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.

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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). ↩