to begin the whole labor of the mind again; not leaving it to itself but directing it perpetually from the very first… (Francis Bacon, Novum Organon, 1620)

All the indications are that the universe is at its simplest at the smallest and largest scales: the Planck length and the Hubble length. It may be no coincidence¹ that the size of a living cell is the geometric mean of these two fundamental lengths. This is the scale of life, the realm we inhabit, and it is the scale of maximum complexity in the universe. (Turok, The Universe Within, (5.11.33²; 256³)

During his tenure as director of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for theoretical physics, Neil Turok delivered the 2012 Massey lectures in venues across Canada.⁴  They were broadcast nationally on CBC.

The fifth and final lecture was given in Toronto on October 24, 2012, and in it, fittingly enough, Turok came to speak of Marshall McLuhan (who had taught at the University of Toronto for 35 years):  

The idea that our communication technologies change us was emphasized by the Canadian communications guru Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, kicked off a wave of interest in the uses of mass media in all forms, from pop music and television to major corporations. McLuhan’s writing is more poetic than analytical, but his basic insight was that the information content of all of these forms of mass media — from ads to games, cars, typewriters (remember, no PCs then!), books, telephones, newspapers, and so on — is less important than their physical form and their direct hold on our behaviour.⁵ He summed up this idea in his famous aphorism “The medium is the message.” (5.17:54; 225)

Turok enlarged his characterization of McLuhan’s thought as “more poetic than analytical” as follows:

McLuhan argued that print altered our entire outlook, emphasizing our visual sense, thus influencing the fragmentation and specialization of knowledge, and fostering everything from individualism to bureaucracy to nationalistic wars, peptic ulcers, and pornography. He was quite a wild thinker! (5.19:44; 226)

The last sentence, which ended with a laugh at McLuhan’s “wild” lack of academic domesticity (5:20:09), was not retained in the book version of the lectures. But it is plain that for Turok McLuhan’s thought had limitations comparable to, and perhaps in considerable part derived from, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,⁶ whose work Turok characterized as “vague, allusive, and (despite his claims) necessarily unscientific”. (5.25:27; 229)

It is notable, in regard to both Teilhard and McLuhan, that Turok opposes “poetic” and “allusive” expression — art — to science. But in his initial lecture he makes these observations:

The separation between non-scientists and scientists was inevitable, as human knowledge expanded and expertise became more and more specialized. It led to a division between the sciences and the arts and humanities, which the English physicist and author C. P. Snow famously referred to as the “Two Cultures.” This seems to me unfortunate. Isn’t science also an art? (1.17:44; 10)⁷

Shortly thereafter, having vouchsafed how in the Renaissance “paintings suddenly leaped from the flat two-dimensional world of medieval icons⁸ to the infinitely richer three-dimensional world of Renaissance art” (16),⁹ Turok notes how

Leonardo da Vinci mastered these [“three-dimensional”] techniques, combining art and science in equal measure. (16, emphasis added)¹⁰

Where Turok sometimes opposes art and science, he can also bring them together. It is just here — with fundamental ambiguity and structural ratios — that engagement with McLuhan must begin.

McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” is not primarily about “the uses of mass media” at all.¹¹ Instead, it is the suggestion that what we take to be self-standing content, like ‘art’ or ‘science’, is in fact a property or effect or message of the medium silently presumed with them. Indeed, before them.¹² So when Turok describes Leonardo as “combining art and science in equal measure”, this is not the same ‘art’ and ‘science’ that he imagines as opposed in Teilhard and McLuhan. These terms are like colors in chemistry where it is a matter of sorting elements and properties.

Now in regard to the “hidden medium”, McLuhan’s claim was not that someone like Turok is unable to recognize how different ‘art’ and ‘science’ can be in different contexts. Of course he can. When Turok raises the question, Isn’t science also an art?, he is asking whether we have understood either science or art appropriately. McLuhan’s stronger  claim is rather that taking notice of media means more than being aware of thought-provoking ambiguities. It even means more than shifting attention away from ‘effects’ (like the various senses of ‘art’ and ‘science’) to their grounding medium in any particular case. Instead, inaugurating notice of the medium implicates “understanding media” (the title of McLuhan’s 1964 book cited by Turok) and this, in turn, entails investigating the “laws of media” (the title of McLuhan’s posthumous 1988 book edited by his son, Eric) within a “new science”¹³ of them.

It is the difference between an alchemical interest in ‘elements’ (many of which had been known for millennia) and a chemical interest in them (instituted only a couple centuries ago). In chemistry, the elements are the medium that is the message in a whole series of senses, but especially in the sense that they ground all the phenomena of the physical universe¹⁴ and in the closely related sense that they ground those phenomena by manifesting them — extending them from themselves as properties, like messages in a wireless broadcast.¹⁵ It is on the basis of the elements operating in these ways that the physical world can be read — which is just what chemists do. Similarly, if “the medium is the message” names the elementary structure of a new domain of communications,¹⁶ the demand is that it be investigated as such — just as we have done in a whole series of domains once their elementary structures were identified.

Consider a spectrum of art/science ratios stretching between ‘all art’ at one of its ends and ‘all science’ at the other. “Art and science in equal measure” would be the spectrum’s centre-point. On the ‘science’ side of the spectrum, art/science ratios moving away from the balanced centre would favor ‘science’ more and more relative to ‘art’. On the ‘art’ side, ‘art’ would be favored in art/science ratios in the same gradually increasing way relative to ‘science’. Each side would terminate in the monolithic dominance of either only ‘science’ or only ‘art’ in the collapse of the art/science ratio itself. At these extreme ends of the spectrum, one of the ratio poles, either ‘science’ or ‘art’, would overwhelm the other and entirely subsume it.¹⁷

These ends are singularities that violate the usual reign of ratios — just as black holes (and the postulated white holes) violate the usual light/dark ratio of physical space.¹⁸ In the world of communications, as in the physical world, such singularities are both very powerful and potentially very dangerous.¹⁹

Of course no particular word or designated thing can serve to characterize such a spectrum since it grounds all the senses of words and things as figures. It grounds them; they can never ground it. The problem of alchemy was exactly that it confused what is basic with what is derivative. To get around this fundamental problem, McLuhan’s suggestion was that the ratios of the spectrum be conceived in terms of their varying ‘ratio-middles’ — or ‘ratio-means’ — or ‘media’. The medium is the message, then, both in being the focal structure of the domain of communication concerning the meanings of words and things, and in grounding, through ‘extension’, the effect or property or ‘message’ of meaning in any particular instance.

McLuhan’s claim was nothing less than that a whole new domain of science, in fact a whole new genus of sciences, plural, is possible once “the medium is [finally taken to be] the message”.²⁰

When McLuhan studied as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba beginning in 1928, the professor who became his mentor there, Rupert Lodge (nephew of the physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge), introduced him to ‘comparative philosophy’.²¹ This was an investigation of the inherently ambiguous universe of philosophical speculation in terms of fundamentally different types. Then, when McLuhan arrived at Cambridge in 1934 he found the English school there, especially in the persons of I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis — themselves greatly influenced by the poetry and prose of T.S. Eliot — fascinated by the phenomenon of linguistic ambiguity. McLuhan’s lifework became the question whether fundamental types and their associated properties might serve to ground a new investigation of human being (construed verbally) in all its multifold manifestations — “everything from individualism to bureaucracy to nationalistic wars, peptic ulcers, and pornography”, as Turok has it.²²

McLuhan’s 1943 Cambridge PhD thesis noted: “In studying the history of dialectics and rhetoric, as indeed, of grammar, it is unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts and the history of the trivium is largely a history of the rivalry among them for ascendancy [in the individual psyche and in society at large]”.²³ Like Lodge, indeed like great thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Vico, Hegel and Heidegger, McLuhan’s solution to the seemingly insuperable problem of self-reference implicated in this insight (“unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts”) was to treat the elementary types of communication as possibilities which human being (construed verbally) never ceases to sift. It is as if all physical material first (when is this?) surveys Mendeleev’s table before (ditto) manifesting itself in this or that way. McLuhan’s claim is that human perception does arise in this way and that this process is subject to rigorous collective investigation. Turok’s image of assessing the checkout lines at the supermarket applies here just as it does in quantum physics.²⁴

In an interview about his Massey lectures with the Toronto Globe and Mail from October 12, 2012, Turok put the point this way: 

The world is not made up of particles and waves and beams of light with a definite existence. Instead, the world works in a much more exploratory way. It is aware of all the possibilities at once and trying them out all the time.²⁵

A central topic in the history of science is the question of how such a sifting of possibilities has eventually led, in an ever-increasing number of areas, to the ontological focus needed to establish rigorous investigation in them.²⁶ McLuhan belongs to a tradition going back millennia that has attempted to identify such focus for the study of the meanings of words and things — always, so far, without success. 

What distinguishes the study of meanings, senses or ambiguities is that it accepts, indeed insists upon, the ineradicable action of bias. Unlike both physical science and mathematical-logical science, it makes no attempt to eliminate or minimize bias, but takes it as a necessary aspect of the objects of its investigations. As McLuhan said of Harold Innis, author of The Bias of Communication (1951):

Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures.²⁷

The meaning of every word, and of every particular thing designated by a word, is first of all generated by a sifting among possible media — a sifting that determines the particular bias according to which that word or thing will be ‘taken’.²⁸ And every such medium is a relation located somewhere along the spectrum of figure/ground ratios (like those of ‘art’ and ‘science’) — Turok’s “all paths (…) all options” (4.46.26;198).²⁹ 

The application of such media work to quantum physics is plain, since there is nothing that physicists do (so far as physics is not mathematics) that does not express itself in words and engage with things designated by words.³⁰ It may be expected, then, that some puzzles in physics are to be solved, in whole or in part, not by exclusive research in physics, but by parallel research in communications.³¹

Further posts in this series will look in detail at just how humans go about continually sifting such media possibilities. This is what McLuhan had in mind when he referred to the “individual’s encyclopedic function”.³² In the genesis of human being (construed verbally), every individual is exposed, moment to moment to moment, to a full spectrum (or ‘encyclopedia’) of possible meanings in terms of a range of media.³³ In the same way, we speak language through an assessment of possible words, grammar, pronunciation and gesture. Of course these checkout line surveys take place almost always only unconsciously and in a kind of vertical, not horizontal, time.³⁴ But we do accomplish speech, effortlessly, and our grammars testify to the fact that we can rigorously investigate such unconscious processes. So also with media, whose systems McLuhan characterized as ‘grammars’.³⁵

It is precisely this perpetual “encyclopedic” sifting of the possibilities of sense, in turn, from which (and from which alone) an “an informed view of the available options” for society may be derived:

In finding the right path for society, perhaps we need to consider all paths. Just as quantum theory explores all options and makes choices according to some measure of the “benefit,” we need to run our societies more creatively and responsively, based on a greater awareness of the whole. The world is not a machine that we can set in some perfect state or system and then forget about. Nor can we rely on selfish or dogmatic agendas as the drivers of progress. Instead, we need to take an informed view of the available options³⁶ and be far-sighted enough to choose the best among them.³⁷ (4.46.26;198)

Hence McLuhan’s repeated insistence that his work concerned the possibility of survival.