We Need a New Picture of Knowledge, 19631
What I have been proposing in this essay is that it is no longer necessary to move from one model to another of the educational process2 as if we were following the higher dictates of some Hegelian disturbance in the emotional life of the Absolute. It is now possible to discern the structural features of the cultural situation that shaped the growth of the very special bias of Western consciousness. It is just as easy to discern the causes that shaped the bias of the Eastern mind. The control of all these causes is now within our grasp. We can deliberately pattern our cultures today by altering the mix of components with their attendant “closures” or effects3 on our outlook and desires and goals. For the goals of any culture are included in its initial structure exactly as the Polaris missile has its target built into it by gyroscopy.4 Any alteration of structure is a change of target. But since men do not choose [or ‘target’] to be missiles,5 their new awareness of [how to investigate the domain of experiential] structure6 can be used to free them from the consequences of any one structure. We can now deliberately create total “field” situations which hold the usual structural consequences [like our endless wars] in abeyance.
As McLuhan already in 1951 pointed out in ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry‘:7
The new method is to work backwards from the particular effect [for example, genocide (which nobody today in 2025 has any idea how to prevent or counteract)] to the objective correlative or (…) means8 of evoking that precise effect, just as the chemist begins with the end product and then seeks the [elements and their] formula which will produce it.9
- In New Insights and the Curriculum, ed Alexander Frazier, 1963. ↩
- McLuhan’s essay appeared in an education yearbook published by the National Education Association. Therefore the reference here to “educational process”. But his understanding of “educational process” was far broader than ‘school learning’. It was his view that all experience, without exception, is a learning process whose elements and laws of combination it was his lifelong labor to attempt to define — to the notice, then or now, of exactly nobody. ↩
- “Components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects” — compare ‘elements with their attendant valences and properties’. McLuhan’s claim is nothing less than that the perpetual disfunctions of human being like war and genocide can now be investigated as properties or “effects” of structural elements that can be openly isolated and investigated. ↩
- With ‘gyroscopy’ McLuhan means ‘cybernetics’, which was developed during WW2 at MIT as an automated means of targeting. ↩
- “But since men do not choose to be missiles”: uncharacteristically, McLuhan offers a valuation here rather than an observation. In point of fact, men — and women — do “choose to be missiles” and wish nothing more than to hurl themselves, and their explosive ‘payloads’, at children. Furthermore, McLuhan did not at all mean to imply that the solution he proposed would turn on individual or collective choice. Instead, as is clear following the industrial revolution, we human beings are affected and effected far more by the environment than by any component of it: the medium is the message and massage. Hence McLuhan earlier in this passage: “the cultural situation that shaped the growth of the very special bias of Western consciousness”. So it will be, if we do not destroy ourselves first, that men and women will no longer “choose to be missiles”, not by individual choice, or through some particular ‘chemical’ analysis of their desires, but because of the general possibility of such investigation and of the altered world it will constellate. Hence McLuhan’s reference concluding this passage to “total ‘field’ situations which (will be able to) hold the usual structural consequences (like genocide) in abeyance.” ↩
- As illustrated by our existing sciences, the definition of any domain must include not only its elements but also the various ways by which they can be isolated and investigated. ↩
- In Essays in Criticism. 1:3, 1951, reprinted in The Interior Landscape, 1969. ↩
- ‘Means’ in 1951 will become ‘medium’ in 1958: ‘the medium is the message‘. In keeping with the subject of his essay, McLuhan has ‘poetic means’ here. But as he goes on in the same sentence to evidence, he saw the arts and sciences as mutually implicating. ↩
- “The elements and their formula” is what McLuhan in the lead passage from ‘We Need a New Picture of Knowledge’ calls “the mix of components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects on our outlook and desires and goals.” ↩