Monthly Archives: July 2023

The spectacle of redemption

The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action. (James Joyce, Stephen Hero)1

Subliminal characteristics are group dynamics. (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, March 24 1960)2

In the early 1950s, marking his way from individual literary analysis to collective multimedia investigation, McLuhan repeatedly cited a passage from Joyce’s Stephen Hero:

The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical  properties: they transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory by the light of day. (…) All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive states (…)3 It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption.4

The passage appears in ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951),  ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ (1954)5 and ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954). The two Joyce essays, in turn, were then republished in the 1960s — ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ in 1962 in  Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques;6 and ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ both in McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967) and in The Interior Landscape (1969). The net effect was to cite the passage 6 different times over a period of almost 20 years — McLuhan age 40 to 60.7

In sum, and leaving aside his own repeated discussions of these same notions, especially of “the entire community in action” as language and/or as the unconscious, McLuhan on six separate occasions marked out his way, both in anticipation and in retrospect, by citing and reciting this passage from Joyce’s Stephen Hero.

 

  1. See note #4 below for the full passage. ↩
  2. https://archive.org/details/naeb-b067-f01/page/n133/mode/1up ↩
  3. Only ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ includes “All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive states” which was Joyce’s clarification of the preceding “The modern method examines its territory by the light of day.” Tellingly, Joyce, but not McLuhan, then continued “dispenses with presumptive states” with “presumptive Redeemers and Churches”. ↩
  4. Another passage from Stephen Hero was also cited repeatedly: “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 that has ever been adored on earth by an examination of 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.” McLuhan has this passage both in ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951) and ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954). ↩
  5. This essay was submitted to The Sewanee Review in 1951, but published there only in 1954. ↩
  6. Edited by Thomas Connolly. For this reprinting McLuhan added a new section on The Problem of Form (1893) by Adolf Hildebrand. ↩
  7. A related passage from McLuhan himself appears in his ‘Introduction’ to Tennyson: Selected Poetry (1955): “Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the little epic (epyllion) as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is ‘the tale of the tribe‘. That is to say, it is not so much a story of the in­dividual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man.” This passage from McLuhan himself was also repeated/reprinted — in the 1970 From Cliché to Archetype. ↩

Extra sensory perception

Like his attention to Pretribal Awareness, McLuhan’s thoughts on ESP were concentrated around 1970.1 The connection between the two, and the allied connection with ‘pattern recognition’, is highly important for a fitting understanding of his work.

Explorations 8 #3, 1957
Extra sensory perception is normal perception.2 Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present.3

McLuhan to Harry Skornia, March 24 19604
Subliminal characteristics are group dynamics. Consciousness will always be the area of the individual and freedom, but of course most of those who talk about such things may be merely subliminally misguided people. Is it not strange that as we push into the areas of awareness of our own mechanisims people should shrill “determinism” when all they mean is that they are becoming conscious of their own mechanism. Consciousness can never Itself be mechanical. Therefore the more consciousness the less mechanism. Thus the whole of the educational enterprise may pass into ESP hands and the only possible consequence would be liberation.

The Humanities in the Electronic Age, 1961
But what has happened with the electronic advent is not [only] that we move the products of human knowledge or labour to all corners of the earth more quickly. Rather we dilate the very means and processes of discourse to make a global envelope of sense and sensibility for the earth. From the moment of the telegraph, extra-sensory perception became a daily factor in shaping the human community and private perception alike. It is not the products of perception and judgment which now reach us by electric media, but involvement in the entire communal process of interfused co-existence. Each one of us, actively or passively, includes every other person on earth. The world no longer offers the possibility of the separatist, centre-margin structure which is featured in all our institutions, legal, educational, political. Centres-without-margins, inclusive consciousness, inclusive organization, these alone are viable or relevant to the new electric age.

Understanding Media, 1964, 130
It is (…) conceivable that the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses.

Understanding Media, 1964, 265-266
With the telephone, there occurs the extension of ear and voice that is a kind of extra sensory perception. With television came the extension of the sense of touch or of sense interplay that even more intimately involves the entire sensorium.

The Role of New Media in Social Change, 19645
It is an ancient observation, that was repeated by Henri Bergson, that speech is a technology of extension that amplified man’s power to store and exchange perceptual knowledge; but it interrupted the sharing of a unified collective consciousness experienced by pre-verbal man. Before speech, it is argued, men possessed a large measure of extra sensory perceptions which was fragmented by speech technology.6

All of the Candidates are Asleep, 19687
The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP.

Playboy Interview, 1969
Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP.

Counterblast, 1969, 23
The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP.8

Counterblast, 1969, 83
Today the return to oral conditions of communication is not merely to be noted in the strictly acoustic sphere. The oral is the world of the non-linear, of all-at-onceness and ESP. There are no lines or directions in acoustic space, but rather a simultaneous field. It is non-Euclidean.

The Hardware/Software Mergers, 1969
When you put a software information environment around a hardware environment, you scrap hardware. But, there’s another feature. When you scrap an old service environment you retrieve a still older one. When we put electricity around the old mechanical hardware, we retrieved ESP; the most primitive forms of society and occultisms were dumped into the Western lap in vast quantity. Five hundred years ago with Gutenberg, the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages was scrapped overnight — and they retrieved antiquity.  Manuscript culture was not powerful enough to retrieve antiquity. Gutenberg was able to bring Greece and Rome back and dump it into the Renaissance lap. Electric circuitry scrapped industrialism, and along with that, it rendered ineffective all forms of specialism. All forms of fragmentation, all forms of classified data were scrapped by electrical circuitry. Everything you call “subjects” — “sex”,  “curriculum” — all these forms were scrapped by the new instantaneous electric networks, which represent our own nervous systems outside us; but while scrapping recent procedures we have retrieved the most primitive forms of culture from the most remote pasts. In fact, there is no “past” now. All cultures are simultaneous; all pasts are here.

Address to NYC Author’s Luncheon, 1969
The coming year has been dubbed ‘the year of the witch’ in book publishing because it is the world of the occult. Alice. I mean of the inner trips of numerology and general mysticism. ESP. The world of the witch. The book of the future. The inner trip. The outer trip of civilized man is finished.

From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, 40
The new cult of ESP is a natural adjunct to telecommunications. When you put your nervous system outside as a world environment, ESP would seem to be rather “Plurabelle”. Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language stresses the new awareness of languages as struc­tures of awareness and patterns of gesture.

Culture is our Business, ‘Author’s Note’, 1970, 7-8
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. While the Twenties talked about the caveman, and the people thrilled to the art of the Altamira caves, they ignored (as we do now) the hidden environment of magical forms which we call “ads”. Like cave paintings, ads are not intended to be looked at or seen, but rather to exert influence at a distance, as though by ESP. Like cave paintings, they are not means of private but of corporate expression. They are vortices of collective power, masks of energy invented by new tribal man. 

Culture is our Business, 1970, 82
The present electric ESP age of multiple interfaces finds no problem in metamorphosis or transubstantiation such as baffled abcede-minded culture of the sixteenth century and after.

Electric Consciousness and the Church, 1970
we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sense we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression constitutes the sort of mythic type of consciousness of ‘once-upon-a-timeness’ which means all time, out of time. It is possible that our new technologies can bypass verbalising. There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself as a universal environment. There is a sense in which the surround of information that we now experience electrically is an extension of consciousness itself. What effect this might have on the individual in society is very speculative. But it has happened, it isn’t something that’s going to happen. Many people simply resort instantly to the occult, to ESP and every form of hidden awareness, in answer to this new surround of electric consciousness.

Innovation is Obsolete, 1971
The electric service environments of telegraph, telephone, radio, and TV have literally junked the nineteenth-century industrial hardware, and all the assembly-line processes and organization charts born of specialism and fragmentation of functions. At the same time, these same environmental services have recovered, or recuperated the entire world of the occult and ESP.

Take Today, 1972, 7
The world of man’s artifacts was considered neutral until the electric age. As the electric environment increasingly engulfed the old Greek “Nature,” it became apparent that “Nature” was a figure abstracted from a ground of existence that was far from “natural.” Greek “Nature,” which sufficed until Einstein, excluded most of the chaotic resonance of the great Sound-Light Show of existence itself. Most of the pre-Socratic magic and ESP and all the Oriental and “Primitive” Natures were pushed into the “subconscious.” Civilized man exists by dumping most of his experience into that convenient bin. Electric man has discovered that it is his major resource center.

Take Today, 1972,14
When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment. This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness.

Take Today, 1972, 39
the world of ESP-rit

Take Today, 1972, 100
The tribal outlook of the young TV kids is as anti-innovation and anti- growth as in any tribal society of the past. Those who “play it by ear” are instantly aware of the effects of change. The same electric technology that has retrieved ESP and the occult for many levels and areas of American life has turned the kids away from “moreness,” from glossy consuming to homespun and “camp” and “found” art. They are finished with both job goals and market values This change of outlook is not ideological but psychological. These children are very much their own “fathers,” in that their early man-made environment programmed their sensory and perceptual lives for a totally different range of satisfactions than those of their parents and teachers. 

Take Today, 1972, 115-116
All religions have recognized a social bond (resonance) between the world of numbers, names, and hidden divinity.  Much of what we call the occult or ESP today is simply the recovery of awareness of nonvisual ground for the figures and configurations of our visual civilization. The visual ground of literacy provides the rationale of connectedness and goals, without which “performance” and “progress” would be meaningless. But in today‘s new hidden surround of information flow, the old visual ground of hookups and hang-ups is transformed by electric speeds into a new acoustic ground of resonant interfaces. All boundaries become porous, the opaque becomes pervious, and goals move faster than measures of performance can. What is your telephone number for today? 

Globe & Mail Review of Julian Jaynes, 19779
Contemporary schizophrenia, says Jaynes, affords a partial reply [replay?] to the bicameral mind. Just as contemporary mediums and faith-healers raise the subject (…) This reminds us that Women’s Lib in the nuclear age is as normal a development as E.S.P. and Parapsychology.

 

  1. But even at the start of his career, in his 1943 PhD thesis, McLuhan had already posited something like “pre-tribal awareness” or ESP as a native facility of human being: “Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings, so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials.” (The Classical Trivium, 51)
    An early example of the use of E.S.P. in a negative sense (thus demonstrating its positive potential) appears in the 1951     Mechanical Bride (p31):
    “Writing in the New York Herald Tribune (January 25, 1948), John J. O’Neill gave an account of Professor Joseph B. Rhine’s views on the possibility of E.S.P. (Extrasensory Perception) as a means of wiping out crime. E.S.P. turns out to be even more pretentiously totalitarian than the Hopkins Televoter mechanism. Using mechanically controlled telepathic powers to probe into the subconscious of individual and society alike, it follows, in the view of Professor Rhine, that ‘Crime on any scale could hardly exist with its cloak of invisibility thus removed; graft, exploitation and suppression could not continue if the dark plots of wicked men were to be laid bare’.
    Neither crime nor human consciousness could exist in the scientific circumstances Professor Rhine outlines in his book, The Reach of Mind. A single mechanical brain, of the sort developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Professor Norbert Wiener, when hitched to the telepathic mechanism of Professor Rhine, could tyrannize over the collective consciousness of the race exactly in comic-book and science-fiction style. The means envisaged for this purpose are complex, but the kind of wish for unlimited power over men which evokes such means is moronic. From the point of view of civilized values, it is obvious that, as our powers of crime detection have advanced, the power to define vice or virtue has declined. In the same way, as market-research tyranny has developed, the object and ends of human consumption have been blurred. Know-how has obliterated the why, what, and when.
    The dream of E.S.P. has stirred the minds and hopes of the top brass of the executive world much as the comic books stir the passions of the very young. If any measure in addition to that of ridicule and satire could be effective in recalling such adult minds to a sense of the true proportions and dignity of human life, it should be invoked at once.” ↩
  2. In his essay ‘Cloning ESP’, Bob Dobbs points out helpfully: “ESP as pattern-recognition is a perceptual complex of mental and non-verbal dance — the tactile sense. However, tactility, as used here, is not one of the senses, but the interplay of the senses, evoking ordinary consciousness. Electric technologies, from the telegraph on, when they became generally used and environmental, simulated that ordinary consciousness, the tactile ESP, collectively. So, personal ESP now existed parallel with a collective, ongoing, dynamic ESP.” For illustrative passages from McLuhan see Tactility. ↩
  3. In this note McLuhan brings together ESP with synesthesia: “SYNESTHESIA the new sin of the nineteenth century roused as much misunderstanding as E.S.P. today. Extra sensory perception is normal perception. Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present. Synesthesia is simply totalism in the use of the senses. After centuries of abstract, printed lineality the Baudelaires and Rimbauds revolted into synesthesia because the telegraphic and photographic resources of the earlier nineteenth century had suddenly revealed the possibility of simultaneous experience at many levels. Wagner leapt at the possibilities. The Bauhaus gave institutional form to the same developments. Today we take the entire Bauhaus program of Synesthesia for granted as normal suburban living.” ↩
  4. https://archive.org/details/naeb-b067-f01/page/n133/mode/1up. ↩
  5. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’, Address to Canadian Orthopsychiatric Association, March 1964. Printed posthumously in the Antigonish Review, no. 74-75, summer-autumn, 1988. ↩
  6. McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, summer 1965: “Eric has worked out that the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering”. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’ comes from the previous year, 1964. At this time in the mid-1960s, at least in these two instances, McLuhan may have deviated from his usual position that human being and language are coextensive: “man is language” (GG 231). ↩
  7. ‘All of the Candidates are Asleep’, Saturday Evening Post., v241, August 10, 1968, 34-36. ↩
  8. UM (8): “If it is asked, ‘What is the content of speech?’, it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal’. ↩
  9. Review of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1977, in the The Globe & Mail, Toronto, June 18, 1977. ↩

Pre-tribal awareness

Der Philosoph ist nicht Bürger einer Denkgemeinde. Das ist was ihn zum Philosophen macht. Wittgenstein: Zettel #4451

Here are texts in chronological order in which McLuhan opens the critical question of the relation between individual and corporate identity, between “pre-tribal awareness” and tribe, between “an intuitive perception of essentials” and language.

Each of these may be seen as preceding the other. Humans must first have the capacity for language in order to be able to learn it. But an understanding of what is entailed in language learning can only be achieved in language.

*

Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings, so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials. (The Classical Trivium, 1943, 51)2

every word is the product of a complex mental act with a complete learning process involved in it. In this respect words can be regarded not as signs but as existent things, alive with a physical and mental life which is both individual and collective. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition3 we stand on a (…) threshold (…) the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

Until WRITING was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition… (Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed The Breath, 1954)4 

By surpassing writing, we have regained our WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural, but cosmic, plane. We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man. [Ibid.]

And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media. (Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956)5

It is an ancient observation, that was repeated by Henri Bergson, that speech is a technology of extension that amplified man’s power to store and exchange perceptual knowledge; but it interrupted the sharing of a unified collective consciousness experienced by pre-verbal man. Before speech,6 it is argued, men possessed a large measure of extra sensory perceptions which was fragmented by speech technology. (The Role of New Media in Social Change, 1964)7

an inclusive consciousness that is at the same time8 private and tribal (Towards an Inclusive Consciousness, 1967)

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) 9

Calvin Springer Hall & Gardner Lindzey, Theories of Personality (1957): “The motivational state exists first and exerts an influence upon the way in which the person will perceive the world.” (Cited in War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, 13)

It could almost be defined as a subliminal awareness of the microscopic extrapolated into the macroscopic. (Through the Vanishing Point,1968, 231)

The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP.10 (Counterblast, 1969, 23)

Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are benumbed by any new technology — which in turn creates a totally new environment — we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it (…) the Greeks [for example] were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. (Playboy Interview, 1969)11

Today we are electrically stoned, humming, drumming, thrumming, with this electric energy within us and without us, which puts us into an extremely primitive state of mind, like that of a Hindu sage listening to insects in a jungle. The kids know this as they sit with their guitars, listening, strumming: they are trying to tune in on a world they never made. They are explorers.  (…) I mean by [a “primitive state of mind”] the levels of perception at which they resonate in relation to the universe that we share. These kids live by ear: they resonate in depth and respond to depth, to worlds that are primal and basic and beyond the range of our educational activities. Beyond increasing our awareness. (The Hardware/Software Mergers, 1969)12

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 entire content of the unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness… (From Cliché to Archetype, 1970)13 

Today, electric technology scraps mechanical industry while retrieving the most primal modes of human consciousness. Your own unique study, Preface to Plato, prompts me to write this note. Is it possible that the phonetic alphabet, by upgrading the visual powers of man after many centuries of the dominance of aural culture, may have scrapped the poetic arts of tribal man and also retrieved the autonomous human entity? This would seem to have been the only time and only circumstances in which the metaphysical and independent human being had been able to manifest himself amidst the vast amorphous resonance of the tribal culture. (McLuhan to Eric Havelock, May 22, 1970, Letters 406)

Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows how the phonetic alphabet scrapped tribal man but retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal14 awareness. (McLuhan to Joe Keogh, July 6,1970, Letters 413)

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)

Man is no longer conceptual. His metaphysics has become a perceptive one. What I mean is that he leaves the world of logic to enter the world of mysticism, with immediate perceptions. (Interview with L’Express, 1972)

our age-old right-hemisphere affinity for telepathy (Ma Bell Minus the Nantucket Gam: Or the Impact of High-Speed Data Transmission, 1981)15

  1. The philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community. This is what makes him into a philosopher. ↩
  2. McLuhan would consider for the rest of his life how “an intuitive perception of essentials” (dual genitive) might be apprehended in that very language that it “produced”. Instead of “an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings” (objective genitive) in the experienced world, now “the structure of beings” (subjective genitive) would be apprehended in, or as, the “parameters” of the experience of world = the underlying range of the “intuitive perception of essentials”. (McLuhan to Skornia, September 3, 1960: “Media are the parameters of all enterprises, whether private or collective. They impose, they are the assumptions. (…) it may be more effective to say ‘Media are the parameters’ rather than that ‘the medium is the message’.”)
    McLuhan was clear about this flipped perspective by 1951:     “    the Symbolists (took) aesthetic experience as an arrested moment (…) for which (…) they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment” (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951); “one major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process (of ordinary perception) as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences” (McLuhan to Harold Innis, March 14, 1951, Letters 221). Such an “arrested moment” is not situated in chronological (linear) time. Its “stages of apprehension” cannot, therefore, themselves be linear. These “stages” or “phases” are synchronic and vertical. And what is brought together in every such “arrested moment” is some variety of “intuitive perception”, some “parameter”, and some corresponding variety of world. ↩
  3. In this same CHML essay: “Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and (ordinary) cognition”… ↩
  4. Counterblast, 1954; Explorations 4, 1955; Shenandoah 7:1, 1955; Counterblast, 1969. ↩
  5. See The very citadel of civilized awareness. This passage from 1956 was reused 15 years later in the 1969 Counterblast. ↩
  6. McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, summer 1965: “Eric has worked out that the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering”. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’ comes from the previous year, 1964. At this time in the mid-1960s, at least in these two instances, McLuhan may have deviated from his usual position that human being and language are coextensive: “man is language” (GG 231). But it is highly important in this context to consider what sort(s) of time are implicated in “before speech”. ↩
  7. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’, Address to Canadian Orthopsychiatric Association, March 1964. Printed posthumously in the Antigonish Review, no. 74-75, summer-autumn, 1988. ↩
  8. ‘At the same time’ — see note #8 below. ↩
  9. The “vanishing point” is the ‘pre-tribal’ filter where “essentials” are separated from non-essentials. It operates in an in-fant when language is learned and has to be already there for that language learning or, indeed, for the subsequent use of language itself, to occur at all. ↩
  10. See Extra Sensory Perception. ↩
  11. McLuhan’s take on the Greeks was highly complicated. On the one hand, he saw them as introducing via alphabetic literacy what would become the mechanical mindset. On the other, he saw them as preserving a fundamental (“pre-Homeric”) primitivity within literacy. Like Harold Innis in this respect, he considered that it was this combination of literacy with the preliterate that enabled the unique cultural unfolding of the classical period. As McLuhan wrote to Havelock in 1970 (cited more fully above): “This would seem to have been the only time and only circumstances in which the metaphysical and independent human being had been able to manifest himself amidst the vast amorphous resonance of the tribal culture.” ↩
  12. Presentation at ‘Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry’ conference at the University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Printed in Educational technology: Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, second session, on H.R. 4916, United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor, Select Subcommittee on Education, 250-274.It is possible that McLuhan was particularly struck by his own remarks at this conference with the ‘pre-tribal awareness’ theme that he took up repeatedly in the closely following year of 1970. Here is the wider context of his presentation: “We are the primitives of a new world. We are more primal today than any primitive society ever was — the reason being that, electrically, we have put our own nervous systems outside us as an environment of resonating, pulsating experience. The Hindu on his sitar makes sounds like insects in a jungle, consciously and deliberately, because he regards them as the most primal modes of being. The kids with their guitars (the Beatles’ name is not accidental; they chose it deliberately as the resonance of a bug, humming, whining, primal, primitive) — the kids, on their guitars are trying to relate, to tune in on this new primitive culture that we have created electrically. It is an inner trip. We are all stoned today, electrically. Western man lives in a perpetual “stoned” condition,  I mean in a psychedelic sense. (…) Today we are electrically stoned, humming, drumming, thrumming, with this electric energy within us and without us, which puts us into an extremely primitive state of mind, like that of a Hindu sage listening to insects in a jungle. The kids know this as they sit with their guitars, listening, strumming: they are trying to tune in on a world they never made. They are explorers.(…) I mean by (“primitive state of mind”) the levels of perception at which they resonate in relation to the universe that we share. These kids live by ear: they resonate in depth and respond to depth to worlds that are primal and basic and beyond the range of our educational activities. Beyond increasing our awareness.” ↩
  13. Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, 200. ↩
  14. It is all important to ask after the time or times implicated in ‘pre-tribal’. The key consideration is given in the 1951 passage from ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ (cited above): for the symbolists “the aesthetic experience (w)as an arrested moment (…) for which (…) they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment.” This is first of all synchronic time and only secondarily or derivatively, diachronic: “time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground” (The Global Village, 10). For further texts and discussion, see Genitives, times and essential types and McLuhan’s times. ↩
  15. McLuhan with Bruce Powers in the Journal of Communication, published posthumously. The same phrase appears in their later Global Village, p124. McLuhan assigns ‘telepathy’ or ESP or ‘pretribal awareness’ to the right hemisphere here, with the implication that ‘tribal awareness’ is left hemisphere. But “inclusive consciousness (…) is at the same time private and tribal” (cited above from 1967) and “no matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres” (Global Village, 62). ↩