Author Archives: McEwen

Brooks & Wimsatt cite McLuhan

In Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957) by Cleanth Brooks and his Yale colleague, William Wimsatt, a pointer to McLuhan’s 1943 PhD thesis appears in its preface:

A more or less pervasive debt in several chapters to a manuscript book by H.M. McLuhan concerning the ancient war between dialecticians and rhetoricians is here gratefully acknowledged and is underscored by the quotation, following chapter 4, of two substantial excerpts from published essays by Mr. McLuhan.

The excerpts were taken from ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’, Sewanee Review, LII (January-March, 1944) and ‘Sight, Sound and the Fury’, Commonweal, LX (April 9, 1954):

Edgar Poe’s Tradition
This tradition [the oratorical]1 has been a continuous force in European law, letters, and politics from the time of the Greek sophists. It is most conveniently referred to as the Ciceronian ideal, since Cicero gave it to St. Augustine and St. Jerome, who in turn saw to it that it has never ceased to influence Western society. The Ciceronian ideals as expressed in the De Oratore or in St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana is the ideal of rational man reaching his noblest attainment in the expression of an eloquent wisdom. Necessary steps in the attainment of this ideal are careful drill in the poets followed by a program of encyclopedic scope directed to the forensic end of political power. Thus, the doctus orator is, explicitly, Cicero’s sophistic version of Plato’s philosopher-king. This ideal became the basis for hundreds of manuals written by eloquent scholars for the education of monarchs from the fifth century through John of Salisbury and Vincent of Beauvais, to the famous treatises of Erasmus and Castiglione. (…)
So far as America is concerned, this was a fact of decisive importance, since Virginia, and the South in general, was to receive the permanent stamp of this Ciceronian ideal. (…) It is thus no accident that the creative political figures of American life have been molded in the South. Whether one considers Jefferson or Lincoln, one is confronted with a mind aristocratic, legalistic, encyclopedic, forensic, habitually expressing itself in the mode of an eloquent wisdom. (…)
New England is in the scholastic tradition, and profoundly opposed to “humanism.” Briefly, the theocratic founders of Harvard and rulers of New England were Calvinist divines, fully trained in the speculative theology which had arisen for the first time in the twelfth century the product of that dialectical method in theology which is rightly associated with Peter Abelard. Unlike Luther and many English Protestants, Calvin and his followers were schoolmen, opposed to the old theology of the Fathers which Erasmus and humanist-Ciceronians had brought back to general attention after the continuous predominance of scholastic theology since the twelfth century. To the humanists nobody could be a true interpreter of Scripture, a true exponent of the philosophi Christi, who had not had a full classical training. So Catholic and Protestant schoolmen alike were, for these men, the “barbarians,” the “Goths of the Sorbonne,” corrupting with “modernistic” trash (the schoolmen were called moderni from the first) the eloquent piety and wisdom of the Fathers. (The Fathers were called the “ancients” or antiqui theologi.) (…)
Harvard, then, originated as a little Sorbonne, where in 1650 the scholastic methods of Ockham and Calvin, as streamlined by Petrus Ramus, were the staple of education. Logic and dialectics were the basis of theological method, as of everything else at Harvard. Here rhetoric was taught, not for eloquence, but in order to teach the young seminarian how to rub off the cosmetic tropes of Scripture before going to work on the doctrine with dialectical dichotomies. Ramus taught a utilitarian logic for which he made the same claims as pragmatists do for “scientific method.” In fact, Peirce, James and Dewey could never have been heard of had they not been nurtured in the Speculative tradition of the scholastic theologians Calvin and Ramus.2

Sight, Sound and the Fury
Until Gutenberg, poetic publication meant the reading or singing of one’s poems to a small audience. When poetry began to exist primarily on the printed page, in the seventeenth century, there occurred that strange mixture of sight and sound later known as “metaphysical poetry” which has so much in common with modern poetry. (…)
The printed page was itself a highly specialized (and spatialized) form of communication. In 1500 A.D. it was revolutionary. And Erasmus was perhaps the first to grasp the fact that the revolution was going to occur above all in the classroom. He devoted himself to the production of textbooks and to the setting up of grammar schools. The printed book soon liquidated two thousand years of manuscript culture. It created the solitary student. It set up the rule of private interpretation against public disputation. It established the divorce between “literature and life.” (…)
We have long been accustomed to the notion that a person’s beliefs shape and color his existence. They provide the windows which frame, and through which he views, all events. We are less accustomed to the notion that the shapes of a technological environment are also idea-windows. Every shape (gimmick or metropolis), every situation planned and realized by man’s factive intelligence, is a window which reveals or distorts reality. Today, when power technology has taken over the entire global environment to be manipulated as the material of art, nature has disappeared with nature-poetry. (…)
From the point of view of its format, the press as a daily cross-section of the globe is a mirror of the technological instruments of communication. It is the popular daily book, the great collective poem, the universal entertainment of our age. As such it has modified poetic techniques and in turn has already been modified by the newer media of movie, radio, and television. These represent revolutions in communication as radical as printing itself. (…)
James Joyce was the first to seize upon newspaper, radio, movie, and television to set up his “verbicovisual” drama in Finnegan’s Wake. Pound and Eliot are, in comparison with Joyce, timid devotees of the book as art form. (…)
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 even as we may say that the movie poets the world. Languages themselves are thus the greatest of all works of art. They are the collective hymns to existence. 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. (…)
It is only common sense to recognize that the general situation created by a communicative channel and its audience is a large part of that in which and by the individuals commune. The encoded message cannot be regarded as a mere capsule or pellet produced at one point and consumed at another. Communication is communication all along the line. One might illustrate from sports. The best brand of football played before fifty people would lack something of the power to communicate. (…)
What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. Modern technology presumes to attempt a total transformation of man and his environment. This calls in turn for an inspection and defense of all human values. And so far as merely human aid goes, the citadel of this defense must be located in analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition. For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves in their manipulation of the new media.3

  1. Insertion from Brooks and Wimsatt. ↩
  2. Several of the omissions made by Brooks and Wimsatt in their excerpt are not marked. They have been indicated here. ↩
  3. Most of the omissions made by Brooks and Wimsatt in their excerpt are not marked. They have been indicated here. ↩

McLuhan and Aristotle 5 (dualisms in 1944)

McLuhan’s 1944 lecture (published in 1946), ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’,1 requires analysis in a variety of ways. Here its treatment of Aristotle will be examined. But it is also interesting as an example of McLuhan needing to get out of his own way2 and of his ‘University of Chicago’ writings in the 1940s.3 It is also, of course, one of a number of texts in which McLuhan attempted to investigate further the “ancient quarrel” set out in his Nashe thesis from 1943.

What is at stake in the lecture is the conflict between the ‘great books program’ and ‘humanism’ at the University of Chicago under its president,4 Robert Hutchins, with the education policy of liberals like John Dewey and Sidney Hook. The latter policy is said to mirror industrial technology in ‘modern America’ generally. McLuhan’s contention is that “this dichotomy”5 of Hutchins vs Dewey must be understood against the background of “the ancient quarrel” treated the previous year in his Nashe thesis over the 2000 years between classical Athens and Elizabethan England.6 In effect, the history of that ‘trivial’ quarrel between dialectic, grammar and rhetoric was now to be brought up to date in specific regard to contemporary university education in America:

Behind this contrast in basic postulates between Hutchins and his opponents there is a long history. What makes the explanation of the conflict rather difficult is the fact that while the [rhetorical] position of Hutchins is recognizably that of Isocrates and Cicero, the position of men like Dewey is not like that [dialectic] of Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless, I think it can be shown that Dewey and the experimentalists are lineally descended from Plato and Aristotle via William of Ockham and Peter Ramus. My explanation of the modern quarrel is in terms of the old quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on the one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand. It is the quarrel begun by Socrates against the Sophists, from whose ranks he came.7

Aristotle’s major role in the piece, usually in consolidated combination with Plato (as seen twice over in the passage just cited), is to function as a stand-in for the ‘dialectical’ art of the trivium. The differences noted in the thesis between Plato and Aristotle, especially Plato’s frequent ‘grammatical’ recourse to myth, is left aside.

At the same time, grammar and rhetoric are similarly consolidated throughout the essay: “the old quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on the one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand”.

Such fusions are effected over and over again — Aristotle with Plato and even Socrates, and rhetoric with grammar in combined opposition to dialectic — fusions which are intended to serve as the historical background to “the basic cleavage of American culture”: “the modern quarrel”.

But while the “ancient quarrel” of the thesis is between the three arts of the classical trivium, rhetoric, grammar and dialectic, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ reduces that quarrel to a 2-fold “dichotomy”. This is achieved through the aforesaid consolidation of grammar with rhetoric or by ignoring grammar altogether, as here:

the Sophists made (dialectical) logic subordinate to rhetoric or persuasion, since their end was political. And this it was which raised against them the opposition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who were all agreed that dialectics should control rhetoric, that knowledge was superior even to prudential action.

Either way, the third power of the “ancient quarrel” is eliminated as an independent force and with it, the possibility of media-tion between the remaining two. Their middle becomes a “no-man’s land” of “conflict” and outright “war”.

For McLuhan’s own development, this reduction of the three to the two through the omission of grammar is particularly important in regard to industry, technology, science and philosophy, all of which he situated on the negative side of the “basic cleavage”:

The cultural cleavage of North and South [in America] reflects the broad divisions of the age-old quarrel between Socrates and the Sophists in the past and between science and ‘the great books program’ in the present.8

Man: a technological unit? (…) Whereas Hutchins’ program would make every citizen a potential ruler, the “liberals” conceive rather of the individual as a technologically functional unit in the state.

He who would understand how in the (…) great books program all knowledge is subordinated to the development of political prudence, must understand the nature and influence of Cicero. When this is seen it is easy to define the opposition which always rises against the Ciceronian program from the camps of technology, science, or philosophy.

When we speak of the humanities today as opposed to technology, the physical sciences, or highly specialized disciplines such as logic, we mean what Cicero (…) meant.

In the past century the abstract cadres of German scholasticism have completely disoriented American school and college organization away from humanistic ends, bringing our education into line with industrial technology. All industrialist organization of society is necessarily technological and abstract. 

As already brought forward in Aristotle 4, in his 1969 Playboy interview McLuhan mocked this approach that he himself had taken a quarter century earlier:

For many years, until [the late 1940s when] I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride [published in 1951], I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was…

Through this self-critique and associated gestalt-switch McLuhan adopted “a totally new approach”:

I ceased being a moralist and became a student. As someone committed to literature and the traditions of literacy, I began to study the new environment that imperiled literary values, and I soon realized that they could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man[kind] adopt a new survival strategy. 

But McLuhan could not adopt such a “totally new approach” as long as he was mired in either-or dualisms. Where there are two and only two fundamental powers, without an inter-media-tory third enabling their modulated community, it is necessary that one of them should “control” the other and that that other should be “subordinate” (if not eliminated altogether). For if fundamental basic powers exist in some kind of balance, however dynamic and variable that balance may be, there must be some third power enabling that community and its modulation. Contrariwise, absent such a third, there is not even a proper border between the antagonists, let alone a basis for their community. The ineluctable result is the collapse of the two into an “entire” singularity via all-out “conflict”:

Conflict, however, will inevitably arise between these parties [the dialecticians and rhetoricians] when either attempts to capture the entire education of an age or a country. 

‘Conflict’ is a technical term used four times in ‘An Ancient Quarrel”, along with ‘contrast’ (twice), ‘battle’ (twice), ‘dispute’ (twice), and ‘war’. All appear in such phrases as “the battle of the books”, “a dispute that began in ancient Athens”, and the “contrast in basic postulates”. All are stand-ins for ‘quarrel’ (used 14 times) and refer to the “ancient quarrel” whose nature McLuhan was attempting, unsuccessfully at the time, to plumb.

But just as in his Nashe thesis, where the possibility of another Aristotle is broached in its concluding section,9 one beyond the Aristotle of a dialectic caught up in dualisms, so in ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’. In a footnote a citation from Aristotle’s Topics (101a) appears that was already given in the Nashe thesis as well (Classical Trivium, 48):

[Dialectics] has a further use in relation to the ultimate bases of the principles used in the several sciences. For it is impossible to discuss them at all from the principles proper to the particular science in hand, seeing that the principles are the prius of everything else: . . . dialectics is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries.

McLuhan was speaking to himself here with this repeated citation. It was first of all he himself that needed to locate this “path to the principles of all inquiries”! And the way to do so was already demarcated, however obscurely, in his 1944 ‘Ancient Quarrel’ essay. He needed to articulate the role of the third power of the trivium, namely grammar, in the varied expressions of the dialectical and rhetorical powers relative to each other. Indeed, this third power already appeared in his essay in such offhand expressions as “the means to wisdom” and “the bond of the state” and especially in the assertion in its concluding paragraph that “between the speculative dialectician (…) and the eloquent [rhetorical] moralist (…)  there need be no conflict.”

Principles as “the prius of everything else” cannot be both plural and only in “conflict”. They must reduce to a singular one (when ‘conflict’ is supreme) or be exfoliated in a society of at least three (when ‘conflict’ is not supreme and some kind of balance prevails despite fundamental difference). 

Principles cannot be a merely conflicted twofold. In the principial realm there is ultimately either a singular one or a community of three (or more than three). For either the two belong together in community as first principles, in which case their relation must be in some kind of balance ‘there’ and they cannot be only in conflict — in which case there must be a further principle, or principles, accounting for that balance and even for the differentiating border between them.10 Or there is no such further principle, or principles, in which case there is no community or border and ‘they’ cannot be plural: they cannot be more than one.11

At the same time McLuhan needed to see that “all inquiries” must include technology, science, industry, logic, and abstraction, all of which in ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ are still dichotomously contrasted with ‘humanism’ — and thereby excluded from his valorization and his investigation. But principles cannot be principles as “the prius of everything else” if they apply only to a selection of their field (just as chemistry cannot cover only some physical materials).

McLuhan would have to find a way to loose himself from himself. He would have to come to see that even, or especially, his moral perceptions were not timeless observations, but relative assertions — thereby requiring an investigation of the relativity of “all inquiries”.12 But this would necessitate not only a focus on ‘grammar’ as the binding third power of the ‘ancient quarrel’, but the submission of himself to it. How else could he himself undergo the trans-formation to “a totally new approach”? How else take the “path to the principles of all inquiries”?

Aristotle would be the primary — but not at all exclusive — means through which, by the end of the decade of the 1940s, the required somersault was achieved in McLuhan’s thought and, indeed, identity.  

 

  1. ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’, Classical Journal, 41:4, January 1946, 156-62. All unidentified citations below are taken from this publication. ↩
  2. McLuhan himself was the medium (who) is (receives and retransmits) the message: he served as a medium for information that came to him as ‘light through’. To do this, he had to get out of his own way, namely stop directing ‘light on’ from him (‘the rearview mirror’) which interfered with his reception of the incoming new. McLuhan’s 1951 letter to Innis ends (with emphasis added): “the actual techniques of common study today seem to me to be of genuine relevance to anybody who wishes to grasp the best in current poetry and music. And vice versa. There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. Using Frequency Modulation (FM) techniques one can slice accurately through such interference, whereas Amplitude Modulation (AM) leaves you bouncing on all the currents.” (The ‘you’ must become the ‘one’, where the ‘one’ is one possibility out of a spectrum of possible you’s. The condition of a science of human artefacts, including thought, feeling and any and all experience, is that also one’s own thought, feeling and experience be part of the domain to be questioned.) In ‘An Ancient Quarrel’, the conscious message from him concerns the stark either/or dualisms described above. But at the same time the message given to him for focused investigation and extended communication was already incoming in his own writing in such expressions as “the means to wisdom” and “the bond of the state” and especially in the notion that “between the speculative dialectician (…) and the eloquent moralist (…)  there need be no conflict.” These all served as variable media-tions of dualities (between ignorance and wisdom, between different interests in the state and between dialectic and rhetoric). McLuhan had to realize, first of all, that messages to him were already there — and then investigate them as a directive given for his life’s work. Indeed, the essential life story of Marshall McLuhan lies in the welcoming access he gave, as well as barriers he imposed, between him and the messages vouchsafed to him as their potential medium. ↩
  3. Throughout the 1940s, as will be detailed in a series of future posts, McLuhan was preoccupied with the University of Chicago (where Sigfried Giedion attempted to get him an appointment). These years began with his critical review of Mortimer Adler’s Art and Prudence (Fleur de Lis, 40:1, 1940, 30-32) and ended with his 1947 proposal to Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, for a ‘faculty of interrelations’. ↩
  4. Hutchins was the president of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1945 and its chancellor from 1945 to 1951. ↩
  5. For ‘dichotomy’, see note 8 below. ↩
  6. The ‘ancient quarrel’ is brought together with Hutchins’ program through the equation: “grammar and rhetoric (everything we today know as humanism)”. ↩
  7. It may be wondered if McLuhan put forward these repeated dualisms on account of confusions in his own mind or as a strategy to prompt consideration of his “ancient quarrel” thesis. Perhaps both! A further question for future research: how far was McLuhan influenced by his ‘agrarian’ friends like Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate towards a fundamental dualism and away from the threefold of the ‘ancient quarrel’? In the two volume Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957) by Brooks and his Yale colleague, William Wimsatt, a pointer to McLuhan’s 1943 PhD thesis appears in its preface: “A more or less pervasive debt in several chapters to a manuscript book by H.M. McLuhan concerning the ancient war between dialecticians and rhetoricians is here gratefully acknowledged and is underscored by the quotation, following chapter 4, of two substantial excerpts from published essays by Mr. McLuhan.” (Emphasis added.) The excerpted essays were ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’, Sewanee Review, LII (January-March, 1944) and ‘Sight, Sound and the Fury’, Commonweal, LX (April 9, 1954). ↩
  8. A footnote to this passage refers to it as “this dichotomy”. And in the essay itself, McLuhan notes that “the reason for this dichotomy (between North and South) lies in the divergent education of the two sections of America.” Further: “Humanistic, legalistic, forensic, southern education has followed Ciceronian lines to this day, as the case of an eminent Kentuckian such as Robert Hutchins illustrates. On the other hand, the North has followed scholastic lines, showing more concern for abstract method and technology than for the res publica.” The comparison of Hutchins with Abraham Lincoln as “an eminent Kentuckian” may have been intended as an inside joke. Hutchins was not from Kentucky, although his father was the longtime president of Berea College in Kentucky. William James Hutchins was appointed to that position, however, only when his son was already in his twenties and studying at Yale. ↩
  9. Classical Trivium, 229m2: “the synthesis effected by St. Thomas between Plato and Aristotle”. ↩
  10. No two can, of course, be bordered by one of the two. ↩
  11. See McLuhan’s important 1955 review of Hugh Kenner’s Wyndham Lewis: ‘Nihilism Exposed’. ↩
  12. ‘Sight, Sound, and the Fury’, 1954: “What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. (…) This calls in turn for an inspection and defense of all human values.” ↩

McLuhan and Aristotle 4 (Synthesis between Plato and Aristotle?)

The synthesis effected by St. Thomas between Plato and Aristotle…(Classical Trivium, 229n2)

As seen in Aristotle 3, McLuhan’s 1943 Nashe thesis begins by highlighting the opposition between Plato as a sometime grammarian and Aristotle as a dialectician:

[Since] Plato (…) habitually employed the grammatical modes of poetry and myth to express his own most significant and esoteric teaching, he is far from confident that grammar can be or ought to be entirely  superseded. Shortly afterwards, however, Aristotle established the nature of non-grammatical scientific method in the Posterior Analytics. His achievement bore no fruit until the [scholasticism of the] twelfth century (…) [and especially in the following] great age of dialectics (…) in the thirteenth century (…) [with] the triumph of Aristotle in St. Thomas Aquinas… (Classical Trivium, 17)

But the concluding part of the thesis briefly refers to the “synthesis effected by St. Thomas between Plato and Aristotle”. Here it appears that “the triumph of Aristotle in St. Thomas” was not a triumph of dialectics over Plato and grammar as may initially have appeared, but, rather, was Aristotle’s triumph as the philosopher of Catholicism1 — achieved in Thomism via insight into the complementarity (not the identity!) of Aristotle and dialectic with Plato and grammar.

This new (for McLuhan) possibility of an integrated Plato-Aristotle relation indicates the terminus of the winding road McLuhan’s thought would take over the following years of the 1940s, leading to the identification in 1950 of his life’s work as a “voyage of discovery into the creative process“2 — “a voyage of discovery”, moreover, which “must begin (…) in the epistemology and psychology of Aristotle”.3

In 1944, the year after his Nashe thesis was approved and his Cambridge PhD granted (oral defense being suspended on account of the war), McLuhan moved back to Canada from St Louis. After a 2-year stop at Assumption College in Windsor, this would lead him to the University of Toronto in 1946. There at St Michael’s College he would become a colleague of Etienne Gilson, who had been the single most cited authority in McLuhan’s Cambridge thesis via Gilson’s favorite pupil, and McLuhan’s best friend in St Louis, Bernard Muller-Thym.4 But Gilson’s master work, Le Thomisme, does not appear in the bibliography of that thesis.5 He would read it when he got to Toronto, however — in French because there was as yet no English translation of the latest 1942/1944 editions — and its effect was to give him a much more nuanced view of Aristotle through the lens of Saint Thomas.

At the same time, Sigfried Giedion, who met and befriended McLuhan in 1943, tried to interest the University of Chicago in hiring him. And this, too, prompted a renewed interest in Aristotle since influential professors there like Ronald Crane, Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon6 were avowed Aristotelians. As recorded in McLuhan’s unpublished essay, ‘The Failure in Chicago’, from the mid 1940’s, McLuhan strongly opposed the views of these professors. But to do so cogently, he had to take on their understanding of Aristotle and to do that he had to have better knowledge of Aristotle himself. 

For religious, theoretical and practical reasons, McLuhan came to engage with Aristotle in the later 1940s. This was a time in which he went through a ‘second conversion’, going from being a rather brittle moralist to being a student of all human experience regardless of what might be taken to be the moral implications at stake. He described this transformation in his Playboy Interview in 1969:

For many years, until I wrote [in the late 1940s] my first book, The Mechanical Bride [published in 1951], I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and 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 (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student. As someone committed to literature and the traditions of literacy, I began to study the new environment that imperiled literary values, and I soon realized that they could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man[kind] adopt a new survival strategy. 

Now Aristotle had a central role in this transformation via his interrelated treatments of metaphor and mimesis. Future posts will document McLuhan’s increasing understanding of these notions in the works of the Stagirite. Suffice it to note here that McLuhan’s “totally new approach”, adopted in the late 1940s when he himself was in his late 30’s, amounted to a turn from a rigid dualism (between the moral and immoral, agrarian and civic, ancient and modern, natural and mechanical, etc) to a more complex understanding of all such oppositions as at the same time deeply, indeed essentially, related (although never merely identified). This amounted to a gestalt switch (“a totally different approach”) for McLuhan, whereby metaphor and mimesis were taken to ground the experience of these oppositions, not as figures based on them.7

Of course McLuhan was not then able to articulate these matters as he later would do. By way of anticipation, however, it may be observed that he came to take metaphor and mimesis as means (or medium) determining the meaning (or message) of any and all such oppositions: ‘the gap where the action is’ as seen through ‘the flip of figure and ground’. Where metaphor and mimesis were taken as secondary figures on stable oppositional ground, the ‘effect’ was the experience of such oppositions typical of the Gutenberg galaxy and the mechanical. Taken, rather, as primary dynamic ground, the effect or figure was the fundamentally different sort of experience of such oppositions typical of the Marconi era and the electric. Either way, the medium determined the message and therefore was the message also in a deeper sense as the variable elementary structure of the artefactual field — the field of the effects of human being (dual genitive) in any and all thought and action.

McLuhan’s bumpy road in the 1940s toward his ‘second conversion’ via Aristotle, may be seen in his writings from the time, published and unpublished — the subject of the next ‘McLuhan and Aristotle’ posts. In them, the faltering and as yet unperceived steps of McLuhan’s “voyage of discovery into the creative process” were underway. It was to reach its goal in 1950 in the decisive insight, at last, that research into “the creative  process (…) must begin (…) in the epistemology and psychology of Aristotle”.8

 

  1. McLuhan read Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy in his first term at Cambridge, 1934-1935. Here is Maritain’s view of the Stagirite from his ‘Preface’ to that Introduction: “the philosophy of Aristotle, as revived and enriched by St. Thomas and his school, may rightly be called the Christian philosophy, both because the Church is never weary of putting it forward as the only true philosophy and because it harmonises perfectly with the truths of faith, nevertheless it is not proposed here for the reader’s acceptance because it is Christian, but because it is demonstrably true.” ↩
  2. ‘Book Reviews’ in Renascence 3:1, 1950, 45. These were reviews of eleven books on T.S. Eliot. ↩
  3. Ibid, 45-46. ↩
  4. Muller-Thym studied with Gilson for 5 years in the 1930s in Toronto and then became a colleague of McLuhan at St Louis University as a professor of philosophy in 1938. He was the best man in the McLuhans’ wedding in St Louis in 1939, the Godfather of his children Eric and Mary (named after Muller-Thym’s wife), and, finally, McLuhan’s mentor in Gilson’s work in particular and Catholicism in general. Muller-Thym left SLU in 1942 to go to New York to work in the war effort. McLuhan continue to visit him and stay with his family there for decades. ↩
  5. Gilson prepared six editions of Le Thomism: 1919, 1922, 1924, 1942, 1944, 1965. At the time McLuhan was writing his thesis, the definitive 1942/1944 editions of Le Thomisme were not yet available to him. ↩
  6. McKeon was a onetime pupil of Gilson in Paris and the editor of The Basic Works of Aristotle, 1941, which McLuhan owned, “heavily annotated”, and cited in his writings. His annotated copy is preserved in his library at the University of Toronto. Several of McKeon’s essays appear prominently in McLuhan’s Nashe thesis. ↩
  7. The understanding of being as fundamentally ‘in act’ — as essentially metaphorical — was central to the readings of Thomas by Maritain and Gilson. ↩
  8. See notes 2 and 3. ↩

McLuhan and Aristotle 3 (the Stagirite as dialectician)

Between McLuhan’s initial exposure to Aristotle at Cambridge in the early 1930s and his PhD thesis on Nashe in the early 1940s, his acquaintance with the Stagirite increased considerably. His view of Aristotle became much more complicated and as a result the Aristotle presented in his thesis is very different from that of his first understanding a decade before.

Here he is near the start of that thesis reversing his earlier ‘Platonist/Aristotelian’ contrast:

[Since] Plato (…) habitually employed the grammatical modes of poetry and myth to express his own most significant and esoteric teaching, he is far from confident that grammar can be or ought to be entirely superseded. Shortly afterwards, however, Aristotle established the nature of non-grammatical scientific method in the Posterior Analytics. His achievement bore no fruit until the [scholasticism of the] twelfth century (…) [and especially in the following] great age of dialectics (…) in the thirteenth century (…) [with] the triumph of Aristotle in St. Thomas Aquinas… (Classical Trivium, 17)

The “non-grammatical scientific method in the Posterior Analytics” and its scholastic fruit more than a millennium later were the sort of dialectics usually characterized as ‘Platonist’ when framed by the Platonist/Aristotelian, Idealist/Realist opposition.1 Indeed, throughout the Nashe thesis McLuhan sees Aristotle as a, even the, dialectician:

Ancient grammar was at odds with the dialectics of Plato and, especially, of Aristotle, as the art of interpreting phenomena. (Classical Trivium, 41)

A history of dialectics by a dialectician does not exist, apart from the brief remarks of Aristotle. (Classical Trivium, 43)

Aristotle, rather than Plato, raised dialectics to the status of an art..  (Classical Trivium, 47)

Rhetoric, placed under dialectics by Aristotle… (Classical Trivium, 119)

The rise of Aristotle and dialectics to supremacy among the arts was especially disastrous to grammar and the classics… (Classical Trivium, 138)

his [Petrarch’s] dread of that Averroism, rooted in the Arabic Aristotle, which drew so many into atheism during and after the thirteenth century.  (Classical Trivium, 158n63)

Just as McLuhan was returning to Lodge in his thesis with the idea that an essential2 threefold generates the twists and turns of the western tradition, so he was also returning to Lodge’s characterization of Plato as more than an abstract Idealist. This, in turn, correlated with the finding that Aristotle was more than a concrete Realist. What McLuhan termed “a fresh receptivity” in a letter home from February 1935, was apparently required not only in regard to religion and literature as had been occasioned by a first acquaintance with Aristotle at Cambridge and his related revised view of Plato there. Now, almost a decade later in his Nashe thesis, such “fresh receptivity” seemed to be required also in regard to Plato and Aristotle themselves.3

  1. Classical Trivium, 39: “At the conclusion of the De Sophisticis Elenchis Aristotle offers what is still one of the few accounts of the history of dialectics. That he was not entirely happy about the results of his inquiry one can easily judge: ‘Moreover, on the subject of Rhetoric there exists much that has been said long ago, whereas on the subject of reasoning we had nothing else of earlier date to speak of at all, but were kept at work a long time in experimental researches. If, then, it seems to you after inspection that, such being the situation as it existed at the start, our investigation is in a satisfactory condition compared with the other inquiries that have been developed by tradition, there must remain for all of you, or for our students, the task of extending us your pardon for the shortcomings of the inquiry, and for the discoveries thereof your warm thanks’.” ↩
  2. Essential threefold — whose components were mutually exclusive exactly because essential. See https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2024/10/mcluhan-and-aristotle-1-first-encounter/#fn-66783-3. ↩
  3. This development inevitably affected the number of types of human experience envisioned by McLuhan. He had gone from Lodge’s 3, to a Platonist/Aristotelian 2, back again to the 3 of the trivium, but the prospect was for many more types than this. For once the complications of both Plato and Aristotle were admitted, the ratios between them must be a much greater number than the few possibilities when they were taken within a monotone Idealist/Realist contrast.  Similarly with the three arts of the trivium. Once allowed the convolutions and varying permutations displayed in the two thousand years covered by McLuhan’s thesis, the number of the genetic types of experience — taken as the ratios of the arts of the trivium with each other — would have to vary over a considerable spectrum whose extent and defining characteristics would be forever open questions for investigation. ↩

McLuhan and Aristotle 2 (Maritain’s Introduction)

Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy cites a passage from Goethe’s Farbenlehre (1810) which may have been the source of Coleridge’s dictum1 (quoted in McLuhan’s 1934 Master’s thesis) that “all men (…) are born either Platonists or Aristotelians”:

Goethe, repeating the theme of Raphael’s wonderful ‘School of Athens’, in which Plato is depicted as an inspired old man, his face turned heavenward, Aristotle as a man in the full vigour of youth pointing triumphantly to the earth and its realities, has drawn in his Theory of Colours (…) a striking comparison between Plato and Aristotle. “Plato”, he says, “seems to behave as a spirit descended from heaven, who has chosen to dwell a space on earth. He hardly attempts to know this world. He has already formed an idea of it, and his chief desire is to communicate to mankind, which stands in such need of them, the truths which he has brought with him and delights to impart. If he penetrates to the depth of things, it is to fill them with his own soul, not to analyse them. Without intermission and with the burning ardour of his spirit, he aspires to rise and regain the heavenly abode from which he came down. The aim of all his discourse is to awaken in his hearers the notion of a single eternal being, of the good, of truth, of beauty. His method and words seem to melt, to dissolve into vapour, whatever scientific facts he has managed to borrow from the earth. Aristotle’s attitude towards the world is, on the other hand, entirely human. He behaves like an architect in charge of a building. Since he is on earth, on earth he must work and build. He makes certain of the nature of the ground, but only to the depth of his foundations. Whatever lies beyond to the centre of the earth does not concern him. He gives his edifice an ample foundation, seeks his materials in every direction, sorts them, and builds gradually. He therefore rises like a regular pyramid, whereas Plato ascends rapidly heavenward like an obelisk or a sharp tongue of flame. Thus have these two men, representing qualities equally precious and rarely found together,2 divided mankind, so to speak, between them.” (Maritain, Introduction, 91-92,n1)

McLuhan was always a man of the senses, especially touch and smell, who never tired of depreciating deodorants. He identified firmly with the Aristotle depicted here by Goethe and seconded by Maritain.  But he would soon come to distrust all heaven and earth oppositions and begin a lifelong process of learning from both Plato and Aristotle aside from such hopeless dualisms.

  1. Coleridge was notorious for his borrowings from the Germans, especially Schelling. ↩
  2. In regard to such “qualities (…) rarely found together”, McLuhan would come to a more nuanced position which disagreed with Goethe, Coleridge and Maritain in one way and agreed with them in another. He disagreed with them in arguing that all experience whatsoever is structured by some heaven and earth ratio. So little are they “rarely found together” that there is no experience at all lacking such a ratio and, therefore, no experience at all lacking some medium, or ‘resonating interval’, or ‘gap where the action is’, giving varying structure to the numerator/denominator poles of that ratio: “the medium is the message”.  What is rare, however, and here he agreed with them, is consciousness of this fundamental fact: “qualities (…) rarely found together” in conscious awareness and theory. McLuhan’s contention was that earth and heaven, manifestation and essence, figure and ground, exactly as always “found together in all experience”, would establish a “new science” once consciously focused and investigated.  And part of this “new science”, its prehistory so to say, would be the recovery of all those anonymous (in myth) and known thinkers (especially, for McLuhan, Plato, Aristotle and Thomas) who saw the point but proved unable to communicate it — at least to our benighted age. ↩

McLuhan and Aristotle 1 (first encounters)

McLuhan’s annotated copy of Jacques Maritain’s An Introduction to Philosophy1 is preserved in his library now at the University of Toronto. This book was apparently suggested to him by Maritain’s friend and translator, Father Gerald Phelan. Phelan frequently lectured  on Chesterton (then McLuhan’s champion) and was the priest who was to guide and inspire McLuhan’s conversion in a process that chiefly unfolded between 1934 and 1937. It was from this Introduction that McLuhan, newly arrived at Cambridge, received another view of philosophy from the one he had from Rupert Lodge as an undergraduate and master’s student at the University of Manitoba. The new view was ‘Aristotelian’, the old one ‘Platonic’. 

McLuhan already referred to this classification of outlooks via Coleridge whom he cited in his 1934 University of Manitoba M.A. thesis on George Meredith:

In his table talk, Coleridge noted that all men (…) are born either Platonists or Aristotelians. There are similarly, in all times and places, definite types of temperament displaying consistency of conformation. The literary or artistic expression of such temperaments has properly the same validity as has the philosophizing of the Idealist and the Realist.

There are “definite types of temperament” which are constant possibilities “in all times and places” and it is from these, as from a kind of birth, that human experience2 variously derives. Lodge himself saw three such primary types, not two, but he agreed that two of these were “the Idealist and the Realist”. Lodge thought that the central charge for ‘comparative’ philosophy was to recognize these possibilities in action and to weigh any and all assertions formed from them in light of how they might equally appear from the vantage of the ‘precluded’ ones.3 He found this contest of foundations (which McLuhan would later style an “ancient quarrel”) preeminently enacted in the dialogues of Plato.

Already in his first months in Cambridge McLuhan reported rethinking the ‘Platonist’ model:

Now I can heartily recommend GK [Chesterton’s] book4 on St Thomas (…) He deals with Plato and Aristotle and their influence on Christendom (…) It is useful broadly to distinguish PI and Arist as tending towards Bhuddism [sic] and Christianity respectively. Plato was an oriental in mind5 (…) Aristotle heartily accepts the senses just as Browning did and says: (…) “All good things / Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul”.6 And that is why great Aquinas accepted Aristotle into Christian theology. (McLuhan to his family, November 10, 1934, Letters 39)

A few months later, early in 1935, McLuhan rejected Lodge’s comparative notion out of hand through his first exposure to Maritain’s Aristotle :

As a handbook on Philosophy with especial regard to its historical development I strongly commend Maritain’s “Introd. to Phil” (…) He is the greatest living French thinker and is one of the foremost students and interpreters of Aquinas. Like most French texts it is a marvel of lucidity and order. I have read or dipped into numerous histories (all of which supposed Augustine and Aquinas were spoofers) and which therefore misunderstood everything that happened in society and philosophy after them. It is for his sympathy in this matter as well as his general account that I recommend him to you7 as certain to prove most coherent and stimulating. Lodge is a decided Platonist and I learned that way [of thinking] as long as I was trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative (!) religion. Having perceived the sterility of that process, I now realize that Aristotle is the soundest basis for Xian doctrine. (McLuhan to his family, February 1935, Letters 53-54)

At just this same time, McLuhan was taking a course on the Poetics of Aristotle given by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘Q’, doyen of the Cambridge English school and editor of the renowned Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900: 

Having just returned from the Divinity School where “Q” recommenced his course on The Poetics of Aristotle, I wish to set down certain facts while they are fresh. There was just one other chap with me and so we were able to be a very chatty trio. (McLuhan to his family, February 7, 1935, Letters 57)

Philip Marchand’s biography of McLuhan makes too much of the image of the farmboy set loose among the sophisticates,8 but it must indeed have been a life-altering experience, one among many, for McLuhan to have had what amounted to a tutorial with one of the leading literary minds in Britain on, no less, Aristotle’s Poetics! As will be documented in further posts, McLuhan would continue to consider the Poetics, and to learn from it, for the rest of his life.

In his two undergraduate years at Cambridge, 1934-1936, McLuhan  experienced tectonic shifts in his foundations. He recorded the experience for his family:

My position in regard to English Literature is altering rapidly. I have discovered that having in previous courses sampled numerous bits of it, I came to certain conclusions about them which really discouraged a further expansion of interest. I have discovered the utmost reluctance to open Keats or Shakespeare (…) largely because of an unconscious reluctance to disturb my previous judgements about them.  I have recently, in this new atmosphere, dissolved the old incrusted opinions (even where they were “correct” but none the less sterilizing) and obtained a fresh receptivity… (McLuhan to his family, February 1935, Letters 53-54)

As seen in his remarks on Christianity above, the same process as was happening in McLuhan’s reading of English Literature was taking place in regard to religion. Aristotle was central on both fronts and the introductory treatments by Chesterton and Maritain, along with the Poetics studied with Q, were the initial drivers of it.

 

  1. French original: 1920. ↩
  2. From early on McLuhan rejected the idea that human types characterize only styles of thinking. Instead, he insisted, they must apply to the whole person or persons (in the case of social entities). Like the relatively concrete “literary or artistic expression” to which he assigned equal rights with philosophy, the word “temperament” is revealing with its implication of emotions. McLuhan was already emphasizing, this in 1934 as a 22 year-old, that a typology of human being must cover any sort of experience whatever including, as he would soon insist, ‘ordinary cognition’. It was around 1950 that he would come to the formulation of the point he maintained for the rest of his life. In a series of papers he would argue that art is not derived from our individual and social life but, rather, our individual and social life from art. An artwork ‘retrieves’ or ‘replays’ or ‘retraces’ the genesis of experience (objective genitive) which is originally ‘poetic’. As he put it in his 1969 Playboy Interview, the key insight concerns “the identity of the processes of cognition and creation”. But already in 1951 in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ he could put the point in this way: “this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning (ie, the perceptual in the sense of learning about the world before one) and the creative processes in (…) the (…) moment of (…) awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative (is revealed in art) by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension”. (The bracketed specifications in the preceding sentences are editorial additions.)  The types of human experience — what he would come in the course of the 1950s to call “media” — are not first of all philosophical or even artistic categories, but are the general poetics encoded in any and all experience (including in philosophy and art as special cases of it). ↩
  3. See The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge: “To take one pathway, of itself precludes taking either of the others.” McLuhan’s decided rejection of Lodge as an undergrad at Cambridge did not stand in the way of his adopting Lodge’s central ideas as the foundation of his PhD thesis a decade later. With Lodge he would argue that there are three recurrent forms in the western tradition and that “in studying the history of (the trivium), dialectics and rhetoric, as indeed, of grammar, it is unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts” given the “essential opposition” between them (Classical Trivium, 43). ↩
  4. The Dumb Ox, 1933.  McLuhan apparently read the book the year after its publication just after his arrival in Cambridge. He may have done so on the recommendation of Father Phelan in Toronto. But as an increasingly active Chestertonian, he hardly needed any external suggestion. McLuhan’s copy is not in his library in Toronto. ↩
  5. Maritain’s Introduction: “It would appear, by way of the Pythagorean school that certain distinctively Oriental conceptions and modes of thought first entered Greece, to pass from Pythagoreanism to Platonism and neo-Platonism, and thence, swollen by further additions, into Gnosticism and the more or less underground stream of heterodox speculation.” (59n) ↩
  6. Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”, #12, 1864. ↩
  7. McLuhan’s brother, Maurice, who became a United Church minister. ↩
  8. When McLuhan entered Cambridge in the fall of 1934, he already had 6 years of university behind him and had been awarded B.A and M.A. degrees. He had toured England with Tom Easterbrook in 1932. While his western Canadian background would certainly have led him to different impressions of Cambridge than those of most of his fellow students, so in other ways would his relative maturity and more extensive knowledge. ↩

Frye’s References to McLuhan in his Collected Works

The following is a post at the Northrop Frye blog, The Educated Imagination, which is archived here since that blog is now largely inactive. The editor’s notations are italicized.

***

Of the twenty-nine volumes of Frye’s Collected Works, there are references to McLuhan in twenty-three of them, from his 1949 diary to the late notebooks of the 1980s and one of his last interviews in November 1990. Here they are.

1940s

From the 1949 diary:

Norma Arnett came up to me last night & wanted to know why a poem she (and I remember to some extent) thought was good had not been considered even for honourable mention in the Varsity contest. . . I said the judge was just plain wrong (I think it was McLuhan, so it’s a reasonable enough assumption). (CW 8, 94)

Marshall McLuhan went after me [regarding a paper on Bacon’s essays] with talk about essences & so on –- Helen Garrett reported back from Jack that he’d said he was out to get me. He didn’t quite, though a stranger would have been startled by his tone. Actually, I imagine he agreed with a fair amount of the paper, though he didn’t say so when I went home with him. . . McLuhan again on his anti-English line –- I think Jack Garrett is right in regarding it as a phobia. (CW 8, 143)

McLuhan did say something after all yesterday, about Germans. Said when a German met another human being it was like a root meeting a stone: he had to warp & twist himself into the most extraordinary convolutions to get around to the unpleasant fact of someone else’s existence. (CW 8, 145)

McLuhan’s Forum article [“Color-bar of BBC English”] suggests that he suffered abominably from the kind of self-consciousness he denies. (CW 8, 168)

Went for lunch with McLuhan and Ned [Pratt]. . . McLuhan brought up the subject about his magazine [about media communications] again. (CW 8, 209)

1950s

From the 1950 diary:

Marshall talked quite well about Wyndham Lewis: first he read a statement, in rather stilted language, about Lewis’ conception of the mask, & then read some amusing bits from the autobiography. . . Considering that Lewis at Rugby got a cup the boys give for six floggings in one day (after getting five & finding the day nearly at an end, he went & bounced a tennis ball against the headmaster’s door) & was kicked out of the Slade in two weeks, I don’t know if Toronto’s attitude was as provincial as he seems to think. (CW 8, 262)

McLuhan said the medieval critics distinguished epic from romance on the ethos-pathos basis –- the association of romance & pathos (passivity, stress on event) made me prick my ears, & I must look into it. (CW 8, 316)

From Notebook 33 (1946-1950/1953-1956):

The detective story is therefore a conservative form: it demonstrates the rightness of society vis-a-vis the criminal. The people who like them best are people who are confident of the essential solidity of the social order, or try to be & seek their reassurance from the detective story. As McLuhan pointed out to me, the detective is a man-hunter, & has about him the glamour of the F.B.I, the London bobby, the Canadian Mounties, & so on. Sherlock Holmes wears a hunting cap. (CW 15, 75)

From the 1952 diary:

I told Marshall that anything I said about any writing I was going to do was just official communique & meant go ‘way & don’t bother me, & he said he’d heard that was the line I took with the Guggenheim Committee. I don’t know who told him. . . Marshall has a tremendous fund of literary gossip. (CW 8, 385)

They [a number of colleagues at a party] discussed a recent article by Al Capp in Life announcing that he wasn’t going to be America’s only good social satirist any more, because he (or his syndicate, I couldn’t make out which) thought that satire was getting un-American. . .

They debated whether it was ironical or not, & it was suggested that the recent marriage to Daisy Mae meant he was going in exclusively for domestic humour. But Marshall pooh-poohed the idea: he said Cappy was just getting started, beginning with the projected birth of a son on July 4 called Yankee Doodle Yokum. (CW 8, 562-3)

In the morning I managed to waste time collecting the committee for Sanborn’s exam. Roper, McLuhan, [Norman] Endicott & myself, in Endicott’s office. McLuhan suggested a single overall question, which I had to fight. It’s bad enough having having to struggle with Woodhouse over exam questions, trying to get something that’s less Woodhouse party line, trying to make him see that what he’s not interested in isn’t necessarily always peripheral to the subject, and now here’s Marshall, a worse party-liner even than Woodhouse. His question followed exactly the general outline of (a) his course (b) Hugh Kenner’s book on Pound, and even though Sanborn had taken the course I thought it was bad for discipline to accept the single-question formula. Marshall didn’t give in too gracefully, identifying me with Toronto prissiness as he did so. (CW 8, 576)

From the Anatomy of Criticism notebooks (c. 1952/1953):

Marshall McLuhan says that Sidney regarded the prose epic, the Cryopaedia, More’s Utopia, & so on, as the highest form of literary art, & that that was the highbrow attitude as opposed to Spenser’s middlebrow attempt to combine popular romance & sound doctrine. This, naturally, is pretty speculative, but the existence of the conception of a prose epic in Renaissance criticism is something I badly need. Also as providing a link with the other half of rhetoric: oratory, & so of the assimilation of the hero to the prophet  via oratory: the existential situation clarified by epiphany being, as in the Incarnation, also a historical “occasion.” (CW 23, 139)

From the 1955 diary:

Carpenter’s Explorations 4 is out, in a most handsome Kandinskyish cover. It has my archetypes thing and Miller MacLure’s Dylan Thomas article, but is otherwise as silly as ever. Except that article by Ong saying the Hebrews talked in terms of the ear & the Greeks the eye, & our conceptual language has got steadily more spiritual as ever, let the cat out of the bag as far as Marshall’s main thesis is concerned. I mean, now I know what he thinks he’s talking about. Back to oral tradition, the ear, and the Word of God. . .

Marshall has issued [his privately published pamphlet] “Counter Blast”: his love affair with the twenties is getting indecent. (CW 8, 606)

1960s

From “Comment” (1961):

Father Ong refers to my colleague Professor Marshall McLuhan, who is one of the few contemporary critics to realize another axiom: at no point can the criticism of contemporary literature be separated from the study of the whole verbal culture of our time, which includes, of course, the whole verbal anarchy of our time. (CW 29, 171)

From “The Drunken Boat” (1963):

In Rimbaud, though his bateau ivre has given me my title, the poet is se faire voyant, the illuminations are thought of pictorially; even the vowels must be visually coloured. Such an emphasis has nothing to do with the pre-Romantic sense of an objective structure in nature: on the contrary, the purpose of it is to intensify the Romantic sense of oracular significance into a kind of autohypnosis. The association of autohypnosis and the visual sense is discussed in Marshall McLuhan’s book, The Gutenberg Galaxy. Such an emphasis leads to a technique of fragmentation. (CW 17, 90)

From “The Changing Pace in Canadian Education” (1963) :

In a book which many of you have seen, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Professor Marshall McLuhan speaks of contemporary society as a postliterate society; that is, a society which has gone through a phase of identifying knowledge with the written word and is now gaining its knowledge from all kinds of of other media which affect the ear as well as the eye. The ability to twitch ears is the mark of the animal which is constantly exposed to danger, and Mr. McLuhan is well aware of the context to which the increase in such media brings with it an increase in panic. He quotes one or two examples of panic in contemporary writers, including some intellectually respectable ones, and remarks, “Terror is a normal state in an oral society, because everything is happening to everyone all the time.” This sense of panic is occasionally rationalized on the level of practical intelligence itself, by people who speak of commitment as though it were a virtue in itself: don’t just stand there, get yourself committed. This is the attitude which was described many years ago by H.G. Wells as the “Gawdsakers” –- the people people who continually say, “For Gawd’s sake, let’s do something.” (CW 7, 174)

From “The Road of Excess” (1963):

I still have a copy of Blake that I used as an undergraduate, and I see that in the margin beside this passage1 I have written the words “Something moves, anyhow.” But even that was more of an expression of hope than considered critical judgement. This plotless type of writing has been discussed by a good deal of other critics, notably Hugh Kenner and Marshall McLuhan, who call it “mental landscape,” and ascribe its invention to the French symbolistes. But in Blake we not only have the technique already complete, but an even more thoroughgoing way of presenting it. (CW 16, 318)

From Notebook 19 (c. 1964-1967):

The opposite of verbal perception is the presentation, the communicated message, what Marshall talks about. Marshall says it’s the form & not the content of the message that’s important, which is why the nature of the medium is also important. It seems to me that the form has this importance only as long as we’re unconscious of it: to become aware of the form as a form is to separate the content. At that point the presentation goes into reverse & becomes a perception: the form comes from us then.

Such a reversal of movement. . .is of course a hinge of all my thinking. Marshall’s “extensions of man” version of it comes from Samuel Butler. A jet plane can move faster & a computer thinks faster than a man, but no machine yet invented has any will to do these things. The will is the reversal of movement from a receptive response stimuli to a Gestalt. No machine can yet make this reversal: no camera, in Blake’s phrase, can look through its lens. I have a feeling that Marshall doesn’t get past the presentation at all, but I’m doubtless wrong. (CW 9, 15)

Roman Catholic education has always been summa-centred, for obvious reasons. In Newman all humanism & individual-centred education has to be sacrificed on the summa altar, or else. Hence Catholic intellectuals go in for great co-ordinating patterns, but are too timid & anxiety-ridden to try to get beyond this point. Or else, like Marshall, they work out their own line on the assumption that the summa is in the background ready to take care of it. (CW 9, 28)

I think my body-and-extensions of body might be a central theme in the McMaster lectures, in view of the importance of abstract extension in Canadian landscape and (McLuhan) thought & culture. (CW 9, 34)

I haven’t yet read Marshall’s “the medium is the message” book, but. . .there is something magnifying in an address to the ear alone, something that reduces scale on a purely visual level. Hearing Hitler’s 1939 speeches was a terrifying & hideous experience. . . .but I wonder if he could have survived television. For in television you can turn the sound off, & that would reduce Hitler to Charlie Chaplin in no time. (CW 9, 38)

Marshall says everything we do today is a potential item in a computer information file: cf. archaeology, & some history, which shows so obviously an apocalyptic perspective on the past. (CW 9, 65)

Two things to get rid of. It’s no use saying I like resemblances more than discriminations: literature is an art & identity and resemblances are positive. Again, it’s no use saying my genres are a false analogy to biology just because it’s impossible to work out an a priori theory that things must be so. Even if you start with a completely chaotic view of art, like McLuhan’s view that art is anything that A can put over on B, the next step will tell you that putting over involves the conventionalizing of what you say, & so genres arise. (CW 9, 95)

From “Speculation and Concern” (1965):

I speak of course of the arts in the plural because there is a group of them: music, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, perhaps others. The dance, for instance, is in practice a separate art, though in theory it is difficult to see it as anything but a form of musical expression. It seems inherently unlikely, at the time of writing, that we have yet to develop a new art, despite all the strenuous experiment that there has been, some of it in that direction. Marshall McLuhan says of the new media of communication that “the medium is the message,” and that the content of each medium is the form of another one. This surely means, if I understand it correctly, that each medium is a distinctive art. Thus the “message” of sculpture is the medium of sculpture, distinct from the message which is the medium of painting. But, as McLuhan also emphasizes, the new media are extensions of the human body, of what we already do with our eyes and ears and throats and hands. Hence they have given us new forms or variations of the arts we now have, and the novelty of these forms constitutes a major imaginative revolution in our time. But though distinctive arts they are not actually new arts: they are new techniques for receiving the impression of words and pictures. (CW 7, 248-9)

From the “Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada” (1965):

What is perhaps the most comprehensive structure of ideas yet made by a Canadian thinker, the structure embodied by Innis’s Bias of Communication, is concerned with the same theme, and a disciple of Innis, Marshall McLuhan, continues to emphasize the unity of communication, as a complex containing both verbal and non-verbal factors, and warns us against making unreal divisions within it. (CW 12, 349)

Marshall McLuhan speaks of the world as reduced to a single gigantic primitive village, where everything has the same kind of immediacy. He speaks of the fears that so many intellectuals have of such a world, and remarks amiably: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” The Canadian spirit, to personify it as a single being dwelling in the country from the early voyages to the present, might well, reading this sentence, feel that this was where he came in. In other words, new conditions give the old ones a new importance, as what vanishes in one form reappears in another. (CW 12, 371)

From “Style and Image in the Twentieth Century” (Broadcast 14 March 1967: interview with Murray MacQuarrie):

MacQuarrie: I suppose emotionally I’m a Tory in that I think that the sense of identity and sense of completeness you derive from existing within a dogmatic structure are a more benevolent and therapeutic thing than the experience of simply existing in an open field of dialogue — shall we say in a world now where there is nothing to do but communicate and where the content of the communication is largely disappearing. That’s a reactionary view: I suppose like many critics and academics the reactionism is an occupational hazard isn’t it?

Frye: Yes. Well, it’s partly that this McLuhan world, where the medium is the message, means that, when communication forms a total environment, nothing is really being communicated. What there is is really just an ambiance of noise. Out of that noise a single, genuine effort at communication — that is, something intelligible being said by A to B — cuts across with a kind of vividness which is perhaps unparalleled in history. The role of genuine communication becomes much more obvious and immediate once this tremendous roaring environment of false communication has been set up by the mass media. When I speak of an open mythology, I am not saying that we’ve entered a civilization which is completely relative and where there can be no standards and no doctrine and no real beliefs or convictions any more. That seems to me to be nonsense. That’s the exact opposite of what I’m talking about. There is no difference between an open mythology and a closed one except in the difference that society makes of it. The real way to strengthen one’s beliefs and convictions and to make the axioms of one’s belief not merely a professed creed, but the real principles underlying one’s conduct, is to regard them as under the judgment of dialogue and “the Parliament of man,” as still something that can always be liberalized, made flexible, and fill with the love and respect for other people which the open-sidedness of the myth makes possible. (CW 24, 56-7)

From “Dix An savant la Néo-critique” (Conducted late April 1967):

Frye: Je pense que McLuhan ne distinguée pas suffisamment entre l’attitude active et l’attitude passive, entre less possibilities nouvelles que la technique nous offer et les dangers qu’elle suscite. Le cult de McLuhan prend son point de depart dans l’illusion du progress. Il donne l’impression que les medias donnerant naissance a une nouvelle civilisation. Voila qui n’est point prouvé. Tout dépendra de la maniere dont la société fera usage de ces medias. (CW 24, 61)

From The Modern Century (1967):

The role of communications media in the modern world is a subject that Professor Marshall McLuhan has made so much his own that it would be almost a discourtesy not to refer to him in a lecture which covers many of his themes. The McLuhan cult, or more accurately the McLuhan rumour, is the latest of the illusions of progress: it tells us that a number of new media are about to bring in a new form of civilization all by themselves, merely by existing. Because of this we should not, in staring at a television set, wonder if we are wasting our time and develop guilt feelings accordingly: we should feel that we are evolving a new mode of apprehension. What is important about the television set is not the quality of what it exudes, which is only content, but the fact that it is there, the end of a tube with a vortical suction which “involves” the viewer. This is not at all of what a serious mind and most original writer is trying to say, yet Professor McLuhan lends himself partly to this interpretation by throwing so many of his insights into a deterministic form. He would connect the alienation of progress with the habit of forcing a hypnotized eye to travel over thousands of miles of type, in what is so accurately called the pursuit of knowledge. But apparently he would see the Gutenberg syndrome as a cause of the alienation of progress, and not simply as one of its effects. Determinism of this kind, like the determinism which derives Confederation from the railway, is a plausible but oversimplified form of rhetoric. (CW 11, 20-1)

From “A Meeting of Minds” (1967):

It is particularly important for Marshall McLuhan to have this kind of space [The Centre for Culture and Technology] around him because he is a very enigmatic and aphoristic type of thinker, an easy person to distort and misunderstand. On the periphery there is a large McLuhan rumour which says, “Nobody reads books any more –- Marshall McLuhan is right.” This, of course, is something of an oversimplification of what a quite important person has to say. So I think it is important for the university to have a structure that will permit serious and dedicated people to get a bit closer to him, not only to understand him, but so they can work out their own ideas in some kind of reference to his. (CW 7, 307)

From “Literature and Society” (1968):

As you all know, within recent times another colleague of mine at Toronto, Marshall McLuhan, has attacked the same question on a much broader front. He has pointed to the immense impact that other media of communication besides books are now making, and has drawn from his observation of this impact the principle, which seems sound enough in itself, that we are returning to some of the social features of a preliterate culture, which means a retribalizing of society, as he calls it, hence his phrase about the global village. What worries me about this thesis is the way in which it has been received by what I call the Eros mentality of the American public. A facile and shallow optimism, a belief in automatic progress, a confidence that a new civilization can be brought about by certain gadgets merely because the gadgets are there, is always close to the surface of American feeling. Along with it goes a constant wish to abdicate moral dignity and responsibility. I am not speaking of McLuhan himself here, but there is one feature in his writing that seems to me to help to encourage such a response, the feature that I have called determinism. I have learned to distrust all determinisms, whether they are economic or religious or mediumistic: they seem to me essentially theoretical devices, which help to make a doctrine more popular and easier to grasp. New media of communication are not causes of social change: they are only the conditions of change, and we cannot discover the direction of social change from them; it is society itself that will determine the direction of change. (CW 27, 277)

As soon as oral and preliterate characteristics make themselves felt in society, a patriarchal figure is likely to make his appearance in the middle of that society. This patriarchal figure may be at first simply an amiable figurehead (Eisenhower), or counter-tendencies in society may throw up opposing symbols of youth and energy (Trudeau, the Kennedys); but if society does not arrest the drift it is likely to go from King Log to King Stork, from reassuring images to Big Brother. Considering McLuhan has very explicitly warned us against this danger, it would be unfairly ironic if he were to become the Pied Piper of our generation. (CW 27, 278)

From “The Social Context of Literary Criticism” (1968):

The strong centrifugal drift away from criticism into other subjects, which had set in at least as early as Coleridge, continues in our own day. Sometimes this drift represents a genuine expanding of the scope of criticism, or even, as with my Toronto colleague Marshall McLuhan, a new mosaic code. But it often take the form of treating the work of literature as an illustration of something outside literature. (CW 10, 348-9)

From “Research and Graduate Education in the Humanities” (1968):

There is, of course, a superstition in our time that this complex, configurated, and, in a sense, mythical thinking is something that can only be brought to us from the new media. I happen to be on a board in Canada concerned with communications, and this board had a committee of policy report to it which recommended that the board should issue publications from time to time. The sentence with which it began this recommendation read: “Despite the disadvantages inherent in the linear representation of a world that is increasingly simultaneous, print still retains its medieval authority.” This sentence, I suppose, is typical of the kind of nitwitted McLuhanism which is confusing the educational scene. McLuhan himself, of course, is another matter, but I think that even he fails to distinguish between the actual operation of reading a book, which is linear, turning over the pages, and following the lines of type from the upper left-hand corner to the lower right, and the effect of a book on the mind as a unity, once read. As that, the book is, and in the foreseeable future will remain, the indispensable tool of the scholar in the humanities. (CW 7, 340)

From “L’Anti-McLuhan” (Conducted 14 November 1968: interview with Naim Kattan):

Kattan: Le livre est-il condamné?

Frye: Non, malgré ce que dissent les imateurs de McLuhan. On a beaucoup simplifié la pensée de ce dernier. Il y a point sur lequel je ne suis pas d’accord avec lui. Il dit que le livre est linéaire et que notre culture est simultanée. Mais la il confound la lecture d’une livre et l’impact excercé par cette lecture, une fois terminée. On lit un livre d’une maniere linéaire, page per page, mais une fois la lecture terminée l’impact s’excerce d’une maniere simultanée. (CW 24, 76-77)

From “Canadian Literature and Culture” (c. late 1960s):

McLuhan’s development out of Innis: Innis’ thesis about the control of communications by an ascendant class never came through clearly, because Innis himself wasn’t committed enough to understand his own real argument. The university was his garrison, and he was perhaps the last major example of that in Canadian life. You can’t hold a vision of that size and scope steadily without more commitment to a society as a whole than he had. McLuhan of course was the other extreme: he got on the manic-depressive roller coaster of the news media, so he was unreasonably celebrated in the early sixties and unreasonably neglected thereafter. (CW 25, 199)

McLuhan would perhaps have remained unknown if he had talked of the global town (although he does use the FW phrase “the urb it orbs,” or global city). (CW 25, 234)

From “Criticism and Society” (c. late 1960s):

But when I look at the books on the shelves of my study, it does not seem as though the criticism of the other arts was the field into which literary critics naturally expanded when they began to deal with larger and broader issues. I can see in front of me on the walls of my study such books as Lionel Trilling’s Beyond Culture, Leslie Fiedler’s An End to Innocence, Irving Howe’s Steady Work, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. These are all books written by literary critics. They all deal with matters considerably removed from literary criticism and yet they say about them the things that a person trained in literary criticism would look for and would naturally say. (CW 10, 229)

From “Engagement and Detachment” (Filmed 1968: interview with Roby Kidd and D.M. Smyth):

Smyth: Do you think that in the field of education our approach to rhetoric or rhetorical skills is sufficiently sophisticated for people to understand the subtleties of modern forms of communication?

Frye: They could be sophisticated and subtle enough — yes. I would strongly agree with Marshall McLuhan, who is saying very different things from what a lot of people think he’s saying, when he says that one of the central duties of education is to provide “civil defence against media fallout.” That’s his phrase. (CW 24, 70)

From “The Only Genuine Revolution” (Recorded 30 December 1968: interview by Bruce Mickelburgh):

Frye: [I]t seems to me that one reason for studying rhetoric is to show the student how advertising is a form of rhetoric and what its means of rhetorical persuasion are. Most sensible adults take advertising rather ironically as a kind of game. They respond to it all right — they’ll buy the car— but I think they can distinguish reality from illusion to that extent. I should think, though, that for somebody of the age of ten or twelve it might come as something of a shock of disillusionment to find out that advertising does not in fact mean what it says, is never intended to mean what it says. It seems to me that’s the age level at which one can bring about a revolution in one’s attitude to language far deeper than conventional literature can make at that age.

Mickelburgh: How would you go about doing that?

Frye: I would simply give them advertisements — the technique of Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride. Just say, “Now what forms of persuasion are being used in this ad? What sort of person are they trying to make you pretend you are?” (CW 24, 166-7)

From Notebook 12 (1968-70):

McLuhan has of course enormously expanded my thesis about the return of irony to myth. His formulation is hailed as revolutionary by those who like to think that the mythical-configuration-involved comprehension is (a) with it (b) can be obtained by easier methods than by use of intelligence. Hence everyone who disagrees (as in all revolutionary arguments) can be dismissed as linear or continuous. But there are two kinds of continuity involved: one is the older detached individuality, the other the cultural and historical continuity of preserving one’s identity and memory and moving from one to the other. The issue here is a moral issue between freedom of consciousness and obsessive totalitarianism, plunging into a Lawrentian Dionysian war-dance. (CW 9, 145)

When I settled into my real line I naturally wanted to be “great” there too: but maybe the great mind is obsolete. . . [S]omething about greatness ended around 1940. We’re doing different things now. Marshall McLuhan is a typical example: a reputation as a great thinker based on the fact that he doesn’t think at all. (CW 9, 146)

And, of course, I’m doubling back on my criticism of McLuhan. Centrifugal meaning tends to be sequential & linear: the Logos as (a) discursive logic (b) history or sequence of events. Centripetal meaning leads to thematic stasis. Here we have the simultaneous perception that takes off from recognition: totality of metaphor mandala diagrams included. (CW 9, 184)

The theoretical aim of the verbal icon stage is the vision of the poem’s unity, but explication is so preoccupied with retracing the process of reading that it often doesn’t get that far. The first line [centripetal meaning] is the McLuhan axis, the communication determinism balanced by the extreme formalism of identifying medium and message. (Of course he goes into the second stage [centrifugal meaning] a good deal too.) (CW 9, 188-9)

Of course the foreground antithesis, a very minor one, is the contrast represented by McLuhan and myself. I hold to the continuous, encyclopedic, linear-narrative Christian structure, and, of course, “discontinuous” is very much an in-word at present. There is no such thing as a discontinuous poem, though there are poems, like Pound’s Cantos, that try to force the reader to establish the continuity of what he’s reading, instead of providing it for him ready-made. (CW 9, 232)

[T]he more I think about McLuhan’s obiter dicta, the more the exact opposite of what he says seems to me to be true. As I say earlier in this notebook, the oral tradition is linear: we’re pulled along by it in time, & at the end there’s nothing. Writing provides a spatial focus: the process of reading a book is linear, but at the end you have the “simultaneous” possession of the whole thing. Also in a newspaper. That’s why writing is democratic, potentially: the oral tradition is much closer to the mob, with its easy access to “lend me your ears” rhetoric. Its revival today goes with anarchism, and also with unscripted improvised dramas, music, and socio-political “happenings.” (CW 9, 237)

From “Sign and Significance” (1969):

The process of explication is consequently easiest to follow, and best organized, when it starts with a sense of the poem’s unity and works deductively from there. Explication sometimes gets so involved in retracing the process of reading, and with mapping out the intricacies of ambiguity and the like encountered on the way, that it tends to lead one away from the sense of unity. McLuhan, again, reflects this difficulty, which he makes the basis of a distinction between print and electronic media. This is of course a technical difficulty only, but explicators who have been most successful in overcoming it, such as Spitzer and Auerbach, raise implicitly other questions of theory. (CW 27, 297-8)

In Marshall McLuhan, who was trained essentially in this school as a [New] critic, an extreme and somewhat paradoxical formalism, which identifies medium and message, has been placed in a Neo-Marxist context of determinism in which communications media play the role that “means of production” do in more orthodox Marxism. A good many traces of an older religious determinism can be found in The Gutenberg Galaxy (CW 27, 298)

From “CRTC Guru,” (Conducted December 1968-July 1969: interview with Rodrique Chiasson):

Frye: May I talk at random for a minute, and if I get anywhere that’s of some use to you then just say so. There’s a paradox in oral communication that looks for two contradictory things: one is detachment, the other is involvement. . . News should be reported objectively and create a mood of detachment in the viewer. There are other things which demand his concern, his involvement. In a drama, the attempt is normally to involve the watcher in a story. On the other hand you have people like Brecht saying that what he wants is to chop holes in the rhetorical façade, to alienate his audience so that they will be detached from the play and in command of their own souls. If you had an incompetent Brecht, what he would produce would be almost identical with the ordinary television program which is interrupted every five minutes by a commercial. Now it seems to me that the way to genuine detachment is not through interruption but through the building up of very small organizations, in a discontinuous sequence. I’m not speaking of discontinuity in the sense of not having sequence, I’m speaking rather of the rhythm in the sequence. If a man writes a book, he’s writing a continuous piece of prose, and you keep turning over the pages, from one paragraph to another; but if he’s a wise man, a guru, an oracle, what he will do is talk in a series of detached paragraphs. That’s an oracular style: it has been from Heraclites to Marshall McLuhan. There are pauses between each remark and this pause requires a great deal of concentration, but it also leaves you in command of your soul. (CW 24, 113)

From “The Limits of Dialogue” (Broadcast 19 February 1969: interview with Eli Mandel):

Frye: Many religious thinkers are convinced that there is [a dialectic as well as a dialogue with God]. For example, Martin Buber, in speaking of the I-Thou relationship in religion, says that the dialogue is really the central form of religious experience. It seems to me that this doesn’t happen only in religion. It happens whenever anybody writes a book and presents it to the public. It looks as though a book written entirely by one person is a dictatorial or authoritarian kind of monologue, where the writer is simply holding your buttonhole and not letting you go until he’s finished. But actually the written sequential treatise is a very democratic form of dialogue with the reader. The author is putting all his cards on the table in front of you. He has made his response to the subject with which he has been in dialogue. He is not transmitting the possibility of dialogue to his reader. If he has really retreated into the upper limits of silence, then he will not write continuously. He will write in separate paragraphs, that is, in aphorisms, or detached oracular utterances. Oracular writers, from Heraclitus to Marshall McLuhan, have always written prose of that kind, that is, in separated sentences, where every sentence is surrounded by a bit packet of silence. (CW 24, 176)

From Notebook 11f (1969-70):

In my early Yeats paper I talked about a hyper-physical world. . .of unseen beings, angels, spirits, devils, demons, djinns, daemons, ghosts, elemental spirits, etc. It’s the world of the “inspiration” of poet or prophet, of premonitions of death, telepathy, extra-sensory perception, miracle, telekinesis, & a good deal of “luck”. . . Fundamentally, it’s the world of buzzing though not booming confusion that the transistor radio is a symbol of. The world of communication which inspires terror. . . Before we come out on the other side of it we recognize the ordinary life as part of it, a Bardo perspective out of which apocalypse, or stage 2, finally comes. It’s the polytheistic world of contending & largely unseen forces; it’s the world of terror that McLuhan associates with the oral stage of culture: twitching ears, & a poor sense of direction. (CW 13, 90)

McLuhan’s medium & message formula was an effort to show that each medium is a mode of perception, & not just different ways of presenting the same content. But nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer’s mode of perception; he thinks of it as his way (if he’s a producer of advertiser) of reaching a viewer. We were astonished when blacks started to smash & loot: we hadn’t thought of television as their way of seeing an affluent white society gorging itself on luxury goods & privileges. No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn’t realize that television is their way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them.

So we still haven’t grasped the implications of the fact that contemporary unrest is middle-class dissatisfaction. If the medium is the message, & newspapers & magazines & radio & television all carry the same message, it follows that they’re all pretty much the same medium. McLuhan’s distinction of cool and low-definition media & their opposites is really a distinction between media where the mode of perception is an essential aspect & the modes that are primarily spectacular, like the movie & the ballet. Spectacular forms tend to a kind of entropy: the film avoided this by developing an “involving” vortex technique of symbolism that such in the viewer & puts him there–2001 was a corny but effective example. The drug cults have a lot to do with the desire to develop new modes of perception which the mass media have cheated & let down. (CW 13, 95-6)

The religious quest of youth today shows up in the search for human contact, encounter groups, folk singers, the sense of comradeship attained in demonstrations (of course it’s the enemy outside that makes it all so cuddly, not the friends inside.) Television is like a telescope, a new method of perception which tells us more, but also makes what it sees look cold, dead, and inconceivably remote. Global village my ass. (Every idea contains its own opposite or antithesis.)

The “flow of information,” which is mostly disinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths. Take another McLuhan phrase, “global village”–one early satellite broadcast was called the “town meeting of the world.” The myth behind this phrase assumes that every technological development creates a new anxiety & understanding–that a village is a community of friends. But, of course, a village may be a community of cliques & feuds & backbiting & gossip of a ferocity far worse than any metropolis, like those hideous little towns at the divisional points of railways, where the conductor’s wife couldn’t compromise her dignity by speaking to the brakeman’s wife. So when communicators, with a schoolteacher’s bright & glassy smile, say: now we’re going to be able to create a dialogue with Paraguay & Tanzania, & won’t that be nice? the reaction is, very often: we don’t want all those people in our living room: we want to get together with the people who speak our language & share our beliefs & prejudices, including, if we’re lucky, a minority that we can have fun of kicking around. Separatism, except when it is a genuine effort to escape from tyranny, is in most respects a mean, squalid & neurotic philosophy, but it is the strongest force yet thrown up by the age of total communication. (CW 13, 97)

From Notes 58-7 (1969/1975):

[H]aving worked with archetypes all my life, I feel that the world in which Jung’s unconscious forces emerge and threaten sometimes to overthrow the ego-consciousness is really an interpenetrating global village. Archetypes represent a world-wide language independent of time and space. The phrase global village made [Marshall] McLuhan famous, and the present eclipse of his reputation is due to the fact that people surmised that he was on to something, but got disillusioned by his apparent inference that the electronic media actually communicate news of this world, which they bloody well don’t. (CW 20, 249-50)

From Notebook 21 (1969-71):

The analogy of intuition is the idol of the cave; the analogy of intellect, which is also the aesthetic analogy, is the idol of the theatre. These are respectively the mother in the depths & the father in the sky: note that the eagle here is descending to a lower sky. The analogy of feeling, the sexual analogy that runs through Lawrence, Swinburne, Yeats, Nietzsche & Freud, is the idol of the tribe: what it creates is a blood-unit that is tribal, in the McLuhan sense. It’s Orc bound to the cycle, leaving the east void. The analogy of sensation, the empiric analogy that is founded on communication, is the marketplace. (CW 13, 176)

1970s

From “Rear-View Crystal Ball” (1970):

Marshall McLuhan has a phrase about reactionaries who don’t get with it as people driving by a rear-view mirror. This assumes the monumental fallacy that we move forward in time as well as space, whereas actually, of course, we face the past, and the rear-view mirror of that direction is the shape of things to come. (CW 12, 408)

From “Communications” (1970):

One common assumption of this fact [the revival of the oral tradition in the electronic age], strongly influenced by Marshall McLuhan, is that print represents a “linear” and timebound approach to reality, and that the electronic media, by reviving the oral tradition, have brought in a new “simultaneous” or mosaic form of understanding. Contemporary unrest, in this view, is part of an attempt to adjust to a new situation and break away from the domination of print. This view is popular among American educators, because it makes for anti-intellectualism and the proliferating of gadgets, and I understand that for some of them the phrase “p.o.b,” meaning print-oriented bastard, has replaced s.o.b. as a term of abuse. It seems to me that his view is not so much wrong as perverted, the exact opposite is true. . .

The domination of print in Western society, then, has not simply made possible the technical engineering efficiency of that society, as McLuhan emphasizes. It has also created all the conditions of freedom within society: democratic government, universal education, tolerance of dissent, and (because the book individualizes its audience) the sense of the importance of privacy, leisure, and freedom of movement. What the oral media have brought in is, by itself, anarchist in its social consequences. (CW 11, 137-9)

From “The Definition of a University” (1970):

I am often asked if a student today is different from his predecessors, and usually the answer expected is yes. The answer happens to be no. There has been a tremendous increase in the rain of sense impressions from the electronic media, and this has produced a considerable alertness and power of perception on the part of students. However, the power to integrate and co-ordinate these impressions is no greater than it was. This is a situation which has been interpreted by my colleague, Professor Marshall McLuhan, but I would regard his interpretation, if I have understood it correctly, as quite different from mine. He distinguishes between the linear and fragmented approach which he associates with the printed book and the total and simultaneous response which he associates with the electronic media. It seems to me, on the other hand, that it is the existence of a written or printed document that makes a total and simultaneous response possible. It stays there: it can be referred to; it can become the focus of a community. It is the electronic media, I think, which have increased the number of linear and fragmented experiences–experiences which disappear as soon as one has had them–and because of that, they have also increased the general sense of panic and dither in modern society. At the same time, there is no doubt that television and the movies have developed new means of perception, and that they indicate the need for new educational techniques which, as far as I know, have not yet been worked out. I did hear a lecture some time ago by an educator which began by showing the audience a television commercial. He then said, “There is one thing in that commercial which all of you missed and which all the young people to whom it was shown got at once.” I thought to myself, “Now we’re getting to something important. Now we shall find out how education is going to adjust itself to this situation.” But, unfortunately, all he said after that was, “This indicates a fact of great educational importance. We don’t know quite what it is, but we have it under close study.” (CW 7, 419-20)

From “The Quality of Life in the 1970s” (1971):

The 1960s were also a period of becoming adjusted to new techniques of communication, more particularly the electronic ones. It was the McLuhan age, the age of intense preoccupation with the effect of communications on society, and with the aspect of life that we call news. Many of the worst features of the late ’60s, its extravagant silliness, its orgies of lying, its pointless terrorism and repression, revolved around the television set and the cult of “image.” (CW 11, 290)

From The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (1971):

During this period I had been an advisory member of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, which had compelled me to think a certain amount about the relation of literary criticism to communication theory–somewhat unwillingly, as I had assumed that my colleague Professor Marshall McLuhan was taking care of that subject. Consistently with the main them of this essay, the references to McLuhan in it are less about him than about the social stereotypes of McLuhanism. (CW 27, 5-6)

More recently, Marshall McLuhan has placed a formalist theory, expressed in the phrase “the medium is the message,” within the context of a neo-Marxist determinism in which communication media play the same role that instruments of production do in more orthodox Marxism. Professor McLuhan drafted his new Mosaic code under a strong influence from the conservative wing of the New Critical movement, and many traces of an earlier Thomist determinism can be found in The Gutenberg Galaxy. An example is the curiously exaggerated distinction he draws between the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages and the book culture of the printed page that followed it. (CW 27, 12-13)

The difficulty in transferring explication from the reading process to the study of structure has left some curious traces in New Critical theory. One of them is in Ransom, with his arbitrary assumption that texture is somehow more important for the critic than structure; another is again in McLuhan, who has expanded the two unresolved factors of explication into a portentous historical contrast between the “linear” demands of the old printed media and the “simultaneous” impact of the new electronic ones. The real distinction however is not between different kinds of media, but between the two operations of the mind which are employed in every contact with every medium. There is a “simultaneous” response to print; there is a “linear” response to painting, for there is a preliminary dance of the eye before we take in the whole picture; music, at the opposite end of experience, has its score, the spatial presentation symbolizing a simultaneous understanding of it. In reading a newspaper there are two preliminary operations, the glance over the headlines and the following down of a story. (CW 27, 16)

The effect of discontinuity is to suggest that the statements are existential, and have to be absorbed into the consciousness one at a time, instead of being linked with each other by argument. Oracular prose writers from Herclitus to McLuhan have exploited the sense of extra profundity that comes from leaving more time and space and less sequential connection at the end of sentence. (CW 27, 27)

Both oral poetry and the life it reflects rely on a spontaneity which has a thoroughly predictable general convention underlying it. It is consistent with the kind of culture that young people should be concerned, in McLuhan’s formulaic phrase, more with roles than goals, with a dramatic rather than a teleological conception of social function. . . We thus have, among other things, new forms of social activity which are really improvised symbolic dramas. (CW 27, 100)

The revival of oral culture in our day has been variously interpreted, and one interpretation, suggested and strongly influenced by McLuhan, is that print represents a “linear” and time-bound approach to reality, and that the electronic media, by reviving the oral tradition, have brought in a new “simultaneous” or mosaic form of understanding. Contemporary unrest, in this view, is part of an attempt to adjust to a new situation and break away from the domination of print. We saw in the first section, however, that the difference between the linear and the simultaneous is not a difference between two kinds of media, but a difference in two mental operations within all media, that there is always a linear response followed by a simultaneous one whatever the medium. For words, the document, the written or printed record, is the technical device that makes the critical or simultaneous understanding possible. The document is the model of all teaching, because it is infinitely patient, repeating the same words however often one consults it, and the spatial focus it provides makes it possible to return on the experience, a repetition of the kind that underlies all genuine education. The document is also the focus of a community of readers, and while this community may be restricted to one group for centuries, its natural tendency is to expand over the community as a whole. Thus it is only writing that makes democracy technically possible. It is significant that our symbolic term for a tyrant is “dictator,” that is, an uninterrupted oral speaker.

The domination of print in Western society, then, has not simply made possible the technical and engineering efficiency of that society, as McLuhan emphasizes; it has also created all the conditions of freedom within that society: democratic government, universal education, tolerance of dissent, and (because the book individualizes its audience) the sense of the importance of privacy, leisure, and freedom of movement. Democracy and book culture are interdependent, and the rise of oral and visual media represents, not a new order to adjust to, but a subordinate order to be contained. What the oral media have brought in is, by itself, anarchist in its social affinities. They suggest the primitive and tribal conditions to a preliterate culture, and to regard them as a new and autonomous order would lead, once again, to adopting a cyclical view of history, resigning ourselves to going around the circle again, back to conditions we have long ago outgrown. . .

It is all very well to say that the medium is the message, but as we seem to get much the same message from all the media, it follows that all media, within a given social environment like that of the Soviet Union or the United States, are much the same medium. This is because the real communicating media are still, as they always have been, words, images, and rhythms, not the electronic gadgets that convey them. The differences among the gadgets, whether they are of high or low definition and the like, must be of great technical interest, especially to those working with them, but they are clearly of limited social importance. If a country goes to war after developing television, the use of a “cooler” medium does not, unfortunately, cool off the war. The identification of medium and message is derived from the arts: painting, for instance, has no “message” except the medium of painting itself. But it is a false analogy to apply this principle to interested, or baited-trap, communication from A to B. There, one identifies form and content only as long as one is relatively unconscious of the form and still bemused by its novelty: but in direct communication, as soon as one becomes aware of the form, the content separates from it. (CW 27, 103-5)

From “Reviews for the CRTC” (1971-2):

[With reference to Sesame Street] McLuhan says that the content of a medium is the form of an earlier medium. This seems to me an unnecessarily inaccurate way of saying that the real units of communication have always been words and pictures, for which television is simply a new frame. Now of course words and letters, in the hieroglyphic stage, were also pictures, so that writing and drawing were originally the same art. Both Sesame Street and the science program brought out this original identity of word and image very clearly.

There is a reversal of this principle that leads to some consideration of the interaction of eye and ear in television. Television is primarily a visual, and therefore a dramatic, medium. They etymology of the word “theatre” indicates its primitive connection with the eye. A visual or dramatic medium is “cool” in the sense that watching immobilizes the body. And while intense continuous listening immobilizes one too, one of the most primitive and central forms of aural message is the command, the starting point of action. Advertising used to try to incorporate this by pretending a kind of urgency: go right down to the store and demand Sudsy Soap. (CW 10, 280)

I suppose the lack of detachment is one of the things that is meant by calling television an involving medium. It is also a “cool” medium, in the McLuhan sense, not just because of the low definition but because of the absence of any sense of exhilaration or exuberance, such as the stage and cinema can so easily and so constantly produce. It seems to me very much a medium of objectified dream. (CW 10, 292)

In television, one wants, in general, a visual focus; but we don’t need an auditory focus. Voice-over and similar devices taking advantage of the fact that sound isn’t so definitely located as vision (what McLuhan calls auditory space) makes everything much more interesting and impressive. It is easy, quick, cheap, and lazy to provide an auditory focus too: in other words a talking head. (CW 10, 299)

From Notes 54-3 (c. 1972):

I think I realize now that what Spengler gave me was a sense of interpenetration of symbolism: everything that happens in the world symbolizes everything else that happens. Nobody had really established this before, though there are hints of it in Ruskin; today it’s a staple of pop-kulch McLuhan-Carpenter stuff, but they (at least McLuhan) got it through Wyndam Lewis, whose Time and Western Man is a completely Spenglerian book. (CW 15, 309)

“Harold Innis: Portrait of a Scholar” (Broadcast 21 November 1972: interview with Elspeth Chisholm):

Chisholm: Professor Northrop Frye is a literary critic and commissioner for the CRTC. He has long thought that Innis’s theories were central to any communications theory.

Frye: This is something that naturally interests both historians and theorists of language, so that Innis, like Hegel, is a person who has both left-wing and right-wing disciples. I don’t think that you could find greater contrasts in outlook and temperament in the University of Toronto than between, say, Marshall McLuhan and Donald Creighton, and yet both of them have been very strongly influenced by Innis. (CW 24, 283)

From “The Renaissance of Books” (1973):

If it were really true, as McLuhan and others have urged, that print is a “linear” medium, carrying the eye forward and hypnotizing all responses except the purely visual one of reading, there would be no difference between print and any other medium. But this thesis confuses the reading process with the consulting process, and overlooks the fact that print has a unique power of staying around to be read again, presenting, with unparalleled patience, the same words again however often it is consulted. It is therefore public access to printed and written documents that is the primary safeguard of an open society. (CW 11, 154)

From “The Search for Acceptable Words” (1973):

I am on a commission in Canada concerned with communications, and when I first joined it I read a policy report which recommended that publications should be issued from time to time. The recommendation began: “Despite the disadvantages inherent in the linear representation of a world that is increasingly simultaneous, print still retains its medieval authority.” This sentence is typical of the nitwitted McLuhanism (I am not speaking of McLuhan himself) which is confusing the educational scene. I recently spoke to an audience of university graduates, and was asked, quite seriously what I thought of the university’s building such a huge library when the book would be out of date by the time it was opened. The book qua book is not linear: we follow a line while we are reading it, but the book itself is a stationary visual focus of a community. It is the electronic media that increase the amount of linear experience, of things seen and heard that are quickly forgotten. One sees the effects on students: a superficial alertness combined with increasing difficulty in preserving the intellectual continuity that is the chief characteristic of education. (CW 27, 315-16)

Many Canadians, including Harold Innis and Innis’s disciple Marshall McLuhan, have been interested in the totality of communication, and the essential unity of its activity, whether it is building railways or sending messages. (CW 27, 328)

From “Violence and Television” (1975):

The television set is a curiously ghostly medium: in our day, if we see ghosts or hear ghostly voices in the air, it means that somebody has left the television on. But the passive viewer’s whole world is equally spectral: he cannot distinguish fact from fiction either on the screen or off of it. He may see the most terrible event take place on the street before his eyes, but he will not lift a finger even to call the police. Nothing is really happening. This represents a central and frightening problem of violence itself: a zombie existence in which violence emerges as a desperate effort at identity. Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message” has been quoted so often, even at this conference, that it has lost all its meaning, if it ever had any. But another phrase of McLuhan’s is much more concrete: he speaks of a need for civil defence against media fallout, which exactly describes what I mean here. (CW 11, 162)

From Notes 54-5 (1976):

The McLuhan “hot & cool” classification of media relates them exclusively to emotional impact: there’s also a cognition element involved. Wonder if McLuhan is still buggered up by the warm emotion & cold intellect cliche. (CW 13, 213)

[W]e need a theory of verbal meaning which turns Aristotle inside out, starting with myth & metaphor as primary, & moving toward descriptive structures as specialized & secondary. The primary fiction that organizes the latter is causality: the correct form of McLuhan’s “linear” notion. Whitehead, SMW [Science and the Modern World]. (CW 13, 250)

“Logical” sequence is midway between subjective sequence, or association of ideas, and objective sequence, or progress of events. In any event hieratic language give a much greater emphasis to time–I suppose that’s partly what Marshall’s getting at. Causality, as I’ve often said, is built into the prose of language. (CW 13, 291)

Curious the number of times people have sold out to some silly cause because they couldn’t distinguish the demonic parody from the real thing. Heidegger has some remark in an essay about National Socialism being essentially the struggle against technology: he wanted so much to have peasants woo-wooing around the soil that he didn’t see that the Nazis were interested solely in demonic technology. Similarly with all the jerks who went for Stalinism, and disregarded all the evidence that Stalinism was the demonic opposite of Marx’s goal. On a very small scale, McLuhan contrasted a linear abstract spatial perception with a sensory and immediate spatial perception, and then spent the next fifteen years gradually realizing that the contrast of reading and television-watching he’d got it identified with was its demonic opposite. (CW 13, 304)

From Notes 54-13 (c. 1975-1982):

[William Morris’] sense of the “minor” or decorative arts as agents of revolution. What they did was, as above, to move backwards in time, from the brain to the hand. He got something Marshall McLuhan I think missed: he was preoccupied with the change from the linear to the simultaneous; but that’s still essentially passive in its orientation: there’s nothing to guarantee the activity of the learner. (CW 15, 326)

From the “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada” (1976):

It is a typically Canadian irony that such a cataract [of Canadian literature] started pouring out of the presses just before Marshall McLuhan became the most famous of Canadian critics for saying that the book was finished. I doubt if one can find this in McLuhan, except by quoting him irresponsibly out of context, but it what he was widely believed to have said, and the assertion became very popular, as anything that sound anti-intellectual always does. (CW 12, 450)

[M]uch is said in this book and elsewhere about the religious drive in George Grant, in McLuhan, in myself. (CW 9, 461)

Mr. Lane refers to the zany quality of Marshall McLuhan’s style that has infuriated some people into calling him a humbug and a charlatan. (CW 12, 464)

From “Presidential Address at the MLA” (1976):

By a curious irony, the catholicity of the MLA creates a difficulty for its own periodical. Most learned journals are much narrower in range, and those who consult them know in advance the kind of thing they are looking for. In having to reflect the whole MLA conspectus, PMLA, according to the options I have heard, tends to become something of what Marshall McLuhan would call a medium of low definition, a collection of prize essays rather a journal with a specific shape. But it would, in my opinion, be a mistake to undervalue the attempt to reflect the scholarship in the modern languages as a total community, however large and miscellaneous. (CW 7, 486-7)

From “Notes for ‘Culture as Interpretation’” (1977):

McLuhan on tribalism is I suppose connected with my hunch about community in Canada, and I notice a book of not very interesting looking essays that talk about communitariansim. (CW 25, 202)

There is a hoary old wheeze about the United States having gone from the primitive to the decadent stage without an intervening period of civilization. There would, I think, be a bit more accuracy in the statement that Canada is a country that has gone from a pre-national to a post-national phase without ever really becoming a nation. It almost became one after the Second World War, in the Pearson-Diefenbaker era, but when Trudeau became Prime Minister and took Marshall McLuhan for one of his advisors we abandoned that phase. (CW 25, 203)

From “The Future Tense” (Broadcast 20 February 1977):

Narrator: As Northrop Frye says, Mr. McLuhan’s vision of apocalypse is worth thinking about. But there’s another side too.

Frye: The possibility of a smash is something that we would be foolish to dismiss. I think that our minds go in a kind of manic-depressive, up-and-down rhythm between feeling that we’re all going to be wiped out by the atomic bomb, which is the depressing one, and the feeling that we’re going to move into an Age of Aquarius where everything will be wonderful and lovely, which is the manic side. I don’t believe in either the manic peak or the depressive myth. I think that the human race somehow or other manages to stagger on between the two. (CW 24, 328-9)

From “Culture as Interpenetration” (1977):

As third-world nations began to emerge in Africa and Asia, Canada’s much more low-keyed nationalism became increasingly inaudible, like a lute in a brass band. . . When Trudeau became prime minister and adopted Marshall McLuhan as one of his advisors, Canada reverted to tribalism. (CW 12, 521-2)

From “The Education of Mike McManus” (Filmed 5 October 1977: interview by Mike McManus):

McManus: Marshall McManus, if I’ve understood him correctly, says or feels that the ultimate effect of the viewer of mass doses of television is one of apathy. This is not your conclusion, Dr. Frye. It’s more anarchy and violence.

Frye: I think it’s partly the conclusion. Apathy is a very important and central response. One can see that in the behaviour of people in the cities, where an act of violence can go on under their eyes and they just stand around with their hands in their pockets. That is the result of apathy. Marshall speaks of “civil defence against media fallout,” which I think is a very accurate phrase in that connection. (CW 24, 346)

From “Criticism, Language, and Education (1979):

The mythological universe that surrounds us includes all the really serious beliefs that we have. First of all, you get a level of utterly phony mythology, a level addressed by advertising and propaganda, that is expressed by all the cliches you can pick up on the streets and all the silly prejudices about minority groups that are a product of certain forms of class conditioning–the phony aspect of mythology has been quite extensively explored in our time by Roland Barthes, for example, in his book Mythologies, and by Marshall McLuhan in his book The Mechanical Bride. Behind that, however, are the real informing myths of our lives, of which we normally become conscious in some kind of crisis. In our society we do grow up with very powerful beliefs in things like democracy and equality of opportunity and so on, but it’s only in something like the Watergate crisis where we begin to realize how immensely powerful these myths are. (CW 25, 323)

From “Criticism as Education” (1979):

I spoke of various layers of our mythological envelope. The innermost layer is a phoney mythology, made of prejudice and gossip and the shallow and superficial reactions that inform so much casual conversation. This is the aspect of verbal mythology which is conveyed through advertising and propaganda. The distinction between reality and illusion is one of the most important activities that we use words for, and, as advertising and propaganda are designed deliberately to create an illusion, it follows that they form, in a sense, a kind of anti-language. Their effect on the modern world has been analyzed by, for example, Roland Barthes in Mythologies and by Marshall McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride. (CW 7, 533)

From “The Wisdom of the Reader” (25-26 May 1979: interview with Beppe Cottafavi):

Frye: [I]solated from nature and from the landscape, isolated from each other, Canadians have always had to fight their isolation, or at least understand it. And this explains, I think, their great interest in communications. The concept of communications is fundamental for historians and theorists like Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. The concept of communications is also basic to my own work. Literature, in fact, is an indirect form of communication. (CW 24, 457)

1980s

From “Introduction to the Second Volume of Harold Innis’s A History of Communications” (c. 1980s):

Marshall McLuhan, we also saw, developed, partly through his study of Innis, the intuition that the entire history of writing had not only an origin in the silent communication of trade, but a conclusion in a gigantic expansion of human consciousness. He identified this latter with the electronic media, and used the metaphorical contrast of “linear” and “simultaneous” to express what he felt was coming. McLuhan is later than Innis, but even his books appeared before the invention of the microprocessor, and it now looks as though the road to the future of communications runs through computer science. Eventually, no doubt, we shall have machines that stand in the same relation to ordinary human brains that jet planes to to ordinary human feet. On the way there will be bitter struggles as entrenched authority grimly hangs on to its prerogatives and as pressure groups attempt to seize them. But even now, before we have entered that period, we can see that Innis’s work is prophetic and not merely a scholarly vision of the past. (CW 10, 306)

From “Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity” (Conducted 3 and 16 April 1980):

Frye: As long as there are two lobes of the brain, there are going to be the two possibilities of Western and Oriental thinking. And I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a “counter-environment.” That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university; there  is always something of Mark Hopkins and the log. There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities. I suspect that no teaching is worth doing unless it has a militant quality in it. (CW 24, 488)

From “Across the River and out of the Trees” (1980):

Marshall McLuhan, a literary critic interested originally in Elizabethan rhetoric and its expression in both oral and written forms, followed up other issues connected with the technology of communication, some of them leads from Innis. His relation to the public was the opposite of Innis’s: he was caught up in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the news media, so that he was hysterically celebrated in the 1960s and unreasonably neglected thereafter. It is likely that the theory of communications will be the aspect of the great critical pot-pourri of our time which will particularly interest Canadians, and to which they will make their most distinctive contribution. So it is perhaps time for a sympathetic rereading of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media and a reabsorption of McLuhan’s influence, though no adequate treatment of this topic can be attempted here.

I have often noted that many nineteenth century writers in Canada, especially poets, spoke of what could be called, paraphrasing the title of Francis Sparshott’s remarkable poem, the rhetoric of the divided voice. Up above was vigor and optimism and buoyancy and all the other qualities of life in a new land with lots of natural resources to exploit; underneath were lonely, bitter, brooding visions of cruelty without and despair within. The division in tone is still in Pratt, in a different way, and can even be traced in later writers, such as Layton, though the context naturally changes. It is by no means confined to Canada, as a reading of Whitman would show, but is traditional here. McLuhan put a similar split rhetoric into an international context. On top was a breezy and self-assured butterslide theory of Western history, derived probably from a Chestertonian religious orientation, according to which medieval culture had preserved a balanced way of life that employed all the senses, depended on personal contact, and live with “tribal,” or small community units. Since then we skittered down a slope into increasing speculation (McLuhan defines the specialist as the man who never makes a minor mistake on his way to a major fallacy), a self-hypnotism from concentrating on the visual stimuli of print and mathematics, a dividing and subdividing of life into separate “problems,” and an obsession with a linear advance also fostered by print and numbers. The electronic media, properly understood and manipulated, could reverse the direction of all this. Below was a horrifying vision of a global village, at once completely centralized and completely decentralized, with all its senses assailed at once, in a state of terror and anxiety at once stagnant and chaotic, equally a tyranny and an anarchy. His phrase “defence against media fallout” indicated this direction in his thought.

In the 1960s both the anti-intellectuals, who wanted to hear that they had only to disregard books and watch television to get with it, and the “activists,” pursuing terror for its own sake, found much to misunderstand in McLuhan. Many of his theses involved research in linguistics, anthropology, sensory psychology, and economics which has still to be done or even established in those fields, and his recurring tendency to determinism involved him in prophecies not born out by events. Media may be hot or cool. But McLuhan raised questions that are deeply involved in any survey of contemporary culture, and in any attempt to define the boundaries of the emerging theory of society that I call “criticism” in its larger context. (CW 12, 559-60)

From “Marshall McLuhan” (Broadcast 4 January 1981—this CBC radio interview was broadcast five days after McLuhan’s death on 31 December 1980):

Interviewer: Professor McLuhan’s great contemporary at the university, Northrop Frye, says that McLuhan’s background enabled him to achieve his insights.

Frye: He as a literary critic and that meant that he looked at the form of what was in front of him instead of the content. And so instead of issuing platitudes about what was being said on television he looked at what the media were actually doing to people’s eyes and ears. He had a gift of epigrammatic encapsulating that made some of the things he said extremely memorable.

[On the decline of McLuhan’s influence in the 1970s]

[H]e got on the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the news media and that meant he went away to the skies like a rocket and then came down like a stick. But he himself and what he said and thought had nothing to do with that. That’s what the news media do to people if you get caught up in their machinery. (CW 24, 510-11)

From “A Fearful Symmetry” (Conducted 15 April 1981: interview with Donald G. Bastian):

Bastian: When people think of Canadian scholars, they invariably put two people together as prime examples: the late Marshall McLuhan and you. How well did you know McLuhan?

Frye: I knew Marshall reasonably well. We were colleagues in the same department. Later, of course, we both became extremely busy in different lines, so we saw less of each other than we had.

Bastian: Have his views been well understood?

Frye: Well, yes and no. What he said was perhaps praised too much for the wrong reasons in the 1960s. And I think he himself realized as well as anybody that they were the wrong reasons. So his intellectual career seems to me to be curiously unfinished this way. He wrote two remarkable books: The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. Everything he wrote after that seems to have been in collaboration with other people and he got increasingly tentative, so that he wouldn’t even defend a position if it were criticized. He’s say, “Well, that’s just a probe, something to think about.” In a way that came to be a substitute for the very serious work I think he could have gone on to do.

Bastian: What do you think his lasting influence will be?

Frye: I suppose his recognition of the fact that the electronic media were bringing in a form of comprehension which was not new, because it was a recreation of things that have always been here, but was new in relation to the domination of print and mathematics. The whole business of being able to see the symbolic importance of things like the electric light, and the occasional insight, such as the way the telephone turned the street-walker into the call girl—that kind of sharp, detailed observation was very unusual. I rather wish he’d carried his academic interests more along with his interest in the contemporary scene, that he’d added his observation of the contemporary scene as an extension of his academic work. (CW 24, 522-3)

From “Medium and Message” (Recorded 1 May 1981: interview with Russell Davies):

Frye: I rather wish that Marshall had come to terms with the linear nature of the book because I think he would have been a much more permanent influence if he had done. What he said about the linear quality and the self-hypnotizing power of the eye in written books and mathematics was, I think, with all due respect to him, a half truth. There’s another side to the printed text, and that’s its uniformity, the fact that it always says the same thing, no matter how often you open it. That seems to me an equally obvious aspect of it. For example, when it came in in the sixteenth century, it had a very close association with magic. You can see that in Shakespeare’s Tempest when Caliban says of Prospero, “Burn but his books, because without them he is just as big a fool as I am.” And that capacity for the printed word to create a kind of instant hallucination is distinct from the merely remembered thing of oral culture. There are so many aspects of the written word which were there right in front of him and which he knew about, and I rather wish he had incorporated them. It was really the G.K. Chesterton butterslide: the notion that everything was unified in the Middle Ages and that we have been splitting and specializing ever since.

What I regret in the distinction of hot and cool media is the tendency to determinism in this thinking, which made him assume that a nation would turn hot or cool as its prevailing media were hot or cool. And he might perhaps have noticed the fact that he lived in a very cool country where all the tempers are cool and consequently all the media are cool. . .

I don’t think academics ought to get on this manic-depressive roller-coaster of publicity. There are just not built for it; they are built for much longer and more leisurely rhythms. And I think he was a little confused by being blown up so much in the 1960s and even more confused by being neglected in the 1970s. . . (CW 24, 536-7)

From “The Double Mirror” (1981):

[M]etaphor was made for man and not man for metaphor; or as my late and much beloved colleague used to say, man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor? (CW 4, 90)

From “Criticism and Environment” (1981):

In our world the control of communications is connected with what is called advertising in some contexts and propaganda in others, depending on the economic context involved. A somewhat unlikely disciple of Innes, Marshall McLuhan, published his first and I think his best book, The Mechanical Bride, in 1951. This is a study of a psychological appeals and responses in advertising. As its title indicates, it seizes on that curious identification of the erotic and the mechanical that seems so central to the sensibility of our age: Eros and Thanatos locked together in a peculiarly twentieth-century embrace. My copy of this book classifies it as “sociology,” but McLuhan was a literary critic who remarks in his introduction that it is high time for the techniques of criticism, in literature and the other arts, to be applied to the analysis of society.

The Mechanical Bride has no specific reference to Canada, but it was, I think, written in Canada, and reflects the perspective of a country to observing rather than participating actively in the international scene. The career of Innis indicates even more clearly that Canada affords some unusual perspective for relating criticism to its social environment. As criticism expands in range and variety of subject, it will merge with communications theory, and the sprawling and disunited Canada, from its very beginning, has been preoccupied–obsessed would be a better word–with means of communication. . . .

The name of McLuhan also reminds us of the growth of electronic media. The Mechanical Bride appeared before the main impact of television, and in trying to grapple with that McLuhan lost the distinction between the positive and negative aspects of his global village. What is positive about the world opened up by the electronic media is the sense of all the time and space known to us as simultaneously present to us. What is negative about it is the control of it, along with so much of the press, by advertising, in our culture, with its ready access to our reflexes and its power of manipulating them. (CW 12, 578-80)

From “Introduction to History of Communications” (1982):

Economic history demands immense assembling and patient sorting through of facts. Marshall McLuhan, in his preface to the reprinted edition of Bias of Communication (1964), assimilates this technique to the “mosaic” type of discontinuous writing in which each detail is to be related to a total context as well as to the narrative sequence in which it is embedded. That is, each detail is separately symbolic of the whole argument, just as each story on a newspaper’s front page is separately symbolic of the editor’s notion of what should be front-page news for that day. (CW 12, 585)

We are reminded here of Marshall McLuhan and of Innis’s interest in McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (1951). McLuhan in turn has described his own major books as a “footnote” to Innis’s investigations: these books developed a large-scale revolutionary thesis about the displacing of linear and time-bound print by the simultaneous many-sided impact of the electronic media. For McLuhan this was primarily a psychological difference: still later he tried to suggest that it was a physiological one as well. What is disappointing in McLuhan’s work, however, is the absence of any clear sense of the kind of social context in which the electronic media function. Television in particular is geared to the rhythms of the social economy: however striking the psychological difference between its impact and that of print, the absence of any real social difference neutralizes nearly all of it. The usual television program, as the CRTC keeps rather irritably reminding Canadian broadcasters, is simply a talking journal, as the phrase “magazine format” indicates, a way of conveying the same words and images for the same social purposes. McLuhan felt, at least at first, that the electronic media would bring in a social revolution so pervasive that one could describe its social context only terms of the future. But, as with other prophetic revolutionary theories, the existing power structures have refused to wither away on schedule. (CW 12, 593-4)

From “Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto” (Recorded 10 August 1982: interview with Valerie Schatzker):

Schatzker: The ways things had been done for the past quarter of a century or more were just not acceptable to some of the younger staff members, who didn’t appreciate the traditional values or didn’t agree with the historical approach to English, etc. Was it disturbing to you?

Frye: It was disturbing to me. I looked at it a little differently, you see. I thought of Toronto as a place that allowed great freedom to members of the staff to what they wanted to do. I think Marshall felt that way, too. I remember his remarking that a man like Bill Blissett would be just unthinkable in a graduate school like Harvard or Yale. He would be processed—he would be put through the regular graduate-school mill—of the first-rate American institutions. Toronto seemed to be so much more relaxed. (CW 24, 611)

From Notes 52 (after 1982 to after 1986):

Existential identification survives in literature, most obviously in the drama as performance. The function of literature is to keep alive the metaphorical attitude of mind. But why should it be kept alive? Parallel with McLuhan’s tribal-civilized-retribalized dialectic. (CW 6, 504)

Narrative movement vs. Gestalt: McLuhan left out the Gestalt and the Derrida people leave out the movement. Convention of speaker in poetry, alternatively music: Epilogue to Lycidas. “Structure” a misleading metaphor whenever it assumes that total understanding of anything of any size in literature is ever possible. The reader is not all the other readers, most of whom are in a different time of history anyway, including the future (CW 6, 596)

Coming to point (crazy Oedipus) where we can’t afford supremacy of ideology any more: let’s have a war and smash that guy’s ideology. Primary concerns must become primary. (Leads directly to authority of poet, but not in this paper [“The Expanding World of Metaphor”].

Feeling that this is so led in the sixties to a revival of ecstatic metaphor: drugs, yoga, Zen, folk singers, rock music (Woodstock) would bring in a new conception of community. Revitalized tribal culture in McLuhan. (CW 6, 599)

From “The View from Here” (1983):

Not long ago I was asked to speak to a group of alumni in a neighbouring city, and a reporter on a paper in that city phoned my secretary and asked if this was to be a “hot” item. My secretary explained that Professor Frye was what Marshall McLuhan would call a cool medium of low definition, and that he could well skip the occasion, which he did with obvious relief. The incident was trivial and typical, and I wanted nothing less than a reporter on my trail looking for hot items, but it started me thinking about the curiously topsy-turvy world of “news” as reported here. (CW 7, 557)

It was a similar intuition that started off the work of Marshall McLuhan, who also contrasted a linear, causality-bound, tunnel-vision type of perception with a simultaneous type capable of taking in many aspects of a situation at once. He associated the linear perception with the reading of print and the simultaneous one with the more many-sided appeal of the electronic media. I think these were the wrong referents, because it is only the preliminary process of reading that is really linear: once read, the book becomes the focus of a community, and may come to mean, simultaneously, any number of things to any number of people. The electronic media, on the other hand, vanish so quickly in time that we can make no sensible use of them without falling back on the continuous ego. I think McLuhan also realized very quickly that these were the wrong referents, but by the time he had been ground up in the mass-media blender and was unable to set the record straight. (CW 7, 564)

From “The Scholar in Society” (Filmed 18-21 October 1983: interview with Donald Winkler):

Winkler: Could you talk a bit about the book as technology?

Frye: There are two elements to the book. One is reading it. The other is using it afterwards. While you’re reading it, you’re following out a linear line of narrative from page one to page “the end.” That was the aspect of it that interested Marshall McLuhan. He spoke of the book as a linear medium in contrast to the simultaneous media which the electronic forms of communication were developing. But there’s  another side to the book. It becomes, besides being read, the focus of a community. It can be given to a class and referred to over and over again. You can always go back to a certain point. Consequently, it is not a linear medium primarily. It is the most continuous of all media.

Winkler: You’ve claimed that the electronic media are in fact the linear media.

Frye: I think they are the linear media because you have to follow them as they go along. Then they disappear, and you can’t refer to them afterwards except by very special efforts, so that the experience of them is discontinuous, as McLuhan said. But it’s also linear. It’s television that makes you live in a clock. (CW 24, 714-15)

From “The Authority of Learning” (1984):

It is obvious that social change would be reflected in changes of language but what interests me much more is the reverse possibility: that the teaching of language, and the structures of literature in which language is contained, may foster and encourage certain social changes. Not long ago I was asked to speak to a group of alumni in a neighboring city, and a reporter on a paper in that city phoned my secretary and asked if this was to be a “hot” item. My secretary explained that Professor Frye was what his late colleague Marshall McLuhan would have called a cool medium of low definition, and that he could well skip the occasion, which he did with obvious relief. The incident was trivial, but it started me thinking about the curiously topsy-turvy world of “news” as reported today. (CW 7, 572)

From “Myth as the Matrix of Literature” (1984):

But the vogue of continuous narrative poetry vanished with the twentieth century: Eliot’s remarks about “dissociation of sensibility” were a polemic against it; Hopkins, many decades after his death, entered English literature as a typical twentieth-century poet; and critics trained in the standards of the modern period tended, like my late friend and colleague Marshall McLuhan, to develop out of those standards a preference for simultaneous apprehension in contrast to linear modes of understanding. (CW 18, 302)

From “Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784-1984” (1984):

Marshall McLuhan. . .thought of the coming electronic media as bringing about a political reversal of development from technological imperialism back to a new form of tribalism, and was sustained by that belief as long as it was possible for him to hold it. No one has spoken more strongly of the dehumanizing effects of technology than he has: “When the perverse ingenuity of man has outered to some part of his being in material technology, his entire sense of ratio is altered. He is then compelled to behold this fragment of himself ‘closing itself as in steel’ [the quotation is from Blake]. In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it. (CW 12, 617)

From “The Expanding World of Metaphor” (1984):

Poets have always said that they did not feel that they were making their poems; they felt more like mothers bringing an independent life to birth. The written poem comes into being partly because of this independence. If there is anything to be said for Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that the content of any given medium is the form of a previous medium, then the content of written poetry is the form of oral poetry, which seems invariably to precede it historically. The subordinate and secondary status assigned to writing, of which so many poststructural critics complain, is derived from a literary convention, but within literature the convention is rooted in the facts of literary experience. (CW 18, 344)

In the late 1960s a state of mind developed that we might characterize as a feeling that the old subject-object consciousness, in which the individual is merely one of a social aggregate, had to give way to a new and heightened form of consciousness. Hence many forms of ecstatic metaphor reappeared. Certain drugs seemed to bring about something close to a sense of identity with one’s surroundings; teachers of yoga and Zen forms of concentration became immensely popular; folk singers and rock music festivals seemed to symbolize a new conception of comradeship. It was a period of neoprimitivism, of renewed identity through ecstatic music or contemplation of a visual focus. McLuhan suggested that the physiological impact of television and other electronic media would create a new sensibility, forming bodies of social awareness in which nations and states as we know them would wither away and be replaced by a revitalized tribal culture. In the 1970s he became less sanguine about this, but something of his earlier view survives as a vague hope that some technological gimmick will automatically take charge of the human situation. (CW 18, 354-5)

From “The Dialectic of Belief and Vision” (1985):

In Marshall McLuhan, for example, the book is equated with the linear process of reading, and the electronic media are associated with the total or simultaneous vision. This account of the matter overlooks the fact that the book has to be understood as well as read, and that it patiently waits around, repeating the same words however often it is consulted, until its readers proceed from the linear stage of attention to the next one. The electronic media, more particularly television, greatly foreshorten the linear process, but still they do require us to follow a narrative as well as make an effort at apprehension, which means in practice that many television programmes make a strong immediate impression and are soon forgotten afterwards. McLuhan came to understand this very quickly, and warned us constantly about the dangers of “media fallout,” the panic caused by the impact of sense impressions that our minds have not been adequately prepared to receive. But in the meantime he had been ground up in public relations blender and was unable to correct, or even modify, his absurd popular reputation as the man who said that the book was obsolete. (CW 4, 346)

From Notebook 27 (1985):

I once consulted the I Ching, using toothpicks instead of yarrow stalks, saying I didn’t want an answer to the specific problem but general advice about what to do and be. I got without qualification or “moving lines,” the second or K’un hexagram, meaning, I suppose, that I was to be a “feminine” or receptive writer. . .

McLuhan would be on the Ch’ien side, I suppose: his ideas were, he said, “probes”–a male metaphor–without social context. He supplied the context by naive determinism: technology is alleged to create society. (CW 5, 4)

If McLuhan’s principle holds up, that the content of a new medium is the form of an earlier medium, then the content of literature is the form of early literature. (CW 5, 17)

Truth of correspondence (“this apple is red,” “I was born in Sherbrooke”) is a form of measurement. It’s words assimilated to mathematics, so far as mathematics is measurement. The kind of truth expressed by an aphorism, where we are impelled to say “how profoundly true that is!”, is a kind of truth that words are built for. Those are verbal probes, as McLuhan called them: they’re powerful magnets picking up piles of iron. (CW 5, 69)

From Notebook 11h (mid-1980s):

For years I have been collecting and reading pop-science & semi-occult books, merely because I find them interesting. I now wonder if I couldn’t collect enough ideas from them for an essay on neo-natural theology. Some are very serious books I haven’t the mathematics (or the science) to follow: some are kook-books with hair-raising insights or suggestions.

[Robert Anton] Wilson’s epigraph [in The Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati]: it’s an ill wind that blows nobody’s mind. McLuhan’s point is that multiple models are the great 20th c. discovery. . . (I’d say it was really the discovery of the variation form. . .) (CW 6, 713)

From “On the Media” (Conducted 20 February 1986):

Interviewer: Could you discuss the notion of popular culture more specifically with reference to Marshall McLuhan?

Frye: Well, as I understand it McLuhan started out with the thesis that print is a linear medium—the pages follow one after the other—and that the electronic media make an impact on a great many senses all at once. On that basis he drew a distinction between two kinds of mental response. That distinction, I think, is totally wrong, and I think he himself realized that very quickly, but by that time he was caught up in a public relations blender and he couldn’t do anything about it. But the print medium is not linear, because the book stays around and presents the same words no matter how often you consult it. So the book becomes a focus for a community. And it’s really the electronic media that are the linear ones, because they are very much harder to remember. If you forget what’s in a book, you can pick it up and consult it. But if you forget what was on last night’s television, then it’s gone into outer space.

Interviewer: What about McLuhan’s distinction between the visual and aural societies?

Frye: It’s very difficult to avoid metaphors. If, for example, you’re reading something, you frequently use metaphors of the ear. And that’s what critics like Jacques Derrida are attacking: the convention that somebody is speaking. But still, when you’re following a narrative, you are in a sense listening. And then at the end you get a sort of Gestalt: you “see” what it means. When somebody tells a joke, he leads in by saying, “Have you heard this one?” and then, if he’s lucky, by the end you see what he means. But these are just metaphors. The hearing is something associated with the simultaneous and the spatial. (CW 24, 767-8)

From “Forward to English Studies at Toronto” (1986):

We began hearing about the “New Criticism,” with its conservative, Catholic, and southern leanings, in the forties, but it had little impact at Toronto. The chief exception was Marshall McLuhan, who had had some personal contact with it before he came to Toronto, but as everyone knows, he developed very different interests of his own. (CW 7, 597)

From Notebook 44 (1986 to 1990):

I have never understood why that blithering nonsense “the medium is the message” caught on so. Apparently the terms “medium” and “message” are being aligned with “form” and “content” respectively. And while it would make sense to say that form and content are inseparable, a medium is just that, a medium. It’s a vehicle, a transmitter, a means of communicating words and sounds and pictures. It is not and never can be a form. The form of verbal message is as verbal as its content. The content of a musical message, say a Mozart quartet, is a musical form. It may be heard in a concert hall of over the radio and read as a score in a book, but such varieties of media touch neither form not content. On Magritte’s pipe principle, the content of a picture is not the objects it represents, but its form or pictorial organization. But painting itself is not a medium: painting cannot be a means of transmitting painting. (CW 5, 234-5)

The network cluster: Chaucer’s House of Fame, of course; Jonson’s Staple of News; De Quincey’s Mail Coach essay; the fascination of various people (Bennett, S. Lewis) with hotels; McLuhan: I don’t know that I’ve got hold of anything here, only the network of rumor is a parody of the spiritual body. Henry James: In the Cage. (CW 5, 238)

From “On The Great Code (V)” (26 May 1987: interview with Donata Aphel):

Aphel: Another illustrious Canadian scholar, Marshall McLuhan, has said that “the medium is the message.” The Bible has had the media of literature, music, painting, the cinema; now it will also have animated Japanese cartoons for TV. Do you believe the Bible can be abused by these media?

Frye: I would say “used” rather than “abused.”  McLuhan’s statement is a highly constructed formulation; the message arrives via the medium and it is important that is should arrive. Thus the message of the Bible reaches us even through a Japanese cartoon. This does not surprise me. (CW 24, 831)

From “Schools of Criticism (I)” (14 December 1987: interview with Francesco Guardiani):

Frye: McLuhan’s global village was a conception developed quite explicitly in connection with the electronic media, and it’s true that they impose a cultural conformity wherever they go. But there are also cultural cottage industries, like writing and painting and composing, that tend to decentralize society and form a kind of counter-environment. (CW 24, 844)

From Notebook 50 (1987-1990):

The Resurrection peroration & the gardener belong, I’m pretty sure, to the end of Six [of Words with Power]. Eight has (a) a concentration of metaphors of time (hither to space, as images are objects in space). Evolution the model–applies to nature. Progress is the authoritarian perversion of this, along with social Darwinism. (b) a concentration of the U-shaped myth of comedy, in Rousseau, the Communist Manifesto, & the Bible (also McLuhan & perhaps the rise of existential metaphor in the sixties). (c) why did God “choose” not a national, much less an imperial, community, but an aggregate of tribes? Tribalism, in short, is a theme. (CW 5, 330)

From “Some Reflections on Life and Habit” (1988):

My successor in teaching it [the course in nineteenth-century prose] was John Robson, the first Priestly lecturer. I think it was also taught at St. Michael’s College by the late Marshall McLuhan: in any case there are several echoes from Butler in McLuhan’s books. (CW 17, 341)

From “Canada and Culture”:

[“Introduction to Canadian Literature”: Moscow Talk, October 1988]

This means that the Canadian imagination is preoccupied with the theme of communications. The building of the first transcontinental railway was almost a national neurosis, because it was a formidable engineering feat without parallel, I should think, in the United States. One can see in the perspective of Canadian painting that faraway look of a canoeist’s eye who is gazing at the horizon to see what is around the corner of the river. Our best known social philosophers–Harold Innis, the economist, and Marshall McLuhan, the humanist–have been preoccupied with other aspects of the theme of communications. But growing up as it did, Canada was forced to accept the mercantilism against which the American Revolution was revolting. It was compelled to devote itself to producing natural resources–furs, lumber, minerals from the Precambrian shield which covered much of the country, grain from the prairies–with the head office always somewhere else. (CW 25, 215-16)

From “Literary and Mechanical Models” (1989):

Apart from the analogies of ballad and folklore scholarship, I was also influenced by the twentieth-century fluidity of media, in which a story might begin as a magazine serial, then become a book, and then a film. I remember the shock of picking up a copy of [Dostoevsky’s] The Brothers Karamozov and seeing it described as “the book of the film,” but I also realized that certain verbal cores, of the kind I usually call archetypes, were constants throughout the metamorphoses. The variety of media, in fact, was what made the conventions and genres I was interested in stand out in such bold relief.

It was this that made it impossible for me to go along with McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” axiom, despite my general sympathy for what McLuhan was trying to do. McLuhan’s formula was essentially in application of the Aristotelian form-content unity. He says, for example, that the form of one medium is the content of a later medium. I could see the identity of form and content: the content of a picture, for example, is the form of that picture, as long as we are talking about it as a picture and not as a representation of something else. But the McLuhan aphorism also implied an identity of form and medium, and that I cannot buy. A medium is precisely that, a vehicle or means of transmission, and what is transmitted are the real forms. The form of a Mozart quartet is not affected by whether it is heard in a concert hall or over the radio or read in a score, though there would be psychological variants in reacting to it, of the kind that McLuhan made so much of. The real forms are not media but verbal or pictorial structural units that have been there since the Stone Age. (CW 18, 455-6)

From “Convocation Address: University of Bologna” (1989):

Introversion in itself, however, does not greatly affect the distinction we have been making between the more public and the more private aspects of the arts. In some quarters the distinction levels out: devotees of a rock singer, for example, show a curious mixture of cult and mass reaction. But the distinction still exists in an electronic environment, where my late friend and colleague Marshall McLuhan tried to characterize it in the metaphors “hot” and “cool” media. A radio is a “hot” or involving medium because a great deal of data is provided in the medium and the listener has nothing to do but listen; black and white television is “cool” because it gives him less definition and more to fill in by himself. Cool media correspond to the more private aspects of our cultural tradition; hot ones to those more public and directly rhetorical in emphasis. But it soon becomes obvious that such metaphors as hot and cool really describe the quality of response to a medium even more than the characteristics of the medium itself. Radio is a hot medium for McLuhan, but if one leaves a radio on all day without listening to it, there is not much heat left in it. The technological context expands McLuhan’s distinction into a larger contrast between an active and a passive response. An active or creative response fosters both public and private emphases; a passive one moves toward a systematic destruction of both.

The primary element in an active response is selection, the free choice of what one will experience in communication. This freedom of choice obviously depends on the degree of freedom of choice in society. Some societies suppress many dimensions of communication on various political or religious pretexts. Elsewhere there may be unrestricted access to thirty or more television stations, but competition and reverence for ratings soon reduces this to minor variations of much the same repertory. Yet it is clear that an industrial high-technology society can put in an immense amount of potential experience, both of the arts and of every other form of communication, into individual hands. The technical developments of the last two decades, cassettes, videotapes, and the like, give access to far more musical, pictorial, and literary material than was available to anyone in even the recent past, and this variety of access is reflected in the variety of cultural influences brought to bear on our arts, our lifestyles, our clothing and food.

There is also a passive response to the communication media, and here too we see a difference between the “hot” involving response and the “cool” detached one. But passivity takes both in pathological directions: the hot response toward hysteria, the cool one towards apathy. Radios blaring from every street corner are a regular feature of dictatorships: the appearance of feverish political activity that results is deceptive, because it is really produced by a hypnotizing and sleepwalking under pressure. The “cooler” medium of television, on the other hand, may reduce its viewers to a catatonic trance by its brief bursts of continuity and the interruption of commercials, which are what Bertold Brecht would call an alienation device. We can see the dead end of this in the horrifying stories of people being robbed and beaten on busy streets in the middle of the day while staring crowds stand around with their hands in their pockets. The world for them has turned into a huge television screen: they see what is going on, but their participation in it is paralyzed.

In Canadian communications philosophy McLuhan was preceded by the economist Harold Innis, who spoke of the “bias” of communication, meaning that whenever a new form of communication arises, it creates a power struggle in society to get control of it. Those who succeed in doing so naturally want everything it can communicate to serve their own interests. This means that in every age writers and artists have to struggle for a greater freedom of expression than most of the authority in their society is willing to give them. The twentieth century has seen an unparalleled number of writers, artists, and intellectuals harassed, imprisoned, exiled, sent to concentration camps, murdered, or driven to suicide by power-maddened governments. Such tyranny has popularity on its side, because shouting slogans and predictable formulas is clearly much easier than reading or thinking, and gives an immediate illusion of doing something. And when a tyrant wishes to distract attention from his incompetence by bawling for the death of a heretical or “blasphemous” writer, he gets a ready response, because, while any form of anti-cultural activity may be pleasurable, bigotry is positive fun. There can be nothing more deeply satisfying, for a great many people, than to feel justified in murdering someone for writing a book one does not even have to read. (CW 10, 345)

From “Canada and Culture” (1989):

[Notes for “Levels of Cultural Identity”]

McLuhan would perhaps have remained unknown if he had talked of the global town (although he does use the FW [Finnegans Wake] phrase “the urb it orbs,” or global city). (CW 25, 234)

From Northrop Frye in Conversation (recorded 11-15 December 1989: interview with David Cayley):

Frye: I suppose I belong to some extent in that category [of communications theory, along with Innis and McLuhan].

Cayley: Could you explain how you belong in that category? That is, where would be the link with Innis and McLuhan?

Frye: Well, Innis started out with a Laurentian theory of Canadian expansion, with the fact that coming to Canada from Europe is a totally different experience than coming to the United States and with the fact that you live in what is, for practical purposes, a kind of one-dimensional country. It’s just a long line of river and Great Lakes and railways from one ocean to the other. The difficulties within communication, within the very act of communicating at all, and the fact that the settlements in Canada are isolated from each other in geographical ways—these things, I think, have brought about certain affinities among people who have talked about communication in Canada. . . I have looked at literature always as a kind of overall pattern, just as Canada, when you see it on a map as one colour, looks like an overall pattern, even though it is actually a collection of isolated communities, or has been. (CW 24, 972-3)

Frye: [Eric] Havelock was one of a group of people, including Marshall McLuhan and his student Walter Ong, who seem to be close to what has always been one of my educational views, that in teaching youngsters to write you throw a dead language at them and ask them to decipher it. I think the obvious way to teach a person to write is to listen to the way he talks and to try to give some shape and direction to that talk as it goes. (CW 24, 985)

Cayley: Marshall McLuhan was a colleague of yours. How did you see his influence when it was at its height?

Frye: I thought that McLuhan was being praised to the skies for the wrong reasons and then, after the vogue passed, being ignored for the wrong reasons. I think there’s a great deal of permanent value in McLuhan’s insights, and I had a great sympathy with what he was trying to do. Unfortunately, he had such rotten luck with his health that he was never able really to complete what he had to say. That’s why he has come down as a kind of half-thinker who never worked out the other part of what he was really talking about. He talked about defence against media fallout, for example, an immensely fruitful idea, which, as a matter of fact, we’ve been discussing for the last few minutes. That I would like to have heard more about. But, as he told me himself, he suffered such pain with the brain tumour that it just knocked him out. Months at a time, even years at a time, he couldn’t work. (CW 24, 996-7)

From “Criticism, Language, and Education” (late 1980s?):

[“Critical Views”]

Genuine vs phony or kidnapped mythology. Barthes & McLuhan concerned mainly with latter. Genuine feelings used to be associated with secondary concerns; now more with primary ones. (CW 25, 340)

1990s

From a draft version of the introduction to Words with Power:

This leads us to some such axiom as “the text is the presence,” an axiom of the same general form as, and not impossibly related to, McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” Such an axiom would, if applied to, say, the Sermon on the Mount, prevent us from reading with the kind of response that says, “Yes, I believe that there was once a man who said essentially this, though of course there are variations in the written records of it.” The text becomes a mere set of invocations of ghostly presences that we supply out of our own conditioning. “In the beginning was the word.” That may invoke the ghost of the creation, which according to the Book of Job is the most elusive of all red herrings. Eventually, as in staring at a perspective drawing, our minds suddenly see a different three-dimensional form, some more like “to begin with, there is the Word.” Where? In front of you, stupid: now start reading. And don’t wander off into “yes, I believe this,” or “interesting but quite incredible legend.” Keep your nose on the trail of “I assume that what I’m about to read next will be roughly equivalent of this.” (CW 25, 412-13)

From “Cultural Identity in Canada” (27 November 1990: interview with Carl Mollins):

Mollins: I suppose McLuhan has certainly acknowledged his debt to Innis and to you, I think?

Frye: Well to Innis, not to me [laughing]. I suspect a great deal of that — I think that’s something to give the critics to play with. Innis was a man who worked like a vacuum cleaner, picking up books everywhere, and he saw something very distinctive in McLuhan, and so he asked McLuhan for autographs, and they did exchange some correspondence. There was a bit of mixture there. I think McLuhan was just a coming person and, with no special reputation at that time, was very flattered by this (as he should have been), and the result was that you get a rather Innis-McLuhan link. But I don’t really see a great deal of influence from Innis on McLuhan.

Mollins: There is something in each of you—the use of the aphorism, the cryptic utterance which compels a reader to dwell upon a sentence.

Frye: It is true that both McLuhan and I are rather discontinuous, mosaic writers of very different kinds. It’s less true of Innis, although actually that book that Christian got out, The Idea File of Innis, does indicate that he thought aphoristically. That’s certainly true of me. I keep notebooks and write aphoristically, and ninety-five per cent of the work I do is putting them out on a line, and then you have a continuous rhythm. (CW 24, 1094-5)

  1. “What is Above is Within, for every-thing is Eternity is translucent: / The Circumference is Within, Without is formed the Selfish Center, / And the Circumference still expands going forward to Eternity, / And the Center has Eternal States; these States we now explore.” (K709/E225) ↩

Malinowski’s “new science” of culture (part 2)

The problem we are facing here (…) is the fundamental problem of each science: the establishment of identity of its phenomena.1 That this problem still awaits its solution, and that the science of culture still lacks real criteria of identification — that is, criteria of what to observe and how to observe, what to compare and how to carry it out, of what to trace in evolution and diffusion — will hardly be disputed by anyone acquainted with the controversies of history2…  (69-70)3

Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus, partly material, partly human4 and partly spiritual, by which man is able to cope with the concrete, specific problems that face him. (36)

Again, in his whole outfit of artifacts and his ability to produce them and to appreciate them, man creates a secondary environment. (…) This environment, which is neither more nor less than culture itself, has to be permanently reproduced, maintained, and managed. (…) Cultural tradition has to be transmitted from each generation to the next. Methods and mechanisms of an educational character must exist (…) All these primary problems of human beings are solved for the individual by artifacts, organization into cooperative groups, and also by the [ongoing] development of knowledge (…) these new needs impose upon man and society a secondary type of determinism. (36-38)

We shall be able to reject the view that “No common measure of cultural phenomena can be found” (…) [Instead,] the scientific analysis of culture (…) can point to another system of realities that also5 conforms to general laws, and can thus be used as a guide for field-work, as a means of identification of cultural realities, and as the basis of social engineering.6 (38)

Unless the anthropologist and his fellow humanists agree on what is the definite isolate in the concrete cultural reality, there will never be any science of civilization. (39)

In order to understand [cultural] divergencies, a clear, common measure of comparison is indispensable.7 (40)

in any (…) comparative research, the problem of identity first has to be faced and solved (43)

The concept of institution (…) is, I submit, the legitimate isolate of cultural analysis.8 (51)

Each institution, that is, organized type of activity, has a definite structure. In order to observe, understand, describe, and discourse theoretically upon an institution, it is necessary to analyze it in the manner here indicated, and in this manner only. This applies to field-work and to any comparative studies as between different cultures, to problems of applied anthropology and sociology, and indeed, to any scientific approach in matters where culture is the main subject matter. No element, “trait,” custom, or idea is defined or can be defined except by placing it within its relevant and real institutional setting. We are thus insisting that such institutional analysis is not only possible but indispensable. (54)

The institutional structure is universal throughout all cultures, and within each cultural manifestation…  (54)

[The prerequisite need is] to establish (…) that our institutional types are not arbitrary or fictitious, but represent clearly definable realities. (66)

All cultures have as their main common measure a set of institutional types…9     (67)

What still remains to be made clear is the relation between form and function. We have insisted that each scientific theory must start from and lead to observation. It must be inductive and it must be verifiable by experience. In other words, it must refer to human experiences which can be defined, which are (…) accessible to any and every observer, and which are recurrent, hence (…) predictive. All this means that, in the final analysis, every proposition of scientific anthropology10 has to refer to phenomena which can be defined by form, in the fullest objective sense of the term. (67)

At the same time, we also indicated that culture, as the handiwork of man and as the medium through which he achieves his ends — a medium which allows him to live (…) a medium which (…) allows him to create goods and values beyond his animal, organic endowment — that culture, in all this and through all this, must be understood as a means to an end, that is, instrumentally or functionally. Hence, if we are correct in both assertions, a (…) definition of the concept of form, of function, and of their relations, must be given.  (67-68)

No organized system of activities is possible without a physical basis and without the equipment of artifacts. (…) There is a constant interaction between the organism and the secondary milieu in which it exists, that is, culture. In short, human beings live (…) the result of an interaction between organic processes and man’s manipulation and re-setting of his environment.  (68)

The problem we are facing here (…) is the fundamental problem of each science: the establishment of identity of its phenomena. That this problem still awaits its solution, and that the science of culture still lacks real criteria of identification — that is, criteria of what to observe and how to observe, what to compare and how to carry it out, of what to trace in evolution and diffusion — will hardly be disputed by anyone acquainted with the controversies of history…11 (69-70)

For reasons theoretical and practical, anthropology, as the theory of culture, must establish a closer working cooperation with those natural sciences which can supply us with the specific answer to [some of] our problems.12 (79)

Form and function (…) are inextricably related to one another. It is impossible to discuss the one without taking account of the other. (83)

In every human society each impulse is remolded by tradition. It appears still in its dynamic form as a drive, but a drive modified, shaped, and determined by tradition. (85)

In short, it would be idle to disregard the fact that the impulse leading to the simplest physiological performance is as highly plastic and determined by tradition as it is ineluctable in the long run, because it is determined by physiological necessities. (…) Simple physiological impulses can not exist under conditions of culture. (87)

We must not forget biology, but we can not rest satisfied with biological determinism alone. (89)

This is the point in which the study of human behavior takes a definite departure from mere biological determinism. We have made this clear already in pointing out that within each vital sequence the impulse is refashioned or co-determined by cultural influences. (94)

It is always necessary in the integral definition (…) to determine (…) essential nature and relate to it the other subsidiary functions.13

And this really is the hallmark of scientific definition. It must principally be a call to a scientifically schematized and oriented observation of empirical fact.14 (115)

Culture supplies man with derived potentialities, abilities, and powers. This also means that the enormous extension in the range of human action, over and above innate abilities of the naked organism, imposes on man a number of limitations. In other words, culture imposes a new type of specific determinism on human behavior. (119)

If our concept of derived need or cultural imperative is correct, certain new types of behavior are implied in all cultural responses, which are as stringent and ineluctable as every vital sequence is in its own right. (120)

We have to show that man must economically cooperate, that he must establish and maintain order; that he must educate the new and growing organism of each citizen; and that he must somehow implement the means of enforcement in all such activities. We have to show how and where these activities come in and how they combine. Finally, in order to make the processes of derivation and the hierarchy of need clear, we shall have to show how economics, knowledge, religion and mechanisms of law, educational training and artistic creativeness are directly or indirectly related to the basic, that is, physiological needs.15 (120)

Can we say, however, that the submission to cultural rules is as absolute as the submission to biological determinism? Once we realize that dependence on the cultural apparatus, however simple or complex, becomes the conditio sine qua non, we see immediately that the failure in social cooperation or symbolic accuracy spells immediate destruction or long-run attrition in the plain biological sense. (121)

The moment that such [cultural] devices have been adopted, in order to enhance human adaptability to the environment, they also become necessary conditions for survival. And here we can enumerate, point for point, the [cultural] factors on which human dependence becomes as great as dependence on the execution of any biologically dictated vital sequences. (121)

Thus, the material equipment in its economic production and technical quality, the skills based on training, knowledge and experience, the rules of cooperation, and symbolic efficiency are one and all as indispensable under the ultimate sanction of the biological imperative of self-preservation as are any purely physiologically determined elements. (122)

We have (…) shown the process of derivation, and thus linked up the instrumental determinism of cultural activities with the basic source of this determinism, that is, biological requirements. (126)

Symbolism is an essential ingredient of all organized behavior; (…) it is a subject matter which can be submitted to observation and theoretical analysis (…) to the same extent to which we can observe material artifacts (…) or define the form of a custom. The central thesis here maintained is that symbolism, in its essential nature, is the modification of the original organism which allows the transformation of a physiological drive into a cultural value. (132)

The cultural equivalent of the vital sequence.16 (137)

The organism, in short, reacts to the instrumental elements [supplied by culture] with the same or at least similar appetitive force as it does to objects which reward it directly by physiological pleasure. We can define this strong and inevitable attachment of the organism to certain objectives, norms, or persons who are instrumental to the satisfaction of the organism’s need, by the term value, in the widest sense of the word. (138)

In reality, however, we have to remember always that the drive17 is integral18 and that it works right through the sequence, controlling all its phases. (140)

What we have defined as charter, that is, the traditionally established values, programs, and principles of organized behavior, correspond once more, fully and directly, to our concept of drive, insofar as this is culturally reinterpreted. This cultural reinterpretation, again, means that the drive operates in a two-fold manner, first by the establishment of the value of the [cultural]  apparatus, and (…) then by reappearing as (…) culturally determined [by that value matrix].19 (140)

The understanding of any cultural element must imply (…) the satisfaction of essential needs, whether these be basic, that is biological, or derived, that is, cultural.20 (142)

 

  1. “The first task of each science is to recognize its legitimate subject matter. It has to proceed to methods of true identification (…) of the relevant factors of its process” (14); “Unless the anthropologist and his fellow humanists agree on what is the definite isolate in the concrete cultural reality, there will never be any science of civilization” (39); “in any (…) comparative research, the problem of identity first has to be faced and solved” (43). Malinowski is clear: “the fundamental problem” or “first task” of anthropology as a “science of culture” still “awaits its solution” such that it “lacks real criteria of identification” of what it is. Of its reality. Hence, anthropology not only does not solve the world-historical crisis of nihilism, it itself remains subject to it and reinforces it — reinforces what negates it. ↩
  2. “The controversies of history” is Malinowski’s understated way of referring to the “nightmare” from which his contemporary, James Joyce, was also “trying to awake”, See note 11 below. ↩
  3. All otherwise unidentified page numbers in this post refer to Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 1944. All bolding has been added. The first word of cited passages has been capitalized in cases where it is not capitalized in Malinowski’s text. ↩
  4. With ‘human’ here Malinowski appears to have meant ‘ideational’. ↩
  5. ‘Also’ — like the sciences of ‘first nature’. ↩
  6. ‘Social engineering’ has rightly become a term of abuse because of its inevitable failures when based on faulty intellectual and moral foundations. But since ‘social engineering’ is always going on, acknowledged or unacknowledged, the great need is for the correction of these foundations and, therefore, of the ‘social engineering’ ineluctably carried out on their basis. ↩
  7. Unfortunately, what is ‘indispensable’ remains missing: “this problem still awaits its solution (such) that the science of culture still lacks real criteria of identification” (69). See note 1 above. ↩
  8. “The legitimate isolate of cultural analysis” is a dual genitive, but first of all an objective genitive. That is, “cultural analysis” is itself a ‘product’ or ‘effect’ of a “legitimate isolate”, or isolates, expressing itself, or themselves, in it. ↩
  9. The multiplication of technical terms by Malinowski — ‘culture’, ‘institution’, ‘form’, ‘function’, ‘symbol’. ‘value’, ‘charter’ — is a sign that he was looking unsuccessfully for the “true identification” of the “legitimate subject matter” of his “new science”. These terms are cards his mind was shuffling in an attempt to find a formulation where ‘everything falls into place’. A generation after Malinowski’s death, McLuhan would supply insights Malinowski ran out of time to locate — especially the critical determination that a Scientific Theory of Culture would not be one more science along with the existing ones, but a new genus of sciences, one with a different elementary structure, the medium. ↩
  10. Dual genitive! ↩
  11. “The controversies of history”: Malinowski was writing in the first years of WW2 when Germany controlled all of Europe. He apparently used ‘controversies’ to cover horrendous conflicts like it and WW1 — to mention only the world wars fought in his lifetime. ↩
  12. This may be the sort of observation Lévi-Strauss saw as misdirected in Malinowski’s work (especially without the qualification added here of some of our problems). But it is clear that Malinowski saw culture as a separate domain from that of the physical material and that he did not think that the latter could ground the former: “Simple physiological impulses can not exist under conditions of culture” (87); “We must not forget biology, but we can not rest satisfied with biological determinism alone” (89); “the study of human behavior takes a definite departure from mere biological determinism” (94). ↩
  13. ‘Integral definition” is both complex and unified: “the drive is integral and (…) works right through the sequence, controlling all its phases (140); “the drive operates in a two-fold manner” (140). Hence Malinowski’s praise for “Frazer’s artistry and his love of the integral and the comprehensive” (114). ↩
  14. Thirty years later in his German language paper, ‘Gesetze der Medien — strukturelle  Annäherung‘ (Uterrichtswissenschaft, June, 1974) McLuhan would cite Nan Lin from The Study of Human Communication (1973): “The ultimate goal of science is to explain by means of a set of theories, events that are observed” (192). ↩
  15. Terms like “the processes of derivation” and “the hierarchy of need”, and especially “basic (…) physiological needs” seem to fall prey to the criticism of Malinowski by Lévi-Strauss: “I must say immediately that I have the greatest respect for him (Malinowski) and consider him a very great anthropologist, and I’m not at all deriding his contribution. But nevertheless the feeling in Malinowski was that the thought (…) of all the populations without writing which are the subject matter of anthropology was entirely (…) determined by the basic needs of life. If you know that a people, whoever they are, is determined by the bare necessities of living — finding subsistence, satisfying the sexual drives, and so on — then you can explain their social institutions, their beliefs, their mythology, and the like. This very widespread conception in anthropology generally goes under the name of functionalism” (Myth and Meaning, 1978). It is well to keep in mind, however, that Malinowski’s essay was written quickly when he was mortally ill. Note, for example, how a footnote on p80 refers to Dr. “A.I.” Richards and Dr. Margaret “Read”. A statement such as this referring to “basic, that is, physiological needs” might therefore be taken as needing qualification and perhaps rewriting, not as specifying Malinowski’s position regarding what is “basic” to a “scientific theory of culture”. And this especially when so much else in the essay differs from it. Furthermore, while it is of course true that a science like genetics presupposes the science of chemistry, and that the latter might therefore be thought in some ways to be more “basic” than genetics, it is also true that genetics is a science in its own right and that it in no way violates the laws of chemistry in being such. So with anthropology in relation to human “physiological needs”. Malinowski: “Simple physiological impulses can not exist under conditions of culture” (87); “The central thesis here maintained is that symbolism, in its essential nature, is the modification of the original organism which allows the transformation of a physiological drive into a cultural value” (132). Is this different from noting that genetics is the ‘modification’ of chemistry which ‘allows the transformation’ of physical material into information? ↩
  16. The terms ‘vital’ and ‘value’ are deeply ambiguous in Malinowski. The ‘vital’ is both “physiological” and the creativity that exceeds the physiological. ‘Value’ is both always already established in culture and the innovating act through which culture is reoriented. “The drive operates in a two-fold manner…” (140). ↩
  17. ‘The drive’ = McLuhan’s ‘extension’? ↩
  18. ‘Integral= McLuhan’s ‘inclusive’ or ‘electric’ = “the drive operates in a two-fold manner” (140). ↩
  19. There is a ‘knot in time’ here which is essential. Somehow from within a “culturally determined” situation (which characterizes all human beings from birth) an “establishment of (new) value’ can take place which fundamentally exceeds that “determined” situation. Hence the birth of sciences, as well as exceptional brilliance in the arts, crafts and practical pursuits like hunting. Malinowski in his essay on Frazer (included in A Scientific Theory Of Culture And Other Essays): “It is the pragmatic and intrinsic value of magic and religion which makes for their vitality and endurance” (191). ↩
  20. A fundamental question for Malinowski is whether he fully understood the great point made by Hegel in his ‘Vorrede’ to Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807): “Daß an jedem Falschen etwas Wahres sei -– in diesem Ausdrucke gelten beide, wie Öl und Wasser, die unmischbar nur äußerlich verbunden sind. Gerade um der Bedeutung willen, das Moment des vollkommenen Andersseins zu bezeichnen, müssen ihre Ausdrücke da, wo ihr Anderssein aufgehoben ist, nicht mehr gebraucht werden. So wie der Ausdruck der Einheit des Subjekts und Objekts, des Endlichen und Unendlichen, des Seins und Denkens usf. das Ungeschickte hat, daß Objekt und Subjekt usf. das bedeuten, was sie außer ihrer Einheit sind, in der Einheit also nicht als das gemeint sind, was ihr Ausdruck sagt…”. In regard to the relationship of the biological and the cultural considered by Malinowski in this passage, the question must be posed whether he saw how ‘the’ biological and ‘the’ cultural were fundamentally different when considered in or out of their relationship in a science of culture? The inauguration of that science turns on this question. The necessarily neutral stance of science is possible only when the ontology of its domain is first specified such that it is not bound to any pre-scientific acceptance of, for example, what ‘biology’ or ‘culture’ have been thought to be. Instead the claim of such a “new science’ must be that only now can it be understood what these really are. In this way, and in this way alone, controversies are removed from a realm of contention and instead are considered in a realm of demonstration. To compare, gold, silver, copper, tin and iron were ‘known’ thousands of years ago; but what they really are became known only with the advent of chemistry a little more than two centuries ago. More, what this chemical knowledge iyself really is, within which gold, silver, copper, tin and iron are demonstrably known, is the transformation of the entire world that occurred over these two centuries. In similar fashion, the meaning of a science of culture can and must be a further transformation of the world that would at last provide a demonstrable way of managing Malinowski’s “controversies of history” (69). ↩

Malinowski’s “new science” of culture (part 1)

The epigraph to Lévi-Strauss’ Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté (1949) is appropriate to Malinowski’s work as well:

The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.
— E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 18711

*

In his posthumously published A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944), Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) describes the “new science”2 he envisioned as follows:

In writing about the scientific approach to the Study of Man, an anthropologist has a (…) duty to define in what relation to one another the various branches of anthropology really3 stand. He has to determine the place which anthropology ought to occupy in the wider fraternity of humanistic studies. He has also to reopen the old question, in what sense humanism can be scientific. (4)4

The real meeting ground of all branches of anthropology is the scientific study of culture. (4)

The ethnologist (,,,) can base his arguments on sound scientific data only if he understands what culture really is. Finally, the ethnographic field-worker cannot observe unless he knows what is relevant and essential, and is thus able to discard adventitious and fortuitous happenings. Thus, the scientific quota in all anthropological work consists in the theory of culture, with reference to the method of observation in the field and to the [theoretical] meaning of culture as [both] process and product.5 (5)

If anthropology can contribute towards a more scientific outlook on its legitimate subject matter, that is, culture, it will (…) base its principles and arguments on the study of man as he really is, moving in the complex, many-dimensional medium of cultural interests. (5)

Scientific method has been inherent in all historic work, in all chronicling, in every argument used in jurisprudence, economics, and linguistics. There is no such thing as description completely devoid of theory. Whether you reconstruct historic scenes, carry out a field investigation in a savage tribe or a civilized community, analyze statistics, or make inferences from an archaeological monument or a prehistoric find — every statement and every argument has to be made in words, that is, in concepts. Each concept, in turn, is the result of a [usually implicit] theory which declares that some facts are relevant and others adventitious, that some factors determine the course of events and others are merely accidental byplay.6 (7)

consideration of what it means to observe, to reconstruct or to state an historic fact (…) consists in (…) a methodical system of conscientious work.7 (8)

However we may define the word science in some philosophical or epistemological system, it is clear that it begins with the use of previous observation for the prediction of the future. In this sense the spirit as well as the performance of science must have [always] existed in the reasonable behavior of man… (8)

The scientific attitude, embodied in all primitive technology and also in the organization of primitive economic enterprises and social organization, that reliance on past experience with the view to future performance, is an integral factor which must be assumed as having been at work from the very beginning of mankind, ever since the species started on its career as homo faber, as homo sapiens, and as homo politicus. (10)

Out of an inchoate body of environmental factors, random adaptations, and experiences, primitive man in his scientific approach had to isolate the relevant factors and to embody them into systems of relations and determining factors. (…) All such productive technological activities were based on [implicit] theory in which relevant factors were isolated, in which the value of theoretical accuracy was appreciated, in which forethought in achievement was based on carefully formulated experiences from the past.  (10)

The main point I am attempting to make here is not so much that primitive man has his science, but first, rather, that the scientific attitude is as old as culture, and second, that the minimum definition of science is derived from any pragmatic performance. (10)

Were we to check these conclusions as to the nature of science, drawn from our analysis of the discoveries, inventions, and theories of primitive man, by the advance of modern physics since Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, or Faraday, we would find the same differential factors which distinguish the scientific from other modes of human thought and behavior. Everywhere we find, first and foremost, the isolation of the real and relevant factors in a given process. (10-11)

Science really begins when general principles have to be put to the test of fact, and when practical problems and theoretical relations of relevant factors are used to manipulate reality in human action. (11)

To observe means to select, to classify, to isolate on the basis of  theory.8 (12)

In the present crisis of our civilization we have risen to vertiginous heights in the mechanical and chemical sciences, pure and applied (…) But we have neither faith in, nor respect for, the conclusions of humanistic arguments, nor yet in the validity of social theories. Today we very much need to establish the balance between the hypertrophied influence of natural science and its applications on the one hand, and the backwardness of social science, with the constant impotence of social engineering, on the other. (13)

The first task of each science is to recognize its legitimate subject matter. It has to proceed to methods of true identification, or isolation of the relevant factors of its process. This is nothing else than the establishment of general laws, and of concepts which embody such laws. This, of course, implies that every theoretical principle must always be translatable into a method of observation, and again, that in observation we follow carefully the lines of our conceptual analysis. (14)

In reality (…) we could find (…) much (…) diversity of (…) theories and methods [in Anthropology,] each characterized by some ultimate conception as to what is the real principle of interpretation; each having some specific approach through which it hopes to reach the comprehension of a cultural process or product; each going into the field with a somewhat differential set of intellectual pigeonholes into which to gather and distribute evidence.9 Thus there is the [implied] comparative method (…) which (…) must remain the basis of any generalization, any theoretical principle, or any universal law applicable to our subject matter.10 (18) 

A great Scottish scholar, W. Robertson Smith, was perhaps the first clearly to insist on the sociological context in all discussions which refer not merely to organization of groups but also to belief, to ritual, and to myth.11 (19)

The whole method of drawing parallels between ethnographic objects and prehistoric findings [of the the archaeologist] was inspiring and fruitful, especially in the measure to which the archaeologist and the ethnographer were both interested in those laws of cultural process and product which allow us to relate an artifact to a technique, a technique to an economic pursuit, and an economic pursuit to some vital need of man or of a human group. (21)

The fundamental principle of the field-worker (…) is that ideas, emotions and conations never (…) lead a cryptic, hidden existence within the unexplorable depths of the mind, conscious or unconscious. All sound (…) experimental psychology can deal only with observations of overt behavior… (23)

We are mostly interested in the foundations of the  [anthropological] edifice, that is, in the really scientific quota contained in these various works. And here we would probably have to carry out a piece of work partly inspired by the profession of house-wreckers; certainly one in which a great many fundamental points would have to be questioned and (…) persistent errors of method indicated. (25)

Where do we find the main shortcomings of the various classical schools of anthropology? In my opinion, they always center round the question whether (…) the scholar has devoted sufficient attention to the full and clear analysis of the cultural reality with which he deals. Here it would be possible to show that throughout the scores or hundreds of books and articles devoted to primitive marriage, clanship, and kinship (…) there can hardly be found a single clear analysis of what is meant by a domestic institution or kinship.12 (26)

In real science the fact consists in the relatedness, provided that this is really determined, universal, and scientifically definable. (27)

To dissociate the studies of mind, of society and of culture, is to foredoom the results.13 (31)

Trait analysis and the characterization of culture by traits or trait complexes depends on the question whether they can be isolated as realities, and thus made comparable in observation and theory. (33)

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in any attempt at isolation of separate traits. The positive contribution of this essay will [be to] show how far and under what conditions we can isolate relevant realities.14 (34)

The only point which matters is whether we are able to isolate a related set of phenomena on the basis of a really scientific analysis, or [do so] on [the basis of] a mere arbitrary assumption. And again, the real point is whether (…) we attach the maximum value to characteristics of [an arbitrary] trait (…) or whether, on the contrary, we look only for relations and for forms which are determined by the cultural forces really at work. The [latter] is the only scientific way to our understanding of what culture really is. (…) On this point there can be no compromise, and there is no middle way.15 (34-35) 

  1. Malinowski a quarter century before Lévi-Strauss’ Parenté: “The credit of having laid the foundations of an anthropological study of religion belongs to Edward B. Tylor”, ‘Magic, Science and Religion‘ (in Science, Religion and Reality, ed Joseph Needham, 1925). ↩
  2. “The new science was born under the star of enthusiastic evolutionism, of anthropometric methods, and of revelatory discoveries in prehistory.” (4) ↩
  3. As emphasized in the passages given here from A Scientific Theory of Culture, it is remarkable how often Malinowski appeals to the complex of real-reality-realities-really. In Magic, Science and Religion , similarly, these appear over 150 times or once in every two pages. ↩
  4. All otherwise unidentified page numbers in this post refer to Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 1944. All bolding has been added. The first word of cited passages has been capitalized in cases where it is not capitalized in Malinowski’s text. ↩
  5. What Malinowski calls ‘product’, McLuhan calls ‘effect’. Malinowski’s constant reference to meticulous observation and theory construction together is an example of what McLuhan calls ‘inclusivity’. Malinowski: “every theoretical principle must always be translatable into a method of observation” and at the same time all observation “must always be translatable” into “conceptual analysis” (14). ↩
  6. Comparably, the essential distinction in chemistry is between elements (and their compounds) and properties. The former explain, the latter are explained. Malinowski: “It is always necessary in the integral definition (…) to determine (…) essential nature and relate to it the other subsidiary functions” (114). ↩
  7. To “conscientious work” Malinowski contrasts mere intuition: “most principles, generalizations, and theories were implicit in the historian’s reconstruction, and were intuitive rather than systematic in nature.” (8) ↩
  8. The ‘theory’ from which observation arises as ‘product’ or ‘effect’ is, of course, nearly always implicit. ↩
  9. The anthropologist is therefore in the same position as the people and cultures being studied. What has to be accomplished is a kind of squaring (or taking to a higher power) of the inherent scientific approach of all human being. J.G. Frazer: “science is nothing but knowledge raised to the highest power” (‘Preface’ to Malinowski’s Argonauts of the western Pacific, an account of native enterprise and adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, 1922). ↩
  10. McLuhan’s mentor at the University of Manitoba, Rupert Lodge, espoused such a ‘comparative method’ — see The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge. Malinowski cautions: “Obviously, this whole approach presupposes a really scientific definition of the realities compared. Unless we list, in our exhaustive inventories, really comparable phenomena, and are never duped by surface similarities or fictitious analogies, a great deal of labor may lead to incorrect conclusions” (18). Again: “In order, however, to make an historical process really significant in terms of explanation or analysis, it is above all necessary to prove that we are, along the time coordinate, linking up phenomena that are strictly comparable” (20). Still lateri: “in any (…) comparative research, the problem of identity first has to be faced and solved” (31): the common identity, that is, of the things to be compared. ↩
  11. What Malinowski calls ‘the sociological context’ here is what McLuhan calls the domain of the ‘artifact’. The essential factor for both is human ‘making’. Hence Malinowski’s interest in “those laws of cultural process and product which allow us to relate an artifact to a technique, a technique to an economic pursuit, and an economic pursuit to some vital need of man or of a human group” (21). ↩
  12. Regarding “there can hardly be found a single clear analysis of what is meant by a domestic institution or kinship”, Lévi-Strauss’ first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, was published, perhaps not fortuitously, five years after Malinowski’s 1944 book in 1949. It is an exhaustive attempt to define kinship rigorously. On the next page after this passage Malinowski continues: “In all this we can see that not sufficient attention has been given so far to that scientific activity which (…) consists in clearly defining and relating the relevant factors which operate in such cultural facts as magic, totemism, the clan system, and the domestic institution” (27). Lévi-Strauss’ Le totémisme aujourd’hui was published in 1962. (Although Lévi-Strauss refers to Malinowski over and over again in his work, including to very obscure titles, A Scientific Theory of Culture does not seem to appear there at all — although he did know the later Magic, Science and Religion from 1948. Did he not know the 1944 book? Doubtful! Perhaps Lévi-Strauss had to ignore this great text in taking his different route to anthropological science? In any case, the description of Malinowski’s functionalism given by Lévi-Strauss in, say, Myth and Meaning is surprisingly simplistic and misleading. ↩
  13. A citation by Malinowski of himself from his article “Anthropology” in the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1926). ↩
  14. Malinowski’s point here reiterates the central lesson of the ‘new criticism’ with which he had been associated since the appearance of his essay, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’ in 1923 as a ‘supplement’ to The Meaning of Meaning by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. That point might be formulated as the insistence on the inherent plurality to the meaning of words and the resulting need for great care in their use, especially in poetry and its criticism. ↩
  15. Malinowski’s thrust here is comparable to Lavoisier’s in the 1780s where the need was to consolidate and systematize existing findings in (what was to become) chemistry. The result in both cases is the identification of a new domain whose investigation would change the entire world in Lavoisier’s case or could and should change the entire world in Malinowski’s. As regards “no middle way”, compare McLuhan citing Aquinas citing Aristotle: “the basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica (…) The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs instantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics  — “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form” (From Cliché to Archetype, 160). There can be “no middle way” in such cases because there can be no ground between grounds, no fundament between fundaments, no time between times. The history of the last 2500 years might be characterized as the consequences of the ever-repeated failure to understand this point. ↩

On the imbalance between physical and social science

Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 1944

In the present crisis of our civilization we have risen to vertiginous heights in the mechanical and chemical sciences, pure and applied (…) But we have neither faith in, nor respect for, the conclusions of humanistic arguments, nor yet in the validity of social theories. Today we very much need to establish the balance between the hypertrophied influence of natural science and its applications on the one hand, and the backwardness of social science, with the constant impotence of social engineering, on the other. (13)

Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, 1950

As the west faces its recent dilemma of the abdication of practical foresight in face of crucial perils, while at the same time science becomes able to exercise its own forms of prediction with ever-increasing power and dangerous effect, it is profitable to recapture the original Greek view which unified the theoretical and the practical intelligence. It is premature to tax Greek thinkers with naiveté because they assumed that there are skills available to man to control and improve and civilize his life and action, and that these have to be trained and cultivated by the same logic that governs the physical sciences. The Greeks in fact invented political and social science and when they said “science”, they meant it. It was the techne, that procedure for which Plato sought an “epistemology” (episteme). Though his philosophy always concentrated on the abstract levels of the intellect, he never forgot the technical procedures which had given it birth. The moral effect of this unification was striking. (84)

McLuhan, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This [2-fold] 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. 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.

 

Laws of the Media in the 1970s

In 1975 McLuhan wrote to E.T. Hall:

I have recently done another book, on The Laws of the Media (not yet published), explaining the linguistic character of all human artifacts, hardware or software. (McLuhan to Hall, December 8, 1975)

In the event, the slightly renamed Laws of Media was not published until 1988, more than 12 years later and more than 7 years after McLuhan’s death at the end of 1980. It was left to Eric McLuhan to put together its pieces into a completed volume.

But McLuhan did publish a series of papers on ‘Laws of the Media’ starting in the middle 1970’s:

‘Gesetze der Medien — strukturelle Annäherung‘, Uterrichtswissenschaft, June 1974, 79-84.1

In an April 3, 1974, letter to Melvin Kranzberg, the editor of Technology and Culture, McLuhan referred to this paper as follows:

I have written various introductions at various times and have thrown them all away. One was called ‘The Laws of the Media: A Structural Approach’, citing Collingwood’s Metaphysics: Where there is no strain, there is no history. Structuralism in linguistics and in aesthetics I am fairly familiar with, especially through the new criticism, and also the history of symbolism.

Eric McLuhan in The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan (2017) notes that this German paper “included tetrads, in list form, on such topics as Spoken Word, Phonetic Alphabet, Press, Typewriter, Xerox, Telephone, Radio, Electric Media, Money, and Satellite.” (11) Many of these same tetrads appeared in different formats in the following ‘Laws of the Media’ papers.

‘McLuhan’s Laws of the Media‘, Technology and Culture, 16:1, 1975, 74-78.

The continuation of McLuhan’s April 3, 1974, letter to Kranzberg (following the initial section cited above) contained passages which were included, presumably on Kranzberg’s suggestion, in the introductory section of ‘McLuhan’s Laws of the Media’ as it came to be published:

The structuralists, beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure and now Lévi-Strauss, divide the two approaches to the problems of form into diachrony and synchrony. Diachrony is simply the developmental, chronological study of any cultural matter, but synchrony works on the assumption that all aspects of any form are simultaneously present in any part of it. This simultaneous approach is the one I use in ‘Laws of the Media’ herewith enclosed.2 However, in the case of any one of them, I can flip to the diachronic approach for filling in historical background and details.
Since electric speeds of information constitute a sort of simultaneous structuring of experience, synchrony, representing all directions at once, is, as it were, acoustic whereas the diachronic, representing one stage at a time, is visual in its analytical pattern. Few people seem to be aware that visual space and order are continuous, connected, homogeneous and static. In these regards, visual space is quite different from any other kind of Space, be it tactile, kinetic, audile or osmic (smell). Visual space alone can be divided.
In formulating the Laws of the Media I have proceeded by induction, even though in the process of induction one discovers many things that could not be merely inducted. The Laws of the Media have been shaped by studying the effects of media so there is always a hidden ground upon which these effects stand, and against which they bounce. That is to say, the Law of a Medium is a figure interplaying with a ground.  As  with a wheel and axle, there must be an interval between the two in order for the play to exist.”3 

An important observation from ‘McLuhan’s Laws of the Media’:

Although these are called Laws of the Media, only a few of them deal with communications media narrowly conceived. Instead, I am talking about “media” in terms of a larger [ground]4 of information and perception which forms our thoughts, structures our experience, and determines our views of the world about us. It is this kind of [vertical] information flow — media — which is responsible for my postulation of a series of insights regarding the impact of certain technological developments.

‘Misunderstanding the Media’s Laws‘, letter to Technology and Culture, 17:2, 1976, 263.

McLuhan’s 1976 letter published in Technology and Culture was originally a 1975 personal letter addressed to Kranzberg. It was a response to a critique of ‘McLuhan’s Laws of the Media’ by Henry Venable, titled ‘Flaws in McLuhan’s Laws’, which appeared in the same 1976 issue of Technology and Culture as McLuhan’s letter,5 but was shown to McLuhan by Kranzberg in 1975. The published version of McLuhan’s letter reads as follows:

To THE EDITOR — Mr. Venable’s response to my ‘Laws of the Media’ is typical of difficulties people have with my writings. For example, Venable attempts to relate my “tetrades”, or laws, to logic (the logic of C. S. Peirce). The whole point about my tetrads is that they are analogical. That is, there are no connections between any of them, but there are dynamic ratios. Everything that follows in Venable’s comments is equally remote from anything I have observed or stated. He has not read me at all but has almost at random used my observations as points from which to take off on his own flights. That is, there is no disagreement between Venable and me; there is simply no point of contact whatever.
By the way, I have just come across an invaluable book, Ecological Psychology, by Roger G. Barker (Stanford, Calif., 1968). It was pointed out to me by Edward T. Hall in The Fourth Dimension in Architecture (Santa Fe, 1975), in which he notes: “The most pervasive and important assumption, a cornerstone in the edifice of Western thought, that lies hidden from our consciousness and has to do with man’s relationship to his environment. Quite simply the Western view is that human processes, particularly behavior, are independent of environmental controls and influence” (p. 7).I appear to be the only person who knows why Western man played up these assumptions about his immunity to environmental influence.
Of late, I have been studying more and more the kinds of response to my own work, and there is a uniform response of hostility to any study of psychic effects of technology. Strangely, non-Western man does not take this attitude. The Hindu and the Japanese and the African have welcomed my approach, without demur. As can be seen in my book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (New York, 1972), I consider that Western man has been going Eastward and inward with the electric revolution. That is, Western man is ceasing to be Western and Eastern man is moving Westward, rapidly, with our technology and hardware.”

Kranzberg deleted the opening paragraph of the August 22, 1975 letter to him for its publication in the journal — McLuhan had indicated that he could make any changes he wanted. Here is that paragraph:

Of course I am interested in Mr. Venable’s response to the ‘Laws of the Media’, if only because it is typical of the difficulties people have with my stuff. For example he says [that my] “starting postulate is that men see the environment as hostile”.  This, of course, is news  to me. He then proceeds to the problem of “non involvement” in relation to books. My entire theme in this regard has been that the printed word creates a habit of “detachment” and “objectivity” on which Western man prides himself. It has been the basis of Western science, at least until the electric age. However, I have always stressed the huge subliminal involvement created by the alphabet, and by the printed word, and have devoted an entire book to this, The Gutenberg Galaxy. By the same token, “objectively” constituted Western man, proud of his detachment, tends to panic in the presence of subliminal response.

The source of this panic may lie in the abysmal border implicated in the possibility of subliminal response. And this may throw light on “the kinds of response to (McLuhan’s) own work”. For if subliminal response represents a deep unknown, the difference between it and ordinary cognition represents an even deeper unknown and one that, unlike a subliminal response, cannot possibly be retrieved. It is this unknown of an unknown, unknown squared, that sparks a “uniform response of hostility”, “panic” and inevitable “misunderstanding”.  

This unrecallable deep unknown is, of course, the transitive medium that is the message.

‘Laws of the Media‘, Etc: a review of general semantics, 34:2, 1977, 173-179.6

Some of McLuhan’s observations:

The “Laws of the Media” led me to the awareness that all our artifacts, all our “sensory and motor accessories,” are, in fact, words. All of these things are outerings and utterings of man. (…) Exploration of the “Laws of the Media” opens up the matter of the grammar and syntax of each artifact. (…) All the extensions of man, verbal or non-verbal, hardware or software, are essentially metaphoric in structure, and (…) are in the plenary sense linguistic. (…) The mind of man is structurally inherent in all human artifacts and hypotheses whatever.

All of man’s artifacts, of language, of laws, of ideas and hypotheses, of tools, of clothing and computers ㅡ all of these are extensions of the physical human body. Hans Hass, in The Human Animal [1970, German original 1968], sees this human power to create additional “organs” as “an enormity from the evolutionary standpoint (…) an advance laden with unfathomable consequences.” The “Laws of the Media” are observations on the operation and effects of human artifacts on man and society, since, Hass further notes, a human artifact “is not merely an implement for working upon something, but an extension of our body effected by the artificial addition of organs (…) to which, to a greater or lesser degree, we owe our civilization.”

‘Multi-Media: The Laws of the Media’, The English Journal, 67:8, 1978, 92-94.7

Some of McLuhan’s thoughts from this paper:

My current writing (…) concerns a study of the laws of the media. (Perhaps it will be called “Phenomenology of the Media“.) This approach to the media is a right hemisphere study which is analogical rather than logical, simultaneous rather than consecutive.

To return to basics in the study of anything whatever means returning to the ground of the central effects of that thing.

The figure-ground approach offers a basic way of studying our culture without getting into controversy about whether a particular thing is good or bad in itself. This study of ground also bypasses the problem of programs and content, whether in books or electric media. The content is not ground but figure, and the overwhelming effect of any technology reaches the public by means of the ground, not by the program or content. 

the extreme point of reversal [is where] any figure, when duly enlarged, tends to flip into ground.

  1. ‘Laws of the Media: a structural approach’, with Eric McLuhan. ↩
  2. ‘Laws of the Media’ was retitled to ‘McLuhan’s Laws of the Media’ when it was published by Kranzberg in Technology and Culture the following year. ↩
  3. McLuhan began referring to figure and ground after he read Kohler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964 and he began using the image of wheel and axle in 1970. These data points help specify the trajectory of his thinking about “the laws of the media”. Other data points would include his reading of Vico starting in the mid 1940s and his long consciousness of reversals, extensions and retrievals which he at first considered separately and then brought together in the 1970s in ‘the laws of the media’ as he sought to summarize his thought for posterity. ↩
  4. McLuhan has ‘entity’ here, not ‘ground’. But an ‘entity’ is an example or effect of a manifesting power grounding it. Such a power may be termed an archetype, a cause, an element, a ground, etc, but not properly an ‘entity’. “To return to basics in the study of anything whatever means returning to the ground of the central effects of that thing” (‘Multi-Media: The Laws of the Media’, cited above. ↩
  5. 17:2, 256-262. ↩
  6. Reprinted in McLuhan Unbound 1:19, 5-15. ↩
  7. With Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon. ↩

Contesting twofolds in Egypt and Greece

Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis. The relation of created things to the ‘pattern laid up in heaven’ is, as we saw, that methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis, the ‘imitation’ by which the living world was built upon the Pythagorean numbers. Thus the relationship created by earliest man, (…) the vehicle of the first-known religion, is now made articulate. The wheel has come full-circle. (Rachel Levy, Gate of Horn, 1948).1


Athena and Poseidon on the Parthenon 432 BC.2


Seth and Horus binding upper and lower Egypt together, c1950 BC — 1500 years before classical Athens.3

*

The excellent Theoi Project site has a selection of texts describing the contest of Athena and Poseidon over which of the two would name Athens and be its paramount god. With some modifications and additions, notably the oldest passage from Herodotus,4 and the revealing use of Athena and Poseidon as geographical and economic markers by Plutarch, these are:

Herodotus, Histories, 8.55 (c425 BC)
In that acropolis is a shrine of Erechtheus (…) and in the shrine are an olive tree and a pool of salt water. The story among the Athenians is that they were set there by Poseidon and Athena as tokens when they contended for the land. It happened that the olive tree was burnt by the barbarians with the rest of the sacred precinct, but on the day after its burning, when the Athenians ordered by the king to sacrifice went up to the sacred precinct, they saw a shoot of about a cubit’s length sprung from the stump.

Plato, Menexenus 237c (c390 BC):
Our country [Athens] is deserving of praise, not only from us but from all men, on many grounds, but first and foremost because she is god-beloved. The strife of the gods who contended over her [i.e. Athena and Poseidon] and their judgement [through the Olympians] testify to the truth of our statement.

Callimachus, Hecale Fragment 1.2 (3rd century BC)
The land [Attika] which she [Athena] had newly obtained by vote of Zeus and the other immortals and the witness of the Snake [Kekrops]5.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.70 ff (1st century BC – 1st century AD):
The rock of Mavors [= Mars = Ares] in Cecrops’ citadel is [in] Pallas [Athena’s] picture [in her weaving contest with Arakhne] and [there is also shown] that old dispute about the name of Athens. Twelve great gods, Jove [Zeus] in their midst, sit there on lofty thrones, grave and august, each pictured with his own familiar features: Jove in regal grace, the Sea-God [Poseidon] standing, striking the rough rock with his tall trident, and the wounded rock gushing sea-brine, his proof to clinch his claim. [In the picture, Athena] herself she gives a shield, she gives a spear sharp-tipped, she gives a helmet for her head; the aegis guards her breast, and from the earth struck by her spear, she shows an olive tree, springing pale-green with berries on the boughs; the gods admire; and Victoria [Nike] ends the work.

Statius, Thebaid, VII: 185 (1st century AD)
Minerva banished Neptune’s fount from her citadel

Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Themistocles (1st-2nd century AD)
Themistocles equipped the Piraeus, because he had noticed the favorable shape of its harbors, and wished to attach the whole city to the sea; thus in a certain manner counteracting the policies of the ancient Athenian kings. For they, as it is said, in their efforts to draw the citizens away from the sea and accustom them to live not by navigation but by agriculture, disseminated the story about Athena, how when Poseidon was contending with her for possession of the country, she displayed the sacred olive-tree of the Acropolis to the judges, and so won the day. 

Plutarch. Morals: Quaestiones Convivales (1st-2nd century AD)
For you [Hylas] are wont to recount unto us how he [Neptune] has been oftentimes overcome — here [in Athens] by Minerva, in Delphi by Apollo, in Argos by Juno, in Aegina by Jupiter, in Naxos by Bacchus — and yet has borne himself always mild and gentle in all his repulses. In proof whereof, there is even in this city a temple common to him and Minerva, in which there is also an altar dedicated to Oblivion. Then Hylas (…) replied: You have omitted, Menephylus, that we have abolished the second day of September, not in regard of the moon [to coordinate the solar and lunar calendars], but because it was thought to be the day on which Neptune and Minerva contended for the seigniory of Attica.

Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.14.1 (2nd century AD):
Kekrops, a son of the soil, with a body compounded of man and serpent, was the first king of Attika (…) In his time, they say, the gods resolved to take possession of cities in which each of them should receive his own peculiar worship. So Poseidon was the first that came to Attika, and with a blow of his trident on the middle of the acropolis, he produced a sea6 which they now call Erekhtheis7. After him came Athena, and, having called on Kekrops to witness her act of taking possession, she planted an olive tree, which is still shown in the Pandrosion.8 But when the two strove for possession of the country, Zeus parted them and appointed arbiters, not, as some have affirmed, Kekrops and Kranaus, nor yet Erysikhthon,9 but the twelve gods (Δωδεκάθεοι). And in accordance with their verdict the country was adjudged to Athena, because Kekrops bore witness that she had been the first to plant the olive. Athena, therefore, called the city Athens after herself, and Poseidon in hot anger flooded the Thriasian plain and laid Attika under the sea10.

Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.24.2 (2nd century AD):
[On the Akropolis is a] group [of statues] dedicated by Alkamenes.11 Athena is represented displaying the olive plant, and Poseidon the wave.

Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.24.5:
As you enter the temple that they name the Parthenon, all the sculptures you see on (…) the rear pediment represent the contest for the land between Athena and Poseidon.

Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.27.1:
About the olive tree they have nothing to say except that it was testimony the goddess produced when she contended for their land. Legend also says that when the Persians set fire to Athens the olive tree was consumed, but on the very day it was burnt it grew again to the height of two cubits.

Hyginus, Fabulae 164 (2nd century AD):
When there was a contest between Neptunus [Poseidon] and Minerva [Athena] as to who should be the first to found a town in the Attic land, they took Jove [Zeus] as judge. Minerva won because she first planted the olive in that land, said to be there to this day. But Neptunus, in anger, wanted to have the sea flood that land. Mercurius [Hermes], at Jove’s command, forbade his doing that. And so Minerva in her own name founded Athens, a town said to be the first established in the world.

The ultimate result12 of the contest between Athena and Poseidon over Athens, and of the interest taken in it by the Olympian gods in council, was that Athena and Poseidon came to be worshipped in the same temple on the acropolis, the Erechtheion. It was here that Athena’s primary cult statue was housed, an ancient figure carved from olive wood, which seems to have been saved from her original temple when it was destroyed by the Persians in 480 BC. The chief priestess of Athena was stationed at the Erechtheion to serve at the altar where civic sacrifices to the goddess were made. Furthermore, this temple of the two together was where the great procession on the last day13 of the Panathenia festival terminated — not at the later-named Parthenon. So the intense contest between these two of the 12 chief Greek gods led14 to a reconciliation brought about by the intervention of the other 10 of the Olympians led by Zeus.


The Erechtheum on the acropolis with Athena’s olive tree, 406 BC.

Hegel called Greece the heir of Egypt and there are many parallels between this contest of Athena and Poseidon with the millennia earlier Egyptian contestings of Horus and Seth.15

In the mythology of ancient Egypt, Horus the hawk god and Seth, the desert animal god, fought each other in mortal combat over the lordship of the land. Horus was usually taken to be the god of lower Egypt to the north, Seth of upper Egypt to the south (although there seem to have been ancient cult sites to each of them in both areas). Their reconciliation brought about by a council of the nine great gods was the mythological founding event of the combined Egyptian nation.

Seth was the god of the arid desert as opposed to Horus of the fertile fields of the Nile valley and delta. Similarly in Greece, Poseidon was the god of desiccating salt water as opposed to Athena of the fresh water dependent olive tree.16 Athena was awarded Athens on the basis of this difference, but Athens, like Egypt, required both. Egypt obtained products from the desert, especially stone and metals, and required its vast peripheral extent as protection for its center. Above all, it was it was from the southern desert that the Nile brought water and life to the Egyptians. Athens, too, required many products from the salt water sea, especially food and trade, and relied on it for protection (as demonstrated particularly at Salamis).

In Greece the story of the contesting of Athena and Poseidon was told not only of Athens but also of Troizen in the Argolid, where the Athenians fled during the Persian sack of their city.17   And similar stories were told (with Athena being substituted by other protagonists) of Hera and Poseidon in Argos (where Poseidon caused the fresh water rivers to dry up and the land to be flooded with salt water from the sea),18 Helios and Poseidon in Corinth,19 Zeus and Poseidon in Aegina, Apollo and Poseidon in Delphi, and Dionysus and Poseidon in Naxos.20 Even in far inland Sparta, Pausanias reports (3.17.3) that the largest figures on the temple of Athena along with Athena herself were Poseidon and his consort, Amphitrite.21 

Finally, the great Greek epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey were tales set against the background of the fateful enmity between Athena and Poseidon — and of their reconciliation.

Troy was Poseidon’s city and Athena working with Hera enabled its destruction. Euripides’ Trojan Women sets all this out in its opening monolog: 

Poseidon: From the depths of salt Aegean floods I, Poseidon, have come (,,,) for since the day that Phoebus and I with exact measurement set towers of stone about this land of Troy and ringed it round, never from my heart has passed away a kindly feeling for my Phrygian town, which now is smouldering and overthrown, a prey to Argive might. For, from his home beneath Parnassus, Phocian Epeus, aided by the craft of Pallas, framed a horse22 to bear within its womb an armed army, and sent it within the battlements, a deadly statue; (…) Vanquished by Hera, Argive goddess, and by Athena, who helped to ruin Phrygia, I am leaving Ilium, that famous town, and my altars; (…) Farewell, O city once prosperous! farewell, you ramparts of polished stone! if Pallas, daughter of Zeus, had not decreed your ruin, you would be standing firmly still. 

Poseidon’s revenge, now working with Athena who has turned against the Greeks for their desecrations of the altars and rites of the gods, was to delay the homecoming of Odysseus and to destroy all his men. Here is the exchange of Athena and Poseidon that continues on from Poseidon’s monolog in Euripides’ play:

Athena: May I address the mighty god whom the gods revere and who to my own father is very near in blood, laying aside our former enmity?

Poseidon: You may; for over the soul the ties of kin23 exert no feeble spell, great queen Athena.

Athena: For your forgiving mood my thanks! I have messages to impart affecting both yourself and me, lord. (…) I will impose on [the Greeks] a return that is no return. 

Poseidon: While they stay on shore, or as they cross the salt sea?

Athena: When they have set sail from Ilium for their homes. On them will Zeus also send his rain and fearful hail, and inky tempests from the sky; and he promises to grant me his thunder-bolts to hurl on the Achaeans and fire their ships. And you, for your part, make the Aegean strait to roar with mighty billows and whirlpools, and fill Euboea‘s hollow bay with corpses, that Achaeans may learn henceforth to reverence my temples and regard all other deities.

Athena and Poseidon, c 530 BC.24

All this matched Egypt where stories of Seth’s struggles not only with Horus but also with Osiris and other gods were already proverbial from the time of its earliest records — two millennia before classical Athens. There, too, Seth was seen as ultimately losing conflict after conflict, though with intermittent triumphs in them, before becoming25 reconciled with Horus, integrated into the community of the gods (with an important place in the boat of the sun god’s daily journey) and worshiped by the Egyptians. 

The contests of Horus-Seth and of Athena-Poseidon were both settled by councils of the gods, councils which represented the triumph of justice both in their balanced assembly and in their rulings.

Both cases are examples of the threefold of Being as seen also in Plato’s γιγαντομαχία περὶ τῆς οὐσίας with its (1) gods, (2) giants and (3) philosophical child ‘begging for both’.26 All these conflicts involve divine beings who are rival ontologies that are equally epistemologies. Being itself is knowledgeable in fundamentally different ways (as polytheisms have always insisted), although it is much more than this as well of course — the inertial power of manifestation, for example.

Horus (1) versus Seth (2) is a fundamentally different matter from Horus and Seth together (3), just as Athena (1) versus Poseidon (2) is a fundamentally different matter from Athena and Poseidon together (3) — and just as Plato’s gods (1) versus the giants (2) is a fundamentally different matter from ‘both together’ as perceived by the philosophical child (3).27 In parallel fashion in Egypt, the peace between Horus and Seth was often said to have been mediated by Thoth (3), the philosophical Ibis god who invented letters.28 Difference within the plurality of Being is necessarily also a belonging together ‘there’ and the very archetype of peace.29 Otherwise, as seen in gnosticisms and heresies of all sorts, opposition that is merely antagonistic inevitably leads to a demand for singularity and, ultimately, to the denial of any sort of plurality at all.

The central question at stake in all these contestings concerns two twofolds: that of either-or (Athena or Poseidon, Horus or Seth, gods or giants) and that of both-together (Athena and Poseidon, Horus and Seth, gods and giants). The former dynamic implicates a demand for unilateral hegemony and singularity; the latter, a recourse to reconciliation and harmonious plurality.

The fundamentality of the plurality option to the Egyptians and Greeks is shown in the accounts of the reconciliation of Horus and Seth, and of Athena and Poseidon, by its institution through — and as a reflection of! — the assembly of the nine great gods of Egypt and of the twelve Olympians in Greece. The γιγαντομαχία portrays the same archetype of reconciled divine contesting.

The great difficulty to this third position is that it cannot be taken as singular truth or reality without reducing it to the would-be monolithic structures of the first and second.  The third can be the third only by embracing that first and second to which it is fundamentally opposed. But fundamental difference of course characterizes the relation of every possibility of Being to every other possibility in its astonishing plurality of fundaments. The inescapable fate of human being lies just here — to be exposed to the fundamental differences of powers far greater than it.

Another marker of the central difference between the warring and the reconciled twofolds was that the Athenians omitted the day from the calendar on which the antagonistic contest between Poseidon and Athena was said to have taken place.30 The action of antagonistic contest was, so to say, denied time and space — perhaps this is what was behind the altar dedicated to Oblivion? — in favor of a calendrical round grounded in mutual recognition. Here is Plutarch (Morals: De fraterno amore, 11):

But let them observe with caution that day above all others, as it may be to them the beginning either of mortal enmity or of friendship and concord.31 

 

  1. Cited by McLuhan in ‘Maritain on Art’ and in ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’ (both 1953). ↩
  2. This is a reconstruction of the west pediment of the Parthenon showing the contest of Athena and Poseidon.  The olive tree of Athena is in the background between the gods. Is this a sign of Athena’s victory over Poseidon? Or is it a sign of their reconciliation in the worship of both gods in the Erechtheum on the acropolis? For the olive tree, like all trees, is planted in the ground but reaches to the heavens — a representation of the peace of earth and sky and of the possibility of the reconciliation of all things. ↩
  3. Relief now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. The plants below Seth (papyrus) and Horus (lotus), which they are using to tie the knot between them, symbolize upper and lower Egypt respectively. The royal cartouche above them, of the pharaoh Senusret I (1971-1926 BC) reads Kheperkare, ‘the Ka of Re is created’ = the spirit of the sun god arises at dawn. The relief therefore shows the combined kingdom of Egypt as the mirroring product of divine manifestation. The c1950 date is the date for the relief, not for the contestings of Horus and Seth which are much older — doubtless stretching into prehistory.  Special note should be made of the third power between Horus and Seth, an axis, like the olive tree between Athena and Poseidon, which combines the two (whether of gods or regions) without reducing them to undifferentiated singularity. Great questions are gathered here, especially regarding time, since the third is not related to the conciliated two as their consequential result, but as contemporaneous with them. See notes 12 and 30. ↩
  4. The Wikipedia entry for the ‘Erechtheion‘ notes that there are passages in Homer referencing the home of Athena in the Erechtheion in the form of her ancient olive wood statue. But the references given there (Iliad VII 80–81 and Odyssey II 546–551) seem to be reversed and should be Iliad II 546–551 and Odyssey VII 80–81. ↩
  5. For Kekrops-Cecrops see the passage from Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca above and note 9 below. ↩
  6. The salt water well of Poseidon in the Erechtheum was called a ‘sea’ (θάλασσα). ↩
  7. For the connection of ‘Erekhtheis’ with Poseidon, see ‘Erysikhthon’ below. ↩
  8. The Πανδρόσειον was a quadrangle just west of the Erechtheum dedicated to one of the daughters of Kekrops, Πάνδροσος. The olive tree of Athena growing here served to tie a kind of knot in which Kekrops and his sons served as kings of Athens under the aegis of Athena, but Athena herself was identified with the daughter of Kekrops, Pandrosos. ↩
  9. Kekrops, Kranaus and Erysikhthon were the mythical early kings of Athens. Their rites and saga were closely bound to that of Athena and Poseidon for Athens issued from them in the same way as it did from the contest and reconciliation of the two Olympians. Kekrops was half man and half serpent and both the city of Athens and Kekrops’ sons were the manifestation of the fertility of the resolution of the conflict between the two species he embodied. The line of the kings represented continuing order, while its descent from the snake represented the celebrated Athenian autochthony or ‘earthborn ancestry’. All this again reflected Egypt since Seth was often portrayed as a snake and it was his reconciliation with the ‘higher’ power of the hawk god, Horus, that was the founding event of the nation. The resulting civilization owed everything to the periodically replenished soil of the Nile valley and delta. ‘Erysikhthon’ = ‘Earthshaker’ was named after Poseidon, the god of earthquakes. ↩
  10. See note 6. ↩
  11. Alkamenes — the great Greek sculptor a generation before Plato. ↩
  12. Phrases like ‘the ultimate result’ place the contest between Athena and Poseidon in narrative time: first this happened, then that. But this is a mythological telling of the question between enmity and conciliation that is ‘always now’ (see note 30). ↩
  13. The 28th day of Hekatombaion. ↩
  14. ‘Led to’ — see note 12. ↩
  15. The most complete early versions of the Horus and Seth cycle found in the coffin texts (c2000 BC) are discussed by Jan Assmann in many of his books. See, for example Tod und Jenseits im Alten Ägypten, 2001, 374 (trans, Death And Salvation In Ancient Egypt, 2005, 283). But the contestings of Horus and Seth are already central to the pyramid texts (c2400 BC). A much later account from c1145 BC is found in the Chester Beatty Papyrus. For further discussion of the contestings of Horus and Seth, see The ancient bond of guest-host-enemy and Assmann on the battle between Horus and Seth. ↩
  16. Seth and Poseidon were gods of the perimeter, of sterility and of general disorder (such as Poseidon’s storms and earthquakes). By contrast, Horus and Athena were gods of the center, of fertility and of order. In the end there is no summary balance to the contest of these fundamental powers, only forever outstanding questions and abysmal depths. Polytheism as was found in Egypt and Greece, and seemingly once the world over, is the insistence that such powers are divine, eternal and impossible to reduce to any singularity. ↩
  17. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.30.6: “They say that Athena and Poseidon disputed about the land (of Troizen) and after disputing held it in common, as Zeus commanded them to do. For this reason they worship both Athena (…) also Poseidon. (…) Moreover their old coins have as device a trident and a face of Athena.” ↩
  18. Pausanias: “Here (in Argos) is a sanctuary of Poseidon, surnamed Prosclystius (flooder), for they say that Poseidon inundated the greater part of the country because Inachus (the god of the main Argos river) and his (fellow) assessors decided that the land belonged to Hera and not to him. Now it was Hera who induced Poseidon to send the sea back, but the Argives made a sanctuary to Poseidon Prosclystius at the spot where the tide ebbed.” (2.22.4) Again in Pausanias: “Inachus (…) was not a man but the river. This river, with the rivers Cephisus and Asterion, judged concerning the land between Poseidon and Hera. They decided that the land belonged to Hera, and so Poseidon made their waters disappear. For this reason neither Inachus nor either of the other rivers I have mentioned provides any water except after rain. In summer their streams are dry” (2.15.5). The contest between fertility and aridity appears here together with flooding — all seemingly a reflex from Egypt. There the flooding of the Nile valley brought life, the flooding of the Nile delta from the sea brought death (both metaphorically in reference to the sea peoples and literally in the destruction of crops and soil by the intrusion of salt). Always in the background was the great question, inevitable in a desert region, of fertility and/or aridity, with Nile flooding bringing the two together and sea flooding driving them apart. Pausanias (2.32.8) records just this question in regard to Poseidon at Troizen: “Outside the wall there is also a sanctuary of Poseidon Nurturer (Phytalmios). For they say that, being wroth with them, Poseidon smote the land with barrenness, brine (halme) reaching the seeds and the roots of the plants (phyta) until, appeased by sacrifices and prayers, he ceased to send up the brine upon the earth.” ↩
  19. Pausanias, 2.1.6. ↩
  20. See the passage from Plutarch’s Morals:  Quaestiones Convivales above. ↩
  21. A further reflex of the Athena-Poseidon contest and reconciliation through the gods may be seen in the legendary war between Eleusis and Athens. The king of Eleusis, Eumolpos, was a son of Poseidon with African roots. Here again, Athens was victorious, but Eumolpus retained his position as priest of the Eleusinian rites. The settlement that brought the two together had divine sanction. Pausanias: “When the Eleusinians fought with the Athenians (…) these were the terms on which they concluded the war: the Eleusinians were to have independent control of the mysteries, but in all things else were to be subject to the Athenians.” (1.38.3) ↩
  22. See note 26 below. ↩
  23. “The ties of kin” between gods is their ontological co-presence. Hence, no matter how extreme their contestings, that co-presence is the ultimate ground of peace. ↩
  24. Here the Amasis vase painter from a century before Herodotus shows Athena and Poseidon together. But in enmity (as Athena’s snakes might signal) or reconciled (as the relaxed spear and triton might show)? The central script says in its archaic alphabet that ‘Amasis made me’ (Άμασις μ’ εποιεσεν) which is interesting in its language and placement for McLuhan’s contention that the making of experience, not matching, occurs in an ‘aesthetic moment’ that is gapped from ‘before and after’ (see note 30 below). It is here in a moment that is ‘always now’ that the question of the contesting twofolds is momentarily decided. ↩
  25. ‘Before becoming’ — see note 12. ↩
  26. Plato Sophist 246-249. Further similarities of the Athena-Poseidon contest with the battle of the gods and giants may be seen in the fact that both Athena and Poseidon were associated with horses (as seen in the Parthenon west pediment scene above), but Poseidon with wild horses (like the unruly giants), and Athena with domesticated horses through her invention of the bridle and bit (like the law-giving gods). Hence Athena’s inspiration of the Trojan horse (as described in Poseidon’s monolog above) — the horse as a work of art. For discussion of the γιγαντομαχία in relation to McLuhan, see McLuhan and Plato 8 – Gigantomachia. ↩
  27. The fundamental difference between (1) vs (2) and the both together of (3) was central to Hegel: “Daß an jedem Falschen etwas Wahres sei – in diesem Ausdrucke gelten beide, wie Öl und Wasser, die unmischbar nur äußerlich verbunden sind. Gerade um der Bedeutung willen, das Moment des vollkommenen Andersseins zu bezeichnen, müssen ihre Ausdrücke da, wo ihr Anderssein aufgehoben ist, nicht mehr gebraucht werden. So wie der Ausdruck der Einheit des Subjekts und Objekts, des Endlichen und Unendlichen, des Seins und Denkens usf. das Ungeschickte hat, daß Objekt und Subjekt usf. das bedeuten, was sie außer ihrer Einheit sind, in der Einheit also nicht als das gemeint sind, was ihr Ausdruck sagt” (Phänomenologie des Geistes, ‘Vorrede’, 1807). ↩
  28. Representations of Thoth often show him as a combination of Seth and Horus. His bird form is like Horus, of course, while his downturned beak is like Seth’s characteristic snout. Compare this relief from Luxor of Thoth as the inventor of writing to the one of Seth with Horus at the head of this post — their difference lies chiefly in the distinguishing Ibis neck of Thoth, the labyrinthine middle or medium between body and mind:


    For discussion of Thoth, see Thoth: “the third ends the discord of the two”. ↩

  29. See note 23. ↩
  30. The 2nd day of Boedromion. See the passage from Plutarch’s Morals: Quaestiones Convivales above. This is a day that is outside normal time (Eliot’s ‘time, not our time’) and yet is ‘always now’:
    And the end and the beginning were always there
    Before the beginning and after the end.
    And all is always now.
    (…)
    Quick now, here, now, always—
    Ridiculous the waste sad time
    Stretching before and after.
    (Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’)     ↩
  31. Πλούταρχος: ἀλλὰ μάλιστα δεῖ τὴν ἡμέραν ἐκείνην φυλαττομένους, ὡς τοῖς μὲν ἔχθρας ἀνηκέστου καὶ διαφορᾶς τοῖς δὲ φιλίας καὶ ὁμονοίας οὖσαν ἀρχήν. ↩

Kenner on McLuhan, the universal sage

In the frontmatter of his early books, Hugh Kenner briefly noted his time with McLuhan in the late 1940s:

The poetry of Ezra Pound, 1951
To Marshall McLuhan
‘A catalogue, his jewels of conversation’1

Dublin’s Joyce, 1955
Dr. H. M. McLuhan of the University of Toronto has permitted me free use of his unpublished History of the Trivium, on which my thirteenth chapter depends heavily, and afforded the continual stimulus of letters and conversation.

The Invisible Poet, 1959
Ten years ago Marshall McLuhan and I planned an “Eliot book” and spent some weeks reading through the poems and essays, conversing and annotating as we went. Though this book is very different from the one we projected and abandoned, it owes more than I can unravel to those weeks of association.

The Art of Poetry, 1959
Several friends and colleagues have been indirect contributors to this book, notably Professor H. M. McLuhan, who extricated from Aristotle the conception of the “plot” of a lyric poem, and first suggested to me the method of exposition by questioning.

Then, after McLuhan’s death at the end of 1980, Kenner remembered him more expansively in a series of written pieces and broadcasts:

Marshall McLuhan R.I.P. (January 23, 1981)
The media sage of the sixties was created, he surely knew, by the media. The Marshall McLuhan I began to know in the mid-forties was a tall, trim pipe-smoker (“Cigarette smokers are not interested in tobacco”) whose passion was aiding people such as me to knit up what he considered unexamined lives.
Our trouble — yours and mine — was insufficient attention to what we were doing. We smoked, but weren’t interested in tobacco. We flipped through magazines, but didn’t adequately ponder half their content, which was ads. We drove cars — he didn’t — but failed to reflect that our cars were driving us. Twenty years later his famous slogan, “The Medium is the Message,” simply generalized that order of preoccupation. What you’re taking for granted, it says, is always more important than whatever you have your mind fixed on. On that principle, Marshall would undertake benign regulation of any life that came near.
Precisely because my mind was fixed on teaching, I had but to reflect that it was not what I was doing. Like it or not, I was embarked on a survival game, for which to begin with I needed a Ph. D. Most of my Toronto instructors had been content with the Oxford M. A. For my part I had a Toronto M. A. Did that not suffice? I had been told it did. No, said  Marshall, your mentors inhabit a backwater. The fields of force no longer emanate from Oxford. A Ph.D., and it had better be from Yale, where his friend Cleanth Brooks had just been installed as doyen of the New Criticism.
Twenty-four hours later we were headed south from Toronto in my car. In New York we paused to ascertain what anyone less rash would have checked before starting out, whether in that particular June week Cleanth Brooks was even to be found at Yale. He was not. We had five days to put in. Just time for a side trip to Washington, D.C., where (a passer-through had indicated) the allegedly mad Ezra Pound was accessible to visitors. (Half of my subsequent life was derived from that visit.) Then to New Haven where the bemused but unfailingly courteous Cleanth Brooks undertook to see what could be done about getting Marshall’s new protégé admitted now. Three months later I was in New Haven again, a doctoral candidate.
Having since been a director of graduate admissions, I am in a better position than most to be awestruck at the prodigies Cleanth must have accomplished: one more gauge of Marshall’s imperious persuasiveness.
And all those dozens of hours on the road — before freeways, remember, we puttered New York-Washington and return on U.S. 1, poking block by block through every obstacle, even Baltimore — he saw tirelessly to my education, which my profs had (of course) neglected shamefully. They had not even told me, for example, about T. S. Eliot, his sanity, his centrality.
Eliot was Marshall’s talisman in those years. We started to collaborate on an Eliot book and read through the canon together, Marshall pontificating, I annotating. As to why that book never got written: its plan got lost, because as you can see (back to the principle) if you are thinking Eliot is important, why, he can’t be.
That was a problem with the McLuhan system: its emphases were by definition self-destructive. Eliot, he came to think, was fencing insights stolen from Mallarmé. If you objected that Eliot barely mentioned Mallarmé, that merely proved what an old slyboots he was.
Later he had decided that Mallarmé in turn was retailing Buddhism, and later still everybody you can think of was feeding the world hidden Buddhism at the prompting of a fraternity of Freemasons. That was dangerous knowledge, and he even came to think the Freemasons had a contract out on him. By that time we were out of touch.
A few years later he discovered media, and became famous, rightly. I don’t know of anyone else who has sucked himself down into a conspiracy theory and come triumphantly out of it. Conspiracy theories are normally terminal. But Marshall was unique.
What always saved him was his ability to get interested in something else. Nothing was too trivial. “Let us check on this,” he would say, and steer the two of us into a movie house, where we stayed for twenty minutes. “Enough.” Out in the light he extemporized an hour of analysis.
I think he did get a television, finally. I know he read books and books and books. (Marshall McLuhan reads books ran a bumper sticker in the sixties.) He read them especially on Sunday afternoons: long demanding books like Lancelot Andrewes’ Sermons. He would nap at two, wake up at three, and start reading, pausing to pencil numerous tiny notes on the flyleaves.
A last glimpse: Marshall’s unappeasable mother, in the back seat of the car, is sampling the Pisan Cantos. She is baffled, and means her bafflement to be a reproach. “What you have to understand, Mother,” he improvises, “is that in the poetry you are used to things happen one after another. Whereas in that poetry everything happens at once.” It served to quell her. As it stands it’s not a good formula, but you can think how to go on from it, if you don’t get flypapered. I’ve been going on from extemporizations of Marshall’s for thirty years. (Mazes, 295-297)

McLuhan Redux (Marshall McLuhan was my first mentor. I met him in 1946, saw him for the last time in 1972, and in 1984 was grateful to Harper’s for an invitation to resurrect his memory. This appeared in November 1984.)
“Computer literacy,” we keep repeating, meaning doubtless something or other. We surely forget to mean the most obvious thing about time spent at a computer terminal, that it is used in two supremely literate activities, typing and reading. Marshall McLuhan noticed long ago that the “content” of a medium is always a previous medium. I’ve also remarked that we don’t see a medium itself, save as packaging for its content. That helps ease new media into acceptability. Genteel folk once learned to tolerate movies by thinking of them as packaged plays or packaged books. Likewise, we sidle up to the computer, saying over and over that it’s nothing but an electrified filing system . “Word processing” is another incantation. Souls are safe in proximity to words.
Yet something is altering. Here is Byte, a fat and glossy computer journal put out by no bunch of hackers but by staid McGraw-Hill. The July 1984 issue contains a long software review, tied to intricate fact in a way manifestly more responsible than anything likely to turn up in the New York Review of Books. Reviewers for Byte are not at liberty to be cranky or erratically informed. This piece undertakes an overview of the difficult language LISP before comparing two “implementations,” as they are called, in detail. For a rough analogy, imagine a point-for-point evaluation of two Sanskrit grammars, such as the American Journal of Philology might entrust to a senior professor. Imagine it, further, prefaced by a guide to Sanskrit for novices, the whole kept clear and readable throughout, and you get an idea of the Byte piece. So who wrote this paradigm? A computer-engineering major at Case Western Reserve, in collaboration with “a recent graduate of Sycamore High School” who designs relational database systems for a living.
In blunt archaic language: Byte‘s authorities turn out to be an undergraduate and a system dropout who has traded his place in the educational queue for something more challenging. Computerist, dropout: a not unfamiliar linking. No reader of newsmagazines will fail to remember how Bill Gates (Harvard dropout) founded Microsoft, how Steven Jobs (Reed dropout) and Stephen Wozniak (Berkeley dropout) founded Apple. No, the filing-system model lacks explanatory power. Passion for filing systems, even electrified ones, does not bring about such a transformation of hierarchies . Yes, something has altered. Marshall McLuhan again: “The drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world . . . not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. . . . At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythical” world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted.”
In 1964 that seemed one of McLuhan’s wilder remarks. No longer. Today we find it pertinent that even when computers were far from ubiquitous he was observing the medium instead of its content, “files.” He was foreseeing, moreover, a dramatic effect of the medium. And instances of his prescience multiply. Once brushed off by The New Yorker as a “pop philosopher,” the author of Understanding Media is starting to look like a prophet.
That is all the more remarkable since “the oracle of the electric age” (a phrase coined by Life) wouldn’t drive a car, never turned on a radio, barely glanced at television, and checked out movies by popping in on them for twenty minutes . Apart from the Olivier Henry V, at which he’d been trapped on a social occasion, I don’t know of a movie he saw from beginning to end. “Marshall McLuhan Reads Books,” said a bumper sticker, graffito of the scandalous truth. He did indeed read books, and, other than talk and scribble, he did little else.
Such disdain for inconvenient fact could erode your confidence . “The horse that’s headed for a can of Gro-Pup” — climax of one of his merry perorations — lost force if you knew that Gro-Pup was not processed meat and did not come in cans. Useless to tell him. He had picked up the name from an ad, and if Gro-Pup wasn’t canned horse, as his metaphor required, its purveyors simply didn’t know their business. His world was full of people who didn’t know their business, such as nearly all of his fellow English professors. But though he was often wrong himself, as when he discerned “the abrupt decline of baseball,” he never had the patience to sit through a ball game.
In those days he countered nigglingly sheer assertion. It was after my time that he discovered a generic answer. People who raised objections were detailists, specialists, locked into local patterns: instances of what had happened to the Western psyche after Gutenberg gave his coup de grace to the old oral culture by persuading everybody that one thing must follow another the way each printed word follows, on its line, the word that precedes it. Nigglers were confined to “the neutral visual world of lineal organization,” and the specialist was one who “never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”
I have sometimes wondered if Marshall didn’t evolve his whole theory of media as a way to explain why there seemed to be people who tried to interrupt his monologues . What cataclysm of history had spawned  them? Why, literacy, with its first-things-first-let’s-keep-it-all-straight syndrome. Were they not the very people who kept wincing at somebody’s grammar? The word “grammar” itself derives from the Greek word for a written remark. That would have been enough to get him started. Much as Saul found a kingdom while out hunting for his father’s asses, Marshall McLuhan found his skeleton key to the social psyche. Thereafter, he kept it hanging on a hook labeled “Media” and never bothered to explain what Media were.
Media included not only magazines and television but also roads, wheels, railways, electricity, numbers, clocks, money — they all did things we had once tried to do with our senses and our bodies; that was why he called them “extensions of man.” Adjusting to any new medium, since it strained what had been a bodily and sensual relationship (his word was “ratio”), meant anguish and anxiety. So “the mediaeval world grew up without uniform roads or cities or bureaucracies, and it fought the wheel, as later city forms fought the railways; and as we, today, fight the automobile.”
Media came in two flavors, “hot” and “cool.” The hot ones saturate you with information; paradoxically, you are then passive, uninvolved, as when you half-listen to the radio. The cool ones draw back and leave you filling in. TV, with its inferior picture detail, is cool; hence, its viewer’s rapt involvement.
Though his pronouncements on the electronic age and its global village made him briefly famous, what he really knew was literacy, and what he developed most fully was his insight into its consequences. What literacy achieves is the “hot” storage and retrieval of words only, as though their choice and sequence constituted the whole of human communication. But in the heat of conversation, relatively little is communicated by words. Silences, intonations, advances and withdrawals, smiles, and the whole repertory of body language — these in their elaborate dance enact most of what is happening.
Screen them out, leave only the silent words on a page, and your first requirement is more words. The dialogue Henry James’s people exchange is wordier by a factor of at least three than any speech human ears have ever heard. James was making up for the absence from printed pages of what normal grammar and diction do little to convey,  the  ballet of interaction. (He brought written prose to its extreme of articulation just before radio took over.)
The next thing you need is a fairly strict one-two-three order, because written words exist only in space, and can presuppose only the words that came before them. Things on a line of print cannot overlap. This is the “linearity”, on which McLuhan harped. Talkers allude to what they’ve not said, or have said on another occasion, or will say later, or needn’t say save by gesture or dawdle or pause; but once discourse is controlled by writing, as even the spoken discourse of literates tends to be, its syntax (think of James again) grows fairly elaborate, out of need for strict systems of subordination among items that can be produced only one after another. Examine the sentence you’ve just read.
Finally, literates come to believe that controlled linearity is order, all else disorder: that the cosmos itself is structured like a Jamesian utterance, with primary, secondary, tertiary clauses. If any sentence of Understanding Media might have turned up without irrelevance anywhere in any chapter, that was because McLuhan thought that prose should work like the mind, not the other way round. Whatever he was thinking of grew in iconic power the more rapidly he could relate it to a dozen other things, if possible in the same breath. So he got called “the professor of communications who can’t communicate/’ an academic Harpo unable to stick to a point. His point was that there is never a “point.” Points are Euclidean junctures in such sentences as come to life only in diagrams.
There are aspects of his plight Beckett might have invented . What language may say in a literate society McLuhan deemed of little importance compared with what literacy had done to the literate. I once heard him deny that anything Plato wrote could match in importance the fact that in a given classroom all copies of The Republic have the same word at the same place on the same numbered page. Hence “The Medium Is the Message”, his most quoted and most suicidal oversimplification. For it was precisely what he said that he wanted understood; moreover, what he said in writing. Using writing to expound the effects of writing was like explaining water to a school of fish. Fish   understand nothing of water, but they judge you by the way you move your flippers. He got snubbed by print-swimmers who deemed measured prose a measure of character.
So obsessed was his readership by “content” that detractor and disciple alike tended to think he was talking about the effect of the medium on the message it carries: TV is highly visual, for instance, hence its  fondness for crowds and confrontations. But that barely concerned him. (He said TV was “tactile”.) What obsessed him is clearer after twenty years: the effect of the mere availability of new media on people’s sense of who and what they are.
The medium called “money” presents a ready example. True, once money had been invented it changed bread and butter into commodities keyed to prices, a message that affected shopper and speculator alike. But in making subsistence by barter nearly impossible, money could also deform the life of a man who never touched it. Even so print, yes, structures its message; but McLuhan deemed it of far more moment that life in a print-oriented culture restructures the soul of even a total illiterate. Not only does he know that other people know things he doesn’t, but he also picks up ambient assumptions about first-things-first. In not being felt at all, the latter effect reaches deeper than any felt deprivation.
Likewise, said McLuhan, all of us have been reconstituted by TV, whether we choose to watch the tube or not: “The utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria.” If TV has a propensity for street happenings (which get staged for its benefit); if its pundits earn their welcome into our living rooms by coming on populist, hence chummily “liberal”; if TV is so “cool” that Bill Buckley — a man whose meaning even devotees have to construct — has been on it longer than almost anyone else; if it’s Paul Harvey (strident, rightist, “hot”) who is left to fulminate in the Hot Ghetto of Radio Gulch while George Will (“cool,” puckish, bow-tied) gets welcomed as ABC’s ticket-balancing House Conservative, still it’s not because of someone’s adroitness at packaging that Ronald Reagan sits in the Oval Office but Richard Nixon in itchy exile, Jimmy Carter in limbo. Articulate opinion of Nixon and of Carter got formed in print, still our only medium of articulate opinion. And yet, it was the omnipresence of television that determined what kind of opinions the older medium — print — could form and seem credible.
This means that in the television age even non-watchers gravitate toward “cool” personalities. Nixon was too jowly and affirmative to pass muster, Carter too morally opinionated. (Mondale? He’s an Identi-Kit. Only TV could have made him a viable candidate.) The prevalent perception of “wake-me-when-it’s-over” Reagan is that he falls asleep: a caricature that affirms his ultimate “cool”. When you have to tell the President what’s happening, that is your ultimate participation.
Reagan’s successor might be Kermit the Frog. The night Kermit filled in for Johnny Carson, no one noticed.
Yes, we’re governed by caricatures, because we perceive by them. There’s no better instance than the regnant caricature of McLuhan, shared by print-folk who thought they were attending to his text and bypassing the electronic media, the wrong thing to do. For he was presupposing TV’s cool collaboration, not print’s hot “specialist,” “fragmented” reading. Like another guide to the future, Bucky Fuller, McLuhan was discarded as unintelligible. Willy-nilly, trapped in hot print in an age of cool TV, he was taken at his (printed) word, just as if in his outrageous one-liners he hadn’t intended audience participation, or hadn’t counted on his audience to fill out and correct all those comic book formulations. The apostle of “cool” came on “hot,” a blunderbuss Nixon of the Media Era, and coolness made a joke of him and discarded him. (Mazes, 223-229)

The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 1985 (reprint of 1951 edition)
Retrospect: 1985 (New Preface to the Bison Book Edition)
Marshall McLuhan and I had visited Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington on 4 June 1948. Pound wrote the date, and his name, on the flyleaf of the copy of Personae I’d brought along. The Pisan Cantos had just been published — he inscribed it for Marshall — and its Bollingen Prize lay many months ahead. We had not come there as special fans of his. Joyce’s was the only twentieth-century work I knew at all well, and Marshall, at that time pretty much a New Critic, believed with F. R. Lea vis that the one major poet of our time was Eliot. To a degree impossible to reconstitute now, those were the Eliot Years. Even my interest in Joyce was eccentric then, a vagary Marshall was sure I’d get over. The passion, meanwhile, with which we two (and many others) studied Eliot! We penciled notes on the yellow postwar paper of a Faber Four Quartets…

Mazes, a 1989 collection of Kenner essays, has the two pieces specifically on McLuhan given above, but also has tidbits about him elsewhere:

It was in 1947, under Marshall McLuhan’s informal tutelage, that I first became aware of my own century. (38)

The chain of accidents that brought Marshall McLuhan and me into [Pound’s] presence on 4 June 1948 I’ll detail some other time [see below]. The Pisan Cantos were then newly published. Later I reviewed them for the Hudson Review, another connection masterminded by Marshall. I’d read them, ecstatic, with Pound’s remembered voice in my ear. Soon, thanks to New Directions’ well-timed one-volume reprint, I could read to the surge of the same spoken cadences the rest of the poem he’d begun in 1916 or before. Its authority, after what my Toronto mentors used to call poetry, was as if great rocks were rolling. I was twenty-five, and about to become a Yale graduate student under Cleanth Brooks’s mentorship. That fall the dismal Bollingen fuss broke — a forgotten minor poet named Robert Hillyer assembling three installments of invective in the equally forgotten Saturday Review — and literati in pulpit after pulpit would do no more than affirm the purity of their own political motives. Enthralled by the master, I resolved that if no one else would make the case for Ezra Pound the poet, then I would. Having no reputation whatever, I had nothing to lose. I was naive enough not to guess that I was mortgaging my future; it is sometimes liberating not to know how the world works. So in six weeks in the summer of 1949, on a picnic table in Canada, aided by books from the University of Toronto library, I banged out on a flimsy Smith Corona the 308 typescript pages of The Poetry of Ezra Pound, which to my wonderment was instantly accepted by New Directions and by Faber & Faber. By 1951 they got it out. Though most of the reviews were put-downs, Pound before long was a stock on the academic exchange: a safe “subject.” What that means is not that I’d “discovered” him, or been magnetically persuasive concerning his virtues. What I’d done, unwittingly, at the threshold of two decades’ academic expansion — people peering under every cabbage leaf for “topics” — was show how this new man with his large and complex oeuvre might plausibly be written about. (39-40)

The late Marshall McLuhan, media guru, personified an earlier array of biases. He fastidiously did not own a typewriter. A fountain pen, yes, because he liked the nib, but he wouldn’t fill it, he dipped it. From the little pump on its glorified eyedropper, he shied as from the devil. Useless to cite the simplicity of the process. “That kind of knowledge,” he would say, “has been so dearly bought it behooves you to have as little of it as possible.” (176)

As the oldest living ex-McLuhanite (disciple in 1946, defected circa 1951), I approached Gary Gumpert’s Talking Tombstones and Other Tales of the Media Age (Oxford University Press, 1987) with special anxieties: “Mushall McGloom” a mutual friend used to say in those years. Was Gary Gumpert going to tell us what Marshall McLuhan took to saying some time after I lost faith, that the “medium is the message” ? Or — Mushall’s next reckless extension — the “massage”? (230)

Gary Gumpert, unlike Marshall McLuhan, hasn’t transcended moral judgments . About some things, he avers, we just should not be so bland. McLuhan used to think likewise, back when his first book was still called “Guide to Chaos.” Rewritten and published as The Mechanical Bride, though, it said, “Let ‘er rip.” He was coming to believe in the “global village,” perhaps because he liked the way the phrase sounded. (233-234)

The Elsewhere Community (2000), which was originally talks on CBC in 1998, has this description of Kenner’s time with McLuhan:

In 1956, I made a journey. (…) Its purpose was simple: to meet some half-dozen people, mostly writers, whom I’d decided I simply must visit. And that constellation of visits quickly became an Elsewhere Community of mine, so much so that it’s altered everything I’ve done and written in the four decades since. (…)  I want to tell vou about the man who advised me to make [that journey]. Through the years, he gave much other valuable advice, to many other people as well as to me. He remains, to my mind, the Elsewhere Community personified. Let me start by telling you how I chanced to meet him.
I was born a Canadian and remain a Canadian citizen, and as to what I’m now doing in the United States, where I’ve been a green-carded Permanent Resident since 1948, well, the story is intricate and I’ll keep it short. In 1946, with a University of Toronto B.A. and M.A. in English, I supposed my academic future was secure. Almost all my instructors had held no degree higher than a British Master of Arts, and so, with a Canadian M.A. of my own, I surely could feel empowered to teach. But that vear, thanks to a friend2 who thought we’d hit it off, I met the universal sage Marshall McLuhan, who convinced me otherwise.
Marshall had just arrived in Toronto and was to be a presence there for the next three decades. His sense of practical reality was then far more acute than mine. He informed me that without a Ph.D. I had no future in this postwar world. So I should obtain one; moreover, I should obtain it at Yale, where his old friend the critic Cleanth Brooks had just arrived. (Marshall did tend to take charge of anyone he was advising.) So in midsummer 1948, he and I set off in my car to visit Cleanth at Yale. And in September, I began my Ph.D. program there. Having since been a director of graduate admissions, I can guess what prodigies of persuasion Cleanth must have performed to get me admitted that late, moreover as an applicant from a foreign country. Hence the green card.
But I’ve shortened that story by omitting another one. For it was typical of Marshall that we’d driven from Toronto as far as New York before it occurred to him to see whether Cleanth Brooks was in fact in New Haven. A phone call ascertained that he wasn’t at present, but would be in three davs. So, we had time to put in. And then a chance acquaintance informed us over dinner that it was now possible to visit Ezra Pound.  He’d been imprisoned a year previously in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane, Washington D.C. Our man, to whom I’m forever indebted, even knew the procedure for setting up a visit. So, en route from New York to New Haven we’d loop through Washington.
On June 4, 1948, Marshall and I pulled in to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. We presented our credentials at the office, saw our names entered in a book labelled “Ezra Pound’s Company,” then were ushered up two stories to the Chestnut Ward. Pound had recently been promoted from the Dangerously Insane so to speak to the Slightiy Cracked; that was the news our New York informant was responding to when he’d told us Pound could now be visited. Still, the staircases we climbed were affixed to the outside of the building; inside, floor was sealed from floor. We rang; a guard opened the door; we showed credentials; the door was locked behind us.
Pound in his new status, had a room of his own, though guests weren’t allowed to enter it. Still, he and his wife, Dorothy, an Englishwoman who now used a Washington address, could receive visitors in, well, relative privacy. We all met in an alcove at the intersection of two corridors.
One low armchair for E.P., who had back problems; three more chairs for Dorothy and the two of us. I seem to remember visitors being limited to two. E.P. advised us to pull our chairs in close. He indicated a fellow patient in the corridor, with a carpet-sweeper from which the works had been removed. The man was acting out an obsession about visitors, who tracked in, from the outer world, unspeakable corruption. Pound’s old friend and disciple, the poet T.S. Eliot, had recently visited, and owing to a failure to gather the chairs in close, Eliot had spent much of the afternoon with his feet in the air, while the sweeper poked and probed after filth beneath him. That was especially funny if you knew about Eliot’s ultra-fastidiousness.
What did Ezra Pound look like? Grey moustache, short grey goatee, grey swept-back hair. His presence could fill a room, or even a makeshift space such as we occupied. (…) And yet, on the day I met him, June 4, 1948, I barely knew who he was. It was one of the two or three turning points of my life.

Philip Marchand’s The Medium and the Messenger has passages from a letter, dated March 18, 1987, that Hugh Kenner wrote to him about McLuhan as Marchand was preparing his book: 

What Marshall always really needed was a stooge. (…) I think he liked to have someone else in the room while he thought aloud. (Marchand, Random House edition, 58) 

He pushed at me T. S. Eliot, who’d been the type of unintelligibility to my Toronto profs. And he had me read Richards’ Practical Criticism, Leavis’ New Bearings in English Poetry, and (eventually) the entire file of Scrutiny. He kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis, whom I’d never heard of, notwithstanding that for two years I’d lived half a mile away from him. (…) So many windows opened! (Marchand, Random House edition, 93) 

McLuhan despised [Joyce] as merely ‘mechanical,’ a ‘contriver.’ McLuhan in those days took the Leavis line on nearly everything, though he did smuggle in Wyndham Lewis. He told a mutual friend (Pauline Bondy) that I was ‘wasting my time’ on Joyce. (Marchand, Random House edition, 94) 

 

 

 

  1. “A catalogue, his jewels of conversation” is from Pound’s Canto III which, as the Poetry Foundation has it, appeared in the July, 1917 issue of Poetry: Originally part of what scholars call the “Ur-Cantos,” this version of Canto III was later edited by Pound to become Canto I of his collected Cantos. ↩
  2. This must have been Fr Gerald Phelan. ↩

Reborn from ruin

Perhaps the single most important thing to be understood about Marshall McLuhan is his self-described transformation from moralist to student:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and 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 — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.1 (Playboy Interview, 1969)

This transformation to “a totally different approach” has been characterized in many different ways in this blog — for example, as McLuhan’s ‘second conversion’ and as his confrontation with Pope’s “Universal Darkness”. It might also be described in terms of his later formulation of “breakdown as breakthrough”. Or, as he said in the Playboy passage above, “from trash to treasures.”

Future posts will deal with the analytic import of this insight — the idea, familiar in the physical sciences, that negative findings (breakdown, trash) are critical to scientific advance (breakthrough, treasures). McLuhan himself was greatly buoyed by the implicated hope that also in the artefactual realm such negative aspects of the modern world as perpetual war and pervasive propaganda might be investigated as “effects” and thereby reveal — at last! —  ways of mitigating them. 

But this second conversion also had significant biographical import since McLuhan could not have had the breakthrough of becoming a “student” without the breakdown of his being a “moralist”.

Now any such transformation has a definitive temporal signature which was specified already by Aristotle and Aquinas and cited on multiple occasions by McLuhan:

the basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica I.II.q 113.a.7, ad quintum. The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs instantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics  — “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”. (From Cliché to Archetype, 160)2

Being “under the opposite form” of the “sterile and useless (…) attitude” of the moralist must have been the extended occasion of much personal suffering for McLuhan. After all, he was almost 40 before he saw the liberating possibility of becoming a student and in the meantime he had converted to Catholicism, gotten married and sired 4 children. All this while he was frequently penniless and living in an environment which he “loathed” and “equated (…) with original sin”. The contrast between the responsibilities he had assumed and the resources he had to meet those responsibilities — especially his own psychological resources — could hardly have been greater. No wonder he was frequently ill and known even to close friends as “Mushall McGloom”.3  

McLuhan’s frequent avowal that he had no problems and more or less skated over life’s difficulties must be taken with a grain of salt. In typical Canadian fashion, he was pointing away from himself. But in fact his experience of a late second conversion, critical as this was for him personally, may also be taken as exemplary of a transformation that is desperately needed by the world at large.

Here are some characterizations of “breakdown as breakthrough” by McLuhan which, if considered at all, have not been taken as autobiographical statements (nor, of course, as indications of the potential transformation that lies within all the crises of the contemporary, 2024, world):

Every breakdown in any field is a breakthrough in disguise (Fordham lecture, ‘The Medium is the Message’, February 26, 1968)

Every world must be reborn from its own ruins. Every discovery rises from the trauma of breakdown and ignorance. (Take Today, 1972, 111)

“a hero must pass through an experience which opens his eyes to an error of his own. He must learn through suffering (…) The essence of a tragedy (…) is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.”4

The mystery of creativity is the paradox of how beauty is created from ruin. After a long career of stylistic invention and triumph, W.B. Yeats deliberately scrapped his entire enterprise in order to begin again: “Now [that] my ladder’s gone, I must lie down [where all the ladders start] in the [foul] rag and bone shop of the heart.” (The Circus Animals’ Desertion) It is the mystery of how life succeeds in that it seems to fail, the paradox of how beauty is born out of despair, art out of the garbage and sweepings of the street. (‘Declaration of Delos Ten’, 1972)5

Less familiar as “bridge” is the “tragic flaw” (hamartia), of which Aristotle speaks in the Poetics. Without this interval of ignorance or awareness in his character, the tragic hero cannot bridge one state to another. The flaw is an area of interface and mutation, without which he cannot get better, but can only be hung up. (Take Today, 9)

Breakdown as Breakthrough
The principle of this action is stated by Aristotle in his description of the tragic hero. The hero’s suffering or agon or struggle for new identity is made possible by a “tragic flaw” or defect. That is the classical case of breakdown as breakthrough. Without this flaw or gap, he could not make the discovery that changes both himself and his actions. As Charles Olson explains in his book Proprioception: “The fault can be a very simple one — a mere unawareness, for example — but if he has no fault he cannot change for the better, but only for the worse (…) He must pass through an experience which opens his eyes to an error of his own.” (…) The “flaw” is the needed gap that permits “interface” and change. When the individual is entirely at one with his world or organization, he is headed for a hang-up of merging and unconsciousness, which is sterility in life or in business. (Take Today, 282)

The breakdown or hang-up is always in the [continuous] connection whereas the breakthrough or discovery is inside the problem itself, not outside but “in the [discontinuous] gap.” Breakdown is the old cause in action, the extension of the old figure to a6 new ground.  Breakthrough is the effect of understanding as a6 new cause [is revealed]. (The Argument: Causality in the Elec World 1973)

“Breakdown as breakthrough” characterizes research that is confident in the intelligibility of its domain. It welcomes negative findings as signposts to discovery. But in order to initiate research of this sort in a new domain of the artefactual, McLuhan had to undergo a “breakdown as breakthrough” of his own.

 

  1. That McLuhan “became a student” meant that he  ‘became a scientist’ — that is, he became a person who interrogates experience in order to learn its dynamics. ↩
  2. Cited by McLuhan in Latin in his letter to Jacques Maritain (May 6, 1969, Letters 371) and in ‘The Medieval Environment’ (1974). ↩
  3. “Mushall McGloom” is recalled by Hugh Kenner in Mazes, 230. ↩
  4. Maxwell Anderson, ‘The Essence of Tragedy’, in Aristotle’s Poetics and English Literature; a collection of critical essays, ed Elder Olson, 1965, p 118. A copy of this page with these passages underlined, and McLuhan’s handwritten reference to Elder, is preserved in the ‘added material‘ found in McLuhan’s books donated to the Fisher Library at UT, # 04304-8. There is a comical aspect to McLuhan’s careful reference here — Olson’s book was published in a series for which McLuhan himself was the nominal editor. See Patterns of Literary Criticism. ↩
  5. Ekistics v203, October 1972, 291. This was the ‘declaration’ McLuhan made in 1972 on Delos, the sacred island of Apollo and Artemis, during his second ‘ekistics’ tour of the Aegean with C.A. Doxiadis. ↩
  6. McLuhan: ‘the’. ↩
  7. McLuhan: ‘the’. ↩

First words on the moon

In anticipation of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing on July 20, 1969, Esquire magazine for that month asked a group of luminaries led off by Marshall McLuhan, and featuring Tiny Tim, Sal Mineo and Mohammad Ali, “what words should the first man on the moon utter that will ring through the ages?”

McLuhan offered two suggestions. Both were from Finnegans Wake but their source was not identified.

 l) The thickest mud that was ever heard dumped. (FW 296)
2) Spitz on the iern while it’s hot. (FW 207)

The first quotation was somewhat mangled from Joyce’s “the muddest thick that was ever heard dump”.  

What did McLuhan have in mind with his suggestions?

The second seems to have been a comment on the occasion of Esquire‘s question and feature article about it (‘Le Mot Juste for the Moon‘ by William H Honan).1 Perhaps he was playing up the extreme contrast between Esquire‘s hope to capture the public’s momentary interest and “words that will ring through the ages”: Spitz on the iern while it’s hot. ‘Spitz’ (German ‘spike’ or ‘summit’) as the acme of interest in this story to be captured before the next big (Spitz) story in the next issue of Esquire. ‘Spits’ as the quality of thought being given to the event, as well as the vaporous-vacuous result of its meeting with the hot iron of public opinion. (The hot iron of Irish public opinion = iern.)

The first must have been intended as a comment both on what Armstrong would have to say (again as Spitz on the iern while it’s hot) and on Esquire‘s speculation about it: The thickest mud that was ever heard dumped — aka, pure bullshit.2

 

  1. Pages 53-55 and 138. McLuhan’s suggestions appear on 138. McLuhan’s name was played up on the Esquire cover and his comments played down, buried, in the article. Esquire obviously had no idea at all what McLuhan had in mind with his suggestions. On his side, McLuhan seems to have thought: OK, you want something to help your circulation, try chewing on this for a while. ↩
  2. McLuhan began his career with a deep faith in language as defining human being and, in particular, the Christian tradition. What he saw in his lifetime was that language had become the thickest mud that was ever heard dumped. ↩

McLuhan’s contributions

In the heights of thought, contributing anything new is extremely rare. But McLuhan made several contributions towards one major one.

1.The elements or archetypes or ontologies or media in the artefactual domain are ratios. Now Plato had suggested as much in maintaining that the ontological battle of the idealist gods and materialist giants was ‘always going on’ (Sophist 246).1 So the two were always actively engaged with one another and this could be understood as a constantly varying relation or ratio between them. But did Plato or Aristotle (who did indeed set out tables of binary oppositions) see that the ratio between oppositions is the key to investigation of the artefactual domain? That the medium is the message?2

McLuhan called this “the ineradicable power of doublets” (From Cliché to Archetype, 108) and the “principle of a continuous dual structure for achieving order” (Spiral — Man as the Medium, 126) and probably became focused on the notion shortly after he arrived in Toronto through Eric Havelock’s study of the epyllion form.3 But the notion itself went back at least to Cartesian coordinates and was slowly developed in the course of the twentieth century as structuralism in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, literary criticism and cybernetics. It was in the air when McLuhan began to intuit his life’s work in the late 1940s. But as was typical of McLuhan, he took the notion in new directions that remain today (2024) largely unexplored almost a half-century after his death.

2. Elements or archetypes or ontologies or media, as ratios, can be expressed either as varying emphases of their numerator/denominator poles or as manifestations of their mediating middles — media in a fundamental sense. That is, any elementary form can be defined by the “resonating interval” (or mode of relative emphasis) between its poles.4 The medium is the message.

3. The elementary media as ratios are not only two or three, say, but are likely to be quite numerous, like the chemical elements, once the possible configurations of their ratios begin to be understood.5 For the ratios of gods/giants and giants/gods (for example) would seem to have a great many permutations depending on the dynamic relations between them: the medium is the message.6

4. The resulting investigations, if they amount to a ‘new science’, do not constitute a sister species to the existing domains of the physical sciences, but are integral to a new genus of sciences.7 This idea has often enough been suggested either by denying that artefactual inquiries are scientific at all or by insisting on their fundamental difference from those of the physical sciences. But McLuhan’s ‘new science’, which he took to be implicit in Francis Bacon and Vico, is explicitly an entirely new genus of investigations with its own laws.8

5. McLuhan saw with Harold Innis that the relativity of all human cognition could achieve demonstrable insights, even laws, without — necessarily without! — eventuating in some kind of matching or merging between the experiencing subject, individual or collective, and the investigated object. Achieved truth of this sort (and there is no other sort) is irremediably finite and always subject to future adjustment and revision, but is nonetheless — actually only on this basis — true. Such finite but truthful insight he called making as contrasted to matching or merging and this artefactual nature was one of the many parallels he perceived between the arts and sciences.

6. McLuhan emphasized the plurality of time, here following (some he did  knowingly, others not) Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Saussure and Heidegger. See McLuhan’s times. The time of the weighing and selecting of possibility ratios is not the same as the time of experience as their effect. Meanwhile these diverse times exists only in ratios of their own and a further time or times characterizes the media of the ratios.

7. The being of human beings consists in the moment to moment to moment katabasis or descent into the possibilities of experience (objective genitive) and the activation ‘there’ of some one of them. These possibilities are always ratios (see above), but future investigation must determine if possibilities are activated only as ‘elements’ or also as ‘compounds’, perhaps even as ‘mixtures’. Here McLuhan might be seen as retrieving Heraclitus: ὁ ἥλιος νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρηι ἐστίν (fr 6: ‘the sun is new every day’). As McLuhan repeatedly asserted, his model here was language where vocabulary, grammatical form and gesture are momentarily selected in a process which is almost entirely unconscious. Just as with language, what was needed was a ‘grammar’ of this process of the making of experience where the key was to treat any and all experience as effect. “Our new dictionary includes all human artefacts as human speech” (Laws of Media, 224).

Taken together, these contributions could instigate (and therefore should be used to instigate) a whole new series of sciences based on the elementary ratios of media. With it would come a new understanding of human being, one whose ongoing explorations would, according to McLuhan, amount to a “survival strategy” — this at a time when human folly threatens civilization and even the  biosphere itself. 

 

  1. Plato’s great insight that ontology is plural as ontologies may have been taken over from the polytheistic mythologies which had been around forever before his time. McLuhan quoted an observation from Rachel Levy’s Gate of Horn (1948)  in ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’ and in ‘Maritain on Art’ (both 1953): “Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis.” The same insight implicates the fundamentality of an abysmal gap, since ontologies could not be plural unless bordered by a nontological groundlessness. Furthermore, if such an abysmal gap holds together gigantic ontological powers, how not also our relatively meager ontic ones? ↩
  2. Usually when something is supposed to be absent from the thought of Plato or Aristotle it will be found to be there after all — once specification of the missing piece is far enough along for us to find it there! Perhaps Plato’s ‘philosophical child’ who ‘begs for both’ (Sophist 249) is exactly the medium that is the message? ↩
  3. See Richards and Havelock before 1947. ↩
  4. In chemistry, to compare, the different elements can be conceived as physical proton/electron structures or as different expressions of (p-e)n, where ‘n’ is that varying but always equal number which dictates the specific form they have in any particular case. With the artefactual elements or media, however, there cannot be any such defining “particles of being” (Take Today, 10) because the domain is exactly that of the range of experience — including the range of experience of any “particle”. It follows that media as the elements of artefactual science must be completely abstract. If they were not, experience would ultimately be tied to some ‘particular’ (unambiguous) object and thereby reduced to physical science. ↩
  5. When chemistry was inaugurated around 1800 there was no idea how many elements there were to it. Now over 200 years later their final number is still unknown — for elements are not only only to be found, but can also be constructed. ↩
  6. Take Today, 10: “There are no connections among ‘particles of being’ such as appear in mechanical models. Instead, there is a wide range of resonating intensities…” ↩
  7. Integral to a new genus of sciences — in the same way as chemistry is integral to further physical sciences like biology and genetics. ↩
  8. See A whole new genus of sciences. ↩

Dobbs: Hand signals for the blind

Bob:

One Spring Day in 1976 I was walking with McLuhan in Queen’s Park, across the street from his Coach House, on our way to the subway. I mentioned the title of a play I had just written: “THE DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY”. He didn’t react.

Then about a year later I was telling Marg Stewart, McLuhan’s secretary, how I had given the play a different title: “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND”.

At that moment McLuhan barged into Marg’s office – I didn’t know he was nearby – and ordered: “Too long. Make it, “HAND SIGNALS”.

I thought this was rather rude and presumptuous — correcting an author’s work.

Later I changed the play considerably but kept the second title: “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND”.

Editor’s comment:

Bob’s identification of McLuhan as the “Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology” with “Hand Signals for the Blind” is an exacting insight. But what is the meaning, or meanings, of “Hand Signals for the Blind”?

Whenever McLuhan is read as evoking literalisms — ‘media’ as literal speech or books or television, ‘senses’ as literal sight or hearing or touch — his work is transported back into the Gutenberg galaxy, into the reign of literalisms, the reign of the rear-view mirror. The great question posed by him, indeed by thinkers since the dawn of time, is how to signal — communicate — aside from the already-known literalisms in that mirror? Absent this possibility, there could, of course, be no real teaching nor real learning. Especially there could be no language learning by in-fants in the first place.

“HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND” nicely gestures toward that great question. Although the phrase may be taken literally as indicating the problem at stake — how to signal something new that by definition is unknown — and which is unknowable as long as the media between the interlocutors remain incompatible, like visual signaling to the blind — it may also be read as specifying how such communication does indeed take place.

Read aside from the rear-view mirror, “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND” concerns no literal ‘hand’, no literal ‘blindness’, no literal ‘signal’. It concerns tactility.

In his 1954 lecture, ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’,1 McLuhan spoke of “the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition”.2 That is, all cognition, specifically including the most “ordinary cognition”, implicates the exercise of creativity (“the poetic process”) in the navigation of the possibilities through which it will come to be as this or that particular instance of experience. Cognition of every sort is always some effect of such a prior process, however unconscious that process may be.

Moment to moment this process of possibility-sifting is entirely free — “poetic” as McLuhan says. Experience comes from it, not it from experience. The upshot is that communication between possibilities, and between the realm of possibilities and “ordinary cognition”, is so little problematic (however mysterious and, indeed, wondrous it is) that human being cannot in any way be without it. It — the “fecund interval” — is always already there.

“HAND SIGNALS”, understood non-literally, may be taken to be that incessant exercise of tactility upon which all expressions of human being originally spring. (For discussion and citations from McLuhan’s work see Tactility.)

On this reading of Bob’s title, “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND” raises the question of how the “blind” artefactual process, the unknown process in which we yet have a “hand”, can be exposed (“signaled”) for investigation. The possibility of that exposure rests on the prior tactility — the resonant interval — that first of all characterizes the relation of possibilities to each other as well as the perpetual, moment to moment, relation of humans to that deep drama.

Here is the etymology of “signal” > sign from the great Online Etymology  site:

early 13c., signe, “gesture or motion of the hand,” especially one meant to express thought or convey an idea, from Old French signe “sign, mark,” from Latin signum “identifying mark, token, indication, symbol; proof; military standard, ensign; a signal, an omen; sign in the heavens, constellation.”

 

  1. ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ has been reprinted in The Medium and the Light, 160ff. ↩
  2. Note the title of McLuhan’s 1951 ‘‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’. ↩

Dobbs: McLuhan on Nam June Paik

Here’s Bob: 

I met Nam June Paik in New York City in the middle of May, 1975. I told him I would be seeing Marshall McLuhan in Toronto in a couple of days.
He immediately handed me a copy of the May 5 NEW YORKER which featured a long profile of Paik, and asked me to give it to McLuhan as a gift.
When I gave it to McLuhan compliments of Paik, McLuhan said he would read it that evening.
The next day I asked him if he had read the article.
He replied he had.
Then after a pause, he said: “But it’s all just CONTENT.”

Dobbs: McLuhan on copy and original

Bob Dobbs:
McLuhan often quoted a mother showing her new baby to a friend who was expressing the appropriate delight:
“That’s nothing, wait til you see the photograph.”

Some questions from the editor…

We learned in the 1950s that the framed reality on the TV screen was superior to the unframed one outside. But today (2024) everyone is glued to their screens even or especially when they are outside. What did the iPhone do? Put the screen on wheels? Take away the house?

Dobbs: McLuhan on what’s the difference

Another great anecdote from Bob:

McLuhan occasionally would state the wrong date when he was discussing the effects of the Russian/Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957.

He seemed to favor October 17, rather than the correct date, October 4.

I once pointed this out to him.

He replied, “What’s the difference?”

Dobbs: a telling problem

Another memory from Bob Dobbs:

After the end of the formal part of a Monday Night “performance” in 1978, I was eavesdropping on Marshall McLuhan engaging in some intellectual banter with a Professor. 
They were getting into the dialogue deeper and deeper when McLuhan all of a sudden said to his ‘colleague’:
“You’re trying to TELL me something.”
This was the end of their exchange. 

Bio statement from 1944

In 1944 McLuhan began to publish in Sewanee Review1 and Kenyon Review.2 Both were edited by close friends of McLuhan’s close friend, Cleanth Brooks — Andrew Lyttle at Sewanee and John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon — and it is probable that McLuhan gained entry to these journals through Brooks. In fact, Brooks was himself an ‘associate editor’ with Sewanee at this time. 

McLuhan’s second Sewanee piece, ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’, featured the following biographical statement:

H.M. McLuhan teaches at St Louis University,3 worked for three years in Cambridge,4 part of this time with Richards and Leavis.5 He is a former contributor to Sewanee Review.  

The last sentence is rather comical since McLuhan’s ‘former’ contribution to the Sewanee Review had appeared only in the immediately previous number. The importance of this connection with the Sewanee Review for McLuhan lay in the facts that it paid for contributions and added weight to his CV at a time when he was searching for a more lucrative position than he had at SLU. Both reflected McLuhan’s virtually penniless state in 1944 when his wife was pregnant for the second time with what would turn out later that year to be twin girls.6

  1. ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’, Sewanee Review, 52:1, 1944; ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’, Sewanee Review, 52:2, 1944; ‘Kipling and Forster’, Sewanee Review, 52:3, 1944. ↩
  2. ‘The Analogical Mirrors’, Kenyon Review, 6:3, 1944. ↩
  3. When this issue of Sewanee Review appeared in the spring of 1944, McLuhan was in the process of leaving SLU for Assumption College in Windsor where he taught from 1944 to 1946. Father Gerald Phelan had set up McLuhan’s job at SLU (as he had done for many Canadians) and was now, it may be supposed, behind the step by step process of bringing McLuhan to Toronto via Windsor. ↩
  4. McLuhan was in Cambridge from 1934 to 1936 as an undergraduate and 1939-1940 as a graduate student. ↩
  5. Describing the time he and McLuhan were working together a few years later, Hugh Kenner wrote in his 1985 ‘Preface’ to the reprinting of The Poetry of Ezra Pound from 1951 that “Marshall, at that time (was) pretty much a New Critic”. ↩
  6. In January 1951 McLuhan wrote to the then editor of the Sewanee Review, John Palmer, complaining that he had to publish elsewhere because his work was not appearing often enough at Sewanee. “Trouble is, he (the other editor) don’t pay, and it’s quite a problem finding hamburger for our five kids these days.” (Between 1944 and 1951 the McLuhans had  two more girls after the twins and their older brother, Eric.) If Palmer didn’t much like McLuhan’s work, despite Brooks’ prompting, perhaps he would be more sympathetic to it in consideration of his hungry children? ↩

Dobbs: McLuhan on how much truth you got

Bob Dobbs has a lot of great memories of McLuhan from the 1970s. The hope is to feature many of them here.

The first is one that Bob says he has subsequently used many times himself.

*

In the Spring of 1979, during one of Marshall McLuhan’s last Monday night “Open House” discussions before his stroke later that year on September 26, somebody said that his statement, “the medium is the message”, was just a half-truth.
 
McLuhan’s response: “Yes, but for most people that’s a lot of truth!”

Yeats’ rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem

McLuhan ended his 1969 Playboy interview with a vision of the world at a crossroads — “its [decisive] hour come round at last” — where there is potential to usher in the millennium, but also of realizing the Anti-Christ: the two possibilities together as captured in “Yeats’ rough beast (…) slouching toward Bethlehem to be born”:

There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man’s consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ — Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants.1 It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.
Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of humans2, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in the potential of human beings3 to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of their4 his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.
I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new humans,5 linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and human themselves6 will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man’s destiny — if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image — tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I’ve tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.

Fifteen years before, in his 1954 St Joseph College lecture on ‘Christian Humanism and Modern Letters’:

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This [2-fold] door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion.7 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. Knowledge of the creative process in [the artefactual domain of] 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.

 

  1. Earlier in the Playboy interview: “our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies.” ↩
  2. McLuhan has ‘man’ here, not ‘humans’. It has been edited to accommodate the wokesters who will see division in his vision, ignoring his appeal to the “human tribe” as “one family”. ↩
  3. McLuhan: ‘man’s potential’. ↩
  4. McLuhan: ‘his’. ↩
  5. McLuhan: ‘the new man’. ↩
  6. McLuhan: ‘man himself’. ↩
  7. According to McLuhan, the modern world — the last 500 years, say — has been shaped by the extraordinary application of elementary forces in both the factual and artefactual realms. Consciousness of the physical elements reached its take-off stage with Lavoisier around 1790. It then took almost a century before Mendeleev was able to formulate his table. But the physical elements had been active, of course, always and everywhere, throughout the cosmos, since the beginning of time; and in the centuries immediately before 1790 their laws and properties had increasingly been applied with great success in many different sorts of manufacturing. But before Lavoisier those applications remained unconscious of the elementary processes they themselves were manipulating. In the parallel field of the artefactual (the domain not of physical facts aside from human perception, but the artifacts of human perception), a comparable application of elementary forces has enabled the great ‘successes’ of our information environment: news, entertainment, advertising, global commerce and politics — all tending increasingly to crass propaganda. The elementary forces manipulated so successfully in these ways remain unconscious to this day, however, just as were the chemical elements before Lavoisier. It is just this ‘successful’ use grounded in unconscious elementary forces that defines the great dangers of our time: nuclear war, environmental degradation, political tyranny, social disintegration, psychical madness. Therefore McLuhan’s “survival strategy” as formulated in the Playboy interview: “man (see note 1 above) must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him (see note 1 above) (…) But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious (…) We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large.” Just as the world was revolutionized following the discovery of the physical elements, so might it be revolutionized again by discovery of the artefactual elements. It was in such a revolution based on collective research that McLuhan saw a potential “survival strategy” and, therefore, grounds for “a surge of excitement and hope”. Now this “strategy” would remain abstract and only a “hope”, of course, unless these “artefactual  elements” were dis-covered and increasingly specified. But it was just such dis-covery that McLuhan attempted to communicate following on the prior truly great (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempts by Plato, Aristotle, and many others — especially, in McLuhan’s case, Vico and Joyce. See A whole new genus of sciences. ↩

Dilworth: McLuhan on The Waste Land

McLuhan on The Waste Land
Introduced and edited by Thomas Dilworth1

Introduction
In 1968/9 I [Tom Dilworth] was a student in Marshal McLuhan’s fourth-year class in Modern Poetry — together with about 25 others in the Honours English Programme at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. At the time, he was at the height of his fame, and I for one was excited to have him as our prof. He co-taught the course with his former graduate student, Sheila Watson, the author of the novel The Double Hook, who was on sabbatical leave from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She was deferential to him and warmly personal to students, whereas he was entirely interested in his ideas on media and the poetry. Sometimes grumpy, he was still recovering from a prolonged brain operation he had undergone the year before while at Fordham. (He gradually improved — I subsequently was in a graduate seminar he taught and audited his seminar on media.) His hearing was hypersensitive, and the sound of construction nearby in the city irritated him.
The class took place in the former dining room of what is now called Founders House, which had originally been a family home. During the first class he sat on the edge of a table, dangling his long legs as he spoke. He began with the aesthetic of Modernism, which is that of fragments and incompletion and which involves the reader (or viewer or listener), who co-creates the work. For that reason, he said, buildings were more interesting when in ruins or not yet complete.
Halfway into the class a student named Terry Edgar arrived clutching in one hand a can of Coke, and McLuhan announced, ‘Here is a representation of the current shallow art.’ (None of us then had any knowledge of Andy Warhol.)
He never prepared for class but, speaking spontaneously, was usually interesting, often brilliant. After hearing him differentiate between visual and acoustic or tactile space and how radio was so effective for Hitler, Roosevelt, and Churchill, I could think of nothing else for the next four days. (He did not mention Conrad, but what he said illuminated Heart of Darkness for me.) I remember him during the course praising Hopkins, whose ‘The Windhover’ is, he said, ‘the greatest modern sonnet’ and referring dismissively to Dylan Thomas’ ‘monism’. He played for us a record of Wallace Stevens reading his own poetry, despite Stevens being a dreary reader.
During the course, he taught T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which clearly meant a lot to him because of its affinity with reality perceived as different, i.e., ‘modern’, owing to the revolution in media and human experience brought about by electricity.
When McLuhan taught he monologued. Not in these notes is an analogy he at other times made between Eliot’s poem and the newspaper, which juxtaposed incongruous reports, stories, features, and advertisements, all unified solely by the dateline.
Slightly expanded and clarified, here are my notes for the class or classes on The Waste Land. They include nothing said by Sheila Watson, if she was present, nor anyone else other than McLuhan.

*****

McLuhan on The Waste Land
The Waste Land is a non-visual poem, fragmented, yet the people of the poem live in a visual continuum — a 9 to 5 world. That world is unlike the tactile reality of the poem. Touch is the experience of the blind, which is full of shock, surprise, and demands maximum alertness.
Living in visual space, the lives of these people are rootless, without tradition, with no sense of the past (no seeing the past in the present), no depth. But the reader experiences the poem differently, in symbols, non-visually, in tactile or acoustic space.
Dead, the people in the poem are all together without a deeper memory. They flow over London Bridge — ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’
‘April is the cruelest month’ refers to the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote’2 — The Waste Land is the opposite of Chaucer’s world of joy. By the 18th Century the city was seen as an enclosure, a prison — by Fielding, and later Dickens — the human community had changed since the world of Chaucer. Now there is a need for spiritual roots. This is implied by the allusions to scripture.
‘You gave me Hyacinths” — the Roman death flower. The descent into the underworld —‘The Burial of the Dead’.
Madame Sosostris ‘had a bad cold’, slang for v.d. She is a poor attempt at salvation since her ‘wisdom’ cannot avoid v.d.
The ’Unreal City’ — a change — organized along visual lines, people walking with eyes before feet in strait lines.
‘The Dog’ — now man’s enemy because of hypercritical friendliness, the dog beneath the skin. ‘Hypocrite’ — Greek for mask. The mask is the language, the poem, a way to present self to the world, but also a way of seeing — you look through a mask — a style — a composite, a way to power, ‘the cool one’ — we pick and choose whom we will resemble.
‘The Game of Chess’ — the treachery women exact on each other for power.
The people are dead now, all systematically deprived of a spiritual life or meaning of life.
The dressing of the dead. The artificial perfumes — not natural — drugs, LSD, the inner trip — preview of formaldehyde. Metal imagery — cold, inhospitable — line 138: ‘lidless eyes’. ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’. Jazz, ‘O that Shakespeherian Rag’, change for the sake of change. Cold — money, teeth — artificial.
‘The Fire Sermon’. Meeting of East and West, Augustine and Buddha.
The ironic hunter-fisher — rat, slimy canal, gashouse, not very rustic or natural.
‘Horns and motors’ — 1922, the world of Gatsby. People like children in the fiery furnace.
‘She puts another record on’. The discotheque, mechanical sounds. Prostitution, cold, the go-go girl. The go-go girl in a cage — a widely participated in ritual — a pre-act act. The mechanical canary, sterile, unproductive. Sex — no touch because of cage — Playboy. Elizabeth and Leicester — lovers — ‘Beating oars’ — the vulgarity and triviality of the Queen in the same situation as the girl in a canoe. The same even then.
Augustine and Buddha, the collision of worlds, the moving together. LSD is a huge step eastward. Japan a huge step west. China — Marxism — another step west.
‘Death by Water’ — drowning of the possibility of baptism. Phlebas: Ulysses steers, man knocked by tiller overboard3 — free boat, loose, ‘the barges drift’ (line 268), turning east.
‘What the Thunder Said’. 1st line, allusion to the Passion. The Third beside you — Xt on road to Emmaus. The rock, the Church.
Swarming over endless plains — the Russian Revolution.
Then oriental responses to the human position — compassion. The Spanish Tragedy, Heironimo — everyone dies at the hand of his neighbour.
Uniform standardized repetitive life. Eliot reads the poem in an Anglican-pulpit equitone, the potent mask of the Establishment. Wendell Berry writes on the voice and how it effects the way they wrote — the effect of Dylan Thomas’s voice on his poetry.
In The Waste Land all the boundaries of all the cells merge into a whole. Like Siddhartha.
An LSD dispensation. The human Teiresias-man-woman merges at the end.
Unconsciousness, which LSD is for some people. For Eliot the soul is not an oversoul, a mass whole.
The poem is inclusive — unconsciousness includes tradition. Exclusive conscious — visual — excludes tradition.
Poets—masters in depth of their present, seers, 60 years ahead. The future, as the past, is included in the present. Seers see the present. The latest is always old hat to a knower. We are all unified in a drastic inability to see the present. Only a whole man can look at the present without blinking.

*****

Afterword (Tom Dilworth)
On a gray November day during the year that I was in his Modern Poetry class, after leaving St Mike’s library, I joined McLuhan in crossing St Joseph Street. He recognized me as a student in his class, and by the time we reached the far curb, he had begun a conversation with me that finished on that curb a half-hour later. He told me that the conventional Western linear conception of time is mistaken, that a circular sense of time was better, and that Aquinas was right in conceiving God as the ground of being. His taking the time to talk to one of his students like that exemplified 1) his compelling interest in what he was thinking, and 2) his generosity as a teacher.

  1. Tom Dilworth is University Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. His excellent essay, ‘McLuhan as Medium‘, is included in At The Speed Of Light There Is Only Illumination (ed, Linda Morra and John Errington Moss, 2004). ↩
  2. Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’ to Canterbury Tales begins ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droughte of March hath perced to the roote’. ‘Soote’ is ‘sweet‘, akin to Danish sød and Middle Dutch soete. ↩
  3. A kind of holy drowning, life by water, baptism is the antithesis of physical drowning (‘death by water’), which is the culmination of a secular orientation, the steersman knocked “by tiller overboard”. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (the plotline of Dublin’s Joyce)

moving self-consciously from the alone to the alone… 

Kenner’s phrase here (from the first page of chapter 7, Dublin’s Joyce, 95) speaks to his reading of Joyce, but through it, as with a palimpsest, may be read the action of “the permanent mind of Europe” (from the last page of chapter 6, Dublin’s Joyce, 94).

Earlier in Dublin’s Joyce Kenner had compared Joyce with Pope and recalled how that “mind of Europe” with “intellectual traditions running back through St. Augustine to Cicero and Homer” now “entered the (…) night-world”:1 

If we want an English analogue for Joyce, it is Pope; their orientations and procedures are surprisingly similar. Pope is conscious of intellectual traditions running back through St. Augustine to Cicero and Homer; and the universal darkness that he predicted at the end of the Dunciad fell exactly as he foretold; the mind of Europe entered the Romantic night-world. (Dublin’s Joyce, 23) 

Here is the passage in Pope from the end of the 1725 Dunciad:

She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest,
Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep,
And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.
She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,
Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

McLuhan ended his unpublished Typhon in America,2 written at a time in the late 1940s when he and Kenner were in intense communication, with this passage. The last sentence of his typescript runs:

In this darkness we must learn to see.

Around 15 years later, he ended The Gutenberg Galaxy3 with this same passage from Pope but with a changed summary sentence:

This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.

Compare Kenner:

In Finnegans Wake (…) Joyce reversed for the western world that current that has flowed from Milton’s exile-myth4 into the romantic night-world.5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 90)

McLuhan’s revision in the Gutenberg Galaxy to reference Joyce and FW does indeed seem to have come about through the reconsideration he made of Joyce in the late 1940s together with Kenner.6 On the other hand, Kenner’s reading of Joyce, as it came to be formulated over the decade leading to Dublin’s Joyce in 1955, owed to McLuhan this plotline of “the mind of Europe enter[ing] the (…) night-world”.7 The great question was, how to go from an isolated perspective — “moving self-consciously from the alone to the alone” (Dublin’s Joyce, 95) — to the common life of Dublin and doublin?8

This plotline goes back in “the permanent mind of Europe” at least to Plato, and arguably to Parmenides and Heraclitus. The central question is, again, how is thinking to break from captivity in “the alone to the alone” and instead join itself with the ‘common world’ (κόσμος κοινός)?

An abysmal circularity is implicated here, since joining is an act of ‘bringing together’ and cannot even be attempted unless the possibility of it is already at hand. But how to get to what is already at hand, especially when a start has long since been made elsewhere with what is equally but fundamentally differently also at hand? Having started with the ‘alone’, how start again with another possibility? Especially with another possibility that is hardly known or even utterly unknown?

A peculiar kind of backwards somersault through the dark is required — a Gestalt switch or paradigm shift in accord with which the action of mind is to be reordered from the start (at a time when it has already started, and been deeply ordered, elsewise).

In “the permanent mind of Europe” it was just such a break with linearity that Plato’s ‘dialectic’ aimed, if not to accomplish — for to accomplish would privilege a student’s chain of thought and the point was to break with that chain, certainly not to reinforce it. Instead, a new start was to be prompted through such a backward break — to ‘occasion’ it somehow.

Dublin’s Joyce traces one more attempt in the action of “the mind of Europe”, this time by Joyce, to relocate itself to where it already is.

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
Heraclitus DK B29

Although logos is common to all, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

Although the logos is shared, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession

τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι
Heraclitus DK B89

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.

The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own.

 

  1. Kenner writes of “the Romantic night-world”. But this threatens to place in an historic era what is a “permanent” possibility. Or did Kenner consider “the Romantic” a “permanent” possibility which the Romantic age may have particularly realized, though not exclusively? ↩
  2. See Typhon/Minotaur/Dionysus parallels. ↩
  3. The Gutenberg Galaxy book, as opposed to ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’ main section of the book, has a kind of appendix, ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’. But that McLuhan considered ‘Pope’s Dunciad’ (pages 255-263 of GG) to be the chief conclusion of The Gutenberg Galaxy follows from the inclusion of this section of GG in The Interior Landscape in 1969. ↩
  4. Kenner’s phrase “Milton’s exile-myth” recalls his quotation a few pages before from William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral: “Milton uses (the myth) to give every action a nightmare importance, to hold every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. It is a terrific fancy, the Western temper at its height; the insane disproportion of the act to its effects implies a vast zest for heroic action.” Kenner comments: “Joyce chose to construct his drama (around) beings inadequate to the Miltonic holding of every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. He chose that image because it was the inadequacy of that formulation to mankind that he sought to display”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 88-89) ↩
  5. With “the romantic night-world” Kenner is referring to Pope’s Dunciad. As cited above from Dublin’s Joyce, 23: ” the universal darkness that (Pope) predicted at the end of the Dunciad fell exactly as he foretold; the mind of Europe entered the romantic night-world.” ↩
  6. This is not to say that that revision itself came from Kenner! Although Dublin’s Joyce appeared in 1955, seven years before the 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy, the latter had been under construction since at least 1952. It is entirely possible, therefore, that the impetus here came from McLuhan and not from Kenner. ↩
  7. Dublin’s Joyce does not have only a single plotline. Kenner’s own plotline follows Joyce through two “cycles” of the Aristotelian lyric-epic-drama progression: Chamber Music, Dubliners, Exiles; Portrait, Ulysses, FW. Against this, McLuhan had became fascinated with the epyllion or “little epic” form after encountering it in the work of Eric Havelock in the mid 1940s. (For discussion see The Road to Xanadu.) This cut across Kenner’s progression of genres. In his 1960 ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic’ McLuhan referred succinctly to “the little epic fusion of lyric, epic, and dramatic”. Here was not only a further complicating genre, but also a whole different notion of time. (For detailed exposition see McLuhan’s Times.) ↩
  8. Doublin’ is the action of participation in the ‘common world’ (κόσμος κοινός). Using a phrase from Jacques Maritain, Kenner describes Dublin as “the world of generality” (Dublin’s Joyce, 88). ↩
  9. This is one of the two epigraphs from Heraclitus to Eliot’s Four Quartets. Kenner has recorded in regard to McLuhan and himself in the late 1940s: “the passion (…) with which we two (…) studied Eliot! We penciled notes on the yellow postwar paper of a Faber Four Quartets.” (1985 ‘Preface’ to the reprinting of Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound from 1951.) ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 6)

Kenner’s long chapter 6 treats Joyce’s Exiles…

Exiles frees Joyce from Ibsen (…) whose (…) pseudo-rigours of revolt had for some years compromised a portion of his spirit. The repudiation of the Norwegian (…) is explicit. (Dublin’s Joyce, 69)

Kenner’s Joyce thinks progressively against himself though his fiction:

The artist lives in two worlds, the world he understands and the world his characters understand (…) he defines the former by disdaining the latter… (Dublin’s Joyce, 75)

“Naturalism”, as Joyce saw instantly, is an essentially ambivalent convention. It parades an ironic obsession with what the characters see in order to express what they ignore. (Dublin’s Joyce, 76)

Joyce’s works are read by Kenner as stages of liberation from “worlds” that make equally for limited art and limited polity — limited polity at all levels from that of the soul to that of the city.1 In this way “worlds” are conceived as in “battle” with one another and growth in art or life amounts to turns or shifts in that battle. The thought goes back at least to Plato, but the imagery goes back to wars of the gods in mythology that was already ancient in Plato’s time and was frequently represented on the most important Greek temples like the Parthenon in Athens and the Altar of Zeus at Pergamon.  

The theme of Exiles is Richard’s agon2 (Dublin’s Joyce, 85)

[in Exiles] Robert Hand (…) proposes to Richard (…) “a battle of (…) souls (…) against all that is false in them and in the world”:
“All life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice. Will you, Richard? Have you the courage? (…) The blinding instant of passion alone — passion, free, unashamed, irresistible — that is the only gate by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life.” (Dublin’s Joyce, 70)

Two matters are fused here which must be detached from one another and considered separately. There is the “agon“, the “battle of (…) souls (…) against all that is false in them and in the world”; and there is “the blinding instant of passion (…) that is the only gate by which we can escape”. Joyce’s language is precise. The “instant of passion alone” is “blinding” in multiple senses. It succeeds, so far as it succeeds, only because it is “blinding”. The claim is that it exactly thereby achieves the “conquest” and “victory” in the aforesaid “battle of (…) souls”. The “battle” is to be won by being put one-sidedly to rest by “escape” through “the only gate” of “the blinding instant of passion alone“.

But the notion that “blinding” can represent “victory” in the “battle of (…) souls” in this way is itself blinding. It does not see that this supposed resolution of the battle does not work in multiple respects — respects Kenner describes Joyce at work recognizing and rejecting in Exiles. And yet it remains very much with us as McLuhan unsuccessfully attempted to explain to Norman Mailer, a modern champion of this “only gate”.

Joyce always weighs the parody against the parody. (Dublin’s Joyce, 70)

That is, he insists that the battle actually be a battle. All “worlds” are to be retained for investigation and the resulting information they exhibit. No world is simply to be cancelled. Further, strictures applied against any one world must be applied against all, “parody against (…) parody”.

We must not be misled (…) into supposing that this [talk of “the sea, music and death”] is any less “faded green plush” than the armchairs of the (…) drawing-room. Ibsen imagined talk like this to be an absolute and a defiance of the drawing-room. Joyce exhibits them as continuous modes. (Dublin’s Joyce, 71)

“Continuous” here means that the “worlds” at stake must not be lifted somehow out of the “battle of (…) souls” through some or other “gate”. They must be left in contesting “agon” with each other. In this context, Joyce found cant as much in existential declaration as in drawing-room cocktail conversation. The test was always how open was any such “world” to the complex real.

Joyce the citizen-exile confronting the dual Dublin, the Dublin of “sordid and deceptive details” and that of civic intelligibility (…) had “all but decided to consider the two worlds as aliens to one another”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 72-73, citing Stephen Hero)3

The real consists ineluctably of multiple “worlds”, both collectively and individually, and the great question concerns the relations of these worlds. When they are conceived exclusively as “aliens to one another”, any resolution of their antagonism will necessarily be one-sided. Since there is no middle that could account for the orchestration of their plurality, a solution to their “battle” can lie only in their dissolution into some variety of supervening singularity.

Conversely, “in his best work, Ibsen achieved ‘the syllogism of art’, the mediation between the two worlds“. (Dublin’s Joyce, 75)

Kenner is very much alive to the differing ratios “between (…) worlds” and to their present or absent mediations accounting for those differences: 

A few weeks after his eighteenth birthday [Joyce] published in the Fortnightly Review (April 1, 1900) an account of [Ibsen’s] recently-issued When We Dead Awaken; the opening paean indicates how, in his4 mind, the stress came to fall: “Seldom, if at all, has he consented to join battle with his enemies. It would appear as if the storm of fierce debate rarely broke in upon his wonderful calm. The conflicting voices have not influenced his work in the very smallest degree.”5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 74)

The “battle” of “debate” between “conflicting voices” and differing “worlds” had been put to rest by Ibsen in a “wonderful calm”. This is achieved through a displacement of emphasis — how “the stress came to fall” — between voices and worlds. Ibsen’s solution, admired by the young Joyce, was to move “stress” from multiple “worlds as alien to one another” to “only” one singular world “alone”. The “battle” was to be stilled in a singularizing move Kenner designates as “the vehemence of uneasiness”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 75)

In his 6 March, 1901 letter to Ibsen Joyce was explicit:

“how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead, how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends, and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism.” (Dublin’s Joyce, 74)

There is an essential parallel between the agon of the individual soul and the artist’s ‘use of words’. Each requires (but seldom acknowledges) what Kenner treats as “the syllogism of art, the mediation between the two worlds” (Dublin’s Joyce, 75):

[In Exiles] Joyce chose to construct his drama of beings inadequate to the Miltonic holding of every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. He chose that image because it was the inadequacy of that formulation to mankind that he sought to display, not just the inadequacy of mankind to the formulation. (…) The battle that Robert proposes to Richard is irrelevant to the context of their plight. It is not “a victory of human passion over (…) cowardice” that will solve their exile. It is not (…) cowardice that inhibits a repetition of the act of love. The conventional marriage into which Bertha and Richard are settling down is not a retreat but as much of a fulfilment as is allowed. As the family, so the City. The City is not a refuge from the demands of alert living but the context of meaningful life. (Dublin’s Joyce, 89-90)

Kenner closes his chapter on Exiles with a summary of his reading of Joyce’s progress through the play:

Hence Joyce drew off the rebellious heroics and cast them as a running sub-plot to his later works: first Richard Rowan, then Stephen Dedalus, then Shem the Penman; a metamorphosis of sham personae containing and controlling all the errors implicit in the relation between Dublin and its “liberated” victim. These figures, impurities from the chemical process to which the artist was submitting Dublin, prove to be of permanent interest, just as Dublin is; the emancipated victim is not only the nineteenth-century tragic hero, he [also] has affinities, through Prometheus and Oedipus, with the permanent mind of Europe. That is why Joyce directed so much labour to the purification of what he had taken from Ibsen. Ibsen was both a catalyst and a heresiarch: a warning. He understood as did no one else in his time the burden of the dead past and the wastefulness of any attempt to give it spurious life:6 his “I think we are sailing with a corpse in the cargo!” corresponds to Stephen Dedalus’ apprehension of the nightmare of history from which H. C. Earwicker strains to awake. But he had never known, and could not know amid the frontier vacuum of the fiords, the traditions of the European community of richly-nourished life; and the lonely starvation of his ideal of free personal affinity in no context save that of intermingling wills inspired Joyce with [both] a fascination that generated Exiles and a repulsion that found its objective correlative when Leopold Bloom, reversing Gabriel Conroy’s lust for snow,7 shuddered beneath “the apathy of the stars”, U 719/694. (Dublin’s Joyce, 93-94)

Bloom, “reversing Gabriel Conroy’s lust for snow”, is yet “continuous” (Dublin’s Joyce, 71) with him. The demand is thus set for a depiction of the City as “the mediation between the two worlds” (Dublin’s Joyce, 75), where a “battle of (…) souls” can play itself out in, or as, “the context of meaningful life”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 90)

Ibsen confused the impercipient inertia of much human conduct with the matrix of convention and artifice in which social and familial relationships are necessarily enacted. (Dublin’s Joyce, 72)

The guidance of a habitual communal order is not an evasion but a human necessity. (Dublin’s Joyce, 87)

 

  1. The central question at stake in these Dublin’s Joyce posts may be put: how far did Kenner’s account of Joyce’s liberation help to spark McLuhan’s liberation from “moralist” to “student”? Further clarification of this question depends upon an investigation of the stages undergone by Kenner’s Joyce book between its initiation in the mid 1940s to its eventual publication as Dublin’s Joyce in 1955. See note 1 to McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 1. ↩
  2. Kenner continues here concerning the other characters in Exiles: “Robert, Beatrice, and Bertha may be said to exist to explicate aspects of his (Richard’s agonistic) mode of being and phases of his plight”. ↩
  3. Stephen Hero has ‘detail’, not Kenner’s  ‘details’ and ‘one to another’, not Kenner’s ‘to one another’. ↩
  4. Whose mind is this? Ibsen’s? Joyce’s? Both? ↩
  5. In a note in regard to Joyce learning Norwegian to read Ibsen in the original, Kenner references Muriel Bradbrook’s Ibsen the Norwegian. (Dublin’s Joyce, 74n) Now Bradbrook was a friend and sometime advisor of McLuhan dating back to his undergraduate years in Cambridge a decade before Kenner and McLuhan met in 1946. This reference to Bradbrook would certainly have come from McLuhan. Similarly, Kenner’s thoughts on Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (Dublin’s Joyce, 76) would have been prompted by McLuhan. Giedion and McLuhan had been acquainted and in correspondence since 1943. And McLuhan reviewed Mechanization Takes Command in 1949 in Hudson Review, where Kenner was also publishing at the time. ↩
  6. Kenner’s Joyce with its emphasis on an imperfect yet best-we-are-allowed sociality may have worked with Corinne McLuhan’s 1946 conversion to suggest the brittleness of McLuhan’s Catholicism to that point. Corinne’s conversion would certainly not have been so ‘theological’ as his own 10 years before. Whatever the complicated motivation, McLuhan’s ‘second conversion‘ from “moralist” to “student” took place in this 1946-1951 period. ↩
  7. This “lust for snow” from the last sentence of the chapter returns to its first sentence: “Gabriel Conroy (from ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners) yearned for the snows. Exiles — an austere ungarnished play — inspects that pseudo-liberation; its Richard Rowan is a Gabriel Conroy liberated by Ibsen.” Kenner seems to have in mind the transition from a pseudo-liberation in what is “yearned for” to its possession — however much dispossession might be implicated in that possession. And however much such a liberation turns out itself to be one more pseudo-liberation. Here is Kenner’s description of Ibsen’s ‘liberation’: “Ibsen unbound Prometheus by dismissing all human bonds as sentiment. The myth that contains his life-work was projected in a (1859) poem, ‘On the Vidda’ (…) In the poem a young man from the valley (…) is visited on holiday in the mountain uplands (the Vidda) by a strange hunter ‘with cold eyes like mountain lakes’ who induces him to stay (…) The youth takes to heart this lesson in detachment. (…) ‘Self-steeled he looks on at joy (in the valley) from above life’s snow-line. The Strange Hunter reappears and tells him he is now free’…” (Dublin’s Joyce, 78). ↩

Chaos and confusion in 1948

McLuhan wrote a short ‘Introduction’ — ‘Where Chesterton Comes In’ — to Hugh Kenner’s 1948 Paradox in Chesterton. It is an interesting document in many respects,1 not least in the context of McLuhan’s conversion from “moralist” to “student” over the course of his first 5 years at the University of Toronto (1946-1951).2 That McLuhan’s mind was in painful flux at the time3 can be seen in his fixation in the piece on “chaos” and “confusion”:

  • The specific contemporary relevance of Chesterton is this, that his metaphysical intuition of being was always in the service of the search for moral and political order in the current chaos. He was a Thomist by connaturality with being, not by study of St. Thomas. And unlike the neo-Thomists his unfailing sense of the relevance of the analogy of being directed his intellectual gaze not to the schoolmen but to the heart of the chaos of our time.
  • That is where Chesterton comes in. His unfailing sense of relevance and of the location of the heart of the contemporary chaos carried him at all times to attack the problem of morals and psychology. He was always in the practical order.4 It is important, therefore, that (…) the reader (…) feel Chesterton’s powerful intrusion into every kind of confused moral and psychological issue of our time.
  • It is time to abandon the literary and journalistic Chesterton (…) to see him as a master of analogical perception and argument who never failed to focus a high degree of moral wisdom on the most confused issues of our age.

It might seem that McLuhan was reacting to the immediate post-WW2 world which had seen the first use of atomic weapons and the accelerating “mechanization” of all aspects of life. He writes of “the current chaos”, “the chaos of our time” and the “confused issues of our age”. But he goes on to write of “the universal confusion” and, indeed, as his Introduction proceeds it emerges that all the times he considers were chaotic and confused as well:

  • St. Thomas was sustained by a great psychological and social order in an age of dialectical confusion.
  • Shakespeare wrote when this great symbolic and psychological synthesis [of the middle ages] was really destroyed.
  • What Descartes really did was to make explicit the fact which had been prepared by centuries of decadent scholastic rationalism: the fact that a complete divorce had been achieved between abstract intellectual and specifically psychological order.  Henceforth men would seek intellectually only for the kind of order they could readily achieve by rationalistic means: a mathematical and mechanistic order which precludes a human and psychological order. Ethics and politics were abandoned as much as metaphysics. But both society and philosophy were in a state of great confusion by the time this desperate strategy was adopted. Since the time of Descartes (…) moral, psychological, and political chaos has steadily developed, with its concurrent crop of fear and anger and hate.
  • that world of adult horror into which Baudelaire gazed with intense suffering and humility.

‘Universal confusion’ results from the constant exposure of the world to a foundational ‘untuning’ — a kind of underlying continental drift that always threatens individual and social order. As he was often to continue to do in his later work,5 McLuhan brings Shakespeare forward to witness his point:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.6

Shakespeare’s rich passage is cited unbroken (though with some omissions) in McLuhan’s piece. But it will be separated into segments here to highlight the movement between its parts.

O, when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick!

For:

How could communities,
(…)7
But by degree, stand in authentic place?

And then:

Take but degree away, untune that string
(…)8
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. (Troilus and Cressida, 1:3)

Against this background of chaos and universal confusion, McLuhan’s Introduction has two short sentences which look ahead to the course he will come to take for the rest of his life:

The artist offers us not a [conceptual] system but a world. An inner world is explored and developed and then projected as an object. 

‘World’ is used here in 2 different senses. There is a new world of experience which “the artist offers us” in an artwork. And there is the “inner world” — the ‘interior landscape’ as McLuhan will later say — through which that artwork is “developed and then projected”.

He was on his way to seeing, as a “student”, that no “moralist” position can hold out by dint of force against other positions held equally by force.9 Indeed, the “chaos” of only forcibly held positions is the “universal confusion”. It followed, as he did not yet see clearly, that the only way to confront “moral, psychological, and political chaos” was through the collective scientific investigation of all experience — all willful positions — without exception. And this, as he would shortly come to understand, by 1951 at the latest, was possible only through examination of just how that “inner world is explored and developed and then projected as an object” — not only in artistic production but in all cognition whatsoever. 

Here he is to 1951, on the other side of his ‘second conversion’ in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’:

Helped by Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Joyce arrived quickly at the formula of the aesthetic moment and its attendant landscape 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 hence epiphanized. 

Every “object” in the artifactual order, whether of artistic production or “ordinary apprehension”, was to be treated as an “effect” — an “effect” of some “creative (…) reconstruction” carried out through exploration in the “inner world” or “interior landscape”. Again in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’:

This secret [generative action both of art and of “ordinary apprehension”] consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes…

All experience is momentary. It is generated moment by moment through a “learning” process (where the range of possibilities ‘before’ it are cognized) followed by a ‘creative’ process (where some one possibility is selected and “developed” out of that range). Compare in language use where moment by moment some particular word with some particular grammar is selected and uttered (outered) out of all the possible words and grammatical markers that might have been “developed”. In both cases, these processes are, of course, largely unconscious. And the time of these “processes” is not horizontal and chronological, it is vertical and synchronic.10 But in the potential consciousness of these unconscious processes is to be dis-covered, according to McLuhan, the possibility of a new science and, with it, the resulting possibility of exoteric orientation — one no longer esoteric via willful insistence.11

In the unpublished Typhon in America,12 dating from this same 1947-1948 period, having quoted Pope how “Universal Darkness buries All”,13 McLuhan concludes his manuscript with this admonition:

In this darkness we must learn to see.

Similarly in The Gutenberg Galaxy, 15 years later, having cited the same passage from Pope, he then immediately concludes:

This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.

Another decade later still, at the end of Take Today (297):

For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the natural program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness.

In his Playboy Interview McLuhan spoke in the same way of the need “to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious”. This “new form of consciousness” might serve, as he said in the same interview, for a “survival strategy”.

 

  1. Other contexts implicated in the document include McLuhan’s relations with Kenner and Fr Gerald Phelan and McLuhan’s Thomism. Of course all these different aspects are closely related with one another. ↩
  2. “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride (published in 1951, but largely written by 1948), I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” (Playboy interview, 1969) ↩
  3. McLuhan to Walter Ong, Jan 23, 1953, Letters, 234: “After 5 years of miserable health I am suddenly recovered and full of energy again.” ↩
  4. Indicating a continuity in McLuhan’s concerns, his first published paper from 1936, more than a decade before his Introduction to Kenner’s book, emphasized Chesterton’s commitment to “the practical order” in its title: ‘G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’. ↩
  5. See Through the vanishing point 2 – Shakespeare. ↩
  6. Omitted by McLuhan here:
    And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
    In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
    Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
    Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
    And posts like the commandment of a king,
    Sans check to good and bad: but when the planets
    In evil mixture to disorder wander,
    What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
    What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
    Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
    Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
    The unity and married calm of states
    Quite from their fixture! ↩
  7. McLuhan includes the following lines here:
    Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
    Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
    The primogenitive and due of birth,
    Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels. ↩
  8. Here McLuhan strangely omits the great lines from Shakespeare:
    And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts
    In mere oppugnancy.
    When he cited the same passage again in The Gutenberg Galaxy, these lines were retained and, indeed, emphasized. ↩
  9. See note 11 below. ↩
  10. See McLuhan’s times. ↩
  11. Here is Joyce in his 6 March, 1901, letter to Ibsen: “how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead, how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart” (Dublin’s Joyce, 74). Such “wilful resolution” is where both Joyce and McLuhan came from. (Kenner has ‘wilful’ in his citation of the letter, but other transcriptions have ‘willful’.) ↩
  12. See Typhon/Minotaur/Dionysus parallels. ↩
  13. McLuhan cites the same passage from Pope’s 1725 Dunciad in Typhon in America and in The Gutenberg Galaxy:
    She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
    Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
    Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
    And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
    Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
    The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
    As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
    The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
    As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest,
    Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
    Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
    Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
    See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
    While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep,
    And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.
    She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,
    Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
    Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,
    Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
    Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
    And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
    See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
    In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
    Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
    And unawares Morality expires.
    Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
    Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
    Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
    Light dies before thy uncreating word:
    Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
    And Universal Darkness buries All. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 5)

Kenner’s chapter 5 treats Dubliners and does so mostly through textual commentary.

The human cogs and levers of the story [‘Counterparts’] whirr and jerk as the rebuke administered by the employer passes through them and emerges at the other end as the flailing of a cane on the thighs of a small boy. (Dublin’s Joyce, 57)

In 1968 McLuhan wrote a review of Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (Book World, November 10, 1968). It was titled, ‘Noble Purpose but to What End?’ But the original title of McLuhan’s review, perhaps rejected by Book World, seems to have been: ‘Ye Shall Be As Cogs’.

Its1 layers of meaning are numerous. It is the paralysis of the City, at one level; the rhythm of the Dubliners’ lives rises to no festivity and is sustained by no community; (…) It is the paralysis of the person, at another level, though it is seldom evident that these persons are so circumstanced that they might have chosen differently. But at the most important level it is metaphysical…

McLuhan reverted to “layers of meaning” over and over again his work — see Multi-levels of simultaneous presentation.

But at the most important level it is metaphysical: the Exiles are exiled from the garden, and the key to their plight, as Finnegans Wake brings forward, is the Fall. (…) As the Rev. Walter Ong has written (…) “the great fiction of the West: the self-possessed man in the self-possessed world, the fiction which seeks to erase all sense of plight, of confusing weakness, from man’s consciousness, and which above all will never admit such a sense as a principle of operation.”2 (…) It is precisely this fiction of self-containment that Joyce defines in successively more elaborate images, from Mr Duffy’s careful control over every detail of life through the tightly-bounded ethical world of Exiles and Stephen’s “All or not at all” to HCE’s solipsistic nightmare. What beats against all these people is the evidence of otherness3…. (Dublin’s Joyce, 59-60)

Shared insight into some such vision of the Fall may have been one of the commonalities that drew McLuhan and Kenner closely together for 5 Years or so after they met in 1946. In the 30 years remaining to McLuhan’s life, they would never be close again. McLuhan thought Kenner used many of his ideas without attribution and, worse, without entirely understanding them. This grated in multiple ways especially given Kenner’s increasing influence as a critic which rapidly outpaced McLuhan’s. But McLuhan’s deepest disappointment was surely that Kenner might have been that colleague through whom collective work on a ‘new science’ could have begun — but didn’t. And this was no question of academic reputation but one of the greatest possible practical significance:

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold4 from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door 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. 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. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

Walter Ong, SJ, was one of McLuhan’s students In the early 1940s at St Louis University and a good friend. Ong’s work and perhaps Ong himself would have been introduced to Kenner by McLuhan. Quoting Ong concerning self-possession as a “principle of operation” (McLuhan’s ‘technical means’ or ‘medium’) may be taken as a disguised acknowledgement of McLuhan’s contribution to Dublin’s Joyce beyond what Kenner openly avows:

Dr. H. M. McLuhan of the University of Toronto has permitted me free use of his unpublished History of the Trivium, on which my thirteenth chapter depends heavily, and afforded the continual stimulus of letters and conversation. (Dublin’s Joyce, vii)5

McLuhan and Ong (and others at SLU) would long have discussed the “fiction of self-containment” of human beings, indeed of being itself. This is the deep background to the subtitle of the 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. ‘The Extensions of Man’ is a dual genitive, but it is first of all an objective genitive. Humankind in all the myriad forms of its expression is the product or effect of media extensions beginning with language itself. Considered as a subjective genitive, in contrast, where extensions would belong to humans, ‘The Extensions of Man‘ define “the great fiction of the West: the self-possessed man in the self-possessed world” — the Fall itself. The unprecedented dangers of modernity derive from this confusion between genitives, which is equally a confused inversion between figure and ground. The figure of humankind arrogates itself to ground and consigns to figure and terrible use that very extension through which it is.

Kenner brings out the point through Joyce’s implied contrast of Dubliners at Mass with Dante’s vision in the last canto of the Com-media:

The gentlemen sat in the benches, having hitched their trousers slightly above their knees and laid their hats in security. They sat well back and gazed formally at the distant speck of red light which was suspended before the high altar. D219/195
O abbondante grazia, ond’ io presunsi
ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna
tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!6 (Dublin’s Joyce, 62)

Whereas “the gentlemen (…) gazed formally at the distant speck”, consuming it within the form of their gaze, hence its distance, Dante’s gaze is itself taken up by “la luce eterna” — “la forma universal”.

 

  1. Kenner seems to be referring to Joyce’s work in general here, but particularly to ‘A Painful Case’ in Dubliners. ↩
  2. Walter Ong, SJ, ‘Kafka’s Castle in the West’, Thought, September 1947, 439-460. ↩
  3. Kenner elaborates: “Man so constituted (…) cannot afford to give, since giving recognizes the fact of otherness, of a portion of being neither susceptible to his control nor violable to his gaze; this works out alike between man and man, and between man and God” (Dublin’s Joyce, 60). ↩
  4. The threshold is the same but the access it gives is to 2 fundamentally different ways. The Machiavelli way was one of fission. The other way of “the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity”, one of fusion. ↩
  5. Some of this acknowledgement is repeated later in the book: “The documentation behind this exceedingly compressed account (of ‘The Trivium in Dublin’) was collected by Prof. H. M. McLuhan in his unpublished History of the Trivium, which he has generously placed at my disposal. (Dublin’s Joyce, 223n) McLuhan’s actual contribution to Kenner’s life (such as his job for 2 years at Assumption College taking McLuhan’s place, or his PhD work at Yale which McLuhan arranged through his close friend, Cleanth Brooks) and thought was much greater than this. And his potential contribution greater yet. ↩
  6. Dante’s vision is given by Kenner, but only (only!) implied by Joyce. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 4)

Chapter 4 of Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce is named ‘Dedalus Abolished’ and the whole first section of the book, chapters 1-7, is titled ‘Icarus’ after Daedalus’ son.1 McLuhan’s unpublished book-length typescript, Typhon in America, dating to 1947-1948, has this style of chapter headings from Bacon’s 1609 Wisdom of the Ancients, and its first two books (of three) have titles from the Daedalus-Minotaur cycle.2 There can be little question that Kenner took this manner of naming, not to say the topic itself, from McLuhan.

One of the epigraphs for Kenner’s chapter is from FW 344:

his face glows green, his hair greys white, his bleyes bcome broon to suite his cultic twalette (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 36)

McLuhan would later cite Joyce’s “cultic twalette” over and over again as a kind of Leitmotif for a Celtic style of Romantic ‘integrity’, Kenner’s “lyrical dream” (39).3 Kenner in the late 1940s was doubtless responsible for turning McLuhan to Joyce, or back to Joyce, at a time when he, McLuhan, was wrestling also with a whole series of other new interests: Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, the epyllion, Mallarmé, cybernetics, Giedion’s Mechanism Takes Command, Pound (again through, or at least with, Kenner), Eisenstein — and so on. By 1951, when he turned 40, he would emerge from this multiple confrontation a new man, a “student” rather than a “moralist”:4

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride [published in 1951, but largely written by 1948], I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student. (Playboy interview)

Compare, as broached below, the time of what Kenner calls Joyce’s “pain of depersonalization”, his “maturation” as “dissociation”.

After its epigraphs, Kenner’s chapter begins with a number of passages taken from Yeats’ The Tables of the Law from 1896.5 The first of these passages has:

I shall create a world where the whole lives of men shall be articulated and simplified as if seventy years were but one moment, or as if they were the leaping of a fish or the opening of a flower.6 (Dublin’s Joyce, 36)

This passage captures, and must indeed have helped to suggest, McLuhan’s notion of the momentary genesis of human experience as “articulated” artifact and effect. The idea is that every moment of human being (verbal, not nominal) is generated through a confrontation with the full range of the “potencies”7 of that being8 — a range which McLuhan found formulated in Yeats’ 1903 Emotion of Multitude as the background chorus in Greek tragedy “which called up famous sorrows, even all the gods and all heroes”. This is Saussure’s synchronic genesis of the diachronic expression of language, but applied to experience conceived as artifact (hence McLuhan’s interest in technology) and effect (ex-facere). Furthermore, these potencies are characterized as dynamic — ex — as captured in Yeats’ “leaping of a fish or the opening of a flower”.9 Thus conceived, “potencies” inherently ‘extend’ themselves such that experience comes from them (McLuhan’s “light through”) as the exfoliation of resulting effect, not (or at least not first of all) potencies through experience (McLuhan’s “light on”) as their purported occasion.

A further epigraph in Kenner’s chapter from Yeats’ Tables has the following:

Just as poets and painters and musicians labour at their works, building them with lawless and lawful things alike (…) these children of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments10 with eyes11 upon the shining [“light through”] substance on which Time12 has heaped the refuse of creation… (Dublin’s Joyce, 36)

Exactly as described by Yeats, McLuhan’s second conversion from “moralist” to “student” consisted in the realization that “lawful things” could not be isolated and protected from “lawless” ones through judgmental segregation in the style of F.R. Leavis.13 Hence, instead of the selected assertion of the “moralist”, the whole of the “refuse of creation” called for study by the “student”.14 Again:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student. (Playboy interview)

On the one hand, this served to detach McLuhan from a strain of Catholicism that tends to gnosticism and that implicates a loss of divine power and providence through the apparently mistaken act of creation. On the other hand, as McLuhan may or may not have been aware,15 this amounted to a recovery of Hegel’s great point in the Preface to the 1807 Phenomenology:

Das Verschwindende16 ist vielmehr selbst als wesentlich zu betrachten, nicht in der Bestimmung eines Festen, das vom Wahren abgeschnitten, außer ihm, man weiß nicht wo, liegenzulassen sei, sowie auch das Wahre nicht als das auf der andern Seite ruhende, tote Positive. Die Erscheinung ist das Entstehen und Vergehen, das selbst nicht entsteht und vergeht, sondern an sich ist, und die Wirklichkeit und Bewegung des Lebens der Wahrheit ausmacht. Das Wahre ist so der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist… (Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vorrede, 1807)

The demand is to consider all experience as a ‘student”, not some selected supposedly standard experience as a “moralist”. And Kenner’s chapter goes on from this point to consider “multitude” in both Yeats and Joyce — without, however considering, or even broaching anywhere in his book, Yeats’ 1903 Emotion of Multitude.

“No man”, [Joyce] began, quoting the outcast Giordano Bruno, “can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude.” Abhorring the multitude, Yeats had done the finest Irish writing of Joyce’s time.17 (Dublin’s Joyce, 38)

But Kenner himself shows how Yeats, already five years before,18 far from simply “abhorring the multitude”, had offered a more complex slant:

Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely majestical multitude.
(To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear)

As Kenner justly comments:

it is the concluding couplet that turns the screw. Yeats’ “Lonely majestical multitude” manages to blunt lonely by multitude and turn flame, flood, and the winds of space from terrors to glories with majestical.  (Dublin’s Joyce, 41)

What Yeats had done, and what Joyce had yet to learn at that time when he was not yet twenty, was to expose the questionability of “multitude”. Such abysmal questions are forever implicated in it such as those raised in Kenner’s chapter 3 regarding “the first formal relationship among parts and whole”, P241/234 and “the first entelechy”, U425/413. For every individual is always already a part of a whole multitude, or a whole multitude of multitudes, and, beyond that, it is not clear just what multitude, or multitudes, should be acknowledged to embrace. In this way, a universal questionability descends on all things (“flame, flood, and the winds”) and it becomes uncertain how to start or who it is that might start:

It is a worthwhile guess that the writing-out of Stephen Hero was the crucially cathartic labour of [Joyce’s] life. The pain of depersonalization was undergone then once and for all. (Dublin’s Joyce, 44)

Kenner calls this period Joyce’s “time of maturation” and, in the same paragraph, “time of dissociation”. What he saw, it seems, even or especially in regard to his own “integrity”, was that a finitizing and hence pluralizing

snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling (…) faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. D288/256

the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. D287/255

There was something prior and in-between to all that could ever be said, or ever be, definitively pluralizing and relativizing it. It was “general all over Ireland” and to “all the living and the dead”. In fact, “it was falling (…) faintly through the universe” as a whole as its “first entelechy” and “last end”. 

Die Erscheinung ist das Entstehen und Vergehen, das selbst nicht entsteht und vergeht, sondern an sich ist, und die Wirklichkeit und Bewegung des Lebens der Wahrheit ausmacht.  

Hence, as Kenner’s chapter concludes, “the infinite number of ways of saying anything” (44/45) and the implicated call for “the uncompromising craftsman” (44).

  1. Joyce’s spelling of ‘Dedalus’ intentionally varied from the accepted one in English of ‘Daedalus’. McLuhan saw ‘dead are us’ in this, tying Ulysses to the last story in Dubliners, ‘The Dead’. Similarly with Kenner: “In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) excised the diphthong from the hero’s surname so that Dedalus chimed with ‘dead’.” (38) This seems more like a McLuhan idea than a Kenner one and therefore a further appearance of McLuhan in Kenner’s book. ↩
  2. For discussion, see Typhon/Minotaur/Dionysus parallels. ↩
  3. See McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 2), note 6, for further on ‘integrity’ in this context. ↩
  4. The general importance of this ‘second conversion’ in relation to Kenner’s work on Joyce is discussed in McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 1). ↩
  5. The Tables of the Law first appeared in issue 5:7 of The Savoy. In a typical McLuhan turn of phrase, ‘Tables of the Law’ became ‘fables of the law’: “the Mosaic fables of the law” (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’,1953). ↩
  6. The Tables of the Law. ↩
  7. “Potencies” is from McLuhan’s long 1951 letter to Harold Innis. Other terms used by McLuhan for these synchronic powers of formation include “archetype” and, all importantly, “medium”. The full range: Yeats’ “the whole lives of men”, “seventy years”. ↩
  8. “Potencies of that being” is a dual genitive, but is first or all a subjective genitive: the multifold forms of human being are the objectivized (thrown forth) effects of a process through which the spectrum of possibilities is, in Yeats’ terms, “articulated and simplified”. The German Auseinandersetzung captures the required abysmal action of confrontation and sorting that is (ids!) at stake here. Regarding ‘ids’, in a letter to Archie Malloch from February 24, 1950, McLuhan writes: “Somewhere a vice is calling.  Once you begin reading F Wake you get into this mood e.g. Flying Sorcerers and a muddle of clearness etc. (…) Very finny (submarine).” ↩
  9. Further on dynamism in McLuhan: The representative ferment. ↩
  10. “Labour at their moments”! The momentary genesis of human experience is broached above. ↩
  11. Whose eyes are these from whose observations our experience and its eyes derive as artifacts and effects? ↩
  12. Time is both vertical and horizontal here. The vertical time of the “shining substance” of the potencies underlies what is “heaped” upon them through their inherent up-thrust, “lawless and lawful things alike”, “the refuse of creation”. ↩
  13. Such dualistic cleavage as between the lawless and lawful McLuhan would come to see as typical of the Gutenberg galaxy (as described in his 1962 book of that name). ↩
  14. McLuhan would later often cite Yeats’ “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” in this context. ↩
  15. McLuhan’s two early mentors at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge, were ‘Hegelian’ enough that both were contributors to John Watson’s 50-year anniversary volume, Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson. And McLuhan’s longtime colleague at St Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Etienne Gilson, was decisively influenced by Hegel in his readings of Augustine and Thomas. In McLuhan’s 1943 PhD thesis, Gilson is the single most referenced source. ↩
  16. ‘Das Verschwindende’ names the inability of any finite order to establish itself in itself (an sich), the inevitability of any finite order to ‘disappear’. And this is particularly true, of course, of any order or claim that is demonstrably false. The great question posed by Hegel is therefore how to conceive of what is fleeting and even false as essential. A clue to the answer may be seen in chemistry where any and all physical materials and reactions are subject to elementary or ‘essential’ analysis. Compare Joyce in Stephen Hero: “The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for its new office, he was the supreme artist.” S78/65. (Dublin’s Joyce, 49) ↩
  17. The Joyce citation is from The Day of the Rabblement (1901). ↩
  18. Five years before: in the 1896 To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 3)

their aqueous emotional element the humming denizens took for granted, (…) as men take air for granted.1 (Dublin’s Joyce, 27-28)

He made a careful distinction between lilting gestures of embellishment and the rhythms which imitate those discernible in the subject, S184/163, “the first formal relationship among parts and whole”, P241/234, “the first entelechy”, U425/413 2 (Dublin’s Joyce, 29)

Whether in fact or in artifact,3 a thing exists first as a set of relations, then [second] when matter joins proportion, or words join rhythm, as a set of articulate [cognate with ‘artifact’] relations.4 (Dublin’s Joyce, 29)

Controlled rhythms afford a continuous matrix to contain what drops through the sieve of discursive denotations.5 Hence it is always with rhythms, arranged relationships, that artistic imitation begins. Like Flaubert, Joyce always conceives the prose paragraph as a rhythmic unit; it is the component of “absolute rhythm” that explains why so much of Finnegans Wake communicates, when read aloud, before being understood. (Dublin’s Joyce, 29)

A metaphoric perception (“Votre âme est un paysage choisi . . .” [Verlaine]) is raised to intelligibility (Joyce’s term was “epiphanized”) by articulation of images whose relevance the poet does not need to justify. (Dublin’s Joyce, 30)

In the emergence of the “meaning” (…) we may discern the “luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure” of which Joyce makes Stephen speak: “the instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure.6 P250/242 (Dublin’s Joyce, 30)

Verlaine discovered, or rediscovered, how to make a mode of passion emerge illuminated without employing the images as mere steps in an argument, and with an action, a progression d’effet, that parallels the movement of the mind penetrating — not playing checkers with — the données.7 (Dublin’s Joyce, 30) 

Here is the programme of “double-writing”: the received expression used “a little ironically”.8 (Dublin’s Joyce, 34)

the poem (…) is the first example (…) of the double-writing that is characteristically Joyce’s. To turn “Love in ancient plenilune” into the dream of a “sweet sentimentalist” with (…) poised equivocalness of feeling…  (Dublin’s Joyce, 35)

 

  1. ‘The humming denizens’ are the Dubliners constantly at their singing. The first words of this chapter are: “Joyce’s Dublin submerged itself in song”. (Augustine: ‘once sung, twice said’.) As was already to be found in the presocratics, the ontological background, on the basis of which all things first of all are, may be thought of as primordial ‘water’ or primordial ‘air’. It is what is always already there enabling both factual things and our artifactual hold on things. ↩
  2. The question, as always, concerns the reality of finite things and the reality of their relation to non-finite things — along with the question of how such matters are to be thought, articulated and communicated. ↩
  3. “Whether in fact or in artifact”: fact is the subject matter of ‘old science’, arti-fact the subject matter of ‘new science’. ↩
  4. “A thing exists first as a set of relations” — this is what Kenner indicated with “the intelligible order (of things) with which (mind) copulates”. “Then when matter joins proportion or words join rhythm, as a set of articulate relations” — this is Kenner’s “intellected order”. (Citations are from Dublin’s Joyce, 19-20.) McLuhan, 17 years later, in Take Today (3): “the ‘meaning of meaning’ is relationship”. ↩
  5. “What drops through the sieve of discursive denotations” is the gap or medium between them. It works to hold them in being only when it itself is held in being by a prior gap or medium in the ground of things. ↩
  6. Italics added. The “instant” of “arrest” in poetry became very important for McLuhan around 1950 (see “Arrest in time” in McLuhan) and then became the central difference for him between fact and artifact. What characterizes every artifact was the ‘technical means’ or medium of the structural construction displayed in it moment to moment to moment — like frames in film. Hence ‘understanding media’ was the key to a specification of such moments and therefore of all ‘artifacts’ — just as an understanding of the elements was the key to the specification and investigation of physical materials as ‘facts’. ↩
  7. Progression d’effet — compare McLuhan to Skornia: “Media are ‘ideas’ in action” (June 5, 1959). ↩
  8. Double-writing is an artifact considering artifacts; a gapped technique considering gapped techniques “a little ironically”. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 2)

Continuing a reading of Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce as background to McLuhan’s second conversion from “moralist” to “student”:

“Coition”, as Joyce is exploiting it in these pages, is the basic Aristotelian and Aquinatian metaphor for the intercourse between the mind and things. It was a classroom commonplace of his Jesuit schooling that the phantasm gathered by the senses fertilizes the active intellect,1 and a concept is generated and flung in affirmation out into existence. The word “conception” unites biology and epistemology. We start with sensory beguilements, whether in begetting or in cognizing; we end with an articulated concept, a begotten Logos, word; an affirmation that this or that exists: is, is irreducibly there, ineluctable. Things are before we know them, that is the first condition; they doubly are after they are known, that is the second. The mind is nourished and impregnated by things, the mind affirms the existence of things, the mind by thousands of successive acts of conception generates an intellected order (…) in (…) analogy [with] the intelligible order [of things] with which it copulates.2 (…) The verb “to be” is a copula in every sense. (…) Words flourish in the soil of known things. (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 19-20)

The abstraction and circumlocution of the language derives from the fact that not a mind in the [Dublin][ assemblage is in contact with any but a sort of spectral colloquial reality. Their meeting-ground is the idée reçue.3 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 21)

If we want an English analogue for Joyce, it is Pope; their orientations and procedures are surprisingly similar. Pope is conscious of intellectual traditions running back through St. Augustine to Cicero and Homer; and the universal darkness that he predicted at the end of the Dunciad fell exactly as he foretold; the mind of Europe entered the Romantic night-world.4 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 23)

“under sleep, where all the waters meet”: Stephen’s two fathers during song for an instant one.5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 25)

Since nostalgia is the sole comprehensive emotion now, integrity beckons to death.6 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 25)

  1. A memorial volume for John Watson‘s 50th anniversary at Queen’s was published in 1923, Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson. Two of its 13 contributors were McLuhan’s early mentors at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge. Another contributor to the volume was Henry Carr (1880-1963), then the superior of St Michael’s College, later the founding president of the Institute of Medieval Studies there in 1929, and the person most responsible for bringing Etienne Gilson to Canada and the Institute. McLuhan was, of course, to teach at St Michael’s for 35 years starting two decades later in 1946 and Hugh Kenner would be a student there for his MA, finishing in 1946. The two would be brought together by Fr Gerald Phelan who was the outgoing President of what was now the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. Carr’s contribution to the Watson memorial volume was titled ‘The Function of the Phantasm in St Thomas Aquinas’. A great many lines crossed at this juncture — Thomas, Aristotle and Joyce, then Watson (Hegel), Wright, Lodge (Plato) and Carr, along with McLuhan and Kenner. It was a key nodal point in Canadian intellectual history — one that could not possibly be less researched than it is. ↩
  2. Italics added. Kenner has “the mind by thousands of successive acts of conception generates an intellected order in more or less exact analogy of the intelligible order with which it copulates”. As usual with writing that does not quite come off, Kenner is trying to say too much here. “Analogy of the intelligible order” (rather than ‘with’ or ‘to’ the intelligible order) wants to make the additional (admittedly highly important) point that “the intelligible order” supplies not only the ground and model for our “intellected order”, but also the possibility of correlation (however imperfect) between the two. ↩
  3. Both ‘their meeting-ground’ and ‘the idée reçue‘ are ambiguous. On the one hand, they lack real “contact with (…) reality”; on the other hand, they are “a distortion, but a distortion of something real” (11). The very existence of such a “meeting-ground” (a good definition of language) and ‘idée reçue‘ (ditto) is marvelous and thought-provoking. ↩
  4. McLuhan ended his unpublished Typhon in America from the late 1940s (probably 1947-1948)  — just as he would conclude the major portion of the Gutenberg Galaxy more than a decade later — with the same extended quotation from Pope’s 1725 Dunciad:
    She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
    Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
    Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
    And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
    Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
    The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
    As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
    The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
    As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest,
    Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
    Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
    Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
    See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
    While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep,
    And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.
    She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,
    Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
    Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,
    Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
    Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
    And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
    See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
    In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
    Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
    And unawares Morality expires.
    Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
    Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
    Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
    Light dies before thy uncreating word:
    Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
    And Universal Darkness buries All.
    The Gutenberg Galaxy then immediately concludes: “This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.” Typhon in America, 15 years before The Gutenberg Galaxy, at a time when McLuhan and Kenner were in intense communication, similarly: “In this darkness we must learn to see.”
    McLuhan often complained that Kenner was loose with his credits for points which he, McLuhan, had shared with him in unpublished work and in conversation and letters. The Dunciad passage may be a major exhibit in this general case. ↩
  5. The feminine matrix of the unconscious harbors all the masculine (extending, re-presenting) forms of possible experience. It might be said that this is the one subject of all icons, with their gold background, and the theotokos who re-presents that background, serving to bring forth mostly male divinities, angels and saints. The great question at stake in this topic is the lost relation between between finite insight and universal truth and how, or if, this might be regained. ↩
  6. Modern ontologies have been unable to preserve “the gap where the action is” which alone can valorize and protect plurality at any level — ontological, international, social, familial, individual. Integrity has seemed possible only by a collapse into One. A complex integrity has proved inconceivable.
    In the same year that Dublin’s Joyce was published, 1955, McLuhan reviewed Kenner’s 1954 book, Wyndham Lewis. ‘Integrity’ is said by McLuhan to be at the heart of Lewis’ work: “it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by (the dominance of) sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by (the dominance of) sheer abstraction at the other. (…) Now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: “I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One.” (Nihilism Exposed) ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 1)

Joyce (…) focussed (…) on what was actually there, and strove so to set it down that it would reveal itself as what it was, in its double nature: a distortion, but a distortion of something real. (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 11)

“Distortion, but (…) distortion of something real” is what McLuhan opposed to ‘matching’ as ‘making’. This complex doublin’ — “distortion of something real” — is the great question at stake in all of Joyce’s tales of the ‘Dubliners’. But did Kenner get this fundamental insight from McLuhan, or McLuhan from Kenner, or both from Father Gerald Phelan — or does any of these alternatives fit the case?

McLuhan was already familiar with what he called Kenner’s ‘book on Joyce’ in 1947. This book was then rewritten multiple times until it appeared almost a decade later as Dublin’s Joyce in 1955. One of its manifestations in the meantime was James Joyce: Critique in Progress, Kenner’s 1950 Yale PhD thesis.1 At some point, the various stages of this book need to be collected2 (so far as they still exist), their progressive innovations specified, and these compared to McLuhan’s ongoing contemporaneous work with its innovations. Importantly, the years of the book’s metamorphoses overlapped with McLuhan’s ‘second conversion’ from “moralist” to “student”.3 It is this conversion that the world desperately needs to understand if it is ever to wake from its suicidal woke.4

Further commonalities between the 2 (McLuhan and Kenner) — or 3 (with Phelan):

So the usual criterion of style, that it disappear like glass before the reality of the subject, doesn’t apply to [Joyce’s] pages.5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 12)

Paul Valery tells us how “a literary langue mandarine is derived from popular speech, from which it takes the words, figures, and ‘turns’ most suitable for the effects the artist seeks”…6  (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 13)

educed order from Babel7 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 14)

“It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted.” U140/132 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 15)

the faded eloquence (…) illustrates the decorums of the whole book, an articulation of the city of the dead.8 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 16)

He started always from the material nearest to hand. He was interested in bad operas because they contained all the dramatic components listed by Aristotle, still held in some sort of classical balance…  (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 16)

He was interested in advertising and journalism because they both were and were not aligned with classical rhetoric. He was interested in Leopold Bloom because nothing was in that philosopher’s intellect that had not first been in his senses, though not exactly as St. Thomas stipulated. (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 17)

“Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we)”9 FW 403 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 17)

we are not for a moment tempted to suppose that we ought to be seeing a subject through a style; what is on the page is quite frankly the subject. The subject is “style” and what style implies.10 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 17)

 

  1. From Kenner’s ‘Acknowledgements’: “Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared in James Joyce : Two Decades of Criticism (Vanguard Press, 1948), Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Essays in Criticism, Shenandoah, and English Institute Essays 1952 (Columbia University Press); I am grateful to the editors concerned for permission to reprint. An early draft of the entire book was written in 1950 as a Yale doctoral thesis, under the guidance of Cleanth Brooks. Though the work has been completely rewritten since then, the effect of his patient counsel has not been obliterated.” (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, viii) ↩
  2. Eg: ‘The Portrait in Perspective’, Kenyon Review, 10:3, 1948 (reprinted in James Joyce : Two Decades of Criticism, 1948); ‘A Communication’, Hudson Review, 3:1, 1950; James Joyce: Critique in Progress, 1950 Yale PhD thesis; ‘Joyce and Ibsen’s Naturalism’, Sewanee Review, 59:1,1951; ‘Joyce’s Ulysses: Homer and Hamlet’, Essays in Criticism, 2:1, 1952; ‘Pound on Joyce’, Shenandoah 3:3, 1952; ‘Joyce’s Exiles‘, Hudson Review, 5:3, 1952; ‘The Trivium in Dublin’, English Institute Essays 1952; ‘Joyce’s Anti-Selves’, Shenandoah, 4:1,1953. ↩
  3. Playboy interview: “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” ↩
  4. The required conversion is not at all to be understood as something peculiar to McLuhan. As Kenner was well aware, something like such a conversion is the topic of Joyce’s whole oeuvre. In happier and less dangerous ages, it was thought to be the mark of maturity as undergone by most people most of the time in ‘growing up’. The present situation of the world is exactly that children, ages 30 to 90, have their hands on the levers of terrible power. ↩
  5. On ‘style’, see the last passage below from p17 and its note 9. ↩
  6. Typical of McLuhan, he took “the effects the artist seeks” not as ‘effects’ in the audience the artist addresses with her works, not as audience reactions to those works, but as those works themselves, the artist’s productions as ef-fects (ex-facere) in multiple senses (what is made, what is outered, what is secondary to something(s) prior). Taking all human expressions as effects in this way is the key move to McLuhan’s ‘new science’ — just as it was the key move in the genesis of chemistry to begin taking all physical materials — facts — as effects of underlying elements. For arti-facts those underlying elements are media. ↩
  7. The wonderful un-gnostic insight that ‘in order’ to exist at all, Babel, even as the revolt against God, even as linguistic and social chaos, could not be without order (as little as any event in the physical universe can be without order). ↩
  8. Compare McLuhan, ‘T.S. Eliot’s  Historical Decorum’, Renascence II:1, 1949. ↩
  9. The “nonland of (…) when you and they were we” is McLuhan’s ‘unconscious’ out of whose  “potencies” (Innis letter from 3/14/51) all human experience in its myriad forms is born as “effect”. ↩
  10. Kenner’s ‘style’ = McLuhan’s ‘effect’. ↩

Euclid and effect

The study of media begins, not with their uses or their programs, but with their effects. Indeed, the “cause” of any medium is its effects. (McLuhan to Martin Esslin, Sept 23, 1971, Letters 440)1

To arrive at his laws of geometry, Euclid needed to implement the insight formulated by Heinrich Wölfflin 2300 years later: “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts.“2 (Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 62)

Wölfflin’s dictum was quoted by McLuhan in 1960 in the context of his discovery that “the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio is3 not the (…) effect obtained”.4

No “sensuous” or factual circle can ground a law like circular circumference = 2πr. Instead, any material circle qua circle is the effect of such laws. Hence the entranceway to a science like geometry is to regard all factual circles as the effects of a formal shape; they take their form to a greater or lesser degree from a perfect circle whose circumference (unlike any material circle) exactly equals 2πr. That formal circle, in turn, must itself be regarded as the effect of mathematical laws like circumference = 2πr. 

But what is the relation of such an ideal mathematical law to the real? McLuhan says that reality does not primarily belong to either side of the ideal/real relation, but to their middle or medium: “the ’cause’ of any medium [= the cause belonging to any medium] is its effects“.5 That is, it belongs to any medium to manifest itself in and as effects.6 Its cause, its motivation, its raison d’etre, its very being — is to extend itself.7 But precisely for that reason, “the study of media begins, not with their uses or their programs, but with their effects.”

To study beginning with effect means to approach a matter (any matter whatsoever) as effect and therefore as inherently intelligible.8 Attention to effect means to regard something (including regard itself) as imperfect — in the sense of never ‘matching’ its cause, of always reaching out from itself — but not for that reason as untrue!

Effect correlates with McLuhan’s ‘making’ as differentiated from ‘matching’ or ‘merging’. Effect preserves difference, but difference as indicative, as suggestive, as meaningful, as intelligible.9

 

  1. Emphasis added. Both genitives in this passage are dual, but first of all they are subjective genitives! That is, ‘the study of media’ and ‘the cause of media’ belong to media like ‘the ball of the boy’. Not — at least not in the first instance — that media are what is studied or what is caused as objective genitives like ‘the punishment of the boy’. The objective genitives here (the study of media and of their causes) are enabled by the subjective genitives (study and causes grounded in media!) ↩
  2. Plato might be read as generalizing Euclid’s insight that all shapes may be regarded as effects. For Plato, not only all shapes but everything without exception may be regarded in this way. But Plato formulated this insight, not after Euclid, following his lead, but a century or so before him! ↩
  3. McLuhan: “was”. See next note. ↩
  4. Project 69: “Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained.” ↩
  5. The gap is where the action is. ↩
  6. See The representative ferment. ↩
  7. McLuhan’s distinctive manner of thought was to consider a term like ’cause’ across the range of its meanings and implications. So ’cause’ here is not only an originating impulse with a certain effect or effects, it is also the goal or conviction or value from which one proceeds: one’s cause. ↩
  8. McLuhan in his letter to Esslin (referenced at the head of this post): “One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility. Moreover, there is absolute value in intelligibility as such, to say nothing of pleasure and satisfaction.” ↩
  9. See Effect before cause in Gilson for McLuhan’s debt on this topic to his St Michael’s colleague, Etienne Gilson. ↩

Faculty of Interrelation in Toronto

The Giedion World, a 2019 large format book edited by Almut Grunewald, is subtitled ‘Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker in Dialogue’. It consists of translated correspondence between Sigfried Giedion (SG) and his wife, Carola Welcker (CGW), in selected periods of their 50-year courtship and marriage, with detailed annotation and hundreds of supporting photographs. 

One of the letters, from SG to CGW in November 1955,1 written from Harvard where SG was teaching that fall, describes an earlier note from McLuhan to Giedion as follows:2

The letter from Toronto you forwarded to me was from McLuhan. He asks whether I wouldn’t accept a one-year term as “resident director for a Faculty of Interrelation3 in Toronto with a handsome payment (…)4 and also Mrs Giedion”5 to run the “pilot teacher” thing!6

McLuhan did not have the power to offer such positions himself, of course. But presumably he had run the idea by his friend Claude Bissell, the President of UT, and received permission to send up this trial balloon. Perhaps he had brought Gideon and Bissell together earlier that spring of 1955 when Gideon came to Toronto from Harvard to give a paper in the ‘Communication and Culture’ seminar.7

Giedion did not take up the Toronto offer, but used the occasion of his letter to his wife to rue the fact that it had not come a decade before:

It’s always the same with these 10 years! How happy I would have been ten years ago if my idea had met with so much as a single outlet! The manuscripts have since yellowed. No door, no hearing, not even a single publication anywhere! 

McLuhan had earlier pursued Giedion’s idea of a Faculty of Interrelation with proposals to the University of Chicago,8 to Harold Innis at UT,9 and to the Ford Foundation (which eventuated in the Communication and Culture seminar). From a December 7, 1955 letter from McLuhan to Giedion10 — a month or so after SG’s note to his wife discussed above — it seems that a further proposal to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations may have been made by McLuhan and Carpenter for a UT “Contemporary Institute” (as they seem to have rebaptized a ‘Faculty of Interrelation’ for the foundations) which, they hoped, might have Giedion as at least its titular head:

Carpenter and I are now drafting outlines for Contemporary Institute to submit to Ford and Rockefeller.  It will be necessary in the Ford case to stress the value of such an institute in clarifying educational aims and procedures. We shall be able to add great force to our presentation in having your consent to act as our advisory head.  Would you prefer any particular title?  Director of Studies?  President?  We are eager to devise ways of working with all branches of Radio, TV and Film Board in working out the grammars of the new visual languages of the new media.  Here you have already done so much for us in discovering the language of vision.11

McLuhan’s later (1963) Centre for Culture and Technology was doubtless conceived primarily as a way to keep McLuhan in Toronto in the face of offers from US institutions. But part of its appeal to McLuhan would have derived, as indicated by its name, from his long-standing interest, since 1943, in Giedion’s ‘Faculty of Interrelations’ between the worlds of ‘Culture and Technology’.12 

  1. The Giedion World, 350. ↩
  2. The letter is otherwise unknown. It is not in the Giedion-McLuhan correspondence preserved with the Giedion papers in Zurich. ↩
  3. See Sigfried Giedion — A Faculty of Interrelations. ‘Interrelation’ seems to have been used, by both Giedion and McLuhan, sometimes in the singular and sometimes in the plural. Indeed the term implicates both plurality (as a relation) and singularity (as a recurrent structure). ↩
  4. Giedion interjection here: “$10,000 dollars I assume”. This would be around $115,000 today. ↩
  5. Giedion interjection: “minimum $5000 dollars, I imagine”. This would be around $57,500 today. ↩
  6. A “pilot teacher” program may have been an initiative at the University of Toronto OCE (Ontario College of Education, predecessor of the current OISE) linking teacher training with the arts in some way. CGW would have been well qualified to lead such an initiative since she had been publishing studies in the fine arts and literature since the 1920s. Her 1952 book, Paul Klee, was reviewed by McLuhan in 1953: ‘Giedion-Welcker’s Klee’, Shenandoah 3(1), 77-82. ↩
  7. ‘Space Conception in Prehistoric Art’, seminar presentation from February 23, 1955, which appeared in Explorations 6 in 1956. ↩
  8. See Proposal to Robert Hutchins 1947. ↩
  9. Innis was Dean of Graduate Studies and the Head of the Political Economy Department at the University of Toronto. McLuhan to Innis, March 14, 1951: “I think there are lines appearing in (your) Empire and Communications (…) which suggest the possibility of organizing an entire school of studies. (…) It seems obvious to me that Bloor Street (where Innis’ Political Economy Department was located) is the one point in this University where one might establish a focus of the arts and sciences. And the organizing concept would naturally be ‘Communication Theory and Practice’. A simultaneous focus of current and historic forms. Relevance to be given to selection of areas of study by dominant artistic and scientific modes of the particular period.” ↩
  10. In the Giedion papers in Zurich. ↩
  11. Giedion answered McLuhan’s notes  on January 11, 1956: “Many thanks for your letters. (…) As you know, I am since years on the tracks for a faculty of interrelations establishing or trying to establish a common vocabulary, a clarification & comparison of method used in different disciplines. I have full confidence in you and in Carpenter and I will be delighted to be with the party. Yet I have to let you know, that I have in Spring 1957 the Mellon lectures at the National Galleries (…). So that I should know approximately what you expect from me! You know that I did not accept the very tempting offer of the University of Minnesota last year. I found the people very interesting & the sum at their disposal very high (120,000 dollars) but I did not know personally the work of the participants. (…) All good luck to your plans.” Giedion’s message: ‘If you don’t want to have the same experience as the University of Minnesota, let me know in detail what would be expected of me at a time when my main priority must be the Mellon lectures! ↩
  12. The worlds of Culture and Technology — what McLuhan in his 1951 letter to Innis (cited in note 9 above) called “the arts and sciences” and “dominant artistic and scientific modes”. ↩

“Arrest in time” in McLuhan

In 1951 “arrest in time” became a decisive theme in McLuhan’s work that he would continue to investigate for the remaining three decades of his career. Perhaps no other of his myriad ‘discoveries’ was more important for his project.1

Below are some of his “arrest” passages in chronological order. Their take-off point may be seen in McLuhan’s letter to Harold Innis from March 14, 1951:2

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (…) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction.

McLuhan soon saw that the key to such retracing and reconstruction was ‘arrest’. He seems to have come along the way of this insight by considering picturesque poetry as an attempt to effect an arrested “aesthetic moment” and then to have then seen, apparently through Joyce’s Stephen Hero, that such poetic arrest was a replay or retrieval of the arrest that already operates both in “every moment of human awareness” (full passage below) and in all language use as a kind of “stuttering”. So conceived, ‘arrest’ implicated a special understanding of space — “the gap where the action is” — and of time — “a moment in and out of time”.3 “This peculiar fusion of the [ordinary] cognitive and the [extraordinary] creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior discovery [of the importance of] the technique of fission [for] the moment of aesthetic awareness. (…) In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.”4

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
It was partly to Schopenhauer that the symbolists owed their peculiar insistence on aesthetic experience5 as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time,6 of intellectual emotion7 for which, in their poems, they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment.

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
The aesthetic moment was recognized as an experience of arrest and detachment.8

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
Helped by Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Joyce arrived quickly at the formula of the aesthetic moment and its attendant landscape 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 hence epiphanized. The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension. And every moment of cognition is thus a Beatrician [= epiphanized or sacramental] moment when rendered lucid by a retracing of its labyrinth. (…) This secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes9 in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior discovery for the technique of fission [= arrest] of the moment of aesthetic awareness. (…) In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.10 

McLuhan to Ezra Pound, July 16, 195211
I’m writing a book on “The End of the Gutenberg Era”. Main sections: The Inventions of Writing [&] Alphabet (Transfer of auditory to visual; Arrest for contemplation of thought and cognitive process; Permits overthrow of sophist-rhetoric-oral tradition)12

Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication, 1953
“Plato’s theory of Ideas institutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis.”13(…) From this point of view Greek Philosophy and science were a means of arresting the wheel of existence or of delivering us from the time mechanism of existence.14

James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953
The idea of speech as stuttering, as arrested gesture (…) is basic to the Wake and serves to illustrate the profundity of the traditional philological doctrine in Joyce.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
Impressionism and symbolism alike insisted on attention to process in preference to personal self-expression. Self-effacement and patient watchfulness preceded the discovery of the creative process. Poets and artists literally turned their own psyches into laboratories where they practised the most austere experiments in total disregard of their personal happiness. Gradually it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was (…) a poetry which would have as its theme the poetic process itself. Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of a moment of perception. For some of the Romantic poets the doctrine of the aesthetic moment as a moment out of time — a moment of arrested consciousness — had seemed the key to all poetry. The pre-Raphaelites had pushed this doctrine as far as they could. But Mallarmé saw deeper and Joyce saw the rest. Joyce it was who saw that Aquinas had the final answer sought by Mallarmé.  The rational notes of beauty, integrity, consonance, and claritas traced by St. Thomas were actual stages of apprehension in every moment of human awareness. 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
It would seem that the poet differs from other men only in his conscious ability to arrest the intake of experience and to reverse the flow. By this means he is able to externalize in a work the actual process by which each of us in perception or cognition incarnates the external world of experience. But every word uttered by man requires a large measure of the poetic ability.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
Poe put crime detection on a scientific basis by bringing into play the poetic process of retracing the stages of human apprehension [in general]. (…) And this process of arrest and retracing (…) provides the very technique of empathy15 which permits intimate insight into the processes and impulses behind products utterly alien to our own immediate experience.16

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
the Senecans had (…) literary techniques for arresting and projecting some phase of the human mind: to arrest in order to project, and to project in order to contemplate. Like the inventors of cinema at the beginning of this century they hit upon the technique of stylistic discontinuity as a means of analyzing or arresting a moment of consciousness.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.” That is the master vision of all those “spots of time” for which Wordsworth painfully sought the precise objective correlative in carefully wrought landscapes. It is the key to all his lyrics and even to The Prelude, which in order to follow his process of enlightenment has to arrest for contemplation the entire movement of his mind from youth to age.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
As poetic practitioners Wordsworth and Coleridge were in agreement (…) that poetry was concerned with the rendering of an instant of arrested awareness which freed the mind from the clogs of habitual perception.

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
Moments of insight in Wordsworth’s poetry are explicitly associated with an experience of an arrest in time.17 

Coleridge As Artist, 1957
Suspense [in Byron] is not for thrill but for arrest of movement for contemplation, and to create one of those “spots in time” which permit a flash of intuitive wisdom. 

  1. Introducing his 1943 Nashe thesis, McLuhan specifically contrasted “arrest” with “continuity”: “The first objective envisaged was to extend Professor R. W. Chambers’ Continuity of English Prose beyond the period of More to the end of the sixteenth century. The proposed dissertation was given the title of The Arrest of Tudor Prose.” (The Classical Trivium, 3) ↩
  2. Letters 220. This letter was with certainty written earlier than March 1951, perhaps already in 1950. The copy we have is a “rewrite” of an original which Innis answered in February saying that he was sorry for his delay in doing so. ↩
  3. ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic’ (1960): “To transcend time one simply interrupts the natural flow of events.” For “a moment in and out of time”, see note 6 below. ↩
  4. This passage has been slightly edited here. For the passage as it appeared in print in 1951, and as it was retained in its 1969 reprinting in The Interior Landscape, see the third ‘Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ passage in the post above. ↩
  5. Especially in his ‘Aesthetic Moment’ essay, McLuhan spoke a great deal about “aesthetic experience”. But his central point was, and remained, that “the formula of the aesthetic moment” consisted in “a retracing of the stages of ordinary apprehension”. ↩
  6. “A moment in and out of time”: unmarked quotation from Eliot’s Four Quartets, iii: ‘The  Dry Salvages’. ↩
  7. “Intellectual emotion” is an inclusive relation between intellect and emotion. Although the two are usually implicitly opposed, they occur together both in the play of ordinary cognition and in the replay of a symbolist poem. “Aesthetic experience (…) of intellectual emotion” is both a subjective and an objective genitive, but for McLuhan it is predominantly a subjective genitive: “aesthetic experience” belongs to the inclusive relation of “intellectual emotion”. That is, “aesthetic experience”, standing in for “ordinary cognition”, illuminates those inclusive relations of the unconscious with consciousness, of the new and old, of the possible with the actual, of the active and the passive, through which experience, moment to moment to moment, is generated — “the stages of apprehension which led to this moment”. ↩
  8. “Experience of arrest and detachment” is a dual genitive, but primarily a subjective one: “experience” belongs to “arrest and detachment”. ↩
  9. “Fusion of the learning and the creative processes” is what McLuhan will later call ‘making’ as opposed to ‘matching’. Finite human beings cannot help but be ‘creative’, that is to say both insightful and biased, in their apprehension. Yet they can and do learn, as especially seen in the acquisition of language by the in-fant. ↩
  10. ‘Preceded’ here is not a matter of chronology! To compare, it might be said in chemistry that the difference (or fission) between electrons and protons precedes their fusion in the elements. This is a logical difference and might be stated in chemistry only to highlight the fundamental nature of the elements — namely, that they are elementary despite their complexity, despite the fact that they may be broken down into constitutive pieces. ↩
  11. Letters 231. ↩
  12. The bracketed amplification is from McLuhan. “Arrest for contemplation of thought and cognitive process”: McLuhan saw the Gutenberg galaxy here as enabling the conscious arrest of unconscious process, whereas he will later see it as obscuring that process. In fact, as he was well aware, all consciousness reveals and hides at the same moment. ↩
  13. G.R. Levy, Gate of Horn, 1948. ↩
  14. McLuhan would later see the Gutenberg galaxy as delivering over to “the time mechanism of existence”! ↩
  15. McLuhan continues here: “The Coleridgean awareness of the modes of the imagination as producer represents an enormous extension of the bonds of human sympathy and understanding, socially and historically.” See the beginning remarks of CHML and the Playboy interview for further discussion of the way of “empathy”. ↩
  16. Two readings are in play here: first, “insight into (experience of others) utterly alien to our own” — that of ‘the savage mind’, for example; second, “insight into (experience of our own) utterly alien ( = unconscious) to our own immediate (= conscious) experience.” ↩
  17. “Experience of an arrest in time” is a dual genitive, but primarily a subjective genitive. Experience belongs to “an arrest in time”, is its effect. ↩

“Arrest in time” in Lewis

“Arrest in time”1 is a central idea in McLuhan.2 It was probably from Lewis that he got the terminology and the spur to consider it further, although the notions of the two concerning “arrest in time” were very different — fundamentally different. For Lewis, “arrest in time” was a manifestation of ‘time philosophy’, while for McLuhan it provided the ever-present possibility of escape from ‘time philosophy’. Still, the profound influence of Lewis’ thought on McLuhan was such that it could prompt even an opposite position from his own.3 

Here are “arrest in time” passages in Lewis:

 arrest his mind (Tarr, 1918, 140)

Picasso is the most useful figure on which to fix your attention. (…) His clock stopped at fifteen (…) These cases of arrested growth are very common in his race. You merely have to consider what sort of a child you have to deal with, what moves him most… (The Caliph’s Design, 1919, 56)

“no human prudence can long arrest the triumphal car of truth” (C.S. Peirce, Chance and Logic, cited in The Art of Being Ruled, 1926, 257; and in Time and Western Man, 1927, 153)

The same emotional tension, the same spurious glamour, in which no one believes, but which yet arrests belief from settling anywhere — extracting, as it were, the automatic reaction from it, without desiring, even, a more conscious, or deep-seated, response; the same straining merely to outwit and to capture a momentary attention, or to startle into credulity; the same optimistic air, suggestive of a bad conscience, or a vulgar self-congratulation ; the same baldly-shining morning face; the same glittering or discreetly hooded eye of the fanatical advertiser, exists in the region of art or social life as elsewhere — only in social life it is their own personalities that people are advertising, while in art it is their own personally manufactured goods only. (In the case of the artist, his own personality plays tlie part of the refuse of the factory.) And these more blandly-lighted worlds are as full as the Business world, I believe fuller, of those people who seem especially built for such methods, so slickly does the glove fit. Yet who will say that the vulgar medium which the scientific salesman must use to succeed, in Western Democracy, does not, thrust into the social world, destroy its significance? The philosophy of ‘action’ of trade is as barbarous as that of war. (Time and Western Man, 1927, 39)

All philosophy of history today — and Spengler is a most perfect example of that — assumes an absolute arrest somewhere or other. There is, on any analogy, advance or [evolutionary] ‘progress’ between the amoeba and Socrates. (…) But now there is nothing but [arrest]… (Paleface, 1929,122)4

It is only by a fresh effort that the Western World can save itself: it can only become ‘the West’ at all, in fact (…) by an act of further creation. (…) As it is, not only such people as Spengler (…) insist on regarding the problem historically,5 in terms of a rigid arrest. ‘The West’ is for almost all of those a finished thing, either over whose decay they gloat, or whose corpse they frantically ‘defend’. It never seems to occur to them that the exceedingly novel conditions of life today demand an entirely new conception (Paleface, 1929, 256)

Disintegrated into a thousand class-warring factions— analysed back into its composite cells, and incessantly stimulated to one huge destructive civil broil — the Occident is much too far gone ever to recover, upon its old lines, even if we desired it. We are here, therefore, taking Occidental disintegration for granted. In the back of our minds it is admissible to entertain some picture of a future integration. And for my own part, the more novel it was the better I should like it. But the disintegration is already very far advanced: the new integration even has long ago begun. Such a book as this is primarily intended to influence the integration. (Certainly it is not intended to arrest the disintegration.) In what manner does it wish to influence the integration? Principally in such a manner as to prevent the mere destructive technique of the transition from being taken too seriously, and so to avoid a great many false and puerile passions and modes of thought — or unthought — from being taken up into the body of the new synthesis. (Doom of Youth, 1932, 62-63)

arrested in its toiling dream (Childermass, 1956, 108)

 

  1. Coleridge as Artist, 1957: “Moments of insight in Wordsworth’s poetry are explicitly associated with an experience of an arrest in time.” Here “experience of an arrest in time” is a dual genitive, but primarily a subjective genitive. That is, experience belongs to “an arrest in time”, is its effect. ↩
  2. See “Arrest in time” in McLuhan. ↩
  3. Lewis seems to have broached the notion of an “arrest in time” especially in Paleface (although it would seem most fitting to Time and Western Man). This is one of the many indications that McLuhan read and was deeply influenced by Paleface, although the book is never mentioned in his work (unlike most other Lewis titles). ↩
  4. The emphasis on arrest in this passage is by Lewis. ↩
  5. “Insist on regarding the problem historically” = the time philosophy. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 14: “nothing exists in itself”

The object of the McLuhan-Plato posts (and of the upcoming McLuhan-Aristotle posts) is not that McLuhan was a considerable classical scholar. He made no attempt in that direction. Instead, the great point (one made by Whitehead in Process and Reality in the characterization of the history of philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato, and by Heidegger in the second half of Was Heisst Denken? in the turn from Nietzsche to Aristotle) is that thinking, when it truly is thinking, cannot help but return to Plato and Aristotle as the progenitors and exemplars, at least in the western tradition, of the acute deployment of mind.

The remarkable recall by McLuhan of Plato and Aristotle may be seen in terms of his central focus on media. In the first instance, media are not literal phenomena like language, letters, print, radio and television, but are ratios or relations. The second paragraph of Take Today (3) reads:

Nothing has its meaning alone. Every figure must have its ground or environment . A single word, divorced from its linguistic ground, would be useless. A note in isolation is not music. (…) The “meaning of meaning” is relationship.

Plato:

nothing exists (…) itself by itself, but everything is always (…) in relation to something (Theaetetus 157a, full passage below)

Now a ratio or a relation may be specified by its two poles, as with mathematical fractions each with its numerator and denominator.1 But it may alternatively be specified by the middle between its poles: “the medium is the message”. The first paragraph of Take Today (3) reads:

The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things. All boundaries are areas of maximal abrasion and change. The interval or gap constitutes the resonant or musical bond in the material universe. This is where the action is. To naïve classifiers a gap is merely empty. They will look for connections instead of bonds. (…) But by directing perception on the interfaces of the processes in ECO-land,2 all gaps become prime sources of discovery.

The media-ting middle or gap between the poles of a ratio is always characterized by a certain emphasis.3 Emphasis, in turn, may be specified in terms of:

(a) the emphasis on one side of the relation, or on the other side, or on both together (when the emphasis is equal between the two)4 = the location of the emphasis

(b) the intensity of the emphasis

A medium specified in this way defines the “relationship” of the two poles of a ratio and hence their respective “meaning”. The total spectrum of such media defines all possible relations of such poles and hence all possible meanings. The spectrum of all possible meanings then defines the field of human experience for open collective investigation.

“The medium is the message” because the location and intensity of emphasis in the structure of a medium defines the message or “meaning” covered by it. The particular ‘content’ of the poles is only a property of the medial configuration, never an essential component of the elementary structure. It is like ‘color’ in chemistry.

The great message of the medium according to McLuhan is that its emphatic structure of location and intensity can serve to delineate all the different varieties of human experience and in this way enable their collective investigation — just as the elementary structure in chemistry serves to delineate all the different varieties of physical material and in this way enables their collective investigation. And since the collective investigation of human experience opens the possibility of openly agreed orientation beyond haphazardly held beliefs, many of which currently are murderous or suicidal, the resulting science represents a possibility of peace for the species which may not be available in any other way. Hence McLuhan’s characterization of his work as a strategy for survival.

*

Here is Theaetetus 155e-157a, with commentary in footnotes:

Socrates: The uninitiated are those who think nothing is except what they can grasp firmly with their hands, and who deny the existence of actions and generation and all that is invisible.5
Theaetetus: Truly, Socrates, those you speak of are very stubborn
and perverse mortals.
Socrates: So they are, my boy, quite without culture. But others are more clever, whose secret doctrines I am going to disclose to you. For them the beginning, upon which all the things (…) depend, is the assumption that everything is motion6 and that (…) there are two kinds of motion, each infinite in the number of its manifestations, and of these kinds one has an active, the other a passive force. From the union and friction of these two are born offspring, infinite in number, but always twins, the object of sense and the sense [of the human subject] which is (…) brought forth together with the object of sense.7 (…) We must assume (…) that nothing exists in itself, but all things of all sorts arise out of motion by intercourse with each other; for it is, as they say, impossible to form a firm conception of the active or the passive element as being anything separately; for there is no active element until there is a union with the passive element, nor is there a passive element until there is a union with the active; and that which unites with one thing [at one time] is [predominantly] active and appears again as [predominantly] passive when it comes in contact with something else [at another time].8 

  1. In a mathematical ratio, the poles of its fractions are numbers which are largely accepted in their ‘natural’ sequence. Given (!) that sequence, mathematics is set free to develop as it will. But when mathematics treats ‘imaginary numbers’ or runs up against ‘surds’, it may be that it exceeds its own field and begins to operate in the more general — or more open — field of human experience. In fact, this is true of all the physical sciences which cannot escape from the fact that their formulations are just as much from a subject as they are about an object. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s ECO-land is an ECO-logy defined by the ECHO-ing or resonating interfaces between the poles of the focal structures constituting the field of experience. ↩
  3. McLuhan sometimes used the term ‘preference’ to designate ’emphasis’: “As for (my) approach itself, it may be said to accept any work of (…) human expression (a road, a town, a building, a poem, a painting, an ashtray, or a motor-car) as a preferential ordering of materials. Since all art expresses some preference, any portion of anything made by man can be spelled out (ed: within the field or spectrum of possible preferences). Every art object and every art situation represents a preferential response to reality, so that the precise techniques chosen for the manipulation and presentation of reality are a key to the mental states and assumptions of the makers. (Stylistic, review of Mimesis by Eric Auerbach, 1956) ↩
  4. McLuhan calls emphasis on one side of a relation, ‘exclusion’ — exclusion, namely, of simultaneous emphasis on the other pole) and calls simultaneous emphasis on both poles together, ‘inclusion’. ↩
  5. “Those who think nothing is except what they can grasp firmly with their hands” — like the giants in Plato’s  gigantomachia. ↩
  6. There are two kinds of fundamental motion in McLuhan’s view. First there are the media or “interfaces” or “boundaries” within the deep structures of experience which are “areas of maximal abrasion and change”. Second, there is the abysmal movement between those deep structures in the moment to moment constitution of subjective experience and objective world: “Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of ‘momentary deities’ or epiphanies” (‘Little Epic’ manuscript). In a seminar at Fordham in November 1967 McLuhan described this metaphoric activity in language use: “the interval is very tactile, the space between sounds is not audible, naturally, it’s tactile, you have to close (or cross) that (space) kinetically”. ↩
  7. The subject in McLuhan’s analysis requires no separate account aside from the momentary emphatic interface in its “sense” of world. The subject just is that sensory emphasis — which, however, implicates a prior abysmal action of the selection of that particular interface out of the totality of possible ones = McLuhan’s ‘unconscious’. And the possible consciousness of this unconscious is foreseen at the end of Take Today (297): “For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the ‘natural’ program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness.” ↩
  8. The active and passive here correspond to McLuhan’s making and matching. All experience is both. “The ‘meaning of meaning’ is relationship.” ↩

Evolution: shift from biology to technology

Beginning 70 years ago in 1954, McLuhan anticipated much of the contemporary (2024) discussion around A.I. :

modern technology is so comprehensive that it has abolished Nature. (The God-Making Machines of the Modern World, Commonweal, March 19, 1954) 

Technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, 1954)

Today, a new technology of great delicacy and precision has created an image of ourselves which invites us to swallow nature. The gap between man and the world, [and between] art and nature, has been abolished. (Radio and Television vs. The ABCED-Minded, 1955)

The old separation of art and nature we now see to have been based on an ignorance of nature.1 (New Media in Arts Education, 1956)

By the end of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution most of the physical organs had been given extension in metallic forms,2 and Samuel Butler could argue that the evolutionary process had been transferred from the biological to the mechanical plane.3 (Humpty Dumpty, Automation and TV, 1962)

The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution. (Understanding Media, 1964, 182)

Satellites = super human environment around planet = end of “Nature” (Notes in Alphabet: Number Thirteen, June, 1967)4

The evolutionary process no longer belongs to the biology of our bodies. Our bodies create these new environments, the extensions of our bodies, create these new environments like the electric one. And these are the location now of the evolutionary process.5 A new environment like TV, or computer, or telephone, or radio, can compress millions of years of evolution in seconds. What has been happening to us in the 20th century is that we have been going through many millions of years of evolution, biological evolution, psychological evolution, through the extension of our bodies to these new environments. The body doesn’t fit into an environment anymore, it makes the environment. It makes that space. (Fordham lecture, ‘Tribal Retrieval’, September 20, 1967)6

The extension of our own nervous system as a total environment of information is in a sense an extension of the evolutionary process. Instead of it taking place biologically over many thousands of years it is now possible — in fact it has happened to us in the last few decades — it is now possible to traverse many millions of years in seconds by putting evolutionary extensions of ourselves outside [of ourselves] as environments, as teaching machines. The man-made environments that are now planetary are, in terms of evolutionary development, a greater step than anything that ever happened to our biological lives in the whole biological past. (Fordham lecture, ‘Open Mind Surgery’, September 28, 1967)7

With Sputnik, nature ended. The Darwinian environment of evolutionary biology went inside a man-made environment. The evolutionary process shifted from biology to technology. (Noble Purpose but to What End?, 1968)8 

Darwin and Marx ignored the man-made environments in their theories of evolution and causality in favor of the eighteenth century and romantic idea of nature as environment. (War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968)

The important thing is to realize that electric information systems are live environments in the full organic sense. They alter our feelings and sensibilities, especially when they are not attended to (…) This is a principle that applies to all technologies whatever, explaining the pathos and impercipience of historical man. Since the new information environments are direct extensions of our own nervous system, they have a much more profound relation to our human condition than the old “natural” environment. They are a form of clothing that can be programmed at will to produce any effect desired. Quite naturally, they take over the evolutionary work that Darwin had seen in the spontaneities of biology. (War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968)

The evolutionary process has shifted from biology to technology (McLuhan to I.A. Richards, July 12, 1968, Letters 355)

The evolutionary process has shifted from biology to technology (McLuhan to Jacques Maritain, May 6, 1969, Letters 369)

The new extensions of man [tele-graph, tele-phone, tele-vision] and the environments they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process. (Playboy Interview. 1969)

We would do well to consider the effect of the new satellite environment around the planet as altering our very concept of Nature. “Nature” is now content, as it were, in a man-made environment. (Foreword to Arthur Porter, Cybernetics Simplified, 1969)

The latest technology in our world is the satellite. The satellite is the first man-made environment to encompass the planet. The earth has become the content of a human artifact. The satellite surround is the new artistic mask worn by the earth itself. (Innovation is Obsolete, 1971)

Hiroshima and The Bomb (…)  returned men to sudden recognition of the precious significance of the human scale. The classic wisdom of nothing in excess was resurrected by this instant of hideous strength, when everything was in excess. The human scale that had been submerged during a century of industrial gigantism was instantly and unforgettably retrieved. Man-made Rim Spins Supplant Natural Cycles. Henceforth, the natural round of seasonal and biological cycles was supplanted by vehement new intensities of man-made “rim spins” demanding a new programming of the entire human enterprise. (Take Today, 1972, 150)

The moment of Sputnik extended the planet. Something happened to the stellar system at that moment. The possibility of “retuning the sky” was born. Previously, the “extensions of man” related to his body, anything from his skin (clothing) to his central nervous system (electric circuitry). Each and all of these extensions affected the transactions between men and their previous environment. The extension of the planet itself meant that the technology was not transported by individual or collective man but by his previous environment — the Earth. It became a totally new game with new ground rules. Our ground now was literally in the sky. (Take Today, 1972, 293-294)

The satellites (…) transform the planet into a work of art by placing it inside a man-made environment. (Take Today, 1972, 294)

The “revolution” of this age has been a new order in which nature has become the extension of man. The centuries-old pattern had been man as an echo vibrating in harmony with the “natural order”. Now nature must play man’s tune. (Take Today, 1972, 296)9

When the planet was suddenly enveloped by a man-made artifact, “Nature” flipped into art form. The moment of Sputnik was the moment of creating Spaceship Earth and/or the global theatre. Shakespeare at the Globe had seen all the world as a stage, but with Sputnik, the world literally became a global theatre with no more audiences, only actors. (The End of the Work Ethic, 1972)10

in both the industrial and electric age Nature is superseded by art. Thus the future of the book is nothing less than to be the means of surpassing Nature itself. The material world, as it were, is to be etherealized and encapsulated in a book whose characters will possess all the formulas for the knowledge and recreation of Being.11 (The Future of the Book, 1972)

  1. With quantum physics, for example. ↩
  2. In telegraphy, photography and phonography, for example. ↩
  3. The printed text of this passage has a typo, ‘revolutionary process’ instead of ‘evolutionary process’. Later in this same essay: “It was just at the point indicated by Samuel Butler’s observation concerning evolution and machinery that the entire mechanical world became enclosed in the seamless web of electro-magnetism, the extension of our central nervous system.” ↩
  4. Transcribed by Andrew McLuhan at his Inscriptorium blog. ↩
  5. War And Peace In The Global Village (1968): “biologists use two (…) categories that are helpful for perceiving (…) the end of nature today (…) They speak of ‘outbreeding’ and ‘inbreeding.’ As (Ernst) Mayr puts it (in Animal Species and Evolution, 1963), ‘Most animals are essentially outbreeders, most microorganisms inbreeders.’ With electricity, all this has changed totally. At present the entire mammalian world has become the micro-organismic. It is the (…) cultures of the world, linguistically and politically, that have become the (outbreeding) mammals, according to the old classifications of evolutionary hypothesis. It is the cultural habitat, in which we have long been accustomed to think that people were contained, that has now become the (outbreeding) mammal itself”. ↩
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx2ed93_Lpc&t=1337s. ↩
  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFuZQxHynmY&t=525s. On November 25, just two months after this ‘Open Mind Surgery’ lecture, McLuhan underwent a day-long operation to remove a large tumor from his brain. ‘Open Mind Surgery’ — a fine example of second sight! ↩
  8. Review of Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, in Book World, November 10, 1968. The original title of McLuhan’s review seems to have been: ‘Ye Shall Be As Cogs’! ↩
  9. It is thought-provoking that this suggestion was made by a Catholic convert! The heart of the matter lies in the question of “man’s tune”. What is this and how does it sound? ↩
  10. Address to the Empire Club of Canada, November 16, 1972. ↩
  11. See note 9 above. The great question is how McLuhan found this sort of future compatible with Catholicism. Put another way, McLuhan’s work centrally concerns the question, what is the ground of A.I.? ↩

The representative ferment

media are ‘ideas’ in action (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, June 5, 1959)1

As epigraphs to his 1944 ‘Wyndham Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput’, McLuhan set out two citations from Lewis’ Time and Western Man. The second of these reads:

I unmask the will that is behind the Time-Philosophy, by displaying it in the heart of the representative ferment produced by it — in the full, instinctive indulgence and expansion of the artistic impulse, and imposing its values upon the impressionable material of life. p. xv, Time and Western Man.2

Lewis’ “representative ferment” must be read in at least two ways. First, ‘representative’ is intended in the sense of ‘characteristic’, ‘identifying’, ‘distinctive’. That is, what Lewis terms “Time-Philosophy” may be identified by the particular type of ‘ferment’ it reveals and, as he attempts to demonstrate, that it in fact derives from. The implication is that there are not only different types of ferment, but that these types are original. Fundamentally different sorts of Philosophy — but also of Art and even of Society — are, he claims, grounded in these various kinds of ferment as the effects of these ferments. According to Lewis, ‘Time’ is one sort of these representational or effect-producing ferments, one that has come to dominate “western man”. 

Secondly, ‘representative’ is used in the sense of a ‘drive to represent’, ‘to manifest’, ‘to go forth’: ‘to ex-press’. As Lewis has it, it is the “expansion of the artistic impulse” — ‘re-presentative’ as itself a “ferment” in all its etymological implications:

from Old French fermenter (13c.) and directly from Latin fermentare “to leaven, cause to rise or ferment,” from fermentum “substance causing fermentation, leaven, drink made of fermented barley,” perhaps contracted from *fervimentum, from root of fervere “to boil, seethe” (from PIE root *bhreu– “to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn”).

‘Ferment’, then, considered with all its Indo-European cognates deriving from *bhreu:

Sanskrit bhurnih “violent, passionate”, Greek phrear “well, spring, cistern”, Latin fervere “to boil, foam”, Thracian Greek brytos “fermented liquor made from barley”, Russian bruja “current”, Old Irish bruth “heat”, Old English breowan “to brew”, beorma “yeast”, Old High German brato “roast meat.”

It is remarkable that a “representative ferment” is at work both physically and etymologically in the sacraments of bread and fermented drink.

1.

On the one hand, this 1944 citation by McLuhan from Lewis’ TWM reaches back a decade to McLuhan’s 1934 M.A. thesis on George Meredith at the University of Manitoba:

The poet plants himself upon his instincts and permits his temperament sovereign sway. And he has quite as much right to do this as the philosopher has to trust his thought processes. In his table talk, Coleridge noted that all men (…) are born either Platonists or Aristotelians. There are similarly, in all times and places, definite types of temperament displaying consistency of conformation. The literary or artistic expression of such temperaments has properly the same validity as has the philosophizing of the Idealist and the Realist.3

With “the philosophizing of the Idealist and the Realist” McLuhan was explicitly gesturing to the ‘comparative method‘ of his University of Manitoba mentor, Rupert Lodge. And at the same time, with “literary or artistic expression”, he was silently pointing to the third elementary form in that method which Lodge usually called ‘pragmatism’ or ‘pragmatist’. 

a third type of philosophy has tended to develop: a philosophy which tries to be true to experience, and to avoid all (…) one-sided theorizings [such as those of the Idealist and the Realist]. This attempt at interpretation has taken many forms. One of the best known is called “pragmatism” (…) Here, then, we have three typical directions in which philosophers move when they attempt to master experience: the realist, the idealist, and the pragmatist direction.4

McLuhan’s contention in his M.A. thesis was that the “third type” must be taken to exceed philosophy if it is “to avoid all abstract and one-sided theorizings” (Lodge) — the “theorizings”, that is, of “the philosophizing of the Idealist and the Realist” (McLuhan). Hence his appeal to “the poet” as opposed to “the philosopher”, to “temperaments” as opposed to “thought processes” and to “instincts” as opposed to “philosophizing”. More than this, McLuhan seems to have been intuiting the further point against Lodge,5 that the very key to a ‘comparative method’ lies in what Lewis termed the “instinctive (…) expansion of the artistic impulse”; what Lodge himself termed the “tende[ncy] to develop” and what McLuhan termed “sway”. 6 7 That is, the “third type” was not only (only!) one of three fundamental forms of expression, it was also and above all the dynamism or inherent “will” to ex-pression in each of these three — the original/originating drive in each not to remain abstract, but to represent or manifest or ex-tend itself concretely. 

Consider any chemical element, say, carbon. It is not to be located only as the ‘abstract’ element ‘C’ in Mendeleev’s table. It is just as much graphite or diamond or a component in the myriad compounds in which carbon plays an essential role. So the element ‘C’ is re-presented in diamonds and elsewhere. But it is not only any one of these — or even all of these manifestations together. ‘C’ is both all those representative manifestations and also itself one ‘representative’ manifestation of the common elementary structure set out in Mendeleev’s table. 

Diamonds re-present ‘C’ because it has an essential drive to manifestation. But this drive does not terminate in ‘matching’ or ‘merging’; instead it is more like ‘making’ in the later sense of McLuhan (which he explicitly contrasted with ‘matching’). ‘Making’ is ‘to manifest justly’, ‘to represent appropriately’, ‘to reveal truly if not absolutely’ — leaving open the possibility in the future for some surprisingly different objective manifestation of ‘C’ and/or for improved subjective insight into ‘C’. 

McLuhan saw with Lewis that finite ‘making’ is not a bar to truthful apprehension but a condition of it. Just as manifestation does not exhaust a chemical element or a physical law, but does re-present truly.

However, there is a great problem to these passages from Lewis and Lodge. Lewis talks of “imposing (…) values upon the impressionable material of life” and Lodge of the “attempt to master experience”. The supposition is that the “material of life” and of “experience” is in some way prior to the forms in which they, life and experience, appear. Their “material” is portrayed as raw stuff that is yet somehow “impressionable” — as capable of being impressed upon. But imagine how far chemistry would get, were it to focus on “the impressionable material” of the physical world, like sub-atomic particles, say, rather than the elements of Mendeleev’s table!

One of McLuhan’s most important tasks was to attempt to recall this mis-taken focus on some supposedly prior material. Unfortunately he did not succeed in this task any more than did Plato and Aristotle 2500 years ago. He himself was always (or at least al too often) trying to find some underlying substrate like the hemispheres of the brain.

2.

On the other hand, it is exactly Plato that this passage from TWM most deeply recalls. As Aristotle, Plato’s great friend and pupil, repeatedly tried to communicate, particularly with his treatments of dynamis, Plato’s forms are not static abstractions. They fundamentally enact a “representative ferment” through which they manifest themselves in “extensions”. 

The subtitle of Understanding Media is “the extensions of man”. The genitive here, ‘of man’, is first of all objective. Human being is what is extended as effect, it is not the creator or possessor of extensions as subjective cause.

Like Plato’s forms or ideas, McLuhan’s media are prior to human being and are what first of all engender it in all its manifestations.

 

  1. https://archive.org/details/naeb-b066-f09/page/n66/mode/1up. The whole paragraph here is very important: “One new concept for us: media are ‘ideas’ in action. That is, any technological pattern or grouping of human know-how has the mark of our minds built-into it. The media dynamics are, therefore, parallel to those of our ideas. But many of our ideas are feed-back subliminally from media. Jeep calling unto jeep.” It is possible that “jeep calling unto jeep” here is a dictation error for “beep calling unto beep” — but error or not, the phrase is telling and funny. Around the same time in the late 1950s McLuhan’s unpublished review of of Northrop Frye’s 1957 Anatomy of Criticism has the related “blip calling unto blip”: “an archetype or profile of collective awareness offers small consumer satisfaction in itself. And Professor Frye would disclaim the notion that even the most diaphanous archetype could afford consumer satisfaction to a reader. These profiles or nuclear models of collective postures are not literary bon-bons for passive savoring but rather scientific data suited to the austere producer-oriented mind, data necessary to the public relations engineer and the shaper and ruler of societies. Like Sputnik they have a hook in outer space whence they relay signals to us, blip calling unto blip in the universe of the pictorialized word.” See this note for “deep calling to deep” in Hamlet’s Mill. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s citation is a slight abbreviation. Lewis has: “I, at the outset, unmask the will that is behind the time-philosophy…”. “At the outset” here is not only an off-hand phrase marking the initial stage of Lewis’ composition. It may also be taken as ‘situating myself at the origin of things’, hence giving him the possibility of seeing into “the heart” of their genesis. ↩
  3. See The essential plurality of the forms of being. ↩
  4. Lodge, ‘The Comparative Method in Philosophy’. For reference and discussion see The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge. ↩
  5. Intuiting the point — it would require much further thought until McLuhan could formulate the subtitle to Understanding Media, a full thirty years after his M.A, thesis, as “the extensions of man”. ↩
  6. McLuhan would later have many other terms for this sort of outreach, of course. Above all: ‘extension’. ↩
  7. All these terms appear in the citations from Lewis, Lodge and McLuhan given in the body of the post above. ↩

Mimesis in Laws of Media

Laws of Media has more discussion of mimesis than any other McLuhan text. But its appearances in LoM are far from uniform. The demand made as much on a reader today as on the McLuhans, when they discussed these points together in the 1970s, is to interrogate its Protean nature.

The question of subjective, objective and dual genitives is, as always, a key to interrogation. McLuhan employs the following genitive phrases regarding mimesis : the nature of mimesis, versions of mimesis, the spell of mimesis, the oral habit of mimesis, mimesis of the alphabet, the mimesis of human action. It must always be wondered what sort of genitive seems to have been intended, what other sort of sorts might have been intended, and what sort or sorts should have have been intended.

Here in page order are the discussions of mimesis in LoM. A later post, or posts, will supply commentary. 

Laws of Media, 4
There has been great confusion for many centuries over certain matters crucial to an understanding of acoustic space, for example, the natures of logos, of mimesis, and of formal causality. This confusion flows directly from the fact that all commentary and research, from Aristotle onwards, was conducted by persons, to one or another degree visually biased, who assumed visual space to be the common-sense norm. As a result, there are at least two forms or rather versions of mimesis and of logos and of formal cause. One of each has an oral structure, and the other a visual — with the former conventionally regarded as a confused or tentative attempt to explain the latter.

Laws of Media, 16-17
The split between conscious and unconscious, as an effect of the alphabet, is of crucial significance. It is a mimesis of the dissociation of perceptual sensibilities (of vision from the other senses), which is inherent in the form of the phonetic alphabet.
For the preliterate, mimesis is not merely a mode of representation but ‘the process whereby all men learn’; it was a technique cultivated by the oral poets and rhetors and used by everybody for ‘knowing’ via merging knower and known. This understanding survives in the maxim ‘the cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known’. Using mimesis, the ‘thing known’ ceases to be an object of attention and becomes instead a ground for the knower to put on. It violates all the properties of the visual order, allowing neither objectivity, nor detachment, nor any rational uniformity of experience, which is why Plato was at pains in the Republic to denounce its chief practitioners. Under the spell of mimesis the knower (hearer of a recitation) loses all relation to [the] merely present persona [of] person and place and is transformed by and into what he perceives. It is not simply a matter of representation but rather one of putting on a completely new mode of being, whereby all possibility of objectivity and detachment of figure from ground is discarded. Eric Havelock devotes a considerable portion of Preface to Plato to this problem. As he discovered, mimesis was the oral bond by which the tribe cohered:
“You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles and so did the reciter to whom you listened. Thirty years later you could automatically quote what Achilles had said or what the poet had said and about him. Such enormous powers of poetic memorisation could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity. Plato’s target was indeed an educational procedure  a whole way of life.” (Preface to Plato, 45)
Paradoxically, when the Greeks approached alphabetic technology using their oral habit of mimesis, they put on its visual stress instead.
The new visual ground completely alienated [the Greeks] from tribal culture; and so there came to be an intense rivalry between the two modes of culture. In the Republic Plato vigorously attacked the control exercised through mimesis by the oral establishment, for it “constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of cause and effect. That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable. He is entering the lists against centuries of habituation in rhythmic memorised experience. He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the ‘subject’ who stands apart from the ‘object’ and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just ‘imitating’ it.” (Preface to Plato, 47) Through mimesis of the alphabet, the Greeks absorbed visual dissociation of sensibilities…

Laws of Media, 17
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.

Laws of Media, 19
Previously, with [oral, pre-alphabetic] mimesis, ‘being’ had been immersed in the metamorphic and Protean flux of everyone’s daily experience. With the new ground of alphabetic awareness, objectivity and detachment became the rule. Mimesis was turned from a making process into representational matching, and the old experience of being was retrieved on the new terms of visual space, that is, as an abstract absolute.

Laws of Media, 33
There is much confusion among early commentators and later scholars about the various forms of space as well as other matters such as the nature of mimesis and of the logos. Aristotle and others were working with one foot in each world, as it were, using the new forms of awareness but trying to retain or update the ideas of the old oral culture.1 

Laws of Media, 35
The mode of cognition in acoustic [and in]2 multisensory spaces is mimesis. ‘The cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known’ while the eye is in equal interplay with the other senses.

Laws of Media, 48
The French symbolist poets responded immediately and intuitively to the ground introduced by the telegraph by retrieving pre-alphabetic forms of discontinuous resonance and mimesis. Baudelaire announced the rediscovery of audience as mimetic ground for [his]3 work: his reader puts on and wears the art as a means of correcting not his concepts but rather his perception. The reader is a mask-wearer (‘Hypocrite’), the poem the mask: ‘Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!’

Laws of Media, 64
The acoustic power available to the poetic establishment that Plato warred against was puny by comparison to the sensory stress exerted by any one of our technologies and its grounds. Plato realized that civilization did not have a chance until the mimetic spell of the bards was broken.

Laws of Media, 80
It took many centuries for the alphabet to suppress the right hemisphere and the mimetic tribal bonds of the Greeks and to release the focused energy of the visual left hemisphere, for the technology had to filter up from the working and merchant classes to the aristocracy.

Laws of Media 83
The caricature of inner or right-hemisphere awareness experienced by the drug culture (…) provides an artificial mimesis of the electric information environment

Laws of Media, 123
Ricoeur [in The Rule of Metaphor] leans on Aristotle’s distinction of metaphor as part of rhetoric on the one hand, and as part of dramatic mimesis on the other. His essential point is contained in Aristotle’s statement, “to metaphorize well implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” [Poetics, 1459a3-8].

Laws of Media, 123-124
The effect of phonetic literacy on the Greek psyche and culture was catastrophic. Mimesis gave way to individualized detachment, and the integral resonating oral logos was broken into multiple fragments, each bearing some one or another of its original properties.

Laws of Media, 205 (Visual Space Tetrad)
resonant, multilocational, multisensory, transformational <=> mimesis, the animate universe

Laws of Media, 229-230
It is Aristotle, notes Paul Ricoeur, “who actually defined metaphor for the entire subsequent history of Western thought, on the basis of a semantics that takes the word or the name as its basic unit. Furthermore, his analysis is situated at the crossroads of two disciplines — rhetoric and poetics — with [two] distinct goals, ‘persuasion’ in oral discourse and the mimesis of human action in tragic poetry” (The Rule of Metaphor, 3). It is no accident that Aristotle chose to dissect the point of maximal interface of rhetoric and grammar, [namely] dramatic poetry. The heart of the discussion is found (…) in the Poetics (1457b, 6-9): “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else, the transference being either from genus to species or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.”

Laws of Media, 235 (Metaphor Tetrad)
transformation/transfiguration <=> fresh awareness via mental mimesis

  1. In a footnote to LoM 35: “The obscurity of this commentary is largely a result of the problem posed Aristotle by his own visual bias when trying to report on audile-tactile awareness.” See McLuhan and Plato 13: epyllion for some discussion. ↩
  2. The McLuhans have ‘or’ here, which is ambiguous between identifying or differentiating ‘acoustic’ and ‘multisensory space’. The suggested amendment takes the differentiating option. ↩
  3. McLuhan: ‘a’. ↩

Wyndham Lewis, Paleface, comments

But if, politically and socially, men are to-day fated to a subjective role, and driven inside their private, mental caves, how can art be anything but ‘subjective’, too? Is externality of any sort possible for us? (Criterion 12) (Paleface 108)1

McLuhan owned a copy of Wyndham Lewis’ 1929 Paleface which is preserved in his ‘working library‘ at the University of Toronto. But he does not seem to have mentioned Paleface anywhere in his published writings.2 At a guess, he may have avoided Lewis’ Paleface3 just as he avoided Pound’s politics, because he wanted to communicate certain of the ideas he shared with them without associating that message with their more notorious notions. Indeed he may well have thought that both men had hurt the cause of their best work by freighting it with dubious and even contradicting social and political theories.

It may be that McLuhan obtained his copy of Paleface, which is not annotated and may not have been read by him, only late in his career.4 But it is possible, of course, that he had earlier read a library copy of it, and/or seen its Part ii in Lewis’ 1927 Enemy No. 2 (which he also had in his library).5 Notably, however, the ‘Introduction’ to Part ii of Paleface, which seems to have been so important to McLuhan, was not included, except for a few of its pages, in Enemy No. 2.

Most of that ‘Introduction’ did appear, however, in an issue of The Monthly Criterion from July 1927 in an essay from Lewis entitled ‘The Values of the Doctrine Behind “Subjective” Art’. And McLuhan certainly knew of this Lewis essay since he cited a passage from it and specifically referenced its appearance in Eliot’s Criterion in an unpublished manuscript now in the Ottawa papers.6

That same issue of The Monthly Criterion had a review of G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity by its editor, T.S. Eliot, himself. Now Chesterton and Eliot were the two most important figures for McLuhan at the time of his undergraduate stint in Cambridge,7 and Eliot’s review mentions “the Belloc-Chesterton gospel of Distributive Property” — McLuhan’s social and political touchstone at the time.8 It therefore seems highly likely that McLuhan, via his intense interest then in Distributism, knew already at Cambridge in 1934-1936 of this issue of The Monthly Criterion and thereby of the Lewis essay in it.

However all that may have been, McLuhan agreed with a very great deal — arguably the very heart of his enterprise — of Lewis’ ideas as they are particularly expressed in the ‘Introduction’ to the second part of Paleface.9 In that ‘Introduction’ Lewis makes an obvious gesture towards Nietzsche in employing the phrase “All-too-Human” (Paleface 110).10  But in fact his whole project as set out there replays Nietzsche in the following key points:

  • the relation of human beings to nature is always indirect and mediated: “things (…) are not objects of direct perception” (Criterion 4) (Paleface 98) 
  • as modernity has increasingly become conscious of this lack of “direct perception”, aka of the inevitability and inexorability of mediation, it has at the same time been borne into it that it “is not in touch with nature” (Criterion 4) (Paleface 98), that “nature is no longer there” (Criterion 5) (Paleface 99)  
  • an attempt to rediscover true — or any! — relation to nature therefore depends upon a critical understanding of the range of mediations, or media, through which human beings at every instant have their experience: “an art that is ‘subjective’ and can look to no common factors of knowledge or feeling, and lean on no tradition, is exposed to the necessity (…) of instructing itself far more profoundly as to the origins of its impulses and the nature and history of the formulas with which it works” (Criterion 8) (Paleface 103) 
  • “it is evidently in these conditions that you must look for the solid ground of our ‘subjective’ fashions” (Criterion 6) (Paleface 100)

Compare McLuhan:

  • “Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained.” (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 1960)11
  • “Technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art.” (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, Explorations 2, 1954)12
  • “As for [my] approach itself, it may be said to accept any work of (…) human expression (a road, a town, a building, a poem, a painting, an ashtray, or a motor-car) as a preferential ordering of materials. Since all art expresses some preference, any portion of anything made by man can be spelled out [within the field or spectrum of possible preferences]. Every art object and every art situation represents a preferential response to reality, so that the precise techniques chosen for the manipulation and presentation of reality are a key to the mental states and assumptions of the makers.” (Stylistic [review of Mimesis by Eric Auerbach], 1956)13
  • “The total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious (…) We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power — and courage — of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world.” (Playboy Interview, 1969)

If McLuhan can be said to have attempted to communicate Lewis after 50 years, so might Lewis be said to have attempted to communicate Nietzsche after 50 years. And so do we need to attempt to communicate McLuhan today — after 50 years.

For Nietzsche, Lewis and McLuhan together:

In a word, we have lost our sense of reality. So we return to the central problem of our ‘subjectivity,’ which is what we have in the place of our lost sense… (Criterion 6) (Paleface 100)

  1. All page numbers below refer to ‘The Values of the Doctrine Behind “Subjective” Art‘ in The Monthly Criterion and to their corresponding pages in Lewis’ Paleface, both at the Internet Archive. ↩
  2. In his unpublished manuscript, ‘The Little Epic’, dating to the middle or late 1950s, McLuhan cites a passage from the ‘Introduction’ to Part ii of Paleface, but in doing so he references, not Paleface from 1929, but the earlier appearance of most of that ‘Introduction’ in T.S. Eliot’s magazine, The Monthly Criterion, from July 1927. Here is the citation: “We have been thrown back wholesale from the external, the public, world, by the successive waves of the ‘Newtonian’ innovation, and been driven down into our primitive private mental caves, of the Unconscious and the primitive. We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness. That is the description, and the history, of our particular ‘subjectivity’. In the arts of formal expression, a ‘dark night of the soul’ is settling down. A kind of mental language is in process of invention, flouting and overriding the larynx and the tongue.” (Criterion 8) (Paleface 103) McLuhan comments in the same place of his ‘Little Epic’ manuscript: “Wyndham Lewis is no friend or admirer of the various art forms which we are reviewing here under the head of ‘little epic’. But he is an invaluable guide to all that these forms mean.” ↩
  3. Lewis’ Paleface, 1929:

    and then, of course, there is also his 1931 Hitler:

    ↩

  4. He may have obtained this copy from, or through, Sheila Watson whose thesis on Lewis  he advised in the early 1960s. A hint in this direction lies in an M.A. thesis by Paula Grace Pantry at the University of Alberta in 1972,  The Wyndham Lewis Polemic: The Enemy as Paleface. Pantry notes in an Acknowledgement: “Special thanks are given to Dr. Sheila Watson, without whose inspiration this thesis would not have been written.” ↩
  5. The 3 volumes of The Enemy are in McLuhan’s library at Fisher in Toronto. In ‘My Friend, Wyndham Lewis’ (1969), McLuhan recalled from 1944: “He (Lewis) suggested that if I were to come to Windsor with him, we could start up again his magazine The Enemy, which had been published twice in 1927 and once in 1929.” ↩
  6. For details, see note 2 above. ↩
  7. See Autobiography – encountering Chesterton and Eliot’s bread. ↩
  8. McLuhan’s first published piece after his University of Manitoba newspaper articles was a letter to the Editor of G.K.’s Weekly from September 19, 1935 — and his first academic article was ‘G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ published in The Dalhousie Review in January 1936 — both while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. ↩
  9. The key passages from that ‘Introduction’ are set out in Wyndham Lewis, Paleface. But it should not be overlooked that Lewis’ best ideas there are not original to him, but in fact have a long heritage going back to the origins of western civilization. It is part of their strength, indeed, that they were not merely his. As Hegel put the point: “Meine Meinung ist nur mein.” ↩
  10. This passage is not in the Monthly Criterion essay. That version of the ‘Introduction’ stops a couple paragraphs before it. ↩
  11. ‘General Introduction to the Languages and Grammars of the Media’. This amounts to a multiplication of our remove from nature. In a medium like film, the ordinary experience of nature, which is always already mediated by, eg, language and culture, is not only presented, it is re-presented such that that mediated experience is again mediated. But this is exactly why, according to McLuhan, that “we live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible”. See the Playboy Interview above for the full passage. ↩
  12. After the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, McLuhan frequently maintained that it was this event that had ‘put an end to nature’. Here he is in a review of Erich Fromm’s Revolution of Hope in 1968: “With Sputnik, nature ended. The Darwinian environment of evolutionary biology went inside a man-made environment. The evolutionary process shifted from biology to technology.” ↩
  13. McLuhan to Pound, July 16, 1952, Letters 231: “Once a man has got onto technique as the key in communication it’s different.” ↩

Paleface (Introduction to Part ii)

McLuhan on the influence of Wyndham Lewis on his work:

Good heavens, that’s where I got it! (…) Lewis was the person who showed me that the man-made environment was a teaching machine — a programmed teaching machine. But earlier, you see, the symbolists had discovered that the [individual] work of art was a programmed teaching machine. It’s a mechanism for shaping sensibility. Well, Lewis simply extended this private art activity to the corporate activity of the whole society in [its] making environments that basically were artifacts, or works of art, and that acted as teaching machines on the whole population. (Lewis in St Louis, 1967)1

According to Lewis, “The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present.” And in his own writing Lewis foresaw many of the problems of today. (…) Giovanelli and I (…) were eager to discuss his own work with him and especially his more controversial “pamphlets” like The Doom of Youth, Time and Western Man, and The Art of Being Ruled. (…) He was utterly beyond the reach of the ordinary political, social, artistic interests of the day. In fact, it is only since the disappearance of the vast bulk of his contemporaries from the scene that his image has assumed its true dimensions in the history of art and letters. (…) He was tirelessly alert to all sorts of contemporary developments in the popular media which I have ever since found a world of delight. (…) Even in the ’20s, as Sheila Watson expresses it, he observed the intrusion of the mechanical foot into the electric desert. Is it any wonder that his analysis of the political, domestic, and social effects of the new technological environments had a great deal to do with directing my attention to these events? (My Friend Wyndham Lewis, 1969) 

  

Below are excerpts from the ‘Introduction’ to the second part of Lewis’ 19292 book Paleface.  Also included here are references to The Monthly Criterion from July 1927 which featured an essay from Lewis entitled ‘The Values of the Doctrine Behind “Subjective” Art’. This was the original appearance of most of Lewis’ ‘Introduction’ — one that McLuhan is known to have seen.3

These essays do not come under the head of ‘literary criticism ’ They are written purely as investigations into contemporary states of mind, as these are displayed for us by imaginative writers pretending to give us a picture of current life ‘as it is lived,’ but who in fact give us much more a picture of life as, according to them, it should be lived. In the process they slip in, or thrust in, an entire philosophy, which they derive from more theoretic fields, and which is usually not at all the philosophy of the sort of people they portray. The whole of Paleface, in fact, deals with and is intended to set in relief the automatic processes by which the artist or the writer (a novelist or a poet) obtains his formularies: to show how the formulas for his progress are issued to him, how he gets them by post, and then applies them. (Paleface 97-98) (Criterion 4)

According to present arrangements, in the presence of nature the artist or writer is almost always apriorist, we suggest. Further, he tends to lose his powers of observation (which, through reliance upon external nature, in the classical ages gave him freedom) altogether. (…) So he takes his nature, in practice, from theoretic fields, and resigns himself to see only what conforms to his syllabus of patterns. He deals with the raw life, thinks he sees arabesques in it ; but in fact the arabesques that he sees (…) emanate from his theoretic borrowing, he has put them there. It is a nature-for-technical-purposes.
(Paleface 98) (Criterion 4)

Scarcely any longer can he be said to control or be even in touch with the raw at all, that is the same as saying he is not in touch with nature: he rather dredges and excavates things that are not objects of direct perception, with a ‘science’ he has borrowed (…) observes only according to a ‘system’4 of opinion which hides from him any but a highly selective reality. (Paleface 98) (Criterion 4)

‘Life’ is not-knowing: it is [therefore] the surprise packet: so (…) if nature can be so arranged as to yield him as it were a system of surprises, the artist will scarcely take the trouble to look behind them, to detect the principle of their occurrence (…) He automatically applies the accepted formula to nature; the corresponding accident manifests itself, like a djinn, always with an imposing clatter (since it is a highly selective ‘accident’ that understands its part): and the artist is perfectly satisfied that nature has spoken. He does not see at all that ‘nature’ is no longer there. (Paleface 99) (Criterion 5)

If I could surprise anybody into examining with a purged and renewed sense what is taken so much for granted, namely our ‘subjectivity’ — though who or what is the subject or Subject? — I should have justified any method [of attempted communication] whatever. (Paleface 99) (Criterion 5)

Oh it is a wild life that we live (…) between one apocalypse and another!5 (Paleface 100) (Criterion 6)

In a word, we have lost our sense of reality. So we return to the central problem of our ‘subjectivity,’ which is what we have in the place of our lost sense…
(Paleface 100) (Criterion 6)

Elsewhere I have described this in its great lines as the transition from a public to a private way of thinking and feeling. The great industrial machine has removed from the individual life all responsibility.6 (…) It is evidently in these conditions that you must look for the solid ground of our ‘subjective’ fashions. The obvious historic analogy is to be found in the Greek political decadence. Stoic and other philosophies set out to provide the individual with a complete substitute for the great public and civic ideal of the happiest days of Greek freedom: with their [Stoic and other then contemporary philosophical] thought we are quite at home. (Paleface 100-101) (Criterion 6)

There is not much resemblance, outwardly, between the pulverization by one central power, such as that of Rome, and the pulverization of our social and intellectual life that is being effected by general industrial conditions all over the world. But there is, in the nature of things, the same oppressive removal of all personal outlet (…) in a great public life of individual enterprise: and (…) at the same time, through the agency of Science, all our standards of existence have been discredited. (Paleface 101-102) (Criterion 7)

[Bertrand Russell] “The kind of difference that Newton has made to the world is more easily appreciated where a Newtonian civilization is brought into sharp contrast with a pre-scientific culture, as for example, in modern China. The ferment in that country is the inevitable outcome of the arrival of Newton upon its shores. (…) If Newton had never lived, the civilization of China would have remained undisturbed, and I suggest that we ourselves should be little different from what we were in the middle of the eighteenth century.” (Radio Times, April 8th. 1928.)
[Lewis] If you substitute Science for Newton (…) that explains our condition. We have been thrown back wholesale from the external, the public world, by the successive waves of the ‘Newtonian’ innovation, and been driven down into our primitive private mental caves, of the unconscious and the primitive. We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness. That is the description, and the history of our particular ‘subjectivity’.
(Paleface 102–103) (Criterion 8)

In the arts of formal expression, a ‘dark night of the soul’ is settling down. A kind of mental language is in process of invention, flouting and overriding the larynx and the tongue. Yet an art that is ‘subjective’ and can look to no common factors of knowledge or feeling, and lean on no tradition, is exposed to the necessity, either7 of instructing itself far more profoundly as to the origins of its impulses and the nature and history of the formulas with which it works; or else it is committed to becoming a zealous parrot of systems and judgments that reach it from the unknown. In the latter case in effect what it does is to bestow authority upon a hypothetic something or someone it has never seen, and would be at a loss to describe (since in the ‘subjective’ there is no common and visible nature), and progressively to surrender its faculty of observation, and so sever itself from the external field of immediate truth or belief — for the only meaning of ‘nature’ is a nature possessed in common. And that is what now has happened to many artists: they pretend to be their own authority, but they are not even that. It would not be easy to exaggerate the naivete with which the average artist or writer to-day, deprived of all central authority, body of knowledge, tradition, or commonly accepted system of nature, accepts what he receives in place of those things.
(Paleface 103-104) (Criterion 8)

It is astonishing how in all the heated dogmatical arguments, you will never find them calling in question the very basis upon which the ‘movement’ they are advocating rests. They are never so ‘radical’ as that. (…) They have not the least consciousness (…) of the many alternatives open to them. The authority of fashion is absolute in such cases: whatever has by some means introduced itself and gamed a wide crowd-acceptance (…) is, itself, unassailable. Its application, only, presents alternatives. The world of fashion for them is as solid and unquestionable as that large stone, against which Johnson hit his foot, to confute the Bishop of Cloyne. For them the time-world has become an absolute, as it has for the philosopher in the background, feeding them with a hollow assurance.
(Paleface 104-105) (Criterion 9)

a herd of happy and ignorant technicians entranced, not with ‘mind’, but with ‘subjectivity’. (Paleface 105) (Criterion 10)

The kind of screen that is being built up between the reality and us, the ‘dark night of the soul’ into which each individual is relapsing, the intellectual shoddiness of so much of the thought responsible for the artist’s reality, or ‘nature’ today, all these things seem to point to the desirability of a new and if necessary shattering criticism of ‘modernity’ as it stands at present. (Paleface 106)  (Criterion 10)

It is an unenterprising thought indeed that would accept all that the ‘Newtonian’ civilization of science has thrust upon our unhappy world, simply because it once had been different from something else, and promised ‘progress’ though no advantage so far has been seen to ensue from its propagation for any of us, except that the last vestiges of a few superb civilizations are being stamped out, and a million sheep’s-heads, in London, can sit and listen to the distant bellowing of Mussolini; or (…) to the [nearby] bellowing of Dame Clara Butt.8 It is too much to ask us to accept these privileges as substitutes for the art of Sung [China] or the philosophy of Greece. (Paleface 106) (Criterion 11)

Most dogmatically ‘subjective’, telling-from-the-inside, fashionable method — whatever else it may be (…) — is ultimately discovered to be bad philosophy — that is to say, it takes its orders from second rate philosophic dogma. Can art that is a reflection of bad philosophy be good art? (Paleface 107) (Criterion 12)

But if, politically and socially, men are today fated to a ‘subjective’ role, and driven inside their private, mental caves, how can art be anything but ‘subjective’ too? Is externality of any sort possible for us? Are we not of necessity confined to a mental world of the subconscious, in which we naturally sink back to a more primitive level (…)? Our lives cannot be described in terms of action — externally that is — because we never truly act. We have no common world into which we [might] project ourselves (…) To those [political and social] questions we (…) in due course would be led: but what here I have been trying to show is that first of all much more attention should be given to the intellectual principles that are behind the work of art: that to sustain the pretensions of a considerable innovation a work must be surer than it usually is to-day of its formal parentage: that nothing that is unsatisfactory in the result should be passed over, but should be asked to account for itself in the abstract terms that are behind its phenomenal face. And I have suggested that many subjective fashions, not plastically or formally very satisfactory, would become completely discredited if it were clearly explained upon what flimsy theories they are in fact built: what bad philosophy, in short, has almost everywhere been responsible for the bad art.
(Paleface 108-109)  (Criterion 12)

My main object in Paleface has been to place in the hands of the readers of imaginative literature, and also of that very considerable literature directed to popularizing scientific and philosophic notions, in language as clear and direct as possible, a sort of key ; so that, with its aid, they may be able to read any work of art presented to them, and, resisting the skillful blandishments of the fictionist (…) understand the ideologic or philosophical basis of these confusing entertainments, where so many false ideas change hands or change heads. As it is, the popularizer is generally approached with the eyes firmly shut and the mouth wide open. [As a result] the fiction (…) takes with it the authority of life — people live it, as it were, as they read: so it is able to pass off as true almost anything.9 The often very elaborate philosophy expressed in this sensational form very often not only misrepresents the empirical reality, but misstates the truth. (Paleface 109) (Not in the Criterion essay)

 

 

  1. Flexidisk recording in artscanada No. 114, November 1967. For the recording itself, images and discussion, see Andrew McLuhan’s post:
    https://inscriptorium.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/mechanisms-for-shaping-sensibility/.     ↩
  2. Much of Paleface was written and published in 1927. As described in this post, much of the ‘Introduction’ to its second part appeared in The Monthly Criterion from July 1927. Nearly all of the rest  of that second part appeared in October that same year in Lewis’ The Enemy Number 2. ↩
  3. In his unpublished manuscript, ‘The Little Epic’, dating to the middle or late 1950s, McLuhan cites a passage from the ‘Introduction’ to Part ii of Paleface, but in doing so he references, not Paleface from 1929, but the earlier appearance of most of that ‘Introduction’ in T.S. Eliot’s magazine, The Monthly Criterion, from July 1927. Here is the citation: “We have been thrown back wholesale from the external, the public, world, by the successive waves of the ‘Newtonian’ innovation, and been driven down into our primitive private mental caves, of the Unconscious and the primitive. We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness. That is the description, and the history, of our particular ‘subjectivity’. In the arts of formal expression, a ‘dark night of the soul’ is settling down. A kind of mental language is in process of invention, flouting and overriding the larynx and the tongue.” (Paleface 103) (Criterion 8) An echo of this passage appears in McLuhan’s 1969 ‘My Friend Wyndham Lewis’: “he was pleased to quote Eliot’s observation in The Egoist (September, 1918) that ‘in the work of Mr. Lewis we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave man’.” McLuhan comments further in his ‘Little Epic’ manuscript: “Wyndham Lewis is no friend or admirer of the various art forms which we are reviewing here under the head of ‘little epic’. But he is an invaluable guide to all that these forms mean.” ↩
  4. Although Lewis also uses science and system in other senses than these, he does not mark his depreciative use of them here with scare quotes. They have been added to mark their ambiguity in his work. ↩
  5. Elsewhere in Paleface commenting on “a herd (…) driven madly hither and thither in gigantic wars that have at length become completely meaningless”: “If this apocalyptic picture sounds to your ears sensational or far-fetched, I can only say that you forget very quickly what was called at the time (= WW1) ‘Armageddon’.” (26) ↩
  6. In ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’ (1944), McLuhan cites Lewis from The Art of Being Ruled (142): “The first object of a person with a desire to be free, and yet possessing none of the means (…) such as money, conspicuous ability, or power to obtain freedom, is to avoid responsibility. Absence of responsibility (…) is what men most desire for themselves.” ↩
  7. Instead of ‘either’, Lewis has ‘first of all’. ↩
  8. Clara Butt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Butt. ↩
  9. Compare McLuhan in Laws of Media half a century later: “Under the spell of mimesis the knower (hearer of a recitation) loses all relation to his merely present persona (…) and is transformed by and into what he perceives. It is not simply a matter of representation but rather one of putting on a completely new mode of being, whereby all possibility of objectivity and detachment of figure from ground is discarded. Eric Havelock devotes a considerable portion of Preface to Plato to this problem.” ↩
  10. The medium is the message. McLuhan in ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’: “It is therefore, politically and humanly speaking, a matter of the utmost concern for us to know from what sources and by what means the rulers of the modern world determine what they will do next.  How do they determine the ends for which, as means, they employ the vast machines of government, education, and amusement?” The phrase “rulers of the world” is used by Lewis in Paleface 88. ↩

Mimesis

‘Mimesis’ is part of a group of terms with ‘simulation‘ and others (like the nous poietikos) which is used in complex ways by McLuhan, both in regard to the individual terms themselves and to their relations with each other. Note 11 below gives some attention to this complexity, but further posts in the future will be needed to do justice to the topic — which lies at the heart of McLuhan’s project.

Survey of Joyce Criticism, 1951
Heinrich Straumann recalls a conversation with Joyce during which he asked whether a knowledge of the local conditions in Dublin would make the reading of Finnegans Wake any easier. Joyce replied firmly In the negative. “One should not pay any particular attention to the allusions to place-names, historical events, literary happenings, and personalities, but let the linguistic phenomenon affect one as such.” Here is Joyce’s confidence in the mimetic powers of language itself to communicate before and beyond ordinary understanding.

Poetry and Opinion (review), 1951
Pound’s (…) prose (…) is, in its mimesis of the drama of intellectual maneuver, unmatched since Bacon and Jonson. The basis of Pound’s prose as of his verse is the immediency of its grip of the object.

Maritain on Art, 1953
G.R. Levy [in] The Gate of Horn views Plato and Aristotle as having been consciously engaged in doing just what Maritain is tackling: “Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis. The relation of created things to the ‘pattern laid up in heaven’ is, as we saw, that methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis, the ‘imitation‘ by which the living world was built upon the Pythagorean numbers.”1

Media Fit the Battle of Jericho, 1956
Writing was the break-through from sound to sight. But with the end of the acoustic wall came chronology, tick-tock time, architecture. Writing, the enclosure of speech and sound space, split off song and dance and music from speech. It split off harmonia from mimesis. Writing permitted the visual analysis of the dynamic logos that produced philology, logic, rhetoric, geometry, etc.

Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1960
The growth of the Euclidean fictions in the patterns of human sensibility were as upsetting then as the return of nuclear non-Euclidean modalities of experience today. Gombrich, writing [in Art and Illusion] of the rise of pictorial space and illusion in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., says: “The very violence with which Plato denounces this trickery reminds us of the momentous fact that at the time he wrote, mimesis was a recent invention.“ (…) The multiple levels and modes of sound and tactility are favored in cave art above the visual. So it is with speech itself. But the reduction of speech to sight by the phonetic technology gave the eye an ascendancy over the other senses which is anything but natural to man. l am not making a value judgment. The natural may not be desirable at all. But the ascendancy of eye over the other senses gave us the miracle of mimesis, of foreshortening, and, eventually of perspective and vanishing point, which we have accepted as natural and rational for centuries. Such assumptions do not coincide with those of the electric media.

Understanding Media, 19642
Eliot and Pound used the typewriter for a great variety of central effects in their poems. And with them, too, the typewriter was an oral and mimetic instrument that gave them the colloquial freedom of the world of jazz and ragtime.

Understanding Media, 19643
Joyce puts these matters not so much in cryptic, as in dramatic and mimetic, form. The reader has only to take any of his phrases such as this one, and mime it until it yields the intelligible. Not a long or tedious process, if approached in the spirit of artistic playfulness that guarantees “lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake.”

The Emperor’s Old Clothes 1966
In his Poetics (Chapter IV, 1448b), Aristotle reminded us that mimesis is the process by which all men learn. He alluded to the process of making by which our perceptions simulate within us the environment that we encounter outside ourselves.  It is this learning and making process that, by electric circuitry, is being extended beyond our central nervous system.4

McLuhan to Donald Theall, Aug 6 1970
The sensory completion, or the actual experience of anything never corresponds to the event or input, i.e. there is no matching, but only making in human experience. This relates, of course, to Aristotle’s poiesis and mimesis, and his phrase: “It is the process by which all men learn.”

From Cliché to Archetype, 19705
The main Cinderella plot of My Fair Lady (…) is a retrieval of the nineteenth­ century world of mechanical industry that had mass-produced a large new upper middle class, The industrial technique of precise repetition gets new force from the musical rhythms, which also increase the irony of dehumanization by which both mechanized speech and mechanized production are attained. This class had been provided with a special uniform speech by the new public schools. It was a speech that unconsciously mimed the machine itself (as T.S. Eliot wittily observed when his Madame Sosostris speaks to her client: “Tell dear Mrs. Equitone … “). To speak with the mechanical precision of a machine has been an aspect of the comic mask worn by the corporate English upper class for some decades. To acquire this manner is not only easy but devastating. One puts on vocally the technology of the age, much as Chaplin did in his way, as if in revenge and reversal. First American jazz and now the English Beatles have me­chanically extended the speech modes of the lower middle classes with image-acceptance. For such mimetic enlargements of ordinary experience are as enticing and flattering clichés as the movie or the motor car. The mime of mechanization is then the subplot in My Fair Lady.

From Cliché to Archetype, 19706
Mimesis or Making Sense — The entire world of technology makes sense by miming the human body and faculties. Most studies of mimesis (…) proceed on the assumption of matching inner and outer. Notable exceptions are found in E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion and Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato. The technique of continuous parallel that Eliot indicates as the essential myth-making form of mimesis in his classic essay “Ulysses, Order and Myth” simply tosses aside the idea of matching in favor of interface and metamorphosis.

From Cliché to Archetype, 19707
Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense via cognition or of making a house by following the lines of Nature. For example, in the Physics, Book II, Chapter VIII, Aris­totle writes; “Thus, if a house had been a thing made by Nature it would have been made in the same way as it is now by art; and if things made by Nature were made also by art, they would come to be in the same way as by Nature.” Aristotle thus confirms the sacral quality of the cliché or artifact by aligning it with the cosmic forces, just as biologists say ontogeny recaps phylogeny.

Take Today, 1972
The artist by retracing the processes of cognition (mimesis) bridges the world of sense and the world of awareness.8

Monday Night Seminar, January 22, 19739
Mimicking is an act of making,  but notice it’s in another medium. You replay something that took place in one medium and you put it in another medium. It’s translated into another material. That is the nature of mimesis. Poetic mimesis means snatching one mode of experience and putting it into another mode, namely language or pigment. It’s translation, it’s metaphor.

The Medieval Environment, 1974
Havelock contrasted the corporate mimesis involved in the performance of the Greek epics and drama with the individualist analysis that came with the innovation of the phonetic alphabet.

Laws of Media, posthumous10
The effect of phonetic literacy on the Greek psyche and culture was catastrophic. Mimesis gave way to individualized detachment, and the integral resonating oral logos was broken into multiple fragments, each bearing some one or another of its original properties.11

  1. This passage from Levy is also cited in ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’ from that same year of 1953. ↩
  2. Page 262. ↩
  3. Page 302. ↩
  4. Compare ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’, 1951: “In the Poetics (Chap. 4) Aristotle mentions imitation as connate to man, being the process by which men learn.” McLuhan often quoted Aristotle to this effect — see the next citation. He did so again, 30 years after the 1951 essay, in the conclusion to Take Today (296). ↩
  5. Page 144-145. ↩
  6. Page 147. ↩
  7. Page 147. ↩
  8. “The world of sense” here does not mean ‘the world of material objects’. See McLuhan’s 1970 letter to Don Theall above: “The sensory completion, or the actual experience of anything never corresponds to the event or input“. ↩
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVBc7v5vjUI ↩
  10. Laws of Media treats mimesis more extensively than any other McLuhan text. These passages are assembled in Mimesis in Laws of Media. ↩
  11. Page 123-124. Mimesis is here (and in the preceding citation) seen as what was lost along with oral culture in Greece, whereas it is elsewhere said to have been what was gained with that loss. Compare the present passage (“mimesis gave way to individualized detachment, and the integral resonating oral logos was broken into multiple fragments”) with, for example, passages from Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1960, above: “mimesis was a recent invention“, “the ascendancy of eye over the other senses gave us the miracle of mimesis”. This sort of striking ambiguity is not infrequent with McLuhan, but it does not amount to outright contradiction (as is often alleged). Instead, he is using ‘mimesis’ in different senses. Laws of Media notes something of this complexity as follows: “there has been great confusion for many centuries over certain matters crucial to an understanding of acoustic space, for example, the natures of logos, of mimesis, and of formal causality. This confusion flows directly from the fact that all commentary and research, from Aristotle onwards, was conducted by persons, to one or another degree visually biased, who assumed visual space to be the common-sense norm. As a result, there are at least two forms or rather versions of mimesis and of logos and of formal cause. One of each has an oral structure, and the other a visual — with the former conventionally regarded as a confused or tentative attempt to explain the latter.” (4) ↩

Nous poietikos, agent intellect

The nous poietikos or agent intellect as “imitation” belongs to McLuhan’s family of terms ‘simulate-simulation’, ‘mimesis-mime-mimicry‘, ‘making’, etc. He seems to have been concerned with the nous poietikos chiefly in the 1948-1954 period.

Difficulties of Yvor Winters,19481 
Coleridge was quite right in lifting from Kant the idea of the esemplastic or creative imagination since it was the nearest Kant could get to the nous poietikos by which in the hylomorphic philosophy the active intelligence reveals the intelligible species of things present. (…) The nous poetikos makes of every moment of human perception a creative activity.2

Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process,1951
In the Poetics (Chap. 4) Aristotle mentions imitation as connate to man, being the process by which men learn. But this fact is not linked with the power of abstraction which in the De Anima he attributes to the nous poietikos, or the agent intellect. That there is, however, a degree of poetic imitation in abstraction itself, is plain from the fact that even in sensation “things exist in the soul without their proper matter, but with the singularity and individuating conditions which are the result of matter.” (St. Thos., De Anima, article 13) That this is so is the effect of the nous poietikos, which has the power of individuating anew in a bodily organ that which it has abstracted from existence. “For in things made by art the action of an instrument is terminated in the form intended by the artisan.” (St. Thos., De Anima, article 12) Again, “For every object produced by art is the effect of the action of an artificer, the agent intellect being related to the phantasms illuminated by it as an artificer is to the things made by his art.” (article 5). And in the same place the creative efficacy of the nous poietikos as “illuminative” is referred to the text in the Psalms (4:7) “The light of thy countenance is signed upon us, O Lord.”
For Joyce and Eliot all art is a shadow of the Incarnation,3 and every artist is dedicated to revealing, or epiphanizing the signatures of things, so that what the nous poietikos is to perception and abstraction the artist is to existence at large: “The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and reembody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.” (Stephen Hero, 78)
Ordinary experience is a riot of imprecision, of impressions enmeshed in preconceptions, cliches, profanities and impercipience. But for the true artist every experience is capable of an epiphany: “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself….Imagine my glimpses of that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.” (Stephen Hero, 211) 

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being [subj gen] within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being [obj gen]. (…) Cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being (…) 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.4

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 even as we may say that the movie parrots the world. Languages themselves are thus the greatest of all works of art. They are the collective hymns to existence. 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.

Memory Theatre Encounter 1967
When the Schoolmen translated Aristotle’s phrase nous poietikos they used the words “intellectus agens” or the agent intellect. The function of the agent or making intellect extends to the very idea of knowing. Knowing as making is an idea central to Aristotle and Aquinas. 

  1. Submitted to Sewanee Review and perhaps elsewhere, but never published. Like other work of McLuhan, this essay bore several different titles over time. More than 20 years later, McLuhan recalled it: “Years ago I wrote an essay on Winters entitled ‘Rhymer Reditus’. (…) Winters pushed criticism into a pattern of concept minus percept, which was also an unwitting parody of paraphrase and poetic commentary of the preceding time (namely that of Thomas Rhymer, 1643–1713, hence the ‘Rhymer Reditus’ title). The great discovery of the Symbolists had been the need to start with effects even when dealing with ideas and systems. To perceive a theory or a philosophy as itself an object for aesthetic experience and testing…” (Roles, Masks, and Performance, 1971) ↩
  2. Two decades later in his Playboy interview: “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and 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 — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” The unpublished Winters essay shows that this shift was in full swing by 1948 at the latest: “The nous poetikos makes of every moment of human perception a creative activity.” ↩
  3. “All art is a shadow of the Incarnation” — at once illuminating (because grounded in the Incarnation) and obscuring (because shadowing) . ↩
  4. Also in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’: “The drama of ordinary perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being.” And: “The poet differs from other men only in his conscious ability to arrest the intake of experience and to reverse the flow. By this means he is able to externalize in a work the actual process by which each of us in perception or cognition incarnates the external world of experience. But every word uttered by man requires a large measure of the poetic ability. Our words are analogies of the miracle by which we incarnate and utter the world.” ↩

Simulation

McLuhan deploys packages of related terms throughout his work. Understanding his thought requires that these packages be teased apart to uncover how they work, that is, to see how similarities and differences operate within them.1

One such package includes ‘simulation’ and ‘mimesis‘-‘mime’-‘mimic’ — and would have included ‘meme’ had the term become current before the last years of McLuhan’s life.2 

Here in chronological order are passages in which McLuhan uses the words ‘simulate’ and ‘simulation’. With the exception of an isolated example from 1947, all fall within the 1963-1971 time period:

the academic mind (…) would simulate a passionate perception which it cannot feel. (The Southern Quality, 1947)3 

The next extension of man will be the simulation of the process of consciousness itself.4 (MM to Harry Skornia October 4, 1963)5

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. (Understanding Media, 1964, 3-4) 6

the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could bypass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s. (Understanding Media, 1964, 130)7

Computers (…) can be made to simulate the process of consciousness, just as our electric global networks now begin to simulate the condition of our central nervous system. But a conscious computer would still be one that was an extension of our consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes, or as a ventriloquist’s dummy is an extension of the ventriloquist.  (Understanding Media, 1964, 351)8

Another way of looking at our situation today in the age of cybernation and information machines is to say that from the time of the origin of script and wheel, men have been engaged in extending their bodies technologically. They have created instruments that simulated and exaggerated and fragmented our various physical powers for the exertion of force, for the recording of data, and for the speeding of action and association. With the advent of electromagnetism, a totally new organic principle came into play. Electricity made possible the extension of the human nervous system as a new social environment. (Cybernetics and Human Culture 1964)

It is one of the mysteries of cybernation that it is forever challenged by the need to simulate consciousness. In fact, it will be limited to simulating specialist activities of the mind for some time to come. In the same way, our technologies have for thousands of years simulated not the body, but fragments thereof. It was in the city alone that the image of the human body as a unity became manifest. (Cybernetics and Human Culture 1964)9 

In the case the astronauts they have to take the planet with them in order to survive. We have now had to build space capsule environments that include the planet. We have to be so much involved in our own planetary forces and gravitations and so that we can simulate it. The old idea of participation in natural forces was by simulation — the tribal dancing and so on was done by mimicry of the natural forces in order to control them. Well, that’s what modern science does. Modern science mimics nature in all its levels. (McLuhan to Studs Terkel, 1966) 

electric technology enables us to mime or simulate the old planetary environment in our [space] capsules. (The Emperor’s Old Clothes 1966)

In his Poetics (Chapter IV, 1448b), Aristotle reminded us that mimesis is the process by which all men learn. He alluded to the process of making by which our perceptions simulate within us the environment that we encounter outside ourselves.  It is this learning and making process that, by electric circuitry, is being extended beyond our central nervous system. The next phase of this extension will naturally concern the action of making consciousness technologically. What we have called education in recent centuries has consisted in visiting or in simulating as many earlier environments and cultures as possible. Language is unrivaled in providing the actual sensuous modalities of other environments, with their unique ground rules. Electric circuitry can become a means to bypass language and plug directly into other modes of consciousness.  (The Emperor’s Old Clothes 1966)10

The all-at-onceness of the electronic environment dispenses with connections. To this degree does it not simulate our unconscious? Having long supposed that the next extension of man would be that of his consciousness, it strikes me as only too fitting that all the while it was the unconscious that had been externalized.11 That is, it is a fitting mark of my own inability to see the present.12 (McLuhan to Warren Brodey, February, 8, 1967)

Consciousness (…) is a specialist and fragmentary operation which works by exclusion rather than inclusion. The subconscious by contrast is inclusive rather than exclusive  It accepts all things and all times and all places, and accepts them all-at-once. That is why electronic information services can simulate the character of the unconscious so readily.  These same services involve us in depth in all the past and present experiences of the race, creating a profoundly mythic milieu for living, if not for thinking. (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest 1967)

The computer enables you to simulate any type of situation, a learning situation, a war situation, way in advance of its coming into reality. (CBC Interview of McLuhan by Bob Quintell, , 1967)

Art is ceasing to be a special kind of object to be inserted in a special kind of space. The sense of participation in the art process has reached an extreme in the so-called “Happenings,” which are plausible simulations of environmental control. (Through the Vanishing Point, 1968)

the story line in the minotaur myth is that of human cognition, leading to the confrontation with human identity, which is the monster. This is what [the] labyrinth was. It simulated the act of cognition.13 (Exploration of museum communication, 1969)

The [trips induced by] hallucinogenic drugs, as chemical simulations of our electric environment,14 thus revive senses long atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical culture.15 (Playboy Interview, 1969)

The motorcar has been obsolete for some time but it may be some quite irrelevant aspect of the car that will finally finish it off. The car, as a means of concentrating workers, or polluting environments with both hardware and smog, seems to continue quite merrily. Its persistence in spite of numerous inconveniences may be due to some hidden factor such as its simulation of the space capsule, providing a carapace for the human organism in an ever more intimidating environment. In other words, transportation may not be the reason for the continuance of the car at all. (Innovation is Obsolete, 1971)

No greater fulfillment of the visual man’s preference has occurred than the faking of the real world in the “software” world of “celluloid” and the silver screen. In this “reel world” a vast simulation of the outer realities was provided as a fantasia of the semiconscious movie patrons. (Take Today, 95-96)

 

 

 

  1. See note 3 for example. ↩
  2. Richard. Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976. Chapter 11 is ‘Memes: the new replicators’. ↩
  3. ‘Simulate’ is used here to mean ‘put on’, ‘pretend’, ‘dissemble’, etc. It is deceptive and decidedly negative. Later it becomes something more like ‘account for’, ‘formulate an algorithm for’, ‘provide a demonstrable discipline of’, ‘set out an investigative field for’, etc.  It is revealing and decidedly positive. Yet another meaning emerges when he maintains in Through the Vanishing Point (1968) that “happenings (…) are plausible simulations of environmental control”, where the sense is ‘provide an example of’, ‘show the ultimate implications of’, etc. ↩
  4. See McLuhan to Warren Brodey, February 8, 1967, cited in the post above, where McLuhan corrects this notion from the extension of consciousness to the extension of the unconscious. ↩
  5. The letter to Skornia continues: “I think it will occur in the 1960’s. It does not mean the end of private awareness, rather a huge heightening of same via involvement in corporate energies. Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive, Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously.” “Corporate awareness” here is “all moments (…) simultaneously” in the same way as chemistry is “all moments” of material nature “simultaneously”. McLuhan’s notion is that human experience must become just as conscious of its own laws and properties as it has come to know, mostly in the last two centuries, those of physical entities. ↩
  6. Regarding “the technological simulation of consciousness”, see McLuhan to Warren Brodey, February 8, 1967, per note 4 above. ↩
  7. Regarding “the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness” see note 4 above. ↩
  8. Regarding “simulate the process of consciousness” and “extension of our consciousness”, see note 4 above. ↩
  9. Regarding “the need to simulate consciousness”, see note 4 above. ↩
  10. Regarding “the action of making consciousness technologically”, see note 4 above. ↩
  11. See MM to Harry Skornia October 4, 1963 above — and the following passages which also speak of the extension of consciousness, not of the unconscious. ↩
  12. Fine example of McLuhan’s self-depreciation which is nearly always missed in assessments of his work which commonly take it to be absurdlyly self-aggrandizing. ↩
  13. Beginning around 1950, McLuhan investigated the notion of “the identity of the processes of cognition and creation” — “artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience” (Playboy Interview). ↩
  14. Compare Laws of Media 83: “the caricature of inner or right-hemisphere awareness experienced by the drug culture of hallucinogenics (…) provides an artificial mimesis of the electric information environment.” ↩
  15. McLuhan continues: “LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, furthermore, breed a highly tribal and communally oriented subculture, so it’s understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.” ↩

McLuhan and Plato 13: epyllion

In his unpublished notes on ‘little epic’ from the middle or late 1950s, McLuhan makes these interesting points regarding Plato:

  • “There is nothing that was later known as idyll and epyllion in Alexandria that was not familiar to Plato and Aristotle.”
  • “There was nothing new about little epic to Plato and Aristotle — the Platonic dialogues can be read as epiphanies of truth obtained in the ritual tracing of the labyrinths of dialectic.”

A decade or so later, in ‘Toward an Inclusive Consciousness’, 1967:

Plato and Aristotle, the representatives of the new literate culture of Greece in philosophy, had this same doubleness. They straddled the written and oral traditions. They translated the tribal encyclopedia of the preceding culture into the written, classified form.1 

The same point is made regarding Aristotle in Laws of Media:

Aristotle and others were working with one foot in each world, as it were, using the new forms of [literate] awareness but trying to retain or update the ideas of the old oral culture. (33)

‘Doubleness’ was the central characteristic of the little epic (epyllion) for McLuhan. In his view its labyrinthine character amounted to a resonance between distinct plots, styles and lessons. ‘Dialectic’ in Plato could be seen as the attempt to instill acquaintance with this resonance — via this resonance.

  1. McLuhan seems to have taken this point from G.R. Levy. His ‘Maritain on Art’ (1953) quotes Levy’s Gate of Horn (1948) on what she saw “Plato and Aristotle as having been consciously engaged in doing”, namely: “Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis. The relation of created things to the ‘pattern laid up in heaven’ is, as we saw, that methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis, the ‘imitation’ by which the living world was built upon the Pythagorean numbers.” The same passage from Levy is cited in McLuhan’s Wyndham Lewis essay later that year of 1953. ↩

Predicting the present

John Kettle’s 1965 article, ‘Marshall McLuhan: Prophet and Analyst of the Age of Instant Knowledge’,1 ends with some observations by McLuhan which uncannily look ahead to 1968 — 3 years later.

Kettle concludes his article with McLuhan’s “response (verbatim, complete)2 to my request for biographical detail”:

I like being Canadian. Being Canadian is to be a 19th century person in a very special sense. The Canadian can use his country as a DEW Line for the whole century. A Canadian knows more about Americans than anybody; they’re his immediate environment.
I have this immediate sense of the 20th century as very odd, surreal — as if the whole thing had been done by Dali, very witty, full of the most crazy conceits and witticisms. In my youth I merely rejected it totally as unfit for human habitation. Now I look at the 20th century as a new form.

The Dali TV Guide cover for June 8-14, 1968 elicited many comments from McLuhan.

The first Dew-Line newsletter, “Black Is Not A Color”, McLuhan Dew-Line Newsletter I/1, appeared in July 1968.

McLuhan’s Playboy Interview was published in 1969 but recorded in 1968:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.3

 

  1. John Kettle, ‘Marshall McLuhan: Prophet and Analyst of the Age of Instant Knowledge: Easing the Technological Burden of Western Man’, Canada Month, October 1965, 10-12. ↩
  2. The bracketed specification is from Kettle. ↩
  3. Full passage: “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and 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 — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” ↩

Global Conference on the Future

“The First Global Conference on the Future” was held in Toronto, July 20-25, 1980. It was sponsored jointly by the World Future Society and the Canadian Futures Society.1

Marshall McLuhan was given an award for his outstanding futures writings. He was in declining health at the time and as he struggled to the front to receive the award, his son Eric had to assist him. (Looking Back on the Future, 157)2

McLuhan died 5 months later on New Year’s Eve.

  1. The 59 page brochure for the conference is available at the Internet Archive:
    ↩

  2. Looking Back on the Future by Fred G. Thompson (1992) describes the conference in Chapter 18, ‘The Great Global Conference of 1980’, 153-159:

    Thompson was a friend of McLuhan and at the time was Director of Communications Studies at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa. ↩

Minotaur

In the myth of Dedalus the Greeks symbolized several matters. Primarily responsible for the Minotaur, he destroyed many generations of hopeful youth. The Minotaur he preserved by a labyrinth of great ingenuity whereby, says Francis Bacon, “is shadowed the nature of mechanical sciences, for all such handicraft works as are more ingenious and accurate may be compared to a labyrinth in respect of subtlety and divers intricate passages (…) For mechanical arts are of ambiguous use, serving as well for hurt as for remedy.” (Typhon in America, ca 1948)1

Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a “minotour” which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision or vagueness, is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

Joyce (…) wanted and got a simultaneous control of widest perspectives and the most intimate and evanescent moments of apprehension. And this he was able to achieve by analysis of the labyrinth of cognition which Aristotle and Aquinas had revealed to him. It is thus, for example, that he is able to include in the first two pages [of The Portrait of the Artist] the entire experience of the race, the ground plan of all his unwritten work, and the most individual features of Stephen’s expanding awareness. The opening words place the hero in the traditional labyrinth and confront him with a minotaur adopted to his infant years: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…”. Stephen Hero is so named because the artist in that work confronts and slays scores of minotaurs. The book swarms with labyrinths of many kinds and levels. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

Traditionally there are two kinds of labyrinth, stone and sea, eye and ear. Joyce uses both constantly. (…) The moment of arrest is an epiphany, a moment not in time’s covenant, and it is by the bringing of complex perceptions to a focus in such moments that the minotaurs of the labyrinths are always overcome. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

Know-how is so eager and powerful an ally of human needs that it is not easily controlled or kept in a subordinate role, even when directed by spectacular wisdom. Harnessed merely to a variety of blind appetites for power and success, it draws us swiftly into that labyrinth at the end of which waits the minotaur. So it is in this period of passionate acceleration that the world of the machines begins to assume the threatening and unfriendly countenance of an inhuman wilderness even less manageable than that which once confronted prehistoric man. Reason is then swiftly subdued by panic desires to acquire protective coloration. As terrified men once got ritually and psychologically into animal skins, so we already have gone far to assume and to propagate the behavior mechanisms of the machines that frighten and overpower us.2 (The Mechanical Bride, 1951)

the labyrinth with its accompanying association of the Minotaur, symbol of the encounter with the self. (Through the Vanishing Point, 1968)3

the story line in the minotaur myth is that of human cognition, leading to the confrontation with human identity, which is the monster. (Exploration of the ways, means, and values of museum communication with the viewing public, 1969)

Daedalus, the mightiest maker or engineer of an­tiquity, contrived the labyrinth that enclosed the Minotaur. The first page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concerns the cognitive labyrinth as it is traversed by Stephen, the artist hero, in his first encounter with the Minotaur and the other scandals (cf. Greek etymology)4. Stephen’s surname is not Daedalus but “Dedalus,” i.e., “dead all us.” Joyce’s last story in Dubliners, “The Dead,” and the last lines of the Portrait explain the relation of the young artist to the dead; “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of ex­perience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated con­science of my race.” This verbal implication of ricorso, the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth, which is traced on the first page of the Portrait, is the task of making sense, of waking the somnambulists in the labyrinth of cognition. (From Cliché to Archetype, 1970)5

Q — is television a monster? A — Yes. It’s literally a tribal monster like the Minotaur from Greek mythology trapped in a maze of sensation. This Bull-man monster swallowed humans lost in the maze. And that’s exactly what TV does. Some of our young are fed to the Minotaur every year. (McLuhan on the Evils of TV, 1977)

  1. Book III. ↩
  2. “As terrified men once got ritually and psychologically into animal skins, so we already have gone far to assume and to propagate the behavior mechanisms of the machines that frighten and overpower us.” Compare McLuhan to Pound, June 22, 1951: “Consider the effect of modern machinery in imposing rhythm on human thought and feeling. Archaic man got inside the thing that terrified him — tiger, bear, wolf — and made it his totem god. To-day we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human machines are geared to smash one another. You can’t shout warnings or encouragement to these machines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe only turned men into swine. Our problem is tougher.” (Letters 227). ↩
  3. Page 219. ↩
  4. The bracketed suggestion is from McLuhan. ↩
  5. Page 148-149. ↩

Easterbrook on Innis

In 1978 Tom Easterbrook participated in the University of Toronto oral history project, completing 4 roughly one-hour tapes between November 27 and December 8 that year.

The Easterbrook tapes are very disappointing, not only because the quality of the recordings is often poor, but especially because the questioner seems to have been more interested in the minutiae of the administration of the Political Economics department than in Easterbrook’s incomparably more important relations with Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Easterbrook’s intimate interactions with Innis in the 1951-1952 period, when Innis was dying, are mentioned only in regard to Easterbrook taking over Innis’ course on communications.1 And the 1953-1955 Ford seminar on culture and technology, where Easterbook worked with Ted Carpenter, Carl Williams, Jacky Tyrwhitt and McLuhan, is hardly touched upon in passing. 

Both Williams and McLuhan were decades-long friends of Easterbrook from the University of Manitoba and Easterbrook and Williams were grad students at UT at the same time in the mid 1930’s when McLuhan was at Cambridge. The three were then colleagues at the University of Toronto for around 30 years beginning in the 1940s until Williams left UT to become president of the University of Western Ontario. Information from Easterbrook about the relations of the three friends over the 1930-1978 period would have been priceless, especially concerning the dynamics of the Ford seminar. 

The eight-minute passage transcribed here from the first tape2 gives an abbreviated overview of Easterbrook’s relation with Harold Innis. Innis was Easterbrook’s PhD thesis adviser in the mid 1930s and arranged the 1938 University of Toronto Press publication of that thesis, Farm Credit in Canada, with a ‘Foreword’ by Innis himself. Easterbrook’s observations have been edited for clarity here, but can easily be checked against the original via the link given in the second footnote below.

Then something [happened] that changed my whole life (…) I had heard about a guy named Innis, who (…) had an awful lot to say if you cared to listen. So I went along to a class (…) and watched this (…) figure walk in with some scrappy looking notes and stand in front of the class. He seemed to be completely unaware that anyone was present. Pedagogically this was a disaster. He read this stuff and, you know, that seemed to me heresy. I’d been raised in what seemed to me the oral tradition where, if you knew your stuff, you spouted it and you kept people alive [to the flow of the lecture]. 

I don’t think he was ever really aware of the size of an audience or cared very much [about it]. There was a story that during a blizzard he arrived in a great hall (…) and I think three people had arrived out of a hundred or so [enrolled students]. I was told that he [nevertheless] gave the full lecture. 

On the other hand, what caught me was that this was an exploring mind at work and this was his own work. Now this was something new to me. For years I’d been listening to professors spouting about the work of others. [In contrast], this [from Innis] was hard rock mining in Canadian scholarly areas of research. When he talked, it was his work. And the lessons he drew from seemingly minor incidents, you know, like how steam points in the Klondike revolutionized the [gold mining] industry up there and then [could be] traced through the whole effects of what was a much more massive change than I’d realized because I’d had no historical background at all. I’d avoided history as poison in Manitoba because of my high school experience where you memorized kings from now to kingdom come (…).

So I was caught. 

Now there was a problem. I talked to him and while he never talked much, for a man who was such a communications expert in his field it was very hard to engage in dialogue with him. (…) He’d say, ‘it’s interesting’ or something — but l don’t ever remember the kind of spontaneous open discussion that I had with McLuhan and several others over the years. It never worked [with Innis]. On the other hand, when you left him, you were fired up [to get on with your work]. (…)

So I began very intensive studies of Canadian economic history right from the beginning, the French period and all the rest of it, and discovered that Innis had a helluva lot to say and that he had the most revealing mind I’ve ever encountered. He could take a simple fact like the contrast between drying [salted ashore] and green [salted onboard] fisheries. They had the most physical difference and the most profound effects on the trading systems of two empires and their relationships with the new world. He saw a whole set of interrelationships from what often seemed to be a very simple proposition into quite a network of change with a definite sense of pattern to it. It was exciting. I tried to tell students who didn’t read his Fur Trade, they ought to read it just to see how you have the whole thing laid out. That’s why it’s such an interesting book. You have tremendous massing of evidence, [the details of] quintal [weights, and so on] — and then [you have] the purple passage, the pulling [everything] together. It’s just like raising a curtain on the whole thing. A whole set of revelations appears in just two or three paragraphs and then you’re back into the sifting, the turning over, [of further details]. His processing seemed to be to sift, turn over, work with material until, intuitively, a sense of pattern emerges, in which he could relate a whole series of elements in terms of their interactions against the background of change regarded in the Gestalt sense.3

[Lately] I’ve been trying to absorb some of this in a course in the physics area, and I’m astonished how many of the findings that they regard as very modern in modern science involve a methodology that is very similar to the one [Innis] adopted.4 (…)

[In my grad work in the 1930s] I carried on doing a bit of statistics on banking and then [got] going into Innis and doing something on early farm finance. (…) My whole interest had shifted to Innis.5 (…) I swung completely over [to him]. So then followed nearly three years [~1934-1937] of intensive work [by me] largely devoted to Innis’s preoccupations… 

 

  1. This may be one more nail in the coffin of McLuhan’s account of his meeting Innis. For discussion see McLuhan on first meeting Innis. But if Innis gave over his communications course to Easterbrook, presumably in 1951, McLuhan’s account falls apart completely. ↩
  2. William Thomas James Easterbrook (oral history, part 1) — 27 November, 1978, 32.10–40:10. ↩
  3. Easterbrook’s appeal to Gestalt here, and to the similarities between methodologies in the humanities and modern sciences, doubtless reflects the influence of McLuhan. Since 1964, when he first read Wolfgang Köhler‘s Gestalt Psychology, McLuhan had been talking incessantly about the Gestalt relation of figure and ground. Meanwhile, since meeting Sigfried Giedion in 1943, and reading Giedion’s work as a result, McLuhan had come to share Giedion’s view that the hidden ‘orchestration’ of the methodologies in the humanities and modern sciences needed to be brought to light and investigated in a ‘Faculty of Interrelations’. For discussion see Sigfried Giedion — A Faculty of Interrelations and Faculty of Interrelation in Toronto. ↩
  4. See the previous note. ↩
  5. A contemporary review of Farm Credit in Canada begins by indicating its Innisian methodology: “The eighty-five pages of notes which supplement the 169 pages of text indicate the character of this book”. ↩

Crump’s Epyllion

McLuhan often referred to Marjorie Crump’s 1931 The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid.1 For example, in his ‘Intro­duction’ to Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry, published in 1955, but apparently written and submitted years earlier, perhaps as early as 1951, he cites Crump describing “the general characteristics of this form” (Crump, 22) as follows: 

An epyllion is a short narrative poem. The length may and does vary considerably, but an epyllion seems never to have exceeded the length of a single book, and probably the average length was four to five hundred lines. The sub­ject is sometimes merely an incident in the life of an epic hero or heroine, sometimes a complete story, the ten­dency of the author being to use little-known stories or possibly even to invent new ones. The later Alexandrians and Romans preferred love stories and usually concen­trated the interest on the heroine. (Crump, 22)2

This same passage from Crump was then re-cited decades later in From Cliché to Archetype (1970) in the course of a long self-quotation there from that same Tennyson ‘Introduction’:

The only extensive study of this form is Marjorie Crump’s The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid, which is discussed in the Intro­duction to Tennyson by Marshall McLuhan3: “The so-called art of the little epic (the idyll and epyllion) was a late Greek form associated with magical rituals. It was especially cultivated by Theocritus, who was Tennyson’s favorite poet. Theocritus and the Alexandrian school were di­rectly responsible for “the new poetry” of Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil.
The work of Theocritus, Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil, masters of the epyllion, needs to be known for any deep understanding of Tennyson’s technique in narrative poetry. But the discontinuous technique of the epyllion is equally the clue to the art form of Dubliners, of The Waste Land, and of The Cantos. Professor Crump describes the epyllion as follows: ‘… a short narrative poem. The length may and does vary considerably, but an epyllion seems never to have exceeded the length of a single book, and probably the average length was four to five hundred lines. The sub­ject is sometimes merely an incident in the life of an epic hero or heroine, sometimes a complete story, the ten­dency of the author being to use little-known stories or possibly even to invent new ones. The later Alexandrians and Romans preferred love stories and usually concen­trated the interest on the heroine.’ (…) Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the little epic as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is ‘the tale of the tribe.’ That is to say, it is not so much a story of the in­dividual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man. From this point of view ‘In Memoriam’, like Petrarch’s Sonnets, is a seasonal cycle of little epics or idylls in the form of the individual quest. And the Idylls of the King is the collective quest, the tale of the tribe. The twelve idylls follow the cycle of the zodiac, each book corresponding faith­fully to the traditional character of the twelve ‘houses’ of the zodiac. By following this traditional zodiacal track Tennyson was able over a long period to compose his twelve idylls in any order he found convenient.
The pattern of collective quest lends the prominent salva­tion note to the Idylls of the King and explains his philosophy of history. ‘The Coming of Arthur’ is thus the coming of the culture-hero, and Arthur’s struggles with the demonic earth powers are the theme of the cycle. The masculine-feminine duality of most of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King may have been suggested to him by the similar aspect of each house of the zodiac.”4

Another essay on Tennyson, the 1960 ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic‘,5 also touches on Crump’s book:

The culture-hero as conceived in our time by James Joyce (Stephen Hero) is he who has learned the technique of intercession between the profane and the divine. He is the inventor of language, the one who can capture in his net the divine powers. In her Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid, Marjorie Crump comments on the passion for abstruse erudition which attached itself to the little epic forms: “The fashion for learning affected not only the style but the choice of subject. Scholars searched their records for unknown myths, strange customs and marvels of all kinds. The idea of explaining some custom or ceremony, which appears in certain of the Attic tragedies, took firm root in Alexandrine poetry, and gave rise to the Aitia of Callimachus and to various poems dealing with ktiseis or the founding of cities.”6 Here is an aspect of little epic which never leaves the form whether it is cultivated by Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, or Marlowe. But its major phase is found in Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. Digression is the principal artistic device by which little epic exists. The reason for this is quite simple. To transcend time one simply interrupts the natural flow of events.7 

McLuhan wrote an introduction (‘Empedocles and T.S. Eliot’) to Empedocles by Helle Lambridis which appeard in 1976. Here again Crump is referenced after a citation from Empedocles:

“I shall speak a double truth;
at times one alone comes into being;
at other times out of one several things grow.
Double is the birth of mortal things and double their demise.
For the coming together of all both causes their birth
and destroys them; and separation nurtured in theirbeing makes them fly apart. These things never stop
changing throughout, at times coming together throughAmity in one whole, at other times being violently
separated by Strife. Thus, on one side, one whole
is formed out of many, and then again, wrenched from
each other, they make up many out of one. This is
the way they become, and their life is not long their
own, but in as far as they never stop changing throughout,in so far they are always immobile in a circle.” (…)
[McLuhan:] Empedocles (…) stresses “a double truth”. This is a matter central to Eliot, but it is also closely involved in the work of Yeats, who, as I have suggested, has elucidated the procedure in his brief essay on “The Emotion of Multitude”.8 This emotion, or sense of the universal in the particular, is born of “a double truth”, somewhat in the mode of Quantum Mechanics where the chemical bond is the result not of a connection but of a “resonant interval” such as must obtain between the wheel and the axle. The means [or media!] indicated by Yeats for achieving the emotion of multitude are familiar to modern students of Shakespeare under the head of “double plots”, and these means were taught in antiquity as essential to the aitiological epic or the Epyllion. (See Marjorie Crump’s The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid.)9

One of McLuhan’s last publications, the 1979 ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’10 reverts to Crump once again: 

The discontinuous epyllion, or mythic, structure, as Marjorie Crump explains, requires a plot and digression, or a double plot, which constitutes a metamorphic structure of figure in interplay with ground — necessary to the etiological epic, a study of origins and causes.

One chapter in Crump must have particularly struck McLuhan, reminding him of Eric Havelock’s 3-part essay, ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’, which was published in the first year McLuhan taught at UT, 1946-1947. Since McLuhan does not appear to have read Crump before the early 1950s, it must have been this essay by Havelock, McLuhan’s UT colleague at the time, which introduced him to the epyllion form and may have prompted him to the study of Virgil which he made over the next decade.11

Crump’s chapter begins:

The story of Aristreus, which closes the fourth Georgic, is the most beautiful of the Latin epyllia. Embodying, as it does, Vergil’ s most finished work in the epic style, it has at once the technical perfection (…) and the poetic beauty of Vergil’s greatest period. So direct is the narrative and so great the charm that it is almost a shock to the critic to discover that it is constructed on the lines of the formal epyllion, and is a genuine product of Alexandria. It is, in fact, an Alexandrian epyllion transfigured by that undefinable quality which constitutes the genius of Vergil.12 (178)

It was Havelock’s essay exactly on this Aristaeus episode in Georgics 4 (perhaps itself suggested by Crump’s monograph), that prompted McLuhan to a study of the epyllion form and of Virgil’s use of it — studies he began in the late 1940s. And it was these, not without other factors like his encounters at that time with Mallarmé and Innis, that prompted McLuhan to a changed sense of the “intercession between the profane and the divine’ (as cited above from his 1960 Tennyson essay). And it was this shift that entailed the great change recorded by him in his 1969 Playboy interview:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride,13 I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and 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 — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.14

The great lesson from the epyllion form is put by Crump as follows:

The digression [on Orpheus and Eurydice] obeys the [Alexandrian] convention which requires a contrast of style in the two parts of the epyllion.15  The convention of a contrast and yet a parallel in subject is also observed. The main subject [Aristaeus and his bees] is the story of a loss, which is ultimately made good. The digression [Orpheus and Eurydice] tells of loss without recovery, the pathos being heightened by the frustrated restoration of Eurydice [from Hades]. Underlying the pathos is the moral, characteristic of many of Vergil’s tragic stories, that the consequences of guilt fall most heavily on innocent people. Aristaeus, who is responsible for the whole tragedy, ultimately recovers his bees; for Orpheus and Eurydice there is no recovery. (189-190)

Until he was around 40, McLuhan had seen only the contrast between the  tradition he revered and the modernity he detested. He had not also seen the parallel between them. And it was this change of vantage from mere exclusion — only difference — to inclusion — difference and unity — that  spurred him to become a student of the two of them at once.

 

 

  1. The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid, by M. Marjorie Crump. Pp. viii + 284. Oxford: Blackwell. 1931. ↩
  2. Crump continues here: “The style varies; it may be entirely narrative, or may be decorated with descriptive passages of a realistic character. The dramatic form is frequently employed, and it is usual to find at least one long speech. So far the only distinction between the epyllion and the narrative hymn consists in the subject. A hymn always tells the story of a god, whereas an epyllion deals with human beings; gods may appear as characters, but there is no emphasis on their divinity. There is, however, one characteristic of the epyllion which sharply distinguishes it from other types, namely the digression. Except the Hylas of Theocritus, all the extant epyllia before the time of Ovid possess digressions. The digression is a second story, often of great length, con­tained within the first, and frequently quite unconnected with it in subject. Usually it appears as a story told by one of the characters; less commonly as a description of a work of art. Judging from the extant examples, it seems to have been the practice to secure an artistic connection between the two parts of the poem by using parallel subjects and contrasting the details; or two definitely contrasting subjects might be chosen; in many cases there is also a contrast of style. (…) The digression is probably an inheritance from both Homer and Hesiod. The Shield of Achilles and the narrative of Odysseus are obvious Homeric examples (…) But in Homer the important digressions are an integral part of the whole story, while any irrelevant matter is kept strictly subordinate to the main interest. In the epyllion the digression is often as important as the main subject, and sometimes even becomes the more important of the two, the main subject acting as a framework. Here we find the Hesiodic tradition at work, for the genealogical catalogue had to depend for its interest on its narrative digression. The general style of the epyllion is that of all Alexandrian poetry, formal, allusive, learned. The language and atmosphere are more homely than those of grand epic, and a graceful use of realism gives great charm to the work of some poets.” (Crump, 22-23-24) ↩
  3. McLuhan and Wilfred Watson refer to McLuhan in the third person here. ↩
  4. From Cliché to Archetype, pp. 94-96. McLuhan and Watson continue here: “For each planet’s day home is located in a positive masculine sign, and its night home in a negative or feminine sign.” The wokers will jump on this as an indication of McLuhan’s prejudice and ignorance and as reason to cancel him. But McLuhan’s life was in fact happily dominated by women — by his mother Elsie, his wife Corinne, his secretary Marg Stewart and his 4 daughters, Mary, Teri, Stephanie and Elizabeth. Over and over again in his work he praises the feminine ability to multitask roles. In his view, women are more ‘electric’ than men, less Gutenbergian, and therefore more likely than men to lead the world in healthy directions. So ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are used here not in an evaluative sense, but in the electro-magnetic sense of interactive poles. ↩
  5. ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic’ in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham, 1960, 86–95. ↩
  6. Crump, 14. McLuhan cites this same passage in his unpublished notes on the little epic dating from the 1950s. ↩
  7. For Crump on digression in the epyllion form see note 2 above. ↩
  8. See Yeats on the emotion of multitude. ↩
  9. The bracketed reference here is from McLuhan. The same point about “the aitiological epic” had been made in a letter from him to Joe Keogh in 1969: “Apropos aitios, remember it is the technical term for ‘little epic’, cf. Marjorie Crump.” ↩
  10. ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’, New Literary History, 10:3, Spring 1979. ↩
  11. For references and discussion, see Jackson Knight on “the main question” and The Road to Xanadu. ↩
  12. Crump and other British scholars like Jackson Knight preferred the ‘Vergil’ spelling to ‘Virgil’. ↩
  13. The Mechanical Bride appeared early in 1951. But it was largely composed in the late 1940s. ↩
  14. McLuhan’s realization “that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures” might be formulated as the artist’s “sense of the universal in the particular” and of the “intercession between the profane and the divine”. ↩
  15. For Crump on digression in the epyllion form see note 2 above. ↩

Gutenberg Quincentenary 1940

For the academic year 1939-1940, McLuhan had a sabbatical from his teaching position at St Louis University. He and his wife Corinne, who married on August 4, 1939, just before their departure for England, spent the year in Cambridge where McLuhan had obtained his second BA degree three years before (following his first from the University of Manitoba in 1933). During this time, McLuhan would receive his second MA degree based on that earlier work in Cambridge (again following his first MA from the University of Manitoba in 1934) and begin systematic research for his 1943 Cambridge PhD thesis. But the time he would have for this second stint in Cambridge was cut short by WW2, forcing the McLuhans to leave prematurely for North America at the end of May 1940.

At just this time, immediately before the McLuhans’ hurried departure from Cambridge, “an exhibition of printing” was mounted at the Fitzwilliam Museum there celebrating the quincentenary of the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. The exhibition was scheduled to run from May 6 to June 23, 1940, but was closed after only 10 days, on May 16, due to the possibility of bomb damage to it from the intensifying air war. 

The excellent History of Information website records the ‘Foreword’ to the exhibition catalogue as follows:

There is no moral to this exhibition. It aims at portraying, as objectively as possible, the uses to which printing from movable type has been put since Gutenberg and his associates invented it five hundred years ago; the spread of knowledge more quickly and accurately than was possible before, the storing of human experience, the providing of entertainment, the simplification of the increasingly complicated business of living. Those books, papers, and other printing have been chosen (so far as the difficulties of the times would permit) which made most effective use of the medium of type; in other words, those which, composed and multiplied, most strongly influenced people and events. Others have been chosen for their illustration of events and trends of particular importance or interest; others again for their intrinsic curiosity as examples of the exploitation of print. All are shewn so far as possible in the original editions in which they were first presented to the world.

The exhibition has been designed therefore to illustrate the development of man’s use of movable type as a tool; its spread from Mainz through the countries of the world, through all the fields of knowledge, through the whole range of man’s activities. Running through the story another theme presents itself and draws occasional comment — the development of the actual form of printing. The technical display deals with the old and modern methods fo type-founding and composition, and briefly illustrates the development of type design. That part of the exhibition is education; for the rest, though there is much to learn from it, it does not set out to teach. It is simply an illustration to that proud but unattributed saying: 

With my twenty-six soldiers of lead I have conquered the world.1  

Although McLuhan would certainly have heard of this “exhibition of printing”, he may or may not have visited it. However that may have been, 11 years later in March 1951,2 he would write to his University of Toronto colleague, Harold Innis, that “the modern press” as a “technological form” (“the medium of type”, as the exhibition catalogue has it) was “efficacious far beyond any informative purpose”. That is, the medium of print was “efficacious far beyond” any particular message it may have been used from time to time to convey:

[Mallarmé] saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious far beyond any informative purpose.3

In the year after that, in 1952, he would announce in a letter to Ezra Pound:

I’m writing a book on “The End of the Gutenberg Era”.4

The book was profiled in the letter to Pound and its second section, “Invention of printing”, had this outline:

  • Mechanization of writing
  • Study becomes solitary
  • Decline of painting music etc in book countries
  • Cult of book and house and study
  • Cult of vernacular because of commercial possibilities
  • Republicanism via association of simple folk on equal terms with “mighty dead”.

It would be a further 10 years later, in 1962 — 22 years after the 1940 Cambridge exhibition — when McLuhan would finally publish the book under the new title of The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Now in 1963 another exhibition, Printing and the Mind of Man, was held in London which modeled itself on the 1940 one in Cambridge.

This 1963 catalogue noted: 

We pay tribute to the organizers of the Gutenberg Quincentenary Exhibition of Printing, assembled at Cambridge in 1940 (and prematurely disassembled because of the risks from enemy bombing). It was our original inspiration for several sections of our display, and its invigorating catalogue has been our constant friend.

The 1967 edition of the catalogue has a slightly different acknowledgement:

A partial attempt [“to illustrate (…) the internal development of (…) printing as a craft”] had, indeed, been made in the Gutenberg Quincentenary exhibition at Cambridge in 1940. This was a suggestive forerunner for several sections in our display, and its invigorating catalogue was a constant friend.

In regard to the work of Marshall McLuhan, several interesting questions are suggested by this history:

  • did the 1940 Exhibition of Printing in Cambridge, mounted while McLuhan was on sabbatical there, plant the seed, not only for his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, but even for his one lifelong topic of “the medium is the message”?5 
  • did rumors of the impending 1963 exhibition, Printing and the Mind of Man, finally motivate McLuhan to get The Gutenberg Galaxy out the door at last in 1962? (As noted above, he had been working intermittently on the book since at least 1952!)

 

  1. The History of Information website has an image of this ‘Foreword’. ↩
  2. What happened between 1940 and 1951 to recall or otherwise activate what McLuhan knew of technological innovations, particularly in the area of communications? Answers to this question point in several directions, the most important of which is: McLuhan’s move to the University of Toronto in 1946 and his exposure there to the work of Harold Innis and of Eric Havelock. By the middle 1940s, both of these professors, the first in Political Economy, the second in Classics, had begun to research, apparently influenced by each other, the role of communication media in historical change. Innis was already publishing in the area and Havelock’s research on the role of orality in Greek culture was widely discussed in the Toronto academic community. Now from his early mentors at the University of Manitoba, particularly Rupert Lodge, McLuhan had long been exposed to the notion that all human experience is preformed by a multiplicity of irreducible forms. His 1943 Cambridge PhD thesis examined the history of this notion in terms of the educational trivium over the 2000 years between between classical Greece in 400 BC and Elizabethan England in 1600. A 1944 lecture (published in 1946) brought this “ancient quarrel” of irreducible forms into the present. But how were these forms to be generally recognized for open investigation? And what accounted for the relative rise and fall of these forms over time? ‘Media’ (although not in a literal sense) would eventually answer these questions for McLuhan. But this realization would take decades and remained in an inchoate form until the late 1950s. In fact, in a 1975 conversation with Nina Sutton (given in James Tenney and Wolfgang Köhler) McLuhan referred even to his 1964 Understanding Media as “the early time” of his thinking! ↩
  3. McLuhan to Harold Innis, March 14, 1951, Letters 221. McLuhan would coin the phrase, “the medium is the message”, after 7 more years had passed, in 1958. See The medium is the message in 1958. ↩
  4. McLuhan to Ezra Pound, July 16, 1952, Letters 231. The End of the Gutenberg Era remained the working title for McLuhan’s book throughout the 1950s. It was changed to The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1960 or 1961 to get away from the chronological implications of ‘era’ — McLuhan had come to see that media as structural possibilities are ‘all at once’. ↩
  5. An important question (further to note 2 above): Did McLuhan engage the topic of ‘the medium is the message’ long before his coining of the phrase in 1958? Consider only that his 1943 Nashe thesis treated the three trivial arts as media in several senses. Each was regarded as a cultural medium in the laboratory sense of promoting identifiable growths. At the same time, each was regarded as a structural form (‘medium’ in another sense) whose recognition could enable collective investigation of the cultural field. These insights lie at the heart of McLuhan’s contribution, along with his slightly later one that media are ratios and that ratios may systematically be expressed in terms of their middles. ↩

James Tenney and Wolfgang Köhler

James Tenney taught at York University in Toronto for 24 years. He was a prolific and influential composer, friend of John Cage and well connected to the Toronto avant-garde musical scene.1 

Tenney’s MA thesis at the University of Illinois, META + HODOS, was published in 1961 and is subtitled “A Phenomenology of 20th-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form”. Along with its central treatment of ‘clang’,2 it repeatedly references Wolfgang Köhler‘s Gestalt Psychology.3

Tenney does not seem to have been mentioned by McLuhan and he may or may not have read Tenney’s META + HODOS.  But it could well have been through knowledge in Toronto of Tenney’s musical and theoretical work that McLuhan came to read Köhler in 1964, just after the publication of Understanding Media. Köhler’s figure/ground would, of course, be at the core of McLuhan’s work for the remaining 15 years of his life. As he said to Nina Sutton:

I was not using figure/ground [in Understanding Media]. It was in the early time [of my thinking] when I wrote that book. I was not using figure/ground. Now [1975] I have switched completely to figure/ground. (…) The medium is ground and the so-called message always figure. (…) The wheel and the axle is figure/ground. (…) They can change roles. The axle can be figure. The wheel can be ground. Or vice versa. (…) They flip all the time. Anything can become a figure to a ground and any ground can become a figure to another ground. They interrelate. (…) Remember, in figure/ground, they both work simultaneously. And it doesn’t much matter which one is top and which one is under. (…) It’s complementary, figure/ground. One has to have the other. You can’t have one without the other.4

  1. Tenney’s Collage No. 1 (‘Blue Suede’) from 1961 is said to have been an early model for John Oswald’s plunderphonics:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plunderphonics
    https://ciufo.org/classes/114_fl11/readings/Oswald_audio_culture.pdf. ↩
  2. ‘Clang’ is discussed already in McLuhan’s 1951 ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’: “T.E. Hulme on space-thinking in Speculations will lead the student back through Hartmann and Lipps on these questions. Lipps is of special importance for an understanding of Joyce, Pound, and Eliot: ‘The simple clang represents to a certain extent all music. The clang is a rhythmical system built up on a fundamental rhythm. This fundamental rhythm is more or less richly differentiated in the rhythm of the single tones.’ Theodor Lipps, Psychological Studies, 2d ed., tr. by H.C. Sanborn, Baltimore, 1926, p. 223.” The thinking here is that the same momentary process, or ‘rhythmical system’, beginning in an act of creation, underlies all cognition, from the most ordinary to the most artistic: “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. (…) Artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience” (Playboy interview).
    Lipps and clang are mentioned again in ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953): “The experiments of Lipps at the end of the last century illustrated how all possible musical structures were contained in a single clang of a bell.”
    Twenty years later in a letter to Ted Carpenter: “    You remember Theodore Lipps with his observation that all possible symphonies were contained in the single clang of a bell? Is not the same true of language? Acoustically speaking, an entire linguistic culture could be encoded acoustically in almost any phrase or pattern of that tongue.” (March 23, 1973, Letters 473) ↩
  3. The term ‘gestalt’ appears 82 times in the 95 pages of META + HODOS; Köhler is mentioned by name a further 6 times. ↩
  4. Around the same time as his conversations with Nina Sutton, McLuhan wrote to his old friend, Morton Bloomfield (the two were at the University of Wisconsin together in 1936-1937): “I have begun to realize that my peculiar approach to all matters has been to enter via the ground rather than the figure. In any gestalt the ground is taken for granted and the figure receives all the attention. The ground is subliminal, an area of effects rather than of causes.” (March 26,1973, Letters 473-474) ↩

The kinetic sense

McLuhan often ran together “the kinetic sense” or “movement” with the sense of touch, although these (“the kinetic sense” or “movement”) are usually, of course, not thought of as ‘senses’ at all. For example, here he is in one of his presentations at Fordham in September 1967:

The visual sense is the only sense we have that gives detachment: movement, touch, hearing etcetera, are very involved senses.1 

Touch was not to be taken literally, of course, but as the tactile ‘in-between’ of the other senses, particularly seeing and hearing, the eye and the ear.2 In this context, “the kinetic sense” seems to have been intended as the ‘action of tactility’, the dynamism or metaphoricity of tactility in the multiple ways the gapped ‘in-between’ of the eye and ear may be crossed.

McLuhan indicated this intention in another presentation at Fordham as follows:

the interval is very tactile — the space between sounds is not audible naturally, it’s tactile — you have to close that [space] kinetically3 

Later in this seminar he spoke of “the flash between the eye and ear”.4

The time of this tactile crossing/closing/flashing between eye and ear is first of all synchronic and vertical, not diachronic and horizontal. Consciously situating oneself (one’s self) in the complex of these times5 is the required parameter, or medium,6 of thinking with McLuhan. Once ‘there’, the following step is to consider the range of ways the crossing/closing/flashing may be effected — and is always already being effected via ‘the kinetic sense’. On that basis, it may then be de-cided7 which of these eye-tactility-ear parameters must be in place to begin the investigation of media and so to initiate its ‘new science’.

Hence the repeated citation by McLuhan of the admonition in Joyce’s Stephen Hero: 

The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action.8

  

 

  1. https://youtu.be/Tx2ed93_Lpc?t=659 ↩
  2. For McLuhan, the eye and the ear are no more to be taken literally than is the tactile. One of the central differences between the Gutenberg and Marconi galaxies is that the former demands some literal basis, while the latter is fundamentally relativistic. How beauty, goodness and truth are compatible with relativity is the great question at the heart of McLuhan’s work. ↩
  3. ‘Earopen End’ seminar, November 1967: https://youtu.be/9ABWzOmS0fM?t=192. ↩
  4. https://youtu.be/9ABWzOmS0fM?t=1337 ↩
  5. See McLuhan’s Times. ↩
  6. See Media Definition for media as “parameters”. ↩
  7. See the etymology of ‘decide’ and particularly of its cognate family of terms. ↩
  8. See The spectacle of redemption for discussion. ↩

The spectacle of redemption

The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action. (James Joyce, Stephen Hero)1

Subliminal characteristics are group dynamics. (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, March 24 1960)2

In the early 1950s, marking his way from individual literary analysis to collective multimedia investigation, McLuhan repeatedly cited a passage from Joyce’s Stephen Hero:

The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical  properties: they transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory by the light of day. (…) All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive states (…)3 It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption.4

The passage appears in ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951),  ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ (1954)5 and ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954). The two Joyce essays, in turn, were then republished in the 1960s — ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ in 1962 in  Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques;6 and ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ both in McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967) and in The Interior Landscape (1969). The net effect was to cite the passage 6 different times over a period of almost 20 years — McLuhan age 40 to 60.7

In sum, and leaving aside his own repeated discussions of these same notions, especially of “the entire community in action” as language and/or as the unconscious, McLuhan on six separate occasions marked out his way, both in anticipation and in retrospect, by citing and reciting this passage from Joyce’s Stephen Hero.

 

  1. See note #4 below for the full passage. ↩
  2. https://archive.org/details/naeb-b067-f01/page/n133/mode/1up ↩
  3. Only ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ includes “All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive states” which was Joyce’s clarification of the preceding “The modern method examines its territory by the light of day.” Tellingly, Joyce, but not McLuhan, then continued “dispenses with presumptive states” with “presumptive Redeemers and Churches”. ↩
  4. Another passage from Stephen Hero was also cited repeatedly: “What we symbolize in black the Chinaman may symbolize in yellow; each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty that has ever been adored on earth by an examination of the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action.” McLuhan has this passage both in ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951) and ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954). ↩
  5. This essay was submitted to The Sewanee Review in 1951, but published there only in 1954. ↩
  6. Edited by Thomas Connolly. For this reprinting McLuhan added a new section on The Problem of Form (1893) by Adolf Hildebrand. ↩
  7. A related passage from McLuhan himself appears in his ‘Introduction’ to Tennyson: Selected Poetry (1955): “Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the little epic (epyllion) as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is ‘the tale of the tribe‘. That is to say, it is not so much a story of the in­dividual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man.” This passage from McLuhan himself was also repeated/reprinted — in the 1970 From Cliché to Archetype. ↩

Extra sensory perception

Like his attention to Pretribal Awareness, McLuhan’s thoughts on ESP were concentrated around 1970.1 The connection between the two, and the allied connection with ‘pattern recognition’, is highly important for a fitting understanding of his work.

Explorations 8 #3, 1957
Extra sensory perception is normal perception.2 Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present.3

McLuhan to Harry Skornia, March 24 19604
Subliminal characteristics are group dynamics. Consciousness will always be the area of the individual and freedom, but of course most of those who talk about such things may be merely subliminally misguided people. Is it not strange that as we push into the areas of awareness of our own mechanisims people should shrill “determinism” when all they mean is that they are becoming conscious of their own mechanism. Consciousness can never Itself be mechanical. Therefore the more consciousness the less mechanism. Thus the whole of the educational enterprise may pass into ESP hands and the only possible consequence would be liberation.

The Humanities in the Electronic Age, 1961
But what has happened with the electronic advent is not [only] that we move the products of human knowledge or labour to all corners of the earth more quickly. Rather we dilate the very means and processes of discourse to make a global envelope of sense and sensibility for the earth. From the moment of the telegraph, extra-sensory perception became a daily factor in shaping the human community and private perception alike. It is not the products of perception and judgment which now reach us by electric media, but involvement in the entire communal process of interfused co-existence. Each one of us, actively or passively, includes every other person on earth. The world no longer offers the possibility of the separatist, centre-margin structure which is featured in all our institutions, legal, educational, political. Centres-without-margins, inclusive consciousness, inclusive organization, these alone are viable or relevant to the new electric age.

Understanding Media, 1964, 130
It is (…) conceivable that the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses.

Understanding Media, 1964, 265-266
With the telephone, there occurs the extension of ear and voice that is a kind of extra sensory perception. With television came the extension of the sense of touch or of sense interplay that even more intimately involves the entire sensorium.

The Role of New Media in Social Change, 19645
It is an ancient observation, that was repeated by Henri Bergson, that speech is a technology of extension that amplified man’s power to store and exchange perceptual knowledge; but it interrupted the sharing of a unified collective consciousness experienced by pre-verbal man. Before speech, it is argued, men possessed a large measure of extra sensory perceptions which was fragmented by speech technology.6

All of the Candidates are Asleep, 19687
The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP.

Playboy Interview, 1969
Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP.

Counterblast, 1969, 23
The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP.8

Counterblast, 1969, 83
Today the return to oral conditions of communication is not merely to be noted in the strictly acoustic sphere. The oral is the world of the non-linear, of all-at-onceness and ESP. There are no lines or directions in acoustic space, but rather a simultaneous field. It is non-Euclidean.

The Hardware/Software Mergers, 1969
When you put a software information environment around a hardware environment, you scrap hardware. But, there’s another feature. When you scrap an old service environment you retrieve a still older one. When we put electricity around the old mechanical hardware, we retrieved ESP; the most primitive forms of society and occultisms were dumped into the Western lap in vast quantity. Five hundred years ago with Gutenberg, the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages was scrapped overnight — and they retrieved antiquity.  Manuscript culture was not powerful enough to retrieve antiquity. Gutenberg was able to bring Greece and Rome back and dump it into the Renaissance lap. Electric circuitry scrapped industrialism, and along with that, it rendered ineffective all forms of specialism. All forms of fragmentation, all forms of classified data were scrapped by electrical circuitry. Everything you call “subjects” — “sex”,  “curriculum” — all these forms were scrapped by the new instantaneous electric networks, which represent our own nervous systems outside us; but while scrapping recent procedures we have retrieved the most primitive forms of culture from the most remote pasts. In fact, there is no “past” now. All cultures are simultaneous; all pasts are here.

Address to NYC Author’s Luncheon, 1969
The coming year has been dubbed ‘the year of the witch’ in book publishing because it is the world of the occult. Alice. I mean of the inner trips of numerology and general mysticism. ESP. The world of the witch. The book of the future. The inner trip. The outer trip of civilized man is finished.

From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, 40
The new cult of ESP is a natural adjunct to telecommunications. When you put your nervous system outside as a world environment, ESP would seem to be rather “Plurabelle”. Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language stresses the new awareness of languages as struc­tures of awareness and patterns of gesture.

Culture is our Business, ‘Author’s Note’, 1970, 7-8
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. While the Twenties talked about the caveman, and the people thrilled to the art of the Altamira caves, they ignored (as we do now) the hidden environment of magical forms which we call “ads”. Like cave paintings, ads are not intended to be looked at or seen, but rather to exert influence at a distance, as though by ESP. Like cave paintings, they are not means of private but of corporate expression. They are vortices of collective power, masks of energy invented by new tribal man. 

Culture is our Business, 1970, 82
The present electric ESP age of multiple interfaces finds no problem in metamorphosis or transubstantiation such as baffled abcede-minded culture of the sixteenth century and after.

Electric Consciousness and the Church, 1970
we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sense we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression constitutes the sort of mythic type of consciousness of ‘once-upon-a-timeness’ which means all time, out of time. It is possible that our new technologies can bypass verbalising. There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself as a universal environment. There is a sense in which the surround of information that we now experience electrically is an extension of consciousness itself. What effect this might have on the individual in society is very speculative. But it has happened, it isn’t something that’s going to happen. Many people simply resort instantly to the occult, to ESP and every form of hidden awareness, in answer to this new surround of electric consciousness.

Innovation is Obsolete, 1971
The electric service environments of telegraph, telephone, radio, and TV have literally junked the nineteenth-century industrial hardware, and all the assembly-line processes and organization charts born of specialism and fragmentation of functions. At the same time, these same environmental services have recovered, or recuperated the entire world of the occult and ESP.

Take Today, 1972, 7
The world of man’s artifacts was considered neutral until the electric age. As the electric environment increasingly engulfed the old Greek “Nature,” it became apparent that “Nature” was a figure abstracted from a ground of existence that was far from “natural.” Greek “Nature,” which sufficed until Einstein, excluded most of the chaotic resonance of the great Sound-Light Show of existence itself. Most of the pre-Socratic magic and ESP and all the Oriental and “Primitive” Natures were pushed into the “subconscious.” Civilized man exists by dumping most of his experience into that convenient bin. Electric man has discovered that it is his major resource center.

Take Today, 1972,14
When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment. This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness.

Take Today, 1972, 39
the world of ESP-rit

Take Today, 1972, 100
The tribal outlook of the young TV kids is as anti-innovation and anti- growth as in any tribal society of the past. Those who “play it by ear” are instantly aware of the effects of change. The same electric technology that has retrieved ESP and the occult for many levels and areas of American life has turned the kids away from “moreness,” from glossy consuming to homespun and “camp” and “found” art. They are finished with both job goals and market values This change of outlook is not ideological but psychological. These children are very much their own “fathers,” in that their early man-made environment programmed their sensory and perceptual lives for a totally different range of satisfactions than those of their parents and teachers. 

Take Today, 1972, 115-116
All religions have recognized a social bond (resonance) between the world of numbers, names, and hidden divinity.  Much of what we call the occult or ESP today is simply the recovery of awareness of nonvisual ground for the figures and configurations of our visual civilization. The visual ground of literacy provides the rationale of connectedness and goals, without which “performance” and “progress” would be meaningless. But in today‘s new hidden surround of information flow, the old visual ground of hookups and hang-ups is transformed by electric speeds into a new acoustic ground of resonant interfaces. All boundaries become porous, the opaque becomes pervious, and goals move faster than measures of performance can. What is your telephone number for today? 

Globe & Mail Review of Julian Jaynes, 19779
Contemporary schizophrenia, says Jaynes, affords a partial reply [replay?] to the bicameral mind. Just as contemporary mediums and faith-healers raise the subject (…) This reminds us that Women’s Lib in the nuclear age is as normal a development as E.S.P. and Parapsychology.

 

  1. But even at the start of his career, in his 1943 PhD thesis, McLuhan had already posited something like “pre-tribal awareness” or ESP as a native facility of human being: “Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings, so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials.” (The Classical Trivium, 51)
    An early example of the use of E.S.P. in a negative sense (thus demonstrating its positive potential) appears in the 1951     Mechanical Bride (p31):
    “Writing in the New York Herald Tribune (January 25, 1948), John J. O’Neill gave an account of Professor Joseph B. Rhine’s views on the possibility of E.S.P. (Extrasensory Perception) as a means of wiping out crime. E.S.P. turns out to be even more pretentiously totalitarian than the Hopkins Televoter mechanism. Using mechanically controlled telepathic powers to probe into the subconscious of individual and society alike, it follows, in the view of Professor Rhine, that ‘Crime on any scale could hardly exist with its cloak of invisibility thus removed; graft, exploitation and suppression could not continue if the dark plots of wicked men were to be laid bare’.
    Neither crime nor human consciousness could exist in the scientific circumstances Professor Rhine outlines in his book, The Reach of Mind. A single mechanical brain, of the sort developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Professor Norbert Wiener, when hitched to the telepathic mechanism of Professor Rhine, could tyrannize over the collective consciousness of the race exactly in comic-book and science-fiction style. The means envisaged for this purpose are complex, but the kind of wish for unlimited power over men which evokes such means is moronic. From the point of view of civilized values, it is obvious that, as our powers of crime detection have advanced, the power to define vice or virtue has declined. In the same way, as market-research tyranny has developed, the object and ends of human consumption have been blurred. Know-how has obliterated the why, what, and when.
    The dream of E.S.P. has stirred the minds and hopes of the top brass of the executive world much as the comic books stir the passions of the very young. If any measure in addition to that of ridicule and satire could be effective in recalling such adult minds to a sense of the true proportions and dignity of human life, it should be invoked at once.” ↩
  2. In his essay ‘Cloning ESP’, Bob Dobbs points out helpfully: “ESP as pattern-recognition is a perceptual complex of mental and non-verbal dance — the tactile sense. However, tactility, as used here, is not one of the senses, but the interplay of the senses, evoking ordinary consciousness. Electric technologies, from the telegraph on, when they became generally used and environmental, simulated that ordinary consciousness, the tactile ESP, collectively. So, personal ESP now existed parallel with a collective, ongoing, dynamic ESP.” For illustrative passages from McLuhan see Tactility. ↩
  3. In this note McLuhan brings together ESP with synesthesia: “SYNESTHESIA the new sin of the nineteenth century roused as much misunderstanding as E.S.P. today. Extra sensory perception is normal perception. Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present. Synesthesia is simply totalism in the use of the senses. After centuries of abstract, printed lineality the Baudelaires and Rimbauds revolted into synesthesia because the telegraphic and photographic resources of the earlier nineteenth century had suddenly revealed the possibility of simultaneous experience at many levels. Wagner leapt at the possibilities. The Bauhaus gave institutional form to the same developments. Today we take the entire Bauhaus program of Synesthesia for granted as normal suburban living.” ↩
  4. https://archive.org/details/naeb-b067-f01/page/n133/mode/1up. ↩
  5. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’, Address to Canadian Orthopsychiatric Association, March 1964. Printed posthumously in the Antigonish Review, no. 74-75, summer-autumn, 1988. ↩
  6. McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, summer 1965: “Eric has worked out that the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering”. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’ comes from the previous year, 1964. At this time in the mid-1960s, at least in these two instances, McLuhan may have deviated from his usual position that human being and language are coextensive: “man is language” (GG 231). ↩
  7. ‘All of the Candidates are Asleep’, Saturday Evening Post., v241, August 10, 1968, 34-36. ↩
  8. UM (8): “If it is asked, ‘What is the content of speech?’, it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal’. ↩
  9. Review of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1977, in the The Globe & Mail, Toronto, June 18, 1977. ↩

Pre-tribal awareness

Der Philosoph ist nicht Bürger einer Denkgemeinde. Das ist was ihn zum Philosophen macht. Wittgenstein: Zettel #4451

Here are texts in chronological order in which McLuhan opens the critical question of the relation between individual and corporate identity, between “pre-tribal awareness” and tribe, between “an intuitive perception of essentials” and language.

Each of these may be seen as preceding the other. Humans must first have the capacity for language in order to be able to learn it. But an understanding of what is entailed in language learning can only be achieved in language.

*

Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings, so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials. (The Classical Trivium, 1943, 51)2

every word is the product of a complex mental act with a complete learning process involved in it. In this respect words can be regarded not as signs but as existent things, alive with a physical and mental life which is both individual and collective. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition3 we stand on a (…) threshold (…) the door 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. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

Until WRITING was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition… (Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed The Breath, 1954)4 

By surpassing writing, we have regained our WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural, but cosmic, plane. We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man. [Ibid.]

And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media. (Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956)5

It is an ancient observation, that was repeated by Henri Bergson, that speech is a technology of extension that amplified man’s power to store and exchange perceptual knowledge; but it interrupted the sharing of a unified collective consciousness experienced by pre-verbal man. Before speech,6 it is argued, men possessed a large measure of extra sensory perceptions which was fragmented by speech technology. (The Role of New Media in Social Change, 1964)7

an inclusive consciousness that is at the same time8 private and tribal (Towards an Inclusive Consciousness, 1967)

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) 9

Calvin Springer Hall & Gardner Lindzey, Theories of Personality (1957): “The motivational state exists first and exerts an influence upon the way in which the person will perceive the world.” (Cited in War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, 13)

It could almost be defined as a subliminal awareness of the microscopic extrapolated into the macroscopic. (Through the Vanishing Point,1968, 231)

The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP.10 (Counterblast, 1969, 23)

Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are benumbed by any new technology — which in turn creates a totally new environment — we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it (…) the Greeks [for example] were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. (Playboy Interview, 1969)11

Today we are electrically stoned, humming, drumming, thrumming, with this electric energy within us and without us, which puts us into an extremely primitive state of mind, like that of a Hindu sage listening to insects in a jungle. The kids know this as they sit with their guitars, listening, strumming: they are trying to tune in on a world they never made. They are explorers.  (…) I mean by [a “primitive state of mind”] the levels of perception at which they resonate in relation to the universe that we share. These kids live by ear: they resonate in depth and respond to depth, to worlds that are primal and basic and beyond the range of our educational activities. Beyond increasing our awareness. (The Hardware/Software Mergers, 1969)12

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 entire content of the unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness… (From Cliché to Archetype, 1970)13 

Today, electric technology scraps mechanical industry while retrieving the most primal modes of human consciousness. Your own unique study, Preface to Plato, prompts me to write this note. Is it possible that the phonetic alphabet, by upgrading the visual powers of man after many centuries of the dominance of aural culture, may have scrapped the poetic arts of tribal man and also retrieved the autonomous human entity? This would seem to have been the only time and only circumstances in which the metaphysical and independent human being had been able to manifest himself amidst the vast amorphous resonance of the tribal culture. (McLuhan to Eric Havelock, May 22, 1970, Letters 406)

Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows how the phonetic alphabet scrapped tribal man but retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal14 awareness. (McLuhan to Joe Keogh, July 6,1970, Letters 413)

The liquidating of the tribal encyclopaedia of the bards (…) was done by phonetic literacy, but there was retrieved something of great antiquity, namely pre-tribal metaphysical man.(McLuhan to Lynn White, August 17, 1970)

Man is no longer conceptual. His metaphysics has become a perceptive one. What I mean is that he leaves the world of logic to enter the world of mysticism, with immediate perceptions. (Interview with L’Express, 1972)

our age-old right-hemisphere affinity for telepathy (Ma Bell Minus the Nantucket Gam: Or the Impact of High-Speed Data Transmission, 1981)15

  1. The philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community. This is what makes him into a philosopher. ↩
  2. McLuhan would consider for the rest of his life how “an intuitive perception of essentials” (dual genitive) might be apprehended in that very language that it “produced”. Instead of “an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings” (objective genitive) in the experienced world, now “the structure of beings” (subjective genitive) would be apprehended in, or as, the “parameters” of the experience of world = the underlying range of the “intuitive perception of essentials”. (McLuhan to Skornia, September 3, 1960: “Media are the parameters of all enterprises, whether private or collective. They impose, they are the assumptions. (…) it may be more effective to say ‘Media are the parameters’ rather than that ‘the medium is the message’.”)
    McLuhan was clear about this flipped perspective by 1951:     “    the Symbolists (took) aesthetic experience as an arrested moment (…) for which (…) they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment” (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951); “one major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process (of ordinary perception) as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences” (McLuhan to Harold Innis, March 14, 1951, Letters 221). Such an “arrested moment” is not situated in chronological (linear) time. Its “stages of apprehension” cannot, therefore, themselves be linear. These “stages” or “phases” are synchronic and vertical. And what is brought together in every such “arrested moment” is some variety of “intuitive perception”, some “parameter”, and some corresponding variety of world. ↩
  3. In this same CHML essay: “Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and (ordinary) cognition”… ↩
  4. Counterblast, 1954; Explorations 4, 1955; Shenandoah 7:1, 1955; Counterblast, 1969. ↩
  5. See The very citadel of civilized awareness. This passage from 1956 was reused 15 years later in the 1969 Counterblast. ↩
  6. McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, summer 1965: “Eric has worked out that the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering”. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’ comes from the previous year, 1964. At this time in the mid-1960s, at least in these two instances, McLuhan may have deviated from his usual position that human being and language are coextensive: “man is language” (GG 231). But it is highly important in this context to consider what sort(s) of time are implicated in “before speech”. ↩
  7. ‘The Role of New Media in Social Change’, Address to Canadian Orthopsychiatric Association, March 1964. Printed posthumously in the Antigonish Review, no. 74-75, summer-autumn, 1988. ↩
  8. ‘At the same time’ — see note #8 below. ↩
  9. The “vanishing point” is the ‘pre-tribal’ filter where “essentials” are separated from non-essentials. It operates in an in-fant when language is learned and has to be already there for that language learning or, indeed, for the subsequent use of language itself, to occur at all. ↩
  10. See Extra Sensory Perception. ↩
  11. McLuhan’s take on the Greeks was highly complicated. On the one hand, he saw them as introducing via alphabetic literacy what would become the mechanical mindset. On the other, he saw them as preserving a fundamental (“pre-Homeric”) primitivity within literacy. Like Harold Innis in this respect, he considered that it was this combination of literacy with the preliterate that enabled the unique cultural unfolding of the classical period. As McLuhan wrote to Havelock in 1970 (cited more fully above): “This would seem to have been the only time and only circumstances in which the metaphysical and independent human being had been able to manifest himself amidst the vast amorphous resonance of the tribal culture.” ↩
  12. Presentation at ‘Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry’ conference at the University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Printed in Educational technology: Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, second session, on H.R. 4916, United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor, Select Subcommittee on Education, 250-274.It is possible that McLuhan was particularly struck by his own remarks at this conference with the ‘pre-tribal awareness’ theme that he took up repeatedly in the closely following year of 1970. Here is the wider context of his presentation: “We are the primitives of a new world. We are more primal today than any primitive society ever was — the reason being that, electrically, we have put our own nervous systems outside us as an environment of resonating, pulsating experience. The Hindu on his sitar makes sounds like insects in a jungle, consciously and deliberately, because he regards them as the most primal modes of being. The kids with their guitars (the Beatles’ name is not accidental; they chose it deliberately as the resonance of a bug, humming, whining, primal, primitive) — the kids, on their guitars are trying to relate, to tune in on this new primitive culture that we have created electrically. It is an inner trip. We are all stoned today, electrically. Western man lives in a perpetual “stoned” condition,  I mean in a psychedelic sense. (…) Today we are electrically stoned, humming, drumming, thrumming, with this electric energy within us and without us, which puts us into an extremely primitive state of mind, like that of a Hindu sage listening to insects in a jungle. The kids know this as they sit with their guitars, listening, strumming: they are trying to tune in on a world they never made. They are explorers.(…) I mean by (“primitive state of mind”) the levels of perception at which they resonate in relation to the universe that we share. These kids live by ear: they resonate in depth and respond to depth to worlds that are primal and basic and beyond the range of our educational activities. Beyond increasing our awareness.” ↩
  13. Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, 200. ↩
  14. It is all important to ask after the time or times implicated in ‘pre-tribal’. The key consideration is given in the 1951 passage from ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ (cited above): for the symbolists “the aesthetic experience (w)as an arrested moment (…) for which (…) they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment.” This is first of all synchronic time and only secondarily or derivatively, diachronic: “time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground” (The Global Village, 10). For further texts and discussion, see Genitives, times and essential types and McLuhan’s times. ↩
  15. McLuhan with Bruce Powers in the Journal of Communication, published posthumously. The same phrase appears in their later Global Village, p124. McLuhan assigns ‘telepathy’ or ESP or ‘pretribal awareness’ to the right hemisphere here, with the implication that ‘tribal awareness’ is left hemisphere. But “inclusive consciousness (…) is at the same time private and tribal” (cited above from 1967) and “no matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres” (Global Village, 62). ↩

Going quantum

If McLuhan is ever to be understood and applied, chances are it will not happen via academics in the humanities or by artists.  The former are not free enough in their thinking, the latter too free. Instead it may be that he will gain a fitting hearing only if his work is able to contribute to ongoing work in the sciences, especially quantum physics. In this way it might be seen to belong together with demonstrable truth sufficiently enough to motivate a fundamentally changed reception among his current champions.

In a substack newslitter to be launched shortly, McLuhan’s new science of media will be used to examine the work of quantum theorists. The hope is that that new science will reveal itself as unremarkably a necessary part of physics as does chemistry or electrical engineering, say, in the James Webb Space Telescope project.

 

 

Solution lies in the problem

Alchemy of Social Change, 19571
We have to know in advance the effect (…) of any change whatever. This is necessity, not ideal. It is also a possibility. There was never a critical situation created by human ingenuity which did not contain its own solution. 

Technology, the Media, and Culture 1960
Let us return for a moment to that increasing awareness of the dynamics of process and learning and creativity which l suggest gains new force from the subliminal patterns of the TV image. In his Landmarks of Tomorrow, Peter F. Drucker has pointed to Operations Research as “organized ignorance”. It is a procedure in tackling problems which resembles the “negative capability”2 of Keats — a sort of intellectual judo. Instead of straining all available effort on a visible goal (…), let the solution come from the problem itself. If you can’t keep the cow out of the garden, keep the garden out of the cow. A. N. Whitehead was fond of saying that the great discovery of the nineteenth century was not this or that invention but the discovery of the technique of invention. lt is very simple, and was loudly proclaimed by Poe, Baudelaire, and Valéry, namely, begin with (…) the problem, and then find out what steps lead to [that problem].3 In other words, work backwards.

MM to Pierre Trudeau April 14, 1969
The real solution is in the problem itself, as in any detective story.

Take Today, 13
Our chief resources are the gripes and jokes, the problems and breakdowns, of managers4 themselves; for therein lie the solutions and breakthroughs via pattern recognition of the processes involved. Managing The Ascent from the Maelstrom today demands [new] awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point.5

Take Today, 92
It is not possession of the solution, but the recognition of the problem itself that provides a resource and the answers.

Take Today, 103
All solutions are in the very words by which people confuse and hide their problems…

The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973
The breakdown or hang-up is always in the connection whereas the breakthrough or discovery is inside the problem itself (…) Breakdown is the old cause in action, the extension of the old figure to [some]6 new ground.  Breakthrough is the effect of understanding [the new ground] as the (…) cause [of the breakdown]. The solution is a figure that we can discover by organizing our ignorance and swarming over the ground. This process is encapsulated in the myth of Hercules in the Augean stables.

At the Flip Point of Time — the Point of More Return, 1975
Understanding that the entrance to knowledge is through the back door of ignorance is basic to an understanding of media and technology. It seems to be a human characteristic to hide the effects of our actions when they move out into the environments of services and/or disservices. Yet as James Joyce said of these man-made environments “when invisible they are invincible”. To free ourselves from the invincible effects of our own programs of organized activity,7 it is necessary that we inspect the ignorance systematically engendered by our applied knowledge.8

In sum: only with the problem do we have a solution.9

 

  1. Explorations 8. ↩
  2. As often broached by McLuhan, Keats described “negative capability” in a December 1817 letter to his brothers: “when a (hu)man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching-after-fact & reason“. ↩
  3. McLuhan has “the solution” here, not “that problem”. The substitution has been made to clarify his suggestion that, when identification is made of “what steps lead to” a problem, a “solution” to that problem will then be found in the modification of those steps. ↩
  4. Take Today is addressed to ‘managers’ and ‘executives’. Its subtitle is ‘The Executive as Dropout’. But its larger topic is the human subject as the ‘manager’ or ‘executive’ or ‘user’ of media (dual genitive). ↩
  5. In order to attain new awareness, transition Through the Vanishing Point is required. “Managing the ascent” is the movement between worlds of experience — from a world with the problem to another with its solution. This requires ‘vanishing’ since there is no world between worlds. ↩
  6. McLuhan: ‘the new ground’. But if ‘the new ground’ were known, the breakdown would not occur. ↩
  7. McLuhan’s phrases here, “effects of our own programs of organized activity” and “our applied knowledge” do not refer only to social activities. They also describe the genesis of individual experience as an “organized activity” and “applied knowledge”. The solutions to problems in McLuhan’s view lie first of all in thematizing a whole new genus of science based on media as the fundamental structures of artefactual reality — and artefactual reality includes all individual experience as well as all social activity. ↩
  8. See the following note: “all technical solutions have a new problem”. ↩
  9. At the same time, however, with the solution we have a problem. Barry Nevitt (?) in the Monday Night Seminar, January 22, 1973: “all technical solutions have a new problem” — οδός άνω κάτω… ↩

McLuhan and Plato 12 — Cratylus

The doctrine of names is, of course, the doctrine of essence and not a naïve notion of oral terminology. (The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time)1

Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings, so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials. (The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time)2

*

Here in chronological order are McLuhan’s thoughts on the Cratylus of Plato and its “doctrine of names” (with commentary in footnotes):

The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, 1943:3
In the dialogue named for Cratylus, the follower of Heraclitus, Plato has this exchange of arguments between Socrates and Cratylus: Socrates: But if these things are only to be known through names, how can we suppose that the givers of names had knowledge, or were legislators before there were names at all, and therefore before they could have known them?Cratylus: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which were thus given are necessarily their true names. Obviously, with this kind of importance associated with the names of things, and of gods, heroes, and legendary beings, etymology would be a main source of scientific and moral enlightenment. And such was the case. The prolific labors of the etymologists reflected in Plato’s Cratylus, but begun centuries before and continued until the seventeenth century, are as much the concern of the historian of philosophy and of science as of the historian of letters and culture. Indeed, it was not only in antiquity but until the Cartesian revolution that language was viewed as simultaneously linking and harmonizing all the intellectual and physical functions of men and of the physical world as well. At any time from Plato to Francis Bacon the statement of Cratylus would have made sense, and would have evoked respect.

The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, 1943:4
Plato’s Cratylus broaches the question of analogy and anomaly in such a way as to indicate that their dispute was of ancient5 origin even in his day, but the issues [between analogy and anomaly]6, of course, are drawn on a plane loftier than that of [linguistic] conjugations and declensions. Socrates refutes the superficial anomalist doctrine of Hermogenes at great length. Hermogenes says, ‘I have often talked over this  matter, both with Cratylus and others, and cannot convince myself that there is any principle of correctness in names other than convention and agreement.’ Socrates replies that ‘I should say that this giving of names can be no such light matter as you fancy (…) and [that] Cratylus is right in saying that things have names by nature, and that not every man is an artificer of names; but he only who looks to the name which each thing by nature has, and is, will be able to express the ideal forms of things in letters and syllables.’7 The general incredulity concerning Socrates’ seriousness in this dialogue is an adequate measure of the modern failure to apprehend the nature of grammar in the ancient and medieval worlds; and much of Plato’s power over St. Augustine and the medieval mind [generally] is owing to his great (…)8 respect for the method of grammar in philosophy.

Medieval Grammar as the Basis of Bacon’s Novum Organum, 1944:
One obvious consequence of the doctrine of the Logos is seen in the Cratylus, named for the famous grammarian who was Plato’s teacher. Socrates concurs in Cratylus’ statement that “a power more than human gave things their first names, and (…) the names which were thus given were necessarily their true names.” The dialogue is then given over to the consideration of essence and the basic nature of things by means of the grammatical arts of allegory and etymology. 

Medieval Grammar as the Basis of Bacon’s Novum Organum, 1944
Bacon, like the Stoics, was an analogist, though a cautious one. That is, he held the ancient doctrine (…) of the Cratylus of Plato. An understanding of the great historical dispute waged for many centuries between the analogists and the anomalists is basic to an understanding of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance culture. 

James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953
By 1885 Mallarmé had formulated and utilized in his poetry these concepts about the nature of language uniting science and philology, which nowadays are known as “metalinguistics.” However, these views of language were commonplaces to Cratylus, Varro, and Philo Judaeus. They were familiar to the Church Fathers, and underlay the major schools of scriptural exegesis. If “four-Ievel exegesis” is back in favor again as the staple of the “new criticism”, it is because the poetic objects which have been made since 1880 frequently require such techniques for their elucidation. 

The Little Epic, late 1950s9
Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of “momentary deities” or epiphanies.10 And such indeed is the view put forward in the Cratylus of Plato: “I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus given are necessarily their true names.” In this way etymology becomes a method of science and theology. William Wordsworth called these momentary deities “spots of time”, Hopkins called them “inscapes”11, and Browning built his entire work on the same concept of the esthetic of the “eternal moment”.

The Gutenberg Galaxy
Cratylus: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which were thus given are necessarily their true names. This view of Cratylus was the basis of most language study until the Renaissance. It is rooted in the old oral “magic” of the “momentary deity”12 kind such as is favoured again today for various reasons. (27-28)

McLuhan to Tom Wolfe, October 25, 1965 (Letters, 326)
Plato’s Cratylus presents a theory of language as the key to an inclusive consciousness of human culture much in the style of Finnegans Wake. 

 

  1. The Classical Trivium, 16. ↩
  2. The Classical Trivium, 51. ↩
  3. The Classical Trivium, 15-16. ↩
  4. The Classical Trivium, 28. ↩
  5. With ‘ancient’ McLuhan signaled a different order of time from the chronological. As seen in the very title of his 1944 lecture (published in 1946), ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’, ‘ancient’ time was not, or was not only, long ago. It was also, and equally, contemporaneous. “Ancient origin” was therefore also, and equally, active — right now. ↩
  6. Analogy and anomaly are not 2, but 3. If there were not the third possibility of ‘both together’ their “dispute” could not be perennial. See McLuhan and Plato 8 – Gigantomachia. ↩
  7. The giving of names is assimilated here to science, since the proper name of an entity is said to follow from what it is — and it is the task of scientific inquiry to establish just that. As McLuhan noted in ‘Francis Bacon’s Patristic Inheritance’ from 1944: “The initial imposition of names in this sense signifies essence, metaphysical knowledge.” ↩
  8. McLuhan has “great, though not exclusive, respect” here. He breaks his train of thought regarding the continuity between Plato and “the medieval mind” to indicate how “respect” is subject to the “ancient quarrel”, or “great historical dispute“, between the trivial arts. Plato was “great” exactly in that his “respect” was not “exclusive”: “Plato and Aristotle, the representatives of the new literate culture of Greece in philosophy, had this same doubleness. They straddled the written and oral traditions. They translated the tribal encyclopedia of the preceding culture into the written, classified form” (‘Toward an Inclusive Consciousness’, 1967). McLuhan differentiated between an “exclusive” and “inclusive consciousness”, but recognized at the same time that an inclusive consciousness could not exclude ‘respect’ for exclusive consciousness without itself becoming exclusive. Like air or water, “inclusive consciousness” had in principle to give way to everything other than it. ↩
  9. Unpublished manuscript in the Ottawa archive. This citation is from a chapter entitled ‘The Greeks’. ↩
  10. For “momentary deities or epiphanies” compare “every letter is a godsend” in ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953): “Whereas the ethical world of Ulysses is presented in terms of well-defined human types the more metaphysical world of the Wake speaks and moves before us with the gestures of being itself. It is a nightworld and, literally, as Joyce reiterates, is “abcedminded.” Letters (“every letter is a godsend“), the frozen, formalized gestures of remote ages of collective experience, move before us in solemn morrice. They are the representatives of age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. For it is in the drama of cognition, the stages of apprehension, that Joyce found the archetype of poetic imitation. He seems to have been the first to see that the dance of being, the nature imitated by the arts, has its primary analogue in the activity of the exterior and interior senses. Joyce was aware that this doctrine (that sensation is imitation because the exterior forms are already in a new matter) is implicit in Aquinas. He made it explicit in Stephen Hero and the Portrait, and founded his entire poetic activity on these analogical proportions of the senses.” The bracketed insertion, “every letter is a godsend“, is from McLuhan and is fundamental to his thinking. It names the ‘dynamic’ or ‘dramatic’ extension that is just as characteristic of media as it is of chemical elements or of DNA: all inherently express themselves in and as particulars to comprise the concrete world around us. The dynamic order is vertical and synchronic; the particular order is horizontal and diachronic. Human being is situation at the crossing of these vectors of space and time. ↩
  11. McLuhan’s interesting suggestion is that Hopkins’ ‘inscape’ is to be understood as the complement of ‘escape’. ↩
  12. For “momentary deity”, see note 10 above. ↩

Inclusive consciousness

What Bacon did was to take the Book of Nature, which had been the medieval image of the natural world, and to this he added the Book of Scripture, the Sacred Page. He took both these pages and directed to these pages a kind of analytic gaze of comprehensive inclusiveness. I’m suggesting that the very components that make for a divided consciousness also can (…) become the means of an inclusive consciousness such as Bacon took for granted in his own case. Plato and Aristotle, the representatives of the new literate culture of Greece in philosophy, had this same doubleness. They straddled the written and oral traditions. They translated the tribal encyclopedia of the preceding culture into the written, classified form, and they too [like Bacon] produced an (…) encyclopedic philosophy. (Toward an Inclusive Consciousness, 1967)1

McLuhan differentiated between exclusive and inclusive consciousness. But at first he identified “inclusive consciousness” with the “auditory organization of many-layered and interpenetrating experiences”. Here he is to this effect in 1960:

The theme of Romantic Image by [Frank] Kermode [1957] is that the quest for the means of an inclusive consciousness drove artists away from discourse of reason and even from language. (…) Romantic poetry developed a one-thing-at-a-time kind of vision and awareness which had succeeded an all-at-once sort of auditory and simultaneous order: “The decline of the aristocratic world of the eighteenth century with its hierarchy of ordered values had sent the Romantic poets scurrying into their own souls in search of a new scale of values. (…) Each created his own order, in terms usually of the vision of love or the journey of life, and each was able to oppose to the flux of a world of broken values, to the anarchy of individualism, symbols of that order in the beauty and permanence of the natural world” (p. 166). Foakes here [in The Romantic Assertion: A Study of the Language of Nineteenth Century Poetry, 1958] reminds us that the image of order that became dominant in the age of Newton was visual. Poetry, too, succeeded in achieving a new visual order based on the correspondence between the inner faculties and the natural scene outside. But this new order was exclusive rather than inclusive in its very nature. It had to deal with one emotion at a time and one level of experience at a time. It could not include erudition and accumulated past experience in the single perspectives of visual space that were devised in order to isolate and to control single emotions. But, above all, it could not fulfill the human craving for an inclusive auditory organization of many-layered and interpenetrating experiences.2

By 1967, as indicated by the lead passage from ‘Toward an Inclusive Consciousness’ he realized that this identification of the inclusive with the auditory had been an error. Now he saw that “inclusive consciousness” demanded balance between “the written and oral traditions”, aka the visual the auditory.

He seems to have come to this awareness in the years immediately following the 1960 review.

The 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy notes:

The speculators of our time can as easily fall unawares into the auditory bias of “field” theory as the Greeks leapt into the flatland of abstract visuality and one-way lineality. (p57-58)

And here he is in a October 4, 1963 letter to Harry Skornia, his partner in crime at the NAEB:

My central idea, as you know, since the GALAXY [1962], is that of electro-magnetism as an extension of the central nervous system. Closely related to this is my insistence that the next extension of man will be the simulation of the process of consciousness itself.3 (…) It does not mean the end of private awareness, rather a huge heightening of same via involvement in corporate energies. Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive. Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously. That is the meaning of tactual involvement. It is the interplay of sense, all the senses, not the isolation of any one sense. 

‘Tactility’ was not used by McLuhan as the single sense of touch, but as the junction or switchyard or “interplay” of “all the senses”. So in this passage the “inclusive” is specifically withdrawn from “any one sense”, like the “auditory”, and instead is expressly assigned to “the interplay of (…) all”.  

The great difficulty here (but at the same time is the key to McLuhan’s whole enterprise),4 is the fact that the inclusive cannot exclude the exclusive without itself becoming exclusive! This is why McLuhan notes in the 1967 passage: “the very components that make for a divided [or exclusive] consciousness also can (…) become the means of an inclusive consciousness”. 

Here “of an inclusive consciousness” must be taken in the first instance as a subjective genitive like ‘the ball of the boy’ — not as an objective genitive like ‘the punishment of the boy’. Hence “the very components that make for a divided [or exclusive] consciousness” belong to “inclusive consciousness” — even as they on their side contradict it!

McLuhan’s insistence that “language itself” is the model and means of “inclusive consciousness” is at work here: 

Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive. Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously.5

Language brings together in dialogue different persons who never match or merge with each other. It enables the expression of all points of view. And nothing at all happens among humans absent this environment which is, however, neither singular nor still.

*

McLuhan read Joyce as grappling with the problems and promise at stake here:

Joyce was all his life attempting to devise means of coping with the problems of inclusive consciousness that have been thrust on men by the simultaneous and instantaneous flow of information which results from electronic channels since the advent of the telegraph. Anybody who can look at Joyce and say, “It is all very confusing,” has not looked at the world he lives in. (One Wheel, All Square, 1958)

it was his mastery of the art process in terms of the stages of apprehension that enabled Joyce to install himself in the centre of the creative process. Whether it appears as mere individual sensation, as collective hope or phobia, as national myth-making or cultural norm-functioning, there is Joyce with cocked ear, eye and nose at the the centre of the action. He saw that the change of our time (‘wait till Finnegan wakes!’) was occurring as a result of the shift from superimposed myth to awareness of the character of the creative process itself. Here was the only hope for a world culture which would incorporate all previous achievements. The very process of human communication, Joyce saw, would afford the natural base for all the future operations and strategies of culture. Towards this vivisectional spectacle of the human community in action we have been led ever more swiftly in recent decades by increasing self-consciousness of the processes and effects of the various media of communication. Our knowledge of the modes of consciousness in pre-literate societies together with our sense of the processes of culture formation in many literate societies past and present, have sharpened our perceptions and led to wide agreement that communication itself is the common ground for the study of individual and society. To this study Joyce contributed not just awareness but demonstration of individual cognition as the analogue and matrix of all communal actions, political, linguistic and sacramental.6 (Notes on the Media as Art Forms 1954)

Every medium is in some sense a universal, pressing towards maximal realization. But its expressive pressures disturb existing balances and patterns in other media of culture. The increasing inclusiveness of our sense of such repercussions leads us today hopefully to investigate the possibilities of orchestral harmony in the multi-levelled drive towards pure human expressiveness. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms 1954)

 

  1. ‘Toward an Inclusive Consciousness’, Lecture of March 17, 1967 at the University of Toronto, in Understanding Me, pp124-138. ↩
  2. McLuhan review of The Romantic Assertion: A Study of the Language of Nineteenth Century Poetry by R. A. Foakes, 1958, in Modern Philology, 57:4 (May, 1960), pp279-280. ↩
  3. This prediction of AI was made 60 years ago. But phrases like “the simulation of the process of consciousness itself” should not be taken as if McLuhan had in mind only a conscious machine of some sort. Certainly this was one aspect of his vision, the spectre of a monstrous take over of the planet by the machines we have created. But the “simulation” of consciousness would at the same time be analogous to the simulation of the material world that we have in chemistry and physics — and, before them and anticipating them, in language and in all human experience. Such physical sciences simulate the world even as the world simulates them. For McLuhan, then, “the simulation of the process of consciousness itself” would eventuate in and through a ‘new science’, in fact a new genus of sciences. This would be an ongoing science or sciences that would specifically include all the ways of human being, just as chemistry includes the ways of being of physical materials (including those of the human body). ↩
  4. See Jackson Knight on “the main question” and related ‘main question’ posts. ↩
  5. One sentence of the McLuhan October 4, 1963 letter to Harry Skornia cited above. ↩
  6. McLuhan’s vision here is of “individual cognition” sparking different synchronic possibilities as its way of creating and maintaining a diachronic flow of life. This is a microcosmic figuration of the macrocosmic ground of “language itself” — an analogous sparking of possibilities, but playing out on a gigantic scale. Cf, McLuhan in The Little Epic from the late 1950s, an unpublished manuscript in the Ottawa archive: “Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of ‘momentary deities’ or epiphanies.  And such indeed is the view put forward in the Cratylus of Plato: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus given are necessarily their true names. In this way etymology becomes a method of science and theology. William Wordsworth called these momentary deities ‘spots of time’, Hopkins called them ‘inscapes’ and Browning built his entire work on the same concept of the esthetic of the ‘eternal moment’.” Compare ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ from 1953: “every letter is a godsend“. These epiphanic moments consist of the ‘dynamic’ or ‘dramatic’ extension of pre-existing possibilities. In this way human experience expressing itself via media would be assimilated to the working of chemical elements or of DNA: all inherently express themselves in and as particulars to comprise the concrete world around us. The dynamic order is vertical and synchronic; the particular order is horizontal and diachronic. Human being is situated at the crossing of these vectors of space and time. (McLuhan, as seen in his famous letter to Innis in March of that year, had this vision by 1951 at the latest: “One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences.” (Letters, p221) By “retracing” human experience back to its sparking of discrete possibilities, McLuhan would follow the same path of dynamic expression that all experience takes, but in reverse direction. This would expose the underlying forms which express themselves in and as concrete awareness.) ↩

McLuhan replays Elsie

He do the police in different voices…1

The City as Classroom, published in 1977 a few years before McLuhan’s death at the end of 1980, replays his early experience, growing up with the constant murmur of his Mother’s preparation of her one-woman shows. As she moved about the house Elsie would have recited passages from poems and plays, both to aid her memorization of them and to try out different voices for them. Later, when McLuhan was at Cambridge, her elocution work was a frequent topic of their correspondence.2

The City as Classroom highlights the role of sound in everyday life and describes its potential use in school, particularly with tape recorders. Here is one of its recommended exercises:

Using tape, rather than the printed page, as the means of presenting the poem (…) edit the tape for a listener. Cut out all the material that is not absolutely necessary to create the effect of the poem, or anything that detracts from its meaning and effect.
Is it necessary to change the sequence of lines or of images in order to present on tape the essential effect of the poem? If you think that it is, try it.
Use sound effects both where they seem called for by the poem, and where they will help to make the poem more concise. Try this with poems written by four or five different authors of different periods. Try to translate something of each poem’s essence into terms relevant to your audience. This is a very difficult exercise, but try it at least: what you are really doing is updating an old situation for a contemporary audience. (p94-95)

Isn’t this just what was going on in Elsie’s mind as she worked around the house? And what McLuhan came to consider when he began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1936?

  1. “He do the police in different voices” is a line from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. It referred to the police news section of the newspaper as read by the orphan, Sloppy. Eliot used the line as the working title for what was to become The Waste Land. For Joyce on “the living texture” of this “unchanging unceasing murmur” see Voices in Dubliners and A Portrait. ↩
  2. See The put-on for an extended discussion of these points. McLuhan’s title for his 1964 Voices of Literature anthology should be considered in this context. ↩

McLuhan on Dali TV Guide cover

In 1968 and 1969 McLuhan reverted over and over again to Dali’s TV Guide cover…

McLuhan to Sheila Watson, June 12, 1968:1
Obtain cover of TV Guide for June 8-14. It is a Dali explanation of the tactile nature of the TV image. Wonderful interview inside, too.

McLuhan to Warren Brodey, June 12, 1968:2
Don’t fail to study TV Guide cover for June 8-14. (…) The Dali picture on the TV Guide cover reveals his deep understanding of TV as tactility, an interval. Also it includes his awareness of the software environment as the extension of the CNS.

McLuhan to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, June 12, 1968:3
The cover of the June 8 – 14 TV Guide is a Dali masterpiece. It manifests in detail the tactile quality of the TV image. The extension of the central nervous system via electricity is environmentally indicated in the upper right corner by a segment of brain tissue. The two thumbs with the TV images on the nails are carefully separated to indicate the gap or interval constituted by touch. The age of tactility via television and radio is one of innumerable interfaces or gaps that replace the old connections, legal, literate and visual.

Include Me Out: Reversal Of Overheated Image, 1968:4
The extreme coolness and tactility of TV has received its most impressive testimonial in a new painting by Salvador Dali. It appears on the cover of TV Guide for June 8, 1968. Two TV screens appear on two thumbnails. The thumbs are widely separated, looking like cracked sculpture (tactile space is the space of the interval, the icon, the contour).

Foreword to The Interior Landscape (1969):
TV Guide for June 8-14, 1968, has a painting by Dali on the cover. Two thumbs exhibit two TV screens as thumbnails. That is pure poetry, acute new perception. Dali immediately presents the fact that TV is a tactile mode of perception. Touch is the space of the interval, not of visual connection. I have been trying to elucidate this fact for years. In vain. The somnambulist knows better. Can’t he see TV with his eyes? How could it be tactile? Pasteur was thrown out of the medical profession because he insisted that doctors wash their hands before surgery. They knew better. They could see their hands were clean.

Retribalized Makers, 19695
The cover for TV Guide for June 8-14, 1968 consists of a painting by Salvador Dali. It presents two TV images in two thumbnails. The thumbs are coarsely textured and carefully spaced to indicate different worlds. Among other features there is on the horizon a segment of brain tissue. The new “software” environment of electric information is literally an extension of our central nervous system. The interface or touch or “gap” that constitutes the sense of touch is scarcely acknowledged except among artists. As an artist, Dali understands that the TV image is profoundly tactile and quite unlike photo or movie. Touch is not only the world of musical beat but of the Beats [– and the Heepies!6].

  1. Letters, p353. ↩
  2. https://ionandbob.blogspot.com/1988/06/ ↩
  3. Letters, p354. ↩
  4. Playboy, December 1968. ↩
  5. In Alexander Klein, ed, Natural Enemies? — Youth and the Clash of Generations, 1969. ↩
  6. See Dali TV Guide interview: watch TV upside down ↩

Pasteur

Flaubert taught us that there is no neutral area in human communications, and no more merit in tolerating hideous and tendentious forms of pictorial arrangement than in putting up with polluted drinking water. Before Pasteur, Flaubert introduced the germ theory into social communication. (McLuhan NAEB presentation September 1959, reused in The Medium is the Message,1960)

The world of body and mind observed by Baudelaire and Bernard was not photographical at all, but a nonvisual set of relations such as the physicist, for example, had encountered by means of the new mathematics and statistics. The photograph might be said, also, to have brought to human attention the subvisual world of bacteria that caused Louis Pasteur to be driven from the medical profession by his indignant colleagues. Just as the painter Samuel Morse had unintentionally projected himself into the nonvisual world of the telegraph, so the photograph really transcends the pictorial by capturing the inner gestures and postures of both body and mind, yielding the new worlds of endocrinology and psychopathology. (Understanding Media, 1964, pp201-202)

The utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria, though the confreres of Louis Pasteur tossed him out of the medical profession for his base allegations about the invisible operation of bacteria. To resist TV, therefore, one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (Understanding Media, 1964, p329)

TV Guide for June 8-14, 1968, has a painting by Dali on the cover. Two thumbs exhibit two TV screens as thumbnails. That is pure poetry, acute new perception. Dali immediately presents the fact that TV is a tactile mode of perception. Touch is the space of the interval, not of visual connection. I have been trying to elucidate this fact for years. In vain. The somnambulist knows better. Can’t he see TV with his eyes? How could it be tactile? Pasteur was thrown out of the medical profession because he insisted that doctors wash their hands before surgery. They knew better. They could see their hands were clean. The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world. (Foreword to The Interior Landscape, 1969)

Dali TV Guide interview: watch TV upside down

McLuhan to Sheila Watson, June 12, 1968:1

Obtain cover of TV Guide for June 8-14. It is a Dali explanation of the tactile nature of the TV image. Wonderful interview inside, too.

Here is that wonderful interview…2

He Prefers To Watch TV Upside Down

Salvador Dali, genius
and madman, tells what he
thinks of the medium

By Edith Efron

Salvador Dali painted the cover of TV Guide this week. He calls it ‘Today, Tonight and Tomorrow’.3

Dali is both genius and madman. (…)

We were sent to interview him about his cover painting and to get his views about television. Here is an exact report of what happened. (…)

“I want to talk about the Heepies. The Heepies are my friends”, he says, while the picture editor and the photographers arrange him. (…)

We begin the interview. “Would you care to interpret the cover you painted for TV Guide?”

“Ahhrrgh,” shouts Dali excitedly.  “TV — everything rigid, square, very clear. Soft watches, soft pianos, soft violoncellos — I create that. Now I create soft television.”

“Why thumbs?”, we ask.
 
“Thumbs? Very adequatt for looking TV. Shape. Thumbnail. Like TV.”
 
“Why just thumbs?” We ask. Why not other fingers?
 
“One feenger sufficient”, says Dali.
 
“Oh”, we say.
 
“Myself”, says Dali, “never watch television. Don’t like TV. Only one very leetle minute.”
 
“You never watch it at all?”
 
“Watch it upside down”, says Dali triumphally. “Through moiré filter.”
 
“Through taffeta?”
 
“Taffeta filter. Change completely. Is possible to see what my own brain create.”
 
“What does your brain create?”

“Liquid television!” Dali beams with satisfaction. “My last invention. Put liquid on hands.” He rubs imaginary liquid into his hands. “TV appear! DNA proves that origin of life . . . TV one day become correlated with DNA. Everything mechanical collapse except cybernetic machines!”

“Mmmmm”, we say. “Referencing back to your watching TV upside down — how does that work exactly?”

“Upside down. Everything in my brain. Project my brain on the screen. Vary agreeable! My brain very superior every medium.”

“What sort of thing does your brain project on the screen?”

“Happenings!” cries Dali instantly. “I make happenings in Paris. I did things extraordinaire. Omelettes aux fines herbes put on head of old, old lady.  She sits with omelette on head, trembles. Omelette falls to ground. Servant puts other omelette on head. Again she tremble, omelette falls. Finally, she up to knees in omelettes!”

“What other happenings do you create?”

“Deux mille boiteux!” shouts Dali in French. “Je mets deux mille boiteux dans une chambre.”

“Lame people?” we ask. “You put 2000 lame people in one room?”

“Si, si. After I throw one hundred wild ducks! Then observe.  Ah, if they did thees kind of theeng on TV, I would watch! But to look at people on pan-ells who discuss? What use? I know everything they say already.”

“You learn nothing new from TV?”

”Nevair”, cries Dali. ”Nevair anything new. Besides, everyone mediocre. Everyone. Except me. Me and Watson. Discover DNA. And Buckminster Fuller. Invent structures the most sublime of epoch. Monarchiques! I’m monarchique. The Heepies, they are becoming monarchiques.”

 ”Excuse me”, we interrupt. “The Heepies?” we ask, astonished.

“Absolument. After Louis XIV there was Revolution Française.  It  brought triomphe of bourgeoisie. The Heepies, they bringing back l’aristocratie.”

“Mmmm,” We say again. “What else would you like to see on TV?”

“Happenings. And things scientifiques! Lots of things scientifiques! And lots of Heepies, lame people. 0p and Pop artists who are most alive. Nevair filmed in advance. Everything filmed advance dead.”

Dali suddenly interrupts himself with an extreme double take. He stares across the room at the picture editor, who is a very pretty and non-ambiguous-looking young lady. “Are you boy in girl’s clothes?” he demands.

“No”, replies the picture editor coldly.

“Arrrgh,” says Dali softly.

“TV”, we coax. “Please stay on TV, would you?”

“TV for masses. Don’t like masses. Only like minority. Masses never cultivé, never good taste. TV should be for to shock them. Force them theenk. But nevair to please. TV for aristocrats to show them [the masses] what they don’t understand.”

”What aristocrats?”

”Op and Pop artists”, says Dali. ”Op and Pop artists superior to masses.”

“Would the masses enjoy a TV run by Op and Pop artists?”
 
“No, no. They would protest. The lame people, the wild ducks. They wouldn’t understand. They…” There ensues a flurry of talk about DNA and molecules in a self-liquefying merger of English, French and Spanish. Then: “Leeches represent living soft watches. The Dalínian universe represents the ideas of Watson. DNA is the… ”

“Excuse me,” we interrupt . ”What have leeches, soft watches, DNA, Dali’s universe, Op and Pop artists, the taste-less masses and TV got to do with each other?”

Dali looks at us with contempt . “The lame people – they are the templates,” he says. “In the genetic code, there are messengers. They always lame.”

”Oh,” we say.

“Everybody idiot but me,” announces Dali loudly.

”You say the masses would protest the lame people and the ducks,” we say, struggling to hold on to the interview. “Why make them watch what they wouldn’t like?”

”Masses need enigmas. Like religion. Must give them enigmas”.

“Do you consider yourself a priest?”

”Not a priest”, says Dali coldly. “Am Dali. That ees sufficient. TV not need humans to run it. Need brains not human. Cybernetics. Very  superior to human brains.

“But computers have to be programmed by humans. Who’d program them?”

“Fuller. Watson. Myself. We program the machines.”

“What’s wrong with the present programmers?”

“Afraid to lose job. Full of bureaucracy. No private initiative. All initiative completely lost. Too much pleasing the masses.”

“The situation would be improved by showing the masses omelletes on trembling old ladies’ heads?”

“Naturalement! The Heepies are against thees bureaucracy,  thees uniformity.” Suddenly, there is a new flurry of Heepies, DNA, molecules and cybernetics, with a few protons and antiprotons thrown in.

We ask again. “About this cover you’ve done for TV Guide — what else  can you say about it?”

“Ees desert. Dalínian landscape. Desert of Spain. Also like desert of California. Put TV set in thumbs. In usual desert.”

Does the desert symbolize TV?”

Dali looks blank.

“My editor thought maybe you meant the ‘vast wasteland’.”

Dali looks blank. “No, ees usual Dalían universe.”

“The cover just means…thumbs in a desert? It doesn’t actually have a meaning?”

“No. Just thumbs.” Dali changes the subject. “Must uplift masses. Op and Pop artists must uplift”, he repeats.

“Would you comment on the future of TV, Mr. Dali?”

This question provokes a veritable scientifique explosion. “Laser beams…DNA…oxydic nucleic acid…holograms! I make hologram of God!..My religious pictures metaphysical. Full of protons, antiprotons, molecules. Everybody make images of God. Michelangelo make of marble. Who make God like that? I make portrait of God with mathematical formula. Holograms! I make God with holograms. Show on TV. Fantastique!

“God on TV?” We stare at Dali.

“Ahhrrgh”, Dali leaps up from his chair. “Fantastique. TV experts don’t know what hologram is. Nobody here know nothing. Should do your job! DNA — don’t know what DNA is. How can you SPEAK people who know nothing? Hologram bring Into existence object in HEAD. Fantastique technology. God is in head, make real. Put on TV”. (…)

Someone tries to pay Dali tribute by mentioning his magnificent Crucifixion [paintings]. Dali stares at the speaker — and then rattles off a long and totally pointless anecdote about having received an elephant as a gift. “From Delhi to Dali”, he says triumphantly.

For a moment we all mill around him like stray cats, unwilling to go without a moment of true communication. But Dali will not have it. 

  1. Letters, p353. ↩
  2. Interview with Salvador Dali by Edith Efron, TV Guide, June 8-14, 1968, pp6-10. The transcript here has been prepared from online photographs of this TV Guide interview. Copies of the issue are regularly offered at ebay and elsewhere and sellers often illustrate their wares in this way. The interview has been lightly edited by omitting some of the less interesting material and by deleting words Dali probably did not use. For example, Ephron’s “Is possible to see whatever my own brain create” appears as “Is possible to see what my own brain create”. Dali might have known the word ‘whatever’; but he was too much of a genius to use it in the way reported by Efron in an interview with the press. Still, odd constructions like “No private initiative” remain. Could Dali really have said this? Or, at least, could he really have made his point about the lack of creativity in TV in such strange (for him) language as this? ↩
  3. The ‘Today Show’ and the ‘Tonight Show’ were TV programs in 1968 — which are still going 55 years later in 2023. The ‘Tomorrow Show’ would also become a TV program, but only 5 years later in 1973. Its use in the title of the TV Guide cover painting has the effect of contrasting present time, ‘Today’ and ‘Tonight’, with the future, ‘Tomorrow’. Or, as Dali’s intent seems to have been, to use time to contrast unreality with reality and superficiality with creative work. ↩

Ear-view mirror

Gordon records that McLuhan used the great phrase “ear-view mirror” in a letter to Barbara Rowes from August 9, 1977.1 But he does so as part of a questionable claim:

The television medium forces the use of what McLuhan later referred to as the ‘ear-view mirror,’ because the eye never receives a complete picture from the screen, just as the ear never receives a word in isolation from a stream of speech.

Gordon’s sentence is often enough cited with approval as if it captured the intent of McLuhan’s play on words. But of course it does not. In fact, once actually considered, it is hard to know what Gordon could have been thinking — his sentence is a sequence of non-sequiturs.2

The phrase is first of all a product of McLuhan’s Joycean mind that found it easy, enjoyable and informative to juggle words and thoughts.  Leaving off the ‘r’ from ‘rear-view mirror’ reveals a mind in action and reflects a common phenomenon in language — like the Cockney ‘enry’ or the Greek ‘oinos’. A funny thing happened on the way to the present.

Secondly, the phrase captures ‘tactility’ in its characteristic action of melding without merging, in this case ‘ear’ with ‘eye’ (view, mirror). According to McLuhan, this is what television, as the epitome of new media, is — the extension of tactility.

Thirdly, the coinage indicates that its twin, the rear-view mirror, is more complicated than might be thought. Like everything else, it is knotted and not-ed internally.

  1. Escape into Understanding, p210 with reference at p405, n63. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s phrase does not concern what “the television medium forces the use of”. Whether or not “the eye (…) receives a complete picture from the screen” depends entirely on how the ‘eye’ is conceived and how “a complete picture” is understood. And what this has to do with the reception of a word in “a stream of speech” — which is usually the case, but sometimes not — is obscure at best. At a guess, Gordon equated the linear “stream of speech” with an analogous ‘stream of images’ in TV and considered that both make sense only in such a chronological context. But this ignores McLuhan’s ‘allatonceness’. So a series of non-sequiturs goes wrong through an overconcern with sequence. ↩

DNA

McLuhan frequently referred to the discovery of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson and apparently saw it as analogous to his discovery of the medium as the structure of all possible messages.

McLuhan to Barbara Rowes, April 29, 1976

All of man’s artifacts are structurally linguistic and metaphoric. This discovery, unknown to anybody in any culture, would justify a book without any other factors whatever. Remember the Watson autobiography of his discovery of the double helix in the DNA particle? Literally speaking, this breakthrough [of mine] about the linguistic structure of all human artifacts [= the medium is the message] is incomparably larger and deeper-going.1 I am, myself, unable to grasp the implications. Certainly it means that the unity of the family of man can be seen, not [only] as biological, but as intellectual and spiritual.2

*

The University In The Electric Age, 19643

Today, in the Age of Information, all materials and energy tend to become a form of programmed knowledge. The process of translation, or application, has become easy. The real work now consists in doing something else, namely imagining the present in all its depth. The power of the imaginative grasp of the present seems to have belonged only to artists till now. That is why they seem to have been “ahead of their time”. But their power to seize their own time in depth is also accompanied by a vision of the unused possibilities of their time. They are often inclined to refashion the sensory life of their age as if they were the Life Force providing DNA particles with new programs. Indeed it is not misleading to envisage the artist as Life Force so far as inventing new sensory environments and ground rules is concerned. If new technology is very much in the order of biological extension and mutation, the artist is not without his role in orchestrating such change with the orderly needs of our sensory life. Without this orchestration of established sensory modes with new technological environments, man undergoes progressive alienation from himself.

Toward an Inclusive Consciousness 1967

If the DNA particle is programmed from all eternity, or is totally programmed before anything happens, it’s an all-at-once operation.

McLuhan to Sheila Watson, June 12, 19684

Obtain cover of TV Guide for June 8-14. It is a Dali explanation of the tactile nature of the TV image. Wonderful interview inside, too.

Dew-Line 1.5, November 1968

The twentieth century is not the era of outer but of inner space. Ours is the era of the inner trip and DNA. The outer trip is for tourists only and for the cultivators of the old hardware.  

Dew-Line 1.6 December 1968

The scholastics were oral dialoguers who had memorized all the basic philosophic components needed in their dialogue. Each schoolman had to be an encyclopedia of such lore. They then went to work (operation-research style) to solve new problems by banging old clichés together, much as Watson and his colleagues did in approaching the DNA. problem (see The Double Helix).5

McLuhan in conversation with to Nina Sutton, 19756

You cannot have learning except at the price of creative ignorance. The moment you learn some vast new thing you realize how very ignorant you were up to that moment and so learning is always creating ignorance — it is like discoveries made on DNA particles or something like that — this suddenly reveals to the scientists themselves their ignorance. So discoveries are always creating ignorance.7


  1. Compare from ‘Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media’ (1960): “I would suggest that the penetrative powers of any structure of technology lie precisely here: namely, that the ratio among sight and sound, and touch and motion, offer precisely that place to stand which Archimedes asked for: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” ↩
  2. Cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, p224. ↩
  3. ‘The University In The Electric Age: The End Of The Gap Between Theory And Practice’, University of Toronto Varsity Graduate, 11:3, December 1964. ↩
  4. Letters, 353. ↩
  5. Watson’s Double Helix was published earlier in that same year of 1968. ↩
  6. Barbara Rowes, to whom McLuhan wrote the letter quoted at the head of this post, frequently joined Sutton in her sessions with McLuhan. ↩
  7. The ignorance revealed by discoveries is not only past ignorance. More important is the ignorance revealed by discovery in the present for future investigation. What might be called ‘essential ignorance’ is embedded in all the tenses of time. The ‘rule of thumb’: no light without dark, no dark without light! ↩

Archimedes

In 1960 and for a few years thereafter, McLuhan used the image of Archimedes’ lever to point to the inherently ontological or universalizing nature of media such that they “embrace the globe”, “imposing their assumptions upon the entire community”:

Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1960
The boast of Archimedes was fulfilled in the phonetic alphabet. The culture that uses it stands on the human eye and levers all the other senses into distorted configurations. Today, Archimedes can stand on the ear by radio or our tactile sense by television and enlarge the operation of these organs till they embrace the globe. 

Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media, 1960
I would suggest that the penetrative powers of any structure of technology lie precisely here: namely, that the ratio among sight and sound, and touch and motion, offer precisely that place to stand which Archimedes asked for: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” 

Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media 1960 
…media as extensions of our senses offer ready access to our inmost lives, putting the lever of Archimedes in the hands of bureaucrat and entrepreneur alike. 

McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff Dec 19, 19601
Natural resources and staples, whether cotton, fish, lumber, coal, iron, water power or waterways are in certain respects low-grade media of communication gradually imposing their assumptions upon the entire community, creating a kind of organic unity. But our electronic media are in a very basic sense new natural resources, new staples of global extent and distribution since they are extensions of our own private senses. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the world.” Photography, radio, television, et cetera enable anybody to stand on the collective human ear, eye, skin and to manipulate the entire human population as natural resource.

The Humanities in the Electronic Age 1961
Madison Avenue is the collective Archimedes of our time. Archimedes had rightly observed: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Today, looking at our globally dilated senses, he would comment: “Well, I’ll be fulcrummed. Why, I can stand on your ear, on your eye, on your skin and move your world as I wish.” 

Understanding Media, 19642
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. (…) As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse. Archimedes once said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, “I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose.” We have leased these “places to stand” to private corporations.3 

  1. For the full letter see McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff. ↩
  2. UM, p68 ↩
  3. McLuhan would come to see this as a mode of “hijacking”. See The Hijacked World. ↩

Hominization of the planet 2

It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electro-technical extension of his awareness.1

In Hominization 1, McLuhan was seen to replay Lucretius on human creativity:

that freewill, wrenched away From the fates, by which we each proceed to follow pleasure’s sway, So that we swerve our motions…

In fact, McLuhan did one better than Lucretius in that creativity is specified by him not, or not only, in the conscious exercise of will, but in all human experience whatsoever — even when the genesis of experience in creativity remains almost entirely unconscious:

In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

McLuhan continued to emphasize the point 15 years later in his Playboy Interview:

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…

The notion is that all human experience, the most ordinary to the most artistic, begins in momentary exposure to the range of the available possibilities together with all the possible combinations of those possibilities. A free or swerved or creative choice must ‘then’ be made between them in the momentary activation of some one of them. So conceived, human being is Aristotle’s energeia, the incessant sparking activation of particular linguistic and experiential forms.

“The gap is where the action is” in that the gap between conscious life and the unconscious domain of possibilities is crossed at every instant and then, in the unconscious, the gaps between the possibilities there are crossed, too, as those possibilities are surveyed and assessed. It is like language use where all possible sounds, words and grammatical markers are available to speakers, moment to moment to moment.2 They must choose between these possibilities and their words are the activated result, or effect, of this discriminatory process. Thus conceived, language is the “playback” of preexisting forms. And, according to McLuhan, so is experience.

In both processes, in the generation of language and in the isomorphic generation of experience, there is a complication of space and time and of the speaking/experiencing subject. The space-time of these processes is not that of the ‘regular world’. They do not unfold in ordinary three-dimensional space nor in chronological time. And identity is more the effect of these processes than its cause. These fundamentally obscure processes are therefore the actions of McLuhan’s nomad/no-man/nobody.3

A kind of “artistic creation” where “we swerve our motions” is implicated, since the ‘rearview mirror’ of previous enunciation or of previous experience does not bind the spoken word or the experiential perception to follow. There is an essentially exploratory aspect to every moment of experience that consists in a sort of reconnaissance of the possibilities before it, forcing a swerved choice between them.

Perception is exploration and you do not know from one moment to the next what you’re going to discover.4

The space, time and subjectivity of ‘ordinary’ life is incessantly left behind for this ‘upside down world’ (as Hegel styled it).

We have to repeat what we were about to say.5

a way of living as if every moment were your next.6

A central question here: what does the actuality of such ubiquitous creativity7 indicate about possibility?

Strangely (since on reflection what could be more obvious?), it has occurred less and less to our purported thinking in the last two centuries that what is actual must also be possible! One of the explicit aims of Heidegger’s 1927 Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was to address this thought-provoking oversight. The last sentences of its ‘Introduction’8 reads:

Higher than actuality stands possibility. The understanding of phenomenology [dual genitive!] lies entirely in the grasping of it [dual genitive!] as a possibility.9

What happens when creativity is recognized as actual and therefore also as possible is that the structural leap or gap expressed in creativity must be rooted in the ground of human being (dual genitive!).10 Hence McLuhan’s insight that “it is man who has become both figure and ground”. That is, human creativity points to the conditions of creativity in possibility — namely, plurality and the bordering gaps that are necessary for that plurality, gaps that are re-played in the re-creative leaps we make in actuality. In this way humans re-present ‘ground’: “men perform the miracle of recreating (…) in every instant”. But in re-presenting ‘ground’ in their actual circumstances, humans cannot enact plural fundamental possibilities at once, any more than physical material can be more than one chemical formula at once.11 So at the very instant when humans re-present ground, they do so as a dynamic figure of that ground.12 “It is man who has become both figure and ground”.

Hominization of the planet 3 will further unpack this insight by considering a passage in From Cliché to Archetype that was later “quoted” in Laws of Media:

The cliché (…) is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive, the residues of other archetypes adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we unconsciously retrieve [all the] others (…) In fact, whenever we ‘quote’ one consciousness, we also ‘quote’ the archetypes we exclude.13

_________________________

  1. Take Today, p11. Humans becoming “both figure and ground” is not a matter that first becomes possible in some chronological time like the “electro-technical” era. Instead, what becomes possible today is a new “awareness” of this perennial condition. As McLuhan said of the objects of the new awareness made possible by literacy in classical Greece: “The functions and processes were not new. But the means of arrested visual analysis, namely the phonetic alphabet, was as new to the Greeks as the movie camera in our century.” (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 23) ↩
  2. For ‘language’ as McLuhan’s central metaphor see Language itself and Grammars of the Media. ↩
  3. For Plato’s description of the journey of this “nomad”, see McLuhan and Plato 1 – Phaedrus and Er. ↩
  4. McLuhan, Interview with Kenneth Allsop, BBC ’24 Hours’, August 19, 1971. ↩
  5. ‘The Be-Spoke Tailor’, Explorations 8, 1957, #4. ↩
  6. McLuhan, ‘A Media Approach to Inflation’, NYT, September 21, 1974. ↩
  7. Creativity is most manifest, perhaps, in the arts and sciences. But we properly recognize it as well, of course, throughout the whole range of human activity: in child-rearing, cooking, hunting, sewing, telling jokes, etc etc. And the often startling creativity of animals manifests it as well! ↩
  8. Since SZ was never completed, there is an important sense in which these concluding sentences of the ‘Introduction’ represent Heidegger’s ‘last word’ on the SZ project. Not to say that there are not other ‘last words’ on it as well, of course — such as ‘Zeit und Sein’ from 35 years later in 1962. ↩
  9. Sein und Zeit, ‘Einleitung’: “Höher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Möglichkeit. Das Verständnis der Phänomenologie liegt einzig im Ergreifen ihrer als Möglichkeit.” ↩
  10. For both Lucretius and McLuhan, the creative freedom of human being is grounded in prior possibility that is ontological. ↩
  11. Not to say that human being or physical being cannot have the form of some highly complicated combination of fundamental possibilities! In fact, it is probable that with human being, as much as with physical being, it is disappearingly rare for a singular elemental possibility to be manifested purely and simply on its own. ↩
  12. Dual genitive. ↩
  13. From Cliché to Archetype, p21 = Laws of Media, p104. ↩

Multi-space dialogue in Greece

Toward a Spatial Dialogue…1

To say that Homer and Hesiod were “nonvisual” poets is to explain in a phrase every problem of the world of Greek scholarship since Lessing and Schliemann. The Greeks never [fully] entered pictorial or visual space. They tended to use all their senses at once. They approached [ie, anticipated]2 the [later] European [more emphatically visual] modes of awareness by a gradual playing down of acoustic space, of kinetic space, of tactual and visceral spaces, in favor of a heightened visual organization of experience.
The change from multi-spaces to a single, uniform, rational space is often associated with the Euclidean breakthrough. [However:] In Art and Geometry William Ivins explains that Euclid never freed himself from kinetic space. In The Beginnings of Architecture, Siegfried Giedion says that the Greeks no more managed to achieve the visual enclosure of space than did the Incas. The new space breakthrough [to visual enclosure] was left for the Romans. (Through the Vanishing Point)3

Plato and Aristotle, the representatives of the new literate culture of Greece in philosophy, had this same doubleness. They straddled the written and oral traditions. They translated the tribal encyclopedia of the preceding culture into the written, classified form, and they too [like Bacon]4 produced an (…) encyclopedic philosophy. (Toward an Inclusive Consciousness, 1967)5

  1. This is a section heading in Through the Vanishing Point, 1968, p33. ↩
  2. Later on the same TVP 225 page: “Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought marshals the available conventional evidence, apropos Greek poetry, to show how the Greeks succeeded in sloughing off most of their nonvisual experience in order to ‘anticipate‘ European rationalism.” ↩
  3. Through the Vanishing Point, p225. ↩
  4. The sentences immediately prior to this passage concern such “doubleness”, or “inclusiveness”, in Francis Bacon: “What Bacon did was to take the Book of Nature, which had been the medieval image of the natural world, and to this he added the Book of Scripture, the Sacred Page. He took both these pages (together) and directed to them a kind of analytic gaze of comprehensive inclusiveness. I’m suggesting that the very components that make for a divided consciousness also can (…) become the means of an inclusive consciousness such as Bacon took for granted in his own case.” ↩
  5. ‘Toward an Inclusive Consciousness’, Lecture of March 17, 1967 at the University of Toronto, in Understanding Me, pp124-138. ↩

Through the vanishing point with Nietzsche

Throughout McLuhan’s New Sciences, appeal has been made to Nietzsche’s ‘History of an Error’ from Twilight of the Idols (1889) and especially to its final stage:

The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we also have abolished the apparent one!!1

Compare in McLuhan:

Let us keep in mind that the new reality is in the image and not behind it.2

Nietzsche’s conclusion about the loss of the “apparent world” — aka, the loss of the image — is precipitated from McLuhan’s observation as soon as it is asked if an image is still an image if it is not an image of something? If its reality is only in it “and not behind it”?

McLuhan did indeed appreciate this utter loss:

Put a fast rim spin around a slow one and the slow one disintegrates. Put a satellite ring around the planet and all arrangements on the planet disintegrate. It becomes garbage. (Address to Author’s Luncheon in NYC, 1969)3

Whereas mechanical “dehumanization” wrecked the person, electric super-“humanization” wrecks the entire system. (Take Today, p221)4

 

  1. Nietzsche (1844-1900), Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Geschichte eines Irrtums — Wie die »wahre Welt« endlich zur Fabel wurde’, 1889: “Die wahre Welt haben wir abgeschafft: welche Welt blieb übrig? die scheinbare vielleicht?… Aber nein! mit der wahren Welt haben wir auch die scheinbare abgeschafft!!” For discussion, see Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 2: What Mallarmé saw. ↩
  2. ‘The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion’, in Mass Media in Canada, ed. John A Irving, 1962. ↩
  3. YouTube recording 12:50ff. The date given at YouTube for this address is 1966. But it is clear from many references in it — like McLuhan mentioning The Love Machine by Jacqueline Susann, which was published in 1969, or describing his return from the May 1969 Bilderberg conference in Denmark — that this date is mistaken and should be 1969. ↩
  4. Later in Take Today: “The UNPERSON is the inevitable result of improved communication, all barriers of private consciousness are overcome, the resulting collective form of awareness is a tribal dream. Western man experiences it only in his sleep. (…) We all become unpersons at night” (p269). ↩

Hominization of the planet 1

This is page 34 of the 1969 Counterblast. The missing bottom “phase” of “creation” is original.1

In the posthumous The Global Village, the same thoughts appear again in only slightly modified form:

The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet; it is the second phase of the original creation.2 

McLuhan saw satellites as that particular ‘extension of man’ best illustrating such hominization:

Satellites (…) transform the planet into a work of art by placing it inside a man-made environment… (Take Today, 294)

When the planet was suddenly enveloped by a man-made artifact, “Nature” flipped into art form. (The End of the Work Ethic, Address to The Empire Club of Canada, November 16, 1972)

A satellite was a kind of mini-planet that could support life, like the planet beneath our feet, but one that was entirely “man-made”. It thereby prompted a different take on Earth itself and ecological consciousness was born:3

The moment of Sputnik was the moment of creating Spaceship Earth… (The End of the Work Ethic)

But even before Sputnik’s launch in 1957, McLuhan had seen the same phenomenon already at work since the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here he is already in Explorations 2 in 1954:

Technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms)4

In fact, once technology was conceived as the domain of human extensions, the abolition of nature and hominization of the planet must have occurred already with those first extensions of paleolithic “humanoids”, speech and stone tools:

The first humanoid uttering his first intelligible grunt, or “word,” outered himself and set up a dynamic relationship with himself, other creatures, and the world outside his skin. Speech (…) is (…) a tool to reconstitute nature (…) to translate one form [nature] into another [human experience and its collective expression in culture].5 (…) The pre-neolithic [= paleolithic] art of making stone tools [like the art of making speech tools] moved man out of the process of [natural] evolution and into a world of his own making. (The Global Village, 1989, p93)

Humans qua humans — humans as humans — are fundamentally creative in this way:

In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

Hence, even with paleolithic “humanoids”, or especially with paleolithic “humanoids” (since a beginning exceeds the development it enables and shapes), a ‘new’ factor is operative in the world. Things no longer follow a purely ‘natural’ course. Through the exercise of creativity even, or especially, in “ordinary perception”, ever repeated leaps of creativity punctuate nature in such a way that the physical course of events is inter/rupted. 

“In every instant” ruptures occur. The gap is where the action is.

Here McLuhan is close to the Epicurean view of Lucretius (c99 BC – c55 BC) in De rerum natura:

Where do we get that freewill, wrenched away
From the fates, by which we each proceed to follow pleasure’s sway,
So that we swerve our motions not at a designated spot
And fixed time, but the very place we will it in our thought?
Without a doubt these motions have their beginning in the whims
Of each, and from that will these motions trickle into the limbs.6

With all living beings, but especially with humans, a decided clinamen (swerve) is seen to operate in the world alongside, but exceeding in some way, the world of nature, the world of the natural ‘course of events’.

.

  1. Harley Parker’s fontwork here is well conceived. The labyrinthine shape of the ‘2’ traces the complications of creation and the analogous complications of thought that would ‘follow’ it. Meanwhile the halving of ‘creation’ illustrates that “original creation” is not the full story. As McLuhan says, a “second phase” is essential to it. Furthermore, creation in both its divine and human iterations takes place across a gap — amounting to an absence that is essential to creation. The very heart of creativity is a gap “where the action is”. This gap is what must be retraced and retrieved today after centuries in which it has been largely ‘overlooked‘ (as the top half of Parker’s “creation” overlooks its missing bottom “phase”). ↩
  2. The Global Village, 1989, p93. ↩
  3. Compare ‘At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theatre in which there are no spectators but only actors’, 1974: “At the moment that the earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and Ecology was born.” ↩
  4. In the same 1954 essay (‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’): “The power of the machine to transform the character of work and living strongly invites us to transform every level of existence by art.” ↩
  5. ‘Speech is a tool to reconstitute nature, to translate one form into another’. Compare ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (cited in part above): “In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being.” ↩
  6. Bk2.257ff:
    unde est haec, inquam, fatis avolsa voluntas,
    per quam progredimur quo ducit quemque voluptas,
    declinamus item motus nec tempore certo
    nec regione loci certa, sed ubi ipsa tulit mens?
    nam dubio procul his rebus sua cuique voluntas
    principium dat et hinc motus per membra rigantur.     ↩

McLuhan’s communication problem

In 1968 McLuhan was in Tony Schwartz’s studio in NY with Harley Parker talking about art illustrations for Through the Vanishing Point.1 Presumably they had an upcoming meeting in NY with Harper & Row, the publisher of TVP, to finalize its contents and layout. 

In a recording of the studio proceedings, McLuhan voiced a central problem regarding communication of his work:2 

I don’t know how to estimate the meaning of the fact that all the philosophers, all the scientists now living, are unaware that there is such a thing as visual space and that they have been living in it for 25 centuries and that is suddenly dissolving and leaving them — causing a considerable disorientation in their world. But how the hell do you start talking to these big shots and explaining the ABC’s of their world to them without creating an impression of megalomania or some utter nonsense?3

Also mentioned by McLuhan: the need for communications analysis to situate itself ‘beyond good and evil’…

I have no values as regards anything I talk about.4

Here are online5 pictures of the studio, the first with Tony Schwartz, the second with Schwartz, McLuhan and John Culkin. McLuhan looks surprisingly well after his brain tumor operation (mentioned in the recording), but he had obviously lost a lot of weight. The old Marshall looked more like Culkin in body style.

 

 

  1. Also mentioned in the recording as present along with McLuhan, Parker and Schwartz: George (Thompson?) and Suzy (?). ↩
  2. Other related problems: McLuhan’s words (like any words) were read or heard via the rear-view mirror, thereby fundamentally distorting them and preventing the perception of the new that he was attempting to foster. Letting go of one’s frame of reference is not easy. Perception of the new requires a step back ‘through the vanishing point’ to another identity and another world and there is no identity between identities and no world between worlds. These problems strongly motivate the “megalomania” and “utter nonsense” assessments. ↩
  3. https://youtu.be/YEtdaqjzCGc?t=2820. McLuhan adds: “It’s like Alice in Wonderland.” ↩
  4. https://youtu.be/YEtdaqjzCGc?t=4915. ↩
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQIPf4ezrwg. ↩

The vortex of the living community

McLuhan uses the thought-provoking phrase, “the vortex of the living community” in Take Today (p5), in a section of the book titled ‘VERTEX v VORTEX’.

If every “living community” has the vortex form, escape from it would be possible only to another vortex and not to some supposedly vortex-free condition.1 McLuhan suggests as much in The Gutenberg Galaxy (pp 30-31) where he cites Wilhelm von Humboldt via Ernst Cassirer:

By the same process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another.2

This image of the social vortex recalls the fundamental role attributed to it by Empedocles of Acragas (Agrigento) who lived in the fifth century BC, a generation or two before Socrates:

When Strife was fallen to the lowest depth of the vortex, and Love had reached to the centre of the whirl, in it do all things come together (…) and, as they mingled, strife began to pass out to the furthest limit (…) but in proportion as it kept rushing out, a soft, immortal stream of blameless Love kept running in, and straightway those things became mortal which had been immortal before, those things were mixed that had before been unmixed, each changing its path. (Diels fr 35-36)3

For Empedocles ‘the medium is the message’ since the message of ‘mortal’ versus ‘immortal’, or of ‘mixed’ versus ‘unmixed’, depends on the middle or medium between such pairs, namely on the relative strength of Strife and Love. Further, the ratio between these is one of inverse correlation: as the one goes down or out, the other comes up or in. McLuhan saw the dynamic relationship of the visual and the audile, the left and right hemispheres, dialectic and rhetoric, etc, in just this way. His tactility, one might say was equal to Love divided by Strife and Strife divided by Love.4 And, just as with McLuhan, the image Empedocles proffers for the world where this dynamic is writ large, and for the individual where it is writ small, is the vortex or maelstrom.  

McLuhan was not so much saying something new as he was attempting to communicate what has been seen forever, but has never been communicated in such a way as to ground a fitting prudence either in the polis at large or in the individual soul:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again….5

In his ‘Foreword’ to the reprinting of Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications that appeared in the same year as Take Today, 1972, McLuhan elaborated on the ‘VERTEX v VORTEX’ contrast:

Innis, in the spirit of the new age of information, sought for patterns in the very ground of history and existence. He saw media, old and new, not as mere vertices at which to direct his point of view, but as living vortices of power creating hidden environments that act abrasively and destructively on older forms of culture.6

A vertex is a point where a line or a surface turns. It derives from Latin vertere, ‘to turn’, as does ‘vortex’. In fact, vertex and vortex were once a doublet with both meaning a ‘whirl’ and especially a ‘whirlpool’. Vertex then became separated from vortex and today is used almost exclusively in mathematical and biological applications.7 McLuhan assimilated the vertex to the Gutenberg galaxy where both the subjective viewer and objective extreme are taken as vanishing points belonging to perspective. Hence the post-Gutenbergian journey ‘through the vanishing point’.

McLuhan saw that humans never have their being apart from “living vortices of power creating hidden environments”.8 The great question was: can we become conscious of these vortex environments in order to subject them to shared investigation?

technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art, so the new media have transformed the entire environment into an educational affair. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, 1954)

“Nature in the old sense” was some unquestioned environment which gave definition to the society within it. Today any such a ‘natural setting’ has disappeared:

the natural round of seasonal and biological cycles [has been] supplanted by vehement new intensities of man-made “rim spins” (Take Today, p150)

The result is confusion and disorder to such an extent that survival itself is threatened.

In War and Peace in the Global Village the principal theme is the quest for identity through violence in a world of rapidly shifting technologies. A sudden change of environment through major technical innovations blurs the identity image of generations old and new. They then begin a tragic agon of redefinition of their image of identity. (From Cliché to Archetype, p114)9

It was McLuhan’s proposal that the world as “an educational affair”, as a “classroom without walls”, could establish a new form of shared identity:  

The old separation of art and nature we now see to have been based on an ignorance of nature. So that art today we apply to cities and to whole regions. Art is no longer for the few nor for the studio. And the learning process and the creative process which we had once reserved for scholars and geniuses we now know to be a character of all human perception. (New Media in Arts Education, 1956)

the next extension of man will be the simulation of the process of consciousness itself. (…) It does not mean the end of private awareness, rather a huge heightening of same via involvement in corporate energies. Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive, Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously. That is the meaning of tactual involvement.10 (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, October 4, 1963)

When everything happens at once, when everybody becomes totally involved in everybody, how is one to establish identity? For the past century people have been working at that problem. Quest for identity is a central aspect of the electric age. Naturally, we’re looking for identity in the old rear-view mirror where it was before. Perhaps we should be looking for it in [the] corporate… (Toward an Inclusive Consciousness, 1967)

The central idea is that ‘second nature’, specifically including all the individual and collective ways of human being, is as intelligible as any other field — or even more so, as Vico argued:

the world of civil society has certainly been made by men [unlike the material things of ‘first nature’], and (…) its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature (…) and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since men made it, men could hope to know.” (New Science, §331)

Investigation of this ‘new’ corporate domain — one that is just as much ‘ancient’ as it is ‘new’ — could serve as a collectively recognized and approved rudder in the defining maelstroms of our human being. 

 

  1. Cf Heidegger in Was heißt Denken? — Was z.B. Schwimmen »heißt«, lernen wir nie durch eine Abhandlung über das Schwimmen kennen. Was Schwimmen heißt, sagt uns nur der Sprung in den Strom. Die Frage »Was heißt Denken«? läßt sich niemals dadurch beantworten, daß wir eine Begriffsbestimmung über das Denken, eine Definition, vorlegen…” ↩
  2. “Spins” and the “circle” suggest the vortex form, of course. The same passage from Wilhelm von Humboldt cited in The Gutenberg Galaxy also appears in Laws of Media, p226. ↩
  3. McLuhan, too, saw the medium that is the message as defined by an “ancient quarrel” of Strife and Love: ‘exclusive’ vs ‘inclusive’ consciousness bound together in an inverse ratio, the more of one, the less of the other, but never One alone. And a striking result of this perennial quarrel for McLuhan was that “every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly” into its opposite (Take Today, p6)  — just as Empedocles observed “each changing its path” as the ratio of Strife and Love varied. ↩
  4. See note 2 and McLuhan to Skornia in the post above: “Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive, Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously. That is the meaning of tactual involvement.” ↩
  5. Eliot, ‘East Coker‘, Four Quartets. ↩
  6. The fact that vertex/vortex appears in this way in two texts from 1972 may suggest that the construction of both took place as selections from McLuhan’s unpublished writing and/or dictations and/or recorded conversations. Perhaps a single consideration of vertex/vortex got pulled apart and its pieces then used in these different places. Certainly the posthumous  Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989) were assembled in this way from McLuhan’s leavings. In fact, it seems that this method of composition may have gone back at least to Understanding Media in 1964, for which Ted Carpenter claimed to have made much input. McLuhan’s subsequent books — The Medium is the Massage (1967) with ‎Quentin Fiore and ‎Jerome Agel, War And Peace In The Global Village (1968) again with Fiore and ‎Agel, Through the Vanishing Point (1968) with Harley Parker, Counterblast (1969) with George Thompson (although Thompson is not named as co-author), From Cliché to Archetype (1970) with Wilfred Watson, Take Today (1972) with Barry Nevitt and The City as Classroom (1977) with Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon (published as Media Messages and Language: The World As Your Classroom in the US in 1980) — were all products of this same method. McLuhan loved to talk and write, but lost patience with book and article composition and was happy when this could be handed over to others. Naturally this involved the danger that content sometimes appeared that was contrary to McLuhan’s own views and intentions. But he seems to have been unconcerned about this compared to the worry that disorderly work might never appear at all — and he was certainly not going to order it himself! Coauthors were the only answer. ↩
  7. Such as the vertex form in calculus which is used to specify the extreme turning point of the graphed parabola of an equation. ↩
  8. ‘Foreword’ to Innis’ Empire and Communications — another echo of this text with Take Today and especially with the passage cited above: “the vortex of the living community”. ↩
  9. There is no identity between identities. ↩
  10. For ‘tactual involvement’ see the discussion of Strife divided by Love in the post above marked by Note 3. ↩

A whole new genus of sciences

Just as with a child, which after a long still gestation draws its first breath, breaking off the continuity of only gradual growth -– a qualitative leap — and it is born, so too the spirit, in ripening itself slowly and quietly towards a new form, dissolves bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering condition is intimated only by isolated symptoms — the frivolity as much as the boredom which enter into the established order, the indeterminate presentiment of some unknown, all are harbingers of the coming of something new. This gradual process of dissolution, which does not alter the physiognomy of the whole, is suddenly undermined by a supervening insight that — a lightning bolt! — at once reveals the prospect of a new world. (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ‘Preface’, 1807)1

But it has never been understood that the second-rate character of the English and American nineteenth century as compared with the German and French was owing to the German and French having adopted psychological rather than the biological experience as the source of the guiding analogies for (…) social study and discussion. (McLuhan’s 1947 Proposal to Robert Hutchins)

to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world. (Playboy Interview, 1969)

*

The basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica I.II.q 113.a.7, ad quintum. The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs instantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics  — “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”. (McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype)2

McLuhan foresaw3 a whole new genus of sciences. Not another species of science within the existing genus,4 but a new genus of sciences entirely. 

This would not be “old science” which studies “first nature” excluding (as far as possible) the bias of human observation and its instrumentation,5 but “new science” which would study what McLuhan called “second nature” — a “second nature” specifically including the spectrum of biases which humans enact, at present nearly always utterly unconsciously, in all their different ways of being.6

The central problem is that the whole environment defined by “new science” was and is invisible: its workings take place unconsciously behind our own backs even as we enact them. But environments in general are invisible, McLuhan argued, until they are not — only consider that 200 years ago the material environment as defined by the chemical elements was invisible and unknown. This did not mean that it was not very much already there and already at work everywhere (including in our own bodies and brains, as much as in the furthest reaches of the universe). In fact, it had always been at work and always will be at work  — but 200 years ago it was as if it were not there at all.

All of the sciences and manufacturing processes that have consequently been established in that newly dis-covered environment, indeed on the basis of that new environment, from chemistry itself to medicine and our whole industrial society — all modern life! — could appear only after it had appeared.7 The medium is the message.

However, once a new environment has emerged, at first always only tentatively of course, and against the resistance of the whole old world for which it remains invisible, humans are attracted to investigate it in a process which never stops generating new knowledge and even whole new sciences. As McLuhan said of this new genus of sciences, and of his attempt to initiate it, in the Introduction to his 1964 Understanding Media:

It [UM] explores the contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that will bring them into orderly service, I have looked at them anew, accepting very little of the conventional wisdom concerning them. 

Two decades before this, already in his Cambridge PhD thesis from 1943, McLuhan had proffered how it is that humans as humans relate to “the principle of intelligibility” in things:

Just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings [by situating/orienting us in a defined natural and social world], so that faculty which produced this state of language is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials.8 (The Classical Trivium, 1943, 51)

And then in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ in 1954:

In this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being.9

And in From Cliché to Archetype in 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.10

*

Here is McLuhan writing to his former student at St Louis University, Walter Ong, in 1961:11

My theory is acceptable only to Thomists for whom consciousness as analogical proportion among the senses from moment to moment is quite easy to grasp. But print technology actually smashes that analogical awareness in society and the individual. (…) I can now explain these matters very much better than I did in Understanding Media.12 But no more evidence is needed of the hypnotic aspect of all media in human history than the absence of awareness among those who underwent [subjection to] them. Each is invested with a cloak of invisibility. I am naturally eager to attract many people to such study as this and see in it the hope of some rational consensus for our externalized senses. A sensus communis for external senses is what I’m trying to build.13

Similarly a few years later in Understanding Media:14

The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of “common sense” that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus.15 When we have achieved a world-wide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a world-wide integration. Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness.

McLuhan contrasted the “exterior landscape”16 and “first nature”, with the “interior landscape” and “second nature”. The difference between them was not that the former are outside and material while the latter are inside and mental. Instead, McLuhan’s “second nature” is “first nature” plus all the varieties of sensibility through which humans experience that “first nature” and relate to it in ways that alter both it and them:

  • Consciousness (…) may be thought of as a projection to the outside of an inner synesthesia (War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, p62)
  • Second nature consists entirely in our artefacts and extensions (Laws of Media, posthumous, p116)17
  • Technology — second nature — recapitulates first nature in new forms. (Laws of Media, p118)
  • Second nature is [first] nature made and remade by man (Laws of Media, p222)

In short, the “second nature” investigated by “new science” consists of “the entire material of the globe as well as the thoughts and feelings of its human inhabitants“. (Culture Without Literacy, 1953)

Sensibility is not something inside our skulls. Sensibilities are extensions that inherently express themselves in and as relations with the “exterior landscape” of “first nature”. McLuhan’s technical name for these extensions was ‘media’. The subtitle of Understanding Media is: “the extensions of man”. 

The task of the investigation of “second nature” is to investigate it not only as including the biases of the human ways of being, so to say objectively, but to understand it also subjectively on the basis of our inevitable biases:

[Harold] 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. (Media and Cultural Change, 1964)18 

The bias of our culture is precisely to isolate the bias of all others in an effort at orchestration. (Counterblast, 1969, p64)

McLuhan’s claim was that we are currently in the same relation to “second nature” as we were to “first nature” before, say, 1800. Only as the chemical elements were specified in the century leading up to Mendeleev’s table in 1869 was it gradually recognized that there was such a thing as the “first nature” of chemical nature — and of all the further sciences and disciplines enabled by chemistry (biology, genetics, modern medicine, etc). 

We are currently blind to “second nature” for the same reason that “first nature” was once unknown: because environments are invisible until we find a way to investigate them through collectively recognized focus. And as the old scientific revolution showed, this in turn requires the identification of elements that serve to supply that focus.

the crucial study that remains is that of working out in precise detail the relations19 between second and first nature (Laws of Media, p117)20 

The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic [first nature] but the perceptual [second nature] code. (Laws of Media, p239).

“It is not the bamboo in the wind [ first nature] that we are representing but all the thought and emotion in the painter’s mind at a given instant [second nature] when he looked upon a bamboo spray and suddenly identified his life with it for a moment.” (Laws of Media, p82)21

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance [first nature] and the environments created by technological innovation [second nature]. (Laws of Media, p98)

Aristotle first noted that the Greeks’ invention of nature was made possible when they had left behind a savage or barbaric state (first nature) by putting on an individualized and civilized one (second nature).22 (Laws of Media, p116)

Second nature consists entirely in our artefacts and extensions and the grounds and narcoses they impose…23 (Laws of Media, p116)

Technology — second nature — recapitulates first nature in new forms; that is, it translates from one nature to another.24 (Laws of Media, p118)

Speech (…) and our technologies, as other [forms of] speech25(…) have enacted our two natures, effectively hoicking us out of servitude to [first] nature [via ‘old science’], but leaving us slaves to the vagaries of second nature [since we unnecessarily continue to lack a ‘new science’ of it]. (Laws of Media, p118)

Vico aimed to heal the rift (…) between the Ancients and the Moderns. (…) In the end, it eluded him for he was caught in a dilemma that had been building for centuries before him [but] that was then [invisible because] environmental. (…) Vico simply had not distinguished between first and second nature for separate study: nothing in his experience suggested such a distinction would be of any use. Second nature is nature made and remade by man as man remakes himself with his extensions. Separate them: the first is the province of traditional grammar [and of the ‘old science’ from physics and chemistry to biology and genetics]; the second, that of Bacon, Vico, and Laws of Media. (Laws of Media, p222)26

McLuhan’s new genus of sciences accorded with the views of Vico and Joyce:

There must, in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. (Vico, New Science, §161, cited verbatim by McLuhan in Laws of Media, p221.)

What we symbolize in black the Chinaman may symbolize in yellow; each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action. (James Joyce, Stephen Hero, cited verbatim by McLuhan in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’)

*

Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth. (Playboy Interview)

*

The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our predecessors lived with the figure-minus-ground. (The Global Village, p26)27

*

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. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)28

 

 

  1. “Aber wie beim Kinde nach langer stiller Ernährung der erste Atemzug jene Allmählichkeit des nur vermehrenden Fortgangs abbricht – ein qualitativer Sprung – und das Kind geboren ist, so reift der sich bildende Geist langsam und stille der neuen Gestalt entgegen, löst ein Teilchen des Baues seiner vorgehenden Welt nach dem andern auf, ihr Wanken wird nur durch einzelne Symptome angedeutet; der Leichtsinn wie die Langeweile, die im Bestehenden einreißen, die unbestimmte Ahnung eines Unbekannten sind Vorboten, daß etwas anderes im Anzuge ist. Dies allmähliche Zerbröckeln, das die Physiognomie des Ganzen nicht veränderte, wird durch den Aufgang unterbrochen, der, ein Blitz, in einem Male das Gebilde der neuen Welt hinstellt.” Pinkard’s translation has been used with considerable changes. ↩
  2. From Cliché to Archetype, p160. ↩
  3. McLuhan wanted not only to foresee such science, of course, but actually to initiate it. His last 20 years, after the start of his blackouts in 1959 and his first serious stroke in 1960, must be seen as a repeated attempt to communicate his findings through writing, lecturing, teaching, media interviews and the cultivation of co-workers who might be his intellectual heirs. But none of this worked — at least not yet. ↩
  4. The Gutenberg Galaxy was McLuhan’s attempt to explicate the foundations of the existing genus of ‘old science’ as defined by a certain kind of subjectivity related to a certain kind of objectivity within a certain kind of space-time. ↩
  5. Like Hegel 200 years ago, McLuhan saw that the goal of conducting investigation somehow aside from the instruments supplying its data, and from the mentalities supplying its experimental design and conclusions, is ultimately senseless and self-defeating. McLuhan: “The old separation of art and nature we now see to have been based on an ignorance of nature.” (New Media in Arts Education, 1956). How so? Because art and nature belong to each other and can be separated only artificially (in a fruitless Gutenbergian attempt to install some One). ‘Nature’ is always ‘nature as experienced in some way’, ‘nature as mediated’. And ‘experience’ (aka ‘art’) is always the ‘experience of natural beings (subj gen!) living in a natural world’. (The equation of ordinary experience and art was the central object of McLuhan’s research for the 10 years or so after WW2. See note 24.) ↩
  6. Terms such as ‘old’ and ‘new’ science, and ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, must, of course, be specified. McLuhan repeatedly tried to do so. He recognized that “the crucial study that remains is that of working out in precise detail the relations between second and first nature” (Laws of Media, 117). ↩
  7. For many reasons McLuhan thought that “new science” could emerge ‘now’ — 70 years ago and counting! — from its previous invisibility. One was that we already apply much of this “new science” in cybernetics, advertising, entertainment, politics, in fact everywhere. These are all much more than chemical constructions! They all implicate a practical knowledge of the workings of human being (understood verbally). What was and is needed: to become conscious of what we already live! Nietzsche’s motto for Ecce Homo “How one becomes what one is” (Wie man wird, was man ist). ↩
  8. Without such “perception of essentials”, how could infants learn language in the first place? Language is just (just!) a filter of essential noise from inconsequential noise and without intuitive perception of this difference, it could not exist! Decades after his 1943 Nashe thesis, in 1970, McLuhan termed this “perpetually operative” faculty “pre-tribal awareness” (since becoming a member of a tribe entails that its language — including its languages of gesture, story-telling, taste, etc — be subject to intuitive assimilation): “Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows how the phonetic alphabet scrapped tribal man but retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal awareness.” (McLuhan to Joe Keogh, July 6,1970, Letters 413) Again: “The liquidating of the tribal encyclopaedia of the bards (…) was done by phonetic literacy, but there was retrieved something of great antiquity, namely pre-tribal metaphysical man.” (McLuhan to Lynn White, August 17, 1970). Literacy retrieves this perpetually operative faculty in that it requires the same pre-tribal awareness or intuitive perception of essentials as does language. For it, too, is a filter — in this case of essential marks from inconsequential ones. The implication is that humans cannot be at all absent a “faculty which (…) is perpetually operative — an intuitive perception of essentials”. This explains (a) how it is that humans are an ontological animal who cannot perceive or feel or do anything that is not preformed by some intuitive understanding of the essentials of being itself; and (b) how it is that humans invent technologies through the apprehension of the essentials at work in different areas. The life or death question posed to contemporary humans is whether an understanding of essentials (aka, media) can be achieved before the unconscious application of essential intuition kills us. ↩
  9. By ‘Being’ here McLuhan does not mean some kind of cloud of unknowing. He means that humans ‘incessantly’ interrogate their surroundings for the being of things. This has eventuated in our understanding of the being of the physical universe: nothing occurs in it aside from its situation in the chemical and physical laws we have learned to identity and further investigate.  This same power can also come to an understanding of ourselves in all our various ‘extensions’. In turn, the possibility of these understandings tells us about the central characteristic of Being itself. As Aristotle has it: ἀλλ᾽ οὔτε τὸ θεῖον φθονερὸν ἐνδέχεται εἶναι
    “it is impossible for the Deity to be jealous”. (Met. 1.983a).
    Being openly extends itself in multiple ways and one of these is the possibility of knowing it.     ↩
  10. From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, p200. In ‘Towards an Inclusive Consciousness’ from 1967 McLuhan speaks of “an inclusive consciousness that is at the same time private and tribal”. The “liaison between private and corporate awareness” consists in the fact that “an intuitive perception of essentials”, aka “pre-tribal awareness”, is required in order to learn language and so to become a member of a tribe. Every human is exposed to an enormous variety of sounds and gestures. A tribe is structured by which of these it considers meaningful or “essential” — just as a word is a meaningful sound, not a meaningless one. A tribe can therefore be described as “the formative process of consciousness” in action, whose basis lies in the “incessant” “repetition” of this “creative process” of identifying what is “essential” and what is not. Finally, that this process not only has happened, but is happening even now in “repetition”, implies, since we are not aware of what we are doing at this moment, that it remains in our “unconscious” (somewhat like our absence of awareness of the hormonal interactions in our bodies). McLuhan’s whole point is that this “incessant” action need not remain unconscious (just as the specification and study of hormones has not). “All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes.” (‘Recommendations’, Project in Understanding New Media, 1960) (“Non-verbal” = ‘essentially pre-verbal’, in one sense, and ‘accidentally not-yet-verbal’, in another sense.) ↩
  11. November 18, 1961, Letters, 280-281. ↩
  12. McLuhan is referring here to his NAEB report, Project in Understanding New Media from 1960, not to his later Understanding Media from 1964. ↩
  13. Such a sensus communis would be a ‘new science’ — in fact a whole new genus of sciences.  This science would not operate like our subjective sensus communis (at least, as we currently imagine it to operate), but conversely, with new science we would come to understand ourselves through it. Not it like us, then, but us like it. ↩
  14. Understanding Media, p108. ↩
  15. When did everybody, especially the French, start talking about the ‘haunting’ of our thought? Was it before this passage from McLuhan in 1964 — or after? ↩
  16. Coleridge as Artist’ (1957): “The (study of the) exterior landscape serves very well for (…) some areas of experience. But it is necessarily (…) ill-suited to the variety and compression of the modern city.” ↩
  17. This is ‘consists in‘, not ‘consists of‘! Since 1953, if not earlier, McLuhan had seen: “the fact that with modern technology the entire material of the globe as well as the thoughts and feelings of its human inhabitants have become the matter of art (…) means that (…) there is no more external nature.” (Culture Without Literacy, 1953) ↩
  18. ‘Media and Cultural Change’ was McLuhan’s introduction to the 1964 reprinting of Innis’ 1951 The Bias of Communication. ↩
  19. ‘Relations’ here has two important significations: (1) “second and first nature” must be perceived as complementary fields of investigation — they are fundamentally different, but also fundamentally related since everything known about “first nature” is also an object within “second nature” exactly as something known; (2) all of the phenomena studied in the field of “second nature” are relations between knowers and what they know. ↩
  20. McLuhan’s posthumous book, Laws of Media, was assembled by his son, Eric, out of materials (published and unpublished papers, drafts, dictations, fragmentary notes, sound recordings and video tapes) from the last 10 or so years of Marshall’s life,1970-1980. Eric knew how crucial and how difficult was the task he had been given by his father. After Marshall’s death he spent a decade of his life putting together Laws of Media and then the remaining three decades of his life after that, continuing his attempt to think through his father’s work and to communicate its importance. In the end he left all the materials he had used for Laws of Media to the University of Toronto for future investigators to work through for themselves. This act of donation and preservation for future research reflected the heart of Marshall’s enterprise which lay in the ever-repeated attempt to communicate about communication with the object of “working out in precise detail the relations between second and first nature” (Laws of Media, p117). The book amounts to Eric’s understanding of a kind of prolonged last will and testament whispered to his first born from a man who was often gravely ill in those years and who deeply suffered from the knowledge that he had not discovered how to communicate what he had discovered about communication — and this to a world in desperate need of his discovery and one that, he feared, might well not survive without it. ↩
  21. McLuhan’s Citation from Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye, 1964. ↩
  22. The specifications of ‘first nature’ and ‘second nature’ in round brackets here are from McLuhan. ↩
  23. See note #17 above: consists in, not consists of. ↩
  24. Compare ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954): “In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being.” ↩
  25. Laws of Media simply has ‘other speech’ here and notes in the same place: “technology, as extension/outering, is speech (…) we speak our selves”. ↩
  26. As detailed in McLuhan on Vico and Bacon and Vico, McLuhan thought Vico pointed to “the only method of escape” from our enormous intellectual and practical difficulties. He especially agreed with Vico that: “The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body (‘first nature’ and ‘old science’), and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection” (second nature’ and ‘new science’) (New Science, §236), further “that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men (unlike the things of ‘first nature’), and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature (…) and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since men made it, men could hope to know.” (New Science, §331). ↩
  27. Compare: “Electronics and automation make mandatory that everyone adjust to the vast global environment as if it were his little home town. (War and Peace in the Global Village, p11) ↩
  28. In The Medium and the Light, 160. ↩

McLuhan & Peterson: competing fundamental myths 2

As Bob Dobbs has nicely articulated, McLuhan was a literary figure who put on tribalism, while Peterson is a tribal figure who puts on literary values. These mixed media were/are1 an important aspect of the success of each of them. But the great question in both cases was and is: what is the medium of these mixtures?

As will be detailed in later posts, Peterson would put the answer to this question in terms of the ‘masculine’ hero who penetrates a ‘feminine’ chaos. In doing so, the hero becomes illuminated by new possibilities through which both individual and social regeneration may be prompted.

Now while McLuhan saw a roughly similar need to go “through the vanishing point”, he knew that the hero could not do so and remain the hero. The hero would necessarily become a “nobody” in the process — in extreme opposition to Peterson’s hero who “as a consequence of such activity (…) necessarily meets himself (…) broadened and extended“.2

For McLuhan, it was only as the hero was utterly dispossessed that the search for meaning could take on the sort of hopelessness through which alone a new sort of identity might be found for our individual and social lives.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate (Dante Inferno, iii:9)3

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (East Coker)4

A world of multiple individual and collective identities could not be organized through a heroically maintained focus without distortion and even violence.5 The need was therefore to learn “how not to have a point of view“6 and the requisite trial by fire was to go through the dissolution of the hero into the nobody. Only the nobody could come upon new ground that would not be heroically stipulated — and therefore not be only ‘figure absent ground’.7

Put differently, Peterson’s hero would need to undergo complete immersion in Nietzsche’s nihilism and Beckett’s solipsism8 in order to turn away from misleading pathways like brain materialism9 and the postulation of a “thing in itself”.10 Both of these typically Gutenbergian attempts at anchoring would uselessly attempt to provide “a rock-solid foundation”11 for the understanding of human experience via a physical (“neural underpinnings”) or conceptual (“the perceived object is thus a low-resolution image of the thing-in-itself”) reduction of an irreducibly ‘gapped’ plurality to a merely stipulated ‘basis’ in singularity.

 

  1. The past tense will often be used in this post to describe McLuhan and Peterson, although Peterson is very much with us. In such cases, the present should be understood as implicated in the past. ↩
  2. Peterson, ‘Religion, sovereignty, natural rights, and the constituent elements of experience’, 2006. ↩
  3. A few lines before this:
    Per me si va ne la città dolente,
    per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
    per me si va tra la perduta gente.
    “Lasciate ogne speranza” is a technical requirement to the understanding of the enormous range of human experience. Whereas Peterson sees in mythology and literature “    imaginative roadmaps to being” (‘Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity’, 2013), McLuhan was clear that we must find in them ‘roadmaps from being’! Between ‘to’ and ‘from’ is a gap — the appreciation of whose significance lies on the other side of all heroism. ↩
  4. Compare Little Gidding: “And what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning / From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled / If at all. Either you had no purpose / Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured / And is altered in fulfilment.” ↩
  5. The problem, of course, is that such heroic focus is part of the class it purports to organize. Whence its privilege? ↩
  6. Often called by McLuhan ‘the technique of the suspended judgement’. ↩
  7. For extended discussion of this point, see the further Peterson posts in this blog. ↩
  8. Nietzsche and Beckett were well aware that neither nihilism nor solipsism could withstand their own disintegrative force. They should therefore be understood as nihilism and solipsism , where the strikethroughs indicate that these strange conditions are nothing conceptual; they are black holes falling though themselves into the unknown and unknowable. Hence Beckett’s great closing text to his trilogy, The Unnamable. ↩
  9. See Hirsh, J. B., Mar, R. A., & Peterson, J.B., ‘Psychological Entropy: A Framework for Understanding Uncertainty-Related Anxiety’, Psychological Review 119:2, 2012: “the need for an integrative theoretical framework to establish its psychological significance and provide a context for its neural underpinnings and behavioral consequences has become increasingly apparent”; “the probability of any given action or perceptual frame being employed p(x) is a function of the weighted neural input for its deployment, as influenced by the combination of sensory input, strength of memory representations, and goal-related attentional processes.” Imagine what Dostoevsky’s underground man would have made of this verbiage! ↩
  10. See Peterson’s ‘Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity’ in K. Markman, T. Proulx & M. Lindberg (eds), The Psychology of Meaning, 2013: “Intelligible arrays have been identified at many levels of resolution: from that of the quark, 1/10,0002 as large as an atom, to the supra-galactic, at 1025 meters. All things-in-themselves exist simultaneously at all those levels, and partake in multiple arrays, at each level. A perceptible object is thus an array segregated, arbitrarily and for subjective purposeful reasons, from its participation in endless other arrays. However, some aspect of the original array must be retained. Otherwise, the object cannot be said to truly exist, and must be regarded as fantasy. (…) The perceived object is simpler than the thing-in-itself (a prerequisite to comprehension) -– while remaining importantly related to the actual thing. (…) The perceived object is thus a low-resolution image of the thing-in-itself.” Compare Nietzsche (who certainly agreed that “the object cannot be said to truly exist”): “Radical nihilism is (…) the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things.” ↩
  11. Peterson, ‘Religion, sovereignty, natural rights, and the constituent elements of experience’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, v28, 2006. ↩

McNamara’s band

Tennyson, like the Romantics before him, was limited by the science of his time to external landscapes. We had to wait for a post-Newtonian science to free us to create the interior landscapes of the Symbolists. The “aesthetic moment” of arrested cognition, a moment in and at once out of time, of simultaneity, could only exist [in our understanding today] when cinema [composed in discrete frames] was technologically possible. McLuhan (…) thus sees the artistic process itself as a deliberate movement backward from a moment of insight (…) [ascribable] to music, to painting, to (…) science and technology (…) The original aesthetic moment [as retraced and delimited in this way] will then become [experientially and so conceptually] possible for us in our own prison of space and time. (The Interior Landscape, 1969)

This is a note from Eugene McNamara, the editor of The Interior Landscape, introducing its second section of McLuhan essays, ‘The Beatrician Moment’. It gestures in the direction of McLuhan’s method and intent. But it is clear that McNamara did not understand McLuhan on “simultaneity” and especially not the difference between the perennial exercise of creativity in the “original aesthetic moment” that is the spring of all human perception1 and its theoretical elaboration. The first is always at work; the second takes place only in discrete regimes of ideation: “the medium is the message”.

Further, he seems not have understood the difference between an aid in understanding the “original aesthetic moment” and a necessity for understanding it. “Post-Newtonian science” and cinema can indeed point to an understanding of the “original aesthetic moment” for our time — but they are not necessary for it. Many different understandings of that moment already exist — in Plato, Dante, Shakespeare and many others. Some of these explications far exceed our capabilities today. But we are just as cut off from them as we are from it.

Illumination of the perennial “original aesthetic moment” in all perception necessarily occasions a revisioning not only of — and away from! — “our own prison of space and time”, but of all the spaces and times that humans have ever lived or will ever live.2

  1. Not just artistic perception! Or, as this may also be put: all perception is artistic perception! “The most poetic thing in the world is the most ordinary human consciousness.” (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, 1954) ↩
  2. The inauguration of a domain that is valid for all time does not entail definitive conclusion. Compare the physical sciences where no event, past, present or future, has or will ever unfold aside from physics and chemistry — but physics and chemistry are so fundamentally open-ended that they are liable even to the paradigm change of scientific revolution. So with the domain of media. ↩

McLuhan’s advice to Leary

Timothy Leary, Flashbacks, 1990, p251-253:

  • The lunch with Marshall McLuhan at the Plaza [Hotel in New York, apparently in the summer of 1966]1 was informative. “Dreary Senate hearings and courtrooms are not the platforms for your message, Tim. You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer. Fine. But the key to your work is advertising. You’re promoting a product. The new and improved accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain can produce — beauty, fun, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical romance. Word of mouth from satisfied consumers will help, but get your rock and roll friends to write jingles about the brain.” He sang: “Lysergic acid hits the spot / Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.”
  • “Your advertising must stress the religious. Find the god within. This is all frightfully interesting. Your competitors are naturally denouncing the brain as an instrument of the devil. Priceless!”
  • “To dispel fear you must use your public image. You are the basic product endorser. Whenever you are photographed, smile. Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage. Never complain or appear angry. It’s okay if you come off as flamboyant and eccentric. You’re a professor, after all. But a confident attitude is the best advertisement. You must be known for your smile.”2
  • “You’re going to win the war, Timothy. Eventually. But you’re going to lose some major battles on the way. You’re not going to overthrow the Protestant Ethic in a couple of years. This culture knows how to sell fear and pain. Drugs that accelerate the brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers. You’re ahead of your time. They’ll attempt to destroy your credibility.”
  • The conversation with Marshall McLuhan got me thinking further along these lines: the successful philosophers were also advertisers who could sell their new models of the universe to large numbers of others, thus converting thought to action, mind to matter. I devoted several days and one acid trip to analysis of the packaging of previous American revolutions: “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death,” “A Nation Cannot Exist Half Slave and Half Free,” “We Have Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself.” “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” One morning, while I was ruminating in the shower about what kind of slogan would succinctly summarize the tactics for increasing intelligence, six words came to mind. Dripping wet, with a towel around my waist, I walked to the study and wrote down this phrase: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” Later it became very useful in my function as cheerleader for change.
  • Turn On meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. Tune In meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop Out suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. Drop Out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.

A report in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, ‘Liddy vs Leary‘, from Aril 9, 1982, has this:

Leary, invoking the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, expressed the view that “education, entertainment and advertising must go together.” “Entertainment means holding someone’s attention,” he said. “It means making my position more attractive.”

 

  1. Leary describes his meeting with McLuhan in a section of his book titled ‘Summer 1966’. ↩
  2. A review of Flashbacks in the London Sunday Times by Jonathan Raban reported of McLuhan’s advice: “Leary did as he was told. Photographs of him show a dazzling crescent moon of upper canines and incisors, as if his teeth had taken leave of his jaw and gone out for a smile on their own.” ↩

Ian Hacking and the Toronto School of Communication

Ian Hacking (born 1936) shares a surprising number of commonalities with Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980):

  • both western Canadians, McLuhan born in Edmonton, Hacking in Vancouver
  • both received their initial undergraduate degrees in their local universities, McLuhan at the University of Manitoba1, Hacking at UBC2
  • both then went to Cambridge where they each obtained another BA and then MA and PhD degrees there3
  • In Cambridge McLuhan studied at Trinity Hall (est 1350), Hacking at the nearby Trinity College (est 1546, but constituent King’s Hall in 1317)
  • both their careers developed through the combination of their Cambridge experience with a particular French author: Mallarmé in McLuhan’s case, Foucault in Hacking’s
  • both first taught in the US and married American women
  • both came to direct their Cambridge training in language studies (McLuhan’s in literary criticism, Hacking’s in analytic philosophy) to questions of social change and the relation of science to life
  • both ended their careers as decades-long University of Toronto professors, but with prestigious interim positions in New York (McLuhan) and Paris (Hacking)

Future posts will detail the similarities and differences in their work. Shortly put, McLuhan found a way to specify the focal (elementary) structure of ‘new science’ (“the medium is the message”) in the humanities and social sciences, whereas Hacking specified the problems the initiation of any new science in these areas would encounter and have to overcome (which he deemed impossible).4 It would seem that the second should proceed the first. But as Plato was already very aware, and as Heidegger specified from Schiller, all genuine thought requires a ‘step back’ (einen Schritt zurück) to a ‘new beginning’ (einem neuen Anfang). Hacking’s work therefore provides critical considerations from which the ‘step back’ to McLuhan may cogently be attempted and investigated.5

 

  1. McLuhan’s family moved from Edmonton to Winnipeg during WW1 and he received all his education there from primary school to his first MA. ↩
  2. UBC, Hacking’s alma mater, has played an important role in the history of the Toronto School. McLuhan first announced that “the medium is the message” there in 1958 (see The medium is the message in 1958). And more than two decades earlier, in May 1935, Innis gave his important lecture, ‘‘The Role of Intelligence’, at UBC. This may have been one of the first writings of Innis that came to McLuhan’s attention and already pointed to Innis’ work in communications in the 1940s (for discussion see Innis and McLuhan in 1936 and Innis multiplying Hugo. ↩
  3. McLuhan had an IODE scholarship which together with family funds maintained him in Cambridge for two years, 1934-1936; he returned on sabbatical in 1939 for his PhD residence year. Hacking had a much longer stay in Cambridge in the 1950s and early 1960s, and doubtless at least originally, and perhaps continually, also had a scholarship, or scholarships, enabling him to do so. ↩
  4. Hacking in ‘Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’ (2004): “There is no single underlying structure according to which looping occurs. More generally (…) I see no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories about making up people. There is no one process, but only a motley.” Compare Innis’ analogous doubts based on the “looping” or self-reference implicated in a science of human experience as discussed in Innis and McLuhan in 1936 (where Innis is cited as declaring “the impossibility of building a science on a basis on which the observer becomes the observed”). ↩
  5. It is unclear how much Hacking engaged with McLuhan. In his 1975 book, Why does language matter to philosophy?, he gestured towards him as follows: “Evidently I have no quarrel with students of technology like Marshall McLuhan who think that the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is only a spin-off from the invention of printing, and who forecast comparable mutations when the locus of the sentence passes from the book to the computer printout via the technology of semiconductors.” This is prescient as regards one aspect of McLuhan’s ‘s work. But McLuhan was much more than a ‘student of technology’. (For discussion, see What was McLuhan up to?) In a word, McLuhan was not an analyst of chronological events or a literalist, he was a synchronist (“allatonce”) and a structuralist — so that the significance or message of ‘printing’, say, or of ‘semiconductors’, depends in each case on the background structure or medium against which it is understood. For example: ” What is to be the new nature and form of the book against the new electronic surround?” (The Future of the Book, 1972) How to solve the implicated infinite regress (once a structure or medium like ‘the electronic surround’ is itself taken as a message) is fundamental to his contribution. (For illustrative texts see Escape from the cul-de-sac.) ↩

Innis or Havelock?

It is an interesting question whether it was Innis or Havelock who first formulated the idea for the Toronto school that the medium of communication might be regarded as a, or the, central force in history. It is certainly the case that Innis saw, already in 1936, that “improvements in facilities for discussion” beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing apace in the twentieth had had great influence:1 

the possibilities of discussion have increased immeasurably.2 The character of discussion (…) has been tremendously influenced by recent industrialism and inventions (…) the development of the printing press (…) and (…) particularly the radio (‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’, Dalhousie Review, January 1936, 404)3

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”4 in the twentieth century, when and where have such ‘eras’ arisen in the past and what could their study tell us about the overall course of history and about our present situation?

It may be that Havelock thought along these lines from Innis in his consideration of the role of literacy in the the development of Greek thought from the pre-Socratics to Plato and in the associated foundation of schools of higher learning like Plato’s Academy.5 By the early 1940’s, at least, he was explicitly considering the question of “the great transition from the oral to the written word”.6

Several strands in this idea may be differentiated: (1) the notion that changes in communication has been influential to the evolution of modernity; (2) the notion that modes of communication, oral and literate, were central to the birth of classical Greece (and of all that has followed from that birth); (3) the notion that communication has repeatedly shaped history for the last 5000 years.

The first was broached by Innis in the 1930s.7 The second was formulated by Havelock in the 1940s on the basis particularly of Milman Parry’s orality research, but doubtless nudged in this direction also by Innis’ work.8 The third was central to Innis’ research on communication beginning in the middle 1940s as decisively influenced by Havelock.9 

McLuhan became the heir of these ideas when he moved to Toronto in 1946. In the 1950s he would hammer away at the question of how to specify the domain of communication (dual genitive) in order to facilitate collective investigation of the subject.

Around 1960 he would begin thinking of ‘galaxies’ of communication rather than ‘eras’ to get away from a chronological framework for such investigation. But already in his PhD thesis from 1943 he was investigating the closely related question of how to define recurrent dominants, particularly in the history of education, but also of the humanities in general, which he saw as constituting a perennial “ancient quarrel”.

 

  1. Having ‘influence’ in historical change and being the focus for the study of historical change are fundamentally different things. The first is alchemy, the second is chemistry. It may be that Innis and Havelock, even McLuhan, never fully realized the ‘gestalt switch’ or “quantum leap” (McLuhan) that is needed to e-merge from the former into the latter. But since the point of such paradigm change is to start differently, if it is not ‘fully realized’ it has not been realized at all. Linear progress cannot be made in this context: a start cannot be made in the middle of a project that is already ongoing — except by ‘beginning again’. However, the need to start differently, and the reasons that support a different start, may well be realized short of making the new start itself. Indeed, a start to “new science” can hardly be made by individuals since science is inherently a social enterprise. So what is at stake here is the question of how close Innis and Havelock respectively were to the launching of new science in the 1940s when both began to investigate how communication media might be investigated and what that investigation might show. ↩
  2. Innis was clear that “change which has so profoundly influenced discussion” necessarily reflects back on the discussion of the individual intellectual so that one who “has failed to realize the significance of the change (…) remains as a vestige of an era of discussion which has passed.” (‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’, 405) ↩
  3. The subject of Innis’ 1936 Dalhousie Review essay is called ‘discussion’ (even in its title, ‘Discussion in the Social Sciences’). But his 1937 Encyclopedia of Canada article on the ‘Pulp-and-Paper Industry’ replaces the term ‘discussion’ with ‘communication’: “Expansion of press services and of advertising agencies has accompanied the marked improvements in communication”. Innis himself was, of course, deeply skeptical of these “improvements”. ↩
  4. See note #1. ↩
  5. See note #8 below. ↩
  6. ‘The Technique of Exposition’, an unpublished essay in Havelock’s papers at Yale. The essay was intended as a chapter on the history of the pre-Socratics which Havelock developed out of his extended study of Socrates. Havelock later wrote (in ‘The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern Mind’, 1987) that he began to read Milman Parry (1902-1935) in 1943 and that he then lectured on oral composition in Toronto before moving to Harvard. Here he was apparently thinking of his 1946 UT lecture on ‘The Sophistication of Homer’. Meanwhile at Harvard, I.A. Richards reported in a BBC lecture that “Professor Havelock has suggested that we may see in Plato’s rejections of Homer the revolt of the writing mind’s mode of apprehension against the pre-literate mind’s other, less abstract and intellectual, ways of ordering itself.” For further discussion see Richards and Havelock before 1947 and Havelock, Innis and Richards in 1947. ↩
  7. Innis, in turn, knew of the notion from Hugo and Bulwer from the 1830s. For discussion, see Innis multiplying Hugo (PEMS 6). ↩
  8. Innis’ work was well known to Havelock. For discussion see Innis and Havelock – 1930 and beyond. ↩
  9. See the previous note for references. Also Sirluck on Innis, Owen and Havelock and Havelock, Innis and Richards in 1947. ↩

3 types of space

Toward a Spatial Dialogue (Through the Vanishing Point)1

  • To talk about my work without showing the centrality of (…) the totally diverse character of visual, audile, and tactile spaces is to have no apprehension of my observations about the media.2 (McLuhan to Bill Kuhns, December 6, 1971, Letters p448)
  • Thought, thing and language are aspects of one reality. (Classical Trivium, 1943, p53)3

All experience is4 some ratio of visual-audile space where the hyphen or frontier or resonant interval is tactility:

  • The world of touch, whether passive or active, creates a relation not of connectedness but of interval. (Through the Vanishing Point p221)
  • The resonant interval may be considered an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space. (Global Village p4)
  • Touch [tactility] is the “resonant interval” or frontier of change and process, and is indispensable for the study of technological effects. (Global Village p13)

The play of this three-fold un-folds as follows:

  • The tetrad, as a right-hemisphere visualization, helps us to see both figure and ground at a time when the latent effects of the mechanical age tend to obscure the ground subliminally. Its chief utility is that it raises the hidden ground to visibility, enabling the analyst to perceive the double action of the visual (left hemisphere) and the acoustic (right hemisphere) in the life of the artifact or idea.5 (Global Village p9)
  • The tetrad illumines the borderline between acoustic and visual space as an arena of spiraling repetition and replay, both of input and feedback, interlace and interface in the area of an imploded circle of rebirth and metamorphosis. (Global Village p9)
  • Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and eternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary (Global Village p45)
  • In our desire to illumine the differences between visual and acoustic space, we have undoubtedly given a false impression: and that is that the normal brain, in its everyday functioning, cannot reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptions of both sides of the mind. (Global Village p48)
  • There are a variety of factors which can give salience or mastery either to the right (simultaneous and acoustic) hemisphere of the brain, or to the left (lineal and visual) hemisphere. [But] no matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres. (Global Village p62)

It might therefore seem that “the totally diverse character of visual, audile, and tactile spaces” could be characterized as follows: (1) Visual space is space where the visual has salience, mastery or dominance over the audile in their “interplay”; (2) Audile space is space where the audile has salience, mastery or dominance over the visual in their “interplay”; (3) Tactile space is the space of the in-between “interplay” — the resonant interval, the invisible borderline, the hidden ground of interlace and interface, of relationship, reconciliation and complementarity

In this case, “the totally diverse character” would chiefly be between visual and audile spaces as figures, on the one hand, and tactile space as ground on the other. Since “no matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres”, it would be the particular “degree of interplay” that would structure each and every momentary6 variety of human experience as some form along the spectrum of visual-audile ratios.

  • “Interface is the basis of the relationship between visual and acoustic space.” (Global Village p13) 
  • “It is the gap itself that has become the bond of being.” (Cliché to Archetype p113) 
  • “The medium is the message.” (McLuhan from 1958 onwards)

But with “tactile space” McLuhan had something else of fundamental importance in mind as well. Consider a spectrum stretching between the overwhelming dominance of the visual over the audile at one end of its range and the overwhelming dominance of the audile over the visual at the other end. Between the two extremes, dominance would gradually diminish along the spectrum getting less and less until switching over at the midpoint to the dominance of the other (which would then gradually increase again). At the precise midpoint of the spectrum, the visual and the audile would be poised in balance, with neither one having dominance over the other. Here the relationship of complementarity would have dominance, not the visual or the audile.7 This midpoint could therefore be called “tactile space” since it would be the dominance neither of visual nor of audile space, but of their mutual “interface” in discontinuous8, indeed “incommensurable”, “interlace”.

McLuhan’s “new science” is situated in the “tactile space” of this midpoint. Since every other point on the spectrum represents a particular dominance either of the visual (on one side) or of the audile (on the other), no one of these lateral points is able to assess the virtues of other points along the spectrum. Its established bias prevents a ‘balanced’ assessment of their established biases.9 McLuhan’s determination to proceed like Nietzsche ‘beyond good and evil’ is based on this determination.10 Just as chemistry cannot favor any element or any material over any other, so the analysis and investigation of experience must work on the basis of the entire field.

The claim is not that tactile space has no bias. Rather, it indeed has bias, but it is an enabling bias11 — it is a bias on the basis of which collective investigation of the worlds of experience (the worlds of a myriad biases) may at last be initiated.

The bias of our culture is precisely to isolate the bias of all others in an effort at orchestration. (1969 Counterblast p64)

And it is “the medium [that] is the message”, aka the “interface [that] is the basis”, aka “the gap itself that [is] the bond of being”, aka “tactile space”, that, according to McLuhan, provides the focus needed to spark this inaugurating event.

every medium of communication is a unique art form which gives salience to one set of human [visual-audile] possibilities [as determined by the tactile interface of their hyphen] at the expense of another set. Each medium of expression profoundly modifies human sensibility in mainly unconscious and unpredictable ways. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press)12

The moment man accepts himself as an object, he is free to encounter a multiplicity of (…) spaces (…) created by himself and his technologies. It is the environments and unique spaces created by man’s own technologies that have [to]13 become especially the concern of the present age of ecology. (Innovation is Obsolete 1971) 

 

  1. Section head on p33. ↩
  2. All bullet points in this post are citations from McLuhan. ↩
  3. If “thought” may be taken as visual space, and “thing” as audile space, then “language” may usefully be taken as tactile space, the connection of the discontinuous (dual genitive). ↩
  4. There are great complications to the word ‘is’ here. What McLuhan means by ‘space’ is a multilevel dynamic event with both an underlying synchronic structure and the correlated manifestation of that structure in the diachronic phenomenal world. (See the quote from ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ at the end of this post.) It is like ‘silver’ which is both an elementary structure that is part of Mendeleev’s table and material we can perceive and manipulate. Similarly, in McLuhan’s view, experience is a phenomenal manifestation of underlying structure which can be, and is, manipulated by the press, advertising, entertainment and, in fact, all media (taken in its phenomenal sense). The word ‘is’ names the underlying structure and its manifested expression and the dynamic impulse of the one to the other. The ongoing revolution of the electric age, according to McLuhan, particularly concerns our use and understanding of this ‘is’. ↩
  5. The tetrad crosses “the visual (left hemisphere)” with “the acoustic (right hemisphere)” to produce “a right-hemisphere visualization”. It is therefore an archetypal example of the hendiadys, the one-through-two, which McLuhan describes in From Cliché to Archetype as follows: “The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.” (p99) ↩
  6. For McLuhan all experience is grammatical in the same way as language is. Not only is there a comparable underlying structure, but this structure is subject to moment by moment manipulation by subjects who are usually entirely unconscious of their constitutive actions — of their work with an underlying ‘grammar’. ↩
  7. I.A. Richards In his 1968 book, So Much Nearer, concerning the “Principle of Complementarity”: “This immensely important topic — publicized recently by Marshall McLuhan”. ↩
  8. Since “no matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere (…) there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres”, there is never a point — and especially not at the point of their balanced complementarity — where they collapse into a merged One. ↩
  9. The birth of chemistry from alchemy might be described in these terms. A great many elements were well known to the alchemists (and blacksmiths, tanners, medical doctors, etc) of the pre-chemical world: copper, tin, iron, sulphur, mercury, lead, etc. But they were not known as elements. Chemistry was the introduction of the collectively identifiable distinction between the elementary and phenomenal manifestation and hence of the field characterized by this distinction. This might be imagined as the withdrawal of special status from any particular material or materials and to accord it instead to their common structure. It is just McLuhan’s suggestion that our different perspectival stances analogously be analyzed (broken up) into their elements and their manifestations — and that “the medium is the message” as “tactile space” provides the key to this achievement. ↩
  10. Understanding Media, 245: “A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.” ↩
  11. ‘Enabling bias’ as “making” is a key aspect to McLuhan’s work. Humans are finite creatures whose insight never achieves a “matching” with the objects of their concern. All things are and will always remain — gapped. But as seen especially in the physical sciences, irremedial finitude does not bar access to truth. This is the great mystery to whose truth finite humans are especially called to witness via contemplation and investigation. ↩
  12. This essay was submitted to The Sewanee Review in 1951 through Cleanth Brooks. But it was published in the Review, lightly revised, only in 1954. Thanks to Mandi Johnson, Director of the University Archives and Special Collections at The University of the South (which publishes The Sewanee Review) for her expert help in this matter! ↩
  13. McLuhan simply has ‘have become’ here, not ‘have to become’. He was thinking chiefly the concern in anthropology to understand cultures from the inside. At the same time, however, he was acutely aware that the methods and understandings of the social sciences remained chaotically unfocused. That concern with the inside of culture had been initiated was very important, even a condition for further advance . But such concern could not genuinely advance without collective in-sight into the elements and phenomenal manifestations of that ‘inside’ — nor without the ongoing investigation that would result from that insight. ↩

Genitives, times and essential types

[The imperative need today is] to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication. (McLuhan to Innis, 1951)

Joyce (…) saw that the change of our time (…) was occurring as a result of the shift from superimposed myth1 to awareness of the character of the creative process itself. (…) The very process of human communication, Joyce saw, would afford the natural base2 for all the future operations and strategies of culture. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms 1954)

Mallarmé (…) saw, like Joyce, that the basic forms of communication — whether speech, writing, print, press, telegraph, or photography — necessarily were fashioned in close accord with man’s cognitive activity.(Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

the central fact [of the identity] of human cognition and the artistic process (…) [is] the key to the modern world. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

*

the Symbolists [took] aesthetic experience as an arrested moment (…) for which (…) they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment. (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951)

Compare from ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954):

The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of [ordinary]3 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.

 Hence (in the same place): 

The rational notes (…) traced by St. Thomas were actual stages of apprehension in every moment of human awareness.

It is imperative to pay close attention to the action of genitives in McLuhan’s work, especially in regard to their relations with time. “The stages of apprehension” in the above passage from ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ is a subjective genitive, not an objective one. That is, the “stages” belong to “apprehension” as their possessing subject (like ‘the ball of the boy’); they are not the reverse where “apprehension” would be the genitive object of the “stages” (like ‘the manufacture of the car’).

“Apprehension” is inclusive of its temporal stages and has actively organized them, it is not organized by them passively in an external or exclusive manner.

The claim is that “apprehension” is not fabricated through some assembly line process (as if it were the object resulting from compositional “stages”), although this linear notion has been assumed by most philosophy and psychology since Descartes. The supposition has been that experience ‘begins’ with some or other sensory input (external or internal) and then is individually and culturally shaped in a kind of customizing process through the application of categories or filters. This is so with Kant as much as with Freud. Instead, says McLuhan, while experience is indeed generated through a temporal process, the time of its genesis is not “sequential” or diachronic, but “simultaneous” or synchronic:

Time considered as sequential (…) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (…) is ground. (The Global Village)4

Hence, as cited above from ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, he could refer to:

stages of apprehension in every moment of human awareness.

The whole “apprehension” with its “stages” is already composed, and is already available, but must be selected (so to say) from the panoply of other whole apprehensions which are equally already composed and already available. To compare: when we speak, our words are not fabricated in “stages” of one sound or one syllable added to another in a chronological process, but are available as already composed in their complex “stages” — along with all sorts of alternate words and expressions with their complex “stages”. Below and before the chronological sequence of our spoken words, there is a synchronic constitution of grammar and a selective operation on it that recognizably expresses both individual personality and social membership (age-group, education, class, region, nationality, etc), in addition (it may be) to some or other semantic intention. 

For McLuhan it was just this language process in simultaneous depth which is the elementary form, or “essential type”, constituting the unperceived environment to all human action.5

In regard to our own experience and behavior, individual and social, we remain in the same situation as was the world between whenever it was that human being6 originated and 1800 (say), when it began to dawn on us that we live in a physical environment constituted by chemical elements. This was an environment that had always and everywhere been active, and that always and everywhere will remain active, but had never before been perceived. It was a total environment of the farthest reaches of the universe, and of the nearest reaches of our own bodies, that had never before been known to exist. The revolutionary changes to the planet in the last 200 years have resulted from this new consciousness of our perennial physical environment, the ‘exterior landscape’.

It was McLuhan’s hope and prediction that an analogous new consciousness of our perennial ‘interior landscape’ could lead to changes of a similar scope.7 And it was here alone, he thought, that the way to peace might be found for a world currently shaped by an unknown and out of control interior environment8 (perilously combined with an exterior environment that had become capable of nuclear war). 

the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) (…) have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language…9 (McLuhan to Harold Innis, 1951)

[The imperative need today is] to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication. (ibid)

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (…) Retracing becomes (…) the technique of reconstruction.10 (…) From the point of view of the artist (…) the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but [to facilitate] a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertising, or in the high arts is toward participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt. (ibid)

It is popular (…) to attack advertising. But is is unheard of to take it seriously as a form of art. Personally I see it as a form of art. And like symbolist art it is created to produce an effect rather than to argue or discuss the merits of a product. Baron Wrangel, the man in the Hathaway shirt [advertisement] — white shirt and black eye-patch: what did it mean? Out of the millions who bought Hathaway shirts, how many could say what the ad meant? It was a piece of magic: irrational, meaningless. But it had a definite effect. The advertiser proclaims to his clients that his pictorial and verbal magic is linked to the assembly line. No pictorial magic, no mass production. The primitive witch-doctor had spells which controlled the elements. The modern advertiser concocts spells which compel the customer. What the advertisers have discovered is simply that the new media of communication are themselves magical art forms. All art is in a sense magical in that it produces a change or metamorphosis in the spectator. It refashions his experience. In our slap-happy way we have released a great deal of this magic on ourselves today. We have been changing ourselves about at a great rate like Alley Oop. Some of us have been left hanging by our ears from the chandeliers. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

 

  1. Nineteenth century figures like Feuerbach,  Stirner and Nietzsche had already seen western culture as “superimposed myth”. This type of analysis was then applied to other cultures by anthropologists and to individual personality by psychoanalysts. ↩
  2. At this same time in the early 1950’s McLuhan was declaring that “technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense” (‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’, Explorations 2, 1954). “The natural base” was not be to be found in “nature in the old sense”, therefore, but in a relativized nature, what McLuhan called “second nature” (Laws of Media, 116ff). This was a ‘nature’ beyond “superimposed myth”. ↩
  3. The word ‘ordinary has been added here. But throughout ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ McLuhan uses phrases like this with ‘ordinary’ included in them. For example: “The most poetic thing in the world is the most ordinary human consciousness”. Again: “In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world”. And again: “in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world”. And again: “this sublime process is that of ordinary apprehension”. And finally: “the drama of ordinary perception (…) is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being. ↩
  4. Page 10. ↩
  5. Like Eliot’s Sweeney, McLuhan had to use words to talk to us. In reading his work it is imperative to differentiate between expressions used in an attempt to communicate (like ‘media’ as books, newspapers, radio, television, etc) and words used in a technical sense (like ‘media’ as the elementary structures of the human environment). This is to understand media, as McLuhan wrote to Innis (and is cited more fully above), “as the essential type of all human communication“. There is an fundamental reversal here. Not an understanding of books (say) leading to an understanding of media, but an understanding of media leading to an understanding of books — and of all other communication technologies. ↩
  6. Throughout this post and blog, ‘human being’ is used as a verbal expression, not a substantive or nominal one: ‘human being’ as ‘human action’, ‘human perception’, ‘human experience’, etc. ↩
  7. In the long ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ passage cited above, McLuhan observes that “the primitive witch-doctor had spells which controlled the elements (while) the modern advertiser concocts spells which compel the customer.” Through the birth of chemistry and its associated sciences, we have learned to ‘control the (physical) elements’ in a fundamentally different way. Through a ‘new science’ of human bias, says McLuhan, we can learn to control the “spells which compel the customer” in a comparably revolutionary way. ↩
  8. The ‘interior environment’ is not inside our skulls. It is the exterior physical environment plus the interior psychological one. ↩
  9. For McLuhan ‘language’ was not one of the array of human tools used for communication, but the underlying ‘type’ of all communication, indeed of all human being. (For ‘type’ see McLuhan’s 1951 letter to Harold Innis cited at the start of this post; for human being, see note #4 above.) ↩
  10. What McLuhan termed ‘reconstruction’ is close to what Heidegger termed ‘deconstruction’. ↩

What was McLuhan up to?

Satellites automatically enclose the old Darwinian “Nature” environment by putting the planet inside a man-made environment.1 

This sentence is from Dew-Line 1.5 (November 1968) but it could be from any number of McLuhan’s books and essays in the last two decades of his life after 1960. Here he is, for example, in 1971:

The latest technology in our world is the satellite. The satellite is the first man-made environment to encompass the planet. The earth has become the content of a human artifact. The satellite surround is the new artistic mask worn by the earth itself. It is a kind of proscenium arch, turning the globe into a theater. With Sputnik, Earth became (…) echo-land… (Innovation is Obsolete)

Are these reports of an historical event and its effects ? Namely, the launching of satellites which began in 1957 and the effects this has had in creating a new “man-made environment” across many fields from warfare to weather forecasting to resource mapping? In this case (1) McLuhan would have been doing a history of modern technology and its effects with an emphasis on new media.

Or (2) are these passages a figurative description of a ‘new science’ of human experience in which all of its data would be “man-made” in the sense of being an “artefact” of some or other subjective perspective or bias? A science, that is, where every object would be correlated with a subjective ‘take’ somewhat as a bat navigates by sonar signals which it sends and receives in a back and forth “echo-land” environment? “Blip calling unto blip” as McLuhan wrote in his 1957 review of Northrop Frye.

The satellite is also the shift from the planet as a homogeneous continuum or visual space, to the planet as a “chemical bond” or mosaic of resonating components. (Dew-Line 1.5)

In this case McLuhan would have been characterizing the domain of a potential new type of scientific investigation.2 Not ‘old science’ which takes its objects as much as possible exclusive of subjective bias, but ‘new science’ which would take its objects always inclusive of a correlated bias.3 Hence McLuhan’s observation that his work was a footnote to that of Harold Innis:

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.4

But already in 1944, years before he met Innis,5 McLuhan could speak in relation to Hopkins of our need to “keep ever sharply focused the stereoscopic gaze at the work itself”.6

Or (3) are these texts a description of how such a science might first come into view as a possibility? Just as satellites provided new imagery of the globe and thereby revealed the possibility and the need for environmental action, so could this same imagery suggest the idea that all of nature — all possible experience of nature — might be investigated in a new science or sciences:

The (…) archetypal-isation of Nature ensures that the Earth is now (…) a sort of archaeological museum affording immediate access to all past cultures simultaneously on a classified-information basis. (Dew-Line 1:5)

The first snippet given above is from this same Dew-Line issue. In it McLuhan brought together the new satellite environment with the possibility of ‘new science’ as follows:

The inability to perceive the “Emperor’s New Clothes” technological environments (…) needs no more illustration than Sputnik.
From the first moment of the satellite, the earth ceased to be the human “environment”.
Satellites automatically enclose the old Darwinian “Nature” environment by putting the planet inside a man-made environment. They are just as much an extension of the planet as is clothing an extension of the skin.
Satellites are equivalent to enclosing the Earth in a Bucky Fuller “dome” of acoustic space.
The consequent process of archetypal-isation of Nature ensure that the Earth is now an old “booster-stage”. . . a quaint form of Camp. . . a sort of archaeological museum affording immediate access to all past cultures simultaneously on a classified-information basis.
THE SATELLITE DECIDES FOR US THAT OUR FUTURE RELATION TO THE PLANET IS ONE OF “PROGRAM”. (Dew-Line 1:5)

In this case McLuhan would have been crafting a real-time history of science, in which the birth of a ‘new science’ of human culture would be traced and thereby announced.   

Or (4) was McLuhan actually doing ‘new science’? That is, was McLuhan talking about the possibility of investigating human culture as “programming” — or was he attempting to perform cultural programming, as far as he was able as an isolated individual, back to us from the actualization of that possibility? Was he fulfilling Hegel’s acute observation that the only convincing proof of the possibility of a science would be its actuality?

Or (5), by continually jumping between all these different aims, was McLuhan attempting to provoke that “quantum leap” which is required to obviate our “inability to perceive” and thereby to come to see the “Emperor’s New Clothes” of new science?

My canvases are surrealist, and to call them ‘theories’ is to miss my satirical intent  altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of rationalistic prose any time I choose to do so.7

Was he jumping between different audiences — in the academy, government, commerce and entertainment — in such different modes — from scientific to analytic to comedic — as a strategy of communication?8 

Or was he always doing all of these different things (and perhaps others as well) together and at once?

  1. McLuhan saw this development prior to the first satellites: “power technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art“. (‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’, Explorations 2, 1954) ↩
  2. In this same Dew-Line 1.5, McLuhan described the appearance of the domain investigated by new science: “A TOTAL FIELD (…) OF MULTIPLE CONGLOMERATES AND INTERVALS WHOSE INTERFACES CREATE A VAST FERMENT OF RAPIDLY CHANGING PATTERNS.” Like old science in this respect, new science would not engage with pure elements at the level of the phenomenal world. Here it would instead find “conglomerates” of various sorts. But, again as was the case with old science, the prerequisite of such study would be the dis-covery of the underlying elements composing those “conglomerates”: media. ↩
  3. “Western Old Science approaches the study of media in terms of linear, sequential transportation of data as detached figures (content); the New Science approach is via the ground of users and of environmental media effects.” (Laws of Media, posthumous, 85, the bracketed insertion of ‘(content)’ is original.) The word ‘inclusive’ is one of the most important in McLuhan’s vocabulary — it designates the need to take subject and object together, as well as the related need to take all the varieties of human experience together. ↩
  4. ‘Media and Cultural Change’, McLuhan’s introduction to the reprinting of Innis’ The Bias of Communication in 1964. ↩
  5. See Innis and McLuhan in 1936 for the question of when McLuhan first read Innis. ↩
  6. ‘The Analogical Mirrors’, Kenyon Review, 6:3, 1944. ↩
  7. McLuhan to Bill Kuhns, December 6, 1971, Letters 448. ↩
  8. McLuhan must be understood in the context of the fact that western civilization knows ever less about fundamental matters. Plato knew far more about the human situation than we do, although we have the means to destroy ourselves, and all life along with us, and the classical Greeks did not. Our problem is, then, not to learn more. It is to learn what has long been available to us — to achieve communication at last, with what is already there. As McLuhan said of the man who in his view provided “the only method of escape”: “Vico aimed to heal the rift (…) between the Ancients and the Moderns.” (See McLuhan on Vico.) ↩

Escape from the cul-de-sac

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen. (Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §309)1

*

I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. (…) The result was precisely what I had hoped it might be. As it is myself who now tell you this tale — as you see that I did escape — and as you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have farther to say — I will bring my story quickly to conclusion. (Edgar Poe, Descent into the Maelstrom)2

Here is the key to the sleuth.  He is that part of Poe which eluded the strom3 by studious detachment. (McLuhan to Brinley Rhys4, June 16, 1946)

Footprints in the Sands of Crime 1946
The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape.

to get out of the wire cage (…) Vico5 provides both the techniques of observation and exegesis as well as the only method of escape. (McLuhan to John Palmer, December 9, 1949)

Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry 1951
The couplet in [Alexander] Pope’s hands escaped from the conditions imposed by univocal discourse which had developed in the Cartesian milieu.6

Radio and Television vs. The ABCED-Minded 1955
The simplest way to get at Joyce’s technique in language, as well as to see its relation to TV, is to consider the principle of the electronic tube. The paradox of the electronic tube is that it is the means of breaking the conductor of an electric circuit. The tube permits the electrons to escape from the wire that ordinarily conveys them. But the tube controls the conditions of escape.7 

Effects of Improvement of Communication Media 1960
If adjustment (economic, social, or personal)8 to information movement at electronic speeds is quite impossible, we can always change our models and metaphors9 of organization, and escape into sheer understanding. Sequential analysis and adjustment natural to low speed information movement becomes irrelevant and useless even at telegraph speed. But as speed increases, the understanding of process in all kinds of structures and situations becomes relatively simple.10 We can literally escape into understanding when the patterns of process become manifest.

Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
The strategy any culture must resort to in a period like this was indicated by Wilhelm von Humboldt: “Man lives with his objects chiefly — in fact, since his feeling and acting depends on his perceptions, one may say exclusively — as language presents them to him. By the same process whereby he spins language out of his being, he ensnares himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another.“11
Such awareness as this has generated in our time the technique of the suspended judgment by which we can transcend the limitations of our own assumptions by a critique of them. We can now live, not just amphibiously in divided and distinguished worlds, but pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously. We are no more committed to one culture — to a single ratio among the human senses — any more than to one book or to one language or to one technology. Our need today is, culturally, the same as the scientist’s who seeks to become aware of the bias of the instruments of research in order to correct that bias. (30-31)

Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
the influence of unexamined assumptions derived from technology leads quite unnecessarily to maximal determinism in human life. Emancipation from that trap is the goal… (247)

The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion 1962
Many are now disposed to reject the entire achievement of literate Western man in an effort to recover integral values.  But surely this [urge to merge] temper is not very different from that which emerged in the early phases of literacy, when leaders were prepared to dismantle and detribalize their world in favour of a visual, lineal, individualistic stress in the organization of experience. To embark now on a reverse course is the immediate suggestion and mandate of electric technology. And to pro or con this reverse course is merely to accept the mechanical fate of a new technology. Is there no third course? How can we elude the merely technical closure in our inner lives and recover autonomy? What if any is the cultural strategy of the suspended judgment, of the open-ended proposition? Is there the possibility of new freedom in the aesthetic response to the models of perception outered from us into our technology? If we contemplate the technological forms that we set outside ourselves as art objects, rather than as the inevitable patterns of utility, can we escape the swift12 closure of our senses?

Functions of Art 1963
One theme that pervades the book [of Leo Lowenthal]13 is stated at the outset, in a chapter on “Diversion and Salvation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” (…) So stating the issues (…) gives new relevance to the ancient quarrel14 between the party of Montaigne and the party of Pascal (…) For Montaigne the hope is to escape from immediate miseries15, while for Pascal the hope is for ultimate escape, by using the more austere forms of art as a means of spiritual grace. It would be hard to decide how much semantics and how much temperament goes to the making of such a polarity, but the distinction has proved sufficient to provide a deep division of attitudes ever since their time. (…) So far as English literature is concerned, the great monument to this crisis [“between the party of Montaigne and the party of Pascal”] is Pope’s Dunciad, in which Pope asserts the responsibility of the author to be a guide and corrective to perception rather than to provide an anodyne for anxieties. In this view the author must inevitably take the side of the language itself, as the accumulated store of perception to which the writer owes the deepest responsibility. That is why Pope made such an issue of dullness, for he saw the hack writers as people not only without perception, but as creators of a collective opacity in language, which is the very instrument of perception.16

Media and Cultural Change, 1964
[Harold] 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.17

Playboy Interview, 1969
Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot. It’s to escape this Narcissus trance that I’ve tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

Playboy Interview, 1969
The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us. No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide. But if we diagnose what is happening to us, we can reduce the ferocity of the winds of change and bring the best elements of the old visual culture, during this transitional period, into peaceful coexistence with the new retribalized society. If we persist, however, in our conventional rearview-mirror approach to these cataclysmic developments, all of Western culture will be destroyed and swept into the dustbin of history.

 

  1. What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the flybottle. ↩
  2. This passage from Poe’s A Descent into the Maelstrom is quoted verbatim by McLuhan in ‘Art as Survival in the Electric Age’ (1973). ↩
  3. See McLuhan on Poe’s Maelstrom. ↩
  4. As ‘Editorial Assistant’ at the Sewanee Review, Brinley Rhys filled in as its editor in 1946 after Allen Tate resigned and before John Palmer was appointed as the new editor. ↩
  5. For McLuhan’s take on Vico see McLuhan on Vico and Bacon and Vico. ↩
  6. McLuhan ended the historical portion of The Gutenberg Galaxy with an extended quotation from Pope’s Dunciad and reprinted this one section of GG in The Interior Landscape. His point was that Pope’s couplet took “the side of the language itself”, a ‘side’ that includes all possible sides, ‘against’ (through inclusion) the trademark dualism cum monism of the ‘dullards’ of the press and book trades. See notes 14 and 16 below regarding essential plurality. ↩
  7. McLuhan’s suggestion is that humans can become a vacuum tube or transistor for their own actions by instituting a scientific investigation of them. McLuhan is thinking of the “electronic tube” here in 1955 in terms of the vacuum tube which in the meantime has almost entirely been replaced by transistors (the Nobel prize for the development of the transistor was awarded in 1956). But it is interesting to read this passage when “the tube” is read as ‘TV’ (as McLuhan frequently did in later writings like ‘A Last Look at the Tube’ in 1978). Especially to be noted is the continuation of the 1955 text here: “the tube controls the conditions of escape. It liberates (viewers from their old contexts and selves) but (in  doing so) it provides a new context in which they can be (and are) repatterned”! Such was the power of TV to remake the whole world — which was ignored in 1955 and is still being ignored today, more than 65 years later, at a time when everybody everywhere has their face glued to a screen. In this regard, here is McLuhan from the previous year of 1954 in ‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’: “The TV screen is not the movie screen. In some sense the (TV) spectator is (…) the screen”! (All bracketed additions throughout this note are editorial interventions. ↩
  8. McLuhan’s bracketed insertion. ↩
  9. The whole history of western civilization is testimony to the difficulties implicated in the attempt to “change our models and metaphors”. In the first place, since identity is established and exercised through “models and metaphors”, such change inherently involves identity-loss. Second, between “models and metaphors” there are no “models and metaphors” giving orientation. Such change is necessarily blind. Third, recognition of a model or metaphor that provides ground and understanding is itself dependent on some model or metaphor. In sum, the way of ‘ascent from the maelstrom’ is the most difficult question human beings face or, far more usually, refuse to face. ↩
  10. McLuhan seems to have felt that owning up to the difficulties he himself had gone through would put people off from the process he was recommending. So it was said to be “relatively simple”. But this idea has proved to be off-putting, misdirecting and fruitless. ↩
  11. Von Humboldt is quoted by McLuhan here from Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, p. 9. The question for humans is not to find an escape from ‘magic circles’, but to find escape in the ‘magic circle’ of collective investigation. ↩
  12. With an “escape (from) the swift” a break in time is prescribed or, at least, seen to exist. And a break in time implicates another time or times in that breakage. Indeed, the existing plurality of times is one of the fundamental tenets of McLuhan’s work: “We can correct the bias of the present time only by coming to know it is a time, not the time.” But the unitemporal or Gutenbergian environment of ‘research’ into his work is constitutionally unable to grasp this. A “quantum leap” is required to perceive this alternate possibility and this is not wagered. So we remain, as Beckett has it, a dog chained to its vomit. ↩
  13. Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society, 1961. ↩
  14. McLuhan used the phrase “the ancient quarrel” in his Nashe PhD thesis from 1943 to refer to the perennial battle of the trivial arts. It appeared again in the title of his 1944 lecture ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ (published in 1946) which brought his thesis into a contemporary context. His use of the same phrase 20 years later, between the 1962 publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy and the 1964 Understanding Media is significant. It suggests that the ground of both books lies in a plurality of reals and of times. If we are to understand the message of these books, we need first of all to understand that pluralizing medium! ↩
  15. Eliot’s “distracted from distraction by distraction” (‘Burnt Norton’, the first of the Four Quartets). ↩
  16. McLuhan sets out three forms of perception here, not two: that of Montaigne, that of Pascal, and that of Pope’s “language”, where language is inclusive of the other two. This 3-fold is the “ancient quarrel” or ontological battle which was McLuhan’s ‘one thought’. See note 14 above. ↩
  17. ‘Media and Cultural Change’ was McLuhan’s introduction to the 1964 edition of Innis’ The Bias of Communication. But McLuhan had this method of understanding cultures very early in his career, before he was much influenced by Innis, if at all. (But see Innis and McLuhan in 1936.) Here he is in his 1947 proposal to Robert Hutchins: “Every age has its reigning analogy (‘dominant imagery and technology of any culture’) in terms of which it orients itself with respect to the past and directs its energies through the present to the future. To be contemporary in the good sense is to be aware of this (‘reigning’) analogy. To be ‘ahead of the time’ is to be critically aware of the analogy. That is, to be aware that it is only one analogy” (in a spectrum of analogies). The parallel with time as times is explicit: “We can correct the bias of the present time only by coming to know it is a time, not the time” (see note 12 above). ↩

Bacon and Vico

In his ‘Preface’ to Laws of Media, Eric McLuhan records:

My father died before we could work out in detail how his new discoveries related to the labours of Vico and Bacon. He knew the relations were there, and his intuitions had never played him false. It fell to me to do the tidying-up and to ready the book for the press. The key to the whole business is sensibility, as the serious poets and artists (and grammarians) have always maintained. Vico in particular targeted ‘the modification of our own human minds’ as the crucial area, while he cast about for a way to read and write the ‘mental dictionary’. Then the relation between Bacon’s Idols and Vico’s Axioms surfaced1 — bias of perception — and the job was near done. Bacon called his book the Novum Organum (…), the New Science; Vico called his the Scienza Nuova, the New Science; I have subtitled ours The New Science. On reflection, I am tempted to make that the title (…) for it should stand as volume three of a work begun by Sir Francis Bacon and carried forward a century later by Giambattista Vico. (x-xi)

Laws of Media details the Bacon-Vico relation as follows:

When determining the principles on which his Scienza Nuova would rest, Giambattista Vico, the last great pre-electric grammarian, decided to use cultures themselves as his text: “We must reckon as if there were no books in the world.”2 In shunning conventional science and returning to direct observation of the page of Nature, Vico pursued the same course Francis Bacon had charted in the Novum Organum... (Laws of Media, posthumous, 215)

Vico (…) begins by reiterating and updating Bacon’s [four] Idols as his own first four Axioms. The first four axioms constitute the basis of Vico’s elements and, says Vico, “give us the basis for refuting all opinions hitherto held about the principles of humanity” (New Science, §163). “These four axioms express a theory of ignorance which we need in order to acquire a doctrine of truth concerning the nature of humanity.”3 (Laws of Media, 11)

The ‘myth of objectivity’, a result of visual bias, belongs to the ‘Idols of the Theatre’ or what Giambattista Vico termed ‘the conceit of scholars’ in his fourth axiom. Vico was merely following [Bacon’s previous] instructions when, at the outset of his Scienza Nuova, he set out his [four] ‘elements’ or ‘axioms’, for Bacon had prefaced his account of his [four] ‘Idols’ with these words: “The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use for the doctrine of idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is to common logic.”4 (Laws of Media, 83-84)

[The first of Bacon’s Idols,] the Idols of the Tribe, and Vico’s first axiom, specify the general bias of sensibility (…) as a pollution of exact observation which must be allowed for. (…) “The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions, as well of the sense as of the mind, are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and decolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”5 (Laws of Media, 84)

Vico’s [corresponding] first axiom is this: “Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of all things. This axiom explains those two common human traits, on the one hand that rumor grows in its course (fama crescit eundo). On the other that rumor is deflated by the presence of the thing itself (minuit praesentia famam). In the long course that rumor has run from the beginning of the world it has been the perennial source of all the exaggerated opinions which have hitherto been held concerning remote antiquities unknown to us, by virtue of that property of the human mind noted by Tacitus in his Life of Agricola, where he says that everything unknown is taken for something great (omne ignotum pro magnifico est).”6 (Laws of Media, 84)

[The second of Bacon’s Idols], the Idols of the Cave, and Vico’s second axiom, pinpoint intellectual laziness and conceptual dogmatism as distorting influences (…) “The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own. which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or to his education and conversation with others, or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.”7 This Idol takes its name from the cave in the Republic of Plato (Book VII). Vico notes (axiom two): “It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things they judge them by what is familiar and at hand. This axiom points to the inexhaustible source of all the errors about the beginnings of humanity that have been adopted by entire nations and by the scholars For when the former began to take notice of them and the latter to investigate them, it was on the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated and magnificent times that they judged the origins of humanity, which must nevertheless by the nature of things have been small, crude and quite obscure.”8  (Laws of Media, 84)

[The third of Bacon’s Idols], the idols of the Marketplace — Vico’s ‘conceit of nations’ — arise in the ‘intercourse and association of men with each other’ (…): “There are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market-place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfair choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies.”9 Vico translates this into his third axiom as follows: “As for the conceit of the nations, we have heard that golden saving of Diodorus Siculus. Every nation, according to him, whether Greek or barbarian, has had the same conceit that it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life and that its remembered history goes back to the very beginning of the world.”10 (Laws of Media, 84-85)

Fourth and last, Bacon cites the Idols of the Theatre ‘which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies’ — Old Science. These Vico terms ‘conceit of scholars’ whose sciences have neither real antiquity of knowledge nor knowledge of antiquity, being cut off from tradition This conceit shores up its own narrow version of thought by claiming that what it knows is what all learning has always been about. (…) [Bacon]: “Lastly, there are the Idols which have immigrated Into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak, for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received”11 Vico renders this in his fourth axiom: “To this conceit of the nations there may be added that of the scholars, who will have it that whatever they know is as old as the world. This axiom disposes of all the opinions of the scholars concerning the matchless wisdom of the ancients”.12 (Laws of Media, 85)

  1. After his father’s death as he was getting Laws of Media ready for publication, but alerted by Marshall’s long attention to Bacon and Vico, Eric seems to have discovered the detailed parallels between Bacon’s Idols and Vico’s Axioms in Croce and Verene. He explicitly credits them as follows: “Benedetto Croce first noted the parallels (between Bacon’s Idols and Vico’s Axioms) in his Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, tr RG Collingwood (pages 155-157). Donald Philip Verene presents the parallels in his essay Vico’s Science of the Imagination (pages 128-133).” (Laws of Media, 11) ↩
  2. New Science, §330. ↩
  3. Verene, Vico’s Science of the Imagination, 1981, 128-129. ↩
  4. Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism xl. ↩
  5. Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism xli. ↩
  6. New Science, §120. ↩
  7. Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism xlii. ↩
  8. New Science, §122-§123. ↩
  9. Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism xliii. ↩
  10. New Science, §125. ↩
  11. Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism xliv. ↩
  12. New Science, §127. ↩

McLuhan on Vico

The stand should (…) have been taken (…) on plenary1 philology. That is, letters understood as the complete education in thought and feeling which fosters an integral humanitas. That is Viconian ground. The only fertile soil in the modern world. (McLuhan to John Palmer,2 November 4, 1946)

To [Vico] goes the credit for having maintained the autonomy of all the practical sciences of rhetoric, poetic, and history against the nullifying effects (so far as the practical intellectual arts are concerned) of mathematical speculation. (…) The (…) entirely relativist (…) bias of a contemporary sensibility (…) began perhaps with Vico’s sense of the simultaneous presence in men of the “three ages”. (McLuhan, Eliot’s Cubist Aesthetic, unpublished, c1947) 

To get out of the wire cage (…) Vico provides both the techniques of observation and exegesis as well as the only method of escape. (McLuhan to John Palmer, December 9, 1949)

*

When man understands, he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand, he (…) becomes them by transforming himself into them. (Vico, The New Science, §405, 1744)

Consider the effect of modern machinery in imposing rhythm on human thought and feeling. Archaic man got inside the thing that terrified him — tiger, bear, wolf — and made it his totem god. To-day we get inside the machine.3 It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. (McLuhan to Ezra Pound, January 1951, Letters p219)

*

Giambattista Vico is an example of a linguistic analogist in the eighteenth century (…) he held that all language was basically expressive of universal concepts. Says Croce: “Vico also looked forward to a universal system of etymology, a dictionary of mental words common to all nations.” (McLuhan, Francis Bacon’s Patristic Inheritance, 1944)4

At the moment I’m reading Vico… (McLuhan to Cleanth Brooks, October 8, 1946)

Incidentally, the suggestion about intellectual self-portraits came to me from reading Vico’s autobiography.5 With him the problem of intellectual growth had been imposed by the struggle to free himself from Descartes. To-day, the problem is the same. To get free of technological modes which have invaded every aspect of education, of thought and feeling. (McLuhan to John Palmer, November 4, 1946)

the metaphor of simple linear perspective (…) yields in Vico to a complex genetic metaphor that becomes the intellectual means of being simultaneously present in all periods of the past and all mental climates of the modern world as well. (McLuhan, Inside Blake and Hollywood, 1947)

That great positivist synthesis [in Britain]6 lasted until the time of Herbert Spencer and petered out in the popular fantasies of the encyclopedic H.G. Wells. Meantime it was increasingly challenged by the more speculative synthesis which stemmed from Vico and Hegel and was carried on through Marx on the economic side and through Nietzsche on the psychological and philological fronts. However, it has never been understood that the second-rate character of the English and American nineteenth century as compared with the German and French was owing to the German and French having adopted psychological rather than the biological experience as the source of the guiding analogies for (…) social study and discussion. Adam Smith introduced into the intellectual currency the analogy of a vague evolutionary providence operating through both human and animal appetites. This analogy fructified the minds of Malthus and Darwin. But it was analogy quite incapable of stimulating the great anthropological and cultural histories which, under Viconian and Hegelian inspiration, appeared on the continent. Sir James Frazer and Arnold Toynbee are by-products of Max Muller and Oswald Spengler rather than of their own traditions.
Every age has its reigning analogy in terms of which it orients itself with respect to the past and directs its energies through the present to the future. To be contemporary in the good sense is to be aware of this [reigning] analogy. To be “ahead of the time” is to be critically aware of the [reigning] analogy. That is, to be aware that it is only one analogy. To be creative and directive of the currents of the age is, while admitting the limitations of the dominant analogy, to carry out as complete as extension and synthesis of the arts and sciences as it will permit. But also to explore as much new terrain in each art and science as it will allow. To recover as much of the past as can be made creatively relevant to the present. To be aware of the past as presently useful and of much of the present as already irrelevant — this is to be a contemporary mind. And this mode of awareness is itself based on an analogy derived from relativity physics (…) whose usefulness to a society faced with the problems of world government and international community is as immense as it is as yet unexploited. (McLuhan’s Proposal to Robert Hutchins, 1947)

To [Vico] goes the credit for having maintained the autonomy of all the practical sciences of rhetoric, poetic, and history against the nullifying effects (so far as the practical intellectual arts are concerned) of mathematical speculation. (…) Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious presents, like Vico’s, a similar multiplicity of simultaneous perspectives which has the effect (…) of conferring the sense of permanent and perpetual availability of the entire past in the present. (…) The (…) entirely relativist and Whiteheadian (…) bias of a contemporary sensibility (…) began perhaps with Vico’s sense of the simultaneous presence in men of the “three ages”. (McLuhan, Eliot’s Cubist Aesthetic, unpublished, c1947) 

Vico’s great discovery of a psychological method for interpreting historical periods and cultural patterns is rooted in his perception that the condition of man is never the same but his nature is unchanging. (…) Vico (…) invented an instrument of historical and cultural analysis of the utmost use for the discovery of psychological and moral unity in the practical order… (McLuhan, Where Chesterton Comes In, 1948)7

Finnegan as civilization hero. Purger of the crap of the tribe. Hercules and the Augean Stables. Diverted a river. Hence one reason for river importance in Finnegan. Hook up with Euripides’ Alcestis. Drunken Hercules descends to underworld. River of unconscious purging via puns. Puns technique of dislocation, irrigation, interpenetration of all levels of society and experience. All heading for bright sea of intelligibility. Hercules in this sense right out of Vico. (McLuhan to Cleanth Brooks, October 16, 1948)

Once Mallarmé had detached poetic act and knowledge from that rhetorical activity in which the poet quarrelled with his age, poetic knowledge was free to enter into the most intimate analogical relations with all phases of social consciousness and processes. A Viconian revolution in which a seeming impoverishment led to the final enrichment.8 (McLuhan, American Criticism and the Demons of Analogy, unpublished, c1948) 

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (basis of myth of Daedalus, basic for the dreams and schemes of Francis Bacon, and, when transferred by Vico to philology and history of culture (…) forms the basis of modern historiography, archaeology, psychology and artistic procedures alike). (McLuhan to Harold Innis, March 14, 1951, Letters p221)

Often noted from Montaigne onward is the growing interest in the anatomy of states of mind which in Giambattista Vico reached the point of stress on the importance of reconstructing by vivisection the inner history of one’s own mind. A century separates Vico’s Autobiography and Wordsworth’s Prelude, but they are products of the same impulse. Another century, and Joyce’s Portrait carries the same enterprise a stage further. Vico generalized the process as a means of reconstructing the stages of human culture by the vivisection and contemplation of language itself. (McLuhan, The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

At the time when Joyce was studying the trivium with the Jesuits there had occurred in the European world a rebirth of interest in the traditional arts of communication. Indirectly, this had come about through the reconstruction of past cultures as carried on by nineteenth-century archaeology and anthropology. For these new studies had directed attention to the role of language and writing in the formation of societies and the transmission of culture. And the total or gestalt approach natural in the study of primitive cultures had favored the study of language as part of the entire cultural network. Language was seen as inseparable from the tool-making and economic life of these peoples. It was not studied in abstraction from the practical concerns of society.
It was at this time that Vico came into his own. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Vico’s Scienza Nuova had proposed language as the basis for anthropology and a new science of history. Extant languages, he argued, could be regarded as working models of all past culture, because language affords an unbroken line of communication with the totality of the human past. The modalities of grammar, etymology and word-formation could be made to yield a complete account of the economic, social and spiritual adventures of mankind. If geology could reconstruct the story of the earth from the inert strata of rock and clay, the scienza nuova could do much better with the living languages of men.9 (McLuhan, James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)

James Joyce certainly thought he had found in Vico a philosopher who had some better cultural awareness than those moved by the “Cartesian spring.” And Vico, like Heidegger, is a philologist among philosophers. His time theory of “ricorsi” has been interpreted by lineal minds to imply “recurrence.” A recent study of him brushes this notion aside.10 Vico conceives the time-structure of history as “not linear, but contrapuntal. It must be traced along a number of lines of development”. For Vico all history is contemporary or simultaneous, a fact given, Joyce would add, by virtue of language itself, the simultaneous storehouse of all experience. And in Vico, the concept of recurrence cannot “be admitted at the level of the course of the nations through time”: “The establishment of providence establishes universal history, the total presence of the human spirit to itself in idea.11 In this principle, the supreme ‘ricorso’ is achieved by the human spirit in idea, and it possesses itself, past, present, and future, in an act which is wholly consonant with its own historicity.”12 (McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p249-250)

Vico was the first to spot language itself as a memory theatre. Finnegans Wake is such a memory theatre for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness. With the arrival of the printed word, the whole fabric of these theatres collapsed quickly. The medieval cathedrals were memory theatres. The Golden Bough is a memory theatre of the corporate rather than the private consciousness and marks a major transition toward the retribalizing of human consciousness. (McLuhan to William Jovanovich, December 1, 1966, Letters p339)

James Joyce put the matter very simply in Finnegans Wake (81:1): “As for the viability of vicinals, when invisible they are invincible.” By “vicinals” Joyce alludes to Vico whose Scienza Nuova asserts the principle of the sensory and perceptual change resulting from new technologies throughout human history. Hence the ancients attributed god-like status to all inventors since they alter human perception and self-awareness.  (McLuhan to Jacques Maritain, May 6, 1969, Letters p369-370)

There seems to be a general unwillingness to consider the impact of technological innovation on the human sensibility. The reason that Joyce considered Vico’s new science so important for his own linguistic probes, was that Vico was the first to point out that a total history of human culture and sensibility is embedded in the changing structural forms of language. (McLuhan to Robert J. Leuver, July 30, 1969, Letters p384-385)

Like Isadore of Seville, Vico saw the history of cultural evolution in the etymologies of words as recording responses to technological innovations. (McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype, 1970, p127)

The Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville in the sixth century a.d. was a compendium of the arts and sciences. Etymology was understood to include the secret principles of all forms of being, physical and spiritual. In the seventeenth century Vico’s Scienza Nuova reasserted those ancient principles of verbal resonance as comprising the keys to all scientific and humanist mysteries. James Joyce, who incorporated not only Vico, but all the ancient traditions of language as science, alludes to the principal feature of this kind of “new science” in Finnegans Wake: “As for the viability of vicinals, when invisible they’re invincible.” The allusion to Vico is environmental (vicus: Latin for neighborhood), indicating the irresistible operation of causes in the new environments issuing from new technologies. Since these environments are always invisible, merely because they are environments, their transforming powers are never heeded in time to be moderated or controlled. (McLuhan, Take Today, 1972, p150-151) 

In 1725 Giambattista Vico explained in his Scienza Nuova (§331): “But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity. so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question, that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.” (McLuhan, Laws of Media, posthumous, 1988, p4)13

Vico (…) begins by reiterating and updating Bacon’s [four] Idols as his own first four Axioms. The first four axioms constitute the basis of Vico’s elements and, says Vico, “give us the basis for refuting all opinions hitherto held about the principles of humanity” (New Science, §163). “These four axioms express a theory of ignorance which we need in order to acquire a doctrine of truth concerning the nature of humanity.”14 (Laws of Media, p11)

The ‘myth of objectivity’, a result of visual bias, belongs to the ‘Idols of the Theatre’ or what Giambattista Vico termed ‘the conceit of scholars’ in his fourth axiom. Vico was merely following [Bacon’s] instructions when, at the outset of his Scienza Nuova, he set out his [four] ‘elements’ or ‘axioms’, for Bacon had prefaced his account of his [four] ‘Idols’ with these words: “The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use for the doctrine of idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is to common logic.”15 (Laws of Media, p83-84)

Summing his great chapter on Poetic Wisdom. Vico reiterates: “We have shown that poetic wisdom justly deserves two great and sovereign tributes. The one, clearly and constantly accorded to it, is that of having founded gentile mankind, though the conceit of the nations on the one hand, and that of the scholars on the other, the former with ideas of an empty magnificence and the latter with ideas of an impertinent philosophical wisdom, have in effect denied it this honour by their very efforts to affirm it. The other, concerning which a vulgar tradition has come down to us, is that the wisdom of the ancients made its wise men, by a single aspiration, equally great as philosophers, lawmakers, captains, historians, orators and poets, on which account it has been so greatly sought after.”16 (Laws of Media, p85)

Western Old Science approaches the study of media in terms of linear, sequential transportation of data as detached figures (content); the New Science approach is via the ground of users and of environmental media effects. (Laws of Media, p85)

When determining the principles on which his Scienza Nuova would rest, Giambattista Vico, the last great pre-electric grammarian, decided to use cultures themselves as his text: “We must reckon as if there were no books in the world.”17 In shunning conventional science and returning to direct observation of the page of Nature, Vico pursued the same course Francis Bacon had charted in the Novum Organum... (Laws of Media, p215)

Vico’s technique is set forth in the second of his five books as the practical heuristic application of not philosophical but poetic wisdom. For method: “We must therefore go back with the philologians and fetch it from the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha,18 from the rocks of Amphion,19 from the men who sprang from the furrows of Cadmus20 or the hard oak21 of Vergil.”22 Vico’s Science went one essential step beyond Bacon’s. Meditating on the relations between the two books, he found a new correspondence, an interplay that raised a new ‘text’ for grammatical scrutiny. “But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows, and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since men made it, men could hope to know. This aberration was a consequence of that infirmity of the human mind, noted in the Axioms, by which, immersed and buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things, and finds the effort to attend to itself too laborious; just as the bodily eye sees all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself.”23 The new text is man’s social artefacts… (Laws of Media, p220-221)

Vico brings to bear all of the resources of grammar, both as regards exegesis of the two books and as regards the processes of etymology: “The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit“.24 (Laws of Media, p221)

This passage puts on display the standard grammatical awareness of the correspondence of words and things, though seldom has it been made so explicit. As poetic (rhetorical) wisdom focuses on the sensibilities as crucial, Vico asserts that there must exist a mental dictionary, not of abstract philosophical ideas, but of concrete poetic-philological sensibilities conformal to the things and artefacts of common experience: “There must, in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. A proof of this is afforded by proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same meanings find as many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient and modern. This common mental language is proper to our Science, by whose light linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary common to all the various articulate languages living and dead (…) As far as our small erudition will permit, we shall make use of this vocabulary in all the matters we discuss.“25 (Laws of Media, p221-222) 

Concluding his discussion of poetic wisdom, Vico accorded it ‘two great and sovereign tributes’. One is ‘that of having founded gentile mankind’; the other concerned the ‘wisdom of the ancients’ as sketched in the fables: “And it may be said that in the fables the nations have in a rough way and in the language of the human senses, described the beginnings of this world of sciences, which the specialized studies of scholars have since clarified for us by reasoning and generalization. From this we may conclude what we set out to show in this (second) book: that the theological poets were the sense and the philosophers the intellect of human wisdom.”26 (Laws of Media, p222) 

Vico aimed to heal the rift in the trivium between the Ancients and the Moderns. He sought to avoid the faults that had accumulated in both philology and philosophy, since they were split in the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, by blending them: “Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes the authority of human choice, whence comes consciousness of the certain. This axiom by its second part defines as philologians all the grammarians, historians, critics, who have occupied themselves with the study of the languages and deeds of peoples both their domestic affairs, such as customs and laws, and their external affairs, such as wars, peaces, alliances, travels and commerce. This same axiom shows how the philosophers failed by half in not giving certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the philologians, and likewise how the latter failed by half in not taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers. If they had both done this they would have been more useful to their commonwealths and they would have anticipated us in conceiving this Science.”27 (Laws of Media, p222-223)

Vico’s contemporaries were no more able to carry forward his work than were their successors, and so the problem has remained to this day (…) In the end, it eluded him for he was caught in a dilemma that had been building for centuries before him and that was then [invisible28 because] environmental. (…) Vico simply had not distinguished between first and second nature for separate study: nothing in his experience suggested such a distinction would be of any use. Second nature is nature made and remade by man as man remakes himself with his extensions. Separate them: the first is the province of traditional grammar;29 the second, that of Bacon, Vico, and Laws of Media. (Laws of Media, p223)

The key to Vico’s science was the mental dictionary (…) the dictionary of real words (…) is, as he anticipated, a ‘mental’ dictionary in that it displays patterns and transformations of sensibility.30 (Laws of Media, p223)

  1. The term ‘plenary’ is very important in the early writings of McLuhan from the 1940s. He used it in the sense of ‘ontological’. See Plenary consciousness (McLuhan and Hegel) and Plenary consciousness 2. ↩
  2. Palmer was the editor of The Sewanee Review from 1946 to 1952. ↩
  3. As detailed in McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (1951), the ‘machine’ here is just as much news, advertising, entertainment, sports… ↩
  4. This paper was unpublished in McLuhan’s lifetime but has appeared posthumously. The Croce citation is from History of Aesthetic, trans. D. Ainslie, 1929, 226. At this date, 1944, McLuhan had not yet begun to read Vico himself. ↩
  5. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch, Ithaca, NY,1944. Presumably (given his association of Vico with Bacon) McLuhan had been alerted to Vico by his Jesuit students in St Louis (particularly Maurice McNamee who wrote his doctorate on Bacon working initially with McLuhan) with the result that he read the Autobiography shortly after the publication of its translation. For McLuhan’s association of Vico with Bacon, see Bacon and Vico. As regards “intellectual self-portraits”, in the mid-1940s McLuhan wrote a series of portraits (of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley and Keats) for a volume which he titled Character Anthology. Never published, it is to be found in his papers in Ottawa. ↩
  6. McLuhan is thinking of the 200 year consensus reflected in the Royal Society in London and the Edinburgh Review in Scotland. ↩
  7. McLuhan’s Introduction to Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 1948. ↩
  8. The “seeming impoverishment” here was Mallarmé’s insight (going back to Aristotle and Thomas, as Joyce saw) that ‘poetic’ creativity is not special and limited to the arts, but is implicated in all ‘ordinary cognition’ whatsoever. ↩
  9. McLuhan continues: “Previously, historians had attempted to create working models of some segment of the human past in their narratives. These (historical narratives) were necessarily hypothetical structures eked out by scraps of recorded data. The new historian need never attempt again to revivify the past by imaginative art, because it is all present in language. And it is present, Joyce would add, as a newsreel re-presents actual events. We can sit back and watch the “all night news reel” of Finnegans Wake reveal as interfused the whole human drama past and present. This can be done by directing an analytical camera-eye upon the movements within and between words.” ↩
  10. A. Robert Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico, 1953. ↩
  11. Re “the total presence of the human spirit to itself” note that the physical sciences study the total material events of the universe, past, present and future. This does not mean, however, that these events are perfectly known without possibility of correction. Far rather, the perpetual possibility of correction is the very motor of science. So with the proposed new science. No human experience will lie outside its purview, but its investigations will never be final. ↩
  12. Time and Idea, p. 142. See the previous note for pertinent commentary. ↩
  13. Laws of Media was composed by McLuhan’s son, Eric, in the decade after his death drawing on materials from the 1970s. The underlying drafts, audio recordings and videos have been deposited with the University of Toronto: 
    https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca/downloads/marshall-mcluhan-papers.pdf ↩
  14. The citation here via McLuhan’s son, Eric, is from Donald P. Verene, Vico’s Science of the Imagination, 1981. ↩
  15. Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism xl. ↩
  16. New Science, §779. ↩
  17. New Science, §330. ↩
  18. As recorded by Apollodorus and Ovid, Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only survivors of the flood visited upon mankind by Zeus, were able to repopulate the earth by casting stones, ‘the bones of the earth’, behind them. ↩
  19. Building the fortification walls of Thebes with his brother, Zethus, Amphion was able to sing his stones into their place. ↩
  20. In a myth often recalled by McLuhan as signaling the effect of literacy, Cadmus sowed dragon’s teeth and from this emerged his army. ↩
  21. In Vergil’s golden age, the “tough oak” will “drip with dew-wet honey”. ↩
  22. New Science, §338. ↩
  23. New Science, §331. ↩
  24. New Science, §236-§237. ↩
  25. New Science, §161-§162. ↩
  26. New Science, §779. ↩
  27. New Science, §138. ↩
  28. “Environments are always invisible, merely because they are environments” (full passage from Take Today, 1972, given above). ↩
  29. And of all the physical sciences. ↩
  30. Here, with his last note on Vico, McLuhan returned to his first in 1944 (given above), 35 years before, at a time when he had not yet begun to study him: “Vico (…) held that all language was basically expressive of universal concepts. Says Croce: “Vico also looked forward to a universal system of etymology, a dictionary of mental words common to all nations.” Here, too, is to be seen McLuhan’s later reading of Finnegans Wake as “a universal system of etymology, a dictionary of (…) words common to all nations.” ↩

McDonald on McLuhan’s utopianism

A passage on McLuhan from Peter McDonald’s Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing has been discussed previously. Here a second passage will be examined (with running commentary in footnotes):1

Read alongside [Goody and Watt’s] ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), which appeared a year earlier, seems like an uncannily preemptive rebuke. For one thing, McLuhan rejected the idea that oral cultures show no ‘capacity or opportunity for independent and original thought’;2 for another, he saw the advent of ‘phonetic writing’ as a cultural catastrophe.3 ‘Literate man, when we meet him in the Greek world’, he insisted, ‘is a split man, a schizophrenic, as all literate men4 have been since the invention of the phonetic alphabet’.5 He did not use the word ‘schizophrenic’ lightly or entirely metaphorically. ‘Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code’, thereby instituting6 a wholly new set of ‘ratios or proportions among the senses’, rupturing the primal integrity of the ‘human sensorium’.7
As we have seen, given the evidence for the ongoing interconnectedness
of the phonological, the orthographic, and the lexical in the literate brain, this sensory-cognitive version of the Judeo-Christian Fall narrative makes no sense in contemporary neuroscientific terms, though for McLuhan it was central.8 The dissociation the Greeks effected was not just psychic, however: it was cultural, since ‘only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere’. In McLuhan’s primitivist lexicon ‘civilized’ was synonymous with ‘schizophrenic’, ‘abstract’, and ‘visual’, whereas ‘tribal’ signified ‘wholeness’, ‘concreteness’, and the ‘audile-tactile’, associative patterns he had no hesitation in projecting onto his own idiosyncratic cultural map of the world.9 While ‘areas like China and India are all still audile-tactiIe in the main’, he claimed, ‘Africa’ epitomized ‘the implicit, magical world of the resonant oral word’.10 In the end, however, McLuhan’s analysis was less an anticipatory repudiation of the world according to Goody and Watt, than a direct inversion of it.11 Like them, he saw Greek ‘phonetic writing’ as an exclusively ‘visual code for speech’, but he recast their positive account of its transformative effects in starkly negative terms.12 In his view, the future lay in the new ‘post-literate’ media of the ‘electronic age’ — namely the telegraph, radio, film, and television — that promised13 to overcome ‘the detribalizing power of the phonetic alphabet’, cure Western ‘schizophrenia’ by reclaiming the repressed ‘Africa within’, and unite ‘the entire human family into a single global tribe’—hence his utopian vision of the ‘global village’ to come.14

Here is McLuhan over 50 years ago with “an uncannily preemptive rebuke” to McDonald’s reading :

Many are now disposed to reject the entire achievement of literate Western man in an effort to recover integral values.15 But surely this temper is not very different from that which emerged in the early phases of literacy, when leaders were prepared to dismantle and detribalize their world in favour of a visual, lineal, individualistic stress in the organization of experience.16 To embark now on a reverse course [with an aural, simultaneous, crowd stress] is the immediate suggestion and mandate of electric technology. And to pro or con this reverse course is merely to accept the mechanical fate of a new technology. Is there no third course? How can we elude the merely technical closure in our inner lives and recover autonomy? What if any is the cultural strategy of the suspended judgment, of the open-ended proposition? (The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion, 1962)

 

  1. McDonald, Artefacts of Writing, 10. Phrases in single quotation marks are citations from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy. ↩
  2. McDonald is importantly correct here. McLuhan took it that all human experience, oral or literate, is the result of a creative encounter with the range of possibilities before it — much as language may be considered after Saussure as the result of a selective encounter with the range of sounds and grammatical forms before it. (‘Before’ in both these cases is to be understood temporally, but also implicates a non-physical ‘space of generation’.) So although oral and literate experience differ fundamentally, the process through which both sorts of experience is generated is the same. In a comparable way, elements like hydrogen and gold differ fundamentally, but exhibit the same elementary structure. Mendeleev’s table sets out the spectrum of ways in which that one structure can be expressed. ↩
  3. In McLuhan’s view, ‘catastrophe’ here should be understood in its etymological sense, as a ‘turning over’ (like a furrow of soil) to expose and promote new possibility. Regarding the negative sense of ‘catastrophe’ as apparently intended by McDonald, the advent of writing for McLuhan was, in fact, like all human events, neither only bad nor only good. It was both. But just how it was both requires detailed study — study that might equally be applied to the advent of new media today. ↩
  4. Regarding ‘all literate men’ it must be noted that nobody is ‘literate’ all the time. Not in sleep, for example. The need is therefore for specific identification which would then enable ongoing collective study in a ‘classroom without walls’. ↩
  5. ‘Schizophrenic’ here is used to indicate the extent of the split that characterizes the Gutenberg galaxy in all its dimensions. All humans, including preliterate humans, generate their experience through the relative emphasis on ‘split’ ear/eye ratios of possibility. ↩
  6. The ratios institute us, not we them. The exposure of new ratios occurs through literacy, but the reality and vitality of those ratios is synchronic, not diachronic. ↩
  7. ‘Primal integrity’ here is McDonald’s phrase. While McLuhan does use phrases like this at times, they should be taken to indicate a relative ‘integrity’ along a ‘primal’ synchronic spectrum, not an absolute integrity along a chronological course. ↩
  8. There are two great problems to McDonald’s explication here. First, McLuhan explicitly rejected this ‘Fall’ narrative: “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951), I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was…” (Playboy Interview). Second: as seen in McDonald’s doubling of “sensory-cognitive” and “makes no sense”, it is anything but clear just what ‘sense’ is (let alone “sensory-cognitive”!). McLuhan’s suggestion was to focus not on supposedly well-known units, like the individual senses, or like the sense of some proposition, but on ratios and, in focusing on ratios, specifically on their middles or media: ‘the medium is the message’. Sense was to be understood through ratios, not ratios through sense. ↩
  9. McLuhan also associated ‘tribal’ with violence and unconsciousness. This considerably complicates McDonald’s purported “primitivist lexicon”! ↩
  10. McDonald does not wonder if the “resonant (…) word” is an object, a subject, or a medium. Perhaps it might be considered in all three ways, separately and together. But then the imperative would be actually to carry out the consideration! ↩
  11. Leaving aside the questions if ‘the world according to Goody and Watt’ is anything more than a turn of phrase, and if it is something subject to “inversion”, McLuhan would like to know if the ratio reported by McDonald between Goody/Watt and McLuhan has a range of possible realization. If yes, what is that range and how does it work? If no, how account for this singularity? ↩
  12. McLuhan never tired of pointing out the obvious fact that he was a teacher of literature. His own values were entirely caught up with letters. In attempting to defend those values, he was accused of attacking them. As he repeatedly noted, he was like a man sounding a fire alarm who is charged with arson. ↩
  13. Elsewhere, McDonald offhandedly refers to the “deterministic aspects of McLuhan’s thesis” (12). Presumably the “promised” “utopian” future has this basis. But McDonald does not explain this characterization which bears no relation to McLuhan’s work. In fact, McLuhan took it that the electric environment would place human beings in a sink-or-swim situation where they would either figure out at last how to study their own actions in the world — or perish from them. ↩
  14. It is hard to see these purported goals as “starkly negative”. And it is simply mistaken to read McLuhan as having “utopian” expectations of the ongoing media revolution or revolutions. He thought survival of the human species and of the planet itself was now at stake. But this was a “starkly negative” view entirely at variance with McDonald’s reading of the man. ↩
  15. Exactly what McDonald attributes to McLuhan! ↩
  16. The constant “temper”, or temptation, is to allow or encourage the takeover of our inner and outer lives by new technology without consideration of the cost. ↩

G.S. Brett

G.S. Brett (1879-1944), longtime University of Toronto professor and Harold Innis’ predecessor as Dean of Graduate Studies, had died by the time McLuhan got to Toronto in 1946. But Brett’s Psychology Ancient and Modern was familiar to McLuhan, perhaps through Carl Williams who knew of Brett’s work from his grad studies in psychology at UT in the 1930s.1

Brett’s book is cited in The Gutenberg Galaxy (p 74):

Only one third of the history of the book in the Western world has been typographic. It is not incongruous, therefore, to say as G. S. Brett does in Psychology Ancient and Modern:

The idea that knowledge is essentially book learning seems to be a very modern view, probably derived from the mediaeval distinctions between clerk and layman, with additional emphasis provided by the literary character of the rather fantastic humanism of the sixteenth century. The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of “cunning” or the possession of wits. Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas who could overcome the Cyclops and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter. Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success in this world.2

Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings into any society, in addition to the split within the individual of that society.

The image of the Cyclops appears frequently in McLuhan’s work, usually signifying unipolar ‘thinking’ that is lacking in depth perception (because lacking the bipolarity necessary for it). 

A further passage in Brett concerning the “spontaneous act of the soul” may have contributed to McLuhan’s idea that the “power of detached observation” provides an escape from the media maelstrom.3 

The mystics were always more or less Platonic; mediaeval Platonism handed on to modern times the one indispensable principle that every fragment of knowledge, though it may be conditioned by the sense, involves a spontaneous act of the soul. Platonism thus became the natural creed of all who believed that consciousness cannot be reduced to physiological terms.4

 

  1. Williams obtained his MA (1937) and PhD (1940) in psychology from UT. He took at least one seminar with E.A. Bott (see D.C. Williams, ‘Bott’s “Systematic” Seminar: Some Recollections‘, Canadian Psychologist / Psychologie canadienne, 15:3, 1974, 299–301), who would be credited with Williams’ ideas on ‘auditory space’ in the culture and technology seminar. Williams’ undergraduate degree came from the University of Manitoba, where he and McLuhan continued their high school friendship. At that time the University of Manitoba had not yet separated the Philosophy and Psychology departments. But William’s decision to take advanced degrees in psychology at UT must have been  influenced by Henry Wright, who was the head of the psychology subsection within the Philosophy department at UM and would become the first head of the separated department of Psychology when it finally came into independent existence in 1945. ↩
  2. Psychology, Ancient and Modern, 36. ↩
  3. ‘Footprints in the Sands of Crime’ (1946): “The sailor in his (Poe’s) story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape.” ↩
  4. Psychology, Ancient and Modern, 150. ↩

McDonald on Humboldt and McLuhan

In his 2017 book, Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing, Peter McDonald makes a series of observations on McLuhan which are utterly mis-taken — but which yet may be taken to point (in the mode of Wittgenstein’s arrows)1 to central aspects of McLuhan’s project. Here is a sample of McDonald’s take with a running commentary given in the footnotes:2

McLuhan looked back to the Prussian idealist philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, citing the following key statement from On the Diversity of Human Language (1836) via Ernst Cassirer and in Susanne K. Langer’s translation:

Man lives with his objects chiefly — in fact, since his feeling and acting depends on his perceptions, one may say exclusively — as language presents them to him. By the same process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another.3

(…) Humboldt saw this as a phenomenon in and of language; whereas McLuhan, like Goody and Watt,4 believed that the effects of print were social and political as well as cognitive.5 If the ‘Gutenberg revolution’ instituted the ‘fixed point of view’ characteristic of nationalist thinking (…) McLuhan, it should be said, did not appeal to Humboldt merely as an exemplar of nation-centred linguistic relativity.6 In keeping with his Utopian vision,7 he saw the passage from the Diversity of Human Language as an endorsement of his own ambition to ‘transcend the limitations of our own assumptions by a critique of them’.8 Humboldt’s relativism, as he saw it, was fundamentally emancipatory, since he showed9 ‘we can now live, not just amphibiously in divided and distinguished worlds, but pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously’.10 For him, the ‘global village’ to come was, in other words, not just post-literate but post-national.11 Like many commentators, he ignored the fact that Humboldt, for all his relativism, always insisted on seeing languages as open-ended rather than ‘closed systems’, the expressive potential of which is endlessly extendable…12 

What McDonald says McLuhan ignored in von Humboldt — “the expressive  potential [of language] which is endlessly extendable” — is actually what McDonald “like many commentators” ignores in McLuhan: namely, the all important distinction between ‘making’ and ‘matching’ (or ‘merging’). Making is “open-ended”, while matching/merging aims at being ‘closed-ended’ — but can never actually be ‘closed-ended’ given the multiple ramifications of human finitude. 

The “endlessly extendable” nature of all human enterprise operates despite the fact that we are always situated in some or other “magic circle” — “from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another”. This may be seen as negative or positive — or both — depending upon context. For McLuhan, the great point is that real communication and real knowing occur despite — or exactly thereby — the fact that no ultimate closure is possible. “The gap is where the action is.” This is most clearly to be seen in language learning by in-fants. Somehow they step from one magic circle to another. But something of the sort occurs in all great art and in all scientific discovery.

As regards the field of media theory, which is no less than the field of all human experience which is never unmediated, never not situated in some or other “magic circle”, the “endlessly extendable” nature of language implicates the possibility that this field, too, may be investigated and mapped. McLuhan’s insistent question: why don’t we get on with the job when so much, even our survival, may depend on it?

Here he is in his Playboy interview:

our survival (…)  is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot. It’s to escape this Narcissus trance that I’ve tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

 

  1. PU #454: “Der Pfeil zeigt nur in der Anwendung, die das Lebewesen von ihm macht.” An arrow has meaning only in the application made of it within some exercise of life. McLuhan: the message of an arrow has meaning only in the context of some prior medium. ↩
  2. McDonald, p 11. Single quotation marks in the passage signal McDonald’s citations from The Gutenberg Galaxy, the great majority of which are from its first 40 pages. ↩
  3. Cited from von Humboldt in The Gutenberg Galaxy, 30-31. ↩
  4. In ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5:3 (April, 1963), pp. 304-345. ↩
  5. McLuhan would reject this “whereas” since for him the “social and political” were fundamentally also “in and of language”. Like everything in possible human experience, they had their “grammars”. For McLuhan’s discussion of the point see, eg, his 1958 Grammars of the Media. ↩
  6. Are “nationalist thinking” and “nation-centred linguistic relativity” offered here as figures or grounds? Do they make sense either way? Especially, are independent investigators able to specify these proposed objects and to investigate them in common? By implicating questions like these, the Gutenberg mentality points beyond itself (cf Wittgenstein’s arrows above) and is, therefore, not at all merely negative in McLuhan’s view (as McDonald would have it). More, McLuhan often characterized his whole project as an attempt to defend such undoubted goods such as individual identity, privacy, human rights, law and science, all of which he saw as priceless products of the Gutenberg galaxy and as gravely threatened in a world gone electric. Today in 2022, over 40 years after McLuhan’s death, it is plain that he was all too prophetic about that threat. ↩
  7. As if wishing to illustrate McLuhan’s description of the literary outlook as “schizophrenic”, McDonald characterizes McLuhan’s work in successive sentences as “starkly negative” and as “utopian” in its desire to “unite the entire human family” (10). The same taste for stark dissociation may be seen in operation immediately before this where McDonald describes McLuhan as “a direct inversion” of the “world according to Goody and Watt”. In fundamental contrast, McLuhan’s enterprise attempted to liberate us from such conceptualizations as “direct inversion” by insisting on the prior range of such ratios. ↩
  8. The word “endorsement” here is strange. Far rather, McLuhan saw von Humboldt’s observation as precipitating basic problems which, once deeply considered, might lead to needed new ground. The central problem in von Humboldt’s passage is the threat of infinite regress from one “magic circle” to another and to another after that — and so on indefinitely. Moreover, as Nietzsche was to show later that century, such regress leads to the loss, not only of the ‘true world’, but of the ‘apparent world’ along with it. Hence his nihilism. Put in McLuhan’s terms, if the medium is the message, how is any medium to be specified except via some further medium? And if the medium can never be specified strictly (because always begging the question of its medium), how can it be that ‘the medium is the message’? What medium? And, therefore, what message? Here Beckett is the great expositor. ↩
  9. McDonald omits explication of just how what “ensnares” might “show” at the same time — especially how it might show something “fundamentally emancipatory”. But precisely this is the heart of the matter! ↩
  10. Here is the fundamental medium (or elementary structure) proposed by McLuhan: “live, not just (…) in (…) distinguished worlds, but pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously”. That is, we may now live not just in one “distinguished world” structured by a singular (usually molecular) configuration of ear/eye ratio, but “in many worlds and cultures simultaneously” — by always judging against the background of all possible ear/eye ratios and their combinations at once. ↩
  11. McDonald’s linear language here (“to come”, “post-“) fails to appreciate the synchronic axis of McLuhan’s work (“simultaneously”) and therefore also fails to appreciate the crossing in it of the synchronic and diachronic axes. The underlying problem is a failure to appreciate the inherent plurality of times. ‘Time’s arrow’, like Wittgenstein’s, is not unidirectional. ↩
  12. Or was McLuhan one of the few people in the world who took this open/closed question with deep seriousness by insisting on the range of their ratios? Indeed, how a “magic circle” that “ensnares” might also be “open-ended (…) the expressive potential of which is endlessly extendable” is the great question — one McLuhan engaged for 35 years as that of a possible “ascent from the maelstrom”. ↩

The entire range of human expressiveness

In the 1969 Counterblast McLuhan writes of the “total matrix of living relations”, the “primordial matrix”, from which humans via an “enormous effort of collective abstraction” can ‘disentangle’ a new understanding of discrete areas of life (such as geometry):

Geometry is visual space. An enormous effort of collective abstraction [as occurred in Greece 2500 years ago in the founding of geometry] precedes the disentangling of these [focal] elements from the total matrix of living relations. Today an even greater energy is needed (…) to understand in a connubium [in a complex singularity like a city], the unity of all the elements which men have abstracted by their codes from the primordial matrix. 

As regards the still un-dis-covered (or, at least, uncommunicated) field of human perception, this “total matrix” or “primordial matrix” is “the entire range of human personal expressiveness”1, the “complete a range of expressiveness”2, the “medium itself”3, from which any particular perception of an individual or a society may be regarded as abstracted. In this same sense, any sample of physical material may be studied as abstracted from the “total matrix” or “complete range” of chemical possibilities (which “range” or Mendeleev’s table is of course just what chemistry is).4

In the passages below, McLuhan points to this matrix or range of expressiveness that amounts to the spectrum of possibilities out of which human experience may be specified — and thereby investigated — as generated:

Technology and Political Change (1952)
If the new reality of our time is in the main a collective dream or nightmare brought about by the mechanization of speech (television takes the final step of mechanizing the expressiveness of the human figure and gesture) then we must learn the art of using all our wits in a dream world, as did James Joyce in FINNEGANS WAKE. 

Technology and Political Change (1952)
Seen as communication networks, all cultures past or present represent a uniquely valuable response to specific problems in interpersonal and inter-social communication. This position amounts to no more than saying that any known language possesses qualities of expressiveness not to be found in any other language [just as any sample of physical material must be investigated as a unique product of the elements composing it].

Notes on the Media as Art Forms (1954)
Andre Malraux came up with the news of ‘museums-without-walls’. The main force making in that direction he saw was the clarification of the painter’s medium itself. The canvas gradually freed from anecdote and narrative became in our time not a vehicle but sheer expression.

Notes on the Media as Art Forms (1954)
Every medium is in some sense a universal, pressing towards maximal realization. But its expressive pressures disturb existing balances and patterns in other media of culture. The increasing inclusiveness of our sense of such repercussions leads us today hopefully to investigate the possibilities of orchestral harmony in the multi-levelled drive towards pure human expressiveness.5

Historical Approach to the Media (1955)
Radio and TV were not just the electrification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness.

Nihilism Exposed (1955)
On the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other.

Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication (1956)
If our new media constitute so complete a range of expressiveness as both to enhance and almost to supplant speech itself, then we have moved into the period of post-literacy. If our present means of exploring and presenting the human past are such as to make simultaneously present all kinds of human pasts, then we have moved into the period of post-history.

Prospect (1962)
The fact that we have many media now enables us to leap across the barriers from one form or one set of rules to another. And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken.

Counterblast (1969)
Our craving today for balance and an end of ever accelerating change, may quite possibly point to the possibility thereof. But the obvious lesson of all this development for education seems to me both simple and startling. If our new media constitute so complete a range of expressiveness as both to enhance and almost to supplant speech itself, then we have moved into the period of post-literacy. If our present means of exploring and presenting the human past are such as to make simultaneously present all kinds of human pasts, then we have moved into the period of post-history. Not that we are to be deprived of books any more than of ancient manuscripts. But it is plain that our new culture is not going to lean very heavily on any one means of encoding experience or of representing reality.6

  1. ‘Historical Approach to the Media’ (1955), cited above. ↩
  2. ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’ (1956) cited above. ↩
  3. ‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’ (1954), cited above. ↩
  4. Sciences are both discovered and invented. Dis-covery is made of existing structures. What is invented is a way of focusing on those structures such that collective identification and investigation of them becomes possible. ↩
  5. In this same essay, McLuhan calls the culmination of this “drive towards pure human expressiveness” a “day of emancipation” for “each channel of expression (even press, radio, cinema)”. ↩
  6. Most of this passage is taken from the 1956 ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’, some of which is given above. ↩

Thoth: “the third ends the discord of the two”

We have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. (Nihilism Exposed, 1955)

It’s to escape this Narcissus trance that I’ve tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present. (Playboy Interview, 1969)

Thoth played a central role in the ancient Egyptian narrative of The Contendings of Horus and Seth. Their battles were said to have been put to rest through his intervention.1

However, it is important to read such narratives as a kind of diachronic description of a synchronic condition. Taken in this way, the contendings of Horus and Seth, along with the mediation of Thoth, sets out a gigantomachia peri tes ousias (the battle of the gods and giants over the nature of reality) that is structurally parallel to that of Plato 2500 years later — and to our contemporary versions 2500 years later still.2

Horus was the hawk god of the sky and the representative of the Egyptian council of the gods, the Ennead. He was the eye of the world. Seth was the desert animal of the earth — the testicles of the world. Like the gods and giants in the Greek gigantomachia, their battle of the above and the below, the Nile and the desert, the black and the red, abstraction and sensuality, was ‘always going on’ — but so was their peace as brought about by, and as represented in, Thoth.3   

The perennial situation of humans is to be the effect of this complex of times and spaces before them: the dynamic contest of Being itself. Such is human being.

The fate of humans is to have increasingly lost a sense of this definitive situation, a loss that amounts to a tower of Babel assault on the divine. But the tower of Babel assault is itself a mode of the gigantomachia! Hence the rejection and forgetfulness of the gigantomachia takes place, and can take place, only by a mimicking of what it would reject.

Of course there is no escape for beings from Being.

Herman te Velde’s Seth, God of Confusion (1967) sets out the figure of Thoth relative to Horus and Seth as follows:4

Thoth: “the son of the two rivals” (44)5

The moon [Thoth] comes forth out of Seth, who has devoured the seed of Horus. (51)

Thoth: “I am he who limits the flood, who separates the two men.” (60)

“I am he who separated the two brothers” (44)

Thoth: “the cutter” [of the “two brothers” apart from the strife between them], “the sickle” [of the moon and as “cutter”] (44)6

The separating of Horus and Seth is equal to setting a boundary between the cosmos and the chaos surrounding it like a flood. The separation, indeed, has creative significance, for it is a decisive mythical event. The Egyptians could link all kinds of distinctions or contrasts in contemporary reality with the separation of Horus and Seth: heaven and earth, earth and underworld, right and left, black and red, to be born and to be conceived, rulership and strength, life and dominion. The separation also means a dividing of the world. In the Pyramid texts there are mentioned the places of Horus and the places of Seth. This horizontal division is traversed by a vertical one, that of above and below. (60)

A hymn to Thoth says: “come and behold Thoth, who has appeared in his crown, which the two lords [Horus and Seth] have made fast for him in Hermopolis” [= city of Hermes = city of Thoth] (…) Horus and Seth are not usually imagined as working together in concord. The two combatants bring forth the god of peace [Thoth]. He appears and places himself between the two gods, thereby interceding in the struggle and ending their homosexual relationship.7 He makes separation between the two gods. The third ends the discord of the two gods. (45)

In sacrificial liturgies where the offering is termed the eye of Horus, lapidary sentences enumerate what may happen. Seth seizes the eye; he treads it underfoot; he has stolen it, etc. (…) All texts in which one can read open combat and a militant conflict [between Horus and Seth], are to be placed in this setting of myth and not elsewhere [eg, in historical events]. Yet even here it is not always necessary to imagine a violent fight. Together with the cause of the conflict, peace also becomes apparent: the mediator, Thoth. (45) 

Thoth has constructed the eye [of Horus] in such a way, that he has designed a new image of reality, which takes account of the existence of Seth. According to the Egyptians, reality is not only being, but being and non-being [together]. (48)

Van Baaren remarks “… the originator of confusion, like the creator who sets in order, is an aspect of total reality which cannot be spared.” This aspect of reality in cosmic, social and personal life, which finds expression in the key words ‘storm’, ‘tumult’, ‘illness’, the Egyptians could typify by means of [the hieroglyph of] a Seth-animal with a curved snout and a straight tail. Thus this disturber of the peace became an element of order in the Egyptian system of writing… (31)8

Van Baaren further: “In Egypt sacrifice is not so much a gift from men to the gods, as a sacred act whereby man can contribute to the restoring or the maintaining of cosmic harmony.” (…) This harmony is attained when both Horus and Seth have received their attributes, eye and testicles respectively. (50)

Kerenyi said in [his commentary to Paul Radin’s The Trickster]: ”Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted”. The testicle symbol is the counterpart of the wedjat-eye, that [Egyptian] symbol of all good and holy things in sound and unimpaired condition. This other aspect of reality could not be ignored. The symbol of the testicles played a part in Egyptian religion from the time the Pyramid texts were composed until Graeco-Roman times [3000 years later]. Horus is appeased with his eye, but Seth must also be appeased with his testicles. Thus he is recognised and worshipped as the “spirit of disorder”, as the lord of the unbridled forces in nature and in civilisation. (56)

Kerenyi called the trickster: “the spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries”. (56)

Thoth, like Plato’s philosophical child or childish philosopher as portrayed in the Sophist, will have ‘both together’. But this is an ontological force, not an ontic one. It is therefore a real and perpetual possibility for humans, if we will submit ourselves to it; but at the same time it is a ‘contested’ possibility, not a singular one. Moreover, exactly on account of this plurality, its recognition requires the paradoxical recognition of its equally powerful siamese rivals, Horus and Seth in Egypt, the gods and the giants in Greece. It is this ontological plurality of the fundamentally different which then grounds the both together of ontology and the ontic in their fundamental difference!

In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.9

 

  1. In other tellings, Isis played this intermediary role: “the great Isis who renders the two men contented” (te Velde, 48). ↩
  2. Of course these dates are very rough. The first hieroglyphic writing in Egypt is attested around 5000 years ago. The contendings of Horus and Seth are evidenced in the pyramid texts only five or six centuries later. But the mythological cycle seems to have been common knowledge then and doubtless had its origins far back in pre-historic (pre-literate) time. It may be a story that is as old and as various as mankind. In McLuhan this 3-fold is to be seen in many different forms, ear-eye-tactility, for example, or in the two wings of the Gutenberg era in contrast to the both together of the electric Marconi one. ↩
  3. Along with the Egyptians and the Greeks, McLuhan insisted that an understanding of peace depends upon an understanding the antagonists who would be brought together in that peace: “In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.” (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape,1951). ‘Understanding’ in this sense begins by allowing the antagonists their independent place in reality — peace does not confuse and annul, but brings together in the third possibility of respected difference. ↩
  4. Page numbers in brackets refer to Herman te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (1967). ↩
  5. In Plato’s Sophist, the third figure is a child “begging for both” sides of the gods/giants battle. ↩
  6. Compare Plato’s third gender in the Symposium which is said to be descended from the moon on account of the ‘mixed’ nature of the two others. ↩
  7. The “homosexual relationship” of Horus and Seth mirrors their shared identity as universal monists and exactly therefore as antagonists. As with Plato, it is the role of the third to introduce sexual generation based on the combination of the two as a complex synchronic alternative to the asserted monism of the contesting gods and giants: “the third ends the discord of the two”. (Re ‘alternative‘: *al — Proto-Indo-European root meaning “beyond.” It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit anya “other, different,” arana- “foreign;” Avestan anya-, Armenian ail “another;” Greek allos “other, different, strange;” Latin alius “another, other, different,” alter “the other (of two),” ultra “beyond, on the other side;” Gothic aljis “other,” Old English elles “otherwise, else,” German ander “other”.) ↩
  8. Th.P. Van Baaren is cited here, and in the next passage, from Menschen wie Wir, 1964. ↩
  9. ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape’,1951. See note 3 above. ↩

Olympus, Pelion and Ossa in Hamlet

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act 5, Scene 1)

LAERTES: O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble on that cursed head,
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Deprived thee of! Hold off the earth awhile,
Till I have caught her once more in mine arms:
[Leaps into Ophelia’s grave]
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made,
To o’ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.
(….)
HAMLET: ‘Swounds, show me what thou’lt do:
Woo’t weep? woo’t fight? woo’t fast? woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I:
And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart!

These references in the last act of Hamlet to the gigantomachia of the Aloadai1 are reinforced by the earlier exchange of Laertes with Claudius:

CLAUDIUS: What is the cause, Laertes,
That thy rebellion looks so giant-like?
(Act 4, Scene 5)

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, like the gigantomachia, concerns the rights of rulership, of fatherhood and of inheritance, as these are fought over between generations. In the end, Hamlet and Laertes kill each other with foils in a dénouement recalling the end of the rebellion of the twin Aloadai giants against the gods: “Artemis finished off the Aloadai in Naxos by means of a trick: in the likeness of a deer she darted between them, and in their desire to hit the animal they speared each other.” (Apollodorus, Library 1.53)

Just before their final duel Hamlet says to Laertes:

Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house,
And hurt my brother.
(Act 5, Scene 1)

Later in the same scene:

I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance…. 

 

  1. Apollodorus describes the war of the Aloadai on the gods as follows: “Aloeus married Triops’ daughter Iphimedeia, who, however, was in love with Poseidon. She would go down to the sea, gather the waves in her hands, and pour the water on her vagina. Poseidon mated with her and fathered two sons, Otos and Ephialtes, who were known as Aloadai. Each year these lads grew two feet in width and six feet in length. When they were nine years old and measured eighteen feet across by fifty four feet tall, they decided to fight the gods. So they set Mount Ossa on top of Mount Olympos, and then placed Mount Pelion on top of Ossa, threatening by means of these mountains to climb up to the sky; and they also said that they would dam up the sea with mountains and make it dry, and make the dry land a sea. Ephialtes paid amorous attention to Hera, as did Otos to Artemis. And they also bound up Ares. But Hermes secretly snatched Ares away, and Artemis finished off the Aloadai in Naxos by means of a trick: in the likeness of a deer she darted between them, and in their desire to hit the animal they speared each other.” (Apollodorus, Library 1.53) ↩

McLuhan and Plato 8½ – Gigantomachia in the Symposium

Plato’s treatment of the gigantomachia peri tes ousias (the battle of the gods and giants over the nature of reality) in the Sophist is discussed in McLuhan and Plato 8 – Gigantomachia. In the Symposium, Plato repeatedly reverts to the topic but more allusively:

189d-e
You must begin your lesson with the nature of man and its development. For our original nature was by no means the same as it is now. In the first place, there were three kinds of human beings, not merely the two sexes, male and female, as [we have] at present: there was a third kind as well, which had equal shares of the other two…

190b-d
The number and features of these three sexes were owing to the fact that the male was originally the offspring of the sun, and the female of the earth; while that which partook of both sexes was born of the moon, for the moon also partakes of both.1 They were globular in their shape (…) since they took after their [spherical] parents. Now, they were of surprising strength and vigor, and so lofty in their notions that they even conspired against the gods; and the same story is told of them as Homer relates of Ephialtes and Otus,2 that, scheming to assault the gods in battle, they essayed to mount to high heaven.3 Zeus and the other gods debated what they should do (…) Then Zeus, putting all his wits together, spoke at length and said: ‘I can contrive [a way] that [this now spherical mankind], without ceasing to exist, shall give over their iniquity through a lessening of their strength. I propose now to slice every one [of the three kinds] of them in two, so that while making them weaker we shall find them more useful by reason of their multiplication; and they shall walk erect upon two legs [instead of circulating].4

192e-193a
Our original form was [spherical and of three kinds] as I have described, and we were entire [whole]; and the craving and pursuit of that [now lost] entirety is called Love [Eros]. Formerly, as I have said, we were one; but now for our sins we are all dispersed [cut in ½ by the gods] (…) and we may well be afraid that if we are [again] disorderly towards Heaven we may once more be cloven asunder [down to ¼].

202d-203a
Diotima: ‘You are a person who does not consider Love [Eros] to be a god.’
Socrates: ’What then can Love be? A mortal?’
‘Anything but that.’
‘Well what?’
‘As I previously suggested, between a mortal and an immortal.’
‘And what is that, Diotima?’
‘A great spirit, Socrates: for the whole of the spiritual is between divine and mortal.’
‘Possessing what power?’ I asked.
‘Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one. (…) God with man does not mingle: but the spiritual is the means of all society and converse of men with gods and of gods with men, whether waking or asleep. Whosoever has skill in these affairs is a spiritual man; to have it in other matters, as in common arts and crafts, is for the mechanical. Many and multifarious are these [interrelating] spirits, and one of [the greatest of] them is Love.’

Notable characteristics of Plato’s thoughts on the gigantomachia are displayed in these passages:

  • Being — reality — is 3. In the Symposium: sun-earth-moon; male-female-hermaphrodite; immortals-mortals-spirits. In the Sophist: gods-giants-child. The 3rd is always the fundamental mixture or bond of the other 2, the ‘both together’.
  • ‘The main question‘ concerns the relation of 3 to 2. On the one hand, the 3 cannot do without the two: it is their combination or harmony and without them it itself would not be.5 On the other hand, the fall into 2 represents the loss and even the death of the 3. The 3rd lives through death.
  • Human beings have an original relation to the 3 even under the reign of the 2 (“as in common arts and crafts”). For the 2 and the 3 imply each other. The 2 requires relation (a 3rd factor!) in order to be 2 — “the medium is the message” — and the 3 requires the 2 in order to be 3 (both because it is their harmony and to avoid falling into an undifferentiated 1) — “the medium is the message”.
  • Division — 2 — is the mark of revolt against the original configuration of the 3. The amelioration of the revolt consists in the re-version or re-turn from the point to the sphere, from linearity to circularity, from the mechanical iteration of the limit, the πέρας, in search of the ultimate limit, to the end-less circular generation of the original forms (subj gen!): the ἄπειρον.6 
  • The possibility of reversion and retrieval is original due to the interrelating power of the third form. Humans are this power — and its denial. Zeus: “I propose now to slice every one [of the three kinds] of them in two, so that while making them weaker we shall find them more useful by reason of their multiplication; and they shall walk erect upon two legs’…7

What is at stake in and through these 3-fold descriptions is ontological perception — the perception of Being (dual genitive!). The transition to this perception cannot succeed by way of beings — even by piling Ossa and Pelion on Olympus. Instead, a flip or Gestalt-switch must be made to come from Being — ‘where’ we always already are, of course — to beings.

The means or medium of relation to Being is first of all at work in Being. Otherwise it could not be. It is through this dynamic third that beings first of all eventuate from Being. It is on the same pathway of ‘from’ that beings are able to take the course of ontological perception.

Ontology as big-B Being and the ontic as little-b being are linked by the 3rd which is at work in Being, and in being, and in-between Being and being.

Plato in describing Being itself is at the same time describing the way to  Beings for beings. But the way to = the way from.

Ontological perception situates itself in the 3rd through what McLuhan designated as “pattern recognition”. 

The pattern recognized is that of the prior 3-fold. Dual genitive.

 

  1. The moon partakes of both the sun and the earth, since it illuminates like the sun, but does not do so from itself, like the earth. ↩
  2. Ἐφιάλτης (“nightmare”, literally “he who jumps upon”) and Ὦτος (“insatiate”) were the Aloadae, the sons of Aloeus. Their plan was to pile 3 mountains (Olympus, Ossa and Pelion) on top of one another to gain access to the heavens and to confront the gods in battle there. This version of the gigantomachia joins it to the story of Babel and the resulting disbursement of the sexes by Zeus in the Symposium version of the gigantomachia is cognate with God’s disbursement of language through the destruction of the tower of Babel. The three mountains of the Aloadae are mentioned in Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 1) before the ‘brothers’, Hamlet and Laertes, kill each other in a similar way to the mutual slaying of Otus and Ephialtes brought about by the gods. ↩
  3. A surprising variation on the Aloadae cycle had them, instead of rude giants, as culture bringers in the role usually assigned to Prometheus. Here they were priests of the muses, founders of cities and teachers of culture. This variation of the Aloadae myth serves to bring Prometheus into the context of the gigantomachia. ↩
  4. The result of Zeus cutting each of the 3 original sexes in half was that only 2 sexes remained. The halves of the third sex of the ‘both together’ gender were now either male or female, just like the halves of the all-male and all-female ones. In this way, the originally 3 kinds of humans lost their family relation with the sun, earth and moon, in regard to their shape, mode of motion and number. But notably, what Zeus decreed in this way merely reiterated what the 3 genders of humans had already de-cided on their own, namely, to cast aside their original relation with the gods, as expressed in rites and sacrifices, and to attack them instead. ↩
  5. “In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.” (‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape’,1951) ↩
  6. The ‘unlimited’ is end-less circularity, the ‘limited’ is repetitive linearity attempting to find its de-finitive end. What is at stake is the nature of the πέρας. Is it transitive or, in the end, intransitive? ↩
  7. The transition from 4 legs (‘supports’ or ‘grounds’, as well as ‘modes of motion’) to 2 amounts to a denial or forgetting or slaying of the mediating 3! Hence it is a denial of the 3-fold gigantomachia form of Being — even while carrying a gigantomachia out! ↩

Mac to Lewis, 1944

McLuhan’s first contribution to The Sewanee Review was ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’ which appeared in the Winter Number of 1944 (52:1, pp. 24-33).

McLuhan gave an offprint of his essay to Wyndham Lewis with the inscription: “For Lewis with the most friendly esteem – from Mac”.

In it, describing both Poe’s situation, and his own, McLuhan wrote:

While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness.

A couple years later, also in Sewanee, he would begin a lifelong characterization of such exploration of the heart of darkness, again with Poe, as ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’.1

  1. ‘Footprints in the Sands of Crime’ (Sewanee Review, 54:4, 1946): “The sailor in (Poe’s) story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape.” For discussion see Cleanth Brooks on the Maelstrom. ↩