Scholars have stipulated that “only in 1951 did he [McLuhan] begin reading anything by that great political economist [Harold Innis]”. So Babe. Theall concurs: “McLuhan first read Innis in 1951”. For many reasons this claim cannot be correct.¹ The proper date must be 1949 at the latest and could have been, at least as regards McLuhan’s time at UT, as early as 1947 (when his long-time Winnipeg friend, Tom Easterbrook, came back to UT to work closely with Innis).

In fact, it is highly likely that McLuhan first read Innis fifteen years before 1951 — in 1936! While he was still in Cambridge!

Here is the cover of the Dalhousie Review from January 1936 with its table of contents: the ninth contribution is McLuhan’s ‘G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’; the second is Innis’ ‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’.² 

McLuhan’s very first scholarly paper appeared in the same issue of the Dalhousie Review as an important essay of Innis — one in which (as detailed below) his turn to communication is already visible.

There are good reasons to think that McLuhan read Innis’ essay as soon as he received a copy of the review.³ In the first place, of course, McLuhan must have taken great interest, and pride, in this issue of the Dalhousie Review with his first paper (outside of University of Manitoba undergraduate publications). It is hardly imaginable that he failed to look into all its articles and to read the ones of interest to him.

In the second place, it is very likely that Innis’ essay, like McLuhan’s, came to The Dalhousie Review via Fr Gerald Phelan at UT.  Phelan was from Halifax, was an old friend of the Dalhousie Review editor, Herbert Leslie Stewart⁴ and was himself a contributor to the Review⁵. Correspondence between McLuhan and his mother (April 12, 1936, Letters 82) shows that both knew Phelan and it was to him that McLuhan communicated his decision to convert (on November 26, 1936, Letters 93). A decade later Phelan, having been Hugh Kenner’s faculty adviser for his M.A. thesis on Chesterton, would secure publication for it (with an introduction by McLuhan). Although no correspondence has yet come to light regarding the publication of McLuhan’s Chesterton paper in Dalhousie Review, it is highly likely that Phelan did the same thing for him as he came to do a decade later for Kenner. Both were started on their academic careers by Phelan through publications on Chesterton and through jobs at Catholic schools (McLuhan at St Louis, Kenner at Assumption in Windsor). And both McLuhan and Kenner went on from Phelan’s assistance with their careers to become Catholic converts.

By 1936 Phelan and Innis had been colleagues in Toronto for more than a decade.⁶ Since Innis — unlike McLuhan at this time — had no need of help to publish a paper, his Dalhousie Review piece must have appeared there through some kind of special request from the side of the Review. And this must have been mediated, if not originated, through Phelan.⁷ Whatever the details of the case may have been, it may be supposed that Phelan talked of Innis’ paper in the course of what must have been a great many exchanges with McLuhan about his Chesterton piece for Dalhousie Review and about his conversion (where Phelan played a, probably the, central role).

Thirdly, McLuhan’s close friend from Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba, Tom Easterbrook, was studying for his PhD with Innis at just this time in Toronto. It is probable that Innis’ essay was discussed in exchanges between the two Winnipeg friends — particularly in regard to Chesterton in whom also Easterbrook had a long-standing interest. Indeed, Easterbrook is said to have been the person who first suggested Chesterton to McLuhan’s attention. Further, this connection with Innis via Easterbrook may have been reinforced through the fact that McLuhan’s mother was now living in Toronto with his brother, Maurice, and both knew Easterbrook well from Winnipeg.  

In the fourth place, Innis’ paper (which was originally a lecture at UBC) would have interested McLuhan both in its content and in its style, especially its biting depreciation of the academy. As regards the latter, Innis at the very start of his remarks observes:

I am addressing a university audience interested in the pursuit of truth and in certain standards of intellectual integrity and honesty. This may be a bold assumption. (‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’ (= DSS below), Dalhousie Review, January 1936, 401-413, here, 401)

He goes on to describe academic conferences as follows:

Conferences subsidized (….) for the discussion of problems of the social sciences would become intolerable without the entertainment provided by a trained group of intellectuals designed to stimulate those anxious to think they are making important contributions to a solution of the world’s problems — and to amuse those who know better. The social sciences provide both the opiates and the stimulants to what passes for modem thought. The travelling comedians who masquerade as economists and prophets… (Ibid, 406)⁸

Innis scholars often criticize McLuhan’s sometimes disparaging style as if it were opposed to the supposedly more scholarly or responsible style of Innis. But this is mistaken. Innis could be just as direct, and just as politically incorrect, as McLuhan: 

Finally, we turn to the real source of intelligent discussion, that carried on by the “intellectual” — the most tragi-comic group in the history of discussion. (…) Academic freedom has become the great shelter of incompetence. The intellectual writes informatively for people who still believe they discuss the complex problems of society intelligently… (ibid, 405)

As regards content, Innis’ January 1936 Dalhousie Review paper was “intended as complementary to ‘The Role of Intelligence’ [in] The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, May 1935″ (ibid, 401n). The proximity of views held by McLuhan at this time to those of Innis (and perhaps influenced by Innis) may best be seen from this “complementary” article:

Innis: the social scientist is apt to develop strong vested interests in the prospects of an enterprise or of a group or of a society. He becomes concerned in many cases with the increasing profits and the increasing sale of products irrespective of the wants of the community, and acts largely in a predatory capacity. (…) A politician succeeds by detecting and using to his advantage the weakness of others. (‘The Role of Intelligence’, CJEPS, 1:2, 1935, 281; hereafter ‘The Role of Intelligence’ = ‘RoI’.)

McLuhan: What sort of motive, what complexion of intelligence is likely to be concerned with the output and control of Little Men? For almost a century now, the intelligence of the ablest men has been systematically bought and set to work to exploit the weakness and stupidity of the rest of mankind. This is the exact reverse of the traditional procedure of all civilizations. Hitherto the ablest men have been selected to govern, to educate, rather than to exploit, the others. (‘Peter or Peter Pan’, Fleur de Lis, 37:4, 1938)

Further, Innis’s RSS paper indicates the direction in which McLuhan (along with Eric Havelock and, indeed, Innis himself) would head in the following decades:

…the possibilities of discussion have increased immeasurably. The character of discussion (…) has been tremendously influenced by recent industrialism and inventions (…) the development of the printing press, economic expansion and the growth of literacy (…) improvements in facilities for discussion, particularly the radio (…) the intellectual has failed to realize the significance of the change which has so profoundly influenced discussion. He remains as a vestige of an era of discussion which has passed.  (DSS 403, 404, 405)

All this is encapsulated in Innis’ bald formulation:

The pulp and paper industry is a fundamental development.⁹ (DSS 403)

That is: continuing “development of the printing press, economic expansion and the growth of literacy”, along with new inventions (“particularly the radio”), have “increased immeasurably” the amount and speed of information exchange (“possibilities of discussion”) and have thereby closed one “era of discussion” and opened another.  With this closure and opening has come a revolution in “the character” and “the significance” of “discussion” — aka of communication.¹⁰

Innis could see with his friend and mentor, E.J. Urwick, his predecessor as the chair of the Department of Political Economy, that these developments implied, or at least served fully to expose, “fundamental limitations” (RoI 284) in the findings of the social sciences.  These had to do, on the one hand, with what Innis took to be “the contradiction in terms” of “introspection” investigating “introspection”:

the impossibility  of building a science on a basis on which the observer becomes the observed (…) the social scientist cannot be “scientific” or “objective” because of the contradiction in terms (…) “Introspection” is a contradiction, but what is meant by the word is the foremost limit of scientific investigation in a range extending back to geological time (…) [“scientific” or “objective”] organized discussion [in the social sciences] is a contradiction in terms…(RoI 281, 283, 284)

This “contradiction” was the old worry that any introspection of introspection initiated an unstoppable infinite regress. For also such investigative introspection as a subjective act could become the object of a further subjective act of introspection in its turn. And so on “in a range extending back to geological time”.

On the other hand, Innis could also sense (with implications he could at this time only vaguely fear, but that Havelock would unfold step by step in the introduction to his 1950 Prometheus book)¹¹ that this “contradiction” left humans enclosed in themselves with no purchase on “reality”:

The never-ending shell of life suggested in the persistent character of bias… (RoI 283)

As Nietzsche had detailed a half century before, human thought encased in a “never-ending shell” cannot come into genuine contact (genuine contact!) with objective reality — not even, or especially not, with the ‘ objective reality’ of “human thought” in its “never-ending shell”.  As Nietzsche put it: “With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!”.  The result was exactly that nihilism which has since manifestly engulfed the planet.  And both Innis and McLuhan would go to their graves wrestling with this spectre.

But meantime a series of deep questions were precipitated from Innis’ 1935-1936 essays which Havelock and McLuhan and Innis himself would all take up in their different ways (thereby defining the ‘Toronto school of communications’):

• what exactly is “the character” of “an era of discussion”?  How is “an era” to be recognized as such and differentiated from another?
• if “the nineteenth century, with the development of the printing press, economic expansion and the growth of literacy”, together with later “improvements in facilities for discussion, particularly the radio”, precipitated a new “era of discussion” in the twentieth century, when and where have such eras arisen in the past and what could their study tell us about the course of history and about our present situation?
• If all human experience is ineluctably limited or biased by the “era of discussion” in which it occurs, might the social sciences be reoriented and revivified through focus on this figure-ground relationship (experience/era of discussion) as on some kind of elementary structure?

In his RoI essay Innis repeatedly broaches this latter possibility:

The innumerable difficulties of the social scientist are paradoxically his only salvation. (…) The ‘sediment of  experience’ provides the basis for scientific investigation. The never-ending shell of life suggested in the persistent character of bias provides possibilities of intensive study of the limitations of life and its probable direction. (RoI 283)

the habits or biases of individuals which permit prediction are reinforced in the cumulative bias of institutions and constitute the chief interest of the social scientist. (RoI 283)

The fundamental limitations outlined by Professor Urwick involve the salvation and the despair of the social sciences. Habits and institutions, even stupidity, are the assets of the social scientist. (RoI 284)

But it may be that Innis himself never resolved the question of whether ineluctable bias is “the salvation [or] the despair of the social sciences”, whether “the persistent character of bias provides possibilities of intensive study” or wrecks itself on the unavoidable reef of “the limitations of life”. The great issue may be put in terms of Innis’ use of the word ‘fundamental’:

The pulp and paper industry is a fundamental development. (DSS 403)

The fundamental limitations outlined by Professor Urwick… (RoI 284)

Was the “fundamental development” of “the pulp and paper industry” (standing in for all those innovations which have served to define “discussion” aka “communication” in terms of mass consumption) “fundamental” in the sense of providing a “basis for scientific investigation” (RoI 283)? Or did it entail “fundamental limitations” that disabled any such “basis” exactly because those “limitations” were “fundamental” and so insuperable?

In 1936, at least, Innis leaned toward the view that “the social scientist cannot be ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ because of the contradiction in terms” (RoI 283) implied by the attempt to make a study of bias that would itself inevitably be biased:

There are fewer and fewer people who will admit that they do not know, or who have the courage to say that they have not solved the problem. And yet that is what the social scientist must continually keep saying if he hopes to maintain any hold on intellectual life. (DSS 408)

If not a science, then, perhaps the social sciences could function as some kind of art? But no! Even this proves illusory. ‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’ ends abruptly with the resigned assessment:

Discussion runs riot and ceases even to be artistic. (DSS 413)

In this vein, Innis would come to speak a decade later of:

the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization (Empire and Communications, 1950, p67).