Monthly Archives: December 2023

Euclid and effect

The study of media begins, not with their uses or their programs, but with their effects. Indeed, the “cause” of any medium is its effects. (McLuhan to Martin Esslin, Sept 23, 1971, Letters 440)1

To arrive at his laws of geometry, Euclid needed to implement the insight formulated by Heinrich Wölfflin 2300 years later: “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts.“2 (Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 62)

Wölfflin’s dictum was quoted by McLuhan in 1960 in the context of his discovery that “the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio is3 not the (…) effect obtained”.4

No “sensuous” or factual circle can ground a law like circular circumference = 2πr. Instead, any material circle qua circle is the effect of such laws. Hence the entranceway to a science like geometry is to regard all factual circles as the effects of a formal shape; they take their form to a greater or lesser degree from a perfect circle whose circumference (unlike any material circle) exactly equals 2πr. That formal circle, in turn, must itself be regarded as the effect of mathematical laws like circumference = 2πr. 

But what is the relation of such an ideal mathematical law to the real? McLuhan says that reality does not primarily belong to either side of the ideal/real relation, but to their middle or medium: “the ’cause’ of any medium [= the cause belonging to any medium] is its effects“.5 That is, it belongs to any medium to manifest itself in and as effects.6 Its cause, its motivation, its raison d’etre, its very being — is to extend itself.7 But precisely for that reason, “the study of media begins, not with their uses or their programs, but with their effects.”

To study beginning with effect means to approach a matter (any matter whatsoever) as effect and therefore as inherently intelligible.8 Attention to effect means to regard something (including regard itself) as imperfect — in the sense of never ‘matching’ its cause, of always reaching out from itself — but not for that reason as untrue!

Effect correlates with McLuhan’s ‘making’ as differentiated from ‘matching’ or ‘merging’. Effect preserves difference, but difference as indicative, as suggestive, as meaningful, as intelligible.9

 

  1. Emphasis added. Both genitives in this passage are dual, but first of all they are subjective genitives! That is, ‘the study of media’ and ‘the cause of media’ belong to media like ‘the ball of the boy’. Not — at least not in the first instance — that media are what is studied or what is caused as objective genitives like ‘the punishment of the boy’. The objective genitives here (the study of media and of their causes) are enabled by the subjective genitives (study and causes grounded in media!) ↩
  2. Plato might be read as generalizing Euclid’s insight that all shapes may be regarded as effects. For Plato, not only all shapes but everything without exception may be regarded in this way. But Plato formulated this insight, not after Euclid, following his lead, but a century or so before him! ↩
  3. McLuhan: “was”. See next note. ↩
  4. Project 69: “Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained.” ↩
  5. The gap is where the action is. ↩
  6. See The representative ferment. ↩
  7. McLuhan’s distinctive manner of thought was to consider a term like ’cause’ across the range of its meanings and implications. So ’cause’ here is not only an originating impulse with a certain effect or effects, it is also the goal or conviction or value from which one proceeds: one’s cause. ↩
  8. McLuhan in his letter to Esslin (referenced at the head of this post): “One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility. Moreover, there is absolute value in intelligibility as such, to say nothing of pleasure and satisfaction.” ↩
  9. See Effect before cause in Gilson for McLuhan’s debt on this topic to his St Michael’s colleague, Etienne Gilson. ↩

Faculty of Interrelation in Toronto

The Giedion World, a 2019 large format book edited by Almut Grunewald, is subtitled ‘Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker in Dialogue’. It consists of translated correspondence between Sigfried Giedion (SG) and his wife, Carola Welcker (CGW), in selected periods of their 50-year courtship and marriage, with detailed annotation and hundreds of supporting photographs. 

One of the letters, from SG to CGW in November 1955,1 written from Harvard where SG was teaching that fall, describes an earlier note from McLuhan to Giedion as follows:2

The letter from Toronto you forwarded to me was from McLuhan. He asks whether I wouldn’t accept a one-year term as “resident director for a Faculty of Interrelation3 in Toronto with a handsome payment (…)4 and also Mrs Giedion”5 to run the “pilot teacher” thing!6

McLuhan did not have the power to offer such positions himself, of course. But presumably he had run the idea by his friend Claude Bissell, the President of UT, and received permission to send up this trial balloon. Perhaps he had brought Gideon and Bissell together earlier that spring of 1955 when Gideon came to Toronto from Harvard to give a paper in the ‘Communication and Culture’ seminar.7

Giedion did not take up the Toronto offer, but used the occasion of his letter to his wife to rue the fact that it had not come a decade before:

It’s always the same with these 10 years! How happy I would have been ten years ago if my idea had met with so much as a single outlet! The manuscripts have since yellowed. No door, no hearing, not even a single publication anywhere! 

McLuhan had earlier pursued Giedion’s idea of a Faculty of Interrelation with proposals to the University of Chicago,8 to Harold Innis at UT,9 and to the Ford Foundation (which eventuated in the Communication and Culture seminar). From a December 7, 1955 letter from McLuhan to Giedion10 — a month or so after SG’s note to his wife discussed above — it seems that a further proposal to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations may have been made by McLuhan and Carpenter for a UT “Contemporary Institute” (as they seem to have rebaptized a ‘Faculty of Interrelation’ for the foundations) which, they hoped, might have Giedion as at least its titular head:

Carpenter and I are now drafting outlines for Contemporary Institute to submit to Ford and Rockefeller.  It will be necessary in the Ford case to stress the value of such an institute in clarifying educational aims and procedures. We shall be able to add great force to our presentation in having your consent to act as our advisory head.  Would you prefer any particular title?  Director of Studies?  President?  We are eager to devise ways of working with all branches of Radio, TV and Film Board in working out the grammars of the new visual languages of the new media.  Here you have already done so much for us in discovering the language of vision.11

McLuhan’s later (1963) Centre for Culture and Technology was doubtless conceived primarily as a way to keep McLuhan in Toronto in the face of offers from US institutions. But part of its appeal to McLuhan would have derived, as indicated by its name, from his long-standing interest, since 1943, in Giedion’s ‘Faculty of Interrelations’ between the worlds of ‘Culture and Technology’.12 

  1. The Giedion World, 350. ↩
  2. The letter is otherwise unknown. It is not in the Giedion-McLuhan correspondence preserved with the Giedion papers in Zurich. ↩
  3. See Sigfried Giedion — A Faculty of Interrelations. ‘Interrelation’ seems to have been used, by both Giedion and McLuhan, sometimes in the singular and sometimes in the plural. Indeed the term implicates both plurality (as a relation) and singularity (as a recurrent structure). ↩
  4. Giedion interjection here: “$10,000 dollars I assume”. This would be around $115,000 today. ↩
  5. Giedion interjection: “minimum $5000 dollars, I imagine”. This would be around $57,500 today. ↩
  6. A “pilot teacher” program may have been an initiative at the University of Toronto OCE (Ontario College of Education, predecessor of the current OISE) linking teacher training with the arts in some way. CGW would have been well qualified to lead such an initiative since she had been publishing studies in the fine arts and literature since the 1920s. Her 1952 book, Paul Klee, was reviewed by McLuhan in 1953: ‘Giedion-Welcker’s Klee’, Shenandoah 3(1), 77-82. ↩
  7. ‘Space Conception in Prehistoric Art’, seminar presentation from February 23, 1955, which appeared in Explorations 6 in 1956. ↩
  8. See Proposal to Robert Hutchins 1947. ↩
  9. Innis was Dean of Graduate Studies and the Head of the Political Economy Department at the University of Toronto. McLuhan to Innis, March 14, 1951: “I think there are lines appearing in (your) Empire and Communications (…) which suggest the possibility of organizing an entire school of studies. (…) It seems obvious to me that Bloor Street (where Innis’ Political Economy Department was located) is the one point in this University where one might establish a focus of the arts and sciences. And the organizing concept would naturally be ‘Communication Theory and Practice’. A simultaneous focus of current and historic forms. Relevance to be given to selection of areas of study by dominant artistic and scientific modes of the particular period.” ↩
  10. In the Giedion papers in Zurich. ↩
  11. Giedion answered McLuhan’s notes  on January 11, 1956: “Many thanks for your letters. (…) As you know, I am since years on the tracks for a faculty of interrelations establishing or trying to establish a common vocabulary, a clarification & comparison of method used in different disciplines. I have full confidence in you and in Carpenter and I will be delighted to be with the party. Yet I have to let you know, that I have in Spring 1957 the Mellon lectures at the National Galleries (…). So that I should know approximately what you expect from me! You know that I did not accept the very tempting offer of the University of Minnesota last year. I found the people very interesting & the sum at their disposal very high (120,000 dollars) but I did not know personally the work of the participants. (…) All good luck to your plans.” Giedion’s message: ‘If you don’t want to have the same experience as the University of Minnesota, let me know in detail what would be expected of me at a time when my main priority must be the Mellon lectures! ↩
  12. The worlds of Culture and Technology — what McLuhan in his 1951 letter to Innis (cited in note 9 above) called “the arts and sciences” and “dominant artistic and scientific modes”. ↩

“Arrest in time” in McLuhan

In 1951 “arrest in time” became a decisive theme in McLuhan’s work that he would continue to investigate for the remaining three decades of his career. Perhaps no other of his myriad ‘discoveries’ was more important for his project.1

Below are some of his “arrest” passages in chronological order. Their take-off point may be seen in McLuhan’s letter to Harold Innis from March 14, 1951:2

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (…) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction.

McLuhan soon saw that the key to such retracing and reconstruction was ‘arrest’. He seems to have come along the way of this insight by considering picturesque poetry as an attempt to effect an arrested “aesthetic moment” and then to have then seen, apparently through Joyce’s Stephen Hero, that such poetic arrest was a replay or retrieval of the arrest that already operates both in “every moment of human awareness” (full passage below) and in all language use as a kind of “stuttering”. So conceived, ‘arrest’ implicated a special understanding of space — “the gap where the action is” — and of time — “a moment in and out of time”.3 “This peculiar fusion of the [ordinary] cognitive and the [extraordinary] creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior discovery [of the importance of] the technique of fission [for] the moment of aesthetic awareness. (…) In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.”4

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
It was partly to Schopenhauer that the symbolists owed their peculiar insistence on aesthetic experience5 as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time,6 of intellectual emotion7 for which, in their poems, they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment.

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
The aesthetic moment was recognized as an experience of arrest and detachment.8

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
Helped by Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Joyce arrived quickly at the formula of the aesthetic moment and its attendant landscape as consisting in a retracing of the stages of ordinary apprehension. The poetic process he discovered and states in Stephen Hero is the experience of ordinary cognition, but it is that labyrinth reversed, retraced, and hence epiphanized. The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension. And every moment of cognition is thus a Beatrician [= epiphanized or sacramental] moment when rendered lucid by a retracing of its labyrinth. (…) This secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes9 in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior discovery for the technique of fission [= arrest] of the moment of aesthetic awareness. (…) In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.10 

McLuhan to Ezra Pound, July 16, 195211
I’m writing a book on “The End of the Gutenberg Era”. Main sections: The Inventions of Writing [&] Alphabet (Transfer of auditory to visual; Arrest for contemplation of thought and cognitive process; Permits overthrow of sophist-rhetoric-oral tradition)12

Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication, 1953
“Plato’s theory of Ideas institutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis.”13(…) From this point of view Greek Philosophy and science were a means of arresting the wheel of existence or of delivering us from the time mechanism of existence.14

James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953
The idea of speech as stuttering, as arrested gesture (…) is basic to the Wake and serves to illustrate the profundity of the traditional philological doctrine in Joyce.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
Impressionism and symbolism alike insisted on attention to process in preference to personal self-expression. Self-effacement and patient watchfulness preceded the discovery of the creative process. Poets and artists literally turned their own psyches into laboratories where they practised the most austere experiments in total disregard of their personal happiness. Gradually it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was (…) a poetry which would have as its theme the poetic process itself. Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of a moment of perception. For some of the Romantic poets the doctrine of the aesthetic moment as a moment out of time — a moment of arrested consciousness — had seemed the key to all poetry. The pre-Raphaelites had pushed this doctrine as far as they could. But Mallarmé saw deeper and Joyce saw the rest. Joyce it was who saw that Aquinas had the final answer sought by Mallarmé.  The rational notes of beauty, integrity, consonance, and claritas traced by St. Thomas were actual stages of apprehension in every moment of human awareness. And so we arrive at the paradox of this most esoteric of all art doctrines, namely that the most poetic thing in the world is the most ordinary human consciousness.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
It would seem that the poet differs from other men only in his conscious ability to arrest the intake of experience and to reverse the flow. By this means he is able to externalize in a work the actual process by which each of us in perception or cognition incarnates the external world of experience. But every word uttered by man requires a large measure of the poetic ability.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
Poe put crime detection on a scientific basis by bringing into play the poetic process of retracing the stages of human apprehension [in general]. (…) And this process of arrest and retracing (…) provides the very technique of empathy15 which permits intimate insight into the processes and impulses behind products utterly alien to our own immediate experience.16

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
the Senecans had (…) literary techniques for arresting and projecting some phase of the human mind: to arrest in order to project, and to project in order to contemplate. Like the inventors of cinema at the beginning of this century they hit upon the technique of stylistic discontinuity as a means of analyzing or arresting a moment of consciousness.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.” That is the master vision of all those “spots of time” for which Wordsworth painfully sought the precise objective correlative in carefully wrought landscapes. It is the key to all his lyrics and even to The Prelude, which in order to follow his process of enlightenment has to arrest for contemplation the entire movement of his mind from youth to age.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
As poetic practitioners Wordsworth and Coleridge were in agreement (…) that poetry was concerned with the rendering of an instant of arrested awareness which freed the mind from the clogs of habitual perception.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
Moments of insight in Wordsworth’s poetry are explicitly associated with an experience of an arrest in time.17 

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
Suspense [in Byron] is not for thrill but for arrest of movement for contemplation, and to create one of those “spots in time” which permit a flash of intuitive wisdom. 

  1. Introducing his 1943 Nashe thesis, McLuhan specifically contrasted “arrest” with “continuity”: “The first objective envisaged was to extend Professor R. W. Chambers’ Continuity of English Prose beyond the period of More to the end of the sixteenth century. The proposed dissertation was given the title of The Arrest of Tudor Prose.” (The Classical Trivium, 3) ↩
  2. Letters 220. This letter was with certainty written earlier than March 1951, perhaps already in 1950. The copy we have is a “rewrite” of an original which Innis answered in February saying that he was sorry for his delay in doing so. ↩
  3. ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic’ (1960): “To transcend time one simply interrupts the natural flow of events.” For “a moment in and out of time”, see note 6 below. ↩
  4. This passage has been slightly edited here. For the passage as it appeared in print in 1951, and as it was retained in its 1969 reprinting in The Interior Landscape, see the third ‘Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ passage in the post above. ↩
  5. Especially in his ‘Aesthetic Moment’ essay, McLuhan spoke a great deal about “aesthetic experience”. But his central point was, and remained, that “the formula of the aesthetic moment” consisted in “a retracing of the stages of ordinary apprehension”. ↩
  6. “A moment in and out of time”: unmarked quotation from Eliot’s Four Quartets, iii: ‘The  Dry Salvages’. ↩
  7. “Intellectual emotion” is an inclusive relation between intellect and emotion. Although the two are usually implicitly opposed, they occur together both in the play of ordinary cognition and in the replay of a symbolist poem. “Aesthetic experience (…) of intellectual emotion” is both a subjective and an objective genitive, but for McLuhan it is predominantly a subjective genitive: “aesthetic experience” belongs to the inclusive relation of “intellectual emotion”. That is, “aesthetic experience”, standing in for “ordinary cognition”, illuminates those inclusive relations of the unconscious with consciousness, of the new and old, of the possible with the actual, of the active and the passive, through which experience, moment to moment to moment, is generated — “the stages of apprehension which led to this moment”. ↩
  8. “Experience of arrest and detachment” is a dual genitive, but primarily a subjective one: “experience” belongs to “arrest and detachment”. ↩
  9. “Fusion of the learning and the creative processes” is what McLuhan will later call ‘making’ as opposed to ‘matching’. Finite human beings cannot help but be ‘creative’, that is to say both insightful and biased, in their apprehension. Yet they can and do learn, as especially seen in the acquisition of language by the in-fant. ↩
  10. ‘Preceded’ here is not a matter of chronology! To compare, it might be said in chemistry that the difference (or fission) between electrons and protons precedes their fusion in the elements. This is a logical difference and might be stated in chemistry only to highlight the fundamental nature of the elements — namely, that they are elementary despite their complexity, despite the fact that they may be broken down into constitutive pieces. ↩
  11. Letters 231. ↩
  12. The bracketed amplification is from McLuhan. “Arrest for contemplation of thought and cognitive process”: McLuhan saw the Gutenberg galaxy here as enabling the conscious arrest of unconscious process, whereas he will later see it as obscuring that process. In fact, as he was well aware, all consciousness reveals and hides at the same moment. ↩
  13. G.R. Levy, Gate of Horn, 1948. ↩
  14. McLuhan would later see the Gutenberg galaxy as delivering over to “the time mechanism of existence”! ↩
  15. McLuhan continues here: “The Coleridgean awareness of the modes of the imagination as producer represents an enormous extension of the bonds of human sympathy and understanding, socially and historically.” See the beginning remarks of CHML and the Playboy interview for further discussion of the way of “empathy”. ↩
  16. Two readings are in play here: first, “insight into (experience of others) utterly alien to our own” — that of ‘the savage mind’, for example; second, “insight into (experience of our own) utterly alien ( = unconscious) to our own immediate (= conscious) experience.” ↩
  17. “Experience of an arrest in time” is a dual genitive, but primarily a subjective genitive. Experience belongs to “an arrest in time”, is its effect. ↩

“Arrest in time” in Lewis

“Arrest in time”1 is a central idea in McLuhan.2 It was probably from Lewis that he got the terminology and the spur to consider it further, although the notions of the two concerning “arrest in time” were very different — fundamentally different. For Lewis, “arrest in time” was a manifestation of ‘time philosophy’, while for McLuhan it provided the ever-present possibility of escape from ‘time philosophy’. Still, the profound influence of Lewis’ thought on McLuhan was such that it could prompt even an opposite position from his own.3 

Here are “arrest in time” passages in Lewis:

 arrest his mind (Tarr, 1918, 140)

Picasso is the most useful figure on which to fix your attention. (…) His clock stopped at fifteen (…) These cases of arrested growth are very common in his race. You merely have to consider what sort of a child you have to deal with, what moves him most… (The Caliph’s Design, 1919, 56)

“no human prudence can long arrest the triumphal car of truth” (C.S. Peirce, Chance and Logic, cited in The Art of Being Ruled, 1926, 257; and in Time and Western Man, 1927, 153)

The same emotional tension, the same spurious glamour, in which no one believes, but which yet arrests belief from settling anywhere — extracting, as it were, the automatic reaction from it, without desiring, even, a more conscious, or deep-seated, response; the same straining merely to outwit and to capture a momentary attention, or to startle into credulity; the same optimistic air, suggestive of a bad conscience, or a vulgar self-congratulation ; the same baldly-shining morning face; the same glittering or discreetly hooded eye of the fanatical advertiser, exists in the region of art or social life as elsewhere — only in social life it is their own personalities that people are advertising, while in art it is their own personally manufactured goods only. (In the case of the artist, his own personality plays tlie part of the refuse of the factory.) And these more blandly-lighted worlds are as full as the Business world, I believe fuller, of those people who seem especially built for such methods, so slickly does the glove fit. Yet who will say that the vulgar medium which the scientific salesman must use to succeed, in Western Democracy, does not, thrust into the social world, destroy its significance? The philosophy of ‘action’ of trade is as barbarous as that of war. (Time and Western Man, 1927, 39)

All philosophy of history today — and Spengler is a most perfect example of that — assumes an absolute arrest somewhere or other. There is, on any analogy, advance or [evolutionary] ‘progress’ between the amoeba and Socrates. (…) But now there is nothing but [arrest]… (Paleface, 1929,122)4

It is only by a fresh effort that the Western World can save itself: it can only become ‘the West’ at all, in fact (…) by an act of further creation. (…) As it is, not only such people as Spengler (…) insist on regarding the problem historically,5 in terms of a rigid arrest. ‘The West’ is for almost all of those a finished thing, either over whose decay they gloat, or whose corpse they frantically ‘defend’. It never seems to occur to them that the exceedingly novel conditions of life today demand an entirely new conception (Paleface, 1929, 256)

Disintegrated into a thousand class-warring factions— analysed back into its composite cells, and incessantly stimulated to one huge destructive civil broil — the Occident is much too far gone ever to recover, upon its old lines, even if we desired it. We are here, therefore, taking Occidental disintegration for granted. In the back of our minds it is admissible to entertain some picture of a future integration. And for my own part, the more novel it was the better I should like it. But the disintegration is already very far advanced: the new integration even has long ago begun. Such a book as this is primarily intended to influence the integration. (Certainly it is not intended to arrest the disintegration.) In what manner does it wish to influence the integration? Principally in such a manner as to prevent the mere destructive technique of the transition from being taken too seriously, and so to avoid a great many false and puerile passions and modes of thought — or unthought — from being taken up into the body of the new synthesis. (Doom of Youth, 1932, 62-63)

arrested in its toiling dream (Childermass, 1956, 108)

 

  1. Coleridge as Artist, 1957: “Moments of insight in Wordsworth’s poetry are explicitly associated with an experience of an arrest in time.” Here “experience of an arrest in time” is a dual genitive, but primarily a subjective genitive. That is, experience belongs to “an arrest in time”, is its effect. ↩
  2. See “Arrest in time” in McLuhan. ↩
  3. Lewis seems to have broached the notion of an “arrest in time” especially in Paleface (although it would seem most fitting to Time and Western Man). This is one of the many indications that McLuhan read and was deeply influenced by Paleface, although the book is never mentioned in his work (unlike most other Lewis titles). ↩
  4. The emphasis on arrest in this passage is by Lewis. ↩
  5. “Insist on regarding the problem historically” = the time philosophy. ↩