extended discussion of this point, see the further Peterson posts in this blog. ↩
  8. Nietzsche and Beckett were well aware that neither nihilism nor solipsism could withstand their own disintegrative force. They should therefore be understood as nihilism and solipsism , where the strikethroughs indicate that these strange conditions are nothing conceptual; they are black holes falling though themselves into the unknown and unknowable. Hence Beckett’s great closing text to his trilogy, The Unnamable. ↩
  9. See Hirsh, J. B., Mar, R. A., & Peterson, J.B., ‘Psychological Entropy: A Framework for Understanding Uncertainty-Related Anxiety’, Psychological Review 119:2, 2012: “the need for an integrative theoretical framework to establish its psychological significance and provide a context for its neural underpinnings and behavioral consequences has become increasingly apparent”; “the probability of any given action or perceptual frame being employed p(x) is a function of the weighted neural input for its deployment, as influenced by the combination of sensory input, strength of memory representations, and goal-related attentional processes.” Imagine what Dostoevsky’s underground man would have made of this verbiage! ↩
  10. See Peterson’s ‘Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity’ in K. Markman, T. Proulx & M. Lindberg (eds), The Psychology of Meaning, 2013: “Intelligible arrays have been identified at many levels of resolution: from that of the quark, 1/10,0002 as large as an atom, to the supra-galactic, at 1025 meters. All things-in-themselves exist simultaneously at all those levels, and partake in multiple arrays, at each level. A perceptible object is thus an array segregated, arbitrarily and for subjective purposeful reasons, from its participation in endless other arrays. However, some aspect of the original array must be retained. Otherwise, the object cannot be said to truly exist, and must be regarded as fantasy. (…) The perceived object is simpler than the thing-in-itself (a prerequisite to comprehension) -– while remaining importantly related to the actual thing. (…) The perceived object is thus a low-resolution image of the thing-in-itself.” Compare Nietzsche (who certainly agreed that “the object cannot be said to truly exist”): “Radical nihilism is (…) the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things.” ↩
  11. Peterson, ‘Religion, sovereignty, natural rights, and the constituent elements of experience’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, v28, 2006. ↩

McNamara’s band

Tennyson, like the Romantics before him, was limited by the science of his time to external landscapes. We had to wait for a post-Newtonian science to free us to create the interior landscapes of the Symbolists. The “aesthetic moment” of arrested cognition, a moment in and at once out of time, of simultaneity, could only exist [in our understanding today] when cinema [composed in discrete frames] was technologically possible. McLuhan (…) thus sees the artistic process itself as a deliberate movement backward from a moment of insight (…) [ascribable] to music, to painting, to (…) science and technology (…) The original aesthetic moment [as retraced and delimited in this way] will then become [experientially and so conceptually] possible for us in our own prison of space and time. (The Interior Landscape, 1969)

This is a note from Eugene McNamara, the editor of The Interior Landscape, introducing its second section of McLuhan essays, ‘The Beatrician Moment’. It gestures in the direction of McLuhan’s method and intent. But it is clear that McNamara did not understand McLuhan on “simultaneity” and especially not the difference between the perennial exercise of creativity in the “original aesthetic moment” that is the spring of all human perception1 and its theoretical elaboration. The first is always at work; the second takes place only in discrete regimes of ideation: “the medium is the message”.

Further, he seems not have understood the difference between an aid in understanding the “original aesthetic moment” and a necessity for understanding it. “Post-Newtonian science” and cinema can indeed point to an understanding of the “original aesthetic moment” for our time — but they are not necessary for it. Many different understandings of that moment already exist — in Plato, Dante, Shakespeare and many others. Some of these explications far exceed our capabilities today. But we are just as cut off from them as we are from it.

Illumination of the perennial “original aesthetic moment” in all perception necessarily occasions a revisioning not only of — and away from! — “our own prison of space and time”, but of all the spaces and times that humans have ever lived or will ever live.2

  1. Not just artistic perception! Or, as this may also be put: all perception is artistic perception! “The most poetic thing in the world is the most ordinary human consciousness.” (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, 1954) ↩
  2. The inauguration of a domain that is valid for all time does not entail definitive conclusion. Compare the physical sciences where no event, past, present or future, has or will ever unfold aside from physics and chemistry — but physics and chemistry are so fundamentally open-ended that they are liable even to the paradigm change of scientific revolution. So with the domain of media. ↩

McLuhan’s advice to Leary

Timothy Leary, Flashbacks, 1990, p251-253:

  • The lunch with Marshall McLuhan at the Plaza [Hotel in New York, apparently in the summer of 1966]1 was informative. “Dreary Senate hearings and courtrooms are not the platforms for your message, Tim. You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer. Fine. But the key to your work is advertising. You’re promoting a product. The new and improved accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain can produce — beauty, fun, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical romance. Word of mouth from satisfied consumers will help, but get your rock and roll friends to write jingles about the brain.” He sang: “Lysergic acid hits the spot / Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.”
  • “Your advertising must stress the religious. Find the god within. This is all frightfully interesting. Your competitors are naturally denouncing the brain as an instrument of the devil. Priceless!”
  • “To dispel fear you must use your public image. You are the basic product endorser. Whenever you are photographed, smile. Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage. Never complain or appear angry. It’s okay if you come off as flamboyant and eccentric. You’re a professor, after all. But a confident attitude is the best advertisement. You must be known for your smile.”2
  • “You’re going to win the war, Timothy. Eventually. But you’re going to lose some major battles on the way. You’re not going to overthrow the Protestant Ethic in a couple of years. This culture knows how to sell fear and pain. Drugs that accelerate the brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers. You’re ahead of your time. They’ll attempt to destroy your credibility.”
  • The conversation with Marshall McLuhan got me thinking further along these lines: the successful philosophers were also advertisers who could sell their new models of the universe to large numbers of others, thus converting thought to action, mind to matter. I devoted several days and one acid trip to analysis of the packaging of previous American revolutions: “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death,” “A Nation Cannot Exist Half Slave and Half Free,” “We Have Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself.” “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” One morning, while I was ruminating in the shower about what kind of slogan would succinctly summarize the tactics for increasing intelligence, six words came to mind. Dripping wet, with a towel around my waist, I walked to the study and wrote down this phrase: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” Later it became very useful in my function as cheerleader for change.
  • Turn On meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. Tune In meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop Out suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. Drop Out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.

A report in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, ‘Liddy vs Leary‘, from Aril 9, 1982, has this:

Leary, invoking the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, expressed the view that “education, entertainment and advertising must go together.” “Entertainment means holding someone’s attention,” he said. “It means making my position more attractive.”

 

  1. Leary describes his meeting with McLuhan in a section of his book titled ‘Summer 1966’. ↩
  2. A review of Flashbacks in the London Sunday Times by Jonathan Raban reported of McLuhan’s advice: “Leary did as he was told. Photographs of him show a dazzling crescent moon of upper canines and incisors, as if his teeth had taken leave of his jaw and gone out for a smile on their own.” ↩

Ian Hacking and the Toronto School of Communication

Ian Hacking (born 1936) shares a surprising number of commonalities with Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980):

  • both western Canadians, McLuhan born in Edmonton, Hacking in Vancouver
  • both received their initial undergraduate degrees in their local universities, McLuhan at the University of Manitoba1, Hacking at UBC2
  • both then went to Cambridge where they each obtained another BA and then MA and PhD degrees there3
  • In Cambridge McLuhan studied at Trinity Hall (est 1350), Hacking at the nearby Trinity College (est 1546, but constituent King’s Hall in 1317)
  • both their careers developed through the combination of their Cambridge experience with a particular French author: Mallarmé in McLuhan’s case, Foucault in Hacking’s
  • both first taught in the US and married American women
  • both came to direct their Cambridge training in language studies (McLuhan’s in literary criticism, Hacking’s in analytic philosophy) to questions of social change and the relation of science to life
  • both ended their careers as decades-long University of Toronto professors, but with prestigious interim positions in New York (McLuhan) and Paris (Hacking)

Future posts will detail the similarities and differences in their work. Shortly put, McLuhan found a way to specify the focal (elementary) structure of ‘new science’ (“the medium is the message”) in the humanities and social sciences, whereas Hacking specified the problems the initiation of any new science in these areas would encounter and have to overcome (which he deemed impossible).4 It would seem that the second should proceed the first. But as Plato was already very aware, and as Heidegger specified from Schiller, all genuine thought requires a ‘step back’ (einen Schritt zurück) to a ‘new beginning’ (einem neuen Anfang). Hacking’s work therefore provides critical considerations from which the ‘step back’ to McLuhan may cogently be attempted and investigated.5

 

  1. McLuhan’s family moved from Edmonton to Winnipeg during WW1 and he received all his education there from primary school to his first MA. ↩
  2. UBC, Hacking’s alma mater, has played an important role in the history of the Toronto School. McLuhan first announced that “the medium is the message” there in 1958 (see The medium is the message in 1958). And more than two decades earlier, in May 1935, Innis gave his important lecture, ‘‘The Role of Intelligence’, at UBC. This may have been one of the first writings of Innis that came to McLuhan’s attention and already pointed to Innis’ work in communications in the 1940s (for discussion see Innis and McLuhan in 1936 and Innis multiplying Hugo. ↩
  3. McLuhan had an IODE scholarship which together with family funds maintained him in Cambridge for two years, 1934-1936; he returned on sabbatical in 1939 for his PhD residence year. Hacking had a much longer stay in Cambridge in the 1950s and early 1960s, and doubtless at least originally, and perhaps continually, also had a scholarship, or scholarships, enabling him to do so. ↩
  4. Hacking in ‘Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’ (2004): “There is no single underlying structure according to which looping occurs. More generally (…) I see no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories about making up people. There is no one process, but only a motley.” Compare Innis’ analogous doubts based on the “looping” or self-reference implicated in a science of human experience as discussed in Innis and McLuhan in 1936 (where Innis is cited as declaring “the impossibility of building a science on a basis on which the observer becomes the observed”). ↩
  5. It is unclear how much Hacking engaged with McLuhan. In his 1975 book, Why does language matter to philosophy?, he gestured towards him as follows: “Evidently I have no quarrel with students of technology like Marshall McLuhan who think that the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is only a spin-off from the invention of printing, and who forecast comparable mutations when the locus of the sentence passes from the book to the computer printout via the technology of semiconductors.” This is prescient as regards one aspect of McLuhan’s ‘s work. But McLuhan was much more than a ‘student of technology’. (For discussion, see What was McLuhan up to?) In a word, McLuhan was not an analyst of chronological events or a literalist, he was a synchronist (“allatonce”) and a structuralist — so that the significance or message of ‘printing’, say, or of ‘semiconductors’, depends in each case on the background structure or medium against which it is understood. For example: ” What is to be the new nature and form of the book against the new electronic surround?” (The Future of the Book, 1972) How to solve the implicated infinite regress (once a structure or medium like ‘the electronic surround’ is itself taken as a message) is fundamental to his contribution. (For illustrative texts see Escape from the cul-de-sac.) ↩

Innis or Havelock?

It is an interesting question whether it was Innis or Havelock who first formulated the idea for the Toronto school that the medium of communication might be regarded as a, or the, central force in history. It is certainly the case that Innis saw, already in 1936, that “improvements in facilities for discussion” beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing apace in the twentieth had had great influence:1 

the possibilities of discussion have increased immeasurably.2 The character of discussion (…) has been tremendously influenced by recent industrialism and inventions (…) the development of the printing press (…) and (…) particularly the radio (‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’, Dalhousie Review, January 1936, 404)3

If “the nineteenth century, with the development of the printing press, economic expansion and the growth of literacy”, together with later “improvements in facilities for discussion, particularly the radio”, precipitated a new “era of discussion”4 in the twentieth century, when and where have such ‘eras’ arisen in the past and what could their study tell us about the overall course of history and about our present situation?

It may be that Havelock thought along these lines from Innis in his consideration of the role of literacy in the the development of Greek thought from the pre-Socratics to Plato and in the associated foundation of schools of higher learning like Plato’s Academy.5 By the early 1940’s, at least, he was explicitly considering the question of “the great transition from the oral to the written word”.6

Several strands in this idea may be differentiated: (1) the notion that changes in communication has been influential to the evolution of modernity; (2) the notion that modes of communication, oral and literate, were central to the birth of classical Greece (and of all that has followed from that birth); (3) the notion that communication has repeatedly shaped history for the last 5000 years.

The first was broached by Innis in the 1930s.7 The second was formulated by Havelock in the 1940s on the basis particularly of Milman Parry’s orality research, but doubtless nudged in this direction also by Innis’ work.8 The third was central to Innis’ research on communication beginning in the middle 1940s as decisively influenced by Havelock.9 

McLuhan became the heir of these ideas when he moved to Toronto in 1946. In the 1950s he would hammer away at the question of how to specify the domain of communication (dual genitive) in order to facilitate collective investigation of the subject.

Around 1960 he would begin thinking of ‘galaxies’ of communication rather than ‘eras’ to get away from a chronological framework for such investigation. But already in his PhD thesis from 1943 he was investigating the closely related question of how to define recurrent dominants, particularly in the history of education, but also of the humanities in general, which he saw as constituting a perennial “ancient quarrel”.

 

  1. Having ‘influence’ in historical change and being the focus for the study of historical change are fundamentally different things. The first is alchemy, the second is chemistry. It may be that Innis and Havelock, even McLuhan, never fully realized the ‘gestalt switch’ or “quantum leap” (McLuhan) that is needed to e-merge from the former into the latter. But since the point of such paradigm change is to start differently, if it is not ‘fully realized’ it has not been realized at all. Linear progress cannot be made in this context: a start cannot be made in the middle of a project that is already ongoing — except by ‘beginning again’. However, the need to start differently, and the reasons that support a different start, may well be realized short of making the new start itself. Indeed, a start to “new science” can hardly be made by individuals since science is inherently a social enterprise. So what is at stake here is the question of how close Innis and Havelock respectively were to the launching of new science in the 1940s when both began to investigate how communication media might be investigated and what that investigation might show. ↩
  2. Innis was clear that “change which has so profoundly influenced discussion” necessarily reflects back on the discussion of the individual intellectual so that one who “has failed to realize the significance of the change (…) remains as a vestige of an era of discussion which has passed.” (‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’, 405) ↩
  3. The subject of Innis’ 1936 Dalhousie Review essay is called ‘discussion’ (even in its title, ‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’). But his 1937 Encyclopedia of Canada article on the ‘Pulp-and-Paper Industry’ replaces the term ‘discussion’ with ‘communication’: “Expansion of press services and of advertising agencies has accompanied the marked improvements in communication”. Innis himself was, of course, deeply skeptical of these “improvements”. ↩
  4. See note #1. ↩
  5. See note #8 below. ↩
  6. ‘The Technique of Exposition’, an unpublished essay in Havelock’s papers at Yale. The essay was intended as a chapter on the history of the pre-Socratics which Havelock developed out of his extended study of Socrates. Havelock later wrote (in ‘The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern Mind’, 1987) that he began to read Milman Parry (1902-1935) in 1943 and that he then lectured on oral composition in Toronto before moving to Harvard. Here he was apparently thinking of his 1946 UT lecture on ‘The Sophistication of Homer’. Meanwhile at Harvard, I.A. Richards reported in a BBC lecture that “Professor Havelock has suggested that we may see in Plato’s rejections of Homer the revolt of the writing mind’s mode of apprehension against the pre-literate mind’s other, less abstract and intellectual, ways of ordering itself.” For further discussion see Richards and Havelock before 1947 and Havelock, Innis and Richards in 1947. ↩
  7. Innis, in turn, knew of the notion from Hugo and Bulwer from the 1830s. For discussion, see Innis multiplying Hugo (PEMS 6). ↩
  8. Innis’ work was well known to Havelock. For discussion see Innis and Havelock – 1930 and beyond. ↩
  9. See the previous note for references. Also Sirluck on Innis, Owen and Havelock and Havelock, Innis and Richards in 1947. ↩