In his unpublished Typhon in America, aka, Guide to Chaos, McLuhan cites many different news reports and ads from the late 1940s to illustrate the link between mechanization and sex.1 One of these, in Typhon Book II2, chapter i3, runs as follows:
Do you like my figure?
MacLevy’s have been keeping it slim and trim.
Monty MacLevy offered books
and home kits to help housewives shape themselves up. His ‘Figurama salon-at-home slenderizing plan’ must have particularly caught McLuhan’s eye:
In 1948 McLuhan was in correspondence with The Hudson Review, about reviews he wrote for the new journal that appeared in its second (summer 1948)1 and fourth (winter 1949)2 issues.
Perhaps alerted in this correspondence to the scathing criticism made of him in Yvor Winters’ forthcoming essay in Hudson Review on Gerard Manley Hopkins3, McLuhan quickly drafted a counter-critique of Winters and submitted it to The Sewanee Review.
The story of this counter-critique, which was never published, may be seen in correspondence between McLuhan and the editor of The Sewanee Review, John E. Palmer.
Following the resignation of Allen Tate in 1946 from his 2-year editorship of Sewanee, Palmer had been appointed as his replacement. He held the position until 1952. The correspondence between Palmer and McLuhan concerning Winters took place in the fall of 1948, but already in 1946 in one of McLuhan’s first letters to Palmer he set out the central issue which was at stake in his criticism of Winters:
McLuhan to John Palmer, November 4, 1946
With him [Vico] 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.4 The Lewis piece on De Tocqueville5 illustrates the failure of a great man to face and solve that problem. Lewis has finally submitted to lick the robot’s behind.6
Jumping ahead to the fall of 1948, the continuing McLuhan-Palmer exchange clarifies what happened to the never published Winters essay.
McLuhan to Palmer, September 21, 1948
The present [enclosed] item [on Winters] you might think better, strategically speaking, if the last five pages (in which an example of Winters at work on metaphor is presented)7 were put before the general discussion of the cause of his troubles. (…) I have no idea what you think of Winters. He is a god for the Hudson. They are to have his things from time to time.8 But if anybody can produce more howlers per page, then S.J. Perelman had better move over.9
Palmer to McLuhan, 22 September 1948
Your Winters paper has just arrived (…) but in view of your letter I thought I had best give you an advance tip about the contents of our Winter issue: we are carrying, no less, an essay by Winters on Robert Frost.10 It has been in our backlog, awaiting publication, for well over a year, and I’ve only now been able to schedule it. Now, I carry no general brief for Winters, and the fact that I am carrying this essay will certainly not prejudice me in my reading of yours. I am somewhat acquainted with his strange combination of the critically erratic, cantankerous, and naive.11 And the essay I am running is not altogether free from these qualities. But it happened that in this instance I agreed for the most part with what Winters had to say, and so I couldn’t see turning him down simply because it was the work of Winters. I’ll be interested to hear your reaction to it.
Palmer to McLuhan, 19 October 1948
How do you feel about public exchanges on such matters as you deal with in your Winters paper? I certainly don’t go in for bickering for its own sake; but I do think that where two such gentlemen as yourself and Mr. Winters can be directly confronted on such crucial terms as you have introduced, the spectacle might well prove instructive for us all. Now, I’ve written Winters to learn his attitude; but even though he should be willing to engage, I’ll not proceed with the arrangements unless I have your consent also.
McLuhan to Palmer, October 20, 1948
Did you find Harold Rosenberg’s ‘Herd of Independent Minds’12 interesting? (…) It’s an approach not unlike mine to the Winters type of critic. Prisoners of the concept. (…) But if a writer thinks his job is self-expression, that means he sets himself the job of inventing an order for his experience.13 He must then have ruling ideas, and these will inevitably be the ones most common in his own time. But a Flaubert needed no ideas at all. Nor a Joyce. The world was enough for them.
I’ve no objection to your proposal about getting Winters to reply. Perhaps some of the semi-personal notes should be removed from my essay.
As you see, Winters is, from my point of view, only a representative of an almost universal situation.14
Palmer to McLuhan, 27 October 1948
I heard from Winters this morning, and he begs off: “I have never been greatly interested in Kant, and I am too busy right now to study him for the purpose of arguing with McLuhan. My literary theories are largely Aristotelian and Thomistic, but did not derive from Aristotle and Thomas so much as they simply agree with them. They derived from a careful examination of a good many hundreds of poems.” Characteristic, is it not? Then he went on to tell how overburdened he was in his teaching, etc. And now, at the risk of appearing editorially spineless, I’m inclined to give up the project, because it would seem to me too lopsided as a one-way affair. For this decision I shall hope that to so old an editorial friend as yourself no elaborate apologies are necessary.
McLuhan to Palmer, November 4, 1948
Naturally I’m not happy to see Winters the swashbuckler suddenly putting on the wily act and so escaping unscathed. The device of running up just any old colors to the masthead has not, I hope, taken you in. His confessed ignorance of Kant is as nothing compared to his actual ignorance of Aristotle and Aquinas. In this respect he is precisely like the Chicago “Aristotelians” who [also] adopted the colors of the Stagirite (…) The Kantianism of Winters, like that of Richards, Empson, Ransom, affects his work the more deeply for being unconscious. The only way not to be a Kantian critic is to know Kant, since his language and attitudes are universal.15
But I don’t give a hoot about Winters as such. I merely hung my paper on him for dramatic reasons, thinking how desperately we need a bit of Menckensian dash in our dreary literary reflections these days. (…) Would you be interested in the paper expanded apropos of metaphor and with Winters omitted from central focus?
Palmer to McLuhan, November 15, 1948
I’m sorry to say that I still don’t take too strongly to the suggestion. Not that I don’t see in it all sorts of likely possibilities; but I’ll have to tell you frankly that I’m leery of committing myself in advance to any piece designed to exhibit a Menckensian dash. Such I think are quite all right now and then, as a break in the routine. But permit me the liberty to urge you, for your sake as well as for our own, not to continue to work indefinitely in this rare a vein.16
The critic, Yvor Winters [1900-1968] published a long essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins in the first two issues of the Hudson Review in 1949.1 In the second section of his essay, Winters mocked McLuhan’s 1944 essay on Hopkins’ Windhover:
M.H. McLuhan, in an essay in which interpretation is often carried so far from the actual text as to approach pure fantasy…
This prompted McLuhan to draft a letter to the Editor of The Hudson Review, which he left in an issue of the review now to be found among his books at Fisher Library in Toronto:2
Sir, It has long been the practice of Mr. Winters to paddle his critical canoe into white waters and there to complain that, by his powers, this was no mill pond. So long, however, as he stays with the literature of simple statement and naive sentiment, his method will bear him up even when it can’t possibly carry him forward.3
Instead, therefore, of rescuing him from the dramatic and turbulent mill-race of Hopkins (he had the same harrowing experience with Joyce and Eliot), it will be more useful to explain why Mr. Winters should above all avoid poets who have a radically analogical outlook.
Analogies are not concepts, nor are they reducible to concepts. They are proportions between congeries of various forms, facts, concepts. Such proportions are for contemplation. They are inexhaustible and irreducible. When Wordsworth presents Lucy in the ratio of “a violet by a mossy stone”, he renders his world. Every conflict, pathos, paradox of his entire vision is there. A violet needs the stone, it needs the moss, and the converse is both true and untrue at different levels.
In short, even this simple statement is not the poetry of concepts or of statements. Poetry is never merely or primarily an affair of essences and concepts. It is in the order of existence and experience. Yet Mr. Winters asserts that poetry is statement about experience. And poetic order must be, he holds, logical coherence of concepts or judgements about experience. This notion of poetry is not as uncommon today as Mr. Winters claims. If anything it is the conventional nineteenth century view inherited from Cartesian and Kantian notions of language as merely conceptual signs. And it is a view which compels the critic to view with distaste all the complex art of our or any other time. Let us recall Rhymer4 and les règles5.
Even Pope is not as much the poet of simple statement as was once supposed. Wherever there is serious poetry, analogy will be present. Wherever there is analogy, Mr. Winters will prove helpless as a critic. And yet it was the discovery of that very eighteenth century, to which Mr. Winters so often appeals for his criteria, that all four terms of an analogy could be managed in a single couplet. That is, a couplet could contain a compressed drama containing both plot and subplot, comprising within itself metaphors as well. Yet every metaphor is itself an analogy in four terms, only two of which need be expressed.
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
“As hungry judges are to justice, so are the victims of justice to the appetites of their fellow men.” Within this ratio is included the same tragic vision as that of Lear on the heath and of Swift’s Modest Proposal [1729]. It is a vision of treachery and cannibalism occurring independently at various social levels and it cannot be reduced to a logical order of concepts and retain the dramatic conflict. It is true that judges are hungry, but not for justice. And it is true that wretches are fed into the social machine to feed other wretches. Meat must be hung before it is eaten.6 But from these observations neither Shakespeare, Pope nor Swift concluded anything logically. (The merely conceptual mind would say that, if only the judge could have a sandwich brought in, then justice would supplant injustice.) They set their observations in a ratio, proportion or analogy which is for contemplation and not to be reduced to a univocal order of conceptual awareness or causal connection.
It is not only Mr. Winters, therefore, who finds himself in difficulties in the presence of analogical awareness. It is still the typical intellectual difficulty of our world as can be seen, for example, in the current efforts to reduce Eliot’s notes on the analogy of culture to a univocal conceptual scheme.
The summer 1949 issue (2:2) of The Hudson Review featured two reviews of ‘Mr. Eliot’s New Book‘, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, by Herbert Read and by Hugh Kenner. It may be that the last sentence of McLuhan’s draft refers to these reviews, or at least to Read’s, and thereby gives an indication of the “current” date of the draft’s composition.
1942
Plotinus was surely justifiable in his exegesis in the fifth Ennead when he held as platonic doctrine that the One and the Good are identical, and that this is beyond being and beyond knowledge; Proclus taught the same. But whenever a Christian tried to adopt the same pattern of unity among things, [he or she] could not but regard the unique source of all, God, as Creator, that is, as Being in the plenary sense of the name, the source of being to beings… (Bernard J. Muller-Thym)1
Perhaps at first following his close friend and mentor, Bernie Muller-Thym, McLuhan deployed the term ‘plenary’ over and over again throughout his career. He seems to have meant by it, not ‘full’ or ‘fullness’ in some exclusive ontic sense,2 but the ‘fullness’ of the natural and spiritual together, in an inclusive ontological sense. As McLuhan said of the symbolists (cited in full below), they effected “the plenary elucidation of [the] verbal landscape, [the] psychological with [the] metaphysical“. Or as he characterized Joyce: “Punning on ‘Dublin’, he constantly invites us to regard his drama as the story of “doublends joined“. Irremediably analogical, Joyce’s work moves as naturally on the metaphysical as on the naturalistic plane.”3
Here are examples of his use of the term in chronological order from the early 1940s to the late 1970s:
1944
American critics once alerted to the new movements in English criticism would probably bog down in the rhetorical exegesis of Richards and Empson rather than adapt it, as F.R. Leavis did, as a means in a critical journey to the full act of plenary critical judgment.4
1944
the arduous stage of the journey (…) remains to be accomplished before winning an overall view, which is plenary critical judgment.5
1946
As I have often said to [Cleanth] Brooks, the Southern tradition has intense value to-day. But the agrarian program was a mistaken strategy because rooted in a failure to see the Southern tradition in its intellectual relevance. The stand should not have been taken on Dixie land. But on plenary 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.6
1947
There has been no lack of critics who have proclaimed the uplifting qualities of the movies without having noticed anything whatever of what was going on in them. Mr. Tyler [in Magic and Myth of the Movies, 1947] is right, therefore, to concentrate attention on the complexity and eminent snideness of movie art as preliminary to opening up a plenary critique.7
1949
English [studies] took over the former functions of Greek and Latin after these had been narrowed to philology. (…) So that the formal teaching of English began and has continued along the lines which first destroyed classical education. The present volumes [under review, Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion and Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command] suggest a variety of means whereby English might in large measure resume the plenary functions of the older classical education.8
1950
Eliot has always insisted on the technical innovations of Laforgue and Rimbaud as basic for his own development. What these poets effected after Baudelaire was the plenary elucidation of verbal landscape, psychological with Laforgue, metaphysical in Rimbaud. They discovered landscape as the formula of a particular emotion of the mind, greatly extending and sharpening the earlier Romantic use of landscape. [James] Thomson [1700-1748], [William] Collins [1721-1759], and even Wordsworth immersed themselves in actual landscapes in pursuit of emotion. Laforgue and Rimbaud invented erudite urban landscapes to control and release precise and complex emotions. [In this way] the Romantics began with the vague search for new art emotions amidst natural conditions and ended with the discovery and precise control of these emotions in art conditions. (…) But the new emotions and the new techniques or formulas for these emotions are inseparable. That is why Eliot always mentions technique and sensibility together, while his commentators discuss only his sensibility.9
1951
The impressionists began with sensation, discovered ‘abstraction’, and achieved, finally, a metaphysical art. The picturesque begins with work like Thomson’s Seasons, in the search for significant art-emotion amid natural scenes and it achieved plenary realization in Rimbaud’s metaphysical landscapes — Les Illuminations. The early Romantics sought aesthetic emotion in natural scenes; the later Romantics confidently evoked art-emotion from art-situations.10
1951
On the labyrinth of the ear, organ of the Incarnation, Joyce built those metaphysical analogies which enabled him to restore the orchestra of the seven liberal arts to its plenary functions. He is never less than the artist of the word. (…) Joyce was at home in all labyrinths because of his original conquest of the stages of apprehension, of the mind in act.11
1953
Such a thought-world [set out in the biblical Book of Revelation]12 is entirely congenial to the twentieth century as its art and criticism testify. (…) Return to the plenary scope of patristic exegesis (…) can perhaps be taken as a mark of the profound coherence13 of modern culture when viewed at its best levels.14
1953
[Following Innis] every medium of communication has its peculiar bias or limitation. Each one distorts the plenary functions of human oral expression. Writing extends the spatial range of speech but creates mental passivity. Writing fixes traditions but evokes large armies, roads and empires. Seen, however, as a special art form the alphabet refashioned all human experience. The translation of auditory into visual terms set up an inner life in man which separated him from the external world and, in part, from his own senses, as we know from the study of pre-literate societies. The psychic withdrawal caused by the complex process of literacy presents the individual with a train of maladjustments unknown to pre-literate societies. But the fixation of the processes of thought in writing permits that analysis of thought which brings into existence the structures of science and philosophy. Alphabetic writing is itself a radical re-ordering of experience, as we know by contrast with the pictorial or ideogrammic writing of China, which releases a totally different set of of human possibilities in contrast to the unconscious preferences of alphabetic societies. In this sense, an art form establishes basic human attitudes and becomes the very mode of [all human] experience.15
1954
Pictographic Chinese culture (…) would seem to stand midway between the extremes of our abstract written tradition and the plenary oral tradition with its stress on speech as gesture and gesture as “phatic communion”. And it is perhaps this medial position between the non-communicating extremes of print and pictorial technology which attracts us today to the Chinese ideogram.16
1955
TV deals with the visual image as radio with the auditory image. That is, there is immediacy or instantaneity of pick-up, projection, and reception. Joyce was entirely aware of these differences in choosing TV as the basic modality of the collective human drama of Finnegans Wake. As immediate sight plus sound, TV permits a full use of the plenary materials of the human drama, namely speech itself, a “verbivocovisual presentment”.17
1957
[Hugh Kenner] differs from all other commentators in stressing the total relevance of Joyce’s Roman Catholicism to his art. The stress (…) implies Joyce’s radical use of reason as a spiritual faculty and not as a mere instrument. It is Joyce’s awareness of reason in this plenary sense that determines his attitude to the verbal universe. Like Pound and Eliot, Joyce assumed that verbal art in the electronic age had to assume the responsibility of precision and power equivalent to the physical sciences. His work simply shoulders the burden both of the alchemy of the word and of the alchemy of history in an act of inclusive consciousness.18
1960
[E.T.] Hall’s concept of “the organizing pattern” concerns the fact that “there is no such thing as ‘experience’ in the abstract, as a mode separate and distinct from culture.” Hall is saying here, in effect, what I formulate as “the medium is the message.” (…) Since speech is itself a master technology, it goes without saying that the Sapir, Whorf, Hall, Trager, Lee axis have long followed this line of study. Not being perhaps particularly familiar with the types of cultural analysis directed by the artists of this century toward human technologies as art forms, the social scientists have been unduly shy of a plenary art approach to technology. (…) The problem for the artists in our time is to say everything at once, and this is the problem in a variety of ways for every kind of person in an electronic age.19
1960
Let us suppose for a moment that a team of present-day testers had been available in the year 1500 to find out whether the new book or reading machines and instructional materials were capable of doing the plenary traditional job of education in the future. Would not this team, even as it would today, ask whether the privately read word could measure up as a means of teaching and learning to the memorized manuscript and its formidable extension in oral exegesis and group disputation?20
1962
As the entire globe becomes a single computer or what de Chardin calls a noosphere, the advent of satellite broadcasting makes every one of the more than two hundred and fifty cultures of the globe as immediately present to each other as are the telephone subscribers of a single town. The dialogue between cultures will become as pervasive as back-fence gossiping. But, as information movement expands in this plenary way, the business and politics and diversions of mankind fuse into a single uninterrupted action.21
1964
The overwhelming trend of film is toward involvement in the creative and social processes alike. Film is now able to digest any kind of theme and to handle it in the mode of an inclusive awareness. The “phantom city phaked of philim pholk” is acquiring the character of plenary consciousness.22
1970
With the new means of plenary cultural retrieval, ancient clichés are taking their place as transcendental or archetypal forms. (…) It is the process by which new clichés or new technological probes and environments have the effect of liquidating or scrapping the preceding clichés of cultures and environments created by preceding technologies. The world of archaeology and musicology today is entirely concerned with classifying these rejected fragments of obsolete and broken cultures.23
1970
Just as the plenary retrieval techniques of Gutenberg print created the Puritan ideal of a recovery of a purified and primitive Christianity, so the modern anthropologist, using plenary methods of retrieval, has rejected the traditional humanistic or literary view of the gods in favor of a complete resacralizing of pagan art and ritual. The resacralizing of the ancient clichés of ancient technology by anthropologists places the literary archetypalist in a very embarrassing position. The archetypalist, having come to regard the gods as a neutered or “spayed” bunch of moralized entities, now [is confronted by] the anthropologist, who insists on accepting them as real environmental forces completely beyond literary occurrence or control. The gods as cliché technologies are not susceptible to literary classification.24
1972
Plenary Indulgences in the Affluent Society
Parkinson stated his law about the nature of administrations to the effect that any task, however insignificant, will automatically expand to use all the available time and resources of all the available personnel of any operation whatever.25
1972
Shifting “Grounds” Transform “Figures”.
The complicated question of whether authority rested in the pope or in the laity or in the church in plenary council fluctuated wildly with the conditions of travel and information movement from the beginnings of the church to the present. This fact becomes apparent today when there is no more geography in the world as far as verbal intercommunication is concerned. The telegraph, telephone, radio and teletype have caused the disappearance of physical space and national and cultural boundaries, and have restored the most primal conditions of primitive Christianity. At the same time, this instantaneous character brings down an avalanche of historical, bureaucratic confusion upon the new oral church. The electric technology that abolishes central bureaucracy and organization also retrieves the entire past of the church — oral, written, bureaucratic, and historical. We begin to live a kind of Dantesque vision that merges all pasts and presents.26
Posthumous (from the 1970s)
All the extensions of man, verbal or non-verbal, hardware or software, are essentially metaphoric in structure, and that they are in the plenary sense linguistic (…) A “metaphor” means literally “carrying across” from Greek metapherein and was translated into Latin as “translatio”. In a word, metaphor is a kind of bridging process, a way of getting from one kind of experience to another.27
Two decades apart, the final lines of McLuhan essays from 1944 and 1964 called for “plenary critical judgment” and for the acquisition of “plenary consciousness”.1
1944:
the arduous stage of the journey (…) remains to be accomplished before winning an overall view, which is plenary critical judgment. (Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson)2
1964:
The overwhelming trend of film is toward involvement in the creative and social processes alike. Film is now able to digest any kind of theme and to handle it in the mode of an inclusive awareness. The “phantom city phaked of philim pholk” is acquiring the character of plenary consciousness. (A Phantom City Phaked of Philim Pholk [FW 264.19–20] or Where the Hand of Man Never Set Foot [FW 203.15-16])3
These concluding lines from McLuhan age 33 and age 53 serve to plot the continuity of the strategy he pursued over his 50-year intellectual life from 1930 (age 19) to 1980 (age 69). Namely, if humans are to survive the technological environment they have created, they must achieve decisive clarity about themselves (the interior landscape) in analogous fashion to the clarity achieved (but only in the last two centuries) about the physical world (the exterior landscape). This, in turn, requires identification of a new field, or fields, defined by the totality, or plenum, of the elements constituting it/them.4 But ‘totality’ here is open, not closed — just as chemistry posits the totality of Mendeleev’s table but is still uncovering ‘new’5 elements constituting that totality as we speak.
McLuhan took over this strategy, and the implicated need to communicate it by instigating its investigation, from his two philosophy teachers at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge. They, in turn, continued a line running back through John Watson (1847–1939) and Edward Caird (1835–1908) to Hegel (1770-1832).
Wright and Lodge were two of the contributors (out of eleven) to the Festschrift volume dedicated to Watson on the occasion of the 50th anniversary (1872-1922) of his teaching career at Queen’s University: Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson. Their essays (‘A Plea for Eclecticism’ by Wright and ‘Moral Validity: A Study in Platonism’ by Lodge) must be studied in detail to understand the context of the philosophical theory in which McLuhan’s English studies at the University of Manitoba and then at Cambridge were cultured.6
To indicate this line from Hegel to McLuhan in preliminary fashion it suffices to note in regard to its two ends that McLuhan’s “medium is the message” from 1958 was central to Hegel’s proposed philosophical science from 1807 — 150 years earlier.
Phänomenologie des Geistes, ‘Vorrede’ (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 the expression that in everything false there is something of the truth, the two of them [the true and the false] are understood like oil and water, which can only outwardly be brought together [and are not already inwardly bound]. Precisely in order to designate the specificity [das Moment] of such absolute difference [between such ‘unmixable’ truth and falsehood], when that difference is cancelled or transcended [aufgehoben], the same designation of them cannot still be used. Similarly, the expression of the unity of subject and object, the finite and infinite, being and thought, etc, is problematic in that subject and object, etc, seem to mean what they do outside their unity, but in their unity they do not have the sense [anymore] of that [differentiated] designation…
Hegel’s point is that the poles of an opposition — like truth/falsehood, subject/object, finitude/infinitude, being/thought — depend for their meaning on their relation; and that such relation varies according to the degree of difference vs unity represented by it. The specification of meaning therefore turns on the prior specification of the range of possible unity/difference ratios or media. “The medium is the message.”7
In his 1964 ‘Phantom City Phaked of Philim Pholk’ lecture, McLuhan set out these same steps as follows (where his visual/auditory ratio recapitulates Hegel’s unity/difference)8:
After McLuhan’s brain surgery in 1967, while he was gradually recovering from it in 1968, Hayakawa wrote him a note:
July 7, 1968
Dear Marshall —
I heard to my sorrow that you have been ill, and I heard more recently that you are well again. I hope you have received an invitation from St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., to take part in a philosophical symposium. They wanted me, and I accepted in the hope that you too would accept so that our paths might cross again.
What’s this I hear about a McLuhan Newsletter? How do I get on the mailing list?
Best wishes, as always.
Yrs etc1, Don
I was in Winnipeg June 13-19. My 1st visit in 35 years! My gosh, how we have all changed!
McLuhan and S.I. Hayakawa were on the program together at a conference at the University of Louisville in October 1954. Both spoke on its first day. When they met there, how many meetings with other and commonalities of interest they able to recount to each other since the time, almost thirty years before, when they were students and neighbors in Winnipeg? Had they met in Madison in the mid-1930s when they both worked there?1 Did their separate associations with Sigfried Giedion in the 1940s bring them together personally at all?2
The introductory notes to the reprint of Explorations 3 include this information:
In November [should be October] 1954, the Explorations researchers attended the “Institute on Culture and Communication” organised by Ray Birdwhistell3 at the University of Louisville‘s Interdisciplinary Committee on Culture and Communication. A number of the contributions to Explorations 3 are essays or early drafts of contributions related to this conference (Birdwhistell, Lee, Trager & Hall).
On October 17, 1954, the Louisville Courier-Journal announced the event as follows:
Films on Child Rearing Slated at Institute Here
A film by a British psychologist and a film by an American psychologist on “How To Rear Children” will be presented during the program of the Institute on Culture and Communication, Friday [Oct 22, 1954] and Saturday [Oct 23, 1954] at the Brown Hotel. The Institute is sponsored by the University of Louisville Interdisciplinary Committee on Culture’ and Communication and the Division of Adult Education of U. of L. Registrations for the two-day sessions may be made with the Division of Adult Education. The fee is $5.
Dr. Ray Lee Birdwhistell, coordinator of the interdisciplinary committee, said the films will serve three purposes. The subject matter itself will be valuable. They will also demonstrate the method of analyzing films and will illustrate the extent that cultures of different countries affect their own psychologists.
Prominent Speakers Due
Several prominent speakers will discuss the part played by the written and spoken word, actions, and sounds in communication. Dr. Henry Lee Smith, chief of the language-training branch, Foreign Service Institute, Department of State, and chairman of the meeting, will open the institute at 9:30 a.m. Speakers on the first-day program include Dr. George Trager, Georgetown University; Dr. Birdwhistell, and Dr. Smith, who will speak on “Tactilism and Communication”.4 Dr. Margaret Mead of the American Museum of Natural History will speak on “Communication and Culture,” the second day of the institute. Semantics will be the subject of an address by Prof. S. I. Hayakawa, University of Chicago. Others on the program will be Dr. John Broderius, chairman of the department of modern languages at U. of L.; Dr. Dorothy Lee, director of graduate studies at Merrill-Palmer School, Detroit, and Prof. Reuel Denney, University of Chicago, coauthor with David Reisman of The Lonely Crowd.
After the event, the Courier-Journal reported it as follows:
About 80% of All Conversations Unnecessary, Anthropologist Says
Some very learned speakers did here yesterday about people who do a lot of talking. And it was agreed that about 80 per cent of all natural communication could be dispensed with. It’s redundant. Take telephone conversations, for example, said Dr. Margaret Mead, anthropologist, author, and representative of the American Museum of Natural History. A person who wants to tell another person something might dial his number and merely say, “Twenty-five.” That would be sufficient, Dr. Mead said, to convey the intended information. Instead, she said, the conversation usually goes something like this: “Hello, Joe.” “Hi, Bill.” “How you doin’?” “Okay. How you doin’?” “Okay.” “You know that figure I was supposed to give you?” “Yeah.” “Well, it’s 25.” “Twenty-five, huh?” “Year.” “Okay. Fine.” “Okay.” “What you doin for lunch . . . “, etc.
Too Much Brevity May Be Bad
Now that isn’t necessarily bad, Dr. Mead said. It is possible to strip communications too far. Too cryptic a message could lead to tension and a fear that the message has not been understood. And redundancy, she said, may be viewed as a safety factor, insuring that the speaker is understood. The same situation may be applied to different cultures, different nations, she said.
All cultures are comparable, she said, if we learn to evaluate them with all the sensory modalities at a human’s disposal. And all are compatible, she suggested, if we communicate long enough and often enough and “learn to listen for the different ways that other people are as human as we are.”
Dr. Mead’s discussion closed a two-day meeting at the Brown Hotel of the Institute on Culture and Communication sponsored by the University of Louisville Interdisciplinary Committee on Culture and Communication.
TV Making Hostesses Anxious
Other speakers yesterday were Reuel Denney, University of Chicago sociologist; Marshall McLuhan, of the University of Toronto; Dr. John Broderius, chairman of the department of modern languages at the University of Louisville; Dr. Dorothy Lee, director of graduate studies at the Merrill-Palmer School, Detroit, and S. I. Hayakawa, of the University of Chicago. Denney suggested that television has given Americans a new awareness of sociability and has made them anxious over their own social shortcomings. There is a tendency, he said, for a hostess to be more concerned over whether her party is properly run than whether her guests had a good time. “But what good is sociability,” he asked, “if you’re not a little bit anxious about it?”
↩S.I. (Don) Hayakawa and McLuhan were neighbors in Winnipeg in the 1920s.1 And they attended conferences together in the 1950s.2
It is not known if they had any contact in the intervening decades, although both taught English at the University of Wisconsin in the mid 1930s.
During WW2 Hayakawa taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He was a colleague there of Moholy’s friend and fellow Hungarian Gyorgy Kepes.3 When Hayakawa took courses at the near-by Institute of Design, perhaps introduced by Kepes, he became friends with Moholy-Nagy — a friendship he described for a University of California oral history project.
McLuhan certainly heard of Moholy-Nagy from Giedion. He reviewed Moholy’s 1947 Vision in Motion together with Giedion’s 1948 Mechanization Takes Command in 1949. But it is conceivable that he also heard of Moholy-Nagy from Hayakawa (if, say, they were keeping up with each other at meetings in the 1940s). Inversely, since Hayakawa and Giedion both contributed to Kepes’ 1944 The Language of Vision,3 and since that common appearance may have reflected some kind of acquaintance between the two, McLuhan may have heard something of Hayakawa, his old neighbor, from Giedion, his new mentor.
In 1936 the first (double) issue of the journal Telehor1 was published — as it turned out, the only issue of the journal ever to appear. It was dedicated to the work of László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and included a ‘Foreword’ by Moholy-Nagy’s longtime close friend,2 Sigfried Giedion (1888-1968).
In the course of his ‘Foreword’, Giedion refers to “that long-term development, for which a few hundred people dispersed throughout the modern world are today preparing the foundations”. When he met the just-turned 33 year-old McLuhan in St Louis in the summer of 1943 (the same summer in which McLuhan met Wyndham Lewis) Giedion seems to have recognized him as one of these “few hundred people”. He immediately recommended him to the University of Chicago — in the immediate proximity to the Institute of Design where Moholy-Nagy was already at work. Since Giedion knew everybody who was anybody in the European avant garde — including James Joyce — this was a high compliment to the obscure English professor.
Here is Giedion’s contribution with comments added here in footnotes:
Foreword
Sigfried Giedion, Zürich
The Position in 1935
More than a third of the present century lies behind us. A retrospective glance shows us that at approximately the same period in the preceding century all the problems which were destined to determine the evolution of art up to and beyond its close had already manifested themselves.
Not withstanding that the conditions of today differ entirely from those of a hundred years ago, it is still possible to predict the general trend of future development. Such a prediction is based, not on mere guess-work, but on a critical estimation of the prognostic significance of the aims which have informed the technique of painters during the last three decades.
A long phase is ahead of us
Although the various movements in art that are of prime importance for us to-day may differ in origin, they are nevertheless inspired by a common aim: to bridge the fatal rift between reality and sensibility which the 19th century had tolerated, and indeed encouraged. The urge behind all of [these new movements in art] is the attempt to give an emotive content to the new sense of reality born of modern science and industry, and thereby restore the basic unity of all human experience. Neither temporary confusion nor momentary retrogression must blind us to the fact that we are witnessing the opening phase of what is bound to be a prolonged period in the evolution of art.
All these new tendencies in art have one thing in common: they seek to penetrate beyond its purely formal aspects, each in its own way is striving to create emotive symbols proper to our new conception of life and thus hopes to regain the power of contributing to the task of reshaping the modern world we live in. In other words they are all bent on restoring that essential reciprocity between art and life.3 The methods by which this transformation of our visual perception could be attained were discovered in the decade 1909-1923 (the war-years being naturally considered as inoperative, although developments were not entirely suspended during that interregnum). In most intellectual centres new movements began to emerge, all of which recognised in their several ways that the old conceptions of the three-dimensionality of space (perspective) and the naturalistic reproduction of objects that had held undisputed sway since the renaissance were inadequate for our new projection of the visible world. This advance will in all probability prove as decisive for the future as did the revolution in art which bears that name [namely, futurism]4 for the epoch immediately preceding our own.
Berlin in 1920
Like most other large capitals, Berlin was a focus of artistic activity about the year 1920. For those imbued with the desire to enlarge the field of our optical perceptions, most of the new movements in art were then coming to the fore there, although as a rule in relative obscurity; and many young artists who were unknown and without influence were beginning to reach maturity.
There were working in Berlin at that time, among others, the Dadaists Kurt Schwitters, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hanna Hoch; the Swedish film-experimentalist, Viking Eggeling, who laid the foundations of the abstract film; the Russian Constructivists [El] Lissitzki and [Naum] Gabo, and the Russian sculptor [Alexander] Archipenko; the Hungarians [László] Moholy-Nagy and [László] Peri; the Dutch architects [J.J.P.] Oud, [Cornelis] van Eesteren, and [Theo] Doesburg; the Italian painter [Enrico] Prampolini; the Danish architect Lon Bergholm; and the editors of the American paper »Broom«. One of the most important studios in which these people were continually meeting, was that of Moholy-Nagy.
The emotive values latent in modern industry and in the realities of modern life in general were lost on the townsman in much the same way as the peasant of previous ages was irresponsive to the emotional appeal of the landscape. A steel bridge, an airplane-hangar, or the mechanical equipment of a modern factory is as a rule far more stirring to the imagination of those who do not see such things every day of their lives. It is not surprising, therefore, that most of the pioneers of the new vision hailed from agricultural countries with little industry of their own. Thus the Constructivists came from Russia or Hungary. That great innovator Picasso spent his youth remote from the big towns, and it was only after he moved to Paris that he was able to vitalize his consciousness of our age with the qualities he derived from the Moorish tradition of Spain. He it was who bridged the gulf between the last great cultural epoch that had found expression In abstract forms and modern civilisation.
Coming from the outskirts of civilisation, the Russian and Hungarian Constructivists similarly brought fresh energy to the problem of interpreting the realities of to-day.
L. Moholy-Nagy
The Hungarians occupy an intermediate position between the volcanic energy and Slav fantasy of a Russian like Lissitzki and the purified tonal and plane harmonies of a Dutchman like Mondriaan. Among them was László Moholy-Nagy. This young painter had begun his career as a contributor to the activist paper published in Budapest called »Ma«, whose aims were resumed in »das Buch neuer Kunstler« (Vienna, 1922), which he wrote in collaboration with Kassak. In »Ma« a small group of young Hungarians had succeeded in giving a far more precise and coherent expression to their consciousness of our age than the Berlin artistic circles of that day, which were still fettered by expressionism. »Ma« was, in fact, working on parallel lines to »I’esprit nouveau«, in which Corbusier and Ozenfant had been revealing the interdependence of painting, sculpture and the technique of modern industry. After being wounded in the war, Moholy-Nagy came to Berlin in 1920. The paintings and sculpture he exhibited there so much impressed Walter Gropius that he appointed Moholy-Nagy to the staff of the Bauhaus in the spring of 1923. This appointment proved of cardinal importance for Moholy-Nagy’s evolution, since it offered the fullest scope to his gifts as a teacher.
The Bauhaus in 1923
The lasting value of what the Bauhaus achieved was due to its success in
evolving a new systematic method of art training based on recent discoveries in painting. All the most advanced artists in Germany were either attached to the Bauhaus or in close and regular contact with it.
After [Johannes] Itten left the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy was put in charge of the beginners’ course there, where he had the responsibility of preparing young students for the training they were about to embark on; and (on the strength of his metal sculpture) [he was put in charge] of the metallurgical workshop as well. It was only natural that Moholy-Nagy’s preoccupation with various problems connected with light should have led him to make practical experiments with various types of lamps. The manifold activities of the Bauhaus were coordinated by the comprehensive discipline of architecture; and architecture, no less than these more specialized branches of design, obviously called for direct contact with industry, thus the short step from a purely educational investigation of the new concept of optics to active collaboration in the technical improvement of lamp-manufacture was only a logical sequence of events.
The beginners’ course at the Bauhaus
Moholy-Nagy’s book »Vom Material zur Architektur«, which contains his lectures on the basic theories of the Bauhaus teaching during the period 1923-1928
(Bauhaus-Bücher no. 14, Munich, 1929; also published by Harcourt, Brace and Co, New York, under the title of »The New Vision«) explains the method he adopted. It was due to Moholy’s influence that all new movements based on fresh advances In technique were thoroughly investigated and embodied in the curriculum, in order to open the student’s eyes — for instance — to the entirely new effects in material that are implied in Picasso’s collages and only waiting to be discerned. The close concatenation between the artistic evolution of our age and the occult forces of the Zeitgeist which permeate our daily lives has rarely been so impressively demonstrated as in this book.
Problems of light and colour
From his earliest articles in »Ma«, Moholy-Nagy’s contribution has been characterized by a persistent endeavour to fathom the creative potentialities of light and colour. All the same he has always been eager to apply his discoveries to the practical problems of life. There is hardlv any field of artistic creation that Moholy-Nagy has not investigated. In many of them his influence has proved authoritative, his exhibitions, typographical work, publicity lay-outs, light-displays and stage-sets (»the tales of Hoffmann«, 1929; »Madame Butterfly«, 1931; and Piscator’s »Kaufmann von Berlin«, 1931) amply substantiate this claim.
Photography, film
Moholy-Nagy has exercised a decisive influence on photography, where he has systematised its potentialities and in some directions actually extended its scope. From the first he recognised that light in itself must be regarded as a medium of form. It is from this angle that his whole preoccupation with photography and the film should be judged. Moholy-Nagy saw that photography offered the possibility of expanding the existing limits of natural reproduction, and that in spite of its imperfections the camera was a means of increasing the range and precision of visual perception (i.e. in the arresting of movement, bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, etc). I well remember how, during a holiday we spent together at Belle-Ile-en-Mer in 1925, Moholy-Nagy consistently ignored the usual perspectives and took all his snapshots upwards or downwards. A few years later the surprising artistic effects of foreshortening and of converging vertical lines had become part of the stock-in-trade of every up-to-date photographer. In »Malerei, Fotografie, Film« (Bauhaus-Bücher no. 8, Munich, 1925) Moholy-Nagy developed many stimulating suggestions, and defined the whole province of creative work in light-sensitive media, from ordinary [photography] to camera-less photography (which enables the concrete shapes of objects to be disintegrated into graduations of light and shade), and reflectional light-displays to photo-montage and film (»Dynamik der Großstadt« 1921; »Marseilles Vieux Port« 1929; »Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiß-Grau« 1931; »Großstadtzigeuner« 1932; »Kongreß für neues Bauen«, Athens 1933).
Moholy-Nagy’s painting is the vital thread linking all his manifold activities. There is no break in its development proceeding in a consistent line from his first publications up to the present day. Nor is this all, for today he is feeling the need to resort more and more to this spontaneous fixation of
artistic vision.
These pictures with their clear, optimistic attitude are the harbingers of that long-term development, for which a few hundred people dispersed throughout the modern world are today preparing the foundations.
The vital significance of modern art
The selection of any one single artist for separate study cannot hope to indicate the creative strength of our age, since this resides paramountly in its manifold manifestations, which despite their diversity share the same fundamental consciousness of modern civilization. Nevertheless, the editor of this review was right in choosing Moholy-Nagy as an outstanding example, since his work serves as an admirable reminder to the public that the basic laws of abstract — i.e. non-representational — art have their root in the bed-rock of contemporary realities.
We have in our post-literacy come to the age of the classroom without walls. (1969 Counterblast)
As described in First contact with the NAEB, McLuhan’s initial step towards work with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters took place in April 1957. But in the 3 years before this, he had renewed the interest in educational theory and practice that he had pursued in the 1940s (as seen in his 1943 PhD thesis, his 1944 lecture on ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ and his 1947 education proposal to Robert Hutchins).1
A decade later, in the mid 1950s, he began to speak of the revolutionary effects of the new media on education, as marked by the catch-phrase “classroom without walls”.
Part of McLuhan’s impetus in this direction was doubtless his discontent with the situation of the humanities and social sciences — and with his own situation in that situation. More and more books, essays, theses, lectures, meetings and courses were flooding the world from these ‘disciplines’: but to what end? Hence his attraction to the work at MIT on cybernetics and to the communications research at Bell Labs. With these there was an objective engagement in stark contrast to the merely subjective, merely personal accumulation of benefits in the academy.
At the same time, and hardly unrelated to that situation in the academy, he saw that among the effects of the new media from comics to LPs to TV was the corrosion of the very foundations of education. Teachers from kindergarten to grad school lacked direction and students correspondingly sensed a disproportion between what they were learning in school and the world outside it. As a teacher himself, McLuhan felt called to address this confused situation and to do so by taking the sort of field approach that had proved so fruitful in the hard sciences from physics to cybernetics.
The idea, following Giedion, was to apply a kind of homeopathy where the very thing that was overturning the world — the electric revolution — would be interrogated for a way to right it again.
“Classrooms without walls” passages are given below in chronological order from McLuhan’s writings between 1954 and 1957. These paved the way for his life-changing engagement with the NAEB from 1958 to 1960 (just before McLuhan turned 50):
Erasmus was perhaps the first to grasp the fact that the [print] 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”.2 It created a new and highly abstract culture because it [print] was itself a mechanized form of culture. Today, when the [print] textbook has yielded to the classroom project and [to] the classroom as social workshop and discussion group, it is easier for us to notice what was going on in 1500 [namely, an educational revolution]. (…) Today, [again], when power technology has taken over the entire global environment to be manipulated as the material of art, nature has disappeared [along] with nature-poetry. And the effectiveness of the classroom has diminished with the decline of the monopoly of book-culture. If Erasmus saw the classroom as the new stage for the drama of the printing press, we can see today that the new situation for young and old alike is classrooms without walls. The entire urban environment has become aggressively pedagogic. Everybody and everything has a message to declare, a line to plug.3 (Sight, Sound, and the Fury, 1954)4
What Erasmus saw was that the printed book was to revolutionize education. He saw that the book gave new scope and power to the classroom. What we have to see is that the new media have created classrooms without walls. Just as power technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art, so the new media have transformed the the entire environment into an educational affair. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, 1954)5
The METROPOLIS today is a classroom6 (…) The [school] classroom [by contrast] is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon. (Counterblast, 1954)
With the arrival of [book] print [around 1500], Erasmus and his humanist colleagues saw exactly what had to be done in the classroom. They did it at once. [By comparison,] with the arrival [300 years later] of the [newspaper] press, nothing was done. (…) Keeping in mind the extraordinary complexity and range of impact of the mere mechanization of writing by Gutenberg and measuring that impact merely by the total change of procedure in the sixteenth century classroom, I think we should try to imagine how sweeping a revolution should have taken place in our classrooms a century ago [with the arrival in the 1800s of the newspaper and its supporting social infrastructure (media) like the steam press and roads]. (An Historical Approach to Media, 1955)7
Writing was a visualizing of the acoustic which split off or abstracted one aspect of speech, setting up a cultural disequilibrium of great violence. The dynamism of the Western World may well proceed from the dynamics of that disequilibrium. If so, our present stage of media development suggests the possibility of a new equilibrium. Our craving today for balance and an end to ever-accelerating change may quite possibly be related to the very possibility of achieving that balance. (…) But it is plain that our new culture is not going to lean (…) on any one means of encoding experience or of representing reality. Already we are accustomed to a concert [or orchestration] of the arts, of the sensuous channels and of the media. And in this respect we shall resemble preliterate and prehistoric societies in the inclusiveness of our awareness.8 That means also that we shall tend as they did toward homogeneity of experience and organization [between individual and society, between subject and object]. Perhaps, therefore, we have in our post-literacy come to the age of the classroom without walls.
It was very hard at first for the contemporaries of Erasmus to grasp that the printed book meant that the main channel of information and discipline was no longer the spoken word or the single language. Erasmus was the first to act on the awareness that part of the new revolution was going to be felt in the classroom. He decided to direct the revolution from the classroom. I think the same situation confronts us. We are already experiencing the discomfort and challenge of classrooms without walls, just as the modern painter has to modify his techniques in accordance with art reproduction and museums without walls. We can decide either to move into the new wall-less classroom in order to act upon our total environment, or to look on it as the last dike holding back the media flood. (…) In such an age with such resources [as ours], the walls of the classroom disappear if only because everybody outside the classroom is consciously engaged in national and international educational campaigns. Education today is totalitarian because there is no corner of the globe or of inner experience which we are not eager to subject to scrutiny and processing. So that if the old-style educator feels that he lives in an ungrateful world, he can also consider that never before was education so much a part of commerce and politics. Perhaps it is not that the educator has been shouldered aside by men of action so much as that he has been swamped by high-powered imitators. If education has now become the basic investment and activity of the electronic age, then the classroom educator can recover his role only by enlarging it beyond anything it ever was in any previous culture. (Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956)9
Print evoked the walls of the classroom. (…) The movie and TV [evoked the] classroom without walls. Before print the community at large was the centre of education. Today, information-flow and educational impact outside the classroom is so far in excess of anything occurring inside the classroom that we must reconsider the educational process itself. The [school] classroom is now a place of detention, not attention. Attention is elsewhere [engaged with the classroom without walls, aka the world outside the school]. (The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho, 1956)10
If “mass media” should serve only to weaken or corrupt our previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it will not be because there is anything inherently wrong with these media. It will be because we have failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage. (…) All of the new media are so many poetic means of packaging the age-old offerings of human culture. Sooner or later we shall recognize the need to study press, radio, movies, and TV as poetic forms in the classroom. (Classroom TV, 1956)11
The ways of official literacy do not equip the young to know themselves, the past, or the present. In the schoolroom officialdom suppresses all their natural experience; children of technological man are divorced from their culture, they cease to respond with untaught delight to the poetry of trains, ships, planes, and to the beauty of machine products. They are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of technological awareness; this [is the] only possible door for them [and it] is slammed in their faces. The only other door is that of the high-brow.12 Few find it, and fewer [still] find their way back [from it] to popular culture, and to the classrooms without walls that the new languages [of media] have created.13 (The New Languages, 1956)14
Before the printing press, the young learned by listening, watching, doing. So, until recently, our own rural children learned the language and skills of their elders. Learning took place outside the classroom.15 Only those aiming at professional careers went to school at all. Today in our cities, most learning occurs outside the classroom. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we’re confused, baffled. (Classrooms Without Walls, 1957)16
In the early and middle 1950s, the Copp Clark Publishing Company issued a series of ‘Study Pamphlets in Canadian Education’. The 12th of these, issued in 1956 and titled ‘Classroom TV’, was written written by McLuhan.
Classroom TV1
It is very natural today to speak of “audio and Visual aids” to teaching, for we still think of the book as the norm and of other media of sight and sound as incidental. We also speak of the new media of the press, movies, radio, and TV as “mass media” and think of the book as an individualistic form.
We have good reasons for thinking of the book as individualistic. It is a form which isolates the reader or learner in silence. Yet the printed book was the first product of mass-production — the modern mechanization of an ancient handicraft. This achievement meant that more or less everybody could have the same books. In medieval times it was out of the question for different institutions to have the same books or for students to have copies of the same book for study. Manuscripts, as well as explanations of the text, were dictated to students, and the students memorized as much as possible of both text and commentary.
Under these conditions instruction was almost entirely oral and was done in groups. Before the advent of printing, solitary study was reserved for the advanced scholar. In its beginnings the printed book must have appeared as a visual aid to oral instruction.
Before the printing press made its great revolution in the teaching and learning process, the young learned mostly by listening, watching, and doing. Until recent years, children in our own rural communities learned the language and the lore and skills of their elders in much the same way. Most learning took place outside school and classroom, and only the very few aiming at professional careers ever went to school at all.2
Again today in our highly technological cities a great deal of learning occurs outside the school. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press, picture magazines, movies, radio, and TV far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school books or school instruction. This situation has challenged the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid, and in fact has challenged the very role of the school. It has come upon us so suddenly that we are confused and baffled about what to do.
In this violently upsetting social situation many teachers naturally view the offerings of the new media as entertainment rather than education. But this view carries no conviction to the student. It is hard to find a classic on our curricula which wasn’t in an earlier time regarded as light entertainment. Nearly all vernacular works were so regarded until the nineteenth century. Many movies on historical subjects are obviously handled with a degree of insight and maturity at least equal to the level permitted in texts for social studies today. Movies such as Olivier’s productions of Henry V and Richard III assemble a wealth of scholarly and artistic skill which reveal Shakespeare at a very high level, yet in a way easy for the young to enjoy. Could it not be said that the movie is to dramatic [stage] representation what the printed book is to the manuscript? It makes available to many people and at many times and places what otherwise would have been restricted to few people at few times and places. The movie, like the book, is a ditto device. TV can show to fifty million people simultaneously the same movie which in theatres would reach only a series of small audiences.
Some people feel that the value of experiencing a book is diminished by its being extended to many minds. This notion is always implicit in the phrase “mass medium” or “mass entertainment”. But it is not a very useful phrase since it obscures the fact that the English language itself is essentially a mass medium. If a language is not the means of inter-personal communication for millions of people, we regard it as unimportant.3 Today we are beginning to realize that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
One does not require a very extensive acquaintance with English literature to see how profoundly the resources of our language have been shaped and expressed in constantly new and changing ways. Mass-production by the printing press changed not only the quantity of writing, but also the character of language and the relations between author and public. Habits of word order in grammatical construction were changed by the printed form, and with the coming of the power press and the modern newspaper the structure of English syntax was modified even more rapidly.
Radio, talking pictures, and TV have pushed written English towards the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom. And the poets, from Hopkins and Hardy to Eliot and Dylan Thomas, have insisted on bringing the resources of Spoken English to the foreground of poetic effect.
The great voice of Dylan Thomas heard over microphone and LP disc provided the first real experience of poetry for millions of people. These people did not mind that his erudite and witty verse was incomprehensible to them at first. They listened to his poetry as they might have listened to Casals’ cello. Microphone and disc have added a great new dimension to the printed or written word, just as movies and TV have recovered intense awareness of the language of facial and bodily gesture. If these “mass media” should serve only to weaken or corrupt our previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it will not be because there is anything inherently wrong with these media. It will be because we have failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage.
As these new developments come under a quiet analytic survey, the evidence points to a basic strategy of culture for the classroom. When the printed book appeared, it threatened the oral procedures of teaching. Yet the [book created the classroom as we know it and enabled every student to have the same authors before him simultaneously. Instead of making his own text, his own dictionary, and his own grammar; he could start out with these tools. He could study not one ‘but several languages. But there is a real sense in which the new media today threaten the procedures of this traditional classroom instead of merely reinforcing them. It is customary to answer this threat with denunciations of the unfortunate character and effect of movie and TV entertainment. In the same way comic books were feared and scorned and rejected from the classroom. Their good and had features in form and content, when carefully set beside other kinds of art and narrative, could have become a major asset to the teacher. Where the student interest is already intensely focused is the natural point at which to begin the elucidation of other problems and interests. The educational task is not only to provide basic tools of perception, but also to develop judgement and discrimination to deal with ordinary social experience.
Few students have ever acquired skill in analysis of newspaper or magazine offerings. Even fewer have any ability to discuss a movie intelligently. To be articulate and discriminating about ordinary affairs and information is the mark of an educated person. Whatever we do about TV in the classroom, we cannot forever dodge the responsibility of training students to evaluate this medium.
As we face the prospect of TV in the school, it would be misleading to suppose that there is any basic difference between educational and entertainment programmes. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It is like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches and the other pleases. It has always been true that whatever pleases teaches much more effectively. In his great Apologia for Poetrie Sir Philip Sidney wrote that, as opposed to the philosopher, the poet
dooth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. . . . He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent4 with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the well inchaunting skill of musicke; and with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you: with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.
Sidney’s argument is that poetry is not merely an attractive coating for the core disciplines, but that it alone can enlist the appetite for knowledge. And knowledge without appetite for the same is null.
Today, all of the new media are so many poetic means of packaging the age-old offerings of human culture. Sooner or later we shall recognize the need to study press, radio, movies, and TV as poetic forms.5
It is too much to expect that this need will be faced at once. Accordingly we must look at the intermediate state in which there will be occasional use of TV in the classroom.
In Canada the C.B.C. has made two experiments in classroom TV. The first was in 1954 and was described in a published report. Two years earlier, the B.B.C. had offered to selected classrooms twenty programmes dealing with science, geography, current affairs, and industry. The resulting study of their reception and effect led to the recommendation of a regular service of this kind which was then scheduled for 1957-58.
From 1945 to 1951 the British Ministry of Education experimented with school telecasts and then in 1951 began regular programmes (aimed for the most part at secondary schools) four days a week. In the United States the Federal Communications Commission reserved mere than 250 TV channels for educational stations. Some dozens of these channels are now in use providing school and university instruction. Most of the school programmes in the U.S.A. are the result of the collaboration of teachers and students on an amateur basis. The professional services of script-writers, actors, and se-designers have so far been little used.
The two Canadian experiments, in 1954 and in 1956, were inspired both by the earlier experiments outside Canada and by the recognition of “the tremendous impact that television is making on the minds and tastes of the rising generation of viewers. Its effects have been felt in every field of juvenile life — hobbies, homework, sport, reading, social intercourse, manners, and family relations.”
The aim of the experiment was “to determine whether, and to what extent, television could help the teacher in her daily classroom work. Thus it was hoped to find out whether television could take its place alongside the other teaching aids such as radio, films, film strips, and slides, which are already so widely used in Canadian schools.”
Towards this end it was decided to focus on the Ontario curriculum and select two levels, grades 5 and 6 on one hand and grades 7 and 8 on the other. For grades 5 and 6 a programme on How Columbus Navigated was prepared. Next a traffic-safety programme, Look Alert–Stay Unhurt, was brought out, followed by Surface Patterns and Starbuck Valley Winter.
For grades 7 and 8 there was The House of History, a tour of the home of William Lyon Mackenzie, and also Iran from the North, Save Our Soil, and Current Events. The standard of production was professional, using the full resources of the C.B.C. staff and studios.
These programmes were viewed in ordinary classroom conditions, and questionnaires for teachers were prepared to assist in evaluating the experiment. There was a generally favourable response to the broadcasts. The teachers’ comments made such points as these: “Television can help teachers create a climate for learning.” “The lesson was dead — more animation required.” “Leaves pupils with a healthy curiosity.” “Topic did not warrant the time on it.”
The report mentions that “no attempt was made to survey pupils’ reactions to the programmes, apart from general questions on teachers’ evaluation forms.” This may well have been a mistake since these programmes were in direct competition with the many other TV programmes already familiar to students. These programmes were not regular class instruction but incidental to such instruction. An experiment in direct instruction in some curriculum topic should be made under the same conditions, so that teacher and student reactions could be evaluated. After all, so far as providing a climate for instruction, press, radio, movies, magazines, and TV already constitute a new tropical jungle within which the classroom teacher attempts to carry on teaching as usual. Our classrooms may be said to provide a tenderfoot training for students who are obliged to cope with sabre-tooth problems in their ordinary environment.
Alternatives to the CBC experiments are rapidly being explored in the United States. One of these is closed-circuit TV, which can be used to make the instructor in one class simultaneously available to all the classes in the city, or can be used on a continent-wide service, as the Medical Association used it to instruct doctors about the Salk vaccine. Another alternative is the new technique of recording sight and sound on a single tape; it will make any TV programme or film almost as available and as inexpensive as an LP disc.
In any estimate, TV in the classroom means that the instructors presented will have a classroom of huge scope. Only the most expert teachers will be called on, and they will be obliged to prepare and to process their lessons with a care and consideration that is seldom found or expected in the preparation for a single class. Theoretically one teacher might do all the arithmetic teaching for grade 6 for the whole country. In this way some teachers could become national figures as much as current celebrities of stage and screen. As one wit pointed out, TV is the biggest log ever invented, and Mark Hopkins can now sit at one end and all the students at the other.6
It is also characteristic of the TV medium that instead of leaving the student twenty or thirty feet from the teacher, TV picks him up and puts him in the teacher’s lap where he has a quiet, easy voice speaking right into his ear. Moreover, the minute expressiveness of eye and face becomes much more visible than in the ordinary classroom.
This means that the talents and powers of the individual teacher will have to be carefully studied by the TV producer just as movie producers have always considered the individual excellences and weaknesses of their actors. And this again presents problems to teachers using such TV programmes. Will their own efforts begin to appear, by comparison, trite and puny to their pupils? Will the TV programmes fit into or disrupt their own teaching? Will the pupils become careless about their homework? From these and similar questions and problems of TV in the classroom there emerges the obvious need for close teamwork between the schools and the producers.7
Within the classroom in which the TV programmes occur, it would seem likely that the teacher will be drawn more and more from the blackboard to the student’s elbow. As TV takes up the visual job, the teacher will assume more and more the psychological job of assisting the individual learning process. TV could, then, in one sense take the teacher out of the classroom into a larger world; and in another sense, restore him to a much closer relation to the individual student.
Does TV instruction mean that education will be extended much farther than ever attempted in the present classroom? Does it mean that by virtue of having a higher quality of instruction at the studio end there will be a richer educational result? Does it mean that child and parent will be able to share the same instruction? If the instruction is broadcast to the present type of classroom, will the room teachers become person-to-person tutors rather than lecturers? How far would such changes affect the present supply and quality of teachers? Would high-level instruction received simultaneously by teacher and student enable the room teacher to achieve a higher personal standard?
It would seem that the number of room teachers required would not be affected, but the demands made of their physical and nervous energies might be lessened. Moreover, the opportunities of the teacher to follow TV programme instruction with personal supervision of individual work would increase to the point of becoming the main mode of teaching. And many parents would be able to follow at home the daily broadcast instruction to their children in school.
It may be a great while before any significant proportion of essential and initial instruction is transferred to TV presentation, even in the U.S.A. The purpose of this essay is not to advocate any changes but merely to survey the situation. For those who wish to look further into these matters some pertinent discussions are listed [in the bibliography] on the next page.
The NAEB “Understanding Media” project, which would commence in September 1959, was notified of its funding by the HEW Office of Education in a letter from May 15, 1959:
‘Schooley’ in the top left referred to Frank E Schooley (1906-1987), professor at the University of Illinois, and the past president of the NAEB. The current NAEB president, William G Harley (1911-1998), was also at the University of Illinois and the director of its radio station.
The note on the right top is from H J (Harry) Skornia (1910-1991), McLuhan’s great supporter and friend, who was the NAEB Executive Director. Skornia, who was cc’d on the letter, directed that copies go to the NAEB board, to the NAEB research committee and to McLuhan. “Work to be done”!
“Imagine that?”, he asks, ‘what about that’! But with that question mark instead of an exclamation, Harry may also have been addressing those who had doubted that a grant could be won, perhaps including McLuhan and surely including Harry himself to some extent as well. Time unspecified between the past and present, the exfoliated message was: ‘you couldn’t imagine that this could be done? Can you imagine it now’?
It is noteworthy that the Office of Education apparently had a ‘New Educational Media Branch’ to whom Skornia had persuaded McLuhan to direct the funding request. McLuhan had argued that new media could not be understood alone, but only as first of all belonging to the general field of all media, past, present and future. But he gave way to Skornia’s practical advice to target ‘new media’ — at least in their proposal.
On May 18, presumably the day the letter was received, Skornia wrote McLuhan of the award: “Let’s make this the finest thing to hit North American education in a century.”
These are the last words of Take Today which are taken from the near last words of Finnegans Wake — just before its gapped last/first sentence.
[Note: Aside from the Burroughs essay in 1964, and Take Today in 1972, McLuhan discussed Joyce’s The keys to. Given! also in the 1974 ‘Medium Meaning Message’ (coauthored by Barrington Nevitt) — treatment forthcoming in Connubium 4. Cunnubium 2 discusses the Burroughs essay in aspects which are not repeated here: reference should be made to its footnote #2. Connubium 5 will discuss the Burroughs essay in yet another respect. (The footnote app broke in this post. So notes that would have been footnotes are included in the text in square brackets with double indentation — like this note).]
In his 1964 ‘Notes on Burroughs’, which amounts to a kind of prospect of his ‘connubium’ texts later in the decade, as well as of the retrospect of these same texts in Take Today, McLuhan discussed this donative — given! — gesture of the universe (dual genitive!!) as follows:
Finnnegans Wake provides the closest literary precedent to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end it [FW] is occupied with the theme of ‘the extensions’ of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension of man, and concludes with the resounding boast: The keys to. Given! Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian.
[Note: What McLuhan means here by ‘Egyptian’ may stem from Sigfried Giedion’s ‘space conception’ presentation to the Explorations seminar: “Egyptian art, in which several different aspects of the same object are depicted upon horizontal and vertical planes.” Published in Explorations 6. Also see McLuhan’s letter to Wilfred Watson in October 1964 (discussion in Connubium 5): “Lewis (…) wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs.”]
It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the ‘extension’ division of the university.
[Note: Pun very much intended with ‘extension’ division. McLuhan’s complex suggestion here is not just that the term ‘extension division’ captures the university’s ‘extension’ to all the other areas of modern life, like commerce and the military, but also and more, that all these activities are constituted by, and as, ‘extensions’ of human faculties. It is the latter which enables the former.]
The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision (…) he is trying to point to the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process.
[Note: McLuhan’s text has ‘shut-on’, not ‘shut-off’ or ‘shut-down’. As always with his writing, it is impossible to say if this was intended to provoke thought or was a typo. And if it was a typo, was it seen and approved by McLuhan, like ‘the medium is the massage’, or was it unseen and so comes to us, not from McLuhan, or not directly from McLuhan, but via McLuhan indirectly as a channeled message/massage from the unconscious beyond? This question suggests an important reason McLuhan was so enamored of talk.]
One way to perceive the extent of what was at stake here for McLuhan’s consideration (see next note for the reach of the term ‘con-sideration’) of “the environment itself” is to look at a presentation given by Sigfried Giedion to the Explorations seminar in 1955 in which he discussed “universal space” or “sidereal space” in terms of prehistoric and contemporary art:
[Note: The word ‘sidereal’ stems from Latin, sidus/sideris = star. Interestingly, this is also the root of the word ‘con-sider‘, which is to ponder, beyond the parameters of the solar system and the local galaxy, to the ‘star’ systems of the All. Giedion in ‘space conception’: “It is possible to give physical limits to space, but by its nature space is limitless and intangible. Space dissolves in darkness and evaporates in infinity.” This throws an interesting new light on the title The Gutenberg Galaxy which may be read as the Gutenberg ‘local ontology’! This explains the great success of that ontology in solving scientific and industrial problems. Forget the larger picture, concentrate on the smaller! The method of calculus! Forget the circle and concentrate instead on manageable straight-line segments! The death of God!]
Prehistoric Space Conception and Contemporary Art
[Note: This is the title of the concluding section of Giedion’s paper. Its overall title was ‘Space Conception in Prehistoric Art’. In the remaining 25 years of McLuhan’s life, he never tired of referring to Giedion’s ‘space conception’ (often in the context of ‘acoustic space’). These references to Giedion by McLuhan should be read as implicating univers-all or ontological ‘space’. Importantly, Giedion’s exploration of relative spaces was already central to the Explorations seminar in 1954 in the very session where ‘acoustic space’ emerged.]
Abstraction, transparency, and symbolization are constituent elements of prehistoric and of contemporary art. The space in which they evolve has many things in common. Differences exist, but (…) at the moment only their inner relationship is what interests us. Their space is a space without background, a universal space. We are indebted to artists like Kandinsky and Klee for slowly being able to grasp the space conception of primeval art. They have opened our eyes to the pictorial [Giedion has pictured’ here.] organization, which is not exclusively dependent on the [fixed] vertical. In Kandinsky ‘s early work — e.g., The White Edge (1913) — we find a passion to exploit the newly gained freedom of lines and color set in sidereal space.
[Note: Kandinsky’s astonishing work formulates the exfoliation of ontology into and as the ontic via the color white (especially in the central thrusting — edge mirroring — burst) and the mass of colors which is white “pregnant with possibilities” (in Kandinsky’s words). Ontology does not lose itself in the ontic, but presents itself in it. Kandinsky re-presents that presentation (just as the red wavy lines in his painting re-present the white ones).]
Paul Klee followed the same path, but in his own way. In one of his popular and most frequently reproduced paintings — The Landscape with Yellow Birds (1923) — the birds are sitting on fantastic plants, which defy botanical definition. On the upper rim of the picture one of the yellow birds is represented upside-down, indicating the spatial fluidity. One is reminded of underwater landscapes, where the body may move in all directions, unhindered by gravity.
Developed even further is the cosmic atmosphere in the far less known Ad Marginem (1930).
A planet hovers in the middle of a greenish undetermined background. Fantastic figurations grow along the margin. Plants, animals, eyes are forms in statu nascendi, polyvalent in their significance. Like primeval hybrid figures, they too cannot be confined to a definite zoological species. Here and there a calligraphically precise letter is inscribed in one of these forms, suddenly losing its everyday aspect and being re-transformed into a magic symbol from which it originated. From the upper rim, the naked stem of a plant is thrust down, and a bird with a long beak marches upside-down in a space without gravity. The forms reveal not even the remotest similarity with prehistoric motifs. Only the problem of constancy — as we understand it — comes to the fore, not in the sense of a rational, direct continuation [as in the Gutenberg galaxy], but rather as that property of the human mind which has been submerged for years in fathomless depths, suddenly reappearing on the surface. This happened in our time. (Explorations 6, 1955)
[Note: Giedion defined “the problem of constancy” or “question of the continuity” at the very start of his presentation: “The problem of space conception is everywhere under discussion. Scholars ask themselves, for example, What things have changed and what have remained unchanged in human nature throughout the course of human history? What is it that separates us from other periods? What is it that, after having been suppressed and driven into the unconscious for long periods of time, is now reappearing in the imagination of contemporary artists?” Giedion’s suggestion here is that human history is a matter of identity (what remains unchanged in it) and difference (what changes in it). Now when Giedion and McLuhan met in St Louis in 1943, McLuhan had just finished writing his PhD thesis on Nashe. Its central concern was with what remains unchanged in history — the trivium — and what changes in it — emphasis on one or other of the trivial arts. The immediate attraction between the two men may have turned on just this fulcrum.]
More than a decade before McLuhan’s discussions of the “macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature” in the late 1960s (for texts and discussion see Connubium of Being 1), he and the Explorations seminar were already engaged with the question of making sense in a ‘macrocosmic’ or univers-all context. His ever-repeated attempts to specify a ‘strategy for survival’ by locating “the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process” must be seen as circling around the question of how to reinstate a sense for a grounding ontology in a world given over to an exclusive, purely ontic ‘reality’ — a ‘realty’ or ‘local ontology’ which, as Nietzsche specified, crumbles into nothing as soon as it is deeply ‘considered’:
The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no!! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.
[Note: How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error’, The Twilight of the Idols (1888). For the original text and various discussions of it see the Nietzsche posts.]
Increasingly, I feel that Catholics must master C.G. Jung. (…) Modern anthropology and psychology are more important for the Church than St. Thomas to-day. (1944)1
*****
KEYS to GIVEN (1939 Joyce; 1964, 1972, 1974 McLuhan)2
*****
trying to point to the shut-off button of an active and lethal environmental process (1964)3
*****
The conclusion of War and Peace in the Global Village (discussed in Connubium of Being 1) was revisited by McLuhan in Take Today.4
Compare the two:
War and Peace in the Global Village, 190
Biologists use two (…) categories that are helpful for perceiving the relation between the end of nature today and the problem of understanding the future of media and technology. They speak of ‘outbreeding’ and ‘inbreeding’. As Mayr puts it: “Most animals are essentially outbreeders, most microorganisms inbreeders.”5
With electricity, all this has changed totally. At present the entire mammalian world has become the microorganismic. It is the total individual cultures of the world, linguistically and politically, that have become the 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 mammal itself, now contained in a new macrocosm or ‘connubium’ of a super-terrestrial kind. Our technologies, or self-amputations, and the environments or habitats which they create must now become [informed by] that matrix of that macrocosmic connubial bliss derided by the evolutionist.
Take Today, 294
RETUNING THE SKY
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 [anymore] 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. (…) Whereas previous extensions had altered the speed of human motions in a great variety of ways, freely hybridizing with one another, the new extension of the planet seemed to call despotically for a new harmonizing of the spheres of action, influence, and knowledge.
The problem posed here, and indeed by the whole history of humans on this earth, is how to understand our place in the “generalized environment” (Mayr)6, that is, in the “super-terrestrial” environment, that is, in the “macrocosm” of the entire universe.
For hundreds of thousands of years before Sputnik,7 answers to this question were formulated within all the different “individual cultures of the world” — “the cultural habitat[s] in which we have long been accustomed to think”. All the cosmic interpretations of humans were “transported” between contemporaries in space and between generations in time via their ‘collective representations‘ of (dual genitive!) the spacetimes of the Earth. Of course all these representations were technologically modulated. But now, “with electricity all this has changed totally”. Now, with “the moment of Sputnik”, we exist within “a totally new game with new ground rules. Our [new] ground [no longer the Earth] now is literally (…) the Sky.”
But just how would this trans-formation work?8 By practicing outbreeding in Mayr’s sense of the “maximum of ecological plasticity and evolutionary flexibility”,9 humans might (indeed can) learn to theorize their total “cultural habitat” (consisting of all their myriad of actual and potential habitats “freely hybridizing with one another”) by isolating its dominants.
Such, indeed, is the only way a domain may be brought into focus and investigated: through discrimination of its dominants.10 The medium is the message.
Humans have learned to theorize all sorts of other domains in this way, so the general ability is not in question — only (only!) its application to ourselves! To the interior landscape!
In the Take Today passage, McLuhan suggests that “the new extension of the planet seemed to call despotically”. This is a very com-plicated matter, a very knotted matter. For McLuhan does not say that the extension into outer space called “despotically”; rather he says that it “seemed to call despotically”. That is, looked at from the Earth, this was the impression. But how on earth can a call be “despotic” absent “despotic” formation? Absent “despotic” in-formation?
No, as McLuhan states baldly, the new impetus came not from the Earth at all, but from the Sky: “Our ground now was literally in the Sky.” Hence, “the new extension of the planet [was able] to call despotically for a new harmonizing” only as a re-call of such a “despotic” possibility. This was to be a celestial dominant exposed as such for the first time by “the new extension of the planet” into outer space. Then, as a re-turn from the Sky to the Earth, this would expose, also here, how “the spheres of action, influence, and knowledge” might be harmonized via the study and application of the new domain.11
It’s not a question of planning but of receiving inspiration and allowing it to gradually invade your own being. You’re not thinking about inspiration, inspiration is thinking about you. (Federico Fellini)12
The goal is to learn how to come from the archetypal dominants or despots — in the Sky as this may be characterized — back to their expression on the Earth.13
McLuhan’s career may be seen as the struggle to bring Jung’s archetypes into demonstrable focus — which in Jung’s work constitute a vast phantasmagoria14 of gods and forces. Just as human experience in all its different manifestations can be interrogated as to its dominants, so can the archetypal realm of dominants be interrogated for its dominants. The medium is the message.
As McLuhan specified in his ‘Notes on Burroughs’:
why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself?
But to enter into this questionable realm, this question of the real, this real(m) of the question (dual genitive!), is to descend chaotically into the maelstrom with Poe’s mariner. How to ascend again to the surface — a surface we are — is the riddle hanging over history like the sword of Damocles.
As with Jung, archetypes are for McLuhan literally dominants or lords (dominus = ‘lord’). We are the expression of these dominants and just as they maintain themselves in and through their extension into us, so our extension is able to maintain itself, and in fact to first find itself, in the mirroring action of our reaching out to them and retracting back from them: ὁδὸς άνω κάτω.
Such a ‘play’ of dominants and dominated, which is first of all simultaneous and only (only!) secondarily sequential,15 is McLuhan’s “global theatre”:
An everyday roundabout with intrusions from above and below.16
For Baker Beck…
In the 1930s T.S. Eliot often lived in the country at Frank Morley’s farm in Sussex.1 He learned to bake bread there and is pictured here with one of his loaves.
The life-long inspiration of Eliot for McLuhan is already reflected in his letter to his family in Canada during his first term at Cambridge in 1934 (when McLuhan was 23):
Of late I have been wayfaring among the work of T.S. Eliot. He is easily the greatest modern poet, and just how great he is remains to be seen, because he has not produced his best yet. However the poems I am reading (ed. Faber & Faber: Poems 1909-1925) have the unmistakable character of greatness. They transform, and diffuse and recoalesce the commonest every day occurrences of 20th cent, city life till one begins to see double indeed — the extremely unthinkable character, the glory and the horror of the reality in life yet, to all save the seer, [only, if at all] behind life, is miraculously suggested. (Eliot is an anglo-Catholic, a theologian and philosopher and one of the best critics who ever wrote in English) Now there is something ineffably exciting in reading a man, a genius and a poet, who has by the same stages, in face of the same circumstances, (he is an American) come to the same point of view concerning the nature of religion and Christianity, the interpretation of history, and the value of industrialism. There is scarcely a modern “intellectual” who has the background of opinion necessary to enjoy Eliot — yet they have one and all heralded him and ranted about him; while he has necessarily been amused by their efforts to show that his poetry “dispenses with all creeds and beliefs”!
(…)
[Eliot’s] poems (…) use the method of dramatic monologue with its swift ranging over every sort of experience. But Eliot’s “consciousness” is not that of a lover, a count, or a distinct individual — it is impersonal and universal and instead of (…) individual associations he ranges over all history and all modern society…2
44 years later, one of McLuhan’s last public lectures3 would be given on Eliot as the Pound Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Idaho: ‘The Possum and the Midwife’.4
In two 1968 texts, the Playboy Interview1 and War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan repeated much the same sentence twice over:
Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container of people, is being transformed by these media and by space satellites into a living organism2, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature. (Playboy)
It is the cultural habitat, in which we have long been accustomed to think that people were contained, that (…) itself [is] now contained in a new macrocosm or ‘connubium’ of a superterrestrial kind. (War and Peace in the Global Village)
The next year, ‘connubium’ appeared twice again in the 1969 Counterblast:
Number, said the ancients, is the sounding of space. Geometry is visual space. An enormous effort of collective abstraction precedes the disentangling of these elements from the total matrix of living relations. Today an even greater energy is needed (…) to understand in a connubium, the unity of all the elements which men have abstracted by their codes from the primordial matrix. (62)
Each culture, each period has its bias which intensifies [and] distorts some feature of the total social process. The bias of our culture is precisely to isolate the bias of all others in an effort at orchestration. Social connubium? The anthropologist is a connoisseur3 of cultures as art forms. The student of communications is a connoisseur of media as art forms. (64)
The War and Peace passage receives particular emphasis through its place in the concluding paragraph of the book.4 With it, McLuhan might be taken to deliver an admonishment in regard to the world’s ultimate fate hanging between war and peace: if we want to survive as a species, this is what we need to do/know.5
But in these difficult passages what exactly is McLuhan’s message?
The medium?
The medium is the message?
*****
‘Connubium’ is Latin. McLuhan would have come across its English derivative, ‘connubial’, in an essay by Innis, ‘The Penetrative Powers of the Price System’:6
Connubial alliances are the best security we can have of the goodwill of the natives.7
‘Connubial’ in English — ‘having to do with marriage’ — follows from its strict Latin sense, ‘con’ + ‘nubium’ (hence our ‘nuptial’ and ‘nubile’). Indeed in War and Peace McLuhan’s next sentence — the concluding sentence of the book — uses the word with this nuptial sense explicitly in mind:
Our technologies (…)8 and the environments or habitats which they create must now become [informed by]9 that matrix of that macrocosmic connubial bliss derided by the evolutionist.10
Now ‘connubium’, as opposed to ‘connubial’, was used by McLuhan in the wider sense of ‘a complex civic association’ (of which ‘marriage’ is, of course, an archetype). In this broader sense ‘connubium’ is almost ‘oppidum’ (town or village)11 such that a “macrocosm or connubium of a superterrestrial kind” is the ‘global village’ in a remarkable new sense which, to anticipate, is ‘civic association’ at an ontological level.12
The ‘connubium’ put forward by McLuhan is an association that is “inclusive”13 — a term used by him to denote ‘integral difference’ as opposed to the Gutenbergian ‘integral indifference’.14 But in the context of the two head passages from Playboy and War and Peace, these terms were used by McLuhan in a ‘macrocosmic’ or “supraterrestrial” or ontological sense: the contrast is between fundamental ‘integral difference’ as opposed to the Gutenbergian fundamental ‘integral indifference’.
But — all importantly! — integral or inclusive difference at the ontological level cannot exclude fundamental ‘integral indifference’ without ceasing to be itself — without ceasing to be “inclusive” and instead being “exclusive”.
It is this fundamental integrity of the absolutely different that is the medium15 — to which McLuhan’s message would recall our attention. The medium is the message.
It is this fundamental integrity of the absolutely different that (1) underlies and supervenes the possibility of the discrete harmony of different cultures and so of peace — and (2) of the making mind with ‘macrocosmic’ or “supraterrestrial” truth — but which (3) first of all underlies and supervenes the possibility of the discrete harmony of the ontological and the ontic.16 It is (3) the latter, alone, which (2) enables the making of genuine truth which (1) is the ongoing perception of the real harmony that is possible between different cultures in “psychic communal integration” — aka, “the universality of consciousness” — aka, PEACE.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
My mother (…) travelled from coast to coast from year to year putting on plays and acts. (McLuhan interview with Nina Sutton, 1975)
Like her father, Henry Hall, Elsie Hall could never stay in one place for long. After she followed her family to Alberta from Nova Scotia in 1907, she married Herbert McLuhan in 1909 and then moved to Edmonton with him in 1911 — six months or so before Marshall would be born there in July of that year.
During the war, when Herbert was in service, she took her two young boys back to her relatives in Nova Scotia for a year. Then she moved to Winnipeg where her mother lived and where Marshall would start his schooling.
After the war beginning in the early 1920s she began her stage career and for the next decade toured Canada, from Victoria to Halifax, putting on her single woman show as an elocutionist and impersonator.
Elsie left the family home in Winnipeg for good in 1933 and set up shop in Toronto. Sometime in the middle of that decade she moved to Detroit where, in 1939 she was living at 616 Pallister (Letters 117). She was in Pasadena for the summer in 1938, of course, where she introduced Marshall and Corinne. And for a brief time that decade, between stints in Detroit, she lived and worked in Cleveland. A letter to her from Marshall from September 24, 1938 ends:
Cleveland is probably a vast improvement on Detroit — Best luck there Mother. (Letters 97)
Another from June 1939, however, asks:
What do you plan on? Is Cleveland a dead issue? (Letters 111)
It was while she was back in Detroit again from Cleveland that she was instrumental in bringing McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis together in 1943.
In the middle 1940s she was in Pittsburgh. Marshall’s letters to her from Assumption College in Windsor (where he was from 1944 to 1946) indicate that she was not just across the river in Detroit. But her time in Pittsburgh did not work out. Here are the concluding lines of a letter from Marshall to her from May 14, 1946:
Wish you could get out of Pittsburgh before it gets you down entirely. Your fatigue is owing to suppressed anger. (Letters 185)
She later (in the late 40’s and early 1950s) lived and worked in New Jersey in association (among others) with the Perkins School of the Blind. Apparently she directed plays for fund-raising events as a self-styled “promoter” (as she appears in the 1948 ‘Oranges Directory’).1
In 1941 she had done at least one previous show of this sort in Lansing, outside of Detroit, for the Leader Dog League for the Blind:
Perhaps it was this experience in Lansing which got her into this line of ‘promotional’ work.2
Elsie returned to Toronto in the 1950s to be near Marshall and his family and died there in 1961.
Elsie is listed as a “promoter” working in Newark but with her residence at 430 New England Terrace in Orange.
In his Playboy interview, McLuhan reflected back on his transformation, almost 20 years previously in the early 1950s (a transformation amounting to a “second conversion”) from “visual bias” to an appreciation of the interior landscape “as means of unifying and digesting any kind of experience“:1
MCLUHAN: I once shared visual bias.
PLAYBOY: What changed your mind?
MCLUHAN: Experience. For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. (…) 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.2 I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience3 — from trash to treasures. 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 adopt a new survival strategy. I adapted some of this new approach in The Mechanical Bride by attempting to immerse myself in the advertising media in order to apprehend its impact on man, but even there some of my old literate “point of view” bias crept in. The book, in any case, appeared just as television was making all its major points irrelevant. I soon realized that recognizing the symptoms of change was not enough; one must understand the cause of change, for without comprehending causes, the social and psychic effects of new technology cannot be counteracted or modified. But I recognized also that one individual cannot accomplish these self-protective modifications; they must be the collective effort of society, because they affect all of society; the individual is helpless against the pervasiveness of environmental change: the new garbage — or mess-age — induced by new technologies. Only the social organism, united and recognizing the challenge, can move to meet it.
McLuhan describes two sorts of changes in his orientation here. One was individual and, so to say, elemental: a totally different approach. The other was collective and meteorological: environmental change. It was the first change that enabled his perception of the second.
In the ‘East & west, horizontal & vertical’ series of posts to follow, the first sort of personal — elemental — change is at stake. The central question posed by these posts is therefore: what sort of change in basic approach did McLuhan personally have to undergo in order to begin to appreciate the second sort of meteorological change — “the social and psychic effects of new technology“?
Peter Chrisp’s great Finnegans Wake blog, From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay, reads the last page of FW — ALP’s emptying into the ocean — as a “contemplation of the mystery of death”. No doubt it is that, too. But it is also a contemplation of the mystery of birth, the coming forth by day, as recorded in these comments to PC’s post:
The take here, or takes rather, seem strangely unambiguated. For is this page only Budgen’s “contemplation of the mystery of death”? Or is it not decidedly also “contemplation of the mystery of birth”? Where ALP as the soul must pass away from all the collective possibilities of life, hence all the great and small events of world history that express those possibilities, into the cold light of day as the animation of a particular individual like HCE.
“And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free (…) I am passing out (…) till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more (…) Carry me along (…) to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussofthlee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the…”
Is this not the way of the birth canal where a familiar warmth in collective life (or Liffey) must be left behind for isolated individuality: “My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!” What might be called a first gift of life in the collective leaves/lives of the Liffey — relived-relieved-releafed-releaved every night in dream — leads to a second gift, individualized “mememormee”, via the kiss/keys(kees)/buss from the parting portal lips, ἡ πύλη τοῦ οὐρανοῦ. Yes, the cause of death is birth but this is not a linear fate, but one of a “yes tid” where life and death like night and day are primordially caught up in the other in a sort of tide-time, each knotted to the other — Kevin’s “sacrament of baptism or the regeneration of man by water”.
I obey laws I have not chosen. (Joyce to Jacques Mercanton on FW)1
Danis Rose’s edition of Finn’s Hotel is controversial regarding the question of whether Joyce ever had the notion of building its ‘little epics’ into a self-standing work. But there is no question that these notes from 1923, after Ulysses and before the Wake (as Rose says), are critical for an understanding of the transition between the two.
The third of its epyllia concerns Kevin, the patron saint of Dublin, who founded a monastery in Glendalough, ‘the valley of two lakes’, in the seventh century. The name ‘Kevin’ goes back to Cóemgein, ‘the handsomely born’, that is to say, ‘the appropriately born’, that is to say ‘the reborn’, ‘the regenerated’. The crossing of the two in the valley, whether of lakes or births or generations, is the matter at stake and questions arise as to how this occurs and what relation it has to what is before it and what is around it.
Joyce’s retaling (formulated in free verse, alone among the episodes)2 situates these questions as concerning a ‘tub’ — namely Ireland or here-comes-everybody’s head3 — and its relation to a prior surrounding ‘ocean’:
KEVIN BORN on the island of Ireland in the Irish ocean
having been granted privilege of a portable altar cum bath goes to Lough Glendalough between rivers
where pious Kevin lives alone on an isle in the lake
on which isle, a plot perimetered with three watercourses, is a pond
in which is an islet whereon holy Kevin builds a beehivehut the floor of which most holy Kevin excavates to a depth of one foot
which done venerable Kevin goes to the lakeside and fills time after time the tub with water which time after time most venerable Kevin empties into the cavity of his hut thereof creating a pool
having done which blessed Kevin half fills the tub once with water which tub then most blessed Kevin sets in the centre of the pool
after which saint Kevin girds up his frock to his loins and seats himself, blessed saint Kevin, in his circumferential hiptubbath
where, doctor solitarius, he meditates with ardour the sacrament of baptism or the regeneration [gein] of man by water.
The ninth episode in the Finn’s Hotel series of eleven epiclets is ‘Here Comes Everybody‘ — “concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey“, and his ancestry, or not, from “the Earwickers“:
Discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys and the Earwickers of Sidham in the Hundred of Manhood or proclaim him a descendant of vikings…4
The episode would explicate his origins instead, or at least first of all, as going back to Eden and to:
the grand old gardener [who] was saving daylight one sabbath afternoon in prefall paradise peace by following his plough for rootles in the rere garden of ye olde marine hotel when royalty was announced…
The tendency of these notes to Finnegans Wake is clear and the central question would appear to concern the roots — and also the rootles(sness) — of genesis.
The crux of the matter has to do with the subjective genitive at stake here. Roots and rootles(sness) belong first of all to genesis, not to us.5 Just so, water is re-generative for Kevin exactly and only because it is not his! He needs to retrieve it — in his tub.6
McLuhan put the matter in negative mode — that is, in terms of our cul-de-sac or “opaque prison” — in ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ in 1954:
For that school of thought for which the external world is an opaque prison, art can never be regarded as a source of knowledge but only as a moral discipline and a study of endurance. The artist is not a reader of radiant signatures on materia signata but the signer of a forged check on our hopes and sympathies.
It had earlier appeared in positive mode in ‘Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum’ in 1949 where the “reader of radiant signatures” has the calling to re-turn to “source” and
To read not in the book of the self but in the book of the existent and subsistent world…
Our home in an “existent and subsistent world” is original. Once fallen away from that birth-right, it may not be re-won by reading further into “the book of the self” (an absorption that leads nowhere but deeper and deeper into the “opaque prison”), but only (only!) through a re-version to origin. From there, and only from there, is a “re-generation” to be experienced along with St Kevin, in reception of its amniotic embrace and power. This is a gift — actually the gift above all other gifts — enabling a “radiant” relation to an “existent and subsistent world”.
Bacon upon occasion used both [Ciceronian and Senecan] styles and so does Mr. Eliot. Quarrels between Senecans and Ciceronians are inevitably the result of the triumph of specialized temperament over general intelligence. (From Eliot to Seneca, 1953)
‘Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis’ is a critical statement of McLuhan’s position in 1944 and of his future orientation as seen from there. One of its aims was to coordinate that position with his PhD thesis on Nashe and the history of the trivium which had just been approved late in 1943.
Just as Korzybski offers us a correlation of knowledge by an extension of the modes of grammar (and in this respect belongs to an ancient tradition headed by Cratylus and carried on by Pliny, Philo-Judaeus, Origen, St. Bonaventura, and the later alchemists), so Mr. Richards, whose Meaning of Meaning is a treatise of speculative grammar of curiously scholastic stamp, offers us a method for interpreting and manipulating our lives by an extension of the devices of rhetoric. In this respect Mr. Richards is a true nominalist son of Ockham, Agricola, and Ramus; (…) Mr. Richards’ rediscovery of the functional rhetorical relationships in speech and prose was timely, indeed, after three centuries of Cartesian contempt for metaphor and rhetoric in all its modes [as an extension of the modes of dialectic]. (Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis)
In this paragraph from his 1944 essay McLuhan offers a summary of his thesis. It sets out its three trivial arts and names, as the thesis had attempted to detail, their ‘extensions’ in historical figures and traditions. The great question, actually questions, precipitated by it may be seen in his observation that each of these arts represents a self-standing “correlation of knowledge” or “a method for interpreting and manipulating our lives”.1
Ten years before at the University of Manitoba McLuhan had encountered a similar situation in Rupert Lodge’s “comparative method“. There, too, there were three “method[s] for interpreting and manipulating our lives” and a kind of meta-method of critical comparison that would study them and their application (or “extension”) in the history of philosophy. Some of the questions implicated in Lodge’s work were:
These questions arising from Lodge’s work also applied to McLuhan’s studies of the trivium. His attraction to Eliot and Leavis in literary criticism was that they pointed to ways (he sensed) in which these questions might be addressed.
The first sentence of ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’ introduces the need to undertake “a critical journey to the full act of plenary critical judgment”. The paper then frequently sets out how such a journey may not be made. In this vein McLuhan writes in regard to Richards and Empson as rhetoricians, what he might equally well have said of Cratylus and Pliny as grammarians or Descartes and his followers as dialecticians:
It may seem simply absurd to say that neither Richards nor Empson [nor Cratylus nor Pliny nor Descartes] is a fully equipped critic.3 That, however, is not to say (…) that the [meta-]critic [equipped with an “overall view” of the three trivial modes] can dispense with their techniques. The fallacy consists in supposing that [any one of] their excellent devices for observing and describing (…) is a technique of evaluation.4
To be able to re-cognize a “dramatic structure” (that is, a dynamic plural structure) which is yet “self-contained” (that is, which is unified in its plurality) is the proper exercise of such “a technique of evaluation“.5 This is a “technique” does not arise on its own but somehow comes back from a prior structure that is before it (‘before’ especially in time): hence the need for “re-trieval” and “re-cognition”.6 In effect, this technique is just Lodge’s “comparative method” which arises from insight into the threefold play of the forms before it — but now under-stood not as a methodological technique but as an ontological response.
Over and over again McLuhan insists that there is no way that rhetoric (and by implication also not grammar or dialectic) can — “within the limits of their method” — be ‘extended’ in such a way as to reach reality and truth, “what (…) actually is“.7 Extension is always bound to the past, what McLuhan will later call ‘the rear-view mirror’. But what “what (…) actually is” stands on its own and instead of being generated out of some past is — as the beginning(s) — what must responsively be understood as already generating all past, present and future.8
A speaker or a writer of [rhetorical] prose has an intention related to an audience of some sort, but a poet’s intention is entirely absorbed in the nature of the thing he is making. The thing made [the poem]9 will stand in relation to an audience but this, while important, is only per accidens. (…) Thus rhetoric is essentially an affair of external (…) relations, while a poem has external relations only accidentally. (…) A poem (…) may contain any number of rhetorical and political components needing exegesis, and yet be wholly poetic — that is, be entirely organized with reference to a dramatic structure or movement which is self-contained. A rhetorical work is for the sake of producing action. A poetic work is an action produced for the sake of contemplation. This is an irreducible functional distinction between rhetoric and poetic10 which it is the business of the critic to manifest point by point in judging [any] particular work. This brings us to the crucial point. Faced with a work full of rhetorical and, therefore, political and psychological complexity, the rhetorician-psychologist can perform prodigies of ingenious and helpful exegesis but cannot possibly, within the limits of his method, determine whether the work IS a poem or not.
Again:
The utmost extension and refinement of the methods for observing speaker-audience relations brings one no nearer the problem of deciding whether a particular work IS a poem, and if so, whether it IS a significant or an insignificant one.
It is not (…) possible to arrive at a critical evaluation of a poem (…) from the point of view of rhetorical exegesis, as one can see in the work of Richards and Empson. Basically a rhetorical exegesis is concerned with indicating the “strategy” employed by a writer in bringing to bear the available means of persuasion. One can go on indefinitely describing the situation from which the strategy emerges, elaborating whole psychological and political treatises without ever reaching the point of critical evaluation.
Later, of course, McLuhan will articulate this point as the difference between lineality and simultaneity, between the literary and the electric. There is no linear way to simultaneity since lineality is exactly what simultaneity is not — and also, and chiefly, because simultaneity, as such, must already be in effect in order to be what it is.
There is a play of times here — hence McLuhan’s later appeal to Aristotle and Thomas:
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, 1970)
Turning from the negative way (“the opposite form”) to the positive response may be seen in the following citations. But careful note must always be made of the basic difference between a “fusion” that is first of all ours and that receives its objectivity through us — versus one that is first of all ‘before’ us and whose prior objectivity it is that elicits our subjective response to it. McLuhan is pointing to this difference with his vocabulary of “contemplation”, “moral perception” and “critical evaluation”.
Put in Lodge’s terms, the great question is whether the components at stake (in his case, the three “channels” of philosophy) are beheld in their irreducible plurality (“diverse components”) but also in their unity (“fusion”) within the comparative method. Outside that unity, there is only one-sidedness; inside it, absent fundamental distinction, there is only a formless merging. The point of the method is to avoid, at once, both one-sidedness and merger.
Such a meth-od13 or medium as the middle road is the message.
So with McLuhan. The three trivial arts must be seen in their plurality and in their unity. Absent unity, there is inevitable one-sidedness. Absent plurality, there is formless merger. Here he is a decade later in his 1955 ‘Nihilism Exposed’…
On one-sidedness or “whim”:
These [gnostic] views flooded into Europe in the fifteenth century. They underlie all the mechanic-materialisms from Descartes to John Dewey, since it is the merest whim whether these views are used to structure a Berkleyan idealism or a Darwinian mechanism.14
On formless merger or “illusion”:
And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, 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!”
In McLuhan’s 1944 essay ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson’1, an involuted set of ideas may be seen which dominated McLuhan’s intellectual life from start to finish — not in a straight line, of course, but as a kind of complex formula persisting through maelstroms and flips.
There are two great riddles to these ideas which McLuhan had to solve. First, how does thinking work towards where it must come back from? Second, how does acuity as it ‘sharpens’ itself become more “general” and exoteric rather than more specialized and esoteric? The answer to both riddles is: communication. But it would be 15 years after 1944, when McLuhan was almost 50, before the second became clear to him. And the first continued to elude him (despite his insight into the “gap” and “discontinuity” and the “flip” and “resonance”) just as it has forever eluded everyone else as well.
The journey to/from the beginning(s) is the way, the only way, out of the cul-de-sac in which the world today — the global village with nukes — finds itself. Or loses itself.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.
(Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets)6
All these ideas and problems may be seen — articulated, half-articulated. and awaiting articulation — in two passages from the 1944 ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’:
The entire effort of Mr. Leavis has been to realize (…) insight in such a way as to make it available for general recognition and experience among intelligent readers.7 It represents not only a major critical effort but the extension and refinement of sensibility as the very8 mode of critical activity and of discriminatory reading and response.
Leavis (…) without any chance of popular recognition [has been] engaged in executing the program which Mr Eliot (…) indicated but relinquished.9 Just how well he succeeded the reader [McLuhan himself, of course] who has worked for six years with Revaluation is best able to say.
In the wake of Eliot and Leavis, McLuhan took it upon himself “to realize (…) insight” in its “very mode” and to do so in “such a way as to make it available for general recognition and experience”. Fifteen years later later he would come to see that this was the path the physical sciences had taken and that the “very mode” of insight needed to instigate science in a similar way in the humanities and social was focus on the medium.
Sometime in his later career after 1960, McLuhan wrote out a short description of Pound’s Guide to Kulchur. Perhaps it was for discussions with grad students working with him on The Cantos. Or he may have thought of using Pound in what was to be a new section on the history of Senecanism in his never-ending reconstruction of his PhD thesis. For McLuhan’s take on Pound was that he was a modern Seneca directing attention “to the idea of production and to the creative process rather than to consumer values and attitudes.”1
Make It New!2
The note was left in McLuhan’s copy of Pound’s Spirit of Romance (now among McLuhan’s books preserved at Fisher Library, University of Toronto) and recently recovered from it after a gap of 50 years or so.
Guide to K
One way of stating the effect of Guide to Kulchur is to say that it is entirely related to the idea of production and to the creative process rather than to consumer values and attitudes. This directive is far more radical to our time than, say, Empson’s Seven Types [of Ambiguity]. Mathematical training had taught Empson that the homogeneities of Euclidean space were easy to translate into the pluralisms of nuclear space-time. Empson hoicked us out of the single level, lineal world of print culture.
But in Guide to Kulchur Pound grappled with the entire cultural transition of the West. Faced with an electronic revolution which reduced the world to a global village as early as the telegraph, Pound sought for the structural dynamics of this change in Chinese culture. Centuries ago, the Chinese had discovered a basis of equilibrium between sight and sound, between the world of one-thing-at-a-time and the world of all-at-once. This inclusive unity of the senses and of consciousness was denied to the West whose abstract technologies began with the translation of sound into sight by the fragmentation of the phonetic alphabet.
Guide to Kulchur is at all points a navigational chart for getting the west out of the segmental and static impasse molded by phonetic alphabet and print culture. Wyndham Lewis in all his work fought against this Pound strategy for culture. Lewis correctly diagnosed the trend of our time as being toward ear orientation and away from the eye-organization of experience.3 One major effect of the Guide to Kulchur was to intensify and clarify the Lewis polemic against his time. At the same time Pound enabled Joyce to shape his multisensuous world with more assurance of his bearings. The Guide is just what it insists that it is: a basic chart for the periplum of the cultural coasts of our time. It is of course the ultimate and indispensable handbook to the Cantos, and as such cannot readily be detached from the Pound corpus.
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, 1970).
McLuhan, at least from the time of his graduate studies around 1940, was interested in Seneca and the question of how learning eventuates. But this (as McLuhan himself came to specify only in the late 1950s) is the same question as: what is communication?
Here is McLuhan on Seneca in chronological order with added bold and commentary in footnotes.
1943
The war between the dialecticians and rhetoricians began as soon as the Sophists attempted to make dialectics subordinate to the art of persuasion. Plato and Aristotle were the greatest enemies of the rhetoricians, not so much in rejecting rhetoric, as in asserting that as an art it had no power to control dialectics. The Stoics, however, are the main defenders of dialectics against rhetoric after [Plato and] Aristotle.1 It was they who made Cicero very uncomfortable on many occasions, and against them he, as rhetorician, directs the main force of his attack. It is in terms of the Stoic contempt of persuasion [rhetoric] and their love of cryptic and compressed utterance that one is able to understand the ancient rivalry between the Attic and Asiatic styles — later, between the Senecans and Ciceronians. The war between these literary camps is basically the opposition between dialectics and rhetoric to control the modes of literary composition; and the ramifications of this opposition stretch into the realms of ethics and politics, both in Antiquity and in the Renaissance. (The Place Of Thomas Nashe In The Learning Of His Time)
1943
Donne is quite explicit about his rhetorical aims in preaching. His intention was to arrange his rhetorical effects in such a way as “to trouble the understanding, to displace, and discompose and disorder the judgement (…) or to empty it of former apprehensions, and to shake beliefe, with which it had possessed it self before, and then, when it is thus melted to poure it into new molds, when it is thus mollified, to stamp and imprint new formes, new images, new opinions in it.” Donne is here stating the Attic or anti-Ciceronian concept of style espoused by the Senecans. His words describe the aims set themselves by Montaigne and Bacon in their essays. In The Advancement Bacon contrasts the two modes of delivering knowledge as the modes of aphorism and orderly method: “But the writing in aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, whereto the writing in Method doth not approach. For first, it trieth the writer, whether he be superficial or solid: for Aphorism, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of sciences; for discourse illustration is cut off: recitals of examples are cut off; discourse of connection and order cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off (…) And lastly, Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total do secure men, as if they were at farthest.” Both Montaigne and Bacon made compromises, gradually admitting examples, authorities, and descriptions, but persisting in their original intention of employing an aphoristic style in order to dislocate the mind from its customary courses. (The Place Of Thomas Nashe In The Learning Of His Time)
1943
It is easy to see how the aphorism was indispensable to this mode of composition employed by Bacon, Burton, Donne, and Browne. It is equally important to recognize that a statecraft, or theory of politics, as well as rhetoric, was the mainstay of the Attic style.2 As [M.W.] Croll3 says: “The negligence of the anti-Ciceronian masters, their disdain of revision, their dependence upon casual and emergent devices of construction, might sometimes be mistaken for mere indifference to art or contempt of form4 (…) Yet even their extravagances are purposive, and express a creed that is at the same time philosophical and artistic. Their purpose was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking, or, in Pascal’s words, la peinture de la pensée“. Thus the ‘cutted period,’ asymmetry of members, sudden shifts from plain to metaphorical statement, or from one metaphor to another, is the result of a style “always tending toward the aphorism, or pensée, as its ideal form“.5 In brief, it is a Senecan style. (The Place Of Thomas Nashe In The Learning Of His Time)
1944
Seneca was for Roger [Bacon], and many others, a Christian worthy, and the relative claims of his eloquence and that of Cicero was a dispute which uninterruptedly split the learned world from the beginning until after the time of Montaigne and [Francis] Bacon. (Francis Bacon’s Patristic Inheritance)6
1944
Elocution, like invention, is of two kinds: [according to Francis Bacon] “it is either magistral or initiative. (…) I call that doctrine initiative (borrowing the term from the sacred ceremonies) which discloses and lays bare the very mysteries of the sciences.7 The magistral method teaches; the initiative intimates. The magistral requires that what is told should be believed; the initiative [requires] that it should be examined. The one transmits knowledge to the crowd of learners; the other to the sons, as it were, of science.” In a word, the one style is Ciceronian, the other Senecan. (Francis Bacon’s Patristic Inheritance)
1951
Landscape offered several attractive advantages to the poets of the mid-eighteenth century. It meant for one thing an extension of the Baroque interest in la peinture de la pensée, which the study of Seneca had suggested to Montaigne and Bacon and Browne — an interest which reached a maximal development, so far as the technique of direct statement permitted, in Pascal, Racine, and Alexander Pope. Pope especially deserves study from this point of view since he first developed the couplet to do the complex work of the double-plot of the Elizabethans. He discovered how to make a couplet achieve a symbolic vision. That is, to effect an instant of inclusive consciousness by the juxtaposition without copula of diverse and even paradoxical situations or states of mind.8 (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry)
1952
The conflicting claims of dialectic and rhetoric or private and public communication account for a good deal of subsequent intellectual and social history. The Roman world divided the dispute in accordance with the position of Seneca and of Cicero, and the mediaeval world opposed the methods of study and teaching of the [Ciceronian] Fathers and the [Senecan] Schoolmen.9 (Technology and Political Change)
1953
Because the function of the exegete is to reveal the hidden and the obscure, he naturally resorts to those forms of expression which arrest the flow of the mind by sudden turns, or dislocate it from its usual channels. (…) By juxtaposing well-known styles [from classical rhetoric] with contemporary themes and controversies, Lyly and Nashe were exercising the art of the continuous parallel so strikingly used in [Joyce’s] Ulysses and in the Senecanism of [Eliot’s] Gerontion and Sweeney Agonistes.10 (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
The Church Fathers are always close to Seneca for the same reason they are close to Pliny. Seneca provided the stylistic means of psychological manipulation of the inner world [just as]11 Pliny exercised the same effects via the objects of the outer world. Montaigne, interested above all in arresting and painting thought, uses the quick conversational turns of Senecan style and the wide variety of stances provided by [Pliny’s]12 world of natural history to snap-shot the various postures of the mind. (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
The natural and age-old antipathy of Senecan and Ciceronian is rooted in diversity of aim and method in communication. The Senecan cares only to reveal the thing. He is an instrument to be set aside the moment that the reader has been helped to see. (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
The [Senecan] circuit represents not a narratio or a record of events, but the stages of the learning process.13 The discontinuities of Senecan style, whether in Bacon’s Essays or Mr. Eliot’s poetry, are not attempts to take the reader by the hand or to unfold a tale, but attempts to reveal exactly discriminated states of mind by devices geared to inner vision. The Ciceronian, however, is engaged not in revelation but self-expression. He takes up the task not of discovery and learning but of transmission and accumulation of data, and the inculcation of moral attitudes. (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
Bacon upon occasion used both [Ciceronian and Senecan] styles and so does Mr. Eliot. Quarrels between Senecans and Ciceronians are inevitably the result of the triumph of specialized temperament over general intelligence. (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
The Senecan schools of declamation in the Roman world elaborated all those terms and procedures which the twelfth-century Senecans revived and elaborated. The Sic et Non of Abelard, like the antitheta of Bacon, is a technique of juxtaposition of texts for the purpose of sudden illumination. Scholasticism was Senecan in origin and temper, and opposed to the Ciceronian humanism of medieval philology and pedagogy. This perspective would have helped Professor Williamson [in his Senecan Amble] to locate the line of wit.14 (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
Seen in the light of its close historical relation with scholasticism, the [seemingly inexplicable] Senecan link with scientific method, on one hand, and with Puritan theological procedure, on the other, becomes explicable. (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
It was the distinction of Pope to have perfected the Senecan essay in verse as a precise instrument of dramatic moral dissection. The return to Senecan style in our time has been made possible by means of the technique of the interior landscape in poetry. The great impetus which Newton gave to the elaboration of external landscape lasted until this century. But the Senecal world, concerned with the postures of mind and the figures on the inner psychological stage, was mainly suppressed by Newtonian physics and optics. There was something revolutionary, therefore, about Mr. Eliot’s directing his exegesis to the Senecal techniques of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and his incorporating these via Laforgue and Rimbaud in his early poems. (From Eliot to Seneca)
1953
In rewriting my doctoral dissertation I am going to include a history of Senecanism as the opponent of Ciceronianism. (…) Seneca is the way of gnosis. Cicero of expression. Senecans stress connatural [innate], irrational [not continuous] knowing via the passions. (McLuhan letter to Eric Voegelin)15
1953
You know my theory of the origin of the technique of scholastic philosophy out of Senecan antitheta. (McLuhan letter to Archie Malloch)
1962
Scholasticism, like Senecanism, was directly related to the oral traditions of aphoristic learning. When it is understood how entirely oral [scholastic] thesis defenses were, it is easier to see why the students of such arts would need to have memories furnished with a large repertory of aphorisms and sententiae. This is a factor in the prevalence of Senecan stylistic in later Roman times and for the long association of Senecan style with “scientific method” both in the middle ages and in the Renaissance. For Francis Bacon, as much as for Abelard, “writing in aphorisms” rather than in “methods” was the difference between keen analysis and mere public persuasion. In The Advancement of Learning, which is itself shaped as a public oration, Bacon prefers, on intellectual grounds, the scholastic technique of aphorism to the Ciceronian method of explicit spelling out of information in the form of continuous prose. (…) We find it hard to grasp that the Senecan Francis Bacon was in many respects a schoolman. (Gutenberg Galaxy)
1962
Attention to Senecanism and scholasticism in ancient Rome will help [the reader] to understand how oral tradition in Western literature is transmitted by the Senecan vogue,16 and was gradually obliterated by the printed page in the later eighteenth century. The paradox that Senecanism is both highbrow in medieval scholasticism and lowbrow in the Elizabethan popular drama will be found to be resolved by this oral factor. But for Montaigne, as for Burton, Bacon, and Browne, there was no enigma. Senecan antithesis and “amble” (as described in Senecan Amble by George Williamson) provided the authentic means of scientific observation and experience of mental process. When only the eye is engaged, the multi-levelled gestures and resonances of Senecan oral action are quite impertinent. (Gutenberg Galaxy)
In his use of wheel and axis imagery starting around 1970 (so in the last decade of his life), McLuhan described what he variously called “the very principle of mobility” in and between moments of experience (1972), “the principle of the dynamic at work in a[ny] new kind of situation” (1973), “the basis of human communication” (LoM posthumous).1
A central name for this basic principal in McLuhan’s work is ‘tactility’. It is “the interplay among the senses”, “that steady ratio among the senses which is the norm of human consciousness”, “the bond among the other senses”, the “unconscious inference or mental action [at work] even in the most basic sense experience”, “the very crux of the interplay of the senses”, the “agent of unified perception“, “the world of the interval”, “the space of the significant bounding line, of pressure, and of the interval”.
These snap-shot characterizations of ‘tactility’ are taken from the following citations of McLuhan describing tactility, given in chronological order, with an emphasis on 1960-1961. It was at this time that he appears to have begun stressing its importance:
From Visual To Tactile Experience, 19602
Externalizations of our senses, such as the wheel, the phonetic alphabet, radio and photography, also constituted closed systems which invaded the open systems of our senses with tremendous transforming power. But the TV image is the first technology by which man has outered his haptic, or tactile, powers. It affects, therefore, the balance or ratio among our senses. Since at all times consciousness involves a ratio resulting in the immediate “closure” or completion of pattern, such new “closure” or completion is, in fact, a new posture of mind charged with new preferences and desires, as well as with new patterns of perception. Tactility means not contact of skin but interplay of all senses.
From Visual To Tactile Experience, 1960
For the tactile image involves not so much the touch-of skin as the interplay or contact of sense with sense, of touch with sight, with sound, with movement.
Letter to Serge Chermayeff, December 19, 19603
Is not tactility and the mode of creative process that very interplay of the senses which we call synesthesia?
Inside the Five Sense Sensorium, 1961
Just at the end of the nineteenth century Bernard Berenson had begun a crusade ‘to endow the retinal impression with tactile values‘. There was wide awareness that photography and other technological change had abstracted the retinal impression, as it were, from the rest of the sensorium. Thus, in 1893 Adolf Hildebrand the sculptor published a small book called ‘The Problem of Form. He insisted that true vision must be much imbued with tangibility, and that creative, aesthetic awareness was touching and making. Such was the timeliness of his insistence, that the theme of artistic vision as tangible, tactile, and based on the interplay of the sense[s] began to enjoy acceptance in poetry and painting alike. The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin taught the Hildebrand stress on visual forms as haptic or tangible-tactile — and his pupil Sigfried Giedion embodied it in his Space, Time and Architecture. How little these men foresaw television as the fulfillment of their program! Photography gave separate and, as it were, abstract intensity to the visual, a development which called for and received swift compensating strategy in the arts. Movies and photo-engraving created a further revolution in Western sensibilities, tending to high stress on pictorial quality in all aspects of human association. And I am bold [enough] to say that there has been no respite from this growing pictorial stress till the advent of television. (…) The television image is, in effect, a haptic, tactile, or synesthetic mode of interplay among the senses, a fulfillment on a popular plane of the aesthetic program of Hildebrand, Berenson, Wölfflin, Paul Klee, and Giedion.
Inside the Five Sense Sensorium, 1961
When Hildebrand conducted his campaign for tactility against mere retinal pictorial impression, he was in the centre of a great cultural current which, from Cezanne in painting to Conrad in literature, swept up all into the ‘Heart of Darkness’ or ‘the Africa within’.
Inside the Five Sense Sensorium, 1961
Tactility is less a separate sense than it is the interplay among the senses. When, therefore, I speak of the tactility of the television image, I mean this stepped-up interplay of the senses which the nineteenth century artists and polemicists struggled to foster in an aesthetically starved milieu. That nineteenth century program makes no sense to anybody who fails to understand the peculiar monopoly and separation of visual experience, at the expense of the other senses, which is imposed by print and its industrial, organizational extensions. Television, then, is not part of the nineteenth century art program for the reconquest of synesthesia. Television is rather the overwhelming and technological success of that program after its artistic exponents have retired.
Inside the Five Sense Sensorium, 1961
A cartoon or an abstract painting offers sparse data and demands much of the viewer by way of ‘closure’ or completion and fill-in. The television image, then, demands much participation from the audience compared to movie, radio, or photo. Its two-dimensional, contoured character fosters the tactile interplay of the senses which painters since Cezanne had stressed as needful. And this sculptural, contoured image with its tactile stress is, in the case of the television medium, given a scope and extent of vulgarization unknown even to movie, photo or newspaper.
Inside the Five Sense Sensorium, 1961
Our technical media, since writing and printing, are extensions of our senses. The latest such extension, television, I am suggesting, is an extension, not just of sight and sound, but of that very synesthesia which the artists of the past centuries have stressed as accessible via the tangible-tactile values of the new vision. Television is not just sight and sound, but tangibility in its visual, contoured, sculptural mode.
Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation, 1961
The senses never operate in isolation. If one sense is suppressed, the other senses compensate in various ways in order to maintain that steady ratio among the senses which is the norm of human consciousness. If one sense is isolated by stress or intensity we are in the state of hypnosis at once. Pushed a bit further, the isolation of sense leads swiftly to insanity (…) the tactile sense (…) appears to be the bond among the other senses.
Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation, 1961
The TV image is the first technology to project or externalize our tactile sense. The externalizing of our tactility has brought great change in the ratios between sight and sound. Sight and sound had reached some degrees of stability in relation to one another, thanks to the evenly divided empires of radio and film, of press and photography. The sudden project[ion] of touch itself changed everything. The human senses were suddenly given an altogether new diet, and a new ratio or proportion among our senses was set up as soon as TV began.
Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation, 1961
tactility — or what the psychologists call “closure”.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
Gombrich records the stages of nineteenth-century discussion and analysis of “sense data” leading to the Helmholtz case for “unconscious inference” or mental action even in the most basic sense experience. “Tactility” or interplay among all the senses was felt to be the very mode of this “inference”.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
An oral manuscript culture had no fear of tactility, the very crux of the interplay of the senses.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
It was not till the pre-Raphaelites and Hopkins that a deliberate campaign for Saxon tactile values in language was to begin in English. Yet tactility is the mode of interplay and of being rather than of separation and of lineal sequence.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
This interplay or synesthesia is a kind of tactility such as Blake sought in the bounding line of sculptural form and in engraving. (…) Blake, at least, had understood the Berkeleyan critique [of vision] and had restored tactility to its prime role as agent of unified perception.
Humpty Dumpty, Automation and TV, 1962
For tactility is not so much the isolated sense of touch as it is the interplay of all the senses.
Understanding Media, 1964
The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object.4
Understanding Media, 1964
tactile participation (…) is sex.
McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, 1965
Tactility is directly related to Thomism and St. Thomas. It is explicitly the inclusive circle of the sense in interplay.
Through the Vanishing Point, 1968
tactility includes all the senses as white light incorporates all colors.
Include Me Out: Reversal Of Overheated Image, 1968
tactile space is the space of the interval, the icon, the contour.
Counterblast, 1969
Tactility is not a sense but an interplay of all senses.
The Hardware/Software Mergers, 1969
The electric world is the world of discontinuity, the world of resonating intervals, the world of involvement, the world of touch. Tactility is the world of interval. When you touch something, you do not create a connection; you create a space between you and it. It echoes, there’s the base of musical “beat.” That is ‘where it’s at’, this is the interface of change resulting from interval. The “missing link” was the greatest discovery of the 19th Century. But it was not missing at all ; it was an interface; it was where the new evolution began.
The Hardware/Software Mergers, 1969
The TV image is not visual at all (…) there are no connections in it. It is all iconoscope or iconic action of the scanning finger. The TV image resembles the painting technique developed by Seurat around the 1880’s. It was pointillism: a mesh of luminous dots creating a tactile bounding line.
Discontinuity and Communication in Literature, 1970
The double plot structure (…) presents no connection or continuity, but only an interface or continuous parallel between two actions. This interface is tactility itself, the metamorphic moment of the resonant interval such as occurs between the wheel and the axle.
Last Look at the Tube, 1978
It was the symbolists who had stressed the character of the discontinuous as the key to tactility and involvement: their structures were never continuous or connected statements so much as suggestive juxtapositions. As Mallarmé put it: “To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.” The simultaneous world of electric information is always lacking in visual connectedness and always structured by resonant intervals. The resonant interval, as Heisenberg explains, is the world of touch, so that acoustic space is simultaneously tactile.
Laws of Media, posthumous
each configuration of senses creates a unique form of space — figure and ground are in dynamic equilibrium, each exerting pressure on the other across the interval separating them. Intervals, therefore, are resonant and not static. (…) Tactility is the space of the significant bounding line, of pressure, and of the interval.5
McLuhan occasionally used the term ‘membrane’ in his later work:
1962
People of literary and critical bias find the shrill vehemence of de Chardin as disconcerting as his uncritical enthusiasm for the cosmic membrane that has been snapped round the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses. (GG 32)
1962
Electricity has wrapped the planet in a single cohesive field or membrane that is organic rather than mechanical in nature. (The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion)
All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure. (Notes on Burroughs)
1972
Government had begun in a modest way as the figure of the helmsman. The ship represented the entire human community. Today, the rudder has become much larger than the ship. The number of helmsmen are coextensive with the community. (…) The stretching of the bounds of government has coincided with the contraction of the social membrane. (TT, 217)
1973
Finnegans Wake is very much concerned with the resonance in the ‘tribal membrane‘ and the drama among the instincts and the artifacts of language and technology, leading to the awareness of the electric role in ‘waking’ or retrieving the old tribal man. (‘The Implications of Cultural Uniformity’, 1973)1
TV in the classroom means that the instructors presented will have a classroom of huge scope. (…) Theoretically one teacher might do all the arithmetic teaching for grade 6 for the whole country. In this way some teachers could become national figures as much as current celebrities of stage and screen. (…) TV could, then, in one sense take the teacher out of the classroom into a larger world. (Classroom TV, 1956)1
Although it is universally accepted that the idea of making McLuhan famous stemmed from San Francisco advertising and public relations gurus, Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen, in 1965, in fact McLuhan had precisely defined the ‘Kim Kardashian’ process already in 1962:2
In the mechanical age a man was famous for having done something. Today he is famous for being well known. In an age of information movement, fame is literally being known for being well known. The Graphic Revolution, by which a private image can be showered on the world overnight, scrambles and confuses all pre-electric categories of fame and greatness. But it also increases the demand for big names and big images. Let us keep in mind that the new reality is in the image and not [anything] behind it. (…) With photography and electronics it became possible to bypass the consumer phase in fame.3 One could simply become famous or celebrated for being famous or celebrated, without going through the tedious process of [actually doing something].4 It was now possible to shift the commodity fame from the consumer to the producer phase. Anybody or anything can now be made famous.5 (The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion, 1962)6
McLuhan doubtless had a better idea of this process than Gossage and Feigen, particularly as regards his own ideas and goals. Indeed, it seems far more likely, instead of them promoting him for some vague purpose of theirs, that he used their skills for a precise purpose of his.
Decades before this, in a letter to Clement McNaspy, S.J., who had been one of his students at St Louis University, McLuhan wrote of his “increasing awareness”
of the ease with which Catholics can penetrate and dominate secular concerns — thanks to an emotional and spiritual economy denied to the confused secular mind. (Letters, 180)
This was from the turn of the year, 1945/1946, twenty years before McLuhan’s San Francisco ‘take-off’. One of his central ideas from early on was that contemporary society had no notion of its own nature and destiny. Its “emotional and spiritual economy” was witless. This emptiness at its core robbed it of direction and persistence even in practical matters.
In his 1967 interview with with Gerald Stearn, he put his notion of taking on the media, in the senses of taking it on as a challenge, taking it on in battle and taking it on as a put-on, as follows:
I am not in awe of media or their contents. For example: When you talk back to ads as I did in The Mechanical Bride, they become your servants. Since you cannot survive the effects of media if you huddle or hide, you must rush out and kick them in the guts — give them what for — right in the midriff. And they respond very well to this treatment. Media, after all, are only extensions of ourselves. The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority. If one lacked this sense of superiority — this detachment — it would be quite impossible to write about them. It would be like an octopus attacking the great pyramids.7
Perhaps Gossage and Feigen were McLuhan’s means of ‘taking off’ by ‘taking on’ the media?
In 1957 McLuhan had not yet formulated that “the medium is the message”. He would do so the next year and the main impetus in this direction from his previous work was supplied by the notion of a variable dynamic relation between centre and margin. His description of this developing idea in ‘Coleridge as Artist’1 from that year of 1957 represents a kind of threshold to his later work.2
Indeed, as will be seen, everything depends on the question of the ‘threshold’ to human experience. How is it initiated such that a collective investigation can be initiated into it in turn?
As broached in Centre and margin overview, McLuhan’s attention to centre-margin relations as the collective focus for the investigation of human consciousness and its life-worlds had necessarily first of all to encounter the question of its own possibility. Was it not so entangled in endless assumption that it necessarily led, as Innis feared, into solipsism?3 Where the examination of assumption always had assumption(s) of its own? And so on in infinite regress?
McLuhan’s answer to this question reached back to his studies beginning around 1950 into the “interior landscape”. There he had repeatedly detailed the “aesthetic moment” of “arrest” and its exploration in poetry and literature and, indeed, painting since the eighteenth century — culminating 300 years later in Joyce. Now in 1957 he proposed that this “moment in and out of time” (as Eliot has it in ‘The Dry Salvages’ in Four Quartets) was ‘before’ experience in such wise as to give “scientific basis” for the investigation of experience even when that experience were “utterly alien to our own”.4
The basic idea which was not yet fully developed in McLuhan’s mind (and would not be until early in 1960)5 was that all experience whatsoever is mediated (“the medium is the message”) and that this (so to say) natural mediation6 not only does not lead into a solipsistic cul-de-sac, but rather, properly considered,7 leads into the sort of open collective investigation that has propelled the physical sciences for centuries now.
‘Coleridge as Artist’ will be examined in detail in this and in a series of following posts. Commentary is supplied in footnotes. Bold and italics have been added to emphasize passages of particular importance.
Poe put crime detection on a scientific basis by bringing into play the poetic process of retracing the stages of human apprehension.8 It is likewise the procedure of Wordsworth’s Prelude [begun in 1798] and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy [1759-1767]. And this process of arrest and retracing (…)9 provides the very technique of empathy10 which permits intimate insight into the processes and impulses behind [experiential] products utterly alien to our own immediate experience.11 In fact, the Coleridgean awareness of the modes of the imagination as producer12 represents an enormous extension of the bonds of human sympathy and understanding, socially and historically. Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth On the Night After His Recitation of a Poem On the Growth of An Individual Mind: “The truly Great/Have all one age, and from one visible space/Shed influence!” This has more than a neo-Platonic doctrinal interest at the present time when the instantaneity of communication between all parts of the world has brought into involuntary juxtaposition the whole diversity of human cultures. What century is it today in Peking or Jerusalem or Moscow? Yet the very speed of communication between these entities so discontinuous in space, time, and experience makes for a simultaneity in which lineal history is abolished by becoming present.13 Coleridge, a myriad-minded man living in a most tumultuous age (…) was forced to invent a great deal of conceptual equipment which is indispensable to an intellectual of today.
Shortly thereafter in the ‘Coleridge’ essay:
Writing in Shelley and the Thought of His Time [1947], Joseph Barrell (…) continues: “The Greek way, which is Shelley’s way and on the whole the Western way,14 is to take the reader or listener, by the hand and lead him step by step from the old position to the new position. It seeks to explain and to demonstrate. Its logic might be described as linear and transitional. (…) The Oriental way is different. Its logic might be described not as linear but as radial. The recurring statements do not progress, but return to their center as the spokes of a wheel to their hub.”15 The dichotomy between linear and radial expression is not really as radical as might appear,16 but it has in such terms as “continuous” versus “discontinuous” or “statement” versus “suggestion” divided the allegiance of poets, critics, and readers from the time of Coleridge to the present. It certainly had much to do with the intellectual divergence between Coleridge and Wordsworth, between Browning and Tennyson, and between Pound and Eliot.17 In general, it seems to be felt that the Greek way of continuous transition in a poem makes for a habitable world of homely realities, whereas the Oriental way is inhuman in its austere demands of unflagging and unremitting intensity of contemplation and participation.18 In one case the poet leads us through the labyrinth of his work, and in the other we are left bewildered to multiply variety in an illusory world of mirrors. In actual fact the quarrel is pointless so far as art goes since both kinds are inevitably dynamic, following the stages of cognition, which are equally the base of religious ritual and [all] human creation.
McLuhan was familiar with the use of a variable center-margin relation in the work of Harold Innis. There it is used primarily as a way of looking at history1 and economics2. The later Innis came in addition to correlate center-margin dynamics with communication3 and — very importantly! — with time.4
But Innis was also unhappily familiar with the feedback of this notion on research and the individual researcher. If a centre-margin relation were implicated in all human experience, how could some variety of it not be assumed in any and all research? And, in an attempt to defend that assumption, or, at least, to ameliorate its acceptance, how could it itself be studied absent further assumption? Do we not always come too late to do so? How bend back to study what has always been deployed already? For Innis this knot implied a “solipsism” from which he did not see an exit for the researcher or, indeed, for “western civilization” at large.5
In the latter 1950s McLuhan began to see that specification of the center-margin relation might allow the sort of collective investigation into human experience that was necessary for human survival in an age of nuclear weapons — and this especially when “the present time [of] the instantaneity of communication between all parts of the world has brought into involuntary juxtaposition the whole diversity of human cultures”.6 This implied investigation into the possibility beyond solipsism of such study (which McLuhan had called the missing “esthetic” dimension in Innis’ work even in his 1951 letter to Innis himself) and then, on the basis of that newly specified possibility, the detailed deployment of the center-margin relation in analysis.
In the period 1957-1962 McLuhan particularly investigated the centre-margin relation in relation to the possibilities of human experience in the following sequence of writings:
CM 1 – Coleridge as Artist, 19577
CM 2 – Letters from 19608
CM 3 – Humanities in the Electronic Age, 19619
CM 4 – Inside the Five Sense Sensorium, 196110
CM 5 – The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion, 196211
Each of these will be examined in detail in posts to follow.
As retaled by Plato in the Phaedrus,1 the Egyptians attributed the invention of writing to Thoth:
Writing effected the transformation of sound into sight which may have been considered analogous to the transformations of the moon, Greek σελήνη.2 And it may have been attributed to Thoth for just this reason, since he was first of all the god of the moon. Hence the moon icon that represented Thoth — or that he represented! — and that was regularly depicted above him. Four or five millennia later, selenium, from σελήνη, would be used to effect the reverse process of sight into sound.
The transformations of the moon are not linear. They do not lead away into an undefined distance. Instead they always lead back in a circular process to the same. So with writing. It is different from spoken language in multiple ways and yet it points back to the same. So again with the sounds of the optophone. In all three cases, a linear process expresses in a mirrored way an underlying possibility of identity in difference. Writing, for example, would not work unless it were possible to express the same (oral language) in something that is utterly different (visual figures).
A further icon of Thoth was the wadjet eye:
It is remarkable that the wadjet image links the eye to the labyrinth of the ear. In paintings the lesser circle in the bottom right of this stone engraving was rendered as a spiral.
The implication was not only that the eye leads to the labyrinth of the ear, but also that labyrinth of the ear leads back to the eye — revealing that it, too, is a labyrinth. The greater circle of the stone engraving is the eye’s pupil. Perhaps it appears as a solid only because its labyrinthine rings are so many and so tightly packed together?
Millennia apart, the translations of sound to sight and then of sight to sound were intimately linked with the moon. The curve linking the twin labyrinths of the eye and the ear in the stone engraving might be taken to represent, for both these translations, in Egypt and England, 5000 years apart, the moon’s special power of metamorphosis. And just as much, perhaps, between our metamorphoses between body and mind, subject and object, word and thing, man and woman, old and young — and so on. Eye and ear.
This shared underlying structure, this underlying structure of sharing, this sensus communis, allows, or enforces, conversion between the experience of the different senses such that it is only by abstraction that we speak in terms of the visual, aural or tactile. Perception itself, via any of the senses, is a multifold labyrinth both in the receptive interpretation of its experience and in the combination of the senses contributing to it.
Now if the source of this transformative power of the moon is to be investigated, the answer must be sought in the fact that it is a superlative mirror of the power that is before it (in all the senses of ‘before’). Indeed, the moon has fascinated humans as long as the species has existed on the planet: a riddle that can be guessed at forever. And here is Fournier D’Alba on selenium:
if anyone were to strike a match on the Moon, we could discover the fact on Earth by means of selenium, even without a telescope. And that feat could be accomplished in one second!3
This power of re-flection was portrayed by the Egyptians with Thoth in that his wadjet eye was the mirror image of Ra’s, the sun god’s, wadjet eye:
Just as the moon derives its light from the Sun, and just as Thoth’s eye is the derivative image of the Sun’s eye, so is his power as a magician and scribe a moon-like reflection of that fundamental power of transformation and re-presentation ‘before’ it — that of the Sun, Being itself.
Being itself presents itself, outers itself, utters itself4 — in and to beings. The moon re-represents this originating ex-pression, not by retaining the light it receives only as an im-pression, but by expressing it, reflecting it, in turn. Thoth’s invention of writing turning sound into sight, and Fournier D’Alba’s optophone invention converting writing back into sound, further express in their turn this uttering that is, at once, a going forth and a circling back.
Being does not lose itself in outering itself. Instead its οδός άνω κάτω process as ex-pression gives its im-pression to all beings — while maintaining itself without loss . It is this fundamental dynamic that both enabled and in turn was expressed by the inventions writing and of the optophone. Like the moon, both were a reflection of a power before them that they were able to reflect through the further reflection of written or musical signs to an underlying de-signation.
Now ‘flect’ is already bent as ‘flex’. So ‘re-flect’ is a double bending. This double bending is the signature of Being. It is best re-flected, turn and turn about, re-flected squared, by the moon.
The frontpiece of E. E. Fournier D’Albe’s 1924 The Moon-Element: An Introduction to the Wonders of Selenium is a picture of him, on the left, and the first iteration of the optophone in 1912:
In those years around 1912 Fournier D’Albe (1868-1933) was working in Oliver Lodge’s laboratory in Birmingham. He repeatedly noted the interest and support of Lodge in his research and, indeed, there is a notable influence of Lodge in The Moon-Element itself. Namely, Fournier D’Albe combines Lodge’s notion of an all-conveying medium of ether with the possibility of the transformation or metamorphosis of the human senses.
In the year 1910 the Author was appointed Assistant-Lecturer in Physics in the University of Birmingham. (…) With the active encouragement of the [physics] Professor1 as well as the Principal of the University (Sir Oliver Lodge)2, the Author started a research [program] on the properties of selenium (…) He [the Author] particularly investigated the manner in which selenium violates Ohm’s law…3
The element selenium (from Greek σελήνη, moon, discovered 1817) has its name due to its perceived relation to tellurium (from Latin tellus, earth, discovered 1782). Strangely, as set out by Fournier D’Albe, it was discovered only much later (in 1873) that selenium, like the moon, has a marked receptivity to light. And this, in the case of selenium, even when the light source is at a fantastic distance from it.
the Moon-element is unsurpassed in its function of producing [variable] electric currents from [variable] light. It is the supreme bridge between [these] two of the most vital forms of energy.4
This gave Fournier D’Albe the notion of
utilisation of the action of light on selenium for the purpose of recording star transits. He [the Author] succeeded in making Aldebaran [located at 65 light years from Earth!], a first-magnitude star,5 ring a bell in its passage across the meridian.6 (…) The fact that light could be made to ring a bell [in this way] showed conclusively that in one respect, at least, the ear could be substituted for the eye.7
The twin actions at stake here, the conversion of light to sound and the implicated conversion to eyesight to ear-hearing could both be considered as enabled by the medium of Lodge’s “ether”:
The influences [like light or magnetism] thus exerted “across space” (…) irresistibly suggest that there must be a medium through which they are propagated, a medium whose properties determine that speed of propagation. This hypothetical medium is called [notably by Lodge.] “the ether of space”. Every movement of an electric charge, whether it consists of electrons, protons, larger ions, or charged bodies, sets up some sort of “strain” in the ether, which is propagated in all directions with the speed of light.8
It is just as if every electron were connected with every other by invisible elastic fibres, so that none of them could start in any direction without the help of all the rest.9
Fournier D’Albe then got the idea got the idea that an analogous set up might allow the blind to read through the selenium enabled conversion of reflected light from a page of print into musical tones.
our optical resources, which for centuries have developed along the same grooves, are capable of entirely new departures.10
Sight had been extended since Galileo through analog means or “grooves” by devices that sharpened focus or gathered more light. Now Fournier D’Albe was suggesting a digital means of extension through conversion. Such a revolution would soon overtake everything from wristwatches on up.
Last year (1912) I described and exhibited at the London Optical Convention an apparatus for converting light into sound by means of electrical effects, and proposed the name ‘optophone’ for such an instrument, as its primary object is not to transmit sound by means of light (photophone)11 but to ‘see’ by means of sound.12
This was to “read by the ear”.13 “The form of each letter causes it to sing its own little tune.”14
Since the number of books (not to speak of newspapers, magazines, journals, invoices, etc) in print is enormously greater than these in brail, the potential benefit to the blind was very great.
We shall have “converted light into sound” through the medium of an electric current. That this “conversion” is symbolical rather than actual is evident when we consider the enormous disproportion of sound-waves and light-waves. Sound-waves are measured in feet, and are represented by the lengths of organ pipes. Light-waves are from forty thousand to seventy thousand to the inch, according to their colour.15
By “symbolical” Fournier D’Albe meant that sound and light were not continuous on each other as physical phenomena. They were not analog. Instead they were definitively discrete16 and yet were convertible, presumably via the fundamental enabling action of “the ether of space”.17
Today we know the name of this “space” or pervading power: digitality.
The optophone was not a figure of Joyce’s creative imagination — Tis optophone which ontophanes (FW 13:15) — but a real instrument described in a Royal Society notice in 1914 as follows:
On a type-reading optophone
E. E. Fournier D’Albe
Communicated1 by Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S.2
The production of sounds directly or indirectly due to the incidence of light is the general function of instruments of the type of Graham Bell’s “photophone.” An instrument designed to solve the more special problem of substituting the sense of hearing for the sense of sight is more appropriately termed an “optophone.” Having concerned myself for a number of years with this special problem (…) an instrument has resulted which should, with some practice, enable totally blind persons to read ordinary books and newspapers through the sense of hearing. (…) I wish to thank (…) especially Sir Oliver Lodge for the kind interest he has taken in the whole investigation.3
A short description of a somewhat later iteration of the optophone is given in the Genetic Joyce online journal:
The apparatus consisted of a vertical arrangement of five light sources and detectors that was scanned across printed characters, each detector corresponding to a note on the musical stave with the amplitude indicating the amount of reflected light. In this way a blind person could interpret the tone as a letter and piece together words.
For McLuhan the “optophone principle”, the power of translation of one sense into another — in human beings and now in machines — pointed backwards to his study of ‘the common sense’ with Bernard Muller-Thym when they both were teaching at St Louis University. In 1940 Muller-Thym published ‘Common Sense, Perfection of the Order of Pure Sensibility’ which focused particularly on the notion of ‘common sense’ in Aristotle and Thomas.4 And behind that were McLuhan’s sessions at Cambridge in the middle 1930s with Arthur Quiller-Couch, the doyen of the English school, on Aristotle’s Poetics.5 At the same time it pointed forwards to “the medium is the message” where the medium is the fulcrum or crossroads of the senses as the generator of experiential life-worlds: Tis optophone which ontophanes.
Human history had come to a decisive juncture (and not only for humans, but for all the beings unhappily sharing the biosphere with humans). By outering the power of “the common sense”, but doing so only in the physical sciences and not at the same time also in the social sciences, humankind had created a danger that was potentially suicidal for itself and murderous for all its fellow species. This was the background to McLuhan working on a “survival strategy” and the key to this strategy was guessed in 1954 with the “opto( )phone principle”.6
At the beginning of his 1954 essay ‘New Media as Political Forms’ (Explorations 3), written six months or more before the Culture and Technology seminar stumbled on the notion of acoustic space,1 McLuhan revealed how ready he was for such a discovery:
For the lineal procedure of individual awareness, Joyce, in his last work, substituted an everyday roundabout with intrusions from above and below.2 For those locked in the metallic and rectilinear embrace of the printed page, Joyce appears as a surrealist magician or clown. But his optophone principle (…)3 provides the key for future literary and social education. The optophone is an instrument for turning images into sounds. Surrounded by a vast new imagery, technological man has yet to learn how to interpret this imagery verbally or socially. Until he learns its language it will continue to act on him like the new liquid meat tenderizers.4
In advance of ‘acoustic space’, this was already to suggest that we are “surrounded by a vast new imagery” of sound. Here in embryo was (a) McLuhan’s turn from literary works to interior and exterior environments (b) as specified by their dominating sense within the range of the sensorium. The rest of his life would be spent attempting to investigate into, and communicate about, this insight.
Furthermore, the new surround or environment, specifically of sound (dual genitive!) was translated from a previous surround of visual images (dual genitive!). Visual images, too, had once created “a vast new imagery”, one that began with the alphabet — the translation of sounds into visual letters — but received its decisive impetus from Gutenberg — the translation of letters into print. Now that “imagery” of print was to be displaced, turn and turn about, by a renewed surround of sound — just as the optophone apparatus translated visual images into auditory sounds.5
The “optophone principle” captures in a single phrase McLuhan’s reading of Joyce and the dynamic basis of his own life’s work. ‘Opto’ as eye/sight and ‘phone’ as sound/ear are correlated over a range of ratios between the two — a range whose one extreme is the overwhelming emphasis on the eye relative to the ear, while the other extreme is the overwhelming emphasis on the ear relative to the eye. In the middle of the range, the two are in relative harmony.
The great question concerns the middle — the middle of the range, on the one hand, and, on the other, the changing middle of the eye/ear ratios constituting the extensive range of their relative emphases and valorizations. Not surprisingly, it is only from the middle of the range, where eye/ear are equally valorized, that the changing middle between the two over their range may be observed and investigated. Absent such a situation in the mean,6 hence assuming a position on one of the two sides of the range of sensory ratios, the virtues of the other side can never be appreciated. Indeed, such an inability to appreciate (in all its senses) is exactly what it means to be on one of the sides of the range of ratios.
McLuhan called this dynamic middle or mean or medium — ‘tactility‘:
tactility is not so much the isolated sense of touch as it is the interplay of all the senses. (Humpty Dumpty, Automation and TV, 1962)7
Tactility may be imagined as a kind of elastic band, fixed at its middle (Pound’s “unwobbling pivot”) that can be stretched in one direction or the other. This dynamic band of tactility (dual genitive!) as the mean governs all the values the two sides of the band, the visual and the aural, can take — relative to one another. “The medium is the message”.
When the band is relaxed, its ends or poles are close together and have a kind of natural repose or poise. Stretched in one direction, the poles are pulled apart in an action that distorts that natural repose but cannot overwhelm it. So with the other direction, in a mirrored way. The relation of the two sides of the band is dynamic, is not constant, but the fact of some relation (dual genitive!) is a constant — or, rather, relationship itself is the constant. “The ‘meaning of meaning’ is relationship.” (Take Today, 3)
Among other terms McLuhan used for this dynamic middle are ‘the gap’, “the interval”, ‘no-man’s land’ and “membrane”.8 This elastic structure must therefore be further imagined as an invisible, inaudible and intangible power like magnetism/electricity/gravity in which poles are dynamically related to each other by attraction and repulsion, by contesting centrifugal and centripetal forces.
Now the range of these ratios is principial, it is first in multiple senses, the most important of which is that it defines the possible elements, or elementary possibilities, of human experience. That is, human experience is built from these elementary possibilities similarly, but not identically, to the way in which physical materials are built from the range of elements in Mendeleev’s table. (It is highly important to note, however, that different sciences focus on different levels of combinations of elements. Thus organic chemistry, for example, of course deals with the chemical elements. But it does so as these are ‘already’ combined into complex compounds. Similarly with genetics and medicine and all the other physical sciences except for basic chemistry. Now in the humanities it has generally been assumed that explanation should or must be, so to say, atomic. But this is not necessarily the case and the history of failure in the area suggests that it is probably not the case. Indeed, why should experiential structures be any less complicated than those of, say, proteins?)
It may therefore be suggested that McLuhan’s life-goal was to specify in an exoteric manner (= via open ongoing investigation) what he found already described esoterically in Finnegans Wake: namely, the “octophone principle” as a dynamic generator — or medium — of environments. Of experiential life-worlds.
Humans somehow have, or are, this principle. Tis Optophone Which Ontophanes. The shining forth (phanes) of realities (onto) ‘takes place’ via the “optophone principle“. This can be termed the principle of the energizing ’tis’ — the principle of the dynamic coming forth by day of the ‘it is’.
The heart of the matter was, and is, to ask after the axis of such transformations between realities — plural — and of its operation. What is the working, or phenomenology, of the repressed gap of the opto( )phone9 principle (as a dual genitive)? McLuhan’s answer in 1958: The medium is the message.
All this fell into place for McLuhan in the late 1950s. But the first steps he took in this direction were made at the start of the decade. A decisive moment came with the uncovering of “acoustic space” as differentiated from “visual space” in the Culture and Technology seminar in late 1954. But earlier that year McLuhan had already guessed the riddle with his announcement from Joyce of the “opto( )phone principle” governing our surrounds.
The debts of Marshall McLuhan to Harold Innis were many and are generally not well known. One of the more obscure ones must be a reference in Empire and Communications to Illusion and Reality (1937) by Christopher Caudwell (pseudonym of Christopher St John Sprigg). As was not unusual for McLuhan, he followed up Innis’ reference by reading Illusion and Reality and referenced it himself in ‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’ (Explorations 2, 1954).
At least three things were highly important for McLuhan in Caudwell. First he reinforced the idea McLuhan was developing, perhaps especially from Joyce, that ‘language itself‘ is the decisive ground of experience (such that media had to be understood as languages). These are the first lines of Illusion and Reality:
This is a book not only about poetry but also about the sources of poetry. Poetry is written in language and therefore it is a book about the sources of languages. Language is a social product, the instrument whereby men communicate and persuade each other; thus the study of poetry’s sources cannot be separated from the study of society.
Compare McLuhan in the same essay in which Caudwell is mentioned:
There has been very little discussion of any of these questions, thanks to the gratuitous assumption that communication is a matter of transmission of information, message or idea. This assumption blinds people to the aspect of communication as participation in a common situation. And it leads to ignoring the form of communication as the basic (…)1 situation which is more significant than the information or idea ‘transmitted’. (…) The well-established view of culture which assumes that it filters down from élites to popular levels will not stand up for a moment to the facts of linguistic history and formation. Yet language is the great collective work (…)2 transcending all individual works. Today this naive content-view of culture prevents us from directing serious critical attention to the media, old and new, as art forms. It is a charley horse inhibiting all education in a technological society. (‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’)
Secondly, the citation from Caudwell reads as follows:
There is a poetic instant and as time vanishes, space enters; the horizon expands and becomes boundless.
That time and space might be related inversely (“as time vanishes, space enters”) became an increasingly important idea for McLuhan.3 Here Caudwell helped along what McLuhan already had from Innis. As well, the notion of the spatial horizon expanding and becoming boundless would come to serve McLuhan as a definition of Gutenbergian perspective and hence of the Gutenberg galaxy itself.
Thirdly, Caudwell’s book was the first of a whole series read by McLuhan in the course of the 1950s dealing with ‘illusion and reality’. Ernst Gombrich’s Art and illusion was probably the most important of these, but all contributed to his notion of the difference between making and matching. If ‘matching’ were not even a possible goal on account of presence of illusion in all perception, what was the status of ‘making’? Did making produce only illusion? Or were making and truth somehow correlate despite an inevitable absence of matching? And were even truth and illusion somehow correlate themselves for ineluctably finite beings — who can yet figure things out?4
As recorded in the published correspondence between Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate, McLuhan visited Brooks in Baton Rouge and Tate and in Sewanee in 1945.1 In a postscript to a June 27, 1945 letter to Allen Tate, Brooks wrote: “Marshall McLuhan has written of seeing you and the pleasant time that he had at Sewanee. We were delighted with him here.” (124) It was during this visit with Brooks at LSU that McLuhan met Eric Voegelin and others in Voegelin’s circle like Robert Heilman (to whom along with Voegelin McLuhan often sent greetings through Brooks). If Wilmoore Kendall was not away from Baton Rouge then, McLuhan would surely have met him at the same time. The two had long known of each other through their mutual friend, Felix Giovanelli.
Prior to this visit, Brooks and McLuhan had gradually become close friends in the early 1940s through two channels.
In the first place, through his reading of G.K. Chesterton McLuhan had been an ardent distributist2 since his undergraduate and MA years at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. When he won a scholarship to Cambridge and studied there from 1934 to 1936, his interest in distributism only grew through friends he made in the movement there and through the link he identified with it in the work of F.R.Leavis, a Cambridge don and editor of the influential journal of English literature, Scrutiny. While at Cambridge, McLuhan attended a distributist dinner in London with Chesterton himself in attendance, and wrote a letter that appeared in G.K.’s Weekly, the movement’s unofficial organ. McLuhan published his first academic article, ‘G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ early in 1936 while he was still in the UK, and then, in the spring of 1937 during his first part-time teaching job for one year at the University of Wisconsin, he followed Chesterton in converting to Catholicism. Distributism was clearly a matter of fundamental importance to him.
When McLuhan obtained his first fulltime teaching position at St Louis University in the fall of 1937, one of his colleagues there was John Rawe, S.J., the head of the American branch of the distributist movement. The year before, in 1936, a convention had been held in Nashville where the distributists led by Rawe had met with the southern agrarians, including John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks. The express purpose of the convention had been to explore the possibility of forming a united front between the two movements. Although the convention decided in favor of the idea, it did not succeed, perhaps in good part on account of the serious (ultimately fatal) illness Rawe contracted around 1940. However, a loose association had been identified between distributist/agrarian social policy and the ‘new criticism’ group in literature. Since this association had already been formed in McLuhan’s mind in England with his combined allegiances to Chesterton and Leavis, it was natural for him to fall in with the parallel American manifestation and particularly with Brooks, whose interest in the history of criticism was close to his own. 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.”
In the second place, one of McLuhan’s closest friends at SLU was Felix Giovanelli who began to teach in the Romance Language department there in 1940 after obtaining his PhD from the University of Illinois. A good friend of Giovanelli in grad school at Illinois had been Wilmoore Kendall.3
While the interests of the agrarians overlapped with McLuhan’s in multiple ways, establishing personal relationships with them was another matter. It is highly probable that the first personal contact between McLuhan and the great cohort of minds then at LSU (Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren and Bob Heilman in the English department, along with Voegelin and Kendall in political science) came about through the mediation of Giovanelli and Kendall. Perhaps the two arranged a meeting between McLuhan and Brooks at some English association meeting? In any case, starting around 1943, McLuhan and Brooks became lifelong friends and frequent correspondents.
Now when McLuhan met Voegelin in 1945, this was the third time in short succession he had met great European scholars who would have decisive influence in his career.4 In 1943 McLuhan had met, separately, Wyndham Lewis and Sigfried Giedion and his relationship with them would in both cases last until their deaths in 1957 and 1968 respectively.5
In the context of the 1953 exchange with Voegelin, McLuhan’s association with Giedion was particularly important. Giedion’s 1941 Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition was based on lectures he gave at Harvard in 1938 and is still in print today. In his introduction to the first edition, Giedion brilliantly observed :
Unity, for us, will have to come about through the unintended parallelisms in methods that are springing up in the specialized sciences and the equally specialized arts. There are indications that we are nearing a spontaneously established harmony of emotional and intellectual activities. In both contemporary science and contemporary art it is possible to detect elements of the general pattern which our culture will embody. The situation is a curious one: our culture is like an orchestra. where the instruments lie ready tuned. but where every musician is cut off from his fellows by a soundproof wall. It is impossible to foretell the events that will have to come before these barriers are broken down. The only service the historian can perform is to point out this situation, to bring it into consciousness.
Giedion’s answer to this problem of communicating orchestral harmony, proposed in the midst of a world war that would culminate in the use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations, was given in the title of an essay which he published in a series of different journals between 1942 and 1944: ‘A Faculty of Interrelations’.6 This was an answer which functioned on a series of theoretical and practical levels at once. On a theoretical level, “the unintended parallelisms in methods that are springing up in the specialized sciences and the equally specialized arts” were based on dynamics. That is, they were based on the Aristotelian explication of Plato’s forms as dynamic possibilities that unfold in the multifold shapes of actuality. The implication was that there is ‘a faculty of interrelations’ common to all physical nature and to human beings (though with complications in the latter that are absent in the former) between possibility and actuality and that it is this ‘faculty’ that allows for, and is the key to, the intelligibility of all actual forms.
In 1927 in his introduction to Sein und Zeit Heidegger had stated that phenomenology must begin with the principle that “higher than actuality stands possibility”. The year before, Born and Heisenberg had seen that the mathematics of quantum mechanics were graphs of possibilities. For decades before that, Freud and Jung had been reading psychopathologies as expressions of underlying unconscious possibilities. And for decades before that, in turn, painters, musicians and poets had been probing the ‘abstract’ parameters of their arts as possibilities that were manifested in some fashion in every actual work (so, eg, color and form in art, scale and rhythm in music). In science, the interrelation between the chemical elements and their expression in physical materials particularly exemplified such dynamics. Today, genetics is grounded in an analogous understanding of the role of DNA.
A faculty of dynamic interaction between possibility and actuality was the “general pattern” that had already “tuned” modern society — but only in chaotic fashion where the various disciplines based on it did not know of their mutual “established harmony” and so were unable to explicate the general possibility of peace which could be formulated on its foundation.
How the required recognition might be brought about lay, in Giedion’s view, in another reading of the phrase, ‘A Faculty of Interrelations’. Namely, a new faculty was needed in universities and research institutes that would be dedicated to this interrelation of possibility and actuality and to the further interrelation grounded in it between the institution’s various other ‘faculties’ (like the arts and sciences). As had been seen at least as far back as Plato, such a general faculty might ground truth in a new way and so provide the basis in society, and between societies, in the δικαιοσύνη (justice, mutual recognition) described in Plato’s Republic.
McLuhan would later state that his meeting with Giedion in St Louis in 1943 was one of the great events in his life. In fact, it is not too much to see the remainder of his career as dedicated to the further explication and communication of Giedion’s “faculty of interrelations” in such guises as ‘culture and technology’, ‘communications and society’, etc.
His first concrete attempt to implement Giedion’s strategy was made with Brooks. In the mid 1940s the University of Chicago attempted to recruit Brooks from LSU and he spent the academic year 1945-46 there as a visiting scholar. By this time McLuhan had already been in contact with UC because Giedion, immediately after their meeting in 1943, had written to his friend John Nef, a close lieutenant of Robert Hutchins and one of the founders of the UC Committee on Social Thought (after whom it is now named), to recommend McLuhan for Chicago.7
The result had been some correspondence between McLuhan and UC, including with Chancellor Hutchins, and the submission of some of McLuhan’s papers for review there. But the result was negative, apparently because McLuhan’s Catholicism, on the one hand, and his ‘the academy is full of idiots’ attitude, on the other, somehow did not sit well with the overwhelmingly secular academics there. No doubt this was especially the case when McLuhan’s scorn extended to the Great Books program which was intended, at least, to address the very oblivion of principles that concerned Giedion and McLuhan. Its proponents, like Mortimer Adler, might have been thought to be natural allies of McLuhan’s ideas and potentially also of McLuhan himself. But he had been a sharp critic of Adler for years and apparently found it impossible to adjust his course for strategic purpose.
Brooks’ presence at UC as a prized recruit apparently gave McLuhan a second chance there two years later. Brooks set up a meeting between McLuhan and Chancellor Hutchins in 1946. Now McLuhan’s aim was no longer the seemingly hopeless one of him joining the UC faculty (particularly when Brooks had decided not to accept the offer to remain there). Instead, he had a far more important and far more ambitious goal. He hoped to elicit Hutchins’ help in financing, at UC or elsewhere, “a faculty of interrelations” that would implement Giedion’s strategy of a practical “editorial” interrelation between scholars in the different faculties of learning. Could whole nations be expected to exercise themselves in some sort of mutual harmony with each other if individual academics and their respective disciplines could not?
In his proposal to Hutchins, McLuhan put forward only two scholars whose participation he saw as essential to it: Voegelin and Etienne Gilson (now McLuhan’s colleague in Toronto and yet another of the great Europeans McLuhan met in the 1940’s.8
McLuhan’s proposal went nowhere with Hutchins, but he did not give up the ambition formulated in it. It even reached a sort of concrete realization in the ‘Culture and Technology’ seminar funded by the Ford Foundation at the University of Toronto starting in 1953 — the year of McLuhan’s correspondence with Voegelin.
Writing to Eric Voegelin in 1953 McLuhan registered his shock concerning what he called “secret societies”.1 This was 70 years ago. He clearly meant something like what is called the ‘deep state’ today in which “secrecy and power [are] intertwined”. He perceived a condition of “an Elite” dictating to a “vulgar” mass, “the bulk of mankind”, which was “to be swamped with lies” — lies in which “the cynical contempt for the bulk of mankind should co-exist and even be expressed by fanatical assertions of universal benevolence.”2
McLuhan had always recognized that publishers have their agendas and that these agendas control not only what content was published, but also how that content was presented. For example, he had analyzed the Luce publications in these terms in his ‘Time, Life and Fortune’ paper in 1947.3 But now he realized that ‘publishing’ was taking place on a scale he had not hitherto imagined: what was being published, and how, was nothing less than the ‘facts‘ of the ‘world’ — ‘reality’ itself.
As shown in his letters to Voegelin, he had come to think:
(a) that all human activity including politics, the news, “historical scholarship” and the entirety of the arts had been reduced to a kind of Potemkin village — a “vulgar or exoteric façade” — which was presented as a seemingly complex “battleground” of different views and opinions,4 but was really the endlessly reiterated repetition of the same (“everything is everything else”);
(b) that the core impulse of the control that was being exercised ever more broadly and ever more tightly was a “falsification of the entire linguistic currency” of western civilization — “everything is everything else” in a more fundamental sense — an impulse that could be called, along with Voegelin, “gnosis” or gnosticism;
(c) that this assault on the word was both intentional and disguised and therefore amounted to “the secret sectarian organization of intellectual life”;
(d) that, in-formed by this “sectarian organization”, life in the modern world was unwittingly carried out as “somebody else’s ritual”, as a “theological” exercise masked as secularism — “the entire technique of the ‘secret’ societies is to conduct their controversies5 as if the terms of reference were historical” (aka, “secular”);
(e) that the central difference between the “linguistic currency” of western civilization and the ‘theology’ of the “secret societies” turned on the fundamental worth, on the one hand, or the utter worthlessness, on the other, of freedom — “for the gnostic there are no autonomies in art, life, politics or anything else”;
(f) that freedom essentially implicates limitations6 — and “there are, it seems, no such limits in the gnostic world”;7
(g) that the return to western civilization and to freedom would therefore have to focus on the basic difference between “making” — a free though inherently limited activity — but one fully capable of the perception of truth (as all the sciences testify); and matching, a purportedly unlimited activity which, exactly as unlimited, as seamlessly amalgamated with truth, had no qualms about licensing and enforcing “fanatical assertions of universal benevolence”.8
What is “initiative in thought” in Innis? Perspective.
What is perspective? It is a position that is: Long-term. Limited. Open. Balanced. Stable. Anchored.
In fundamental contrast, the loss of thought and perspective in the contemporary world (beginning in the late nineteenth century) is: Short-term. Unrestricted. Closed. Unbalanced. Unstable. Ungrounded.
The task of thought (dual genitive!) is to indicate the way from the first to the second.
The task is to indicate the way from one beginning to another beginning, from one origin to another origin.
The history of the twentieth century is testimony to the difficulty of this transformation.
Her [the university’s] traditions and her [proper] interest demand an obsession with balance and perspective — an obsession with the Greek tradition of the humanities. The search for truth assumes a constant avoidance of extremes and extravagance. Virtue is in the middle way. There are no cures. Always we are compelled to be sceptical of the proposal to cure the world’s ills. We cannot tolerate the dominance of any individual or of any group. (A Plea for the University Tradition, 1944)
In the words of Cobden, political economy is “the highest exercise of the human mind, and the exact sciences require by no means so hard an effort.” 1 (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
the [contemporary] study of economic history emphasizes short-run points of view acceptable to the price system rather than long-term points of view which necessitate perspective. An equilibrium of approaches to the study of economic phenomena becomes exceedingly difficult to achieve with the insistence on short-run interests and the obsession with the present. (A Plea for the University Tradition, 1944)
The modern tendency to find mental satisfaction in measuring everything by a fixed rational standard, and the way it takes for granted that everything can be related to everything else, certainly receives from the apparently objective value of money, and the universal possibility of exchange which this involves, a strong psychological impulse to become a fixed habit of thought, whereas the purely logical process itself, when it only follows its own course, is not subject to these influences, and it then turns these accepted ideas into mere probabilities.2 (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
Cartels and formalism in commerce paralleled ecclesiasticism in religion and in both cases initiative in thought was weakened. (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
Machine industry through printing dispenses with thought or compels it to move in certain channels. The dispersion of thought through the printing industry makes attacks on monopoly increasingly difficult.3 (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
economic history should contribute to stability. Not only should it supplement political and social history, it should in supplementing them check the tendency in itself and in them to bias and fanaticism. Within the narrower range of the social sciences it should provide a check against the specialization of mathematical systems peculiar to a monetary and a machine age and should indicate the extent and significance of the irrational as contrasted with the rational.4 (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
The circulation of printed matter cheapened thought and destroyed the prestige of the great works of the past which were collected and garnered before the introduction of movable type. Rational thought [in the sense of narrowly defined fields fenced off from “the mysteries of life and death”] and art [in the event that the other ‘absolute’ pursuits of philosophy and religion had ‘given up the ghost’] consequently had more influence. (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
economic history (…) should indicate the extent and significance of the irrational as contrasted with the rational. (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
recognition of factors affecting [consideration of] irrationality is a beginning. (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
religion is an effort to organize irrationality and as such appears in all (…) organizations of knowledge. (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
language is deliberately [manipulated]5 as a framework for hocus pocus and unintelligibility (…) with no possibility of a common approach through rationality. Irrationality assumes fresh importance as a means of capitalizing the necessity of unintelligibility and deliberately avoiding rational contacts.6 (The University In The Modern Crisis)
Man as a biological phenomenon has been unable to sustain the excessive demands of rationalism evident in the mathematics of the price system and of technology.7 (The Economic Significance of Culture)
Rationality which accompanies the price system brings its own handicaps in the formation of monopolies.8 (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
The printing press and new methods of communication have been developed as methods of division rather than co-operation. (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult. (Innis, Minerva’s Owl, 1947)
Probably via Edward Bulwer, Innis read the expository chapter on Gutenberg in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1943 or 1944.1 Taking off from Hugo Innis proposed:
As [the international Church and its Latin culture] was crushed by the book, so the book [and its culture] was crushed by the newspaper. In turn the newspaper was destined to feel the effects of the radio.2
Similarly in ‘This Has Killed That’:
The power of the [newspaper] press, more recently supported by the radio, [announced that] the day of the printed [book] word (…) was over.3
In these passages Innis was explicitly invoking Hugo’s model of the communications revolution brought about by Gutenberg. For Hugo this had been a revolution that was “indestructible”, one that had passed into “immortality” as “definitive”: “the invention of printing is the greatest event in history.” But Innis applied Hugo’s “definitive” singular model to multiple communications revolutions subsequent to print such as those originated by the newspaper and by radio.
Here is Hugo’s model of a communication revolution:4
Bulwer put Hugo’s “definitive” notion this way:
The magic of Gutenberg (…) hath conjured a wide chasm between the past and the future history of mankind: the people of one side of the gulf are not the people on the other…5
Now there was not one “chasm”, however, but a whole series of them and their repeated appearance was accelerating. Hugo had supposed that “human thought”, “intelligence”, indeed “the human race”, were not only preserved through Gutenberg’s revolution, they were enhanced. But as the “gulf” produced by each communications revolution was multiplied by subsequent iterations, the thread holding these together, providing their coherence, was increasingly cut through and threatened to unravel completely — if it had not already done so. It could well be doubted if there were such a thing as “the human race” anymore, let alone “thought” and “intelligence”.6
Such revolutions do not ‘take place’ only in the interior landscape. Instead, “everything changes” in a process where the interior and the exterior landscapes interactively affect and effect one another. The process is therefore “economic”, as Innis would have it, or “environmental”, as McLuhan would come to say. Changes in the interior landscape of humans result from exterior technological developments and exterior technological developments result from changes in the interior landscape of humans.
Innis saw that three great interrelated problems resulted from the ever more quickly repeated communications revolutions constituting this “second tower of Babel of the human race“.7
First, since further communications revolutions could be anticipated, or at least not ruled out, it was impossible to specify any order as “definitive”. A “complete (…) change of skin” of the psychological or social landscape could happen at any moment, the one then overturning the other, such that ‘reality’ itself, along with ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, could be specified only by insistence — by dint of force. But, then, by what right could such force be exercised? Only by dint of force. As a result, as Nietzsche was the first to see, or, at least, the first to see clearly along with its cause and its effect, ‘reality’ fell through itself like a black hole:
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!!8
Or, as Innis repeatedly specified :
the collapse of Western civilization (…) begins with the present [twentieth] century (The Economic Significance of Culture, 1944)
The central internal problem was that repeated communications revolutions though which “everything changes” had eradicated foundation:
the purely logical process itself, when it only follows its own course (…) turns these accepted ideas into mere probabilities… (Ibid)
[we have lost] an anchorage or a point of view from which to approach the problem of European civilization. (Ibid)
Second, when what Innis termed “the Platonic tradition” had collapsed, and with it the very possibility of specifying truth and reality, international institutions no longer had a basis from which to maintain peace among the nations:
We have seen the effects of the disappearance of the Platonic tradition in the necessity of appealing to force as the unifying and dominating factor9 (University In The Modern Crisis, 1945)
[ours is] a period in which we have been unable to find a solution to the problem of law and order, and have resorted to force rather than to persuasion, bullets rather than ballots. (The Economic Significance of Culture)
[repeated wars reflect] the inability of the twentieth century to find a solution to the eternal problem of freedom and power (Ibid)
Hence:
The basic post-war problem is that of stopping the loss of blood or the problem of peace. Plans of the new world or of the new international order can be purchased in large quantities at low price. The question remains as to why there are so many plans for the new world. What is the source of the confusion? Why has a century of comparative peace such as prevailed from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of the last war been followed by the breakdown of Western Civilization? Why has European civilization turned from persuasion to force or from ballots to bullets? What has brought about a change of such disastrous consequence? (Problems of Rehabilitation, 1946)10
The need for force in the specification of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ at the individual psychological level — in the interior landscape — was inevitably reflected in the need for force at the international level — in the exterior landscape — to ‘settle’ any matter of contention. No other method of settlement — that is, of justice — was recognized.
Third, the collapse of accepted standards in the interior and exterior landscapes inevitably characterized the national economy as well — “the fabric of human institutions”.11 Weapons manufacturing became the major national industry and war became an economic necessity.
the phenomenal rise in the standard of living (…) and the prosecution of major wars were a result of increasing efficiency of machine industry (Political Economy in the Modern State, 1943)
Weapons manufacturing was no longer a requisite of war; war was a requisite of weapons manufacturing.12
Has commercial development been effective in destroying religious centralization as a stabilizing influence to the point that new sources of power such as nationalism and autarchy with subordination to militarism have taken their place? (The Economic Significance of Culture)
At the same time, war fever in ever-varying flavors became the staple product of the news. Here again, news did not follow war, but war followed the news.
The Spanish-American War and the South African War came at the beginning of the new journalism and were exploited to the full in efforts to increase circulation in New York particularly and in London; the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Journal, and the World pushed circulation to new levels. They were ideal newspaper wars. To Mr. Hearst was attributed the telegram to [Frederic] Remington, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” (The Newspaper in Economic Development, 1942)
in both Great Britain and the United States the Boer War and the Spanish American War enabled sensational journalism to reach new peaks. Wemyss Reid wrote of the Boer War, “It has been said that this has been a war made by newspapers. Evidently the newspapers are [also] capable of carrying it on.” (An Economic Approach to English Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1945)
The mind of the individual, together with the family and society as a whole, were all taken over to serve collective forces no one saw, let alone understood and controlled. Indeed, life and death themselves were put to work somehow — two world wars, with fifty million deaths, or so, were symbols of a fall into a fatal robotism that did not end with those wars. Furthermore, these repeated communication revolutions with their implicated militarism were inevitably styled as ‘progress’ — the ‘rise of freedom’! — so that the first casualty in them was the word.
These three failures of understanding, along with the implicated death of language, all reinforced each other in a planetary mesh and the great question was (and is): how to get out? where is the exit?13
McLuhan took over this problem complex from Innis. Here he is to Pound in a letter of June 22, 1951:
the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and ‘news’-casts? I’m working on THAT problem. The word is now the cheapest and the most universal drug.
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.14
As set out in McLuhan reads Innis (PEMS 1), Innis cited Edward Bulwer and Thomas Carlyle on the world-changing event of Gutenberg in their writings in 1833 and 1834 respectively.1 Bulwer at least must have obtained the idea from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame which appeared in 1831 and which Bulwer and his brother, Henri, both mentioned in their writings in the 1830s.
Innis went back from Bulwer to read Hugo’s account for himself and was immensely influenced by it.2 Here are the relevant portions of Hugo’s long expository chapter (Hunchback, Book 5, Chapter 2):
We pause for a moment to seek what could have been the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words of the archdeacon [earlier in the novel]: “This will kill that.3 The book will kill the edifice.”
To our mind, this thought had two faces. In the first place, it was a priestly thought. It was the fright of the priest in the presence of a new agent, the printing press. It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg.4 It was the pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word (…) the cry of the prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. It was the prognostication of the philosopher who sees (…) that one power was about to succeed another power. It meant, “The press will kill the church.”
But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no doubt, there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first, less easy to perceive and more easy to contest, a view as philosophical and belonging no longer to the priest alone but to the savant and the artist. It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable [yet]. In this connection the archdeacon’s vague formula had a second sense. It meant, “Printing will kill architecture.”
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.
When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded,5 when the mass of [spoken] reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech, naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil6 in a manner which was [then] at once the most visible, most durable, and most natural.
(…)
The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these [stone] edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was (…) the holy book itself.
(…)
Thought written in stone [was] a privilege exactly comparable to our present liberty of the press.
(…)
Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal writing, the universal writing.
(…)
In the fifteenth century everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead [type] are about to supersede Orpheus’s letters of stone. The book is about to kill the edifice.
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution (…) it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once. We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form [thought] is far more indelible [than in stone]? It was solid, [now] it has become alive. It passes from duration in time to immortality. One can demolish a mass; but can one extirpate ubiquity?
(…)
Before the invention of printing, reform [of the Church] would have been merely a schism; printing converted it into a revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated. Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenberg is the precursor of Luther.7
(…)
Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg. The past must be reread upon these pages of marble. This book, written by architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must not be denied.
This [new] edifice [of print] is colossal. Some compiler of statistics has calculated, that if all the volumes which have issued from the press since Gutenberg’s day were to be piled one upon another, they would fill the space between the earth and the moon; but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.
(…)
The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work. The whole human race is on the scaffoldings [of this new towering edifice]. Each mind is a mason (…) Every day a new course [of this new edifice] rises. (…) Assuredly, it is a [towering] construction which increases and piles up in endless spirals; there also are confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor, eager competition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of barbarians. It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.
A science of the archive must include the theory of [its] institutionalization, that is to say, at once of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it. This right imposes or supposes a bundle of limits which have a history, a deconstructable history (…) the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured…(Derrida, Archive Fever, 1994, 50 years after Innis’ 1944 lecture.)1
In his presidential address to the Economic History Association in September 1944, ‘The Economic Significance of Culture’,2 Innis began by setting out a series of limitations to economic thought — limitations, that is, to any attempt to formulate an ‘account’ (nomos) of the ‘household’ (eco). At bottom, the central problem to this part of the address was to engage the questionability of both of these components of ‘eco-nomics‘: what is it to render an ‘account’? what limitations must be considered in doing so (if, that is, the account is to be made comprehensively and conscientiously)? and just what is the human ‘household’?3
In addressing “the limitations of economic history or of the social sciences“, more generally, Innis specified that we must focus on “the question of their [limiting] boundaries or what cannot be done” in them:
In attempting to answer this question perhaps we can improve our perspective regarding the place of the field of economic history, and in turn of the social sciences, in Western civilization. We need a sociology or a philosophy of the social sciences, and particularly of economics, an economic history of knowledge, or an economic history of economic history. Economic history may enable us to understand the background of economic thought, or of the organization of economic thought, or of thought in the social sciences.4
Inquiry into this question complex immediately precipitates the problem that it is located within the tradition about which it proposes to inquire. It is delimited by the circularity of attempting “a sociology (…) of the social sciences” or an “economic history of economic history”.5
The inherently limited “application of scarce means” to “the vast range of social phenomena” demands that any “weakness for omniscience“6 be jettisoned at the outset.
Further, according to Innis, the investigation of economic history (dual genitive) must recognize other limitations, both internal and external, beyond that of its inherent circularity:
Innis concluded his barrage of observations on the fundamental limitations of the social sciences (objective genitive!) with this attestation:
[It is] the influence of the Greeks [that] compels us to raise [such] questions about the limitations of the social sciences.15
“The influence of the Greeks” does not only not turn away from limitations, according to Innis, it urges and even needs and welcomes them. Our ‘household’ as defined by “Western civilization” through “the influence of the Greeks” would therefore be founded on limitation — limitation not as dis-abling, or not only as dis-abling, but also as en-abling.
In the face of such enabling limitations, the first demand on economic history is what Innis called “an equilibrium of approaches” — for there are bordering limitations also between different “approaches”, marking their plurality:
Economic history can point to the dangers of bias and the necessity for a broader perspective (…) an equilibrium of approaches (…) the integration of basic approaches (…) a broader synthesis…
This would, however, be no mere matter of capaciousness: “a recognition of factors affecting irrationality is [only] a beginning”.16 Much more, or much less, any such “broader synthesis” would have to take upon itself the demand implicated in “the collapse of Western civilization” for a new “solution to the problem of law and order”, for “an anchorage or a point of view from which to approach the problem of European civilization” — namely its exposure to “cyclonic” or catastrophic destabilization:
When a field is subject to general destabilization, the unavoidable inference is that it is subject to forces larger than it — to forces outside of it. At their broadest, these forces might be termed “the mysteries of life and death”:
The “collapse of Western civilization” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflects a general inability to relate to “the mysteries of life and death” and, consequently, to respond to them as we must — if we are to survive. This amounts to — or results from — the death of religion since within Western civilization it is “religion [that] has been vitally related to the mysteries of life and death”. This, too, is through “the influence of the Greeks”.
Innis would have economic history and the social sciences generally begin their investigations with an acknowledgement of their situation (situation?) in the general collapse of the tradition within which they would have their ground and their possibility of significance — if, that is, they had ground and the possibility of significance. This is, he maintained, the abysmal groundlessness in which today, and in which alone today, authentic ‘account’ may be rendered. At the same time, he would on no account forget what former ages knew, and knew accountably, concerning those very “mysteries of life and death” and which gave them “anchorage” within “European civilization”. A renewed sense of ‘household’ would need to embrace both that abysmal groundlessness and that accountable hold.21
In ‘The Later Innis’1 from 1953, McLuhan described Innis’ social vision in terms reminiscent of quantum mechanics. He compared Innis’ apprehension to an apparatus like a cloud chamber or a radar screen:2
The later Innis had no position. He had become a roving mental eye, an intellectual radar screen, on the alert for objective clues to the inner spirit or core of our times.
…in his later prose the linear development of paragraph perspectives is abandoned almost entirely in favour of the rapid montage of single shots. He juxtaposes one condensed observation with another, mounts one insight or image on another in quick succession to create a sense of the multiple relationships in process…
What was recorded on that “intellectual radar screen” were “single shots” of momentary traces, momentary lines of force, that illuminated, although never without considerable limitations, some historical epoch. Just as physical nature is the sum product at any instant of time of the interactions of innumerable entities at multiple strata, a sum that is in principle as uncertain as the quantum particles comprising its lowest stratum, so the social scene is such an assemblage of a myriad psychological actions and interactions. Bias, as Innis emphasized, even in the title of his most important book, is of course inevitable in any “shot” recording a momentary impression of such kaleidoscopic action:
The technique of total presentation or reconstruction led [Innis] swiftly to the vision of the total inter-relatedness of social existence. It is quite evident that Innis was not prepared for all this. No individual can ever be adequate to grappling with the vision of what Siegfried Giedion calls ‘anonymous history’. That is to say, the vision of the significance of the multitude of personal acts and artefacts which constitute the total social process which is human communication or participation [in multiple interacting strata]. For in this kind of awareness ‘commerce’ or ‘technology’ are tools of extremely limited usefulness in discussion. Behind such concepts are the [interactions of a dynamic cloud of]3 human attitudes, preferences and decisions.4
This notion of the social context or ‘interior landscape’5 may somewhat have been prompted by findings in twentieth century physics, but McLuhan was doubtless thinking of Innis for the most part in terms of Finnegans Wake and of “language itself”.
As he put the point simply in ‘The Later Innis’:
Language itself [is] at once the greatest mass medium of communication and also the greatest time-builder of cultures and civilizations.6
And in the initial issue of Explorations that year:
Language itself is the greatest of all mass media. The spoken word instantly (…) reverberates with the total history of its own experience with man.7
Then again in the same year in ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’:
“Every letter is a godsend,” wrote Joyce. And, much more, every word is an avatar, a revelation, an epiphany. For 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. The conventional meanings of words can thus be used or disregarded by Joyce, who is concentrating on the submerged metaphysical drama which these meanings often tend to overlay. His puns in the Wake are a technique for revealing this submerged drama of language, and Joyce relied on the quirks, “slips,” and freaks of ordinary discourse to evoke the fullness of existence in speech.8
Then. finally, early in 1954 in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’:
it is a commonplace of the poetic and critical discussion of the last 100 years to note that human languages themselves are the greatest of all works of art beside which the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare are minor variations. The English or any other language is itself a massive organization of traditional experience providing a complex view of the world. Today our increasing knowledge of the languages of primitive cultures has made it easy to observe how language itself is the principal channel and view-maker of experience for men everywhere. This reverent attitude to the human world which has unexpectedly sprung up in symbolist, existential and positivistic circles alike is not unrelated to numerous other attitudes and procedures which are common today to the scientist, the historian and the sociologist.
Although Innis himself had no background or training in contemporary art, this was the context, according to McLuhan, in relation to which he needed to be read:
This prose calls for steady contemplation of what is happening on the page. It is not intended to deliver an idea or a concept in a formula or in a package. It is an ideogrammic prose…
The question of how to conceptualize the interactional social cloud indicated by Innis, and as depicted in Finnegans Wake, would lead McLuhan a few years later to propose the idea of ‘Grammars of Media‘. Innis had been correct to see communication as the key to the comparison and analysis of different cultures, and to have seen media, in turn, from stone engravings to radio waves, as the keys to communication. And he had of course been right to emphasize bias as an unavoidable factor in any sort of intervention in the estimation of such a maze. Now McLuhan submitted that it was necessary to define media not in material terms (“in this kind of awareness (…) technology [is] of extremely limited usefulness”),9 but as languages.
Put otherwise — McLuhan twisting Innis’ kaleidoscope — all social phenomena might be seen as linguistic messages through which their enabling media expressed themselves: “the medium is the message”. But in this case, media themselves had to be defined though a specification of their elementary forms and of their laws of combination and interaction. These could be termed their ‘grammars’. And if each medium were a language with its own grammar, the goal of ‘understanding media’ would be to uncover a kind of grammar of those grammars — “grammars of all media in concert”:
Having long been engaged in exploring the characters of the various media of communication, I have become convinced that what is needed is a series of Grammars of the Media. A “grammar of a medium” like English or Latin means a codified awareness of the powers and properties of the medium. And the advantage of such codification is its speed and precision in teaching and imparting the special powers of the medium. (…) The fact of being confronted daily with several media has begun to impress upon observers the strange fact that the medium is itself the message. So that we are beginning to understand why a written message is so very different from the same information when spoken or when pictorialized. (…) Grammars of all media in concert (including the medium of print)10 are needed, first, to protect and transmit our great stake in the forms and values of the printed word, and equally to foster enlightened use and control of the much more powerful electronic media. An X-ray unit can get very hot but is not a satisfactory space heater.11
Innis’ May 1944 convocation address at the University of New Brunswick, ‘A Plea for the University Tradition’1 included warnings he was to reiterate at a similar occasion in 1945 at McMaster.2 But it also specified what the McMaster address only intimated: the fundamental link between force in the determination of truth and force in the determination of the international order between war and peace.
The 1945 McMaster address — given May 14, a week after VE day, May 8 — would repeatedly declare that “western civilization has collapsed”. His apparently more hopeful admonition the year before at UNB, as the war in Europe continued, was that “we [must] commit ourselves afresh to the maintenance of a tradition without which western culture disappears.”
Innis concluded that UNB address as follows:
Universities have grown beyond the high-school stage of development (…) and [their] maturity involves (…) proper recognition of the role of the scholar and of the university in the nation’s life. The efforts to maintain the traditions of the university are in themselves a testimony to these traditions. As recent graduates, we commit ourselves afresh to the maintenance of a tradition without which western culture disappears. (…) These [convocation] ceremonies — peculiar to an institution which has played the leading role in the flowering of western culture — remind us of the obligation of maintaining traditions concerned with the search for truth for which men have laid down (…) their lives.3
It is critical to appreciate the multiple circularities at play here in Innis’ famous “obscurity”. It was, he said, essential to the vocation of the university to maintain its own calling: “The efforts to maintain the traditions of the university are in themselves a testimony to these traditions.” The present and future of the university must be dedicated to the fresh cultivation of its own past traditions. Those traditions must be passed on. Those traditions, in turn, were focused on “the search for truth”. It was through this search that the “institution [of the university] has played the leading role in the flowering of western culture”. But this “leading role”, in its turn, was a “testimony” to that “flowering”. That is, the most important way in which the university could maintain its own traditions and so help to maintain the “tradition without which western culture disappears” was to function as an image of that “flowering”. As a “testimony” to it. Only this would constitute, “afresh”, the “proper recognition of the role of the scholar and of the university in the nation’s life.”
The calling of “the scholar and of the university” was to continue to cultivate the essential tradition of western culture by, first of all, being shaped by it. Their fundamental activity of “the search for truth” required a prior receptivity.4
Earlier in his address Innis specified the dynamic form to which the university community was called upon receptively to con-form:
Her traditions and her interest demand an obsession with balance and perspective — an obsession with the Greek tradition of the humanities. The search for truth assumes a constant avoidance of extremes and extravagance. Virtue is in the middle way. There are no cures. Always we are compelled to be sceptical of the proposal to cure the world’s ills. We cannot tolerate the dominance of any individual or of any group.5 (UNB)
The search for truth could not terminate in any “proposal to cure the world’s ills”. But neither could it terminate in an empty scepticism. Both were extravagant extremes. Instead “the scholar and of the university” had to cleave to “the middle way” ac-cording to which truth itself is essentially limited — but is nevertheless truth. As seen in all the physical sciences, “the search for truth” is the way truth truly manifests itself to human investigation. It is never fully present (so the search goes on), but it is also never fully absent (so the search goes on).
Innis drew ramifications for contemporary action and for historical perspective from this circular dynamic of reaction and action: “In our time [the university] must resist the tendencies to bureaucracy and dictatorship of the modern state.” (UNB) Elsewhere, Innis depicted these tendencies in terms of the burgeoning of irrationalism at the end of the nineteenth century.2 Since rationalism in Innis’ view “demand[ed] an obsession with balance”, these tendencies to irrationalism were specified in his UNB address as the turn to the extremes of imbalance:
In our time, unfortunately, the power of resistance to extremes has been greatly weakened. (…) the university has largely ceased as a vital force (…) by this ordeal of militarism. (UNB)
In 1944 the “ordeal of militarism” was, of course, the second world war. But it was also, and in Innis’ mind more fundamentally, an “ordeal of militarism” in regard to the university’s essential activity — the pursuit of truth. In his McMaster address, Innis cited Oliver Wendell Holmes to the effect that “truth is the majority vote of the nation that can lick all the others.” Where the essential receptivity required for truth was eclipsed by a militaristic activity “that can lick all the others”, truth, too, would be eclipsed — and freedom and democracy along with it. The balance required for all of these, beginning with truth, would disappear in favor of the one-sided — unbalanced — exercise of force.
Doubtless reflecting his close ties with classicists at the University of Toronto, Innis made the point at issue by citing Jacob Burckhardt on the society of classical Athens and its importance to the work of Plato:7
Festivals were a regular feature of life not a strain. Hence it was possible to develop that social intercourse which is the background of Plato’s dialogues.(…) People had something to say to each other and said it. Thus a general understanding was created. Orators and dramatists could reckon with an audience such as had never before existed.8 (UNB)
It is imperative to under-stand that “social intercourse” for Plato, and for Innis in turn, was not, first of all, a matter of what human beings happen to do in the market place. It was a matter, first of all, of truth itself, of what Innis called the “equilibrium of approaches” to “the mysteries of life and death”. Truth is internally limited and hence plural in itself. Submission to this plurality might be termed ‘internationalism’ and its refusal ‘isolationism’.
It was the “collapse” of that “general understanding” that led to the extremes of irrationalism and, ultimately, to the “century of war”:9
If we agree with Professor Whitehead that “The safest generalization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato,”10
we are forced to conclude that its power succumbed in the face of the Industrial Revolution and machine industry and the rise of romanticism. We have seen the effects of the disappearance of the Platonic tradition in the necessity of appealing to force as the unifying and dominating factor.11
The turn to force in the international order — or disorder — was the result, according to Innis, of the turn to force in a fundamentally misguided or unbalanced “search for truth”.12 It was the calling of the university to refresh its own traditions in the effort to return western culture to “the Greek tradition of the humanities” and to the required “obsession with balance” originated by it.
McLuhan specified this precisely in ‘The Later Innis’:
True social equilibrium, [Innis] saw, consisted in the simultaneous adjustment of the claims of space and time, power and knowledge. In the modern world the divorce between the between the city and the university reflects the loss of such equilibrium.
A description of the world in 2021 could hardly be done better than Harold Innis was able to provide in 1945. With new technology Innis could not have dreamed of, the world has careened, faster and faster, along a path he could see before it — 75 years ago!
Here he is in a May 1945 convocation address at McMaster, ‘The University In The Modern Crisis’1, an address that begins and ends with the same declaration:
The address is a description of this “major collapse of civilization” in relation to the university in particular and to society in general:
↩At the end of ‘An Economic Approach to English Literature in the Nineteenth Century’ (1943), Innis cited Edward Lytton Bulwer1 on the world-altering event of the invention of printing:
The magic of Gutenberg (…) hath conjured a wide chasm between the past and the future history of mankind: the people of one side of the gulf are not the people on the other; the physical force is no longer separated from the moral; mind has by slow degrees crept into the mighty mass — the popular Cymon [as personification of the rude crowd] has received a soul! In the primal and restless consciousness of the new spirit, Luther appealed to the people (…) From that moment, all the codes of classic dogmatists were worthless — the expired leases to an estate just let to new tenants, and upon new conditions. (Innis citing Edward Lytton Bulwer, England and the English, 1833)
In ‘Political Economy in the Modern State‘2, a lecture before the American Philosophical Society from later that same year of 1943, Innis began his presentation, more or less taking off from the end of ‘An Economic Approach‘, by enlarging on the same theme. He started with repeated citations from Lord Acton3:
Lord Acton has outlined the historical background of modern freedom essential to the social sciences. The lesson of Athenian experience taught that “government by the whole people, being the government of the most numerous and powerful class is an evil of the same nature as unmixed monarchy and requires for nearly the same reasons institutions that shall protect it against arbitrary revolutions of opinion.”4 (…) “The ancient writers saw very clearly that each principle of government standing alone is carried to excesses and provokes a reaction. Monarchy hardens into despotism, aristocracy contracts into oligarchy, democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.“5 (…) “When Christ said Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s, those words gave (…) to the civil power (…) bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom. For (…) to reduce all political authority within defined limits ceased to be an aspiration (…) and was made the perpetual charge and care of the most energetic institution and the most universal association in the world. The new law, the new spirit, the new authority gave to liberty a meaning and a value it had not possessed (…) before”.5
With Acton, Innis equates “historical background of modern freedom essential to the social sciences” with the development of “bounds” and “limits” protecting against the “unmixed” or unrestricted exercise of power. But it is unclear, perhaps purposely, if Innis were referring here to the historical and contemporary facts analyzed by social science or also to the essential nature of social science itself. “The state was circumscribed in its authority by a force external to its own”, concluded Acton, and in this circumscription lay the “inauguration of freedom”. But for Innis, social science itself “was circumscribed in its authority by a force external to its own”, namely, its own internal limitations: “the social sciences have been disastrously weakened by the neglect of a study of their limitations”.7 (“External” was used by Acton here in the sense of ‘independent’. Such externality or independence could therefore also be ‘internal’.)
These considerations from Acton and from Innis himself provide clear illustration of Innis’ structuralism. Like Acton,8 he conceived of freedom as determined by the balance of opposed powers like those of church and state.9 Either of the two sides acting alone, or even in preponderant power relative to the other, was a formula for disaster. The essential thing was to realize the fundamental need for a plurality of competing forces — including the plurality of that plurality. That is, the twofold plurality of independent factors in ratio — like church and state — itself has a plurality of different forms depending on the multifold configurations of those ratios. The imperative for the analysis of political economy (dual genitive!) was therefore to investigate social realities, like freedom or war, in terms of the range of ratios whose numerator and denominator10 each required acknowledgement of its self-standing reality — but only in some kind of dynamic homeostatic relation to the other.11
The balance of church and state arose through the bounds each gave to the other and it was through this mutual limitation that social and political freedom was first born. This happy homeostatic situation in history did not long endure, however, since, as Innis wrote, “the downfall of the Roman empire was followed by the rise of the Roman church” to a preponderant power relative to the weak political states into which the empire fragmented.12
However, since “each principle (…) standing alone is carried to excesses and provokes a reaction”,13 the Church, in turn, also met its inevitable limitation14 and the resulting metamorphosis of the whole social and cultural environment:15
[The Church’s] centralizing tendencies were followed after the invention of printing by the protests of Martin Luther, reinforced by the opposition of [the likewise empowered] political states. He was compelled [!] to take up the position that authority was more dependent on [individual] divine revelation and less on [collective Catholic] ecclesiasticism. His position and the translation and printing of the Bible opened the way, on the one hand, to the growth of the Calvinistic state, as in Switzerland and in Scotland, and on the other, to the growth of Puritanism as it flourished among the sects in Holland and in England. “The substitution of the Book for the Church was the essence of [the] Protestant revolt” (Morley16). Calvin evaded the dangers of the Reformation [as found] in [the renewed] ecclesiasticism under Luther, by enforcing two cardinal laws of human society, [individual] self-control as the foundation of virtue, [collective] self-sacrifice as the condition of the common weal, and created a new centre of union.17
The relation of structuralism and media revolution is on full display in Innis’ passage here. In it, Gutenberg technology is seen as bringing about, even ‘compelling’, a flip in the ratios of church/state and in all the associated ratios like collective/individual. The cybernetic goal, as always, was to find “a new centre of union”, a renewed balance or homeostasis between independently existent forces in tensoral ratio.
History is seen as the play of such ratios, always momentarily constellating themselves in some variety of homeostasis, with the media of communication at times compelling a sudden catastrophic change in them, Then would arise a “new spirit [and] new authority [with] a meaning and a value (…) not possessed (…) before”:18
The magic of [these media revolutions] hath conjured a wide chasm between the past and the future history of mankind: the people of one side of the gulf are not the people on the other…19
In the summer of 1958, the whole McLuhan family drove to Fort Worth to see Corinne’s family, then went on to the University of California, Santa Barbara. The trip seems to have taken 3 months, with 2 months spent at the summer session of UCSB. The UCSB newsletter, El Gauchito, for June 21, 1958, included the following information:
Four of our distinguished visiting professors will give public lectures during July on Tuesday afternoons at 3 p.m. for both the campus community and campus visitors. The series will be given in the lecture hall of the New Classroom Bldg.
The summer lectures will open July 1 with the distinguished Canadian critic and author, Marshall McLuhan, professor of English Literature, University of Toronto, speaking on “The Electronic Revolution and the Undeveloped Countries of the Mind.” A brilliant wit as well as an intellectual leader, Prof. McLuhan is the founder of the Canadian journal, “Exploration”, and is interested in the problems of communication in this century.
The announcement was repeated later in the newsletter:
Important Coming Events, on campus:
July 1 ALL-COLLEGE LECTURE by Marshall McLuhan, Professor of English Literature, University of Toronto, on “The Electronic Revolution and the Undeveloped Countries of the Mind,” at 3 p.m., New Classroom Building Lecture Hall. No admission charge.
Earlier that year, on March 31, McLuhan had lectured at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee campus, on “TV and the Undeveloped Countries of the Mind”.
All those who are struggling for success have forced upon them the idea that their strongest effort should be made in touting for praise. Those who are not familiar with the lives of authors will hardly believe how low will be the forms which their struggles will take: — How little presents will be sent to men who write little articles; how much flattery may be expended even on the keeper of a circulating library; with what profuse and distant genuflexions approaches are made to the outside railing of the temple which contains within it that great thunderer of some metropolitan periodical publication! The evil here is not only that done to the public when interested council is given to them, but extends to the debasement of those who have at any rate considered themselves fit to provide literature to the public. (Harold Innis citing Anthony Trollope in ‘An Economic Approach to English Literature in the Nineteenth Century’1 from Trollope’s 1883 Autobiography)
Legal notice: Any resemblance of this passage to the machinations of contemporary academic publishing, and to “the debasement of those who have (…) considered themselves fit to provide literature to the public” by submitting themselves to it, are purely coincidental.
Harold Innis’ 1945 ‘An Economic Approach to English Literature in the Nineteenth Century’1 was read by McLuhan in the late 1940’s, probably in 1948, along with the rest of Political Economy in the Modern State (PEMS).2 Here a series of nuggets are to be found, often in citations by Innis from other authors — augmented and reinforced by the rest of PEMS and by further writings of Innis from The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) to ‘Minerva’s Owl’ (1947) — whose extended investigation could not unfairly be said to have informed McLuhan’s whole career for the next thirty years.3
Of course there were other major influences on McLuhan at this time — his first 5 years at the University of Toronto — including French poetry, Pound, cybernetics, Joyce, Havelock and the tradition of the epyllion form. And behind him since his undergraduate and masters degrees in English lay his study of Maritain and Gilson in theology, Richards and Leavis in criticism, Eliot and Lewis in modern literature, as well as — only a few years before — his PhD thesis on the history of the trivium. But all these interests and further influences were often correlate with what was to be found in Innis and all were subject to Innis’ historical analysis based on political economy calculations of opportunity and cost and on the then available means of communication.4
The specialties of Innis and McLuhan in history and literature were different. But Innis had a theory of historical change which illuminated McLuhan’s interests in new and surprising ways. This lent it a sort of independent verification, on the one hand, and supplied a fundamental factor to McLuhan’s work, on the other hand, which it had hitherto lacked.5
The following excerpts from ‘An Economic Approach to English Literature in the Nineteenth Century’, must have particularly struck McLuhan as coming, not from a scholar of literature, but from an economic historian:
In Innis’ essay, this “magic of Gutenberg” quotation is given in a footnote. But it is the last footnote in the essay on its last page and in this way constitutes its final word.
The last words of the essay proper, however, were these:
And so we entered the open seas of democracy in the twentieth century with nothing to worship but the totalitarianism of the modern state. A century of peace gave way to a century of war.
Here Innis expressed his foresight into the fate of the modern world. At the same time he exposed the grounding impetus of his ceaseless attempts to analyze the course of that fate and, perhaps, to indicate a way out of its hunger for disaster. The great question was and is: what does the “magic of Gutenberg” have to do with our robotic pursuit of annihilation?13
In Goya’s astonishing painting, El Coloso (1808-1812), special note should be made of how man and beast flee in every direction from the stupendous apparition. ↩
In September 1960 McLuhan and Tom Easterbrook presented papers at the annual meeting of the Economic History Association. Their section of the meeting seems to have been a commemoration of Harold Innis organized by Arthur Cole (1889-1974) of Harvard. Cole had been a longtime friend and correspondent of Innis1 and the two were founding members together of the Economic History Association in 1940.2 Meanwhile Easterbrook, working under Innis as his adviser, had, in 1938, obtained the first PhD in Political Economics ever granted by the University of Toronto.3 After WW2 he returned to Toronto, rejoined the Political Economy department, now headed by Innis,4 and then worked closely with him as a colleague and increasingly close friend until Innis’ death in 1952. It was Easterbrook who first brought Innis and McLuhan together in 1947 or 1948. Thereafter McLuhan was decisively influenced by Innis in his turn to media and claimed that his work in that area could be considered a footnote to Innis’ pioneering.
It seems that Cole introduced the session with remarks that were, however, not reproduced with the Easterbrook and McLuhan papers in the December Journal of Economic History. But Easterbrook gives some indication of them in his paper:
Present interest in communication research in the social and physical sciences raises some interesting and difficult questions for the economic historian. Arthur Cole, who claims that he is merely trying to carry further the work of Harold Innis (…)5 at Toronto, but who is [himself] surely the moving spirit in this session, has suggested that we might begin by pin-pointing a few leading questions for examination. Is this comparatively recent development [viz, interest in communication] to be regarded as merely a passing phase in the history of fashions in thought? Is the process of relating communication to economic change mainly a process of [increasing] sophistication (…)? Or, on the other hand, does it in fact amount to a major breakthrough in scientific and historical analysis?6
Arthur Cole’s challenge — to move beyond ‘increasing sophistication’ — remains unanswered. This session, I take it, is designed to explore prospects of meeting this challenge.
the informational [or content] approach7 (…) represents a many-sided attack on communication problems (…) and for the economic historian it is useful and occasionally exciting stuff. On the other hand, it is difficult to see any indication here of a major break-through of the sort that Arthur Cole — with his talk about “transcendental” aspects of business, and his appeal to an analogy with the human nervous system — appears to be seeking, and I doubt that it will come this way, if in fact it comes at all. Most of us, I think, will be inclined to take the view that this is as far as we can go, at least until much of the research underway goes beyond the speculative, hypotheses-to-be-tested stage. [But] Innis would have disagreed with this point of view, and McLuhan most certainly does.
Beyond the light it throws on Cole’s continuing concern with the work of Innis, Easterbrook’s paper is interesting in many additional respects. It reflects his close relationship with both Innis and McLuhan and, in regard to the latter, sets out a view of McLuhan’s early media work as few others could have known it in 1960 — that is, before Gutenberg Galaxy, before Understanding Media and before McLuhan’s celebrity. By that point Easterbrook had been an intimate friend of McLuhan for over 30 years, had toured England with McLuhan one summer when the two of them were undergraduates and had been a founding member with McLuhan in the Ford Foundation Culture and Communication seminar in the mid 1950s.8 Outside of McLuhan’s family, Easterbrook probably knew McLuhan better than anybody else on earth.
Easterbrook mentions in his paper his own thesis that “uncertainty or imperfect knowledge as to the outcome of future events” is a, or the, central factor in political economy and in the social sciences generally.9 This view made him an endless opponent10 and perfect foil for McLuhan, of course, and he recognized (as explicitly stated in the passage from his paper cited immediately above) that both Innis and McLuhan sharply disagreed with him on it. But they naturally did not disagree that our “knowledge as to the outcome of future events” is “imperfect”. Rather, they posited that a focus on “the bias of communication” might present a way to investigate “events” that could leverage our inevitably “imperfect” knowledge to enable a new understanding of them in the past, present and, indeed, in the future.11 In the same way, chemistry understands physical events as they always have been and always will be. But it does not understand them ‘perfectly’! Instead, it probes our existing understanding for its ‘imperfections’ and finds in those ‘imperfections’ ways to further our understanding endlessly. We have had such a self-conscious12 knowledge of chemistry only for a couple centuries, however. And the key to its discovery was the increasing specification of the structure of the chemical element in the nineteenth century. Easterbrook saw that Innis and McLuhan had such a development in mind for the humanities and social sciences:
there are indications that a major shift in thought, or approach, may be underway. Whereas communication has been regarded in the main as merely one element in a large complex, one thread in the web of history [= Cole’s “increasing sophistication”], there is a growing tendency to place it at the center of analysis and to make it the focal point of interest. Innis was convinced that he had found [a] unifying theme13 in communication change, and it has been suggested recently that [media]14 be made the independent variable, economic magnitudes the dependent variables, in the study of economic growth. This would indicate a pronounced shift in vantage point, one which would provide a common core of analysis across the disciplines.
The proposal of an “independent variable” that “would provide a common core of analysis across the disciplines” was indeed the thrust of the work of both Innis and McLuhan — although Innis was never sure it could outweigh our “uncertainty or imperfect knowledge” of events. In this respect, Easterbrook and McLuhan might be seen as the two sides of Innis, the one coming down on the side of ultimate “uncertainty” and the other coming down on the side of truthful insight despite, or on the very basis of, “uncertainty” and “bias”.
What we have here is not an advance on many fronts [= Cole’s “increasing sophistication”], but a concentrated attack on a single front or sector. The interest is in the medium itself, its physical characteristics, its formal, material aspect, seen as a tool with independent qualities of its own and as the key to analysis of total situations. As such, it appears as a resource, one transformed by technology and making its impact over the whole range of human action. The study of change becomes the study of the impact of changes in media and their consequences in terms of the structuring of societies along the lines of force of dominant media. In this view, priority in change is assigned to change in media in its material aspect and to the impact of shifts in media on patterns of human association.
Easterbrook’s description of the medium in McLuhan’s work as having “independent qualities of its own” and “making its impact over the whole range of human action” and “patterns of human association” is not mistaken. The common structure of chemical elements might be described in the same way as regards its “impact” on the whole range of physical nature. But Easterbrook’s repeated references to the medium’s “physical characteristics, its formal, material aspect” is not only untidy (“formal, material aspect”?), it also threatens to make our understanding of media subject to underlying “physical characteristics” rather than our understanding of these subject to media.15 Which is figure and which is ground? Are media to be understood in terms of physical ‘forms’ like roads and books? Or are these phenomena common across media, like properties in the physical sciences, and are to be understood in any given case in terms of the media mix underlying them?16
It would seem that Easterbrook had understood McLuhan only up to the point where a transformation of the bias of the researcher was called for and, indeed, essential. Only so could “uncertainty” and “bias” be thought together with truth.
McLuhan indicates a way to understand this point in his paper at the conference:
The type of visualizing fostered by high intensity print technology is quite natural and habitual to highly literate populations, putting them at great disadvantage in a nuclear age, since nuclear structures are non-visualizable.17
Not that a “nuclear age” knows no “visualizing”! Only that its “type of visualizing” is fundamentally different from that of a “high intensity print” age!
In fact, what is “fundamentally different” between the two ‘ages’ is exactly the relation of visuality to their understanding of ground. For the one, this relation is “high intensity”, for the other it is low. If a “totally new form of science”18 of communication (dual genitive) were possible, it would have to understand the whole range of such relations — including the one best suited for the investigators carrying it out.19
In an address in Vancouver in 1958, two years before his appearance with Easterbrook at the Economic History Association meeting, McLuhan specified the issue at stake here in terms of problems that were encountered in the Ford Culture and Communication seminar even with its founding members like Easterbrook:
The psychologists could study what the effects of radio are on the structure of human perception: what new habits of perception come from just listening to radio, or watching movies or television, or reading. They’ve never done these studies because they are mutational and psychology has tended to be static and non-mutational in its studies so far. That‘s why when we began those studies, the media studies at Toronto under the Ford grant, we didn’t know how to go about it because the members of our group were all trained in the static non-mutational terms of science. We had gradually, groping around, to discover certain ways whereby we could talk about these things, since they don’t satisfy the ordinary scientific procedures at all. It calls for a totally new form of science.20
Media research is “mutational” exactly because it raises the figure/ground question universally — and specifically in regard to its investigators themselves. In 1960 Easterbrook did not understand — or at least he did accept — the “mutational” figure/ground demands of this “totally new form of science” on himself. Indeed, given his standing reliance on “uncertainty or imperfect knowledge”, he never would.
Easterbrook continues:
Innis (…) in his search for a more universal theme [than staples] (…) turned to communication in its time aspect. McLuhan, if I judge correctly, is building on his work. If we turn to (…) the dynamics of Iong-period change, it is evident that the media approach lends itself to a more comprehensive analysis of change than the staples thesis permits. Stages [historical periods] are marked out by shifts from one staple or medium to another, but in the latter [media approach] the simple linear sequence that [changes in staples]21 mark out gives way to a more complex array of clashing communication structures (configurations)22. The instability associated with these shifts is again more broadly defined in communication terms [than in staples terms], as each dominant medium is in turn challenged, then replaced by the marginal thrust of a later and more compelling rival.
Easterbrook’s use of “structures” and “configurations” here points to his fitting sense of what McLuhan was up to. But at the end of the day, he could not bring himself to — could not allow himself to be mutated to — a scientific investigation that would bring into question (bring into investigation) his existing point of view. As McLuhan was to write to Jacques Maritain in 1969:
There is a deep-seated repugnance in the human breast against understanding the processes in which we are involved. Such understanding involves far too much responsibility for our actions. (Letters, 370)
Much more, there is another “repugnance” at work on the way to under-standing media as proposed by McLuhan, a kind of repugnance2 (repugnance squared). Between the identities of a researcher who cannot see the new science and one who can, there is no identity! This gap, this dark night of the soul, this cloud of unknowing, this pathless path, must be ventured and somehow navigated in order to reach a destination which cannot be seen until it is seen:23
Without knowing it, you are questing for a new identity (…) which cannot be known until it has actually been made. (Adopt a College)24
As McLuhan was well aware, Eliot25 has the point wonderfully in Four Quartets:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing
(East Coker)
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.
(Little Gidding)
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?26
(Little Gidding)
It was in his May 5, 1958 opening address to the ‘Radio in the Future of Canada’ conference in Vancouver that McLuhan first used his signature slogan, ‘the medium is the message’. Then, after his talk, he fielded questions from conference attendees. In the course of his responses he came to speak of media science, a topic that would be much on his mind in his ‘Understanding Media’ project with the NAEB over the following two years.
In the talk itself McLuhan noted that in the face of profound social and educational crises “we need types of observation, prediction and control that are totally new“. He would repeat the phrase “totally new” many times in the course of his remarks that day. And the possibility of such discontinuous innovation he saw in the fact that media revolutions in the past, especially those of literacy and then of print (the multiplier of literacy), had in their time produced “a totally new set of mental operations”. A repetition of the media revolutionary process had now to be made again on the basis of electricity — but this time consciously. The imperative need was, first, to avoid the thoughtless destruction of the hard-won achievements of literacy, like private identity, democracy and human rights, at a time when literacy itself seemed doomed. Then, second1, to identify the elements of media (dual genitive!) so that an open investigation could be made of them such as had followed the identification of the chemical elements of physical nature (dual genitive!) in the course of the nineteenth century. This was one of the central meanings of ‘the medium is the message’ — one that has been completely overlooked, in a kind of unconscious abstention, in our continuing “numb”.
No one in 1800 could have foreseen the “types of observation, prediction and control” that had become possible by 1900 — not to speak of 2000! These were and are “totally new” types of “mental operations” that generated, and/or were generated by, manufacturing processes, university, business and military research, the world-wide exchange of ideas and experimental results, new inventions, not least of new media — and so on. It was just such an explosion of insight in and of the interior landscape that McLuhan saw as the only possible answer to the implosion of the exterior landscape. Hence his frequent characterization of his work as a “strategy for survival”.2
In his remarks after his talk McLuhan continued:
it seems to me that it’s possible to put this thing on an entirely predictable scientific basis. That you can analyze the properties of any given medium to the point where you can say ”All right, if you mix [it]3 with that particular [other medium]4, you will get this [new] kind of complex. or cluster of events, that you don’t have if [they are] not [mixed].” You could predict.
This possibility was, however, very far from being actualized:
psychologists could study what the effects of radio [and other media] are on the structure of human perception: what new habits of perception come from just listening to radio, or watching movies or television, or reading. They’ve never done these studies because they are mutational5 and psychology [as a result] has tended to be static and non-mutational in its studies so far. That‘s why when we began those studies, the media studies at Toronto under the Ford grant, we didn’t know how to go about it because the members of our group were all trained in the static non-mutational terms of science, and we had gradually, groping around, to discover certain ways whereby we could talk about these things. They don’t satisfy the ordinary scientific procedures at all; but I think it calls for a totally new form of science.
Such new science could not be systematic in the Gutenbergian manner:
I don’t think it’s possible to produce a systematic account of all these things. You have to jump in here, and cut in there, look down, look up and so on simultaneously to get any sort of a full coverage, so there’s no use apologising for the lack of system.
The new interior landscape science, or sciences, would be more like quantum physics than, say, Euclidian geometry. It, or they, would mime the new aesthetics of the poetry, painting, sculpture, dance and music that had emerged around 1900 in which the characteristic structural element was discontinuity.6
A science of media would be “totally new”, then, not only as a new discipline studying new content, but in its form. This in turn raised questions concerning the shape and number (singular or plural) of time. For if the discipline studied the forms of media, it — as itself a form — would have to begin with the results of that study.7 This feedback imperative was exactly why such study was inevitably “mutational”. But if this somersault were possible, this sort of circling back from the end to the beginning, time could not be only linear nor singular. And identity could not be static, but would have to be fundamentally gapped:
In my end is my beginning.8
Oh abbondante grazia ond’ io presunsi
ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna,
tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l’universo si squaderna:
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume
quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo
che ciò ch’i’ dico è un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch’i’ vidi (Dante, Paradiso, 33.85-92)
O grace abounding, through which I presumed
to set my eyes on the Eternal Light
so long that I spent all my sight on it!1
In its profundity I saw — ingathered
and bound by love into one single volume —
what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:
substances, accidents, and [their mutual] dispositions2
as if conjoined — in such a way that what
I tell is only rudimentary.3
I think I saw the universal shape
which that knot takes4
These are close to the last lines of the last canto of the last section of Dante’s Commedia, the Paradiso, in which Dante tells of his beatific vision there. The last lines of the last section of the last Quartet of Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’, cited by Peterson and discussed below, were written in modest echo of Dante’s unsurpassable vision.
*****
There was no one McLuhan wrote about more in his published and unpublished work than T.S Eliot. Hugh Kenner has described “the passion (…) with which we two (…) studied Eliot! We penciled notes on the yellow postwar paper of a Faber Four Quartets.“5 This was in the late 1940s when McLuhan and Kenner were planning a book on Eliot together. The project came to fruition, however, only in separate publications by both men.6 While Kenner was already expert in tracing the narrative of literary figures like Pound7 and Eliot, McLuhan was fixated on understanding discontinuity in Eliot, but also in cybernetics, the epyllion and in his own life. He was undergoing his second conversion at just that time. His investigation of Eliot then continued for the rest of his life such that one of his last literary essays and one of his last public lectures would be on Eliot.8
Jordan Peterson has paid far less attention to Eliot than McLuhan, and — as a psychology professor — with far less training to do so, but he does discuss Eliot briefly in 12 Rules for Life (p 57-58). He begins by citing the last lines of ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth of the Four Quartets. These last lines of the last Quartet bring the Four Quartets to its close and represent a wonderful coda of the whole work:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Characteristically, Peterson takes this culminating passage to describe heroic “exploration” and especially the heroic exploration of consciousness (dual genitive9):
The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself — that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean? (…) The answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God — to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good — but to do so consciously, of our own free choice. Back is the way forward — as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted — but back as awake beings, exercising the proper choice of awake beings, instead of back to sleep. (58)
Peterson makes a series of assumptions here which control his reading of Eliot’s coda — and lead him to mis-take it fundamentally. More importantly, these misguided assumptions disable Peterson’s own project and actually rehearse the grounds of the distress of the world rather than (as he of course intends) tending to its relief. Some of these assumptions are:
Now the Four Quartets disputes all these assumptions and wonderfully rehearses its contrary acceptances in those very closing lines of ‘Little Gidding’ cited by Peterson. Here “beginning” is not to be found at some singular point at the start of an historical sequence, but is “here, now, always”.
This is a moment (as Eliot has it earlier in LG13) “suspended in time” or, if a “moment” must be said to implicate some sort of time, this is a moment in
time not our time
(…)
a time
Older than the time of chronometers (DS).
This “moment”, although specifically not chronological, yet has vast implication:
Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. (EC)
This is a time that is at the heart of chronological time
in the stillness
between two waves of the sea (LG)
Yet also precedes and succeeds it:
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. (BN)
But as ‘Burnt Norton’ already has it near the very beginning of the Four Quartets:
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
For in this “time not our time”,
time future [is] contained in time past (BN)
Such that:
In my beginning is my end (EC)
And this is why:
that which is only living
Can only die. (BN)
More, when “all is always now”, the shameful hurt we have inflicted on others is incessantly exposed:
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. (EC)
Such that:
We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm. (EC)
In short, there is no heroic way of redemption: its progressive “exploration” is undermined from the start. “The end of all our exploring”, as those last lines of LG distil from all the Quartets, is not a matter of being more, but of being less:
costing not less than everything
“Everything” must be lost — including, or especially, heroic identity and its lights.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill. (EC)
BN, the first Quartet of the Four Quartets, introduces images which will be taken up again, transformed, at the end of the last Quartet, in its coda in LG:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
“The waste sad time stretching before and after” is Peterson’s linear history, the time of heroic exploration:
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after (…)
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after. (BN)
It is exactly this assumed notion of progressive capability that must be jettisoned14 through submission to another time — “Quick now, here, now, always” — as “that which was [and is and will be] the beginning”:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Imagine that the human environment might be better considered as “what is and has always been common to all domains of human experience, regardless of spatial locale or temporal frame.” The environment, construed in such a manner, consists not of objects [in the first place], but of phenomenological constants… (Jordan Peterson)1
Very early in his career McLuhan had a notion of what Jordan Peterson calls the “constituent elements of experience”. His undergraduate philosophy mentor at the University of Manitoba, Rupert Lodge, argued that all philosophy is built from three fundamental forms, acting alone or together: idealism, realism and pragmatism.2 Although McLuhan was always more interested in literature than philosophy, as a more concrete expression of human “types of temperament”, this did not mean that he considered literature as lacking comparable fundamental forms. The “artistic expression of such temperaments”, he argued, exhibits a “consistency of conformation” at least equal to that of the “thought processes” of philosophy:
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.
This is from McLuhan’s 1933-4 M.A. thesis at the University of Manitoba on the English novelist, George Meredith. McLuhan was 22. Ten years later in his Cambridge PhD thesis, he described 2000 years of intellectual history, from classical Greece to Elizabethan England, in terms of the interplay of the three forms of the trivium — dialectic, rhetoric and grammar. Their constant interplay, he submitted, constitutes an “ancient quarrel” underlying and accounting for the formation of the surface level of human experience across all the areas of its expression in (say) literature, philosophy, theology and education generally.3
In his thesis McLuhan did not yet consider just how these constants come to concrete expression in an individual and in groups. Known or unknown to themselves, humans must somehow come to their experience via a process played out aside from (or inside of?) historical time — for there is no delay in our experience of the world while we consider its possibilities. There must be another time in which these constants are surveyed and then one of them, or a combination of them, ‘selected’ (through submission) for adoption/adaption as experience.4 Humans are the beings of (subjective genitive) such multi-dimensionality.5 Over the next decade McLuhan would come to characterize this process as a ‘descent into the maelstrom’ (aka the ‘worldpool’). But like everyone else since at least Plato, he would fail in the attempt to explicate this process enough to spark its collective investigation — despite the fact that during his lifetime we all came to mime the process by ‘going to the movies’.6
By his early 30’s, then, McLuhan saw human experience as multilevel (surface and depth) and multi-chronological (history with its underlying dynamic “quarrel”). He would spend the next four decades investigating this “whirling phantasmagoria” (as he called it in the ‘Preface’ to The Mechanical Bride) and attempting to communicate what he more and more believed was its potential contribution — a potential contribution that conceivably was unique — to human survival.
Now, although explicitly referenced by McLuhan mainly in its derivative form of the attack on the heavens represented by the tower of babel,7 what was at stake in his whole career from the 1930s to 1980 was a myth described in Plato’s Sophist as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias,8 the originary battle of the gods and giants over reality:
What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality (…) One party [the giants] is trying to drag everything down to earth [their mother] out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. (…)
Their adversaries [the gods] are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen [their father], maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps. (…)
It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions of the forms the doctrine that all reality is changeless and exclusively immaterial, and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party who represent reality as everywhere changing and as only material. Like a child begging for ‘both’, he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once. (Sophist 246a-249c)
The same story was told in Egypt as many years before Plato as we are after him. This was at the very beginning of written history, but there is no reason not to suppose that humans have always known this story and always recounted it in one way or another.9 In the Egyptian version, Horus, the hawk son and/or reincarnation of Osiris, battled his snake brother, Seth, for domination of the land (always divided between the arable riverside ‘overseen’ by Horus and the always threatening desert of Seth). Their battle laid the earth to waste — in particular it stirred up the holy pool before the temple of Atum in Heliopolis so that it no longer served to reflect the above in the below. The nine great gods then met in council to decide how the rift in the divine family might be healed. The council of the gods was headed by Atum, the sun, who was the grandfather of Geb (the earth) and Nut (the sky) and great-grandfather of Osiris-Horus and Seth. The conciliar decision was to anoint Thoth (god of letters and sometimes called a further brother of Horus and Seth) with the authority and the power to settle their dispute — which he was thereby able to achieve to the satisfaction of the two warring combatants. This action of reconciliation, first within the council of the nine gods in reaching its decision, and then in the work of Thoth in reconciling Horus-Osiris and Seth, became the model of justice ‘before Geb’, that is, both in the place and time of the gods and in the place and time of Egypt (where the pharaohs of Egypt occupied the ‘throne of Geb’).10
The parallels between the Greek and Egyptian myths are plain. A familial battle of originary forces takes place concerning domination of above and below. The contest is settled in a philosophical way through a reconciliation of both together. In neither case, however, is the action linear such that reconciliation would simply do away with strife (or strife simply do away with reconciliation). Instead the action is, as Plato says, “an interminable battle [that] is always going on between them”.11 “Going on”, this is to say, in another time from chronological time in the depths of both ontology and psychology — where the imperative need of the latter (currently in indescribably dangerous eclipse) is to retrieve the reconciliation of the former. The possibility of this retrieval is grounded, in turn, exactly in that reconciliation which is ‘before’ it, a priori.12
Most important of all to under-stand concerning this contest is that it is not ‘about’ reality, as if the contesting figures disputed at some remove from it. Rather, this gigantic agon ‘is’ reality.13
Reality itself — “real existence” or “true reality”, as Plato says — is plural and, therefore, abysmally gapped in the borders between its multiple contestants.
One of the foremost implications of this mythological ontology is that justice is possible among individuals and states because it is first of all a possibility in reality itself. It is ‘true’ — where the etymology relates to ‘tree’ and has to do with ‘deep roots’ and ‘steadfastness’. Justice as ‘truce’ (another cognate), even among original powers in their unsurpassable power (like the gods and giants, and Horus and Seth), is grounded in a reconciliation that is just as original and mighty as they are.14
In the course of the 1950s McLuhan became increasingly clear about the practical ramifications of this background “quarrel” and hence of our need to initiate collective investigation of it. Here he is in Network #2 from 1953:
The area of spatial communication is that of politics, business and power. Time is the sphere of language and knowledge. Equilibrium between these interests means social viability. Divorce between them is the breakdown of communication — the jamming of the social network. Nineteenth century development of spatial communication widened the gap between knowledge and power, [between] poetry (all the arts) [on the one hand] and politics [and] business [on the other]. The withdrawal of the arts to an ivory tower and of politics and business to a tower of Babel is the figurative way of citing the current divorce between knowledge and know-how. Irresponsibility and loss of bearings occurred in both domains. Yet major developments in each sphere were strikingly parallel, and even belated recognition of common problems and solutions may help mend the broken network.
From his Cambridge English School training McLuhan was well aware, of course, that ‘space’ and ‘time’, the ‘arts’ and ‘business’, and so on, are utterly ambiguous and could never be used to define the archetypal struggle between “divorce” and “equilibrium”. Instead, they needed to be defined by it. But he didn’t yet realize, apparently, just how important this distinction was and is. Hence it was only a full 5 years later in 1958 that he first declared that “the medium is the message”.
His guess was that a definition of media along a spectrum, characterized at its two extremes by “divorce” and at its centre by “equilibrium”, might enable investigation of human experience in a new — but “ancient” — way. Through such investigation, the rift “between knowledge and know-how” might be healed and the demonstrable power of “know-how”, after two centuries of its unbridled domination of the planet and all the endless disasters resulting from that domination, might now itself be turned to our desperately needed reconciliation. As McLuhan already noted in his ‘Preface’ to The Mechanical Bride:
Since so many minds are engaged in bringing about this condition of public helplessness, and since these programs of commercial education [like the news and advertising in the general environment and all based on “know-how”] are so much more expensive and influential than the relatively puny offerings sponsored by schools and colleges [in the classroom], it seemed fitting to devise a method for reversing the process. Why not use the new commercial education as a means to enlightening its intended prey? Why not assist the public to observe consciously the drama which is intended to operate upon it unconsciously?
In short (in the same place):
Where visual symbols have been employed [via “know-how”] in an effort to paralyze the mind, they are here used as a means of energizing it.
Now Jordan Peterson, too, appeals to a myth which he terms “the most basic of plots”15 and “the oldest and most fundamental story that mankind possesses.”16
Here are some of his accounts of this myth:
There are, of course a great many parallels between Peterson’s hero myth and the mythological ontologies of Plato’s gigantomachia and the Egyptian Horus-Thoth-Seth proceedings. He describes some of them himself. In all three cases “a world-story [is recounted] that made of existence and experience the eternal battleground of order and chaos, mediated by (…) Logos, the Word”.24
But the most important part of Peterson’s “willingness to risk”25 is his assumption of the contemporary state of the world’s mind. That is, he ‘puts on’ an understanding of this “world-story” that largely26 dis-places it from multi-dimensional spaces and times, and from a phenomenological or dynamic ontology, to an “evolutionary/historical perspective” with a unidimensional space-time. This displacement may be observed in many features of Peterson’s account of the myth:
It is exactly because Peterson ‘puts on’ the dire state of the contemporary world that he turns mythology-ontology around to where it might indicate something (existence itself!) — if only we could “illuminate” it more brightly via further heroic investigation. The result is just that of Nietzsche’s “History of an Error” which Beckett so nicely capsulated in Three Dialogues: “There is more than a difference of degree between being short –- short of the world, short of self -– and being without these esteemed commodities.”
For Peterson’s hero, the quest is an eternal matter of linear degree — the “thing-in-itself” is to be reached through its refractive object. He is unable to take on the thought of eternal recurrence which Zarathustra endured as the condition of his ‘convalescence‘. In the circularity of eternal recurrence the arrow of time is not linear and does not point to the goal of reality and truth. In this fundamental circularity we are “without these esteemed commodities” as conceived in Gutenbergian perspective.
Peterson’s project has led him into the cul-de-sac of the contemporary world disaster in which humans know nothing — but know enough to terminate life on earth. The latter possibility is of course infinitely more dangerous given the former actuality.
Peterson’s task is to under-go the reversals and involutions of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in order to find that incipet the world so desperately needs. The outstanding question is whether he will fulfill his mission.
Jordan Peterson cannot make up his mind if time is singular or plural. Or, perhaps better put, he cannot make up his mind about which of two singular times is more basic than the other. True to his sometimes commitment to Gutenbergian perspective,1 truth and reality must conflate at some point. So in this mode, Peterson’s usual but not exclusive one, his consideration of anything must come down to the question of — which singularity? Which one?
The passages below are from a single paper,2 but the views it expresses on time are plainly at odds with each other. Moreover, the same ambiguity about time appears in all his work.
Over and over again he references our need for a “broader evolutionary/historical perspective”:
But just as frequently he reverts to an ‘eternal’ drama underlying human experience involving three figures/principles/orders/archetypes/gods:
At its base, the problem at stake in this ambiguity is Peterson’s inability to let go of his heroic persona. Absent this persona and its typical demand for foundational singularity, he might be exposed to the possibility that time is plural and that its central riddle is not, ‘which of historical time and eternity and history is more real?’, but instead, ‘how are equally real time and eternity knotted together?’.10
The hero comes to experience with a predetermined11 notion of the form of reality and truth — including his own reality and truth. In order to consider the full range of possibilities that such predetermination might take, the hero must of course jettison the one already in effect, the one shaping his experience and identity, and therefore abdicate that identity — for identity must be allowed to result from the range of such predetermination, cannot be allowed to dictate to it.
All the misfortunes of humans (and of all the creatures so unhappily subject to us) are the consequence of the insistence to judge reality and truth rather than being judged by them. Now Peterson would heroically address our misfortunes and attempt to heal them. This is a great thing. But his heroism only reinforces our misfortune and certainly cannot administer to it.
I desire that your conjectures should be limited by what is thinkable. Could you think a god? But this is what the will to truth should mean to you: that everything be changed into what is thinkable for man, visible for man, feelable by man. (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
Nietzsche would reduce everything to “what is thinkable for man” and then show that “what is thinkable for man” — self-destructs, falls through itself, utterly collapses like a black hole into….nothing. Hence nihilism and through nihilism and only through nihilism: INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA!1
Supposing there were no self-identical “A”, such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirm it. The “thing”— that is the real substratum of “A”; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The “A” of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing — If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a “real world” — this, however, is the apparent world2 once more… (Nietzsche, Will to Power)
In his 2013 essay, ‘Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity’3, Jordan Peterson repeatedly registers his attachment to the fabled ‘thing in itself’ and does so through what Nietzsche calls “our belief in things”. But Peterson begins his essay by setting out a preliminary overview of perception4 which would seem to rule out any such access:
Most psychological models (…) are based on the assumption that the world is made of objects, existing independently and given — or, more abstractly, of stimuli. That assumption is incorrect: the boundaries between objects or stimuli are largely situation-dependent and subjectively-determined. Half our brain is devoted to vision. This indicates that we do not simply see what is there. The “frame problem”5 (…) looms over all other current psychological concerns. We live in a sea of complexity. The boundaries of the objects we manipulate are not simply given by those objects. Every object or situation can be perceived, in an infinite number of ways, and each action or event has an infinite number of potential consequences.6
Still, Peterson is somehow able to stipulate how things are with the thing-in-itself, indeed with “all things-in-themselves”:
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 [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 related8 to the actual thing.9 (…) The perceived object is thus a low-resolution image of the thing-in-itself.10
Compare Nietzsche (from a late note included in the posthumously assembled Will to Power):
Radical nihilism is (…) the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things.
Nietzsche agreed with Peterson that absent certain presuppositions (aka, needs) “the object cannot be said to truly exist”. But exactly contrary to Peterson, Nietzsche denied those presuppositions and even those needs. All was indeed a “fantasy” — except that, absent subject and object, “fantasy”, too, must be dispensed with as self-cancelling => fantasy.
A footnote in Peterson’s essay continues his stipulation that the thing-in-itself is available for our manipulation:11
What is axiomatic about the object is that it is a representation of the thing-in-itself, sufficient for some delimited purpose.12
Given this stipulated axiom, as Peterson claims in the same place, “the object is less than the thing-in-itself and (…) can [yet] still be empirically ‘real’.”13 The enabling assumptions here are that the thing-in-itself and reality are coterminous and that the thing-in-itself can somehow lend that reality to a representation of it in and as a perceived object. Hence, the thing-in-itself is real and its object, while at an unaccountable psychological remove from it, is also ‘real’.
Now Nietzsche took the same view as Peterson that the thing-in-itself and reality are coterminous. But he concluded, since we lack any access to the thing-in-itself, that we must do also without that “esteemed commodity”14 of “reality”. He set out the history of the dissolution of our access to reality in a famous aphorism from Twilight of the Idols:
How The “True World” Finally Became A Fable: The History of an Error
1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, “I, Plato, am the truth.”)
2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man (“for the sinner who repents”). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian. )
3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian [ie, Kantian].)
4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The “true” world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)
Peterson has written and lectured on Nietzsche a great deal, including on Zarathustra. But his heroic reading has not taken that step beyond “the thing-in-itself”, “beyond good and evil” (another of Nietzsche’s books often discussed by Peterson), where Zarathustra — starts!
Point #6 is of critical importance for Peterson. For not only is it not the case that we have some sort of inexplicable access to the thing-in-itself, we also have no access to the apparent world — exactly because we lack of access to the thing-in-itself. The apparent world, including our apparent selves, is, unfortunately, sadly enough, along with the real world and our real selves — missing.
Stipulation of any access to the real or even the apparent world is dependent on some ground (hence Peterson’s various appeals to the thing-in-itself, or to brain materialism15, or to the hero’s penetration to “the constituent elements of experience”16 and, throughout his work, to uralt mythology17). But none of these stipulations can succeed, for reasons that Nietzsche already made clear 150 years ago, since all remain, in Peterson’s words, “mere arbitrary supposition”.18
What has happened is that Peterson has made the human, all-too-human error of mistaking the strange threshold of the way we need to go — for an endpoint. It is, he thinks, a problem to be solved through the stipulation of some ground. Or waved at as an eternally ventured and eternally indistinct heroic quest. In any case, he has refused in various ways the labyrinthine path to Zarathustra’s incipit.
The central demand at this threshold is that “the constituent elements of experience” be identified — as indeed Peterson knows.19 But the hero cannot know “the constituent elements of experience” absent the possibility of doing so. That is, before he can know “the constituent elements of experience” the hero must have visited “the constituent elements of experience” and activated or “put on” (as McLuhan would say) that one of them, or that one combination of them perhaps, through which knowledge of “the constituent elements of experience” is first of all possible. Unfortunately the hero cannot accomplish this somersault in time without losing himself in the process. Only the ‘nobody’ can follow Zarathustra into that ‘convalescence‘ which is so desperately needed by the world.
Tremendous self-examination: becoming conscious of oneself, not as individuals but as mankind. (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book 3, #585)
“Becoming conscious of oneself, not as individuals but as mankind” was reverted to again and again by McLuhan in terms of Yeats’ ’emotion of multitude’. He (McLuhan) thought of it as the unconscious range of possibility out of which actual experience emerges through a process we do not understand — but which we urgently need to understand as a matter of survival. It was a question of bringing to light the synchronic aspect of experience: “Let us reflect, let us think back; let us follow the highways and byways!”1
Here is Yeats’ 1903 note:
Emotion of Multitude
I [WBY] have been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems necessary it one is to succeed on the modern stage. It came into my head the other day that this construction, which all the world has learnt from France, has everything of high literature except the emotion of multitude. The Greek drama has got the emotion of the multitude from its chorus, which called up famous sorrows, even all the gods and all heroes, to witness as it were, some well-ordered fable, some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus, it has created an art where poetry and imagination, always the children of far-off multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than the mere will. This is why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is so often a little rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the imagination. The Shakespearian drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one’s body in the firelight. We think of KING LEAR less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time. Lear’s shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful children and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond shadow, till it has pictured the world. In Hamlet, one hardly notices, so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet’s father and the sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the plays, or in all but all, and very commonly the subplot is the main plot working itself out in more ordinary men and women and so doubly calling up before us the image of multitude. Ibsen and Maeterlinck have on the other hand created a new form, for they get multitude from the Wild Duck in the Attic, or from the Crown at the bottom of the Fountain, vague symbols that set the mind wandering from idea to idea, emotion to emotion. Indeed all the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich far-wandering many imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it. There are some who understand that the simple unmysterious things living as in a clear noonlight are of the nature of the sun, and that vague, many-imaged things have in them the strength of the moon. Did not the Egyptian carve it on emerald that all living things have the sun for father and the moon for mother, and has it not been said that a man of genius takes the most after his mother?
McLuhan saw “this same doubleness” in Plato and Aristotle:
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)
Up, abysmal thought, out of my depth! I am your cock and dawn, sleepy worm. Up! Up! My voice shall yet crow you awake! Unfasten the fetters of your ears: listen! For I want to hear you. Up! Up! Here is thunder enough to make even tombs learn to listen. And wipe sleep and all that is purblind and blind out of your eyes! Listen to me even with your eyes: my voice cures even those born blind. (Zarathustra, Part 3)
This is Zarathustra calling up his most “abysmal thought” immediately before he had to go down into the death experience (experience?) required for ‘the convalescent‘:
No sooner had Zarathustra spoken these words than he fell down as one dead and long remained as one dead. (Zarathustra, Part 3)
However, in scientific endeavour, as elsewhere, the willingness to risk Is everything.1
Passages on the hero are given below from two of Jordan Peterson’s papers. Of course, a great many more could be culled from his many other papers and from his books, but the passages cited here may be taken as representative of his position.
The epigraph above is the last line of his 1991 PhD thesis and sums up not only his take on the hero but also his own credo. Indeed, Peterson plainly identifies with the hero-savior which is an excellent thing in terms of his deeply felt need to answer the cries of the contemporary world in its manifold individual and social dangers; but it is also limiting as an effective remedy. Commentary in the footnotes attempts to show how and why this is so.2 The great point to be kept in mind was put in short form by one of Peterson’s great heroes, Nietzsche:
instead of the deification of man, his un-deification, the digging of the deepest chasm, which only a miracle, only prostration in deepest self-contempt can bridge…3
No man believes now in this absurd self-inflation: and we have sifted our wisdom through a sieve of contempt.4
***
Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture Of Belief (Precis), 19995
Religion, sovereignty, natural rights, and the constituent elements of experience, 200614
You can imagine some of the local yokel heartburn and nausea at the calamity of my “fame”. Wish you were here to enjoy the show. (McLuhan to John Wain, March 26, 1966)1
It has not escaped notice that Jordan Peterson has recapitulated in the first decades of twenty-first century what Marshall McLuhan achieved sixty years ago in the mid-twentieth. Namely, these two longtime University of Toronto humanities professors became world famous through the new electronic networks of television (McLuhan) and social media (Peterson). To the consternation and envy of their academic colleagues, especially at UT, both became in the process not only enormously influential in the extra-academic world, but also — horror of horrors — relatively wealthy.
The talent of both was sharp insight into what might be called the surprisingly obvious. They could see against the tide and could and did trace individual and social problems to the utter obliviousness in which those individuals and whole societies went about their unhappy and dangerous business: “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”2 The surprise they elicited in making their observations came partly from the consternation people had in wondering how they had not seen it before; but there was also a vague sense of the catastrophic effect that would result in their lives if the observations were allowed their potential to decenter. Their observations were made from a depth, and of a depth, that was at once obvious and unseen — and thereby powerful on multiple levels.
There are, however, many other parallels between the two men suggesting a kind of commonality of vocation that calls for thoughtful consideration:
McLuhan in his 1954 lecture, ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’:
The empires of Alexander and the Caesars were essentially built by paper routes. But today with instantaneous global communications the entire planet, is, for purposes of inter-communication, a village rather than a vast imperial network.
“Inter-communication” was a favorite catch-phrase of Henry Wright, one of McLuhan’s mentors at the University of Manitoba — more than two decades before the ‘Catholic Humanism’ lecture.
Electric speeds create centers everywhere1
In 1938 Bernard Muller-Thym returned to St Louis University, where he had obtained his MA in 1933. In the meantime he and his growing family of eventually eight children had been in Toronto where Muller-Thym received his licentiate from the IMS2 and his PhD from the university. At SLU, he taught in the philosophy department and immediately began publishing a whole series of important papers.3
Muller-Thym and McLuhan quickly became very close friends — Muller-Thym was the best man in the McLuhans’ 1939 marriage ceremony and the Godfather to two of their first three children, Eric (b 1942) and Mary (b 1944 with twin Teri).
In Toronto Muller-Thym had been a favorite of Etienne Gilson. Both were family men in a sea of single priests and seminarians at St Michael’s. Both loved music — in fact Muller-Thym and his wife, Mary, the daughter of the conductor of the Kansas City symphony, were very accomplished musicians who performed in public concerts.4 Muller-Thym was also an extraordinarily skilled linguist who wrote his MA thesis in Latin; and Gilson must have particularly appreciated Muller-Thym’s knowledge of German and Dutch,5 where Gilson felt his own knowledge was limited.
Gilson saw to it that Muller-Thym’s PhD thesis on the Establishment of the University of Being in the doctrine of Meister Eckhart of Hochheim was immediately published in 1939. In the Preface he wrote to the book, Gilson expressed his high regard for Muller-Thym and his hopes for him as a Christian philosopher:
My (…) reason for introducing Professor B. J. Muller-Thym to the learned world of mediaevalists is that I want to thank him publicly for having so well done something that I had long hoped to undertake, and for having done it at the very time when I was beginning to realize that I could never do it. After reading his interpretation of Meister Eckhart’s doctrine of the university of being, I feel myself quite close to the final answer to one of the most intricate problems that arises in the field of mediaeval philosophy,6 and anybody who reads his book will probably agree that Professor B. J. Muller-Thym is now better qualified than anybody else to carry the study of that problem forward to its complete elucidation. (…) Historians have spared no effort in parallelling a large number of Eckhart’s statements with similar statements culled from the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It is beyond doubt that still more text, materially similar, could be quoted to the same effect. Yet, when all is said and done, it remains true that, as the author of this book aptly says, “If we should take these texts with their genuine Thomistic import, and then put them with all the texts of Eckhart, it is simply impossible to find Eckhart making sense with Eckhart.” For having so clearly realized the true nature of his own historical problem, Professor B. J. Muller-Thym has finally succeeded where his predecessors failed. Here, at last, is an historical interpretation of Meister Eckhart’s philosophical thought; and, because Meister Eckhart is a philosopher worthy of the name, we are now able, thanks to Professor B. J. Muller-Thym, not only to understand his doctrine in its historical setting, but also to pursue a definite metaphysical position to its ultimate implications. (…) The great artist, Corot, used to say: “A painter is a man who knows where to sit.” The same can be said of the true historian. Because he has singled out the only spot from which Meister Eckhart can be seen in his full intelligibility, Professor B. J. Muller-Thym has proved himself to be a thoroughbred historian of philosophy. It is most gratifying to reflect that such a book as this, complete in itself though it be, is at the same time an earnest of those further explorations in the same field, promised by the author in his foreword.7 (ix, xii-xiii)
Between 1938 and 1942 Muller-Thym introduced McLuhan to his own work, but also to the work of his mentor, Gilson. Gilson became the single most cited source for McLuhan’s 1943 PhD thesis on the classical trivium and Thomas Nashe. Muller-Thym’s influence was slower to unfold, but was very deep. A footnote in the Eckhart thesis, which McLuhan must have read closely with Muller-Thym, observes in passing:
God in His unity, the esse absolutum, is the point which is everywhere; His circumference, the creature, is nowhere. (University of Being, 105n)
This observation captured Muller-Thym’s critique of Eckhart in nuce. At the end of the day, Eckhart’s esse could not account for, or valorize, either plurality or difference: his “esse absolutum” was only a “point”. Hence “God in His unity (…) is everywhere [and] His circumference (…) is nowhere”.8
Now McLuhan would come to use the figure of point and circumference, usually in the form of ‘centre and margin’, over and over and over again. Indeed, he was still doing so in one of his last essays, ‘Ma Bell Minus the Nantucket Gam’, which was published posthumously in 1981. Significantly, he began to discuss the critical importance of the ‘centre and margin’ form about the same time that he started to insist, in the late 1950’s, that “the medium is the message”.9 Arguably, it was exactly this ‘centre and margin’ form that was the medium that is the message. The revolution his thinking underwent at the time10 resulted in the idea that it might be possible to “move the world” through the specification of the spectrum of possible centre-margin forms.
Here are some centre-margin passages from the crucial period immediately following completion of his ‘understanding media’ project with the NAEB in the second half of 1960:
McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff, December 19, 1960:
Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the world.” (…) Must we not now expect every position whatever to be simultaneously a montage of all others? When there is no longer a center-margin interplay in a positional or spatial sense, is it not yet possible to have a more inclusive ecology [based on center-margin interplay in a simultaneous temporal sense] than any previously envisaged, and would not such equilibrium or interplay be capable (…) of [bringing about] true freedom?
McLuhan to to Jackie Tyrwhitt, December 23, 1960 (Letters 278):
Noise [in a communication network] is of course just any kind of irrelevance, and yet irrelevance is a needed margin for any kind of attention or center. In the field of attention, a center without a margin is the formula for hypnosis, stasis and paralysis.
McLuhan to Harry Skornia, January 7, 1961:
New insight via center-margin interplay. In systems development (see Hans Selye’s Stress) any center creates a margin for itself. Any moment of perception has center-margin. When center swallows margin you are hypnotized, or mad. If center is ear (radio), margin is visual. Interplay between center-margin is need of any system.
Inside the Five Sense Sensorium 1961:
We still imagine that politics can follow the pre-telegraph patterns of center-margin interplay. With electric media any place is a center. No place is a margin. (…) Psychologists explain that when the field of attention has a center without a margin we are hypnotized. Such is the condition of tribal man, past or present. The problem of design is to understand the media forces in such wise that we need never sink into the zombie tribal state [while at the same time avoiding the Gutenberg “pre-telegraph patterns of center-margin interplay”].
The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion 1962:
The new quantum physics is not much concerned with visual modes of perception, and least of all with the centre-margin patterns that characterized the outward radiation of the baroque explosion and colonial expansion. Today physics confronts the phenomenon of fusion and implosion rather than the outward and analytic movement of explosion. (…) Habits and attitudes natural to centuries of expansion now yield with equal naturalness to the intense pressures of an electronically unified world. Another way of stating the change is to say that when information movement speeds up a great deal, centre-margin patterns yield to centres-without-margins. (…) The new structure is not the old sponge pattern of intake from the margins and output from the centre, but of dialogue among centres.
McLuhan to Edward T. Hall, April 5, 1962:
Reading Heisenberg has made me feel that my media studies are at the state that nuclear studies had reached in 1924. But my heart sinks, because those nuclear studies were being urged forward by eager teams, and media studies enjoys no such support at all. But I am bold [enough] to say that many of the same techniques and concepts are needed for advancing media studies as were used for nuclear studies. But there is the huge difference, that media studies involve human lives far more profoundly than nuclear studies ever have done, or ever can do.
The Copenhagen school talks my language (…) Heisenberg’s distinction between rotational and non-rotational systems as creating quite distinct spatial configurations corresponds exactly to my divisions between centre-margins and centres without margin systems.
An important question emerges immediately. As illustrated in the two passages from 1962, McLuhan began at this time to champion “centres-without-margins” and continued to do so for the rest of his life. At times he even equated this form with God. But in the 1960 and 1961 passages he asserted:
The glaring discrepancy between these characterizations and that of “centres-without-margins” (especially where the latter was held to be some kind of absolute or even God Himself) turned on the ambiguity of ‘margin’. On the one hand it could be taken as the differentiated relatum of a point or centre to its margin or circumference, where the nature of the relation between the two relata remained undefined. It is in this sense that “any center creates a margin for itself [and] any moment of perception has center-margin”. On the other hand, ‘margin’ could be taken to imply a relatum that was or should be ‘marginalized’. In this case the nature of the relation between the relata was defined, not undefined, and it was defined as negative. Hence the desire or need of the centre at least to control its margin and potentially to eliminate it in a fit of “hypnotized” madness.
At some point in 1961 or 1962, speaking historically but also autobiographically, McLuhan stipulated that “centre-margin patterns yield to centres-without-margins”. This was to move, at least in McLuhan’s own case, from the undefined sense of ‘margin’ to its defined negative sense.
In McLuhan’s usage, “centres-without-margins” did not revert to Eckhart’s “God in His unity (…) is everywhere [and] His circumference (…) is nowhere”, nor to his own “center without a margin”. Instead, “centres-without-margins” now came to mean centers whose relata were also centers such that their relation was one of “dialogue among centres”. Hence, “with electric media any place is a center [and] no place is a margin” and “electric speeds create centers everywhere”.
It may be that McLuhan’s turn to these confusing terms (confusing, perhaps, even to McLuhan himself) resulted from the abbreviations he began to use for these different forms. A notation (doubtless from Eric McLuhan) on p 3 of the McLuhan library spreadsheet explains McLuhan’s “short forms” including “c/m: Center Margin (i.e., fragmented)” and “c-m: Center Without Margin (i.e., inclusive)”. The slash in c/m indicated a negative relation between the relata that could be characterized as “fragmented”. The hyphen in c-m indicated the contrary relation of harmony between the relata that could be characterized as “inclusive”. But the hyphen in c-m might also be read as a minus sign and in this case it signified “c-m: Center Without [fragmented] Margin”. Less confusing abbreviations might surely have been c/m and c+c.
However all that may have been, the central point was that the nature of the relation between centre and margin was correlate with the nature of the relata themselves: where the relation changes, so do the relata; conversely, when the relata change, so does their relation.11 Here is McLuhan in his 1954 lecture ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ where particular “forms or channels of communication” stand in for relations or media in general and “social and political consequences” stand in for the relata of those relations:
One generalization, popularized in the writings of HA Innis in view of the history of forms of communication since writing, is that any change in the forms or channels of communication, be it writing, roads, carts, ships, stone, papyrus, clay, or parchment, any change whatever has revolutionary social and political consequences.
McLuhan was very close here to the idea that the range of centre-margin relations (including that of centre-centre) might be the elementary form of experience aka “the medium [that] is the message”. The spectrum of such possibilities would stretch between all centre at one extreme and all margin at the other, and its mid- point would be the “inclusive” relation of both of them together. However, on account of the ambiguity of these terms (as described above) and the further ambiguity of ‘centre’ and ‘mid-point’ in regard to the spectrum of possibilities itself, much clearer terminology might be ‘ear’ and ‘eye’ as defined over a spectrum stretching between all ear and all eye with the centre of the spectrum being ear and eye in ‘inclusive” or ‘superposition’ relation. In this case, the spectrum of ear/eye relations would equally map the spectrum of the possible values of the “tactility” between them. And the result might be a kind of Mendeleev’s table of the elementary forms of all human experience.
McLuhan continued the passage from ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ as follows:
Related to this fact is another one that any channel of communication has a distorting effect on habits of attention; it builds up a distinct form of culture.
That is, the insights of H.A. Innis concerning external “forms or channels of communication” and the “revolutionary social and political consequences” resulting from “any change whatever” in them, also have an internal analogue. Here the drama was that of the interior landscape and the need was to begin to investigate it as extensively as was the external landscape has been in the last two centuries. In fact application of a loose knowledge of the interior landscape had already begun in the arts, advertising and propaganda. As McLuhan continued in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’:
It is not markets we now invade but the cultures and the minds of men.
The year before in his ‘Later Innis’ essay, McLuhan made this point in regard to Innis’ own work:
the work of the later Innis was a shift in attention from the trade-routes of the external world to the trade routes of the mind. Technology, he saw, had solved the problem of production of commodities and had already turned to the packaging of information. And the penetrative powers of the pricing system were as nothing beside the power of the new media of communication to penetrate and transform all existing institutions and patterns of thought.
But how to understand the interior landscape of thought, the trade routes of the mind, as extensively as the exterior landscape had been investigated beginning around 1800? What remained missing was specification of the elementary form of that internal landscape. McLuhan would realize the critical importance of this absence later in the 1950’s with his admonition that the specification of “the medium is the message”.
What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end…1
Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X….2
What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.3
Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals; because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had.4
Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values (…) — the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things (…). This realization is a consequence of the cultivation of “truthfulness” — thus itself a consequence of the faith in morality.5
The Will to Power is a collection of Nietzsche’s notes published after his death (he lived from 1844 to 1900 but was incapacitated after 1889) in a series of different renditions.6 In it, as in a number of the books Nietzsche published in his lifetime, problems are posed concerning the logical, psychological, social, political and war and peace consequences of nihilism.
Now McLuhan was, of course, a Catholic convert. If his conversion and his work generally are to have significance for us today, 120 years after Nietzsche’s death and 40 years after McLuhan’s, it can only be because he, like Nietzsche, “lost his way (…) in every labyrinth of the future” and so “lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself”. It is such a past that has been passed through, and such a passed past alone, that could provide McLuhan with a methodical basis for his work — if that work is to command our attention today.7 The great question is whether he, too, was “a soothsayer (…) who looks back [to the threading of those labyrinths] when relating what will come” — whether in his work, too, “a countermovement [to nihilism] finds expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism — but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it.”8
The first aphorism in The Will to Power is one of Nietzsche’s many drafts of an outline for a book he never came to write. He delineates this outline in 8 points:9
Many of Nietzsche’s points here are familiar in McLuhan’s work. For example, from his earliest essays onward he argued that the intellectual tenability and even the historical survival of Catholicism depended upon the depth investigation of the Church’s own roots — by the Church itself and its faithful. Such an investigation entailed a familiarity with contemporary art and science13 and, as McLuhan began to see somewhat later, also with the evolving technological environments in and through which the Church attempted to express its message.
McLuhan’s conversion is therefore the crucial question at the bottom of all his work.14 After the insight of Nietzsche — and after all those McLuhan haphazardly lumped in Nietzsche’s company (Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Sorel, Proudhon, Freud, Bergson, Spengler, Joyce, Stein, Proust, Eliot, Pound, Picasso, Rodin, Benda, Einstein, Lewis and Jung)15 — how was conversion possible in an intellectually cogent manner? In an authentic manner? In a manner we can respect and learn from today? And — most importantly — what has such a possibility to do with our desperate need to extricate ourselves from the cul-de-sac in which we find ourselves in extremis even now?
As insistently described by Nietzsche, the great necessity was to enter and to thread “every labyrinth”. And, indeed, from start to finish, McLuhan never tired of pointing to the significance of Poe’s Maelstrom16, of the vortices of Pound and Lewis and of the ubiquitous labyrinths in modern art, especially in Joyce.17
Further, again like Nietzsche, McLuhan repeatedly insisted that values had no place in his analysis. If they appeared at all, they did so as explanandum, not explanans18 — as what had to be investigated, not as providing any sort of accepted basis from which investigation might be initiated.
Crucially, for both Nietzsche and McLuhan, the cul-de-sac in which the western tradition has eventuated is no merely logical or psychological event. It is above all a global social event in which commerce and government are even more caught up than are the arts. Analyses of the labyrinths exposed at the end of the western tradition are therefore consequential first of all for our communal, national and international lives, and especially for war and peace, as no analysis has ever been before.
We have no choice. We have either to surpass any previous age or to collapse into a new Babel. For our problems, like our means and opportunities, are of a scope beyond those of any previous age. (Symbolist Communication 1953)
Lastly, the very key to this social event which has come to dominate the world like a cloud of poisonous gas, was, for both Nietzsche and McLuhan — romanticism!19 Nietzsche ends his 8-part aphorism above with references to this fact (and therefore to his many discussions of it in his published work20). For his part, McLuhan saw in romanticism an “automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitude”21, which necessarily disintegrated when that “fixing” was exposed and could not account for the privilege implicated in “fixing” whatever it had fixed!22 As a result, he fully agreed with Nietzsche “that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things” since these could not be anything but Gutenberg galaxy “fixings” whose legitimacy passed away with it.
All the art and science of any consequence following romanticism could be seen as documenting this disintegration, as can the millions upon millions of deaths in the unending wars waged in its continuing wake.
The great question, which cannot be repeated often enough, was whether a “counterblast” or “countermovement [to nihilism] finds [open!] expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism — but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it.” Any other “movement”, one with a different presupposition, could not withstand the force of nihilism, could not be true,23 and could not win and hold our acceptance.
I remember a phrase, “Meaning is an arrow that best reaches its mark when least encumbered with feathers”. What’s wrong with that remark? Without feathers there wouldn’t be any arrow. (…) At what stage do feathers become an encumbrance? At what stage do they become a necessity?1 (McLuhan to Nina Sutton)
McLuhan’s remarks here (reminiscent of Wittgenstein) are both a statement of his method and an illustration of it.
In regard to any observation McLuhan wants to know where it may be situated on the f/g < > g/f spectrum. Here with “Meaning is an arrow that best reaches its mark when least encumbered with feathers”, feathers as figure are seen on the ground of the arrow of meaning and this figure is situated near the end of the f/g side of the spectrum.2 The arrow of meaning is taken as having exclusive, or near exclusive, worth relative to feathers: “best (…) when least encumbered”.
But, says McLuhan, the arrow of meaning is possible only on account of feathers: “without feathers there wouldn’t be any arrow”. Now feathers are seen as ground and the arrow of meaning seen as a figure on it. Here the previous f/g relation or ratio has flipped to a g/f one and the new ratio of the two is now situated somewhere on the opposite side of the spectrum between its middle and g/f end.3
McLuhan’s next move is to try to specify where on the spectrum this flipped g/f ratio should be situated. He does so by further inquiry into the spectrum itself. “At what stage do feathers become an encumbrance? At what stage do they become a necessity?” On the one hand, if an arrow were to have too many feathers, it might fly badly or not at all. On the other hand, if it had too few feathers, it would again fly badly or not at all.
McLuhan’s unstated conclusion is that the ratio between arrow and feathers, between ground and meaning, between medium and message, must be situated at the middle of the spectrum: neither too many feathers nor too few. (In the middle of the spectrum — that is, the point where not only g/f obtains, but also f/g. As Heraclitus put it 2500 years ago, but with communication of the insight still not achieved today, ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή, ‘the way up is the way down’. Here ‘up’ and ‘down’ or ‘f’ and ‘g’ are definitively different, but also bound together in a fundamental structure just as are, say, electron and proton in the chemical element or 0 and 1 in the binary bit.) This midpoint is the ‘superposition’ of quantum physics.
The further implication has truly vast importance. If statements (a) may collectively be investigated on the basis of the f/g < > g/f spectrum (b) with cumulative results (thus enacting ‘science’), this might serve (c) to show the carrying power (so to speak) of the spectrum and particularly of its middle position.
Consider the relation of homelessness to being at home. If the f/g < > g/f spectrum is able to demonstrate itself as science through collective investigation, the decided homelessness of modern civilization (if this may still be termed ‘civilization’) could be seen as balanced at the middle position of the spectrum by ‘being at home’.4
McLuhan traced violence to a lack of identity aka ‘homelessness’. The extreme danger of nuclear war (‘extreme danger’ in multiple senses) might therefore be ameliorated through this method. Perhaps only through his method?
The newfound possibility of science in and of the humanities would supply the ground for a new sense of identity for humans beings in a global village where particular identities were, dangerously, no longer possible. Or, better put, where particular identities once seemed to be no longer possible (“when least encumbered with feathers”), but could now be re-evaluated and rejuvenated and reinstituted through their repositioning on the f/g < > g/f spectrum.
McLuhan’s conversion was an illustration of this universal possibility5 and a kind of second sight or pre-conclusion of a method he would not be able to articulate until two decades later.
In the spring of 1943 McLuhan was alerted by his Mother (then living in Detroit) to the presence of Wyndham Lewis in the area. McLuhan was already in touch with Fr Stanley Murphy at the time in the hope of moving from his St Louis University position to one at Assumption College in Windsor — a hope that would be realized the next year when McLuhan assumed the post at Assumption that he would occupy for two years, 1944-1946.
A job at Assumption would bring McLuhan closer to his Mother, would bring him back to Canada, would bring him within the orbit of Basilian institutions headquartered at St Michael’s College (University of Toronto) and would therefore bring him one step closer to a job at St Mike’s — McLuhan’s vocational goal. McLuhan’s mentor, Fr Gerald Phelan, President of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St Mike’s, was the genial hand behind this chain of moves, all of which would culminate in McLuhan obtaining a position at St Michael’s starting in 1946 — where he would remain for the rest of his life.
Here are the first letters exchanged between McLuhan and Lewis leading to their meeting in person at the end of July or start of August, 1943.1
McLuhan to Wyndham Lewis, July 24, 19432
Dear Mr Lewis, Father Murphy said that he had mentioned me to you as one who was much interested in your work. When our summer-school winds up here in a few days I have to go to Detroit. If you are not too busy or too exhausted by our heat, there is nothing I should more enjoy than a chat with you. Yours Sincerely, Marshall McLuhan
Wyndham Lewis to McLuhan, July 26, 19433
Dear Mr. McLuhan. Thank you for your letter and I include hope that when you are up here you will let me know.
In his programmatic letter to Ezra Pound from June 22, 1951,1 McLuhan recorded his reaction to Wyndham Lewis’ America and Cosmic Man:
In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society. Lewis saw that years ago. His America and Cosmic Man2 was an H-bomb let off in the desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much more fun. Lewis clears the air of fug. We want to get rid of people entirely. And it is necessary to admire the skill and thoroughness with which we have made our preparations to do this. I am not of the ‘we’ party. I should prefer to defuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the sidelines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists.3
It may be that Lewis’ pointers to “the medium” in Cosmic Man acted as a spur to McLuhan’s eventual appeal to the notion ten years later — and for the rest of his career thereafter. The most important of Lewis’ observations in this book concerning “the medium”, at least for McLuhan’s purposes, were these:
Until you know something of the medium — the political and social atmosphere — in which these great figures live and have their being, it would be useless to attempt to delineate them for you4… (34)
Water is a very different medium from air: and if you had never seen water in any but minute quantities, it would not be easy to explain to you about the life of a fish.5 (35)
Human societies are engaged in a perpetual struggle to disengage themselves from a chaos of superannuated laws. The accelerated tempo of mechanical evolution makes things much worse. (…) A bundle of old statutes, or the medium of exchange hallowed by long use, has us bewitched. A superstitious fixation makes of our political and economic life one vast “bottleneck”.6 (154-155)
Lewis was discussing “political and economic life” life here, but McLuhan would have seen an excellent description of our social, cultural, familial and individual predicaments as well. The Gutenberg Galaxy, begun not long after McLuhan’s letter to Pound, but completed only a decade later, could well be described in the terms set out here by Lewis: “Human societies [and all individual human beings] are engaged in a perpetual struggle7 to disengage themselves from a chaos of superannuated laws. The accelerated tempo of mechanical evolution makes things much worse. (…) A bundle of old statutes [governing first of all our perceptual patterns], or the medium of exchange hallowed by long use, has us bewitched. A superstitious fixation makes of our political and economic life (and our social and individual lives) one vast “bottleneck”.
And now today, more than 70 years after Lewis’ Cosmic Man, the planet remains fixated before this “vast bottleneck” — while it juggles nuclear bombs at an ever-increasing number of ‘flashpoints’….
An aerial view of a territory to be occupied by subsequent toil. (McLuhan to Felix Giovanelli, Aug 1948)
His [Aquinas’] “articles” can be regarded as vivisections of the mind in act. The skill and wit with which he selects his objections constitute a cubist landscape, an ideal landscape of great intellectual extent seen from an airplane. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)
In his 1951 ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ essay,1 McLuhan set out the subject matter of his investigations for the following decade. They would focus on the specification of the technique of flight:
If anybody ever consciously cultivated2 a move camera eye it was Tennyson. But if one asks what it was of landscape art that the Romantics and the Victorians did not achieve, it must be replied, [it was] le paysage intérieur which had to wait for Baudelaire, Laforgue and Rimbaud. It was this discovery that gave the later poets and painters alike, the power to be much more subjective and also more objective than the Romantics. For all their skill in discovering and manipulating external-nature situations by which to render states of mind, the Romantics remained tied to the object3 (…) So they repeatedly bog down (…)4 just at the moment when they are ready to soar. They could not discover the technique of flight. It would be interesting to inquire how far the cessation of the poetic activity of Wordsworth and Coleridge was connected with this technical frustration. By means of the interior landscape, however, Baudelaire could not only range across the entire spectrum of the inner life, he could transform the sordidness and evil of an industrial metropolis into a flower. With this technique he was able to accept the city as his central myth, and see it as the enlarged shape of a man, just as Flaubert did in The Sentimental Education, Joyce in Ulysses and Eliot in The Waste Land.5 Moreover, the technique of inner landscape not only permits the use of any and every kind of experience and object, it insures a much higher degree of control over the effect (…) The picturesque artists [= the Romantics]6 saw the wider range of experience that could be managed by discontinuity and planned irregularity, but they kept to the picture-like single perspective.7 The interior landscape, however, moves naturally towards the principle of multiple perspectives as in the first two lines of The Waste Land where the Christian Chaucer, Sir James Frazer and Jessie Weston are simultaneously present. This is ‘cubist perspective’ which renders, at once, a diversity of views with the spectator [including the author or artist]8 always in the centre of the picture.9
The great question was how to domesticate this “technique of flight”? How could it be specified and thereby applied to crises not only (only!) in the humanities, but in education, economics, politics and war and peace?10
Ten years later, in 1961, McLuhan set out his progress in this quest in ‘The Humanities in the Electronic Age’:
Bertrand Russell pointed to the great achievement of the twentieth century as the technique of suspended judgement. That is, [it made] the discovery of the process of insight itself, the technique of avoiding the automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitudes that so easily results from any given [individual or] cultural situation – [the discovery of] the technique of open field perception. (…) The technique of insight itself is a natural phase to succeed the nineteenth-century discovery of the technique of invention, because it is the means of abstracting oneself from the bias and consequence of one’s own [individual and social] culture. (…) Innis’ concern in the Bias of Communication11 is with the technique of the suspended judgement. That means, not the willingness to admit other points of view, but the technique of how not to have a point of view. This is identical with the problem facing physicists in correcting the bias of the instruments of research, and it draws attention to the fact that the historian, the poet, the critic, and the philosopher, now as always, face exactly the same situations as the scientist.12
For Gerry Fialka and Clinton Ignatov, and with a tip of the hat to Søren Kierkegaard1….
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 others, and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. In fact, whenever we ‘quote’ one [archetype of] consciousness [objective genitive]2, we also ‘quote’ [all] the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes has been called by Jung (…) ‘the archetypal unconscious’. (From Cliché to Archetype, 21-22)
[Freud’s] conception of man, considered historically, is a reaction against the Victorian tendency to see everything in a rosy light and yet to describe everything sub rosa. It was an age of mental “pussyfooting” that finally gave birth to Nietzsche, who was driven to philosophize with a hammer. So it is only logical that ethical motives as determining factors in human life do not figure in Freud’s teaching. He sees them in terms of conventional morality, which he justifiably supposes would not have existed in this form, or not have existed at all, if one or two bad-tempered patriarchs had not invented such precepts to protect themselves from the distressing consequences of their impotence. Since then these precepts have unfortunately gone on existing in the super-ego of every individual. This grotesquely depreciative view is a just punishment for the historical fact that the ethics of the Victorian age were nothing but conventional morality, the creation of curmudgeonly praeceptores mundi. (Jung on Freud)3
In ‘Sigmund Freud in His Historical Setting’, Jung considered how something like a ‘galaxy’ of experience operates:
even the most original and isolated idea does not drop down from heaven, but grows out of an objective network of thought which binds all contemporaries together whether they recognize it or not.
Such an “objective network” is manifested both individually (in a person like Freud for the purposes of Jung’s essay) and collectively (“which binds all contemporaries together”). But “all contemporaries” here should not be understood to mean ‘everybody alive at the same time’ and especially not to mean ‘everybody alive at the same time who all experience the world in the same way’. The human community (or comedy) is far more various than that.4 Some singular form of experience certainly did not dominate individuals like Freud all the time (let alone whole groups of individuals all the time) and it did not dominate in any way at all many other individuals who were alive at the same time as Freud and in that sense were ‘contemporary’ with him.5
It would seem that human experience, individual or collective, must be understood more finely — that is, with greater attention to its phenomenology, to its breaks and variations and assumptions (on the sides both of the observed and observer!). Descriptions in terms of persons (Freud) or groups of persons (Freud’s ‘contemporaries’) or ages (the nineteenth century!) will not do. These are air balloons. But while they fail in categorizing experience in a rigorous way, they do show that categorizing experience is always going on in one way or another. We can’t do without it! These air balloons therefore demonstrate both a need and attempts to answer that need. Determined investigation is called for to retrieve what is at once signaled by them and obscured by them.
Instead of such easy and misleading understandings, “contemporaries” may be taken to name, as the word itself indicates, a group whose shared experience has its root in a certain acceptance of time (dual genitive)6: con-temporaries. In the case of the Gutenberg galaxy (the phenomenon, not the book), the acceptance was (and is) of time as singular and linear. But since this particular acceptance of time is anything but unanimous across the extended record of human cultures, it must be asked where and when and by whom such a determination is reached. Apparently there is another space and time (McLuhan termed it the ‘interior landscape’), in which the specification of such acceptances is incessantly at stake (McLuhan termed it ‘the drama of cognition’) involving some sort of ghostly actor (McLuhan termed it the ‘nobody’7 behind the dramatic masks).
The resulting implication is that time and space are fundamentally plural, not singular, and, at least in the first instance, vertical, not linear. ‘Con-temporaries’ thus takes on a further meaning as the fundamental task of human individuals and societies in determining, moment by moment, space, time and identity. This is a task that is going on ceaselessly, yet with no notice at all, behind our own backs. Penelope unweaving by night what she wove by day is an image of this definitive activity of humans — an essential activity like breathing that is yet, remarkably enough, unknown and uninvestigated.8
McLuhan would initiate investigation of this activity as the path to potential survival in an age in which the ‘advance’ of human activity has come to threaten its own destruction: the Tower of Babel revisited. But just as with the ‘exterior landscape’, preliminary “pattern recognition” must first be achieved9 in order to initiate collective investigation of this “landscape” based on common focus. This is what happened with chemistry in the exterior landscape and what must now also happen in the interior one — if its investigation is finally to take off.10
A ‘galaxy’ of experience covers a loosely defined group in the same way that ‘organic’ names an enormous variety of carbon-based compounds. A timeless structure like carbon is at the base of such a group, but that structure has “innumerable variants”11 and is in any case only one elementary possibility amongst a whole ‘table’ of others.12 Exactly therefore, “when we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we unconsciously retrieve [all the] others” — that is, we cannot understand the particular structure of one of them without understanding the general structure of all of them.
To take an example, electric media expose old media, like the book or the car, as obsolete. Unconsciously (in the vast majority of cases) or consciously (at least potentially), this exposure implicates the medium as such. We are able to judge old media on the basis of new media only because we have some implicit notion of the medium and of the range of its expression — as plural media.
McLuhan’s quest was to bring these implicit understandings to explicit collective investigation — hence his constant appeal to “the grammars of the media“. For just as we follow the rules of language without knowing that we are doing so, so (in McLuhan’s view) we follow the ‘laws of media’ — but unconsciously.13 And this quest would be no mere conceptual exercise. It would eventuate in the study of dynamic media structures both in themselves and in their phenomenal expression — just as chemistry studies the elements both in themselves and in their phenomenal expression.
The phenomenon of the Gutenberg galaxy was a multifarious collection of individuals and groups. When it was in operation, this form issued from a principle that was be-fore in time14 (but not clock-time, of course) in such a way as to “fore-ordain” experience — regardless of “whether they [those dominated by it] recognize it or not”:
the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines
he is under compulsion from the Zeitgeist
“Zeitgeist“15, like “contemporary”, is ambiguous. It can refer to a rather vague epoch in chronological time or to the underlying possibility out of which such temporal phenomena are issued — like the outburst of a geyser16 into diachronic time (Zeit #2) from out of its “ancient”, perennial or synchronic time (Zeit #1). Jung makes the point nicely:
The human psyche, however, is not simply a product of the Zeitgeist [narrowly construed as an historical epoch], but is a thing of far greater constancy and immutability. The nineteenth century is a merely local and passing phenomenon, which has deposited but a thin layer of dust on the age-old psyche of mankind.17 Once this layer is wiped off and our professional eye-glasses are cleaned, what shall we see?
Jung therefore comments as regards Freud that:
A general psychological theory that claims to be scientific should not be based on the malformations of the nineteenth century, and a theory of neurosis must also be capable of explaining hysteria among the Maori.18
In the same way, media may not be understood literally as modern communication devices or even as all such devices, modern and historical. Instead, media as the abysmal patterns of the weaving and unweaving of experience19 are ‘contemporaneous’ with human being: it cannot be understood aside from them and they cannot be understood aside from it.20 In fact, neither can be at all without the other. Hence the very great difficulties involved in the investigation of media by human beings.
A check on any discussion of McLuhan and media may therefore be made simply by asking if it has overlooked, or not, what it means (and what it always has meant) to be human.21
Universal abdication of human motive is now plain. (McLuhan to Pound, July 30, 1948, Letters 198)
Man, the wanderer within the labyrinthine ways at once of his psyche and of the world… (McLuhan, ‘Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility’, 1951)
I’ve been doing some work on the development of landscape technique — exterior and interior landscape — before and since Rimbaud. (McLuhan to Pound, 1951)
McLuhan attributed the notion of the interior landscape to the French, to Claude Bernard (1813-1878) and to the symbolist poets who were contemporary with him. It was Bernard who coined the phrase, “le milieu intérior” in his physiology studies. But it may have been Jung who gave McLuhan the geographical direction, so to speak, to the new territories whose contours it was necessary to explore and to specify.
In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm, between these two stands man, facing now one and now the other (Jung, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul, 1933)1
An interior spiritual world whose existence we never suspected opens out and displays contents which seem to stand in sharpest contrast to all our former ideas. (Two Essays in Analytic Psychology, 1928)2
Failure to adapt to this inner world is a negligence entailing just as serious consequences as ignorance and ineptitude in the outer world. (Two Essays in Analytic Psychology, 1928)3
As rhetorician, Mr. Empson has brilliantly availed himself of the new insights of Freud and Jung into traditional speaker-audience relations. The Seven Types of Ambiguity is an ingenious and valid application of Freud’s analysis of wit and of dreams to some of the material of poetry. Insofar as political and social myth-making is inevitably part of the material of poetry, as it is of language, it too can be subjected to psychoanalytic scrutiny with fascinating results. (Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis, 1944)
Increasingly, I feel that Catholics must master C.G. Jung. The little self-conscious — unearned — area in which we live to-day has nothing to do with the problems of our faith. Modern anthropology and psychology are more important for the Church than St. Thomas today. (McLuhan to Ong and McNaspy, December 23, 1944)1
La trahison des clercs has been to subordinate detached critical intelligence to the servile functions of ‘political’ evangelism. They are thus the inheritors of the sectarian enthusiasms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries presenting a scientific demonstration of Jung’s social principle: “No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.”2 (Footprints in the Sands of Crime, 1946)
As Father Victor White wrote concerning ‘Jung and the Supernatural’3: “A living symbol does something to us; it moves us, shifts our center of awareness, changes our values. Whether it is just looked at, or heard, acted out, painted out, written out, or danced out, it arouses not only thought, but delight, fear, awe, horror, perhaps a deeper insight.” That is, (…) symbols are not just referential signs. They don’t just say something. They do something. And saying is also symbolic action. We are moving very rapidly today to a grasp of scriptural, poetic and social communication which promises to take up all the wealth of patristic insight and to go far beyond it. But we have no choice. We have either to surpass any previous age or to collapse into a new Babel. For our problems, like our means and opportunities, are of a scope beyond those of any previous age. (Symbolist Communication, 1953)4
McLuhan read Jung in the early 1940s, if not already in the 1930s,5 and at the time valued his work very highly indeed (as evidenced in his 1944 letter to Ong and McNaspy above). But the eventual influence of Jung on McLuhan’s work may have been more unconscious than conscious and taken decades to unfold. It was above all in that perpetually indistinct area of what Jung termed the “energetics“6 of consciousness7 — aka, the “enantiodrama“8 of consciousness — where that influence, appropriately enough, would eventually set to work. That is, McLuhan, having ‘put on’ role after role after role in three decades of tireless talking and writing, finally found one that could be ‘set to work’ to focus communication problems — and this in that very figure/ground “enantiodrama” that had previously stumped him.9
Jung himself set out his take on “energetics” especially in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:10
McLuhan often requires translation from himself to himself. As will be illustrated here with reference to ‘Why the TV Child Cannot See Ahead’1, there are a variety of reasons for this.
In the first place, McLuhan wrote amazingly quickly, but paid little attention to correcting his work. Unclear and potentially misleading constructions were often left standing. Second, he frequently used passages written at different times and for different purposes in composing ‘new’ texts.2 This could lead to conflicting emphases or contradictions. Third, he habitually used abbreviated designations in place of more complicated ones even when this created inevitable confusion. For example, in the text given below, he contrasts “mosaic form” to “visual order”. But are ‘form’ and ‘order’ strictly comparable? Maybe yes, maybe no. More, what about ‘mosaic’ and the ‘visual’ themselves? Surely these belong to very different categories whose alignment is questionable? More yet, he says of “mosaic form” that it “is not just to be seen [like ‘visual order’], but to be perceived by all our senses”. Later in the same essay, however, it is said that “all forms whether of art or technology (…) involve all the senses”. But if everything “involves all the senses”, if nothing is “just to be seen”, where does this leave “visual order”? Or its supposed contrary, “mosaic form”?
Here is the passage in question:
a mosaic is not just to be seen, but to be perceived by all our senses. Highly literate people in our Western world are naturally confused whenever they move across the boundaries of visual order and arrangement. But mosaic form, although it can be seen, is not visual in its organizing principle.
‘TV Child’ later supplies some clarification of the matter at stake:
The effect of phonetic literacy in extending and amplifying the visual component in Western experience and social organization was to create a sort of hypertrophy in our visual lives at the expense of the other senses.
That is, there is in fact nothing at all that is “just to be seen”. Instead, “visual order” like “mosaic form”, involves “all our senses”. The two are not differentiated by the one visual sense versus all the other senses, but by the emphasis or weight or stress accorded, in the case of “visual order”, to the visual relative to the other senses. Hence the characterization of “visual order and arrangement” as “a sort of hypertrophy in our visual lives at the expense of the other senses“. Presumably the “mosaic form” is a more balanced configuration of these same senses and may therefore loosely be said to be “perceived by all our senses”.
But, then, is “mosaic form” something objective (something “to be seen”) or subjective (something “to be seen” with)? Or is it both of these? And if both, is this not a ‘matching’, which McLuhan routinely rejected? Or if it is not a ‘matching’, but a differentiated ‘making’, where does this leave the point or points at stake in McLuhan’s text?
The underlying conception is of sensory ‘form’ or ‘order’ as a topological matrix of “all our senses” with an undefined number of configurations, each depending on the emphases accorded the various senses relative to one another:
The tribal drum extends hearing in a specialist mode. Clothing extends skin and heat control [hence ‘tactility’?] in a specialist way. Each of these extensions or amplifications, in turn, involves all the other senses, modifying their relation to each other. (…) All forms whether of art or technology, if not for their impact then in our reactions, involve all the senses… (TV Child)
Even appeal to different configurations of all the senses is itself misleading, however, since, at the end of the day, it is not the senses that are at stake in the investigation of experience. Instead it is the “organizing principle”, “form”, “mode”, “order”, or “medium” that is at stake — and the senses, alone or together, are but one way of designating these.
Here is McLuhan to Harold Rosenberg, March 1, 1965:
As soon as you begin to deal with the sensory modalities, you quickly discover that the visual mode may occur in situations that are quite unvisualizable. For example, central heating structures the thermal space of a room visually. That is, a centrally heated room has a thermal space that is uniform, and continuous, and connected. That is visuality as such. (Letters 318)
A few days later he wrote similarly to Claude Bissell:
Sensory levels are really quite useless without knowledge of sensory modalities. (March 4, 1965, Letters 319)
The great question is how to characterize “modalities” such that they become openly and uncontentiously identifiable. On this basis, the shared investigation of all human experience could (and must) be initiated: “the medium is the message”.
‘TV Child’ points to this possibility as follows:
the instant character of electricity introduces the principle of interrelation that is antithetic to all earlier technologies which in effect had fragmented and extended the body by way of specialism and amplification
This passage has much to say between the lines. Taken at face value, it seems to parallel the earlier contrast between “visual order” (“just to be seen”, the eye “fragmented (…) by way of specialism and amplification”) and the “mosaic form” (“perceived by all our senses” according to “the principle of interrelation”). However, if “all forms whether of art or technology (…) involve all the senses”, it must be that “the principle of interrelation” is actually a constant — a highly variable constant, to be sure — in all human experience, individual or collective, at any time whatsoever. Hence the famous “allatonceness”.
Once this is clear (if that is the right word), it may be seen (ditto) that McLuhan’s text here moves on two different levels at once. There is the obvious diachronic contrast between earlier forms or orders, ones that amplified a single sense relative to the others, and the later electric order that is said to introduce3 a more balanced approach. Read closely, however, this ubiquitous reading falls apart. In the first place, McLuhan emphasizes that it is “the instant character of electricity” that “introduces the principle of interrelation”. But how is such instantaneity to be squared with a diachronically ordered understanding of the passage? Instantaneous but somehow also before-and-after? Likewise with “the principle of interrelation”. If this is the signature of the electric form, would McLuhan have us step away from it — presumably back to the Gutenberg galaxy — in order to behold “all earlier technologies” not in principled “interrelation”, but as “antithetic” to one another and to us today?
McLuhan’s contention is far different. Between the lines4 he is saying that with electricity “the principle of interrelation”, which is always active in human experience (what might be termed its implicit or “instant character”), becomes (or can become) explicit.5 What is “antithetic” between electricity and “all earlier technologies” is not their basic common form of interrelation, but their ability to explicate that basic common form. This is what he called, amongst a raft of other designations, the ‘exteriorization of consciousness’. It is because a technology like television achieves an objective replication or ‘exteriorization’ of consciousness’ that the human form comes to us in it, not from us to see or otherwise use it.6
When chemistry took off in the nineteenth century, it marked no difference in the physical makeup of the world. That exterior landscape was what it always had been and what it always would be. What was new was the increasing ability to explicate that world. Just so, according to McLuhan, with the “interior landscape” in the electric age.
However, this new possibility remains hidden from us by our own presupposition — “the viable is always invisible” (Take Today, 285).7 Here is McLuhan further in ‘TV Child’:
The effect of phonetic literacy in extending and amplifying the visual component in Western experience and social organization was to create a sort of hypertrophy in our visual lives at the expense of the other senses. This situation exists even among our scientists [today] who make assumptions about the natural order of things as if this order were primarily visual in respect to uniformity and continuity and connectiveness.
Instead of ‘our scientists’ this passage might be read as ‘this situation exists even among all our McLuhan scholars’. For without exception,8 all are locked in “assumptions about the natural order of things” which it was the explicit purpose of McLuhan’s lifelong labors — to unlock. His revolutionary suggestion of a “new science” goes begging because the unwavering assumption of “uniformity and continuity and connectiveness” by his readers binds their understandings of him to a past in which there was no such science and, indeed, could not be one. They cannot make the required “flip” out of this unavailing “uniformity and continuity and connectiveness” of unscience.
This would be hilarious — indeed, it is in fact hilarious — but for one small problem. Namely, McLuhan conceived his work as a ‘survival strategy’. Here he is speaking to Nina Sutton and Barbara Rowes:
McLuhan: when you invade one [group’s] culture with a totally different [cultural] strategy from theirs, naturally they regard you as an enemy.
Barbara Rowes: And how do you personally take this?
McLuhan: I simply consider that this particular form of enmity or creation [of mine that elicits it] is necessary for [our] survival. That’s all. If you want to survive, you had better pay attention. But in paying attention [and who pays attention to McLuhan other than McLuhan scholars?], they get quite angry because they are enraged to think that all these years we have been manipulated by our own culture without knowing it. This is what enrages [the McLuhan scholar]9 — to think that he has been put through all these paces10 like a trained seal, like a blooming robot.
Of course, few McLuhan scholars regard themselves as “enraged” or, even less, as “trained seals”. Most of them are doubtless hail fellows, well met. What with their tenure, travel grants and great bennies, how not? But perhaps it is not so easy or obvious to know what it is to be “trained” to be “enraged”? And perhaps it is just this obscurity at the foundation of our experience, one that prevents the perception of a deep rage, even or especially in oneself, that above all places the question of our survival in grave doubt?
we live in a global village and the job is to create a global city (McLuhan to Tyrwhitt, 1960)1
Bob Dobbs has emphasized the importance in McLuhan’s work on “the citadel of individual consciousness”.2 Indeed, McLuhan himself marked this importance by repeating in the 1969 Counterblast this same phrase from 13 years earlier in the 1956 ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’.
What may be the deepest questions probed by McLuhan are: who, when and where is this citadel? what does it do? how does it go wrong? how might its function as a kind of gyroscope be put right?
‘Citadel’ derives from Latin ‘civis’, city, and McLuhan explicitly drew on this etymology in the passages below culminating in the idea of the citadel/city as “the central nervous system” (aka, as we might say today, the operating system). In a letter to Jackie Tyrwhitt in 1960 he set out a notion of the city as the social sensus communis against which his ‘citadel’ texts should be read:
Now that by electricity we have externalized all of our senses [in technologies like tele-phone and tele-vision], we are in the desperate position of not having any sensus communis. Prior to electricity, the city was the sensus communis for such specialized and externalized senses as technology had developed. From Aristotle onward, the traditional function of the sensus communis is to translate each sense into the other senses, so that a unified, integral image is offered at all times to the mind. The city performs that function for the scattered and distracted senses, and spaces and times, of agrarian cultures. Today with electronics we have discovered that we live in a global village and the job is to create a global city, as center for the village margins. The parameters of this task are by no means positional [= geographical]. With electronics, any marginal area can become centre, and marginal experiences can be had at any center. (…) The problem of [Tyrwhitt’s area of] urban planning today (in the field of nuclei that is the global village) is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times comprise all the senses, but in evershifting ratios which permit ever new light to come through them. Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space — not fixed but ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness? Thus the human community would assume the same integral freedom and awareness as the private person?3
Here are McLuhan’s ‘citadel’ passages in chronological order:
Ever since Burckhardt saw that the meaning of Machiavelli’s method was to turn the state into a work of art by the rational manipulation of power, it has been an open possibility to apply the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society. That is attempted here [in The Mechanical Bride]. The Western world, dedicated since the sixteenth century to the increase and consolidation of the power of the state, has developed an artistic unity of effect which makes artistic criticism of that effect quite feasible. Art criticism is free to point to the various means employed to get the effect, as well as to decide whether the effect was worth attempting. As such, with regard to the modern state, it [art criticism] can be a citadel of inclusive awareness amid the dim dreams of collective consciousness. (‘Preface’ to The Mechanical Bride, 1951)
No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspectives, either artistic or national. Everything [possible] is present in the foreground [of our consciousness]. That fact is stressed equally in current physics, jazz, newspapers, and psychoanalysis. And it is not a question of preference or taste. This flood has already immersed us. And whether it is to be a benign flood, cleansing the Augean stable of speech and experience, as envisaged in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or a merely destructive element, may to some extent depend on the degree of exertion and direction which we elicit in ourselves. (The Mechanical Bride, 1951, 87)
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. (Closing lines of ‘Sight, Sound, and the Fury’, 1954)
we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do so only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. But4 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. (Closing lines of ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’, 1956, that were repeated in the 1969 Counterblast.)
The literate man is one who is accustomed to the inner translation of sight into sound and of sound into sight, a complex activity for which he pays by psychic withdrawal, a weakening of sensuous life and a considerable lessening of the power of recall. But in return he obtains analytic mastery of specific areas of knowledge, and especially the power of applied science for social purposes. The increase of inner self-awareness resulting from the incessant translation of sound into sight and sight into sound also enhances his sense of individual identity and fosters that inner dialogue or conscience within, which we rightly associate with the very citadel [< civis] of civilized [< civis] awareness. (Printing and Social Change, 1959)
Historians see the forms of the great cities in the ancient world as manifesting all facets of human personality. Institutions, architectural and administrative, as extensions of our physical beings necessarily tend toward world-wide similarities. The central nervous system of the city [< civis] was the citadel [< civis]… (Understanding Media, 1964)
The 1959 passage from ‘Printing and Social Change’ continued:
In the new time which must be one of co-existence and pluralism there will be a basis for the simultaneous use of print and of all other media as well. To discover that basis now before we exhaust ourselves in moral denunciation and pointless clashes is urgently indicated. (Printing and Social Change, 1959)
The 1960 letter to Jackie Tyrwhitt cited above augmented these thoughts on “basis” from the previous year as follows:
By electricity, Jackie, we have not been driven out of our senses so much that our senses have been driven out of us. Before we can return to one another, a good deal of clarification is needed for the purposes of reconciliation. (…) Noise [in a communication system] is of course just any kind of irrelevance, and yet irrelevance is a needed margin for any kind of attention or center. In the field of attention, a center without a margin is the formula for hypnosis, stasis and paralysis. Again, when our senses are external to us, it becomes natural to regard a perpetual flow of programs5 through all media as indispensable to the community,6 just as much as the private individual considers that all of his senses should be receiving impressions all the time, even in sleep.
In McLuhan’s view, “reconciliation” required the reconstruction of the “citadel of individual consciousness”, and of the analogous social “central nervous system of the city”, as a dynamic yet ordered site of “evershifting ratios”. The need was for ‘pattern recognition’ of the spectrum of figure/ground relations through and as which that citadel both received and managed its formations. The great riddle was and is how to under-stand ‘management’ as something received:7
The problem (…) is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times implicate8 all the senses, but in evershifting ratios which permit ever new light to come through them. Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space — not fixed but ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness?9
“Of conscious” — an objective genitive!10
To understand the trajectory of McLuhan’s work, it is necessary to understand when key terms appeared in it. Only with such a skeletal map in hand can questions properly be asked about the overall shape of that work or of its status at any moment in its course.
Naturally, some of these terms appeared in McLuhan’s writings before he realized how they might be used in a more technical way. For example, as early as 1951, in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’, he cited a passage from Ruskin in Modern Painters:
A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character.1
There is so much here anticipating his later work — regarding time and times, the consumer as producer, the do-it-yourself ethic and the transitive gap — that the passage might well be read as Ruskin addressing McLuhan with the demand: Think about all this! This is the way to go! Or, since it was McLuhan who was citing Ruskin, it might just as well be read as some part of McLuhan, his second sight perhaps, addressing himself with this admonition: Here is what you need!
The aim below is to identify not when bare terms or phrases were first mentioned by McLuhan, but when he realized their systematic importance for his project. But no pretense is made to finality. Further key terms will doubtless have to be introduced from time to time and dates will have to be adjusted as new findings come to light.
*************
epyllion: 1951 ‘A Survey of Joyce Criticism’2
eye and ear: 1951 in ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’3
acoustic space: late 1954 in the Culture and Technology seminar4
classroom without walls: 1956 in ‘Media Fit the Battle of Jericho’ and ‘Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication’5.
medium is the message: May 1958 in ‘Radio in the Future of Canada’6
consumers as producers: 1958 in ‘Myth and Mass Media’7
structure: 1958 in ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’8
light through vs light on: 1958 in a letter to Harry Skornia9
all-at-once: May 11, 1959 in a speech to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club10
global village: May 11, 1959 in a speech to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club11
formal cause: 1959 in ‘Communications and the Word of God’12
input/output difference: 1960 in a letter to Harry Skornia13
multilevel: 1960 in ‘Technology, the Media, and Culture’14
tactility: 1960 in ‘From Visual To Tactile Experience’15
the unconscious: 1962 in ‘Prospect’16
figure/ground: 1964 in letters from July 10 to Harry Skornia and to Bascom St John.17
interval: 1964 in ‘Notes on Burroughs’18
gap: 1964 in ‘Cybernetics and Human Culture’:19
environment (as medium): October 1964 in a letter to Harry Skornia20
satellite surround: October 1964 in a letter to Harry Skornia21
concept vs percept: 1969 in ‘Hardware/Software Mergers’22
nobody: 1969 in ‘Hardware/Software Mergers’23
media ecology: 1976 in ‘Violence of the Media’24
the environment itself becomes educator as it was for primitive man, the hunter (McLuhan, A Garbage Apocalypse)
In the TLS August 6 1964 issue with McLuhan’s Statement of Culture and Technology, William Burroughs contributed a piece on ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith‘. McLuhan’s ‘Notes on Burroughs‘ which appeared a few months later signaled that he had found Burroughs’ article highly interesting and suggestive.
Since late 1958, closely contemporaneous with his admonition that ‘the medium is the message’, McLuhan had been emphasizing the difference between light through towards us in contrast to light on from us.1 Now he found that same distinction in Burroughs along with its corollaries of the organic nature of words and the imperative to perceive behind and below the surface level of things — especially of ourselves.
The great matter lay in Burroughs’ question: “Your words spelt out whose words?”
Our own words are light through towards us, not light on from us!2
In order to hear our own words we must, as Burroughs says over and over again, learn to listen. That is, we (whoever this ‘we’ is!) must first of all learn to re-cognize and inhabit an acoustic world, not (or not only) a visual one! Marconi, not only Gutenberg!3
In an acoustic world, all of our words are retrievals and replays: “muttering voices looking for a role”.
We are always in some role, always wearing some mask, always running some “errand”, always repeating some prior “muttering”; but roles and masks and errands and mutterings are not mine, are not me. As Burroughs directs twice over: “forget [your] me”!
The great matter at stake is just which role and which mask is fitting: “You only use the ones that fit you know.” A question of the put-on. At this “intersection point”, who am I? And who should I be?
…”muttering voices looking for a role”…
*****
The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith
I do not present the techniques I use in writing as a solemn new literary movement but rather as amusing exercises so introducing Lady Sutton-Smith who ‘haunted’ as she put it a villa in the Marshan (Tangier) overlooking the sea, Lady Sutton-Smith trailing spectral bouganvillia and thin stray cats: “I think of writing as something that is fun to do. Out here we have to make our own fun you know crippled with arthritis I hardly walk so I write my walks. I write my walks in columns.” Every day her servant went to the market to buy food and Lady Sutton- Smith wrote the walk before she sent her servant, wrote what he would see, who he would meet and what would be said. She plotted and timed his walk on her map of Tangier…”Now he is just here by the bouganvillia where the old junky doctor used to live”. When her servant returned from the market she questioned him to see how close she had come and entered the corrections in a separate column. Then she filled a third column with cross column readings and observations . . ledgers she kept stacked up in a dusty room each page divided neatly in three columns. Lady Sutton-Smith is here to answer your questions. Please remember she also has stray cats to feed, that she must organize benefit slave auctions for the SPCA and the Anti-Fluoride Society and teach a class in flower arranging at the leprosarium which is another of the civic things she did.
“Cut ups? but of course. I have been a cut up for years and why not? Words know where they belong better than you do. I think of words as being alive like animals. They don’t like to be kept in pages. Cut the pages and let the words out. Sometimes I take all my old Tuesday walks and fill a column on some future Tuesday with old Tuesday cut ups and see how close that comes when I get there. You would be surprised how I can write a future Tuesday from old Tuesday cut ups or any other day as well I use pictures too in my books…Oh not just any picture…The picture…”
Now back on a 1957 Sunday I wrote : “An old junky selling Christmas seals on North Clark St…’The Priest’ they called him”…And just here is a picture from Newsweek, May 18, 1964…plane wreck .. the priest there hand lifted: “Last rites for 44 airliner dead including Captain Clark (left).” Left an old junky on North Clark St dim jerky far away Lady Sutton-Smith Lady Sutton brings you an article I wrote once for the uplift magasines…My Advice to Young Writers: I had an old city editor once who used to tell his young reporters: “You will never get anywhere sitting on your dead tail. Go out and get that story. Go out and get that picture. Not just any story. Not just any picture. The story. The picture. And that goes double for young writers. Now look at your typewriter. Your words spelt out whose words?“…phantom tape playing over your typewriter, sad muttering voices looking for a role. Listen and record. Before you can write you must learn to listen. Now look beyond your typewriter. Pick up your soft typewriter and walk. Sit down in a cafe somewhere drink a coffee read the papers and listen don’t talk to yourself. (‘How do I look? What do they think of me?’) Forget me. Don’t talk. Listen and look out as you read (Any Private Eye knows how to look and listen as he rather ostentatiously reads The Times)…Note what you see and hear as you read what words and look at what picture. These are intersection points. Note these intersection points in the margin of your paper. Listen to what is being said around you and look at what is going on around you. Cast yourself as a secret agent in constant danger of assassination or enemy torture chambers all your senses on total alert sniffing quivering down streets of fear like an electric dog this is an amusing little literary exercise bringing to the writer what he needs namely: Action. Camera. You will find that a walk, a few errands, a short trip will provide pages of copy when you learn to look listen and read. Yes how many of you know how to read ? Look at Time or Newsweek. Hold a page up to the light and see what is on the other side. Just here in Newsweek, July 6, 1964 page 5 is a picture of a loaf of bread in some obscure way advertising Esso Petroleum Co. On the other side page 6 is devoted to Banking Service American Express. Now ‘bread’ in hip lingo used by old time ‘Yegg Men’ means money. How many of you saw that money behind the ‘bread’? When you read a novel look and listen out. I recently took The Quiet American by Mr. Graham Greene on a short trip from Tangier to Gibraltar so sitting in the saloon of the Mons Calpe cold mist outside fog horns blowing I read ‘Pyle looked dreamily at the milk bar across the street. Was that a grenade? he said’, No that was not a grenade. That was a fog horn . . cold mist through the milk bar. (Note in the margin). Now look around and see if you can find ‘Pyle’ in the saloon. Yes there he is . . bottle of beer . . quiet American eyes. So take any book on a trip and make a reading diary. Now arrange your reading diary in one column. In another column the so called events: arrivals and departures . . hotels . . (‘I wondered peevishly if I might not find every hotel on the Rock full of Swedes’)… incidents …(waiter there with the wrong wine). In a third column enter all the thoughts and memories stirred by the trip…Tangier Gibraltar… Gibraltar Tangier…’Captain Clark welcomes you aboard…Set your clocks forward an hour…Set your clocks back an hour…’ Now read cross column and see what an interesting trip you have made and how much there is to write about really because any intersection point in present time contains all your past times and maybe your future time as well…What’s that? I’m a little hard of hearing…Oh no of course you don’t use all your cross column readings any more than you use all your cut ups or fold ins. You only use the ones that fit you know. Yes it is a lot of work picking them out and putting them just here in the right place. I have often thought much of the opposition to cut ups was perhaps a premonition of the amount of work and precision required to use them properly. So look at a page you have written and move the lines around why not? Read from line one down to line anything: ‘I do not present just any picture…All your senses on Milk Bar Alert’…you can write on North Clark St intersection points…The ‘Priest’ there, quiet hand lifted brings you my advice to young writers…Forget me from old Tuesday intersection points…I on the other side…sad muttering voices…a few errands…An old junky writes in the margin dim jerky far away — Get that picture? You know how to read behind a novel? Future fog across arrivals and departures? Smell of ashes rising from the typewriter? Fear like this is an amusing literary exercise put away in some remote file…The Nova Police Gazette. Yes I keep all my papers in files and the title of the file tells me what is there already and what belongs there. Inspector J. Lee of The Nova Police like everyone who does a job works to make himself obsolete. I keep files on all my characters with identikit pictures. When I see a picture in a newspaper or magasine that seems to have something of Doctor Benway, AJ or Inspector J. Lee I cut it out and return it to the appropriate file with all the intersection readings from novels newspapers and magasines its all here in the files stacked up in a dusty room and that’s about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks. Always tell my young reporters…”Get the name and address.” Lady Sutton- Smith returned to a cool Sunday file. Fresh southerly winds stir papers on the city desk.
Note: The first cut ups were made by Mr. Brion Gysin Summer of i960 and appeared in Minutes To Go September i960. There are many ways to do cut ups: 1. Take a page of text and draw a line down the middle and cross the middle. You now have four blocks of text 1234. Now cut along the lines and put block 1 with block 4 and block 2 with block 3. Read the rearranged page. 2. Fold a page of text down the middle lengthwise and lay it on another page of text. Now read across half one text and half the other. 3. Arrange your texts in three or more columns and read cross column. 4. Take any page of text and number the lines. Now shift permutate order of lines 1 3 6 9 12 etcetera. There are of course many other possibilities. A throw of the words gives you new combos. Selection and use is up to the writer.
For Andrew…
The same TLS issue1 of August 6, 1964 with McLuhan’s ‘Statement on Culture and Technology’ featured a piece by William Burroughs: ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith‘. There is good evidence that McLuhan read Burroughs’ piece and was impressed by it.
In the first place, McLuhan wrote an article on Burroughs in The Nation2 that appeared only a few months after their joint appearance in the TLS. Presumably McLuhan was prompted to write his ‘Notes on Burroughs‘ for The Nation after reading Burroughs’ TLS note on ‘Literary Techniques’.
In the second place, there are passages in Burroughs’ piece which would have impressed McLuhan as giving off a whiff of central aspects of his own thoughts — or, indeed, as something he needed to consider further thanks to Burroughs:
In the third place, the cut-up method that Burroughs’ TLS piece both describes and illustrates was a way (Gk οδός, hence meth-od) of deploying the com/plexity of language — its exfoliations and infoldings — and the gaps which are required for such com/plexity.
Forget me from old Tuesday intersection points…I on the other side…sad muttering voices…a few errands…An old junky writes in the margin dim jerky far away…Get that picture? You know how to read behind a novel? Future fog across arrivals and departures? Smell of ashes rising from the typewriter?
The cut-up method is a practical application of “the gap is where the action is”:
Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method” (…) To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed. (McLuhan, Notes on Burroughs)
In the fourth place, it must have been a very rare (and presumably much appreciated) event in McLuhan’s life to encounter a word he didn’t know. In earlier times he had delighted in using words which no one had ever heard of. Now Burroughs offered him one: “Yegg Men”.5 Burroughs had gone to Chicago to hear a course of Korsbinski lectures in 1939 and then lived there on the near north side in 1942-1943.6 He must have had these years in Chicago on his mind when he wrote the TLS piece since he mentions North Clark St three times in the course of its few pages. And ‘Yegg Man’ was Chicago slang for “hobo burglar, safe-breaker, criminal beggar”.
McLuhan would have been the all more delighted with this new word since he could identify with it: he himself was a self-professed “safe-breaker”:
Most of my work in the media is like that of a safe-cracker. In the beginning I don’t know what’s inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work. I grope, I probe, I listen, I test — until the tumblers fall and I’m in. That’s the way I work with all these media. (Stearn interview, 1967)
I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open. (Playboy interview, 1969)
Hence it was, when Eric McLuhan came to describe ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication‘ — this was in 2008, almost thirty years after his father’s death and 44 years after the Burroughs and McLuhan TLS pieces — that he called his essay ‘The Yegg’. And the definition he offered there for the word was “an itinerant professional safe-cracker”.
The Aug 6, 1964 issue of the TLS was dedicated to the question of the avant garde. McLuhan appeared in it as did such figures such as William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg. McLuhan’s ‘Statement on Culture and Technology’ is available on YouTube read by Andrew McLuhan. Along with other contributions to the TLS issue, it was reprinted in Astronauts of Inner-Space (1966).
*********************
Statement on Culture and Technology
TLS, Aug 6, 1964
The work of Adolf von Hildebrand (Problem of Form 1893) and of Remy de Gourmont was typical of a great deal of new awareness concerning the nature of materials and their relation to the modalities of human perception and creativity. The new art and architecture and poetry of the 20th century had their roots in a new kind of perceptual discipline that centers in the awareness of style. In 1922 Middleton Murray’s The Problem of Style made quite explicit the relationship between style and perception as well as the relation between art and the active training of sensibility. Recognition of technique became a program of discovery.
In 1920 T.S. Eliot’s essay on [Philip] Massinger brought new stress to bear upon the language of a period in order to make it a means of perceiving the entire structure and values of a civilization:
These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled.
This is the kind of approach to language as the material of poetry that launched many of the artistic experiments of the 1920s as well as the critical programs of the Calendar of Modern Letters and of Scrutiny. It is not only an attitude but a method and a technique of grappling with all the materials and technologies of any human environment so that if politics is the art of the possible, its scope must now in the electric age include the shaping and programming of the entire sensory environment as a luminous work of art.
From the neolithic age men had been engaged in creating technological extensions of their bodies in various fragmented and specialist forms whether of script or wheel or housing or money. These extensions serve to amplify but also to fragment human powers in faculties in order to store and to expedite knowledge and materials and processes. Naturally such amplifications of human powers greatly enlarge the means and incentives to violence and foster the enlargement of bureaucracy and enterprise alike. The break with the neolithic age comes with electromagnetism and its derivative technologies. The electronic age is distinct from any other age. The numerous extensions of hands and feet in the various forms of spindles and wheels and roads now begin to yield to the circuit in the loop “where the hand of man never set foot”. The immediate extensions of our nervous system by telegraph and telephone and radio and television not only usher us into a period when the codifying and movement of information supersede all other tasks in scope and in the creation of wealth, but they involve us totally in one another’s lives. The extensions of our nerves and senses as they constitute a new man-made environment also require a wholly new kind of understanding of the sensory materials of this new environment and of the learning processes to which they are so deeply related.
One of the discoveries of Baudelaire and his followers concerned the means of relating the creative process in poetry to the stages of apprehension of human knowledge. Since Baudelaire art has become co-extensive with discovery and knowledge in every sphere of action and at every possible range of human development. The gap between art and technology has now ceased to exist as we come as we become cognizant of our art and technology as immediate extensions of ourselves. We have also acquired the responsibility of heeding the psychic and social consequences of such extensions. It is now many years since Mr Eliot pointed to the effects of the internal combustion engine on poetic rhythms. Many forms of technology far more potent than the internal combustion engine have been assimilated to the rhythms of art and poetry and social life since that time.
With the extension of the nervous system in electric technology, information not only moves in much greater quantity than ever before but at very much greater speed than ever before. Paradoxically the acceleration of information movement restores us to the habit of mythical and inclusive perception. Whereas data were previously fragmented by earlier forms of codifying information the electric circuit has restored us to the world of pattern recognition and to an understanding of the life of forms which had been denied to all but the artists of the now receding mechanical age. Our main concern today is with the patterns of the learning process itself — patterns which we can now see to be correlative with the processes of creativity in the world of the organization of work. The electric revolution means the end of jobs.
That is, electric circuitry eliminates the fragmentation and specialization of the work process which created the job type of work in the renaissance and after. The elimination of the job in the work process means a return to the depth involvement in role-playing formerly associated only with arts and crafts. But now in the age of information the work process and the learning process become interfused. Automation is learning a living. Precisely the same kind of a revolution is taking place in the world of learning as in the world of work. Numerous centers such as the center for culture and technology at the University of Toronto have recently come into existence. They are the response not so much to a theory as to a need and even to a pressure.
It has long been known that in graduate studies a research student crosses departmental boundaries as a matter of course. As access to all kinds of information becomes swifter, so does involvement in the pattern of every type of information. As an example the center for culture and technology which exists by cross appointments within the University of Toronto is concerned to establish ways of quantifying the psychic and social consequences of every type of technology. It is natural that the extensions of our senses technologically should have a direct effect upon the sensory usage and preference of any community. Many of these effects are quite incompatible with the continuance of older values. Once a sensory typology has been established for a given population therefore it is possible to predict the effect on that sensory typology of any given new artifact such as the motor car or television. That is to say it becomes possible to control or to avoid kinds of innovation that are destructive of such established values as we prefer to retain. However a large measure of personal and social autonomy thus becomes possible across the entire spectrum of culture and technology, much in the way that we now have the means of thermostatic control of the thermal environment.
A full understanding of the sensory typology of cultures on one hand and sensory order and impact of art and technology on the other affords the possibility of a human environment centrally programmed for the maximal use of the human powers of learning.
McLuhan’s talk, ‘A Garbage Apocalypse’, given at a 1970 conference on art criticism in Ottawa is available online in the Critique d’Art archives.1 Here it is in text and with added emphasis:
*********************
A Garbage Apocalypse
We live in an age of innovation when we are surrounded by so many scrapped cultures that ruins, junk, and garbage have become a new kind of environment. Every innovation scraps the preceding environments created by preceding innovations and this prepares the ground for new cultural figures to emerge. The Greeks abstracted phusis2 as a visual figure from the ground of the surrounding barbaric cultures, sunk in their non-visual existential modes.
Thanks to the new art of phonetic writing, the Greeks were able to establish a new order of classified and conceptualized art structures which gradually became consolidated as Nature.
To the Greeks, phusis or “Nature” was abstracted from the huge existential mass of oral culture and magical practises by which the pre-Socratic world had established its relations with the ground of existence. The pre-platonic world was auditory, tactile, and kinetic, anything but visual in its patterns of order. The entelechies of man and society in the pre-Socratic world were resonant and auditory rather than visually classified. With the new phonetic writing, with its drastic separation of sign and semantics, the Greeks were able to make a complete divorce between the old pre-literate cultures and their own Euclidean order. Euclid himself had consolidated the new abstract, visual space, retaining as little as possible of the old kinetic aspects of land measurement in the organization of his formal structures. It was not, however, until printing that geometers were able to reduce the kinetic character of geometry to an absolute visual minimum. (See Art and Geometry by Wm. Ivins Jr.)
To the Greek of this early time it seemed plain enough that he was creating an order of phusis, or physics, or “Nature” from the huge midden-heap of confused barbaric cultures. What eventually emerged from this “garbage” of destroyed cultures was a highly selective abstraction of classified conformities and patterns which the Greeks called phusis, or physics, and which gradually became familiarized in the Western world as “Nature.”
In the age of non-Euclidean geometries (later 19th century and since), it is quite easy to see that the Greeks had separated out visual space from the many other kinds of space in setting up geometry. Visual space has the unique properties of uniformity, continuity and connectedness. These properties do not belong to the kinetic or auditory or tactile spaces. Only phonetically literate man has ever sufficiently separated out the visual sense from the perplex of all the other senses in order to create a merely visual order in art and knowledge. Pre-literate man lives primarily in the audile-tactile world of the resonant interval which is now familiar to us from the new quantum mechanics. (See The Nature of the Chemical Bond by Linus Pauling.)
The world of play, celebrated in the study Homo Ludens by J Huizinga, is a world of the resonating interval such as we experience in the relation between wheel and axle. It is play rather than connection or logic that makes possible both wheel and axle. Logic is known only to the visual man who looks for connections rather than for play and metamorphosis. The artist, however, must always prefer the world of play and metamorphosis to the world of visual continuity and logical connection.
The Greeks, having created phusis from the huge midden-heap of surrounding barbaric cultures, proceeded to study the entelechies of their newly invented “Nature.” The processes within the structure of classified data and which they had included in their rigorous selections from the existential world outside themselves, they studied as vortices of power which they called energeia, or entelechy. Somewhat strangely, they excluded from this entelechizing process of observation and formulation all those forms of energy generated by the extension of man’s own being. Even language, itself the divine Logos as resonant in human speech, was given scant attention as a form of magical energy. The pre-Socratics seem to have been much more aware of the entelechies of language than the literate Greeks. It was surely writing itself that dictated this preference for the visual rather than the auditory manifestations of the word. Civilization has been reared upon techniques that suppressed the resonant and the magical forms of language and other technologies.
May it not have been their Greek satisfaction with the massive artefact of their phusis that made them feel exempt from the task of discerning the entelechies of human technologies? How else is it possible to account for this huge hiatus in Western philosophy and science? 3 Oriental, and also pre-literate societies around the world have always felt awe in the presence of the entelechies swarming from and around human artefacts. Only visual man has stood aloof and scornful of all the magical powers exerted upon us by our own ingeneous innovations, whether weapons, clothing, utensils, or vehicles.
Today in the age of Sputnik when the planet itself has been enclosed in a human artefact, Nature, whether the nature of Euclid, Plato and the Greeks, or that of Newton and Adam Smith and Marx, has been scrapped. The planet, enclosed in a human artefact, has become itself a vast garbage apocalypse. The instant environment of electric information made possible by the “wired” planet, has restored the pre-literate ecology of the pre-Socratics to the Western world. The Orient never did abandon the non-visual modes of magic and ecology. It is only visual, logical, and abstract Western man who has preferred to have “a place for everything”, and everything in it’s place”, and “one thing at a time.” Such an order, and the processes that are compatible with such an order, can scarcely co-exist with the electric all-at-once patterns of awareness.
It was in the mid nineteenth century that poets and artists began to explore the entelechies of human arts and technologies. Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire and Mallarmé were foremost among those who began a new approach to the arts and artefacts of man. They proposed the strategy of studying not causes, but effects. With Poe this meant the study of every kind of process, but especially the artistic and cognitive processes. In the art of poetic making, Poe recognized that order was related to effect and considered it necessary to start with effects rather than causes, with perceptions rather than concepts. This had been the hiatus of the preceding centuries since the Greeks. Concepts and classifications had been the supreme mode of studying Nature. Systems of thought and philosophy stood out as figures against the ground of “Nature.” Today when “Nature” has simply been scrapped by electric technology, it is obvious that we have returned from the ground of Nature to the ground of existence itself. Existence is enormously greater than anything included in any philosophical system, since a system, as such, must be exclusive rather than inclusive.
For most people the return from the Greco-Roman visual order of Nature to the audile-tactile resonance of existence, is nothing less than a garbage apocalypse.
Question from Laurent Lamy: You said something about American Telephone and Telegraph. I wonder if we let the AT&T people do the news, and listen to the telephone and telegraph all the time, that might be more fun.
McLuhan: I am not sure what is involved there, in your mind. I am not sure what you mean by AT&T doing the news. They do it now. What do you want them to do? It is their technology that does it now. They are the ones who have wired the planet.
Incidentally, when you have wired the planet for this type of service it becomes mandatory to make sure that your wire installations remain unviolated by other political forces so that the wires have to remain clear. You could say that the United States, or whatever powers have undertaken this wiring, feel obliged to keep other people out of the way of their wiring system. This, I think, may help to account for the strange contradictory policies, so that what is really a technological precaution for protecting a huge wiring system, seems utterly inconsistent with the old hardware, weaponry, goals, territorial and other objectives from a previous age. I think the United States is probably caught completely between these technologies, and has not a clue what to do with the new in terms of the old anymore than our postal department knows what to do with the old hardware technology in relation to the new software.
What would happen, for example, if video phones were to come in. You would scrap the old telephone. If you brought in video phone you would scrap the person-to-person character of the telephone, and you would bring in everybody. The video phone would not permit a person-to-person call but everybody would be there. Here comes everybody instead of just the person you want to speak to. The telephone is famous for this person-to-person character. It enabled people to speak person-to-person for the first time in the world. You were there, they are here, whereas the old letter, which you would send to correspondents, did not permit you or they to transfer your position. You stayed in your corner and the sender stayed in his. The telephone enables you to be there and the person to whom you are speaking to be with you. Now with video phone. the person to-person character of telephone would disappear instantly. The whole environment would be there, the whole surrounding in which you were speaking would be there, and all the people in the room with you would be there, and the person at the other end would be with you. You can imagine the chaos that the telephone system would undergo with video phone. The telephone people are terrified of the video phone possibility, just as the educational establishment is paralyzed by cassette ideas.
It is too much to make this transition from classrooms in which people stay in one position to a world in which everybody can be everywhere, instantly and simultaneously. Nobody has ever tried to devise a curriculum where everybody can be everywhere. The answer, by the way, to those types of problems is that the answer is already here. In fact, the curriculum that takes over at that point is that the environment itself becomes educator as it was for primitive man, the hunter.
The primitive hunter used the environment itself as a trainer of4 perception, not concepts.
That is why under electric conditions concepts become useless. For example, the man who is up against the telephone problem or the mail strike problem, is up against a technological problem that has nothing to do with unions. Nothing to do with salaries. The educator who is up against an electric environment suddenly discovers that concepts are no use. He has to use percepts instead. The man who is trying to solve the video phone problem will find concepts, ideas, of just no use at all. He has to know what is happening and what is going to happen.
In the environment of the hunter of the new Paleolithic age in which we live, percepts are prior. Concepts are pushed into the background again, as nuisance. in the way of percepts. That is what I meant earlier when I said that we had moved into the age of the hunter again. The hunter is a man who cannot afford concepts, he has to use his senses. He has to perceive his world immediately and directly as a survival kit.
I do not think there are very many concepts that have the slightest relevance under these new instant conditions. The concepts that were built up laboriously over centuries of literacy, all the concepts turn out to be classifications. Filing Systems for information, and they are of no use in an age of instant retrieval and instant exposure to everybody.
I do not know whether this has any relevance to the question about AT&T, but AT&T has wired the world, they have already done the job referred to superbly and perhaps irresponsibly in the sense that they are not answerable to anybody. Nobody asked them to do it. People have not taken enough interest in what is going on to know what is involved and what was done. Those sounds which we just heard, I do not know whence they come, but they remind me of the primitive sort of animal cries. When you are at a loss for words you tend to resort to gestures, and grunts, and ‘like I mean, man’. Have you not noticed that language is disappearing very rapidly?5 In the new electric age the Marcel Marceaus have it all over us. We have returned to the age of mime, gesture, the verbal universe has been scrapped too.
It is part of the junk heap, witness Finnegans Wake. Finnegan is one of the great testimonies to the scrapping of the languages of the world, tossing them onto a junk heap as new resource material for poets. All of the languages of the world are now available simultaneously as poetic resource. We know more about languages than ever, but we have not decided what to make of them. Finnegan takes language as itself, material to be manipulated into art, possessing all the clues as to the inner structures of our own beings and also the inner history of our psyche. Finnegan is a new electronic use of language as gesture, language as resonant interval, pun. Joyce uses the pun to release the enormous stored perceptions of language. Every word ever introduced into any language represents millions of perceptions of millions of people, over long periods of time. Language as codified experience of many, many generations can be released only by puns. The pun is a kind of interface or interval which enables the stored perception of words to be released. Literary people who are accustomed to imposing semantic definitions on words are baffled by this use of the pun as a trigger for releasing experience in language. All language resonates with total perception of the race.6 The artist7 is a person who seeks to arrange it in forms which will release that power.
In our time advertising slogan-makers and label makers have spent more energy trying to release the magical powers of language than any other group in the community. They are, to our shame, the most active artists in the verbal field that we have. The rock bands do not make very many syntactical statements. They, too, are mainly concerned with rubbing words together to see what they are made of. They do not have much semantic or intellectual curiosity about them at all. Somatic rather than semantic, is the new thing, where it is at.
I am very interested in the phrase “where it is at”. It is a new dimension of perception in English because “it” does not refer to anybody or anything. It means everybody and everything, and “at” is a very strange word indeed. There is a kind of consensus and a consensuality, everybody and all our senses simultaneously concentrated in a single moment of awareness in that phrase. There is a new – it is not avant garde at all – there is a new feeling of need to know where it is at– and I would toss that one to Mr. Rosenberg.
I would suggest that ‘where it is at’ is a very much more complex and difficult approach to human awareness than anything that the artist had ever thought of in the avant garde period.
It certainly is not a task for a private artist to tackle, to discover where it is at.
Desvergnes: Vous avez dit un jour qu’un de vos amis, ingénieur du son newyorkais a rapporté cette remarque d’un policier de New York, qui lui disait, “Lorsque vous avez des problèmes, n’apellez pas à l’aide mais apellez au feu parce que l’aide est une chose froide qui ne donne pas envie de s’en mêler, alors que le feu est chaud, en donnant l’impression qu’on peut faire quelque chose très vite”. Je veux vous poser la question, dans cette idée de critique d’art et de ‘hunter’ et de ‘hunted’ la question de savoir si le critique d’art va être, tandis que vous vous êtes créé une situation prophète un peu dans le domaine, avec tous les alias que ça comporte, est-ce que vous croyez que le critique d’art va être du froid ou du feu, de l’aide ou du feu, “of the outer trip or the inner trip?”
McLuhan: A critic after all, like anybody else, thinks of himself as speaking to somebody. Montaigne, when the book was new, said there was nobody to speak to. It is very interesting to go back to the 1500s and see the strange efforts that people made in that period to find a public. Now, the medieval writers had tiny little publics, maybe a few dozen people at most, because the manuscript could not be read very quickly and it could not be read by very many people. But with print came the possibility at least of hundreds of readers and then thousands, and so on. There was nobody who knew how to write for the printing press for a long time. Montaigne thought of himself as putting messages in bottles and throwing them in the ocean. Montaigne thought of the book as a message in a bottle, he did not believe that it could actually reach anybody, except by chance.
Think of what your problem would be if in some African community you were the only person who could read and write and you had a great masterpiece in mind and you wrote it and got it published, in English or in your own African dialect. Who would it be for? Actually, you cannot even begin to write until you have in mind a public. The public is a producer, not a consumer. For the painter, too, and for the art critic, the public is a producer, not a consumer. Today we are in a very good position to realize that. We have scrapped all the publics and the consumers have all become producers by virtue of Gallup polls and various investigatory committees. The whole world audience is now being used as a resource for research and this is one function of the computer, to store data about everybody, and to make it available to anybody, for a small fee.
When you [are] asked about the art critic then, you have to say, who was the public for whom the painter worked, and then again, in a very subsidiary sense, who was the public for whom those art critics wrote about those painters? Mr. Rosenberg can answer those questions very well, having worked in that field for a long time. Notice that the New Yorker and Esquire, for which he wrote, were fun magazines, and that light-hearted magazines of that sort should be the vehicles of serious art criticism is itself rather strange. Where else would you print serious art criticism except in a comic magazine? This is one of the hang-ups of the art critic.
When you asked the question about the art critic, who is the art critic for the rock bands today, who are the people who do the evaluating and the standard making for the big bands?
This is worth looking into because what function these bands perform for their audiences, artistically, is certainly an important question. They do a profound amount of educating of the young. Their credentials as educators have never been examined except by — whom? I do not know. I am not sure that the art critic has a future in that kind of world. On the other hand, notice that you have a very high level of virtuosity, of discrimination and awareness among the consumers of rock music. The audiences are very critical. They are many of them participants. This is a new situation.
It is like the old Homeric rhapsodists who were the professional performers of the poems, the harpists, the bards, their audiences were participants too, and knew every trick in the game.
I think art criticism, in the sense of high standards of awareness of what is going on, probably is going to go up, up, up, in the pop art world but just what that might portend, I am not sure.
Mrs Weelen: Mr. McLuhan, earlier in your talk you said that the camera is an eye turned towards the world and that the television eye can be compared to the eye of the blind man turned in an inner quest. I wonder if you would mind elaborating on that because, of course, at first sight [at first sight!] it seems very contradictory since the journey made inwardly by the blind man would seem to be rather the opposite of what takes place with a spectator watching television. I would like to ask if you can elaborate on that.
McLuhan: It is not an easy matter. I referred already to this book of Lusseyran. Jacques Lusseyran wrote a book called And There Was Light. It is in English and was published8 about 1964, I think. Having gone blind he became intensely conscious of the change in his sensory life and it is one of the best studies of the inner trip undergone by a blind man9 that I have ever read. In the ancient world, the seer, the one who knew, was portrayed as a blind person and he [ Lusseyran] explains that sort of thing very well in this book. He also explains the enormous stepping up of the senses of touch and hearing resulting from blindness. So, in a sense, in the television age of the inner trip, the other senses have become enormously more keen. The visual sense has gone down but the other senses have come up into a higher [relative intensity].
Weelen: You mean the watcher? The senses of the watcher of the television?
McLuhan: Yes. His touch and taste and smell and hearing have got much more sensitive than they had been before. The watcher of television, of course is mostly watching old movies but the fact is that they are translated into a television form of experience by the medium. That is, a movie put on television is not a movie anymore, it is television, and television goes into you. It is like a drug. It is an immediate injection into your system, your nervous system. That is not a figure of speech. It is literally an injection into your nervous system and the Krugman experiments revealed this.
Weelen: Yes. But surely all thought process is stopped there, whereas the blind man presumably…
McLuhan: Thought is again something subject to amazing varieties depending upon cultural set-ups. The idea that the body itself might be turned into a means of intellectual awareness is now an everyday fact under electric conditions. Now again, it is very difficult to evaluate these things but it is very different from the sort of thinking that went on in the age of concepts. I can only suggest that that might be one place at which to begin to study it, study the nature of preconceptual thought, you might go back to the pre-Socratics, or preliterate thinkers, and see how they encountered their world. But we are post-literate and more primitive than the pre-Socratics ever dreamed of being.
Television and Society has the necessary components to make it the classical study of television as a social institution. The natural authority with which Dr Skornia explores the complexities of the institutional character of TV was earned during the years of his unselfish devotion in proving the potential of TV in education and in social liberation. (McLuhan’s blurb for the back cover of Skornia’s 1965 Television and Society)
Robert Rutherford Smith in Beyond the Wasteland: The Criticism of Broadcasting (1976) gives this capsule portrait of Skornia:
It has been charged that television and radio news, as the activity of corporations with vested interests in defense and other economic activities, is influenced by what is thought to be the corporate well-being. Anti-war activists were particularly enamored of this argument. Harry Skornia, author of Television and the News [1968] is perhaps the most eloquent advocate of this point of view. (65)
A note at the Veterans For Peace website memorializes “Dr Harry Skornia, the ardent peace activist who founded PBS, but is virtually unknown, even to those who work in public broadcasting.” Skornia died in 1991. And yet ‘World Storytelling Day‘ (“If I can hear your story, it’s harder for me to hate you.”), held around the world almost 30 years later on March 30, 2018, was dedicated to him in its Minneapolis iteration. Veterans For Peace was one of the sponsors of the event there.
Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough1 cited Skornia in remarks to the Senate from September 12, 1969:
Consider for a moment the rigors of qualifying as a third grade teacher. The applicant must have a college degree from a school of education. She must be qualified under standards established by the state for a teachers’ certificate. She must meet the standards of the local school board. She must have spent some time as a “practice teacher.” She may continue to take in-service training. She must meet these standards because she is going to spend time with a group of perhaps 25 children for a few hours a day for a few months out of the year. She will be giving them ideas, information, opinions, attitudes, and behavior patterns that must hold them in good stead throughout life. We don’t want to trust their minds to any but the most skillful and responsible of hands. Contrast these concerns and standards, if you will, with those we associate with broadcasters, with their access to millions of young minds for far more hours every year. As Harry Skornia has said, “Although broadcasting is one of the most powerful forces shaping social values and behavior, broadcast staffs and management in the United States generally have no specific professional standards to meet.” There are exceptions. But of the NAB Code Skornia says, “A document so vaguely worded, so defensive, and so flagrantly violated, can hardly be seriously considered a real code of either ethics or practices.” He believes that the mass media “should be entrusted only to professionals, who study their effects as carefully as new drug manufacturers are expected to test new drugs before putting them on the market.” News is, of course, a special concern: “It must be recognized that news, like medicine or education, is too important to be entrusted to people without proper qualifications.” Let me hasten to make clear that I do not urge that the FCC is the most appropriate agency to establish such professional standards, or to engage in licensing. But I do urge that the American people have the right to expect professional standards from those who instruct millions of young people Saturday morning that are at least as high as those it imposes upon the teachers who instruct a classroom of 25 on Monday morning. And I share Harry Skornia’s concern that: “In news and public affairs, particularly, the fact that there is no national academic standard prerequisite to practice, and that neither the names of the schools from which newsmen graduate, nor their diplomas or degrees, if indeed they are even considered necessary to employment, represent any definitive standard of intellectual accomplishment, morality, character qualification, or even technical skill, is disturbing if not shocking.” (25286)
That same year Skornia was quoted extensively by Congressman William D Hathaway of Maine in his “extended remarks” from Monday, December 1, 1969 on “censorship of the broadcast media”.
Professor Harry Skornia has alleged: “In case after case it appears that the broadcast industry itself has firmly blocked release to the public of certain facts. Although this blockage sometimes has been on behalf of the political party in power, or the military, with which large corporations are closely allied, most of it seems related to the financial and profit interests of corporations controlling broadcasting, either as station or network operators, sponsors, or a part of the business community generally, as opposed to the over-all national interest.”
Here’s another comment from Mr. Skornia: “The press might render a great service if it let the public know how things stand between say, the copper companies and Central America. Or the oil companies and the Middle East. In the broadcast area, questions might be raised regarding the pressures exerted on the United States government by fruit, oil, sugar, tobacco, and other companies with investments in Cuba since Castro’s rise to power. Why are these enormous problems so little discussed in view of the overwhelming importance they have in making United States foreign policy?” (36300)
Claude Bissell’s tenure as UT president ended in 1971. By 1973-1974 the new president, John Robert Evans, had decided that a new form was needed for the President’s Report, one with less print and many more pictures, McLuhan had foreseen the development twenty years before, of course.
The Report has no description from McLuhan of the activities of the Centre for Culture and Technology. But it does have an extensive list of publications stemming from it:
McLuhan, H.M. “El camino a seguir en la investigacion de las communica- ciones” (Dossier Mundo, no. 32, April 1974, pp. 6-8. Interviewer: Jose-Luis Gomez. Barcelona: Ediciones Meridiano, S.A.
“Changing Nature of Communications” (Detroit News, part of a series commemorating the 100th anniversary of the newspaper, Oct. 28, 1973, pp. IE and 2E) . 284
“Communication Crisis in Our Global Village” (from an interview by G.A. Vitiello in Pegasus, Jan. 1974, pp. 1-5).
“Communication needs human scale” (Nursing Management, published by Kendall Co. of Canada, vol. 1, 1971, pp. 1-2).
“Company we keep – Trudeau and Nixon in the TV Vortex” (Saturday Night, Dec. 1972, p. 17).
“Do Americans go to church to be alone?” (The Critic, vol. 3, Jan/Feb. 1973, pp. 14-23).
“End of the Work Ethic”; in The Empire Club Addresses 1972-73, pp. 105-25. Toronto: The Empire Club Foundation, 1973.
“English Literature as Control Tower in Communication Study” (The English Quarterly, vol. 7, spring 1974, pp. 3-7).
“Future of the Book”; chapter in Do Books Matter? published papers of seminar of The National Book League, 1972, pp. 31-41. London: Dunn & Wilson (Leeds) Ltd., 1973.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (Christian Communications, newsletter published by St. Paul Society, Sherbrooke, Quebec, issue #39, Dec. 1972, pp. 1-2).
Interview with Professor McLuhan, by Derrick de Kerckhove (Vie des Arts, autumn 1973, pp. 19-23 (French) and 91-3 (English)).
Interview with Professor McLuhan, by Jean Pare (Forces, no. 22, 1973, published by Hydro Quebec, pp. 4-25).
Introduction to Empedocles, by Helle Lambridis. University of Alabama Press, 1974.
“Letter to the Editor” (The Listener, vol. 86, Aug. 26, 1971, pp. 272-3).
“Letter to the Editor” (ibid., vol. 86, Oct. 28, 1971, p. 273).
“Letter to the Editor” (ibid., vol. 89, Jan. 4, 1973, p. 19).
“Liturgy and Media” (The Critic, vol. 31, March/April 1973, pp. 69-70).
“McLuhan – McLuhan – McLuhan” (New York Times, May 10, 1974).
“The Medieval Environment: Yesterday or Today?” (Listening, vol. 9, winter/spring 1974, pp. 9-27).
“Mr. Eliot and the St. Louis Blues” (Antigonish Review, vol. 18, summer 1974, pp. 23-7).
“New Technology is changing human identity” (Toronto Star, Dec. 29, 1973, p. B-5).
“Patterns emerging in the new politics” (Globe and Mail, Oct. 20, 1972, p. 7).
Preface to Empire and Communications, by Harold Innis, pp. 7-10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. 3, 1971.
Preface to Subliminal Perception, by Wilson Bryan Key. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
“Private Individual vs. Global Village”; in Abortion and Social Justice, by Thomas Hilgers and Denni9 Horan, pp. 245-8. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1973.
“Understanding McLuhan – and fie on any who don’t” (Globe and Mail, Sept. 10, 1973, p. 7).
“Watergate as Theatre” (Performing Arts, vol. 10, winter 1973, pp, 14-15) .
“The Yestermorrow of the Book” (The UNESCO Courier, 25th year, Jan. 1972, pp. 16-21). McLuhan, H.M. (with Forsdale, L.)
“Making Contact with Marshall McLuhan” (an interview); in Electric Media, pp. 148-58. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1974.
McLuhan, H.M. and Nevitt, H.J.B. “Cybernetics and Management”; in Kybernetes, vol. 2, p. 1. London: Gordon & Breach, 1973.
“Everybody into Nobody” (New York Times, July 16, 1972, p. 3).
“Medium – Meaning – Message” (Communication, vol. 1, 1974, pp. 27-33).
Parker, H. “The Beholder’s Share and the Problem of Literacy”; in Media and Symbols: The Forms of Expression, Communication and Education, ed. David E. Olson, pp. 81-98. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
The 1963 report has no information on the new Centre for Culture and Technology other than an odd picture of McLuhan captioned as the Director of the Centre. McLuhan has one leg on a chair and is holding a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy, which won the Governor General’s award that year for academic non-fiction:
The background is the original office of the Centre which Marchand describes as “an office in a seedy Victorian house on the St. Michael’s campus, with wooden floors that creaked and a door leading to the street”. McLuhan and his Centre would remain there until 1968.
There was, in fact, little to report of the Centre in 1963 — or in 1964, 1965 and 1966 — since it was only in 1967 that it received the right to offer an accredited course from the faculty of Graduate Studies and, with it, the right to designate itself as an official Centre at the University of Toronto.
The 1964 President’s Report alludes to the Centre for Culture and Technology but has no separate section for it. However, McLuhan did issue a Statement on Culture and Technology which seems to have originally been intended for internal University of Toronto use as a kind of self-portrait of the Centre concerning the need for it and its intended studies.
The President’s Report does list some of McLuhan’s outside lectures during 1964:
Dr. H. M. McLuhan, on “Art Becomes Reality”; on “Changing Attitudes to Space in Poetry, Painting and Architecture Since Television” (co-author) ; on “Jobs to Roles in the Age of Automation”; on “The Europeanizing of the American Way of Life Since Television”; and on “The Strange Tendency of the Popular Arts to Go Iconic and Highbrow” at the Vancouver Festival in the Fine Arts Gallery; on “Changing Patterns of Decision-Making in the Electric Age” at the Executive Training Seminar of the Bell Telephone Company, Toronto.
McLuhan’s 1965 report for the Centre for Culture and Technology is especially interesting in providing information about its initial advisory committee. Just as had been the case a decade earlier with the Ford Foundation seminar, the bulk of the committee was composed by a Winnipeg mafia of Easterbrook, Williams and McLuhan. Malcolm Ross was an old friend whom McLuhan had known for decades (beginning when Ross taught at the University of Manitoba in the late 1940s) and was then the Dean of Arts at UT. Easterbrook and Porter were the heads of their respective departments. Williams was a close confederate of UT president, Claude Bissell, and J.H. Sword was Bissell’s Executive Assistant. So McLuhan had managed to assemble a crew which at once featured friendships going back even 40 years in Winnipeg and yet was also very well connected politically within the contemporary UT community. (The image of McLuhan as a Lone Ranger academic outsider may be both constructed and mostly untrue.)
The Centre for Culture and Technology was founded in 1963 to advance the study of the effects of technology on society and culture. During the first two years the concern of the Centre has been to establish means of observing and measuring the psychic and social consequences of technologies old and new. During the first year much work was done on experimental designs. During the second year research funds were obtained to carry out an experiment based on these designs.
At the present time a team of researchers, under the direction of Dr. Daniel Cappon, has begun to measure the sensory preferences of the Toronto population. Having determined the existing levels (and, if possible, the changes in these during the past thirty years), they expect to shift their attention to Athens in order to determine the sensory levels of that population just before the advent of television. At present the function of the Centre must continue to be experimental rather than instructional. The probing of hypotheses concerning culture and technology naturally lends itself to interdepartmental dialogue. In this respect the Centre has been richly nourished by the participation of: Professors J. W. Abrams, Department of Industrial Engineering; A. Bernholtz, Department of Architecture; B. Bernhollz, Department of Industrial Engineering; Dr. Daniel Cappon, Department of Psychiatry; Professor Brian Carpendale, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Professor A. J. Dakin, Town & Regional Planning Department; Professor W. T. Easterbrook, Department of Political Economy; Professor J. M. Ham, Department of Electrical Engineering; Principal R. S. Harris, Innis College; Dr. John A. Hrones, Provost, Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland; Professor R. A. Lucas, Department of Sociology; Professor Thomas McFeat, Department of Anthropology; Dr. Richard Meier, Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan; Professor N. M. Meltz, Department of Political Economy; Professor D. M. Nowlan, Department of Political Economy; Mr. Harley Parker, Display Chief, Royal Ontario Museum; Professor Arthur Porter, Department of Industrial Engineering; Dr. Alan Thomas, Canadian Association for Adult Education.
The Centre has been strongly encouraged by a large enrolment of able graduate students from many fields.
A considerable subsidy (non-academic) has been given to the Centre to advance research and to aid in its publication. This subsidy has made it possible to consider a programme of student term projects directed toward annual publication.
The organizing theme of study in the Centre this past year has been “The Recognition of Change.” It is a theme that made it possible to carry on a dialogue with many other areas within the University. This was actually carried out with the co-operation of several departments. The great success of these occasions suggests the advantage of choosing similar themes in the future.
The advisory committee of the Centre is Professor W. T. Easterbrook, chairman, Department of Political Economy; Professor Arthur Porter, head, department of Industrial Engineering; Professor Malcolm Ross, Department of English, Trinity College; Dr. D. C. Williams, Vice-President, Scarborough and Erindale Colleges; J. H. Sword, Executive Assistant to the President; and Professor Marshall McLuhan, Director. The Committee met twelve times during the year.
McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology report for 1966 was brief:
Last year the theme of the seminar for the Centre had been “The recognition of Change.” This year the theme was “Future Changes in the Man-Made Environments” of work, advertising, technical education, politics, science, money, language, the motion picture, the city, the school, consciousness and the unconscious.
Our sessions were graced by people from various fields of study and work, such as L. H. Freiser of the Electronics Information Services of the Board of Education, Graeme Cropley, Australian architect, and Barry Nevitt from the Ontario Department of Economics and Development.
The first phase of our sensory research project nears completion under the direction of Professor Daniel Cappon. This work has been made possible by a grant from I.B.M. of Canada. The second phase of the study concerns the production of a sensory profile of the Toronto population.
The 1966 President’s Report does not include listings of lectures by McLuhan (or others), but it does include a surprising observation about McLuhan from his friend, Claude Bissell, the UT president:
The key to attracting staff is a reputation for scholarship. This University enjoys such a reputation, even more widely outside than inside the country. The constricting domesticity of Canadian comment frowns upon claims of excellence. Marshall McLuhan was a colleague with a few amusing and provocative ideas until the journals in New York and London began to put him in the company of the great social critics.
This could be interpreted in several ways and was probably intended by Bissell to be ambiguous. He was doubtless unhappy with McLuhan’s departure for Fordham and the possibility that McLuhan might continue there or take one of the many other offers he had from US institutions.
Patterns of Literary Criticism was a series of ten (?) publications edited by McLuhan along with his UT colleagues, R. J. Schoeck and Ernest Sirluck. The series was originally issued jointly by University of Toronto Press and University of Chicago Press, but was eventually continued by UC Press alone.
Beginning in 1965, titles appearing in the series included:
Aristotle’s Poetics and English Literature (1965)
Shakespeare: The Tragedies (1965)
Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction (1965)
American Drama and Its Critics (1965)
Images of the Negro in American Literature (1966)
The Seventeenth-Century Stage (1968)
Italian Poets and English Critics, 1755-1859 (1969)
Bibliography and Textual Criticism: English and American literature, 1700 to the present (1969)
Contexts of Canadian Criticism (1971)
English Literature and British Philosophy (1971)
In the 1967 UT President’s Report there is no separate report from McLuhan on the Centre for Culture and Technology, presumably because McLuhan was busy that spring getting ready to decamp for Fordham. However the Report, as usual, does record the lectures he gave during that school year outside of his courses:
The Marfleet Lectures [at UT] were given by Professor Marshall McLuhan, on “Canada, the Borderline Case” and “Towards an Inclusive Consciousness.”1
Professor H. M. McLuhan, on “Technology: Its Influence on the Character of World Trade and Investment” at the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, Md.; on “Film and Poem and the Interface of Landscapes” to the Modern Language Association meeting in New York City; the Purves Memorial Lecture at the American Institute of Architects’ convention in New York; on “The Museum as an Educational Institution” to the American Association of Museums meeting, Toronto.2
As acting director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, while McLuhan was at Fordham for the 1967-1968 school year, Arthur Porter contributed to the 1968 UT President’s Report as follows:
During the current session, Professor Marshall McLuhan, Director of the Centre, has occupied the Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham University, New York. He will return to the University of Toronto in July 1968.
Following the pattern established in previous years, a major activity of the Centre during the current session has been the weekly interdisciplinary seminar. The theme during this session has been “The Communication of Values.” As in the past, the object has been to bring together a group of scholars and scientists to introduce topics associated with the theme and to lead subsequent discussions. The Centre has been encouraged by the consistently good attendance at the seminars — an average of 25 faculty members and students drawn from several disciplines have attended each Monday evening. The Centre is particularly grateful to the following scholars and scientists who presented seminars during 1967-68: Professor J. W. Abrams, Department of Industrial Engineering, and Department of History, U. of T. ; Mr. Ray Affleck, Architect (Montreal) ; Professor D. E. Berlyne, Department of Psychology, U. of T.; Mr. Milton Carman, Province of Ontario Council for the Arts; Professor W. T. Easterbrook, Department of Political Economy, U. of T.; Rev. A. G. Gibson, St. Michael’s College; Professor T. A. Goudge, Department of Philosophy, U. of T.; Professor Michael Gregory, Department of English, York University; Professor Ian J Jarvie, Department of Philosophy, York University; Dr. D. V. LePan, Principal of University College; Dr. Warren McCulloch, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mr. Wm. McElcheran, Artist; Professor T. F. S. McFeat, Department of Anthropology, U. of T.; Professor H. J. Olnick, Faculty of Music, U. of T.; Professor Brian Parker, Department of English, Trinity College; Mr. Ronald Ritchie, Director, Imperial Oil Limited; Professor Edward Safarian, Department of Political Economy, U. of T.; Dr. E. Llewellyn Thomas, Institute of Bio-Medical Electronics, U. of T.
Professor J. W. Abrams, Department of Industrial Engineering and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and Professor T. A. Goudge, Department of Philosophy, have been appointed members of the Advisory Committee of the Centre.
McLuhan’s report:
The overall theme of the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1968-69 concerned the changing forms of cultural perception and organization now occurring East and West. The advent of the world-wide service environment of electric information is naturally attended by huge disservices of previously existing environments and organizations.
The programme of presentations began with the visit of Louis Van Gastern, Dutch film maker. He had just completed a film on Biafra which he screened for us. It was later shown on the CTV television network. There were other distinguished visitors during the year including Jane Jacobs, Dr. A. J. Kirshner, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, and Dr. Arthur Porter. Barrington Nevitt was also a frequent visitor. Such, however, was the richness of talent and enthusiasm among the twenty-five students that there was no need to seek for enrichment outside the group. As always, there was an irrepressible fringe of senior citizens from a diversity of fields who greatly enhanced the proceedings.
Following is a list of the graduate students who participated in the programme : Jo-Ann Baernstein (English), “Image by Icon”; Edward Bridge (English), “Theory of Oral Composition in Old English Poetry and Modern Culture”; W. Michael Brooke (Educational Theory), “Inventory Method of Cliché Procedures in Remedying All Kinds of Illiteracy”; Barry Cole (Music), “Clichés in Music Education”; D. de Kerckhove (French), “Decadence via Hertz Law”; Glen Eyford (English), “Changes in Radio since TV”; Donald Forgie (School of Library Science), “Obsolescence of Libraries as Hardware in the Age of Instant Retrieval”; Dr. John Godden (Psychiatry), “Editor as Probe”; Mary A. Griggs (Sociology), “Current Relationship Between Dress and Popular Culture Generally”; Chalmers Hardenberg (Astronomy), “Models of Perception used in Astronomy”; Polly Henninger (Educational Theory), “Clichés in Media in Education of Children”; Olivia Jacobs (Adult Education), “Changing Images of Self in Various Psychologies”; Louis LeGall (Special Student), “Advertising Clichés in English and French”; Richard Mackie (Educational Theory), “Clichés in Small Group Theory”; Raphael P. Martin (English), “Blake’s Way of Fighting Print”; John Morris (Industrial Engineering), “A Computer Garden”; Sister Noreen O’Neill (English), “Changing Religious Clichés”; Dallard Runge (Architecture), “Perception as a Clue to Knowledge of and Use of Functionalism” ; Ronald D. Schwartz (Sociology), “Changing Structure of the Rock and Roll Universe”; Joan Sherwood (Special Student), “Effect of technology in 16th Century Spain”; Fred Thompson (Architecture), “Japanese Concept of ma”; Arthur Van Diepen (Business), “Conglomerates”; Robert Wiele (Adult Education), “New Directions for Adult Education”; Arnold Wise (Urban and Regional Planning), “City Planning: Principles, Clichés and Roots.”
Professor H. M. McLuhan, on “War and Peace in the World Village,” the inaugural address, College of Communications, Ohio University; on “Modern Nationalism” at the Irish Studies seminar on theatre and nationalism in twentieth-century Ireland at St. Michael’s College; on “The Computer and the Mini-State” to the Systems and Procedures Association in Toronto; on “The Stunning Observations form the Astoneaged Muse” to the National Packaging conference in Toronto; on “One Touch of Nature makes the Whole World Tin” to the Young Men’s Ad and Sales Club in Toronto; on “Media and the Unstructured Society” to the Media Directors’ Council seminar in Toronto; on “The Executive as Drop-Out” to the International Council of Industrial Editors in Boston; the Commencement Address at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY; addresses to the Advertising Age Group and the American Booksellers Association in Washington, DC and the Institute of Canadian Advertising in Toronto; Liberal Party seminar with Prime Minister Trudeau and his Cabinet for the purpose of improving communication between government and people.
Perhaps the high points of the year were the seminars addressed by Dr. Claude Bissell, Professor Lynn White of the University of California at Los Angeles, Walter Starkie of Trinity College, Dublin, and Etienne Gilson. We were able to make video tape recordings of Gilson, Starkie, Fr. Stan Murphy, Dr. Bissell, and Madame Sarraute, the French novelist, interviewed by Mile. Riese.
The general level of dialogue during the year was enhanced by the regular attendance of Professor Eric Jorgensen, Professor Ross Hall (Chairman, Department of Biochemistry, McMaster University), Professor A.P. Bernhart, Department of Engineering, Professor J. Edwards, Centre of Criminology, and Mr. R.A.K. Richards of the University Planning Division. The theme of the 1970-71 seminars was “Obsolescence as the Matrix of Innovation“. This theme involves study of the effects of innovation as themselves rendering many earlier forms of organization merely part of the neutral ground. There was a general consensus that an inventory of effects relating to any innovation reveals a pattern that points to the new processes that supplant antecedent causality.
One of the principal efforts of the Director of the seminars was the completion of a book on Changing Patterns of Power: The Executive as Dropout. This volume (to be published by Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich next spring) was co-authored by McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt. Nevitt is an electrical engineer and management consultant who has been associated with the seminar for the past three years. He has addressed many international bodies on the work of the seminar. Being fluent in several languages, including Russian, he has been able to make available to our discussions experience gathered from working on four continents. The book he has written with McLuhan concerns the training of present perception in an environment of innovation.
The increasing rim-spin of the information environment insures not only the dissolution of the organization chart and the disappearance of all monopolies of knowledge, but also the decentralizing of all human organization. Under these conditions, obsolescence becomes the biggest product next to the abundance of ignorance generated by new knowledge. As Michael Polanyi says in The Tacit Dimension: It is a commonplace that all research must start from a problem. Research can be successful only if the problem is good; it can be original only if the problem is original. In view of the proliferation of exciting problems arising in a period of rapid change, the seminar looks forward to an even more fruitful year in 1971-2.1
Talks given by the McLuhan brothers in 1971:
Professor H.M. McLuhan, on “The switch from dress to costume in the twentieth century” at Webster College, St. Louis University; on “The concept of space in art” to the International Association of Art Critics at the National Gallery of Canada; on “The horse that’s known by touch alone” to the CNIB National Public Relations Conference; on “Television and its effect on the nation” at the University of San Francisco; on “The inner and outer reorganization of current society” to the Certified General Accountants’ Association of Ontario; on “Alternatives in communication media” at Syracuse University and at Auburn Community College; on “Discontinuity and communication in literature” to the colloquium on the Problems of Textual Analysis; on “The software revolution” to the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation; on “Relevant to our Electric Age” at the Christian Culture series at the University of Windsor; on “Patterns of teaching for the wired planet” at Queens College, City University of New York; on “The user as the content of technology” to the American Society of Medical Technologists.
The Reverend M. McLuhan, on “The New Education” to the Grimsby School Conference; on “Megalopolis begins with me” to the Toronto Principals’ Association; on “Humanism and the New Education” at the University of California, Riverside; on “The Medium is the Message” at Glendon College, York University; also to the Department of Political Economy, University of Toronto, and to the Data Processing Management; on “McLuhan Ideas” at Huronia College; on “A leap into the future” to the YMCA National Staff Conference.
Talk by Harley Parker (apparently a co-presentation with McLuhan):
H. Parker on “The horse that’s known by touch alone” to the CNIB National Public Relations Conference.2
The overall theme of the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1969-70 concerned technology as creative action. All technology comes into a new configuration against an existing ground of institutions and social goals. The new technology, since Sputnik in 19571, has put a figure around the planet itself. This literally creates a monster, since the planet has been the ground of all previous human figures and operations. The planet is now a figure within a man-made ground of satellites and information. This is the formula for the monster, when figure merges into ground, or ground merges into figure. This is the formula used by Hieronymus Bosch in his paintings. It is also the formula of the surrealists – Dali and the fur-lined tea cup, and Mona Lisa’s moustache. The consequent loss of all human bearings and identity in this switch of traditional figure-ground, is accompanied by the familiar release of violent emotion and frustration. Violence, like the tragic agon, seeks new divisions, new patterns, and new equilibrium in a disrupted situation. Environmentalism becomes an obsession in a world in which Nature has “ended” and human programming of the space-ship earth becomes mandatory.
The seminar devoted a good portion of its time to ecological interests, as these were prompted by new technologies from Sputnik onwards. We studied the scrapping of the preceding technologies as well as the retrieval of ancient ones. In Viet Nam the elephant and tiger traps are ancient paleolithic devices now pitted against helicopter and radar warfare. Every new technology prompts a recall of a much older one. The young today are adept in the occult. The last two centuries of rationalism have been swept into the dustbin with much dispatch. These themes enabled full play for the wide diversity of interest represented in the seminar group.
A very large demand for speakers from the Centre2 has been met in part by the Centre Associate, Harley Parker, who is presently in South Africa consulting with government personnel on the effects of media on apartheid, and other matters. (A list of talks given by Mr. Parker during the past year is given elsewhere.)3
Centre studies on the effect of colour TV, for example, in upgrading the black image and downgrading the white image, have pointed to the great dangers latent in colour TV in many ethnic areas. In the same way, the effects of radio in intensifying tribal passions, especially in preliterate areas, has been the basis for considerable seminar discussion this year. Likewise, the effects of radio in creating the booze panic of the twenties, and the effects of television in creating the drug panic of the sixties have been canvassed in various seminar discussions during which psychologists and drug investigators were present.
The Rev. Maurice McLuhan, a new Research Associate of the Centre, has devoted much of his time to study of the nature and causes of student unrest. He attended a White House Conference in Washington on this subject a few months ago and has been in much request from various places since then. He has decided to concentrate on understanding student activism in relation to the new information environment.
The studies of Dr. Herbert E. Krugman, which were prompted by the McLuhan media hypothesis, constitute a welcome aid and enlargement to the studies at the Centre. Backed by a large staff of psychologists, and large funds for research, Dr. Krugman has begun a series of diversified tests. His initial report substantiated the proposition that the medium is indeed the message. He found that the content of media had little effect on the neurological responses of the subjects, although the various media had very pronounced effects, independent of their content. Dr. Krugman concludes his studies by saying:
In short, television man, the passive media audience, is an active but clumsy participant in life, while print man, the active media audience, is a selective, less active and more mature participant in life. Never mind now which is better. McLuhan was aware of the difference while none of our mass communication theory was relevant.
What then is the new theory of mass communication, not just for television but for video-phone, GE’s Video Projector and other and newer devices of the future? I suggest that communication theory is still a transportation theory, but with a difference. The old theory was concerned with the fact that the message was transported. The new theory must be concerned with the fact that the viewer is transported, taken on a trip, an instant trip — even to the moon and beyond.
Dr. Krugman’s study makes a very satisfactory extension to the Gappon-Banks experiments on media and changing sensory quotients done at the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1966-67 with a grant from IBM.4
The central theme of the seminars this year was “Critique of Satisfactions, Private and Corporate, Individual and Social.” Relating to our study of media and society and politics, there was a timely visit from Mr. Joseph Foyle of Dublin who has opened a Centre for Understanding Media in Dublin. He has asked for, and been granted, the right of association with the Centre for Culture and Technology here at the University of Toronto. (Similar association has been asked for by other groups, notably in Denver, Colorado, and in Paris, France.) Mr. Foyle, having studied the work of Harold Innis and the work of the Centre for Culture and Technology, had proceeded with some surveys of politics and media in Ireland, North and South. He is planning to expand this greatly and has already published some papers on the subject.
A major project which has been one of the underlying themes of Centre seminars for the past four years has finally been completed. This consists of the book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., N.Y.). This book was made possible by teamwork with Barrington Nevitt, engineering and management consultant for the Ontario Government. Mr. Nevitt is an electrical engineer whose contributions to the work of the Centre have been very great indeed. Many people come regularly to the seminars to hear him and to chat with him about many of the current problems in telecommunications. Since he has been a life-long specialist in precisely this field, he has added a great and important dimension to the activities of the Centre by his enthusiastic work with everybody associated with the Centre. A great linguist, with an extensive background in many countries of the world, he is also a humanist with an avid interest in contemporary art and poetry and literature. In a word, his encyclopedism constitutes a sort of ideal for any contemporary person.
A good deal of discussion during the year related to the problems encountered in the exercise of power and the dissatisfactions relating to the possession of great wealth. The Howard Hughes case came pat to the topic and the discussions on the problem of privacy and identity in a world in which mobility has destroyed community. Directly bearing on these problems came the Clifford Irving affair which brought into prominence the entire question of media coverage as constitutive rather than as reportorial. Clifford Irving brought out the fact that the media have more power to make than to report news. Coverage itself has become the new reality, and fact and fiction merge.
Phil Pendry, a CBC cameraman, visited the seminar and presented films to illustrate a strange development in political news coverage. In the North of Ireland the participants in violence carefully timed their public actions to synchronize with the TV and news cameras. They then adjourned indoors to watch themselves on TV and to hear themselves on radio. Until the cameras were in position, all was quiet in the streets.
The factor of massive public participation in on-going events presents a special problem with regard to public trials, whether in the Eichmann affair, or the Lieutenant Calley affair, or Angela Davis, or the Manson-Tate affair. As the defendants’ lives and motives are deployed, the public identifies more and more with the defendants simply by virtue of the coverage. There always seems to be the point at which the public suddenly feels that it has become the defendant itself, and at this moment the initial defendants flip into the role of public heroes, with the public saying: “I would have done the same thing myself under these conditions.” We studied violence as both the loss of identity and the means of regaining identity, whether private or corporate. This process raises that aspect of the social organism whereby its need for pervasive encounters in order to maintain identity and momentum is now fed by its consumption of its own image in the mirror of the mass media.
The decision to limit the graduate enrolment to fifteen students has worked out very well. It had become impossible to direct or to follow the projects of thirty or more students. Monday evening sessions from 8:00 to 10:00 were also held all year. Unexpectedly, this proved an ideal way of providing a platform for the fifteen graduate students on which to meet a wide range of faculty and community representatives. These representatives were always eager to initiate dialogue on many issues relating to the entire community. So natural and pervasive did the ensuing dialogue become that it was merely enriched by unexpected visitors, of whom there were many. This, in turn, prompted the idea of an “Airport University” to be conducted as an on-going seminar at major airports. This seminar could be a sponsored show on network or cable TV. Any major airport contains numerous key figures from almost all fields of social action and administration. These people sit for varying periods awaiting transport to their ultimate destinations. Many of them would welcome the opportunity to gather around a table to share food and drink and dialogue with their fellows.
Perhaps the highlight of the Monday evening seminars was one in the spring when Dean Safarian, Dr. Doug Wright and Father John Kelly, President of St. Michael’s College, shared their interests and problems with the other participants of the seminar. By its very nature, the Centre for Culture and Technology attracts a great many visitors from East and West throughout the entire year.1
Here are the opening lines of Take Today:
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. (…) 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.
Around 1970 McLuhan began using the relations between the wheel and axle to illustrate the focus on “resonating bond” that he advocated for media analysis.1
Here in chronological order are some of his observations around this image:
Where lt’s At — or the Garbage Apocalypse, 19702
The world of play, celebrated in the study Homo Ludens by Huizinga, is a world of the resonating interval such as we experience in the relation between wheel and axle. It is play rather than connection or logic that makes possible both wheel and axle.3
Discontinuity and Communication in Literature, 19704
The double plot structure (…) presents no connection or continuity, but only an interface or continuous parallel between two actions. This interface is tactility itself, the metamorphic moment of the resonant interval such as occurs between the wheel and the axle. Without the interval, there would be neither wheel nor axle. It is this resonant interval that constitutes the chemical bond, according to Linus Pauling.
McLuhan to Frank Kermode, 1971
As you know from many sources (eg, Linus Pauling’s The Nature of the Chemical Bond), there are no connections in matter, only resonant intervals. Such is the nature of touch. It is like the space between the wheel and the axle.5
Take Today, 1972
Touch, as the Japanese know best of all, is created by space between the wheel and axle where both action and “play” are one.6
The End of the Work Ethic, 1972
All are familiar with the play between the wheel and the axle as the very principle of mobility, and we seek to avoid the up-tight, on one hand, or the too slack, on the other hand. But it could be argued that the dropout is a victim of the up-tight situation and that he drops out in order to regain “touch”. When the wheel and the axle get too close, they, too, lose touch. When they are too distant, they collapse. To be “in a bind” is to lose touch as much as when we become too remote.7
Media and the inflation CROWD, 1973
It is necessary to recognize the principle of the dynamic at work in a new kind of situation — one in which there is an interface or abrasive action between two unconnected spheres (…) Is the gap or interval (…) itself the hidden causal “connection”? In current physics and chemistry the resonant interval is where the action and abrasive interface is found. Between the wheel and the axle is an interval of “play” which is where the action is, but without this “play” there is no action at all. (…) The interface of parallel but unconnected actions creates the sense of universality in poetry and drama, the sense of the crowd. Between the parallel actions (…) is an interface which renders the sense of the situations as indicative of the human condition in general.8
Technology and the Human Dimension, 1974[1.Interview with Louis Forsdale in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message (1989).]
Well, the new physics tells us that touch is not connection but a gap where things rub, like the gap between the wheel and the axle . There has to be “play” here, if they are to “keep in touch”. When the wheel and axle get too close together, they “seize up” in a bind. When they get too far apart, they collapse.
Foreword to Abortion in Perspective, 1974
Let us consider for the moment one of our conquerors, the TV image itself. This image is constituted by innumerable pulsations of bits of light. What makes the image so enthralling and compelling is precisely the intervals or gaps between these pulsations. It is in these intervals, which people feel urged to fill, that their involvement with the action occurs. Just as action is in the play between a wheel and the axle, so too, our psychic and social lives find their action in the play between our identities and the surrounding world. As long as there is the interval of “play” between man and his world, there is action and life; but when the interval between the spirit and the world closes, there is no more play but the fusion of stasis and death.
Man and Media, 1975
The dropout is the figure of our times. He is the person who is trying to get in touch. When you get uptight you have to let go in order to get back in touch. “To get in touch” is a strange phrase. When a wheel and an axle are playing along together, as long as there is a nice interval between wheel and axle, they are in touch. When the interval gets too big or too small, they lose touch, the wheel is either uptight, or seized up, or else falls apart. Keeping in touch requires this interplay, this interface, which is a kind of interval of resonance. Touch is actually not connection but interval. When you touch an object there is a little space between yourself and the object, a space which resonates. This is play, and without play there cannot be any creative activity in any field at all.9
Nina Sutton Interview, 1975
The resonant interval is where the action is. And so the dropout is a person who is trying to restore the resonant interval. The dropout is one who finds out that the interval is too small or too big, and loses his grip. (…) He gets up tight. When you get up tight, there’s no interval. (…) There’s many ways of getting up tight. Or of losing touch by getting things too wide apart. Like the wheel and the axle. When it gets too far apart, it falls off. If it gets too tight it stops. So it can go both ways. But the wheel and the axle is figure/ground. They can change roles.10 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.
Empedocles and T. S. Eliot, 1976
Each of the Empedocles passages 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”. 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.11
Laws of Media, posthumous
Interface of the resonant interval — as’where the action is’ in all structures, whether chemical, psychic, or social — involves touch. Touch, as the resonant interval or frontier of change and process, is indispensable to the study of structures. It involves also the idea of ‘play‘, as in the action of the interval between wheel and axle, as the basis of human communication.12
As shown in Schafer — The Tuning of the World, McLuhan described Murray Schafer’s work at some length in a presentation to UNESCO in 1976. He and Schafer had long been aware of one another (ever since Schafer studied at the University of Toronto in the early 1950s)1 and then got back in touch decades later as illustrated in a December 16, 1974 letter from McLuhan to Schafer:
Dear Murray,
Naturally I approve entirely your approach in soundscape. We are living in an acoustic age for the first time in centuries, and by that I mean that the electric environment is simultaneous. Hearing is structured by the experience of picking up information from all directions at once. For this reason, even the telegraph gave to news the simultaneous character which created the “mosaic” press of disconnected events under a single date-line. At this moment, the entire planet exists in that form of instant but discontinuous co-presence of everything.2 One hidden dimension of the soundscape is to be found in Rock music, which pours the sounds of the city through the rhythms of the English language as a means of humanizing metropolitan cacophony . The role of music as humanizing technological noise by processing it through the regional dialects, seems to have been ignored by all musicologists. Rock can only be sung in English , and for that reason the Chinese and the Africans and the Hindu learn English so they can sing Rock. The radio soundscape, earlier, had brought forth jazz, which also depends entirely on the rhythms of the English language, especially its Southern and oral manifestations.
In a magazine called Listening (University of Chicago Press, vol. 9, nos. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring, 1974, p 9-27 ), I have a recent essay explaining in what senses the medieval period was acoustic right up to the edge of the Gutenberg, or visual, revolution. Huizinga, in The Waning of the Middle Ages (1954), explains some of it, and Siegfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command has a section on medieval comfort, in which he explains that a medieval space was furnished even when empty, because of its acoustic properties.
If you can manage to interest psychologists in the nature of acoustic space, you would be doing a good work. What they, and all scientists, call “space” is simply visual space, which is continuous and connected and static. Scientists and architects alike refer to this as “physical” space. It is the space which can be divided and quantified, measured and tabulated. Acoustic space cannot be divided or connected, and it is certainly not static but dynamic. Clinging to the remnants of visual space in this new acoustic age has become a kind of a paranoiac state. Personally, I think I prefer visual to acoustic space, but this should not be a matter of either/or. In his Responsive Chord, Tony Schwartz explains how the TV image uses the eye as an ear (on page 14). (Incidentally the book was published by Doubleday, N.Y. in 1973.) The rapid disappearance of literature is directly related to this factor.
Had you ever thought of surveying the poets for some of their awareness of the soundscape, starting with the opening of Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and onwards? I think you will find direction and perception in this matter. Let me urge you to put some of this material into your Tuning of the World . Would be glad to help.3
McLuhan in unpublished letter to Archie Malloch, April 18, 1954:
But this summer I would like to write my book on the Gutenberg Era. Shouldn’t take too long. Would appreciate any texts or quotes you meet that bear on effect of print on human habits of learning and attention generally. Donne key case. Switch from poetry geared to music and oral delivery (as song) to poetry as read or spoken to oneself. But he was transition in this respect. The real trend developed after him.
A year later to Malloch on July 11, 1955:
Hope to get on with book on Gutenberg Era.
The epigraph to Claude Lévi
The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.2
McLuhan’s question, explicitly from the time of his Nashe thesis onwards (but implicitly from the time of his work with Rupert Lodge at the University of Manitoba a decade before), was: what are the basic structures of human experience and how do they interrelate?3 “The medium is the message” marked his realization, 15 years after his thesis, that the first step towards an answer to this question had to lie in the specification of those basic structures.4 Only so could the open collective investigation into human experience at last be initiated –- through which survival might be yet be achieved.
[The Law of Media 2 is an internal expansion of The Law of Media 1. The two versions have been retained as indicating the current of thought exercised in this blog. Its flow-through. That current should be open to critique as much as any factual assertion in the blog’s posts. McLuhan named this current at play here in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ rumination: “There are endless popular phrases (…) that are really questions.”]
The epigraph to Claude Lévi
The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.2
Earlier in the same decade as Lévi
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.3
Tyler in 1871 located the “conclusion” that “law is (…) everywhere” as following from a “tendency of modern inquiry”. On its surface, Tyler’s observation concerned an objective condition (the ubiquity of law) to which subjective inquiry found itself increasingly constrained. This was its “tendency“. But what was the nature of this constraint on the subjective side and just how grounded was its conclusion of the lawful condition of the objective side?
Like the concern in phenomenology with Wesensschau4 in the first decades of the twentieth century, McLuhan’s formulation, 70 years after Tyler, shifted the matter at stake towards the conditions of reliable “perception”. The assertion was that both sides of Tyler’s equation are subject to an “intuitive” — unconditional — consolidation. That is, the essential nature of the object is revealed as that without which it could not be that object; while for the subject, its “perception” is bound to that essence — focused on it — since only so could it be the “perception” of it.
But just who was doing this looking? And exactly why should her “perception of [just these] essentials” be trusted?
“The medium is the message” marked McLuhan’s decided realization, 15 years after his Nashe thesis, that the first steps towards open collective investigation into these questions had yet to be taken — namely, agreed identification of those purported essentials.5 Such ‘agreement’ had to do not only with the question of the object to be investigated collectively, but also with the question of the ‘who’ doing the investigation. For once an agreed object were in place — the ‘medium’ — subjectivity would be constrained to findings about it and could no longer freely hypothecate (except in art and in the rare circumstance of scientific revolution).
Moreover, here the object to be investigated was just that of subjectivity itself. As a result, the subject would find itself doubly bound: on the one hand, within the new investigation, by its agreed parameters and findings (Kuhn’s ‘normal science’); on the other hand, outside that investigation, by feedback from it to human deportment everywhere. Where before actions and beliefs had been the effects of unknown causes or (as McLuhan preferred to say after he read Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964) figures on unknown grounds, now those causes and grounds, along with their effects and figures, would be exposed in and by the newly inaugurated field of interrogation. Within the field, just as in any other science, findings would continually lead to further findings through the working of scientific interrogation. Outside of the field, formerly subliminal actions and beliefs would now increasingly be exposed and illuminated.
This double binding of subjective action and belief would introduce a new sort of freedom to individual and collective behavior. But would humans be capable of exercising it? The old freedom had been grounded in the caprice of ignorance. It expressed itself in the ungrounded figures of that vast range of individual and collective action comprising the historical record.6 Now a new freedom was possible, comparable to the new ways of behavior both within and without such relatively new sciences as physics and chemistry7 — but now applicable to social and political behavior in ways they were not.
With “the medium is the message”, it had become clear to McLuhan that only agreed definition could at last initiate the open collective investigation into human experience — through which survival might be yet be achieved.8 But he was also increasingly aware that the possibility of such agreement was subject to a strange and potentially ominous knot in time — a ‘knot’ that could eventuate (and indeed always had eventuated) in a ‘not’ of refusal.
The problem was that the promised future feedback9 between figured thoughts and actions and their grounds had to be activated (or pre-activated, as might be said) in the present — in order for that future to be initiated. This knot in time meant that, at a minimum, investigators would have to expose themselves to the uncertainties of a rigorous investigation into the unknown grounds of their existing thoughts and behaviors.
McLuhan knew that few would understand this requirement, let alone submit themselves to it. Therefore, the prospect of such agreed collective identification of the ‘medium’ to be interrogated in the new field was uncertain in multiple respects: it was uncertain if investigators would submit themselves to the uncertainties entailed by the peculiar initiation required for such investigation. And, if McLuhan were right that the survival of civilization and perhaps of the species depended upon this achievement, it, too, was uncertain.
McLuhan reflected on these problems in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ essay:
Man is now in a somnambulant state because this offers him [what seems to him as] his only possibility of survival and sanity [whereas it is really exactly what threatens survival]. He couldn’t bear a fully conscious existence under the frenetic conditions that he is exposed to by his own technology. He could not register these terrible shocks directly and survive. He’d go mad. I think that all human technology and invention has occurred under this kind of anxious pressure. You don’t outer anything [original]10 (…) until you’re under some dire pressure and fear. But when you put the nervous system outside [with the innovations of electric technology], fear is no longer the problem. Anxiety is the problem. Fear is specific, anxiety is total. As in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread, a book that appeared in the year of the telegraph.11 You don’t know now precisely what you’re dreading, rather it’s a pervasive state. The condition of man is what you dread. You no longer dread [things or possibilities in the environment like] that animal [or] that famine, and so on, but this [unprecedented] condition [of human being subject to “a fully conscious existence” in dread.] (…) Anxiety means utmost alertness, utmost watchfulness, involvement and therefore of course a very heightened kind of existence, a sort of nightmare (…) This [all] terrifies mechanical man because he does not know what to do about the transition that is taking place [within and without him].
In the 1950s McLuhan himself had gone through the “transition” he described here. Now he wondered about the prospect of anyone following him in the required complete trans-formation of turning oneself inside-out. The operative inside-out of the electric environment where “our nerves [are] outside ourselves” made both possible and impossible12 a science which would treat the human insides, at last, in an outward conscious manner.
The following is a post at the Northrop Frye blog, The Educated Imagination, which is archived here since that blog is now largely inactive.
*****
From Northrop Frye: The Selected Letters, 1934-1991, ed. Robert D. Denham (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2009)
Letter to Robert Heilman, 29 October 1951
. . . I am very deeply obliged to you for being responsible for my having a wonderful summer. I have seldom enjoyed a summer so much. We topped it off with ten days in San Francisco and two weeks in New York—one at the English institute, which turned out to be a very good one. I got Marshall McLuhan down to give a paper [“The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry,” in Alan Downer, ed., English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 168–81; rpt. in The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, ed. Eugene McNamara (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 91–7].
Letter to Richard Schoeck, 24 November 1965
You may know that Marshall and Ernest have asked me to do a collection of comments on myth and criticism as one of the Gemini books. I gather that their original idea was to collect contemporary essays on the subject, but I thought it might be more interesting and useful to go back into the history of the tendency. Things like Raleigh’s History, the opening of Purchas, Camden, Reynolds’ Mythomystes, Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients, Sandys’ Ovid, from that period; some of the “Druid” stuff from around Blake’s time; some of the material used by Shelley and Keats, and so on down to Ruskin’s Queen of the Air, but without incorporating anything much later than The Golden Bough and the turn of the century. An introductory essay would of course indicate the relevance of this to what came after Frazer. I’ve spoken about this to Marshall and he suggested that I might consult the other editors. [Frye wrote a preface for the proposed collection, but the project was for some reason aborted. His preface was published forty years later in CW 25:326–8.]
Letter to John Garabedian, 12 September 1967 [In reply to an letter by Garabedian (1 September 1967), a feature writer for the New York Post, wanting Frye to expand on a comment quoted in an article in Time magazine that hippies were inheritors of the “outlawed and furtive social ideal known as the ‘Land of Cockaigne.’” The Time article also referred to Frye as a disciple of McLuhan.]
Thank you for your letter. I am not sure that I can be of much help to you, as I did not have hippies in mind when I spoke of the Land of Cockaigne as one form of Utopia. The association was due to the Time writer, and I doubt very much that the Land of Cockaigne is really what the hippies are talking about. Neither was it correct to describe me as a disciple of McLuhan, although he is a colleague and a good personal friend.
Letter to Walter Miale, 18 February 1969
. . . Korzybsky was, because of his anti‑literary bias, a person I was bound to have reservations about, but there was still the possibility that he might be, like Marshall McLuhan today, probing and prodding in directions that might turn out to be useful.
Letter to Walter J. Ong, S.J., 28 March 1973
. . . I saw Marshall [McLuhan] the other day at a meeting on Canadian Studies, where we were discussing the question of how difficult it is for students in this bilingual country to acquire a second language when they don’t possess a first one.
Letter to William Harmon, 13 August 1974
Harmon had requested (8 July 1974) the source of Joyce’s referring to Eliot as “the Bishop of Hippo,” which Frye quotes in his book on T.S. Eliot (pp. 67–8). Frye replied that he wasn’t certain as he was quoting “orally from someone who had been working in the Joyce papers at Buffalo.” Harmon responded with a note of thanks, which prompted Frye to write again to say “Marshall McLuhan was present when this tag from Joyce was quoted, and his memory of it may be more accurate than mine.”
Letter to Richard Kostelanetz, 7 January 1976
. . . Please don’t make me an enemy of Marshall McLuhan: I am personally very fond of him, and think the campus would be a much duller place without him. I don’t always agree with him, but he doesn’t always agree with himself.
The statement of Colombo’s on page 16 strikes me as curious, but it’s your article. [John Robert Colombo had said that “McLuhan and Frye are Canada’s Aristotle and Plato. McLuhan is the scientist, and Frye the mystical theorist, with the eternal paradigms and everlasting forms” (qtd. by Kostelanetz, Three Canadian Geniuses, 131).]
Letter to Andrew Foley, 20 April 1976
. . . I think psychologists are now moving away from the Freudian metaphors about an unconsciousness buried below a conscious mind, and are thinking more in terms of the division in the brain between the hemisphere controlling a linear and verbal activity and the one that is more spatially oriented. It seems to me that the most important aspect of McLuhan is his role in the development of this conception.
Letter to Fr. Walter Ong, December 1977
. . . I saw something of your student Patrick Hogan this year, but he left early. I don’t know whether he was disappointed in what we did or didn’t do for him. He was very keen, and one of his proposals was that he and Marshall and I should form a seminar to discuss Finnegans Wake, which hardly fitted my working schedule or, I should imagine, Marshall’s.
Letter to Barrington Nevitt, 20 September 1988
This is in connection with your letter about your proposed book on Marshall McLuhan. I am sorry if I am unhelpful on this subject, but I doubt that I have anything very distinctive to say on the subject. What I could say I said at the teacher’s awards meeting you referred to [Distinguished Teacher Awards, December 1987], but unfortunately I had no text for that talk. I think I remember saying that Marshall was an extraordinary improviser in conversation, that he could take fire instantly from a chance remark, and that I have never known anyone to equal him on that score. I also feel, whether I said it or not, that he was celebrated for the wrong reasons in the sixties, and then neglected for the wrong reasons later, so that a reassessment of his work and its value is badly needed. I think what I chiefly learned from him, as an influence on me, was the role of discontinuity in communication, which he was one of the first people to understand the significance of. Beyond that, I am afraid I am not much use.
As detailed in Dating McLuhan’s “flush-profile” review of Frye, this unpublished review of Anatomy of Criticism, probably written by McLuhan in the fall of 1958, has been discussed by Philip Marchand in his bio, in a post at the Frye blog, The Educated Imagination (in which Marchand’s treatment is cited at some length), and by Bruce Elder1 in an extended footnote to his comments on Barilli at New Explorations (since removed by the censors there). The first two agree that the paper amounts to a rather petty attack on Frye by a supposed UT English department rival. But the review is, in fact, an enthusiastic endorsement of Frye’s work by McLuhan, who had the hope that he and Frye together, through “a genuine chain reaction”, might inaugurate a new investigative approach, not only to literature and its criticism — but to all human experience.
If it is asked how such wildly mistaken readings could have arisen, the answer is that McLuhan’s review has been read in various settings of the rear-view mirror, the RVM, and it has been found there to be both largely unintelligible and regrettable. There is a certain tension between these findings, of course. But the Marchand and Frye post discussions (relying on the recollections of the then grad student Frederick Flahiff) leave the matter there: the review is an obscure attack that reflects badly on McLuhan.
Elder engages with the review more extensively. His determination to find a setting of the RVM fitted to the task is explicit:
McLuhan highlights (…) the importance for the era of holistic (group) consciousness of the rhetorical understanding of communication.
However, Elder also has
electric media, with their holistic nisus, might help restore their original power to rhetorical devices.
Which is figure and which is ground? McLuhan’s answer, in Elder’s reading at any rate, was that “rhetorical devices” are ground:
Holistic (cosmic consciousness) should be understood through rhetoric, McLuhan avers.
Elder doesn’t say so outright, but his notion here may be that McLuhan allowed his concerns from the 1940s to contaminate his investigation of “electromagnetism”. Instead of probing the former through the latter, he probed the latter through the former. The charge is familiar from Jonathan Miller and others.
In his explanation of McLuhan’s purported averral that “holistic (cosmic consciousness) should be understood through rhetoric”, Elder begins by taking another look in the RVM: “McLuhan’s interest in rhetoric dates back to his university days and his dissertation (The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, 1942)”.2 It may be that Elder’s misdating of the “flush-profile” review to 1947 has to do with the connection he supposes of McLuhan’s thesis with it.
In any case, Elder unrolls the following series of observations regarding that thesis:
[McLuhan] treats grammar and rhetoric as positive expressions of a mentalité,3 while the [the?] dialectic, logic, he sees as menacing: logic rejects the patterns that are sown into the fabric of the world.4 Thus, in his unpublished commentary on Anatomy of Criticism, McLuhan essentially recommends that Frye pay heed to this topic.
Deploying paradigmatically and paying heed are two different things, of course, and Elder seems to water down his suggestion from the first to the second as he goes along. But it is exactly paradigmatic or archetypal deployment that is at stake both in Anatomy itself and in McLuhan’s review. So when Elder corrects the threefold trivial grounds of McLuhan’s thesis to a singularity (by running its grammar and rhetoric together as “a mentalité” and then rejecting the remaining art of dialectic as supposedly “menacing”), it is clear how and why earlier in his post he has asserted that “there is no bifurcation of reality, no ontological gap”. In a word, Elder’s reality is not a plural three, per McLuhan,5 requiring abysmal “bifurcations”, but a singular One, per the RVM setting employed by Elder, for which this is a, arguably the, favorite metaphysical cum nihilist move of all time.
“Let us rejoin the One”, writes McLuhan in ‘Nihilism Exposed’6, specifying the central urge of the gnostic persuasion, where ‘rejoin’ must be read both as a merger with the One (in a submission of our subjectivity) and as putting the One back together (in an assertion of our subjectivity). “Holistic (cosmic consciousness)” seems close at hand.
Elder continues:
Discerning the meaning of the transformation of rhetoric from pre-Classical7 times to the early renaissance is the kernel8 from which McLuhan’s histoire de mentalités9 developed. We might conjecture that McLuhan, even in 1947, had a sense of the importance that study [of rhetoric] would come to have and was hoping that his University of Toronto colleague might come to share his interest. After all Anatomy of Criticism gave evidence that Frye had at least glimpsed the significance of new media and new ideas about language.10
Despite the non-sense in the penultimate sentence regarding McLuhan’s supposed “sense” of rhetoric (see the detailed consideration below), Elder’s last sentence is on the verge of coming to a fitting understanding of McLuhan’s review. The reading of it that follows here shows how he might have, not ended with that observation, but started from it.
***
McLuhan begins the review by noting:
It is natural for the literary man [ie, Frye]11 to underestimate the relevance of Professor Frye’s archetypal approach to literature.
The rest of the review is at work to show how this “quarrel” within Frye himself, the literary Frye vs Professor Frye12 — a quarrel reflected in Anatomy of Criticism — might be investigated and potentially resolved. First, the Janus-face of the backward looking literary Frye is specified:
For four centuries we have been conditioned by the printed word as snap-shot of the postures of the individual mind. Segmental analysis of all motion, mental and industrial, has long been for us the norm of education and of civilized life.13
In fundamental contrast, the other Janus-face of Frye, Professor Frye, can see, or almost see, not only how this “norm” is changing, but that this trans-formation is of enormous consequence:
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.
Part of Frye and all of Flahiff may think that literary work relates to library carrels and obscure journals, but for McLuhan a great deal more is at stake — as it was for Plato in his various attempts to educate “the shaper and ruler of societies”. How this is now possible (when it was not for Plato and for the two and a half millennia after him) McLuhan then sets out in the truly wonderful sentence:
Like Sputnik they [these “nuclear models of collective postures”] have a hook in outer space whence they relay signals to us, blip calling unto blip in the universe of the pictorialized word.
The visual sounding “pictorialized word” (referring especially to comics and advertisements, but tending towards the ratio of the ‘pictorial’ eye and the ‘word’ ear) was used by McLuhan in the 1950s to mark, rather confusedly, a difference of the eye at that time in the Marconi era, from the eye of the visual book world in the Gutenberg era.
The fundamental point at stake is that our models of minding in regard to the interior landscape can now be as universal as our ‘models’ in chemistry and physics in regard to the exterior landscape. Like satellites (enabled by those very ‘models’ in chemistry and physics), such ‘universals’ see the entire world. If we are to survive, it was McLuhan’s contention, we must investigate and otherwise subject ourselves to the “signals” which such models “relay to us” — as MRI images (say) signal information to us to which we gladly and profitably subject ourselves: “blip calling unto blip”.14
The universality of these models is, like chemistry or physics, applicable to any place or time:
It is natural15, therefore, that Professor Frye should have betaken himself to the anthropologist and to the folklorist for his profiles of literature16. (…) For the characteristic mode of learning and knowing since the telegraph offers a pattern of instantaneous inter-cultural x-ray, very different from the enclosed spaces of literature. (…)
The one Frye is
a literary man describing a people past or present [who] adopts a slant, a point of view. He selects. He structures his image with syntactical bonds of perspective in the style of Hume…
The other Frye, however, Professor Frye, is capable of “statement without syntax”:
Not the personal point of view, nor the partiality of perspective and self-expression, but the catalyst role of the non-personal chemical medium…17
This “non-personal chemical medium” is
A bedouin’s rug of timeless patterns which include all possible arrangements of human experience…
And it “is indispensable equipment today” when our news and entertainment have assumed the role of being “the shaper and ruler of societies” and when humans guided by them have thrown their own survival into doubt.
The two Fryes with their Janus-faces looking in different directions are summed up in a single paragraph as follows:
Seen from the split-level18 picture-window House of Archetypes, the receding world of Western literature may look [to the Gutenbergian literary Frye] appallingly like a silent movie on a late TV show. But for those who recognize the importance of aligning all education with the dynamics of the new mass media, the deft and decent burial of literature provided by [the Marconian Frye in some aspects of] the Anatomy of Criticism will come as an exhilarating climax to the slower-paced preliminaries of the literary centuries.
It is at this point in the review when McLuhan enters into his concluding paragraph that Elder’s reading goes off the rails, leading him to mis-take the review and, in fact, to reveal his misunderstanding of McLuhan’s work as a whole.19 McLuhan begins the paragraph by stating that:
Professor Frye is not, perhaps, sufficiently cognizant of one major resource adjacent to his enterprise. The world of ancient and medieval rhetoric was vibrant with archetypes referred to as “the figures of rhetoric”.
As indeed noted by Elder, McLuhan immediately specifies:
These figures are, it is true, postures only of the individual mind which had become accessible to observation and control after phonetic writing. The written word arrested the mental and verbal flux of the fast-talking Mediterraneans and gave them the means of classifying hundreds of mental postures such as chiasmus, catachresis, and scatalogie.
But this remains an important technique in Anatomy! Or, better put, it is the technique of Anatomy as advanced by the literary or “humanistic” Frye. The Gutenbergian one. It is doubtless the “odor” of such “individual expression and eloquence”, the “pipe-line of natural gas from the farther shores of rhetoric”, that renders the book “uniquely opaque and almost unreadable”:
These figures or postures of the mind were like so many whales left immobilized amidst the shallows and sands of the written word. And in due time their odor began to be abroad in the land. Writing, however, as a means of capturing, or perhaps of fashioning, the postures of the individual mind [has missed the lesson of these reeking carcasses and therefore] has proved to be fatally committed to the fostering of individual expression and eloquence [just like them]. It is flawed by preference for the humanistic…
This obtuse Frye, says McLuhan, should go to school from “Professor Frye”:
a scientific [not “humanistic”] enterprise such as that of [the Marconian] Professor Frye (…) has secured a vehicle which by-passes all rhetorical expression of this personal type, and makes possible the deploying of the total resources of [all time from] pre-literate culture on to the Madison Avenue testing ground. This in turn will greatly hasten the mopping up of [the Gutenbergian Frye’s] remnants of private awareness and expression such as now give a confused and unsettled character to the literary and educational scene [as instanced both in Anatomy and in the grad student panel discussing it]. So that what has here begun as a momentary flush-profile of literary profiles [in one side of Anatomy of Criticism] will develop [better: flip or “blip”] into a genuine chain reaction [of its other scientific side, propagating to McLuhan’s work and then beyond the two into a whole new field of analysis], and the remnants of a decadent form of personal expression [in the obtuse Frye and the whole “mechanical” world he instances] can be dispatched down the drain.
The “major resource” of “the world of ancient and medieval rhetoric (…) vibrant with archetypes” could and should show both Fryes where his Gutenbergian Janus-face, “vibrant with [its] archetypes”, has gone fundamentally wrong.20 But getting down to fundamentals is a major achievement, regardless of Frye’s Janus-faced ambiguities, since through his work a way appears that “makes possible [at last] the deploying of [mankind’s] total resources of [all time from] pre-literate culture on to the Madison Avenue testing ground”. This would constitute “a bedouin’s rug of timeless patterns which include all possible arrangements of human experience”, hence a “non-personal chemical medium” in which the abysmal problems of the present would be subject to the sort of unforeseeable solutions as revealed themselves after those other media revolutions of literacy and of print. And — especially — after that revolutionary “pattern recognition” of the elementary structure of the “chemical medium” that took place leading up to Mendeleev’s table in 1869.
For all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past. . . . If there be any suspicion, that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. (Hume’s 1748 Enquiry as cited by Elder in his comments on Barilli)
Strangely, Elder seems to have missed how the observation from Hume cited by him exactly captures the working of McLuhan’s RVM, the rear-view mirror. Recourse to it presupposes “as foundation, that the future will resemble the past”.
In one important respect, however, the future will really be like the past, namely, that the two will be entirely different after a media revolution like those of the institution of literacy in Athens or of print two millennia later in Europe. In such cases, our understanding of “the course of nature may change, and [we will find] that the past may be no rule for the future, [for] all [past] experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion” about anything at all in a new media environment (including about our own selves and everything we hold dear).
Elder nevertheless puts forward the hope that refinement of the RVM can reveal what McLuhan was up to. “A little more background will help us appreciate the richness of Barilli’s commentary on McLuhan’s notion of holism and its parallels with Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics.”
Against this it must be said that what McLuhan was trying to indicate cannot be seen! By definition! For through the sort of revolution he foresaw, as illustrated by past Gestalt-switch events like the advents of literacy and printing, “all experience [of the preceding type] becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion” about the new world now dis-closed.1 This was the great point detailed by Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato which McLuhan championed from the moment it appeared in 1963 (as acknowledged and much appreciated by Havelock). McLuhan did so exactly because it revealed the sort of change 2500 years ago that he saw as both possible and necessary today. His own Gutenberg Galaxy had the same impulse. The unrealized hope was that pointing out revolutionary Gestalt-switch in the past might help its recognition in the present. Mais au contraire!
What is at stake in McLuhan (namely, the medium that is the message) is necessarily unknown, partly because it cannot appear in the RVM at all (when the RVM is all we have absent originary insight!) and partly because, when it “paradoxically” is seen, at last, through and behind the RVM, its nature will then forever be subject to scientific investigation. Only consider the dis-covery of the chemical element by Lavoisier and Priestley. Their breakthrough into a whole new world was astonishing. But what did they know of it? What could they know of it? So it is with us in face of McLuhan’s not unrelated demand (above all to himself) that “the medium is the message”. It is both presently almost entirely unknown and forever subject to future revision (whatever it is).
What McLuhan was attempting to indicate is itself necessarily subject to what he called the “paradox” of sudden awareness — and all appreciable awareness is sudden! We always and only experience through Aristotle’s “opposite form”, aka the RVM: “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”.2 This is why, as McLuhan endlessly repeated, breakthrough absolutely depends upon breakdown. No breakdown, no breakthrough.
Now, as broached above, one of the aims of Elder’s comments on Barilli is to flesh out Barilli’s view that McLuhan’s achievement may be illuminated by the study of Kant as its background. So Elder would further illuminate Kant, in turn, by study of his background, particularly in Hume. But this is to revert to the RVM in two different ways. First, McLuhan is located against what we know or, at least, what we can and should know — as if his suggestions were intended as contributions to ‘normal science’. Second, this linear and progressive view with its focal objects like ‘Hume’ and ‘Kant’, even ‘Wolff’, is itself an instance of the Gutenberg galaxy whose idea of the ‘past’ in these senses has, according to McLuhan, ‘passed’ away.
Refinement of the RVM not only won’t work, it is counter-productive! (Hence McLuhan’s turn away from explanatory prose to something like comedy.)
If we are to approach McLuhan as a consequential thinker, indeed if we are to approach Hume and Kant as consequential thinkers, we need to do so subject to the proviso that they inform us, not we them. They can’t be put to use! Applying such a method won’t work for McLuhan — but it also won’t work for Hume and Kant! The entire procedure breaks down.3
Here, again, background is helpful only as something to be broken through, as forty or fifty years of McLuhan ‘scholarship’ amply reveals — negatively. He wanted to dis-cover a new mode of investigation into the entirety of human experience. In determined opposition, the McLuhan industry, supported by many $millions a year in Canada alone, will have anything but that — for it would require a break with the established (ie, ‘passed on’) past in which one’s reputation, identity and understanding are firmly anchored.
In McLuhan’s view, there is no such thing as, say, ‘Kant’. This is the alchemical green dragon. Instead ‘Kant’ is like an immensely complicated chemical solution with (eg) propylene glycol (CH3CH(OH)CH2OH) suspended in it. It is impossible to get anywhere at all with such an identification until you understand C and H and O — and to do that, you have to understand the elements and how they work: “the medium is the message”.4
If we are to survive what McLuhan approvingly cited from Sheila Watson, “the intrusion of the mechanical foot into the electric desert”,5 it will be only because we have learned to understand at last: (a) how everything we currently experience, from our own identity to world issues threatening nuclear war, are subliminal effects of as yet imprecisely known media structures — effects which are insuperable as unknown, but optional once dis-covered and investigated:
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. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, ‘Recommendations’, 1960)
(b) that we do not have to know definitively how to specify these media structures prior to initiating research into them. Rather, just what such media are and how they operate is exactly the central question of the proposed investigations. Therefore McLuhan’s emphatic remark in 1959 to Harry Skornia in the course of his NAEB project to research new media: “We can’t assume that we understand media already!” And therefore as well his constant admonition: “Organize the ignorance!”
Did Priestley and Lavoisier understand chemical elements? Mostly not. But they understood enough to spark a change in our investigation of physical nature — the exterior landscape — through which the world has been utterly revolutionized. Between 1800 and 2020 the entire world has been through a kind of worm hole which has left almost nothing the same. And yet the chemistry through which much of this change has come about is just as applicable to materials from a million years ago as it is to materials today. Everything has changed and nothing has changed.
The “survival strategy” urged by McLuhan turns on the notion that the interior landscape is subject to a comparable revolutionary change in investigation, one that has already been deployed so to say objectively (especially in the development and use of mass media, ironically enough), but has not yet been deployed subjectively in investigations of the interior landscape. Civilization and perhaps the species as a whole will survive, in his view, only through a revolution in our knowledge of human being (dual genitive!) where we finally apply what we already know to what we already experience — but have somehow failed so far to activate.
In his Foreword to the 1958 reissue of his Degrees of Knowledge (orig 1932) Jacques Maritain wrote the following tribute to Gerald Phelan:
I am happy to extend my very special gratitude to the captain of the [translation] team, Dr. Gerald B. Phelan, who directed, supervised and revised the whole work. I deeply appreciate the great testimony he bore to our long and affectionate collaboration in spending thus so much of his time for my book’s sake, and allowing this new translation to profit not only by his mastery of the subject matter but also by his mastery of the French and English languages. I avail myself of the present opportunity to pay my tribute of loving gratitude to this incomparable friend. When I first came to this continent, some twenty-five years ago, it was because, in his capacity as President of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies, he had invited me to give a series of lectures. I was immediately captivated by the eminent qualities of his mind and the charity of his heart and by the way in which were united in him love for truth and philosophical wisdom, in all their objectivity, and evangelic love of one’s neighbour. This was the beginning of an intellectual fellowship which has been especially dear to me. And from that time on, I cannot count the proofs of steadfast support and generous cooperation I have received from him. The last, and not the least, is the present translation.
Elder’s comments on Barilli (since censored out of existence) at New Explorations immediately raise noteworthy difficulties.
First and foremost, when gaps are to be removed or solved or declared absent from McLuhan’s thought, we are no longer dealing with McLuhan. “There is no bifurcation of reality, no ontological gap”, writes Elder. “The barrier, the gap, the hiatus that exists between the two poles [of subject and object or word and thing], denying any possibility of communication (…) was the main feature of all modern philosophical positions as they anxiously awaited an audacious solution that would be able to bypass the obstacle”, writes Barilli, thumbing his notice at Hegel, but presumably pointing to McLuhan’s great gap-obviating contribution.
But McLuhan insisted that “gaps are where the action is” (not least to the Ontario Dental Association), and it or its equivalents featured prominently in his work and were meant very seriously. And this for a series of reasons (quite aside from the fact that the man was a Catholic convert for whom the dead God on the cross symbolized, or was, the condition of a definitively gapped reality).
Creativity, beginning with the infant’s learning of language, does not take place through x number of steps of linear sequence to produce “matching” (by conquering the gap), but through a “paradox” resulting in “making” (on the basis of the gap):
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”.1
Shortly put, no gap, no paradox. And if no paradox, no language and no creativity. (Hence McLuhan’s full agreement with Hume, as cited by Elder, in the supposed obstacle that “the first imagination or invention of a particular effect, in all natural operations, is arbitrary” — but not for that reason, for McLuhan at least, necessarily false or unaccountable!)
Furthermore, what gives for McLuhan the unique revelatory power of the electric form (which Barilli and Elder decidedly want to celebrate, if not apotheosize) is exactly its ineluctable gap between negative and positive poles in electricity and magnetism which, generalized, became the ineluctable gap between yes/no gates and 0/1 binary digits in computers and other computing machines.
But this did not mean previous thought was thereby overcome (as though McLuhan or anyone else could out-Kant Kant, or out-Plato Plato). Instead it meant that the same sort of value free analysis as chemistry can make of materials at any time anywhere could now be made (if McLuhan were right) of all experience anywhere anytime. As Elder himself cites McLuhan in his extended discussion in this same Barilli post of McLuhan’s unpublished review of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism:
A bedouin’s rug of timeless patterns which include all possible arrangements of human experience is indispensable equipment today.
Right or wrong was not the issue; the issue was how to approach “all possible arrangements of human experience” in a new medium such that collective investigation became possible — with, it was McLuhan’s great hope, the same sort of revolutionary insights and solutions as followed upon those other media revolutions — the instigation of literacy in Athens 2500 ago and again after printing 500 years ago. And — especially — after that revolutionary “pattern recognition” of the elementary structure of the “chemical medium” that took place leading up to Mendeleev’s table in 1869.
Moreover, the key to understanding space, time and media was exactly to understand their inherent plurality and, therefore, the “bifurcation” or “ontological gap” between (!) their instances. “Understanding media”, in particular, posed the problem of this plurality and of its gaping borders (since media cannot be separated and differentiated by media), for here the spectrum of medial gaps was itself gapped.
Finally, McLuhan recognized what might be termed existential gaps. Here he is in his Nina Sutton interview with Barbara Rowes sitting in:
BR: What is the fascination with identity ?
MM: Because it’s gone [under electric conditions]. You are always aware of the thing that’s disappeared. It’s a gap. It’s like a lost tooth, an aching void — you feel it all the time.
In a word, gaps, plural, are what are to be understood in understanding media. They are McLuhan’s topic. They are his one thought, as Heidegger might put it.
The other great difficulty posed by Elder and Barilli is what seems for all the world to be a far too one-sided evaluation of the electric form and electric environment,2
] despite the unique dangers they pose (of which McLuhan was well aware early on). It may be that enthusiastic assessment is where Prof de Kerckhove gets his notion of the saving power of digital ID. In any case, however the electric may have solved various problems, it has also created more of its own and more ominous ones to boot. Forgetting this means to overlook the up-down dynamic of Heraclitus’ way of which McLuhan’s tetrads are a modern iteration. For humans there is no up that does not implicate an ever-present down and this gapped-gaping-chaotic3 implication is — the medium that is the message.
In his Comments on Renato Barilli (now censored out of existence) post at New Explorations, Bruce Elder has a long footnote (ditto) on McLuhan’s unpublished “flush-profile” review of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. In what is either a simple typo or a confusion of McLuhan’s published review of Frye’s Blake in 1947 with his unpublished review of Frye’s Anatomy a decade or more later, Elder gives 1947 as the date of the latter paper. Since Anatomy was published only in 1957, and since McLuhan mentions Sputnik (which launched in October 1957), the earliest possible date for the “flush-profile” review would be the last couple months of 1957.
As indicated by Elder, McLuhan’s review is reproduced along with a discussion of it in a post, Frye-McLuhan Rivalry?, at the Northrop Frye blog, The Educated Imagination. Philip Marchand is cited there from his McLuhan bio as dating the UT panel discussion on Anatomy, for which the paper is said to have been written, to “shortly after its publication”. Here again, then, the review would date to the last months of 1957 or, perhaps, to early in 1958. But Marchand gives no source for this dating and he goes on to cite Fred Flahiff concerning McLuhan’s paper as saying that Flahiff and McLuhan “went out and walked around and around Queen’s Park” discussing it. While this is not impossible in winter in Toronto, it is unlikely.
Absent other evidence, dating the paper must rely on its vocabulary and style. Tellingly, McLuhan notes in it that “Professor Frye has devised a kind of nomadic bookcase for the cosmic man of today who is inevitably a mental D.P.” The same image of “a mental D.P.” appears in a passage in McLuhan’s address to the NAEB Annual Convention in Omaha in October, 1958, ‘Culture Is Our Business: The meaning of the new electronic media’.1 In his address McLuhan observed:
One of the great problems in pedagogy, I think, is a kind of process of translation from one culture to another culture that we are undergoing; and an extensive medium revolution, such as the electronic one, turns us all into mental DP’s. We are all displaced persons today, whether we like it or not; and we are all confronted with huge undeveloped countries of the mind where we hardly know what to do first.
Since the image of our being displaced persons is very rare2 in McLuhan’s work,3 this would provisionally date his “flush-profile” review to 1958, probably in the early fall when the university was just back in session, at the same time as McLuhan was drafting notes for his NAEB convention address in October.4
In 1953 McLuhan, now in his 40s, was turning from the literary views that had defined his way for the previous two decades to a new way that would remain indistinct and tentative for most of the remainder of the decade.1 Here he is in letters that year to Wyndham Lewis:
For Shenandoah magazine Lewis number I’ve attempted to present your Theory of Art and Communication. Mainly in your own words. Only in the past year have I become fully aware of the reality of the secret societies in the arts, philosophy and politics. Your own work has consequently taken on a much different significance for me. (April 15, 1953, Letters 236)
Re-reading Snooty [Baronet] (1922) recently I realized my own situation is not unlike his (…) The range and character of the “cultic twalette” has just dawned on me in the past year. Like Snooty I’m trying to get my bearings. (July 14, 1953, Letters 239)
As for my book. It owes much to you of course. But it was so long in the publishing (6 years) that I had lost interest in its approach before it appeared. Now I see that I was trying to prop up the standards of book culture when we have passed out of the Gutenberg era. (December 9, 1953, Letters 241)
As an indicator of that new way, first of all to himself — “trying to get my bearings” — he twice over in 1953 cited the same passage, word for word, from G. Rachel Levy’s Gate of Horn, once in ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’ and again in ‘Maritain on Art‘:
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, and the means of his growth as already described; the vehicle of the first-known religion is now made articulate. The wheel has come full-circle.2
McLuhan’s work for the whole remainder of his career is captured here in nuce. But it would take McLuhan himself years and sometimes decades to realize these implications.
To “Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis” compare McLuhan almost 10 years later at the end of his 1961 ‘Humanities in the Electronic Age’:
The ideal Marriage of Mercury and Philology, of spiritual values and perfected method, will be consummated, if ever, in the electronic age.
What Plato’s “gigantic effort” had been unable to accomplish — even with Aristotle’s further specification of the dynamic “methexis or participation” of the forms (the “pattern laid up in heaven”) in constituting “the living world” — might now “in the electronic age”, at last, be realized or “consummated”.
The notion at stake is just that of chemistry or genetics where a “pattern laid up in heaven” (the elements in the first, the DNA structure of genes in the second) expresses itself dynamically in and as “the living world”. There is, of course, a fundamental difference between such structures and the physical materials they constitute (even when they are of utmost purity), but the two levels, while maintaining their distinction, are one in any given sample. The answer to the question, ‘what is this?’, must always be given in terms of those elementary structures, but is always also some particular expression of them. Theory and instance are never simply identical, but each mirrors the other in a re-flection that is essential. First starting in 1958, McLuhan would term the necessity of this sort of specification, “the medium is the message”.3
Inherent to this idea even in Plato and Aristotle was a “multilevel” approach. Only so could focus be directed to “methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis“. These are all terms or actions which seek to explicate how differences like form and matter or experience and world are dynamically inter-related and so mediated. No such multilevel approach, no possibility of insight into the medium as focal message. In fact, McLuhan seems to have come to the former multilevel approach before the latter medium as message insight and arguably to the latter only by way of the former. Here he is some years before his insistence, beginning in 1958, that “the medium is the message”:
anybody can test for himself the fact that sixteenth-century prose [like that of Nashe, McLuhan’s PhD thesis subject from 12 years before] still retains many of the rapidly shifting perspectives of multiple levels of tone and meaning which characterize group speech. It took two centuries of print to create prose on the page which maintained the tone and perspective of a single speaker. (Historical Approach to the Media, 1955)
Oral disputation and multi-level comment on texts were the natural result of oral teaching. Multi-level awareness of linguistic phenomena and of audience structure held up during print’s first century [eg, with Nashe], but swiftly declined thereafter, since the speedy linear flow of printed language encouraged single perspective in word use and word study. (The Effect of the Printed Book on Language, Explorations 7, 1957)
McLuhan would incessantly insist on “multi-level awareness” in his writings after 1960, particularly (after reading Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964)4 in terms of figure and ground. But he became aware of the fundamental importance of this awareness5 only when he began to explore the differences between orality and literacy in the 1950s.
Another implication of the Levy citation, one that McLuhan would broach in his 1962 ‘Prospect’ piece for Canadian Art Magazine, and then endlessly repeat, was the return to the paleolithic, to Levy’s “wheel [that] has come full-circle” back to “earliest man, and (…) the first-known religion”:
When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomad state. We have become like the most primitive paleolithic man, once more a global information-gatherer instead of a food-gatherer. The source of man’s food, and wealth, and daily life from now on, is just information.6
Finally, the most important implication of Levy’s passage, one that McLuhan himself did not see clearly until the 1970s, was the plurality of time. Levy indicates at least three different workings of time: 1) the linear “effort to establish” intellectual clarification on some newly specified “basis” — “the means of (…) growth”; 2) the synchronic or simultaneous working of that ‘new’ basis via “methexis, or participation” “by which the living world [is] built”; 3) the revolutionary time-flip or “paradox” through which (1) culminates in recognition both of itself and of the oldest of the old as constituted by way of (2) — “the relationship created by earliest man, and the means of his growth [up to the present insight] (…) is now7 made articulate. The wheel has come full-circle.” The linear finds itself in the synchonic:
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, v)8
