The antithetic configurations of eye and ear, of civilized and tribal, of literary and electronic cultures, range the entire gamut of human experience and satisfactions and commitments in utterly different ways.¹ It is important to know all about these divergent [configurations of] experiences before attempting any value judgements. (2)²

In 1973 McLuhan wrote, or patched together, some thoughts on Lewis Mumford following Mumford’s no-holds-barred attack on McLuhan in his 1970 Pentagon of Power. The resulting essay was never published or even titled. And, as was common with McLuhan’s drafts, especially when they were dictated, the construction of sentences and the agreement between subject and verb can be haphazard.³

There are many reasons to believe that McLuhan worked with some old notes on Mumford in composing this essay. For one thing, its pedestrian style resembles his writing from decades before in the 1930s and 40s — not the more ‘discontinuous’ style he developed in the 60s and 70s. For another, he mentions Mumford’s 1938 Culture of Cities in his first sentence and compares it to Macaulay — a hero of McLuhan in the early 1930s, but little mentioned in the interim except as an example of youthful enthusiasm.⁴ Gordon Childe is also mentioned, apparently in reference to his 1936 Man Makes Himself — another figure McLuhan seems to have read in the 1930s and ignored thereafter. Passing references to Carlyle and Bentham fit a similar pattern. These are people a student of English at Cambridge would need to read, but held little interest for McLuhan once he graduated.

Furthermore, at the time of the essay in the early 1970s McLuhan frequently recycled his early work. Sections of his 1943 PhD thesis on Nashe, for example, were reissued in 1970 in the UT journal, Renaissance and Reformation Studies.⁵ The 1969 Counterblast recycled pieces from the 1950s including the 1954 ‘Counterblast’ and the 1955 ‘‘Historical Approach to the Media’.

At the same time, however, the essay obviously does not consist exclusively of early notes. It was prompted by Mumford’s 1970 Pentagon of Power which it often cites. It repeatedly reverts to the structural form of figure and ground, which McLuhan began to do only in 1964 after reading Wolfgang Kohler’s Gestalt Psychology. And the image of wheel and axle appears several times — a preoccupation of McLuhan only after 1970.

*

Passages from McLuhan’s essay appear below in page order. But a topical arrangement will be attempted in a following post which will group together mutually illuminating passages from throughout the essay. A commentary on the essay will appear in a subsequent post. In fact, given the importance of the essay, probably several commentaries will be necessary.

*

Years ago, when The Culture of Cities was new, I incurred a debt to Dr. Mumford which I am now happy to acknowledge (…) His (…) enthusiasm and generosity was only matched by the diversity and range of his interests, which he presented with the dash and verve of a Macaulay. (1)

Personally, having found the utmost ambiguity in all human technologies, and having never discovered a fixed position from which to view or measure them, I have settled for studying their on-going effects on their users; for the users are inevitably the “content” of all of them. (1)

Mumford’s problems in dealing with the contemporary flip from hardware to software, from the visual to the auditory patterns of power structure [are] very clear. (…) He is a visually-oriented man who is unaware of the peculiar and ineluctable modalities of the visual. (1-2)

He is a visually-oriented man who is unaware of the peculiar and ineluctable modalities of the visual (…) This is not a value judgement. The antithetic configurations of eye and ear, of civilized and tribal, of literary and electronic cultures, range the entire gamut of human experience and satisfactions and commitments in utterly different ways. It is important to know all about these divergent experiences before attempting any value judgements. (2)

Mumford spends much time in The Pentagon of Power looking into the crystal ball of the Megamachine. He has discovered that the Megamachine contains no message; it is the message. The Megamachine has no content because it is a total new world. The Megamachine is not contained in our world because it is our world. The Megamachine is us. (2)

Echoing Gordon Childe [in Man Makes Himself], Dr. Mumford declares: “Man is his own supreme artifact.” But it is all so tentative and whimsical, this flipping from animal to human and then into the magnetic-organic- unhuman again… (2)

It appears that [for Mumford] there is a divine, if dim, spark in man… (3)

A perpetual source of joy in ordinary experience and consciousness is in the power of the mind to discern pattern and form amidst the utmost confusion of data. The mind moves much faster than light and has an instant analogical power to establish ratios among ratios that creates con-sciousness. Mere sciousness or knowing is not enough to constitute either human awareness or speech. There needs to be the con-sensus of interplay. And for interplay there must be the interval, as between the wheel and the axle; for without such play there can be neither axle or wheel, neither figure nor ground. And so, without play or discontinuity, there can only be logic and connection and fixity. It is here that we encounter one of the problems of Dr. Mumford who, on moral and other grounds, disapproves of the merely monopolistically visual world [although “he is a visually-oriented man” himself]⁶ (4)

Mumford has special need to understand the nature of visual space since he, like many
others, is an unwitting prisoner of its modalities, which include fixed points of view,
dichotomies, classifications, panoramic descriptions and blueprints. Thus it is this unconscious visual bias that betrays him into a pervasive habit of moral quantification, a habit of adding up the losses and gains of historical development with a fervor of moral arithmetic that equals that of any Benthamite. (4)

Mumford’s central problem (…) is this: he has no theory of communication or change. (4)

He [Mumford] argues: “But there is a difference between using the machine to extend human capabilities, and using it to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man still exercises authority on his own behalf; in the second, the machine takes over and man becomes a super-numerary.”⁷ This is a very wishful kind of categorized thought that avoids the entire problem of particularized perception of the Process. There is no kind of technology, from speech and clothes to satellites and computers, that does not constitute an environment of services and disservices. (5) 

Mumford seems to hold implicitly to some metaphor or image of man and technology as “contained” within some sort of plenum. Within this plenum, man is an occupant or dweller. Technologies are added as new content to this plenum. This assumption of “content” and “added” factors such as human technologies, are the typical illusion of naive visual bias in human perception. (6) 

Werner Heisenberg (…) in 1927 explained the “resonant bond” of material existence.  (6)

Once launched on the visual trajectory with its uniform and connected and static properties, literate man knows no halt till his path reaches the sensory limit, and that flip shim into the complementary resonant mode.  (6)

If man is seen (on page 195) as choosing between extensions of his body that he can manage, and extensions that will manage him, it also appears (page 417) that “Man is his own supreme artifact”. And (page 435) it is this self-formed artifact that is “the only form of thing we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life”. Mumford seems to be saying, on one hand, that man is a self-fabricated fiction or artifact, and, on the other, that this figure without ground is all we know of reality or of anything.  (6-7)

visible and lineal routes loom large in the thought of Dr. Mumford (7)

a new factor intervened [between “our biological and technological responses”] and it is one ignored by biologists and technologists. The artist, the maker, the poet, appeared [on the scene] to bridge the gap between biology and technology. These special spirits, devised the new sensory modes necessary to relate and to adopt man’s ancient biological heritage to his fast-changing environment of technological services. They have been called “the antennae of the race”, or “technicians of the sacred”. (8) 

New art is the survival chart for relevance amidst the technological changes that incessantly distort and junk our existing sensory patterns. (…) when this role of the artist for making and bridging between the [ancient] world of biological [time]⁸ and the [modern] world of [technological]⁹ speed, when this power flags, then anarchy and collapse ensue. (…) Without the artist, men lose their figure-ground relation to their own machines. They merge and become their machines. The wheel and the axle lose their play, and fuse. (9) 

Long before writing his story of the angelism of the magnetic city in The Human Age, Wyndham Lewis wrote Men Without Art, or the story of the robot. (9) 

now in the electric age we flip backwards over the ages of hardware technologies into what Dr. Mumford calls “the pre-conscious sources of technology”. Yet in this “dark backward and abysm of time” [Shakespeare, Tempest 1.2] it is plain that there will be nothing “concrete” in this domain of resonating and non-visual intervals. (9)

Men who live in man-made-environments of electric and instant information occupy a 360 degree sphere of acoustic resonance. A “point of view” has no means of existence except by fantasy in such a situation; yet it is the situation in which both Mumford and the rest of mankind now live. (9-10) 

I know of no way to indict the whole secular world. As a Christian, I share a faith that deters me from [either] trusting or judging (…) As a member of our displaced Western culture, I yet cherish its altogether fragile and evanescent values, and I study and recognize the quite different [equally fragile and evanescent] values of Oriental and other cultures, realizing the quite special advantages of living in this present time when the wired planet presents us a magnetic city of instantly transportable and disembodied “spirits”. (10) 

Mumford has totally misread my supposed scorn or enthusiasm for any or all of the technics of human history. (10)

I find satisfaction in understanding the many intelligible relations and unexpected forms that the (…) extensions of our own physical beings have involved us in. But I regard understanding as creating an available means of liberation and deliverance rather than as commitment. Awareness of the sensory and perceptual effects of diverse technologies can make possible a humane and modest existence for those who seek it. (10)

Unawareness of the sensory modes and psychological states subliminally communicated by the unrestrained environments released by technology, has been the lot of most peoples throughout recorded history. (10-11) 

Men have always been manipulated by own inventions and called it “freedom”. (11)

it is the very nature of the “Megamachine” to be its own “message”, for the message is the totality of social and psychic mutation effected by any extension of human faculties. Nobody is outside the Megamachine. (11)

The work of T.S. Eliot and his contemporaries was devoted to demonstrating that The Waste Land enters the human heart with the rise of specialism and its attendant dissociation of sensibility. This specialism whether in work or in emotion came to its peak with mechanical industry; but something quite new has occurred with the electric transportation of data. (11) 

Just as the child is not limited to visual, enclosed, and static space, so the child can recognize the disembodied character of electric communication in which the sender is sent. (11) 

the word “transport” can be allowed its ethereal as well as its material meanings. (12)

To turn, then, to the absence of entelechies in Greek and Western philosophy in general, it must be emphatically stated that this gap or lack is both vast and catastrophic. The Greeks and their philosophic successors have been willing to consider the entelechies, or patterns of “cause and effect” as they relate to “nature” or physis, but the entelechies or vortices of power engendered by the figure and ground play of artifacts, have been uniformly ignored in the Western world. (12) 

Harold Innis, in Empire and Communications and other books, explains in detail the diverse psychic and social spatial vortices resulting from phonetic script and the portable medium of papyrus, in contrast to the time-vortices created by hieroglyphics on non-portable stone (…) What Innis is saying (and he is totally ignored by Dr. Mumford) is that the medium of paper and the medium of stone altered the perceptual and psychic lives of their users. Totally different kinds of people result from their [use and identification]¹⁰ with [such] contrasting [means of information storage and communication]¹¹. (13) 

Visually oriented Western philosophy, from Plato to Bertrand Russell, presents only figures minus their grounds and has been blind to the central metamorphic role of all human artifacts whatever. (14) 

Personally, I have been able to find no other reason for this disastrous oversight than the insecurity of the private Western psyche and its reluctance to study or assume responsibility for the wounds and distortions inflicted upon it by its own inventions. (14) 

[Mumford] pays no attention to the worlds of difference between the visual and the acoustic forms of the clock. (15) 

When clock technology married Gutenberg technology and both book and clock became portable, they became very much more visual than they had ever been. The book, the first uniform mass-produced commodity, also created a totally new approach to prices, which led to what Harold Innis refers to as “the penetrating power of the price system”. (15) 

To refer to the coin, the clock, and the book as “processes that were already at work in society” [Mumford, Pentagon, 65] is to beg the question of how they actually affected their makers and users in their perceptual lives. (16) 

It is Siegfried Giedion who was the first student [of technology]¹² to give adequate and particularized attention to the changes in human sensibility relating to the production and use of everyday objects. Dr. Mumford is not concerned about the effects of technology on human sensibility and awareness, but is content to generalize about “those who created the mechanical world picture” (p. 66) and he does not hesitate to refer to “the renewed interest” [p. 65] in science itself. He is thus unable to get to the point of the matter that the heightening and isolation of the visual power was the indispensable condition for the beginning of quantified or modern science. (…) For it is only the specialized and visual forms of space that admit of division and sub-division and quantification. The French refer to it as l’esprit de géométrie, but geometry, or earth measurement, did not become completely visual until Gutenberg. (16) 

Mumford discerns that Bacon is modern in a different way from (…) Galileo. The fact is that as a scientist, Bacon continued the ancient patristic approach to the analysis of the page of The Book of Nature. He was not interested just in the content but in the multi-levelled depths of implication. (16-17) 

the fate of language amidst the sweeping panoramas of Milton and his successors has long been a matter of concern among poets and men of letters. [The disintegration of the sensual anchor of language]¹³ under the impact of visual science exactly parallels the decomposition of human autonomy under the impact of visual specialism. (17)

Mumford’s lack of a theory of communication [and therefore of ambiguity] (…) deprives him of any means of evaluing change except in the most vaguely moralistic and descriptive terms. (17)