Neil Turok’s McLuhan

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 coincidence 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, (5.11.331; 2562)

During his tenure as director of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for theoretical physics, Neil Turok delivered the 2012 Massey lectures in venues across Canada.3  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:  

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. 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 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 work had limitations comparable to, and perhaps in considerable part derived from, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,4 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)5

Shortly thereafter, having vouchsafed how in the Renaissance “paintings suddenly leaped from the flat two-dimensional world of medieval icons to the infinitely richer three-dimensional world of Renaissance art”,6 Turok notes how

Leonardo da Vinci mastered these [“three-dimensional”] techniques, combining art and science in equal measure. (16, emphasis added)7

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

McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” is not primarily about “the uses of mass media” at all.8 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.9 So when Turok describes da Vinci 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 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”10 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. 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 universe11 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.12 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,13 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.14

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.15 In the world of communications, as in the physical world, such singularities are both very powerful and potentially very dangerous.16

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 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 senses of words and things, and in grounding, through ‘extension’, the effect or property 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”.17

When McLuhan studied as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba beginning in 1928, his mentor there, Rupert Lodge (nephew of the physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge), introduced him to ‘comparative philosophy’.18 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, William Empson and F.R. Leavis — themselves all 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.

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]”.19 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 these elementary types of communication as possibilities which human being (construed verbally) never ceases to sift. Turok’s image of assessing the checkout lines at the supermarket applies here just as it does in quantum physics.20

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. 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 presence of bias. Unlike both physical science and mathematical-logical science, it makes no attempt to eliminate or minimize bias, but accepts it as an necessary component 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.21

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’. 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).22 

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. 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.23

Further posts in this series will look in detail at just how humans continually sift such media possibilities. This is what McLuhan had in mind when he referred to the “individual’s encyclopedic function”.24 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.25 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.26 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 described as ‘grammars’.27

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 options and be far-sighted enough to choose the best among them.28 (4.46.26;198)

 

 

  1. References to the audio of Turok’s lectures are to the CBC webpage for them. But the CBC unaccountably does not enable links to individual lectures or to time stamps within them. Consequently, all that can be given here in audio references is the lecture number followed by the time within that lecture, but with no jumplink. ↩
  2. Page numbers without further identification refer to the print edition of Turok’s lectures, which often varies considerably from the lectures as delivered: The Universe Within: from quantum to cosmos (2012). Turok does not remark on the striking parallel between his Universe Within title and McLuhan’s title from more than forty years before, the 1969 Interior Landscape. ↩
  3. Turok was director of the Perimeter Institute from 2008 to 2019. ↩
  4. “Teilhard (…) took a very big-picture view of the universe and our place within it, a picture that encompassed and motivated some of McLuhan’s major insights. Teilhard also foresaw global communications and the internet, writing in the 1950s about ‘the extraordinary network of radio and television communication which already link us all in a sort of etherised human consciousness’…” (5.22:12; 227-228). Turok accepts from Tom Wolfe that Teilhard “motivated some of McLuhan’s major insights”. And it does seem that McLuhan had access to Teilhard’s work in samizdat when he taught with Teilhard’s fellow Jesuits at St Louis University from 1937 to 1944. However, from the very start of his intellectual life, McLuhan took it that essential reality is plural, as it is in particle physics and chemistry, not singular — and in the domain of ontology there is no greater difference than that between fundamental plurality and fundamental singularity. He was always allergic to ‘omega point’ visionaries like Teilhard and took ‘etherised’ rather in terms of Eliot’s ‘etherised upon a table’ (from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). ↩
  5. The lecture as given live and as reproduced in the book vary considerably in this section. After it there is a further section on Richard Feynman and John von Neumann that was not broached in the lecture at all. ↩
  6. For McLuhan, “the flat two-dimensional world of medieval icons” represents ‘light through’ to us, while the “three-dimensional world of Renaissance art”, achieved through technical manipulation, manifests ‘light from‘ us. For him, then, it is Renaissance art that is one-dimensional and flat in this sense, while icons and mosaics, although flat in another sense, refer beyond themselves (or are referred to from beyond themselves) and are multi-dimensional. Of course terms like ‘flat’ are deeply ambiguous; but this is exactly McLuhan’s springboard. ↩
  7. This section of the book on Leonardo da Vinci (16-17) was not given in Turok’s lecture, either because he skipped over it or because he added it later. ↩
  8. Cited above from 5.17:54 and 225. Turok is not wrong in observing that McLuhan repeatedly discussed mass media, however, just as he frequently turned to the perceptual senses, especially sight, hearing and touch. But thinking needs to locate itself somewhere! Even a thinking which is not about particular somethings, but about the varieties of all particular somethings, namely ontologies, must nonetheless start in some particular context. For every interlocutor with whom it would communicate is necessarily located in some particular context. The miracle, as McLuhan said, is that communication nonetheless occurs at all. Furthermore, as has been true of all thinkers in these heights at least since Plato, McLuhan had the problem, beyond that of communication in general, of how to introduce a thinking that implicated seemingly insuperable problems of self-reference and infinite regress (to name but two). And although he became a world-famous talking head, and worked tirelessly on his own as well (as testified by the enormous mass of unpublished writings he left behind him), this was a problem he never solved. His discussions of mass media and of the senses were not able, in the end, to thread the labyrinth of ambiguity which was his central aim and occupation. ↩
  9. See note 26 below. ↩
  10. A nod to Bacon’s Novum Organon and Vico’s scienza nuova. ↩
  11. All the phenomena of the physical universe — at the chemical scale. ↩
  12. Wireless broadcast was one of Sir Oliver Lodge’s major research interests. As described in this post, Sir Oliver was the uncle of McLuhan’s first mentor, Rupert Lodge. ↩
  13. Just like all other once ‘new’ domains, the object of media study has always been active and always will be active. Only (only!) its recognition would be new. Furthermore, even notice of the existence of the domain would not be entirely new since great thinkers have glimpsed it for millennia, arguably based on even older knowledge. What would be ‘new’ to such a ‘new domain’ is, then, the initiation at last of a collective discipline through which knowledge of it can progressively be refined and enlarged. ↩
  14. It is thought-provoking how Turok’s spectrum of scales is isomorphic with such a spectrum of ratios: “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 coincidence 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”  (5.11.33; 256). ‘Mean’ here is exactly McLuhan ‘medium’! But for McLuhan, of course, ‘mean’ and ‘medium’ are ineluctably plural as means and media and it is precisely this plurality which their spectrum sets out as a kind of Mendeleev’s table of meaning. ↩
  15. As will be detailed in a future post in this series, such a spectrum of variously mediated ratios — ‘media’ — already appears in Plato’s famous gigantomachia peri tes ousias in the Sophist. In it, the gods and the giants battle forever over true reality (peri tes ousias), each attempting to subdue the other and so to reduce inexplicable multiplicity to its brand of ideal or material singularity. But the philosopher, says Plato, must be like a child ‘begging for both’. Almost 2500 years ago, here is Turok’s “combining (…) in equal measure” and his “geometric mean” ranged against, but somehow also including, fundamentally differing ‘omega points’. (That ‘omega points’ — Turok’s “the universe (…) at its simplest” — are plural is just what the western tradition has failed for 2500 years to conceptualize within a domain of collective investigation.) ↩
  16. The Hardware/Software Mergers (1969): “When figure and ground merge you have the monster.” Take Today (1972): “order (…) pushed to extremes (…) becomes ordure.” Media and the inflation CROWD, 1973: “It is precisely where there is no (mediating) connection that there will occur a resonant and potentially violent interface of mounting intensity.” ↩
  17. See A whole new genus of sciences. ↩
  18. See The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge. ↩
  19. The three trivial arts studied by McLuhan in his Cambridge PhD thesis are the reappearance in literary history and criticism of Rupert Lodge’s three types of philosophy. ↩
  20. “According to quantum theory, the world is constantly exploring all of its possible classical states all of the time, and is only appearing to us as any one of them with some probability” (206, not part of the lectures as delivered). Turok explicates the checkout images in terms of William Rowan Hamilton’s ‘principle of action’: “Whereas Newton had formulated his laws of motion as rules for following a system forward from one moment in time to the next, Hamilton considered all the possible histories of a system, from some initial time to some final time. He was able to show that the actual history of the system, the one that obeyed Newton’s laws, was the one that minimized a certain quantity called the ‘action’. Let me try to illustrate Hamilton’s idea with the example of what happens when you’re leaving a supermarket. When you’re done with your grocery shopping, you’re faced with a row of checkouts. The nearest will take you less time to walk to, but there may be more people lined up. The farthest checkout will take longer to walk to but may be empty. You can look to see how many people have baskets or trolleys, how much stuff is in them, and how much is on the belt. And then you choose what you think will be the fastest route. This is, roughly speaking, the way Hamilton’s principle works. Just as you minimize the time it takes to leave the supermarket, physical systems evolve in time in such a way as to minimize the ‘action’. Whereas Newton’s laws describe how a system edges forward in time, Hamilton’s method surveys all the available paths into the future and chooses the best among them.” (2.19:28; 62-63) In his lecture, Turok cashes “the best among them” as “the least action path among them”. In these terms, McLuhan’s idea of individual or social identity is that it is a trajectory of ‘best’ choices. ↩
  21. ‘Media and Cultural Change’, McLuhan’s Introduction to the 1964 reprinting of Innis’ The Bias of Communication. ↩
  22. McLuhan was aware, that while some effects of communication media may be elementary, like valence in chemistry, most (to judge from the physical world) would more probably be molecular. Or they might be effects of even more complicated structures like McLuhan’s ‘mosaics’ and ‘galaxies’. ↩
  23. Overlaps between sciences are, of course, unavoidable. All physicists are subject to chemistry both in their own bodies and in the objects they study. So, it may be, with physics and the “laws of media”. ↩
  24. Turok cites this phrase in another connection (5.21:18, 227).  As noted by him, it is from the posthumous Global Village, 143, but it is from 1978, so not Turok’s “thirty years before the internet was launched” (227). ↩
  25. The range of usable sounds varies considerably between languages. It may be that ‘encyclopedias’ of possible meanings vary in a comparable way between social groups (which would then offer a way to characterize and investigate them). ↩
  26. Hence the title of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, which appeared in 1927, just as quantum physics was being formulated. From its introduction: “Höher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Möglichkeit. Das Verständnis der Phänomenologie liegt einzig im Ergreifen ihrer als Möglichkeit.” Heidegger was well aware that the sifting of possibilities (Turok’s checkout counter navigation) had been thematized by the Greeks, but not brought into collective investigation in the millennia since. ↩
  27. See Grammars of the Media. ↩
  28. McLuhan’s great colleague and mentor at the University of Toronto, Harold Innis, was particularly concerned with the conditions of far- and short-sightedness in society. Eric Havelock, who was a colleague of Innis in Toronto for almost 20 years, and who briefly overlapped with McLuhan there, later becoming his good friend, was concerned with the same question in classical Greece, particularly as instantiated by Prometheus and Epimetheus. These three thinkers, Innis, Havelock and McLuhan, constituting the core of the Toronto school of communications, mutually influenced each other deeply over a half century span, 1930-1980. ↩