Monthly Archives: March 2026

Ordinary apprehension is poetic

The scriptural exegetists will hold, as Francis Bacon held, that Adam possessed metaphysical knowledge in a very high degree. To him the whole of nature was a book which he could read with ease. He lost his ability to read this language of nature as a result of his fall; and Solomon alone of the sons of men has ever recovered the power to read the book of nature. The business of art is, however, to recover the knowledge of that language which once man held by nature.  (The Classical Trivium, 1943, 16)

Around 1950 McLuhan came to identify the “stages of cognition”, aka the “learning process”, with the “poetic process”, aka “creativity”. That is, the “poetic process” is implicated in all cognition and apprehension whatsoever. Even ‘raw’ perception as the means of learning what is happening around us is subject to a prior process of “stages” in which “creativity” cannot not be exercised.1

Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951
Burke [in The Sublime and The Beautiful, 1757] arrived by a single stride at the position that the cognitive process was also the creative process. And it is that awareness in Cezanne and Mallarmé, as later in Joyce and Eliot, which produced the doctrine and practice of ‘significant form’ in modern art.

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
Helped by Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Joyce arrived quickly at the formula of the aesthetic moment (…) 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 [on that basis]1 epiphanized.  The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once2 its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension.2

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
Joyce, Pound, and Eliot recovered the secret of the dolce stil nuovo through the prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. And this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative [“the poetic process”] by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension…

Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951
the figure of the labyrinth [and its retracing] is used everywhere by Joyce as the archetype of cognition and esthetic apprehension, and the modern detective since Poe employs the technique of retracing in order to reconstruct an action exactly as it occurred. Edgar Poe is rightly regarded in France as the father of symbolism because he was the first to formulate the poetic process as one of discovery by retracing. The precise poetic formula for any emotion, he pointed out, was to be found by working backwards from effect…

McLuhan to Ezra Pound, July 24, 19513
From Joyce’s Stephen Hero, I gather that he had with the combined aid of Aristotle, Dante and Rimbaud decided that the poetic process was nothing else than the process of cognition. That sensation itself was imitation3 since the forms of things in our sensations are already in a new matter. Namely a human organ. So that the first stage of apprehension is already poetic. Dolce stil nuovo [is] based on this learning process as poetic process…

McLuhan to Ezra Pound, August 2, 19514
Cinema was immediate consequence of discovery of discontinuity as principle of picturesque landscape. MOVING PICTURES were made and shown in Naples and London in 1770. Painted scenes on rollers projected by lantern. This led at once to discovery of principle of reconstruction of situation by intellectual retracing. Retracing conditions leading to moment of aesthetic apprehension and arrest was Poe’s discovery.5

Sight, Sound, and the Fury, 1954
in cognition we have to interiorize the exterior world. We have to recreate in the medium of our senses and inner faculties the drama of existence. This is the world of the logos poietikos, the agent intellect. In speech we utter that drama which we have analogously recreated within us. In speech we make or poet the world (…) For in cognition itself is the whole of the poetic process. But the artist differs from most men in his power to arrest and then reverse the stages of human apprehension. He learns how to embody the stages of cognition (Aristotle’s “plot”) in an exterior work which can be held up for contemplation.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
The symbolist poet makes of the poem not a vehicle for views, ideas, feelings, but a situation which involves the reader directly in the poetic process. That is why he will always say that the poem is not about anything; it is something. It doesn’t say anything, it does something.4

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
as we trace the rise of successive communication channels (…) from writing to movies and TV, it is borne in on us that in order for their exterior artifice to be effective it must partake of the character of that interior artifice by which in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world. Because human perception is literally incarnation. So that each of us must poet the world or fashion it within us as our primary and constant mode of awareness. And the mechanical or mass media of communication must at least parrot the world in order to hold our attention.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
The creative act of ordinary human perception a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so; but with Edgar Poe and the symbolists this central human fact was taken up to the level of conscious awareness. It then became the basis of modern science and technology. That is what Whitehead meant when he said that the great event of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Because the drama of ordinary perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being.

Note: The phrase “created being” must be taken in multiple ways. In the first instance it refers to everything that exists, everything factual. In the second instance it refers to that special sort of being that exists in, and only in, human experience: artefactual being. In the third place, it refers to that special kind of artefactual being, artistic creation. Now in McLuhan’s view, the third is the key to knowledge of the second which, in turn, is key to knowledge of the first. For the first is known only in experience. If humans can come to real knowledge of the real, this possibility must be a possibility of, and for, artefactual being. That is, artefactual being must be able to reach out of itself to relate to the other in its reality. This is “the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being”. But this true outreach is first of all possible because it is the nature of the relation between Being and beings and, before that, it is the nature of the relation between the plural species of Being within its gigantic genus.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
The whole of nineteenth century art and science is charged with the implications of the poetic process and its discovery. Our own century has seen that process put to work in the so-called mass media.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
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
Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a (…) threshold (…) to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno [one that contemporary history is living out]. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss.

The Emperor’s New Clothes. 1968
Our relatively recent insights into the power of the preconscious in both the creation and the apprehension of works of art indicate that the subliminal is in fact a strong force in [all] psychic reorganization.

Note: For McLuhan, “psychic reorganization” occurs perpetually, moment by moment by moment. There is no time in human being when it is not faced with all the possibilities of that being and hence with the need to choose between them. (Since identity derives from this choice, who and when and where is that ‘nobody’ that makes it in the first place?)

 From Cliché to Archetype, 1970
The Expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension, somewhat along the lines that relate Coleridge’s Primary and Secondary imagination. In the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the (…) unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness.

Playboy Interview, 1969
For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. (…) [But then]5 I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience…

  1. Since this process certainly does not take place in clock time, the word ‘prior’ in this sentence should prompt the question, in what time? See McLuhan’s times. ↩
  2. The epiphany or manifestation that is an artistic creation is a “moment of arrested cognition”  — “the aesthetic moment”  — in two senses. First, it is an achieved “stasis” in the process of poetic creation that marks its end: the artist ‘signs off’ on it.  There will be no more “stages” in the “process” of its creation since it is now deemed to be finished. Second, the artistic process can be understood as a replay of “the stages of ordinary apprehension”, but just as much “the stages of ordinary apprehension” can be understood as a foreplay of the artistic process. Regarding human experience in this light, there is at every moment a presentation of possibilities, an assessment of them, and a definitive signing off on one of them (or a compound of more than one of them) that will be the form of the following instant of experience. In this view, experience is discontinuous and in “the gap where the action is” artistic creativity is ineluctably implicated. Here experience and the artistic process are plainly correlated with film and when he developed this view McLuhan was in fact studying film theorists like Eisenstein, Zavattini and Balázs.
    Now in “ordinary apprehension” this whole process is, of course, utterly unconscious. But it is unconscious in the same sense as the chemistry of wine making was once unconscious. An exacting process had been followed and successfully completed by vintners for millennia, but it was unknown just what was going on in that process. Only in the course of the nineteenth century were the implicated stages of transformation revealed as the new discipline of chemistry developed its insights. So, now, “the stages of ordinary apprehension” are successfully completed by billions of people at every moment and this same success has, of course, been accomplished by humans forever. But we have been and continue to be unaware of what is taking place in it. For McLuhan the conditions of modern technology allow the veil over those processes to be lifted. The medium can at last be the message. ↩
  3. Letters 228-229. ↩
  4. This letter is referenced and partially quoted at Letters 224n. It will be available soon within the collected Pound-McLuhan correspondence.↩
  5. McLuhan’s use of terms here like ‘immediate’ and ‘at once’ is thought provoking. He says that the “discovery of principle of reconstruction followed 1770 “at once” and then that “retracing conditions leading to moment of aesthetic apprehension and arrest was Poe’s discovery”. But Poe was born in 1807 so McLuhan clearly did not have a period in historical time in mind. Instead, he must have thinking of Aristotle’s dictum in his Physics that “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”. Change cannot occur in linear sequence, but must be sudden,  ‘immediate’, ‘at once’. In the first text above from ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ McLuhan uses the phrase ‘arrived by a single stride’. ↩
  1. McLuhan: ‘hence’. ↩
  2. See note 5 below. ↩
  3. With ‘imitation’ McLuhan probably had Aristotle’s ‘mimesis‘ in mind. ↩
  4. That a poem does something mirrors the fact that ordinary apprehension is not a passive reception but a creative action. ↩
  5. The writing of The Mechanical Bride took place between 1945 and 1950. ↩

McLuhan as supposed satirist

Beginning around 1970 McLuhan began to be mocked as a lightweight who could not think or write. He had a major heart attack that year and throughout that last decade was in uncertain health until his debilitating stroke in 1979. Even in the preceding decade after his first serious stroke in 1960 he was obviously not himself for those family members and friends who knew him well. (This is not at all to deny that from time to time he came up for air and produced remarkable essays.)

McLuhan’s health problems necessarily turned his attention to questions of how his work might be brought to conclusion and preserved — this at a time when he lacked the energy and concentration to do this himself. But even when he had had tremendous energy before his cascade of health problems after 1960, book creation had never been his thing. His PhD thesis was not in a finished state when he submitted it and he never succeeded in bringing it to completion despite decades of work on it . Mechanical Bride went through an endless back and forth with the publisher between 1946 and its eventual publication five years later. The original Understanding Media from 1960 was a joint production of McLuhan and the NAEB.  Gutenberg Galaxy was in preparation for a decade and was finally finished only with the help of a team of grad students.1

When his health problems began to get serious around 1960, he had a huge backlog of notes, manuscripts in various stages of completion, recorded conversations and even published writings belonging to largely unpublished projects. And, of course, he did not know how much time he had left —  his mother had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1956, similar to his in 1960, and she had died five years later in 1961.  

Although there is little evidence in the Carpenter-McLuhan correspondence, it is said that Carpenter already played a major role in the production of Understanding Media in 1962-63. Certainly that book was very different from the report McLuhan produced in 1959-60 for the NAEB which was also titled Understanding Media. Except for Culture is Our Business in 1970,2 all of McLuhan’s subsequent 8 books3 after Understanding Media (2 of which appeared posthumously) were co-productions (including the 1969 Counterblast where this is not acknowledged).

Many of these co-productions were hastily put together and contributed to, when they did not first cause, McLuhan’s precipitously declining reputation. Critics of his earlier work,4 usually as defenders of the book and print, found these 1970 and subsequent criticisms very congenial. They piled on. And this especially at the University of Toronto!

In response to this criticism and at times outright mockery, the people around McLuhan, led by his son Eric, came up with a defense strategy.5 In this presentation McLuhan was not a theoretician, much less a thinker, he was a Menippean satirist,6 a jokester, who did not intend his ‘work’ to be taken seriously (at least in an academic way). Those who mocked it had been ‘taken in’ by his professorial ‘put on’. More, such satire and joking were not only some idiosyncrasy of McLuhan as an individual, it was the hidden bond between him and much of the western tradition as a whole. Its productions, too, had either been satirical or should have been. The value of McLuhan’s ‘work’ lay in this general deconstruction. He was important and prescient after all, but as a satirist, not as a thinker or scholar.

Although there was a certain genius to this strategy, it represented a concession to the very criticism it was intended to deflect. Yes, it might true that he didn’t know how to think as a theorist, but this was because he didn’t want to, because this wasn’t his goal. All he really wanted to achieve was to trick people into the idea that he had any intention to think and theorize. As Eric McLuhan put it in his 2008 essay ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg‘: “Marshall McLuhan did not have A Theory of Communication and he did not use theories in his work.”7

This is not to deny, however, that McLuhan himself saw this satirical line of defense as helpful. He did. After all, he had long experience with the futility of the more difficult defenses of his work through an appeal to rigor or truth or uncommon insight. But there is a world of difference between the sometime use of a certain rhetorical strategy and the claim that that is all there is. 

  1. See the series of ‘The Beginnings of Gutenberg Galaxy‘ posts, 1 to 9. ↩
  2. Culture is Our Business is an assemblage of ads and notes where McLuhan was helped in a major way by the McGraw-Hill editorial department — doubtless hoping for another Understanding Media sales success for the company. ↩
  3. Not counting The Interior Landscape from 1969 which, except for an excerpt from The Gutenberg Galaxy, is a collection of McLuhan’s essays from decades before. ↩
  4. Like Professor Carroll Quigley, who loudly characterized McLuhan as a charlatan. ↩
  5. That this strategy came first of all from McLuhan himself may be seen in his use of it in 1944 (!) in a letter to John H. Randall concerning a Bacon paper he had submitted, unsuccessfully, to the Journal of the History of Ideas: “This Bacon paper was intended as a raid, but not as a raid to set up a scholastic regime — merely a raid to upset a mass of complacent cliché. (…) The main reason for presenting this paper in its present form is not to produce conviction (…) but to get the scholarly world by its ear (…) The only kind of research which interests me is of an unconventional kind…“. See Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 116. ↩
  6. In connection with this theory, Eric McLuhan became an expert in the traditions of satire. See The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (1997) and Cynic Satire (2015). ↩
  7. But in this same ‘Yegg’ essay, Eric cites Stephen Hawking specifying that we cannot do without theories: “When Stephen Hawking discusses his own theory of communication, it becomes immediately obvious that one function of a theory in the hands of a scientist is to prod reality into revealing itself: ‘we cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory’, he (Hawking) writes. A good, elegant theory will describe a wide array of observations and predict the results of new ones. ‘Beyond that, it makes no sense’, he points out, ‘to ask if (a theory) corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory’ (citing Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes, 1993: 44).” (Yegg, 28). For further discussion, see Menippean satire 3. ↩

The Unconscious: realm of possibilities

A Joycean Interpretation, 1966
Nighttown [in in the Circe episode of Ulysses] is the human unconscious, which is the surround or environment of human consciousness.1

‘Love’, Saturday Night Magazine, February 1967
Speedup of information-movement has the effect of putting the whole human Unconscious outside us as an environment2 — and thereby creating what appears in every way to be a crazy world. The Unconscious is a world where everything happens at once, without any connections, without any reasons at all. We’re making the outside world just as crazy and mixed-up as our own Unconscious has always been. The Unconscious includes all the experience of the human race.

Great thinkers from Plato to Heidegger have attempted to understand why they have not been understood — in an attempt to make themselves understood.

The blockages occur in these ways:

The enormous range of possibility of human experience entails that communication is never to some tabula rasa awaiting in-formation. Instead, all experience is always already informed from out of that range. As described millennia ago in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the attempt at radical communication must awaken some new possibility of reception. But such a leap from already actualized and tested possibility to unrealized and untested possibility is exactly what informed experience prevents at all cost. The very suggestion necessarily seems “crazy”.

Communication can be attempted only to already informed experience. But — as just described — it cannot occur as linear cause and effect. It is therefore possible only when it has already occurred. Communication presupposes a ‘knot in time’ where the desired future transformation is a past achievement, “where everything [like future and past] happens at once”. This, too, is “crazy”.

The range of basic possibilities is necessarily “without any connections, without any reasons at all”. There is nothing basic between bases, no possibility between possibilities. The suggestion that such abysmal gaps might be transitive, might be bridges to the possibility of a new sensibility of truth (double genitive), is the most “crazy” thing of all.

But these transitive gaps are the medium (between possibilities) that is (issues in) the message.

These blockages are the topic of all authentic thought.

  1. ‘A Joycean Interpretation’, Scene Theatrical Magazine, Feb 20-26, 1966. ↩
  2. In seeming contrast to his statement here that “the whole human Unconscious” functions “as an environment” and that it “includes all the experience of the human race”, he says elsewhere that “10 percent of the typical situation that (Peter) Drucker designates as the area of effective cause and as the area of opportunity, this small (10%) factor, is the environment. The other 90 percent is the area of problems generated by the active power of the 10 percent environment. For the environment is (this) active process pervading and impinging upon all the (other) components of the situation.” (‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, 1968) It might well be wondered if the environment is “the whole” or some “small factor”? But compare to chemistry where “the whole” of Mendeleev’s table accounts for all the happenings in physical nature, but in any particular case it is some “small” part of that table that is expressed. Furthermore, the elements in that particular case are “small” in another way, that is, compared to all the various properties implicated in that particular case. As McLuhan says following Drucker, 90 percent, or more, is generated by 10 percent or less. ↩