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.